MasterStarman’s Blog!

Pixxel, one of the Co-Founders has officially backed out of running this website after abandoning his blog a good six months ago or so. This leaves me as the only one to keep this place going*. I have officially decided that this domain will expire at the end of the paid period. I will do my best to move this blog, however, it will probably not be moved and simply evaporate.

I have moved on, I am writing some software and plan to form a company around it after high school (it will be rather small, so I will be able to manage the company and college). I have met another programmer and he is interested in building an MMO. I have taken him up on the offer to join and am currently in the stages of helping with that.

Pixxel, has disappeared, the only notice I got of this was a simple text message last night stating that he was done and he wanted out. I have officially removed him from the staff list however, his blog will stay active since he is a paying member but I don’t think anything will change.
Tao
By Do As Infinity
Their final song.

You finish talking about everything
In front of us are two paths
In the middle of our long and painful journey,
Our heavy baggage separates into two

If that’s so, take the right
I’ll keep on believing
We go to the left

Now, the shadows melt into the distant sunset
I will wave both of my hands until you disappear

Goodbye my friend, I won’t forget you
I feel proud that I met you
In place of you, the staff of hope
Will probably lead us to the end of the light

I continue to pray for the tears to dry up
Under this distant sky

Somewhere, remember again
That the same rain will surely fall on us

Ah~ The cherry blossom flowers flutter
Ah~ And the paths that we each dream about.

-MS

*Corpheus long ago left, it’s still unofficial for him…

PS: WordPress has something against me putting “TAO” (just those three letters) in the codeblock, so I had to remove all of the fancy formatting. I made a webpage of this. Somewhere for him to find.

Well, after nearly 2 weeks with the openSUSE Project’s shiny new OS. I have to say it is rather disappointing. I have had to reinstall many times due to problems and odd failures. I was helping someone setup their machine with openSUSE 11 and they have reported tha same problems. I think I am going to abandon openSUSE until version 11.1 because this latest failure may be too much to deal with; ALL of the colors in the display are discolored and now X is reporting problems. I, for the time being, am going to give OpenSolaris 10 (more likely, just Solaris 10, full) because of my familiarity with the system.
-MS

EDIT: It seems the last install may have been a little tweaked. I’m going to give it ONE more chance, and hopefully future updates will help with stability…

Well, after having openSUSE 11 for a few days my first impression was “This is really cool!”. Then I started using it. The biggest problems are with the package manager which likes to bitch about not being able to install packages that need upgrades (Python-Devel) even though you never installed them in the first place. THe default touchpad setting on a laptop require you to press really hard in order to operate it and the “circular scrolling” feature makes it impossible to move from top right to any other point on the screen because it is trying to scroll in a circle, so I recommend turning that off. THe new Compiz is cool but it does not work THAT well and the default user control interface is limited and I have not been able to find the control panel that will allow you to manually control every action (supposedly there is a beryl-like control interface somewhere). Other than that, the system works and it has a very fast startup time and can be left for long periods.

-MS

Well, I got my iPod and my MacBook battery replaced. I took a half an hour for the iPod though because they couldn’t “recreate the problem”. The did eventually switch it out with no problem however the second Genius (Apple tech support guy) was disapproving of the decision to replace the iPod since he saw it as normal wear. Anyways I got a brand new iPod Touch! I asked him about the TIme Machine thing and he just said to trash the backup. He was surprised that I knew about the .plist files though.

-l8r MS

PS. Read this if you’re confuzed about why I am excited Hmmm…

A couple of days ago I started noticing that Time Machine wasn’t taking backups and every time it would try to take a backup it would fail saying that it could not copy files to the backup drive. I looked on Google to try and find some sites that might have some information on this. I discovered that while this is a fairly common problem it happens for a variety of reasons, the biggest being permission errors. I ended up searching through Console (the log reader in the Mac) to see if I could find the problem. The backupd (UNIX talk for backup daemon (Time Machine)) would fail with “Copy stage failed with error:11″. I did a search for “Time Machine error 11″ on google and discovered it may be due to drive corruption and that the failure usually happens on the same file. I checked my backup drive and discovered that the APM (Apple Partition Map) that the factory had put on the drive was made incorrectly. I opened Disk Utility and partitioned the drive with a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier) partiton table since I have an Intel Mac*. Now my drive is fixed and the failures happened exactly at 31.23GB of 110.19GB. Since the failures were regular I figured that the next problem was due to a file having incorrect permissions. I was right, the culprit was a TAR file I had made in shell that had improper permissions. I chmod-ed the file and deleted it. Time Machine works perfectly now.
-l8r MS

PS. If you’re reading this because you have problems with your Time Machine backups be aware that this issues happens for a multitude of reasons. Error 11 seems pretty generic in the failure of Time Machine. If you have questions or would like to analyze my log files I’d be glad to give you a copy (edited of course to remove my UUID and other identifiable information). just drop me an e-mail at masterstarman[at}g00dlif3{dot)net and good luck.

*PPC users may want to use the APM option because that is a native PPC partition table as stated by Disk Utility.

Well today hasn’t gone very well. Tomorrow probably won’t be great either since some of the events today have a compounding effect…

Here is a list in chronological order of the event’s of today:

1) My dad comes in a ~6:10AM to wake me up. I have already been in the process of getting up for 10 minutes so this is rather unnecessary.

2) It appears that my dad knocked my iPod off the shelf. It contacts some object during it’s descent and now has a dent in the side.

3) I fly out the door forgetting a USB HDD that contained some examples for the material I was supposed to help teach today.

4) In the car I notice that the sound quality on my iPod has degraded. I dismiss this as a headphone problem since I didn’t have time to diagnose the problem…

5) I get to school and open my MacBook to check a few things before class starts. My MacBook won’t respond. I decide that it didn’t sleep properly and that the battery is now dead. I flip the MacBook over to check the battery indicator. I find that the battery is stuck on one dot even though I didn’t press the button. I pass this off since the bell rang.

6) During lunch I pull out my iPod again and try to listen to some music whilst I starve because I forgot to get some money for lunch (fortunately, a friend was kind enough to give me two dollars). I find that the sound seems worse especially when the headphone jack is moved.

7) During robotics I find that I spent the weekend reading the wrong API for NBC.

Eight*) I get home and do some diagnosing. The iPod appears to be damaged, I need a new battery for my MacBook and my Guinea Pig bites me. Both of my ears are plugged for some reason right now. and I’m out of tea….

–What else is in store for today? l8r MS

*Technically this event isn’t over yet and for some reason word press replaces “8)” with a smiley.

Wel, we bought VMware fusion for our Macs and it’s really cool but it’s also really wierd to see Windows running fullscreen on my iMac. It’s even wierder to see Windows apps alongside Mac apps when using the “Unity” feature. (See below for screenshots.)

I think the title says everything.

-MS

Well, I’ve got some good stuff liened up. I downloaded the OCRemix Complete torrents and I have some ChronoCross and ChronoTrigger. After that we’ve got Earthbound and we’ll deviate to ROCK CANDY!! While we come off the sugar we’ll chill (chill might not be the right word…) to some Zelda and finish with some Mario music.
-DJ MS