Well, coding has been on the back burner today as I rejig my hardware to recover from the damage done a few days ago to the sensitive electronics in my home network by the sinister Captain Power Spike. Amazon and Overclockers have been their usual speedy selves, so my wireless and ADSL connections are restored to their previous state, with the small advantage that the new modem can handle ADSL2+, should it become available over here (for a fee which doesn’t require the auctioning of one or more of my organs), and I’ve shunted the firewall / VPN responsibilities off the Linux server to the dedicated hardware.
I was juggling some network cables today as I tested the hardware I plan to use to replace my Linux server. The good news is the Linux server worked fine, I just plan to order a couple of 80Gb hard drives to mirror on it and it’ll be up and running. The bad news is that I noticed while rearranging said network cables that my wireless acces point was completely blank.
In between getting a new Linux desktop install up and running and fiddling with busted PSUs (I bought 2 new surge protection strips this morning), I’ve implemented what is likely to be the last new feature I’ll add to Dagon before release, ‘material schemes’. You can now associate any Technique you define in a material with a named ‘scheme’, the default setting being, rather unimaginatively, a scheme called ‘Default’. Material schemes are a way of switching the preferred techniques used to render your objects, allowing you to implement many different paths and choose between them.
I got home today to discover that the PSU on my mini-Linux server had blown, and it’s turning out to be very difficult to find a simple replacement - this particular PSU was one of the early small form factor ones made by Chyang Fun and as such nobody seems to stock them anymore. I could buy a completely new case but that’s a bit of a waste. I need this machine since it’s my main mail repository, test web server, and the machine I build OGRE releases on.
It appears that finally, the upper echelons of government (in the UK at least) are realising that the patent system is fundamentally broken and needs serious medical attention. It is, however, a little worrying to see a few too many quotes about reducing the complexity of the current system to encourage more patenting by SMEs, without explaining what to do about defensive patenting, patent hoarding by holding companies doing absolutely nothing productive, patent scatter-shotting where quality is irrelevent so long as a % goes through, and other such atrocities.
Well, I’m blogging this from Ubuntu 5.1 which I just installed this evening. It’s been a little while since I used desktop Linux, I’ve been using Debian or Gentoo on servers with a command-line interface alone for the past year and a bit and enjoy using them. However, the Ubuntu desktop install experience has left me somewhat underwhelmed, for a number of reasons: Installer wasn’t much above the bare Debian installer, and had a habit of just sitting on a blank blue screen whilst examining and / or formatting partitions, which can be unnerving.
This is another nice thing to see in VC8 since I’ve upgraded my machine: 5>—— Build started: Project: Plugin_OctreeSceneManager, Configuration: Debug Win32 —— 6>—— Build started: Project: Plugin_ParticleFX, Configuration: Debug Win32 —— 5>Compiling… 6>Compiling… 6>OgreScaleAffector.cpp 5>OgreTerrainVertexProgram.cpp 5>Generating Code… 5>Compiling… 5>OgreHeightmapTerrainPageSource.cpp 6>Generating Code… Yep, that looks a little odd because it’s interleaving the building of 2 projects at once - ‘5>’ is one build process, ‘6>’ is the other. This isn’t really news, but I didn’t have a HT chip before so never saw this until this week.
Well, the Microsoft marketing machine is in full swing again. I can only imagine the despair of MS engineers when they see what the marketing guys do to their creations. It’s recently been announced that Vista will appear in no less than six variations - that’s right, six. Now, we all know that market partitioning is one of the oldest tricks in the book for extracting the maximum revenue from your customers (latin: Bovinus Cashius), but this raises it to a truly art form.
Well, I finally got my SATA drive issues resolved. As briefly discussed in the comments of the last post, on looking at the detail of the drive I noticed that whilst mine was in the same model range of those affected by the bad implementation of NCQ (DiamondMax 10, model number starting with 6B), the firmware version on mine was a few notches below that supposedly affected by the bug (mine is BANC1B10, the affected version in this family is BANC1B70).
Well, my upgraded machine has been yanking my chain all evening. I’d resigned myself to losing the games drive and went to recreate the partition and format it, however XP was having none of it. The remaining 100Gb of my disk thus remains inaccessible, due to what seemed to be inexplicable format errors. Turns out now that there are actually known problems with Maxtor drives and the nforce4 chipset, for which Maxtor have issued a firmware patch, although you have to contact their support to get it.