Raw source and immediate archive at http://www.icculus.org/~phaethon/plan/ Entries are currently sorted in: Newest First Syntax (time and date in UTC, my local timezone is PST/PDT): [YEAR].[MONTH].[DAY] ~[APPROX. HOUR] [SUMMARY] [CONTENT] 2006.10.08 ~07 My First (Personal) Soldering Project I applied my non-existent soldering skills to a little project trying to fix a non-working dance pad (non-mainstream brand). Lessons I learned in soldering today: * tin the damn tip. It really really helps, even if it forms a gigantic ball of solder on the tip. * shortening wires that are too long is easier than trying to extend it. * desoldering a mistake can get messy and crappy. * applying iron to a wire's end can still burn the nearby insulation because the conductive metal, of all things, gets hot. * holding onto the wire near the heated end is a bad idea. * the spent solder on the tip needs to get scraped off often. * scraping it off with a wet napkin does weird things to the iron. * breathing burnt insulation hurts. * breathing burnt flux also hurts. * using lead-free solder gives me warm fuzzies. * using rosin core doesn't. * diag cutters help with those spiky solder points. I should get some. * when measuring the resistance of a trace, it helps if the trace is not already covered in epoxy. Now I need a cheap-o USB PC gamepad to hook up this puppy. And remembering to attach the negative terminal properly so that the electrolytic capacitors can do their jobs. 2006.09.23 ~15 So like there's this trip with a student group at UCLA that was planned out three months ago, but somehow I marked Sep 29 and the date of the trip was never mentioned again since, so when mailing list chatter about the trip picked up a couple days ago, I got a bit suspicious, and got confirmation that it's for today through Monday, not next week. I seem to be really bad about synchronizing with group-known information. I may need to work on that this school year. 2006.09.13 ~13 So I was reminded that I... (a) have a .plan (b) have a dead/resurrectable Q3 mod cvs respository sitting on this server. I should do something useful about them. 2005.04.14 ~07 vidcap and 3D Well, finally, I got video-capture and accelerated 3D both working again, again. Radeon 7200 vidcard with VIVO, latest X.org from CVS, latest Mesa from CVS, latest drm from CVS, linux 2.6.11.7. X.org CVS at this point has incorporated the video-capturing stuff of gatos, so the ati.2 and ati.4.4.0 stuff from the GATOS project are not needed, and in fact break the install. A major snagging point for me was the kernel modules. Basically km_api_drv.ko and km_drv.ko have to be loaded before drm.ko and radeon.ko get loaded. Otherwise radeon.ko initializes the vidcard first, and km_drv's probe() never gets called. 3D failed, but vidcap worked, using stable Mesa 6.2.1 (mesa_6_2_1). Blindly jumping to Mesa CVS finally got 3D working. Furthermore, glxgears runs a tad faster than I remember (1400-ish now compared to what I think was around 1250-ish way back). 2005.04.07 ~05 another suspiciously scammish phone call Got another suspicious phone call, this time offering $200 in coupons for a shopping spree, mentioning enough department store names to trigger Carnivore. Also, I was told this month was Consumer Appreciation Month... but that it was really in March. When I pressed about the previous "Consumer Appreciation Month" call from January, the caller sidestepped the question quite overtly, trying to rush through a script. Quite obviously a script, since he didn't seem to want to sidetrack from his side of the conversation. The repeated words were also a giveaway of a script; I kept interrupted and he'd keep trying to resume with the exact same words. I don't know about other people, but reading off a script gives me the impression of an ulterior motive in play. The clincher was when he mentioned free movie passes in addition to the coupons, good for ANY MOVIE (no exceptions!). When pressed for names of which theaters, he listed so many theater chains, even those I know aren't even remotely close to California, that all I could do was just retort "That's bullshit!" and hung up right there. Note: free movie passes, espeically those given to the unwashed masses (me), have close to 0% chance of being honored for Super Duper Ultra Premiere Specials, such as Day 1 of the next Star Wars movie. That, and no way in hell every movie theater in the nation/world will simultaneously decide to honor a blanket movie pass, franchising notwithstanding. TANSTAAFL -- Economics 101. 2005.01.18 ~08 Content-free ads of "Million Dollar Baby" The ads for the movie "Million Dollar Baby" are fast approaching spammish. First of all, I'm hearing it all over the place (radio in car during commute). Secondly, there's nothing substantiative in the ads. It's all "this person said...", "that group nominated us for...", "these editors proclaim...", "look at how many thumbs up we got", and so on. Not even a slight hint at the plot of the movie. The closest thing to a plot hint was a comparison of its powerfulness(?) to "Mystic River". But otherwise completely content-free and based on what someone else is saying or doing. The movie makers aren't saying squat about it. All this makes me seriously doubt the value of the movie. What the hell is the movie about? No one's saying. Hrm... maybe it's a pointless movie. 2005.01.05 ~04 Gasoline vouchers? So this is the second time I got a call offering vouchers for $200 worth of gasoline. This time claiming to come from Shell Oil Company. The first time I got such a call was a few months ago, and I got really suspicious over it. I forget the details of that call, aside from that the conversation somehow degenerated into a "what? I can't hear you!" shouting match, then cussing the other end out as I hung up the phone. This time, since it was the second of such calls, I decided to make a note of it somewhere. As it only happened minutes before I started writing this entry, the details ought to be mre recallable. So, the call comes in, I answer it. First hint something was amiss, there was a lot of noise/chatter in the background. In fact, I thought the call was coming from an analog cell phone. The second thing was that the caller, unlike the more legitimate telemarketers, did not open with "is such-and-such there", but instead goes off with "Hi, my name is Charles, and I'm calling from Shell Oil Company." For some reason, the fact the guy gave his name (if that's his real name) right at the start raised a red flag as well. Thirdly, the caller mentions my phone number was selected to receive $200 in vouchers for gasoline at any Shell station. The mention of "number" rang in my head. Phone number, as opposed to name, address, or a frickin' lottery ticket. It's a really strange way of selecting a "winner", using a phone number. Most of all was the material being pushed. USD 200 of gasoline is a lot of money, a lot of gasoline, to be given away for free. With the price of gasoline around here, that represents approximately 90 gallons; for my car alone approximates to 2250 miles (um... 3500-ish km) of driving, which I think is enough to drive to the nearest Canadian border crossing and back. The sheer amount of money being given away for nothing was just staggeringly ridiculous. The other thing that got me thinking was the notion that my phone number was chosen more or less at random. If that were the case, they (the purported gasoline company) may as well just hand out gasoline lottery at the pumps (station ownership issues notwithstanding). But even that, being as random as it is, may as well be just a general price reduction of all gasoline products. In other words, there something bizarre about handing out vouchers/discounts to random people when that wouldn't be much different from just an across-the-board price reduction. The final straw was when the caller said, basically, that he needed to verify my phone number, and read back my phone number. Or the number he dialed. Something deep inside me felt very insulted by this reading back. Perhaps because he, the very caller, said this, my, phone number was selected, then asking if the number is correct. Couldn't he ask if the number was correct *first*, then start the spiel? Asking later felt like he was insulting my intelliegence (which he probably was, a google search later). My response was silence. Utter silence. The guy eventually hung up; when I hit the 'off' button, the display showed 1:05 of talk time; even if it's of minimal consolation, at least the caller's phone bill got rounded up to two minutes (or is that even a good thing in retrospect...). Now for the google result. I googled for "Shell Oil Company gasoline voucher". Lo and behold, the only hit that had all the terms in a meaningful position was a warning about an identity theft scam: http://www.wate.com/global/story.asp?s=2666657&ClientType=Printable Basically the whole spiel about gasoline and vouchers is a ruse to grease up the victim to start handing out personal information. Detailed personal information, along the lines of every damned digit on their personal check -- routing, account, everything. Now, if this caller is part of a scam ring, then someone else's money and life was used to pay his phone bill. Either directly (ID-theft phone purchase) or indirectly, such as, oh, draining someone's checking account down to, and perhaps even past ("overdraft protection"), the last penny. Which is why now I'm now wondering if it was such a good thing to deliberately crank up "his" phone bill to the next billed minute. Overall, though, my cynicism/pessimism, paranoia, and wandering thoughts had stopped a dumb, and potentially dangerous, phone call early. Now if only ATT would permit me to "reach out and strangle someone." [section="life"]Life:[/section] No Life found. [section="project"]Project:[/section] 1. Project FI, Quake 3 mod (http://www.icculus.org/fi/) a. provide an extensible environment for a Q3 mod. The intended notion is that of "mutators" in Unreal Tournament. b. FI:WFC, a more faithful reproduction of Q2WF for Q3 than WFA. 2. QuakeScheme * Extensible language for Project FI. * Builds on TinySCHEME (http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/) * Deal with the idiosyncrasies of Q3VM not handled by most other Scheme impls. 3. Q3VM libc * Implementation of Standard C Library for Q3VM bytecode. * Implementation of a subset of Single Unix Specification v2 (SUS v2). * Help import third-party library into Q3VM. 4. QuakeScheme GUI/widget set a. Need to research advanced OO and GUI of Scheme derivatives and Common Lisp. b. Replication/extension of boxy widgets in Q3TA (Q3 PR 1.27+). c. Pie menus -- just to annoy theoddone33. 5. Q3 compilation toolchain [X] q3lcc sources (official version out with Q3A SDK 1.32) [X] q3asm - get static to work, dammit. [ ] q3as - assemble-only (.asm to .o). [ ] q3ld - link-only (.o/.a to .qvm). 6. ZBoxZ (PalmOS) rewrite um.... hrm... 7. misc PalmOS stuff a. PiNGer (gfx viewer) * generalize interface to a "any-gfx" viewer (libpnm?)