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Well, as you all know, I use Linux. As a consequence, my iPod doesn't have official Apple support. I had it working fine through GTKpod, but a little file monitor program called "gamin" had a bug in it. The purpose of the program is to notify GNOME (my windowing environment) when files change. Unfortunately, gamin kept making my system freeze while my iPod was in the middle of unmounting and ejecting. After finding out that switching to the older "famd" (File Alteration Monitor Daemon) fixes that problem, I did so. But the damage has been done: my iPod is corrupted (because it lost a connection while it said "Do not disconnect"). I've formatted it several times on here with mkdosfs to no avail. So I just hooked it up to my dad's computer and restored it. It seems to be working now. And yes, my dad runs Windows. I could have rebooted, but there are a couple issues with that I'm going to bitch about:

  1. After a motherboard upgrade, Windows won't start. It spews BSODs. Safe mode won't work. Nothing works. The most major thing that changed was the chipset model. It's still the same processor it booted with last time, and it's still the same sound card and LAN. The main difference is the chipset. My Linux machine worked perfectly fine (except I needed to switch the sound driver from snd-cmipci to snd-via82xx, but it's got the same generic AC97 chipset). I would figure that since Microsoft thinks open source is inferior, Linux wouldn't have better hardware support than Windows. Apparently it's true.
  2. If I didn't remove WPA from Windows when I installed it, after I reinstall Windows (I'm not going to -- I'll mooch off my dad or something until it becomes a real necessity for me to boot into Windows [so far there hasn't been any major reason for me to]), I'd have to call Microsoft up and give them this long spiel about where I got Windows, what brand my computer is, how much I paid for it, the key of Windows, what time of day it is in Russia.... you get the idea. I don't enjoy getting treated like a criminal (even though, according to their "nobody reads this" EULA, I am already one for removing WPA). If I ever have this problem with my dad's "no, don't crack WPA" install (again -- after replacing a fried HP motherboard with a cheap ABIT one, Windows asked to be reactivated, and the online/phone activation wasn't working, so I had to wait an hour to talk to a CS rep to give me a new XP serial + a new key), I'm going to be straight and upfront with them: "Your inferior product required me to reinstall it, reformat the hardrive, reinstall it again, and fondle it. Give me the bloody number so I can spend another 3 hours installing all my other applications. And in the future try not to make an OS that sucks." So yes, I'm very happy I don't run Windows. This kind of crap would annoy me to no end.
  3. I have no good Windows CDs. They're all scratched up. So even if I really really wanted to reinstall Windows (I don't), I'm pretty much SOL.

In other news:

  • I had my birthday yesterday (1-Mar) because that's what day of the week my birthday would have fallen on if it occured this year
  • eXonyte had his birthday the day before mine.
  • Yesterday, I installed my new ASRock motherboard with USB 2.0 and discovered in the process that:
    • When the computer store fails to include mounting screws with the case, you should complain
    • Canned air works better than a vacuum cleaner
    • The first thing to check when diagnosing sound should be to see if the sound mixer is muted. I spent an hour and a half installing drivers, reinstalling drivers, recompiling kernels, and all that business only to find out that the mixer labeled "VIA DXS" was muted. Almost all of the others were unmuted (except Mic and Line In, for obvious reasons). Needless to say, I'm going to check the mixer FIRST before anything else next time.
    • It's a bad idea to ask your friend which end of the fan sucks or blows in front of sophomores. He was demonstrating my new leet fans in front of the sophomores coming by Vo-Tech to tour it, and when I asked for him to hand me it, I said "which end is sucking, and which is blowing?" Every sophomore in the room giggled. It wasn't that funny.
    • Having "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp" running in vty 1 and then pressing the M key on the "VIA DXS" item in alsamixer (running in vty 2) with headphones on cranked up all the way is a bad idea. Basically, what happened is this: I had "cat /dev/urandom > /dev/dsp" running in my first virtual terminal. Normally, this'll make random static go through the speakers. I had headphones on. M is the mute/unmute toggle key for alsamixer. So, when I unmuted VIA DXS with headphones on cranked up all the way... well... very very very loud. My head still hurts.
    • Pertaining to lunch: wasabi is illegal in most states, or should be. I took about a half teaspoon of it in a ginger root thing and rolled it up. My face is still numb.... But it was worth the bet. I get Doom 3 now :P
    • What else.. er... well.. I need some canned air to blow all this dust crap out of my computer. Probably would be easier and less expensive to take everything out of the computer and take the case to the carwash and spray the sucker down. That's what I'm doing with my old case that will be delegated to my sister.
  • I'm going to Carl's house tomorrow. Nobody here knows him, I'm sure, but it's still relevant. LAN party :P. At least three people besides me are going to be there. Sure, playing with just 4 people isn't as fun as with 20 to 30 (more info coming soon), but it's better than singleplayer any day.
  • My iPod is now synced properly (started it when I started writing, it just now finished).
  • I get to play CS/1942/DesertCombat tomorrow in Linux. I'll be the only Linux user there. Yay for me ☺.
  • My new motherboard overlocks nicely. VERY nicely. I went from 1910 MHz to 2300 MHz without anything blowing up (and it's all very stable still, and I can probably squeeze about 50-60 MHz more, but I'm not going to attempt it). Although I think it did mess up the USB clock or something (or, it could have just been that my front USB headers aren't getting enough juice). I reset it to normal, but I'll probably clock it back up tomorrow.
  • I need a new (more powerful) power supply. My +12V line is reading +11.3V (on a multimeter, my board monitor reads it as +11.14V).
  • I love the hell out of bullets ☺
  • I tinkered with CSS and HTML for ignitionLite. I've come to the conclusion that I will have to use frames in order to make everything line up properly. It'll still be powered by XMLHttpRequest and its bretheren (and XML parsing and such too), but all that would get dispatched via frames. I'm thinking it would make sense having a #control frame for the actual JavaScript, a #chatbox frame for the chatting area, a #rightside for the right sidebar (nicklist, channel name, n people chatting, "me" selection), and a #inputbox for the text entry area. All of this, of course, would be scaled to fit in the browser, so it resizes. And it should work if placed in an iframe (so "embedded" controls work too). The main issue I'm going to have to solve with ignitionLite is the "what to do if they close the browser window" problem. If I can send a small packet to the HTTP server telling it you want to quit when the browser is unloaded, it'll solve that problem. I'll also need to put a throbber somewhere so users can see if XMLHttpRequest is doing anything useful (probably just copy the Firefox throbber and put it in the upper-right hand corner of the page or something).

That's enough for now I think.