Brian's Blog

After ages of using the same old K6-2 450MHz System that I built for him years ago my father finally gave in to the fact that he needed to upgrade his PC. Of course, this task came to me so I hopped on over to newegg.com and ordered a case, 512MB RAM, a AMD Semperon 2200+ CPU/Mobo combo set, a new CD-RW, and a 40GB Hard drive. The price was pretty good to, all that with shipping was under $300. Anyway, I tossed it all together and started installing his beloved Windows XP. And yes, I did try to get him to give Linux a shot. But as soon as I mentioned the "L" word he clammed up and didn't want to hear anything else about it. I'll never understand how closed minded some people are. But hey, he's the old-man and it is his computer. I just told him that when he gets tired of the spyware and viruses that I have something better for him. Well, at the least I've gotten him to stop using IE and run Firefox instead.

Anyway, here I am at the 2nd try to get Winblows Xpee to install on this brand new system. For some odd reason, immediately after a fresh install plus drivers, the system started acting strange. As in, it wouldn't let me install Service Pack 2 because "the cryptographic service isn't running" and when I attempted to actually view what services were running the computer management window would freeze up. The only thing it could possibly have been is the drivers, or maybe it's that Windows sucks? So, this time I guess I'll have to install Service Pack 2 right after the OS then install the drivers and see what happens. One of the drivers probably relies on fixes in SP2.

I've been hearing that some sort of nasty virus was going around making people feel really ugly for a few weeks. Well, lucky for us my daughter brought it home and it managed to get everyone except for me, or so I thought. Now, normally I never get sick. For some reason I'm just lucky and have a good immune system. But, after about a week of hanging out with the rest of my sick (physically, not mentally) family it finally got me. This thing is nasty, you end up with a case of the Hershey Squirts, nausea, and become terribly tired. I slept nearly 24 continuous hours before I started feeling better.

Anyway, the issue for this one is timing. I came down with this on Friday night, the night when we were all supposed to go away for the weekend to a House uhh, I mean "cabin", on Lake Wallenpaupack in the Pocono Mts. I didn't want to disappoint the kids so my wife took them up and I stayed home. Come mid-morning Saturday I was feeling pretty much OK, but still very sore. I was considering going up but decided to take the time to do some light work around the house so my wife and come home to a clean place and we can spend the Holiday with the kids instead of doing house work.

Yesterday I finished modifying stratdate and submitting the changes I made to the author. He seemed to like what I did plus I learned a few new things about scripting in bash. I don't know if/when he will put the changes into it officially, but I have the modified script in my downloads section in case anyone cares to give it a whirl. This is just a thing I did for the heck of it. I'd go to the projects page on sourceforge for the official one. I've upgraded a spare system as a test from a default Slackware 10.1 install to slackware-current w/o a hitch as a test, so far so good.

The changes I made are:

22/05/2005 - Brian Reichert (rignes@ptd.net)


Made copying of the Slackware 10.1 CD prior to running rsync work.
----
Put in a check for the kdei directory and will only move it out of
the $LPATH/slackware-current/slackware tree if it exists.
----
Added UPG_KERNEL to the conf file to choose whether to upgrade the
kernel or not.  I personally prefer to take care of my kernel
manually.  This also prevents the updating of alsa since the driver
modules are kernel specific.
----
Prevent the upgrading of aaa_elflibs* since Pat mentioned in the
Slackware 10.0 changelog that this is meant only for an initial
install and should never be updated
----
Added RUN_LILO in the conf file so you can choose to not run lilo
after each upgrade if you run GRUB or just prefer to do it yourself.

I've been spending a decent hunk of time watching what goes on, and occasionally partaking in, the goings on in ##slackware on freenode. Once again the talk of how evil upgrade tools are for slackware came up. Honestly, I'm good and sick and tired of hearing about it so I finally asked for examples on just what has caused this attitude. Well, it turns out that everyone who could tell me of any problem mentioned upgrading glibc while not in runlevel 1 has caused these problems. It is made clear in the UPGRADE.TXT on any Slackware CD that you must telinit 1 prior to upgrading. And all the tools that I know of don't check your run level and warn you of this. Now, I personally consider it a bad idea to blindly trust automatic tools, I admit it would be a nice check to have to prevent the moment when you have a brain fart and forget about changing your runlevel. As a side note, I think the reason I've had zero problems with swaret is because I always change runlevels for glibc.

There is one script called stratdate, which is based on Phrag's slackmon, that does just that. Basically, it gives you a nice tool to see what has changed in the slackware-current changelog since you last checked it, rsync it to your drive, and upgrade your system. It essentially does the exact same thing that UPGRADE.TXT explains. It looks nice, but there are a few things about it that aren't 100%. In particular, there is a feature that should copy the contents of Slackware CD1 to your drive prior to running rsync to help save download time that isn't working quite right. Also, as it is written now it will upgrade your kernels and automatically run lilo. This is nice if you run a 100% stock Slack, but what about if you run grub, or the 2.6.x kernel instead?

I'm currently tooling around with it as sort of an exercise in bash and will try to add the ability to skip a kernel upgrade and the running of lilo.

Yesterday I finally got out to see The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I have to say it was well done, especially considering how difficult it probably is to pull of this type of humor. It's a different type of humor though, that I think will be lost on most of us Americans. I'm still not sure I like the way they did Zaphods heads, but that is really a minor thing. One thing though, I don't think it would have been nearly as funny for me if I hadn't already been a Hitchhiker's Guide fan from reading the books. Don't get me wrong, it would have still been funny, just not as funny without the pre-knowledge of having already read it.

I keep up with slackware-current on my main system here, mostly because I like to see whats coming up. I don't mind because I keep good backups and slackware-current has been more stable then the supposedly stable releases of some other distributions I've tried out. I'm no programmer, so my knowledge of these things are limited, but the recent update to glibc to add Native POSIX Thread Libraries is supposed to offer significant performance increases in highly loaded systems. It's also gets rid of that annoying message that cedega keeps giving me about lack of pthreads support.

Anyway, I did this update, after a full system backup because I've heard horror stories about upgrading glibc and only ran into one hitch so far. It seems that xmms doesn't like the new libs. I tried compiling it myself and it still didn't like them. So I was forced to run "LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.30 xmms" to get it to run correctly. Furthermore, this problem only cropped up when running the nvidia drivers from nvidia.com. So, I figured I'd shoot an E-mail to Patrick Volkerding and let him know. Well, I was sure surprised when I got a reply from him about 10 minutes later with a link to a package he was working on to fix it. How's that for service eh? The thing is he knew what the problem was, but didn't know anyone who had nvidia cards to test out his fix and asked if I could. I tested it out on my spare system and it worked like a charm.

I know it's a minor thing, but it feels nice helping out just a little for the distro of my choosing. Anyway, I'll wait until the change makes it into the current tree before I use it on the main system. There seems to be quite a bit of action in -current the past few days. I like that!

Of course, all the doomsayers on ##slackware are still up in arms about any upgrade tool for slackware. And, once again, I've updated to current using swaret plus a little common sense with out a problem. I'm still waiting for it to kill my system like they say it's going to.

This morning I saw on slashdot a story about an ipod explosion. A short conversation about this on the LVLUG IRC got me a bit fired up and critical. So, here are my critical thoughts.

The title, "Teenager's ipod goes boom", brings pictures of well, things going boom. As in an explosion. So, I thought, "Wow, I never heard of such a small device causing an explosion! I better read this." After reading it I was disappointed. Sensationalism was used to suck me in and get my interest, then once I got the real facts I realized I just waisted time on something utterly useless and non-informative. Granted, it was only 5 minutes or so but still, that's not the point.

So, lets look at this a little. Here is part of the article:

Don't put your ipod through the washing machine. And if for some reason you do, don't try to fix it with a screwdriver.

That's the advice of fire investigators probing a small explosion that burned a hole in the bed of a Melbourne teenager who tried to perform emergency surgery on his ailing mp3 player.

OK, the important part is, "...probing a small explosion that burned a hole in the bed...". When I read this sentence I pictured shards of plastic flying and a hole in the bed big enough to put your head into.

Then it goes on to say:

"It wasn't working, the young fella tried to undo it or fix it with a screwdriver and at that stage there was an explosion, or more of a pop.

"It was more smoke than fire but it did leave a burn mark on the cover."

So, it wasn't really an explosion per se, but just a pop. And now the hole in the bed is actually nothing more than a burn mark on the cover. How stupid do they think people are? Do people actually not notice this kind of contradiction within the same article?

In contrast to my rant about Allentown Mazda Volvo I've had a very nice experience with Scott Chevrolet this week. My wife and I received a phone call from the dealer asking us to give them a call because of a recall on the vehicle. It turns out that they needed to replace something in the front breaks. Anyway, since I bought this used Chevrolet itself has no record of me being the current owner so any notice regarding the recall wouldn't make it to me. But, it seems that the dealers are informed of all recalls. Scott Chevy took the time to look through their records and made a point of letting me know that this needed to be done. So, I took it in for the breaks (no charge for the recall fix) and a quick oil change and when they gave me the car back it was all wet on the outside. They washed the car for me! I don't know, this may be a common practice these days but it impressed me all the same.

One of the guys (dstate I think) who frequents the LVLUG irc channel pointed out Shakeskin.com. The purpose of this site it seems is for you to shake your head round while keeping your face as limp as you can and taking a snapshot in mid shake. Makes for some funny facial expressions.

I must be tired, because this thing really cracked me up. Don't I look so purdy in my picture?

Time for bed before I hurt myself.

I finally finished HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide this weekend after having it shows as being currently read for months. I used to run a website back when HTML 1.0 was current and wanted to get my skills up to snuff just enough to keep my blog here nice and I can say this book has been very helpful.

HTML & XHTML is written such that it can be read either cover to cover or used as a reference. I read it straight through and noticed that each section has a fair amount of repeated info such as the lang and id tags. This is a good thing for a reference, but sort of annoying when just reading it like a regular book. Even so, once I felt I knew a particular repeated subject I'd just skip it, and if I didn't get it enough I'd read it again. They say repetition is the key to learning right?

All depreciated tags and browser specific extensions are marked clearly. I found myself skimming over the browser extensions just so I knew what they were but not really trying to learn them, mostly because I'm trying to stay away from them and stick with the XHTML 1.0 transitional standard. For tags or attributes that are depreciated it's made clear that they still work for now, but will probably not be usable forever and often suggests that CSS can be used to accomplish similar results.

Now, the most recent edition (5th) was first printed in 2002. and only talks about Netscape and Internet Explorer, which makes sense as they were the two big browsers at that time as I recall. While working through the examples I often saw comments that certain things were no longer supported in current browsers or not implemented yet. I tried a handful of the supposedly unsupported examples in Firefox and they worked perfectly. The point being that, even if the book says it's won't work that you should just try it and see. Even so, the unsupported tags are covered just as well as the supported ones for future reference. This was a good move I think because the core material won't be outdated nearly as fast.

One thing sort of puzzled me a little. The authors seem to play up XHTML 1.0 as being terribly complex compared to HTML 4.01. The main differences are that in XHTML every tag must be lowercase, have an end tag, and all attributes need to be enclosed in quotes. To me this isn't that harsh. Especially since when I was using HTML 1.0 I always thought the end tags were required. After drilling in this false complexity into your brain they then go on to suggest you use a good web authoring utility to do your web pages. This is said sometime after they show the output of a web authoring program compared to an identical handwritten page. The hand written one was about 20 lines or so, whereas the machine generated one was over a page long in the book. Then they say how important it is to go through your machine generated documents and clean them up. I think that if you need to know the tags well enough to be able to clean up a document then you should know them well enough to just skip the extra step and write your code nice by hand from the get go. There are valitator tools available from the W3C to check your work.

Two other things I like are the Tips and Tricks chapter which has some cute ways to use tables that I never thought of before and a nice pull out cheat sheet for people like me with no memory. Overall I'm happy I bought HTML & and XHTML: The Definitive Guide.

Remember when I talked about getting screwed on eBay by a guy named vinylguitarguy? Well, if not I talked about it here, here, and here.

Anyway, today I was surprised by another package from him with another copy of the record I bought along with a letter. In the letter he explained that personal problems (health, divorce) caused havoc on his business and that these issues were resolved and he's working on getting his business back up to stuff.

I offered to send back the LP he sent, but he said to just keep it. He seems to be legitimately trying to get things set right.