zen.org Communal Weblog

This summer I was asked to take the role of technical expert witness in a case in the High Court here in Ireland. My first. Holy cow.

It involved Internet filter usage in libraries, and I was on the side of the person filing suit for no filters being in place. Today, finally, was the court date. Last week I finished my official opinion, all 21 pages of it, and today it was going to be submitted to the judge as part of my appearance when the whole trial started.

In a very anti-climactic way the trial ended up not happening. There was no judge available to hear it, so there ended up being some kind of settlement since apparently neither side really felt like waiting til February or March for another try. The system is very different from America, at least using my Law & Order-based perspective: you learn at 11am whether or not you can get one of the three judges that listen to cases in this group, whatever that may be. If you get one, you may start in half an hour. Or you lose out and have to reschedule for some later date. Very down to the last minute.

Turned out only one judge was available, with three separate cases vying for position. The first case on the list, with us in third place, won out. I arrived at the court at about 9:45am ready to rock, and finally left after tons of cafe latte and tea at about 2:30pm. Most of the time was spent waiting around to learn if there would be a judge, then waiting for a settlement or a later trial.

Overall it was an interesting experience where I got to take part in two consultations (meetings with the client or the barrister involved), do a few technical evaluations of what’s currently set up at the library, research a-plenty, and reread my written opinion a few times en route to the Four Courts to make sure I would remember the important stuff. Lots of work but I think it was worth it. (Hmm, am I overstepping my bounds by putting it on my resume if I never actually spoke in the courtroom?)

Maybe I’ll be lucky and get to do it again some time. Hey, maybe I’ll even make it into the witness box.

I tried to upgrade my desktop system from SuSE 9.1 to SuSE 9.2, but it failed. I have a few drives on it:

hda / and /home
hdb /work
hdc /music
hdd CD-ROM/DVD-RW
hde /backup and /tv

(I know I need to put /home on its own disk, just not easy at the moment—either a 40Gb as it is now, or a 250Gb. Too much space for /home not isolated on its own disk.)

I was able to boot off the CD, pick the language English(US), and then select “Update an existing system.” (Why on the initial boot menu don’t they say “Installation / Upgrade”? I had to go through to see if it supported upgrading instead of just a raw install.)

It got to the point of trying to figure out my system and then complained, “Failed to mount target system.” It pointed me at /var/log/YaST2/y2log for the details. Tsk tsk, the GUI should let me see it there. I looked in the log, and saw that it failed trying to mount /dev/hdd1 as /backup. Hmm.

It looks like it saw the hde drive just fine (meaning the kernel has the driver for the Promise UDMA133 card that I use to let me have more than 4 devices), looking at the Alt-F3 screen where it initially lists the drives. But something in the scripts used to install messed up the idea of where the drives are. The original /etc/fstab is clear about mounting /dev/hde1 on /backup and /dev/hde2 on /tv. I’m not yet sure why it thought it was hdd (the CD doing the install). I didn’t expect a mistake like this.

The short-term fix will be to just comment out the /backup and /tv entries in /etc/fstab so that the install process won’t think that those partitions need to be mounted. Maybe tomorrow or next week, time to go to bed.

I posted on the jPodder user forum some notes about my progress trying to port jPodder to Linux. Well, not yet really porting it; what I’m currently tackling is the ability to just recompile all the Java files so that I can then look at making changes to the code, recompile, and test the result. I want to find a way to make it use the interface for KDE to use juk, for example, to do the listing and playing of shows like happens with iTunes and the Windows Media Player. Via KDE’s kicker?

I’ve had a lot of luck with Alien Package Converter recently. I have Debian liboost-* packages installed on Fedora and Fedora libaio* packages installed on Debian. All seem to work well.

So I tried converting one of Sun’s Java RPM package to a .deb, it don’t work. The resulting .deb file installs fine, but none of the commands work. At least Sun put out an alternative install method, and all is working well.

After looking at the RSS 2.0 Spec, I was able to fix wp-rss2.php so it’ll properly give attribution to the author of each post when someone gets them via a RSS aggregator like Liferea. Ahhhhhh, much better. I’ve got it doing ‘mailto’ because apparently some aggregators use that properly; Liferea actually shows it and doesn’t create a link for it. At least, not the version I’m using.

It’s weird going through my old blog entries and thinking of titles for them. The thoughts from weeks ago are often gone, I’m not really sure of the mood I was in.

I am already missing some features of my old software. WordPress features includes “Instant publishing with no rebuilding,” I’m a little worried if the Pentium II this server is can take regenerating a page ever visit!

I also liked that that my entry systems was not web based, I could easily use spell checkers. Now I’m stuck in this low feature box. My spelling is bad enough as it is.

The thing that really bugs me in the timezone. The goal of my blog software was to make in so you could set the timezone differently for each post. So if I was in San Francisco when I posted I would put PST. Here everything is stuck in eastern time. I never finished that feature, but it still bugs me.

I’ve nearly got a perl script done using DBI to copy all of my posts and E’s from our respective WordPress databases into the new common zen one. Just need to spend a little more time figuring out how to make the comments end up attached to the correct post.

UPDATE: Woo hoo! It looks like it worked pulling all of my posts in, with their comments, and adjusting categories. Now to try for E’s …
UPDATE 2: I’ve got both of us in place now. If I try to use wp-rss2.php it even shows the RSS enclosure properly. However, when you point iPodder-X at it, you get “zen.org Communal Weblog” for the title of the feed, not “The Accidental Cook” as we’d like. This seems to be from wp-rss2.php using the bloginfo() function with 'name' as the argument. Hmm. Wonder how you can make the title of the blog change if you choose a different category (in this case, cat=10)?

Hmm, and when you get the RSS feed from the site, it doesn’t identify the author of each post.

UPDATE 3: Aha, adding a link category “Authors” made it possible to add a list on the right of each person posting. That means you can click on that to use the (not obvious) URL to see posts only by that person. TODO: make the calendar properly reflect the dates that have posts by the person chosen.

Last Friday I upgraded my work desktop system, Debian Sarge, to Firefox 1.0 via the Debian packages. Today I come into work and I can’t launch it. Some web searching indicates that if I run Firefox as root first all will be well, no such luck. I can run it once after a reboot, so if I quit out of it it’s reboot city for me. I wonder if plain Mozilla works any better. At home, where I run Debian Sid, all seem well.

In the beginning of September I installed four systems with Debian Sarge, a few weeks later I was rsyncing the old mixed Debian system back. Today I’m taking four different systems on the same cluster and putting Debian Sarge on them. Welcome to Samsara.

When you select New Install from SuSE 9.2 Professional’s installation program, apparently you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that it’s going to actually wipe your entire drive.

Turns out it saw that I had a root partition on /dev/hda1 before. My brief foray into trying out Mandrake 10.1 was on that original partition, but something—I forget what just now—made me reconsider and skip playing with Mandrake for now, instead going straight to enjoying SuSE 9.2. The installation process instead just gobble up the home partition on /dev/hda6 for its own new root-everything partition.

I’ll do it over again tomorrow and run through my ChangeLog (used to track every system change) just reiterating the steps I took this morning. I realized that I neglected to link what I did in my previous post, so I’ve uploaded my /etc/X11/XF86Config file (aka xorg.conf, I’m glad they’ve moved to X.org’s stuff) for an X-Windows that’s much faster and happier and the /etc/sysconfig/powermanagement file where I set ACPI_BUTTON_LID_CLOSE to be “hibernate”. Really, I didn’t have to tweak anything else. I did need to go back into YaST2’s installation interface and have it add tons of stuff that I want (fetchmail, firefox, emacs gasp it was missing, cvs, etc etc). But no other editing of random files.

The big pluses I’m seeing so far: I can hibernate the system via working ACPI support; it comes with KDE 3.3 already (and I’ve got 3.3.1 handy); much better wireless support (for the orinoco internal device and the prism2_cs-based Linksys card I sometimes elect to use); more polished YaST2 ways to configure things; and new “system profiles” so taking the laptop from one office to another is no longer a bullshit shell script.

The one loss: sound doesn’t work. Been that way before, and if I unload snd_ali5451 and instead load trident, it seems to work. I’m guessing ali5451 should work with a change of a variable somewhere. Ah, I’ll care after I reinstall.