June 2006 Archives

I'm sitting outside on a balcony (it used to be my balcony), watching the city, sipping a scotch. I'm feeling melancholy. It's the end of an era.

I deleted my last post. It was made in anger, and I usually try not to post when I'm being unreasonable. I know I've never deleted nor edited a post before, but these circumstances quickly got extreme.

I'm heading to Austin tomorrow. I'll only be there until Tuesday. There's someone there that can help me get my head on straight. He's one of the last people that can help me. He offered to let me stay longer, but it's not feasible. When I get back, I don't know exactly what I'm going to be doing. I'm homeless, I guess. My ex-boss from my previous job offered to let me stay in a spare room at his place, but I'm going to try not to ask him for that. I hate handouts. I'm afraid I may have no other choice, though. Unfortunately, he lives pretty far outside the perimeter, so public transportation won't be an option. I won't be able to get to work.

The end result of this is that freebsdgirl.com is going down. I don't have the money or energy to run this server anymore. If I can find someone to host it, I'll try to continue updating, but my life has gone tipsy-turvy. I don't know where I'll be from one day to the next.

I wanted to think all my loyal readers for sticking with me all these years. Without you guys, I couldn't have made it through some parts of my life. The supportive emails I've gotten are still printed out, and I read them from time to time when I'm feeling sad. They give me hope.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?ForumName=wow-tech-support&ThreadID=925421

Shattered Hand:
Ciaral (Troll Shaman)
Taniana (Undead Mage)
Parian (Troll Priest)

Garona:
Taniana (Human Warlock)

I'm very rarely on Garona. Most of the time, I'm playing my shaman. Horde 4 Lyf!

wow_addon_update.pl is a script to automatically download updated UI addons from http://ui.worldofwar.net, one of the main addon repositories for WoW. This quickly became essential after dealing with updating 50+ addons after a major patch. :)

Requirements:
perl, LWP::Simple

Configuration:
Edit the script and change the $config and $download_dir variables to point to the correct paths. You'll need to create the config file manually. Each entry must be on a seperate line.

The format is: <addon name> :: <id> :: <revision date>

<addon name> is the name under which the downloaded data is saved.
<id> is the addon id as defined by 'id=' in the url of the addon on ui.worldofwar.net.
<revision date> is the string following 'Last Updated' on the addon page. Initially, set it to 1 to force a download of the addon.

Example Initial Config:
flexbar :: 62 :: 1
atlas :: 400 :: 1
titan panel :: 1442 :: 1
auctioneer :: 137 :: 1
gatherer :: 277 :: 1
sct :: 75 :: 1

Download

Although it's none too functional, at least I've got a kernel I know will boot 100% of the time.

After I managed to get FreeBSD booted again (by rebooting about 20 times), I recompiled my kernel without APIC and without SMP. Even on the rare instances when I could get both CPU's to initalize properly, the second one still wouldn't report properly later. (cpuid)

dmesg from latest -CURRENT build

It's detecting two mice and two keyboards on the USB bus, although only the first detected has the proper product ID. moused won't work with /dev/ums1 at all, and if I specify /dev/ums0, it doesn't work properly. The pointer only appears if I hit the mouse button, and it slowly moves down the screen until it hits the bottom, randomly highlighting things along the way. The same behaviour occurs in X, even if I tell it not to use sysmouse.

ACPI isn't really functional, either. ASL and DSDT.

The internet wireless showed up as ath0 with no problems at all. yay! Internal gigabit ethernet wasn't quite so lucky. I think the sk(4) driver could be easily modified to support the Marvell Yukon 88E8053 driver, since the sky2 driver in Linux seems to be handling it properly.

I've been trying to get the ng_ubt(4) driver working with the internal bluetooth for a few days now, but Apple has quite a bit of weirdness when it comes to how their USB devices report. I have got it working in linux with a one line edit to the usb bluetooth driver, but FreeBSD I haven't been quite so lucky with. Maksim Yevmenkin, the author of ng_ubt(4), has been kind enough to take a look at what I've come up with so far, so hopefully we'll be able to come up with a working patch.

There's a few more files I've posted about the MacBook Pro - sysctl -a, smartctl, and pciconf -lv output.

Here's what I've been through so far today:

Tried to boot with new 6.1 ISO. Locked after pretty loader boot menu. Reboot.

Tried disabling ACPI. No luck. No text at all is displayed after the menu. Reboot.

Popped in a 7 snapshot CD. The laptop actually boots past the menu this time, yay! But then it gets a message about how AP #1 (PHY# 1) has failed, and asks me if I'd like to panic. Hell no, I don't want to panic. I press n - Nothing happens. D'oh. The keyboard is handled over USB. Go figure. Reboot.

Do a little bit of poking around on teh google, and decide to disable ACPI. Laptops without ACPI are completely pointless, but so's having a laptop that can't boot FreeBSD. I boot with ACPI disabled, and it gets past the initial processor magic. Everything appears to be going fantastic, then it panics with some screwed up mutex error from sys/vm/vm_fault.c. Whatever. Reboot.

Boot up again, and forget to hit any buttons on the keyboard because I'm talking to someone on IRC on my desktop. I look down, and I've got an installer screen.

Today is just full of weird stuff. I'll update again on my progress later.

ST. PETERS, Missouri (AP) -- A woman angry that her new puppy had died pushed her way into a dog breeder's home and repeatedly hit her on the head with the dead Chihuahua, authorities said. (Link)

I looked at my referer list in awstats, and I saw anti-web.ws as one of the top ones. Check that shit out. I think it used to be a warez site. My first thought was that it was a troll, but I can't figure out what they are trying to accomplish.

I'm sure you've already heard this a million times today, but Happy 6/6/6!

Surprising that a few of my hard drives in my file server failed yesterday instead of today. If you've got an account on nymph, it should be back up within the next few days. I checked S.M.A.R.T on the drives, and they were reporting a temperature ranging 63-68C for each drive. We're going to attempt to find a better cooling solution. Although there was HD failure, no data was lost, as I had copies of some fo the data, and managed to pull the rest of it off. nymph account holders are encouraged (begged) to submit hard drives or monetary donations, as we're now out a 250G and soon possibly a 120G, down to 8 drives. We will be consolidating drives into the 4u over time, as the data shuffle is a bit immense and time consuming considering the current lack of space.

The Truth For Youth.

myspace stylez!@#