I've been avoiding saying much about politics and religion in places where my name can be attached easily. After all, there's nothing that can make you unpopular like expressing your own opinion on something so very flame-worthy.
But it's time. I can no longer deny it, and I can no longer hide. I am an atheist, and have taken the Blasphemy Challenge.
There is not a single place on the web that seems to document this procedure.
Step 1: Unzip packagename.tgz Step 1a: cd packagename Step 2: phpize Step 3: ./configure Step 4: make Step 5: make test Step 6: make install Step 7: Add the extension to your php.ini
Seriously. That's it. The XML files sitting in the root of the archive are for PEAR, and can be ignored if you don't do PEAR.
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So in my very, very slow quest to put together a Linux powered media center system, I found myself short a cable. So I went upstairs into the storage room and decided to see what I could find. I used to have a bunch of parts to build the needed cables, so I figured it wouldn't be a problem. Well, it was. I couldn't find anything I needed.
Instead, I found a source of awesome. In a box, I found a dozen CDRs, dating to 1999 and 2000. Full backups of good old CELERON, including lots of things that I thought were gone for good when his drive crashed.
I guess November and December really are great for nostalgia.
... then head over to Startrekker and say hi. She'll appreciate it.
Both the utility bot component and the Alice component are now running here on Lobotomy, thanks to GNU Screen. She went down about two years ago after she went offline for a bit over a holiday weekend, resulting in a log gap. I was unable to import the logs, so I delayed bringing her back up until I could figure out what was wrong.
Oops. I've imported most of the missing logs, and recently found some obsolete logs from the Phoenix Chat days that I might import. If I do that, it'll mean that Feenix will then have a log of everything that happened in Startrekker from mid-2001 to the present. That's kinda scary.
I finally grabbed some of the parts Wynn was done with in Portland, so I figured I'd make sure they still worked.
Now most of you won't be familiar with the epic saga of my home computers.
Once upon a time, there was Celeron and his equally-as-mediocre-named brother, Pentium. They served me well for a very long time, and I was very happy with them.
Then along came Steph's system, Mister Happy. Mister Happy wasn't happy at all, and eventually got himself nuked and paved into Lobotomy, and he was very happy. Quick, look at the URL bar.
To replace Mister Happy, Steph got Squiggles, and the two were happy together. Well, mostly. Poor Squiggles got mangled badly to and from college.
Eventually Celeron became too old and slow, and it was time to replace him. And thus was born Scorpy.
Meanwhile, Squiggles was transplanted into the shell of what used to be Celeron, and around the same time, the original Lobotomy hardware was retired and replaced with a new system of the same name, still just as happily puttering away.
Next it was time to retire Pentium, and hardware was picked up to match Scorpy's config.. but never worked. It infuriated me to no end, and I ended up RMAing the motherboard, memory, and CPU, but to no avail. It rarely passed a POST, and always flunked out a memtest86. The partial machine was nicknamed Headcase and shoved into the boneyard in the corner, to be forgotten about. He joined Lobotomy 1.0, and CCAPPS, my old desktop machine from Infopop.
I eventually adapted from the dual box setup of Scorpy and Pentium down to just Scorpy. However Scorpy was also growing old, and just last year was replaced with Duo.
Now Scorpy wasn't slow or anything, just not as new as I wanted. As he was perfectly good still, I loaned him to Corwynnde to replace her aging system. She eventually did some hardware swaps -- the fan on the chipset went out, etc.
But Duo was flaky and annoying, and I eventually determined that one of the two sticks of RAM was at fault.
And now that you know all that seemingly useless information, allow me to actually rant about the topic of this post -- I hate RAM.
So I get the motherboard back, and I figured that I'd just put together a system, as I had recently uncovered CCAPPS in the boneyard and knew I could grab things from him if needed.
Wynn also gave me two sticks of RAM that she pulled out of Raukurk's machine. Two sticks that she knew were bad, and that I knew were bad.
So I did the motherboard swap into Headcase, and put in Rauk's RAM. It wouldn't even POST. Beautiful!
So I grabbed the memory that was in the original Headcase motherboard... and, no, it wouldn't POST either. Uhoh.
Desperately, I grabbed the one gig stick from Duo, the one known bad, the one that caused me months of hell when it was living inside of Duo... and it POSTed. And booted. And passed three memtest86 runs.
WTF?
So I stuck a stick of Rauk's memory in, along with the 1 gig stick... and it also passed. So I put the second in, and it also passed. But take out the 1 gig? No POST... in dual channel mode. Passed fine once I switched around the banks.
I'm so confused.
Those are known bad sticks, but they're testing fine. How does that even work? I've put Headcase back in the boneyard for now, as I really need to replace the chipset fan before I do anything else with him. I still trying to figure out what I'm gonna do with him.
Oh, but it gets better. I put the one gig stick here in Lobotomy, and test it... and test it... and it's fine. And I hope it'll continue to be fine, as Lobotomy isn't too happy with only 256 megs of memory.
So I dunno. I have five sticks of 256 meg memory here, all but one of which are "known bad," but all of which work in Headcase or Lobotomy.
... is really far too fun. Seriously. Space Pirates are cool. Ninjas are cool. Amazons? Still coool. Catgirls? Cool. Put them together for random goodness. And catnip. Mmmm.