Category: The Undefined Remainder

Geeky stuff. Internet, Games, Free Software, Sci-fi etc.

Napoleon Dynamite

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A while ago while surfing the blogosphere I saw this movie mentioned. It immediately caught my attention because I was a big geek at school and I always had a special place for nerd movies.

(spoiler)

Well, this one was nothing I was anticipating. The protagonist was a total looser, as was expected of course, but for the whole movie I kept waiting for things to change for the better, you know, in the classic Hollywood legacy.

They didn’t.
And that’s the beauty of the movie. It’s a movie about boring people having boring and all too mundane lives. The movie made me cringe at times from the way Napoleon was reacting to situations. I mean, I was a nerd but never of that magnitude.
In the end however I couldn’t help but cheer for the underdog.

This movie is a true “In your face” film against all those classic Teenage movies or Hollywood tripe like “The Revenge of the Nerds”. Although I was surprised on how boring it was at times, after it ended I couldn’t help but liking it (the 80s pop music helped immensely as well.)

I don’t think this movie is for everyone but it is worth watching just in case you like it.

Ubuntu

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I’ve finaly brought Ubuntu where I want it. I now have [tag]amaroK[/tag]-svn, Firefox 1.5 and nothing has crashed for a few days. I seem to be on stable footing finally.

For the last few days I’ve been tweaking the Smart DJ in order to make it work as I want it to. I’ve converted all my .mp3 collection to .ogg, I’ve vorbisgained everything and had the script analyze everything.
I got it working after a few tries but it still brings some pretty stupid matches now and then. Until I know how its tempo/style slider works I don’t think I’ll be able to use it to its full potential.

However I have written a small guide for Ubuntu here that I hope may help someone.

Junkie of the Old Republic

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These past three days I’ve been hooked in front of my computer screen in a marathon of gaming I haven’t taken in a while. The source is of course knights of the Old Republic 2 which I took from the local video club on Friday as I was sitting bored.
What started as a way to pass the idle time ended up in a full blown activity that held me home even on Saturday night. I mean, I actually played from 4pm to 8 am on Saturday and then from 4pm to 1am on Sunday which amounts to 25 hours within two days, and that’s not even counting my Friday and Monday sessions…ugh!

However I don’t expect to be hooked for much longer, my short attention span will take care of that for me. If I haven’t finished it within the week (which I fully expect to do) I will probably get bored with it.

Monday was not so much of a gaming session (although I played for a full 4 hours as well) as a restore session on my PC. After failing in my tries to copy the game without needing a no-cd patch I ended up restoring my windows partition from the ghost image I took after I installed and everything seems fine now. I still didn’t make the perfect image with both Alcohol 120 and CloneCD but since this is just a single player game I don’t care as much.

B-day

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Well, I’ve finally turned 1/4 of a century. I don’t feel too old.

It seems however that my lj writing has taken a break for a while. I just don’t feel like writing at this point.

This Monday I send SMS to various people I know to come over at the [tag]X club[/tag] where I’ll be hanging out tonight. Today most of those canceled 🙁 Still, If at least one or two show up things should be fine. I also plan to drink a lot (at least for me)

Happening this last month:

We finally solved the problem with the AD at work. The security policies had been corrupted and we restored the default ones. Pericles and I have become friends and go and eat crepes together.

I’ve once again failed at romance. A girl I thought was mine, changed her mind in the last minute. At least she continues to talk to me…

I’ve played F.E.A.R and finished it. I Started playing UFO Aftershock and I’ve already grown bored with it (Although I still like it a lot).

I used duct tape to fix my broken [tag]firestaff[/tag] (duct tape rulez!) and started double-twirling which is much fun. Unfortunately the weather screwed me up and unless I find a place big enough to use (or risk freezing to death) I won’t be twirling for a while.
Here’s some (not-so) nice pics as well. I turned one into my avatar as well 😉

I’ve formatted and reinstalled Ubuntu from the start. I got tired of stupid crashed and bugs. Still experiencing those. I’m waiting for Fedora 5 now.

That’s for now

Still Migrating

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The migration process on my workplace is continuing. I am still writing down things as I go here. I’m still not doing much so it doesn’t have much activity but there are some worthwhile things to check out, mainly the guides.

As I said, I write things as I go and when I set-up something new from the ground up, I take the time to create a step-by-step guide of how I did it. This way for log may actually be useful to anyone who cares to read it. Until now I’ve written two guides, one to set up a [tag]jabber[/tag] server on SuSe ES with AD authentication and an related one on how to set up conferencing on that server.
After being asked permission, by the guys of ejabbber, to copy the text of the second guide on their servers, I decided to release all of them under a creative commons license.
This is a great way to save time for anyone who wants to copy and modify them. They won’t need to contact me to get permission anymore.

Doomtown

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W00t! I'm playing doomtown once more.
In the past few days I've been converting some of my other gaming buddies, Σιδέρης and Αργύρης mainly, to play Doomtown.

Doomtown is my favorite CCG of all time and I was very disappointed when it was canceled due to lack of sales. This story is outside the scope of this journal so I won't re-iterate it but you can get the gist of it here.

Anyway, the guys are excited with the game and really like the great mechanics. I've searched eBay for stuff and found some Ashes to Ashes starters for them, one took the Agency and the other the Texas rangers and even though the decks are not very strong we managed to have some good games. The other day we had a five player games. It didn't finish but it was fun and the two new players were interested in playing as well.
Now I've just bought a box of Ashes to Ashes starters to split with the gaming buddies (and unfortunately the shipping cost were much more than the actual cost) and I'm going to buy 6 more starters to give to anyone that is interested in playing.

Sweet.
simple hit counter

This I had to post

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This is just precious:

—-
HEAVY METAL: The protagonist arrives on a Harley
Davidson, kills the dragon, drinks some beers and
fucks the princess.

GRIND METAL: The protagonist arrives, screams
something completely undecipherable for about 2
minutes and then leaves…

POWER METAL: The protagonist arrives riding a white
unicorn, escapes from the dragon, saves the princess
and they make love in an enchanted forest.

TRASH METAL: The protagonist arrives, fights the
dragon, saves the princess and fucks her……. easy
and quick.

FOLK METAL: The protagonist arrives with some friends
playing accordions, violins, flutes and many more
weird instruments, the dragon falls asleep (from all
the dancing) protagonist leaves without the princess.

VIKING METAL: The protagonist arrives in a ship, kills
the dragon with his mighty mighty axe, cooks and eats
it, rapes the princess to death, loots the castle and
burns it down before he leaves.

DEATH METAL: The protagonist arrives, kills the
dragon, fucks the princess and kills her, then leaves.

BLACK METAL: The protagonist arrives at midnight,
kills the dragon and impales it in the front of the
castle… then sodomizes the princess, drinks her
blood in a ritual before killing her… then he
impales the deflowered princess.

GORE METAL: The protagonist arrives, kills the dragon
and spreads his guts in front of the castle, fucks the
princess and kills her….then he fucks her dead body,
slashes her belly open and eats her guts, fucks the
carcass for the third time, burns the corpse and fucks
it for the last time.

DOOM METAL: The protagonist arrives, sees the size of
the dragon and thinks that he never could beat him,
gets depressed and commits suicide… the dragon eats
his body and the princess as well.

PROGRESSIVE METAL: The protagonist arrives with a
guitar and plays a solo for 26 minutes, the dragon
kills himself out of boredom, the protagonist goes to
the princess’ bedroom, plays another solo with all the
techniques learned in the last year of the
conservatory… the princess escapes, and is now
looking for the “HEAVY METAL” protagonist.

GLAM METAL: The protagonist arrives, the dragon laughs
at the guy’s appearance and lets him enter, he steals
the princess’ make-up and tries to paint the castle in
a beautiful pink color.

INDUSTRIAL METAL: The protagonist arrives wearing
greasy overcoat, makes obscene gestures towards the
dragon, and gets escorted out of fairy tale land by
security guards.

CHRISTIAN METAL: The protagonist rides in on his way
home from church and sings a mushy power ballad to the
dragon about how much Jesus loves him and that the
dragon should turn to Him. The Dragon is immediately
converted, and when the princess wants to “thank” the
protagonist he replies, “sorry, but I don’t believe in
having sex before marriage.”

TECH METAL: The protagonist plays a whole tone riff
switching between 11/16 and 23/16 with his left hand,
while he taps a descending chromatic pattern with his
right hand. The dragon suffers a massive brain aneurysm
and dies, and the princess runs off to music school so
she can understand what the protagonist was playing.

Suse

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I finally found a system I could work with. I took another m/b from work and installed it on my system. I will return the older one tomorrow. This P4 m/b fortunately has DDR slots. Unfortunately it has only 2 and my 512 ram is fubar 🙁 It recognizes it as 512 but it kills the system in DT time.

I decided to discard the fedora installation to try something new and my original thought was Debian. Completely open and volunteer powered. Unfortunately, even though the original set up was done and I managed to find what to install with aptitude I was stuck at configuring the Xfree window system.
Until now I’ve been using x.org and xfree was kind of different and thus I couldn’t find the configs and even after I found them I coudln’t figure out why the system wouldn’t boot. After a few tries I gave up and tried OpenSuse 10.

Installation went flawlessly (although I would like a DVD version so as not to change installation mediums all the time) and I booted into my new system with all the bells and whistles on (even amarok 1.3.1, I was impressed at the cutting edge) with only one problem. The network would not work. At this point I had to leave to go and play board games with a few friends so I left it for the night.

At about 3am that I returned home, I tried setting up the ips, gateways and dns but nothing seemed to work. I tried disabling firewalls, switching cables, rebooting dsl routers but nothing. I knew that I was missing something because of fatigue so I left it for the other day. Fortunately amarok worked off the box (and finally without crashes) and I could hear some of my own music.

Today I found out what the problem is, it seems I had confused the default gateway with the DNS. I need to put the firewall as a default gateway (duh) and the dsl router as DNS. I can’t think why I didn’t try this before.

So anyway, now I’m in Suse and letting things work by themselves for a while. I’m tired of tweaking and prodding things to work and not know how to fix them so I’m taking a break from Gentoo (that still refuses to boot the kernel). Maybe when I have enough time to waste on my computer I’ll return again.
simple hit counter

Is this unbelievable or what?

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2 friggin’ days after putting another m/b on my PC and yesterday I come home after playing some warlord and find the system halted. No response to any key combinations so I restart only to find out, to my dismay, that the system will not boot and the speaker does a beeping sequence. I originally thought that was the sequence for RAM error, so I take out the two dimms and it does another sound. I change their position, put them in again and it does the first one. Not RAM error then.

I take out the VGA, boot, same beeps. Put it in, boot, same beeps. So I figure it’s that. I take it to my workplace, test it on another PC. It boots fine. FUCK! What is it then? It can’t be the M/B unless for some reason the AGP power feed has shut down for some reason and I can’t fuckin’ think how that would happen.
I plan to take a VGA from here to my PC to see how that works out.

What I really want to know however is it that has jinxed me.

Limping Back

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I’ve managed to get a system running for now.
Yesterday I took an old P4 apart while at work and installed it on my box. Unfortunately too late did I notice that the old-crap p4 motherboard used SDRAM dimms and DDR, that means of course that not only do I work at 1700 MHz but I also lost 133 MHz from memory.
Of course yesterday I did not have SDRAM chips available so I had to make do with Knoppix as best as I could (and It wasn’t much let me tell you). So today I borrowed some dimms as well (2×256 to be exact) that I plan to return when I gather the money for a new system and took them home to install.
Luckily that went fine.

Gentoo, as expected, will not start, it’s got the march=”athlon” flag and until I find how to override that I’m stuck at Fedora, which is not bad now that I see it again. I’ve forgotten of that GTK look. Anyway, some settings are not working correctly over here and I need to do some more tweaking.

If only I had enough money 🙁