Survival Of The Fittest

The Nordic Saga... Ragnorok: PC-BSD

2005-09-13T20:07:00.000+01:00

For eons the final battle "Ragnorok" had been waged between the mortals of Athlonia64 and the Immortal PC-BSDites, many a time the war got tough, many obsticles in their way, the Athlonian sought a new Ally... MAConians... with their infinate abilities and easy to understand but complex style of warfare, the MAConians using the Hammer of Thor "Virtutal Pz Ce" in their native tounge, they smote the PC-BSDites, and conquered them!.

[end of saga :P]

Okay... what happened? well PC-BSD hasnt worked on my Athlon64, so since getting A mac about a month back, I havent been bothered about PC-BSD, but 0.8 was released recently, so got me interested again... I purchased VPC5 for Mac off of ebay, and I've now installed PC-BSD on VPC on my Mac.... thats the story in a way that makes sense lol

College... Yay?

2005-09-05T21:08:00.000+01:00

Well tomorrow I'm going to try and get one of the few places left on the Night course "A238/62 BS7671:2001" aka "The 16th Edition Wiring Regulations", theres 11 places left as of this lunchtime so hopefully tomorrow morning there'll be some places left.

Sprouts Blegh!

2005-09-04T22:00:00.000+01:00

Now for a random in-explicable post... okay all of my posts are random and in-explicable but thats beside the point, when god created the world in 7 days he forgot to make some of the cabbages properly and the nasty Sprout was born from this case of forgetfulness.

The Sprout... a small green blob of nastiness, resembling the humble cabbage but just like a car miniture it never has the same appeal as the original... also Sprouts taste foul....

Oh yeah don't turn this into a "God doesnt exist" thing... well who ever created sprouts wants a kick up the arse and wants to try one.

note: yes I know sprouts evolved over many millions of years, but I can't blame evolution, so its better to blame a higher being of some sort

Nickelback: Photograph

2005-09-03T10:31:00.000+01:00

Just finished downloading the Nickelback - Photograph video in QuickTime, I heard the song on the radio the otherday, and I must say It's a pretty neat video, and the song is just brilliant.

For those of you that don't know me, I'm a Nickelback fan.

Miffed To The Extreme

2005-09-01T18:09:00.000+01:00

Today at work this afternoon I got seriously Miffed (P*ssed Off), heres the story; been working in Tickhill, and today there was a cricket match on at the Tickhill Cricket ground, so at dinner we went to the cricket ground to watch the game, they didn't start playing until 10minutes before we had to get back to the job, so that miffed me abit as I was looking forward to it.

But we decided between us, to hurry up and finish wiring up the downstairs lighting, and then get done with time to watch the rest of that innings before "Afternoon Tea", we went back to the job at 1pm we didnt finish the lighting until 4:50pm... hmm our plan went tits up.

Also the tenants of where we are working, have never once offered to make a drink for us, also they dont make life easy for us, it takes us about 45minutes -1hr to clean up their mess so we can work. Also none of them talk to each other, they just sit there in silence... which is a bit strange at best of times.

Got An External DVD-/+RW Drive

2005-09-01T18:06:00.000+01:00

I got my external DVD-/+RW drive, its a LaCie d2 DVD-/+RW Firewire drive, its very fast, features LightScribe, and supports +R/RW, -R/RW & DL Disc's, it came with Roxio Toast 6 Titanium, If I'd waited a few weeks (which I can't as I am a pretty impatient person when it comes to gizmo's and gadgets, particularly those that I want.

MSN On The Fritz?

2005-08-29T22:16:00.000+01:00

Well trying to sign into MSN just a moment ago with Adium X, and well it's signing in but then signing out again and demanding the Password again... damn MSN get sorted out!

External DVD-/+RW

2005-08-28T19:34:00.000+01:00

I've been looking at external DVD-/+RW drives for my mac mini, thus far LaCie drives seem to be some of the only ones to support Macintosh connectivity via either USB2.0 or Firewire.

Firewire would be my preference at the moment, as I don't own a USB2.0 hub (something else on my Mac Mini list lol)

Hostility In A Community

2005-08-27T16:23:00.000+01:00

Last night I posted a submitted piece about SkyOS's code ransom, one person in the comments claims to have proof that SkyOS wasn't coded "Entirely" by Robert, I know that SkyOS wasn't coded Single-handedly by Robert, because Pre-3.x was OSS, but how much of that initial code remains is a mystery.

And now there seems to be alot of hostility in the SkyOS community to a number of people.

Viking Rendering Engine 0.1.1

2005-08-27T13:25:00.000+01:00

I've named the .DNX 1.1e rendering engine "Viking" I've been able to begin writing a basic parser, and runtime, I'll post screen shots soon.

In other news: I got some CD-RW's lol just a shame that Roxio Toast 6 Titanium won't write ISO's correctly for me, so Im gonna buy Toast 7 Titanium in 4 days when it comes out.

CD's CD's everywhere but not a signle RW

2005-08-26T12:42:00.000+01:00

Okay, downloaded the PCBSD 0.8-alpha ISO onto my Mac mini, It's the one without superdrive so i have a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo, all my x86 systems have DVD-/+RW drives and one even has a DVD-/+RW +R9 drive, well I have a couple DVD-RW disc's lying around but I can't believe I doin't have a single CD-RW lying around.

.DNX Rendering Engine for MacOS X

2005-08-26T11:55:00.000+01:00

I've begun work on writing a rendering engine for .DNX 1.1e the web language / syntax I created earlier this year, thus far I've spent a few hours reading MacOS X developer articles, and have installed XCode 2.1 for MacOS X Tiger. I've begun work on the engine in AppleScript. Yes maybe not the bestest of choices but I'm still in the process of learning Objective-C so I could code it for Cocoa.

Update: Got a working .DNX patch interface working, allowing the engine to actually load files into itself.

Database Woes

2005-08-26T11:54:00.000+01:00

I've spent about 6hrs, so far working on trying to build a Costing Database system, which will auto-calculate the cost of various things based on Item cost, Labour costs, and such, thus far it's been a pain in the arse to say the least... But I shall prevail!

Office: Mac 2004 & Other Stuff

2005-08-23T21:54:00.000+01:00

Well got myself Microsoft Office: Mac 2004, for my Mac Mini, it's a pretty sweet Office Suite, One thing... well two things I miss are Microsoft Access and Microsoft Frontpage, I just guess that either there's no call for them on MacOS X or that they'd be too difficult to port / write a comparative version for MacOS X.

Haven't touched my x86 box since sunday morning, the Mini is silent, and with my External USB2.0 HD; I have more than enough room for my app's to sit in, yeah I formatted my Western Digital External HD to HFS+ so I could use it for app storage.

Well, this friday I'm off so i got 4 day weekend, some of you not from the UK may be wondering how me having friday off gives me 4 days but its Bank Holiday monday this coming monday so i have 4 days of sleep and relaxation :P

Mac Mini

2005-08-21T09:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I bought a mac mini, and I must say I enjoy using it, felt a bit strange at first using the one-buttoned mouse, but after a while it made sense. I bought one of the 256MB Mini's and got it at a discount because of this fact.

It came with MacOS X 10.3 installed and came with 10.4 Tiger install DVD, so first thing, install Tiger, and I must say Tiger runs faster than 10.3, One thing in tiger I haven't used alot is Dashboard, only widget I've used is wikipedia, even then it was only for a couple minutes.

Dragging icons to the trash can to un-install and eject volumes still feels strange to me, but well I guess I'll have to get used to it.

FreeBSD Ports & PC-BSD PBI Integration

2005-08-17T16:56:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I wrote a guide to what I call P-PBI (Ports-PBI) which links Ports to PBI, and allows ports to handle and register the file locations, this should cure many problems people complain about... problem is im not sure if it would work 100%. It should work, but I as of yet haven't had time to test it.

Cranky Baby Syndrome

2005-08-16T18:12:00.000+01:00

Today I was working with Lee, and at about 3:00pm, I got a bit aggitated for no reason, Lee says its because I'm not getting enough sleep, and calls it "Cranky Bady Syndrome" just like waking up a baby before its ready it gets angry and mardy.

State of The World

2005-08-15T17:21:00.000+01:00

Now I personally am not an "Eco-warrior" but I do believe we are screwing the planet over, the human race is essentially a Virus, we find a host, in this case the Earth and consume / destroy all resources with no thought for the planet.

Agreements have been made between many nations to lower pollution, but the worlds largest producer of polution per populous ratio has stated it will not agree to any such thing, this nation is the USA, the USA produces more than 1/4 of the worlds total pollution but has no where near 1/4 of the total human populous.

We see films like, "Independance Day", etc and we think that aliens or something will wipe us out, in my opinion we will have either nuked our selves into oblivion, killed the planet to a point where Human life can not be sustained, or killed out selves by some other means. Humans are a violant territorial Species, its in our Genetics, Chimpanzee's are extremely territorial, its part of our Genetic heritage.

We'll thats the end of "State Of The World" rant.

Illiteracy or Stupidity?

2005-08-14T19:25:00.000+01:00

Me and Thom have known each other for about 2 years now, we have good laughs, we have alot of them actually; but occassionally something happens that makes you laugh so hard that it hurts.

All day when I've been on MSN and he has, he's been screwing up with his typing and then when he thought he'd finally sussed it, this happened...

Thom: yeah but where to put it? i have no clue whatsoever with css
Andrew: lol neither do i
Thom: hmtl is getting better every day, but css is pos to understand
Thom: html (ogddamnit!)
Thom: aaaargh
Thom: i give up
Andrew: ROFLMFAO

But in all honest today I've been screwing up too, but I'm not the best speller in the world to begin with.

iPAQ Woes

2005-08-14T18:22:00.000+01:00

Had to hard reboot my HP iPAQ rx3715, lost all the settings I had built up in the 3/4weeks I've had it, there is a backup feature actually on the iPAQ but I thought I wouldn't have to use it, but I guess it's my own fault.

Now why did I have to do a hard reset? Well the iPAQ crashed and wouldn't soft reboot when I was playing a Video in TCPMP, the video has played fine 100's of times before, guess it was just the law of averages. You maybe wondering why use TCPMP? well WMP10 included with Windows Mobile PocketPC Edition 2003SE is well poor, it crashes all the time when playing videos.

I've pretty much gotten the iPAQ back to the state it was before the disaster struck, all except one thing, "Age Of Empires for PocketPC: ARM" I deleted the email with the registration code I paid for, so hopefully I'll be able to request it again, as I don't want to fork out again for it.

Western Digital External HD

2005-08-14T16:06:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I bought an external USB2.0 HDD, namely a 160GB Western Digital Essential. I bought it mainly so that i don't have to keep buying DVD-/+R Disc's to backup information and buying DVD-/+RW's for transfering files... also because I had money in my pocket and it was beginning to burn big holes in it.

It's larger than other External HDD's but I don't mind because it is a proper 3.5in HDD compared to the vast majority of External HDD's which are 2.5in Laptop HDD's running at 5400RPM or even 4800RPM, where as the Western Digital runs at 7200RPM, supports Fullspeed USB 2.0 (480Mbps) and is virtually silent.

The Drive is formatted to FAT32 for compatibility, but is easily formatted to other FS's, in the box there is a guide for formatting to HFS/HFS+ for MacOS use.

Thus far the drive has performed flawlessly, except in DesktopBSD, which refused to mount it, as far as i can sumise this is due to it being a 160GB FAT32 drive, where as FAT32 can only support 34GB drives, this is why western Digital have a download on the site for a Formatting tool, which can format the 160GB capacity to FAT32.

GTK+ 2.8.0 Slowness

2005-08-14T15:11:00.000+01:00

Before I begin I will just say I have a preference towards KDE over GNOME, so you can see this as biased if you like, it most probably is but... GTK+ 2.8.0 was released recently, and I must say it's getting ridiculous, GTK+ wasn't the fastest toolkit in the world to begin with. But now 2.8.0 uses a new rendering backend (Cairo) which is even slower.

GNOME developers for a while now have ignored complaints from users about draw speed problems but they always come back with the reply

"What speed problem? I have no speed problem"

I just had to have a bit of fun with Thom, have a bit of honest fun about it, as he prefers GNOME over KDE, so we do have contrasting views a lot of the time, here's something I said in MSN Messenger, which Thom posted earlier on his blog.

Andrew: yeah, KDE is getting leaner and faster, where as GNOME
Developers ignore complaints about a slow inferior toolkit, and then to top it
off choose a slow rendering system... MUWAHAHAHAHAHA... [end troll]

Andrew: we might stick widgets everywhere, but at least our toolkit is
fast enough to draw them lol

Thom: lol