Divine Lunacy

For about three weeks now, I have been in the process of cleaning my room, which wasn’t really dirty. Well, today, I finally arrived at the “vacuum up all the dust” stage. ( the less dust in my room, the less dust to make it past my computer’s dust filter… ) well, about 5 minutes into the task, the vacuum cleaner overheated and died. Was my room too much for it?

Cross country skiing agian yesterday. My parents seem to have a new facination with the sport… After skiing, we had planned to eat at uno, but plans don’t always work the way they are supposed to. There was a 1.5 hour wait. well, thinking we were smart, we headed over to TGI Fridays, only to be taken aback by the line so long we wouldn’t be able to get through the door to inquire as to the wait. Figuring the adjacent applebees would be in the same condition, we headed over to the longhorn steakhouse. Upon entering, I commented to my sister “If that was a 1.5 hour wait at UNO, this must be three.”– it turned out to be 2 hours and twenty minutes. At this point, my sister and I were in clear consensus that it was the yuppies out to ruin our lives. Again, thinking we were smart, we tried to outwit the yuppies by heading over to Wright’s Farm. ( yeah, who would think to go there after 7 on a saturday? ). Enough people were there to form a 50 foot-single file line stretching from the couter all the way past lea and the coats. a 90 minute wait, so they told us. Ah, again the yuppies had beaten us. Determined to win, we did someting we were sure the yuppies would never think of. We headed down to Elite II, were we were met with a stunning wait of 9 seconds. Food arrived sometime in the near future; we live happily ever after–Until we again meet up with restaurant going yuppies.

edit: The vacuum came back to life and died again within 5 minutes.
edit: In order to keep our computers operating at optimal temperatures, we keep the air there in at an agreeable temperature. Opening the windows in order to yoke the power of mother nature’s subzero temperatures allowed me to vacuum for a full 15 minutes.–wearing a jacket is highly advised

Today, I partially rewrote a program which I initially wrote last year. The program, written in c++, deals with combinations for a combination lock. It has several different modes available, allowing one to make one number constant, or display only combinations containing a given number, or numbers. Naturally, I had to check the programs work, so, for the hell of it, I will post that here. ( yeah, I know, I am weird. )

mode 1: list all possible combinations.
. No digits are allowed to repeat, so this is simply (50)(49)(48), or 50!/47!

Mode 2: list all possibilities where the x^th number is constant.
This one is a little bit harder, but still, not all that hard. It is given as: (50)(49), or 50!/48!.

Mode 3: list all combinations containing x
This one is a little bit harder. 3!(50)(49)(1)/2!. The three factorial comes from the fact that the three numbers can be permuted three ways. The 2! there is because we are dealing with combinations. (all digits unique)

That was really poorly written… I’ll post something less educational tomorrow…

Everyday, I tell myself I am going to post today; Everyday, I think of something to post about. For some reason, I never end up posting. I think I am too lazy to post or something, but it is either that or force myself to clean my room at the moment… Now, this post is just putting of the inevitible cleaning of the room ( and… Why must drum sets and computers attract all the dust? ).

Since I last posted anything informational/mildly journal-like, I switched from my 10% mandrake, 90% I compiled myself to Fedora Core 3. For some reason, SELinux wasn’t completely working for me. I had the SELinux patched version of init compiled and installed, as well as util-linux, pam and openssh. ( Yeah, before the pam, I was using shadow passwords. I ended up booting to a rescue Cd several times to fix things, but in the end, it was all good. ) The main reason I switched is because I got really pissed off at Mandrake’s Glibc. There was a problem with md5.h being non-existent ( at least, I think that was a problem. ) I tried to compile Glibc from source… which is where things really bad. There was a problem compiling, probably something I could have fixed with a dependency or something, but I just got really mad at it…. I ran make, with the -k option. I built all of Glibc with -k, then I installed with -k, knowing that things would most likely be messed up. I broke all My c applications. basically, the only applications I could run were the ones that I already had running. Luckily, I had gaim runing at the time, so, I was able to seem half alive anyway. I could not open any new shells ( bash… hehe.. ). Luckily also, KDE is written in C++. Now, I am happily running Fedora Core 3, but trying to install over as many things as I can. ( well, delete it then install a self-compiled version ). SOmething along the line somewhere prompted me to switch to Vsftpd. It seems to be really fast, as everyone says, and the download was very small. I definitely lost features I had with Proftpd, but from what I have seen with Vsftpd, it is more efficient in many ways. Also, somewhere along the line, I was prompted to switch to X.org.

The most depressing part about switching to Fedora was definitely the prospect of facing more GTK+ compilations… They went without trouble this time. The whole package, and its dependancies installed without a single error.

Things aren’t all better now… I am facing some oscure library error when I try to install firefox. The same error Occurs when I try to run UT2k4. After scouring the internet, I was unable to find any useful information about it, but I will have to keep trying. It seemed to be a problem with the GCC install, so I compiled fresh from source to no avail… As if having errors trying to install a precompiled firefox isn’t enough, there is also some annoying error trying to compile from source. Luckily, though, Fedora core 3 comes with firefox installed ( although, it is the 1.0 preview )

As part of the switch to Fedora, I wiped my whole root partition, and reformatted it ext3… now, I can’t get my 2.6.10 kernel to boot. I’ll have to look into that. Well, compilng and installing lilo went fine. I can’t stand grub for the life of me… Now, that was a very long discombobulated post… *skips the proofreading*

*edit: Thanks to josh for downloading and and burning Fedora for me

I watched “The Passion of the Christ” this weekend. Sure, it gives a pretty accurate historical account, but as far as a movie goes, it is just a bunch of blood and gore. Yeah… what is with those freaky devil scenes? how about that one where he is just sitting on the cracked orangish floor screaming? Who had the idea to make King Herod such a fruit? That was kind of funny. Addmittedly, my sister and I were laughing histerically at that and the scene in which the children were yelling at judas. Where is all that excessive beatind documented? It seems as though Mel Gibson decided to greatly over dramify things. So, how about the shooting blood at the end of the movie? Test if he’s dead? Everyone knows that if you stab a dead person, the blood will just kind of “meander” out. Judging by the exaggarated gushing blood, Jesus must’ve been alive. Basically, its a really bad movie, and we all know how it turns out, but if you want a taste of what Jesus’ crucifiction may have been like, go ahead and watch the movie.

Its that time of the year again!!! Yes, Its Exam week! After thinking about it, all I really have to study for is English and History, so it should be a pretty relaxing week…

wooohoo! I finally added that next page button… It works and everything. Took me no more than 5 mintues to add and stylize.

Alas, I have the dead hex people shirt from thinkgeek.com!

I went camping with my troop this weekend. We stayed at some camp out in some remote part of Mass near the New Hampshire border. It was a fairly good campout, aside from the temperature. ( fighting a wood stove is never fun ). We went Cross Country skiing/snow skating At winblown mountain on Saturday. It was a nice mountain, and the Rental equiptment was nice, but before they day was even half way done, it began to snow…. and snow…. and snow… for the second half of the day, we were on un-groomed trails with an accumulation of fresh powder. It was tough going.. Ok… enough of that. I had 32 ounces of cappuchino and 16 ounces of coke… It was good.

The real queer excitement came later that night when I laminated a card with duct tape and every one else followed suit. We then began throwing the cards at each other. The whole cabin was turned into a war zone… It was definitely a funny sight… some of those cards hit really hard.