Facebook Chat

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?

Return to ArchLinux

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.

FragMano

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.