I’ve been abusing BF2 for a few weeks now, so I thought I’d post some stuff. There’s such a wealth of knowledge to be unlocked over time, it would take forever to compile it all. Many things you discover through playing.
10.30.05
Now that I am getting my share of comment spam, I’ve installed one of the two dozen different plugins for WP to help deal with the problem. I finally decided on Elliott Back’s WP plugin that uses obfuscated JavaScript functions to decode and deliver a hash that’s then verified server side for authenticity.
10.27.05
I had the opportunity last night to watch the original theatrical release of Aliens. Ouch. It’s not nearly as good as the director’s cut. The original effectively neutralized some of the tension by omitting several scenes which I found valuable when included. For those who haven’t seen the director’s cut, I found four key scenes being cut in the theatrical release.
10.24.05
Wow, never thought I’d see the day. Gainesville’s 13th street Domino’s, previously one of the top in the nation, is dead. I called today to be told the wait time is 45 minutes to a hour. Never in five years has that been the case. And it’s a Monday evening! I was told, honestly, that they were understaffed. No real surprise there.
10.22.05
gcupdate is a small Perl hack (~ 50 lines) that removes some of the noise from QFX/OFX payee names so they sort better in spreadsheet tables and accounting software if you wish to sort by payee and not just your assigned categories. I used Config::General to make it possible to hardcode output for entries on an individual basis for those that the simple regex doesn’t clean up nicely. I found the regex worked surprisingly well for most of my transactions, though, so it’s rarely necessary. (For some reason I am fanantical about the payee names being reasonable looking — Not sure why.) It would probably be useful to add that this script expects input on STDIN.
For a long while I had an extra partition on my Windows laptop, a second primary partition, that I had formatted as FAT32. I used it for my Knoppix /home image and whatnot.
Read the rest of “Windows 2000 hopelessly confused about partition change” »
10.16.05
10.14.05
With the recent decision by Massachusetts to require software vendors to support open standards, it’s worthwhile to note on a somewhat unrelated topic how pleased I am that GnuCash keeps my financial data in an open format. I have not used Quicken for years, but it’s disturbing to note how screwed users of Intuit’s flagship product are. For example, if you want to acquire your statement information for your Discover Card, you will find this disturbing notice. (Unfortunately Discover does not allow you to download a raw OFX file, so you’re out of luck if you don’t own a copy of Quicken or Money. I find that nasty, being locked into either of these proprietary choices to access my statement information or simply being shut out.)
10.08.05
Having had such success with Satchel’s Pizza, I thought I’d hit another pizza place local to Gainesville, Florida. My friend suggested Momo’s Pizza, so I picked him up around 8 p.m. and we headed on over. It’s located directly across from UF in the UF Plaza. Needless to say, parking is nearly nonexistant not much unlike campus itself.
10.07.05
I finally updated polltc with a few minor changes and fixed a warning.
I thought I’d swap over to my 3Ware Escalade 6200 and run 40GBG x 2 in RAID 1, but it was not to be. After migrating all my files over from my Quantum Atlas 10K2 9.2 GB SCSI disk and my /home from my single 40GB ATA disk, I started experiencing filesystem errors rather immediately. First it was only on the XFS filesystem, but soon I started seeing input/output errors on files on my ext3 filesystems. After running a memtest86, I came up with no bad RAM. Spending more time swapping back to the original configuration without the 3Ware card, the system is stable again. I’ve had that 3Ware card for six months, but never tested it. I guess it was dead on arrival. At $20 for the card, it was worth the risk. I could run software RAID, but don’t really feel like it. I’d rather send the data once to the hardware RAID controller than twice on the bus to each ATA disk. Plus, I’d need to install an PCI ATA controller to obtain enough free ports to run a disk per port. Ah well. Perhaps I’ll buy a 36GB SCSI disk instead…