wolfwings

...just placed the order (through a local company, YAY for supporting local businesses!) for the hard drive I wanted in my laptop from the get-go, but Lenovo just doesn't use. Until 4GB SO-DIMM's become commercially available to end-users some time next year most likely, my laptop is fully kitted out and maximized.

So... yeah, 250GB drive, here I home. With 325G/2ms operating shock durability. So basically, any drop too short to park the hard drive heads with the Wiimote-like sensor in my laptop won't hurt the drive, any longer fall and the drive will get parked to withstand up to 900G/1ms shock. And this is both a Seagate drive (so a 5-year warranty) and one of the best-performing laptop drives out there at the moment that's not a power-hungry monster. For under $100 at reputable retailers. Seagate Momentus 5400.4 series.

Then the 'stock' drive gets put aside, and I'll finally delve into a fully-ground-up build for this machine. At this point, definately keeping Windows XP Pro x64 for some gaming for native DX9/pseudo-10 support and native Windows development/testing. I'll be transitioning to a 100MB FAT32 'boot' partition, and the remainder an NTFS 'shared system' partition. It'll be sticking to the Linux directory structure, since it's fairly trivial to rename/re-route all the Windows core folder names with nLite before I actually install the OS. So everyone will be out of /home instead of 'documents and settings', and I'll keep the /windows folder since there's no better name for it. And I'll add /win32 and /win64 instead of 'program files (x86)' and 'program files' since I'm running a 64-bit Windows *AND* a 64-bit Linux system. At least... that's my current thoughts... still toying with thinking if there's a better place to move the 'root' Windows folders to for integration purposes. /usr/local/windows/{core,i386,amd64} maybe?

I'll have some quirks running Windows, I'm sure, but I already run into most of those just running 64-bit mode. Anything that doesn't barf already, isn't likely to barf from further twiddling.

Just a silhouette-style design, nothing fancy or big. Smaller than 100x100 pixels in the finished version. I'm re-building my Zombies!!! Megasite and would like to ditch the overly-noisy half-assed background to have simple background colors and what-not, for more of a 'training manual' appearance to the site.

But, first, I'd like to add a proper 'icon' to the site, intended to be in the upper-right corner, preferably something that can work at 16x16 pixels as a 'favicon.ico' and a bit larger at up to around 100x100 pixels, or ideally some kind of SVG file or other vector-based format so I can define everything in relative sizes on the site. It won't be used for anything but the on-line site, and I am willing to pay for this.

So... any takers out there? Again, not looking for anything beyond a black-on-white (with possibly a simple gradient fade around one edge if you want to cut off the zombie at the torso or neck or what-not) silhouette-style zombie design.

The Dilbert website now has a Ultra-lean Version available, thanks to the shitstorm the bloated-with-flash version got. Even Scott Adams admits the company that re-did it went grossly overboard with the new version, and they're working to trim it down a lot. So... at least he listened, and for the time being (if not indefinately) has provided an ULTRA-lean, bare-bones 'just show me the damn comic' version of the site to boot. =^.^=

I... thought my SWR meter was broken at first. I was getting a 1.3 SWR with the naked antenna no matter what I did.

Then I hooked up the AM/FM/CB splitter, and re-tested. THAT let me throw the SWR all the way over to 3.0, so at least I know the meter works. But I ended up being able to get a 1.1 SWR on channels 1 and 40 equally, and it actually dipped lower (though I couldn't measure accurately below 1.1) towards the middle-channels. I think I can safely go buy a smaller antenna. =O.o=

And the 'quick fold over' is worthless. I'm going to delete it, and put the potbelly spring in with a shorter antenna I think, rush home, take a shower, then head to work. Ah well, anyone out there want a screwed-in-once 102" stainless-steel whip antenna in the KCMO area? Free?

And just to prove I did it:

Though thankfully, aside from two or three of the plastic 'click studs' I didn't actually tear anything at all, and I'll just move the damaged ones to easilly-accessed panels so I can replace them later. But... the car's stripped except for the dashboard and front doors, so I'll be able to drop the headliner tommorow, install the CB antenna, get a rough tune on it and either leave the headliner out for a day or put the headliner back in for a night and put the soundproofing in on Saturday.

After yanking the interior out, I feel a lot more comfortable about reassembling everything in a single day on Saturday at least, so the car'll be ready to run at autocross on Sunday, albeit 60lbs heavier and a whole lot more silent inside. =^.^=

RAAMaudio, the place I ordered my soundproofing from? Yeah... you call in an order, you speak to Rick who writes down all the info. =O.o=

So... yeah, my soundproofing'll be here around Friday, woot and stuff! Just in time to install it possibly before autocross on Sunday. =^.^= Man, I'm gonna have to pre-strip my car this week a hunk at a time each day before I head to bed, so Saturday is soundproofing-and-reassembly day only.

Just placed the order for the permanent-install CB gear (antenna, cable, mount, splitter so it can go to my radio still, re-using my existing radio-shack CB for now) and the RAAMmat soundproofing for my Yaris. I may actually get it installed before RCFM. *hopeful look*

But yeah... $400 should let me truly finish my Yaris off now. Road-warrior wagon, here I come. =^.^=

...managed to port that source code from earlier to a Windows Service that behaves correctly, though it only supports Start/Stop, I couldn't think of a sane state to handle Pause/Resume since there's no solid answer to 'should a web server finish existing requests, close existing requests, or just 'hang' existing requests when paused?' that I could find.

Still, pleased with myself, now to work on a DNS filter that'll automatically integrate itself into the existing network stack, and then integrate that with the main program so it'll be a single executable/service to deal with. Then comes the hard part: Adding configuration screens to adding new domain-names to block like this.

I think there might actually be a market for this sort of thing, if I can manage to make it not break corporate Windows networking's wierd DNS requirements and what-not.

/. article about the situation actually. Seems pretty unanimous with it's animosity, the new design is a pile of rubbish.

I have a non-forking, select-based and mostly-1.0-complient HTTP server that uses almost no memory, is only about a hundred lines of code, and works with all the web-browsers I've thrown at it nicely. It cheats horribly since it's specifically meant to be used to hijack arbitrary HTTP servers by using DNS to point back at your local machine, so it utterly ignores all incoming bytes until it gets the 'blank line' sequence indicating the client isn't sending any more headers. Then it sends back a fixed 83-byte buffer, closes the socket, and goes back to listening for more connections.

Now, to make it handle DNS requests as well, and in effect filter them... that will be harder, but it's about time I learned stuff like file-modification monitoring and the like. Long-term? I'd love to port this stuff to Windows as a Service, but that would require all KINDS of junk I'd rather not consider just yet.

If anyone wants to see the code so far, ( it's behind this cut. )

Warning, the full-size images are about 2.5MB! But you can see enough detail to see how nicely the gryphons end up looking like inlays on my car's paint. =^.^=

I waited all winter to get these on, the weather has finally been nice so I made an appointment. And today, yes, on April 1st, I got my gryphons on my car finally. =^.^=

I ended up going with a 'bronze' sort of vinyl, that was a dead-on match for the metallic flake look, and same 'value' as my car's paintjob. As a result, in shadows or at night unless the light hits it, the gryphons mostly fade away, but in sunlight or similair the gryphons 'pop' out quite nicely, very easy to see the details when you look for them but unobtrusive. =^.^=

And

lizkay? To quote the vinyl guys when they loaded the image-file: Wow!

Pictures or it didn't happen:

Current Mood: bouncy

I offically am amazed that Linux has entirely surpassed Windows for handling of new, modern devices. It's taken me almost 3 days to find all the drivers for my hardware, and accomplish the above picture. There's still three devices I don't have 'drivers' for, though two of them are core 1 and core 2 of my processor not being in the 'current CPU list' so I get "Unknown Processor" instead of "T9300" and the Atmel TPM module lacks any 64-bit drivers for any OS apparently, but the first two are cosmetic since I'm not using Intel's official SpeedStep handling but RMClock instead, and the last one I couldn't care less about.

But Linux? Boom, out of the box, everything Just Worked. Even the Wireless USB worked out of the can once I ran a system-wide emerge update. I'll be keeping the Windows install if for no other reason than Steam-based games just still don't work without race conditions on memory-heavy machines because Steam just doesn't know how to handle a machine with a properly-efficient disk-cache.

It is interesting though... I never thought I'd see a screen high enough resolution that I didn't actively beg for anti-aliasing to be turned on. I... kinda like playing at 1920x1200 with anti-aliasing off, though at the quarter-resolution 960x600 TF2 and City of Heroes scream even with every single bell and whistle cranked all the way up to maximum. :-)

It's stupid, so I'm making a trivial post just to prove I'm not striking today.

On a side-note, new laptop is purring along nicely now. And GODS I'm still amazed at it's performance. It's mostly useless as a benchmark, but glxgears gets 68-70k at the default size. My old laptop only got 3k. At 1280x768, my old laptop was lucky to get 400, my new laptop at 1920x1600 gets over 30k still. =^.^=

Finally gave up entirely on keeping the Windows install on my new Thinkpad. It's so bloated with crapware and Lenovo won't supply a Windows XP Install CD (only a stack of *EIGHT* recovery CD's, geezus) that it was running slower than my 2.0Ghz single-core Turion laptop except in heavy 3D gaming where it has a much better video card even once I uninstalled all the junk pre-loaded on the box, and I wasted an entire day trying to 'just' restore the OS without letting the pre-loading crap install. No dice.

Keeping the recovery partition since I won't miss the storage. Current plans are to go non-multilib amd64, with a seperate chrooted 32-bit environment inside for 32-bit apps like Wine and the sort. Making the core systems from 'hardened' though I need to wait for the matching kernel to update to 2.64 still before I can swap that over.

Just need to figure out how to get the T9300 to accept power-management nowq, the existing cpufreq systems don't seem to recognize it which is odd. May just be that it's too new, I'll nose around. Kernel adjustments are trivial compared to rotware that won't release a system from it's clutches.

Yet to come: Getting XP 64-bit installed, AKA Server 2k3 Home Edition when you get right down to brass tacks. Will need that or some Windows platform for official support to VPN in to work if I telecommute during bad weather.

Current Mood: rushed

...at least, once I cleaned all the scummware off the thing. Geezus... 1920x1200 City of Heroes... ALL the graphics options pegged, all the way up, 60fps. The ONLY thing I could do was turn the particle-count all the way up to 50k+, then turn on a specific 'prestige sprint' effect that uses all unaccounted for particles to leave a massive, constant 'speed line' effect behind you in additive white. THAT managed to get my framerate down to 20, when I was zoomed way in so it was doing a couple dozen layers of blending over top of each other.

But geezus... this laptop is officially insane. I'm UBER happy with it. =^.^= Built like a brick, too, but hey, it's a ThinkPad. I do love that the screen folds flat open though, as odd as that may sound it's useful. And sturdy enough I feel comfortable handing it to someone just holding one edge or corner. =O.o=

So... my laptop shipped earlier than expected.

3 weeks earlier than expected.

Banzai!

Only 'upgrades' I made to my previously-posted plans were to a full 4-year on-site fix-it warranty, 4GB of RAM, a full A/B/G/Pre-N wireless card, 8x DVD dual-layer RW, and adding the Certified Wireless-USB option back in. Majority of the cost was the 4th year, so the total after tax, including the eCoupon effect, was $2305.01, and it should be here... around April 1st, amusingly. =^.^=

Um... Ow+Squeeeeee=Laptop? :)

Just installed class-5 synthetic Amsoil into the transmission fluid (75W-110 extreme-duty racing spec), engine oil (0W-20 extreme-duty spec), and for engine oil filter (25k miles commercial-fleet-duty spec), and ended up buying a set of impact-driver bits for the job because nobody... and I mean nobody, not Wal-Mart, not Auto-Zone, not any mechanic shop I went to today had a 24mm socket except as part of a $30 or more set, or as a metric-only impact-driver set... also for $30. If I'm gonna spend $30 either way, I'd rather get the impact-driver-rated 6-sided-sockets all in sizes I'll actually use, than a 40-piece with wierd sizes I won't.

It's also heavier than the 40-piece set, despite only having a tenth as many pieces. No chrome here, just that dull-black gunmetal-like finish most actual autoshop sockets have. And all (from 10mm up to 24mm) are both deep-socket AND 1/2" Drive, so they fit right onto the 2-foot-bar-style torque wrench I picked up on sale for $30.

I'm still amazed at the Yaris from a self-service perspective, honestly. I didn't need to jack up the car at all to reach the transmission drain, transmission fill, or engine drain plugs, and the engine oil filter is oriented so it acts like a 'cup' with a very slight tilt to it, so it's mostly an 'unscrew quickly and drop it, no dribbles' affair.

And the first test drive? Much quieter engine, much smoother transmission shifting, and from feeling the transmission housing after driving it firmly it's running cooler. Normally the transmission gets 'slightly warm' from being driven around, it was basically ambient-temperature after driving it a little firmly to test things. Downside... I now have much less engine braking. As in hills that I could engine-brake in 2nd on and keep my speed around 30 now let me roll up to 40mph. Far easier to roll along slowly in gear in parking lots though.

Now... next weekend I'll flush the brake fluid to Amsoil synthetic as well, and I hope to get some cheap rims and mount some tires on them before April 13th so I can make it to the first Autocross day fully kitted out. =^.^=

Current Mood: quixotic

Originally I was going to go with a Dell, because it was just cheaper for the equivalent than a Lenovo. Then... well, with the release of Intel's T9300 Mobile Core 2 Duo CPU they have an insane sale going on for their T61's. As in, I'm getting over $600 off on the laptop. That... more than made up the difference, and let me get a much better laptop.

So... specs I'm planning on (and I converted the check-out to a 30-day Quote, so I have time to get the funds together easily and reconsider if someone out there finds a better deal) are:

Windows XP Professional (Sadly they don't offer 64-bit)
1920x1200 15.4" widescreen LCD screen (960x600 for gaming)
Ge-Force 8600M GT 256MB video card
T9300M 2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo w/ *6* megabytes L2 Cache
1GB PC5300 DDR2. (4GB Kingston kit is $100)
80GB 5400RPM Hard Drive (Yes, small and slow)
4-in-1 media card adapter (Yes, it supports SDHC)
Intel 3945 a/b/g wireless card
Bluetooth
10/100/1000 Ethernet (Yay, gigabit!)
54mm Express-Card slot (16GB 34mm Express-Card planned)
And the most important part: Three year next day on-site warranty w/ accidental damage protection. I'm sick and fuckin' tired of this 'mail your only computer in to us to replace the freakin' KEYBOARD' bullshit.

And it's gonna cost me about $1790 before tax, about $1900 after tax, including the warranty.

Current Mood: hopeful

And the Laptop is finally more-or-less complete...

Any artists out there care to draw a zombie or undead icon for me?

Oh, and on a side-note. Dilbert listened!

Um... yeah. I think I have too much antenna.

Whew... feels good to tear into a car project.

Wow... okay, color me impressed.

And... that's the last thing I needed/wanted to order for my Yaris.

Making a Windows Service isn't that hard...

I'm glad to see I'm not the only one thinking the new Dilbert website is rubbish.

Well I'm making progress on a stand-alone 'ad blocking' DNS/Web server-combo.

Better pictures of the gryphons on my car!

Yaris... now with Gryphons!

It's ALIVE!

Nope... not striking.

Well, hell... this is annoying.

Holy CRAP this laptop's fast...

(no subject)

I... just made the single largest purchase in my life to date.

Well... Yaris is running a lot better.

Finally pieced together what I'll be getting for my next laptop.

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