Wikipedia has an intriguing article on common misconceptions.
Month: December 2008
Surround Sound in Intrepid!
I’ve been wanting surround sound in Linux for a while. My XP machine at mom’s flips stereo to the back, which I really like. Thanks to the Ubuntu forums, I found that I had to uncomment the default-sample-channels line and change it to 6 for 5.1 sound. (5 speakers + subwoofer) I also changed the sample rate because I noticed it complaining in the PulseAudio logs (it was changing it to the correct value) while I was fiddling with getting it working, but I don’t think that’s needed. I added myself to the pulse-rt, pulse, and pulse-access groups. It still wasn’t working, and I was getting upset. I found this post, and sure enough, the volume on the other channels was zeroed out in the volume control. I set all my sound output preferences in System > Preferences > Sound to PulseAudio Sound Server, but when I put it back to Autodetect it still worked. I’m happy now.
WordPress Upgrade, RSI, and the LAN
I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. The admin interface is now really slick. It’s gotten an overhaul and is now a pleasure to use, although it seems like it’s slower. The main page just took an ENTIRE MINUTE to render! This is unacceptable, and hopefully I can get it sorted out. [EDIT: I enabled WP Super Cache, and it seems better. That’s odd because it didn’t seem to enable last time.] Unfortunately, I forgot, although I understood I was supposed to, disable my plugins before the upgrade. Result: white screen of non-loading death and me panicing. Luckily, Google revealed a very helpful page on how to disable plugins by editing the MySQL database, so now the site is back up.
I was hoping to get into RSI, which is an MIT research program. The first sign was that it wanted people who already knew what they wanted to do for their PHDs. (I seriously almost wrote “PDFs” there.) I checked my PSAT and ACT scores and they didn’t meet the minimum. Even though they said that lower scores could be balanced with strong recommendations and whatnot, I decided not to continue the application process. That saves my teachers writing recommandation letters then. It made me feel strange to request an essay from a teacher.
I’m holding a LAN with 8 people on January 2nd. I say 8 because we would need that many for a full game of Versus Left 4 Dead. Pat might not be able to come due to a New Years thing, but I hope it works out.
EDIT: Hmm… The delay in response time looks like it’s limited to default_socket_timout in php.ini…
NTP and genetic algorithms
The pfSense box now syncs to the NTP pool. The service doesn’t show up under services, which made it confusing. It’s running now though. All machines on the network sync to it. This is nice because they’re all synced and I suppose there’s less bandwidth usage although I wasn’t getting the feeling it was a bandwidth how anyway.
I’ve found, thanks to Reddit, this mezmerizing implementation of a genetic algorithm. The purpose is to get a vehicle that consists of four circles, two of which are wheels and two that cannot touch the ground, to go as far as possible in a seemingly set time. Suspension, angle, length, and stating position of the circles (I suppose through angle) are varied, as well as circle size. It’s really interesting and is making me seriously concider starting a project of my own in this nature.
Source Dedicated Server
SRCDS is now working with pfSense. I ended up deleting all my SRCDS-related NAT port forwardings and firewall rules. I then added:
Port forwards:
27015 TCP/UDP
27011 TCP/UDP
NAT outbound:
27015 (Static port yes)
27011 (Static port yes)
I’m happy that it’s working now. That leaves the only remaining issue as the xfire file transfer. It’s weird because the UPnP service is running. Maybe I have to change the max upload/download rates from their defaults of blank? That’s for another day, though.
Modem
My DSL modem (even though I guess it’s actually a bridge, but modem is what is says on the box) crashed. I knew something was wrong when a request to Google timed out. I couldn’t ping the modem, even from the router. I have homework to do and I haven’t started any of it yet. Tomorrow will be busy. 🙁
BOINC
It took me this long, but I finally figured out that Rosetta@Home is far, far more memory-bound than Seti@home. Zombie 1, which has a Celeron @ 432 MHz and 123MB of RAM, had if I recall correctly an load average that was maybe 2 – 3. I suspended Rosetta, and what I had thought was the power light turned off. It was the hard drive light. The thing was eating swap like no other. I have to get more RAM in the poor thing. Zombie 4 was using swap too, although to a much lesser extent. It has a Pentium 3 @ 728 MHz and 124MB of RAM, so the CPU is a factor too. For now I’m going to detach Zombie 1 from Rosetta and start it back up on Seti@Home, where I don’t remember that happening. In the longer term, I’m probably going shopping for some RAM.
EDIT: Success. Load average is now 1.00.
pfSense
My network at mom’s is now running off pfSense! I took Zombie 6, gave it a second ethernet card I bought from the school, and installed from the LiveCD. Fairly simple, it even let me figure out which card was which by plugging it into the switch! That was cool. The install was uneventful. It started working! I configured the port forwarding and even some fancy DNS options I’d been looking forward to. The domains I host now go straight to the LAN IP of the server when accessed from within the LAN. I think before that it was going out to AT&T and back. DNS seems much faster, although I haven’t put it through a scientific test, nor do I intend to at this point. I set the pfSense box to query the AT&T DNS servers that the modem was querying, although I’m not entirely sure if it’s doing that. Then it broke. I spent what I’m pretty sure was hours going over the configuration of the modem and pfSense box. Then I turned on the monitor, and it was spamming errors which I now unfortunately cannot remember. Google revealed that it was a problem with the PCI bus and ethernet card I bought from the school. (10/100 Mbits, WAN side, a Gigabit card is LAN side) I took down the machine and moved the card to another slot. It started working again, then failed in the same way. I swapped it with the ethernet card in my sister’s machine. It worked instantly in the pfSense box! After another reboot and some nagging, the other card started working on my sister’s Ubuntu box. I then, after some effort, set my Linksys router to be a switch and wireless access point. I had to set the advanced routing option to router instead of gateway, disable its DHCP server, assign it an IP out of the router’s DHCP range, and plug one of the LAN ports (not the uplink!) into the pfSense router. Hooray! The only problems out of all this are that Xfire file transfer didn’t work when Brad tried to send me a file, although it worked a few minutes later for Pat, so whatever, and that for some reason my SRCDS server can’t be seen from the Internet now. I’ll have to check the pfSense forums when I get time, and if worst comes to worst there’s always commercial support… Zoneclient is awesome. I was able to just point it at the modem connection status page, from which it found and used the IP. Surprisingly easy.