Insentricity

Goodbye Gift Box Server... Hello Wishzilla.com!

I'm sure most of you probably already saw the email that we sent out to announce it, but for everyone else: The Gift Box Server has finally got a facelift! The new site is at Wishzilla.com.

For those of you who may be new to this thing (or just in need of a refresher), here's how it works: you and your family members each set up an account, and then start making wishes for what YOU want. Whenever you think of something, you can simply add it to your Wishlist. If you see it online, you can just use the new Wishzilla.com magic Wish Getter, right there from any website, no need to go back and forth! Then your family members can look at the things on your list and choose which wish they would like to fulfill for you, and you can do the same for them. But don't worry, this won't eliminate the fun of the surprise, and it's still the thought that counts: you choose which item you would like to give, and when you want to buy it you can lock the item away, so nobody else will buy it... all without the recipient knowing anything about it! This removes the stress from the holiday season and ensures many happy exchanges, without the hassle of dealing with returns later.

Some of the new features are integrated images, mobile devices, and multi-family. Put images on your wishes! Let people see exactly what it is you want. In the store and want to see what someone wants? Well there's iPhone and other mobile device support too. Plus, now you don't need to sign up for multiple accounts, a single account can be a member of multiple families! No longer do you need to maintain several different gift lists.

Come sign up and make gift shopping a lot easier.

New Air Conditioner

5:45pm: It's installed and running

It took them all day to get the duct work and plumbing sorted out. It was 88 in here when they started it up, but within 30 minutes it was down to 86. The old unit would have never been able to cool it off at all if I let it get over 80.

11:50am: Looks like it will be a challenge to get the ductwork to match up

11:30am: Recycler shows up to drag away old unit.

9:15am: Old one goes out

Another guy came with a cart with big inflatable wheels. Just as I went out to snap the picture he climbed on top to ride it and add a counter balance to keep it from sliding off the back of the cart.

8:15am: Arrival

I'm not sure yet how they're going to get it around the house to where the old one is. They say it weighs around 400 pounds. There's sidewalk in the front of the house, but the unit is 4 feet wide and the sidewalk is pretty narrow by the bushes.

Roman numerals and back again

Remember way way way way back in the days of the Apple ][, one of the magazines used to have a contest to write one and two line programs in Applesoft BASIC that did neat things? I think it was Nibble, but I'm not positive. Well anyways, here's a program that I wrote that I should have entered, but never did.

The reason I wrote it was because at the time, one of the Apple ][ magazines had included a sample program listing that would convert decimal numbers to roman numerals, as well do the opposite, convert roman to decimal. I was appalled by how long the program was, it went on for page after page after page. It seemed to me it could have been much much shorter. And so there was the challenge.

It turns out I was able to condense the whole thing down into two lines. Yes two! And it still accepts either a roman numeral or a decimal number, and converts it to the other. Sorry about the listing, it was a struggle to get the emulator to even cooperate enough to get the file transferred and get a listing.

I dug this program out because I need a quick & dirty converter for a new program and I thought I'd take a look to see how I did it and how I got it so small. Unfortunately it looks like I used a lot of dirty Applesoft tricks so the code isn't all that re-usable. Oh well, it's still cool.

Atomic Clock Radio

I have a really old clock radio that my grandparents gave me when I was kid that I still use to keep time in my bedroom. It's so old that it's from before manufacturers figured out to stick batteries in to maintain the clock when there's no power. Every time the power goes out the clock resets itself to 12:00am.

The clock only has two ways to set the time: fast and slow. Fast moves ahead about 1 hour every second, and slow is 1 minute every second. If you happen to overshoot on fast then you have to go 24 hours around to try again. It's a pain but the power doesn't go out too often. Usually.

Lately the power has been going out a lot and I've gotten tired of resetting it. I kept thinking it would be nice if the computer could fix it for me. What I decided to do was plug the clock into an X10 appliance module and stuck a Firecracker module on a Linux server I have nearby. Using Heyu and At, I told the computer to turn off the clock at midnight and turn it right back on. It worked great! Now I just have to try not to accidentally push the button on an X10 remote that turns it off...

I need my own lumber mill

Last Friday I woke up to find 3 large branches had been torn off my maple tree during the big storm that had happened. Looking out the window they didn't seem that big, but when I got out next to them, they were huge!

I don't think the damage to the fence is too severe since it's just a wire fence. But the branches are much much too big for me to drag away. They will need to be cut up before I can move them. I'm hoping I can find a way to slab the bigger parts and save them for woodworking projects.

Just for fun I looked at the free stuff on Craigslist the next day, and it was just full of "Free wood" ads. Lots and lots of trees had been blown down. And not just fir trees, lots of hardwood. Makes me wish I had one of those portable lumber mills so I could go harvest all that free lumber!

Retaking my mailbox

I've had the same email address for well over 12 years. It's probably on every single spammer's list that's out there. I've been getting over 500 spams a day for a long time and I've had to resort to sorting spam out into another folder because my inbox was constantly alerting me about new mail.

Of course, sorting spam into another mailbox doesn't work. All you end up with is a huge mailbox so clogged with junk you'll never find a message that was falsely identified, if you somehow find out it got in there by accident. Plus it still means that you're looking at every single spam, so what's the point? It has been my goal for a long time to get rid of this system and block spam before it even gets to my mailbox.

Over New Year's, I spent a lot of time tweaking and adding new spam blocking systems. I have to say, the new methods were very successful. I was able to go from 500 spams a day to only 40 spams. Over a 90% reduction! At this level I was finally able to get rid of sorting into a spam box. Now I don't have to worry about false positives. Spams that are blocked are also now being blocked at the SMTP level, so if something is falsely identified, the sender will get a bounce back and know that I never got their message.

It's been strange for the last week. I keep expecting a ton of spam, but my mailbox is just as quiet as it was when I was sorting. And yet, there's no sorting and I have no spam box! It's just unbelievable! At this point I'm thinking maybe the couple of clients that are using an anti-spam service should be switched to this setup.

Warm Floors Cubed

I've had a Rubik's cube floating around the office at Warm Floors since almost as long as I've worked there. It was given to me by the owner of the company after he picked it up at some computer show. It's a fairly standard cube except that it is covered in Microsoft ads. It's slightly harder to solve than a standard cube because you have to make sure the center tile is rotated the right way.

The poor cube got trashed because the other people in the office got tired of me always solving it. It ended up covered in red stickers on every side for a while, and then when they tired of that they pulled all the red stickers off which took off several of the original Microsoft stickers too.

Over the weekend I decided it was time to do something new with the cube, so I made new stickers with employee faces on it. I also threw in a Santa face since it happens to be Christmas time and they had just put up decorations at Warm Floors.

It's even harder to solve now, since once the faces are all mixed up it's hard to tell which piece goes with which person. But it's not impossible. I found solving the Santa side first was easiest since once he's done the rest pretty much fall into place.

I think it turned out really cool, and if it wasn't so much work cutting out all the stickers, it would be neat to make lots of them with different pictures for stocking stuffers.

I hate Tetris

Today I ran out and got myself a tiny little chest freezer. It was the smallest one that Sears carries. I've been considering getting one for probably 5 years or so, and I finally did it. I was originally thinking I would put it in the garage, but it's so small it fits real nice right next to the washing machine. Very convenient since it's right off the kitchen.

Why today? Because when I went grocery shopping today at SaveMart, they were giving away free frozen turkeys to anyone that spent $99 or more. Of course when I got it home, no matter how much shuffling and unboxing of frozen items I did, there was no way to fit the turkey in the freezer too. Since I had been thinking of getting a freezer so long, I figured it was a good enough excuse. Plus it was not very expensive.

It's a 5 cubic foot model. When I looked online I thought it would be really tiny, but when I got in the store I was surprised how big it is. It's so small though that the guy that brought it out didn't even need me to put the lift down on my truck. He just bear hugged it and lifted it right in.

Now I need to get even more frozen stuff since I have plenty of freezer storage. Rob claims the Bel Air store near him still stocks the 8-inch round Freschetta pizzas. If that's true then I will definitely be stocking up. But I still don't know what I'm going with a 13 pound turkey.

Pizza Protector

I made this shield to protect the crust of my pizza from drying out too much while cooking. In the past I've used aluminum foil to protect the crust, but it's a lot of work to prep the pizza, and it tends to stick to the cheese and I end up with aluminum bits or else tearing off big chunks of the pizza. For a few years I was able to do without shielding since the Freschetta 8" pizzas didn't cook for as long. Unfortunately Freshetta discontinued their 8" pizzas, and I'm stuck with the DiGiorno which isn't quite as good.

The DiGiorno pizzas require a much longer cooking time or else you end up with a pizza that's still cold (or even frozen) in the middle. But the long cooking time ends up drying out and making the outer crust rock hard. With the shield in place the crust comes out cooked but nice and soft.

To make the shield I cut two 8.5" disks out of 3/4" and 1/2" wood and stacked them together. I then wrapped them with a 2.75" wide strip of aluminum and secured the ends together. I screwed the aluminum to the side of the disk and then hammered the whole thing over so it was flattened on the top of the disk. Presto, a pizza shield!

I cut off one head and two grow back in its place

After many years of junk collecting, I have acquired a large number of Matrox Millennium II cards. These cards have a rather unique feature in that you can put more than one of them in a computer and use them at the same time. Those of you that used to run NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP no doubt recognize this card. In all I have five of the Millennium II cards. I also have an AGP Millennium G200 which also supports the multi-card feature.

In order for this to be a "worthwhile" demonstration, I decided I would try out OPENSTEP, Linux, and Windows XP. I cobbled together a stand of sorts to arrange the six monitors. It's nothing special, I expect this to be a temporary setup so ergonomics weren't much of a factor. I can't look at the monitors on top for long because they are so high that it strains my neck.

The motherboard I chose is an older Tyan S2460 with dual Athlon 1200 processors. The monitors I'm using are three 15" monitors and three 17" monitors. The 17" monitors are all identical, the 15" monitors are two random CRTs and an IBM T55D digital LCD.

To start off I thought I'd boot KNOPPIX and get the disk partitioned while I wait for the latest Ubuntu distro to download. The kernel on the KNOPPIX 5.1.1 disk did not like so many cards. It would immediately reboot the computer as soon as the kernel was loaded. Without the extra cards KNOPPIX would boot fine. By the time I had given up getting KNOPPIX to boot the Ubuntu had been downloaded and burned.

Ubuntu was able to boot up fine. Interestingly, while the text console came up on the G200/T55D in the AGP slot, X11 decided that my video card was the first PCI card. Switching back and forth between X11 and the text console via the keystrokes would switch back and forth between monitors. When the text console was active the 17" monitor turned off, but when X11 was active, the T55D stayed on but the screen was blanked out.

Ubuntu did not detect the additional cards by itself. I couldn't find any GUI or control panel to let me add the additional cards or arrange them. This meant I had to delve into manually configuring X11, a task which I really loathe. I hate all that modeline and sync rate crap. I did find this guide which does a good job detailing most of the process of getting multi-head going.

I cut & pasted the section relating to the working video card to try to bring a second one up. Both displays came up, but they are mirrors of each other! Uh... That's not what I wanted. Checking over the xorg.conf I noticed I forgot the RightOf option. Corrected the error and tried again and I had two monitors working the way I expected.

After getting two screens to work I copied & pasted to pick up the other three Millennium II cards. It again only brought up two monitors. Thinking maybe it was a limitation that I could only have two (although I've seen photos of at least five on other sites), I tried again with only the center and the left. Only got the center that time. So I tried again with only the left. Xorg complained there were no screens detected and listed out all the cards it found and said there were no Device sections for them. Wait, what's this? They're listed in decimal and I punched in hexadecimal just like I got from lspci. Changed it and now I get all five displays.

I was unable to get X11 to use the sixth display. Lots and lots of searching and fighting with the config file yielded no results. Every single time X11 fired up, it would clear the screen, pause for a second, then shut the T55D display off. The best I can tell is that no-one has ever succeeded in getting the T55D working under Linux. Ever.

The next thing to try was XP. After XP finished the text console part of the install it had no problems switching to the graphic installer. XP was quite happy to display graphics on the T55D without shutting it off. During the hardware detection phase the monitors connected to the PCI cards started snapping on one-by-one, but they did not display anything on them yet. After finishing the install all I had to do was go into the desktop properties and check that I wanted to expand my desktop onto the additional screens and drag them around to match my physical layout. I didn't have to go online and download drivers or anything. I guess that's an advantage to using older hardware, the drivers are stock. I was able to get all six screens working under XP without any hassles.

For the heck of it, I tried playing a video clip and dragging it around between the heads. I could only play it on three of the heads, the AGP and the first 2 PCI slots. On the others it would either stay black and start again when I got it back onto a working head, or else it would stop playing and WMP didn't know it had stopped. Changing the hardware acceleration options in WMP made no difference. This might be a problem with sharing IRQs, I don't know.

To install OPENSTEP I had to remove the G200/T55D. With the G200/T55D installed the graphic text console would shut the T55D off. With the card removed and the console coming up on another display, I discovered that I couldn't install OPENSTEP onto the 13gig drive I had already set aside a partition for.

OPENSTEP is so old it couldn't count high enough and wasn't able to see the partition table of the disk. I dug out a 4gig HD just to install OPENSTEP onto. Still didn't like it. Mostly installed but still had problems calculating the size during the final step. Broke out OPENSTEP on Parallels to make a disk image the same size as the partition I had set aside on the 13gig, and imaged the whole thing over. No go, wouldn't boot.

Found an option in the BIOS to change the disk type from "Other" to "DOS". Made OPENSTEP a lot happier, it realized I had more than a 200meg disk. I was able to fully install, although it still didn't see the original partition table. I let it wipe out the partition table since I expected I could recreate it, and if not I had already tried the other two operating systems anyway. (As a side note, I was able to use gpart to recover the Linux partition. I couldn't recover the XP partition since the OPENSTEP partition now overlapped it.)

Once I installed the 4.10 "beta" MGA driver OPENSTEP was happy to detect all five of the Millennium II cards. Unfortunately there was a bug in the Screen preference and I was not able to rearrange the screens to match my physical layout. I probably could have gone in and manually changed the appropriate settings, but at this point it wasn't really worth it. I was able to see that all the cards were working which was good enough.

While having five or six heads is certainly cool, this was only a temporary setup. I sort of would like to find a way to justify keeping the six headed monster, it might be fun to make a nice stand (maybe out of K'Nex?). Unfortunately none of the operating systems I tried out are ones that I can sit in front of and work with all day. I don't really have any use for Windows, there aren't any programs on it that I use that much. Linux is at least a unix, but the GUI still blows. I manage around 20 Linux computers, but of them, only one is connected full time to a monitor, and that's my MythTV box. OPENSTEP 4.2 is just too dated with no USB support, no DPMS support, no modern software, etc. If I could run MacOS X with six heads, I'd probably do it, I still use a Mac with a G4 450 every day as my main computer simply because I can run it dual headed.

In the end this project was of course a stupid waste of time.

Stupid Ways to Waste Time • 4 Comments/Trackbacks