frase.id.au archives

frase.id.au archives for March 2006:

29-03-2006 - of fork() bombs and one-byte buffers (frase)

24-03-2006 - The Upgrade: Part III (frase)

24-03-2006 - The Upgrade: Part II (frase)

24-03-2006 - The Upgrade: Part I (frase)

21-03-2006 - pfft... sleep is for sissies. no wait... (frase)

19-03-2006 - mmm... caustic fibres :/ (frase)

17-03-2006 - hello! (frase)

11-03-2006 - on this day... (frase)

08-03-2006 - Viva la Vista redux! (frase)

08-03-2006 - we now return to Battle Seizure Robots (frase)

08-03-2006 - Viva la Vista baby, yeah! (frase)

05-03-2006 - mmm... LCD goodness... (frase)

03-03-2006 - hey, I just realised... (frase)

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 76

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 77

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 78

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 78

Warning: date() [function.date]: It is not safe to rely on the system's timezone settings. You are *required* to use the date.timezone setting or the date_default_timezone_set() function. In case you used any of those methods and you are still getting this warning, you most likely misspelled the timezone identifier. We selected 'Australia/ACT' for 'EST/10.0/no DST' instead in /store/1/www/frase.id.au/common/functions.php on line 80

Wednesday 29-03-2006

of fork() bombs and one-byte buffers

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Posted by frase @ 23:31 on 29-03-2006

FORK BOMB, FORK BOMB
YOU'RE MY FORK BOMB
AND BABY YOU CAN CHOKE MY OPERATING SYSTEM

hello world+dog

I hope is all well with your. My brain is fried. I have been programming non-stop for nearly 12 hours (well I stopped for dinner but that's abou tit), and all yesterday afternoon/last night as well. I hvae got the bloody thing (a file transfer server) working finally! Although there are still bugs :( Lukcy the client, which was written by another group member, is all working very nicely, and also I haven't been the server all on my own but GAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'll be happy if I never have to write another line of C in my life (or at least in this subject)

Of course, that will never happen. Because while this assignment is almost done, there are two more to go, and I find the prospect of implementing a reliable protocol using UDP far more horrifying than a forking file transfer server.

But yes, that's that. Truth be told, I have really learned a lot and found this assignment quite rewarding... but whatever that reward is, it sure isn't sleep or free time. And it's not even over yet!

I need water.

t

Friday 24-03-2006

The Upgrade: Part III

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Posted by frase @ 19:31 on 24-03-2006

Well, after sitting in HORRENDOUS traffic on the gateway for well over an hour, and a somewhat productive though far from enthralling day at the labs, I got home and frantically assembed the new bits and pieces into a semblance of a computer.

Short story: everything seems to be working okay. The stock fan on the 7600GT is noisy as hell. The power supply is very nice. Ubuntu chucked a hissy fit when it tried to start X but Frenzy is working fine, so it's most likely a driver issue. For now, the system will sit here on the bench as I have Rivers tonight and work in the morning, so there's not much else I can do at the moment.

PICS!!! (well one, anyway)

t

Atomsk2... NAKED!!!

The Upgrade: Part II

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Posted by frase @ 10:52 on 24-03-2006

Wootskies! Dad just phoned to say my new parts have been delivered. So I'll be able to get it all happenang this weekend!

Now, for those of you who are hanging on my every word, wondering what the specs of this new beast are... here you go!

CPU: AMD Athlon64 3000+ Venice E6 stepping *
Mobo: MSI K8N SLI-FI
RAM: 1GB (2*512MB) Corsair XMS3200
GPU: nVidia GeForce 7600GT *
PSU: Antec NeoHE 380W

* Will be overclocked like crazy

Anyhoo, I have to go to uni now. Bubye.

t

The Upgrade: Part I

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Posted by frase @ 00:01 on 24-03-2006

Today, I tried something new. A triple-boot. It did not go well.

Long story short, the motivation was to have a PC-BSD installation on which I could do all my network programming work for uni. Somewhere along the line, I completely screwed the boot sectors or the MBR or both, which left me unable to boot into either XP or Vista, and although PC-BSD booted fine, for some reason it was unstable as anything and kept locking so that was not too good.

Thankfully, some random resuce floppy image came to my rescue and saved the day. I'm in now, so I've just been doing a few backups of the few things that weren't already backed up; profiles, the latest Steam game files, etc. I'm very close to being fully detached from Atomsk... which is a good thing. In case you didn't already know or guess from the title, I have an upgrade coming up soon. Real soon.

Naturally, I'm going for an AMD64 solution. The current Intel chips are excellent performers (although Intel's upcoming `Core` architecture is going to be a cut-and-a-half above anything available right now), but the price of Intel parts (including motherboards, DDR2 RAM, et al.) means that AMD is the way to go (the performance gap is appreciable but far from dramatic). So that's that.

When I upgrade, I'll be going for Windows XP Professional x64. The idea of running native HL2 binaries and a 64-bit JVM is just too appealing for me to *not* to run a native 64-bit OS. The driver support is there and WoW64 works a charm - we've yet to have any major problems running x64 on the family PC so x64 it shall be for Atomsk2.

And of course, I'll be looking forward to experiencing 64-bit Vista too, not that I expect massive differences from the 32-bit builds I've been testing.

As for the actual specs of the upgrade... well I shall leave that for another post. Stay tuned!

PS I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write in this post. Also, wow holy moly, I just noticed the clock is completely off. Best fix that. Um yeah... meh. Peace out.

t

Tuesday 21-03-2006

pfft... sleep is for sissies. no wait...

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Posted by frase @ 03:09 on 21-03-2006

Actually, it's the other way around. CSSEs *don't* get sleep. Well we do sometimes. But not me, not tonight.

The strange thing is, I really didn't have that much work to do. I'm just doing it reeeealy slowly, probably because it was a fairly long and tiring day (yesterday, that is) to begin with.

So, here I am. It's 2am and there's a good hour's work left if I continue at my current rate. Beyond that, I don't see much point in sleeping for a mere two hours before having to get up again, so I'll probably do some other uni work or generally try to be productive. And I'll cook some bacon and eggs for my breakfast. At 3am.

I've included a wonderful pic of me hard at work (actually, me writing this, although work is soon to follow). This is a rare photographic glimpse into my life - and wow I wonder how my shirt got that crooked?! And wow I also need a haircut - why didn't someone tell me I was looking so shaggy?! Although it's kinda a paradox to be a CSSE and *not* look shaggy and/or somewhat goofy (unless you're JLo). I qualify on both accounts so I truly am living up to my degree.

Anyhoo, enjoy your sleep y'all.

t

she sells c shells by the sea shore

Sunday 19-03-2006

mmm... caustic fibres :/

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Posted by frase @ 13:54 on 19-03-2006

Well, a few old motherboards have died on me recently. And combine that with the few dead ones I already had lying around, that all adds up to a lot of fried mobos sitting around collecting dust.

Well, I figured I might as well use them for something, and so, lo and behold!, I have embarked on a bit of manual arts (or whatever you call it). YES! I'm building something that isn't software, and I'm *using* hardware to do it. Yes actual hardware hardware. And computer hardware :)

Given the ridiculous amount of spare PCI and AGP cards I have lying around, I though I would build some sort of rack for them. I've pulled out the old Bizarro Dremel and hacked the 'expansion slot' regions out of the old, dead motherboards, to make the perfect retention mechanism. I've not bothered with ISA slots, as there's *really* no need to keep ISA cards anymore except perhaps for historical reasons, but I'm lacking AGP slots (I only need a few), so a bit of skipdiving is in order methinks.

I'm still planning exactly how the thing is going to go but the first (and most hazardous) part is done. I actually used a heat gun to melt components off the board that were in the way of my cutting... I've inhaled a lot of lead and caustic fibres and that can't be good.

I'll definitely post some pics of the finished product, though that's a little way off yet.

Friday 17-03-2006

hello!

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Posted by frase @ 00:30 on 17-03-2006

well, it's been a little while since I've blogged so I'll bring you up to speed with a few things that have been going on.

Tonight was Bagurk's GRAND FINAL netball match. We lost by 6 point, though were were ahead by 4 at half time. It was a great game though, especially considering the last (and first) time we played our opponents, they absolutely flogged us.

Right now, I'm sitting here trying to resurrect the ol' HP Brio. Up until a few weeks ago it was serving as our gateway/firewall but alas, it developed a rather annoying habit of restarting every five minutes or so, so I decomissioned it... as you do.

At the moment, it's either a powers supply issue, or there something wrong with the disk controller itself, since the HDD in there at the moment is known good. I'm hoping it's the former, although sourcing a replacement power supply for it could be rather interesting. Propriety boxen are FUN FUN FUN!

What else can I say? Uni's going alright - the assignments are starting to trickle in; I'm hoping it will remain a trickle and not become a flood; I'm on top of things at the moment which is always nice.

And I guess that's about all I have to say tonight. Bye now.

(yes, I have been watching a bit of Life Support)

t

Saturday 11-03-2006

on this day...

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Posted by frase @ 15:50 on 11-03-2006

Today, March 11, is 311's day of days. Now, the whole 'month before the day' thing is purely an American phenomenon, but March 11 is 311 Day, and so on this day I will pay special tribute...

To 311 - Thank you for your awesome music! And please come to Australia! Or else I'll cry. Hahaha not really! But seriously come; Australia needs you! Keep it up boys!

t

Wednesday 08-03-2006

Viva la Vista redux!

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Posted by frase @ 23:59 on 08-03-2006

It's still the same build (5308) but this morning I reformatted and reinstalled the earlier compile (5308.17 as opposed to 5308.60 which I installed last night), and believe it or not, all my troubles went away!

Well, not all of them; but I'm happy to report that this time the install went without a hitch (and quite a lot faster), and I'm yet to have the system reboot on me unexpectedly, so that's quite a lot bet. There's the odd occasional explorer.exe crash but I can live with that since it restores the process painlessly and automatically.

So, this time around my experience has been much nicer; I've actually been able to do things which is always nice. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this in Firefox on the Vista install. A few things are quirky; the sound drivers won't install, Quicktime screws up the GUI and Gaim won't let me sign in. But all in all, these are not major issues; most of what I bothered installing (OOo, GIMP, Firefox and a few other tidbits) works perfectly, and looks a treat on Aero Glass to boot!

Anyhow, there's a lot more to tell but I suppose it's best done in small(ish) doses. Of course I could tell you everything I know right now, but that would take a long time and wouldn't be anything close to comprehensive anyway, so there's not much point to that.

t

we now return to Battle Seizure Robots

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Posted by frase @ 20:14 on 08-03-2006

http://www.seizurerobots.com/

nuff said

t

Viva la Vista baby, yeah!

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Posted by frase @ 01:34 on 08-03-2006

I couldn't wait any longer...

About a week ago, I installed Vista build 5308 in VMWare. Naturally, it ran like a dog and was without the sexy Aero Glass interface, but nevertheless it was still pretty awesome and only served to whet my appetite for a proper install.

That was planned for when I upgrade, which is likely to happen in a few weeks. I was going to install it on my current hardware... but that all went to hell. I couldn't wait any longer the experience Aero Glass, so this afternoon/evening, I did a bit of repartitioning, and away I went with the install.

The install was not without its problems. I have no idea why Microsoft would omit from the distribution the drivers for a disk controller so common as the SiI3112, but they did, which means seperate driver disks for a lot of people including myself. We haven't seen the end of those days yet, but we entered a time where drivers can be presented to the installer in formats other than floppy disks - that's right people, CDs, DVDs and USB drives - the future is now!

It's still painful, but about one hundred times less so than XP so that's a step forward - but I certainly look forward to the day when your OS installer can connect to the net to find drivers for unrecognised devices.

So that was the installer. Now let me say a few things. Aerogasm.

Well that was just one thing, but it pretty much sums up everything I have to say about the GUI. It is exquisite. It is also very intensive. My Radeon 9800 runs it quite well though it is a little laggy from time to time. I've no doubts, however, that it will be optimised a great deal before launch, and it's also worth considering that it was running the Microsoft drivers for the chip; ATi's WDDM drivers are probably appreciably faster and naturally, they'll improve with time as well.

Unfortunately, Vista is not especially stable on my computer right now. It basically ran perfectly (albeit slowly) on VMWare but either running Aero Glass brings a host of new difficulties, or something went awry during installation. I'd hazard a guess to say that it was a bit of both, as the latter part of the installation was throwing up a lot of bugs.

The default install, by the way, came in at over 8GB. That's pretty much Freakin' Enormous(tm).

Anyhow, the machine is damn unstable. It reboots when you try to do anything, and even when you're not doing anything there's a good chance it'll just reboot anyway. I managed to get Firefox installed and running (once), but now it's just hopeless, so I'm going for a reformat+reinstall... quite soon. All of these problems, mind you, have only occurred on the dedicated install (which is running Aero Glass) - the VMWare install was certainly buggy but nothing fatal.

So yeah... that's where Vista is at. I'm sure I'll have lots more to say about it over the coming weeks and months, but for now, I'm still pretty much in awe of the interface, despite the fact I only get to gawk at it for 30 seconds or so before the computer restarts...

Viva la Vista!

t

Sunday 05-03-2006

mmm... LCD goodness...

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Posted by frase @ 15:13 on 05-03-2006

Well, after failing once to score a sweet LCD on eBay (damn Chinese scammers... grrr), yesterday I successfully bid for a Samsung 730B - pickup from BNE. And this morning, I picked it up.

It took me a while to get the colour settings Just Right, but dayam, that's done now and this monitor is mighty schmick! 8ms response time, 1280*1024 native resolution, DVI input (which I'm using, because frankly, sifn't DVIz0r) and it looks very nice on my desk.

I'm going to run some benchmarks in 1280*1024 shortly, since that's not something I've ever really done before. Here's hoping that source will run decently in the new resolution, but if not, my upgrade is only weeks away, so I'll live :)

I can't believe it took me so long to enter the LCD age, but now that I'm here, I'm loving it! The extra screen real estate is very much appreciated already!

t

Friday 03-03-2006

hey, I just realised...

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Posted by frase @ 16:47 on 03-03-2006

actually, I first released it on Sunday. Then forgot all about it. And now, I've just remembered it again, and I'm on the computer so what else can I do but share?

I'm on my opens - wootskies!

t

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