Sitsofe's diary for January 2001
30 January, 2001 
No Jason in lectures today... Turns out Jason had a bit of a heavy night (it was his 21st) but is in one piece. David (Brooks), Gareth (James) and myself rounded on Neal Harmond after the attendance form missed the row we were in entirely. The only reason why we were so paranoid was because Mark Jones had sent an email to all those who failed to attend his lecture that morning...
29 January, 2001
Couldn't make Jason's birthday party because I had been busy pulling apart the two new(!) 486s that SUCS had and testing the numerous SCSI hard drives that SUCS seemed to have floating about. By the time I got back to the house there were two drunken messages on the answerphone.
28 January, 2001
I installed the incredibly slow JBuilder on my home computer today. I gather the reason why it feels so slow is because it's written in Java itself...
27 January, 2001
theraven gave Platinum a new fan and it seems to be feeling better. Went over to theraven's place for an end of exams party.
26 January, 2001
Woke up late in the day to find out that Platinum was crashing randomly. Turned out to be due to the fan not working correctly causing Platinum to overheat.
25 January, 2001
Fiddled about with cross compiler some more (after downloading sparc-devel for the sparc headers). Failed to get it working though and thoroughly tired myself out in the process. Also discussed a great application idea with arthur - xweather. xweather would simulate the weather outside your window on your desktop (so here in Swansea it would always be raining).
24 January, 2001
Sat last exam Algorithms and Complexity. Feeling quite tired now. Saw Unbreakable which turned out to have as good a twist as Dan said it would. I hate watching people breaking bones though.
22 January, 2001
Sat the difficult Theory of Programming Languages exam in which plenty of people had left by the half way mark. The question is, how low will my mark be?
21 January, 2001
Tidied up sparc installation howto (it's getting to the stage where it could almost be rolled into a real howto). Revised for Theory of Programming Languages exam. Tried to merge all my bookmarks (Netscape and Mozilla on SUCS, Netscape and Mozilla on my home machine under Linux, IE under windows on my home machine) into one but somehow missed something. Checked Jungle.com to see if they had shipped my order (printer, cable and cd drive) yet but it doesn't appear they have and they only guarantee prices for 16 days...
Spent a little while reading about Cross Compilation. If I could get it working then I could build a sparc kernel at a sane speed.
Still haven't heard anything from Simply. I'm liking this company less and less especially after one of the complaints I read on Slashdot. Time to email them again methinks...
20 January, 2001
Spent the morning revising for an Operating Systems exam in the afternoon... I wish I had spent longer learning about inodes. Finished off Chromium installation (which worked) and got sonic to reinstall Zinc (so it now it displays the xsnow at the login prompt and sawmill works). Discovered just how cool webcollage is when it works (grumble broken mandrake installation grr).
19 January, 2001
Spent part of the day messing about with the chromium (one of the new sparcs) trying to fit a working hard drive to it. Chatted to spook about this and that and left the room with Chromium starting its second redhat installation. Found out that pb (Lead's external disc drive) was broken.
18 January, 2001
Sat Object Technology exam. The exam proved to be testing in terms of the time it took to answer the questions, but this is probably poor time management on my part. Corrected the year on the entries in this diary from 2000 to 2001. Started to speculate that Zinc (one of the SUCS sparcs) hadn't been installed properly. Also noticed that Lead (another one of the SUCS sparcs) appears to be broken - corrupted swap drive? Noticed that the SUCS elections have been opened. Panicked that SUCS may become a script kiddie haven but it turns out that arthur has been applying the patches from day one, showing up exactly how much I know about running an Internet server. Found a working nightly of Mozilla and installed it on Platinum. Tipped off another friend about Spamcop.
17 January, 2001
Spent the day revising for Object Technology exam.
16 January, 2001
Had a not-as-bad-as-expected Database Systems exam in the afternoon. Showed Gareth (Jenkins) Bill Joy's Why the future doesn't need us article in Wired.
14 January, 2001
Spent the evening helping someone on #nvidia install the NVidia Linux graphics drivers under Slackware. This took a few hours but proved quite satisfying in the end.
11 January, 2001
Packed up all my stuff and made the trip back to university. Stole the SUCS' screwdrivers to let Gareth (James) put a network card back in his machine.
10 January, 2001
Sussed how to get SSH working on the compsci machines after foeh asked me how to get Mathematica working across a remote X to SUCS (which firewalls off non ssh remote Xs): copy /usr/sbin/sshd and /usr/bin/ssh-keygen to the target system. Once there: ./ssh-keygen -f sshd_key touch sshd_config (or put some nice options inside it - the file has to exist at a minimum). To run the start the server: ./sshd -f sshd_config -h sshd_key -p 4000 It will automatically fork itself into the background (so don't forget to kill it when you're finished). To connect: ssh thehostname -l usernameonthehostname -p 4000 Of course, this only let's you log on as yourself.
To get xfs working you'll need to find a machine with the fonts installed and start xfs with the Mathimatica font path in it's config.
8 January, 2001
Failed to go shopping for card but sent Mum an email card instead.
7 January, 2001
It has just occurred to me it is my Mum's birthday tomorrow. Need to go shopping for a present soon...
Emailed Simply Computers because their OEM Windows 98 cd no longer installs and one of my kettle leads is broken.
6 January, 2001
Went round to Dave (Little)'s house last night and played Rollcage Stage 2 for a good few hours. Unfortunately a lot of those hours' hard work was lost when the game became stuck in between menu screens :( When the previous save was loaded up, barely anything was inside. Sigh.
Rollcage Stage 2 has a lot going for it - the scramble mode is inspired. In this mode you have to complete a narrow obstacle course as quickly as possibly and it is amazing how addictive this proves to be. It is even possible to cheat on some of the difficult later courses by taking "shortcuts" - jumping off the side to land later pieces of track. However it has lost some of the charm of the first game with (in my opinion) weaker music and has also followed Wipeout into the tunnel that is dark lighting. Unless you crank the brightness on your TV up it is impossible to see what you're doing.
5 January, 2001
Went off the Bristol Lanarena. To make sure that today actually happened, I carefully arranged for as many people to go as possible so that when other dropped out it would still be worth our while. Counterstrike proved the most popular game with a disappointingly short amount of time spent playing Quake III. GTA2 proved a bit erratic and everyone chose the boring marine survival mode in Aliens vs Predator. Finally worked out how to get to Temple Meads train station by road and also discovered that missing vital left turnings on the way back to the city centre will lead you up the M32.
4 January, 2001
Visited dentist and received the information that I probably won't have to have my wisdom teeth pulled out. Good.
2 January, 2001
Spent the past few days after Christmas reading Sluggy Freelance. This an incredibly entertaining comic which occasionally borrows from manga such as Ranma 1/2 along with more traditional comics such as Snoopy. The off beat humour really hits the mark with the vicious Bun-bun taking honours as the best character. I'm only sorry I didn't find it sooner (the first time I read it a few months ago I was put off by a below average Dimension of Pain episode).
Also got around to doing a nice big backup and finding updates of all my software (PuTTY 0.51 now supports staying put even when new lines are appearing at the bottom so I can read a milliways backlog in peace. Yay!).