Sitsofe's diary for December 2000

21 December, 2000

Recovered from cold.

Realised that today was really Thursday and not Wednesday as I had hoped. Will have to go Christmas shopping tomorrow (shudder).

Finished reading Big Ball of Mud after quite a few months. Very good - I must go out and read more about design patterns.

Found out that the reason I couldn't run PhotoPaint was because the fonttastic rpm had not been installed. Fortunately I had brought the Linux Format cd with me. It looks like the uninstalled rpm wants to fiddle about with /etc/init.d which conflicts with another rpm I have... Fiddled about with the rpm by hand. Note to self: to extract the contents of an rpm use rpm2cpio rpmname | cpio -id

20 December, 2000

I'm back home for Christmas. Should update diary more. Will bung the past few months' events here.

Managed to achieve a grade average of 77% and came second overall in last year's exams. The big benefit was having the £50 of book vouchers upgraded to £100 of book vouchers from O'Reilly. I even got to get a free T-shirt.

Found that the audio that accompanies DVDs whilst being played by PowerDVD has a sort of metallic/scuba/watery sound to it. Getting version 2.55 Build 620 of PowerDVD helped as did lowering the treble.

Bought lots of CDRWs from Jessops. Swansea Jessops (a chain of shops that sell photographic supplies) seems to have a property that I've never seen in a shop before. That is, lots of people have heard of it but no one can give you accurate directions to where it is. Dan and myself went searching for it one Friday and were pointed in lots of different directions by different people without ever actually finding the shop itself. In fact, one of the replies that we got was "isn't it away from the sea?" which isn't all that useful given that Swansea is coastal. Another good one was that "it was up hill". We managed to find when we went back the following Monday and promptly cleared out the last of the CDRWs.

I bought the Fatboy Slim's newest album Halfway between the Gutter and the Stars which was initially a disappointment but turned out to be good after repeated listening.

Turned out that the reason why the drives weren't automounting themselves all those months ago was probably because supermount had broken (note to self: automount deals with mounting only network shares). This could have been in either /etc/fstab or because the modules for it had not been compiled for the updated kernel. It looks like supermount can be disabled by Mandrake in /etc/fstab if the module doesn't exist (nice but it would have been nicer if mandrake had told me this).

Today - Feeling slightly ill.

Found out that it was CUPS that was filling /var/log/messages full of stupid USB probes and daft binfmt-000 errors. Turned CUPS off.

Found out that the X font errors were because of Mandrake not setting up the X font path correctly. Deleted the 100dpi line in /etc/X11/fs/config because 100dpi fonts were not installed.

Worked out that the reason why xscreensaver couldn't display the help was because it was trying to use an xterm and the xterm rpm had not been installed.

Found out why xscreensaver was not switching off monitor - need Option "DPMS" to be in the Monitor section.

Downloaded and installed xmatrix for xscreensaver.

Fixed xscreensaver on platinum.sucs.swan.ac.uk - it now accepts users' passwords when they lock the screen.

New SB Live drivers compile and install but no bass 'n treble control and the mixer has a weird name (both these things were known bugs I later found out). Got the 2.2.18 kernel to compile and install nicely too.

Tests with 2.4.0 continue - not bad, not perfect. Learned that after compilation you should really copy System.map into /boot/System.map-2.x.x so that a few startup error messages are avoided. Fixed console problem with mouse going mad - looks like I should have chosen the type of my mouse to be an M$ Intellimouse not a Generic 3 Button PS/2 (in either mousedrake or mouseconfig).

Thanks to a lot of fiddling, worked out how to get ide-scsi to be only loaded when it's needed. The only problem is that it now never unloads itself automatically (sigh).

Bizarre unable to delete default route problem persists. Create a sudo script to work around this.

Adapted the small gvim script to allow syntax highlighting in black and white.

Worked out that Quake 3 runs much faster when X is running in 16bpp.

Freeserve was being strange last night - for several hours in the evening it was impossible to connect. Very odd.