Aynjell's journal

Out of boredom the other day, I decided to finish the rest of my Fullmetal Alchemist episodes. Oddly enough, I had paused right where everything starts coming to a close, and as a consequince, when I finally started watching them again I couldn't stop. At least, not until fatigue overpowered me and I layed down to a restful nights sleep (my first I've had in almost 2 months; I actually dreamt!).

When I woke up, the fist thing on my priority list was to finish my remaining 3 episodes. What I got in that 1 and a half hour of programming was the biggest emotional rollercoaster I've ever experienced.

Particularly with a character named lust. (slight spoiler)

She is a paradigm amongst the creatures known as homonculi. Not only was she beatiful, but she had something that the other homonculi didn't:

Memories.

A homonculus is created with a failed attempt at a human reincarnation using alchemy, and being what they are, they aren't the person they were born from. They don't have a soul, and all they want is to get one. Lust was the truest to those desires, but like the rest was controlled by "that person". She was sent to do That Persons bidding, and over time realized she'd never be compensated, and in a moment of weakness, stirred up a billion different feelings in me...

If she doesn't have a soul, why does she have the feelings and thoughts that she has? How does she have memories? Of course, all too many questions arise, and in short order, she's gone. In the span of one episode, she became one of my favourite characters.

Anyway, this is quite possibly the most beautiful series I have ever seen. Not only does the show make me like every single character and give all of them depth, but it made everyone out to be good...

(Actually, now that I think of it, the only one to not receive depth was gluttony) I've dropped a few names would be similar to the seven sins, so I must explain. At any given time, it would seem that only 7 homonculi roam the earth (their earth), each of them is named after one of the 7 sins (seeing as how human alchemy is a sin).

Anyway, I could not dare to let you in on my secret without intent to share:

The Music
The Show

For the show, you will need bittorrent. Install bittorrent and double click on the file you are linked to by "The Show". :]

This post was edited by Aynjell on Jan 29, 2005.

Okay, as is expected with any computer build...

I had some issues. First and foremost (and the current needle stuck in my ass) is the sound card that came with the motherboard. Apparently it sucks balls in both windows and linux:

Linux, unless aoss and dmix are used, can only dump one sound through it at a time. This is bad, because XMMS going while I play UT can be a good thing, for the most part...

Windows, well, lets put it this way: A BSOD a day keeps the UT2K4 player away. That's right, DX9C seems to fuck with my sound card via UT2K4's calls. This is bad, because playing UT is good (with freinds, by myself it's balls)...

Then there is the display. As to whether it's the adapter or the display itself, I can't say. But, Nothing outside of 1024x768 and 1280x1024 veiws at full screen. This is absolutely irritating, and I'd love to find a cure to this...

This post was edited by Aynjell on Jan 21, 2005.

As this thread's title would imply linux has crashed on me, several times, even. During the course of oh, say, 2 days maybe 10 times, it has up and quit. Upon reading some fairly cryptic error messages, I noticed the words paging and cache. "Shit!" I thought, that couled be the CPU or RAM. Either way, it's hardware failure.

So, as any linux liveCD should, gentoo comes with a memory tester built into their install CD. Turns out, that a very specific memory location consistently failed, and these errors were only noticed at the end of each flyby on the RAM.

So, I did what any crazy son of a bitch who wants thier computer to work would do: He cut it open and took out the second stick of RAM. Upon my return to memtest86 it was faster (due to less RAM to test) and it never errored once. Faulty RAM, and kingston at that?

Damn it. I just hope the company I purchased from has a decent RMA policy...

I've never installed linux on a computer and gotten everything working. Hell, the computer I have now is not exactly entirely "working." (To elaborate, I don't have the other two buttons on my mouse working, although the solution has in fact been reached, and I am not entirely sure as to how to mount anything of type USBFS. i.e. so called "Flash Drives.") I can say that the functionality is at a level that I am satisfied with. Everything that I'd use regularly is more than usable. Is there a way to complian about that?

Well, there were a few kinks in the setup:

First and foremost, was my n00b attack. My video card drivers can't be implemented by using the command xorgconfig, no you have to manually add them in (Via nano or whatever text editor). Well, this was simple enough, but I could have sworn something wasn't working until I realized I wasn't an administration level account (i.e. root). I was editing a file that I couldn't write to! With that resolved, i received a hefty GLXgears reading of 11450. Nyum, nyum! :]

Next up, came the my sound card. Well, as a certain NAO member under the alias contingencyplan put it:

"aRts does not play well with others..."

When I compiled KDE and ran it, for some reason, my sound system didn't work like it should, and alsa started to throw a fit. Well, in the KDE control center, I had to turn the sound system off, thus making KDE (and aRts) unawares of my sound system, putting all of my speakers back into action. Harrah for me! :]

Lastly, DMA is a pain. A freind of mine who also has an account here, mystilleef, had to offer me some hdparm settings to enable on boot time. This as I could only beleive (but cannot readily verify) sped my computer up. Not sure if it did, but I'd like to think it did. :]

Well, it installed, and works quite well. Thanks to any and all for the help you gave me!!

Now, can anyone help me to understand linux firewalling?

I'd love to harden my system, and I'm well on my way to doing so (I'm recompiling the entire system as we speak with -fPIC (for prelinking), 3dnow, mmx, and other various use flags to increase the CPU, and HDD performance. I can't wait to instate prelinking! The benchmarks for prelinking are awesome, and increase most program load times by a great deal...

Well, I finally did it. I managed a fully functional computer within the confines of linux. Furthermore, this is with recent hardware as listed here.

The hardware is yeilding great results in the scantly informative but oddly reassuring benchmark GLXGEARS. So far, my highest rating was somewhere in the range of 14500 and the lowest was 11500. this is of course assuming I don't count the times the CPU was getting chewed up by some random compile. This machine is super fast when it comes to gaming, and linux does not change that.

I'm so happy. So, what does everyone elses computer yeild them in GLXgears?

This post was edited by Aynjell on Jan 11, 2005.

Danielle

Gentoo Linux
Altec Lansing 5051 5.1 Speakers
Saitek Eclipse
Logitech MX700
NEC 17" Accusync LCD LCD72v x2
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ [Socket 754; 2.42 Ghz 512kb L2]
Kingston Value RAM KVR400X64C3A [512 x 3 PC 3200 CL3 @ DDR360]
EVGA e-GeForce 6800 [128MB/DDR]
Audigy 2 ZS Platinum
DFI Lan Party UT nF3 [nForce 3 250gb]
LG Dual Layer [16X DVD+-/RW]
Lite On CD-ROM [52x]
Western Digital IDE HD [160 GB x 1]
Codegen Briza Case [Modded, No Case Fans]
MGE Vigor PSU [500 watts]

This post was edited by Aynjell on Aug 02, 2005.