Entries Tagged 'Science and Technology' ↓

…for pseudo-pipelined JavaScript. I’ve seen it done before, and it’s always seemed really neat — I’m really curious to see if it can be done dynamically…

BitTorrent, Comcast, EFF Antipathetic To FCC Regulation of P2P Traffic

If you can, try and give this a read — see if you can get the message.

It’s not bandwidth that Comcast is trying to protect, it’s the flow of information — that’s why they’ve gone after Bittorrent, now that Bittorrent is a media provider, too.

If you’re using Ubuntu on your laptop, do the following:

Go to “*System > Administration > Services*” in your menubar, and then enable “*Hard disk tuning*”.

Then (and this is just a bit more complex, but not very), type “*Alt + F2*” to bring up your “*Run Application*” dialog box, and type in “*sudo gedit /etc/hdparm.conf*”.

Then, scroll all the way to the bottom, and type in:

/dev/sda {
apm = 254
}

Save the file and then restart your computer. That is all.

[ "Source":https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/acpi-support/+bug/59695 ]

Just got finished installing my new Pentium III-S in my gaming PC using some wonderful “Arctic Silver Ceramique”:http://arcticsilver.com/ceramique.htm — more later, but I will say this: while I didn’t see much of an improvement right away in raw CPU speed (my clock speed _didn’t_ change, for what it’s worth), my 3dMark score went up by about 300 points.

Hey, not bad for $19!

Yep. A completely incongruous series of events which led to its poor little LCD screen being smashed upon my knee.

First, I was wearing a pair of pants that I had that couldn’t use the side pockets on — the pockets were too small (what the hell were they good for then, eh?), and couldn’t be used for anything more than my pair of keys.

Thankfully (or not), there was little “mid” pocket on them, about halfway down the leg that had a zipper and everything — perfect for those items that are too big to put in your side pockets, right? So, I stick my cell phone in there and forget about it. It’s sitting around banging against my knee when I walk, but at least it’s not falling out of my pocket and getting lost.

Well, later on Nina and I go to my sister’s house for supper (she was cooking Italian sausage soup that night, so at least that part of the night was good), and she’s showing us the new bed that her and my brother-in-law had recently got, and she’s all like, “Jump up and see what it feels like,” and I jump up on it, knees first like an idiot, and then Crack! it’s broke.

I knew just from the way the “crack” felt that it was broke. I pull it out of the pocket and the LDC screen looks like someone’s spilled chemicals inside it — those things look weird when they break, I’ll tell you what.

Luckily enough for me, my phone still worked — I just couldn’t see anything on the screen. Text messaging is impossible, of course, but at least it still functions as a phone.

And that’s that. What do I do? I bought it outright so that I didn’t have to get a 2-year contract with my cellphone company (almost unheard of where I live), and I don’t have the money to pay full price for a new one right now. So, I thought about repairing it myself.

I actually wanted to give Alltel a chance to make some money (why the hell not — they’re one of the better cell phone companies in America), so I took it up to them to ask if they could fix it. I was willing to pay a little bit more for “quality” service from them, if they could fix it immediately.

Well, I found out that not only do they not repair cell phones at the local Alltel shop where I live, but that they couldn’t even send off for the phone to be fixed — they said that it wouldn’t be “cost effective.”

Read that as: “We’re selling these phones to you at a 1000% markup — you’re paying $300 for something that cost us like $30. Why the hell do we want to repair it? Just buy a new one.”

Sorry, Alltel — no can do.

So, I go on Ebay and find a new LCD screen for $20. Hell, it’s worth it — even if it doesn’t work and I have to get a new cell phone in the end, I’m only out $20.

Well, there’s a new addition to my family of computers — it’s my wife’s new portable laptop, Henry. (You just _always_ have to name computers — if you don’t, it’s bad luck! Kinda like with ships.)

!http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1157/1342842965_7bb70e7705_m.jpg!

Nina needed a slightly smaller laptop so that she could sometimes bring it to school — eh, who am I kidding? _Slightly_ smaller? No insult meant to the laptops we already had, but I’m firmly convinced that they were never meant to be portable — just _smaller_ than desktops. My personal laptop and hers are 15-in *8 lbs.* _monsters_, from about four or five years ago.

Now, this nice model (the Compaq Evo N410c), is from that era too, but for its time it was made with a completely different paradigm — it’s only 0.9 inches thick, weighs slightly less than 3.5 lbs, and is only 12 inches, diagonally.

…and I got it all, used, on “Ebay”:http://ebay.com, for less than what people pay for iPods.

…_used_ iPods.

We’re running “Ubuntu 7.04″:http://ubuntu.com on there right now, with all the bells, whistles, and fancy effects, and it’s more than capable of running it (3D-emulation worked right away). Not only that, but the installation was slick as shit, too — I’ve never had one run more smoothly than it did with Henry. Even the bonus wireless card that the seller included (one with a Prism GT chipset) worked right away, with absolutely no tweaking needed whatsoever…

The battery seems to be quite old, though (laptop batteries _never_ last very long), so I’ve ordered a new one that should be here soon.

I’ve been fiddling with my cars lately, too, in various efforts to fix them and tune them up.

The Beetle was brought to Montgomery in the guise of performing a break-light switch recall, and whilst it was there, I told them about a “funny vibration” we had been hearing for a while — I cringed the entire time I did this, knowing that, if it turned out to be something under warranty, the examination cost (about $70) would be covered, but if it wasn’t covered under the warranty, I had to fork over the dough.

Well, turned out the noise, which I had been thinking was an exhaust leak and malfunction, turned out to be a rear wheel bearing that was slowly wearing out — oops (it was my second guess, to tell you the truth). However, it’s covered under the warranty! Yeah!

My other cars have not faired so well. Ever since doing an oil change on my white Mustang (and disconnecting the battery so that I could clean off the terminals), it’s been shutting off at weird times and sometimes refusing to start up at all. I actually got a chance to check around the engine compartment today, and during the course of my examination, I decided to pull one of the spark plug boots off (just to take a random look)… and the spark plug boot fell apart in my hand, with most of it still remaining on the spark plug.

Yeah… I don’t know if that’s what had been originally causing my problem, but I’m sure it doesn’t help.

My purple Mustang has been having problems of its own, as well. It’s been “pinging” (a sound caused by ill-timed detonation of the fuel inside the cylinder) for a while now, but it’s gotten worse. I bought a “timing gun”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timing_light about a year ago with the intention of fixing the timing on my purple Mustang (if it needed it), but I couldn’t figure out how to use it with my car (the front engine compartment is very, _very_ cramped).

Well, today, a year’s gone past, and I’ve since figured out how — by moving my upper radiator hose two inches to the left.

That’s it. Why the hell couldn’t I have figured that out sooner?!? Now, to figure out what the hell I’m looking at and how to fix it!

Currently in the process of doing this:

“Recovering Ubuntu”:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RecoveringUbuntuAfterInstallingWindows

for my brother-in-law. Not because anything went wrong, per se — it’s just that we installed Ubuntu on a drive that was too small for our liking (12GiB) and needed to “move” the entire installation to a bigger disk (20GiB).

Yeah, lazy, eh? Anybody else would just wipe everything and reinstall, but I used the handy-dandy “PartedMagic Boot CD”:http://partedmagic.com/ to just “move” the entire installation of Ubuntu onto the bigger drive.

It’s all worked out fine except that now I’m having to reconstruct the boot sector by hand, which isn’t too hard, _if_ I knew completely what I was doing!

Wow — normally, I wouldn’t give two shits and a fart about Beyonce, but I was trying to show someone the video of her falling on her ass recently, and it’s become nearly impossible to find! It’s removed from YouTube, from Google Video, every goddamn thing!

Apparently, Sony’s started kicking up a fuss about one of its main stars (and sources of income) being made to look like a clumsy oaf all over the damn world, so apparently they’ve been slapping everyone who hosts the video, from big sites to small, with “DMCA”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMCA requests (even if they’re not actually filing the actual requests, they’re at least threatening to, I guarantee).

I _finally_ found the damn thing on a site called “PinoySpyTV.com”:http://pinoyspytv.com at “http://www.pinoyspytv.com/view/158/beyonce-knowles-falls-on-stage-in-florida-concert/”:http://www.pinoyspytv.com/view/158/beyonce-knowles-falls-on-stage-in-florida-concert/, which I’ll post for you below:

You can download the actual source of the video at “http://www.pinoyspytv.com/flvideo/158.flv”:http://www.pinoyspytv.com/flvideo/158.flv (right click and go to “Save as File…” or something like that).

Like I’ve said, normally I wouldn’t give a shit about something like this, but I just think it’s scary as hell that a company—not even the government mind you, but just a damn company—is actually trying to erase an event from history like this! (Think that’s crazy? Do you think Sony isn’t sitting there wishing they could do exactly that?)

Download it. Save it. Remember it. Remember the day Beyonce fell on her face like an idiot and slid down a flight of stairs on her mug.

Trust me, today it’s videos of Beyonce disappearing, tomorrow its the Constitution.

What, you don’t believe me?

I was going to go through the “Bill of Rights”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights here and describe how each one is being threatened today, but it quickly got too depressing… feel free to check ‘em out, though I’m sure you’re already acquainted with them, right?

Well, this morning I decided to move around my partition tables on our main gaming computer — yeah, I know, silly idea, right?

“Why do you keep fucking around with stuff if it’s working fine?”

Because if I didn’t, I’d never learn anything new, would I?
Anyway… I moved around the partition tables (I wanted to make one partition bigger), and all of a sudden Ubuntu wouldn’t boot correctly anymore.

I mean, it _worked_, but it would hang during boot and give me a terminal screen. At this point, I could safely press Ctrl-D to continue the boot process, and everything would be fine. Annoying, but workable, I guess… but I want to know how to fix it.

So, I notice it’s hanging on something called “fsck” during the boot process (some kind of disk management utility for Linux), so I google it along with the word “Ubuntu,” and it leads me to this page:

“fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve”:https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/e2fsprogs/+bug/66032

Turns out that in your “/etc/fstab” file in your Linux installation are a collection of entries regarding which boot partitions will be loaded at boot time, and there was an old entry for the drive that I had resized (I had actually deleted it and created a bigger one, now that I think about it).

I just commented out the line (with a “#” character) that referred to the old drive that I had deleted, and whatta-you-know… it works. No more dumping to the terminal screen during boot.

Now, the partition manager I used is called “Parted Magic”:http://partedmagic.com/ — it’s a great little application that comes in the form of a bootable CD (by way of .ISO file). It’s got an amazing GUI-based interface (looks like it’s based a bit on “KDE”:http://www.kde.org), and is easy as crap to use, trust me. It runs amazingly fast and has booted fine on every computer I’ve tried. Try it!

…so we’re sitting there, having just installed “Joost”:http://joost.com on our main Windows computer, and we’re watching “Strangers with Candy” on the MTV channel, and then all of a sudden…

All the other computers on my network start going apeshit and telling me they’re having their ports scanned, and the originating address is the computer I’ve just installed Joost on.

Uh… Yeah. No. Nuh-uh. Fuck that shit. I uninstalled it and now I’m having to do full scans just to make sure that I’ve gotten rid of all its little processes.

Now, look — I know about Joost’s “relevant advertiser information” that it sends to companies like Viacom, Warner, and the like; I expect that shit. Companies like DirectTV already do that (it’s how you can see features like “what are other people watching” on the DirectTV service), and you _pay_ them to let them do it to you.

But the port scanning of other computers on my network? Nope — you leave the other fucking computers on my network alone. If I want you looking at them, I’ll install your fucking software _on_ them.

Port scanning is spyware-like activity, and if I wanted spyware on my computer, I’d turn off my firewalls and browse with “Internet Explorer”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/ie/default.mspx, okay?