Mostly about my amusement
I caught a bug or stomach virus this week. This morning when I got up to wake the kids, I got taken over by nausea. Nice post I know but bear with me for a moment.
My son goes to the bathroom and says
“Daddy, you should throw up. You’ll feel better if you do.”
Medical advise from a 6 year old. I didn’t hurl but I did call in sick; tummy pains are one thing but 90 minutes to the office could go really bad.
I don’t know anything about this movie really, other than if I ever see it, it will be only when it hits cable. I’ve just looked over the trailer and the movie web site looks just fancy enough to not be too slick.
The Wikipedia page says the main character discovers a lost civilization. Can you call a civilization lost when the movie takes place in 10,000 BC?
It looks like it will be good escapism fun. I can’t wait for all the peopl who will insist “That did not happen! The dates are wrong!”. Independence Day was another Roland Emmerich flick and everyone liked that one. The trailer looks like they got the elements for a fun movie.
But quickly looking over the cast I can make one statement:
If you are going to make a movie called 10,000 B.C. then there ought to be a law saying that Raquel Welch MUST appear in at least a cameo.
I was hoping that Senator Clinton would somehow be able to out-hope Senator Obama but her getting angry like this is just another coffin nail in her campaign.
I did not really mean to upgrade my home server today, it just worked out that way.
Weeks ago I cleaned up my basement computer room and Alek had dropped off an old PC for my use. It is a dual Pentium III 800 MHz machine with 700 odd megabytes of RAM. It does not work well with my old WinTV PVR-350, Windows Media Center Edition 2005, and can’t play most AVI or MPEG files.
My server is a 3GHz P4 with 1 GB of RAM and a okay Geforce 5600 FX in it. So I figured I’d swap the drives and just use the server as a workstation and vice versa. Just to be on the safe side I moved my blog to the backup server on my VPS.
The server hard disk would not boot on the PIII box. The initrd image did not have the drivers for the ide system in the new box. Getting the initrd updated would have required the openSUSE 10.1 which I could not find.
I did have a recently burned openSUSE 10.3 DVD lying around so after a couple of hours I was able to get my server working by upgrading from 10.1 to 10.3. The updated 10.3 YaST is faster than before and I’m going to start using zypper to keep my system up to date.
Once I get the system to a point where I am comfortable then I’ll move the blog back to my basement.
I’m running Vista 64 on my XPS 700 720 and I just upgraded from 2 GB RAM to 4 GB of 800 MHz dual channel DDR2 ram. My system was running slowly (it’s a Microsoft Operating System).
The RAM even came with heat sinks. After the upgrade my system does perform nicely and I have much less disk thrashing. But Vista is a pig. Even running idle and having only Firefox or Internet Explorer, the system is using more than 1 GB of RAM. That’s just nuts.
This is one reason why people should stick with XP. With every iteration of Windows you get an even more hungry monster for very little benefit. I’m glad I moved to Vista but that’s because I have a character defect. I like working with broken and difficult systems.
I went with the 64 bit version because I was sure I’d run application that could use the RAM. With a 32 bit Microsoft OS you get a actual limit of somewhere between 2 and 3 GB’s. It’s an addressing issue and the fix is to go 64 bit.
HD-DVD is dead, long live Blu-ray. Engadget has some more comments.
When installing a WinTV PVR-350 on a Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 PC, don’t forget to install the Sonic CinePlayer DVD software that came with the PC. MCE won’t display a TV image until you do.
Today it’s President’s Day, it’s raining, and the kids are off this week. So naturally I am goofing around with my PC. I’ll head to the basement soon to play with the kids but first I want to setup something on my workstation.
My main workstation is a Dell 700 720 with a Core 2 Duo and a pair of nvidia GeForce 7900’s.
It’s a great machine and I am currently playing Call of Duty 4, Crysis, and a couple of others. But I really enjoy working in Ubuntu. I just don’t want to give up the games.
I installed Virtual PC 2007 on my workstation and enabled hardware-assisted Virtualization. I captured an Ubuntu 7.10 iso on my disk and began running the installation. I created a disk for the virtual PC and began the installation.
I knew that once the live CD booted up I would have problems with the X11 driver. So I ctrl-alt-F1 and ran “sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf”. I replaced the “Depth 24” with “Depth 16”, saved the file, did alt-F7 to switch back to the X11 screen and then alt-backspace to restart the X11 server.
The mouse still did not work. Google is my friend and I learned that when I boot the CD press F6 and append the following to the kernel boot parameters ” i8042.noloop”. The article suggested running the Virtual PC in safe graphics mode but that went very low resolution on me.
Wash, rinse, repeat the “Depth 16” portion. I’m now installing on my Virtual PC 2007 Ubuntu with a color depth of 16 and a working mouse. My system has only 2 GB of RAM but since I upgraded to the XPS 720 motherboard I can go nuts with the 800 Mhz stuff.
Vista 64 with 8 GBs of RAM, that sounds like a good upgrade.
After the install I modified the /boot/grub/menu.lst to add to the kopt line i8042.noloop as well as to the end of the kernel line. That’s probably not the place to put it but it works for now and I’m going to continue working on it. I’ve just got the networking going and I’m putting on 187 updates since the iso image was created.
Over at my brother Stefan’s blog, he’s been running Movable Type for years. It bugged be because his server was slow, the theme was dated, it lacked a good archive page, etc.
Mostly I did not like the look or the speed. Stefan takes really good pictures and I thought he should have a web site that can show off some of his work. What I ended up showing him was good enough that he told me to go ahead and do it.
Read on for what I had to do to make it all work. Read more
From Engadget, things get worse for HD-DVD.
