Matt D's Blog

Well, got the support rail for my laptop yesterday and put itin. At least now it can close again without a problem. Just the screen isa little messed up is all that’s left. It was quite a pain to install thepart into my laptop, probably about 30-40 screws I had to take out… I hadto take off the top / touch pad in order to get acess to the support rail,which was not fun. Hopefully I’ll get the LCD connector quickly afterI order it. Had a math test today, think I did decent. We’ll soon see.

Things are seemingly returning back to normal here in NY. A fewdays ago I had an accident with my laptop, and I am really upset at Dell. Ipersonally will not buy from them again, and will no longer recommend themto others. It happened that I was on my way to school one morning, and Iwas a bit late. So I packed my bag a little faster than I usually do. Ialso packed my Calc book, which I almost never do. As a result, I put mylaptop inside of my bag in such a way that all the weight of the calc bookwas on the bag, and the laptop was on top of everything else, which I never do. In any case, after I got off of the bus, and I was walking to school, I was walking rather quickly, and I noticed when I was about 3/4 of the way there that my bag felt funny, and thought nothingof it. About (literally) 2 seconds later, my bag was open, and my laptop andcalc book were on the ground. Needless to say I was upset. I put it back into my bag, and then checked out what the damage was. I turned it on, and noticed that it was working for the most part correctly, however, that therewere a few things that weren’t quite right, one being the screen. I was ableto get the screen back correctly for a few seconds, so I am quite sure that the actual LCD panel is ok, and it’s just the connecting cable from thelaptop base to the panel that is damaged. Go Dell. When I went to order replacement parts from them, the support rail that was damaged wasin stock, however it would not get to me until around October 2nd. To saythe least, that sucks, considering I ordered it on the 20th. I have to call back after the 1st to even order the LCD connectioncable, becuase it was not in stock at the time. On a completely unrelated matter, I also completely re-structured my networkat my house, because in my router I have two wireless interfaces along withthe existing wired ethernet. I did have just one wireless interface, andbecuase of a misunderstanding, I thought I had to assign it a completelydifferent address range in order to do the correct routing for it. It turnsout that I did not, and I renumbered the interfaces to compensate for thisfact. See my new wireless page. I also switchedIPv6 providers, and theoretically I could become a tunnel provider for peoplein my area. I have an entire /48 to work with, which, in IPv6 addresses, is awhole lot of PCs.

The initial shock is over, but the disbelief is still there -New York has lost one of it’s great structures, and part of it’s skyline.No classes today, things are very quiet everywhere. Justice will beserved. Things will return to normal; Eventually.

The world is in shock. Things are in disarray – how the hell could something like this happen??? The World Trade Center is 99.9% GONE. How could we not see this coming… things will never be the same…

School sucks. Not really. Seriously though, Digital Systems is byfar my most boring and pointless class – I have to get this “lab kit” of logic chips – a $50 deposit!! How lame - it probably would cost me like $20 to BUY everything. Physics is freaky - my physics teacher broke his leg, andnow I have this Russian dude instead. OK so far. Going to build a yagi formy wireless cards – hope I don’t completely screw them up… Should be funoverall. I hate NetSentric, Inc. I still haven’t gotten my replacement batteries..argh. I wish I was getting more out of school……

Last two days of school were OK. Literary New York is kinda cool..Digital Systems is seemingly boring as of yet, C++ is ok. Today will not bevery fun, having classes from 9 AM to 4:30 PM with no breaks(!), so oncetoday is over, the rest of the week (I’m taking a tour with my english classon Sat…) will be relatively simple..

School days again… I’m updating this during what should be myComp SCI II class, but the teacher never showed up. IAC, I added some new (and not so new) songs to my collection, including a new version of the music project from high school that started this all…Re-tracked the rhythm guitar, along with a different solo (in some spots)…School is OK sofar, Math teacher is OK.. can’t say any thing but anyone else quite yet. Gonna eat lunch at like 11 AM, have a literature class (hmm…wonder how that’s gonna be?) at 12, and then PHYSICS (argh!) II at 1.. Again, checkout the Sounds page to see whats new…

Got my physics grade: C. That sucks. Finally settled uponDebian Potato for floyd. School is soon.

Well, things are finally fixed and up again. Between this Code Redcrap, and OO filtering port 80, to re-structuring my network, to…. well, you get the picture.In any case, everything is back up, IPv6 capable SUPERMAN to the rescue. Superman ismy workhorse - my Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120 - damned fast and capable machine for it’s speed.It’s taking care of web (duh), DNS, and DHCP requests. My old webserver, netbsd, has been moved to a position of doing only routing a firewall, and my main machine, floyd, is now my personal one once again. It will become a full time Linux box, serving as a NAS (with nice tape backup) forthe network. That’s a little down the road when I put together my audio / video workstation.As for now, I will just reboot whenever I want to record something. Speaking of which, ideas are flowing, but are not being finished – I’m very lazy. Eventually there will be moremusic. See the FOLK project for a very feature-filledLinux kernel.. using a subset of those features right now (I’m testing out JFS, low latency, andPacket CD-RW writing).Got a free machine from my friend Mike – thanks again man!I also put up public web stats for everyone to see.Getting extremely upset that my summer Physics I grades aren’t in yet…..

God bless IPv6 - I am shelled into the web server DIRECTLY using an IPV6-enabled version of PuTTY on Windows XP RC1, going through an OpenBSD router, out to FreeNet6, on to the 6bone, to Hurricane Electric to my Linux router, then to my NetBSD webserver which I’m updating this using good old vi. Isn’t that cool? Now who said there are no good uses for IPv6?

My goodness - haven’t updated this page in a LONG time. Well,two things happened recently that were pretty big - I had my birthday,and I went to MIT Swapfest. My birthday was OK. MIT Swapfest on the otherhand was cool in some respects, and a nightmare in others…It was cool in that we stayed at MIT for the night from Saturday untilSunday, and we got to see (quickly) what things were like at MIT. Well,let’s just say that things are very very different from Manhattan College..Total (within any realm of reason) freedom of expression – there weremurals on the walls of the dorms, record album covers stuck in the dropceiling tiles, all sorts of cool stuff… Computer and other electronicsgalore..One person was putting in their own LIGHTING into their room, keepin mind this is a DORM. Then again, the same person made a connected fridgecalled “Mr. Chilly.” Someone set up a wireless access point, we were playingaround with that using RFMadman’s wireless cards. Their “Athena” system ispretty funky…Alas, I didn’t get what I wanted to get from the swapfest. The main thingsI was lookingh for were a DEC Alpha system (cause they’re cool), and a monitorswitcher and cables (cause I have too many machines, and only one monitor).However, I did get something cool – I bought two Dell/Cisco Aironet wirelesscards for $100! I then bought a PCMCIA reader for my desktop machine overthe net, and I’m using right now to surf the net wirelessly. I alsopurchased a 512MB upgrade for my main machine, so that’ll be “pimped out”(to quote Matt), and I’ll throw the 128MB in my grandmother’s machine so itwon’t be a turtle any more….Wrote some more songs, fine tuning them, will post soon.

Working on new songs… will be uploaded soon.

Well, yesterday was fun, and I learned things from my friendsand from my family: From my friends - Yes, hot dogs can be burned prettybadly on an electric stove. From my family - Yes, london broil can be cookingat a point where it’s on fire.. Anyways, it was fun in CT, Matt has a pooltable, a cool neon sign (Molson), and basically a miniNOC.. it’s quite funny.. computers everwhere in his basement.. It was myself,Matt, Rory, and his brother Sean… Matt’s parents were away, so we had tofend for ourselves… So we played video games on the PC, watched part of a movie, took a tour of the house, etc.. Then we had to eat dinner… but thereweren’t enough things in the house.. so we all walked to the store.. at onepoint we actually raced each other running, it was quite funny…Then we allstarted cooking… I cooked the french fries first.. No deep frier, so we threwthem in the oven. Easy. Next I cooked the hamburgers, no problem.. Threw them in the oven to keep them warm. Then Rory decided to cook the hot dogs – bigmistake.. I was cooking the burgers at like 4, out of 10… Rory decides “Ilike my hot dogs well done” and puts it on NINE.. a few mins laterthe kitchen is, well, filled with smoke.. it was funny.. We then pulled Roryaway from the stove, and we all remarked that he won’t be cooking again withus any time soon…. Matt then took over cooking the remaining hot dogs, whichcame out very good, not burned at all.The rest of the meal was cooked fine, except the corn wascold when we went to eat it.. Oh well.

Well, after three different kernels, I finally settled upon the 2.4.3 kernel for pita. The other two that I tried were 2.4.4, and then .4patched to .5 – Well, let’s say there’s some problems lurking in those….4 - IPv6 NIGHTMARE… Put it this way: 2.4.4 + ping6 = DoS - EASILY… Whenthe CPU is tied up with something else, like dnetc, and it’s ping6’d, betweenthe 55th and 65th ping the machine will KERNEL PANIC… NOT GOOD.. So thenI tried compiling 2.4.5 without much luck, something with check_bit and mm.o.Oh well. Then I tried 2.4.3 (what I’m happy with on my x86 machines..) andit worked fine, except for a minor hiccup in the input layer. I’m using theolder keyboard driver for the moment, as it didn’t compile correctly with the new driver.Well, I’m off to see Matt’s house in Conn., will be interesting to see whathe’s done with the Alpha system….

Now I’m doing all these updates at once, hehe, but here’s what wasdone: I installed PHP 3, and PostgreSQL 7.0 on the NetBSD machine. I have anew computeri that I picked up at the Trenton Computer festival, a 120 MHz PowerPC 601, with 32MBs of RAM. Very “peppy” for the processing speed.It is running Linux 2.4.4 kernel, using the Yellow Dog Linuxdistribution, and a Quantum 1.2GB SCSI drive. It has PostgreSQL 7.1 on it, aswell as SSH, and SAMBA. It is also IPv6 capable. It can be reached at pita.ipv6.drobnak.com for pings and such. It is an Apple Power Macintosh 7200/120. It’s really not that bad.. MacOS is not too great, but you gotta love the speech synthesis. That I think is everything.. I just gotta fix the script forthe BSD news, and everything’s “all good” again..