Tonight I was installing Ubuntu 8.04 on an old PIII system when I came across an odd error:

ata1.00: exception Emask 0×0 SAct 0×0 SErr 0×0 action
0×2 frozen

After some googling, I found that I was not alone. After looking through a bunch of sites I came to this one (Ubuntu forums rock!).

It turns out that having your jumpers/cables setup the wrong way will cause this error. I unplugged my CD Drive and my HDD. I then changed my HDD to be master and my CD Drive to be slave. I replaced the IDE cable and what do you know…everything worked!

Hopefully this helps others! Be sure to visit the Ubuntu forums often. They are a great source of information sharing.

So, the EQ2 devs today came out with a real gem.  Apparently the petition system is down in game while the backend gets a little overhaul.

Notwithstanding all the jokes that could be made on whether the petition system actually does anything when it is working, it makes you wonder what happens if you were to try to use the petition system without knowing that it was down.  When you realized it was broken, what would you do… /petition it?  We’ve got a mind-blowing paradox here, folks.  The next thing you know, Sony is going to give dividing by zero a shot.

Cuil (pronounced cool), has been launched by a two professors out of Stanford today.  They hope to directly compete with google by offering a couple new ideas:

1. Search webpages based on context.  After the original search, offer the users a few categories to refine their search to get to what they really want
2. Bring more information to the user - Index more web pages than google and do it faster

I tried a few searches on the website.  It seems to be okie; it is hard to determine if the site is effecient or if I am still biased towards how google organizes things.  To be fair I will give cuil a try for a week or so and see how many times I have to defer to google to find what I need…