Smithology

Did I say the other day that I like my Dell D630? Was I mentioning the awesome power of the dual core intel and the 2 gigs of RAM after using my bottom of the range G4 iBook.

Well I have one of two quibbles, the networking on this thing has made me more angry and caused me to swear more than anything I can think of. The wireless does seem a bit better since I upgraded the Intel ProSet thing. Like now it doesn’t just randomly drop out and then decide it can’t connect to anything unless I reboot.

I just spent the last two hours (which was going to be some nice relaxing DVD time) battling it out with the fricking piece of shite internal network card. I need an internal network card to be able to copy stuff off a certain computer at home – actually I can do it wirelessly but the network is way faster for certain large files.

The Dell D630 has a way cool feature that disables the internal network card when it is running from batteries in order to save power. Way cool until you actually want to use the network port and it stays disabled.

Things I tried:

• unplugging and plugging the cable multiple times
• rebooting
• using the Dell quickset to ‘Always activate on battery’
• turning the ‘Always activate on battery’ with various combinations of plugged and unplugged cables
• rebooting with cable plugged in
• rebooting with cable unplugged
• plugging into mains
• doing all of above combos whilst plugged in
• reinstalling drivers
• swearing
• unplugging and replugging power, network in various combinations
• cursing
• swearing
• power cycling the network switch
• attempting to enable the device from the device manager

All this time, the little lights on the network port and blinking in time to the pings from my linux box. What the hell is going on? Oh yeah and I should mention that at some point the device disappeared from the device manager. Then it came back after a reboot with ‘Device is disabled (code 22)’ and an enable button – which I pressed. A few times. Then I swore at it. Then I tried it again. Then I tried it with the cable unplugged, replugged, etc…

Then I just went into device manage and deleted the device. Rebooted and as it was rebooting: “64 bytes from 192.168.1.20: icmp_seq=7859 ttl 128 time=0.371 ms”. Yes, Jesus thankyou at last! Don’t ask me to explain – I suppose it managed to find the driver and reinstall it as it was booting.

No thanks to you Dell, Broadcom and anyone else responsible for this debacle. I’m sure it was the sales guy’s fault. It always is.

UPDATE: The plot thickens, it might not be the laptop’s fault at all. It might be something to do with my switch or the linux box’s network card. If I ever get the time, I will Wireshark it and get to the bottom of this madness!

UPDATE: It is definitely the Dell as evidenced by the number of people commenting here. It seems uninstalling quickset helps.

[tags]broadcom, dell, network[/tags]

Linux, Uncategorized

Alas, poor left pinky
a years past you sprung healthily from my youthful left hand
yet the cruel railway sleeper of landscaping
marked the paving with your blood

i remember the fretful hours
waiting for the surgeons verdict
you came close to death
but fought to remain

bandaged and broken
so small yet determined
never complaining
always hopeful

and now here we are
guitar in hand, so sad
brave despite the pain
you will never be the same

the music sounds different today
i used to hear inspiration, but now
i hear notes that i will never play

[tags]bad poetry, finger, guitar, injury, music[/tags]

Uncategorized

I’ve just listened to the latest ‘Metacast’ address from Steve Eley of Escape Pod. I’ve been a fan of Escape Pod for a couple of years now and keep meaning to blog about it but because I often listen to them in the car, I usually forget by the time I get home. Probably the highlight for me was episode 100 when they (the Escape Pod volunteer reader team) did Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall. But there have been many many other stories by authors I’ve never heard of that have really inspired me (just ask Steph how much I bore her about some of the stories).

Escape Pod has some off-shoot projects in other genres as well: there is pseudopod the horror podcast and podcastle the fantasy podcast.

The thing that’s finally gotten me to blog about Escape Pod is that Steve has just disclosed on his podcast that he has gone through a very rough time with his job and relationships and that escape pod has been one of the rocks in his life. On hearing this, I thought it would be a good time to show my support for his podcast for all of the joy that it brings me. So Steve if you’re doing a google ego search and come across this: thanks for keeping it going and I’m glad things are looking up now. Oh yeah: and have fun!

As for you dear readers: go forth and download a few episodes right now!

Science, books

Good news lovers of books and reading this week. First I was checking out Google Books and thinking that was pretty neat. Then today I see that LibraryThing have integrated a little bit with Google Books

So now you can browse my LibraryThing library and if you see a book that looks interesting you can click on it’s title, check out all the LibraryThing social data (like reviews, similar books and user ratings) and then click “Google Books: Book info” over in the right hand sidebar and actually read an excerpt of the book online. Sadly a lot of my sci-fi books aren’t scanned in Google Books yet.

books

Here are a few thoughts just in case you ever get caught in a time paradox.

The simplest scenario for a time paradox is that you have traveled back in time and met yourself. In more complicated scenarios, a different person travels back in time and meets you (or you travel back in time and meet someone else). Sometimes before you travel, you have knowledge of what happens. In even more complex scenarios, an object travels between you and someone else or you and yourself – the object travels back in time but then survives until you pick it up again in the future – often the object is a communication medium such as a letter or in the case of Dr Who Season 3 (Blink), a DVD easter egg.

The problem with time paradox’s is that if you stuff it up, the whole of the universe might implode so you have to be careful. For example, if you have traveled back to the past and you alter the past in such a way that you are never born, then all hell will break loose. The process is similar to solving simultaneous equations, the universe has to be able to settle into a stable time loop.

Another way to think of this is like sound feedback. When you put your microphone near the speakers, the sound from the speaker is picked up by the microphone and then played out of the speaker again. If you are far enough away, the sound picked up by the microphone will only be small and all that will result is a bit of an echo. There is a point at which the sound picked up by the microphone is amplified to be more than the original sound in which case there is a buildup at the resonant frequency which gets louder and louder until the electronics become saturated (at maximum volume) or the plug is pulled. In the case of a bad time paradox, all of the universes energy will be sucked into the feedback loop until all existence collapses in on itself – not unlike the big bang in reverse.

Thinking of this another way. The universe as we know it is just one of infinite billions of universes in the multiverse. The multiverse consists of universes where nothing can exist and other universes where existence is possible. Think of it like the bounded (black) and unbounded (coloured) regions of a mandlebrot set. Now all the interesting stuff happens at the very edges of existence which is where we are where existence is dynamic and interesting things such as atoms and galaxies and planets have formed. Within the infinite multiverse, all possible universes exist. If something like time travel is possible, then it will happen not only in one of the many universes but probably in millions and billions of them. Now when we travel in time, it’s like we are able to merge universes or link one adjacent universe to another through the time machine. If the universes are incompatible, then a run-away time paradox occurs and the unstable universe ceases to exist. And there are millions and billions of universes in the multiverse where this is happening all of the time.

Because of this, it actually doesn’t matter what you do when you find yourself in a time paradox. If you can see the paradox and are talking to it or whatever, then everything that will happen has already happened and the universe has been able to achieve a steady state. On the other hand, at all times during the paradox, millions of spawned alternative universes are imploding for the whole time that the paradox happens. You just aren’t aware of them because you don’t exist in those universes as soon as the paradox happens.

The best thing you can do when in a time paradox is try not to think too much about it because while it is unlikely that the universe will implode, the thought of how narrowly you escaped the fate of non-existence could potentially blow your mind.

In conclusion, I just want to press home my point that it is incredibly risky to initiate a time paradox in the first place and I strongly advise against it. Time travel is best left to the experts.

Science

I couldn’t find instructions out there so here are my notes:

downloaded from svn

svn checkout svn://svn.lighttpd.net/lighttpd/trunk/
mv trunk/ lighttpd-1.5-svn-2119
cd lighttpd-1.5-svn-2119

Mucked about with the auto tools

libtoolize
aclocal
autoheader
automake
autoconf
autoreconf
automake --add-missing
autoreconf

got error:

./configure: line 25224: syntax error near unexpected token `XML,'
./configure: line 25224: ` PKG_CHECK_MODULES(XML, libxml-2.0,'
make: *** [lighttpd_source] Error 2

Realised I needed to use cmake

sudo apt-get install cmake
cd lighttpd-1.5-svn-2119
cmake -L -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr \
         -DWITH_PCRE:BOOL=OFF .

Sadly I pretty quickly get an error to do with a program called lemon. It appears that lemon is a helper app that is compiled during the make but due to the cross compile, it can’t run.

I was able to get around this by manually compiling lemon first in the host format and then cross compiling the rest of lighttpd

cd lighttpd-1.5-svn-2119
CC=/usr/bin/gcc cmake -L \
    -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr \
    -DWITH_PCRE:BOOL=OFF .
make lemon

Now do the cross compile config

 rm CMakeCache.txt
 CC=/opt/eldk41/usr/bin/ppc_6xx-gcc \
    LD=/opt/eldk41/usr/bin/ppc_6xx-gcc-ld \
    cmake -L -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/usr \
    -DWITH_PCRE:BOOL=OFF .

finally touch ‘lemon’ so that it won’t be remade

 touch build/lemon
 make

Hmm. This blog theme is not the best for displaying code.

UPDATE: once I got it to cross compile, the other differences were that I had to add a new required module mod_chunked.so and also a dependency on librt.so.1 (I don’t automatically copy all of the eldk compiled libs to the target unless i need them)

[tags]cross compile, eldk, lighttpd, linux[/tags]

Linux