zen.org Communal Weblog

RTE 2fm dj (and all around good guy) Rick O’Shea has set up a fundraiser for Brainwave, the Irish Epilepsy Foundation.  Brainstock will be on October 12 at Vicar St, one of the best places in Dublin to see anyone.  The lineup so far is:

Boss Volenti on the foot of their newly released debut album “Boss Volenti”. 
Couse & the Impossible – Meteor Music Awards 2006 Nominee – Best Irish Male & Best Irish Album. 
Emm Gryner fast becoming a regular on the Irish music scene after the Irish release of “A Summer of high hopes” at Oxygen 2006. 
Jape Richie Egan striking it out on his own 
Neosupervital one of the most genuinely interesting and intriguing acts in ages 
Penfold DM after a string of sell-out shows in Whelans & the Sugar Club. 
Pugwash the champions of the cause for melodic & enigmatic rock and the critically adored Steve & Joe Wall – many more special guests to be announced over the coming weeks. 

You can get tickets from Ticketmaster for 20 euros, that includes booking fee.  These are some great bands, and honestly, the cost of the ticket is a steal for what you’ll get.  And Brainwave says: All the funds raised on the night will support Brainwave’s 2007 Epilepsy Awareness/ Anti-stigma campaign which aims to eliminate some of the ill-informed prejudices surrounding epilepsy which still exist in today’s society. 

Why is Rick doing this?  He was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was 16, and has recently become patron of Brainwave.  Recently, he blogged about a seizure he had, and in his words the “real reason for talking about it here is not to drag you through my dreary medical history but to give you some idea of how this whole process works for the next time you come across someone who either has epilepsy or is having a seizure.”

Fair play to ya Rick.  And if you want to go to Brainstock…GO!!! 

I bet you are sitting there thinking, I wonder what the two candidates running for the Pennsylvania senate are bickering about. Global warming, property tax, Bush? Let’s get down to the dirt, it’s about a unibrow:

Thank you http://www.wonkette.com/politics/unibrow/metrosexual-unibrow-war-201817.php for the picture. I know nothing about him but Carl Romanelli is looking better and better.

I submitted a patch to the GNU Core Utilities mailing list to allow wc to print byte count in human readable format (563G instead of 603519039483).

A few years ago I sent a patch to GNU documentation system that added an option to the info command to print out the default $INFOPATH, I got a very nice thank you but there is still no way to extract the default $INFOPATH without doing something like: strings /usr/bin/info | grep /info:

Using to MythTV 0.20 under FC3 appears to be going well so far.

After the “smart upgrade” and a reboot, I found that mythfrontend wasn’t coming up. It failed to start, as did mythbackend, because of

2006-09-14 15:14:10.068 Connected to database ‘mythconverg’ at host: localhost
2006-09-14 15:14:10.070 Upgrading to schema version 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.071 DB Error (Performing database upgrade):
Query was: ALTER TABLE program ADD listingsource INT NOT NULL default ‘0’;
Error was: Driver error was [2/1060]:
QMYSQL3: Unable to execute query
Database error was:
Duplicate column name ‘listingsource’

new version: 1136
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Database Schema upgrade FAILED, unlocking.
2006-09-14 15:14:10.072 Couldn’t upgrade database to new schema

Even though my full dump of mysql before doing all of this doesn’t actually have ‘listingsource’ in the program table it emitted. Weird.

To fix it, I had to do

mysql -umysql -p mysql mythconverg
> alter table program drop listingsource;
> quit;

and then make mythbackend do its stuff in front of me so I knew it’d actually succeeded:

sudo mythbackend

Once that was happy having done a bunch of upgrades to schema versions incrementing to 1160, it finally calmed after emitting

2006-09-14 15:20:19.384 AutoExpire: Required Free Space: 2.1 GB w/freq: 10 min
2006-09-14 15:20:21.298 Reschedule requested for id -1.
2006-09-14 15:20:21.795 Scheduled 260 items in 0.5 = 0.15 match + 0.35 place
2006-09-14 15:20:21.801 Seem to be woken up by USER

With that, I did a Ctrl-C and restarted it with

sudo /sbin/service mythbackend restart

Now it’s up and humming. Almost happy; bugs include:

• the preview play of recorded shows has a very blue-tinted color now
• mythmusic fails cuz libmythmusic.so can’t resolve mm_support (possibly cuz of libexif and the fact I’m running FC3 vs FC5, supposedly)

Otherwise, so far so good. Others are having some trouble with this new version, though, so I wouldn’t jump on it yet.

Daphne and I had not lived in our house very long, and we where getting cable hooked up that day. I already had DSL set up, so I was telecommuting when my mother called me up and told me to turn an the television. Yardley is in this dale that prevents good reception, but thought the snow I could pick up what was going on. Then in came the cable guy, he hooked me up and sat down to watch. I don’t remember what was happening but by then we knew it was an attack and not an accident. The the cable guy, who was scarcely more then a child, said something like: “We should kick foreigners out of the country.”  I would have none of this, and told him it was wrong, he said he had to go and left.  I wonder what he thinks about foreigners today.

Most of my CD collection is ripped into OGG files. I have an ad hoc set of perl scripts to edit the Vorbis comments, search them, play the search results, plus load them into my iRiver. With MP3 files one is limited to a strict set of comments, including one genre. The Vorbis comments to the OGG files is a key value set that allows the same key to have many values. One song could be labeled with many genres, and I usually did. Glenn Miller’s Moonlight Serenade is in the genres: “Big Band”, “Swing”, and also my own special genre “relax”, My “relax” genre is a exclusive set of songs that help me lower my blood presure. Loaded this song into KDE’s amarok, not only can I only edit the first genre labled, but all other “genre” tags are wiped out when I do so. It tries to fit the very flexable Vorbis comment structure into the limited MP3 structure. KDE’s Juk produced similar results.

I told Daphne about this problem, she said I ask for too much. I, one the other hand, am just trying to stop using the keyboard so much and not go not resort my entire music collection. So, is there a solution? Do I go back to my ad hoc scripts? Do I ask for too much? Does this sound like a bad Sex, and the City parody?

Our friend Michael got a Fujitsu Lifebook P7010D (which was in my running list of cool laptops). But he needed it to run both Window$ and Linux.

About six months ago, I set up SuSE on it. Most things worked, but the wireless support didn’t really do well, even with the latest MadWifi stuff.

To try from scratch, Michael did a fresh install of Ubuntu and was interested in having another shot at making things work. After switching him from Gnome to KDE (which lets you use the YYYY-MM-DD format for dates, in comparison to not finding anything similar for Gnome), an install of the 915resolution package (installed via its normal package interface under Applications -> Add/Remove -> Advanced) and its magic modifications of the BIOS video settings finally made it be 1280×768 instead of 1024×768. This is going to be filed as a bug so Ubuntu can help get rid of this step in the process; it should’ve seen the kind of video device in use and automagically installed and used this.

To make the wireless work, I just followed the great HowTo made by the MadWiFi folks. I had to install make and linux-source-2.6.15 in order to actually build it, in addition to taking these steps:

cd /usr/src
tar -jxf linux-source-2.6.15-26-386.tar.bz2
cd linux-source-2.6.15-26-386
ln -s `pwd` /lib/modules/2.6.15-26-386/build
make oldconfig
make
… and hit ctrl-c once it set up all the headers and such and started building things like mounts.o

Of course, none of this should really have been necessary—in particular, I’m sure I just missed some other step that would’ve created the build symlink for me.  But, more to the point, Ubuntu’s version of the madwifi/Atheros support should be getting updated, shouldn’t it?