It snowed.  I took some pictures.

Long time no updates!  Well, sorry about that, I've been a little busy.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving, and didn't eat too much turkey.  I spent Thanksgiving with my grandparents, cousins, uncles, etc.  It's nice getting together with the family every once and awhile.

In other news, I finally took OpenBSD off my Sun Blade 100 and tried FreeBSD, then ended up with Gentoo Linux.  FreeBSD 5.1 was supposed to be better for the sparc64 arch, but when it gave me multiple kernel panics after the install (some IDE DMA issue, I think), I figured it was more trouble than it was worth.  So I installed Gentoo, and (even from stage3) about 10 hours later I had a fully-functional system.  I think there's a bug in the stock kernel that boots off the CD though, it kept hard-locking the system.  After I build 2.4.22 that seemed to go away.

Anyway, one more week of class for me.  Lots of presentations, tests, and papers.  Sounds like fun!

Apparently RPI is running an advertisement on Slashdot.  Har.

Speaking of mirrors ... two other members of the RPI-ACM's SAC (systems administration committee) and I successfully replaced the ACM's main fileserver on Friday.  Aside from serving home directories for ACM users, we're also providing some mirrors of open-source software.  Check out the mirrors page here.

I've added a PuTTY mirror.  Mostly for me, but might be useful for others.

As most of you at RPI already know, Phynd, one of the two campus search engines, has been taken down recently following a letter from the Dean of Students.  It has recently turned into a forum, for students to comment on the actions of RPI et al.  There's an archived of the letter(s) here.

Survey time!  I'm working on a "Motivation and Cyberspace" project for a psychology class I'm currently taking.  If everybody could help out (it'll only take a minute or two, tops) and fill out this survey of online communication, I'd be greatly appreciative.  Thanks!

Fun weekend so far.  Spent a good chunk of today configuring the RPI-ACM's new fileserver.  It's quite an impressive setup:

• Tyan Tiger MPX system board
• Athlon XP 2100+ processor
• 3ware 7800 IDE RAID controller
• 5x 120GB IDE drives w/8MB cache, RAID-5 (480GB total)

It'll provide space for home directories and Debian/FreeBSD/Gentoo mirrors, on a quick 100Mbit/sec connection.

In other news, I put up another miscellaneous photo gallery for kicks.