The Debian issue I’ve had since at least June has been resolved. I am now back on testing (squeeze). See this report for more information. The real reason why I’m happy is because I was able to get myself off of ATi’s fglrx driver. I have a Mobility Radeon X1300 and Linux support for it dropped some time ago, leaving me stuck with the 2.6.28.9 Linux kernel, since that’s the last kernel the last drivers support. I’ve been trying for years to get the open source radeon drivers to work and I got them finally this past weekend. I had to compile everything basically from the ground up and build it into the kernel and it worked. Now, I get fewer FPS than I did with the proprietary driver, but it works. Compiz works wonderfully and I can now resize video without X crashing. There’s also no tearing and I can play video in VLC once again. So, yeah, as a result of this I can use the newest 2.6.31 kernel – with ext4 and grub2. I’ve been using reiserfs since the days of Woody and it’s time to move on. I don’t see a future in reiser4 so I see no point in holding out for it.

Some bad news is that the primary drive in my server may be dying. It’s an 80GB Hitachi Deathstar Deskstar that I pulled from a dumpster in 2003. Since 2004, it’s been making bizarre noises that are a mix between beeping and clicking. I guess it’s its own African clicking language or something, being a computer and all. Starting last week, the clicking has become more slow and frequent. I ran a SMART check on it back in 2006 and got back no problems. I’m running an extended test as I type this so I’m hoping things are okay. Just to be safe, though, I have a scheduled cron script to back up all the important files on it to the secondary drive. I don’t really want to buy a new hard drive so I hope everything is okay. I actually depend on this one for a lot of things.

I wish I had a bigger tank for Mossby and Trigby. They’ve gotten so big, but I can’t afford a larger tank right now and I don’t have the time to maintain anything larger than what I already have. I’ve promised them that when I’m finished with school I will get them a bigger one – one with a filter so I don’t have to constantly change the water from their nastiness. I should really clean my room up a bit. There are wads of paper everywhere from where I’ve been ripping pages out of spiral notebooks. Oh, I watched Watchmen this evening. What a let down.

I do not look forward to writing this paper for my ethics class. The length requirement isn’t long, but it’s going to take a lot of rambling to fill it up. I’m finished being sick, finally. Luckily, it wasn’t anything serious. The only real odious task for this week was cleaning out Mossby and Trigby’s tank, which I did this morning. It was disgusting, to say the least. Their water was cloudy and smelled awful. Mossby has been proudly sitting on top of the rock this afternoon. I don’t know why. Watching Trigby eat three whole grasshoppers this past week was hilarious. Mossby was supposed to get two of them, but that didn’t work out…unsurprisingly. I watched The Girl Who Leapt Through Time yesterday.

It was pretty good and there weren’t any boring moments. The next one up on my list to watch is Perfect Blue. I have no idea what it’s about, but I hope it’s good. Also, it’s been a long time and the Debian installer is still broken. The root password and users set at installation are not actually saved and network manager is broken. The last time I used it (couple weeks ago), it didn’t detect any of my network hardware even though it was recognized by the kernel. Both of these problems have been reported, but nothing much is really being done about them. I’d like to switch back to Squeeze, but I can’t until this is fixed.

I’ve had two African clawed frogs for some time now. The male is named Trigby Phipps and the girl’s name is Mossby Pomegranate. Mossby is fatter of the two, which also makes her the hungriest. I also have a black snail that they live with…or so I did.

Yeah. Guess who ate him. I had to pull the remains out of her mouth so she wouldn’t choke on the hard part of the snail, but she pretty much ate most of it. All that was left was a hollow shell. So, to make Trigby feel special I went outside and found two earthworms, which he happily devoured.