Older blog entries for Milambar (starting at number 15)

Sunday 29/08/2004

Its been a long time since I updated this. I wasn't even sure if I my account would still be valid. In the meantime... I've been to Canada, experienced the worst Canada can throw at me..

Canada:
I arrived at Halifax International, Nova Scotia, on 3rd February 2004, after an exhausting two step journey that took me via New Jersey/EWR. My host for my months stay was my ex-girlfriend, Nicole. As I came out of the baggage area to meet her, she began laughing incredulously at me. Why? I was wearing a light summer, blouson style coat. The ambient air temperature outside was -22°C. Yes, thats minus twenty two degrees celcius.

The airbus dropped us off outside the Lord Nelson Hotel, and I got a month long buspass from Shoppers Drugmart, then, back on another bus to her flat. Only one problem was...

23 minutes to wait till the bus.

In the freezing cold!

You don't appreciate cold until you've stood in -22°C in Canada for 23 minutes. Thankfully the bus arrived after only 20 minutes. Aieeee.... The cold!

The bus ride might have been more interesting had I been able to see anything. It was gone 9pm local time, and pitch black. I was exhausted, and felt every single jolt of that "Metrotransit" bus.

Thankfully her flat was only 45 minutes away by bus.

Day 2, I was forced to part with $175CAD for a proper winters coat, made by Helly Hansen

Im glad of the coat. It snowed. In fact, it more than snowed. Apparently it was the worst snowstorm in the recorded history of the province. 95cm of snow in the first 24hrs, a further 45cm of snow the following day. Its official, I never want to see snow again in my life.

Well, those are the highlights of my trip, theres more, but, advogato isn't really the place for them. I might post the full diary on my livejournal.

Power Failures Suck:
A powerfailure occured just at the right time... Or the wrong time.. The main disk in my Mandrake based fileserver is deader than the dodo. Still, an excuse to buy a larger disk. What does rankle though, was the loss of the work that I hadn't backed up. Especially my sendsms project.

Windows SP2 Sucks:
Yes, I have a windows machine. My laptop runs XP Home. :SHAME:. Installed SP2 on it, and everything died. My network printers were deactivated, and XP wouldnt let me reactivate them, I had to reinstall them.. My WIFI LAN needs a "repair" at every reboot... Perhaps I should just install a *nix on the laptop.

Tuesday 8 July
I got back from kempo (a form of karate) this evening, feeling quite depressed. I wanted music. Lots of music. I had a choice, download some mp3's which I beleive is technically illegal, or play a cd. So.. I set about working out why xmms wouldnt play my cd's.

All the appropriate plugins were installed. It wouldnt list the contents of my CD. Finally, I found a posting on a newsgroup.. "Play Location", so I hit [CTRL]+[L] and entered /mnt/cdrom, and... it started playing. Its not very clear you have to "Play Location" and not just "Add Directory" (not very clear to me anyway, but then I suck at reading documentation), but still, its working now. Note: This is using the cd plugin shipped as standard with Mandrake 9.1.
30 Jun 2003 (updated 30 Jun 2003 at 00:55 UTC) »

Well, after a fairly long break, which involved my girlfriend coming over from Canada to see me, I decided to fire up my Linux machine, and stop playing games on my win2k machine. Well... Its a dualboot actually, so its one machine, I just booted the other partition.

While my girlfriend was down here, we happened to stumble across an old old old 486 machine that somebody had thrown out. After replacing some parts in it, namely the memory chips, I got it to boot. It is running:

Windows95a

Now, I'm not what I term an "Operating System Snob", a person who takes the line "If its not xxxxx, its not worth using." or "xxxxx is the best operating system.", where xxxxx is any operating system of choice, but I feel justified in saying that windows (versions aimed at home users, not NT based Windows) in general, is not all that stable.. So, why on earth, does that 486 have an uptime that matches my Linux machine? The only reason I had to reboot it, was to install a new network card.

The only reason I am keeping Windows95a on it, however, is because Linux doesn't yet have drivers for my flatbed scanner. It runs fine on the windows machine. Once I manage to work out filesharing, so that I can grab the files off that machine via the LAN, I'll be happy.

Talking of the LAN, getting it set up and running under Mandrake 9.1 was the most infuriating thing I have ever done in a long while. drakgw (the internet connection sharing wizard), really screwed the configs up. I ended up having to configure most of the stuff manually. Once I sat down and actually READ what everything was trying to say though, and not what I wanted it to say, the LAN came online quite happily.

The SorceryNet website which I coded from scratch, is doing well, so much so that, I am looking for other projects to occupy my time. Anyway, thats all for this update.

Talk to you folks latah!

16 Jan 2003 (updated 16 Jan 2003 at 22:28 UTC) »

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!
22 Sep 2002 (updated 22 Sep 2002 at 01:41 UTC) »
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.

6 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!