Random Musings

Turns out I had a bum CPU. I’ve had the replacement running full out on distributed.net stuff for most of the week, it’s running around 50°Celsius, which is warm but not horrible, and it works just fine, so I’m happy.

Simply indescribable, imo:
(Original url http://www.antville.org/img/conspir/nooooo!.jpg or maybe this blog)

I just randomly visited The Register today, to read an article about trojans having trojans in them, and saw a humorous, and hopefully either ironic or satirical, comment to end the article:

At least one security expert says there’s a lesson to be learned from the whole affair. “It obviously says you should always use open-source Trojans,” says Mark Loveless, a senior security analyst with Bindview Corporation. “That’s the moral. You can’t even trust Windows malware.”

The worst part is how accurate it is…

I think I’ve pinpointed my hardware problems - running memtest86 overnight with all tests turned on got me a single error in the same spot as the ones I got when I had the ram swapped out.

That definitely makes me think “bad motherboard”, so it goes back to the store to get that replaced.

Wish me luck!

At work, we’ve been switching to using BitKeeper instead of CVS - I’m even more impressed than I was when just using it as a lazy way to download updates to the Linux kernel to play with at home.

It’s odd to feel inclined to do real work just to have an excuse to play with the tool involved…. but then again, my current project is to replace all text strings in our main product (ADX) with calls to gettext…. which is an incredibly boring task.

If only I could figure out why xgettext has no facility to set the character set (encoding? Whatever UTF-8 should be called.)…. I’d love a way to get rid of the crapload of warnings that ends up causing me.

For the last several weeks I’ve been battling a series of failing hardware - seemingly a losing battle, as well.

Last weekend I got angry at the server I’ve been using to host my email and such for years (An ABIT-BP6 with Dual Celeron 466s in it.), so I went out and bought an Athlon 64, case, power supply, memory to use to replace something.

I ended up (after several failures at other ideas) replacing my gaming machine with that, and moving harddrives around in other hardware so that everything else works.

First, I have to reinstall Windows XP on it (not really sure why), then after I do that, it still has spontaneous crashes to deal with, which may have been related to the bad ram I had.

Now it appears the gaming machine has killed its harddrive. sigh