1. Most posts I make are open. I don't have any opinions to hide. You may think it's brash, but at least I say what I say to your face instead of behind your back. What posts I do make Friends-Only usually contain VERY personal information.
2. On that note, don't expect me to make an LJ Friend out of you just because you make one out of me. If I notice you've added me, I'll peruse your LJ, maybe even lurk for a bit. I may not add you that day or even that week, but if I like what I see, I will add you.
3. I will talk about anything under the sun, and you may not like it. However, I will tell in detail why I feel the way I do, and I expect any posts made here to do the same. Unlike The O'Reilly Factor, this really is a no-spin zone.
4. All anonymous posts are screened. As long as you're not being an ass, I will unscreen it. If not, you're wasting your time because no one will see the fruits of your labor. If you want to be an ass for the sake of being an ass, go ahead and I'll simply ban anonymous posts all together.
5. Flamers and trolls will be banned. Yes, it can be done. [livejournal.com]

Rewind back to, oh, say, the beginning of 2002. Two months prior, an artist takes her sweet time with a commission...I called her out on it...and out comes the friends brigade. As I had a whirlwind of a year, I decide to sum the year up -- so guess what gets mentioned again? Out of a trailer full of shit said to me over all of that, one of them was to get over it.

Fast forward to November 2005. Three things happened: (1) Eddie Guerrero died, (2) huskerfox makes one "ego-post" (for lack of a better term) too many for my personal tastes, and (3) someone of less than ideal IQ (aka retard) starts drama with another furry artist over something even God forgot. Number 1 relates to number 2 in that I used number 1 in an ill-begotten attempt to shift husker_fox's attention away from himself. What was supposed to be "Who cares what other people think about you?" probably came out "Who cares about you?" Number 3 -- well...

Fast forward to yesterday: Said artist brings it up again. Not even Slashdot dupes that hard. Mention the person should get over it and what happens? Das boot!

Hmmm....I bring up 2 month old shit and I'm the asshole. I point out to someone else that they're bringing up 9 month old shit, and I'm the asshole. It's like being back in junior high school -- only with people old enough to know better! Yippee!

What was that about furries being over-sensitive? About LJ being for emo kids? Well, I haven't found proof-positive yet, but I sure as hell haven't found proof-negative either. Maybe I'm just on the wrong blogging software. There's a slow turning point when the Livejournal stereotypes [madhousebeyond.com] go from hilarious fodder to energy drainer.

Ah well. husker_fox gets a long-over-due apology and everything else gets written off as a bad investment.

Check out https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia and scroll to the Troubleshooting section. See the Firefox info? That was me. Yes. BrainwreckedTech = SimionLonewolf = me.

No, I'm not trying claiming any sort of 1337-itude here. Wikis can be edited by anyone. Lord knows X server configuration files can be borked by anyone (or any script). It's just nice to be able to contribute back like that. I may not have cash to donate, but here, please accept this info on how to avoid this heart-break.

I've been out looking for a new Linux distro ever since I got burned on trying to get xgl to work in SuSE 10.1. Admittedly, xgl is experimental. But I didn't expect the whole X server to come crashing down when following SuSE's own directions. Lessee...must use the command line to get ndiswrapper to work with wireless, the Hauppage TV tuner card I just bought inexplicably doesn't work though numerous success stories exist on the net, no more pre-built binary drivers for nVidia or ATI starting with 10.1, and xgl blew up in my face. Yeah.....smooth.

So far, Ubuntu has solved two of those problems. Nice GUI for ndiswrapper (though I had to make a simple hack to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist to get it to work -- thanks to all the nice folks on the forums). And thank you, Ubuntu, for not taking such a hard-lined approach to the binary drivers from nVidia, ATI, et. al. I'm for open standards and all, but the high-end video card front is not where you take the fight.

You can all thank maartje for this: http://marchtogether.blogspot.com/2006/07/murder-without-conscience.html

WARNING: Picture of dead fetus ahead, in all it's bloody glory.

I can only imagine the thought process on this one

Person #1: How can we further the pro-life agenda today?
Person #2: Ooo! I got this picture of a bloody dead fetus!
Person #1: Brilliant! It's shocking! It's for the KIDS!
Person #2: What've you got?
Person #1: I got this article from The Onion where Miss Caroline Weber blames us for her abortion!
Person #2: Brilliant! No matter what she says, we say she shouldn't be such a slut.
Passer-by: Um, you know, The Onion is fake news.
Person #1: What do your mean?
Passer-by: I mean, it's not serious...
Person #2: Nuh-uh! The interweb is serious business, jack!

Only fucknuttery on this level would try to turn a fake news article into propaganda fodder. Guess The Onion's jab at pro-lifers got under someone's thin skin.

Ganked from celyddon

1. Pick your birth month.
2. Strike out anything that doesn't apply to you.
3. Bold the five-ten that best apply to you.
4. Copy to your own journal, with all twelve months under a lj-cut.

SEPTEMBER: Suave and compromising. Careful, cautious and organized. Likes to point out people's mistakes. Likes to criticize. Stubborn. Quiet but able to talk well. Calm and cool. Kind and sympathetic. Concerned and detailed. Loyal but not always honest. Does work well. Very confident. Sensitive. Good memory. Clever and knowledgeable. Loves to look for information. Must control oneself when criticizing. Able to motivate oneself. Understanding. Fun to be around. Secretive. Loves leisure and traveling. Hardly shows emotions. Tends to bottle up feelings. Very choosy, especially in relationships. Systematic.

( Da other months )

Surprise, surprise! Unbiased reporting. Although it's obvious poor ol' Jeff doesn't know what to make of it.

Link: Furries on WPCW [WMV, 1MB]

I've probably spent a total of 24 hours on making it work, but I finally got the Mac triple-booting between Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Suse Linux 10.1.

Why? Because I can.

The thing that absolutely threw me for a loop was the fact that Apple's Disk Utility program does NOT list the appropriate system type for Linux. If you use the terminal app diskutil, it's there, but you can't change anything about a partition that Mac OS X currently has mounted except for its size. Even dumber, diskutil can't do squat during the installation routine. Argh! Here's what to do:

WARNING: This is the preferred method for people with with new Macs, those picky about giving each OS even space, those with no important data to lose, or those for whom diskutil cannot resize their existing volume to leave enough room for two more operating systems.

1. Insert your Mac OS X Install Disc 1 DVD and restart the computer.
2. When you here the Apple "bong" hold C down to boot from the Mac OS X Install Disc.
3. Once the GUI is up, select Utilities from the menu bar and select Disk Utility.
4. Select the drive, then Partition, then 3 partitions. Disk Utility automatically sets up three partitions as evenly as it can.
5. Select the first partition as format it as Mac OS X Extended (Case Sensitive, Journaled)
6. Select the last partition and format it as MS-DOS FAT32.
7. Leave the middle partition as is -- Disk Utility can't format it correctly and diskutil can't do anything while installing.
8. Install Mac OS X as normal. It's suggested that you use Customize to install a minimal system. This is just in case you foul things up and have to start again. You can install extras later.
9. Once you have Mac OS X set up, Cancel the Software Updater and go to www.apple.com/support/downloads and grab the Mac OS X 10.4.6 update for Intel. Burn the disc image to CD or copy to an external hard drive. Again, this step is a safe-guard against having to download the update over the internet each time you may or may not foul up.
10. Install the update and reboot back into Mac OS X.
11. Run Terminal (under the Utilities folder in Applications) and run sudo diskutil eraseVolume Linux [name] nonbootable disk0s3.
12. Run diskutil list and verify that the 3rd partition reads "Microsoft Basic Data". If it does, you're good to go. (Yes, the label is wrong -- trust me, you're heading in the right direction.)
13. If there are no errors, go to refit.sourceforge.net and download rEFIt. Open the disc image and copy everything over to your Mac OS X drive. Then run /efi/refit/enable-always.sh in Terminal.
14. Insert your Windows XP SP2 installation CD and reboot the computer.
15. When rEFIt comes up, select the Disk Partition tool and verify that the GPT data for the thrid and forth partitions both read "Basic Data" and that the MBR data for the third and forth partitions reads Linux and FAT32, respectively.
16. Exit out of the utility and select the Windows XP SP2 installation CD.
17. Install XP as normal. You can choose to use FAT32 Quick or NTFS Quick, it doesn't matter which. Don't go crazy setting up XP, though, in the event you foul things up.
18. When you're done installing XP, and while in windows, right-click the DVD drive and click Eject. Insert your Linux installation CD and reboot.
19. in rEFIt, select your Linux install CD.
20. Set up your Linux distro as usual. If your distro gives you the option to use GRUB or LILO, use LILO -- GRUB won't work.

This journal entry written in Linux on a Mac that triple-boots.

In preparation of another post, I decided to conjure up this little post about bandwidth and how it relates to the PCI bus.

First off, I get bitchy with specs that get thrown about by hardware manufacturers and neophytes on the net. A decimal megabyte (1,000,000 bytes) often gets confused with a binary megabyte (1,048,576 bytes, or 2²⁰). To make matters worse, bandwidth is often expressed in decimal megabits (8 bits = 1 byte) while data is measured in binary megabytes.

Finding the truth behind the PCI bus is a mix of everything.

The PCI bus can tranfer 4 bytes and operates at 33¹/₃ MHz. (No, I'm not making the ¹/₃ part up -- for simplicity's sake it's always been left off. Those old enough to remember the first 100MHz processors operated on a 33MHz bus with a clock multiplier of 3. The reason the CPU's clock speed ended up being 100 was because the bus speed was actually 33¹/₃MHz.) So, 4 bytes * 33,333,333¹/₃ = 133,333,333¹/₃ bytes per second. This is where you get the common claim that the PCI bus's bandwidth is 133MB/s, but that's wrong.

If you divide 133,333,333¹/₃ by the binary megabyte, you get approximately 127MB/s, or binary megabytes per second. This is the transfer rate you can use when trying to figure out how much data you can spit through a line, or how long it will take to transfer data over a line.

So, now things look a little clearer. Except for one small fact: PCI is a bus, which is akin to an ethernet half-duplex hub: Only one device can talk at a time, and that device broadcasts over the entire bus, with only the intended reciever acting on the broadcast. So now that 127MB/s turns into 63.6MB/s when input and output occur at the same time. Yeesh!

So what all can "fit" on the PCI bus? Video cards have long been moved to AGP, but what about other devices? Belive or not, a lot of on-board devices were still routed through the PCI bus until recently. There's no real way to tell what gets routed where unless you call up the manufacturer. You could use a tool like SiSoft Sandra to find out what logic chipsets are being used on your motherboard, and then look up those chipsets, but remember that your motherboard manufacturer may have routed things differently.

The most common upgrade for older computers is a new hard drive (and hard drive controller for motherboards with anything less than on-board ATA/66). And for this, the PCI bus is still well-suited. Even a single 150GB WD Raptor can't max out the PCI bus by itself.

Another common upgrade is to add an ethernet card, and here's where problems may start to arise. If the computer is not going to be part of a home gigabit network, then adding a PCI ethernet card with a PCI HDD controller card isn't going to be that big of a deal. 100mb ethernet caps out at 23.8MB/s (11.9MB/s x 2) and top-tier broadband tops out at 1.19MB/s downstream.

The problem with PCI arises in faster RAID0 configurations and gigabit ethernet. These two things can saturate the PCI bus on their own, let alone when you put them together. Indeed, using an older computer for purposes that call for either of these two technologies pretty much negates using an older computer. And that's the situation I found myself in with my current file server, which is why I spent $420 on a new server and an addition $85 on gigabit networking gear.

So, to recap:

PCI bus - 127MB/s half-duplex, 63.6MB/s full-duplex.
100mb Ethernet - 11.9MB/s half-duplex, 23.8MB/s full-duplex.
Gigabit Ethernet - 119MB/s half-duplex, 238MB/s full-duplex.
Samsung SpinPoint P120 - 72MB/s
Fastest RAID - 250MB/s (4x 150GB WD Raptors in RAID 0)

This was a legitimate call-off, but look how it screwed up my whole week. Imagine how pissed I'd be, and how deep in shit the employee would be, if this were made-up.

I get a call some time in the AM from my boss. He screwed up the schedule and had three people working second shift, so he thinks I should come in to tie up administrative ends instead. Come in and get my 40 hours and go home. OK, no problem there.

( 6-Day Time Table )