Andy's Blog

The status of my car

A passed another nifty milestone on the odometer today, and decided to commemorate it with a picture:

My car has made it past the 9 year mark, but I am hearing all sorts of new and scary-sounding noises now, that I didn't used to hear. So, I either need to start putting some money into this thing, or I need to start looking for a new car.

So, even though my initial plan was to keep this car for a full 10 years, I have started looking to see what is available in the market. I haven't done too much work, as of yet (only about 7 test drives), but it is looking like I'm going to be going the new car route.

But then again, we'll see what happens over the course of the next month and a half. :)

-Andy.

Back up

Well, redefine is finally almost-kindof happy again. I have reverted from running FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE to FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE, and from running on two disks in a hardware RAID configuration to one single disk on the built-in IDE controller. For the last two weeks, it has seemed like every time that I have touched my computing environment in an effort to make things better, I have actually made things work.

The icing on the cake occurred last Friday, when I managed to break things so badly in the two hours leading up to Rushabh's arrival that none of my readily-available machines would boot off the RAID, and hence I was blocked from accessing my data. In order to get it back, I had to cannibalize my Shuttle SN95G5 (which was serving as my MythTV machine) in order to get things back.

This weekend, I'm going to be hitting this RAID card pretty hard, to see where I need to go from here. At this point, the thought of ditching it in favor of software RAID is sounding fairly compelling.

-Andy.

A no good, horrible, very bad day

You ever have one of those days were absolutely nothing goes your way? That pretty much sums up my day today -- just about every computer that I touched today did something odd, unexpected, unexplainable, or just all together crashy. Worst of all, all of my problems occurred with my home computing infrastructure, which provides not only a home for this blog, but is also my gateway to the Internet.

It all started this morning, when I decided to tinker before going to work. After last night's hardware swap, I had redefine re-compile FreeBSD while I slept. When I checked things out this morning, everything looked good. The compile went well and the machine hadn't crashed. So, I rebooted, in order to go into single user mode, so that I could install the new FreeBSD bits that I had compiled. On the way to single user mode, I decided to actually power the machine off, so that I could put the case back on, and move it into its home, under my desk.

The case installed, I powered back up. But instead of booting into FreeBSD, my Dell Precision Workstation 420 failed to POST. This means that it crashed, but before it even loaded FreeBSD. Several frantic reboots later, not only was the problem not fixed, but now my helpful Dell BIOS was displaying this fantastic error message:

What a helpful error message, thanks Dell!

Not knowing what the heck that error meant, and being in a rush, I decided to try moving my hard drives and RAID card to a third machine that I had lying around (old computers never die -- they just "lie around"). This machine has been known to be temperamental in the past, but I bought the motherboard at a computer flea market for only $35, so I can't really complain.

After moving all of the necessary parts over, things got off to an auspicious start when this third machine (let's call it "Frankenbox") wouldn't even light up the monitor. Some jiggering of cables provided an image, and everything seemed fine, at first:

As you can see, FreeBSD 6.1 is starting to boot just fine...

However, as the kernel started to load, I suddenly noticed that the text on the screen seemed odd somehow. It actually appeared to be garbled, which is something that I have never, ever seen before - not on FreeBSD, Linux, DOS, or heck, even Windows. Check it out for yourself:

All of those repeating characters and spelling errors is NOT how FreeBSD normally boots. :(

Thoroughly appalled and dejected by this turn of events, I resolved myself to stop tinkering with my computers, and go to work (it was hard to let go, especially with this sort of problem unsolved, but I managed to do it). While at work, I google'd the error that I got from my Dell machine, and found out that it had to do with the Dell BIOS not properly recognizing some PCI cards. The fix was to pull your card and reboot, clearing the error condition, and then putting them back in.

So after work, I began tinkering with the Dell again. And after not too much effort, I managed to get it booting FreeBSD off of the RAID controller again. Hooray! I was even able to reboot after finishing my FreeBSD upgrade, and everything seemed fine.

But then, I got cocky once again. I powered the machine off, in order to put the case back on (deja-vu, anybody?). And once again, I was greeted with my Dell failing to POST. More messing around ensued, and the basic story at this point, is that the sun, the moon, and the stars all have to be aligned properly in order for the Dell BIOS to accept this 3ware RAID card that I bought. And unfortunately, I still haven't figured out the magic alignment that will reproduce booting whenever I see fit.

So, after all of this time wasted, I am back to where I started -- I put the RAID card and hard drives back into the old machine, and I'm back in business. So, the lessons that I have learned:

• Don't knock software RAID - you certainly won't have all of these crazy hardware compatibility problems. I wasn't really too interested in software RAID, but based upon the experience that I'm having with this 3ware card, I have suddenly gotten a lot more interested in software RAID.
• Also, don't knock late 90's technology - the Intel PR440FX motherboard is quite formidable, as it is the only machine that I own that works reliably with the a RAID card from 2006.
• I was hoping to wait until next year to buy a new server machine (so that I can get my hands on a nice, low-wattage CoreDuo machine), but now it's looking like I might have to invest in some new hardware a might sooner.
• And finally, computers suck.

-Andy.

Hardware swap

My FreeBSD machine has been crashing a whole bunch the last several days. After the last time it went down, I grabbed the latest stable source code and started running that. Things seemed fine (the machine was up for over 3 weeks, I think), until several days ago. Now, it has been crashing every day.

In fact, today I was trying to upgrade the OS again, and it crashed while I was doing a "make clean", before the compiling even started.

At this point, I reckoned that either I'm getting some bizarre network traffic that is taking the machine down, or (as is more likely), something is failing on my 8 year old PC. I mean, the thing is fully broken-in, what are the odds of something going wrong?!?!

Coming back to reality, tonight I dropped the guts (two 400gb HDs and a RAID card) into the previous redefine (which is only 6 years old), and so now we'll try that.

So far, so good.

-Andy.

Watch the NBC Nightly News netcast full-screen

Since my MythTV machine went on the fritz, I have been trying to cobble together the viewing of all of my shows in an ad-hoc manner. For some, I am using iTunes, others are going to the "poor-man's Tivo" (i.e. my VCR). And of course, BitTorrent is playing a role.

For the NBC Nightly News, however, I decided to check out their "netcast". Every night, around 2 hours after the news airs, NBC makes a steaming version available on their website. Normally, this is viewed in the browser, via a MS Media Player plugin. Thus, when viewed via a plugin, you are stuck with the size of the video. It's not resizable or anything.

However, if you use the MS Media Player client, then you have access to all of the controls, including fullscreen viewing. To get this going on my PowerBook, I had to wade through a bunch of obfunscated HTML and JavaScript, before I found the "magic" URL that the Nightly News website was loading for the video.

To access the NBC Nightly News netcast directly, you need to use a URL of the following form:

mms://msnbc.wmod.llnwd.net/a275/e1/video/100/nn_netcast_YYMMDD.asf

Note that the above URL as it stands will not work. You have to do a substitution for the YYMMDD part (where YY is the two-digit year, MM is the month, and DD is the day, all in digits), to get the URL for the exact day of the news that you want to watch.

So for example, to watch this evening's news, I formed the following URL:

mms://msnbc.wmod.llnwd.net/a275/e1/video/100/nn_netcast_060511.asf

You can see that I constructed a date of '06' (for the year 2006), '05' (for the month of May), and '11' (for the day of the month). Just enter that URL into the "open location" dialog in your Windows Media Player (or free equivalent), and you should be all set!

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: NBC Nightly News

Nintendo at E3 - good, but not great

Earlier, I trounced Sony's showing at E3 (as did Wired), and I openly wondered how Nintendo would fair. Well, I watched a good chunk of their E3 presentation, and it while it was certianly much better than Sony's, it wasn't necessarily as good as what I was hoping for.

I think that Nintendo did a great job highlighting some of the games that are coming out for their new console, the Wii. And to a long-time gamer like myself, they had me salivating over the new Zelda, Mario, and Metroid games. And the new controller looks like fun. I won't know for sure until I get my hands on it to try it out.

The main point of Nintendo's presentation, however, was that gaming is still basically a "niche" thing. I can't remember exactly how the presentation went, but basically Nintendo made this point: try to think of someone that you know who has never seen a movie. Now, try to think of someone who has never played a video game. At least for me, I can't think of anyone in the first category, but I can think of several people in the second.

So, I definitely think that Nintendo has a point, and that there is room for expanding the size of the gaming audience. What disappointed me, however, was that nearly all of the games that they showed were aimed at hardcore and/or longtime gamers such as myself. Sure, the controller appears to be more accessible than past controllers -- but it is going to be the games that are going to draw in first timers, not controllers.

And to that end, I think Sony has actually been doing a better job of getting 3rd party software on their system to expand gaming's reach. I'm thinking of games like Karaoke Revolution, Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Hero, and possibly even Katamari Damacy. These are games that appeal to non-gamers, work well in groups, etc. And these are the kinds of things that Nintendo is going to have to bring to the Wii, if they are to succeed in their quest to expand the size of the world-wide gaming populace.

But, I wouldn't count Nintendo out. The DS didn't ship with Nintendogs or Brain Training, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Nintendo comes up with some sort of innovative, market-expanding game at some point in the Wii's run.

Miscellany:

• I'm sorry Nintendo, but the "Wii" name is still stupid. During the E3 presentation, they made the point that a lot of "stupid" names like Lexus and Google are now accepted by the masses, but I think that's missing the point. Nintendo could call their new console "woozle-wuzzle", and people would still buy it. But that doesn't mean that it is a great name. Unfortunately, the Nintendo corporation is too stubborn to figure this out.
• I'm also disappointed that Nintendo didn't have the stones to announce the price or launch date of the Wii. You pre-announce your revolutionary controller, allowing Sony to steal it, but not the price? C'mon guys, I don't think that Sony is going to steal that one....
• But on the upside, new Metroid. Wow. I really think that Nintendo might have nailed how to control FPS games on a console -- at least to this snobbish mouse + keyboard gamer's satisfaction. :)

Bottom-line: I think that Nintendo has solidified my lust for their next console, but I certainly don't think that they have the next generation of the "console wars" locked up. In fact, this next round of the battle is shaping up to be pretty interesting -- there could, in fact, be no clear winner.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Sony, PS3, E3, Nintendo, Wii

Woo-Hoo - Buffy and Firefly are on iTunes!

I just say that Apple has finally done a deal with Fox, and now some current Fox shows, as well as "classics" like Buffy and Firefly (how can a mistreated and abused TV show become a classic? Hmmm...).

This is great news. The more exposure there is to Firefly, the better. I have spent the last several weeks re-watching all of the episodes (making sure that Kevin has seen them all), and that show is just simply amazing. And apparently, the show is still selling well on DVD for Fox. Hopefully, being on iTunes will perk those numbers up even more.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Firefly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, iTunes

PS3: Thoroughly unimpressed

I watched a good chunk of Sony's PS3 presentation at E3 today, and it left me (to my own surprise) thoroughly unimpressed with the PS3.

Let's be clear, I do buy-in to the notion that Sony has a wicked piece of hardware on its hands. I think that Sony has been quite innovative on the hardware front -- with the powerful and exotic cell architecture, and the Blu-Ray DVD drive.

And I think that Sony went out of its way during the presentation to drive that point home. "We're a hardware company, and we have made an impressive piece of hardware".

However, in the past, the gaming industry has been ruled by one maxim at the time of new hardware release. The maxim: "It's all about the games, stupid!". And so when I say that I was unimpressed with what Sony displayed today, I'm speaking more about the games (which are what really matters, anyway).

And sure, the games looked fairly spectacular (it was a little hard to tell seeing them through the webcast). High resolution, lots of polys, tons of character animation and realistic physics. I'm sure that the fan-boys are drooling.

But here is the kicker -- none of the games (not one!) looked like they were any fun! In order to rebut the rumor mill, Sony made a point of highlighting which games are going to be playable at E3. Well, after seeing the demos, Sony can keep them -- because I'm not interested in playing game one.

One of the demos actually showed how you had to manipulate a character into running around in a 3D environment (which the presenter seemed to struggle with), knock a boss character over, and hit said character in its weak spot in order to defeat it.

Are you freakin' kidding me?!?! I have been doing that in video games, since like, forever!

Where is the innovation, Sony? All of the big new innovative features that Sony announced today (save from their hardware) were direct rip-offs of their competitors. Integration with PSP? Nintendo showed us the way with integration between the GameCube and GBA. Advanced online features like player matching and a marketplace? Such a shameless rip-off of the Xbox live, that I'm surprised that the Sony executives could deliver it with a straight face.

Now I am super-interested to see what Nintendo talks about tomorrow. I think that there is a giant opening in this next generation for games that are actually fun to play.

Because, as we all need to keep in mind, that is the point of playing games, after all. Which is lucky, because "Mario Kart: Double Dash" sure is a lot of fun, which hopefully explains why Kevin and I are still finding at least 7 hours a week to play...

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Sony, PS3, Mario Kart: Double Dash, E3, Nintendo

Tool at the Paramount Theatre, Oakland CA

Wow.

Just, wow. Another great Tool show. True to the performance in Seattle on Tuesday, and similar to the Coachella show on Sunday, Tool played a tight set, demonstrating tremendous energy. There was no opening act, and on this warm-up tour, the venues are being kept small (the Paramount apparently holds something over 2000 people). The time listed for the concert was "7:30", but I assumed that meant that the doors opened at 7:30. I stepped into the venue at 7:50, just as the opening song started!

The outside of the Paramount Theatre. After the show was over, the Marquee had already been reconfigured for R. Kelly.

Holy crap, I almost missed part of the show! I left work a little before 6, and did some "creative driving" to try and beat traffic, which combined with BART, got me to Oakland when it did. Thankfully, I made it to my seat in time. My seat, for being a last-minute ticket, was actually pretty decent. I was on the ground level, fairly far back, but dead center. Seeing as how the Paramount isn't very big, however, there really aren't any "bad" seats in the place. I was much closer to the stage than for Coachella, that's for sure!

Without further ado, here is the setlist:

1. Lost Keys (Blame Hoffman)
2. Rosetta Stoned
3. Stinkfist
4. The Pot
5. Forty-Six & 2
6. Schism
7. Jambi
8. Eon Blue Apocalypse
9. The Patient
10. Sober
11. Lateralus
12. Vicarious
13. Ænema

This is basically the same setlist as Coachella, with Lost Keys and Rosetta Stoned tacked onto the beginning. There was no encore, but Tool did take a short break (2-3 minutes) after Lateralus.

Maynard came out sporting jeans and a mohawk, carrying a megaphone on a shoulder strap (which I never did see him use...). After Rosetta Stoned, he donned a cowboy hat, which he wore for the rest of the show. In addition, during Schism and Vicarious, I spied Maynard messing around with a keyboard of some sort. I believe I also saw Adam and even Danny getting into the act as well, but I am not as sure.

Camera phones suck, but you should be able to make out the relative size and position of the video displays. This was taken during Lateralus, I think.

They are doing some interesting things with the video screens on this tour, as you can see in the image above. They have evolved to four separate screens, each of equal size. They are placed evenly at the back of the stage. What is interesting, however, is that the displays vary from working independently to "teaming up". I saw images that took up 2, 3, and even all 4 of the displays. Tool tends to use more of the displays in tandem for the songs that have actual video content (like Schism, for example), to great effect.

Overall, Maynard wasn't as talkative as he was at Coachella. Here is an incomplete list of his between-song banter:

• "Those were, some songs. Coming up: more songs."
• "Peewee's Playhouse. Always a blast."
• Before playing Sober, he said "Little bit of OGT".
• He tried telling a story about how his grill was stolen when he looked away, and then he told a cop, but the cop was stolen when he looked away. "Tough town", I believe he said. It didn't come off well, however due his mic cutting out in the beginning.

A shot of the crowd, as Tool leaves the stage.

Overall, I am pleased with 10,000 Days - I am growing increasingly fond of it with every listen. Three of the songs on there, The Pot, Jambi, and Vicarious are extremely good, and play quite well live. But what is really surprising, is how well The Patient holds up. That song is crazy-good, and nearly upstaged the entire night.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Tool, 10,000 Days

Seeing Tool twice in one week

The really good thing that happened today is that I managed to secure a ticket to tomorrow's Tool show in Oakland, CA. After getting shutout when tickets went on sale, I saw that scalped tickets were going for insane prices, so I decided not to buy.

But, after seeing them at Coachella, and listening to 10,000 Days nonstop since yesterday morning, I found myself clicking around craigslist a whole bunch while at work today.

Up until around 6 PM, all of my scalping attempts had failed - in spite of the fact that I was willing to go as high as $200 for one ticket. Luckily, a member of the Tool community noticed that Ticketmaster (of all people) had released some more tickets on their website.

So, like some sort of rocket with wrists, I shot in there and scooped up a ticket. No over-inflated scalpers premium, no worries about the ticket being fake. In a word, Awesome.

This is the one time that I have been glad to pay all of Ticketmaster's fees!

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Tool, 10,000 Days, Ticketmaster

Paying the geek tax at a rather unfortunate time

As all of the TV fans in America are aware -- we are coming up to the end of the regular TV viewing season, when all of the dangling threads will be wrapped up, resolutions made, and the cliffhangers engaged to keep us all on the edge of our seats throughout the summer.

Which, of course, makes it a perfect time for the Seagate hard drive in my MythTV machine to give up the ghost. Which is apparently what it did sometime on Monday, while Mike and I were driving back from Coachella. The geek tax strikes again.

Of course, I didn't notice until last night, when Kevin and I sat down in front of the boob-toob in order to watch "Gilmore Girls". Amazingly, the MythTV front-end program was still working, but no new content had gotten recorded. And when I tried to investigate, I saw that Linux was encountering massive errors while going to and from the disk.

So, it looks like I'll have to replace it. But before I can get to that, TV must still be watched! I had to resort to BitTorrent for the things that my MythTV machine was supposed to record but didn't, and I have bought a multi pass of the Daily Show on iTunes. For everything else, I will fall back on my "poor man's PVR" -- i.e., my VCR.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Open Source, MythTV, Geek Tax

Coachella 2006: Tool

After a long, hot, and tiring day at Coachella, it was finally time for Tool, to send the crowd home happy. The started about 20 minutes later than their scheduled start time, due to what appeared to be techincal difficulties. Thankfully, once the show got under way, Tool didn't seem to experience any other technical difficulties (as opposed to a lot of the other bands playing at Cochella).

In typical Tool fashion, the band commandeered the large displays on either side of the Coachella main stage, in order to display Tools' graphics and videos. Given the lack of magnification (that the big displays provided for the other bands), this means that, because I was so incredibly far away from the stage, there is no way that I could see the band.

The Setlist:

1. Stinkfist
2. The Pot
3. Forty-Six & 2
4. Jambi
5. Schism
6. The Patient
7. Sober
8. Lateralus
9. Vicarious
10. ænema

In all, they played just a bit under 80 minutes. My impression of the setlist is that it provided a pretty even balance between Ænima, Lateralus, and 10,000 Days (3 songs a piece), which was nice. I was worried that it would be crazy-10,000 days heavy. Worried, because I hadn't heard the album yet at that time (I actually restrained myself from downloading it -- shocking, I know). I was somewhat surprised that they played "Sober" - I was hoping that they would be able to put that song to bed. But I guess it is still a crowd pleaser, and we all know that Tool loves pleasing its crowds. Overall, I think that I was happiest during "The Patient". That song is just so amazing, especially when played loud (which the Cochella PA certainly was). I also liked ænema as a closer, especially considering the fact that the concert was right around where the hypothetical "Arizona Bay" would be.

The video displays continue to complement the music well. Overall, a lot of the material was similar to what I saw on the last Lateralus tour. For example, the corresponding video was played for each song that has one. The differences for the Coachella show included more of Alex Grey's artwork (particularly the cover head from 10,000 days), as well as more female images. I believe that during "The Patient", there was a shot of a woman looking into camera, much as if she were in a photo booth. The image was cast in a green tint, and looping up and down - like when the vertical hold is messed up on your TV.

Maynard was reasonably chatty, with his latest batch of Maynardisms:

• "Welcome hippies. I smell patchouli!"
• "Welcome to our first show in many years. We wanted to take it down a notch, keep it small and intimate, invite a few friends. Welcome. But you dude - you can put your fuckin' clothes back on, you're bummin' me out. Got lost on the way to Burning Man."
• "New album comes out tomorrow at midnight. I know you fuckers all downloaded it already. [crowd cheers]. Do me a favor, I'm trying to buy this, gold nugget shaped like a piece of popcorn for a ring. So I need you to buy a bunch of records so I can afford that. Big 'ole gold nugget. That's four of 'em. Then when I hit you in the face for taking my photo, it'll look like someone hit you with a bowl of popcorn. Help me out, willya? I'm destitute."
• "Had enough? [crowd yells "No!"] Good. We've come to paper, scissors, rock you. I wrote that."
• Before playing "Vicarious", he said "Single".
• "Hope you all enjoyed yourslves. Hope you all got a chance to go in the VIP tent. 'course you all did right? It's fuckin' L.A., right? Everybody's fuckin' VIP. Can I get a witness?"

Overall, it was another great performance from Tool. I would say that Tool's live show is relatively mature at this point - as evidenced from how little things have changed from Lateralus to 10,000 Days. I expect that they will make some minor tweaks for the subsequent 10,000 Days touring, but I think that the basic format will remain the same. Which is totally fine - Tool has evolved into a comfortable place, and there is nothing wrong with that.

All it leaves for me to do is continue to hope (in vain, most-likely) for something from Undertow other than "Sober". :)

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Tool, Coachella

Coachella in 500 words or less

How do you summarize an exhausting, exhilarating, amazing, sun stroked, mind blowing day at Coachella? I've been trying to figure it out, but there was so much that happened, that it seems like there really is no way. I'll see if I can blog myself out of this hole over the course of the next several days.

Maybe I'll start with this:

Carrie on the big screen at the Coachella main stage

The executive summary: Sleater-Kinney brought the true rock (sorry Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Massive Attack provided the must stunning and engaging performance of the night, closely followed by Tool, who brought the house down at the end.

But it was an incredibly long and hot day, and I'm tried from all of my travels (and that little thing that happened on Saturday), so this will have to stand for now.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Tool, 10,000 Days, Coachella, Massive Attack, Sleater-Kinney