09 Jan 2011
For some reason, my resolutions for a new year mostly get implemented without any active work by me.
It's quite odd. Maybe I am aware of these objectives subconsiously ? Let's hope that this trend continues!
My newyear's resolutions for 2011 (in no particular order):
- Build the wargame for HES2011
- Apparently, the HES2010 wargame that I created last year was an overwhelming success. So much so that a lot of people have asked me to create the wargame for HES2011 too. I was already working on it of course, but it's still nice that people request it explicitely ;)
- Eat less meat!
- At the Dranouter festival in August 2010, I saw an interesting presentation from a guy who said that if everyone would be a vegetarian half of the time, that would be the same as half the population being a vegetarian. Less animals get killed and noone has to stop eating meat completely. A very appealing thought! So, I will make an attempt at eating less meat. Maybe I can participate in the "Vegetarian Thursday" initiative
- Visit Australia
- If I have enough vacation days that is... I would like to visit Australia and meet up with some friends there. Maybe I can go to Ruxcon 2011 :)
- Continue work on my CNC machine
- Do some decent work on my PhD
- Find a new house
- Release information on my master thesis from last year
- play more party games
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28 Jan 2010
I only had 1 exam, but at least its over and I think it went well. The last couple weeks I've finished GTA4 on my PS3 and did some work on my thesis. I finished a buttugly version of Conway's game of life using dirty pointer arithmatic tricks.
The idea was to make spaghetti code, just so I could have a testcase for my thesis :)
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07 Jan 2010
The reinstallation of victoria was successful. 2 of the 4 virtual machines on it were converted and started without much trouble. The 3rd however was very troublesome. The VMWare snapshot would not load in virtualbox and I feared I had damaged the (original) disk by trying to boot from it. After a lot of fiddling I managed to dump the disk with all snapshots merged, converted it back to vmware format and loaded it in virtualbox.
The final virtual machine I resurrected was the games machine which hosts 4 wargames: vortex, semtex, drifter and krypton.
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03 Jan 2010
My good intentions to have the OTW wargames up and running by the end of the week are being tampered by bad fortune in the form of an outdated gentoo installation.
We currently use a VMWare setup hosted by an old gentoo installation, The gentoo installation is so old that it can't even upgrade itself. I've tried it with some sad results. After it destroyed its own portage system and I had to revive it, it would not compile virtualbox-ose because of conflicts among bash, portage, util-linux and coreutils. Installing virtualbox-bin worked, but the kernel module required by virtualbox wouldn't load because the kernel didn't export the correct symbols.
I recompiled the kernel but didn't have the guts to reboot the server because if it doesn't come back, there is nothing I can do (I have no console access or anyone to contact at the datacenter)
Finally, I tried to install qemu, which kindof worked, except that qemu segfaulted all the time.
So I'm fed up with gentoo and will attempt an exciting "viral" hack: repurpose the swap partition to install a bootstrap linux and boot into that, and then erase the root partition and install a new linux on it.
Before I do any of that, I want to test out this procedure on a local setup.
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