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April 26, 2007

Happy Birthday to me.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 1:57 pm

Yes, I’m 22 today. Yay for getting older.

I’m at work all day, too. And my home computer seems to have broken itself when I rebooted it remotely. Lovely. I’ll have to fix it when I get home.

Went to some informational job meeting hosted by Nielsen Media. I passed on getting more information, the job really doesn’t pertain to my interests at all, although the perks were kinda nice. I’ll hold off until I can find something else.

Going to the casino at some point in the next couple days to celebrate. I’ve been stressed out, I could use some winnings.

April 20, 2007

HOWTO: Beryl/XGL inside of VNC on Ubuntu

Filed under: Linux — sherl0k @ 8:17 am

Now, I love me some Ubuntu. I also love me some Beryl. Sure the drivers can be a bit flaky, but I live with it. It’s a fantastic little app, makes using my computer more “fun” and also adds some more functionality to my sessions.

Up until now, I could never figure out how to get Beryl working while inside a VNC session. The screen would just freeze. Lurking around and checking out the many options, I found a solution that just plain works.

My method may seem a bit more simplistic than yours, but it can be mashed up into different methods (running it as a service, adding in a password, etc etc). Please note that I’m not using the built-in VNC function (aka vino) built into GNOME, for I am using XFCE – not to mention I’ve found vino to actually be a slower VNC server than this.

All you need to do is install x11vnc and run it from a console.


sherl0k@bakerstreet:~$ sudo apt-get install x11vnc
sherl0k@bakerstreet:~$ x11vnc -noxdamage

I SSH into home from school/work, and I don’t keep port 5900 open so I tunnel the port. This way, using a password is pointless (since 5900 can’t be reached from the outside). So every time I need to VNC into home, I just SSH in, run x11vnc with the -noxdamage option, and I get full Beryl functionality from within my VNC viewer.

If you want to get fancy and keep x11vnc running as a service, there’s a nice guide on the Ubuntu forums that will give you the step-by-step process. Just make sure that -noxdamage argument is added onto the “server_args” line.

April 19, 2007

Life confuses me.

Filed under: Life,Linux,Work — sherl0k @ 7:52 pm

First let’s start the week off with this gem between me and my friend Chris:

<Blown-Upp> i have a snow day today
<Blown-Upp> but it’s f*cking april
<Blown-Upp> not complaining but like
<Blown-Upp> it’s april
<Blown-Upp> I just had SPRING BREAK
<sherl0k|school> don’t you love our city

Yeah, snow day in the middle of April. That was Monday. Today, we had 60 degree weather. Good going, Mother Nature.

And as much as I love Ubuntu Linux, it’s so temperamental when it comes to using the closed-source NVidia driver. It wasn’t working before, but I had to reboot a couple nights ago so I decided to switch back to it for kicks just to see if it would work. And, it does. I can’t explain it, it wasn’t working beforehand and now it’s working again. Ah well, I have a spiffy desktop again. No complaints here.

Today was spent downtown at the Skills USA Competition. I was grading tests the entire time, 23 highschoolers taking 2 tests each, one being 102 questions and the other being 57. They were both based off the 300+ question A+ exam, so it was pretty tough. Only 2 people really scored well at all, but I’m not really sure the amount of material these kids were taught beforehand. I’m guessing they haven’t learned it all. The upside is that I was able to get a contact for a job, down in the Binghamton area working for the school system down there.

My car comes back tomorrow, I’m stoked about that. Definitely getting out this weekend, that’s for sure..

April 14, 2007

Wow I was productive today.

Filed under: Life,Work — sherl0k @ 11:29 pm

Swedish server all set up and ready to go? Check.

CS Server up and running? Check.

XP Box in the basement done? Check.

I guess having an extra day off is good.

Well that was overdue.

Filed under: Life,The Internet — sherl0k @ 1:40 pm

I disappeared for a couple days, if anyone noticed. Just needed some time to myself, my car needs a new engine and that’s going to run me $1000 and I’m without it for another week. Not exactly the best news. So between that and just other crap surrounding me, I just up and left for a couple days.

I potentially have a job offer though, with a local IT consulting firm. That would be pretty sweet if I landed a spot there.

I swapped the PCs in my house giving me the 1.6ghz in my room and put the 1ghz in the basement. Kept the cases in the same spot though, which means I had to swap mobo’s and other parts. My tower was so dusty because of the fact the heatsink is HUGE and was propped up right against the power supply, offering no air flow at all. Cleaned it out though, and the box is so much quieter now. Also the heatsink on this mobo is a lot smaller, so there’s more airflow. I fell asleep last night barely hearing the fans, it was refreshing. Also, this mobo has DDR RAM, which makes it go MUCH faster. I installed Xubuntu Feisty and this thing flies. The beta runs pretty well, haven’t come across any problems aside from the usual compositing errors with the NVidia driver, their method of enabling the binary driver is still a bit buggy. I had it working for a bit, I rebooted, and it stopped working causing X to crash. Back to the nv driver I go, at least until a new version of Envy is released or Ubuntu fixes the problem. I think it has to do with the newer kernel revisions not working with the NVidia driver, but I could be mistaken. I’m no kernel developer.

So the basement PC needs a fresh copy of XP installed on it, I’ll get around to that today. I don’t think it’ll take much of a performance hit in the sense of watching movies and playing the few games I have down there, hell it only had 256mb of RAM before, and it was playing x264 and DVD movies without a hitch. That’s all I’m worried about.

Playing around on the new server for sows. Not exactly an easy task, but I’m doing the best I can configuring everything the way it needs to be done. It’d be easier if I was physically there to do this, but with it being in Sweden and me being in New York is a bit of an issue. Ah well. Just another day at the office, I suppose. Reminds me, I need to get that Counter-Strike server up and running for Carlo… ugh. One more thing added to the list.

Oh right, it’s Saturday, and I’m not at work! I switched around my hours at work so now I have weekends off completely. I’m loving this. I haven’t had a weekend off in such a long time… it’s great. now I can get more stuff done. And with that… back to my multiple console sessions I go.

April 10, 2007

I swear, automobiles are out to get me.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 7:33 pm

The head gasket on my car went. It was going to happen sooner or later, it just sucks it happened now and not last week, when say, I had extra money. I have more coming this week though so it’s not going to be *too* bad. $500-$600 to fix it, but I’ll have the funds to cover it. My dad says that with this out of the way the car is destined to last a lot longer now. Which is a good thing. I need this baby to last me a lonnnnnng time.

Been getting progress reports back in my classes, I’m hovering above 3.5 which is just fantastic for me. It’s scary, I have midterms next week. These quarters just fly by. Reminds me, I need to make sure I can take 4 classes next quarter so I can graduate in September… they better let me. Otherwise there’s going to be hell to pay.

So I’ll be without a car for a couple days, but I got rides when/where I need them. Things could be much worse, I suppose. Still got a smile on my face, I can be thankful for that.

April 9, 2007

So, I update when I see good movies.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 11:28 pm

And Grindhouse was AMAZING. So yeah, go see it.

J-rod’s here. We’re just chillin’ out, blastin’ some Uniting Nations and slacking on homework. Ah, the good life.

Packages came in the mail for me today. Part for my PS2, so now I can use it again. My Threadless t-shirt came in too, The Communist Party. Always goes fast, so I made sure to grab it while they’re in stock. My DVD Swap Magic disc is dead though, so I gotta re-order one. Hey Jesus, looks we’re both in the same boat. I’ll make sure to order you one when I get mine, considering your birthday’s in a couple days. Packages were received too! Cheryl got what I mailed her out, she seemed to like it a lot. And I hope you guys know that I plan on giving everyone gifts when I get down there, it’s the least I can do.

Things are much better now than they have been in the past couple weeks. I hope the trend continues, I got high hopes.

April 5, 2007

Another day, another dollar

Filed under: Life,Work — sherl0k @ 8:32 pm

Work was excruciatingly long and boring for the most part, I think I’m going to grow tired of Thursdays quite quickly. Jenn’s with me though, so at least I have a coworker to spend time with. We just sit in classes and help kids out, acting like we know what we’re doing. Ah, the joys of being a workstudy. Ran some errands after work and just lounged around for the rest of the afternoon.

Finally reinstalled Half-Life. Now I remember why I stopped playing CS, it’s far too addicting D: But I had to reinstall it, need to figure out how to transfer a CS 1.6 install and get it running on the school network for a LAN game without connecting out to Steam. Tomorrow will be the day to get all that working. And before you ask, yes this is work-related.

Speaking of tomorrow, I have to be there at 9 tomorrow as opposed to the usual 10. Gets me out an hour early, which I suppose I can’t complain about. As long as the weather isn’t too bad I’ll go out for another run… or maybe I’ll just fall asleep. It’s usually one or the other for me, depending on how drained I am after I leave work.

I suppose my life as of late has just revolved around work work and more work. At least I get a vacation in a little over a month…

April 4, 2007

C’est la vie.

Filed under: Life,Work — sherl0k @ 8:42 pm

Figured I needed to update. Work’s going good, got some extra cash flow coming in so that’s always a plus. I’m able to actually buy things I’ve been waiting on buying for a long time, like more clothes, a part for my PS2 so I can actually fix it, and more RAM for the media PC.

School’s pretty good, nailing the work pretty well and doing a bang-up job on the quizzes. Still scares me that I’m so close to graduating. But that’s a whole ‘nother issue.

Aside from all that, I’ve just been lacking sleep a lot. I finally caught up to it last night and got like 14 hours, that was really needed. But, I guess I’m back to just letting my mind wander off to places it probably shouldn’t go. C’est la vie…

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