Hardware

Date: 2002-09-11 23:30:49

Back when Gem and I were registering for wedding gifts, it started to slightly annoy me that all of the gifts were for Gem. (At least, that's what it seemed to me; I'm not the one who will get the most benefit from having all sorts of fun kitchen implements. Although I will concede that I am using one of the pillows and pillow cases and towels we got.) I concluded that what I wanted was not really judged as official wedding gift material. I wanted hardware -- a Firewire card, and a sufficient processor and motherboard so I could edit video easily on Ziyal. Gem was kind enough to allocate a budget for my adventure from the epic quantities of cash money people gave us. (I won't be telling any of these people that they gave me hardware, with the notable exception of one individual.)

Last Tuesday, I met with scottgalvin.com and Bitscape at the Castle Lair, played some Pikmin, and handed scottgalvin.com some cash for the acquisition of hardware. We departed, having concluded our fun-filled and action-packed little planning session, and I headed to Best Buy in Broomfield, where I successfully acquired an IEEE 1394 (aka Firewire) card. (I wanted to acquire said card from a meatspace stuff-acquisition locale so I could return said card easily should it fail to work properly with my alternative operating system of choice.)

When I departed Temptation Zone, Scott called my wireless phone and revealed that he was able to pick up the hardware I requested at that very moment in time. We arranged a rendezvous so I could take possession of the hardware. I headed to Borders in the nearby expansive luxury mall (this would be the "new mall" that another pseudo-Content Solutions member mentioned not too long ago) and got a cup of especially sweet chai (which I think is becoming my hot beverage of choice), and fielded a few more calls from scottgalvin.com to figure out exactly what hardware I should get, since the components I identified weren't actually in stock. I proceeded to the rendezvous coordinates and picked up the hardware, which I learned I couldn't actually use yet because the motherboard used elite DDR ram, which I had none of.

I ordered half a gig of DDR ram and two well-priced IEEE 1394 cables at a certain e-tailer that night. I actually wanted to be able to use my stuff, so I paid extra for second-day shipping. On Thursday, I learned that the memory was on back order (it said "usually ships in 2-3 days", which I thought was a good thing), but the two IEEE 1394 cables had shipped. This forced me to revert to alternate video release plans. On Monday, the second business day, I was off on a furniture acquisition run (which will likely be documented in an upcoming changelog, or at least a journal entry I'll write within a couple of months), so I wasn't around when the FedEx truck dropped by with my cables. I swung by their nearest distribution center at 1700 and presented my ID and magic FedEx "we missed you" sticker and signed for the package.

Upon reaching home, I wasted no time recompiling Ziyal with a new kernel with IEEE 1394 support. After figuring out why attempting to enable DMA was crashing my system (2.4.19 decided it wanted me to include the appropriate IDE chipset driver to enable DMA; 2.4.18, which I had been using, contained the driver but didn't care terribly about actually including it), I fired up Kino and successfully managed to see Gem on Ziyal's monitor, being digitized on the camcorder sitting next to me. I poked around, figured out how to get DMA to work, and successfully managed to capture video. I wasn't absolutely sure whether it was successfully capturing all of the video; I could tell that Scott's bee-licking adventure was a little fuzzy, but I wasn't sure how much of that was Ziyal's fault.

Tragedy struck Tuesday night, when I attempted to duplicate my experiment without success; for some unknown reason, Ziyal refused to let video capturing work, no matter how hard I tried. Tuesday night I also gave up on the ram I ordered a week previous; I canceled that order and ordered another, similar dimm that was actually in stock. I knew I didn't want to wait for ordinary shipping, and next-day shipping was only a dollar and five cents more expensive than second-day shipping, so I clicked the most expensive option.

Wednesday morning (that would have been today, until eleven minutes ago), I got two e-mails from Buy.com telling me that my order had shipped. Apparently the first dimm -- the one I ordered last week -- actually shipped Tuesday evening before I canceled it, but they hadn't bothered to update their system yet. The second shipped late Tuesday night. While I was eating breakfast, the doorbell rang. I opened the door to see the UPS man heading back to his truck and a shoebox-sized box sitting next to the door. I opened it to reveal a half-gig dimm.

I wasted no time performing major surgery on Ziyal. An hour later, I had Ziyal up with an Athlon XP 1800+ on an MSI KT3 Ultra2 ATX Mainboard. It took me a while to get my kernel modules compiled correctly; I kept getting "Unresolved symbol: _mmx_memcpy". I consulted the Oracle and learned that it had something or another to do with compiling with K7 optimizations enabled. I recompiled the modules for i686 and everything worked fine.

(I'm going to continue to call this computer "Ziyal", even though the only original components from Ziyal 1.0 are the case, power supply, and thirteen gigabyte hard drive, which I'm currently using just for extra storage space. (The acquisition of a sound card three weeks later marked Ziyal 1.0.1; I still have that sound card as well.) Just in case anyone cares, Ziyal is now at 2.0.)

Everything, that is, except for IEEE 1394. I continued to attempt to coerce it into behaving, but nothing really worked. Every once and a while, I could get Kino to report one frame from the camcorder, but even that was luck. My kernel log is inhabited by the following messages:

ohci1394_0: Too many errors on SelfID error reception, giving up!
ohci1394_0: SelfID interrupt received, but NodeID is not valid: 0800FFC0
ohci1394_0: Error in reception of SelfID packets [0x80120000/0x0021bd93]

Any elite IEEE 1394 hackers out there are invited to guess what that gibberish means, and what incantations I should whisper to fix it.

blug meets tomorrow night. I'll be there. I may even drag some other people along.

I want a job. I want to do something productive with my time. (And I want to have a steady income so I can move out of my parents' basement (about the time I'm finally starting to get comfortable) and so I don't feel guilty every time I feel compelled to acquire something.) Unfortunately, I have no real idea how to get a job. Maybe I should just concentrate on Buildmeasite... I suppose it'd help if I started working before 1600 every day. (Maybe I should adjust my sleep schedule so I wake up at 1500, so then I'll be getting to work early every day. Although I suspect Gem might object.)