FremLog

Dearest Facebook,

You have no Linux users in your UI testing groups. Either that, or you ignore them. Or they don’t actually test. It’s one of those. I state this merely because Firefox 3 on Linux is not compatible with your new design. This has been tested in Arch Linux and the version of Ubuntu that came out back in April.

So anyway. The links on the main page don’t work. You must click a link, then refresh the page to be taken to your destination.

On a completely different note, it’s somewhat disappointing to see that you switched from one fixed-width style to another. I used to be able to have a web browser on the left sode of my desktop and IM windows on the right side. Now my browser needs to be about 170 pixels wider, so it overlaps. The worst part is how much seems to be dedicated to ads (a large number of which are either completely irrelavent to me or offensive. I shamelessly block them) and whitespace. Yeah, the new layout seems a lot cleaner, but a lot of that is because you bought the whitespace by making the user resize the window larger. And what’s up with 1/3 of the viewable area not being used while looking at wall-to-wall conversations? It would have been a lot more nifty if the layout flowed depending on how wide the window was.

Just some thoughts.

Sincerely,
–James

P.S. Oh, just remembered. That you know that guy Joe Minifeed? Why are you calling him “Mr. Wall” now?

P.P.S. Try loading the main page with the window not full length. Scroll to the right. Note the fun redraw issues. I’ll bet we see Firefox 3.0.2, “Facebook Edition” pretty soon.

Aforementioned “free as in my time” ZoneAlarm firewall was installed upon almost every Windows computer in the house, up until this evening. This evening, it randomly decided that it would be a really great idea to block all traffic to and from port 80. Since the free version of this product does not let you configure individual ports (a grevious inconvenance at junctures such as this), I was left with no option but to replace it.

Of course, this doesn’t actually affect me in any way except that I’m de-facto home tech support because people in the house become unhappy and suspicious when I’m the only one with functional internet access. It couldn’t be because I’m running Linux and never actually have to deal with all this ZoneAlarm nonsense, could it?

Get your act together, Zone Labs.

So, Microsoft has stated that they’d be willing to resume talks to acquire Yahoo if Yahoo’s current board of directors are replaced. link

Best quote of the article: “The Yahoo board just doesn’t get it: The girl won’t go to the prom with them.”

Oh, the irony.

A new wifi network appeared this morning, “Punknet.” Yes, Punknet. Seriously? I’m tempted to treat as I would an insolent newbie speaking in leet who endeavors to build a castle on a previously undiscovered tiny island just off the coast of my magnificent kingdom. Namely, by leading a raiding party party out to investigate and extend it either a boon of friendship or notification of doom. In this case, the signal pretty weak, so my glorious civilization and his rather less glorious might-be-mistaken-for civilization will probably be at peace. But one can never be too careful about anything with the word “punk” in it.

On the other hand, my wifi network is named after our cocker spaniel, so I suppose I can’t complain much about stupid names. Except that spaniels aren’t stupid. They’re amazing. How amazing? Cry  ’Havoc,’ and let slip the dogs of war!

Woah, so this is what sleep is like. *ahem*

Everything is all over the place in room. Most of my textbooks are about a fraction of a centimeter too tall to fit anywhere in my bookcases neatly. Random books I never use, various burned CD-Rs, and paper scrap litter various elevated surfaces; this is partially due to my philosophy that the easiest way to clean up a book case is to take everything off it, then put everything back on. The other part is due to the current complete lack of floor space. >_<

Summer of Code marches on! Except not. The new router I set up for family which seemed to work so nicely over Christmas break now seems barely capable of transmitting a signal which I can receive consistently. I get disconnected from our home network and reconnected to our neighbor’s stupid “linksys” signal every ten to thirty minutes. And just forget about it if someone is using the cordless phone or the microwave. A reconnect every ten to thirty minutes doesn’t seem too bad- and I keep telling myself this. And [sic, don't care] it woulden’t be, if I didn’t happen to be conversing with someone about how to fix it, or downloading an eclipse update, or something of that nature every time it happened.

Seriously! NetworkManager is driving me crazy. Why on earth can’t I easily blacklist this “linksys” network? It’s freaking weak, weaker than the signal I want to stay connected to. Wicd won’t connect to my network at all. It’s really rather messy. To compound the frustration, the wifi tool in XP seems to have a slightly longer timeout that NM, so I can stay connected in Windows but not Linux. The irony!

Also ironic: the IDE situation on Linux, which is usually my development platform of choice. I installed Arch Linux half way through this past semester because of issues with Ubuntu, and I’ve been absurdly busy since then. Thus, I’ve just been using Gedit and a terminal window with gcc, guile, or whatever compiler/interpreter the situation called for. No sense mucking around with a full fledged IDE for 200 line homework assignments. However, AbiWord has a lot of code. This is by far the most complex project I’ve worked on.

So, after getting thoroughly overwhelmed (and reminding myself that this was the planning/research phase and I didn’t have to start coding in earnest for another three weeks), I decided to take Eclipse for another spin. Problem: it won’t spin. After figuring out how Subclipse worked and getting things syncing off the AbiWord SVN, my wifi connection died, taking Eclipse with it mid-checkout. Now Eclipse freezes on the loading splash screen.

In between the lack of IDE and lack of stable internet connection, I’m getting pretty frustrated. So, I need a plan.

• Teh Internets
  • Construct a Pringles ™ antenna, slap it on the router and point it in the general direction of my laptop.
  • (Plan B) Install OpenWRT (or something similar) on the WRT54G router, then pump up the transmitting power. Pray that the router doesn’t overheat, the FCC doesn’t show up at my door, and that the router doesn’t brick. Any of these are bad as they mean potentially making the internet situation worse. Gah!
• Eclipse (Ideally, after fixing the wifi situation. It’s hard download packages and/or to flame people on IRC when one’s connection drops every other thing.)
  • Visit #archlinux. Complain. Get connection dropped. Be ignored by everyone. (Accomplished)
  • Run Eclipse and get some sort of terminal output. There must be a console debug argument or log or something somewhere.
  • If Eclipse won’t run at all, I’ll fall back upon the “pencil and paper” approach and try drawing out the relationship between things. You laugh, but it’s worked before.
• General Sanity
  • Unpack from school and get boxen out of room.
  • Find mouse. Battling my laptop’s touchpad is not aiding my mood.
  • Unruly mob! Unruly mob!
  • Get something done on AbiWord. Seriously.

That said, I’ve got quite enough to keep me busy right now. Over and out.

So, Facebook got a new feature, Facebook Chat. It looks a lot like Gtalk, but it can only be accessed online on the facebook website. It also comes with an annoying gray bar which covers the entire bottom of the screen and can’t be permanently removed. Joy.

So, I thought it would be a great idea to have Jabber support for this thing. I told them as much.

Will Facebook chat support Jabber in the future?

It would be a shame if it were browser-only or used some proprietary desktop client not compatible with Linux.

They replied.

Hi James,

Thank you for your interest in Facebook Chat.  Unfortunately, the features offered by Facebook Chat do not necessarily match those of other chat clients.  Additionally, Facebook Chat cannot currently be integrated with third party chat applications.  We will keep your suggestion in mind and welcome your feedback as we continue to improve this feature.  Let me know if you have any further questions.

Features? Facebook Chat has features? Additionally, I distinctly remember the word “future” being in there someplace. Meh. Open standards! Interoperability! Pretty please?

Today is third CSS Naked Day. Disable your style sheet and promote good webdesign!

Also, as long as I’m procrastinating, might as well post this too. It’s only like a week or two late.

• Diddy Kong is a lot of fun. I was surprised as how fun and balanced a character he was.
• But Sonic the Hedgehog is definitely my favorite character.
• Moves are way easier to pull off. Love chaining combos in midair? So much easier now.
• Way more floaty. Wee!
• Because there’s a lot more airtime, there’s a lot more focus on combat in the Y-axis. Sonic’s down stomping attack is used a lot.
• Sonic is now the fastest character. However, he doesn’t really move all that fast compared to the characters in Melee. Thus, everyone moves more slowly.
• The nerf bat hath smiteth Link, my previous main. He feels a lot less visceral than in Melee. Part of might be the animation cycles; in Meele it was totally possible to pull off two or three spins in a row on DK. Now, not so much. Things feel slower and smoother.
• SOOO much more of an emphasis on items. I have no problems with items normally, and Nintendo hit the sweet spot with the defaults in Melee. Now it just feels like too much.We’re talking like five smash balls in a single round, and two or three insane ships of doom, split into three pieces which everyone battles like crazy over. Yeah. When you play with items (he said, abusing italics), you fight for items. There are now at least five or six items of power equal to or greater than the stupid hammer. And they spawn all over the place! Seriously, it’s completely insane.
• However, you can turn it all down and/or off, so I’m not complaining too much.

So, when an Ubuntu kernel update severely messed up X.org last week, I was trapped with the horrors of Windows XP for a week. Clearly, something had to be done. I didn’t want to reinstall Ubuntu just to be faced with the same annoying X crash, and I do like to be running kernels with the latest security updates applied.

Enter Arch Linux. You can thank this fine fellow for reminding me of it’s existence. Though installation was much longer and painful than Ubuntu, it should be a lot less of a pain to fix if something breaks. Everything seems to be running fairly smoothly, though the interface fonts on Firefox 2 are in like 6 point font for no apparent reason, and sound is either muted or non-existent.  I’ll live; I just needed my coding environment back. I figure that if I have enough time to care about non-school-related details, I’ll have enough time to fix it.

Oh, It’s fast too. Noticeably faster boot, login, and package installation times. I’m pretty happy about pretty much everything associated with the switch.

All except for my 5 gigs of bandwith. *sigh* Alas, one-fifth of my five gigabyte per month bandwith allocation. I knew thee well.

My roommate and I are both nerds. My nerdy nature is probably already widely known to people online (due in part to this blog), and to associates in The Real World (due to my attire, language, topics of conversation, and general social awkwardness). However, I felt it necessary to establish that my roommate is with me on this.

So, what did we do with part of our extended, three day weekend? No, I can truthfully say that it had absolutely nothing to do with the dixie-cups. No! We were constructive! We built a Beowulf cluster!

Behold: Project FragMano.

While, in the past, a project to get a permanent gaming server running for my dorm floor was titled this, the majority of gamers are gone, and it’s much too cool a name to waste.

What you see here (aside from my back and amazing Hootenuity t-shirt) is our (poor) estimate of about 3.5Ghz of combined processing power. They’ll be running Ubuntu Linux (server install) with OpenMosix. We’ll use them for rendering Blender stuff, possibly a little folding@home, and (of course) seeing if we can program games that utilize the cluster effectively.

Right now, the task is getting the stupid things running, much less talking to each other. Two of them are missing vital organs such as hard disks, ram and cables. One of them is missing a processor. A few are under the mistaken belief that they have no physical storage media implanted within them.We’re working on it. Andy is a hybrid hardware/software guy, and I’m mostly software, so it works out quite nicely. My priority is installing Linux, recompiling the kernel, and getting the cluster software on as many of them as possible, while he figures out the happy hardware and network configuration. Or something. In theory.

We would like to note that there are now no less than eleven x86 based machines in the room. There are even more computers than that if you count our calculators, the hacked routers, and Andy’s game console. Isn’t being a computer science major just amazing?

Check out our Flickr stream for more photos of our progress as it develops.