Laptops and cruft
Got a new laptop. It's very nice. Big screen, high resolution, fast CPU, wireless networking. All those good things.

Installing Linux on it is a pain. I expected it would be, and so far things have gone just about as well as expected, which is very slowly and painfully.

In the process of setting things up, I got out my old WL200 wireless network card, since I actually have a motivation to use it now. Unfortunately, it was one of the pieces of hardware that the floods a few weeks back managed to affect. I thought it was okay, but apparently not. It's taken out a desktop machine. Either a dead powersupply, or dead motherboard. Hopefully a dead powersupply.

I'm not eager to try the card in another machine now. I'm a bad sad that it's dead, since it's possible to convert the card into an access point, and it's got good support under linux. And it cost quite a bit of money. Drat.

I can see at least one other network in my area, apparently if I walk down the street I can see Ian's as well.

I may well end up buying an 802.11 to ethernet access-point/bridge. Probably less stuffing around. Even so, the WL200 would have gone into our loungeroom PC. Hardware sucks, and it sucks more when it dies and takes things with it.

Holidays
Goodness, it's awful coming back to work from holidays. Work is good -- after all, I set my own conditions and hours -- but having free time is _so_ nice.

What I really want to do right now is hack code because I want to hack code, not because it's required for some project I'm working on. That would be lovely.

I should stop trying to work on this client contract. But being distracted is so much better than reading legalese.

SCSI Pain
Have the new SCSI card, new cable, new drive. Put them all into the machine, and end up with an extremely painful set of errors from the aic7xxx module about how much it isn't enjoying the experience.

Oh well, fall back to the old tape drive. Nope, it doesn't want to talk either, the advansys module wants to tell me how much pain it's in as well.

Scanner? Yes, sometimes. But sometimes not. Seems to be depending upon how the whole chain is feeling that day.

Eventually tracked the damn thing down to the SCSI cards hating each other. Depending upon the PCI slots they were in, and the phase of the moon, they may either work badly, or not at all.

So, the lesser of the cards is now pulled from the machine. This sucks, because I have both narrow and wide devices that I would like to connect, but only a wide controller in the machine. Mixing narrow and wide on the same bus? Uh uh, I've been there before. Not doing that again.

I'm so sick of hardware. I can't believe how painful it can be sometimes.

OpenRPG
Recently started toying with a virtual table-top environment called OpenRPG. It has the advantages of being cross-platform (Mac, Linux, Windows), open source (GPL), written in Python (okay, I'm a Python weenie, but it could be a good reason to learn), around for a while, and under active development.

We tested OpenRPG in our face-to-face game for miniature and map management. There were a few hiccups, and I'm hoping to iron them out using a newer (and apparently beta) release of the client. Through use of wireless networking and existing loungeroom infrastructure (ie, a TV), I'm also hoping to make the experience more comfortable for the players as well.

One of the big advantages of OpenRPG is that if we can get it working, we'll have an excellent way to patch in one of our players who is currently stationed in northern Queensland, rather than trying to use a dinky webcam to give him an overview of any maps/miniatures. Instead the dinky webcam can be used to give him an overview of all the players.

The only problem I've found with OpenRPG so far is that the servers are not sufficiently robust. Twice today during suitability testing the server we were using died upon us.

Holidays
My holidays are over. This is incredibly sad, as I love holidays and rarely seem to be able to take them. I spent most of my time playing games rather than doing anything remotely productive, and this was extremely relaxing and good.

I've got a quarter of a mind to scale back my workload at the end of this financial year, so that I can have more time. The other three-quarters of my mind urge me to continue to generate as much revenue as possible, since retirement in 4-5 years will prove to be a wonderful experience, and the sooner I get there, the better.

I may end up taking something between the two, by trying to keep income constant rather than always increasing.

Hardware
Found the problem with the scanner. It had changed from /dev/sg1 to /dev/sg0, and apparently the snapscan driver wants the device mentioned explicitly in it's own special config file in order to work. *shrug*

Trademarks
Found on the back of a candy wrapper (capitalisation adjusted):

Cadbury, dairy milk, the glass and a half device, magical elves and the colour purple are Cadbury Ltd trademarks and used under license in Australia by Cadbury Schweppes Pty Ltd.

A trademark on the colour purple? I wonder what the magical elves(TM) have been handing out to the trademark office?

Hardware
I am truly sick of hardware. Installed a new SCSI card today, but it doesn't want to talk to the tape-drive attached to it. I suspect a termination problem, although it could be a BIOS problem on the card.

That in itself is okay. It's that for some reason xsane now completely refuses to talk to the scanner on a completely different SCSI card that's incredibly frustrating. Especially when sane-detect-scanner is convinced (and so am I) that the scanner is there and working perfectly.