I have enough WoW characters that listing them all when someone asks is rather annoying. So, to save in typing I decided I'd create a web page with the list. An easy-enough to update format and easily linkable in any number of situations. Only I've done very little html and am lame about learning. Hey, I'm just trying to live up to the slackers!

So, I coded up a simple little web page with an html table. And borders. And viewed it in FireFox. What a beautiful table! It was perfect. I was happy. Until I tried it in IE. Ouch. Okay. Next came Konqueror (my non-Mac wanna-be Safari tester). Very much like IE. And finally Opera. Close to FireFox, but still not as nice. I internally grumbled, and mentioned the differences to a few people. Everyone told me the best way to fix it was with css. Someone suggested taking a screenshot and using that, and if the data didn't need such frequent updating, I just might have.

The problem here is, I've never made a border with CSS. I've never tried to configure a table with CSS. And I didn't want to actually have to do the work of learning something (Oh no!) to make this look decent in different browsers. But I gave in today and asked Google to help me learn. I used CSS to make solid borders, and now had IE's double border look in everything! I grumbled yet again, knowing there was a way to fix it, and yet again not wanting to do the work to figure it out. But boredom won, and I did. Border-collapse seems like a wonderful thing. And suddenly, the double borders were gone! Yay! But the borders were still flat and boring. They didn't have that curved look that the original table had in FireFox. A bit more reading, and I tried "ridge" instead of "solid" for the border type.

And so, the final result. Certainly nothing fancy, but I learned, and the information is there. I'm planning on taking screenshots of each character and linking them, as the Night Elf Equiraptor has. I'm considering a link from races, classes, and professions to the page about each on WorldofWarcraft.com, but I feel it might make it a little busy. If nothing else, this has been a good way to occupy me while long test cases run.

Tags: geek, wow

I feel like my brain is mush, for some reason. Oh well.

Autocross last weekend. See nugget's post for a video. I absolutely sucked. I don't know what it was, but I had terrible problems sticking to the course. I kept going on the wrong side of cones. I was doing better handling the car. I didn't spin this time, though I came close. The car felt very slippery to me. I blame the tires. They probably could have used a bit more air and a bit more tread. Heh. Or maybe I just need to spend an obscene amount of money setting myself up with different rims/tires for autocross days. Hey, I'm spending an even more obscene amount of money on the engine/supercharger, right?

On the supercharger subject: Due to the fact that I'm taking Dan's engine, and Dan is a regular, competitive autocrosser, the installation of the supercharger needs to be delayed about a month. In a way, pout, but in a way, this gives me more time to prepare. I need to make sure we get the right radiator and setup for the gauges BEFORE I take the car in, not after. I do not want to risk blowing up my car because I procrastinated. The machine work on the head will probably take 4 days. Dan says he can do the block swap + supercharger in two, and is willing to do it over a weekend so I can watch (Yay!!!), and then will come tuning. Due to the headwork, the tuning will be more of a challenge. John says he's up to it, but wants to take a couple of days to be sure he does it right. So I'll probably be in The Boat (blue Camry) for about a week and a half. Slushbox, slush-suspension, real roof. Pout. At least it has new struts, a new rear swaybar, and a newly fixed transmission. John was telling me it's now a great car!

Now for some computer geekery. The fan on my Radeon 9800 was making a bit of a squealing noise at times, and if I powered off the machine, it would make a grinding noise for a few minutes when it was powered back on. This inspired me to search for a new fan for the graphics card. I found a Zalman heatsink and fan that looked like it would work well and be quieter. The set arrived today and Nugget and I began the complex installation. The original heatsink did not want to come off and did not want to be unplugged. Once that was done, screws and braces had to be put in the correct location and the heatsink carefully tightened to the board. However, now my video RAM and chipset all have heatsinks, with a larger, more efficient fan/heatsink on the chip. Hopefully this will allow for hours playing WoW with minimal noise levels.

Tags: autocross, geek, miata, wow

So, I kept meaning to buy Crossover Office so I could run Quicken in both Windows and Linux, so that I would be more motivated to keep things updated. Instead, I just never updated Quicken. But, nugget today mentioned that Codweavers says Crossover Office now supports running iTunes. This, we both had to see. So, I finally paid for that trial version I downloaded so many months ago, and tried.

Probably as a result of me not reading the directions more than anything else, the iTunes install said it failed the first time. I had let it attempt to "autoreboot" the fake Windows environment. So, I ran the installer again, telling iTunes I would reboot later. This time, the installation succeeded and I could run iTunes. Yay! iTunes was running! But, it didn't see Nugget's share. It could access the music store, so we knew networking wasn't the problem. On startup, iTunes had warned me I wasn't running the latest version. So, I let it open Internet Explorer and download the latest update. That installed, and now I can play music from Nugget's share on our slacker radio (using the Airport Express). Things aren't perfect. I currently don't seem to be able to play music on my own speakers. But, that's okay. When I want that, I have XMMS, and I can output to Slacker Radio, so all is well.

Now, my speakers... Hmmm.....

Tags: geek

Work changed quite a bit over the weekend. Not only do they have a new website, they've re-done much of the intranet. Our servers are now running Novell tools. They claim to be making a number of changes over the next few weeks, including the implementation of shared calendaring using iCal. My first thought: It's not Exchange! Yay! My second thought: Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar... What do I use? And what can I safely recommend to other employees?

I'm using FireFox for web and Thunderbird for email. I don't want to do my web browsing in Mozilla... There are things about FireFox I prefer. I don't have much experience with Mozilla's Mail client and how it differs from Thunderbird, but I prefer the looks of Thunderbird. There is Mozilla Sunbird - a standalone calendar program, but it's at version .2b. So far, it looks pretty nice. I have no idea how it will work with the iCal stuff, though. Also, it feels... ridiculous to be running FireFox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird when I could just run Mozilla and have it all. I dunno. Maybe I could find a theme that would make the looks of Mozilla Mail more pleasing.

What other solutions are out there that are cross-platform? I want something that's likely to run on my FreeBSD install on this laptop, and that I could run on the Linux desktop at home, if I wished.

Tags: geek
Current Mood: curious

*sits and watches "system" compile*

So, my computer died. It was built in August of 2001, and survived a few warm summers without air conditioning. It was a pretty loud system, and nugget was looking for a way to make it quieter. He purchased a quiet case, with a quiet power supply. Somehow, in the process of transffering everything to the new case, my system died. It was an Athlon Thunderbird, 1.2GHz, 512M RAM. It's sitting on a book, on the door of the old case, not far from the dissected case, with a few parts laying around it. It won't POST anymore, at all. It never beeps. So, last night, Nugget and I headed over to Fry's, for a spur-of-the-moment computer purchase. Most of the computer was still fine, it was just the motherboard, processor, and RAM that needed replacing (mostly because my current hardware isn't compatible with what's being sold now). So, I ended up with a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard, an Athlon 3200 with 400MHz front side bus, and two paired 512M sticks of 3200 RAM. The board has everything from Gig Ethernet to sound on-board, so the only card I still need is the video card. Somehow, the nVidia card managed to mostly die in this process as well, so I'm back to the Radeon 7200 that doesn't always play nicely with this monitor.

I have Windows XP Pro installed, after some fights with the RAID controller and dying nVidia card. I'm currently working on installing Gentoo. I was planning on simply untaring my old system on the new drive, but with the change in hardware, I'll need to recompile everything. So, now, the processor gets to work. Even though I'm not actually using RAID, I appear to need the drivers to get everything to work. I'm hoping they're in the normal default kernel... The motherboard did come with a Linux kernel with the drivers, but... *shrug* We'll see what happens.

I'm still sad, though... my first computer has died.

Tags: geek
Current Mood: excited
Current Music: Sunrise giving POST errors

The goal of this project was to determine which is better as a desktop - FreeBSD or Gentoo Linux...
( A Review )
And in case anyone was wondering, I did this for fun in a week in between jobs. :D

Tags: geek
Current Mood: geeky

The Tejas Miata group had a drive this past Saturday, out to a drive-in movie theater is Gatesville. An MG club had scheduled a run to the same theater on the same day, but from a different area, so we didn't see them until in the theater.

The Austin Miata group was supposed to meet at 3:00pm at it's normal meeting place: the "NE" corner of 183 and 1431 in Cedar Park. Nugget and I didn't get there until about 3:10, and didn't see the group, so we figured they'd already left. Fortunately, there was a second meeting place, at 4:00pm, at a gas station in Briggs. This was also a typical meeting place for the Tejas Miata group, and we'd been there with them before, so Nugget and I took the Miata up there. I drove quickly, hoping to catch the group. We finally made it to the second meeting place (a little before 3:30) and saw absolutely no one else. Well, at least no other Miatas. We stuck around for a few minutes, but then decided we had mis-read the instructions, and turned back. Right as we entered 183, we saw Barry, the run leader, in his Laguna Blue Miata. A quick U-turn on 183, and we were back in the gas station. Heh... Miatas are good at U-turns.

We talk with Barry and his son for a bit, and another group shows up... a red 240SX, a silver late-model Mustang, and an Ivory 300ZX. Ummm, ok, so now we're two Miatas and three non-Miatas? That can't be the run... We wait for a bit, hoping Nugget and I had managed to miss the Austin group, and low and behold, right at 4:00pm, about 9 Miatas and Dodge Stratus show up. We got ready for the run. After the routes were explained to the drivers, we learned that the Stratus was not intended to be part of the run. It was going to be left in Briggs, and picked up later. But the route made that highly impractical, so, for our run, we were ~11 Miatas, two Nissans, a Ford, and a Dodge.

The Miatas on the run included a 10AE, my 94M, and Dan's Ubercharger test car. It was a great run, through beautiful, small, twisty roads, up to a good, but slow restaurant in Briggs, and out to the theater. We arrived at the theater early and got very good spots. Two Triumphs showed up after a while, and finally a set of 4 or 5 MG's arrived. One interesting note: It took two Triumphs and an MGB to fill the space of two pickup trucks, with similar sized padding around each vehicle. Those cars really are tiny.

Eventually, darkness settled over the theater, and the previews started. After the previews, during the beginning of The Day After Tomorrow, some people came and sat behind us, and some came and sat in front of us. You'd think they could have done this during the previews, at least. The Day After Tomorrow was okay... Good special effects, what felt like an incomplete look at the weather phenomena, and an okay storyline. Shrek 2 was the second movie shown that day, and Nugget and I were one of the few Miatas to stick around. The movie had its entertaining moments, and it did manage to keep me awake, but it was not a great movie. Though maybe I was just distracted by the kids behind us who seemed incapable of staying quiet.

So, for the rest of the weekend, and into this week. Im doing a test. A very imprecise test, pitting FreeBSD against Gentoo Linux. Gentoo has been running my desktop for over two years now, but FreeBSD impressed me, both on the server and the laptop, so I thought I'd give it a try. I used my current Gentoo install, and added a FreeBSD install on recently added hard drive. A full review will come later, once I've had some time using each system.

Tags: cars, geek
Current Mood: content

School's out for the summer! Or, actually, school's just out. Overwith. Done for. Graduation is on July 10th, 3:00pm, in the LBJ Auditorium on UT campus (weeee, don't we think we're special).

So, I've taken my school hard drive (40G Western Digital), and placed it in my desktop, in place of the 1.2G Western Digital that was my second drive for a while. The box is a little quieter, at least at times, which makes nugget happier, and I know have a total of 120G in there. There's a Windows 2000 Server install on the 40G which I don't plan on touching, but it should only be using 2-4G (I haven't checked yet), so there's still plenty of space. I'm thinking of doing a FreeBSD install and playing around... Tweaking it, seeing how much I can break, how much will stay fine, and how it compares to Gentoo installed on *almost* the same hardware (the two WD drives may have different RPMs, and the Gentoo install is behind a 40G Windows install). Hrm... If I write up a detailed report, think I could make Slashdot?

My birthday is tomorrow! Well, basically tomorrow, since it's past midnight here. Thursday the tenth. I was born at 10:21pm on Thursday, June 10th, 1982. I weighed 7 pounds 11 ounces, and was 21.5 inches long. This is all on a needle point on display in my room at my parents' house... I guess it's still my room. The only changes from when I was there are it's cleaner, and guests sleep there.

I've become rather fond of two XBox games... It's all Nugget's fault. Knights of the Old Republic and Project Gotham Racing 2 seem to have me hooked. I'm about to finish my fourth time through KotOR.

A while ago, I had compiled a 2.6 kernel for my Gentoo desktop, but I had yet to actually boot it. I figured since I was taking the box down for the hard drive install tonight, I might as well try that new kernel. It's booted fine, and everything seems to be running well. In fact, many things are running much more smoothly. From a general, soft feel perspective, the 2.6 kernel (Gentoo's 2.6.5-r1) is running much smoother than the 2.4 kernel (Gentoo's 2.4.25-r3). Neither has the preemptable kernel option on, but my actions in Enlightenment are less strongly affected by the compiles with the 2.6 kernel. Even Flash seems to run faster, though it can still slow down Firefox. It's pretty nice.

Tags: geek, school
Current Mood: cheerful

The laptop I'm currently using appears to be dying. When I attempt to install FreeBSD, many packages fail, claiming they cannot find libssl. The Gentoo boot CD fails to boot... /sbin/modprobe binfmt fails.

A while ago, ghewgill gave me his old digital camera. I've been wanting one for a while, for spur-of-the-moment pictures (a Pentax K-1000 isn't too great with those) and for the ease of adding digital pictures to my gallery. I've been slow about actually using the camera, partially because the battery doesn't hold much of a charge anymore, and partially because I don't have a cardreader. Nugget has one that will work with a laptop however, so I thought I'd give that a try.

Now, we have a problem. The laptop doesn't have ssh installed. It seems unwilling to install anything, because it cannot find libssl. My Gentoo live CD fails. Tonight, it finally dawns on me that I could try a Knoppix CD. I'd rather have a boot CD that didn't head strait into X with all the bells and whistles, but booting is booting, right?

Not only did the Knoppix CD boot, it autodetected everything, is running the console in framebuffer and X at appropriate settings, and it even talked to me. I've never bothered to try to get a sound out of the laptop, and now it's making noises just from booting. Yipe! I'm glad it booted, but I don't really want the boot CD to do everything. I don't mind a minimal system. O well, it works.

So, I snatch nugget's CF-cardbus adapter and throw in the card from the camera. I plug it into the laptop, and it gives a reassuring little *beep* as an icon appears on the KDE desktop - /mnt/hde1. I swear, Knoppix does more than Windows. I now have my data off the card, and am happy enough with the world. I just wish Knoppix were a little bit faster.

Now, on to the car portion of the story.

Not long after purchasing my Miata, I noticed a few other Miatas at work. There's a black one that's a '95... I was considering purchasing that vehicle, but the owner changed his mind about selling. I definitely understand. There's a red one as well, and a blue one. I've managed to meet the owner of the black and red, but the owner of the blue one remains a mystery. One day, all of the Miatas ended up in a row, so I decided to take a few pictures. I've finally been inspired to get them off the card. I just might create a web page for the work intranet...

Tags: cars, geek
Current Mood: accomplished

School is only a few weeks away from finishing. My major projects are done. I have to finish up a Power Point presentation for my Wednesday class, and we have to present on it. There will be a few more things to do in the Friday class as well, but the tough class this quarter is done - the Monday class, Telecommunications. I now know more about the phone system than I ever wanted to know.

I changed a few of my CFLAGS on the desktop. Changed from -O3 to -Os, and added -ftracer and -ffast-math. I'm now rebuilding everything (emerge -e world). The compile is on package 218 out of 281. FireFox and Mozilla are in the list of not-yet compiled, XFree is compiled, and it's working on the various GNOME packages now. I suspect the compile will still be a while.

The Miata is the funnest car that they've made over 700,000 of. Eww, bad grammar. Anyway, I'm really enjoying the car. It doesn't have an easy life, but I suspect it likes it that way (if it were capable of liking, yes I personify my car, leave me alone).

Like I said, I'm a nut. Package 220 of 281.

Tags: cars, geek, school
Current Mood: cheerful