Jory Stone's Place

Also called The Advancement of Jory Stone

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Cicra Prehistoric times: An Amstrad, believed to have a 2x86 CPU.
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Cicra 1996: An IBM 486 50Mhz with 20MB RAM and a 2x CD-ROM.


Cicra 1998: Then on a 6x86 133Mhz with 96MB of RAM.


Cicra 2000: Now with a M2 250Mhz with 160MB of RAM.


2003: Then a T-Bird 650Mhz with 320MB of RAM.
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2005: After that a Athlon 64 2800+ with 512MB of RAM.
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2006: Currently with a Intel Core 2 E6300 with 1GB of RAM.
<No Picture> Continue reading "The Life of Jory Stone in Pictures"

Dad had new tires put on the van today. The old tires were well worn, one was balding so bad you could see the metal mesh underneath. Another slowly leaked air and had to be aired up everyday before driving anywhere.

I spent most of today outside cleaning Mom's AC and playing with Lily. I didn't plan on playing in the pool but I slipped and fell into the pool, and so since I was already wet I went ahead and played with Lily for a while. Took me quite some time to dry even though it was scorching outside today. I think a have a light sunburn, it doesn't hurt but my skin is visibly red.

In the computer side of things, I setup my local Linux box to act as a caching http proxy using squid. It was very easy to configure and setup and it actually does seem to help. I expect with all four computers using the proxy we should benefit from visiting the same sites.

After setting up the proxy I thought about RAID-5, the Linux box is also our backup server. Every night all our systems do a daily backup via ftp to the Linux box. RAID-5 would make me feel much safer and would actually be very easy to setup.

After googling a little bit I found this interesting article on Tom's Hardware about using Software RAID-5 in Windows XP Pro, http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/.

After reading that I think software RAID is much better than hardware RAID for the recovery aspect, as with hardware if your RAID controller fails you will need to buy another one of the same model if you still can. With software RAID all you need is a system that has enough IDE (or SATA) connections.

The cost of software RAID isn't high either, just the cost of the hard drives. Buying three 160GB hard drives for a total of 320GB of storage in RAID-5 comes out to almost $200.

I compiled a version of the Welcome Back Plugin for XChat for Windows users.

Welcome Back Plugin 0.5 Win32 Build (07/25/2005, 4KB)

Homepage: http://tuxserve.sourceforge.net/wb.php

Wow, I haven't written a blog entry for quite sometime.

I've been busy looking for my own car and working to have enough money to actually pay for the car

I recently bought a laptop and have been using the wireless lan. I must say a notebook is one of the coolest things I've messed with. Being able to move from room to room without any hassle. Using it in the car it sweet to, of course I only use it when I'm not driving... One thing that amazes me is hot the laptop gets whenever you really start using the cpu. I don't know how it compares to other laptops, but it gets hot enough that it actually burns my bare legs. You have to wear some jeans to keep your legs intact while doing heavy processing. Light processing like surfing the internet, listening to mp3s, chatting, and compiling doesn't heat it up very much so those tasks work very well on it. However I'm afraid to do any video encoding for fear that it would melt itself. Continue reading "Long time no see"

Only a week left of college this semester. It has has just flown by.

I managed to apply for FA early enough so that this Fall I will be getting some aid. But I had still missed the deadline for the extra scholarships offered through the college. I had only missed the deadline by two weeks

I've been taking my younger brother to praise team practice at the church and have been thinking about getting a laptop so I could work while there. During the summer I could really use it, since right now I'm just using that 2-3 hours we stay there to study. But when college is over I'm not going have anything useful to do.

I looked at Walmart's $500 laptop, quite nice for the price. Though for me the cpu is too slow, not enough memory or hard drive space. I've read the 1Ghz VIA C3 is roughly equal to a Celeron 633Mhz which isn't too bad but it would be too much of a slow down from my current A64 1.8Ghz. I think 1Ghz should be useful. The 128MB of RAM is also much to small, 512MB would be the ideal amount as I multi-task like crazy. 20GB would barely hold all my mp3's much less my development tools and code. I think I could manage with a 40GB, of course my dream laptop would have a 120GB+. Hey I said dream laptop

It sure has been a long time since I wrote an entry. A lot has happened, going to college, upgraded to a A64 2800+ system.

Google Desktop Search is one of the coolest things I've seen.
Simply install the tiny GDS program and let it index your hard drive. Then you can search for anything instantly.
The only downside someone might have is the index size, on my system with a 120GB and 80GB it totals about 1GB, which isn't bad IMHO.

I had written a plugin that allowed GDS to scan and index Matroska files a few days ago. It uses Haali's Matroska Parser library with HTML formated content for indexing. Today I packaged it up and submitted it to the official Google Desktop Search Plugin page.

GDCMatroska 1.0
Installer Package
Bare DLL

An updated version of the Matroska Shell Extension for Windows Explorer.

MatroskaProp 2.8
Installer
Source Code

Here are few basic Linux tips I've found handy.

Display Disk Filesystem Usage
df

Restart the network interface - (from RedChina)
ifconfig eth0 up or down and then up
If you need dhcp, after it's up, type dhclient eth0, or pump eth0, or dhcpcd eth0, whatever client you use. Fedora core and up uses dhclient, older Redhats used dhcpd, and I believe Gentoo uses pump.

Install SpeedStream 1020 Network Card
Run modconf
Then add the net->tulip kernel module

Listing Folders from FAT32
You need to set the chmod to a+x.

First to enable Remote Desktop.
Go to the System Properties (right-click My Computer -> Properties) Remote Tab
Check the Remote Desktop checkbox.

Now to enable the telnet server. Pull up the Computer Management MMC.
Services and Applications -> Services
Look at the Telnet service properties, change the Startup type to Automatic.

Now add a user that would be used only for remote access. This can be a Limited Account or Admin, you generally would like to dedicate a user account for remote access for security reasons, and also a strong password is needed for remote access.

To add a user go to the Computer Management MMC,
System Tools -> Local Users and Groups -> Users
Right-Click, New User.
Now Add the user to the Administrators, Remote Desktop Users, and TelnetClients (you may need to create this group) groups.

Now to hide the remote user's account from the welcome screen in Windows XP. First Open Registry Editor.

In Registry Editor, navigate to the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\SpecialAccounts\UserList

Create a entry of the REG_DWORD type with a name is the username of the remote user.

Assign it a value of 0.

Now after all this, you should reboot and check that the remote login works.

Here is a diskwriter plugin I wrote for foobar2000 v0.8.2 that writes WMA (Windows Media Audio) files.

foo_wmaenc v1.2
Binary
Source Code