Haircut

Well I got my hair cut. The girl who did it was crap though. Normally they do a really good job in Evola, but she clearly didn't give a shit. I asked her to give me "short back and sides, number 6 or 7 on the sides, thinned on top and short enough to have a filck at the front".

I thought those instructions were pretty explicit. Yet somehow she still managed to not thin it. This might not sound like a huge error, but it is. My hair is dense. Somewhere in my family tree I swear someone must have been raped by a Chinchilla or something as my hair gets so dense that it can break clippers.

Seriously. You think I'm making this up, but my hair managed to kill 2 different sets of clippers in one sitting one day. It's just so light, but so dense, that it bungs them up. Because it's so dense and because it grows so fast, if I don't have it thinned then it needs cutting again with 5 minutes of leaving the barbers.

Worksheet Signed Off

I went to get my worksheet signed off having installed the Sun Application Server. They said they needed to see screenshots, which was fair enough, so I started logging in to show them the screenshots I took while installing it. I'd just typed in my password when he said "oh don't worry about it" and signed me off anyway! Heheheh.

Utterly Splendid

This is just incredible. The soundtrack was made entirely using Windows' Sound Recorder.

Ginkgo Bilobo

For those of you who don't know, that was mercilessly stolen from Thumb Wars

I bought some Ginkgo Bilobo which is a plant extract with the second silliest name in the galaxy. It's designed to help improve circulation, but often also has a positive effect on people with vertigo. Since I took it my hands and feet have been a hell of a lot warmer, which is very nice. Not sure it has fixed my diziness though. All well.

Now I'm off to get a haircut as I am utterly sick of looking like something from the 70s. I went last night but got there 3 minutes after they closed, and that was only because I get stuck behind someone at the cash machine who was taking forever. Life is cruel sometimes. I walked a mile looking like a twat with huge hair, then I had to walk back like that. And now I have to do it again. *sigh*

App Server

There, that's the worksheet finished (apart from the very last bit which didn't work because a directory that should have been there wasn't). I'm so glad to have that shite program out of my computer's memory, I now have about 118 Mb free again which is about normal, as opposed to the 8k I had free when running the server. The swap memory has freed up a fair bit too.

Jeeze, I hope we don't have to use the application server much for this module, it's bloody awful. Anyway, now I need to go to town. Then I guess I'd better do my bit in the manic house tidying in preperation for tomorrow's inspection.

Oh, I found this earlier too. I've been getting some serious neck pain recently because my monitor is at a 45 degree angle to my chair (this desk is tiny so it seem the logical place to put it) and the chair is utter shit. So all in all my neck is starting to hate me. I'll move the monitor as soon as I get a chance and I think I might go whine at the reception until they give me a nice shiny new office-style chair. Anyway, the exercise on that page is surprisingly good. As soon as I tried it my back stopped aching and my neck loosened up a lot. Well worth a go if your back is killing you.

J2EE SAS

Sun's Application Server is a fucking MONSTER! It's eaten all of my free memory and more. Doing ANYTHING with it causes my machine to spiral into a pit of thrashing. When they wrote this, they must have assumed it was only going to be ran on immense servers or clusters. If M$ really want to push .NET all they need to say is "you don't need to have a computer the size of the Isle of Man to run it".

I'm going to carry on limping through the rest of this stupid worksheet so I can get it signed off tomorrow. *limp*

Small Real-time Systems

I just found out I am, actually, registered on this module. Bollocks. Bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks, bollocks. Not sure just how many lectures I've missed and I'm not sure I want to think about it either. I'll see if someone can lend me their notes and I'll catch up what I've missed when I've got time.

Bollocks.

BG Lowey

I'm being turned into a character for Baldur's Gate. 1337!

R.I.P. Christopher Reeve

Sad, sad news. He deserved a medal for his bravery.

Why BSD is Superior to Linux

Saw this linked off the YakYak forum, made me chuckle. It's definitely an interesting twist on the old debate: Why BSD is Superior to Linux

Firefox

I've left the computer compiling FireFox for the best part of the day. I decided to give it another go after someone told me that the reason it didn't have the options I wanted was because I had to download a plug-in to do it. I hadn't realised just how modularized FireFox is. Anyway, after it had installed I went and got the missing plug-ins and sure enough I now have the options I wanted and so can at least use it comfortably. I'll give it a fair trial, and if deemed shit I can always go back to the full-blown Mozilla. It's a damn sight faster, that's for sure, which is a definite bonus.

Actually, this machine is starting to look great. In the past I've always been interested in functionality rather than making the computer look nice, but with FluxBox becoming nicer and nicer to look at, the good ol' framebuffer device, Amsn, and FireFox themes... this machine is starting to look great. Plus it still runs stupidly fast. In fact, I'd maybe even go so far as to say it runs faster than a new machine running WinXP does and this machine is now about three years old. God I love Linux.

Think I'll pop down to the Linux User Group meeting this... er... whatever day it is it runs on... I feel I've done enough Linux geeking recently to warrant showing my face down there. That, and Bryn who runs it, asked why I didn't turn up to the last one. God knows how he knew I'd been considering it. Perhaps he really is a villainous character from a comic book as I implied the other day when he turned up wearing black from head to foot, including black leather gloves. All he needed was a black cane and top hat to complete it. That, and hiding the text "There's no place like 127.0.0.1" on his t-shirt. It took away from the overall effect slightly. His super-villainous power? Telepathy, of course.

Okay the medication has clearly gone to my head.

CDRW and Framebuffer

Two things I've been meaning to sort out ever since I first installed Gentoo: The CDRW and the framebuffer. Although the framebuffer was just because it looks nice and wasn't important.

I don't remember the CDRW being a pain to set up when I installed it on Mandrake, but that was a year and a half ago, and I didn't have to manually reconfigure and rebuild the kernel either. Anyway, both my CDROM and CDRW are treated as SCSI now and they both work the way they're supposed to, so hurray for me. The framebuffer also randomly started working during all this (I played with a few settings before my final recompile of the kernerl), so I set it up to run at 1024x768 and show the fluffy penguin logo. Splendid.

Of course, this has probably all been in vain as I plan on removing the CDRW soon and replacing it with the newer faster one I have sitting around doing nothing, and I plan on removing the CDROM and replacing it with the DVD drive I have lying around ... ah well. It's only half a day wasted.

Bed time now, I think. Although I'll read a little more War of the Worlds, I think. A very good book, and it nicely breaks the monotony of watching the kernel compile for the Nth time.

Flash RAM

I just had a huge argument over MSN with a friend who seems to think that within the next 2-3 years RAM will be a thing of the past. Or, looking at it another way, HDDs will be a thing of the past. He seems to think we will have one big lump of Flash RAM in our computers which acts as storage. We will partition it so that part of it is used like RAM and the rest is used as plain simple storage like a HDD.

Personally I can't see it. There are reasons why we have multiple tiers of storage. While Flash RAM is getting faster and faster, so too are other RAM technologies. There will always be something that's fast but expensive, and there will always be something that is slow but cheap. This is how it's been since the dawn of the computer and I don't see it changing within the next 2-3 years.

While I can't deny I do believe that Flash will soon be used as some sort of non-volatile fast storage internally, I don't see it becoming one unified storage method. If it reaches DDR RAM speeds then I can see it replacing existing memory as the standard meaning we can have lovely non-volatile computers (rebooting would be a thing of the past!) and that would certainly be a great advance in personal computing. However, speed and large volumes of storage do not go hand in hand. Because we all want large amounts of storage we need cheaper technologies. Plus, large amounts of storage usually needs larger amounts of space to live in, and a massive wad of flash on the motherboard strikes me as a bad idea.

Look at it another way, latency is very important in memory access. If the latency is high the computer will be sluggish. If the latency is low it will be far nicer to use. In mass-storage higer latencies are normal, and it's not a problem because generally we are just dumping large amounts of data to them. Especially now that RAM modules are getting so big.

Anyway I can't be bothered discussing it any more. We agreed that in 2006 and 2007 we will see who is right and who is wrong. However, considering his previous track record with these kinds of arguments, I don't think he should get his hopes up. ;)