Diary of a Wolfeman

A new distro has cropped up on my radar: Arch Linux 0.6. By all accounts, it is a nice fast, small distro with a handy package management utility – somewhat like Gentoo, but by reports much easier to install.

Unless, of course, you happen to have my luck with hard drives.

The 40 GB I bought a while ago due to other issues is now officially dead, and the 80 GB unit Greyduck handed my way may have issues as well. (This is the one that wouldn’t accept a Windows XP install.) So, the idea is on the back burner until early next week, when I will have the drive from my mom’s old computer up here.

Speaking of which, the old eMachine I rebuilt for her should be a nice improvement over the elderly PII she’s currently using. I’ll be going down there this weekend to swap them out, and also to see my little brother on furlough from the Marines.

According to an article on CNN.com, L.L. Bean has discovered that people visiting their website were being served pop-up ads – from their competition. Not an uncommon occurence, however L.L. Bean’s response is: they are suing the owners of the ads.

By creating ads that appear when Internet users visit L.L. Bean’s Web site, retailers Nordstrom, J.C. Penney, Atkins and Gevalia have traded on the company’s name and infringed on its trademark rights, said Mary Lou Kelley, vice president for E-commerce at L.L. Bean.

“These advertisers are illegally poaching on L.L. Bean’s trademark,” Kelley said. “Using our trademarked name as a trigger to which you want to serve your ads causes customer confusion and crosses the line into trademark infringement.”

L.L. Bean is taking a new approach here by suing the customers of Claria Corp, the company that codes the tracking and pop-up malware.

Kick ’em right in the pocket, boys!

Ok, maybe there will be some display changes as well.

The default for WordPress is a pretty stark white, so I went searching and came up with this. It will probably take me a while to hack the css from the MT setup to fit this template (or vice-versa). In the meantime, this may just grow on me enough to leave it as-is.

As usual, feel free to let me know what you think.

Well, we (Greyduck and I) finally got to the bottom of why my video card (ATI Radeon 9200SE) wasn’t giving me full 3D-accelleration under Linux: the Linux 2.4.x kernel doesn’t really support AGP 8x.

So, once again, it seems that I simply have rotten luck when choosing hardware for compatability.

The good news, however, is that the 2.6.x kernel does support 8x, and SuSE 9.1 of course comes with 2.6.x standard. Now I just have to get my hands on a copy.

{cluebat}Y’know, folks, Da Wolfey-guy’s birthday is coming up here.{/cluebat}