WauloK’s BangRocks Blog

Woo! Our ii account is already set up!!@!^@$&^!!!!

Our internet has been down all day, so Bec suggested I ring ii to find out if they had already connected us (we the doubting Thomasesesess’s) and lo’ and behold they said ‘Yus. Joo wuz du3 4 c0nn3ct1n9 2dae. 15 dun’.

SWEEEEET! Let’s celebrate! $49.95 per month. 1.5mb download speed and 20Gb limit.

I can’t wait to get home to try out Second Life at supersonic speed!

Here you can see a couple of photos from the Gold Coast airport. It may possibly be the reason Blake could not fly in last week. What do you think?

Next, we have some photos from Bond University. Let’s hope everyone has flood insurance for their cars, yea?

Yes, the sign says "Floodway". Ironic, don’t you think?

As you can see, I’ve finally uploaded a WYSIWYG plugin for WordPress. It makes things much easier to work with. I can upload images to display and enter emoticons with a click.

I finally found a way to really speed up my PC. I deleted the C: drive partition and reinstalled Windows XP. Now it doesn’t have any extraneous drivers or other applications loading on startup. I’ve spent the last couple of days reinstalling all my favourite applications. It’s nice to have a clean install. Less clutter and faster PC operation. I hope it makes Second Life work a lot better. I had a problem with Second Life crashing too often. Either that or my PC would just totally reboot spontaneously. ARGH.  No idea why tho. So, I’m hoping it was a driver or something. Cross your fingers for me.

We picked up Blake from the airport last night. On the way home, we stopped at and hoped to go into Sizzler, but the line was out the door so we just went next door to KFC. We’re not fans of KFC, but it was there and everyone was hungry, so no other option. Well, next door to Sizzler is also LoneStar, but last time we went there the service was terrible.. very terrible so we aren’t going back there again.

This morning we got up and headed to the Carrara markets. The kids both played the clown ball game and won their prizes (Sienna won a fluffy monkey and Blake won some water balloons) and they went on the airplane which goes round and around. They both loved it. Sienna was crying when it stopped. She didn’t want it to finish hehe

After that, we went to another market nearby and picked up some fresh vegetables while the kids played on the park equipment.

YO! Where’s all this rain come from? Have we had the Pacific Ocean evaporate over our home?
The whole back yard is flooded. The drain can’t cope. He’s lost his bottle, man!
The car port is flooded and a river is flowing down our driveway!
Haven’t seen this much rain since the day I flew up here to check out potential places to live.
I heard on the news on the way home that they expected severe weather conditions so I put both cars in the carport tonight. It’s a wonder they don’t float away anyhow.

I hope Blake is going to fly home tomorrow okay. They said on the news also that if you expect anyone flying in tonight to ring the airport as they might not be coming after all. It appears some flights were cancelled.

We’ve decided to go back to ii for our internet. I went to check our plan for internet and our phone bundle. I found out we were on the highest line rental plan there is. Over $40.00 per month! Also, we had thought it was costing us $44.95 per month, but that’s the 256k/128k (iirc) plan. We are really on $59.95 per month. We were getting 12Gb per month for our limit then being shaped to 64kbps if we went over that.
Now, ii has $49.95 per month for a 1.5mb/256k plan with 10Gb peak/10Gb offpeak plan with $29.95 line rental! WOAH big difference. Since Second Life is extremely bandwidth-hungry, we need all the speed we can.
So, we can get three times the download speed for less cash per month. Hmm. What would Jesus do?
I rang them today and signed up straight away! We should get it by next week and have 2 - 5 hours downtime, which is quite good.
The thing with Second Life is the textures are all on the server and uploaded by players, so if you enter an area you have to stream download the textures via UDP to your PC before they can be rendered. Also, any sound bites or streamed music/video has to be downloaded to your PC as you play. This is different from other MMO’s where the world is mostly static with minor updates downloaded in a big patch once. Second Life is totally dynamic and any part of it can change from day to day or even hour to hour. In fact, I was reading where one place people frequented they had decided to completely re-do it, so they wiped all buildings and other 3d objects and totally rebuilt the place from scratch.
I exceeded our download limit for this month at the start of the week, so we’ve been shaped to 64kbps until Friday when it gets reset so only one of us is able to play online at a time. My game isn’t affected by Bec’s but if I play her game will lag so much that it’s totally unplayable since mine will be sucking all the bandwidth to download textures, etc.
The game can cache up to 1Gb of data (the main reason I resized my C: drive the other day) which really isn’t that much in a ‘game’ this size.
Now we can’t wait until next week. 8Gb pm more download space, triple the speed and cheaper charges. Sounds great
The funny thing is, when we were on ii before (when it was still called iiNet) if you joined their iiPhone as your preferred long distance provider, they HALVED your download limit per month. That’s fuct up! NOW they do the right thing and DOUBLE your download limit per month for using iiPhone.
We don’t care whom provides us with our phone line. If we didn’t have ADSL we wouldn’t need a local line anyway, but it’s a pre-requisite unfortunately. We make most calls mobile to mobile since we get free 10 min mobile calls all day.

What a waste of about five hours.
I decided to take the 120Gb HDD out of my desktop PC and whack it into the FreeBSD server. I was using it to try out Linux again, but it annoys me since it still doesn’t work 100% and my interest in Linux has waned yet again.

Since Blake’s computer hasn’t been working for some time (I thought the Hard Drive in that was broken) I decided to ‘upgrade’ the server with bits out of Blake’s computer and get him another one when we have time and money.
Retrieving the server from behind my desk is a chore in itself. There’s no way to take it out sideways or underneath the table. You can only remove it by reaching right over the high desk and grabbing the top of the case and lifting it over the desk. Unfortunately, it’s in an old old full tower case which by itself is extremely heavy. Add the bits inside and try to lift it with nothing to pivot on by putting your arms over the top and trying to pull it up and you have yourself a perfect case for Occupational Health and Safety.

I got it out and pulled two hard drives out of it and put those with my 120Gb HDD into Blake’s smaller mini tower case. So that’s a 120Gb HDD, a 200Gb HDD and a 40Gb HDD which I was hoping to boot off. I was going to discard the 20Gb HDD I used to boot off.
To make sure it was all going to work, I plugged the PC into enough cables to boot it and show it starting FreeBSD on my monitor. Cheerin’. It wouldn’t even boot Blake’s OS nor let me install an OS on his HDD so his old 17Gb HDD must be broken, right?
I put it all together and leaned over the table and lifted the mini tower over it. My arms aren’t that long, so of course the PC drops the last foot to the floor (oops).
I power it up and it won’t start.
Apparently, it had been configured to have the main boot sector set up on the 20Gb HDD then load the kernel off the 40Gb HDD!! wtf!
After much stuffing around (and nearly calling Sarge in on the fone, but he wasn’t available) I managed to get it to boot the 20Gb HDD with an old kernel it still had on it. It booted most of the way but at the end it couldn’t get a signal any more from the HDD (controller?) and tried to reset the drive and locked up.
I put the old full tower together with the old motherboard already in it, in order to get a working PC for Blake with a nice 40Gb HDD in it.
I put in my Windows XP cd and it loaded all the drivers into memory and displayed “Booting Windows…”. After 30 seconds it shut down the HDD and after another 30 seconds it shut the PC off. I tried another XP cd but it did the same thing, so I chucked in my Knoppix Live CD and it started up, detected some hardware, sent TERM signals to all processes and turned the PC off again.
*SIIIIIIIIIIIGH*
I found another old motherboard in the cupboard which had stopped working ages ago and had been replaced, but I thought “what they hey” and put it into the mini tower case instaed. That wouldn’t boot up either, so it MUST be dead.
By this time I was very frustrated and angry. A lot of time invested and both motherboards are broken.
I had some lunch and a shower and went back to business.

I reached over and picked up that mini tower case, nearly giving myself another hernia, and pulled all it’s guts out again and put them all back into the full tower.
Next, I leaned over the table again and heaved the damn full tower up and over again. It only has to drop about half a foot to the ground.
I had decided to put both the 40Gb and 20Gb HDD’s back into the full tower since they seem so reliant on each other and detatched the CD Burner drive in there. So now it’s got: 200Gb HDD, 120Gb HDD, 40Gb HDD and 20Gb HDD in there. 380Gb should be enough for anyone

So, now I have a server which works, but it’s a 433 MHz Celeron with 256Mb RAM. It was going to be an Athlon XP 1600+ with 512Mb RAM and cables and controller supporting 100 UDMA drives instead of the 33 it now supports. At least it supports S.M.A.R.T mode (Never knew what that was but I suspect it’s not as good as having 100 UDMA mode HDDs in there. For some reason, the motherboard which supports UDMA 100 automatically disabled S.M.A.R.T on the HDD’s anyway. Weird.

Oh well. I will have to get a new motherboard for the server at some stage. I’m sure I can get a relatively cheap one. So long as it supports Athlon 1600+ (do they have them any more? I might have to go to the computer markets and get a second hand mobo).

So, maybe Blake’s 17Gb HDD does work after all and it was the motherboard controller that was broken? Dunno. Maybe both.
We’ve seen advertisements on TV about ex-Government laptops for a couple of hundred dollars, so we might get Blake one of those instead.

I also chucked in an old Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 sound card I found in a drawer in the bedroom. If/when I cbf I might install sound drivers on my FreeBSD servers, but now I’m off to play Second Life again. I need the relaxation.

I’m currently downloading new drivers for my PC. My Second Life has crashed a few times and I was reading that you should check your drivers. I hadn’t updated mine in a year or something so have downloaded the latest ones and am about to install them: nVidia nForce2, Intel Pro 100B network & nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200. Wish me luck.

I also consolidated my partitions. I had: C:, D:, E:, F:, G: now I have C:, D:, E:
Unfortunately, the partitioning program got an error twice and I had to try to recover the partitions. It didn’t work, so I lost a partition. It was my games partition and so only had a couple things on it, so no great loss. I had to reformat the lost partition. In the end, I got it all working tho. C: drive is now 20Gb instead of 10Gb.
I found a great program called PerfectDisk for defragging hard drives. I had tried running the builtin Windows XP defragger but after it ran it still looked fragged, so I clicked ANALYZE again and it told me it recommended I defrag the drive!! SHEESH!
You get a 30 day trial of PerfectDisk and that’s enough to defrag all your partitions and drives.
Now, my PC seems like it’s almost FLYING! It was laggy in it’s responsiveness, but now it’s a lot better.

I also was brutal deleting and uninstalling applications and data. I cleared off so much crap which had just been rotting on my hard drive.

I’m still having fun with Second Life. Bec tried it for a short test, but it doesn’t interest her. She’d rather go around whacking monsters in World of Warcraft or fragging people in Quake than playing a game like SL. The programming and creating interests me, tho.
I played some more SL-ingo today and my friend whom introduced SL to me (Hi EGGY!) popped on, so I invited him over to the Casino I was in. He’s not at all interested in playing games tho, preferring programming instead. I sometimes like to program and sometimes like to explore. Since I don’t know how to create/build/program in SL yet (doesn’t seem to be many detailed tutorials or documents on it) I haven’t done anything worthwhile yet. I created a cube and resized it’s sides. That’s about all I can figure out for now.
The game has what it calls ‘primitive 3d shapes’ or ‘PRIMS’ for creating whatever you wish. It doesn’t seem too intuitive tho. I can’t even figure out how to make my own clothing or skins. Guess I will have to ask around.

Eggy donated some money to our SL-ingo pot (L$500 WOO!) but early in the game, my client crashed so I missed out on being in the running for it since I missed a few rounds while restarting the client, logging on, caching the graphics and getting back to my SL-ingo card.
Hence why I am trying to work out how to cut down on crashes.
I’ve turned off all graphics enhancements in the game since it seems to play rather laggy. Unfortunately, with a game like this, you need quite a good lot of bandwidth speed. Players can upload their own textures (for a fee of in-game money) so whenever you enter an area or even walk around in the area you are currently in, it has to constantly stream content, graphics and audio to your PC (not audio so much depending on what’s happening around). It can cache up to about 1Gig of data (selectable) but it doesn’t seem to alleviate the problem so much. I think it’s better if you live in USA or have a phat pipe to your PC. Maybe one day we will look at getting iiNet ADSL2

I took Sienna out before lunch this morning to pick up our mail from the PO Box and do a bit of shopping. We popped into BiLo to pick up some supplies. We made Tacos tonight with some of them. I bought the new ‘flat bottom’ tacos which allow you to sit the taco up on it’s end while you fill it up. A great idea if I ever heard one