Finger info for chunky@icculus.org...



[2002-02-27]

Two things:
This one's for MSPhil [or, more technically, Katie]
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/kriloshot.png
No doctoring. Suck it down.

This one's for anyone having trouble with Myth2. I wanna know if this
fixes it:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/myth2/

Grrr. Waaaay too much project work to do with waaaaaay not enough time
to do it in.


[2002-02-25-later]

Because I'm in a bad mood with BT [or just generally], I thought I'd
respond to their last letter.

It's a deliberate troll, given that I know I'll never be using their
services again, and doing my damndest to put other people off them,
too [I find them sufficiently offensive, I'm gonna do my part in taking
them down].

Anyways. http://icculus.org/~chunky/rants/btresponse.txt

I'm also genuinely curious as to why they're driving away really quite
good customers such as myself. I mean. Come on. Think about it. Someone
who leaves their internet on permanantly. That means that I use the
internet lots, whether it's with BT or another provider. And if it's
BT, then they get money off me. If it's not, then they don't. Give it
a whole moments thought, you morons.


[2002-02-25]

So. The general conclusion I've been able to come to is that the
nv drivers are toasted. I've been told this by several reliable-ish
sources. So I've tried downgrading to older drivers that supposedly work,
but am unable to make the bastard things actually at all. Just some
scary-looking red lines vertically on the screen, and nada else.

So there are several things I'm doing right now:

1) Choosing to ignore the damn thing, as I didn't pay for the card,
haven't yet paid for the monitor, and I need to fix the damn monitor
before it'll even turn on anyways, so dualhead would currently be useless
as I've only one working monitor. That sentence made no sense, but I'm
in a bad mood so I can't be bothered to fix it.

2) Time for project work is drawing to a close at an altogether shit-scary
rate, so I'm gonna ignore it on that count, too.

3) I have this nasty feeling I'm about to end up coding on just my dumb
terminals again, soon, as my GFII fan is making that nasty noise again,
that it made last time I ended up having to take it out and get heavy
on it's ass.

Side-Note: Postal2 May well be coming to Linux. Which is cool. Postal
Rocks.

To install myth2 on a recent distro you need to download either a more
up-to-date installer, or, if you're like me on a slow internet connection,
use a bind mount as a quick'n'dirty hack. Details will be forthcoming
on the lgfaq.

It's pissing with rain. Lots. Often. Am soaked.

As a direct result, I'll probably update this later while camping out
the computer labs again to avoid going home. And I don't have uplink
installed in the labs.

Sod it. I have a lecture to go to. More later. Perhaps.


[2002-02-19-a-bit-later]

Grrrrrrrrrrrr.
http://icculus.org/~chunky/nv/
I'm annoyed at NV, now. Can anyone help me?


[2002-02-19]

http://icculus.org/~chunky/rants/btshutdown.txt
I'm now officially internet-connection-less

I guess it's my fault for using my "Anytime" account at "Anytime". I'll
make a mental note not to do it again.


[2002-02-17]

I've just bought a new book. [It was going very cheaply indeed]

Pay attention to the title of the book, and the picture on the cover:
http://icculus.org/~chunky/images/ntnetworking.png
[700k or so]

Note: I have in /no way/ edited this cover at all. I just scanned it in
and put it up.


[2002-02-16-just-after-reading-Yoda's-plan]

Ryan: If you change the vi on icculus.org, I will fly over to the states
and cut your bollocks off.

It behaves like genuine vi. None of this noncy new stuff. none of this
multiple-undo stuff [multiple undos is for wimps]. It behaves /exactly/
like the original vi. Which is what I like.


[2002-02-16]

Today is the day after my birthday. Anyway.

Yesterday, I got some seriously cool stuff.
I got a big plasma-ball-type thing. Which is cool.
Being the simple guy that I am, I got a spinning top, which has also
been hours and hours of amusement thusly far.
Some other random stuff.
And what Sara gave me.

Sara is nice.
Sara gave me whole stacks of Pooh stuff [Pooh rocks. Pooh is my friend],
some stupidly strong coffee [mmmmmmm. 'tis nice], and a really nice hip
flask with my initials engraved on it,

And a new shiny rock. This one says "Love" on it. Aaaahhhh

Am seriously bored of work, now. I really would like to be on the Candy
Cruncher beta, but there's no way on earth I can justify installing
another hideously addictive game with so much work to do.

Elsethings. Am confuzzled. After lots of hassle with Scan, I've finally
had my new TNT2 and 4 rounded ATA100 cables, 90cm long. Yes, they are
theoretically gimmicky [and damn expensive, for 10p worth of plastic
and metal], except they're really nice to actually use. Especially with
a big, fugly, mass of cables that exists inside my machine.

Hmmm. Well, for a start, they were delivered to the wrong address. But
luckily, since dad came up to visit me, I got them pretty sharpish.

The next thing that confused me is that the invoice comes to zero
pounds and zero pennies. And has lots of works on it like "free" and
"zero cost". Am majorly confuzzled.

So. Now I have two graphics cards in my machine. Funky. Except:
The GFII GTS [AGP] on it's own works fine.
The TNT2 [PCI] on it's own works fine.
The line
Screen "Screen PCI" Leftof "Screen AGP"
is enough to cause the X server to bomb. The cards are correctly detected
and working fine. There are two things in /proc/nv. Everything's
cool. Except that trying to put two screens in ServerLayout causes a
bomb. Bastard f***ing X bastard f***ing nVidia bastard f***ing Linux. I'm
sure it's actually me just being a cripple, but in the meantime, my
internet connection at home has died an altogether horrible death. So I
can't be online at home, trying to fix my machine, and I can't fix it
from campus. Bastard f***ing BT.

I have a feeling, also, that this may be a prime example of something
X 4.2 would fix, so I'll download it and try it later. I've done my
"compiling X" penance at version 4.1.0, so I shan't be compiling
this one myself. Deep thought: Compiling X is a whore. I do it once
every few versions, as my penance to all the Linux things I've done
wrong. Ever. That's how bad things like that are.

More mental notes: Everyone has been a llama in their past:
I was a llama once, too
There are two specific embarrasing things about that:
1) I was writing that from Outlook Express.
2) I was asking how to make gnome start instead of twm, because I didn't
  like twm.

Just think. Anyone at all [even people who don't know how to change
a window manager, like gnome, and use Outlook] can end up as a
semi-competent person such as my good self.


[2002-02-13]

Hmmm. Well, I'm doing lots of work-type things again. You know, I
_really_ hate one thing in particular about final year projects: It's
100% on the write-up. If my code never works, then it's just the way
it goes. I can still get full marks. I want to code and get marks for
/that/, goddammit. Ho, hum.

Anyways. I'm currently camping out pc172s in the computer science
department on campus, solely because I can't get home. Indeed. The river
going past my house has flooded. I may or may not actually have a home
to go back to by this time tomorrow. Hmmm. That's bad, right?

Actually, to be fair, I'll have a home, but it may be a bit fetid/smelly,
and wet. This morning I got my feet soaked above my ankles while cycling
to campus. Bugger. But there's something rewarding about a car going
past at speed, soaking me, then stalling. And not starting again. So I
quite happily cycle past, stop at the edge of the puddle and admire the
quite substantial distance that the bloke in his car is going to have
to trapse through on foot, while I got past on my bike With merrely damp
ankles. Mwahahahahaha.


"Cease to resist giving my good-byes. Drive my car into the ocean. You
think I'm dead, but I sail away..."

Bonus marks for guessing what the only CD I actually bought with me
is. Gonna be a long night. One CD, and a bloody hot computer room.


[2002-02-06]

And I think I've worked out the last problem, too; in order to make
krilo2.prog run without bombing upon entering a password, you need to edit
the script that runs it to "cd /usr/lib/krilo" before executing anything.


[2002-02-05-yet-later-still]

Level 56 is insoluble with krilo.prog; you need to switch to krilo2.prog
to be able to play it.
Level 57 is /hard/


[2002-02-05-later-still]

I have the password for Level 55. Level 56 is a bit weird. Causing
me problems. Time for me to go and do some work, I think.

Wave of Mutilation is my favorite song on PutV. Followed by Everybody
knows. [Although I prefer the one in the film with the gravelly voice
version thingy]

Hmmm.

This is far and away the best penny-arcade comic.

[in a go-and-do-some-work-you-bloody-student kinda way (=]


[2002-02-05-later]

Still depressed about shitty exam results. But have bought the
soundtrack to "Pump up the Volume", to make me feel better. Not quite
sure how that's gonna work, but hey; you gotta have a laugh, right? I
think this can join Placebo, Radiohead, and the Crow soundtrack in the
"Chunky Cheerful Collection"

IHBT. IHL. HAND


Hmmm. In other news, someone the other day showed me a Rubik's cube, so I
dug out a couple of mine, and am playing with them again. For reference
for anyone who doesn't know how to solve them, it is, actually, really
piss-easy. You just learn a couple of moves by rote [which are mostly
highly symmetric, making it so easy that even punters like me can grasp
it], and you can solve the whole thing. The only interesting bit is
when you start trying to make pretty patterns.

Which is much more interesting with my professor's cube [5x5x5 instead
of 3x3x3 - you can buy them at www.mefferts-puzzles.com], but
unfortunately, that's on loan, and I'm getting it back ASAP.

Professor's cube


And here's a hint: the solution that comes with it is a damn site harder
than the solution described here:

How to solve a 5x5x5 Rubik's Cube

Yes, that's my name on the page, as I found a really simple move to do
one particular exercise.

Elsewises, two pieces of news WRT my mum [who won't ever read this,
but I love you, mum, anyways. You're the best].

She's now got the house that she [and me, and my sister] wanted. It's a
really really nice house, just outside Aberystwyth. Now she can settle
down, get an Aga for the dog to lie against [and me, whenever I'm there
(=], and generally start actually living the rest of her life in earnest.

Plus, she's just texted me to ask for help with FrontPage. I don't know
if any of you people have ever actually used it, or if you've merely
heard lots about it. It is, actually, as bad as everyone says it is. I
used it for a couple months once [I was paid to. I feel so cheap, but
it's the way it goes, right?], and loathed it. But since it's what she's
been told to use, it's what she's using. So I'm gonna have to help her
with it. Ho, hum.


[2002-02-05]

Hairy goat balls. Just got my exam results, and they suck. Royally.

Sara cooked me dinner again last night. Spag Bol. And delicious, with it.

And now this terminal's fucked, so I'm typing blind.

Fuck this. I'm going to find a small {corner,stone} to crawl {into,under},
and sulk.



[2002-02-04]

finger msphil@icculus.org

Addition:
And if you're not using an RPM-based distro [/a la/ slack], you need to
overwrite /usr/lib/krilo/levels.pak using /usr/lib/krilo/levels2.pak. It's
something that the RPM does, but rpm2targz gives no recurse to.

Other conclusion: Katie is a figment of MSPhil's imagination.

PS I now have the password for level 45, and got to level 49 earlier.


[2002-02-03]

Damn you, MSPhil. I get over my Krilo addiction by nature of the fact
it doesn't work under Linux, and I'm no longer near my father's windows
machine... And then you tell me that it does, actually, work. And a bit
of research shows that yes, it /is/ possible to play.

So I'm no longer over my Krilo addiction. Bugger.

PS I can get a damn site further in it than you can, though, so all is
not lost. I have the password for level 40. You?

PPS My money says it's MSPhil with the Krilo addiction, and not his Katie;
she's just an excuse.


[2002-02-02]

Right.

Why I call myself Chunky Kibbles

What that means is that people can stop asking, now (=

Plus, I've gone back over this .plan, and changed all the ones saying
2001 to 2002, since I'm clearly a bit slow on this. [Thanks, Trisk]


[2002-01-31]

Loki officially cease, today. And that's pretty shit. I'm really sorry
about it, actually, as I think they were doing some seriously good things.

Anyways. Life goes on. There's a good chance that the only real answer
right now is that "that's what you get for having a sucky business
model". By "sucky business model", I mean that you're asking linux people
to give you money. Which Linux people are generally, it would seem,
loathe to do.

Anyways. There are lots of other companies out there, #loki still exists,
www.tuxgames.com still exists, and so on, and so forth. Life goes on,
and I wish Scott, wife, and friends, all the best in whatever they choose
to do.

On other topics, if you're a student in the computer science department,
I wrote a quick howto on SSH'ing about in the department without using
passwords. Mostly this is only necessary because the linux boxen have
silly-bugger ssh setups. But hey; I guess that's just the way it goes.
SSH in Comp. Sci at York

And elsethings? Not much, really. Have been to bed for the last 3 night
running, so I guess it's time I quit sleeping again. I wrote another
page this morning that lynx users will be able to find, but I'm afriad
it's mostly a visual image-type thing, so... Hmmmm...

Did some shopping. Can't find [it would seem] a PCI graphics card at
all, except one shop was trying to sell me a TNT1 for 45 quid. Ha. F**K
right off.


[2002-01-30]

Today, I had my interview at ARM. I got ripped to shreds on the hardware
stuff and actual chip-implementation type things, as I was expecting
[to be honest; hardware isn't really, as it were, /my thing/. Add to that,
I was taught computer architectures by a mathematician, not a computer
hardware guy...].

On more cheerful notes, my C knowlege was sufficient to answer most of the
questions, but one or two required a little prompting [eg, "Write a macro
in C that returns 1 if you're on a big-endian machine, and 0 of you're
on a little-endian on". Or the other way round. It's not like which one
returns which is the point of the question, you know? Anyway. That one
required a fair bit of prompting. The rest were OK.]

Hmmm. I'd still like to work for them, but there's still a company or
two higher on my list than them [not by much, understand, but a little].

Anyways. Sara's really cool. She got me a shiny rock with "luck"
stamped on it. OK, it's a hunk of metal, but "shiny rock" sounds
cooler. Anyways. She drove me the 175 miles each way [from York to
Cambridge and back], and has really good taste in music, so the trip
was really good. I'm /really/ sorry that my interview took two and a
half hours instead of the half an hour I {was expecting, am used to},
for the duration of which she sat in her car outside doing her work on
"Death and Dying", phoning loads of people whining about how long I was
being, and other similar stuff.

I also saw someone who I haven't seen in ages, and wants me to do some
random work on the Quake2 engine. Some pretty cool stuff, actually
[ripping entities from a database instead of hard-coding them into
maps, and other similar things]. And other as-yet-unannounced things,
severally. If it comes to anything, you'll all know about it in a
few years.

Anyways. Sod this. I'm going to bed.


[2002-01-28]

Some things that annoy me
Nothing really specific; just things that annoy me when I'm cycling about,
a letter I've sent to a company that is now starting to really piss
me off, and I've moved my bt page there, too. I'm sure this page will
grow. And grow, and grow, and grow. But hey... what can you do, you know?


[2002-01-27]

The Chocfest
Chocfest was yesterday, now. It was _seriously_ good fun. Random juggling
convention that we hold in York every year [yesterday was the seventh]. If
you've never been to a juggling convention, it's pretty much an excuse
for many many jugglers to get together, have a natter, and juggle lots
in the meantime.

At the end of the day, there's a show with some professionals on stage &
stuff. Half-way through a raffle was drawn, and I won a box of useless
tat. Cool day, though.


Something I should have done a long time ago

A fair while ago, now, I crashed my car. Was going up the motorway,
and a tyre blew out [100% no bugger's fault]. Bounced off the barrier
times, severally, and the car was absolutely totalled. By "fair while",
I mean it happened nearing the end of last August.

I was fine except for a case of whiplash, but the nice doctor gave me
happy drugs so it wasn't too much of a problem.

Anyways. Rather than an attempt at self-pity, this is more of a thanks.

Several people actually stopped. I'm some random guy with a destroyed
car standing by the side of the motorway, and three [IIRC] totally
independant people driving along stopped to make sure I was ok. At the
time, I didn't have a mobile, so one guy offered to let me use his. It's
the small things, you know? But a whole bunch of people basically stopped,
got out of their cars, wandered over to make sure I was ok, stood around
chatting with me for a bit [I'm guessing I was acting a little oddly],
and then when the police & ambulance arrived, they wandered off.

I'm afraid I only got the name of the guy who lent me his mobile; Steven
Marsh. Man, you're great.

Anyways. The point of all this? There are a few people I'd like to
really really thank, but I'm unlikely to ever be able to. Really can't
imagine they're reading this, but if they are, you know who you are. [by
Peterborough going north on the A1, beige Fiesta]. So this is also just
to say that there /are/ good people around. Several people really went
out of their way to make sure someone who they'd never met before and
will never meet again was OK, for a bare minimum of thanks. And that's
really amazing.

Thanks.


[2002-01-26]

Later today is the chocfest. The juggling convention in York every
year. It is cool.

I've been really geeky and put some "easter eggs" on my homepage [sorta]
that you'll be able to see if you're either a lynx user, or prepared
to trawl html source. Pointless, but it gives me another use for fugly
pie menus.

Quake2 is pretty funky. Relnev, you's good.


[2002-01-24]

Have a shufty at my homepage.
I kick Dan's ass

Yes. I've put a pie menu back on. looking at it another way, I'm writing
HTML to save myself from have to do any work today. Now /that's/ bad.


[2002-01-23]

Hmmm. Well, the schedulers don't work as planned, we're getting there,
but it's taking some time.

I've started keeping a log of issues, which I really should have done
before.
Random things

Coffee is still my bestest friend.

Just bought a PCI graphics card only to discover it's AGP. F**K. Now I
need to find someone who
1) Has a PCI TNT2 and an AGP MoBo
2) Wants a free upgrade
3) Is near to me right now so I can have this puppy working in the next
  couple days.

ChunkyLand has been modified so that the green terminal is now on top of
the orange one, as all it's currently used for is the entry in syslog.conf
that says:
kern.* /dev/console

Damn useful. In the meantime, I've basically been using my main machine
for IRC and web browsing, and doing all my work on the orange terminal, as
it's actually a damn nice toy to use. If you need to know what ChunkyLand
is, have a shufty at my homepage.

I need to find myself a job. I'm bored of job-hunting, and would like
to just go on with getting degree-type things done. I have an interview
with ARM on Wednesday, that Sara's driving me to [she's lovely, she
is]. A couple other random punters have contacted me, too, and I'm
specifically hoping the one in LA pans out. But let's see how things
turn out, shall we?

I see Dan's put a pie menu on his webpage. On general principle, I'm
going to have to re-write mine just so's I can feel superior again. [And
because he was nasty to me on one of Loki's newsgroups when I tried to
start a troll-fest]


[2002-01-21-ten-pm]

Depressing .plan update. Ignore if you're not interested in reading
depressing things in my day.

Just watched Amelie. It's a french film with english subtitles. It's
about a french lass, called, strangely enough, Amelie. One day, her life
changes radically. This film is actually _really_ _really_ good. It's
funny lots, often, and is generally really enjoyable.

Once again, I've been to the movies and cried over random couply
couples. I'm not currently part of any couple, and that really sucks. I'm
not planning on reducing myself to Prometheus' level, but I really hate
being single.

Hmmm. Here's how life seems to be for me: find a really nice girl,
with whom I get on really well, and decide I really like. Time spent in
relationship with her is indirectly proportional to how nice they are. I
can think of someone I went out with recently for just a few weeks,
and she really made a difference.

OTOH, if I can find someone who's a generally nasty lass who'll treat
me like shit, it'll last at least a couple of years.

No, scarily enough, I'm not bitter at all. Just sad that she's bitter
at me.


Hmmm. Haven't slept since I got up on Friday morning, except a couple
hours in one stint, and various "power outages" during some of my
lectures. You know what I mean if you've been there.

I think I shall go home and sleep.


[2002-01-21-just-after-midnight]

This .plan update dedicated to Sara, who cooked me a really nice dinner
last night. She won't understand a word of this as she's a non-tech,
but hey; it's better than never getting a mention at all, right?

Well. I've now done really rather a lot of work in the last few days,
at the expense of sleep, food. But not, it would seem, without the truly
premature emptiness of multiple jars of coffee. Ho, hum.

My project
That's what I've been working on. I've basically written the hooks
into the normal RTLinux scheduler, and implemented one policy that is
defined in my project [a deferred server], and one policy that's not
[a never server]. And it's actually pretty good fun.

You know, in a geeky sorta way.


[2002-01-18]

Bugger it.

Sara's now got my PlayStation, and it's staying there until I do some
bloody work. Grrr.


[2002-01-17]

Built a mySQL database on my machine at home this morning, Builds really
cleanly now. Nice.

Sara whupped me at BomberMan. Bugger.

Hmmmmm. Am being offered muchos cash to write a Quake2 mod. Hmmmmm.

If you're currently running FAKK2 on Linux and are seeing
total blowouts early in the game, have a shufty at my
unofficial patch

Major kudos to Taylor Richards if it's actually working


[2002-01-12]

The PlayStationCam
That is all


[2002-01-09-after-exam]

Hmmm. Well, the exam's over. Lemme see. The exam started at 9; here's
the first entry in my timeline for today:
9.35am: Phone call from department wakes me from my sleep.

Ho, hum. What can you do, right?

Anyways. I think I failed it. Not by much, but a bit. Apparently, I may
or may not get penalised.

Got two e-mails from companys I've applied to for jobs recently. ARM
want to see me for a second interview [which is very very cool indeed],
and CodeMasters wondered if I'd consider testing for them, and if not,
could I please verify I'm l33t with C and C++...

Note for people on icculus.org: I've updated one to mutt that doesn't
have the recently-found remotely-exploitable security hole.


[2002-01-08]

Why I hate my ISP
I'm just really annoyed at BT, now, and I'm hoping this puts them into
perspective for anyone who is considering purchasing their service.


[2002-01-07]

And I'm still not getting any work done. I re-built UnrealTournament to
include a splash screen again instead of doing any reading, today.

You have no idea how mind-bogglingly boring this course is. You may
think you do, but you don't.
Witness:
The whole course in a nutshell



[2002-01-07-just-past-midnight]

Just for reference, I've given the playstation away until after the
exam. In the the hopes that in the 48 hrs I've got left before it,
I'll do some reading for it. I'm going to bed.


[2002-01-05]

Note to self: you have an exam on Wednesday, for which you must have read
on the order of 40M of text. Of which you've currently done, literally,
zero. So why, exactly, are you playing Metal Gear Solid?

Just thought I'd mention: if you're a user of icculus.org, I've actually
built tin and mutt in my home area. They're in ~chunky/bin. Mutt is the
latest stable [1.3.24i], and tin is the latest unstable [1.5.10]

Note: mutt doesn't have imap support; you don't need it. Get qmail to
deliver to a mailbox in your home, and then you won't be able to hammer
the imap server. Look at my .qmail to see how to do this with procmail.

For reference, I have the following in my .bash_profile:
export NNTPSERVER=news.lokigames.com
alias tin="tin -r"

You may also find this of use:
My configs


[2002-01-04]

Am working on a PlayStationCam. If other people are allowed webcams, I
should be allowed a PlayStationCam [since that's the only thing currently
plugged into my TV card (=]

Just for Mr Hendersa-man, you should know that yesterday I did this:
IIS is annoying me now

When this .plan was written: 2002-02-27 08:18:31
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