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2004.11.27 ~08 How times change (inet).
Via random perusals, I found this joke page with an mdate of 1996 Feb:
http://users.vnet.net/matjohns/humor/10.ways.internet.worse.html("Top ten ways the internet could get worse")
Relevant Google searches peg a date predating mid-1995. Around this
time, Microsoft Windows 95 started, Intel Pentium CPUs were clocking in
at around 100 MHz and still stinging from the FDIV bug, and WWW was just
starting to bloom with Mosaic and Netscape Navigator.
What's scary is how much of the joke's content has come to pass.
> 8. Home shopping "network".
Online shopping (e.g. amazon, e-bay). 'nuff said.
> 6. Sun internet servers replaced with pentiums.
It's pretty clear the pentiums referred to are the original series
pentium, the i586-equivalent, and not Pentium IV, but still, a good
number of online servers these days are running x86-family CPUs (e.g.
Xeon, Opteron, ... Celeron...). And let's not forget the vast sea of
wintel machines ripe for zombification.
> 5. Dan Quayle appointed head of "bandwidth expansion tiger team".
I think President G.W. Bush (#43) is pushing for more spread of
high-speed net connections in homes across the US. But then, so had
Pres. Clinton (#42), but Quayle was VP under Pres. G.H.W. Bush (#41),
which sort of compounds the eerie-ness factor.
> 4. Free netcom account with purchase of big mac.
I get a weird deja-vu-ish feeling that something very similar had come
to pass. The following come to mind: juno, netzero, gmail, hotmail. I
can't think of any in particular associated with purchase of fast food,
though. On another note, the significance/meaning of "netcom" has faded
with time as well; I have no idea what "netcom" is supposed to mean in
this context, and a naive lookup of www.netcom.com redirects to
www.earthlink.com; www.netcom.org is beyond my comprehension.
> 3. Gameboy web browsers.
As with the pentium bit, the referenced device is clearly the
Z80-powered original Gameboy, and not the contemporary StrongARM-powered
Gameboy Advance. Regardless, we now have Gameboy [Advance] web
*servers*:
http://www.fivemouse.com/gba/> 1. Two words: "Microsoft Network".
Indeed. www.msn.net. ph33r.
2004.11.23 ~06 my e-mailbox
My mailbox has been overflowing with mostly virus payloads, and a slowly
growing number of spam. Also, recently I have received a sudden flow of
mail regarding the various programming projects I worked/am working on. As
a result, I have determined obfuscating my e-mail address on my web pages is
no longer productive, and have changed as many as I could bother to change
to transparent mailto: URIs.
2004.10.25 ~16 Fujitsu Lifebook S7010 notes
I'm keeping notes of my progress on my notebook at
http://www.icculus.org/~phaethon/notebook/lifebooks7010.htmlThe target audience is people seeking to get GNU/Linux running on the
notebook, so I aim to minimize historical notes and journal-like rambles
as I am wont to do.
The link for it is already listed on
http://www.linux-laptop.net/2004.09.28 ~22 New notebook, Fujitsu S7010, installing Linux
Got a new notebook computer yesterday, a Fujitsu S7010. It's actually a
refurbished machine, which may explain some of the variations from the
posted specs. Intel Penium M 1.7GHz, 512M RAM, 80G HDD. WLAN is an Atheros
adapter of some sort (PCI ID 168c:0013); the built-in ethernet is a
Broadcomm gigabit adapter (PCI ID 14d4:165e). This machine apparently also
has built-in bluetooth, a nice bonus. There's a hardware kill switch for
the wireless stuff on the front bevel.
I first booted this machine with Knoppix 3.2 EN, but nothing was usable, not
even network. After waiting for Knoppix 3.6 EN to download and burn, I
booted that. Suddenly just about everything worked: wireless, wired
ethernet, bluetooth, infrared... dunno about modem. Also that SpeedStep
thingy kicked in under Knoppix 3.6, whereas the CPU always went full-tilt
under 3.2 (read: very very hot).
First order of business was to image the hard drive. This took close to
three hours, shoveling 80G through gzip then 100baseT onto a remote machine
on the LAN. I want to image the hard drive so that I have a known starting
point in the event of total hosing. The final archive weighed in at 4.9G,
quite a bit more than a DVD+R's capacity. I may either split it into a DVD
and CD pair, or just keep it on the desktop's hard drive.
Next I resized the NTFS partition until it barely had enough room to
breathe. It was something like 9.43G used, so I use qtparted to resize it
from 77.8G down to 9.6G. There was already some sort of recovery partition
on the drive as well (FAT32 labelled "DISE_BACKUP", apparently for "Disk
Image Special Edition"... imo, I don't know what's so "special" about
something that could be accomplished with dd(1) and bzip2(1)).
After resizing the NTFS, I fell back to familiar grounds and ran cfdisk to
partition the drive to my liking. I carved out a 9.6G /, 2 of 4.2G swap (one
for suspend, the other for regular swapping), and another 9.6G for /home.
Then I formatted them, using Knoppix.
Next came about five hours trying to get from a running Knoppix system to a
Debian installation. To distill it, it basically come down to this:
Installing Debian sarge (testing) from a running Knoppix session.
Under Knoppix, mounted what would be /home as /mnt/hda6. Downloaded debian
initrd, vmlinuz, and sarge-i386-businesscard.iso to it. Then I set up grub
to use this partition: "grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda6 /dev/hda".
Rebooted off HDD.
At the grub prompt, "root (hd0.5)" (which is linux's /dev/hda6), then
"kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0", then "initrd /initrd", then "boot".
This booted into the Debian installer, which found the relevant .iso image,
then things went off from there. In the installer, I then selected the
originally to-be "/" to be Debian's "/", since the installer insists on
being able to mount / during the install process. At the end of
installation, Debian pointed GRUB at proper new root partition.
On reboot, the rest of Debian installation went smoothly. Now to pick and
choose packages...
2004.09.26 ~01 Radeon 64DDR, X.Org 6.7, GATOS CVS, linux 2.6.8.1
Finally I got both 3D and vidcap simultaneously again, after I don't
know how long. Prior to today, I had two sets of X installed, one that
works with DRI but no vidcapping, and the other with vidcapping but no
accelerated 3D. To make matters worse, I couldn't straighten out
the modules mess, so using the other X install meant having to reboot
into the other kernel as well (linux 2.4.26 with vidcap, linux 2.6.7
with 3D).
I compiled stock X.Org 6.7. The radeon (radeon.ko) module was from the
X.Org tree under programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/os-support/linux/drm/kernel
(I cd'd to there so many times I have the path memorized by heart now).
The KMultimedia modules were from GATOS CVS as of 2004.09.26; these are
km_api_drv.ko and km_drv.ko. I used the ati.4.4.0 drivers from GATOS
cvs as well; had these installed into the XOrg tree with "make install".
Upon running avview (also from GATOS cvs), the kernel module (km_drv, I
think) kept complaining about the Radeon memory controller being
misconfigured. Searching the GATOS mailing list, I came across a post
from Jan 2003 --
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_id=5014&style=flat&viewday=14&viewmonth=200301 --
indicating that I may skip the check causing this error messsage if I
were certain the memory controller was indeed configured properly. I
assumed it was, since other posts implied that ati.4.4.0 properly
configures the Radeon memory controller for linux 2.6.x. So I edited
km/radeon.c so that it always returned 1.
Testing avview... well, avview from CVS doesn't seem to vidcap properly,
so I reverted to the older version (which has always worked before),
which was from GATOS CVS 2003.03.22. Testing the recorded MPEG with
xine, I was satisfied that recording actually worked.
I tested 3D first with glxinfo (said Yes for Direct Rendering), then
glxgears (got 1300fps, 200 if software rendered), then Blender, then
finally Quake 3. Everything worked as expected.
I had checked out DRI, but those drivers seem to conflict in existence
with GATOS's ati.4.4.0. So no Mesa cvs either. As circumstances have
it, XOrg 6.8 is already released, but someone else has tried GATOS on
XOrg 6.8, without success.
In summary, linux 2.6.8.1, XOrg 6.7, GATOS cvs for km and ati.4.4.0, old
GATOS avview; radeon.ko from XOrg 6.7, km_api_drv.ko and km_drv.ko from
GATOS km (with one-line change).
On another note, km_drv.ko cannot coexist happily with fbcon. Best as I
can tell, the fbcon calls dibs on the Radeon device before km_drv can
get to it, so the kernel never gives km_drv a chance to probe devices.
I wonder if there's a way for them to coexist.
2004.07.05 ~01 Making a fighter game
On the Samurai Spirits Forever (SSF) forums, someone (else) has embarked
on an attempt to create a Samurai Showdown-esque fighter game.
http://samuraispirits.net/cgi-bin/ikonboard/topic.cgi?forum=5&topic=296The general consensus seems to be against this fellow. Personally, I
think it's doable.
In any case, I've been working on my own fighter-type game for about a
decade or so. Shortly after my introduction to Street Fighter II, I
attempted to mimick it... in GW-BASIC. Well, I didn't get very far; as
the years passed, I tried redoing it again and again, in Pascal, in C,
and now Python (+ pygame).
The forum thread on SSF essentially ends on an ultimatum to deliver
something by July 25, twenty days from now. I decided to take this
chance to try to finish my own version of a fighter game. I probably
won't have anything decent by the 25th, but I figured I may as well
build up the underlying technologies.
I intend to journal my progress, to extract components reusable in other
languages.
If I can figure out where to start documenting...
2004.06.26 ~11 Radeon 7200 gatos, packet-cd (pktcdvd)
So now I'm trying get back to online FPS gaming after a five-month
hiatus due to a curious {video-capture} XOR {hardware-3d} dichotomy
(long form short, I became a TV junkie).
I finally managed to compile me a new X from the XOrg tree. The final
stretch was finding the page of release tags, which finally got me a
XOrg tree that actually compiles (fwiw, 'xorg-6_7_0').
For 3D drivers, it was the DRI tree. After some minor fiddling, it got
installed, and glxinfo and glxgears seemed happy.
Trying to retain video-capture, I dropped by gatos.sourceforge.net.
For some reason, all the pages haven't been updated at all. And the CVS
module 'ati.2' is outdated as well. Poring through the mailing list
archive, I found there's a new module 'ati.4.4.0', presumably the set
intended for XFree86 4.4. Well, it compiled cleanly for XOrg-6_7_0,
so whatever. Haven't tried actually vidcapping since the kernel module
"km" wasn't ready yet.
Then I realized I was in ye olde linux 2.4. So it was time to bake a
new kernel of the 2.6 variety.
I got a DVD+RW burner back in late April. I've been using UDF and
packet-writing for DVD+RWs. So I wanted to retain packet-writing under
linux 2.6. Though packet-cd.sourceforge.net is the website for linux
packet-writing, again it suffers from outdated content (it claimed
latest patch targeted linux 2.4.0). Prior visits to the website and
it's mailing list turned up a site that actually carries up-to-date
patches, but the url is ridiculously long and complicated. On the
off chance that google might be helpful, a search for "packet-cd" turned
up the very site that carries the "live" packet-cd patches.
Life: No Life found.
Project:
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 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. QS 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).
5. PalmOS stuff
a. PiNGer (gfx viewer)
* generalize interface to a "any-gfx" viewer (libpnm?)
b. ZBoxZ (file manager)
* beef up its appness: menus, dialogs, pen actions
6. Blender development (
http://www.blender.org)