Beagle made an oopsie.

The total filesystem capacity in the pic is double what it should be because my Windows partition was mounted. I found out that something was wrong when a nice little message popped up on the desktop informing me that my disk space for / was low.

 

Yay! I fixed my Xbox 360!

A couple of months ago my Xbox 360 broke. I’m not under warranty for some reason and I’m not paying $140 to get it fixed, so it’s been sitting under my TV while I tried to figure out what to do with it. Last night I ran across this pdf that describes how to fix an Xbox that has the symptoms that I’ve been seeing. I went out and got the parts, followed the instructions, and now my 360 seems to be working again. Before, it would give me the Red Ring of Death almost immediately upon startup. Now, I’m able to watch movies and get online without any problems (so far). I traded in all of my games when the thing broke, so I haven’t been able to test it with any games yet. Hopefully this fixes it for a while.

 

Windows and Gametap

Well, I’m back to Windows. The reason I’m back in Windows again is because of games. I wanted to try out Gametap, which is a subscription service that allows you to download any game they have and keep it for as long as you maintain your subscription. If this were music I wouldn’t use a service like this, but with games I have a tendency to play the hell out of them for a couple of weeks and then never touch them again. Gametap fits that play style perfectly. They’ve signed some good deals with some game publishers, so hopefully I’ll be saving money in the long run even though it’s a subscription service.

Unfortunately the Gametap client only runs on Windows. Since Vista’s backwards compatibility support for games is kinda iffy,  I decided to go back to XP. XP’s installer really does suck. The only downside of not using Vista is that I won’t be able to run DirectX 10 games. I read recently that steam is again picking up behind OpenGL, so maybe companies will move towards OpenGL 3 + SDL. Probably not, but one can always hope.

 

I installed Ubuntu

I decided to give Ubuntu another try yesterday/this morning when I accidentally nuked my Vista partition. This time it actually worked without kernel panicking! I was shocked and pleased. I’ve managed to finagle my way through getting the nVida drivers to work, installing mp3 support, getting java installed and updated, and getting Flash installed. Getting java installed drove me batty because the Sun Java packages update most of the links in /etc/alternatives, but not the important ones. For instance the link to the actual ‘java’ executable was still pointing to the gcj executable while the jre link was pointing to the new 1.6 JRE. Maybe that’s done on purpose for some reason, I don’t know.

 

(Re)Learning to code in C

I’ve decided to ramble a bit while I wait impatiently for the Bioshock demo to finish downloading.

I first learned to code in C during a semester-long class in college that somehow managed to wedge both C and general Linux usage into a single course. In retrospect, I would have preferred that the two subjects be given their own classes, but I digress. Anyway, since that class I haven’t really had an opportunity to use C, so my already meager skills have atrophied to the point where it’s like I never had them in the first place. Since I’ve been getting the urge to learn a new language for a while now, I’ve decided to put the urge to good use and relearn C.

The reaction I got from one of my co-workers when he learned of my plan threw me for a bit of a loop. He seems to think that my time would be better spent learning C++ or some other even more higher level language, almost as if learning C wasn’t really worth it anymore. That placed a seed of doubt in my head, so I spent a while looking up active projects that still use C. Here’s what I’ve found so far (some of which I already knew before I started looking):

• Python is both written in C and provides a C API that makes it fairly easy to embed in other projects and create custom extensions.
• Ruby is also written in C and provides a C API that makes it fairly easy to embed in other projects. and create custom extensions.
• A hefty chunk of SVN is written in C, and it provides an API that allows Subversion to be integrated with other projects.
• A lot of embedded programming is done in C.
• SDL is written in C.

There’s a ton of other stuff out there too. I feel a bit better about my choice now.

 

Blog This!

I’ll give this whole blogging thing another shot. Maybe I’ll actually think of things to write about this time.