Why did you say six months?
He's coming.
This matters. This is important. Why did you say six months?
Why did you say five minutes?

Ooh! Pixels!

Now running at 1792x1344 at 85Hz. It's kind of an odd resolution, and not officially supported by my monitor, but it seems to work just fine.

I tried going even higher, but then I can only run at 75Hz - and I can see the flicker.

Update: And no crashy badness!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Irradiated

Well, the GeForce FX 5700 is out and the Radeon 9600XT is in. The switch was easy and painless. Swap cards. Install drivers. Done. Works.

Crashes since swapping cards: None

The card comes with a rather interesting little cable: At one end, a nine-pin mini-din; at the other, male and female four-pin mini-dins (S-Video in and out) and male and female RCA (composite in and out). Which is odd, because either you're going to plug it straight into another device - in which case you'd want a male plug - or you're going to use a patch lead - in which case you'd want a female plug.

I'm going to try capturing all my old laser discs and burning them to DVDs. That should keep me occupied for the next year or two...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Farewell to Crashy Badness

I live in hope...

My new new video card, a GeCube Radeon 9600XT Vivo, arrived today. I'll try installing it tonight.

I don't know what's up with my old new video card. It worked just fine in my Linux box with the default drivers. The reason I swapped it out was that the Linux nVidia drivers don't yet support the GeForce FX 5700 (which is what it is). My Windows box ran fine on the old GeForce 4, but the new card brought frequent lockups and crashes.

I've previously used nVidia cards ranging from the Riva 128 through to the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 Ultra, and never had a problem like this. Given the nature of the problem - it only ever fails when I am actively using the computer, never (for example) while I'm watching a video or while the screensaver is running - it looks like a fairly specific driver issue, but I haven't been able to track down any answers.

Anyway, the Radeon card I now have is the same one I was trying to get before Christmas, so it's not all bad.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:19 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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A Quiz... Of Sorts

You preferred the Democratic stance for 1 issue. Democratic Platform

You preferred the Green stance for 2 issues. Green Platform

You preferred the Libertarian stance for 1 issue. Libertarian Platform.

You preferred the Republican stance for 3 issues. Republican Platform.

Which bunch of loonies do you least disagree with?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:21 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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More Crashy Badness

It's the video card. Gotta be.

Better be, 'cause I just ordered a new one.

Which is a bloody nuisance, because the crashy one is also new.

Grrrr.

Hopefully I'll get the new new card tomorrow, so I can have a less crashy weekend.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Just Where It Should Be

Given the continuing crashy badness of my Windows box, I decided to reinstall Windows. Only... Someone seems to have hidden my Windows install disk! Where could it be? The last time I saw it, it was -

In the CD-ROM drive.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:33 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Out Of Socks Error

... But when I got there,
The sock drawer was bare,
And so my poor feeties had none.

Well, I managed to find a mis-matched pair - one blue, one green, but the same pattern. Which is good enough for going to the office in.

I bought six new pairs at lunch time, all with little sheepies on.

Oh, and my computer crashed again. Even with the new old drivers. Pfft.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:41 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Less Crashy Badness

After the fifth (or sixth) crash of the day, I got fed up and rolled my video drivers back to the previous version. This only took two reboots, a great improvement on the old days.

And since then: No crashes. Use the little scrolly wheel: No freeziness. No black screen of deathness. No BIOS screen at exactly the moment you least want to see it-ness.

Not the mousie, then. Or so it would seem. Or so it would appear to seem. Well, this new and exciting non-crashiness continues tomorrow, I might just see my way to purchasing a small selection of cheesy comestibles.

On the other hand: It went from a crash every two or three days, to more-or-less daily crashes, to two, three, four a day, to four times in three hours. Looks awfully like a case of software rot to me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:43 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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EKAPANCASHAM ASHTASHATAM

No, it's not the name of a scroll in the latest version of Nethack.* Ooh, 3.43, when did that come out? Must download...

Oh, yes. It means:

(eka 'one' + pancasham 'fiftieth') + (ashta 'eight' x shatam 'hundred') = '851'

(literally 'eight hundred of a fifty-first sort', following the translation formula in Whitney 1924: 180)

Not many blogs would use it as the title of a post. Not many blogs would have a post titled:

WHITE OVERLORD OF THE CONDIMENTS

either. Maybe "Damn You" Scrappleface.

Fewer blogs still would tell you:

Voiceless nasals were once more widespread in Asia: they used to exist in Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai (e.g., Mandarin hei, Cantonese haak 'black' < Old Chinese *hm@k) but in some cases have left traces on the tones:

Thai maa [with rising tone] 'dog' < earlier Thai *hmaa (and still spelled h-m-aa in the Thai alphabet) - maa 'come' from earlier *maa with a regular *m has a mid tone (and is spelled m-aa without an h). The rising tone of maa 'dog' is a trace of the older *hm.

Rare in the blogging world is the informed discussion of the Law of Consonental Drift (also known as Grimm's Law, after the Brothers who discovered it**).

There are the requisite traumatic computer problems:

Here's how Coma earned its name. If left unattended for long periods, it will black out (good) ... and not wake up (bad). It enters a mode not in my manual - neither standby nor hibernation but a strange state in which the power mode light is on (it should either be blinking in standby or off in hibernation mode) yet the keyboard, touchpad, and even the power button (unless pressed down for several seconds) are unresponsive. The only ways to awaken Coma are to keep the power button pressed or lift it up and use a paper clip to press the reset button conveniently located at the BOTTOM of the machine! Brilliant design choice there.

As if this coma state weren't annoying enough, this laptop also has the worst power cord I've ever encountered on any product. Move Coma slightly, and the cord may fall off! Even the slightest nudge of the cord is sufficient to cut off power. And if I remember correctly - I'll have to test this again - the computer even shuts off if the cord is nudged/falls out and the battery is fully charged and installed! Never had that happen to me before. I was initially tempted to name Coma after the anole (often mistakenly called a 'chameleon'), a kind of lizard that used to live by the bushes beside my front steps. Coma's cord is like the anole's tail:

Like the tails of many lizards, that of the green anole is easily broken. The tail bears fracture planes in the bones-- weakened areas at which the tail can easily break if grasped. There’s good reason for this.* In the wild the broken tail tip wriggles animatedly for several seconds-- drawing the attention of a predator and allowing the anole to escape. The anole will regrow (regenerate) its tail, but it is never quite similar in appearance to the original.

*Why can one say/write "There's/There is good reason" without an article before the noun phrase "good reason" but not, say, "bad reason"? One can only say/write "There's/There is a bad reason" (Google has zero hits for that sentence). "Good reason" seems to be a fixed phrase.

There's History and Stuff

There was an Indo-Greek ruler named Plato who ruled about 2,100 years ago. Here's a list of other Indo-Greek rulers. Read all about the Indo-Greeks and later cultural mixes at Prabhu's coin site (which isn't just for numismatic freaks). The Indo-Scythian coin at the bottom of this page has an image of Zeus with the word "maharaja" 'great king'. What a combo! And check out Buddha - whose name is written as "buddo" (cf. Pali Buddho) in Greek letters on this Kushana diinaara coin. (The word diinaara is from Greek denarion.) Looking at all this reminded me of a question posed by some role-playing game (GURPS?) author: What if Indo-Greek culture had survived? What would a Hellindic world be like?

There's speculation:

I've never seen anyone use bloggin' in such a way before. Here, it seems to be an intransitive (objectless) verb meaning 'being written on a blog' rather than a transitive verb meaning 'write on a blog'. It's fascinating to watch the semantic extension of a term that didn't even exist not too long ago.

And there's the unending battle with the idiotarians:

Chomskyanism never goes that far. Although they are far more interested in fantasy (er, their deep structures) than reality, they never claim that surface structures do not exist in themselves. Their position is similar to, but not identical with, dualism:

[M]ind and matter exist independently of each other and have nothing at all in common (and that the mind is fundamentally inexplicable by scientific method, since it cannot be directly measured or even detected) ... But somehow interact.

Remember, Chomsky was first a linguist.

There's only one place on the web where all this is gathered into... Uh, one place. And that place is Amaravati: Abode of Amritas. Your host, Marc Miyake. If you're looking to stretch your blogroll a little, you'd be hard pressed to find a better direction to stretch it in than this.

Oh, and that last quote? He was quoting me!

* Foobie bletch! Andova begarin! Venzar borgavve!
** They also wrote some kids' books.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:10 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The Ditto and the Glory

So while I was messing about with Faith (the server in the previous story), I decided that since I had only a W.A.G. as to what was wrong, I would set up another server to take over FTP just in case I couldn't fix it quickly enough.

So I fired up the box that I think used to be called Amelia (though it might have been Lina, since the two are identical twins) and started loading up Fedora. I called the new box Glory.*

And about mid-way through the first install disk it folded up and died.

I rebooted, started into the install, and SPLAT!!! with a CRC** error.

And again.

I checked all the cables. I checked the power supply. I checked the CPU fan. Um, shouldn't that be, like, spinning?

Moved a stray power lead from here to there and all the Chemical Rubber Tree plants were banished for good. Er, the installed proceeded smoothly.

* All the servers at our office are named after characters from Buffy.
** Chemical Rubber Company.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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