Mostly about my amusement
So my little girl misbehaved today and was sent to her room. Her grandmother let her know that if she is quiet for two minutes she can come out.
Two minutes go by and Grandma lets her out. She walks right up to her grandmother, looks straight at her and says “Don’t do that to me again.”
She’ll be three in a few days. Where does she get the attitude and confidence…?
Grandma told her “Want to go back to your room?” Can’t wait to see what she is like at 16.
I moved my wordpress blog onto the server in my basement. The old server was a dual CPU PIII running at 993 Mhz with a gig of RAM.
The server in the basement is PII 450Mhz box with 256MB ram so it was chugging. I wanted to install the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) for performance reasons but when I ran the command to install it I got back that my version of php was not supported.
openSUSE 10.1 comes with php 5.1.2 so I ran the upgrade via yast (System Update). This had the fun effect of rendering my server un-bootable. The kernel package did not really install so last night I did some quick surgery and got the system booted. This afternoon I installed the DVD drive from my workstation and got the system properly updated.
APC still did not install. Suse and the phpize command (php5-devel package) is apparently broken. Fortunately this webpage has a list of additional repositories. I added LAB-Project since they maintain updated php5 packages including one for APC.
After I added the apc extension to the php5.ini file, the wordpress pages load almost twice as fast before. Mysql was updated to version 5 so that may have also been a factor.
Half-Life 2: Episode One keeps crashing.
I figured it would be related to my Audigy sound card so I removed it and turned on the built in RealTek AC97. While I was at it I removed the wintel PCI modem. I never used it and wanted to make my PC as friendly to steam as possible.
I optimized my hard drive, ran the whole Symantec Norton tools, etc. I was able to play further but still eventually keeps crashing.
Sigh. Need to get a new PC, this one is becoming a pain to support.
Update: Last night I booted up into Ubuntu Linux, ran the latest Transgaming Cedega application and installed Episode One on it.
Amazingly it installed and ran. Still locked up though. The only difference was that it locked up the application and not the whole desktop. I was able to kill Cedega and not have the whole computer sieze up.
Transgaming rocks. Up until the game locked up Half-Life 2 ran at full speed.
I so need a new PC. The only thing I have not tried is swapping out the video card.
First person shooters are great fun (usually) and I have purchased and completed all of the Half-Life games. Half-Life 2 ended with a cliff hanger.
The next game in the series Half-Life 2: Episode 1 was made available today. I had pre-ordered and had the locked gamed downloaded and ready to be unlocked for a week now. After playing it for less than an hour it looks like good fun and continues the game.
The LOADING… portion is a pain. My PC is a few years old but it’s a P4 3.2GHZ with HT, has one gigabyte of RAM, a Nvidia 6800 AGP w/256MB, etc.
The loading of data is death and kills the flow of the game. I’ll do the usual optimization and make sure nothing is competing with the game. Once the loading screen is done the game plays very well but this is a pain.
