eccentric blog

I've been wanting to see Cracker in concert now for a loooong time but they just never seem to play up here in Canada at all... But I was browsing about the other day and found out that Camper Van Beethoven is playing in Toronto on Oct 21st. Being the next best thing to a Cracker concert, I picked up some tickets online and I'm all set to go. Being on a Thursday evening I should all dead and whatnot on Friday so it'll probably be a long workday... But I'm sure it'll be worth it :)

posted at: 10:10 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I finally found the option for the digital audio output in xine. It was right in the FAQ for xine, and I'm not sure how I missed it before. Just had to change the audio.speaker_arrangement: option in the ~/.xine/config file and set it to Pass Through. It seems the default is to output two channel audio. So that is all working properly again, and everything is well with the freevo box. I still have one thing that I've been meaning to do for a while and that is setup a screensaver so that when it's idle for a long time it just cycles through a slideshow or something.

posted at: 15:25 | path: /freevo | permanent link to this entry

I got a copy of Richard Burns Rally this week and have been playing it quite a bit. It is by far the best rally simulation I've ever played. Needless to say it's consumed much of my time over the past few days. Unlike Colin McRae rally it actually support using two joystick devices so I can play the game using my Act-Labs pedals with my Logitech wheel. So far I've completed all the driving school stuff in the game with perfects, and now I'm just working my way through a rally season. Good fun...

posted at: 23:42 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Stayed up late and got a bunch of work done which is nice. Always good to actually get stuff done for a change. Went over and helped hurt out for a bit with some linux software raid stuff earlier today, and replaced a bad drive which went quite smoothly. I spent a good portion of the afternoon setting up enlightenment on my computer as a change from gnome which I've been using for the past few months. I can't tell if I like enlightenment because it's what I used to use back in the day or if it's just all the fun features and ways to customize it. Either way I think I'll stick with it for a while or until I get lazy and just go back to gnome...

posted at: 05:00 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I've been working quite a bit lately with interchange the past few days while doing work on the goosystems.com website. I'm really quite impressed with all its features. I've set it up to do more of its database functions with mysql instead of just working with flat text files now and that has been working out well. Its way of doing things seems like a pain when you first start working with it but once you start to understand how everthing fits together it all starts to make sense. I'd suggest taking a look into it for anyone that is setting up a full e-commerce type solution.

posted at: 16:09 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I think I talked about dspam earlier this year when I first installed it, but now that I have been using it for some time I thought I'd give an update. After the initial training of only 50 or so spam emails, the system almost perfectly classifies all my email. It did mark a few copies of the Debian Weekly News as spam but after training of that it seems to be fine now. Its filtered just over 5000 emails so I'd have to say that is pretty good. I haven't had a piece of spam in my inbox for 3 weeks or so now which sure is a nice change from how things used to be.

If I get energetic I may install dspam system wide on slavery and have it filter every accout. (right now I only filter single accounts through procmail) If I do that I'll have to setep the stats pages they have which look pretty neat as well...

posted at: 13:55 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Had Monday and Tuesday off this week and got a bunch of stuff done around the house. Had a very productive day Tuesday and got a whole bunch of work I've been meaning to do for a long time done. It's been nice having so much time off work and getting a little time to myself. I have booked off next Monday and Tuesday as well so it'll be another three day work week next week as well. Other than that not a whole lot has been going on... Just the usual I suppose :)

posted at: 21:36 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Just upgraded my freevo box to version 1.5.1, and mplayer 1.0pre5. The only problem I ran into was that the mplayer alsa audio output driver was changed from alsa1x to just alsa. The new version supports caching of zsnes titles which should speed up browsing games which always takes longer than I'd like.

posted at: 11:06 | path: /freevo | permanent link to this entry

The long weekend is over, and it was back to the daily grind this morning. Had a pretty good long weekend and headed up to Canada's Wonderland on Saturday with my dad, girlfriend and son and had a really great time. I was quite suprised to see that Landon was so eager to go on all the rides as I didn't quite expect him to be much of a thrill seaker. He ended up going on just about every rollercoaster he was allowed on. Had some troubles on the way home as we nearly blew a tire on my dad's cadillac. Noticed some bumpy riding on the way home and when we stopped it turned out we had lost some of the tread of the tire and the belt was all broken up. Pretty lucky we stopped when we did as it wasn't very far from blowing. We managed to get home on the spare tire for just over 100km's I believe.

posted at: 19:05 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry