[r a n d o m h u m a n]

For the moment, I don’t like wordpress. When I tried to log in from mozilla it crashed my browser. On top of that, I have to redo all the work I did on the look of my blog. Right now, that just seems way to much like effort, seeing as how I lack an internet connection at my new gaf (for the moment).

However, when I do eventually get around to a redesign, and get an internet connection, and can use firefox, I’m sure it’ll be fine. The interface does look pretty good, after all.

5 weeks I waited for these distributions to be delivered, and what do I get? One distro crippled by lack of software, and another crippled by lack of a GUI!

Debian (woody). Crude (but functional) installer, old kernels, but I thought at least I’d have something familiar to work with straight away, even if it was a little outdated. I had all the questions answered, all the software installed, and ready to land with my feet firmly in the K desktop, when I was greeted by the dreaded “3-flickers” (I had the same problem with my laptop until I got Ben Herrenschmidt’s ibook kernel. Ben, you’re a legend). I thought maybe the radeon drivers were too old for my brand-spanking-new (I guess?) radeon 9800SE (agpgart wouldn’t install either…), so I added a testing apt source and got the highest 2.4 kernel available (2.4.27). But I think that made it worse.

SuSE (9.1 personal), on the other hand, has an entirely graphical installer where more or less everything is autodetected. And a 2.6 kernel. I was exploring KDE and YaST in 20 minutes, tops. This is how things should work, I thought, despite all the puke-green splash screens in place of the usual, sleek, scrolling white text on a black background during the boot process. That is, until I decided I’d quite like to use Mozilla Thunderbird as my email-client, and discovered that it wasn’t included, nor was there any way to download a binary package. apt-rpm seemed like a fine solution, but while there was a binary rpm available for that, one of its dependencies needed to be compiled from source. No problem. Except that SuSE9.1 Personal doesn’t include gcc…

Got the pics off my digital camera The quality isn’t great, but I didn’t really expect it to be. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do well in the dark, or in artificial light. Which really sucks, but hey. I guess I’ll just stick to the daytime, outdoor photography.

Microsoft VBScript runtime error ’800a005e’

/k/account.asp, line 582

I don’t think Komplett want to take back the ram I bought off them (turns out mac and pc ram is different). If I try filling out the return form a second time, it babbles at me in Norwegian. Or is it Swedish?

Ah well, great website otherwise, and the computer they delivered yesterday seems to be working well, although I have yet to install anything on it. First will be Windows (don’t give me that look!), then Suse (sounds like it’ll be easy to install and use) and finally, Debian (fingers crossed it’s a smoother ride on an x86).

Things I’m looking forward to:

• Installing, configuring, blah blah blah. That stuff’s great
• Games!! Hopefully wine is as good as it’s been made out to be.
• The Gimp, on a big screen. Resolution doesn’t seem great though.
• DVD playing, ripping and burning. Downside: Just recently I figured out how to record a DVD to a VHS tape, but now I may never get to try it for real Oh sure, I could do it anyway, but it just wouldn’t be the same.
• Getting the damn photos off my damn digital camera. That was a damn stupid purchase on my part. I seem to do that a lot…
• Having a computer that I can leave on all the time without the hard drive melting.

I don’t think randomhuman2.tk is really working out. It’s too static, and there’s really no reason for people to return. I know if I came across a site like it, I’d probably browse around idly for a minute, and move on to something more interesting.

I’m not sure what to do with it though. Make it less inclusive? More thematic?

What I’d really like to do is incorporate it into the blog as sort of an aside, so people could visit repeatedly for the blog, and the rest would be there to flick through whenever people are in the mood.

Donnacha! Help!

My home network is finally starting to resemble something useful. Previously, all my computers only had one network card each, so I could only network two at a time, and things never settled into a reasonable order. Now I have two network cards in my powermac 7300, so I’m using it as a server/router. It took a couple of frustrating nights (I forgot to turn on ip forwarding the second night, did it accidentally the first. Doh!), but now I’m sharing an internet connection across all 3, and I don’t even have to become root to turn on masquerading anymore (something I should have done years ago).

Three cheers for me.

Next comes file sharing. I think I’ll try samba this time. We’ll see what happens from there.

Ow, my head.

Instead of studying last night I stayed up until 5am playing computer games. And then again after my exam today. Turns out that if I want to get past a certain point in the missions, I must register. Fair enough says I, tis well worth it for the hours of entertainment it’ll provide. But of course, now I have to go about getting a money order, posting it off, waiting for a reply…

Quite convenient really. Now I might actually get some work done.

I went war-walking in Galway this weekend. The great southern hotel on Eyre square appears to have at least 4 Eircom access points. I found two other networks, one generic, the other belonging to galwaywan.org. I didn’t even know there was a wireless WAN in Galway, but they have an access point in the middle of town!

I went shopping for my moms birthday present today, and as I went I once again had my laptop sniffing for wireless networks. I passed the two I found the last day. One of them is on patricks st, around roches and Brown thomas, the other is definitely just at macd’s on winthrop street. I still don’t know exactly where they are though.

I also found a new network: Caseys ground floor. I don’t know what Casey’s is, but it’s on Oliver Plunkett street near an Brog, or in the Grafton Mall. I’m regretting not sitting down in the Grafton mall and seeing what I could learn, but there you go. I’m shy about using technology in public

I’m going to do something with this site, yes I am. I even did up an image to put at the top:

Whatever else gets done we’ll just have to wait and see how lazy or “busy” I am. I also registered a dot.tk domain, randomhuman.tk to point to here. It’ll take me a while to get my head around the html (I’m considering a major overhaul) but hopefully it’ll be worth it.

Oh yeah, I got an internet connection! I thought I was going to have trouble setting it up because the instructions were only for windows, naturally, but it was actually easy as pie. It’s ADSL. It’s faster than anything I’ve ever seen before. I did a dist-upgrade with apt-get, and I was getting download speeds between 70 and 100 kb/s! Muahahaha… I’m in heaven. It’s going to be horrible when I go to Galway this weekend though, and when I move into a house next year.

I was just chatting with a few alicebots there. They reminded me somewhat of eliza, the old AI “counselling” program. And text editor, for some reason. Somewhat better, but still not great. They still repeat what you say in some situations, which just makes them look stupid.

I was looking for VRML multi-user environments as well. There never seems to be many, whenever I look. I should start one (yeah right).

You may notice I edited the style sheet for my page. The title bar doesn’t go all the way to the left border of the window like it did before. Small thing I know. Really have to get that css thing sorted out when I have a free minute. And not such a throbbing pain in my skull. I mean ovaries. No skull, definately skull.

I’m sure this “blogging” isn’t doing me much good on the skull-pain front, so I’m going to go find the computer labs in the food science building, glance at them, and go home.

Apparently, and I have no reason to doubt it, I have, in my room, a connection to the UCC network. That should be fun to explore I was told that it was a satellite connection, but that seems a little over the top to connect to a network that’s less than a mile away. I’m guessing it’s wireless. Possibly… that might be my link to the internet as well… Hm. Fast + Always On = droool.

I’ve been working on securing my own little network, exchanging telnet with ssh, and turning off unnecessary services. There’s some I can’t figure out, but in time I’m sure (How often do I say that, and how often does it become true? Lets see, GDAM, no. MOL, no. DRI… no. Do I suck or am I just lazy?) I’m sure there’s lots of other stuff I should do too. Lots. I don’t want to mention them, because then I’ll just feel bad when I don’t do them.

I’ve been messing around with nmap and ethereal a bit. They’re great fun! I can’t wait to unleash them on the internet.

Gonna buy me a webcam too. A cheapo one. Hopefully it’ll work.

Muahahaha! I’m compiling MOL (Mac-on-Linux) at the moment, and it seems to be working. I just gave up after it didn’t work the first time, because I wasn’t interested in MacOS at all at the time. Now I just want to be able to get at it without having to reboot.

I’ve been souping up my 7300 over the last couple of days. I took ram from my sisters computer, mounted a 4gb hard drive inside the case that had been external, and bought a new ethernet card because the built in was only 10mbps. I’m going to use it as a firewall/mp3 server/backup when I go to Cork in a few weeks.

Wow, my first server. I feel so proud. It’s a real hassle getting hardware for a mac though. I’m definitely going PC next time I get a computer. I’ll still use Linux of course.

I had to burn a CD full of photos for Brendans friend Kristine the other day, and since I wasn’t 100% sure I could do it hassle free in linux, I decided to do it in MacOS. Big mistake. It took over an hour. Never again.

FreeWrl wouldn’t compile. All my hopes and dreams have been dashed… I think I might just have a go at some 3D modelling instead, since I probably wouldn’t even have an audience for my worlds. Haven’t tried to get GDAM (mixing software) working again yet. Last time I did, I tried a million and one things in the config file, but got the same result EVERY TIME! One fix was even specifically for the computer I’m using, and even that didn’t work. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to do that much with it if I do get it working, because I only have one soundcard, and only the shitty internal microphone on my laptop. I suppose I could get a synthesizer program or something, or just mix the songs I have. Or, I could buy a cheap PC and an extra soundcard for it to act as the server. But probably not for a while.

I’ve been thinking recently about PCs. I think maybe they are a better option than macs, just because of the widespread availability of cheap hardware. I don’t know if I could even get a second soundcard for my desktop mac. It was always windows that kept me away from them, but now that linux has fixed that problem, what’s to stop me? I wouldn’t get a PC laptop though, because they’re ugly and noisy and heavy. I mean, fucking floppy drives like!

My brand spanking new gpg key, all shiny and fresh out of its box. Or random number generator. Pity I have nobody to share it with

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