Move along, nothing to read

Daria is the poster child for "teen misfit," and holds in high contempt what she sees as the shallowness and superficiality of the world around her. She is also cynical -- though she'd say she's "realistic" -- and mistrustful of authority, and doesn't hesitate to make her opinions known when she sees fit. She has a talent for writing, a sharp intellect, an even sharper tongue (her sarcasm could cut tempered steel), and a wit so dry it makes the Sahara look like a rain forest.

This was actually a really decent TV show. It showed how many of us feel.

So I wake up at 11am. A nice and reasonable time for once :-). I spend time cleaning my room, so it's tidy now.

Then I had a long discussion via long-distance phone call with a guy at a consulting company doing a case study on Open Source Software. He was quite knowledgeable about things, showing that he had done his research properly.

After that, I had lunch (raisin bread toast with apricot jam), and came downstairs finally. The usual loads of email happening.

I have batch of homework due the next few days:

• Fri Jan 25/02 11:00pm:Peer Evaluation
• Sat Jan 26/02 11:00pm:Mid-Module Portfolio
• Sun Jan 27/02 11:00pm:First Draft of Essay
• Sun Jan 27/02 11:55pm:SWOT Analysis
• Mon Jan 28/02 9:00am:Tech 151.1 module assignment

Ok, so I got a fair bit of work done today. After math class, I made a start looking at stuff on the Onyx, then Gord announced he had finally got the compiler going. I managed to get ssh compiled properly, I wanted to use OpenSSH, but I can't get it see the zlib for compiling on the Onyx.

Turns out to be just Java and C++ that he got working. No pure C yet. As soon as we get that, the system will be very set 8-).

Parallel make is very cool on quad-processors 8-). The system compiles insanely fast because of those quad processors and the 2Gb of RAM.

Around lunchtime, I set up exporting X displays from spitfire to the onyx. And we tried to watch the Planet of the Apes DVD. It plays just fine on spitfire, but the exported display's colours are totally messed up, and the framerate is only 7.5fps.

I will see about getting the raw vobs onto the SGI hard drives, since we have a few hundred gigs of space to play with, then the movie should play very well if I get a player. Ogle might even work.

For my first direct experience with DVD movies, it has been really cool. I actualy had not handled a DVD myself before. I had seen them in stores and around, but not played with one myself. Now I'm running a Linux DVD player, and exporting to our nice huge SGI screens for a 20ft x 10ft display :-). This is turning into a regular movie theatre.

If I get the movies onto the onyx myself, then I will be watching Matrix on tuesday during lunchtime.

I was really impressed with the RedHat on spitfire, for having correctly auto-configured the sound. It worked right out of the box. Now if we get the proper sound over to the main speakers, then we will really be rocking!

I'm sitting in the NMI/SVR lab, waiting for my NMI class to start (14h30).

I need to get more music on my playlist here!

I'm sitting in my math lab now. Exploiting the powers of my TI-89 calculator. I ain't doing LU decompositions by hand no more 8-).

I was glad I wore my snowboots to walk to the bus this morning, they stopped me from slipping quite well. But now that I am here at school, I have had to take them off because they are too bulky, and alas I forgot my slippers. My other shoes I left at home are wet anyway.

My official transit route on Tuesday & Thursday mornings is now: #151 (Holdom to Brentwood), #130 (Brentwood to Metrotown), SkyTrain (Metrotown to TechBC)

Ok, so this morning I ran out of the house at 9.10am, and made it to the stop for the #151 just in the nick of time as the bus was pulling up. I went to NewMIC downtown. I was supposed meet Gordon & Tom (my boss) there at 10am. I was there 9.55am. Tom didn't turn up till 10.05am (he had another meeting in the same building before this tho). We waited until 10.15am for Gordon, and since he wasn't showing up, we went to NewMIC on our own. We had just got in, and started discussing things with Brian when Gordon showed up. The doors in the first skytrain he was on got jammed, then they cut the power between Broadway and Joyce for a while so he was stuck for a bit. Anyway we discussed the Onyx systems and software packages to use for the 3D work, then we went to see NewMIC's cave setup.

Their display setup puts ours at TechBC to shame. Their onyx has an extra graphics pipe, and they have 4 projectors (3 wall, 1 floor). They can also change their screen configuration a lot easier than us, as theirs is designed to flip between a theatre mode (3 screens together) and a cave setup. (cube with 2 faces missing). They also have proper head and controller tracking systems, which we haven't purchased yet. With their tracking stuff, you can do demos and really point to the thing in 3D that you want people to see. But using the cave mode in 3D with tracking is really impressive. The one thing that really got me, was caveQuake3. I can literally peak around the corner and see just that bit 8-)! I would really like to get the guns and multiplayer going in that, as then I can really whip some rear end properly. No more turning around to check your rear, I can just look over my shoulder. Plus ducking and jumping would become literal movements making it a lot easier for me to dodge missiles 8-).

Hmm, this band rocks now! The sound is really nice an acoustic.

My old server, fermi, went down for a bit, because dhcpcd flaked out badly. It caused a kernel Oops right in the middle of an interrupt handler. No Magic-SysRq key for me to use to prevent lengthy disk scans after that. I have upgraded dhcpcd now, so hopefully it doesn't happen again.

I have taken a shower, and I'm going to start on homework now. But I feel really tired already.

I'm sitting in front of spitfire, eating lunch now. The TechBC research systems have now been named after WWII aircraft. The workstations are small planes, and the mainframes are bombers. The SGI Onyx is B52. Naming computers is fun!

Spitfire is RH7.2 box, with no security concerns, as it is behind serious firewall stuff. Gord installed all of the Ximian stuff on here, with the RedCarpet system, and I like what it does, but I'm not happy with some of the results. It broke every browser except Konquerer & Netscape 4.

My lunch is chicken teriyaki, one of my usual things. The guys at the teriyaki takeaway know me by name now, and I know them. They know I like extra sauce with mine, and chopsticks instead of a fork.

I have sound piping thru the nice speakers up on top of the Rave displays, so the working area here is starting to get really nice :-).

Next I will set up a DVD player on this box, and hook into the displays and the speakers, then we can have big screen movies that put the rest of what we used to do at North with the projector to shame.