I apologize for the website outage for the past 20 some hours.  The network where starfire resides had some routing issues recently.  Apparently, an entire subnet was accidently blocked from the outside Internet (commodity and Internet2).  Service has been restored, apparently.  With any luck, prolixium.com's SSL site will be back up soon, too.

Today's a nice day!  Get away from the computer and go outside and enjoy the weather.  That's where I was, too bad my skin doesn't really agree with the sun.  One of these days I'd like to get a tan instead of a burn.

So, I stumbled across this livejournal user the other day.  Recognize the background?  Nice of them to directly link to a photo from one of my galleries.  Thanks for um, asking permission.  I suppose I'll let this one slide.

In other news, you should watch Scrubs.  It's a good show, and quite funny at times.

I've added some photos, and rearranged the photos section of the site.  Ok, I didn't do much, but I just felt like posting something.

If you're in the mood for some comedy, I suggest reading The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

I was bored this evening, so I hacked my D-Link wireless access point.

It's always nice to be woken up early on a Saturday morning by the sound of case fans biting the dust.  Looks like a trip to Radio Shack is in order for today.

In other news, the new Avril Lavigne album, Under My Skin, is quite good.  I suggest you give it a listen.

After watching the season finale of Enterprise tonight, I have come to one inescapable conclusion, Star Trek is dead.  The end of the episode, "Zero Hour," reminded me of the end of the Planet of the Apes remake.  It was just plain bad, in a "what were the writers thinking?" sort of way.

No offence, but I think Rick Berman should be fired.

Well, I upgraded my Linux box recently to an AMD Athlon64 3200+ and my Windows box to an AMD AthlonXP 1800+.  Bit of a bumpy ride.  I'll give you a brief overview.

The FedEx truck dropped off the processor, motherboard [AOpen AK89 Max, nForce3-based], and KVM [IOGear MiniView 4-port USB] early Monday morning.  I also picked up a Maxtor 120GB SATA drive the same day from CompUSA.  The case and memory [2x Crucial DDR PC3200 512MB ECC DIMMS] came late last week.

I threw the system together only to find out nothing happened when I hit the power button.  It took me way too long to figure out I had forgotten to connect the P4 plug.  I thought only Pentium IV's used this ... guess I was wrong.  I booted up the Gentoo LiveCD installer, which to my surprise came with Linux kernel 2.6.5.  I followed the directions only to find out that after a failed emerge system, every binary that had been built produced a segmentation fault.  I looked around, and figured out that bootstrap.sh didn't work on 2.6 kernels, bootstrap-2.6.sh was the replacement.  After that, the Gentoo install proceeded smoothly.  Quite fast, I may add.

The IOGear KVM seemed to work fine, except somehow I had damaged my monitor (LCD) cable, and the screen showed a nice yellow tint.  Since my LCD panel was somewhat cheap, the analog cable was non-detachable.  I think I need to replace the monitor ... poking it only fixes it temporarily.

After having the Athlon64 system freeze up when doing large network transfers, I concluded the onboard R8169-based gigabit ethernet card was having issues.  I threw in an old 3Com card, and the problem went away.  I hope it's a driver issue.  This was around the same time that my SATA drive started disappearing.  The system would go into an infinite I/O wait sometimes, and other times the drive wouldn't be detected at boot.  Eventually, it stopped being detected altogether.  I've always had good luck with Western Digital drives, and this was the first time in over 5 years that I've bought a non-WD drive, so I figured I was going to have to replace it.  However, I swapped out the SATA cable that I was using (came with the Maxtor drive) with the one that came with the motherboard.  Bingo!  The Maxtor cable "just went bad."

Of course, my windows box had problems too.  When I was moving components around, apparently the ECC RAM hadn't been reseated properly.  Memtest86 scared me a bit, showing that most of one chip was bad.  I too a picture of it.  Reseating the RAM again fixed the problem.

So, yeah, that's the end of my story.  Since this whole thing was a pain in the butt, I figured I'd post the results of a small benchmark I ran, to make me feel good about the purchase.  I timed a bzip2 -9 of a 74MB MPEG video file on a couple systems.  Here are the times:

model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 240
cpu MHz : 1403.233
bzip2 -9 test.m2v 36.59s user 0.33s system 99% cpu 37.007 total

model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 4 processor
cpu MHz : 1535.887
bzip2 -9 test.m2v 98.75s user 1.71s system 88% cpu 1:53.23 total

model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.00GHz
cpu MHz : 1993.564
bzip2 -9 test.m2v 71.27s user 0.48s system 97% cpu 1:13.29 total

model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+
cpu MHz : 2000.015
bzip2 -9 test.m2v 27.07s user 0.22s system 99% cpu 27.312 total

As part of a graduation present, I recently ordered an AMD Athlon64 3200+ bare-bones system.  I'll be running Gentoo Linux on it, and hopefully won't encounter any of the lockups I've seen on other AMD64 systems running Linux.  We'll see ... stuff should come on Monday.  I'll post photos of the, um, box.