… and the guestbook spammers discovered my guestbook… 😐

Oh, I forgot to mention my evaluation talk went fine! No negative points at all, “keep up the good work!” :d I’m trying… fighting fires all day and not really having the time to put them out for good 😐

Went to see “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” yesterday… which was an OK movie 🙂

Afterwards (around 1am) I started installing Debian GNU/Linux on my new laptop (which is great btw :d) … It seems to work almost perfectly (well, I still need to set up acpi, cpu frequency scaling, wireless, bluetooth, chipcard, etc etc ;)) so I’m happy. Will do a nice writeup for linux-laptop.net later.

I really need to get this blogger protocol implemented here I think, so I can post messages from my desktop… that would certainly mean I would post more entries in between things … also, we really need internet connectivity at Diana’s place… I’m lagging behind everything and can’t do any development outside of work. 🙁

Everyone seems to be hung up on this powerball craze… 5000rpm! 8000rpm! 10000rpm! Yayay. They’re years old by now, and they’re pretty boring if you ask me … 😛

I’m still happily together with my Diana’tje, and I’m so happy she’s living in Belgium now 😀

… so let’s talk about the last week and the upcoming one 🙂

Work’s been pretty busy but going well… I’m still learning a lot at my workplace and I’m expanding the network and services all the time 😀

Scary though, tuesday I have my first official evaluation talk… hopefully all goes well 😉

Went to see “Alexander” last friday… pretty long (almost 3 hours), pretty boring… I wouldn’t recommend to go see it in the theatre… even Angelina Jolie couldn’t really save the day 🙂

Last weekend I acquired the last parts of my RAID setup for boo. 4x200GB disks, 2x80GB disks, and a Promise SATA TX4 controller. The 4 disks are put into a 600GB (well, 560GB) RAID5 for storage, the 2 80GB’ers are replacing a failing 40GB disk (with / on it). Everything is working nicely. Kudos to the Linux md Software RAID maintainers, I can’t afford “real” 3Ware or Adaptec hardware RAID 😉

As far as productivity goes.. I’ve been sorting and moving stuff around here (Dilbeek) to put on the aforementioned RAID drive for further sorting and storing, and by request of HoliemaN I’ve written a mysql-based url redirect thingy for tequila (and NetFX) … Doing this stuff manually takes too much time, and we needed it anyway. 🙂 Other productive stuff is hard on this underpowered 800×600 htpc Celeron 533 with 256MB and a broken Mozila.

I bought a 19 EUR wifi pcmcia card at Belgacom store… nice promo. 19 EUR isn’t a lot of money and… It’s LINUX COMPATIBLE! Yay 😉 I’ll write up another post later on (can’t reach that machine right now for the setup), but it’s powered by an Atmel chip and it’s working… They also sell a USB version, and the Atmel drivers have some USB support, but I can’t guarantee it’ll work on Linux cause I haven’t tested it 🙂

What I also bought, and which I hope will work dandily under Linux is my laptop… 😀 Acer Travelmate 8004LMib, Centrino 1.7GHz, 15″ TFT, 1GB RAM, 60GB HD, Radeon 9700, Cardreader, Bluetooth, Wifi b/g, Gigabit LAN, backpack, extra battery… I hope to receive it somewhere next week. Thanks to Lazernet 🙂

PS: Proximus is #r”éàç!r¼#@xz … they kept fucking around with Diana’s subscription.. I won’t get into details, let’s just say it needed 6 visits to the Belgacom store. GRR.

Eek, it’s been exactly a month since I last posted something! 😐

First of all, I’d like to wish every one of you a belated merry christmas and a happy newyear! May 2005 bring happiness and joy to everyone 🙂

Had a fun family newyear thingy yesterday… even though I worked from 9:00 to 12:15… I’ve actually been working long all week long to do some network, hardware and serer upgrades… Then to find out on friday, having a terrible headache, that our main fileserver didn’t boot anymore. *argh* Turns out that by moving it, the mainboard got short circuited somehow, which meant I had to put in a replacement… which then meant LILO needed to be updated… so I booted with knoppix… then turned out the software raid for / was fubar… Yayay. Oh, and then I got an SMS telling me that my main personal server (hosting this site for example) was down… It’s in Amsterdam, so yay. Luckily Netholding could reboot it remotely for me, and it got up again. I seriously think it’s time for 2.4.29 by the way.

On a related note to the post below, I’ve decided to keep the steering wheel and do the mod. (For other interested parties, it’s now 28.90€ at Makro) We’ll see how it goes after I find someone who can solder it for me 😉

Yesterday Diana arrived in Belgium with a car packed fully with stuff for her new little place.. Yes yes, she’s finally moved to Belgium, and not on holidays :d

Also, I’ve started work again on JTV, a HTPC solution in Java (Linux-only though, due to use of commandline tools) … should rock if I find time to finish it up 😉

I’ll try to post more regularly from now on, when things get organised a little better both at work and on my personal and NetFX infrastructure, I’ll have some more free time hopefully 😉

Got a new adapter for a Steering wheel I got (“Guillemot Force Feedback Race Leader Steering Wheel”, what a mouthful) .. cause I got one with a UK adapter first 😐 Now.. turns out there are no Windows 2000 drivers for it. Nor XP. Cause Microsoft decided not to support serial port gaming devices anymore… How gay. Now, turns out there’s a workaround to make it USB (why didn’t they do this in the first place) if you open it up and solder a USB cable to certain connection points (and I guess this does work). On my model there weren’t any connection pins so I couldn’t just use a plug, and I can’t solder at all, so no go there… I’ll just take it back to the store I guess. Anyhoo, if any of you come here through Google looking for a driver for the serial port version.. [url=http://www.ukshop247.co.uk/i/games/itmB0000C790C]here[/url] is a link to how the wires should be soldered 🙂

Diana’s coming to Belgium today for 3 weeks (yes, THREE :D) … Picking her up later 😀

Got a mail from Chello… they’re doubling speeds 😀

That means my internet connection goes from 3Mbit down, 256kbit up to 6Mbit down, 512kbit up… Other changes are the 4Mbit/384 going up to 10Mbit/768, and the 5Mbit/384 (which I have at work) goes up to [b]16[/b]Mbit down and 1Mbit up! Very nice, finally a decent connection 😉 (10/10 would be fine too though)

Been pretty busy at work having almost no time for other stuff…. except Need for Speed Underground 2 which I’ve been playing for a while now. (see below post ;)) Fun game 😀

Power went out on friday… one machine didn’t come back up… sucky. This means my fileserver is down, which also holds a virtual machine where IPG’ers can get online from 😉 Gotta fix this soon…

Went to InterXion saturday to put a Wake on LAN card in my server… turns out it doesn’t have a connector on the motherboard and the onboard LAN doesn’t support it… So this thing will never wake up if I reset it through the APC MasterSwitch :'( Did see the use of a serial console though… went to grab something to eat and then saw Alien vs Predator… which was actually nice and relaxing to watch after a hard day’s work 😉

Went to eat out with “the boys” yesterday… that was fun. We decided to do that every monday 🙂

Diana is coming to Belgium soon… Yay 😀

Now, back to work to work to work…

Finally released… Looks a *lot* better than the first one 🙂 Only a pity that sometimes my PC doesn’t seem to be able to pull all the rendering off… slows down considerably at some odd moments (not a lot of cars on the road or anything) 🙁

Anyway, lots of improvements, very nice game :d (if you enable autosave, otherwise the abundance of questions gets annoying pretty quickly) and the outrun races ROCK 😀