I’ve got lots to blog about, but I’ve been too busy playing with new toys to get around to it. This is just a quick note for the internets.
Running Xen on Debian Etch on a machine with 4gb of ram, if you get
"PAE mode mismatch error (xen=yes dom0=no)"
you need to install:
apt-get install xen-hypervisor-3.0.3-1-i386-pae
as the default xen kernel now enables pae by itself when necessary, and the default hypervisor doesn’t support it.
I would love to expound on the ideas Lessig puts forth at the end of this talk, but I don’t quite have the time at the moment. Instead, I ask that everyone just watch this.
I’ve spent most of the afternoon revamping the mythbox here. I removed myth-backend from neo and installed it on architect, as well as mysql-server to back myth-backend. I’ve installed and configured LIRC and created a .lircrc for the Packard Bell remote and receiver I bought years ago on ebay.
I’ve installed splashy on the machine for a more pretty boot sequence and set X up to auto-spawn on ttyS7 for the mythtv user and automagically runs irxevent and mythfronted via .xinitrc.
For most people, they will read to hear and take away that my mythbox is now sexier. For the insane few that care to know what exactly I did, that’s after the jump. Continue reading The Mythbox just got hotted up
Life’s been treating me pretty well this past month.
I’ve been good about something things (try to de-stress and such) and not so good about others (diet… exercise) but overall I’ve been pretty happy about how this month has gone. Ultimately it’s time for me to develop a new routine and stick to it rather religiously.
Over the last couple evenings I’ve attempted a repair of the poorly designed floating bridge on my guitar and restrung it. Spent a few minutes strumming away before I made supper this evening. I’ve been debating trying to pick up guitar again as a winter project. Other contenders for that spot are also getting my HAM license and working on my geek cred. I suppose it would be possible to do all of these things, but I don’t know how likely that really is.
Yesterday also brought an upgrade of wordpress to the blogs I host. 2.3 seems to be pretty neat. They’ve added tag support as well as a tag-cloud widget for the side bar. It figures that such a thing should exist as just 3 days ago I found a cloud widget that works on the existing category system. I guess if I’m to start tagging things I’ll need to reconsider my current categories.
I’ve also seen talk of a Debian User Planet which somewhat intrigues me. I think I’d be more inclined to write and thusly post more technical articles if I knew people who’d get some use out of them would actually be exposed to them. Though for such a thing to happen I would need to be able to generate an RSS feed for just a single category and I haven’t found a way to do this yet.
To be fair, if I expect people to read what I write, then I need to write more compelling content and post more frequently. I suppose that would tie in with the above. Establish a routine that involves posting to the intarwebs, practicing guitar, studying for the HAM license, and working out. Oh yeah, and work and socializing and sleep.
oi.
For as long as I’ve used Debian and Alsa, I’ve used to alsaconf to configure my soundcard(s). Late last week, I dist-upgrade’d my machine and moved from the 2.6.18 kernel to the 2.6.22 kernel which seemed to improve a number of performance issues with my E6420 and Asus P5B-E (though I haven’t tried recompiling the gigabit NIC driver under this kernel to check if those performance issues are resolved, so I’m still using a 3Com 10/100). However alsa broke for me with this upgrade. After running alsaconf, I would get the following:
amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such device
I googled at first, and found nothing, so I gave up for a couple of days. Last night I decided it was time to fix shit, so I got back into troubleshooting mode. Long story short, update-modules is now deprecated, alsaconf relies on update-modules, so stop using alsaconf. Let udev load the drivers for your soundcards and it’ll be all good.
I’ve recently picked up a Motorola H670 to use with my phone. BT range is good, volume is decent, it fits snug against my head and it doesn’t look like ass. So far so good.
The only problem? It auto-answers incoming calls, and I need to figure out how to change that. I’m almost certain that it didn’t do that when I first paired it, so it must be something I did, but I haven’t as of yet figured out what that was. I’ve checked all the settings in my phone that I know of and none are set to auto-answer. This shall be the last piece of the puzzle. I figured it was time for an update. I really have nothing else to say about this.
I have a Treo 650 that I have accepted into my life as my personal lord and savior. It allows me greater mental freedom by offloading less important tasks like remembering anything.
For the last year, I’ve been using a Motorola HS850 with my Treo, and it’s been very well behaved. But over that year, the driver element has started to crackle, the over the ear hanger bit is loosening up and the unit is prone to falling off easily. So I decided it was time to look for a new headset. Originally I ebayed a Moto H700 which turned out to be a cheap knockoff. That said, it didn’t play nice with my Treo. So I gave it to a friend (it was only $30, good sign it was a knockoff) and yesterday I picked up a legit H700 at FutureShop.
I have a PalmOne Treo 650. Hardware revision A, Firmware 01.71, and Software Treo650-1.20-ENA. The legit H700 didn’t work with this phone. Disabled bluetooth, deleted the bluetooth device cache and trusted devices list, did a soft reset, turned bluetooth on then paired the H700 with my 650 and it still didn’t work. The H700 would pair with my phone and take itself out of discoverable mode, it would show up in my trusted devices list. It was non functional as a headset. Couldn’t answer a call, couldn’t transfer a call from the handset to the headset. Flipping open the boom didn’t “wake-up” the handset either. Every standard behavior I’m accustomed to with my HS850 didn’t work.
I tried the above in car-kit mode as well. Still no dice.
The only redeeming bit to the entire story is that there was no hassle returning the headset to FutureShop. And so, the search continues for a new headset to replace my trusty but dieing HS850.
Anybody who builds their own 3d printer with a rework station and a make controller gets uber geek cred. That it prints in sugar is just a bonus
The new hardware has been stable in apoc so far. Almost 48 hours solid, which is a fairly big jump from rebooting every 12-16 hours. It’s also a far cry from “proven stable” in my mind though. I think I’m going to start running some tests on the hardware I pulled out though. First round is going to be a couple passes of memtest. If that clears then I guess I’ll be getting a pair of hard drives and trying to mimic the OS install.
From there I hope that the same behavior will present itself. Then I can try the tweaks one by one, disable hyperthreading, disable usb, disable apic, etc. Until we find out what solves the problem. Then I can get this board back in apoc. I’d really much prefer to have the full 3gb in the VM host.
I’ve got all the MD units renamed now, so instead of /dev/md0 consisting of /dev/sda5 and /dev/sdb5 those units are in/dev/md5 and so forth. Does it make a difference to anyone but me? No not really. But I like having things consistent.
Today I headed down to the colo after work. I swapped out the mobo, proc, mem, and sata controller in apoc. So far things seem to be a bit more stable. However, I made a number of other tweaks that may have fixed the instability. On the new board, I disabled hyperthreading and onboard usb. Unfortunately this board doesn’t do dual-channel ddr and only has three slots instead of four for ram. I would eventually like to get the original board back in apoc, but only after extensive testing at home.
Here’s to hoping we get a stable Xen box soon.