Converting caffeine to code, shooting pics, and cruising the roads of life.

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The knack

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

There are times when people or companies make you mad, this is one of them. I was planning on beginning this post with a video from youtube called “The Knack.” It was a family guy video about computer and electronic tinkering. Well, Sony somehow feels that this 1:01 minute long clip violates their copyrights, so it has been removed in the last round of DMCA cease and desists on youtube. So, I won’t be starting this post off this way…

Last week, I got “The Knack.” It seems to bite any computer guy that comes into contact with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) hardware. It all started when a fellow programmer friend of mine sent me a link to a DEC Easy WebServer. This is a relabeled DEC Alpha Multia that shipped with Windows NT 4.0 Server. It included some sort of Netscape software for setting up a webserver easily. Well, I figured I would go ahead and add it to my watch list, since it was only $20 + shipping. I continued browsing and around and found a DEC VAXstation 3100 for $18 + shipping. I have been wanting a VAX for a while, so I bought it. 2 days later, I bought the DEC Easy WebServer.

So in total, I spent over $100 in a week on computer hardware that is older than me.(almost as old as me in the Multia’s case) The VAXstation came and it ended up missing the whole SCSI controller board, so I’m still looking for one of those. The Multia came today and works great, but it seems to operate in “Space heater emulation mode” all the time, I’d hate to see it under a full CPU load.

I tried installing OpenBSD/Alpha on the Multia tonight, with little luck. The installer boots and then says it can find no drives, but the hardware compatibility list clearly says the Multia is supported. So, I tried to find Debian net boot floppy images and failed. I’m currently installing FreeBSD/Alpha as I’m writing this, hopefully it works better.

Here are a few pictures of my new machines, more pictures of the Multia can be found here; more pictures of the VAXstation can be found here.

DEC Alpha - Multia EasyWebServer
DEC Alpha - Multia EasyWebServer
VAXstation 3100
VAXstation 3100

School has been crazy lately. I’ve been loaded down with homework most of the time, and on top of that I’ve been drafted by a few of the teachers at school to participate in the FBLA competitions. I’ll be competing in the single person test on computer networking. The test is a 100 question test given at a local university. I’m competing in the area my school does really bad in, so I hope I can change the tradition…

As I said above, school has been crazy lately. This has had it’s negative effects on Threadbound. When I do have time to code, I’m working on my client’s website, which I got sometime after my last post, or I’m doing coding for thunder-it.com. Today, I’ve been hit with a new block of inspiration and ideas for threadbound, so hopefully I can make some time to work on it. The stuff I came up with today is definitely new for the area I plan to implement it in.

For those of you still not quite sure about this whole Web 2.0 thing, check out the video below. It’s the best one I’ve ever seen that describes how I feel about it.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geek Humor, Geekery, Linux, NetBSD, Personal, Programming, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Web 2.0, Web Development | No Comments »

Setup KDE4 - Alpha on your Mac

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

As some of you may have heard, KDE4 is going to be a major upgrade for the K Desktop Environment. They plan on releasing libraries to allow their applications to run on OSX’s aqua, X11, and win32. Besides those few major upgrades, there has been much work on improving the UI and graphical elements of the system. Today, I will show you how to setup a KDE4 developer snapshot for OSX. This will allow you to run all of the KDE applications without any X server. (Beware: this is a snapshot, so there *is going to be* bugs).

The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:

Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4

Also, as quoted from the official page:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.
Finder window listing the KDE4 installers

From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:

export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:

/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite

These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.

Note: I’m still a gnome guy.

Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:
Kwrite

Konqueror:
Konqueror

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, OSX, Personal, Programming, Site News, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »

An Apple for Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

I would like to wish everyone that reads this blog a happy Thanksgiving. Hope you all don’t eat too much. I know I will be tomorrow…maybe even with an Apple. Yep, my new 17″ MacBook Pro finally came on Monday and today is the first day I’ve really put the time into learning how to use OS X. So far, I’m completely amazed, it’s a very nice system. I like how all the applications seem to work together for even simple tasks.

The Kenwood Apple Store was true to their word, they called me the day they came in. I ended up getting to the store around 6:30-7pm and it was packed. These things must be selling like hotcakes because I know they sold 3 of them while we were waiting on the cashier to see if they had any 2gb ram sticks in stock — which they didn’t. So I’m still 1gb of ram short until my reserved stick comes in. They do have a nice deal going right now though. You can get an HP Photosmart C3180 printer for free with your MacBook if you are buying it on a college discount. You have to pay upfront, but you get a rebate for the full price of the printer, similar to how they were running the iPod deals.

So far my experience of moving from Linux to OSX has been pretty grand, as I hinted at above. The built in wireless coupled with my new WRT45G, that I hadn’t tested the wireless on, seem to be working much better than my old setup. It’s so nice having wireless again, no cat5 cable to get tangled up in my mouse. Application-wise, I have already found a replacement for everything I used on Linux. I knew all of these before I even owned a Mac though, since I talk to/code with a few people that own a mac.

Heck, in the three days I’ve had this thing, I’ve already spent $50 in software. I bought textmate since it appears to be the best coding text editor on the planet for the mac and web 2.0 crew. I’m definitely liking it so far, but I’m on the hunt for PHP plugins now. They are a bit saturated with Ruby plugins. ;) I still need to get a legal copy of Photoshop CS2 for this box though. If only it was cheaper…

I’ve also had the joy of being able to run a lot of my favorite Linux applications on this thing. Fink is quite a nice system. I already have X11 running at startup, without that stupid xterm. I’ve modified my shell settings so everything I need to start X apps from Terminal.app is there and ready to go. I suggest all of you go out and install Xdroplets. Combined with this custom X11 setup and Xdroplets, I have a pretty standard application interface for running my old applications, such as XMMS or Konqueror for testing.

To give you some idea of how fast this laptop is, I have two benchmarks for you. While I was writing this post, I started a compile of Apache 2.0.59 to start setting up my development environment for ThreadBound. Here are the command that I ran:

$ ./configure
$ export MAKEOPTS=”-j6″
$ time make

What are the results? Astounding, considering this is a 10-20 minute compile on my old Athlon64 3200+ laptop…

real 1m37.240s
user 0m53.671s
sys 0m37.242s

The other benchmark is from when I installed Windows XP on my friend’s MacBook Pro, which is identical to the one I bought. After installing Counter-Strike: Source, we ran the video stress test. These machines averaged 114 FPS on it. This test set all of the settings on high, so we tried it. We were getting about 60-90 FPS at 1680×1050 during games. This just goes to show you the performance of this machine. Considering that people don’t know that the x1600 graphics cards they ship with are underclocked by around 45% below what ATI ships them as, due to heat. So I’m going to have to overclock them a bit and see how it does.

Here is a nice picture of my MacBook Pro:

Macbook Pro Core 2 Duo OpeningMacbook Pro Core 2 Duo Opening Hosted on Zooomr

More pictures of it can be found here.

Posted in Apache, Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geek Humor, Geekery, Linux, OSX, PHP, Personal, Programming, Tips and Tricks, Web 2.0, Web Development | 1 Comment »

NetBSD 3.0 Release Now runs on the bebox

Monday, October 9th, 2006

As some of you know, and some of you don’t, last weekend was the 2nd NetBSD bugathon. Over 300 bugs have been reported as fixed and over 97 people joined the IRC channel to help out and talk about their ideas, I was one of them. I spent a lot of yesterday, in between homework assignments, chatting to a few of the developers about getting NetBSD/BeBox running again, and I succeeded.

Currently, the only thing you have to do to get NetBSD 3.0 Release to compile is edit the list file that has two entries for pte.h, one marking it obsolete and one marking it not. Remove the line marking it non-obsolete and compile as the handbook says with build.sh.

The good news to come from this is that one of the developers instructed to get the port updated was there. He doesn’t have a bebox, so he didn’t want to do it blindly. He asked me to assist him with getting it up-to-date. So not only was yesterday the first day that NetBSD 3.0 has run on the bebox, as far as I know, but it also marks my slow journey back into an open source project. (I’m not going to get near as involved this time.)

Here are some pics to drool over, click for larger versions:

NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr
NetBSD 3.0 on beboxNetBSD 3.0 on bebox Hosted on Zooomr

Posted in C/C++, Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, NetBSD, Operating System Development, Personal, Programming, Tips and Tricks | 4 Comments »

A bit of a test

Monday, September 25th, 2006

The past few weeks have been pretty insane. I have not only had a lot to do at school, but a lot going on too. My Counter-Strike: Source addiction is coming back too, thanks to a bunch of my friends at school and our newly formed clan. I wont’ have much time for anything the rest of the week though. Tomorrow and Wednesday I have PLAN testing, which is basically the pre-ACT test. Then I have a week to do my PSAT practice booklet and take the PSAT. Fun times ahead. :)

In other news, I would like to leak a bit of news on one of my new projects that I am co-developing with a network operator for theWyldRyde.org IRC network, DamnSmallBSD. It is a take off of the very first linux distribution I ever used, Damn Small Linux. Our goals are similar, but we are based on a completely different operating system, FreeBSD. We also have some cool ideas to keep it modular for people looking to remaster it. Keep your eyes open, the cd is bootable, we just haven’t done much work on the userland yet.

Over the past day, I also broke back into some PHP. ThreadBound officially moved a step closer to it’s main goal. Here is a little hint of a very early page:

ThreadBound - previewThreadBound - preview Hosted on Zooomr

I have also been contacted to do some more work for ThunderIT.com, so I’m very happy about that. The project I’ll be working on is very cool. Hopefully some of the cash I get from this job will help me get a new laptop.

Posted in Daily Grindage, Experiences, FreeBSD, Geekery, Linux, Operating System Development, PHP, Personal, Programming, Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Web 2.0, Web Development | No Comments »

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