zen.org Communal Weblog

A classmate from school is over for the afternoon so his mom can take the younger brother to the doctor to look at an ear infection. E’s up into town with Eoin (did I mention we have a second boy now? 🙂 ) for his 6-week checkup. So today I get my initiation into letting two 5 year-olds play together for about 3 hours. hee hee.

Of course all I can think of is the sheer havoc my cousin Peter and I got into when we played together. At least P doesn’t know about melting sulfur yet…should be fun!

FADE IN:

INT.
CHILD’S BEDROOM – NIGHT

DAD is in a chair at the head of SON’s bed reading a bed-time story to SON, who has just dropped his pillow on the floor.

Fudge!

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.

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?

Patrick (age 4-1/2) and I were on a guys-only stretch for a couple of days. This morning we played football—er, soccer—out on the front lawn, and finished building a wooden train we’d glued together yesterday. Then I said, “Ok, we need to go in and make some bread since we’ve run out.”

“No way, Dad, I don’t want to do any of that Martha Stuff.”

I convinced him to go upstairs and transfer some laundry into the dryer. He turned the knob to make the dryer start, then looked me square in the eye. “Ok, Dad, we can go down and do Martha Stuff. Let’s go.”

Next scene, he’s standing on a chair in front of the kitchen counter where the flour, sugar, and other elements were waiting.

Please tell me this is the positive side of television…

Going through immigration in Ottawa yesterday, the nice lady asked me a bunch of questions. She finished with, “Do you have a computer with you?” I replied that yes, I had a laptop (as would lots of other people at the GCC Developers Summit I’m attending). Boy was “yes” a wrong answer.
I was sent to a mystical back room for a further search. A big guy in a police uniform did a cursory look at my two bags, then focused primarily on my laptop. He opened it, turned it on, asked me to log in, and with the screen turned away from me proceeded to click his way around the system. (It’s my backup laptop running a 2-letter commercial O$ … I so wished I had Linux on it instead, just to see if they’ve any idea what to do.)

He explained he was looking for “objectionable material, which most people think is just child pornography.” Nope, it’s anything that may cause offence (left to be defined) including “beastiality” and anything that is “traitorous”.

I asked if there’s a list somewhere listing what they go looking for; he repiled, “Well, if there’s any kind of a match there’s a database we consult,” and continued—click, click … click. “Do you use your computer to connect to the Internet?”

What the hell kind of question is that? I felt like I was back in 1984 dialing up to Telenet.

I just stood there looking around, my brain pondering all sorts of things: is the arbitrary examination of your personal files legal? What would he do if it were any other OS? Why would anyone transporting illegal stuff like child porn leave it in any form this guy with Windows Explorer could find? Why not encrypt it all and rename it to “quicken.exe”? Why not just wait and download everything over a secure link once you’ve gotten to your hotel? The possibilites are endless.

When he’d finally seen enough to satisfy himself, he gave me the laptop back and said I could leave. Meanwhile my friend Doug’s out in the baggage area waiting to see if I’d ever show up after walking up to the immigration people at the same time.

I still wonder if it’s equally legal to open up a binder full of paper and start reading what’s on the sheets, waiting to see something derogatory about the Prime Minister.

Canada appears to have its own Department of Homeland Decency.

Last year my favorite laptop suffered a horrible death at the hands of hardware failure.

Now my Sony Vaio TX1XP laptop, only about 7 months old, has also failed. The power plug on the back was a bit loose, and has become looser over the last few weeks. With it came the too-familiar problem of getting it to realize it’s been plugged in. Today, it finally wouldn’t see the power no mater what angle I tried to twist it. I used the last 2-1/2 hours of battery life to back stuff up and restore the factory image back onto it. (As opposed to sending it off for repair with all of my stuff still there. At least I use unique SSH keys for each lifetime of the machine.)

I’ll call the Sony Vaio customer support line, walk thru the troubleshooting steps, and get them to send me the box used to get it repaired. Can’t do that til late next week, though, so fingers crossed.  A few days ago I found a forum online where people described the same exact problem, but of course I can’t seem to find it now.  (And didn’t bookmark it, shame shame.)
At least this all happened today, a Saturday, as opposed to any time earlier this week when I was hammering on some time-critical work with it. (And had to do the work under XP.)

I wonder if I’ve got bad laptop karma.

Inspired by Sven’s recent post and some messages on ILUG, I replaced SuSE 10.0 on my Sony Vaio VGN-TX1XP laptop with the Desktop copy of the new Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper” release. (I tried to install an earlier version of Ubuntu in the past, and hoped this would go more smoothly. Bingo, it was great.)

After doing a full backup of my system (aka rsync -vaRx / brendan@otherbox:/backup/kaylee-20060604/), It took maybe 5 minutes from booting off the CD to having the installation process get underway; you start by just double-clicking the “Install” image on the desktop.

The whole install took about 20 minutes. A reboot at the end and it came back up as a fully functional system.

So far, so good, tho I’m a KDE user normally so its GNOME default will take some getting used to. Of particular interest so far:

• Ubuntu uses apt-get instead of rpm for packages;
• the GNOME Network Manager makes it really easy to switch between Ethernet and wireless;
• X automatically goes to 1366×768, the not-so-normal size of the screen on the TX series of laptops;
• hibernation is quite fast—the same under SuSE took much more time;
• even more amazing: suspending (aka standby and its glowing orange power button) works (well, almost)! I right-clicked on the Power Manager battery icon at the top, and in its preferences I selected it to use suspend when the lid closes. Down goes the lid, wait til it’s orange, open it up, and in about 10 seconds at most the screen saver is prompting for my password, and everything is still there and working (including the network interfaces). Awesome awesome awesome—for about a day.  But then it fails to properly bring up X when it’s woken up; this is apparently a known bug, still not fully fixed.
• Fn-F5 and Fn-F6 darken and brighten the screen (I knew there were tricks I could play under SuSE with lots of manual editing to try to make this happen; here it just works);
• Just by doing a rsync of ~/.gaim* from the backup, I was able to bring up Gaim (installed by default) with no trouble at all;
• everything, including bringing up Firefox to edit this post, goes really fast;
• the original install of XP wasn’t messed up (in part cuz of my selection of partition from the previous install of SuSE), but even better, the Ubuntu install of Grub automatically put it in the list of choices at boot-up;
• I have to do Ctrl-Alt-Left and Ctrl-Alt-Right to switch workspaces, instead of the Ctrl-Tab used by KDE to cycle thru them;
• Applications -> Add/Remove is so amazingly easy to install other stuff I want (like Thunderbird, Kaffeine, emacs, and Gnumeric).

I’m really impressed at how easy and seemingly effortless it was to install this.
B

“The NSA wants to remind everyone to call their mothers this  Sunday.  They need to calibrate their system.”

This has got to be one of the coolest domains ever: tcl.tk
(Tcl is an interactive programming language, and Tk is a graphical user interface toolkit in Tcl.)