Dec 5, 00:58 I've been playing with eBooks on my Visor. They work quite well, although there seems to be an ugly mob of formats and competing readers for them. One such conflict caused my Visor to lock up for the first time. Most distressing. Still, the biggest problem seems to be lack of available books. The vast majority I've seen available are in the public domain - Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Jane Austen, and Lewis Carroll. If I could pick up recent SciFi and Fantasy novels online (without waiting for shipping :-) I'd do it. I wouldn't pay a premium, but I'd certainly be willing to pay 50-75% of the normal price (I figure I can read 2-3 novels on a set of batteries). You lose some of the tactile goodness of a printed book, but they're much more portable, and I can have half a dozen "open" at one time and always on hand.
The sparc station is finally off my hands, so it's time to track down random crashes on my desktop machine. "Unknown error in atapi.sys". Don't know if it's the IDE controller, cable, or hard drive. Ugh. Different error messages show under Linux. But Linux recovers instead of bluescreening :-). If anyone out there wants to design an OS, remember: Paging out the kernel is BAD. Don't do it. NT/2000 does this. It is evil.
The first week in over a month when I've had actual work to do for my job comes during the same week I promised to help sort through my (late) grandfather's things. I had to come back to town a day early because they were getting antsy at work :-( On the brighter side, we got a lot done, and staying the night in that house might not have been the best thing for a restful night.
Nov 28, 11:42 Having just joined a Counter Strike clan (think Quake or something) I'm noticing that they form yet another sort of online community. Interaction via IRC, ICQ, the game itself, and various voice over IP technologies. Quite amazing. The dynamics are incredibly unstable - characterized by a mix of 20 and 30 somethings (about 1/3 of the total) and 14-16 year olds. All male, of course. Some random Sociology student could probably pull a pretty good thesis out of analyzing the interactions of the younger (but not necessarily more junior) members with the older. Of course, just like on a Wiki, or anywhere else online, almost nobody knows anything about anybody else except what those people choose to share. (After all, I could be a 13 year old. You realize that, don't you? And my real name might be <nowiki>FredDimplemortz</nowiki>. But it isn't. ;-)
Nov 27, 01:26 OK, so the whole USB sync to Visor under Linux thing was easier than expected. pilot-sync works. coldsync doesn't (although it's the recommended tool on the usbvisor.sourceforge.net page). jpilot looks like a fair GUI shell for doing things. life is good. I think the new backgammon game I downloaded is easier than "gammon", which was continually kicking my butt...
Nov 26, 23:09 <nowiki>SparcStation</nowiki> 2 and Sparc IPC systems use the same NVRAM chip. You can just switch them out, but you'll have to change the system id to match the new system, else you get ugly error messages at boot time. http://dbaseiv.net/sun/sun-nvram-hostid.faq.html has full details. This means that I now have a fully functional sparc station, whereas I previously had two broken sparc stations (although I thought it was 1 broken, 1 working, and a bad monitor). I think that if I added the computational power of both of them together I'd just barely beat my Visor. Unfortunately, the <nowiki>SparcStation</nowiki> IPC that works has a weird proprietary serial port, so I can't do serial console (pout). Now to install Solaris on it and give it to my mother.
And yes, I did break down and buy a PalmPilot clone. So far graffiti is still 1/2 the speed of writing by hand (which is 1/2 the speed of typing. if that). I'm working on getting the USB cradle to work under Linux (others claim success). I've been hampered by the lack of USB support in the 2.2 kernels, the lack of support for 2.4 kernels with my video card, and joining a Counter Strike clan. I just got a CVS version of XFree86 up and running that has vid card support, so it won't be long now...
For light reading I recommend the Harry Potter novels. I just finished them. Not intellectually taxing, but the way the author conveys the feeling that the title character is just a normal kid at school even though he is busy saving the world, etc. is quite interesting to watch. Also the political commentary built into the storylines is quite amusing. Any time the government shows up it is either inept or corrupt. Racism is bad, unless the race in question is really bad.
Nov 3, 23:55 I learned today that my serial terminal problems were actually a problem with the terminfo db on my linux box. FreeBSD ships a termcap that works properly with the terminal - so now I just have to convert one to the other and (hopefully) all will be well. Sometimes I find the quantity of bugs in the average OS to be quite depressing. OpenBSD seems to be the best around, but there's not enough software - you end up spending too much time tweaking things so they'll compile.
CategoryHomePage is a magic tag that prevents pages from being used in certain IndexingSchemes. (Diaries add heavy bias..)