Archive for the ‘g33kl0g’ Category
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005
Within the next few months, I will officially be moving from using Microsoft Windows as my primary operating system to a Linux distro. I will most likely be dual-booting using grub but it will definitely default to the Linux distro of my choice instead of Windows. Depends on how flexible Wine will be when I want to run applications and other programs that depend on Windows.
I am 95% set of making Gentoo my Linux distro of choice. The other 5% is a mixed evaluation of Debian in second and then Slackware being third in line.
Gentoo has by far amazed me beyond my wildest expectations and previous experience with trying out various Linux distros as a desktop replacement over the past few years. I have tried Redhat, Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD in the past (some of them not successfully due to cumbersome incompatibilities). Gentoo, although it has the reputation of being a very frustrating operating system, only demanded a few hours of my time to get the basic system installed from stage3 (stage2 took way longer on my test P3 500MHz system so I didn’t even bother starting it from stage1). I’ll probably try bootstrapping when I’m ready to get Gentoo installed and hopefully, I’ll have plenty of time free to get everything compiled and troubleshoot anything that needs troubleshooting. Other than the time it takes to get Gentoo basic system, X, gdm, and fluxbox (a very simplistic and clean windows manager) installed, everything was extremely stable and customizable.
I also purchased a 2-port KVM which apparently has a high chance of successly functioning with my Logitech Cordless MX Duo Elite and is cross-compatible with Windows and Linux. So far, all I’ve been doing was running my secondary PC without a monitor and just either VNC (or remotely ssh) into it. This limited to the secondary’s function when the primary crashed so a KVM would make things much easier. 
Anyway, I have been taking a much-needed break from everything back at home after the Summer semester was over. It was nice to just relax and not continuously worry about school for a while.
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Friday, June 10th, 2005
I’ve always enjoyed self-learning.
As geeky as this may sound, ever since back in the days when I was finally able to get onto the Internet with ease, it seemed like a whole new world had opened up for me. I had access to so many resources that I could use to learn about what interested me. For example, I remember when I first found Geocities. I spent an entire day learning HTML by example and even trial and error (upload and see). The work-in-progress product definitely looked like a child scribbling some gibberish on the monitor but I found it amazing and absolutely awesome.
That was when it all started. I started to seek out resources I could use to learn what I thought was awesome at that time like Visual Basic programming. My first textbox, command button, and form that did absolutely nothing other than displaying “test” in the textbox when you clicked on the button was spectacular in my mind. All the programs I’ve made during those days were all so trivial but they were still fun and it probably kept me from doing foolish things with my time.
I’m so glad that I learned the ability to self-teach. As a matter of fact, I know for a fact that I am more productive learning things on my own than having to go to class and listen and take notes during a lecture. It’s a bit weird when I say it like that but I’m confident that it is true. (But of course, having a professor to go to when you can’t figure something out is something outside of this context.)
… to be continued.
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Thursday, March 31st, 2005
Just an addendum to the g33kl0g
-su-2.05b# uptime
3:38PM up 216 days, 2:01, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.05, 0.01
ALPHA Uptime 
Am I going to celebrate if it reaches “up 356 days” ?
You betcha! 
(An afterthought: I probably just jinxed it right there… but wanted to check up on this because apparently there was a power outtage at the DC but from what I can see, power was still on in the area where this server was yet the network was down.)
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Wednesday, February 9th, 2005
So, my computer crash as it does randomly when I am surfin the web and watching TV through Leadtek Winfast 2000 Expert PVR. So as usual, I do a hard reboot of the computer.
Only this time, I come to realize that Windows wasn’t booting up. Right after you see the Windows XP loader screen, it went blank and showed a BSOD:
Stop c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The session manager initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000017 (0×00000000, 0×0000000) The system has been shut down.
Now, normally, I would have thought okay… Windows got screwed up somewhere. To my horror, right as the BSOD showed on the monitor… I heard a sickening noise as there was a click, sound of lowering RPM, and nothing else. At first, I thought it was my 250GB slave drive that had just died on me. If this was the case, better than nothing as it had been less than a couple of months since I bought it and it only had useless data on it.
I disconnect the power cable to it and booted my computer up thinking it would boot up without a problem. Except… same issue. This is where the idea struck me… I could have lost everything on my primary drive which I was lazy to backup lately. So I sorta panic in my mind and started thinking about what kind of data I would lose if this primary drive died. Nothing that would kill me but certainly all my email correspondences, school work, programs etc… (fortunately for me, there was a paper that I was working on last night but it was due today so I already turned it in).
Anyway, I started installing XP on a laptop Simon gave me as he had no use for it. I wanted to see what that error meant and if there was any way to fix it. During the XP install, I decided to take it out and put it as a slave to my sister’s old computer I’ve brought just for the heck of it. The thing never booted for some reason unknown to me not even to safe mode.
Then, I decided to try safe mode on my computer to see if there was anything different; this resulted in the same issue. Then I tried the “Boot last good configuration” option … and amazingly enough, it booted up fine.
After a long sigh of relief, I backed up my documents and emails I would not be able to retrieve if my primary drive failed. That was a close call.
Searched the net but found out Microsoft only shows this case in NT system knowledgebase and does not mention XP at all so their “Solution” didn’t make much sense.
Moral of this incident: Backup your data at least once a month if not once a week. I thought this would be my 3rd drive failure (first two were both Western Digital drives which explains why I first suspected it was my secondary drive as it was WD).
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