omz13

I have, as a bit of an experiment, started to blog using tumblr. You can reach my at  blog.omz13.com. Of course, if tumblr starts to suck I’ll move the blog to a new backend, but the url will be the same. Being the uber-geek I am, I really should get around to developing my own CMS and web front-end.

For the foreseeable future the plan is that this site, www.omz13.com, which is running wordpress, into a static html site to serve up documents, ephemera, and so on. Or possibly not.

The day: Tuesday
The time: late evening
The event: catastrophic failure of my MacBook air

So there I am, beavering away on my MacBook air, when all of a sudden, it powers down; my aural senses are hit with the sound of electrical arcing; my nasal membranes twinge to the sudden aroma of burning motherboard; my brain screams oh [redacted]; my hand jumps to the power cord and pulls the MagSafe connector out; my heart paces towards tachycardia as the adrenaline kicks in.

Im currently traveling, and due to the lack of an Apple Store, I’ve taken poor MacBook air to a nearby Apple Premium Reseller. We all had a quick look inside the machine and could see no obvious damage. However, when it was connected to a power supply, one of the chips started to smoke. Its pretty impressive as you don’t see that too often. New motherboard ordered so, if all goes well, by the end of Friday I should have it fixed. Until then Im using my iPad as a temporary workhorse.

Oh my: It has been a long time since my last post. I plan to ramp up my blogging activities, subject to the usual constraints imposed by real-life. Meanwhile, Im off to play with Xcode (yes, Im hacking something for OS X) and if you are nice I might tell you about it.

As a few of you may know, I’ve started gaming. Now, I don’t normally do games, but Osmos is different… its a bit like life, it obeys the law of physics, the music (such as The Shape Of Things To Come from microscopics) is very trippy (and a bit like Hallucinogen), and despite its simplistic nature its highly addictive and great fun… so now you know why I haven’t blogged for ages… I’m chillin’ and trippin’ to Osmos and The Shape Of Things To Come respectively..

A new stable version of cvsnt has been announced today. I have bumped my gentoo ebuild for cvsnt.

As always, get my ebuilds for cvsnt into your local-portage tree using rsync as follows:

# rsync -rztp --delete rsync://rsync.omz13.com/local-portage/dev-util/cvsnt /usr/local/portage/dev-util

Then to install, do the usual:

# ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge cvsnt

Enjoy!

Remember that sweet DC945GCLF2 that I’m using to replace my aging hardware with? Its not as sweet as I expected. Somebody at Intel who bought the components on the BOM for these boards obviously went for the noisiest cooling fan they could get their hands on… its driving me crazy… so, I surfed over to Quiet PC and picked up a replacement fan: a Mini-Kaze 40mm x 10mm. Just undo the four screws attaching the fan to the heatsink, remove, unplug from the motherboard, and do the reverse with the replacement. Nice and easy. According to the specs its only pumping out 14dBA, which is pretty low. Interestingly enough, its also only sucking .06A whereas the original fan sucked .18A. Nice going Intel, not only is the original fan noisy its a power hungry too. Now, I know the profit margins on these boards is thin, which probably explains why they’re supplied with a cheap cooling fan, but these days we all expect out computer gear to be unobtrusive, so that means it has to quite and not cause the dials on the power meter to fly

For the past few years I’ve been using gentoo. Mainly as a server, but also as a desktop so I can learn/play with linux.

And then, two years ago, I picked up a MacBook. As as I tell anybody who listens, “It Just Works”. I spent a long time agonizing before I bought the MacBook. Was I prepared to turn my back on Windows and become a follower of Steve? With things like Parallels and VM Ware, I could run Windows too, so that eased that issue (and there are two Windows applications that I absolutely must run: Visio and FrameMaker). So after visiting the local Apple Reseller and developing a case of what could be be described as “lust”, I picked up a Black Mac Book. Sorry, the white one just felt wrong, and I wasn’t quite prepared for fork out for a 15″ Mac Book Pro (not to mention that those babies are heavy to lug around).

Now, when people speak of Apple and OS X, everybody tends to think of its über-slick GUI; but under the hood its all unix. Not only is it unix (its Darwin which is based on BSD), its certified too. Its the real deal. Now, while I like eye-candy as much as the next dude, the combination of eye-candy atop and certified unix underneath get me more than a little excited.

Two years on, I spend 99.9% of my time in the land of OS X, and about 0.1% ssh’ing into my gentoo system to do some BOFH maintenance. So I’m ditching gentoo for FreeBSD, because two years of BSD on OS X have warped my mind and themy future is BSD/unix and not linux.

At the same time, the hardware running my gentoo systems is getting a bit old, so I’m replacing that too. Instead of getting some ugly el-cheapo black or beige tower, I’m going for a mini-ITX based solution using the Intel DC945GCLF2 board, which means a sweet dual core Atom-based system that is not going to make much of a dent in the electricity bill and take up hardly and room too.

Finally, wordpress 2.7.1 is available as a gentoo ebuild, so I’ve done the emerge and webapp-config dance, and upgraded this site.

The more eagle-eyed readers may have noticed my recent lack of posts to this site. This has been caused by a number of factors, not least of which is that I have been diagnosed with a bit of a medical condition and have been taking things easy whilst I pop the medication and wait for things to sort themselves out, which they should do, given time. Fortunately I was diagnosed very quickly and the treatment appears to be going well.

I received a couple of emails from people which have not only corrected a mistake or two in ftp-mfxx, but have also given me the necessary nudge to try and get this out as an RFC. I’ve updated the draft (available in publications) and submitted it to be published on internet-drafts… once there, I will try again to get the RFC Editor to publish it as a RFC.

Here is the announcement on the I-D list.