| (no subject) |
[Oct. 12th, 2010|09:24 pm] |
So I was thinking about D&D 4's flavor text for classes of the divine power source, and it ocurred to me that it sounded a lot like the apostolic succession (in Wikipedia by that name), and if that made any sense in the post-apocalyptic setting I'm developing. Which led to this, eventually:
So like two thousand years ago, this totally boss Mexican hacker decided to just punk the Romans, back when they were just beating up everyone at Age of Empires. Called himself "Hey,Zeus" to mess with their heads, make them think he's Greek, you know? So he's so l33t that he h4x0rz a new character class, cleric, and gets some newbs following him around, sayin' he's godly. He hits the level cap and this mob finally catches up with him, and the admins didn't like him much, so it takes him three days to respawn. So he finally shows up and the newbs are all like, zOMG!one!1!!!eleventy!! and all, and he hits them with the PC stick. And they go out and totally pwn these zones with awesome names like Thessalonica, which should totally be a metal band, and when people started asking what the hacker's up to, he was like, Dude, I'm in your base, being your deity.
So yeah, "Apostolic Succession" is the kick-ass name of their guild, and to join, one of them has to have hit you with the PC stick. |
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| Scary GPRS... |
[Sep. 5th, 2009|12:10 pm] |
... seems to be working. Except I can't SSH to Az-chan. Scary. (Now to find out how much I just spent...) |
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| Asus EEE PC 1000HE |
[Sep. 2nd, 2009|08:24 pm] |
Incidentally, I've noticed it being much easier just to say 'triple-E', although it sounds silly, than try to say 'e pea sea', or even worse, 'e~e pea sea'.
Been doing some hacking away at Ubuntu 9.04 ("Jaunty")'s Netbook Remix. With the initial installation, my wireless didn't work; luckily, the wired ethernet did, and I was able to update (using aptitude, because apt-get was confused by the switch from the generic linux kernel packages to the specifically-versioned ones) and get the wireless working. nm-applet is surprisingly nonbroken these days, and keeps the static IP for my home wireless information stashed away completely distinctly from the configuration for 'whichever wireless AP you can find', which means I can just login (I'm not sure if nm-applet has to be running or if NetworkManager proper isn't keeping up) and have wireless connectivity at home or wherever without any futzing. (This is a big improvement over the NetworkManager/interface for the OLPC, for which I was doing command-line tweaks and rebooting. It's also an improvement over the Windows side of things, which insists on timing out on DHCP before "falling back" to the static IP information for home WAP. I'm worried it'll "fall back" to my home WAP's static IP if it can't a DHCP server on some other WAP...) The sound works, although the OSS mixer emulator doesn't seem to work. (This is an issue because I prefer to use WindowMaker, and I think all of its Dock mixers are OSS.)
Anyway, I got the wireless toggling working. The key thing to realize is that all the documentation you'll find online is wrong. :) For my 1000HE and installation of UNR 9.04:
1) In /boot/grub/menu.lst, add pciehp.pciehp_force=1 pciehp.pciehp_poll_mode=1 to the end of the first kernel. This will permit the wireless driver to find the card after you power-cycle it.
2) The following two scripts do things in the right order.
#!/bin/bash
# Turn the WiFi radio on.
echo 1 > /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state
sleep 1
modprobe rt2860sta
#!/bin/bash
# Turn the WiFi radio off.
ifconfig ra0 down
rmmod rt2860sta
sleep 1
echo 0 > /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state
Which rfkill control to use seems to be a stable mapping. (Where 'rkfill1' is the BlueTooth radio.) The scripts are deliberately asymmetric with respect to ifconfig; I don't know why (since I stole the ordering from eeepc-acpi-utilities, which, depending on the phase of the moon, break either the sound or the wifi), but they seem to work. My guess is that turning off the interface is a little rude than removing the module. (It's also entirely possible that a live network interface would prevent the module from being removed.)
It turns out that acpid actually scans /etc/acpi/events for matching events (keystroke-equivalents, usually), so you can readily set up your own mappings. If you kill acpid (sudo /etc/init.d/acpid stop) and then run sudo acpid --debug, you can easily see which keys acpid is seeing when you press them. I used that to make the following changes in /etc/acpi:
Change /etc/acpi/asus-brn-up and asus-brn-up to
#!/bin/sh
test -f /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants || exit 0
. /usr/share/acpi-support/key-constants
acpi_fakekey $KEY_BRIGHTNESSUP
with the last line ending in $KEY_BRIGHTNESSDOWN, as appropriate. This will eliminate some silly errors in the acpid output.
Change events/asus-brightness-up and -down to make the hotkey line more specific: event=hotkey ATKD 00000022 and 21, respectively.
Remove asus-volume-up from events entirely, since it's entirely wrong.
Add if-asus-eee.sh to /etc/acpi containing the single line #!/bin/true. This will make the EEE-specific scripts shipped with Jaunty work. (Why that script is missing entirely is a very good question.)
Then add wifi-radio-toggle to events:
event=hotkey ATKD 00000010
action=/etc/acpi/wifi-radio-toggle.sh
This will run /etc/acpi/wifi-radio-toggle.sh when you hit FN-F2. Add that script:
!/bin/bash
STATE=`cat /sys/class/rfkill/rfkill0/state`
if [ ${STATE}x == 1x ]; then
echo "Turning off the WiFi radio..."
/etc/acpi/wifi-radio-off.sh
else
echo "Turning on the WiFi radio..."
/etc/acpi/wifi-radio-on.sh
fi
Note that if Something Mysterious happens, this script defaults to turning the wireless on, on the theory that you'll want to be able to go online to figure out why Something Mysterious was happening.
Naturally, you'll need /etc/acpi/wifi-radio-on.sh and wifi-radio-off.sh scripts, for which, see (2), above.
Next time I get a chance to hack on this I think I'll look at the other special keys. The 'LCD off' button is recognized, but may only kick in the screen-saver. It also resets the screen brightness to full for some reason. I really want to change the latter; the latter may actually be the right thing to do, in terms of letting user preferences determine what to do. The toggle resolutions button and function key don't appear to do anything, although there should be an command-line X utility for invoking resolution changes. (1024x768 scrolling mode should be supported by X's native ability for the screen and viewport sizes to be different.)
I don't have any plans for the two "user-defined" keys. I'd like to get FN+F1 (sleep) working, though, and FN+F4 & F7 [resolution and LCD off], for which I'll just use the solutions from the paragraph above. FN+F9 I'll probably also ignore, mostly because I don't care about the system monitor. I'd also like to get FN+F3 [toggle touchpad] working. I haven't had trouble recently, but I can totally see myself accidentally whacking the touchpad frequently, especially when using an external mouse. I have /no/ idea how to manage this trick, though... |
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| The New _Quinn Retcon |
[Sep. 2nd, 2009|08:23 pm] |
"You wouldn't believe the wolves near Vladivostok, Ping... Heck, /I/ don't, and I taught at Nekomi Tech!"
So, yeah, been watching Horo. (Spice and Wolf II, for future reference.) And Princess Lover, which was bad but enjoyable, and was just terrible (but still oddly enjoyable) in the last two episodes (7 and 8). Watched Ef: A Tale of Memories, which was surprisingly good. Started watching Special A, didn't like it that much. Loved Eden of the East, but didn't manage to snag the whole thing before it was liscensed. (Grr.)
Still haven't gotten around to Hayate-with-ads, mostly from sheer laziness.
Also haven't gotten around Clannad: After Story, for no particular reason.
Just started rewatching Nadesico, before letting cp borrow the DVDs. |
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| Anime mumblings. (I've been sick, can you tell?) |
[Apr. 10th, 2009|08:47 pm] |
Just finished watching Tytania. I liked it a lot, although the fleet tactics kept making me wince. I also found the ending quite weak; it seems to confirm the concern I had waiting for the series to get moving faster that, as space opera, it was intended to keep going and going. Also, as I believe I've mentioned, love the OP.
Also finally got around to watching the last few episodes of Hayate no Gotoku. Discovered that there was (another? Isn't 52 episodes two seasons already?) second season, and that it had already been licensed, and so AnimeSuki didn't carry any links to it. Still pondering that one. Not sure how much I really want to pay for it; more of a "would watch with ads" than "would pay for" series, although I will buy out the manga.
Still watching Tora Dora, Baccano (well, it's in the playlist, which I'm trying to clear out), and RideBack.
Finally snagged the last episode of Giant Formula, which was pretty much exactly what I expected. Good show, though.
Watched, or more probably re-watched, the last few episodes of Clannad. Not sure why they were still on my playlist, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to be sure. Very drama. Next up, the after-story.
Also finally got around to finishing Strike Witches, whose ending was very silly.
Finished watching Shakugan no Shana, which was fun to watch but hardly a classic. Ending made me wonder WTF is going on with the manga, though.
Also finished Nodame Cantabile: Paris, which was satisfying. |
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| Randomly, |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|01:15 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Shakugan no Shana | ] |
in fact, J-Randomly, I noticed that "Dollhouse" has a character named Echo who's called a "Doll." Synchronicity makes me twitchy. (Especially since Garran likes banging the malleability drum for Ping, and that's apparently what Dollhouse is all up to. Creepy.)
In other news, I've been watching Tytania, Shakugan no Shana, and the tiger-and- show whose name I just forgot. (More the first two than the last, recently.) I really like the Tytania OP.
... and that's enough for lunch. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 13th, 2009|09:10 pm] |
just how awesome the drawing of Junko in the last panel of today's MegaTokyo is. (I'm also amused by what appears to be the massive retcon that's going on, but I also haven't been paying much attention, so I won't talk about it.)
In 27 minutes -- I'll go ahead and write this and post it then -- the all-new Az-chan will have been up for eight days, matching her recent records in this incarnation. (Hopefully I'll finish standing her up the rest of the way this weekend, so that, forex, the CWDB comes back.) I will therefore speculate/rant about a possible cause: apparently, the DDR2 spec does not require that you, um, meet the DDR2 spec. That is, it is apparently not a breach of the DDR2 licensing agreements to not support a third of all the DDR2 RAM out there, and then not bother to tell anyone about it: DDR2 RAM can be 1.8, 2.0, or 2.2 volts, and the M3A doesn't actually support 2.2 volt DDR2, according to the hilariously misnamed "Qualified Vendor List". This fact is not mentioned anywhere in the hardcopy that comes with the motherboad; in fact, it's not even explicitly mentioned in the "QVL"; it "just so happens" that all the "Qualified" memory modules (note, explicit model #s in the "QVL", not /vendors/) are 1.8 and 2.0 -volt modules.
The above, in fact, never made it to posted. Odd, that.
Garran, thank you for the "Princess Tutu" recommendation; it's been magnificent, up through half-way through and then one more, to the opening which begins, "Once upon a time there was a man who fell in love with a doll." Naturally, I capitalized the last letter... and left this here, just in case the story in a story which contains another story interacts strangely with its subject. |
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| A breakthrough, sort of. |
[Dec. 30th, 2008|06:25 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | Sky Girls (still) | ] |
So I've been leaving my monitor on and at VT1 when I leave Az-chan alone at home to see if I could get some error messages before she committed suicide. I got one today, a kernel panic. Unfortunately, the top half had scrolled off the top of the screen, but the call tree was kind of scary: from cstar_do_call/sys_write/vfs_write through some timer code, into sock_aio_write and tcp_sendmsg, through down to dev_queue_xmit. The RIP printed at the bottom was in loopback_xmit, which suggest the scary possibility of something fairly seriously buggy with the kernel.
On the other hand, after rebooting with the reset switch, the BIOS detected bad RAM, which it's never done before. Some repeated variants of soft resets and hard reboots all blew up and died. Holding down the front power switch, waiting for the system to shut off, and immediately restarting it into memtest86+ caught more errors. (This lattermost has happened before after restarts.) Turning it off again and letting it sit for 30 seconds resulted in a fully-functional system again. None of the temperatures reported by the BIOS were anywhere near the warning level, although the CPU fan was running flat-out (which, as usual, puts the CPU at about 55degC). I don't like the heat explanation, anyway; I ran two BOINC jobs and pegged both CPUS at 100% for eight hours or so the last time this happened. Loafing around handling my e-mail shouldn't cause a heat problem.
I'm hoping one of you has an idea, because I don't really want to have to start swapping parts through. Grr. |
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| I'd been thinking about this for a while, |
[Dec. 18th, 2008|02:54 pm] |
and finally decided to ask here. Then I did some quick googling to find out and stumbled on this editorial, which asks the same question but comes up with a totally different answer. (They want to say that the difference between GM and Toyota's respective homeland operations is that if Toyota were paying what GM were paying for its retirees' healthcare, Toyota wouldn't be making a profit. That doesn't mean that GM /would/ be, and being unable to export cars from the home market is a sign of weakness on GM's part, not of a lucky bonus on Toyota's.) My question was this: there's an assumption that Toyota is badly skimping on healthcare costs for its transplant factories (rather than saving money, by say, competent management and lower salaries for what is, after all, generally unskilled labor). Is that really tru? Could it be used as a protectionist lever to get universal healthcare in the US?
Another article from a while back basically said that GM was paying for health care on three times as many people as Toyota because 2/3rds of GM's healthcare recipients were retired, which could limit the scope of the health insurance discussion... although from what I understand, GM has mostly kicked a lot of them off to another company/trust it will fund with a huge one-shot pile of cash and then spin off.
I was going to go check Toyota's corporate website to see what they said about their healthcare plan, but the 'careers' link is, you guessed it, 404.
Anyway, the comparison I really wanted was GM/Toyota productivity and expenses per worker in the US. In terms of a bail-out and other politics, the question is of what's possible in the US -- not how much better of GM would be if it spun off its American operations and let them collapse. (GM of South America (no idea) and GM of China (high-quality Buicks, oddly enuogh) made a bucket of money last year, from what I've heard. I think GM of Europe (read: Opel) isn't in bad shape either. |
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