The new name for a blog is now: bloggity-blog-blog

Thanks to Nelsie for clearing this up.

Btw, here’s a photo of Andy and Nelsie.

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After recently getting my insanely fast ADSL connected last week, I wanted to rebuild Gentoo on my desktop machine. I found the document Installing Gentoo 2005.0: Stage 1 NPTL on a Stage 3 Tarball on the Gentoo forums and thought it sounded quite interesting. The document outlines step-by-step how To Build a Fast and Bulletproof Gentoo System — Stage 1 NPTL Installation on a Stage 3 Tarball Using GCC 3.4.3.

The tricky part is that GCC 3.4.3 is still marked as unstable in portage, and the live-cd still contains GCC 3.3.4. This means that you have to do a stage 3 install, then do a stage 1 again over the top (something about keeping better track of installed apps in portage) and recompiling your GCC, glibc, libstdc++v3, etc a couple of times so that you end up with GCC 3.4.3 compiled by GCC 3.4.3 (and not by GCC 3.3.4 - which is available on the 2005.0 live-cd). Also, the guide provides some pretty crazy GCC optimisation flags, which seem quite stable.

After the very long process of recompiling the GCC suite a couple of times, and using the GCC flags:

CFLAGS=”-O3 -march=athlon-xp -fforce-addr -momit-leaf-frame-pointer -fomit-frame-pointer -ftracer -pipe”

I can notice a huge increase in speed over the old system, and it even seems more stable. Although, GCC flags like these reminds me a lot of The Gentoo is Rice page.

Also, I wanted to just rave about VMWare 5. I emerged the latest unstable from portage (vmware-workstation-5.0.0.13124) and it rocks! I love the new GTK2 interface, and it does some really nice stuff. One of my favourite things is the dynamic resolution of desktop size. You can resize the VMWare window, and it will automatically adjust the screen res of the OS running inside it. I don’t know if this works in Linux, but Win2k does it.

Check out the screen res

I still do feel kinda dirty by having this, but I can’t seem to get around it at big T.

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Since moving in at North Melbourne, I signed us up to iiNet’s new broadband2 light plan. What makes this special is that iiNet have been installing their own DSLAMS in the close-to-city areas, including North Melbourne, and I happen to live about 1km from our exchange.

Since ADSL has been available in Australia, Telstra have regulated the speed to a maximum of 1500k. One of the reasons this may be is due to the distance limitations of ADSL, and customer expectations. The following graph from Internode sums up the speed and distance issue pretty well.

The graph shows that after about 2km, the speed of ADSL1 begins to drop. At about 4.8km, the signal drops to a max of 1500k. ADSL2 and ADSL2+ is a whole other kettle of fish…

So, iiNet and other ISP’s decided to install their own DSL infrastructure, and open these speeds right up. What I don’t understand is, why wouldn’t Telstra open their speed up if their infrastructure supports it? Even people between 2km and 4.8km would benefit from the speed increase!

Last night, I got an SMS from iiNet to tell me that my ADSL was activated. After some technical issues, I got it running, and it was FAST! I was downloading a gentoo live-cd, using a multithread downloading app called prozilla, using 16 threads, I downloaded the ISO at an average of 850k/s. It was bitchin!

And therefore, I believe that everyone should move to the city

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Just a quick update on what’s been happening.

Leachy and Hayley’s wedding was great, and I have even put my photos online. Some funny stuff in there.

Moved into the new place, and it ROCKS! Thanks to Dad, Mum, Michael, Bek, Stretch and Jay for lending hands. I even had time to go to the footy that afternoon to see the most exciting game EVER against St. Kilda at Telstra dome.

Jay and I have been walking to work in about 25 minutes. Walking to work is such a novelty after having to catch the train for an hour and walk another 20 mins. With all this free time, I don’t know what to do with myself Also, housewaming is coming up soon, once we can work out a date for it.

Looks like Matty is coming home. It’s almost a case of deja vu… going to Perth, looking for work, finding nothing, coming home again a couple of months later…

Last but not least, I think I may have to go to Sydney to visit the Meat and Wine place that Mick and Timmy went to last night. I wish I could remember the way he described it now, becuase it was piss funny.

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