I bought a Shuttle SB86i a few months ago, which is an Intel based small form factor system (reviewed by Silent PC Review) which came with an on-board gigabit ethernet adapter. This piece is referred to by lspci as a “Marvell Technology Groupl Ltd. 88E8053 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 15)” and by dmesg as a “Yukon Gigabit Ethernet 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter”. Either way, the chipset is made by SysKonnect and the driver in the kernel tree (sk98lin) just plain doesn’t work. A quick search (via Google, what else?) turned up this post which referenced SysKonnect’s driver page. Fromt the driver page (I chose the ‘SK-9E21D 10/100/1000Base-T Adapter’ under ‘PCI Express Desktop Adapter’) I was able to get their very simple package to build the kernel module on my Ubuntu system, all you need are the compiled kernel sources for the kernel you’re running. If you don’t know anything about your kernel and you’re running Ubuntu (Dapper Drake, probably others), run this command as root to get and compile the kernel sources:
~# KERNEL_VERSION=uname -r|grep -o "2\.[4|6]\.[1|2|][0-9]" &&\
apt-get install linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION &&\
cd /usr/src && /bin/tar jxf linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION.tar.bz2 &&\
ln -s linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION linux &&\
cd linux-source-$KERNEL_VERSION &&\
cp /boot/config-$KERNEL_VERSION-* .config &&\
make oldconfig && make
…and then install the driver from SysKonnect. If you don’t know what the above comman does, pick it apart and figure it out! That’s what Linux is all about.
(cool regex, eh?)
Drew Stephens @ 11:51 pm —
I just read some interesting stories about those “exit bag checks” that many stores have implemented in the past few years, namely, Best Buy. Unsurprisingly showing your receipt to the goon at the door and letting him inspect your purchase is entirely optional, from a legal standpoint. The store’s only powers to detain you are if they suspect you of shoplifting which requires that they:
- Have seen someone approach, take, and conceal the merchandise
- Observe the shoplifter continuously
- Verify that they fail to pay for it
- Apprehend the shoplifter outside the store.
The guy at the door can’t possibly do all of this; he’s stationed by the door and, assumedly, doesn’t leave his post. After reading these stories, I’m inclined to test these systems every chance I get; it’ll be an interesting day the first time I’m accosted as a shoplifter.
My social psychology teach counseled his students in the great benefit that goals can have on mood, self-esteem and self-efficacy, the latter being much more important in light of recent studies. Accomplishing goals, however small, has a great positive effect upon one’s feelings of self worth (self-esteem), motivation and ability to achieve (self-efficacy). In this light, he implored everyone to create to-do lists every day, outlining everything you plan to do.
Really, you want to include as much as possible, within reason. Something like “get out of bed” probably doesn’t belong on a list, but “go to the gym” is a good goal. If you see breakfast as standard fare, it doesn’t need to be on the list, but if you’re one to normally skip the day’s prime meal and want to change, it ought ot be on your list. As silly as some goals seem, even eating breakfast, achieving a goal has great positive psychological effects, as mentioned above. Be warned however, that failing to achieve a goal has inverse effects. In that light, creating goals that aren’t trivial but at the same time aren’t too much of a stretch is the best thing to do.
Furthermore, having a list of huge goals that are very long in the making should be somewhere else; putting “build kit car” on your daily list won’t do anything good but keep that un-achieved objective present in memory. If you are building a kit car, perhaps you want to get the bottom end assembled this weekend or install a couple of control arms today.
Intel’s latest big chip, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965, costs just over a thousand dollars and yet it still looses out to the AMD’s not-quite-top-of-their-line Athlon 64 X2 4800+ which can be had for around $650 (the Athlon 64 FX-60 is their range-topper). The biggest discrepencies are seen in gaming benchmarks, which is particularly sad because gamers are the biggest market for such hugely expensive chips.
In short, Intel’s NetBurst architecture still sucks; for their sake, I hope Core is as fast as they purport. Until then, as the state has been for the past few years, buy AMD.
I wrote a little program to print some statistics about your iTunes library while watching the Malaysian GP today. It doesn’t really do the whole XML thing, and only prints a couple of things that iTunes itself won’t tell you, but It’s a start of something that could be good. Right now it will tell you which artists and genres you have the most songs of, the average length of songs in your library and their average size.
Update: Now produces output based upon how many times tracks have been played, which was really the point of this whole thing.
Number of tracks: 2964 Total size: 24181 MB
Avg. length: 6:41 Avg. size: 8 MB
File types: 2954 files, 10 URLs
Most popular genres, by number of tracks:
Trance: 420
Ska: 337
Techno: 326
Dance: 300
Rock: 260
Most popular artists, by number of tracks:
blink-182: 116
Griffin Technology: 102
Paul Oakenfold: 82
DJ Miko & Mini Me: 81
Anabolic Frolic: 79
Most popular genres, by playcount:
Ska: 2210
Dance: 1755
Trance: 1331
Techno: 1078
Rock: 987
Most popular artists, by playcount:
blink-182: 621
DJ Miko & Mini Me: 438
Goldfinger: 380
Paul Oakenfold: 362
Big D and the Kids Table: 347
Check it out.
So, I’m pretty high in self-efficacy; I am very confident in my own abilities and my aptitude for learning new skills and information. I look at things like WRC or Formula 1 and think, “With some practice, I could definitely do that,” which is my assesment of most things I come across. Overconfident isn’t a far off descriptor for me at times. Occasionally, though, something comes along that totally shatters my belief in my own skills and simply leaves me in awe of someone’s knowledge or talents, such as this video of a guy performing a choreographed juggling routing with 5 balls. Seeing this video left me speechless and I have immense respect for that guy. When you break it down, those are all moves that, with some practice, most people could be taught to do. Stringing them together into a 5 minute routine choreographed to music without a single dropped ball is entirely another story. Wow.
Edit: So apparently the guy is Jason Garfield, a professional juggler. Given that juggling is his occupation, it’s a lot more understandable; I’m still amazed at his skill.
Must we be congratulated for the simplest of tasks performed on the internet? I just left feedbeack at eBay and was applauded for doing so. If memory serves, most web stores praise you for making a purchase. If you’re going to congratulate me, at least send a medal along with the thanks.
I want to be able to pay for simple services on The Internets, say running a few searches on a subscription site, without having to shell out for their full subscription service. Earlier today I wanted to look up some restaurants in Zagat’s guide which, like everything these days, has interweb-searchability but, because they are a commercial entity, using said service requires having a subscription. This is something where, right now at least, I don’t want to sign up to use it for a month as I only want to run a couple of searches and paying $20 to use it for a day is a waste. There should be some system by which I can pay per search or buy a short time period to access the site, worth less than a dollar.
Such payments, which are trivial to consumers who would barely think twice about paying for services all over the web once setup with the service, could net business like Zagat’s online arm or Consumer Reports online searching functionality a significant amount of money. There must be other people out there who have wanted to use a service for a short period, but don’t care enough to sign up for a full subscription.
