Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Word to the wise: FFX-2 International does not have an English interface. Or English text anywhere, except in the voices. So don’t run out like a stupid bastard and buy it, expecting it to have these. Just because Square released, um, FFX International, FF7 International, and basically everything else with the word “International” tacked on with English and Japanese doesn’t mean that X-2 has them.

So in summation, yes, I’m a stupid bastard.

I did it - I made the switch from Windows XP back to Linux on this machine fulltime. The gory details follow. The whole “Why” of the switch will come later.

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Today I had to take a 2.5 hour trip outside of Tokyo, and I knew I’d be totally bored on the train. I have a cell-modem that I’ve mentioned before called “AirH”, which I thought that I’d use today to get some work done while in transit (I’ve done this before).

Friday though interfered with today. On that day I blew away Windows and installed Debian on my laptop (which is a story to soon come). I was really thorough at backing everything up - documents, bookmarks, music, and so on. So I got on the train this morning and whipped out the AirH, expecting to wrestle with the Linux pppd system to get it working. The PPP component was fairly easy to setup - problem was, I had forgotten to copy down the phone number.

Shit. I was going through e-mail withdrawl. I couldn’t call them, since I have no idea what my account number is or any other relevant details (not to mention the support people probably don’t speak English).

I mentioned I installed Linux. Basically, I previously had one big NTFS partition which needed to go. That got split up into a FAT32 partition (/dev/hda1) and a ReiserFS partition for Linux (/dev/hda2). Here comes the sweetness: I knew that the connection under Windows was named “Prin AirH”, so I typed “strings /dev/hda1 | less” and searched for the name. Bingo, I got the number.

I was lucky enough that in the formatting of the new FAT32 partition, and subsequent restoration of my data, that the phone number was there. And on a whim I figured, run strings on the raw partition.

So that’s it. Just a geek-eureka moment.

P.S.: Know what didn’t work? KPPP, the nice GUI-frontend for dial-up connections. It kept sending modem initialization strings that the card did not understand, and the configuration didn’t allow me to stop sending the strings (and I tried hard since I have nightmares from 10 years ago due to setting up connections with pppd).

We went out to Bic Camera tonight (that’s not a typo) so Chie could pickup Dragonquest V, which came out yesterday. There was a huge damned lineup to get it, but it was worth it since it seems quite cool.

What was even more cool was outside the store a bunch of salespeople were selling the new Docomo 900i series phones. One of the Java games included on the phone is a port of Final Fantasy I. Mmmm, I want.

I finally got Linux installed on my work laptop. It’s a Debian installation on yet another USB external hard drive, but it’s working now quite well. I used Knoppix to get the base system on, and then had to use the Gentoo kernel. For some reason the Knoppix bootloader wouldn’t let me override the root device, but the Gentoo kernel (after copying over the correct modules) worked quite well.

The only thing left to really configure is the X server - Xig offers an accelerated server for the Intel 855 series chipset, which I think I’ll have to use since no other driver supports the 1280×768 resolution.

First I’ll try out the official Intel X driver though - they even have the AGP GART and DRI modules. But who knows if that’ll work.

Jakarta was insane. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, and far more fucked up than I could have possibly foreseen.

Seriously though. Here’s a list of thing I saw or witnessed in approximately the correct order:

• The airport itself was nice, fairly clean and stunk like powerful cigarettes everywhere.
• The roads from the airport to Jakarta were about 3 inches of water away from being flooded. Apparently we were extremely lucky, since usually the roads are flooded. When that happens, military ATVs are sent on routes between the city and the airport ferrying stranded passengers.
• Once you hit the city, you start noticing that the average income is extremely low. A sizable portion of the houses are collapsed, although that doesn’t deter anyone from living in them. All the roofs have holes and pieces missing, and so on. The freeway is built at least 20 feet above these houses, and it feels like its purpose is to shield people from seeing them.
• People burn garbage in their yard. Any type of garbage. All the time. Smoke trails come from every direction you can see, and the air is well, pungent with the smell.
• Speaking of garbage - it’s everywhere. There are piles of garbage in every nook and cranny that can hold it. Piled really high too, sometimes over ten feet tall. Usually nestled around the piles are homes, as well as stalls selling food.
• The streets. Wow, where to start. OK - there are lines for lane designation, but no one cares. On two lane streets there are three or four lanes of actual vehicles with hardly anybody bothering to use signals. And major roads are shown as being one way, but vehicles occasionally come at you from the wrong direction.
• You can probably see in the photo that people are literally hanging out of the buses. That’s no big deal, and it happens in a lot of countries (though this is the first time I’ve seen it).
• There’s certain roads reserved for vehicles with 3 or more people (like carpool lanes). So at locations where these roads begin - and that’s usually in the middle of nowhere, halfway to the airport - clusters of kids hang around, and for about 50 U.S. cents they’ll jump in your car so you meet the person quota.
• This is awesome: When big trucks are driving down the road, people run alongside them with a tube and a gascan, and steal their fucking fuel. While it’s moving. I saw almost crapped my pants when I saw this happen and realized what the guy was doing.
• There’s two classes of people there with absolutely no gradient. You’re either really poor, or massively rich. The wealthy families live in big, gated communities with armed guards.
• It’s dangerous being a foreigner there. Truly dangerous. Most cars have dark tinted glass to minimize the chance of anything bad happening to the passengers. In face, a guy named Rupert wrote on my entry the other day saying that, “there are plenty of instances where people pull up on a motorbike, smash the window with a gun and relieve you of your phone etc“. He’s right; that shit does happen there.
• Most people don’t have phone lines, nobody has the Internet at home. But pretty much everybody has cellular phones.

So yeah, it’s another world. Chances are that I’ll go back, but I’m not tingling with the desire to do so. And I’m not embellishing in the information here - Chris, my coworker who accompanied me, will probably read this and kick my ass if I bullshit about his homeland.

The best image I could get:

I’m going to freakin’ Jakarta of all places tomorrow. I go there in the morning, and then fly back to Singapore around 9PM, then back to Japan about 2 hours later. So yeah, tomorrow’s really gonna suck.

By searching for the GD library I accidentally found out that Google aggregates financial and stock information.

More Linux stuff. I talked recently about getting two shiny new Rackspace-hosted RedHat machines. So I got the machines, configured them and gutted everything I didn’t need, got them to a stable nice configuration and migrated applications to both.

So they chugged along, serving HTTP like no tomorrow. I logged into one of them yesterday and noticed that something was chewing up a lot of CPU (not all of it, but a significant portion). It was the RedHat Network update agent. Why would this be running for hours and spinning like mad in some wacky loop?

Turns out the RPM database on the system happily corrupted the hell out of itself. Know what you do when that happens on a RedHat (or other RPM) box? You reinstall.

At least, that’s what you usually do. Luckily both systems run the exact same packages, so I copied over the RPM database and the RHN updater works again.

This RPM corruption thing has screwed me a few times in the past also, and I’ve yet to run into it with dpkg-based systems - the one time dpkg had a severe problem on my home machine was due to overheating and the filesystems mysteriously dissapearing. Other than that, I’ve never seen a hiccough from dpkg/dselect.

Enterprise is nice, kind of. I don’t like how there’s no choice in anything from RedHat though. Like for a mail transfer agent, you got qmail, that’s it. No exim, no sendmail (as if that’s a bad thing). Debian gives you the choice of any MTA you like, and in theory RedHat ES does this as well through similiar use of virtual services provided by packages. But it doesn’t quite work because there is no official Exim RPM from RedHat. Oh, and get this - once you do install Exim from source or an external package, half of the programs on the system can’t send any mail. This is really wacky - most applications send mail through the “sendmail” program, which is usually a link to the actual MTA. But Mutt, without qmail installed, can’t send mail.

And again, exactly like I was talking about Fedora, RedHat doesn’t provide any upgrades to the packages except security updates until the next update. That’s frustrating. It’s similar to Debian Stable I suppose, where they QA the packages and freeze them excepting bug fixes and security changes. But there’s a lotta bugs I’ve found so far - the Mutt/qmail is just one example.

The RPM database corruption, on the other hand, should never, ever happen. If RPM or the underlying Berkeley database is easily corruptible (and in my experience it is) then RPM should take snapshot backups of the database once a night. In fact, I plan on writing a quick script to do just that.

Some more stuff about Fedora. Like I said, it’s nice. My girlfriend has been successfully using it since I’ve left - e-mail, web browsing, etc - and has experienced no problems with it at all (that I know of).

My thoughts - it’s good, but falls into the old RedHat game of never updating software until the next major distribution release. It’s got Mozilla 1.4. You’d think that even with apt for RPM you could get a later version, but I’ve not found one yet. I don’t know why RPM-based distributions do this, because Fedora isn’t the only one. Oh well, I’ll look into that more.

On the other hand, Fedora Core 2 is in beta and I might grab that. Unfortunately it’s multiple CD images, so it’ll take me at least, oh, I don’t know, fucking forever to get it here.