Four Island

Do you ever get that feeling that it's 11 o'clock and you haven't written much all day and you're feeling kind of tired? And then do you realize that it's a Friday, you haven't written much all week and you're 39 minutes away from destroying a month's worth of posting effort? Yes, this has happened to me quite often, most notably during last year's Kirby Week (I invite you to look at the time that post was posted :P).

Anyway, it's happening right now and the little Spongebobs in my head are running around and screaming "WE THREW OUT HER NAME!!!!!" Lol, no, but I'm sitting in bed, overheating slightly (the computer is on my lap) and trying to write something, anything (well, not anything, because my blog has standards (lol, sentences like that make me think of My Weird Social Commentary and the aforementioned Kirby Week post and I shudder)), to prevent myself from failing my annual goal. Yes, I am taking my annual goals very seriously this year. I have only failed one so far and that was the "post 2 True Falsity stories a month" goal, and that's even possibly excusable because I'm thinking of possibly discontinuing and archiving True Falsities. If, by the end of the year, True Falsities is not longer active, I can't really say I failed the goal, so I'll just say NEUTRAL.

Wow, is it getting hot in here? No, that's just the laptop. One of the great features of my new laptop is that it doesn't overheat. Well, obviously, it's new. But my old laptop overheated on a regular basis. In fact, now that I am using a different computer for general use, I decided to use my spare (and slightly broken) computer for other purposes, and chose to use it as a development computer. And then I discovered that running WEBrick caused the computer to overheat. So, I do my Ruby on Rails programming on my general use computer now.

Speaking of Ruby on Rails, I have some news! A few weeks ago, when I announced that my top-priority project was Xidet, a lot of people were annoyed. Okay, one person was annoyed. Lol, maybe a few people, if you count the voices in my head. Anyway, the consensus was that The TGS Website was more important and has been promised for longer. While it is true that the idea to restart Xidet just suddenly popped into my head one lazy Thursday, the original Xidet announcement was posted in March of '08 while TGS was not started until April of '08 (not to mention the The TGS Website, which was not conceived until MUCH later).

However, while Xidet quickly died out (it wasn't official until January of '09, though), The TGS Website had much more promise and my first attempt at it in '08 seemed like it might be going somewhere. Plus, TGS is (surprisingly, considering the slow reaction time of some of our members....) an active project which should have a website to support it. So, I've rearranged my project queue. The TGS Website is Number #1, while Xidet has falled to Number #2. And yes, I have been doing some workingness on it. Check out my awesome codingz at the TGS Website project site! Lol, that wasn't vain at all.

Ah! That reminds me! I would like to inform everyone of a momentous occasion that most people forgot about! Yesterday, February 18th 2010, was the first anniversary of Pillowcase! One year ago yesterday, I sat down on my bed and wrote Bluemonkey's Saga, went insane and later made it into a real comic! Obviously, I am insane, but Pillowcase is yay! I am excited about how well it was received last year and am pleased to leak the rumor that it may possibly be starting up again very soon! Stay tuned for more information!

Wow, would you look at that! My lonely ramblement/massive digression has landed me a post! A weirdly random one, but an actual post! You know, I do think I'll post this. Especially as I now only have 16 minutes. And rest assured, I will, from now on, make every attempt to release my weekly post early in the week so as to prevent this procrastination problem from happening again. Thank you all, and good night!

It seems in my post strike last year, I neglected to do the obligatory Christmas Day post. Well, actually, I completely missed out on Christmas Week. Last year (lol, two years ago) I did some fun things like reviewing an extremely odd play that I had written when I was young (I had written another play that I planned to review this year, but.... :P), writing an extremely corny story and temporarily reviving KFM.

Actually, looking back at 2008, you will not find a Christmas post. That is because, somehow, the contents of the row were deleted from the database (even though the actual row wasn't deleted). I keep meaning to check my backup (yes, you read that correctly, I only have one pre-October '09 backup) and restore the post, if possible, but anyway, back to last year.

The main thing I was going to write about in my Christmas post was the most important Christmas present: a new laptop! Oh my god, I know! :P It took two days to transfer my files, set up Ubuntu and install all of my programs, but it was worth it! However, I currently have one problem that doesn't want to be fixed.

When I installed Ubuntu, I opted for the new ext4 filesystem rather than ext3. It seems I made a mistake. Today, while on my Windows side, trying for the fourth time to mount my Ubuntu filesystem, I discovered something terrible. First off, as you may know, while Linux is very nice about foreign filesystems, Windows has remained blind and apathetic. I had previously managed to mount my Linux partitions on my old computer (which had an ext3 filesystem) using a third-party IFS driver that was actually for ext2, but as ext3 was backwards compatible, it worked okay.

Both last week and today, using four different IFS drivers, when I mounted my partition, all I could see were the root subdirectories (such as "home", "usr" and "bin") and nothing else. These folders didn't contain anything either. It was very frustrating until I remembered that I had ext4 and I realized that that was probably what was causing the problem. At that point it became very annoying because I would now have to either remember to transfer files while still on Linux or use a memory stick. It gets worse, however.

When I next booted into Ubuntu, I looked back to the screen to a horrible sight. "Why is it in terminal mode?" I wondered, "Oh god, is it a kernel panic?" It wasn't, but the error message wasn't much better. "ERROR MOUNTING ROOT PARTITION - LOADING MAINTENANCE PROMPT - PRESS CONTROL-D TO RETRY". I crossed my fingers and pressed ^D, but I just got the same error again, along with some more information, however. It now said "OMG RUN FSCK MANUALLY NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (not verbatim :P). So I ran fsck, pressed ^D again and it now worked. It gave me quite a scare, though.

So, when deciding which filesystem to use, if you dual-boot with Windows, go with ext3 but otherwise, you should go with ext4. I really don't know what extents are but I'm just going to assume it's better in some way. :P

Even if you know me, you might not know that I am not good around glasses of water. Seriously. If there is a glass of water around, I am very likely to accidentally spill it. Lol, really. I've spilled water on books, homework, precious memories and expensive electronic equipment. And this is a problem because I'm almost over-hydrated, I drink way too much water.

So, it was just a matter of time before I did something with a glass of water that I would really regret. Sunday, November 8th, 2009. 11pm. I was in bed, with a glass of water on my bedside table. I got up to go to the bathroom, and as I did, my hand spazzed and I spilled my glass of water all over my laptop computer.

Yes, you read that correctly. Go back and read it again if you're not sure. I spilled a glass of water on my computer. I immediately pulled the battery out and dried it off with paper towels, but, being the impatient idiot I am, decided to try to turn it back on after only 7 minutes instead of the generally accepted 72 hours. It actually turned on.... for about 30 seconds, after which it would not turn on at all. The power button did nothing at all and even inserting the AC adapter wouldn't light the charging light at the front of the computer. So basically, I killed it. What's worse is that I got that computer on November 9th, 2008. Yes, you read that correctly too, I killed my computer an hour before it's first birthday. Oh, irony, it just keeps coming back.

So, after switching between freaking out and lying on the floor doing nothing for three days, we finally brought it into Geek Squad at Best Buy. We waited for an hour and a half on that line, and even tried turning the computer on while in the line, but it didn't work. When it was our turn, I placed the laptop on the desk and, seriously, the guy put his finger on the power button, pressed it, and the computer turned on. ???? I know, very weird.

I was ecstatic that the computer was working as I was expecting that it would have to be sent off to someplace for weeks and that I would have to survive without a computer. But, the enthusiasm didn't last. My precious fourie was spazzing a bit. Most of the keys on the keyboard didn't work, but luckily, the arrow keys did so I was able to boot into Linux. However, one of the keys must've been stuck because the username prompt kept filling up with "u"s and it was nearly unusable. The tech person told us that the computer would continue to get worse until it completely died, and advised me to buy an external hard drive to back up my data to. I ended up getting a 500 GB Seagate drive (which was really exciting because I'd never had an eHDD before) and left feeling very happy because my computer was at least working.

It didn't last. When I got home and tried to back up my data, I was having a ton of trouble with the eHDD. Eventually, I decided it was corrupted and was annoyed that I couldn't use it. Instead, I returned it and bought a flash drive (the exact same flash drive I use to backup trindla) and now use mondoarchive to backup my laptop nightly.

My laptop has been getting better, though. The spazzing keyboard has stopped, and even though I have to use a USB keyboard now (which is very annoying), the computer doesn't have any other visible problems. I even ran an extensive (it took 30 minutes) test on my hard drive and it came up as completely healthy. So, here I am, typing up this post on my precious little laptop. It's just so resilient :P

The moral of this story is, if your hand spazzes when it gets too close to a glass of water, don't put a glass of water next to books, homework, precious memories or expensive electronic equipment. :P

EDIT: Lol, I keep saying that I killed my computer an hour before it turned 1 year old, but I actually just found that November 9th has nothing to do with my laptop. November 9th 2008 was the day Four Island went back up from it's extended downtime. OCTOBER 9th was the day I went laptop-searching and found this computer, but October 12th was the day I got it. :P

You should know that I use Ubuntu Linux. Recently, however, I upgraded from 7.10 (Gutsy) to 8.04 (Hardy), which, among other things, replaced Firefox 2 with Firefox 3b5. Of course, I though this to be a good thing because the newest version of any piece of software is normally the best. But I'm not so sure now.

My time with 3b5 started out OK, but this state didn't last long. Soon, Firefox was committing suicide at random times such as in the middle of typing up a very long Fourm post, or simply pressing more than 3 keys on the keyboard at a time. Naturally, these abrupt terminations were very annoying, especially as sometimes, Firefox refused to re-open and I had to restart the computer to get it to start again.

Another problem I had was the gradual slowdown of Firefox. Nearly everyday I had to restart my computer (and I'm talking about a hard shutdown, just finger on the button, nothing to do with the OS) to get Firefox working at a reasonable speed again. These problems started getting very annoying, so I decided I wouldn't take it any more and installed Firefox 2.

Firefox 2 has been working fine for me. With the exception of Firebug, which for some reason won't install, so if I need Firebug I need to use Firefox 3b5's buggy version of Firebug. That can get a little annoying, but for now, it seems as if everything's back to normal. I hope.

So remember, peoples, just because something's newer doesn't mean it's better. Especially if it has the word "Beta" in it.

For the record, I'd just like to say that if I had the choice, I'd do away with Firefox and use Internet Explorer.

Hi, I'm back! Sorry for the unannounced downtime yesterday. I thought I put up something in yesterday's post about it, but nope!! Anyway, if you're wondering exactly WHY there was downtime yesterday, I'm here to tell you! Note to self: Make posts on blog sound less stupid

Yesterday I archived nearly everything on my computer (personal files, website(s), subversion repositories, databases...) with the handy-dandy Tar (filtered through bzip2)--which may explain why some data inputted yesterday after I archived everything is gone now--and installed Xubuntu onto my computer. Xubuntu, A: Looks much nicer, and B: Is much more CPU friendly. I think I may have made a post about Xubuntu before, and if I have... wait.. let me just go check...

Hmmm... I haven't really, I just advertised it in [blog]Polls wear Linux[/blog]. Anyway, Xubuntu is a great OS, and... wait.... I already said this. OFIHOIUASDHFOA!

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What I'm trying--and failing--to say is, if you want Linux, and Gentoo is too advanced for you, GET XUBUNTU!

Well, I updated KFM again. (Whew!) And got back from the vacation. But there's another thing going on. That's right! Remember Project Linux? No, of course you wouldn't! I never posted it on this site!

Project Linux was the idea to move some of my servers on to a dedicated server computer. And that is finally about to come true.

I've downloaded and burned a SLAX iso image. Now remember, this is just supposed to be a Live CD, not a distro, but I'm going with it because I know actually boots on the computer I'm trying (unlike Gentoo and Ubuntu), and doesn't installation sequences that may corrupt and fail (I'm lookinig at you, openSUSE). Here is how I did it:

Unmount the hard drive. I open fdisk within the prompt that SLAX gives you (before you run startx), and deleted all previous partitions. I then created a 1 GB partition, a 512 MB partition with the "Linux swap" type and another one that filled the rest of the drive. The first one is the boot partition, the second is the swap and the third is the filesystem. Run mke2fs for the boot partition, mkswap and swapon for the second and mke2fs -j for the third. CD to the place where the live cd is mounted. For me it was /mnt/live/mnt/hdd. Oh wait! Be sure to unmount the boot partition before running this step! Run: "./make_disk.sh /dev/hda1" where /dev/hda1 is the /dev path to the boot partition. Now, this step will take a while.

Then, when it is done, mount the boot partition and run "fileswap /mnt/hda1/swapfile.swap 512" where /mnt/hda1 is the mount point of the boot partition. That will also take a while.

Almost there! Now, open lilo.conf up in vi (there's no better one you can use just yet, sorry, I know emacs is soooo much better) and add " changes=/dev/hda3" to the "append=" line, right before the last quotation mark. /dev/hda3 should be replaced with the /dev path to the last partition. Replace the "/mnt/make_disk4372q84246" s with the mount point of your boot partition. I know this is getting complicated, but just bear with me. Next, run: "lilo -C /mnt/hda1/lilo.conf -m /mnt/hda1/lilo.map -s /mnt/hda1/origmbr 2>&1 grep -vi warning". Remember to replace /mnt/hda1 with the mount point of the boot partition. That will configure LILO to tell SLAX to save all changes not to memory, but to the second partition. There's only one thing left to do, and you need to restart the computer first. Horray, you're done! You can now reboot into the live system! Oh yes, remember to remove the CD from the drive or else your new system won't come up, the CD will.

Login and CD to /etc/rc.d. Open rc.local in vi and add "swapon /mnt/hda1/swapfile.swap" where the only argument there is the path to the swapfile on the boot partition you created with Swapfile. Now you can restart the computer again and Run "startx" to start KDE!

Well everyone, I hope that was an interesting tutorial that no one else really cares about! Thank you, and good morning!

Well, although I normally make it a rule not to post twice in one day, so as to allow people to actually READ the post, I realized that I needed to make this important announcement.

I am flying to New York in two days time. I am also bringing my laptop. That means that Four Island will be down for at least a day, and if I am unable to access the router login details at my relatives' house, it will also mean Four Island will be down for a month.

I give it a 50-50. 50% I'll get the UN and PW and Four Island will be back up, and half chance that I wont. Please keep your fingers crossed that I do, because I really don't like the idea of Four Island being down for a month, especially since I am hosting other sites, which will also be down, obviously, if Four Island goes down.

HORRAY! My computer screen is fixed! This is soooo............. (At this point Hatkirby falls over and faints)

(Later...) OK... Anyway... in other news, I've put a new game up! It's located in the Windows Games section, though I guess you don't need Windows to play it. In fact, it's completely platform-notcaring! It's called the Impossible Maze! Go look at it!

I have good news and bad news everyone! What do you want to hear first? The good news? OK! My computer's cracked monitor is finally going to be fixed! HORRAY! The bad news, Four Island will be temporarily down some time this week. Don't worry, it won't vanish, hopefully I'll have configured the down page properly and you'll be told that Four Island is temporarily down. I can't wait! A fixed monitor again! Sorry about the downtime, but it had to happen sometime, and the sooner, the better! What's the point of putting it off?

Well, another Poll of the Week has come and gone, Minimsgs has vanished, and if that's not enough, there will be some downtime soon. The computer that is serving you this website has a cracked screen, and it is going to be taken in to be fixed some time in the coming week. During that time, you sadly won't be able to access Four Island, but we hope it gets fixed soon.

In other news, the Projects section is going to be split up! Four new links will appear:

• Windows Programs
• Windows Games
• Flash Games
• Challenges

We hope you like them, and if you are looking for them, Tetrgi will be moved into Windows Programs, and Rubiwin will be moved into Windows Games.

UPDATE: By the way, the results of the Poll of the Week are as follows:

Yes! - 4 vote(s)! It takes up space on the HatBar. - 0 vote(s)! groan - 0 vote(s)! Scrolling thing! - 0 vote(s)!