After my iBook problems last week, I tried to install Debian on the thing. I have narrowed down the problem to something with the hard drive inside, because the machine seems to run fine and go through most of the installation without any trouble, but once I start using the hard drive, it completely freezes. I successfully ran the hardware test disc which came with it a couple times in extended mode, but I’m not sure that it uses the hard drive in it’s tests long enough for it to exhibit the problem. The failure seems to be somewhat random in nature, occuring at different times in the install process. Now I have the unhappy decision of trying to save this laptop which is more than 3 years old, or to attempt to buy a new one. Right now I am leaning toward buying a new one.

Honeywell seems 1.5 times as long this week, mostly because I’m making up for a day which I missed a couple weeks ago. Things have settled down there in terms of software failure, so I’m back at the normal coding which I am doing. The code uses Ogre, which is a handy 3d engine, making it much easier than learning something like OpenGL, and as a bonus adding portability. I am considering building some play applicaitons with the toolkit at home just because it would be fun.

Tonight I need to build a couple presentations covering some papers which were in CVPR this year to present at a reading group at Honeywell. It would be fine except that I am completely unaware of any of the recent history of vision research, so it makes it much harder to build the presentations. I hope I can finish them in a reasonable amount of time so I can watch Eureka tonight.

The TiVo Diet is still working out as expected. I discovered that I don’t really have anything to watch on Sunday or Monday of the week. I’m getting much more productive work done than I used to. One downside of the diet is that I tend to not want to just sit and veg at the end of the work day - I think it frustrates [lj user=”ceilingsarecool”] a bit because I’m always going off to the office to do something on the computer.

I recieved and watched the Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip yesterday. Being an Aaron Sorkin fan, I am excited for another of his shows to broadcast. Judging by the pilot, it should be a decent show.

Sidenote: Planet Debian seems to like one of my weekend weeviews a little too much, and is regrabbing it for the front page every so often. I can’t figure out why this is happening, so any help would be greatly appreciated. Otherwise, in a couple more posts it should be off the RSS feed.