baby pics

We finally got the new baby pictues back today. I'll take them to my mom's tomorrow and run them through the scanner so I can put up some new pics for the world to see of my beautiful baby girl.

re-ds-ing

Well, that new DS Lite I bought the other day with the dead pixel... I took it back. I got a new one, with another dead pixel. Well that makes three DS models I've owned now and each and every one came with a dead pixel, all in random places. I guess I'm stuck with a dead pixel no matter what.

That sucks.

re-building

Those SDLMAME builds I posted the other day sure enough did need rebuilds. So if you were one of the unlucky ones who actually went and got those... go get them again!

sdlmame 0.110u3

Updated my G4 builds to the current mainline changes today. SDLMAME hasn't officially been updated, so these builds might need rebuilding in a day pending any official changes. But they are current as of now.

ds lite

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite today so I could play my to-be Christmas present of Final Fantasy III from my girlfriend on it. I had originally owned a DS but didn't like how ugly and bulky it was so I ended up selling it. With the release of FFIII and the redesigned DS out, I decided to give it another shot. I am very impressed with the sleekness of the device. It no longer feels like I have a cheap toy, but I now have a great shiny piece of gaming equipment.

There's only one problem with the thing, a dead pixel. It wouldn't be a issue if it was in the corner of the screen, or not noticeable. But this thing glows bright green on a black background. And that's just ugly.

I'm going back to the store tomorrow to exchange my new purchase for one hopefully without a dead pixel.

I do, however, recommend that if you do not own a DS, go get a DS Lite. It is a wonderful piece of engineering and a very sleek design.

And my girlfriend thinks Nintendo sucks...

annoying

When I log out of my blogger.com account, since it's connected to my google account, it logs me out of all my google stuff too. This includes my google homepage, gmail, and um.. well that's it. But, fuck it's annoying. I definitely think the cookies should be separate. I want to always be logged into my google homepage but I do not always want to be logged into blogger.com. They should stay two distinct entities and not be tied together. Just my two cents.

sdlmame 0.110u2

I updated my compiles of SDLMAME for us old G4 Mac users on my site yesterday. I think the only new features in this update worth note is the ability to play DDR. Oh boy. Lemme go get that one right now, it's all I ever wanted to play. Go get my compiles here and go play some pacman instead.

subversion, neon, and openssl

Apparently, using a SSL-enabled version of subversion requires using a little more then what is included in the subversion-deps package. Of course, one needs to get OpenSSL themselves, but neon which is the piece of the puzzle one needs to connect all three together (and is included in the deps package) isn't the version one needs to use the SSL feature. To use SSL connections with subversion, you cannot use the included neon package. Instead, you have to go get neon-0.25.5, and replace the included one from the subversion-deps package and recompile the entire thing.

Thank you subversion team for sending out a incompatible version for everyone to use. I'm sure it makes everyone happy to have such a easy installation, only to find it don't work as advertised.

EDIT: Well, after recompiling and installing all this software, subversion using SSL still don't work. Nice. Now, how am I supposed to checkout things from sourceforge without being able to access https?

wii

I could have swore the Wii was to be launched today, now everywhere claims it comes out this Sunday. I've heard reports that games are already for sale at stores across the nation and they even started pirating them already. huh. Go figure ;)

new layout

I moved to a new layout, playing a bit with the blogger beta features. I haven't been updating this thing much... life and World of Warcraft got in the way. I've got so many things I'd like to write down somewhere for no one to hear too... oh well maybe another day.

mac mini

It's no secret, I need to upgrade my Mac. But I'm currently torn between waiting until Apple decides to release something better in my price range, or just buying a Mac mini. I could get another iMac eventually, and maybe I will. But I don't have the money for those things right now. The G4 Mac mini's are going for $350 out the door at many places, and they are 42% faster than my current Mac. I could probably manage one of them but I'd need to get a monitor and max out the ram too. Which would bring my spending up a few hundred bucks, but still cheaper then a new Intel-based Mac mini. I may end up doing that, as I'm not interested in windows, or PC vendors options.

Then again, I could just build my own machine and run linux again.

slackware 11.0 rc2

11.0 final is near. I fixed up some missing files on my ftp, cleaned up the entire thing and I'm ready for 11.0 to drop now, are you? ;)

slackware 11.0 rc 1

Today marks the new Slackware's first release candidate. There have been so many improvements in the distro since the 10.2 release, and its finally coming to a stable point here now. If you use linux, I'd highly recommend getting this. Maybe you'd like to get it from my very own ftp mirror? ;)

spam

Is it me or has Gmail been hammered lately with all kinds of new and crazy spam? Fuck, I hate email.

iPodtastic

Well after fiddling around in the iPod debug menu, I finally made some progress. I got the thing to boot into disk mode after entering a "FW TEST" mode and updated the firmware from there. It appears to be slowly copying my 4000+ song collection back to its hard disk and we'll see from there if it works correctly. The drive makes some funky noises which could be a result of me throwing it on the floor repeatedly in a feeble attempt to fix it. I probably broke it but well, it does SOMETHING now at least.

iPod debug menu

I have been searching for a way to fix my seemingly un-repairable iPod for months now. I had assumed it just needed to be charged from a real electrical outlet. Wrong. Apparently, the problem which my iPod suffers from, is caused by a bad flash of the firmware. There is a secret debug menu hidden which I can access by holding down the Rewind, Forward, and "Enter" keys upon booting. I cannot find any documentaion of the 15 or so utilities available in this mode anywhere online. I'm not sure if it will enable me to fix the iPod yet, but I'm not going to stop trying these options until I get this fucking thing working again. As a side note; don't mess with the debug stuff unless your willing to possibly damage your iPod, and if you do fuck yours up... don't blame me.

sad day

You know it's a sad day when I'm seriously considering the Xbox 360 as my next console purchase. I think Nintendo got it wrong with the Wii, I don't really want to have to jump around and shit to play video games. And Sony, with the PS3, I just don't trust their products anymore after my PS2 shit out on me after 2 years...

Jay buying a Microsoft product??!!?? It's almost unheard of. Of course I won't have $500 for a 360 anytime soon... but Quake 4 is calling to me already...

^Q3Tr0LL3R^

I have some interest in the continued development in the now open source Quake 3 source code. So I began looking around online for projects that may be looking for help in a OSX specific area. I found one (according to their website). icculus.org/quake3, as they call it. I noticed they had some files up and a svn repository for the source. The OSX binary they had on thier site was out-of-date to thier current revisions, so I thought I'd be nice and offer up a up-to-date OSX binary (temporarily located here for anyone interested). Upon sending a email to the mailing list that I had compiled a current OSX PPC binary, I was nothing short of flamed for it not being a Universal Binary (a binary which works on Intel and PowerPC Macs) and my all around not supporting of the x86 architecture which makes up the newest models of the Mac computer line. Truth be told, it didn't compile a Universal Binary out of the box, and I lack the knowledge to change source code to do it. I saw nothing wrong with making my contribution, and saw no reason for the rude comments I received.

I had also posted a question on thier message board previous to all of this, reguarding my creating a native OSX installer for the application. Which according to thier website, they needed someone to do. I was doing that just because I wanted to help out a open source project which claimed they needed the help. When the help was given, they didn't seem to want or care for it. And then had the nerve to tell me I was trolling.

I unsubscribed to thier list after being called a troll and deleted any and all work I had done for the installer and was done with it. This is notably the first time I had attempted to help a open source effort and been shot down for my help.

icculus.org/quake3 can fuck off. I'll stick to id Software's PPC only official release from now on.

home-- home again

Krissy and the baby are home now. The slow road to her recovery begins. It's good to have my family back.

gall stones

It begins friday night at about 1:30am, Krissy wakes up with heartburn. Nothing new, she's gotten heartburn quite frequently while pregnant, so I didn't think much of it. After she took medicine and it didn't go away and was still hurting in the morning, was when we decided something was wrong.

We went to the doctors early saturday to see what the problem was. He prescribed her some kind of anti-inflammatory pills and told her if the pain don't go away by 8pm that day to go to emergency at the hospital. If the pain didn't go away it meant she more then likely had gall bladder stones and needed more testing done.

So, she got taken care of quickly because Sam was working (thanks Sam) and they took her in. After a night in the hospital, a ultrasound and MRI, it was determined that; yes, she had gall stones and yes, they needed to remove her gall bladder. So they decided to do surgery on her.

Now comes to monday, and they did surgery sometime this morning. I am assuming things went well and she is still sleeping because she isn't picking up the phone in her room right now. I hope everything is okay and she can come home soon.

Anyway, this made for one hell of a fun weekend. Now I'm off to go see her and make sure she's doing okay.