Sean Middleditch

So for my birthday, my parents managed to actually suprise me. That was hard. Not only did the gift surprise me, but the fact that they suprised me surprised me, which left me pretty damn surprised over all. Lots of surprise.

Today, this morning, they did it again. Twice in one year. ;-)

I am now the owner of an iPod. Which is pretty darn cool. I’m still in the process of ripping all my CDs, but I’ve got a lot of my favorites on it already. Happy goodness. I haven’t even tried setting it up on Linux yet, but my iBook is doing the job just fine.

Speaking of getting it working on Linux, the best utility I found was gtkpod. It’s feature set is nice, but it’s UI looks like something that was designed by a stoned monkey. In need of a little HIG loving, I think. When I get a chance to play with it more I plan on logging some bug reports so the developers can take a crack at cleaning it up.

Among the rest of my gifts, I also got two signed photographs of the actress Anne Hathaway. Now, that also rather surprised me, and I’m also surprised to realize how much I like those particular gifts. Not even sure why, really - she’s just an actress that I never have and never will meet. Ah well. I like ‘em, and I guess that’s all that matters. ~_^

On a downnote, my Led Zeppelin IV CD is not in its case and no one is claiming to have it. That is great sadness. An iPod and no Stairway to Heaven or Battle of Evermore! Well, at least not the originals - the symphonic versions sound great, as always. :)

I finally got a Java(tm) applet with LiveConnect working! Woohoo!

Only, the simple test page I have crashes the browser. :(

Hopefully it’s just the current Mozilla/Epiphany combination in Fedora Core right now. Now that I have the applet itself working, getting it to connect to the MUD server and parse/send telnet and ZMP shouldn’t be trouble at all. The applet can do the network I/O (with no need to be signed and in a cross-platform manor) and the JavaScript code can handle all the real work of figuring out what to do with the input and ZMP commands and deciding when to send responses and all that good jazz. Yay!

So, for the first time ever, a service I administrate has been hacked. Namely, this very blog.

I have no idea how that got in. There are no logs for me to check since this is SourceForge. I was running WordPress 1.2-beta, so it could have been the “overblown and not important” security problem in WordPress - I’ve upgraded to 1.2.1, so hopefully that won’t be a problem in the future.

The only other way they could have gotten in would be through SourceForge itself, although I doubt it, since the AweMUD.net site was fine, just the blog got defaced.

So my mouth hurts. Each individual tooth has little daggers of pain shooting into my jaw. I also can’t drink any soda (which I don’t except for a morning energy boost), eat ketchup or mustard, drink tea, or otherwise enjoy the food of life for a couple days.

The cause for this is, of course, some dental work. The reason for the dental was, well, vanity. The result of the dental work is some quite white teeth. My teeth weren’t bad at all before, but now they’re even better. In hind sight, given the difference it made, it probably wasn’t worth the money, the day off work, and the pain, but what’s done is done.

Ah well. Now my charming smile is even more charming. ;-)

And yes, I know some people who read this (yes, you know who you are) are against any sort of cosmetic surgery. For what it’s worth, this wasn’t surgery. It was like going and using some of that whitening toothpaste, except it was industrial strength and only took an hour instead of a couple month. Basically just special bleach-for-teeth baked in with a bright light. Zoom! is the product name for specific stuff they used at the dental office.

Fixed an odd bug with the blog. Apparently the code morphed somehow to no longer lookup categories. I don’t recall making any changes to the WordPress install and I know it worked before, but lately is hasn’t. Got rid of an extra function call and now it all works.

Weird.

Yay, the SATA debacle is finally over. Mostly. The Promise TX2+ controller came, is installed, and now works. I got my old hard-disk contents copied over, rebooted, and… crap, that didn’t work.

Getting Fedora Core to actually _boot_ off the new drive was… a chore.

(For those of you who know how booting and initrd images and all that work, you can skip the rest of this.) See, the kernel doesn’t have any the drivers for the SATA controller or even the filesystem built-in. They’re external drivers. Now, obviously, the kernel can’t load those drivers off the disk if it doesn’t have the drivers to access the disk. So we have these ‘initrd’ images which are basically mini-file systems that just hold drivers and some very, very basic code, just enough to get the drivers loaded and get the kernel to start booting from the actual installed filesystem.

Getting one of these images built can be a bit of a chore. See, Fedora has the nice mkinitrd command that does all the work for you. It’s great. The only problem is, it chooses all the drivers and such to include based on your currently running base install. The only way I could get the new filesystem running was, basically, to hack several config files like /etc/fstab to look like those off the new system, make the new initrd image, and then revert the config files back incase I needed to boot into the old install.

This all wouldn’t have been so bad if, say, someone had bothered to document the process. It took several hours of trial-and-error along with reading through quite a few scripts and manual poking in the initrd image to finally get all the bits and pieces figured out and running.

On the upside, I now have a very, very keen understanding on the working on the Linux boot process. On the downside, that was 3 hours I could have used doing something more constructive.

So I managed to blow up my computer.

Again.

The SATA hard-disk I got for my birthday last June still wasn’t working, and my parents decided to work around my apathy by just buying a new one, since we conjectured that it was not the hard-disk, but the controller and hard-disk combined. (Silicon Image controllers and Seagate hard-drives apparantly don’t get along.)

So the new hard-disk came, but not yet the new controller. Figured a Maxtor plus the SI controller should be fine. Swapped the disks, plugged the computer back in, turned it on… flash of light, sizzle, and no power. Greaaaat.

Fortunately there was a spare, *very* nice power supply in the house (bought and intended for a gaming machine that never got built), so after I cooled down and stopped fretting about how the two thousand dollars of components might all be fried, I plugged in the new power supply. (Which was a lot easier than I remember power supply swapping to be. Yay for minor improvements.) It worked. Just the power supply had failed, for whatever reason.

So, all gleeful like, I turned on the computer and tested out the new hard-drive.

Only to be greated by the exact same kinds of errors I got with the last one.

Therefor, I now (6 months later) know what the problem was - the entire controller card itself is just junk. Thankfully it’s a $30 cheapy card (I think) so the fact that it’s OEM warranty is expired (don’t buy parts OEM people, I don’t care if it’s cheaper, there’s a *reason* why consumer parts have a year or three warranty on them) doesn’t concern me a whole lot. A new Promise TX2 controller is on the way, hopefully here by tomorrow, so I can swap the controllers and fry something else then. Hopefully that’ll actually work.

This is why I hate hardware. Software never has sparks and fizzles and failures for no reason. It always does exactly what it was told every single time - unless a hardware problem got in the way. (Of course, sometimes the shear complexity of software can make it _seem_ like it fails randomly, but that’s just perception. Unlike hardware, the Chaos Theory doesn’t exist in the software land.)

Every now and again, when I have a little spare time, I start searching on Google for answers to the various computer troubles I’ve had. For example, things like getting all my server and client apps running GSSAPI.

What gets irritating is that the only hits I can often find on Google are people asking, “Does this work?” and not getting any answers. Double irritating is that the best hit I usually see ends up being my own blog! Either my blog is a lot more popular than I think, or almost nobody else in the world tries to setup simple things like GSSAPI in their network.

::sigh::

Went to a one day KANAR event on Saturday - the last KANAR event of 2004.

Wasn’t too bad. A bit cold, and I actually left early due to that, since my lungs don’t like the cold at all. We had a pitched battle of several dozen orcs against a little more than half a dozen PCs. And the orcs kicked ass. Yay orcs! (Ya, I was an orc.)

Cleaned off all my gear and stored it away. Including my boots, which not just two nights ago the god-damned dog decided to drag outside in the middle of the night. Stupid dog. Boots are now in my closet, since I won’t be using them again until February. I need to take a few things to get professionally cleaned, and get my boots and other leathers re-water-sealed, but in general, the gear is out of my mind for the next couple months.

The AweMUD Wiki has been one of my best ideas in a while. It’s so easy to write up and public content using a wiki, and as a result I’ve gotten several large-scale ideas that have existed only in my head written down and out for the public to read on the wiki there.

Specifically, check out the Ruleset and World Model design notes. Also, these are not yet complete, but I’m working on them, check out the AI and Navigation design notes.

I also have a personal wiki setup on my local network server where I’m storing various notes and ideas. It’s great. I wrote down plot outlines and notes for a couple stories I want to write, have a TODO list, and so on.

My only real regret now is, actually, writing Wikisome. It has a few features that I still haven’t done but really need (revision control, mostly) and don’t really feel like writing. The main reason I wrote it was that no other wiki I could find was very easy to integrate into an existing site. They all had their own user databases, made use of table names like ‘login’ which completely conflict with the rest of your site when you only have one database, stored all sorts of cookies with fairly generic names that clashed elsewhere, and so on. Wikisome’s biggest selling point to me is that it prefixes all table names, cookies, form elements, CSS classes, HTML element IDs, and that it uses a thin abstraction layer over the database access and user management code, making it possible to integrate with pretty much *any* web site around. The database abstraction layer mimics the PHP MySQL API, and so if you don’t have another database it just uses MySQL easy as pie, no effort necessary. The user management code is super simple to use, and the basic version I use just uses the REMOTE_USER server variable so I can use .htaccess to authentication. On AweMUD it wraps around the user management code for the site. The header and footer generating code is broken into a separate file so you can easily replace it with code that users your sites existing header and footer, as soon on the AweMUD wiki.