Month: March 2003

Things are coming together (at least in geekdom they are). The 256MB of ram I bought on ebay is now installed in my sun Ultra 5. I also found a 15 gig hard drive that used to be in my TIVO and dropped that into the box. The extra 256 meg really made a difference and Solaris is almost usable now. I have a dual port ethernet card coming some time this week that will hopefully work in my firewall. If it does then I will have an outside, dmz and inside segment in my appartment. The wrieless box and the sun box are going into the DMZ. The sun box is currently running an ftp server. Once I am done it will have a web server, maybe dns, email server and a Real media server on it. I should proably run a dhcp server for the wireless network.
You might be asking your self why? my answer why not. Seriously the sun box is a learning tool. I seem to spend a large amount of time googling newsgroups looking for answers on how to do something. At a high level it is very similar to linux. At a low level it is all very different. It took me 30 mins reading to work out how to partition, format and mount the new hard drive.
New media mini-itx I bought is a bit of a let down. The latest alsa sound drivers give a lot of static when playing music but the ones that come with Suse 8.1 seem to work well, but the kernel that comes with Suse doesn’t have the support for hard disk controller so I can’t use DMA (aka fast hard disk transfers) which means I can’t play DVD’s on it. So I guess i will have to wait a little bit until the drivers get sorted out. Right now it can play MP3’s display pictures on the TV and play internet radio streams so it is doing almost everything I wanted it to do.
If you use KDE try dropping a CD in to the drive and starting Konqueror and typing in audiocd:/ This is cool. It lets you rip cd’s by dragging and dopping folders. There are no draft limits on the encoding quality which beats paying for realplayer and or an upgrade to a non bastardised version XP.
I am also for kicks trying to compile KDE for my sun box. I have been trying on and off for 2 weeks I still haven’t got it all working but I learned some stuff on the way and i am getting closer. I now have arts and kdelibs and i am working on kdebase. After that everything else should be easy.

Woooh hooo my cable modem is on line…..

spoke to soon its off again…..

Oh on again just in time to tease me into thinking I good write a post…….

Oh no off again……….

I am giving them the benefit of the doubt because this is the first outage they have had in the year that I have been living here, and they don’t cap my speed so if there is bandwidth I can use it. I will miss my cable service if I move….. My options would be comcast or verizon.

Oh damn down again……

one more try

All I heard was pisssssssshhhhhhhhh…….

I walked my bike back to my apartment and took my car to work. After work and shopping at Ikea I checked the tire and pulled out half a razor blade. This would be patch number 4 or 5 on the back tire so I think it is about time that I wen out and bought a new inner tube. I also noticed that I am down to about a millimeter of tread on the flat of the back tire. Not bad for about 2000 miles. I don’t know exactly how many miles because I changed my odometer at one point and the new one wouldn’t let me set the initial mileage and the battery is now dead on the old one. I dropped the new a couple weeks back and it reset back to zero. It was at 820 miles so I guess I have done about 2000 miles but I could be under estimating that. I know that I used to get my bike serviced every thousand miles, but my bike from the UK is blurring in the bike I have in the US.

I now have a new bed spread, a new set of shelves (which forgot to buy the metal brace [Ikea Ivar]). A CD holder for the billy book case except they have changed the dimension on the billy book cases and the cd thingy is about an inch to wide. I need a saw preferably one with electricity to cut it down to size. So I need to make another trip to Ikea……. maybe I should leave my credit card at home.