paamayim nekudotayim

I have agreed to take a part time job with a startup (a one-man startup, really). This would be no different than those freelance projects I’ve taken in the past, except that the guy I’m working for (and with) is rather knowledgable in software architecture and development. He has a really careful planning, design and documentation of the project. I’ve never felt so organized doing a project. I’ve learnt quite a few things after a few days work.

Side note, I just watched my 14th film of James Bond. Six more to go!. Favourite so far is still Goldfinger.

The house is so quiet. Well, of course, it’s past midnight. But I meant to say the house has been quiet for the entire night; no TV’s noise, no kitchen’s activity, no flick of door’s being opened, no nothing. It will stay this way untill early next month. I’m all alone.

so after the power supply incident is over and I’m sure the new hdd is working just fine, I’ve started to install FreeBSD and various Linux distros. I made lot of harddisk partitions for them.

Not bad. After a week, I have quite a number of OSes set up: FreeBSD, Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, and CentOS. There’s room for LFS, too, but unfortunately not time, not just yet.

Once I’m really certain of the stability of the new hdd, I’m going to reinstall the old hdd, thus giving me an extra 200GB to play with. There will be a lot more distributions to fit into this computer. Installing Knoppix and Kanotix and then start having some fun creating some customized Live-CD, that’s one idea comes to mind.

Having done and said all this, I’m a little ashamed to admit that my experience in Linux, or UNIX in general, is somewhat limited to installing them. I’ve never really used them a lot (except there’s one development machine running Debian which I use only as server). Desktop-wise, I’m still too comfortable working with Windows, well most of my favourite applications live only on Windows.

I should start on some plan of spending at least some time for each installation, say Monday is FreeBSD day, Tuesday will be Slackware’s, Wednesday will be Gentoo’s, and so on. Sounds good. Whether or not I will live up to it,.. remains to be seen.

On a different note, two of my flatmates will go on holiday for about two weeks. Two others have already been gone for a week now. So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be all alone in this big flat. Not that it matters anyway, I used to stay in a single-room in a large boarding house of which I’d not been much involved in its community.

It seems that as long as I have a computer and internet connection, I will be fine on my own (of course thing is not always as it seems). There was a little discussion about being alone with computer: there’s a quite important figure in open-source world, creator of a certain popular file system, he’s under arrest for murder. There’s a forum post hoping that should the guy be convicted and jailed, hopefully he’ll be allowed to continue with his work on the file system development. Another post immediately mentioned that one of the purpose of jail is to give some kind of punishment. Giving a hacker-inmate a computer to play with while in jail is hardly a punishment.

Anyway.

Sometimes a simple problem could make you lose sleep and curse your luck; simply if it happens on the wrong time. That’s why we need to keep the mind as clear as possible 24 x 7.

But that’s the thrill of it, really. After thinking so damn well hard about the what seems to be critical problem, day and night, in the end you realize that it’s really simple, even no problem at all. That’s when, amidst the joy of having it solved, you curse twice as much as if the “simplicity” of the problem posed much more trouble than the supposedly more complicated one.

Got a major hardware problem today.

I was planning to swap the harddrives in my computer, so I had to turn it off and started plugging things in and out. No sweat, except when I turned it ON again, it refused to do so. The processor’s and casing’s fans spinned for only one second before stopping. I retried for a dozen times turning it ON and OFF and ON and OFF, no luck. It’s like, well, starting the motorcycle’s engine one early morning beforewhich it’s stayed in the garage for a month, out of gas and out of lubricants.

I stripped every peripheral off the motherboard: harddisk, graphic card, memory, casing’s fan, dvd drive, everything; leaving only the processor. Still, this bare setup did not make any difference.

Praying the culprit not to be the processor (it’s the most expensive part in my computer), I began to suspect the PSU, Power Supply Unit. Afterall, it’s not a genuine one, yet I’ve overused it to power up three large harddrives and a dvd drive in addition to its main function for the processor. To test my suspicion, I pulled out an old PSU from the storage-room, and plug it in.
Voila! The CPU’s fan was spinning as it should be. Boy was I glad.

“Boom!”.
Barely ten seconds passed, the PSU exploded, practically next to my face. Son of a bitch. This is the only second time I found a PSU dared to explode in front of me. Pray God the explosion did not affect the motherboard or the processor. Thank God it did not.

Not long afterwards, I didn’t know whether it’s because of the PSU exploding, or by pure chance, the electricity was down for the entire block, and around the neighbourhood as well. Just what I needed amidst my attempt to solve an “electrical problem”.

Fast forward now, ten hours later, the computer is up with new, genuine power supply, and I’ve taken the opportunity to reinstall the operating system, restructuring the harddrives’ partition and keep them company until perhaps tomorrow morning; moving some 500 GBs of files around will take some time. Labor of love, they say.

My new harddrive is of Seagate’s brand. Actually I was looking for a Western Digital, but no store seemed to have stock of 320GB. So I settled for Seagate. And this is the first time I’m buying non-Maxtor harddrive. I don’t know what’s started my loyalty to Maxtor years ago, but I’ve always bought Maxtor ever since. When last night I asked around for some recommendation, almost everyone despised Maxtor, not to mention that it’s recently out of competition -sortof- after being acquired by Seagate.

I hope there won’t be much problem from here on.

“My God! What’s Bond doing?”
“I think he’s attempting reentry, Sir”.

Must have been Q’s wittiest remark.

Bought myself a couple of posters last week.

I’ve always wanted to buy some movie posters for ages, but last week I finally got myself into really buying one[s]. I chose Casablanca, and Reservoir Dogs. I would’ve chosen The Godfather, too, but it was out of stock.

As much as I really wanted those posters, not until yesterday did I manage to find some time to put frames to them. I did not buy readily-built frames since they are too expensive. So I figured if I could just buy some basic, raw materials needed to assemble a poster frame, it would be just fine. Apparently, lacking necessary experience with poster and frame, I struggled for a good couple of hours to put together the underlying ‘corrug’ board, poster, plastic cover and the plastic strips around the perimeter.

All done, except I haven’t got a proper means to hang them on the wall. So at the moment I just put and move them one spot to another.

The Reservoir Dogs poster, curiously enough, does not feature “Mr. Brown”. So careless I did not notice this at the store despite having taken quite some time looking at it before making my decision. But, perhaps there was a reason why he is not in the picture?

Anyway, with these posters, now whenever I want to say “What do you mean you don’t tip?”, or “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”, I could say it to these pictures, it sure will sound more real and lively. Lovely.