Saturday, May 18, 2002

Episode II DVD Soon(er) -- 9:46 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

TheForce.Net is reporting that Star Wars Episode II: The Attack of the Clones will be coming out on DVD more quickly than Episode I did. Episode I took about a year and a half to come out. The Episode II DVD will be out this fall. Unfortunately, the original trilogy will not hit DVD until after Episode III comes out in 2005.

Disk Problem Solved -- 5:47 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

After playing around with the hdparm command in Linux, I discovered why I was having so much trouble with disk access on my Red Hat drive. It was not enabling DMA transfers. My transfer rates (as reported by hdparm) shot from 3.8M/sec to 31.5M/sec. It's still well under the theoretical maximum, but it is lightyears better. To activate the changes, I uncommented the following lines in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks:

USE_DMA=1
MULTIPLE_IO=16
EIDE_32BIT=3

If your distribution doesn't use the above file, add the following line to rc.local:

hdparm -d1 -m16 -c3 /dev/xxx

Replace the xxx with the drive's device name. Mine is the slave on the first IDE channel so it is hdb. Just be careful. The hdparm command can also wreck your drive. Check out the O'Reilly Network article on it for more information.

New Treos Coming Soon -- 9:27 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Handspring is ready to release new Treo communicators according to VisorCentral. The Treo 270 is a communicator (PDA and cellphone in one) with a color screen. It seems to be a bit wider than the original Treo too, maybe more like the Visor. Even more interesting, there is a rumor of a Treo 90, which would be the 270 without the cellphone capabilities and with no Springboard slot. The big difference is that the 270 should retail for $599 while the 90 should be $299.

My $0.02? Unless the 270/90 all of the sudden sports a 320x320 screen instead of 160x160, there really is no reason to upgrade. There's no Springboard slot anymore (is Handspring really killing it off?). Basically the only advantage over a Visor Prism is an extra 8M of RAM. Rah.

Bleh -- 9:06 am CST, Update by The Master

Went to see Star Wars Episode II last night. Two words: frippin' AWESOME. Go, see it. Now. Happy you will be.

JKII Master Server Down -- 9:03 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I forgot to post this yesterday. If you are trying to play Jedi Knight II online right now, forget about it. Raven's Kenn Hoekstra updated his .plan saying that their master server upgrade was pushed off until today from 9 A.M.-1 P.M. U.S. Central time.

Friday, May 17, 2002

Senator Responds -- 5:05 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Back in March I urged to you contact your Senators (story) to speak against the CBDTPA. Today I received a letter back from Senator Kohl (D-WI). He states that while he shares my concern about the impact that this bill would have on innovation and "fair use" rights, he also feels that those who create intellectual property must receive compensation and have protection for their works. Although that is a very political answer and doesn't really state his position on the bill, he does hope that legislation will not be necessary. At least my voice has been heard and acknowledged on Capitol Hill.

Audigy Problems Fixed -- 1:14 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

I was having some minor problems with my Audigy in Linux. Some sounds would only play through one speaker or the other. After fiddling with XMMS (the open source answer to Winamp), I determined that if a program was using KDE's aRTs sound server, all the sounds would play fine. If it was using the OSS driver, it would only come out of one speaker. I pulled the latest driver from CVS and installed it. Now everything works dandy. It was more of an annoyance than anything else, but it's nice to have it fixed. Thankfully, the strange sound problems I was having with Red Hat 7.2 and the emu10k1 driver are gone as well.

The long and the short of it is this: if you use Linux and are considering getting a SoundBlaster Audigy, go for it. The drivers work great for standard analog output. I can't verify the digital output since I don't have a digital sound system to try it with. If someone wants to buy me one, I'd be more than happy to test it for you. :)

Past Two Days' News

The Haus is powered by:

All original information on this website is copyright © TheHaus.Net, 1999-2005. The use of original images, text, and/or code from this website without expressed written consent is prohibited. The authors of this site cannot be held responsible for any damage, real or imagined, which comes from the use of information presented on this site. All trademarks used are the properties of their respective owners. This site is not to be used as a floatation device (but if you try, I want a video tape of it).