User Blogs

As I may have mentioned previously, my 1993 Subaru Impreza LS has a faulty throttle position sensor. I diagnosed it using a non-autoranging digital multimeter on the megohms setting. A better solution is to use an analog ohmmeter, or to follow the factory test procedure and connect a voltmeter to some of the pins on the ECU. So far so good. I ordered a cheap Delphi replacement part from autopartswarehouse.com, and the fun began.

As you may already know, I am the owner of a 1993 Subaru Impreza LS (GC5). While returning from a trip to San Francisco to attend the Power to the Peaceful festival (which was extremely underwhelming this year) in celebration of the three-year anniversary of my relationship with my lady Anna-Maria, a loud clicking noise was to be heard while accelerating and turning left. I easily identified this problem as a failure of the left front axle (I could tell by feeling the vibrations as much as by hearing the sound in this rather small car) and proceeded to research the issue of repair.

Every so often I visit Pricewatch to take a look around at prices. Mostly I've been looking at laptop, desktop, and server prices, with occasional visits past the CPU+Motherboard combo page. One day I stumbled across an ad from Hyper Microsystems for an IBM eServer 325. This was a dual-Opteron 240 1U server with 1GB DDR333 ECC memory and a 120MB ATA disk - for $189. This sounded too good to be true, so I did a little research.

SimCity is one of the most popular and well-known video games of all time. This game was ported to Unix in the 1990s and the source code has since been released under the GPL version 3. Micropolis is the resulting program (as well as the original working title of the game.) Making this game work correctly is easy enough once you know the recipe.

Let me follow up my inflammatory title with all due respect for CVS and what it has brought us, besides a thousand years of pain. Who knows how many man-hours were saved by CVS? Of course, there is always the argument about how many man-hours have been lost due to it as well, but then again we all know the importance of proper backups... especially when dealing with source code control systems. While CVS is one of the oldest, its legacy of suggesting it will do one thing and will do another is probably its most-emulated feature, so it is by no means unique in that regard.