Not that I get all that many.. but I see odd entries in apache logs and see grumblings online about a possible exploit in mt-comments.cgi to send spam again. Just to be safe I disabled comments until it looks like it's ok.
on May 28, 2008 3:43 PM
Found my system run out of ram a few times lately. Just again tonight. Found there's a fairly well known bug in ImageMagick in re: to libgomp.so.1 in gcc-4.2.x (See this Gentoo bug entry for an example). Didn't see any openmp flag check in the ebuild for imagemagick so I added the --disable-openmp bit to configure and re-emerged imagemagick and it's ok now.
So if you tried to comment recently and it never came back... sorry. Should be fixed now. Will try to comment to this myself to make sure.
So if you tried to comment recently and it never came back... sorry. Should be fixed now. Will try to comment to this myself to make sure.
Only took them a month.. but my 360 finally showed back up last Friday. They never bothered to even send an email letting me know it had shipped so I could be there to sign for it... luckily they left it with my neighbor who called me (first time he ever did.. at first I was worried my house was on fire or something until he said he had a package). Sadly... either swapping out a DVD drive is far too difficult for MS techs or something on the mobo itself was failing (maybe the sata controller) because they sent me a replacement unit. Why that took 4 weeks to do is beyond me.
However it seems to be running fine. I have to at least give them credit for getting me back a working unit. There have been plenty of stories out there about people sending in broken 360s that come back and are DOA.
However it seems to be running fine. I have to at least give them credit for getting me back a working unit. There have been plenty of stories out there about people sending in broken 360s that come back and are DOA.
Boy do I have a reason now though. I now have had 2 out of 3 Xbox 360's fail. That is so pathetic.
I've had gaming consoles going back to the original 8bit NES (and we had an old Pong system in the 70's that my dad bought) and I don't remember any ever having issues on the level the 360 has had. Yeah, eventually (after several years) the NES and Coleco systems both suffered from oddities where you had to do things like blow in the cartridge slot and/or cartridge itself... click the NES game up and down a bunch of times to get it to lock properly, or you'd suffer graphics glitches. However, they continued to work long past the time the next gen consoles came out and still worked by the time they were retired.
I've had gaming consoles going back to the original 8bit NES (and we had an old Pong system in the 70's that my dad bought) and I don't remember any ever having issues on the level the 360 has had. Yeah, eventually (after several years) the NES and Coleco systems both suffered from oddities where you had to do things like blow in the cartridge slot and/or cartridge itself... click the NES game up and down a bunch of times to get it to lock properly, or you'd suffer graphics glitches. However, they continued to work long past the time the next gen consoles came out and still worked by the time they were retired.
For those who don't know.. or just haven't paid attention, there's a battle going on in the marketplace right now about which format should replace the current DVD one.. the 2 competing formats are HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (HD and BD from here on out). If you really want more info, I suggest this page at Wikipedia as a good starting point. They have a few pages there, with a really good chart comparing HD and BD with DVD for added info. You'll note from the linked page that there are a few other competing ideas too, and there's downloads, but these are the 2 big dogs. I pretty much discount downloads for Hi-Def content anyway, as the data sizes for storage and the required download times just won't really work... today.
Rock Band is extremely cool. Yes, it's basically just a compilation of the Guitar Hero, Karaoke and a drum game.. but when put together, it's more then just the sum of it's parts. The solo careers are pretty much run of the mill; much like the previous games already listed. However, when you play in a group, it's so much fun it's insane. We played for several hours over at my parent's house on Thanksgiving, and man was it fun. Of course my parents and grandparents didn't care for a lot of the music included, but even they were singing along with some of the songs, like Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive.
The new drum set (the one real new addition to the game over previous Harmonix games) are both extremely cool, and quite hard. My niece was actually the most talented out of the box. She was wailing on stuff on Medium with barely any practice at all.
Not having played the karaoke games, this is the first experience I've had with the singing. While everyone seems embarrassed to try it in front of a group, it is a lot of fun to do in the privacy of your own home without anyone around to hear. :)
Anyway, to refer back to the title. The BOC classic is included. Even better, there are periods in songs where the vocalist can hit the mic in time with some marks on the screen as a tambourine. However, in this track, you actually are doing the cowbell... I started laughing so hard when that first happened. Here's a little taste to show you (yes, it's crappy quality.. I just pulled out my little cam to snag this real quick):
I was rear-ended today. Gee was that fun. Most people's first thought is probably, "eh, people get rear-ended all the time." Yeah, but I was going about 60mph at the time, and the idiot still managed to ram into me.
I was on my way into work around 1:45pm (hey, I was up until after 1:30am working on urgent stuff). I entered the 805 North from 52 West, and after I looked in my rear view, I saw a commercial truck (not a big-rig, but uhaul sized or so) coming up on me fast. He came pretty close but slowed down and fell back. He fell back enough that I didn't keep track anymore. About 2 miles later, as I was approaching Miramar Way.. I had to slow down a little (maybe down to 55) due to slower cars in front of me. There wasn't any real traffic to speak of, but I was going to be exiting soon and wasn't in a hurry. The car in front of me got into the "Exit only" lane to take Miramar, and I noticed the car in front of him was an old VW (or maybe Volvo) and it was the slow car. I was catching up to him a bit (he was a couple hundred feet ahead) when he took the 2nd lane exit to Miramar. At this point I started accelerating again to get back up to 65, and seconds later I checked behind me again.. . lo and behold, here came the same truck from before. I started to think something along the lines of "here comes that jackass again," but quickly realized he was going to hit me! I couldn't swerve either way (short curb for exit on right, car in lane behind me a bit to the left) so I just jammed down the gas to try to minimize the speed difference. Then he nailed me.
I don't think the speed differential was more then 10mph... but goddamn was the hit hard. Luckily I didn't lose control at all, and immediately we both pulled over and stopped. I got out figuring the back end of my car was smashed to hell, but it turns out there was almost no damage whatsoever. I was in that fairly angry, but really shaken up mode.. so while I did get his info, I completely spaced on getting his name. I got the insurance info and wrote down the license plate too just in case. I didn't feel any ill effects, nor do I yet. I'm pretty sure I put my head against the head rest to minimize any whiplash... still a tiny part of me worried about the horror stories you hear about people who feel fine then wake up the next day with their necks killing them... hoping nothing like that happens.
Some crazy things I noticed that gave some indication of the force of the hit:
- The moon roof in my car had opened up about 4 inches.
- I had a soda can in the center console cup holders, which barely had any soda in it.. and some of that splashed out onto the gearshift.
The only visible damage: 4 nut imprints in the bumper. 2 from the license plate, 2 from wider out on his front bumper. That and a bit of the left side of the bumper had popped out of place a bit, but it snapped right back in when I pushed on it. Took this shot as soon as I got to work... can see the 4 bolt spots. Part of why I took it was for a date/time stamp just in case too.
All in all, it could've been a hell of a lot worse, of course. It's a good thing I didn't swerve too, I'm pretty sure that would've pretty much guaranteed that he still would've hit me, but at an angle instead of flush, which would've made me fishtail and lose control I'm sure. All the drivers training (that drove me nuts at the time) that my grandfather put me through likely helped me keep my cool and maintain control too. Thanks for that gramps. :) Kudos to Toyota for building a hell of a car too.
Going to call dealer tomorrow (would've today but I was still really busy) and set an appointment. I have a couple things that already needed doing, but I figure it'd probably be a good idea to have them check out the car for any damage I can't see. Just in case.
I previously wrote about my woes with a Samsung drive in my Macbook Pro. I had decided to try a Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 drive, because 200gig is enough for me and the extra speed sounded nice. I ordered it online and it showed up about 2 weeks ago. I put it in the MBP and installed Tiger (OSX 10.4) on it. The install went somewhat slower then I expected and within a few hours (as I restored data) I started getting long hangs and there were error messages in my system.log file. From google hits for the errors it's an indication that the disk is failing. That sucked.. brand new disk basically DOA. I went back to the Samsung disk and lived with the hangs every few days.
Last night I plugged the 7k200 into my linux box in my home office so that I could make sure it showed failures on there, and mainly wanted to write random data on the disk to cover over the data I had on there. However, it worked perfectly well in the linux host.. no errors, and I filled the complete disk with random data. I decided to try it in the MBP again, thinking that either maybe the connector was loose, or maybe it had something to do with the disk not being fully initialized in my system (I just used the erase setting in the disk utility vs a completely new partition).
Since then the host has been perfectly stable and I don't see any messages in the system.log indicating any posible problems. It seems like maybe the fact that disk utility have to create the whole GUID table and partition the disk from scratch (I'd used fdisk in linux to create a DOS label and did a mkfs.ext3 and mkreiserfs on the disk under linux) somehow fixed whatever issue I was having last time.
Fingers crossed, but hopefully my MBP will stay stable now.
Might as well make a quick entry about the wildfires since everyone else has. Wasn't directly effected by the fires myself, other then 3 days working at home because work decided to have us stay home. Part of it was due to the amount of people effected, part was due to the horrible air quality. I have a lot of relatives and friends that were evacuated, at least a couple of which either just barely got to go home today, and perhaps one that hasn't yet.
I was able to snag the periodic mpg file from the HPWREN cameras, on Lyons Peak... well, from their archives. I used iMovie to stitch them together and basically have a full time lapse movie from approximately noon Monday until noon Friday. Over Tue-Wed night the fires burn right up to the structures, and the next night, you can see little flashes where the fires continually flare up a bit then die out. Impressive really.
I haven't put them online yet because I want to get permission from the people at UCSD first just in case. I didn't see anything saying the files were copyrighted at all, but figure better safe then sorry. Will likely put on Youtube if I can, then link from here then.
So I was able to wait a few weeks,but I finally. Caved and got an iPod touch. I got an 8 gig model vs a 16gig one, mostly because no one had any 16gig models in stock but also because the difference isn't enough to make a big difference at these sizes. I would wait if there were known plans for a hard disk model or maybe even 40+gig but for now 8 is plenty to play with. Plus I wanted the video and wifi more than Massive storage. It easily holds my main playlist and another of some albums I like more. Plus several videos, plenty of photos, my contacts and calendar too.
The video quality is amazing, and the screen is surprising big for how small the whole thing is. The web browsing is pretty cool too; in fact, I'm posting this from it now. Typing I'd obviously slower than with a fullsize keyboard but it's pretty good and relatively fast.
If you've been thinking about getting one and don't need to carry your whole iTunes library with you, it's worth it.
On, lack of 3rd party apps and any games yet kinda limiting,but I'm sure that'll change fairly soon. ...and yes I'm aware of some hacking to get apps, but I'm tired of dealing with hacks on stuff like this and the firmware and iTunes updates tend to break the hacks fairly quickly.
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