Benfalk Blog

I am not dead!  I know I have missed three days in what now must seem like a religious posting schedule I maintain in posting… but rest assured I was busy having fun =) .  To recap what has been happening the last couple of days I’ll give a quick break down.

Thursday was of course Thanksgiving.  Lucas, Jackie, and I headed down an hour or so early to help mom with last minute house cleanup and furniture arrangements before the rest of the family guests starting showing up.  The dinner was pretty great and the day seemed to buzz by pretty fast.  Thanksgiving seemed to be out of place a bit with our father and youngest brother not being there.  After a few debates over keeping a Christmas gift exchange draw or not people cleared out pretty fast, but later than normal.  After the Falk side we went to our mom’s side for Thanksgiving, which was just down the road =) .  It was very empty, only a few families were still around… but they were the ones who like to play games, which is what we did until about 2am!!  I didn’t make it back home until about 3am Friday morning.

Friday, of course was supposed to be the great LAN party Lucas and I had been planning for.  I use the word ’supposed’ because except for Ryno, nobody else showed up on Friday =( .  We still had a fun time though.  We played Tactical Ops and Team Fortress 2 for hours and ate corn chips with amazing bean dip made my Mason.  Off an on through out the whole day I was working on my kiosk-box project for work getting all of the Linux packages compiled on it and trying to figure out most of the bugs that I had been running into.  It turns out, at least I think, that I was using the wrong set of base packages… I was trying to use the i686 packages when I should have been using the base x86 ones.  Again I didn’t get done gaming until about 2am or so when we finally crashed and all decided to take a break for sleep =) .

Saturday was equally, if not more fun than Friday.  We played some more Tactical Ops in the morning and around 11am Ryno was making plans to leave =( .  We convinced him to stay for a couple rounds of Starcraft which ended up being the game of choice for the rest of the day.  When I say the rest of the day, I mean until about 3am on Sunday morning lol.  Ryno did end up leaving around 3:30 or so but we kept playing away the rest of the day.  We only played a handful of normal map games and mainly stuck to the modded map games with team based objectives to them.  Around 7:00 or so we got a phone call from Emery, a person we used to hang out with in High School asking if he could come over and hang out and play with us.  It was cool to catch up with him for awhile and play some Starcraft with him as well.  Hopefully he won’t be a stranger and comes back again =) .

Sunday was pretty much a normal Sunday for Lucas and I.  We headed back home to have dinner with mom and helped her do a few things around the house.  She is really fixed on knocking out a wall in her bedroom before she leaves for the Philippines… so I imagine we will be doing to major work in the next couple of weeks on that.  After we stocked her up on firewood in the house we said our goodbyes and headed back for home.  When we got back Lucas didn’t waste too much time sticking around as he packed up and was back out the door in about five minutes of getting back…  Now it’s Sunday evening and I have to go to work tomorrow =( .

I made zero headway on my user library…. read only about twenty pages in my C++ book, and did zero running over the holiday weekend.  In some ways I feel rotten for not working more on these things but I feel hanging out and having fun with others ever now and again like we did was worth it.  As I said, I did get a lot working on my kiosk box over the extended weekend and a final product is almost done =).

Duel OMG Shirts from Woot!

Falk Thanksgiving

Falk Thanksgiving

Falk Thanksgiving

Winan's Thanksgiving

Dangerous Game of Spoons!!

Winan's Thanksgiving

LAN Party!

Installing Linux for Kiosk

Lucas playing a bridge simulation game???

Mason's Bean Dip

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A wasted day…  Maybe not 100% wasted, but it feels like it.  I have been struggling with getting everything working on these kiosk boxes all day, on my day off no less.  I slept in until almost 10am this morning after staying up way to late working on this project.  I have been so engrossed with getting this system working that I haven’t really done anything else today =( .  Hopefully I’ll be able to look back on this day as a big learning experience.

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Made more headway with the small kiosk boxes I’ve been working on.  While it may sound strange, I am having the best time I have ever had getting these ultra light-weight boards loaded up with Linux and getting them ready to be simple display machines =) .  I messed up the install system before lunch today which had me a little upset, but in the end it turned out for the better because I found a really nice kernel configuration tips page for a system board very similar to the one I am using.  I also learned some more about C and C++ compilers today, as one of the strengths of Gentoo is the fact it helps optimize the compilers for your specific system build.

Kiosk System

I ended up staying until about 5:30 waiting to get some important key programs compiled on the system.  Once it was finally finished I packed it up and brought it home.  I didn’t have much time to work on it when I got home because Lucas had invited me over to watch “Blade 2.”  I must say, it was better than the first one by a long shot.  Lucas was in really good spirits today, and for good reason, as he is being promoted to an admin =) !!  I am extremely happy for him because I know he was getting weary of answering phone calls all day.  I start wondering myself more often now than before how much longer I can answer phone calls and gofer all the time.  I really like developing this system and doing the programming for it, way more than anything else.

Tonight I’ve started an automated recompile of all my system packages on the kiosk box.  Think I’m going to crash on the sofa and wake up in a couple hours to see if it’s done yet and finish working on my user library on my pseudo Friday.

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Today was a pretty good day.  In spite of quite a few interruptions I set out on building the web kiosk system I have been working on from the ground up today.  I opted to try Gentoo’s minimal install for it’s speed and ease of use.  So far I must say I have learned quite a bit more about Linux that I previously didn’t know.  If anyone wants to learn more of the nuts and bolts to Linux, or the idea behind any operating system for that mater, I recommend installing Gentoo from scratch.  It makes you compile your kernel from source, which, in theory will give you a leaner and faster running operating system because it will only have the things you need it to have.

I brought the kiosk system home from work so I could finish getting some things squared away on it because it was bugging me.  Before I did though, I went for a run tonight to try and keep some sort of order to my training.  When I got back from my run Mason helped me by explaining how to load up different kernels into my boot section.  Now I have a game plan to make a final clamped and locked down kernel for the system when I have it all ready for release =) .

A large part of my evening, aside from running was spent over at Lucas’s watching Blade… ‘LOL’ at the graphics for that movie.  After the movie we made a voyage to Walmart, in which I made a quick purchase of 48 cans of tuna, 4 pounds of spinach, and a tube a carmex cream for my lips… what a life I live haha.  Tomorrow is my Friday since I have Wednesday off from work before the big Thanksgiving holiday. I’m hoping to pull an all-night coding tomorrow and finally finish my user library for Codeigniter!

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I didn’t get as much accomplished today as I wanted, but all in all it wasn’t a bad day.  Lucas and I went down to help our mom again.  We mainly cleared out stuff from her bedroom and moved it down to the basement to get it out of the way.  We had a fairly big lunch and I ended up falling asleep on the couch for about two hours =\ .  Before we left around 5:30 or so we made sure mom had plenty of wood in the house to keep the fireplace going until Thanksgiving… which I found out today is going to be down at our parents house for the Falk side of the family.

Before we got back home I got a call that the email was not working in the Philippines which had me a little irritated as I knew it was going to take a bit to get it going again.  After it was solved I started working on my user library again.  I am very close to getting it done!  I am extremely glad that this is only a two day work week, which will give me plenty of time to test it and make a nice front end package to it =).

Before I go to bed tonight I’m going to look into how I can better manage my multiple monitors in Linux.  It is really nice having the multiple monitors.. but it would be really nice if there is a window manager or something of the sort for it.

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Today was a pretty good day.  I did some work on the user library for CodeIgniter and then Lucas and I went down to help our mom with stuff around the house.  We met at Pizza Hut and had an early lunch while finding out the only thing our mom really wanted done today was to move her water bed upstairs in Lucas’s old bedroom.  The longest part of the process was the draining and filling of the bed.  Our mom wanted to put the bed in the room at an angle to maximize the wall space… which seemed goofy to me but oh well =) .

Water Bed Construction

While we waited for the water bed to fill back up we cleaned out the ashes in the fireplace, brought some firewood in and restarted the fireplace.  There was still a ton of hot coals in the fireplace and judging by the amount of ash in the fireplace it looks like mom has been running the fireplace quite a bit this week.

When we got back I started doing a bit of research on my system and started looking for a descent walk-through on how to up my system a bit.  I did eventually find a good walk-through, although it does have some gaps in the explanation.  I’m running memory tests on my machine right now, but already I can tell it’s a ton faster than it was initially =) .  I think the real problem with the system was it was running my memory slower because it wasn’t giving the memory the voltage it needed.  It’s almost 1am but I want to see this system up performance through before I head to bed.  After looking around for a good walk-through on how to overclock your system I am planning to do some research on these newer AMD systems and make my own walk-through!

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Today was a descent day.  I didn’t get a whole lot done today at work because this morning I was bombarded with calls, one right after another it seemed like until about 10am.  When I finally was able to sit down at my desk and get some coding pounded out a person showed up to work on some of our measuring machines as part of an annual maintenance contract.  I led him around the building to show him the devices and gave him a quick break down of everything that I knew was wrong with them.

At lunchtime today I finished chapter eight in my C++ book =) .  After lunch my day seemed to fly right by as I got a little bit of coding done and thought out some logic problems I knew I was going to run into with my project.  When I got home tonight I changed into some warmer gear and went on a run like I had promised myself I would do last night.  I am very glad that I went to bed early last night, it seemed to help me through the whole day a lot better.  After my run Lucas wanted to go to Walmart to pick up a frozen pizza and some tea so I tagged along and got a bag of generic brand cereal, “Honey Nut Scooters,” and a gallon of milk.

The rest of my evening so far has been spent in disapointment trying to overclock my system to a degree in attempts to get it’s performance up higher… but it just won’t do it.  I have not given up yet, I’m going to do some more reading on what it is I need to do to get this system running faster, but not tonight.  I’ll worry about it later.  Going to spend the rest of my evening working on my windows installation some and get it ready for the LAN party next weekend =) .

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Today was a descent day.  I was able to get some coding done at work and all in all had few problems to deal with, minus an error that cropped up due to a downed database in the afternoon.  When I got home from work I kept loading up the Linux part of my system to get it back to where it was before my system went dead on me.  For the most part it’s back up and seems to be working well =) .   I know I have some extra helper software and programs that I need to install yet, but that will come when the need reminds me of it.

In spite of sounding like a broken record and pending any other show stoppers, I have two goals that I really want to knock out of the way this weekend.  I am finishing the user library package for CodeIgniter and getting a long run in as well.  My running has really slacked this week from lack of sleep and poor planning with my daily schedule.  This lack of sleep issue has really tolled on my system and I am heading to bed tonight by 9:45pm.  I normally head to bed by 10pm but lately it seems like its after midnight before I’m in bed.  Tomorrow I’m going to get back into the groove of scheduled running and plan to hammer out a long run on Sunday.

PS: Michelle, hope things turn around for you and happier days find their way back.

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Today was a long day.  I was tired the whole day and was pretty busy in the morning trying to get caught up on some stuff that cropped up from my day of absence.  My Acer monitor and new motherboard showed up today.  I always have my stuff shipped directly to my workplace so I set up my new monitor on my work PC as a second display monitor and it was awesome =) .  I brought my tower in to work today and blew out the dust and mounted my new motherboard in it near the end of the day and from the small time I ran it I knew it was running boat loads better with the new motherboard.

When I got home I installed Windows XP first and made sure all the drivers were working.  Lucas stopped by to pick me up to go to Pizza Hut and before we left I started up the memory test that I was running before.  After we got back the memory test was at about sixty percent and had no errors on the same memory it had found so many errors with just last week.  I felt confident with my memory and canceled the test.

We found out tonight that Jake won’t be coming home for Thanksgiving =( .  It turns out if he has to go further than 300 miles from the base he has to take public transportation to do so and the cheapest form we could find that would give him enough time to even be here was over $500… sucks bad cause I know how much he wanted to come back for the day after Thanksgiving LAN party.  We’ll have another one when he gets back for Christmas leave!

Going to finish installing a base fresh install of Linux on my computer and head to bed… hopefully tomorrow I can get back into a normal routine of coding and running.

PS.  My Linux of choice is the new Ubuntu 8.10, 32 bit edition.  I hope the 32 bit edition works better with WINE, a Linux package I have tried to use in the past to play windows games and run other miscellaneous windows apps.

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