Monthly Archives: December 2004

Saturday while Beth and I were at the meetup, Chris‘ parents came up to visit and brought us a new reclining couch (the old couch is in our kitchen now [temporarily, I hope]). He and his parents also went out and got our xmas tree, which (after dinner [at the Boatyard]) we all decorated:

…. And that about wraps it up (at least on my side of Ithaca) for Saturday.

Sunday, I had a relaxing day which mostly consisted of eating Eggs&Pasta, seeing Chris‘ parents off, watching The Shining, and reading. Which is great, because that’s pretty much exactly what I wanted to do on Sunday :)

Question:

Is it preferable to constantly allow the hard drive to run, reading and writing data at least every minute or so, or to let the hard drive go ‘idle’ (not spinning down entirely, but going into idle seek mode). Or is there really much of a difference?

Mostly I am concerned with hardware life- I know that spinning a drive up and down is bad, but I also know that leaving it running normally generates heat, which is also bad.

So after being badgered a bit about it (hi, Scott!), I’ve finally been enticed to try this xorg-x11 thing. The fact that dri works the same way in both is an unexpected benefit, as is the nearly identical configuration (which Gentoo was smart enough to fix for me, once I let it [apparently etc-update went and got less stupid when I wasn't looking]). So far it’s not too obviously different from XFree86, save for some fonts on websites seeming chunkier and the fonts in xlock appearing much tinier. I seem to be getting the same framerate in glxgears, so I assume that opengl and/or dri are working as well as before.

Speaking of which, neops1‘s framerate while playing back video is shite recently (not related to xorg-x11), which is really annoying because it used to perform better than minips1 and now it’s next to impossible to watch anything on it. Grrr. I can’t find anything wrong with the configuration, and both the kernel (dri drivers) and xfree/xorg have been recompiled a few times, so they should be up to speed with each other. Since I’m getting a kickass new video card for xmas I’m thinking that I’ll just wait until then to have a desktop that can play non-jumpy video again.

Bah. After that last debacle, I’m admitting to myself what I always knew: online quizzes are incredibly stupid, poorly coded, and a waste of time. Besides, no one else on the internet really cares whether I’m more like Chewey or Princess Leia.

So that’s it- no more of them for me.

…

Unless I find a really cool one, of course. ;)

I’m such a hypocrite :)

Yeah, since I have nothing interesting to report (save the fact that we tried [and failed to get a tree yesterday, Spaced rocks, and it’s fun to read about Drizzit), here’s another quiz (this one’s from Marcia).

You scored as alternative. You’re partially respected for being an individual in a conformist world yet others take you as a radical. You have no place in society because you choose not to belong there – you’re the luckiest of them all, even if your parents are completely ashamed of you. Just don’t take drugs ok? alternative 75% Middle Class 50% Upper middle Class 33% Lower Class 33% Luxurious Upper Class 25% What Social Status are you? created with QuizFarm.com

Geez, there are more embedded tables in that mess than should be legal… I truly believe that whoever originally wrote this has no idea that a table in HTML can have more than one row (so they just added a new subtable for each ‘row’). Bah! I’d fix it, but then you’d all be denied the displeasure of marveling at the source code as it is now. I did take out the extraneous paragraph tags, at the very least.

I have no idea why I’m posting this, because the code is atrocious and the results aren’t in the least bit surprising to anyone who knows me. Probably so I have an excuse to use this ‘blog’ thing until something more interesting happens…

edit: They also forgot to close a table somewhere, apparently. I’m trying to find it now.

edit2: The problem was that they had an extra </td></tr>; I fixed it.

I ‘borrowed’ both of these from elwing.

How the mighty have fallen….

Which OS are You?

I hope the logical fallacies inherent in the above (making false assumptions about both Windows XP [duh!] and myself [Slack on!]) don’t imply that the next one is equally wrong, ‘cuz I kinda like that one.

This is much more like it:

Which File Extension are You?