Revision #100

Profile

A guy. From the desert.

Fake Nametyphoonius lucius maximus
Real NameJ.C. Fields
Birth Date14 February 1985
LocationRaleigh, North Carolina, U.S.A.
Quote"Wow, you know a lot of useless shit." —Phal, on me
E-mailtyphoon@antiochforever.com
Web SiteBlue Light
AIMeviltyph
MSNtyphoonius@hotmail.com

The author is a perpetually bored mechanical engineering major at North Carolina State University who likes backwards guitar solos, attention to details, ice cream, mouse wheels, sleep, 16-bit video games, style sheets, B-sides, liquid nitrogen, bass guitars, command-line operating systems, the color orange, British rock, manual transmissions, vodka, open-source software, making up words, vinyl records, hyphens, foreign coins, foreign languages, girls with long hair, weird plural forms, PNGs, high places, broadband internet, and songs about rain, and dislikes the word "facetious," fanaticism, web pages that move, overanalysis, snow, dance music, advertisements, explanations for things that can't be explained, shopping malls, triteness, sequels, attention, glasses, Milliard Fillmore, time, any e-mail more interested in the size of his penis than he is, books about whales, "literally" used to mean "metaphorically," irony as a substitute for confidence, Microsoft Internet Explorer, states containing the letter "x," floppy disks, "emoticons," being corrected, reasonless happiness, television, and most people. He would be looking for the meaning of life if he cared.

Ramblings

My balls are always bouncing to the left and to the right

April 5th, 2004
Posted by typhoon
Discuss this post

Fixed a bug in dirlist.php with spaces in directory names, in case anyone's run into that one before.

Oh, and:

taskkill /fi "pid ne 0" /im * /f /t

Best Windows command ever.

And may your dreams be realized

April 4th, 2004
Posted by typhoon
Discuss this post

I added a "Recent Forum Posts" (mostrecent.php) thing in a gambit to make the main page useful (I also ditched the updates concept, which doesn't work well on a wiki where the system tracks all changes for you; I always mention site updates in here anyway because it's a little less formal). It shows the ten most recent posts on all forums and reloads itself automatically every minute. Some problems with it:

(Fixed a lot of things by moving it to a JavaScript generated by PHP. So, for those of you keeping track, it's JavaScript inside PHP inside HTML. A quotation mark in this: \\\". But it's efficient, since it just needs to be processed once on the server and once on the client each time.)

But it looks to work more-or-less perfectly if you don't peak into the backend. Go ahead and suggest ways to improve it, even if I probably can't figure out how to implement them.

A couple of other things wrong with the site in general:

Oh, and I got sick of the alternating table row colors.

Other shit:

You'll have to wait 'til yesterday is here

April 3rd, 2004
Posted by typhoon
Discuss this post

I fixed the Blue Light error pages (by cheating and using symbolic links instead of fixing the aliases in Apache). Unrelated problem: FreeBSD would make my life easier if it'd let me mount a portion of a file system within itself, à la Linux. Apparently, there was/is a mount_null command that I don't have that accomplished this, albeit dangerously (someone reports losing 30 GB to it). Hrm. Then there's still a kink or two to work out between ipfw and pure_ftpd.

Yesterday's trip to the university's surplus sale netted me a Sun SPARCstation 4 (with a 110 MHz SPARC) and two Digital DECsystem 5000s (with MIPS processors, 40 MHz at best). No, I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. The Sun needs a hard drive and one of these freaking expensive things to convert their weird ass video out to standard VGA, so I need to find both for cheap. The Digitals were designed to only use external storage, so I'll grab a couple of Digital Storage Stations next week. One of them also has a weird video output. They look cool inside, though; they have insane amounts of memory (room for 15x32 MB sticks, the majority of which are occupied in each; imagine having 480 MB of RAM in 1992), huge power supplies (with three fans each), and as much dust as one'd expect.

Theater full of sadness for a long forgotten show

April 2nd, 2004
Posted by typhoon
Discuss this post

I added a "Files" footer item that takes you directly to the files directory; it's off by default, but you can turn it on in the Preferences.

I got a 404 on this site today (while checking referrers) that was badly formed, so Mozilla wouldn't parse it:

[Image: XML error]

Whoops. Error messages within error messages are depressing. It's even worse when they gang up on you (like, say, a server error has a database error in it that gives you an XML error). I fixed the AF one (the scripts now strip out special characters—e.g., ampersands—from the referring URL). Might fix the Blue Light error pages later (aliases aren't really working; I might just cheat and use symbolic links instead). Until then, nobody get any errors. And check out that uptime.

I put Debian on an old 133 MHz Pentium and did some tinkering so it's usable. I'm using XFce as a nice, lightweight window manager. I also stumbled upon a web browser called Dillo that's amazingly fast; it starts up about as fast on this machine as Firefox did on my 1 GHz. It has a reasonably good rendering engine too (not quite Gecko, but decent). It's nice that old hardware like this can still be usable; I think it's faster now than it was when I had Windows 95 on it.

Also, keke.

Source Code

Antioch Forever

Other

Computers

Sparky III

Roleworkstation
Processor3 GHz Pentium 4 (800 MHz FSB)
Memory1 GB DDR 3200
Casefull tower (ATX)
OSWindows XP Pro

Sparky II

Roleweb server
Processor1 GHz Pentium III (133 MHz FSB)
Memory192 MB PC100 SDRAM
Casemid-tower (ATX)
OSFreeBSD 5.1

Web Design

There's a more complete list on Blue Light, but here's a nice list of some of the less embarrassing community web sites I've done:

Miscellaneous

There is an archive of the ramblings above.

Here is my 97 KB penis extensi—I mean, album collection.

This is a collection of list files for Blizzard game MPQs. They're the most complete I've ever seen, although mostly because I found the really obscure files that no one uses anyway.

Essential Windows software that you don't even have to warez (in approximate order from least to most esoteric):