Fedora Core 3 install so far..
Well, I’m on my third try installing
Fedora Core 3 and
MythTV.
The first time, I was doing well until, just before the point where I would install mythtv-suite, I decided that the blinking exclamation mark was worth investigating, and “upgraded” my system to the latest patches.
That little decision wiped out my /etc/apt/sources (or something like that).
Silly me, I thought the old ones would be in sources.rpmold or something.
No such luck.
Perhaps with looking around and poking and prodding, I might reinstate the old sources, but I had to go, so I figured a reinstall would be faster, since it would be done by the time I next looked at the thing.
Install #2 fell over when I tried to upgrade the kernel to a 2.6.10 version.
This went swimmingly during install #1.
Now, I had gone through the list of services and turned off a bunch of stuff I didn’t think I need, so maybe that did something?
But.. the services aren’t supposed to start until after the point at which I was getting the hang.
Actually, it was hanging right at the point where it starts all the services.
I tried setting kernel boot args like verbose=10, but all I got at that point in the boot process was “Starting udev.. [OK], Initializing hardware … storage.. network .. audio… [OK]” and then a hang.
Nothing I did made it be more verbose so I could see *WHY* it hung.
So.. install #3, which is in progress.
Foo.
CD Baby rewrite – lots and LOTS of detail
Derek Sivers, the owner, proprietor and sole developer at CD Baby, is writing a blog about his rewrite of the CD Baby web site and online store on O’Reilly Developer Weblogs. He recently wrote entries about handling gift certificates and shipments. which actually include the SQL to create the tables he is using. I find that to be pretty cool. Not to mention the fact that he is using Ruby on Rails.
Here we go again…
As I type, I am installing Fedora Core 3 onto the Media Box. I am following the instructions in the Fedora Myth(TV)ology HOWTO. I’ve installed the PVR-350, formatted the disk as described (mostly XFS under LVM), and it’s now chugging away installing. I have a DVD version of Fedora, so it doesn’t need any swapping, thank goodness. I am hoping that the PVR-350 will make for a much better experience than the previous card, which is labelled as a “WinCast/TV” and copyright 1996! Maybe something 9 years more recent will do better? Time to head for bed and hope things install nicely. I am a bit concerned that it didn’t detec my second hard drive, but that’s okay since I am planning on adding it to the LVM manager as part of my /video partition. G’nite all..Free uploads on istop.com
Thanks to Iain, I found out that istop.com has uncapped upload limits. Woo! That means I can leave BitTorrent uploading all day, like a good little BitTorrent user. Of course, Ronnie and Michael will kill me if I eat up all the bandwidth with BitTorrent, but at least I can leave a dribble there for people to start with. That’s all a torrent needs is one seeder willing to leave the seed up, even at a low, low speed, for a looong time.We’re BACK baby!
Posted by rae in web site
at 9:50 pm on Wednesday, 26 January 2005
Turns out the kernel panic’ed, otherwise tnir might have been up earlier in the day.
No reason for the back-uppage, the phone line is just suddenly all better.
It’s a known issue for me that the Linux driver for my ethernet card will crash if the other end of the ethernet cable is unplugged, or if the DSL modem is powered off.
I just try to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Usually when the power goes out and then back on, the DSL modem is up and running long before tnir has booted, so it’s not usually an issue.
But I think I powered off the DSL modem yesterday night when I was trying the unpluggin of phones etc.
at 9:50 pm on Wednesday, 26 January 2005
HDTV buying
So we’re looking at getting an HDTV.. soon-ish. No sooner had Luisa and I posted about it in the comments in that last post than Iain sent me this way cool list of CRT HDTV’s in Canada.Drug policy
Posted by rae in Reid
at 9:39 pm on Tuesday, 25 January 2005
Now this is a book I would like to read:
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use
by Jacob Sullum, senior editor of Reason magazine,
Tarcher/Putnam, May 2003.
My perception is that the war on drugs is one of the most foolish expenses of modern governments,
and a huge contributor to social inequity and thus the disproportion of ethnic populations in prison.
Some key historical points are made in
Cory’s recent letter
to his MEP (Member of European Parliament?):
at 9:39 pm on Tuesday, 25 January 2005
File-sharing is part of the traditional cycle of new technology development: from the phonorecord to the VCR, from the radio to the satellite service, every new technology that lowered the barriers to reproducing and distributing copyrighted works has had to make use of the popular media of the day to conjure itself into existence — usually over the howls of protest of rights-holders who were merely the legitimized pirates of from the last fight. When the phonorecord people bitterly fought radio, they conveniently forgot that they’d built their business through widescale infringement of the sheet-music publishers. It’s no different today: filmmakers (who enthusiastically violated Edison’s film patents), broadcasters (who played records without permission or payment), cablecasters (who pirated free-to-air signals for their networks) and even hybrid entertainment/electronics companies (like Sony, whose piratical VCR was characterized by the motion-picture people as the certain death of the film industry) are all standing shoulder to shoulder in the fight against programmers and ordinary citizens who have, once again, discovered a better way to distribute and reproduce creative works. It’s no surprise that these pirates of the entertainment industry want to pull the ladder up behind them and dog the hatch. After all, the traditional role of inventors has been to create massive new revenue opportunities for the entertainment industry, and the traditional response of the entertainment companies has been to seek legislative relief from those opportunities.
The ‘Net, she be down & Ruby
For some reason our connection is having a lot of trouble. When I called home from work earlier I couldn’t get through — all I got was an error tone. So I geuss there’s something physically wrong with our phone line, although outgoing phone calls and at least two incoming calls worked okay. Ah well. I got a book in the mail today (well actually it showed up yesterday, but nobody was here to accept it). It was “Programming Ruby, The Pragmatic Programmers’ Guide”. I’ve really been getting into Ruby lately. I think it’s going to take over from Perl for me. Another book also arrived, but it was the wrong one. It was “Microsoft Visual C#.Net Deluxe Learning Edition“. What I had ordered was something like “Visual C++.Net Deluxe Learning Edition“. At least, I thought I had ordered that. Well, they’re sending me a ship-back label and when they get it they will credit my account. Not sure how much it will cost me. … I’m pretty damned sure I didn’t order a C# book. :-/Command line printing on Mac OS X
I have this thing for printing in 2 columns. I bothers me that there are no web browsers that supply an option to print web pages in 2 columns. Most web pages are in a silly fixed-width format that wastes tons of paper when printed. Ideally, good web sites would have print-specific CSS files that open up the columns when printing, and indeed a few do. However, the vast majority do NOT. I was going to print some code today and remembered that I had scripts from the Alias days that printed things nicely in 2 columns. After some scrounging, I found that the scripts were based on “enscript”, then an expensive, proprietary offering (apparently). Now it’s open source, or maybe someone wrote an open-source replacement and named it the exact same name. Well, whatever the case, it’s a part of Mac OS X (10.3 at least) in/usr/bin/enscript.
So here is the magic command line I used to print my file (which btw, was part of Apple’s MoreIsBetter line of sample code):
enscript -G2E -fCourier5 -T 4 MoreSCFHelpers.c -p ~/Desktop/foo.ps && open ~/Desktop/foo.ps
Now, what this does is to “print” the code to PostScript, save it in a file on my desktop (named “foo.ps”), and then open that file, which causes Preview to convert it to PDF and then display it.
Sort of a “print preview”, if you will.
I’m sorry, but I found this to be way to useful not to share.
Also, since Mac OS X now uses the Unix “CUPS” printing architecture, all the command-line print queues are the same as those available in your “Print” dialogs.
Just open iTerm (or Terminal if you only have that) and type the command “lpstat -a“.
On my G5 at home I get:
% lpstat -a
Downstairs_LaserJet accepting requests since Jan 01 00:00
Epson1 accepting requests since Jan 01 00:00
man -t genstrings | lp -d Downstairs_LaserJet
lpadmin -d Downstairs_LaserJet