All posts by John Goerzen

Video Game Consoles

Technology

I’m thinking of getting a video game console system. Trouble is, I haven’t really followed the market since the days of the original Nintendo. I do own a N64, but I didn’t really research it before I bought it, and it looks pretty bad on our HDTV.

So I’m hoping someone out there can give me some advice, or some links to sites that could give me some advice. I have no idea at all where to start.

My criteria to begin with are:

  • Support for HDTV systems. Are there any widescreen (16:9) game systems or games out there? That would be ideal.
  • Not about to be end-of-lifed. I want it to be able to play new releases for awhile yet.

It pays to be a pack rat

General

I am excited this evening. I just found a CD that I burned back in 1996 or 1997 or so.

On this CD is some data I thought I had lost. It has copies of information on some floppies that can’t be read anymore.

But it also has the PowerPoint presentation I did as an 8th grader that got me to National History Day in Washington, DC. Not only that, but also the original high-resolution scans of the photos I used in that presentation. Some of these scans are of photos that date back to the early 1900s, whose owners may not be easily reachable today. I had been hoping to find this for years. I knew it was buried somewhere.

And YES — stumbled across it tonight.

I will be posting some photos on this blog in the coming days.

But first, I have to find a way to convert this ancient PowerPoint file to a format that OpenOffice can read — so I get the correct story behind each photo.

The scans were saved back in the days when a person got 8 characters to name a file. Not very descriptive.

(And I remember how much space it took up on the hard drive I had back then, and how much I wanted to just delete those big picture files. Glad I didn’t.)

Being on a committee can be fun!

General

So I am on the Tabor Mennonite Church centennial committee (coming right up in 2008!).

We’ve been going through the church archives, and I’ve been scanning in interesting photos. Here’s one, taken about 1950.

This is a photo of the original 1908 Tabor Church building, as remodeled in the 1930s.

You’ll notice the front door, the many windows.

And the two well-worn paths out back.

They are leading to the two outhouses. If I understand correctly, they continued to be used up until the mid-1960s when the “new” (present) church building was constructed.

The building in the middle housed a Delco Light Plant (generator), which was used until rural electrification provided power to the church.

So yes, this church had its own on-site generator, decades before it got indoor plumbing.

There’s a joke in there somewhere but it’s late and somehow I can’t come up with a good one. Feel free to post your own ;-)

A Joke

Humor

Overheard on today:

Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and Donald E. Knuth engage in a discussion on whose impact on the computerized world was the greatest.

Stallman: “God told me I have programmed the best editor in the world!”

Torvalds: “Well, God told *me* that I have programmed the best operating system in the world!”

Knuth: “Wait, wait – I never said that.”

Views from the porch

General

I’ve enjoyed Cliff‘s views from the porch.

I’ve decided to post some of my own: click here for a few photos.

I also threw in one of the porch itself, to prove that I really can point the camera in all those directions without leaving it :-)

Here’s that one:

Maybe soon I’ll post the views from the *back* porch. Between the two, I think I could get a 360-degree view…

Just A Geek

Entertainment / Arts

Recently, I bought a copy of Wil Wheaton’s book Just A Geek.

I’ve read one chapter so far. And I have to say: great book.

This has to be one of the most insightful, brutally honest books I’ve ever seen.

It’s also funny. Here’s a little snippet, recalling his first-ever book signing:

… a guy walked over to me, and extended his hand.

“Hi, Wil,” he said, “I’m Tim O’Reilly.”

HOLY MO– WIL! IT’S TIM O’REILLY!! HE CAME OUT TO SEE YOU!

Before I could scream out, “I KNOW! I KNOW! I KNOW! GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!” my brain said, “Stay cool, Wil. Don’t geek out.”

I heeded my brain’s advice . . . “It’s really nice to meet you,” I said. . .

Check me out. I totally behaved myself.

“Nicely done,” said my brain. “Have some serotonin.”

Wil talks a lot about his two inner voices: his totally-honest self, and the voice he calls Prove To Everyone Quitting Star Trek Wasn’t A Bad Idea, or just Prove To Everyone for short.

I think we all have some of Prove To Everyone in us. Especially Americans, and free software hackers, where competition and, well, proving onesself are expected.

It’s time to loosen up a bit.

I’m going to enjoy the rest of this book.

Control Room

Movies, Reviews, Society

Have you ever wondered why so many Arabs hate Americans? Why they view us as occupiers? Why they want to be rid of both Saddam Hussein and us?

We watched Control Room tonight. What a fascinating documentary. There was no narration. Just journalists talking. Arab journalists, American journalists, Pentagon spokesmen. Lots of different viewpoints. Lots of insight.

It was hard to watch at times — they showed footage of how events were covered in different countries, and it was graphic sometimes. They also showed the journalists talking about why they covered things in a certain way.

It was very moving, and thought-provoking.

Sometimes it is useful to have a view from an outsider (to America) or an insider (to the Middle East).

Hello, ext3. Goodbye, reiser4.

Linux, ,

So I’ve been trying out various filesystems over the past few months, by converting a few machines to them and using them on a daily basis.

I’ve found that reiser3, JFS, and XFS are all risky and actually corrupt data on crashes. JFS also has a few weird bugs that make the kernel oops, and sometimes cause filesystem corruption. All of the above also have starvation issues, where one IO-intensive process can dramatically slow down everything on the system (by a factor of 100 or more).

Reiser4 has proven better — only one small issue that I can recall. But it’s got a huge problem: no ability to resize a Reiser4 partition. That is rather ridiculous these days, and really reduces the utility of LVM. (Hans says he’ll make it resizable when someone pays.)

So I’ve tried out ext3 again, for the first time in a few years. I’m using data=ordered,commit=300 (or 600 on some machines), which still makes it safer than the other journaled filesystems.

And I must say that it is impressive. The old bottlenecks that I was used to were gone. The thing is reliable and fast, and scales well. I’m going to move everything back to ext3.

So why do Hans’s benchmarks show reiser4 being better? For one thing, most benchmarks measure throughput, not response time, so things like starvation don’t cause black marks in them. Most of them don’t even use multiple processes to simulate real-world activity anyway. Plus, ext3’s default mount options (commit=5, for instance) are much more conservatve than other filesystem’s. To get a fair test, one should increase that commit= number on ext3.

Here’s another discussion about ext3.