I’ve been busy these past few weeks trying to get my 280Z autocross ready, and porting my C++/DirectX windows game to Java with LibGDX. Overall I am very impressed with LibGDX. The GUI API isn’t very good though. I’ve decided to roll my own (again!) for this game. At least the first release. I see that the LibGDX one supports nice fonts and textures and whatnot. It shouldn’t be too difficult to reimplement the base class with it and refactor when it matures.

I’ve ordered a 2 terabyte hard drive to appropriately serve as a backup drive for my home server. This would normally just require swapping the old backup drive out for it, and then performing a backup. But I figure since I’ll have it down anyway, I’ll have enough drives to swap to Arch Linux and get things going again with the old drive as a … backup. I’ve got quite a few services setup on it, and I’m not looking forward to moving all the config files over

Time installing Gentoo: days Time installing Archlinux: 30 mins. I have an old Intel based Dell laptop with 1.8GHz single-core processor. I’ve had Windows XP on it for a couple years, then I switched to Gentoo for the past 5 or 6 years. Well, it’s really not the kind of laptop that you should be compiling everything from source on. I’m tired of going through the “everything’s broken, hook it the ethernet cable and start fixing it” routine after I’ve left it alone for months at a time.

Let’s take my new Focus to the Autocross.

I attempted to get a webcam going on our home server. So, I plug it in, and since I’ve done this before I ran a script I made to grab an image from the webcam. Which didn’t work. So, after checking out why (/dev/video0 node was missing), I noticed that the kernel no longer had support built in. After going through the kernel options, I realized they changed the v4l and webcam support options around and since I just upgrade using “-silentoldconfig” (the bad way to do upgrades), it broke whenever I upgraded to 3.

I’ve been working with a MacBook Pro and OS X 10.8.2, and I have to say I’m not impressed. Coming from a background that consisted almost entirely of Windows and Linux, it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s still another OS with it’s own set of problems. That said, the user interface is more consistent and usable, in a lot of cases, than Windows and especially Linux desktop environments.

I’ve been working on a small Arduino project to datalog my commute. I’m using an Arduino Uno with SK Pang’s CAN Bus Shield. I also have added the optional GPS and LCD to the mix. There is an micro-SD card slot for storage. The aim of the project is just to collect data. As much as I can put into the SD card. I plan on calculating driving efficiency using somewhat arbitrary measures like throttle modulation, temperature, etc.

BBC’s Top Gear resumes today! I can’t wait to watch it. It’s been a while since they left off, and I’ve been watchin TG:USA in the meantime during my lunch breaks. TG:USA, will it really work? It just feels so scripted. I know, BBC’s Top Gear had a rough start too, like many shows. But, I’m watching season 2 right now, and the chemistry just hasn’t happened. I like Tanner, he actually has lines that seem natural.

I’ve pulled power and cable from the attic and just powered up the home server again. It’s been asleep for 5 months until now. I’ve just done an emerge -sync, and it took about 10 minutes to complete. However, it went up without any problems, which is good. Considering I turned it off in a working state. I was tempted to backup all my config files and start fresh with, say, Arch Linux, but that would take all weekend.

I’m re-learning JavaScript, and I noticed I was refactoring functions a lot on some old code. I’m putting some useful stuff here for reference: aFunc(blah) → this.aFunc = function(blah) Find: function (\w+)( Replace with: this.\1 = function(  To go the other way: Find: \t(\w+)\s=\sfunction( Replace with: \tfunction \1(  Change aFunc(blah) to SOME.qualifier.aFunc(blah) **Find: **\t(\w+() **Replace with: **\tSOME.qualifier.\1