Apparently my RSS feed is sick. I’m not quite sure why. There are two major ways that this sickness is showing itself. Firstly, it’s not putting spaces around links on BlogLines. This was pointed out by a helpful reader and it appears to be doing it on all my entries. Secondly, when I read the entries on Blam! it really does a good job of mangling them.
I’ve tracked this down to a few different problems in my setup.
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I’ve had my MGA G400-MAX dual head video card since I built my current desktop computer back in April of 2000. I’ve used the second head for xinerama and dual monitor work in the past, it always worked pretty nicely. I sold the second monitor last year after I got my laptop. I figured I might as well get the second head to output on the TV.
Using the drivers provided by Matrox I was able to get the second head to output to the TV, but I couldn’t get XV accelerated video.
It’s spring break so I decided I would play a few video games. I’ve got a bunch of the old Linux ports of games from LokiGames (which went bankrupt in a mess of supposed lies and missed payments in January, 2002). Unfortunately, these games need some work to function in Linux. Well, at least the ones that I’ve tried.
For Alpha Centauri, you should first go and fetch the patch for SMAC.
Last night Kristina and I went out with a group of folks from school to the Robert Morris University Island Sports Center and hung out with the Pittburgh Curling Club. It was different to say the least. I think every one of us fell down at least a few times. But it was definately fun and I think we may consider doing it again. At the very least, at $10 a person, it was a very cheap way to spend a Saturday evening.
The title about sums it up. Apparently Ubuntu is being bit in the ass by a rather nasty NFS server bug that prevents writing to the NFS drives. It just creates 0 byte files. Well, not exactly.
I realized that when my laptop (2GHz) is on the wired connnection it can transcode recorded programs much faster than my master backend (700MHz). So I figured I’d have the laptop transcode Forrest Gump and Vacation for me.
Now that my system has some reasonable hard drive, I’ve been working on other bells and whistles with MythTV. After the 0.17 upgrade I found that my remote no longer worked, mainly because I forgot to tell Myth to compile with LIRC support. I decided since I was flubbing around, I might as well upgrade my system kernel to the K7 kernel (my mythbox is an Athlon 700). This went well, but somewhere along the line (I think before the upgrade) the alsa drivers for my SB!
Mark Cuban takes a lot of crap from people for being a little out there. He reminds me a bit of Howard Dean, he’s doing things to shake people up and get them off their comfortable asses. He’s not only the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, but also is a major player in the migration to HDTV. Last week he wrote a great article about why FCC should call the broadcater’s bluff.
I found out that I passed both parts of my qualifier at “well above the Ph.D. level.” This means that I need to get new business cards that read Ph.D. candidate. In general, the qualifier is biggest hurdle in getting a Ph.D. Next up is my thesis proposal which I hope to do sometime this summer. I should defend sometime in the summer of 2007 (my funding runs out in August of 2007).
I’m not sure if Dave is going to post my response to interesting people, but I figured that I’d post it here. I don’t like how Googlebashing seems to be the in thing. I happen to like Google. Their autolink feature of their toolbar is an option that is not on by default, and yet people complain about it. The most recent one was some complaining that you could do reverse phone numbers in Google.
On Sunday morning I ordered myself a nice little pre-passing-qualifiers present: a shiny new 200 GB hard drive from Staples. After rebate I got it for about $40 or so. Not a bad deal. However, installing it was a royal pain. I’m convinced that if I buy more I’m just going to get a firewire card and make them external.
The problem resulted from the wiring in my case, which still uses ribbon ATA cables and how I needed to move some drives around and disable my plain 56x CD rom drive.