Older blog entries for Milambar (starting at number 12)

Wow... What a week. I only managed to lose BOTH my main harddisks, completely smuck up my PC, and then, by some fluke, manage to repair it all again. Heres the full story.

1. I bought a 512Mb 168pin SDRAM from my local PC shop, without checking if my motherboard can handle it. It couldn't. When I booted, linux immediatly died with multiple errors. Windows booted but I kept getting all sorts of lovely STOP errors (windows 2000), and eventually, that died spectacularly too, crashing the harddisk.
2. I removed the sdram, and then did something that made the situation even worse. I put the old chips back in, in the wrong order. Linux wouldnt boot at all, it kept dying with "respawning too fast" errors. The windows disk was dead, so I had to reinstall that.
3. On the advice of a friend, I took the memory out, and reinserted it, and this time, I realised they were in the wrong order, so I put them all back, making sure the largest sdram went in slot 0, and the smallest in slot 3. Windows now booted without errors, but, linux wouldn't. Not even a cd boot in rescue mode would boot it. I reinstalled Mandrake 9.0 from scratch, and... Lost all my work I'd previously done when it reformatted hdb* for me.

Well, I now had two completely clean operating systems. Windows worked as well as windows CAN work, linux was up and running, but because I have an unusual graphics card, X Server wouldnt start.

No problem, I thought, I'll just install the powervr patches.

No I won't. I now had a 2.4.19 kernel, the powervr patches were dependent on a 2.4.18 kernel.

There was a srpm, which could be rebuilt for custom kernels. I downloaded this, and ran rpm --rebuild powervr.... etc.

It wouldnt rebuild, so, in the end, I ended up unpacking it all, and manually compiling and installing it. It was an easy task, but a tedious one.

Anyway. The net result... After a lot of time and stress, I now have a fully working Mandrake 9.0 installation again. Yay

Computer died for a while. Well, it didn't totally die, but the windows disk got badly corrupted. The windows disk is C:\ so I was stuck floppy booting Linux for a while. But I eventually got bored of not having any games, fdisked the disk, and reinstalled windows 98se. So now both my windows and Linux systems are running normally again, and Im happy.
Personal

• My girlfriend suprised me. She wants to come stay with me for 2 months. Why's this a suprise? She lives in Canada, and I live in the UK.

Personal

• I sat there, last night, quietly despairing. My Palm m105 had crashed in grand style. I had to leave the batteries out for a while to clear the memory. No problem, I thought. The data is backed up onto my PC. I can just hotsynch it and restore the data. Cool...
  
  How wrong I was. I hit the hotsynch button, it bleeped, and... Nothing was restored. Okay... I checked my settings in jpilot. They looked ok, so I tried again. I got a message to "kill 2196 or press hotsynch"..
  
  Huh????
  
  Well to cut a long story short.. Somehow, somewhen, gnome-pilotd had been started, and was holding onto /dev/ttS0 with a vengence, refusing to let jpilot work properly. So gnome-pilotd was performing the synchs, but it didnt have the data I needed restoring.
  
  Blar! I discovered this AFTER I had deleted the contents of ~/.jpilot in despiration. All I needed to do was su root, kill gnome-pilotd, and jpilot would have worked fine. The net result is... I lost all my data anyway. Blar!

SorceryNet

• Well... SorceryNet has now got a MySQL backend to the website, although currently, the only page using it is the servers page. Its been fun putting it together, actually. Ive learned a fair bit. The hardest thing for me was the concept of table joins. Theres nothing that I like better than learning new ideas.
  
  I have to.. Think of a way to implement a "login" session for the admins so they can update their own server information. The problem is.. I can see inherent problems with all the methods Ive considered. Cookies.. People disable cookies.. Sessions.. Well, one of the admins had serious misgivings regarding sessions. I think I just need to think about it long and hard for a while.

Personal

• I got a new girlfriend, and.. Heh... I'm so happy, its incredible!

SorceryNet

• I recently decided to move the website for www.sorcery.net over to a database driven website for ease of maintainence. Of course, I now need to learn MySQL to a greater depth than before. Before anyone yells PostgreSQL at me, I happen to like MySQL. I don't like PostgreSQL at all. Ankh keeps telling me to aim for the 3rd normal form, for the database... Err... The what now? Time to study the MySQL tutorials I think *g*.

Personal

• My car bit me yesterday. That is... I was fitting a new incar CD player/autochanger, when I shorted out two wires, and took a shock. Oh boy, it sure packed a wallop.

I bought a little digital camera recently. l'espion by Digital Dreams. I even managed to get it set up to act as a webcam in Mandrake Linux. This one feat boosted my self confidence, as I didn't need to bother my usual guru.

Sadly, due to time constraints, I have ended my phpdomain project. xml/xslt is still on the backburner. However, I managed to complete the new website for www.sorcery.net

On a more personal note, I got a new bike :-)

Ok, its been a while since I updated this diary.. Things have been a little busy.

Progress Reports:

• phpdomain - No progress. This sadly went onto the backburner, as more important things happened.
• xml/xslt - This too went onto the backburner, sadly.
• html - In my spare time, I pruned sorcery.net's webtree down severely. It was 16odd megabytes in size.. Its now 3.8Mb, with no broken links. All I did was prune out a couple of disused directories, and removed all the backup files. Backups arent really needed, as the entire site is kept in cvs anyway. Yes, I'm finally getting used to cvs.:-)

Personal Life:

Things are looking up. I started some martial arts classes, Kempo JuJitsu, to be specific. Anyway... Thats all for now folks.

A tirade on GIMP

I recently needed to make a nice little banner image for a webpage I was working on. No problem, I'll just use the GIMP. Hmmm...

• Crop to selection... Doesnt exist...
  Tools->Transform->Crop and Resize.. This looks like it!... Nope, did nothing... Basically the only way I found to crop an image to the selection, is to copy the selection to a new image. A bit fiddly.
• Layer->Add stroke...Doesnt exist...

Lets end here... The GIMP in my opinion, sucks. It has no tools that work. It takes... 5 minutes for my Linux install to power down cleanly, another 2 for windows to boot up. 1 minute to get the effect I want in Adobe Photoshop (that was seemingly impossible in GIMP), followed by 1 minute to shut down windows, and 10 to reboot Linux.

Right now, I am very disillusioned with Linux, as I seem to be wasting a lot of time switching between the two operating systems, to use tools that Linux SHOULD HAVE.

What did I want to do? Simple... Make a graphic of a word.. Drop a black 2px border round it.. Crop the image so there is no wasted space, and save it as a .gif. Such a simple thing... There doesnt seem to be an easy way to do so in GIMP.

• Mood - Sad

Well, hasn't today been fun!

• My Printer - A friend gave me a second hand Lexmark 4039 10R laser printer.

  Windows has the drivers for it built in. Linux does too... Only.. they refused to work unless I put a ^D into the files I wanted to print.

  I downloaded the Linux drivers from Lexmark themselves, and still it didn't work properly. So, I tried a couple of other drivers intended for other printers. One of the IBM drivers worked. Not well, but at least I don't need to keep inserting a ^D.

• My Graphics Card - Hercules Prophet 4000XT (Kyro Chipset).

  This never worked under Linux, and was only partially stable under windows. Until now. With Ankh's kind advice, I downloaded the beta linux drivers for the card. Installed them, and suspenseful music edited XF86Config-4. Much to my jawdropping amazement... My card works, and is finally running a resolution better than that naff 800x600. I'm happy :-)

Woah
I noticed something today! If the network connection is down at all, then Gnome 2 boots really slowly. Still, no network connection meant no IRC which meant more work got done.

• xml/xslt - This is my personal project. The conversion of SorceryNet's services documentation, which are stored as flat-files, into xml. I finally got rid of the bug in the xslt that generates the html files.
• phpdomain - I altered it slightly to use an external config file. Which I hope will make it easier for people wantint to use the script.

I really am liking gnome 2 despite its... quirks. For instance.. vim, at least as I have it configured, seems to be inserting ^M's, a-la windows style. Now thats probably just a configuration setting. However, Im perservering, as I am finding kde2 to be... dated.

• Favourte sawfish theme - DAE
• Favourte other theme - Default (Im strange, I know)

Ok, back to work. I think I need to do some kind of documentation for phpdomain......