Planet HantsLUG

• Amazing slow motion lightning video

This and similar posts are just going to be me moaning about a minor tumble I took the other day and are mainly presented only for others to take amusment from.

Day 1

On the morning of Tuesday 26th I was crossing the railway level crossing at Feltham when I did what I always reflexively do and looked both ways to see if a train was coming (which I know is a bit silly because the barriers wouldn’t be up if there was, but still). I saw a train in the station and as I was staring at it wondering if it was my train, I tripped up.

I had a bottle of orange juice in one hand and the remote control for my iRiver in the other and before I could decide what I was doing with those, my nose had smacked into the ground with a bit of a crunch. My vision went black for a second and I thought I had broken my nose. Touching it produced a lot of blood (both from the bridge and from the nostrils) but no blinding agony so at least I knew it wasn’t as bad as that. The image to the right is what it looked like by the time I’d got to dayjob and washed up a bit.

I also found out that the expensive sunglasses I bought about 10 days ago have a massive scratch across one lens, and my iRiver remote is even more broken than it was already.

In hindsight it was probably lucky that I was on the level crossing as most of my nose went into the groove of the track. If I hadn’t been and had smacked the flat ground I’m thinking it would be far more likely that it’d have broken my nose.

Day 2

By Wednesday the throbbing in my nose had mostly gone away, but the bruising really started to show and it began to look a bit uglier. I must have landed on my left little finger as well, as that started to swell up during the night and by the morning was making it difficult to type properly or get the God-forsaken on-call phone out of my pocket.

More to come!

In the last year I have bought an Eee PC 900 and a Thinkpad R61 from laptopsdirect.co.uk. The purchase of the Eee PC went smoothly although I did get a call a few weeks later from someone who wanted to sell me an expensive additional warranty.

When I ordered the Thinkpad, I got a call back within a couple of hours saying that they had some “security problems” with my phone number. They claimed that my home phone number did not work. I knew I had input it correctly, and when I asked them to tell me what I had supposedly put in, I got a string of numbers that was too short to be a phone number and which I knew I had never put in myself. I gave them my correct number, and then immediately I was asked a number of sales questions.

They attempted to sell me Microsoft Office (I’m a Linux user), a “pre-delivery dead pixel check” for £39.99 (no thanks), a 3 year warranty for about £80 (I went with manufacturer’s warranty) and laptop insurance (covered by my home insurance). Each time I politely declined, the woman made comments like “oh, you’re just going to risk it then?” By the end of the call I was pretty annoyed and strongly got the impression that the original story about my phone number was a complete fabrication in order to get me on the phone for a hard sell.

Still, the goods were a fair price and arrived on time so apart from making a mental note to be wary of this in future, I forgot about it.

Today I have just received this email:

Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:18:20 +0100
From: "Alice@AirConDirect.co.uk" 
To: “[redacted]@[redacted]” [redacted]@[redacted]>
Subject: End of Summer Sale - Further Reductions AND Free Delivery, Ends Sept 1st
Reply-To: noreply@aircondirect.co.uk
X-Mailer: aspNetEmail ver 3.1.5.0                                                                                                                                                   

Hi,                                                                                                                                                                                 

Summer’s almost over and we are clearing out all our stocks of air conditioners with a further reductions off sale prices AND FREE DELIVERY to boot.                                

Offer must end 1st September so click on the link below to see what difference the final reductions make to our prices.                                                             

http://[redacted]/email_shots/summersale.html                                                                                                                           

Alice Taylor
AirCon Direct Advisor
Tel - 0870 160 3191
www.AirConDirect.co.uk                                                                                                                                                              

Prices and titles correct at the time of sending e-mail and are subject to availability.
You are receiving this email as a previous customer of
Laptops Direct / Appliances Direct / Direct TVs / Servers Direct / Acer Direct / AirCon Direct / Shop Targus.
You are subscribed to the mailing list with the email address
If you have received this in error or would like to unsubcribe please email unsubscribe@aircondirect.co.uk with “unsubscribe” as the subject

At no point did I give my permission to Laptops Direct to pass my email address around as I have no desire to receive these (completely unrelated) “offers”. I realise that they are owning up to why I am receiving the email and have therefore not done anything illegal, but it is exceptionally rude in my opinion.

This together with the routine with the phone call have ensured that I will never shop from Laptops Direct again, nor any of the other companies listed above. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to use a tagged email address so I can now send mails to that address into oblivion.

I attempted to complain to Laptops Direct about this, but their web site contains no contact email address. They do have a web form. Here’s what happened when I submitted it:

Clownshoes.

According to the BBC a priest from Italy wanted to organise a beauty contest for nuns.

He stressed that too many people thought of nuns as dower and old, so he wanted to rectify that.

There are apparently lots of pretty nuns in Italy and none of them are old.

So he wanted the pretty-and-not-old nuns to send photos of themselves so he could put them on his blog.

Is it just me or is that a priest advertising for young, sexually inexperienced, catholics to e-mail him pictures of themselves?

Has this one just written itself?

For some inexplicable reason the Bishop canceled the contest before it even got going.

Mind you sort of looses me. I find the whole 'nun' thing a bit of turn off to be honest. Well most of the time.

Still can't sit around here chatting all day I have to go away and come up with a convincing reason as to why someone else wrote this blog while I was away on holiday.

This from Joey Stanford..

"The #launchpad team leads just developed a roadmap to open source Launchpad by the next #oscon conference. Really cool stuff!"

No pressure there guys..

I've updated my simple Simple SDL based perl game, so that:

• It has a name.
• It has an intro screen which uses that name!
• It has multiple balls.
• It gets harder, ie. more balls are added.
• The collision detection is much improved.

I still need to work on the rebound-angle but otherwise it is as complete as it will probably ever become. It would also be nice if the balls could collide with each other, and be different colours..

Regardless it was a fun diversion for a few hours, and probably tells me that I shouldn't attempt to waste more time doing gamy things, and that maths is too hard for me these days.

ObQuote: Interview with the vampire

Also known as:

• our program starts too slowly
• advertising our product makes our customers happy
• we’ll cover up part of the screen so you can’t work whilst our bloated product loads
  

I’ll admit that last one doesn’t apply so much to Windows users, but definitely _does_ apply (hello there openoffice) on Linux.

However today I was particularly pleased that despite Java _still_ not having standardised memory options, they have at least standardised the ability to set a splash image:

    -splash:
                  show splash screen with specified image

As an aside, why oh why can’t Java just grow memory usage when garbage collection is triggering too frequently - I’d _far_ rather have a program use too much memory than just fall over.

Lastly, when I talk to JMX, I want to use that IP address, not one it randomly chooses, heard of multi-homing? or NAT? The FAQ is crap - and no, adding Djava.rmi.server.hostname=ip.add.re.ss is also crap for the same reason.

Dear HMRC,

Thank you so much for including an envelope for me to reply to you with. I understand that I have to affix a stamp and that it’s not prepaid. That’s fine. However I thought you might like to know that in the country you server (in fact, across the entire continent of Europe) the standard size of paper is A4.

A4 measures 297mm by 210mm. Traditionally this is folded in three thus reducing it to around 100×210mm (allowing for the fold). So WHICH IDIOT decided to send out envelopes measuring 205mm wide.

Cheers,

Adrian

PS: the envelopes I use are 219×110mm thus allowing for number of sheets to be included. Your envelopes measure a mere 205×104mm, hence being unable to fit a single sheet of paper. This being tax related there is a strong likelihood that many supporting documents will be required.

So I got bored tonight and figured I'd write a game...

I'm genuinely not sure whether I've seen this concept before, or came up with it myself. I suspect the former. I know that I sat down with the intention of coding this game and knew how it would play and what the mechanics would be.

Having said that though I cannot think of a similar game I've played - though parts are obviously derivitive.

Anyway the aim of the game:

• A (single currently) ball bounces around the screen.
• You draw lines upon the screen, using the mouse, to influence the movement of the ball.
• The level (game) is over when the ball lands in the "exit box".

Thus far the game exists only in the skelital form with the minimum required functionality. There are two modes currently: "easy" & "hard". The hard mode was primarily added to prove to myself that the "leveling" system could work in a fun way.

Feedback welcome. Especially if it can tell me where I'm going wrong with the collision detection - but even if it is to critique my hacked-up SDL coding.

(The only other SDL coding I've done was in C, and was the mousetrap game.)

Obviously the game is written in perl, and I admit nasty perl at that. To play it you'll only need:

apt-get install libsdl-perl

Code:

• http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/tmp/skx.pl

ObQuote: The Chronicles of Riddick

I've recently started a new job which calls for a 1.5 hour train journey each way each day. I like to keep my brain going during that time so I tend to listen to audio and watch video podcasts. I'll listen to the audio ones on my Nokia N82, and watch the video on my Toshiba laptop running Ubuntu 8.04.

I recently stumbled upon a new (to me) video podcast which has an Ubuntu slant. Presented live every Tuesday at 23:00GMT/UTC (midnight BST), and available for download afterwards, I'm really enjoying Category5.tv.

Presented by Robbie Ferguson, and recently with a new co-host to help him stay on track, the show covers technical subjects with Q&A, how-tos and product reviews. Robbie has a professional, friendly, entertaining and informative style which I find refreshing in a technology podcast.

Being a live show means he gets some great interaction going with the listeners. Many other tech podcasts such as Tekzilla answer viewer questions, but with Category5.tv being Live, and with a 'chatroom' it's possible to extend questions, ask for clarification and also let Robbie know when he's fully answered your question. Despite the odd pause here and there where he waits for viewer replies, it's pretty slick. I've only watched a few of more recent shows via download, but I'll probably catch one of his live shows soon enough, even if it's just to say 'hi' and 'thanks'.

The chatroom I mentioned is actually an irc channel. You can join it to follow the discussion during the show and of course ask your own questions, and leave comments. If you have an irc client already then connect to chat1.ustream.tv and join the #category5-technology-tv0 channel to join the chat. If you already have a ustream user ID then you can use the "/nick" command to change your name from some random "ustream-guest-foo" so Robbie can address you better during the show :)

The most recent episode had a screencast type tutorial about DeVeDe, the DVD authoring package. I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert with Ubuntu, but there's always something new to learn. Having never really use DeVeDe in anger however, this was a useful how-to for me.

Maybe you too will learn something from this programme. Take a look and find out.

For many, many months now my favicons have been corrupted - incorrect favicons stored against various bookmarks. And they keep changing.

So first off all I wrote some sed to remove this from bookmarks.html:

  sed -i 's/ ICON="[^"]*”//’ bookmarks.html

I started firefox and … the icons are still there!

So now I find that they _also store the favicons in places.sql (ever heard of the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don’t_repeat_yourself DRY principle guys?). So fire up “sqlitebrowser places.sqlite”, then goto the SQL tab and type in “delete from moz_favicon”, execute the query and resave the DB.

Finally, purged favicons. Now hopefully they won’t repopulate in a broken manner (fat chance).

After reading this article, I’m inclined to agree with the idea that “someone will buy Sun”. However I don’t agree with the author about who will buy them.

Fujitsu and Sun work together on the hardware side (SPARC chips), but I don’t quite see why Fujitsu bothers TBH - as far as I’m concerned, Solaris is a dying operating system. Due to brainshare more than anything, Linux _will_ beat it. It’s also IMHO not as robust or mature as AIX or HP-UX for the really big box stuff.

If HP or IBM buys Sun then they have to figure how to support _another_ Unix (in addition to their own + Linux). Look at what happened to Alpha customers after HP bought Digital for what a mess that makes of your roadmap. I just don’t see what’s left as valuable to them.

I think Microsoft is a good candidate to buy them. They get a large stack of Unix patents to FUD Linux and the other Unix vendors with. It’s almost worth the cost _just_ for that. Secondly they get access to a huge number of Unix customer and can then work on converting them to Windows shops. Solaris is very definitely the “mass” commercial Unix - if you look at the numbers, they sell a lot of very small boxes. IBM and HP by comparison sell a much smaller number of much bigger boxes. Low-end Unix is of course the best target for Windows Server.

Sidenote: blimey four blogs in one day!

Well it’s a long weekend and so after I’ve finished doing fun stuff (visiting friends, riding the bike) it’s only fair that I do some chores. One such chore was writing a letter to the Inland Revenue going through mistakes (or bad assumptions) made in my 2006-2007 tax calculation.

To make my life easier I make notes and refer back to them each year. This year I decided to write them up. So here is my guide to Tax calculation. “Enjoy” seems to be the wrong expression somehow!

Steven Brust is a big tease.

His most recent Vlad Taltos novel is full of tease for two reasons:

• He jumps back in the timeline so that we hear nothing of Lady Teldra.
• The acknowledgements of the novel mention the use of some "emacs macros" with no hint of what they are, or why he uses them.

It was a fun read though, and didn't make me as hungry as the previous volume did. (Mmmmmm pies food.)

I always liked him as an author, and he rocks for publishing Dzur around the time I was telling local people "Too many people seem to write novels in which nobody really eats. Forget all that action, dialog, and exposition. Lets have a bunch of folk sit down and eat an exceptionally well described meal."

(Many things that people do are never described in books. We all know why. Still on the same subject I love the scene in Terry Pratchetts Pyramids where Teppic puts his outfit on. "And slowly falls over". Nice)

ObFilm: Blade

Each time I cook, I wonder about a few things. Firstly, the oven - it’s a fan assisted oven and air is also blown through the front of the over to keep it cool (in case there are kids in the house). Why isn’t it just done in a similar way to Thermos flasks - keeping the oven hot for a few hours (if I’m doing a roast) uses a huge amount of electricity.

The hob isn’t much better - I remember a long time ago on Tomorrows World (before they lost all the harder science) where someone had a gas how where the gas came out in a spiral - to keep it in contact with the pan for longer. All gas hobs I’ve seen just force the gas out radially - it’s as if they are trying to be inefficient.

Anyhow, this is tagged “idea” so, what’s my novel idea? Well if I’m cooking say some vegetables on the hob, I often put the water in, then turn the gas to max and wait for it to boil. Some minutes later I then turn it down a bit and put the vegetables in. Then a bit later I realise I’ve turned it down a bit too much and turn it back up again. I wondered if the cooker could detect how hot the pan was and automatically control the gas so that it’s just boiling (and perhaps beep when it starts to boil). Obviously the idea could be extended so that if you want to heat something slowly you can just set it appropriately.

You have managed through sheer stupidity and bloody mindedness to overtake even Gnome as my most hated Linux project.

I do _not_ like being mollycoddled. The SSL fiasco is still ongoing and whilst it’s now slightly easier to bypass, it’s still not good enough.

How many of your users do you think are going to _thank_ you for making them jump through completely unnecessary hoops? Since Mozilla seems to be incapable of thinking about their users I’d better give the answer here - none. By _all_ means, warn that it’s an experimental plugin, that’s useful information, but just do it once (hey, set a cookie to store the fact that I _never_ want to be asked again to confirm).

Update: Even better their captcha’s

leave much to be desired (in fact, most captchas I’m starting to find really quite difficult).

Update2: And an hour to receive the email before I could download (yes, I use greylisting - who doesn’t?)

Update3: And the download fails with “invalid hash” - you have to edit-preferences and enable “3rd party cookies” for the download to work. I wonder how much more they can possibly break!

A few people I know ("friends") on Facebook have recently had messages/wall posts sent in their name that link to malware. It seems to me that these issues demonstrate two things to avoid:

• Using Internet Explorer. This should be the case anyway incidentally.
• "Remembering" your details. This should also be the case anyway - on any authenticated site.

You see, having your details saved within IE makes it very easy for Mr Malware to post in your name, in the background, without you knowing anything about it.

Don't do it. Don't use IE. Don't save authentication details. Do neither of these things. Make the world a better place.

I followed the official HOW-TO on installing from a USB stick. I have a local mirror of the Ubuntu repositories so wanted to use them as a source for downloading the packages, not the archives out there on the ‘net. It also meant I didn’t have to download and copy an ISO on to the USB stick. The first thing I had to do was add main/debian-installer restricted/debian-installer to my mirror, as these little repositories hold the code needed by the installer. Once I did that I was able to work through the installer as normal, manually specifying my mirror at the appropriate point. The “Ubuntu Desktop” meta-package failed to install due to dependency problem, but the Xubuntu Desktop package installed OK. The installer detected the existing (original) installation on the first hard disk partition and added it to the GRUB list.

Happily the new installation booted without needing to add the “acpi=off” argument to the kernel. I did notice some errors related to the PnP BIOS but the system still booted. However, I suffered from the same bug as Alan with the video driver. I discovered that switching to the console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and back to X (Alt+F7) cleared the display. What I got then was the upper left 640×480 pixels of an 800×600 display. But I could log in and start applications etc. It’s an interesting and disappointing regression though. I have thus far failed to get anything more out of the display than that. Removing xorg.conf and allowing the GUI configuration tool to start was probably a good idea, except that the font on the tool was too small to read. By miles and miles. The icons and other furniture were normally sized though. In order to get round that I removed xorg.conf again and rebooted without the VGA cable attached. This caused the failsafe X configuration tool (xfailsafedialog) to run with readable text. Win. Eventually after several attempts I got a reasonable XFCE desktop running, however I totally failed to get X running in widescreen with the geode driver.

In fact, for ages I failed to get it to produce anything more than 800×600 on my LCD TV, despite numerous attempts to configure X to do more. Along the way I discovered that the tiny fonts issue is X using a high DPI setting for fonts by default. By opening Applications->Settings->Settings Manager->User Interface, selecting 75dpi and restarting X I got nicely legible text, even at the default 9pt font used by XFCE. Eventually, through a combination of copying xorg.conf from my MythTV box, using the X configuration tool and blind luck, I found a setup which produced 1024×768. Then 1280×1024. No widescreen resolutions though, I guess the chip or driver just doesn’t support that yet. There was a weird bug at the higher resolutions though that the mouse wouldn’t click on the “Applications” menu properly. It worked fine controlled remotely using x11vnc though.

Generally I’m finding this unit quite quirky. It doesn’t power off properly when shut down, and hangs on a reboot. It has occasionally done the “white screen with no POST” thing I talked about in my first report on this box. It’s doesn’t seem reliable enough that I’d want to use it in on a remote site or install it in an inaccessible place (without full remote control over the power and a remote console connection, anyway. ) That’s a great shame as its ideally specified to be an appliance.

Like Tony, I too bought a couple of the Viglen MPC-L devices we reviewed in episode 11 of the Ubuntu Podcast made by members of the Ubuntu UK LoCo Team.

I wont repeat what Tony said in his two blog posts, but try to add to them. Read his first :)

Some things that I noticed though:-

The BIOS is quite basic indeed with pretty much no configurable features at all. I guess if I were in a positive mood I'd call it "simple". The BIOS version info says "GROM_BIOS_IONA503_0.00.08_Viglen_03" which gives away some detail. It's date stamped 04/25/2006 18:28:04 which (along with the early 2007 vintage Ubuntu install) says to me these things have probably been kicking around on a shelf for a while.

The device itself is an FIC ION 503 (not the current 603 model pictured in that link) which appears to be similar to the Linutop 2 only the Viglen has a hard disk rather than just a USB key, and is a lot cheaper. Indeed you can still get them for £79 including VAT and delivery (in the UK) if you use the details we gave in the podcast.

After booting mine attached to an NEC 1700V monitor and logging in, I too had the "no swap" issue that Tony referred to, and fixed it in the same way. I suspect the reason for the odd partition setup (36G for /, 880M swap and 37G as /scratch) is down to the units originally shipping with a 40G disk. I guess they didn't go through the effort of making a new build for the 80G disk but just fudge it on and add the extra space as a new partition (scratch).

I note they're still shipping with Ubuntu 7.04 - which goes out of maintenance shortly, rather than a more up to date 7.10 or even 8.04.

The first thing I did after hooking it all up was apply the outstanding 7.04 updates - of which there are quite a few. I then (without rebooting) issued a "sudo do-release-upgrade" to kick off the upgrade from 7.04 to 7.10. This has been chugging away for a little while now, having downloaded all the necessary packages, it's installing them.

Once this finishes I hope to just issue another "sudo do-release-upgrade" to take it all the way to 8.04 (gutsy). One reason I am doing this (with no reboots between) is to see if it can be done, partly to avoid any of the issues Tony had when he rebooted. The main reason though is because I'm using it to type this blog post and catch up with my email after returning from holiday, and
don't really want to reboot!

Things I'd like to do:-

• Finish the upgrade process off all the way to 8.04 and reboot to a working system.
• Update the status of bug 236019 after testing the new driver for this machine.
• Upgrade to 8.10 (development version of Ubuntu) and see if there are any further bugs to uncover, and of course report those.
• Try a lighter weight window manager than XFCE - E17 perhaps, other suggestions welcome..?
• Upgrade the 512MB RAM and see if that makes any descernable difference (especially for firefox with lots of tabs)
• Try out IPCOP on it.
• Try out some emulators on it (Spectrum games for example)
• Configure it in "kiosk" mode to auto login and let the family play with it
• Something else?

Update: Bah, at the end of do-release-upgrade it says that to complete the upgrade you need to reboot (which I can easily do myself later), but then asks if you want to continue [Yn]. Press Y and it reboots! That doesn't seem right to me.

“The quartet smashed the previous world mark of 37.40…by a huge margin to set a new benchmark of 37.10.” BBC

“smash Michael Johnson’s mark of 19.32….” (with 19.30) BBC

Dear BBC, please educate your journalists - 0.8% faster and 0.1% faster are not worthy of those statements. By comparison the 100m report was accurate - he really did “destroy his rivals” (figuratively speaking) - the picture speaks for itself, particularly when you consider he pretty much stopped running before he got the line!

The laptop-style PSU has an output of 12V pulling up to 3.3A, which suggests it could be powered from an in-car charger socket, making it ideal for an in-car entertainment system. In operation the unit is virtually silent. You can hear intense hard disk activity and there’s a slight electronic “zing” from the device, but to all intents and purposes it’s silent.

The first time I powered it on, a white screen appeared and stayed there. No sign of HDD activity, or indeed any other sort of activity. After a power cycle, I saw a familiar BIOS POST screen, followed by GRUB and the Xubuntu 7.04 splash screen. Booting was not very fast, about 90 seconds to the login screen with a further 20 seconds to the fully loaded Xubuntu desktop.

I logged in as the default non-root user. There was a volume entitled “888M Volume” on the desktop which I was unable to access via the icon. This leads me to wonder whether people are expected to use the root account by default as Windows users tend to do with the Administrator account. Alongside Firefox 2.0.0.3 was Opera 9.21. Rather weirdly, these were the only two applications given their own shortcut on the taskbar. It seems odd to include two web browsers anyway, but to give both equally high profile could lead to confusion. In the trash can was a shortcut to Opera, originally in /home/david/Desktop/. Presumably David was the guy who made the image up for these units. There was also a group in /etc/group called “david”. The output of lspci and /proc/cpuinfo is:
00:01.0 Host bridge: National Semiconductor Corporation Geode GX2 Host Bridge (rev 21)
00:01.1 VGA compatible controller: National Semiconductor Corporation Geode GX2 Graphics Processor
00:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ (rev 10)
00:0e.0 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 61)
00:0e.1 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82xxxxx UHCI USB 1.1 Controller (rev 61)
00:0e.2 USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. USB 2.0 (rev 63)
00:0f.0 ISA bridge: National Semiconductor Corporation CS5535 ISA bridge (rev 13)
00:0f.2 IDE interface: National Semiconductor Corporation CS5535 IDE
00:0f.3 Multimedia audio controller: National Semiconductor Corporation CS5535 Audio
00:0f.4 USB Controller: National Semiconductor Corporation CS5535 USB (rev 06)
00:0f.5 USB Controller: National Semiconductor Corporation CS5535 USB (rev 06)
processor : 0
vendor_id : Geode by NSC
cpu family : 5
model : 5
model name : Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by National Semi
stepping : 2
cpu MHz : 398.450
cache size : 32 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu de pse tsc msr cx8 pge cmov mmx mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
up
bogomips : 798.74
clflush size : 32
I had connected my unit to my LCD TV, capable of running at 1920 x 1080. The onboard graphics card automatically configured the display to run at 1280×1024 which is pretty good. The screen configuration dialogue offered VGA, SVGA and XGA resolutions. There were three small black rectangles across the top of the screen which disappeared when I moved the mouse over them, but I’m not sure if this is a fault with the drivers, desktop environment, graphics card or panel.

main, restricted, universe and multiverse repositories were all enabled. There were 136 updates to be applied to the new system. It would have been nice if all available updates had been applied as part of the build process. The 80GB HDD was partitioned in to two ext3 ~35GB partitions, one mounted as root and 5% used, the other mounted at /scratch and essentially empty. A slightly weird mounting system it has to be said, especially as the default non-root user didn’t have permissions to write to /scratch. It would have made more sense to make the second partition /home where users might make use of the storage, rather than /scratch which many people may not find and work out how to use it to store data on.

It was about this point that I worked out the reason for the mysterious “888M Volume” icon. There was a swap partition on the hard disk, but when I looked at the output of top, it showed no swap enabled. Running “swapon -a” returned an error and I needed to run “mkswap” on the partition before it registered as swap. So it looks like something in the imaging process didn’t set up the swap partition properly. It wasn’t getting enabled but was getting detected by HAL/dbus and showing up as a volume on the desktop. Weird.

Then I rebooted and it kernel paniced. So I tried with the old kernel, that paniced. I tried with the “noacpi” option suggested by Alan and it still paniced. So I’ve broken it within one evening of playing with it. Eventually, I worked out that the incantation needed to be “acpi=off”, after which I was back in the game.

I then tried to play back an OGG Theora file, to test the unit’s suitability as a media front-end. The default media player is XMMS which doesn’t play Theora files. So I installed Xine and although the internal speaker played back the soundtrack to the video for a few seconds, the picture was green and purple and just plain not right. It did persevere with attempting playback but I put it out of its misery once I was able.

The second 35GB seemed like a useful place to install other operating systems whilst leaving the default installation intact. The onboard NIC doesn’t support PXE booting, so the options really were for a USB CD-ROM drive (which I don’t have) or a USB flash stick thing. Fortunately I do have one of those. There was even a very useful official HOW-TO on getting the USB stick set up correctly. The USB stick had to be in one of the rear USB sockets, not the ones on the front. There were at least three different installations I want to try on it. Xubuntu Hardy, Ubuntu Hardy (GNOME) and Ubuntu Hardy Server. My successes or otherwise will form another post.

Yesterday a disk dropped out of my RAID array at home:

ata3.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4050000 action 0xe frozen
ata3.00: irq_stat 0x00000040, connection status changed
ata3: SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake DevExch }
ata3.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0
         res 40/00:04:14:d6:42/00:00:25:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
ata3.00: status: { DRDY }
ata3: hard resetting link
ata3: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata3.00: configured for UDMA/133
end_request: I/O error, dev sdc, sector 625137172
md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0
raid1: Disk failure on sdc2, disabling device.
raid1: Operation continuing on 1 devices.
ata3: EH complete
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 2:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:1 rd:2
 disk 0, wo:1, o:0, dev:sdc2
 disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdd2
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:1 rd:2
 disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdd2

So I kicked the disk and rejoined it:

md: unbind
md: export_rdev(sdc2)
md: bind
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:1 rd:2
 disk 0, wo:1, o:1, dev:sdc2
 disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdd2
md: recovery of RAID array md1
md: minimum _guaranteed_  speed: 1000 KB/sec/disk.
md: using maximum available idle IO bandwidth (but not more than 200000 KB/sec) for recovery.
md: using 128k window, over a total of 312472192 blocks.
md: md1: recovery done.
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:2 rd:2
 disk 0, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdc2
 disk 1, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdd2

This morning I wake up and find the other disk has dropped out - an I/O for the same sector - this is too much of a co-incidence for my liking

ata4.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4050000 action 0xe frozen
ata4.00: irq_stat 0x00000040, connection status changed
ata4: SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake DevExch }
ata4.00: cmd ea/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/a0 tag 0
         res 40/00:04:14:d6:42/00:00:25:00:00/40 Emask 0x10 (ATA bus error)
ata4.00: status: { DRDY }
ata4: hard resetting link
ata4: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 300)
ata4.00: configured for UDMA/133
end_request: I/O error, dev sdd, sector 625137172
md: super_written gets error=-5, uptodate=0
raid1: Disk failure on sdd2, disabling device.
raid1: Operation continuing on 1 devices.
ata4: EH complete
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] 625142448 512-byte hardware sectors (320073 MB)
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Write Protect is off
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
sd 3:0:0:0: [sdd] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn’t support DPO or FUA
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:1 rd:2
 disk 0, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdc2
 disk 1, wo:1, o:0, dev:sdd2
RAID1 conf printout:
 — wd:1 rd:2
 disk 0, wo:0, o:1, dev:sdc2

This week has been a little hectic, as I've been struggling with testing different versions of the GNU/Linux kernel.

Specifically I've been trying to solve a problem where a Phenom processor, when coupled with 8Gb, would kernel panic under heavy load.

After testing various patches, kernel versions, and random things I believe the problem is fixed in the kernel version 2.6.27RC4 - however nothing in the changelog appears relevant, so I guess only time will tell.

Now we need to solve the problem of Atom processors panicing when attempting to boot 64-bit kernels. That is still present in the 2.6.27RC4 kernel.

(ObRandom: If there are any interested parties I can provide remote serial console access to such a system.)

Finally I've also been playing with PAM, the plugabble authentication module. Again specific use-case here. At work we want to allow people to ssh to some systems (to access serial consoles, etc), and we wish their connections to be tested against our internal single-sign-on mechanism.

That could have meant a whole new PAM module, which would do XML-RPC-fu. Instead it meant packaging libpam-external - which is a neat PAM module allowing you to specify a shellscript to validate users & passwords.

(libpam-external is very similar to mod_authnz_external which is a similar pluggable Apache2 module)

So, this week "kernel hacking", & "pam hacking". Does that make me a real developer now?

ObQuote: Time Bandits

Thanks to Zonker for dropping me a line while I was away to let me know Planet SUSE was unavailable. Sadly, there was little I could do from the middle of a field in Somerset - even with my new Nokia N95, having not yet installed PuTTY on it. Anyway, it's now back - as am I.

So, how was Linuxworld? Great!

I went as part of the Opsview team and met lots of potential new customers ranging from very small to very large. Opsview is a monitoring system for networks, servers and applications. Based on Nagios, it’s substantially better.

The conference went very well, we had a modest stand since we aren’t burning through lots of VC cash (yes, that’s a hard-disk rodeo….). Even better we won the Linuxworld excellence award for best system management tool

On Friday I _finally_ picked up my new toy and I’m loving riding it. If only the weather in this country was a little better than it’s been recently.

Leaning into corners rather than just going around them is much more fun, you also feel much more connected with the world. It’s so impractical compared to a car (other than in fuel economy) - you have to suit up, you are exposed to the elements and more importantly the idiots who drive on the road, however it is so much more fun than being in a car

Using Windows is like having an Emery Paper Enema, it's not something a sane person chooses to do. It's taken me two days to get Windows to talk properly to one of our pumps and even then it's not stable. It's going to be a real challenge to get all the data out of the pump and into SAP in time.

On the up side it's Perl programming which is good and I'm now confident it will work, even if it's an evil solution. If only we could use Linux or Unix everywhere, life would be so much easier.

After seeing a friend’s HTC TyTN II phone I simply had to have one. It’s a cracking piece of hardware and ticks all the boxes for my needs. But…. the OS is Windows Mobile 6. Now I have a PDA at work, which has the same OS, but it’s locked down, so I’ve never had a desire to do anything but sync it to the work PC.

So, when I’d finished drooling over the hardware, the software nightmare began. What an absolute PITA software is to add to the device, there are many different ways it can be installed, cab file on a micro-SD card, zip file on a micro-SD, executable on a Windows PC, cab, converted onto the device via Active Sync, and your guess is as good as mine as to which of these variants your software will need to be installed.

Of course, the next issue is cost, there’s very little decent free software out there for WM6.

Finally, and possibly most importantly, how on earth do you sync the normal day-to-day stuff, photo’s, music, podcasts, email, contacts? Answer, SynCE. What a life saver, if this great “package” wasn’t available, I may have sold the phone. But SynCE does it all, and their launchpad ppa has Ubuntu packages ready to go. Brilliant.

..and so I’m chuffed to bits with the new toy, now, do I attempt to flash one of these Carlos Fandango custom ROM’s onto it? Not just yet

I'm in the middle of a "Quality Management" project at work for the factory. I've done some Perl code already and it's clean and good. I've done some SAP ABAP code and it's as clean as ABAP gets and it's as good as it gets. I'm actually happy with the evil shell script I had to hack to make the Perl and SAP bits talk.

The final big problem is getting our pumps to download their test data directly into the SAP QM system. The pumps speak a proprietary line orientated language over RS232 (print and read). Alas I have to make this all work on Windows client systems which I try to avoid these days and I'm short on time...

Life would be so much easier on Linux or Unix...

This is my significantly late review of LUG Radio Live UK 2008.

Having taken the Friday off work, the drive up the country was fairly leisurely, stopping to pick up bits of equipment on the way. Having had walkie-talkies at the US event the gents were adamant they wanted them for the UK, mainly so they could look important and pretend to be spies. Having arrived at the Novotel to find the power out in the room (not good when you have several video cameras to keep charged up) and a £4 car parking fee we headed over to Jono’s for a chat with him and Aq about the plans for the weekend and pizza. Then back to the hotel for a shower and off to the Hog’s Head for the traditional Friday night piss-up. It was great to see so many members of the LUG Radio community there. It was impossible to talk to everyone, such was the size of the crowd, but importantly all the crew heads who had been annoying each other on conference calls for weeks finally got to chat without the “satellite delay.” And Neuro, mrben, Dave2, oojah and many more! It was also good to see new faces there, not least Ciemon who seemed to settle straight into the LRL vibe. Brilliantly Emma Jane, ultra-lovely lady who we hung out with at the US event was there, having flown from Canada to speak in the UK. I also chatted to Matt Garrett for ages, discussing social etiquette in geek circles. I avoided having more than a handful of drinks (which is quite enough for me these days anyway), unlike some people who spent the rest of the weekend suffering.

The Saturday morning get-in was much more straight forward than last year. It really helps when you know where the plugs are, what equipment you can expect to encounter and what you need to bring with you. One of the highlights for me was having such a great AV crew. It was four times the size of the crew last year, and that meant that everyone got some time off to enjoy the event, as well as ensuring we got coverage of all the talks. It really made the whole weekend go much more smoothly. Barring a power outage when we tripped a circuit and found out that the caretaker wouldn’t be in to reset it until Monday, it all went pretty smoothly. So much so that Jono had time to think up stupid ideas like the “Furries for Justice” protest during the Second Life talk.

As ever I didn’t get to see any talks from start to finish, but I saw bits of Emma and Bruno as well as most of the Gong-a-thong, featuring more of mrben than I’d ever wanted to see. I gave my little contribution, a re-written version of the “We happy few” speech from Henry V on the end of LUG Radio. It got a few laughs which was good, but I’m not sure how many people in the audience knew the speech that was parodied. The live show, which was supposed to be the last ever LUG Radio episode, turned out not to be. After many loving kickings from the community the gents relented and we will be running another LRL event next year. Nothing is planned yet of course, but it will be a lot of work to make the event as popular without the regular podcast episodes to provide publicity. I think it’s really great news though because this year it seemed like LRL had really grown-up. Without being more mature. I’m sure next year’s event will rock.

The next best bit of the live show was that the gents gave me the coveted title of “Community Hero.” It’s a real honour to be given this title, even if I unluckily won the year there was no prize to accompany it. It also shows, I think, how open the LUG Radio community is. Like all communities from which friendships have grown, accusations of cliquishness are sometimes pointed at the LUG Radio community. But I’m not part of WolvesLUG or the Scottish Mcfia, I didn’t have any special “in”s. I just listened to the show and sent a couple of e-mails. I joined the IRC channel and the forums, admittedly early on when it was easier to get to know people. I went to the first LRL event and noticed that the presenters spent quite a lot of time helping speakers get their laptops working with their projector. I thought they probably should be doing other things and afterwards collared Aq and suggested that I could help out doing that if they held another event. They did, and I did. It went from there. I just volunteered for stuff and showed that I could do it to a reasonable degree of competence. It’s a great community and I’m proud to be part of it, and especially proud that the gents would think I’m “hero” material. Now I just have to get the conga line off Xalior.

After the show was the after party, but that’s a post for another day.

In a recent episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast we reviewed then gave away a mini-PC from Viglen, the MPC-L. We also told you how could get hold of the units for just under £80, which is significantly less than the advertised price. I’m not going to tell you how, if you want to know you’ll have to listen to the show.

Anyway, I ordered one about a week and a half ago and it turned up today. First impressions? Well, Viglen probably aren’t going to be winning any rewards for environmental packaging any time soon. The unit is almost exactly the same width and depth as a CD case, but was shipped in a standard size PC box. I presume this is largely because they included a keyboard, but the amount of empty space and air pocket packaging showed that the space was not being effeciently used. Spot the 50p on the top of the box (and the actual unit below) for scale.

On top of the box was a black Viglen-branded USB keyboard and a Microsoft-branded USB optiocal mouse. This mouse feels like it’s the cheaper end of the Microsoft USB optical mouse range, but at the price there’s no reason to complain.

See what I mean about the packaging? Inside the small white box is the bubble-wrapped MPC-L unit, along with a laptop-style PSU. Oh, and unlike the review unit there was an instruction sheet giving the default username and password. The specification sheet enclosed in the box lists 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD (not the standard 40GB) and 12 months on-site maintenance, 7 day response. And a “Xubuntu Operating System pre-installed.” All for £79. Yey!

Although I’d seen, even dismantled, the review unit having one of my own is quite pleasing really. The unit is so physically small that it lends itself to all sorts of cool ideas. Indeed we had lots of interesting suggestions as answers to the competition. I’m going to try and run it as a MythTV front end just to see if it can cope with it, but other devious thoughts have already formed in my mind. I’m quite tempted to buy a second one.

So if you haven’t ordered one yet, download the show and find out how to order yours. Any geek worth his or her salt will find something interesting to do with this little box! Now I have to go and turn it on…

One of the sites that I no longer use, but have fond memories of is dotfiles.com.

It had some pretty coarse catagories and allowed you to view other peoples configuration files. (I have no idea how the upload worked. Probably email submission I'd guess.)

I know that my my own dotfiles have benefited from seeing other peoples snippets.

Sadly it seems that the last upload to their site was back in 2006.

With all the Web2.0 lust around it would seem to be a perfect candidate for reinvention.

We need:

• The ability to create/delete an account.
• The ability to upload a file (<100k say)
• The ability to tag all files with multiple arbitrary labels.
• Possibly the ability to comment / rate / vote on submissions.
• The ability to flag uploads as being "spam"

Somebody competant could probably knock up a reasonable hack in a day or two. I guess we have some sites out there already like DZone snippets, snipplr, & swik, but none of those are exactly the same thing.

Consider it my challenge to the world - just don't tempt me. I've got enough to do as it is.

ObQuote: Hellboy

I'm currently listening to my backlog of ubuntu uk podcast recordings. There was an interesting piece on the Show Me Do site, that provides lots of educational screen casting videos on various open-source topics. Very interesting.

Well I’ve had enough of Xen - I’ve recently moved a disk from hdd to hdc and since I referred to it in a xen domain, when I tried to start that domain, it hung for several minutes (other domains also seemed to stop responding for a while) and then failed with:

abridgett@ripley:/var/log/xen$ Error: Device 2081 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working.

I checked the config and spotted the problem, but there is no excuse why this is not reported better by Xen. Even in the multitude of Xen logs, only one mentioned it - and that itself shows bad checking!

+ logger -p daemon.debug -- /etc/xen/scripts/vif-bridge: 'Writing backend/vif/7/
0/hotplug-status' 'connected to xenstore.'
+ xenstore-write backend/vif/7/0/hotplug-status connected
stat: cannot stat `/dev/hdd6': No such file or directory

This by itself wouldn’t be enough to drop Xen, but the fact that it’s stuck on 2.6.18 (for Dom0) means that I’m having to backport more and more fixes and I’ve finally had enough. The only reason it’s not been replaced yet is that my hardware doesn’t support KVM (no hardware support on the CPU) but the hardware seems to be becoming unreliable (although it might be bad error recovery on such an old kernel) so I think it is probably time to upgrade anyhow.

Slide Share is an on-line slide presentation sharing web site. It seems to be popular with the Perl community, this year's YAPC::EU having it's own Slide Share Event.

I've therefore decided to upload all my sides to the site and make them freely available on that site as well as the ones they are currently on. My slides can be found here: www.slideshare.net/drajt and as new ones are created or the old ones updated I'll keep them up to date.

This has been a rather random few days.

• I bought a steam-boat (not really; but close enough.)
• I fell in love with mod_perl

For those of you that don't know it mod_perl is an Apache module which embeds perl into your webserver.

You can use this to write extensions, handlers, and all kinds of fun things in pure perl.

Me? I just changed the beefy CGI script that I use to power a couple of my sites from being plain-CGI to being mod_perl-CGI - that means:

• The same perl engine & copy of my script stays in memory.
• I don't need the fork()/exec() overhead for each incoming rquest.

The downside is that I have to "/etc/init.d/apache2 reload" if I change my script, or any of my custom modules it uses. (I suspect this is something I can fix; I just don't know how yet :)

All that was possible, with zero changes to my applications as I use the CGI::Application framework - lucky? or planned? I'll let you decide ...

In terms of speedup I can now process about 100 requests a second, compared to 10. As reported by the Apache-benchmark tool. Cool.

ObFilm: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Small/cheap notebooks are all the range since the Asus Eee PC-701 launched. Interestingly many of them come with Linux installed instead of the more typical Microsoft Windows. My current Dell Inspiron is showing it's age, it's way to slow and the case is breaking in quite a few places. I don't use or need a notebook much so I've been unwilling to buy a new full price notebook, even a cheap £300 Dell Inspiron.

The initial Asus created quite a stir and there are now several members of the Eee family and several alternatives from their competitors. The Acer Aspire One looks rather nice and works pretty much out of the box with Debian. Maybe I'll buy one, or then again perhaps I'll not...

• Debian Acer One
• Debian EeePC
• Asus Eee PC talk from my local LUG

Episode 12 of the Ubuntu UK Podcast is out! In this episode:-

• A great chat with Chris Jones about his project Terminator and his dreams of a robot future.
• Sarcastic News
• We discuss the new Ubuntu training courses and certification
• A great chat with Jeremy Allison from the SAMBA project.
• Some listener feedback.

• Competition:
• We announce the winner of the Viglen MPC-L and start a new competition to give away another Canonical Store voucher

This wraps up the content recorded at LUG Radio Live and sets up some exciting stuff for the next episode. Get it here.

Update: I have applied the BIOS update by putting the old hard disk back in, and using the working windows install there to do it. It still can't see all 4G of my RAM.

Apologies for this slight rant. I need to get it off my chest.

I have a Toshiba Portege M400 (3G) laptop which I bought just over a year ago. It had a 100GB hard disk which initially came with Windows XP pre-installed. The very first thing I did was wipe Windows off and install Ubuntu. I wasn't entirely happy because the system ran slowly. It turns out that a BIOS update from Toshiba fixes this. Unfortunately the particular BIOS update can only be installed from within Windows running on the bare metal.

I booted off an Ubuntu Live CD and copied the contents of my Ubuntu partition from the hard disk to a USB attached hard drive. I then used the Toshiba XP recovery CD which came with the laptop to wipe the drive again, and install a minimal-sized (10G) Windows XP Professional setup. I then booted to it and installed the BIOS update and the system became much quicker. I then reinstalled Ubuntu on the remaining space and copied back all my data from the USB disk.

Everything was fine.

I now use Ubuntu daily and only use Windows when I am using the 3G card built into the laptop - which doesn't work in Ubuntu (bug filed here:- https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/128556 )

Skip forward to this month. I started running out of disk space in Ubuntu so I bought myself a nice new 320G disk. Here's how I migrated from the 100G disk to the 320G one.

1. Connect a USB hard disk.
2. Boot to ubuntu live cd.
3. dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/media/disk/windows.img # this backed up my Windows XP install to a file.
4. mount /dev/sda2 # root (/) filesystem for ubuntu
5. mount /dev/sda3 # home (/home) filesystem for ubuntu
6. rsync -avz /mnt/sda2/* /media/disk/ubuntu/root/  # backup root filesystem
7. rsync -avz /mnt/sda3/* /media/disk/ubuntu/home/  # backup home filesystem

I then yanked the 100G disk out and slapped in the 320G disk and again booted to the Ubuntu Live CD. Using similar tools as above I partitioned and copied everything back onto the disk. I happily use Ubuntu and all my data is intact.

However, Windows refuses to boot. I get the Windows splash screen (where you get the bouncing blue bar) and then it bluescreens and reboots. This repeats.

I have mounted the Windows filesystem from within Ubuntu to make sure it's sane and it looks good. The usual files are all there. When I reboot I of course get the usual "We're sorry" and am offered a "Safe Mode" option. This fails in the same way.

A kind guy at work loaned me a proper XP CD (not these silly recovery ones you get with laptops these days) so that I might use the "recovery" option. However when I choose that, Windows says it can't find any hard disks because (presumably) it doesn't have the driver for the SATA controller my laptop has.

The reason I _need_ to use Windows is because there is a new BIOS update for the laptop, and I need to install it. 64-bit Ubuntu can't see all 4G of memory in the laptop - which it should. Installing the BIOS update will eliminate that from the list of possible causes. I can't install the BIOS update without Windows however.

So my pain is summarised by:-

1. Windows wont boot and I don't know how to make it boot
2. Windows XP CD can't see the SATA controller without a driver disk (I have no floppy drive)
3. I have to use Windows to install Toshiba BIOS updates

So far the only thing I can think of doing is putting the _old_ hard disk back in the machine and using that (working) Windows install to do the BIOS update. In fact, I could of course keep that 100G disk just for Windows, and only put it in the machine when I need this kind of BIOS sillyness. Then I could remove Windows from my new 320G disk, thus giving me 10G back.

End of rant. Carry on.

The good news is that I'm off out for a curry with my colleagues from work at lunchtime.