Author: Eugene

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Video card fun

A couple of new colour Barco monitors arrived yesterday for one of the diagnostic workstations over in Ultrasound. The monitors shipped with ATI FireGL video cards of an unknown model (read: I didn’t look all that closely at the card before I popped it in), but since the workstation already has video cards in it, the ones that shipped with the monitors were extra. So I decided to grab one to put in my Fedora 7 workstation at work and see if I could get a dual-head setup running with the spiffy new 21″ LCD monitor I scavenged from the above workstation (it was one of the monitors being replaced by the Barcos, really).
Normally this kind of thing should be easy.

  • Download the drivers from ATI
  • Build them into the kernel and create a suitable xorg.conf
  • Reboot
  • Configure for dual-head operation

Naturally, I know better. For some reason, the drivers I grabbed from the ATI site (8.35.5) for the FireGL cards wouldn’t compile at all, so I have a feeling I might be missing something. One of the first errors that popped up was an attempt to link to libstdc++.so.5. libstdc++ is installed, but I have libstdc++.so.6 in /usr/lib, so I’m guessing I need to find an earlier version of the library or install the libstdc++ compatibility package. I didn’t tinker around with it too much this afternoon, so I’ll have to play around a little more tomorrow.
Boots up ok and shows the boot messages on both screens, which is promising. The driver issues are keeping the X server from starting though.
It’ll be cool once I get this going. 3 megapixels of desktop goodness at my fingertips. Woot!

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Statistically speaking

September is the peak of the storm season, and seeing as we’re heading into September in a couple of days, there are plenty of things to keep an eye on according to tonight’s TWO.

A TROPICAL WAVE LOCATED ABOUT 750 MILES EAST OF THE WINDWARD ISLANDS IS PRODUCING SHOWERS AND A FEW THUNDERSTORMS. THERE HAS BEEN LITTLE CHANGE IN ORGANIZATION THIS EVENING. HOWEVER…UPPER-LEVEL WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO BECOME MORE FAVORABLE FOR DEVELOPMENT OVER THE NEXT DAY OR TWO AS THE SYSTEM MOVES WESTWARD AROUND 15 MPH.

DISORGANIZED CLOUDINESS AND SHOWERS EXTEND SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES EAST AND NORTHEAST OF A NON-TROPICAL LOW CENTERED ABOUT 330 MILES EAST OF JACKSONVILLE FLORIDA. ALTHOUGH THERE ARE NO SIGNS OF DEVELOPMENT AT THIS TIME…UPPER-LEVEL WINDS COULD BECOME A LITTLE MORE FAVORABLE FOR TROPICAL CYCLONE FORMATION DURING THE NEXT DAY OR TWO.

CLOUDINESS AND A FEW SHOWERS ASSOCIATED WITH A WESTWARD-MOVING TROPICAL WAVE ARE BEGINNING TO SPREAD OVER THE THE BAY OF CAMPECHE. THIS SYSTEM HAS SOME POTENTIAL FOR DEVELOPMENT BEFORE IT MOVES OVER MAINLAND MEXICO IN A DAY OR SO.

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Dog FAQ

I’ve considered putting this on a shirt to wear while I’m walking my dogs.

  • Yes, they’re Labs.
  • No, they’re not part something
  • No, he’s not a miniature Lab.
  • No, they’re not related/married.
  • No, I’m not breeding them.
  • Yes, you can pet them.
  • No, you can’t feed them.
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Battlecry

You are but the buzzing of a fly to me, for I am VIGO!!!

A battlecry commonly used by Houseboat Hooligans (paraphrased from Ghostbusters 2) to challenge other houseboat dwellers (most of whom had no idea what it meant).

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First pics

This is one of the first pictures I took with the new camera. This was with a zoom factor of about 8 or 9 and shows how nicely the image stabilization works. It’s much reduced from the original 32xx by 23xx (8 MP) pixel image. I’m really liking this camera so far.
P1000046.jpg