Sunday, May 19, 2002

I'm Gone! -- 12:07 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, the Hunster is leaving today for a well-deserved vacation. I leave you in the capable hands of The Master and J.t. I will be popping in daily, especially to check the news on DOOM3 at E3. I also plan on seeing Star Wars Episode II several times. Oh yeah, I'm going to drink some high-quality malt-based beverages too . . .

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.

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).