Long time, no post...REDUX

So, much has happened.

Uncle Sammy here is gonna be a dad. Although I'm very excited (partially since I thought I'd sterilized myself back when I was a bad bad kitty doing bad bad things), that was a pretty big jolt. The ultrasound or whatever it was was WAY f-ed up, holmes...The little one in there was just kicking back until suddenly it's choppers went ga ga ga, then swung an arm up. I just about crapped myself and fainted.

So since February I've:

1. Moved from Portland, Oregon to Ambridge, Pennsylvania
2. Got a contract, then full-time developer job
3. Got a place in Pittsburgh
4. Got pregnant
5. Got married (shotgun-style)
   

Anyway, this was always meant to be yet another tech-centric blog, but if anybody does actually read this and want to know any more about 1 - 5 above, do a comment and I'll counter-comment, etc. Now, moving along to tech crap:

First of all, I'm salty with Linux right now. I just got a $300 eMachines T5230 and an nVidia 8500 (plus a 22-in widescreen Acer monitor). Very tasty sweet deal. But, I wanted to fully exploit the 64-bit Athlon in there, as well as utilize the hardware virtualization. Thus, I wanted KVM. Now, my awesome apartment / rowhouse I'm renting said they had a networked house. That was semi-false: the contrators or whoever wired the house with cat-5, but just for the phones. So I just went and bought meself a Linksys wifi router and Ralink USB wifi thumbdrive.

Tried Ubuntu. Couldn't install nVidia binaries, nor did the repository ones work. Tried CentOS 5. Fucked up my hard drive partitions. Mandriva, ok this one worked...initially.

Mandriva was the easiest of the three to install. The only initial problem was the xorg.conf file needed to be changed slightly to get KDE up and running. I went in and got rid of any DRI references and changed the device from "nv" to "vesa". Then I could start X. I could not get nVidia's drivers installed properly on there, but went instead into HardDrake, selected the (currently undetected) video card, and used to config tool to select Vendor->nVidia 8300 - 8800. Then it worked like a champ.

The Ralink was pretty damn easy once I decided to ditch WPA as the setup and go to WEP, as wpa-supplicant sucks right now. I downloaded the drivers from Ralink's site and copied rt73.bin into the /lib/firmware directory. ifconfig showed rausb0 online already, so I iwconfig'ed the essid and key to open (or restricted worked, as well). I then went into Control Center->(something)->wifi something and got the prompt for the WEP key. I entered that shiz nit in and BAM! Gots me some internet.

Then came the problem of getting KVM set up. I had already changed my repositories through the Source Media Manager (or whatever it's called), and then did a search for KVM. Nothing. I instead installed GCC 3.4 and changed the symbolic link /usr/bin/gcc to point to 3.4 instead of 4. I downloaded KVM and tried to build. Nope.

At any rate, I'm going to try a last-ditch effort using Fedora. I'd really like to get a BSD virtualization workhorse up, but I'll wait until they get the KVM ported.

To any Linux users who may come across this: please, any suggestions to make my eMachine a virtualization monster would be very, very welcome. One caveat: no vmware. I think it's a great product, but seem to notice way better performance with both Virtual PC and VirtualBox. VirtualBox seemed too unstable last time I used it, but perhaps it's come a long way. Xen I have no idea about.

On the programming front, I've been itching to try F#, particularly with some managed DirectX action, but I don't currently have a project in mind for it. I've also come across Cw (C-Omega) and am a bit curious about this extension. This also seems REAL cool.

So, this entry got rid of the nagging itch to post. I'm hoping to post more frequently again, now that my vacation's over. Bye bye, now.