Rufus's :: HACKISH // Blog

Panoramas

It's amazing how little activity this blog gets. Oh well, I find it's activity is inversly proportional to my activity offline, so I guess that's a good thing. Anyway, I've been playing around with panoramic photos a bunch lately and have added a panoramas folder to my European trip gallery. I'm quite pleased with how they've come out. I'll slowly be adding a few more as I process them.

And speaking of photos, I think some of the ones of Pittsburgh in snow come out really well, especially the night pictures on the second page.

Snow, Sled, and Houston

Apparently that combination can exist, with Hell deciding to freeze over for Christmas. We got real snow too, with about an inch sticking to the ground. We decided this was too good of a chance to pass up so I pulled out my sled (it's from when I lived in Chicago), headed to the Bay Oaks golf course, and went sledding. The hills were a tad dissapointing (what do you expect from a golf course?) but it was a bunch of fun none the less. Pics are up in my gallery.

Fucking spammers

I've been having lots of problems with automatic spam being fed to my comments so I disabled comments on all previous posts and I'll be disabling them like a week or two after each post. Not that it'll really make a difference since next to no one posts comments and I rarely update, but anyway....

My Recent Breakage

So I don't know what's up, but I've been horribly bad to my body lately. It's very rare for me to get hurt, yet I've done this:
- Thr, Oct 28th - Jump handle bars after landing badly on my bike, scrape up wrist and palms a bit.
- Fri, Oct 29th - Riding in the rain behind some umbrellas, I mis-counted the number of cars that were blocked from my view. Glancing blow against front of car, everything (me, car, bike) ok.
- Sat, Oct 30th - Paintballing (so much fun!) I got hit right below the nipple, the ribs, and knuckle, the first of which blead.
- Thr, Nov 4th - Hit curb badly with my biked, rolled ~10 feet and scraped hands fairly badly (nice open sore on middle of right palm).
- Fri, Nov 5th - Reheating some lasagna I pulled the saran wrap back to early, the steam flashed over and completely removed a layer of skin on my left index finger.

Hopefully I can keep myself sane for a week while I recover...

Gamecon PSX patch accepted by Linus

A while ago I posted that my patch was accepted by Vojtech Pavlik but that apparently only meant that he accepted it into his local tree. For the past ~month my patch was actually merged into the -mm tree for testing and a few days ago Linus did a pull from Vojtech's tree pulling my changes into the official kernel. You can see the changeset in the kernel here. This means that 2.6.9 should include the patch. Yay.

Quick update

So this update will be fairly quick since we have to get back home to my grandparents house to pack in order to leave tomorrow evening for Athens. This past week has been quite interesting. We first went to Veria for three days. The first day we dorve out to Vergina and saw the tomb of Phillip II, father of Alexander the Great, which was pretty damn impressive. The rest of the days were mostly spent going around the city of Veria which has about 1 church for every other house. It's kinda funny that there are so many churches that most are locked up and you have to find the person with the key to open it (which thankfully my Aunt who was taking us around knows about half the city and everyone of any importance). One of the most interesting parts of Veria is the older district. It used to be the poor area of town so they never got around to tearing the old houses down and building apartments for long enough that they were protected. Now some people live in the old houses but since the appearence of them can't be changed they are somewhat impractical. As a compromise it has become a bar and club district. The bars and clubs get a very unique feel to them and a lot of character, and the district is preserved because you can thrown a bar into just about any space. There was also a Byzantie museum that we saw, but just like when we saw it 2 years ago we were the only visitors there yet there were 4 receptionists. I really question how some of these things survive.

Right after Veria we went to Skopelos, one of the islands in the Agean sea about halfway to Athens from Thessaloniki. I absolutely love the Greek islands with their mountaints jutting right out of the sea and the white-washed buildings. We rented a Jeep and took it off-roading around the island to visit some of the monisteries on the mountain and the beaches on the north side (only one side of the island is accessable by paved roads). It was amazingly cool untill we got back and the car no longer turned to the left. Apparently on one of the 20% grade downhill slopes we hit a rut or something and popped a bearing out of I think the CV joint in the front (something like that, I didn't really understand the Greek). We ended up having to pay 200 Euro which I guess isn't that bad considering it was split 5 ways and they didn't charge us for labor.

Yesterday we spent the day at Meteora in central Greece which is a bunch of monisteries on top of rock pillars, you've probably seen them in car comercials and not realized it. I'm still amazed how someone in the 15th century could climb up some of these rocks let alone pull up enough building materials to build a huge monistery complex. We did the driving tour stopping at each of the 6 working monisteries and climbing up to them. One of them was a good few hundered feet straight up stairs cut into the side of the rock. I'd love someday to come back though and do a hiking tour to other dozen or so monistery and cave ruins not accessable by the road. Speaking of which, I'd also love to hike some of these Greek islands, or better yet, just a general hiking / biking tour of Europe. I guess I'll have to plan something when I graduate from college.

We're off to Athens tomorrow night, taking the midnight sleeper train and ariving at 6am. We'll have two days there then it's off to Spain. That's it for now, I'm not sure when my next update will be as I don't know what internet cafes are like in Spain.

Slow Day

Time for an update today because otherwise we're not up to much at all today. Glancing over the last post it seems somewhat rambling and uninteligible, but I guess that's what I get for doing a stream of consciousness post with a time limit. I'll try to make this one a bit more coherent =p.

This weekend we went to Thasos, a fairly large island to the east of Thessaloniki. It was a fun time going around and swiming at various beaches, but they weren't the best beaches I've been to in Greece (this coming weekend we're going to another island and hopefully their beaches are a bit better). The best part was climing up on a ten foot tall or so rock that was a bit out from the beach and jumping off it. Other than the beach we went to a (very) small monistery and also drove around seeing the island. On the way back we had a few hours to kill so we ended up going, on a whim, to the ruins Philip. Though it wasn't the best preserved site it was a large complex with a forum, church, lots of houses and an auditorium. They're actually restoring the auditorium and it looks like they're going to be using it for regular performances. It was a bit strange that their lighting was just hung outside and didn't seem to have any special covered plugs or outdoor instruments, but I guess they'll work. Today it a dead day to recover and tomorrow we're leaving for 3 days to Veria to see some more relatives.

The most interesting event (that you might have even seen on american TV) was Greece winning the 2004 Euro cup. As I said in the last post we were on the island when it happened, but there was still a good share of fireworks going off and horns honking. The Greek President today commented that this was the largest celebration that Greece has had since it overthrew the dictatorship in the 70's, and I wouldn't doubt it. Since a few hours before the game started Greek TV has shown nothing else starting with pre-game shows, then the game, then news shows showing partying and highlights, the next day there was a huge ceremony in Athens (probably in the stadium built for the Olypics and and using the Olypic infrustructure =) crowning them, then today there was a Presidential metal giving. Just today, 2 days later, are they showing hints of backing off the coverage a bit. I will give it to them that it was an amazing victory (considering that Greece had never won a single game before, let alone a playoff game or won anything) but making this into a huge national event is a bit much. It was mentioned that a Greek representative was talking down to representatives on the UN Security Council because they beat them and weren't on the Council.

Speaking of the Olypics, Melissa mentioned the lack of Olympic stuff around. It seems that the Greeks are as apathetic to it as us Americans were when they were in Atlanta. So far the only mention whatsoever I've seen is overly comercialized TV ads and some Communist party posters showing a picture from the Nazi Olypics (1936 Nazi Germany hosted them) with a few of the Nazi symbols replaced with Coke and McDonalds and the likes.

Another interesting thing about this little trip of ours was that although it only took a few hours to drive there, Greeks would never consider just taking a weekend trip or something for this distance. They seem to be very against casual traviling so my godparents and another family we went with are staying for a full 10 days. Likewise my Aunt has a house just 2 hours outside of Thessaloniki, but I've never heard of them going there for a weekend or so. I guess this stems from when very few had cars so the only method of transportation was bus, which though there are a lot of them and fairly reliable they're obviously no the most comfortable. It'll be interesting to see how this changes in the next decade as most families have at least one car now.

One of the best parts of coming to Greece has to be the abundance of food. My Grandmother does the normal Grandmotherly thing of cooking way too much and then asking why we aren't eating it all, but of course it's very good. What's been interesting is that on Thasos we didn't go to any of the Taverns right on the water with a nice sea-side view. Instead Paul (my godparent's son) asked a local what he suggested and we went to that one, a bit off the main street. We again did the same thing after Philip and ended up in a very good small place where when we asked for the bill the owner just kinda glanced around at us and how much we ordered and said 30 euros (6/person). It seems the quality of food is inversly proportional to the popularity of an area. The small owner-run taverns in villages have wonderful food while the taverns in touristy areas of villages are a bit worse and the taverns in the city are by far the worse.

That's all for now. Next update will probably be in a week after we get back from Veria and then go to an island for two days. We have a heck of a lot of pictures but unfortunately these internet cafes are quite locked down so I can't find any way to upload them. I'll just have to wait untill I'm back in the States for that.

A bit from Greece

Well we finally found our way to a cyber cafe here in Thessaloniki after wandering for a good half hour. The first one we found was some sort of gaming place, but looked like it had really nice machines. Second place said billiards and internet cafe, but it seems to have been missing computers. Finally this place is just an internet cafe, and not a bad one at 2.4 euro/hour.

Anyway these first few days in Thessaloniki have been very much how I remembered the city. Very crowded, busy, somewhat dirty, constantly moving, insane roads (4 lane roads with double parking on both sides, 2 moving lanes of traffic, and motorcycles and scooters inbetween everything), overly crowded busses. Dispite all of this I still like the city. I think one of the major differences between most American cities (I've never been to New York...) and here is that though the city is very crowded it's also very alive. There are always people moving around coming and going to parts of the city. Compare this to dowtown Houston or Pittsburgh where the traffic downtown can be just as bad and crazy (well almost as crazy), but after an hour or two the city's basically dead. The other thing is even though the city is very busy, it's surprisingly not too loud, though that's probably because my grandparents apartment is not on a main street and there's a park across the street.

The first two days we spent going around different sights such as Churches, and arch, the old walls, the White Tower, and the old castle. It's amusing how many ancient ruins Greece has that they just don't know what to do with them anymore. The castle at the top of the city was a prison until 1990 and there are countles little walls that poke out from city parks. Last night we went out to my godparent's village to watch the Greece v Cech quarter-final game, which they ended up winning in overtime on a corner kick causing most of Greece to explode again. I kinda wanted to be in the city at the square around the White Tower where there were literally tens thousands of people were partying and watching the game on a video wall, but instead we were just in a small town.

That's it for now. This weekend we are going to an island for a few days (we'll be on the island for the finals game on the 4th so again no party for me =p). Next week we're going to another city in the mountaints to visit some relatives and then we're probably going to another island. I'll upload some pictures if I can get a chance.

Last Day

This weekend in Houson has been pretty cool before I jet off to Europe tomorrow morning. I definetly need to practice playing more Risk though (I was the first one out both games, I'm just too agressive and independent).

Now this coming month is going to be so much fun. First thing I'm looking forward to is Greece has made it to the Semi-Finals of Euro 2004 when they've never even made it into the quarter-finals before. The Semi-Final is Thursday so all of Greece is going to be one heck of a party. Otherwise lots of sight seeing, visiting relatives, and stuff like that. I've decided this time not spam eveyone who's e-mail address I have like I did two years ago (archived here if you never read them) but just update my blog when I have a chance. I really don't know how internet access is going to work over there, but I should at least be able to pop into a cyber cafe to post an update and a picture or three.

Accepted into the Kernel!

My gamecon patches to vastly impove PSX support have been accepted by the maintainer! I'm not exactly sure when his input related tree gets merged into the official linux tree, but when it does be looking at the file drivers/input/joystick/gamecon.c for this line:
Copyright (c) 2004 Peter Nelson <my@address>