Steve Dougherty – Page 22 – Steve Dougherty's Blog

W3C Validation and Free Energy

I’ve tweaked the blog theme a bit. Nothing really that will affect you. I added alternate text to all the images, so now the blog validates as W3C compliant, so that’s good. I also fixed the path to an icon that was broken. The HTML pages I made in WordPad way back when are horribly mangled, unsurprisingly.

For some reason, when I pointed the validator at the test page of the theme, it said it was fine. However, when I looked in the code of the test page, it had the same omissions it was nagging me about, even though I had a fresh install of the latest version of the theme. Oh well, that’s over now. I also tried to maybe save W3C a bit of bandwidth like they asked, and hosted the standards definition file on my own server. I cron’d it to update every 3 months or so, as it would typically have a 90 day expiry time, using this line:

0 0 7 */3 0 rm /var/www/wp-content/themes/aqueous-lite/xhtml1-transitional.dtd wget -P /var/www/wp-content/themes/aqueous-lite/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd

The remove is to get rid of the previous version so wget can get a new version. If this was not done, a copy would be saved with a “.1” or “.2” ect on the end.

I can’t seem to change the <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”> without it becoming inavalid, as it would seem that setting is fixed. Anyone with tips on how I can cache this or something, please let me know. I also removed an outdated version number from the footer. Thanks to those who pointed out I was apparently using an outdated version of WordPress!

I’d also like to draw your attention to an interesting demo. As far as I can tell, it’s a way to increase efficiency in motors by piping electromagnetic radiation that would otherwise be lost back into it. There are also claims that the laws of physics have been broken with this thing, so a healthy dose of skepticism wouldn’t hurt.

It Are Snow!

So, there’s snow, and lots of it. It took an hour and a half to get home, whereas it usually takes fifteen minutes.

It was:

It was deep and very fluffy.

Anyone outside got coated with it.

I had just cleaned off the headlights.

It also deserves a mention that when I was brushing off the car for preparation to get it in the garage, (we didn’t want ice on it in the morning) I would frequently look back over my work and find it had already been snowed back over. Yes, it was snowing that hard, really.

Luck

This guy hasn’t had a fun last five years. Link.

Google Translate!

I have simultaneously become sympathetic to how hard it is for a computer to translate and very amused at how very wrong it can be. I fed poder to Google Translate, wanting to know what it meant, having forgotten. (I ended up just googling the word and it was in the exerpt of the second result.) It said power. This isn’t right, although in its defense I gave it no context. It wasn’t even close, though. I then fed it Yo podo to see if conjugating it would give any clues. Apparently not, as it then said I podo. Not very helpful. I then added a period, making it Yo podo. Google proclaimed: I shortly. Amazing what modern technology can do! Online translators seem to be very good at producing amusing nonsensical gibberish.

HouseView?

Google Maps StreetView, but off the street, and into your house!

Sweater

It has been brought to my attention that what I thought was a nice, textured, slightly fuzzy grey t-shirt I had never seen before is in fact a white t-shirt with a somewhat uniform coating of fuzz from my sweater.

Portal and Leaves

I’ve been reading Portal. No, not Valve’s Portal. I mean Portal: A Dataspace Retrieval. It’s a really interesting online book, and there’s a hardcover available at Barnes and Noble. It’s about a man who was supposed to come out of stasis orbiting a star he was going to study. However, something goes wrong and he wakes up back at Earth, and everyone is gone… Trees are intact, the oceans are fine, animals prosper… No people.

Leaves. How does it feel, being able to rake them in January as the snow melts immediately upon contact with the thawed ground?

Virus?

I recently ran a virus scan on my Windows partition from Linux. It took six hours and completed overnight. The results were the last thing printed to the terminal. It showed it had scanned some 84 gigabytes of data, and that there were 13 infected files found. As I looked around, I couldn’t find a search function in the terminal, and the scroll bar didn’t even go up far enough. How would I find out which files those were? I ran the scan again, but instead of the clamav -r /media/hd1 of the first time, I used clamav -r /media/hda1 &> clamav.log to dump all the output to file. The scan completed for a second time, and again found 13 infected files. I came to my next problem. How on earth would I find the lines of the infected files out of the 106,064 lines in the log? I tried searching for DETECTED, but that didn’t work. I discovered I should search for FOUND. I wanted to get the lines in a separate file because I could, which was easy with cat clamav.log | grep FOUND &> infected.log. It turned out all of the marked files were part of Warsow, an open source multiplayer FPS. The detected virus was Oversized.Zip. When I googled this, I found that it was because the compression ratio had exceeded some threshold somewhere. The pages often mentioned it in the context of a false positive. I think I just spent 12 hours trawling through my hard drive looking for 13 false positive compressed archives. It was fun, though. I got to use command-line fu. 🙂

School Again

Only three days in and it feels as if break never happened… It was nice while it lasted, and it didn’t help that I was sick over half of it. Oh well.

I have all my Linux boxes getting the correct time from t3h Internets on a daily basis. It’s way easer than I would have thought – in /etc/cron.daily/ put a script named ntpdate (for human readability, I would think) with the line ntpdate <server name>.

The <server name> is the domain name of a time server. AT&T runs two at ntp1.sbcglobal.net and ntp2.sbcglobal.net, and Ubuntu has one at the logical ntp.ubuntu.com. I’ve noticed severe drift in the time on all my Linux boxes, so hopefully this’ll sort things out. Instead of a daily update, there’s also an option to run ntpd, which will use up some resources, but correct the time constantly.

Computer

It’s nice to be on break!

I finished my build of a computer with the following specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.66Ghz

3GB RAM

500GB HD

Two nVidia 8600 GTs in SLI

And Windows XP. This thing got 162.65 FPS on the Lost Coast stress test! It’s really snappy! However, I hit several snags from idea to having a working box humming in front of me.

Newegg wasn’t restocking on my nVidia 680i motherboard, so I bought it from TigerDirect. I also didn’t realize that XP’s 3GB total usable RAM limit counted video RAM. I got 3GB RAM, and the video cards added up to 512MB, so functionally I had 2.5GB non-video RAM. There’s a lesson learned.

The CPU fan was really hard to push into the motherboard. I would have preferred screwing it in, but I don’t think that’s possible with the ATX motherboard standards. It was something that required great strength. The tooless drive bays were a pain, but they managed to be fairly stable once I screwed it in. I wish they’d stop selling tooless cases – it really doesn’t help in the long term, or in stability. Then the computer kept overheating – just turning off suddenly – after sustained hard drive use. Then I remembered that hot air rises, and moved the hard drive to the lowest bay – it had been in the highest – and it stopped overheating. There’s another lesson learned.

The Windows XP installer surprised me by being really ugly and slow. When it first started up, it was text-based. It then booted from the hard drive and used a low-resolution (800×640?) GUI to configure things. While it recognized my PS/2 keyboard, it didn’t recognize my PS/2 mouse. A USB mouse worked fine though. After setting everything up, I was able to login. It turned out that nothing really worked out of the box – no sound, no networking. The driver CD included with the motherboard fixed all those problems, but seeing how Ubuntu did support sound and networking and even the PS/2 mouse/keyboard while running off a LiveCD, I was not impressed. To make me even more annoyed, when I first logged in one of the first notifications was the “Your system may be at risk.” It was complaining I wasn’t running antivirus. Great way to greet your users with a fresh system, Microsoft. At least it was just an XP install disk so it didn’t have lots of 3rd party crapware. eMachines have hours worth of it – and by hours I mean that’s how long it takes to get rid of all of it. I also learned that building a computer can be way, way cheaper than buying a new one. A used machine is about as cheap as you can get…

The rest was installing OpenOffice and Firefox, running benchmarks in Steam games, and setting up the machine again at my customer’s house. It was fun, and I even got paid! 🙂