2 Bit Hacker

Did a couple of things yesterday. Matt and I met Nagle and some other people to play a few games of bowling. I won one game, and did pretty well overall. I miss bowling, it’s feels odd to go bowling by yourself. I remember back when Jason and I and whoever else we could get to go would go bowling about once a week. Ahh the good old days.

After bowling, we went to Hilton Head to get a tasty hamburger from Fudruckers. They were very tasty burgers. We were going to go to the place I have a gift certificate for, but I forgot the certificate back home. Yup, even after being reminded to take it. So instead we went to Old Navy so Matt could buy pants, then we went back to Savannah.

Also, we’ve been working on fixing Matt’s computer. We’ve tried reinstalling the OS, removing hardware, and testing, testing, testing. It seems to be doing pretty well now, but it’s only got 128MB of RAM in it, with two of it’s sticks removed. We suspect one or both of them to be bad, we’re not really sure. It’s definitly an odd error we keep getting, since it kept changing. Hopefully we’ve gotten it now.

Oh, and apparently we’re basically at war now. We’ve been keeping a television tuned to the news most of the time, though they don’t really say too much in the way of information. I still think the whole thing is stupid, now I just hope it’s all over in a couple of days.

And there’s a tornado on the way here. So the war coverage keeps getting interrupted by storm reports. Whee!

Thoughts are a little disjointed right now, I’m not terribly awake…

Random Junk

Up to day 4 of my visit now, if you count Saturday when I arrived. Not really doing much of anything exciting. Mostly just hanging out and having fun. Matt drove me around downtown Savannah today, pointing out all the interesting sights and the various SCAD buildings. We stopped briefly at the photo building so Matt could pick up some photos from last semester. Basically Savannah doesn’t look like a very big city, all the buildings are 4 floors or under, and nothing looks particularly new, even the new buildings are designed to look old apparently, so as not to upset the historic preservation people.

We also spent some time today debugging Matt’s computer. It started randomly rebooting last night, and we couldn’t figure out why. It turns out that Windows XP lowers the number of blue screens you see by rebooting instead of hanging. I guess it’s kindof a productivity boost, since the only thing you can do at a BSOD is restart anyway, and this mechanism saves you the trouble. Various web searches all suggest fairly basic debugging things, checking for driver updates, BIOS updates, all that sort of junk. It seems to be doing okay now, but who knows…. Very strange.

Oh, and apparently Matt noticed there was some kid sitting on his roommate’s car earlier. It turns out the kid was scared by a puppy, and hopped up on the car. Jason (Matt’s roommate) decided to take the puppy in and take if over to the animal control people. Apparently the embed tracking chips into the dogs they handle, so they scanned it for one of those, but it didn’t have one, so they told us to give the dog to some other animal control place. Unfortunatly, they’re closed, so the dog is staying at the apartment for the night, apparently.

I’ve taken a couple of pictures since I got here, and decided to upload them to my gallery.

Random Junk

Well, I’ve made it down to Savannah. I drove last night until about 3am, making it down to Fredricksburg, VA (I think that’s the right town name.) Stopped for the night at a Holiday Inn, woke around 11:30 the next morning, and by noon I was on the road again, finishing up the trip around 7pm.

Overall, the driving was pretty simple, though I’m pretty sure New Jersey has the worst rest areas in the nation. I had to get gas at one of these. They had maybe 12 gas pumps, but it was required full service, and they only had 1 or 2 guys working, so only 3 pumps were actually open. This would normally be okay, but there were about 50 cars that wanted gas. Luckily, very few of them had their fill points on the right, so I was through in about 20 minutes. Other than that, the trip was pretty uneventful.

So far we’ve just been hanging out. Matt’s playing some shoot-the-Germans FPS at the moment. We went to a mexican place called Jalepenos for dinner, it was tasty and inexpensive. Not much in the way of plans for the next few days. Apparently Savannash is a big holiday drinking town, so Matt’s thinking we should lay low until the transient drinkers leave town.

Oh, and I’ve update my wardrive maps, both the map for the trip down and the full map.

Random Junk

Got my Cuecat in the mail today, hooked it up to my main PC and it appears to be working fine. I tried scanning a few things and looking up in the UPC Database, worked perfectly. Eventually, I’m planning to hook it up to the I-Opener once it’s hacked, so I can use batchelor to keep track of my grocery shopping.

I’m also thinking of using it to track my books, movies, and games. It seems like the UPC Database has information for a lot of the stuff I have, so it should be trivial to write up a script to look up things then look them up in other databases, like the IMDb. Should be interesting.

Geek Stuff

Well, aside from my previous dealings with annoying drives, adapters, and power in the wrong places, today has been a pretty good day. I got my cable hooked up to the new apartment, so I’m once again online and with television. My plan is to ignore the television until the TiVo picks up something worth watching, which may be a while.

So now the only thing I need to make the apartment complete is the futon, which will hopefully be here tomorrow. I’m hoping it doesn’t get delayed too long, since I’d like to get it in before going on my trip. I want to do a little apartment walk-through with my camera and make a little video thingy.

Random Junk

Sitting at Earthworks at the moment, waiting for a database to finish vacuuming itself, and without much else to do, so I figured I’d type up an entry. I’ve been wondering for a while now if Postgres was really the right database for the job on these systems. So far it’s been slow, difficult to deal with, and brings the system to a crawl when we get more than 25,000 entries in a table. Perhaps in my grand, glorious, and forever-on-the-horizon rewrite, I can switch back to MySQL.

In apartment news, I got a bit more done over the weekend. I’ve gotten most of my poster hung, the only ones that arn’t up that I want up are the Vampire Hunter D and Mallrats posters, but I’m having trouble finding frames for them. They’re larger than the other posters by a few inches in both dimensions. I also purchased a floor lamp and coffee table from Wal*Mart, and went insane and bought a futon from a place called Sticks in Nashua. The futon should be arriving on Wednesday.

Also, Dave brought over a simple folding table, which I’ve put in the bedroom. I’ve got the NeXT on it, and plan on using it for a workbench for the various projects I want to get done. Currently the guts of the I-Opener are strew about on it. Just waiting on a 40-44 pin IDE converter to get that finished up.

I feel like I’ve been a lot happier since I moved into the new place. I’ve got stuff to do on the weekends now which keeps me relatively busy, but it’s fun to do. Also, it feels good to be in control of the entire apartment. In the old place, after Andrea moved out, I never felt like I could do anything, since nearly everything in the place belonged to her. Here, everything is mine, and there’s no one else to consult about changes I want to make. It feels good.

Also, this Friday I’m leaving for Savannah. Really looking forward to it. I’ll be wardriving the whole way down, so I should have some interesting maps this time around. Just need to get Matt’s meatspace coords to feed into GpsDrive, and I’ll be all set. Not really sure what we’re going to do for the week, but it’ll be nice to get away from work and snow for a bit.

Random Junk

Last night I ended up helping Dave get Greenerd’s wireless access point working right, and setup their firewall to make it all happy and stuff. I would strongly recommend against anyone buying one of SMC’s access points. It can only be configured through SNMP, which is very annoying to me. No web interface, no telnet interface. Oh, and when you download the self-extracting utility to configure it, it just extracts a readme and a zip file. So if you don’t have WinZip, you have to go get that too. It was a fun night.

In the course of things I also picked up a new wireless card, a Netgear MA401. Dave has had the same card for a while, and it seems to work pretty well. I decided I needed a normal card in addition to the modified SMC.

I’ve also been thinking about replacing my Netgear MR314 at home with a Soekris net4501 running m0n0wall. Just another project to keep me busy. There are a couple things on the m0n0wall todo list that seem interesting, like VPN support. Hopefully that means he’s planning on making it so that a m0n0wall can have people VPN into it, which would be cool, being able to VPN to my home network.

Random Junk