Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Made it to Singapore safely, going to sleep soon.

I’m going to Singapore again on Sunday night, so I’ve had no time to blog or e-mail. James, I’ll e-mail you back; I’m not ignoring you.

So since I’m leaving I figured I’d try to get the old laptop running for Chie to use in my absence for a week. I got Gentoo installed. In short - I hated it. I’ll dig into that one more later, but basically I don’t fucking have the time required to do a three stage build of the GCC compiler suite on a 700mhz system. And yeah, you can use binary packages, but that defeats the point.

So I was browsing a bookstore with her today. Needless to say I was bored, until I found a Linux World magazine with two free DVDs included - Debian 3.0r2 and Fedora Core 1. This issue was dedicated to a shoot-out between the two (and if you care, Fedora won for the desktop and Debian won for the server). So I got the magazine and decided to try Fedora. I really wanted to test out the Mandrake Community 10 release, but I neither have the time nor the bandwidth to download it - plus I’m not sure about how decent it’s internationalization and localization is for Japanese users.

So Fedora got slapped on in less than an hour - I actually put the DVD in and booted like 30 minutes ago. I choose Japanese from the start and went through a simple install (which was a first for me). In short - it rocks. Everything just worked out of the box, and the multilanguage support is superb.

The one roadblock I hit was the RedHat Network Update tool. I clicked Update and then it proceeded to consistently timeout while downloading RPM definitions. One Feedster search later and I found apt for Fedora. Now it’s happily pulling down updates while I’m just using the system - no bullshit after-install nightmares. A very, very slick package - Fedora that is.

Charles Stross, who is in my top ten authors regardless of the fact he’s only published a couple of books, has a novella online called A Colder War. It’s also in his short fiction collection Toast: And Other Rusted Futures.

It’s a superb story that mixes science fiction with the classic H.P. Lovecraft Cthulhu concepts. He’s written a full book covering this unique genre called “The Atrocity Archive” - which I dont’ have yet. Charles has a list of his fiction online, so there’s plenty more where this one came from.

I forgot to post these. Some shots of Kamakura and a few of Ginza.

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OK, I think - think - that I’ll be back in Toronto from April 23rd to May 5th. And for the second week of that trip my girlfriend should - should - be joining me. Cool eh?

BitTorrent 3.4 was released, with “lots of bug fixes and tracker bandwidth savings”. Since this has been about six months since the last point release, it makes sense to grab it.

I got my old junker HP Omnibook running again with the help of a tiny external 20 gigabyte hard disk. The only way to get it to work is to disable both IDE controller channels in the BIOS (otherwise occasionally the screen will flicker as the drives get trashed). Bumped up the kernel to 2.6.3 and it’s nice. Gotta get DRI to work again. And the pre-emptiveness is strange; for some reason under heavy I/O with this kernel the mouse gets sluggish. I was under the impression that the opposite should happen. Of course I could have something else on here totally screwed.

A nice bookmarklet for users of Bloglines that allows you to subscribe to any page without having to hit the site. Drag this to your bookmark toolbar: Subscribe with Blogines. Courtesy of warmbrain.

I’ve used feed on feeds (by Steve Minutillo) for a while now, and I tried out Bloglines for the hell of it. Now I’m using Bloglines exclusively. It has essentially the same features, but having it on a server where the feeds are pulled and dished out to all the users makes a lot more sense to me than everybody installing their own aggregator (specifically one that resides on a server). Besides, the amount of feeds I’m subscribing to is growing quickly and it was starting to kill the virtual server I rent. I think Goods switched now as well.