Today, Elizabeth Smart was “rescued”. I type it that way because everyone who has been following the story still wonders what the nature of her abduction was — Was it an abduction at all? Why didn't she run? Why didn't she tell someone she was being held hostage?

Who knows. We'll probably learn something in the next day or so.

Kernel be mine

In my main machine at my parents (bar) and my machine at work (spike), I have MSI motherboards with AMD Athlon XP processors. Both motherboards use VIA vt8233 chipsets and I've had problems enabling DMA mode on CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives on both machines.

On bar, I am able to put my DVD-ROM drive into DMA mode if I boot to Red Hat's 2.4.18-14 Linux kernel. With other kernels, I can play DVDs, but they're all choppy and laggy.

On spike, the situation is much worse. Playing VCDs in the CD-ROM drive results in read errors and fatal hiccups in the media player applications. More recent kernels from Red Hat (e.g. 2.4.18-26.8.0) seem to be better. Not so many read errors... and I can use the -X67 option to hdparm to put the drive into UltraDMA mode 3, but media player apps like xine drive will eventually seg-fault or something.

So... right now I'm compiling 2.4.20 from source on bar using Red Hat's 2.4.18-26.8.0 config file to see if I can get this DMA situation straightened out. I've run across some mailing list chatter about the vt823x chipsets having some support issues in kernels prior to 2.4.19 or 2.4.20. So... I'm giving 2.4.20 a spin.

I will not!

I'm fighting a little cold. Well, I hope it's little. My wife and kids have been dealing with being sick the last couple of days too. Christine had it really bad today and had to call her mom for help. Her mom had Christine's aunt who lives in Hyrum come over to take care of the kids while Christine got some more rest.

Christine sounded awful this morning. Just awful. Her speech was all slow and hoarse. She sounded old. Fortunately, by this evening, she sounded a lot better. I think the extra rest helped her a lot. I hope she feels better tomorrow.

Thinking about blogs

As more and more and more of my friends and colleagues are using the Fozzolog code to spread the details of their lives out across the Web, I've been thinking of ways to improve the relatively simply journaling system.

Exposure to other weblogging systems like Blogger,
LiveJournal, and Moveable Type has exposed me to a plethora of bells and whistles for consideration. Some features I've been considering include:

• Threaded comments
• WYSIWYG editing
• More “blog”-style display options
• Reverse chronological ordering
• Blockstacker mode (a la Slashdot)
• Hooks into other blogs (Most recently updated...)

One of my buddies suggested making it something I could sell or open-source. That is a possibility, but that really isn't my goal. We'll see, I guess. I'm just doing this for myself and some friends.

Salute the kernel

That damn kernel is still compiling. Well, actually, the kernel compile finished a while ago. Then I started compiling the kernel modules... and something in the SCSI stuff broke. I don't need a lot of SCSI support, so I went back in and edited the configuration and removed most of the SCSI options and started over. In any case, it's building modules again now. Because I used the Red Hat config as a template, most of the kernel modules are being included. As a result, the complete kernel compilation is taking a while to finish.

Yes, it's still going. Oh heck... it's compiling sound drivers now. That's dumb considering I'm going to use ALSA drivers regardless of what is in the kernel. *shrugs*

I hope this work.