Present Perfect

So, Peter en Tinneke dropped by. It's always nice to have friends pay you a visit, bringing a piece of home to your home. Among other things, we dropped by the Razzmatazz on Friday evening to see Soulwax - the Nite versions. We had to queue for an hour even though we had tickets. It made Peter even more happy though than before, go figure !

Soulwax was disappointing. I had read rave reviews about their rebuilt remixed album and their live performances based on them. I hardly recognized anything except for a few shards of lyrics, there was almost no singing, everything sounded the same... I guess I'm just destined to be a regular rock kid.

Saturday, among other things, Peter and I went window-shopping for hardware. I wanted to show him the block that has all the computer stores. I think he liked it - we went to more than ten stores. I realized I hadn't been to more than three or four myself, not realizing the difference between the stores. I guess I don't have a hardware buddy round here the way Peter was back in Belgium :) Each store seems to have taken up some specialty. We were especially hunting for an acceptable case, but it seems a lot of stores specialize in butt-ugly cases to attract gamers. We only found one reasonably acceptable Asus case at first. When we had decided to finally give up and go back to meet the girls, we passed by a store that had cases from brands we found on the internet. We spent another half hour looking over the store, they specialized in HTPC components, and were willing to order whatever we found on the internet that they weren't selling.

The weekend after that, I played around with an old Epia board I had lying around. It was one of the first out there, it has a 500 Mhz Samuel CPU. After quite a bit of fiddling, I got it to net-boot various distros, and a very optimized MPlayer seems to almost be able to keep a constant framerate going for playback. One of the nice things about this board is that TV-out just works right from the start - even the BIOS shows up. Another nice thing is that it can operate completely fanless and driveless. So I'm seriously considering redoing my home setup with a server stashed somewhere, and one or more clients netbooting off the server. While the noise in the living room wasn't terrible, it was noticeable, even from the bedroom.

So I am now browsing for nice cases that I would consider using in either setup.

Some of the cases I've been looking at:

• Ahanix MCE302 - VfD has linux drivers
• Ahanix D5
• Silverstone LC16M (VfD again with Linux drivers, plus Infrared Receiver)
• Silverstone LC14M (different design)
• Silverstone LC09 (for an EPIA board)

If anyone knows about more decent HTPC case producers, or has any first-hand experience, feel free to share and drop me a line at thomas at apestaart dot org

So, Peter en Tinneke dropped by. It's always nice to have friends pay you a visit, bringing a piece of home to your home. Among other things, we dropped by...

Have I ever mentioned before that I hate hardware ? The only good thing about hardware is that it lets me transfer chunks of creation in my mind to something real. But other than that, I hate it with a passion.

Two weeks ago on Tuesday, there was a day off, which I switched for a Friday because Peter and Tinneke were going to be there on that Friday. So I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to switch out my personal hard drive which was in Fluendo's router (after last year's hard drive crash - CUE OMINOUS MUSIC) for a new one I bought. Only Andy and me in the office, so not too much complaining about not having Internet, right ?

So I press the little switchityswitch button on the KVM thingamole to go to the router screen and shut it down. Passing by one of the screens I noticed a lot of "hda", "{ ... }", "DMA" and "error" bits across one of the screens. Oh, great - clocktime, our 64-bit test machine was having hard drive issues. I restarted it to fsck the machine, but fsck told me the root directory's inode was lost. So that made most of the files end up in lost+found, without any names (sigh), and fsck complained during checking that lost+found was too small to hold everything... The only thing I had going for me that day was that we happened to have a big enough hard drive lying around being used for a development board that didn't have that much installed on it.

I dd'd the smaller firewall HD onto the new one, then resized the ext2 partitions (first time, but worked fine), except that GRUB didn't really work anymore after that.
I couldn't boot the firewall's machine off a CD either, so in the end I had to fiddle to get PXE booting going just to be able to start up a rescue environment. grub-install didn't seem to correct the problem. So I thought I'd run an upgrade with the same distro version (FC3), to fix my bootloader settings, which didn't happen because that only gets done if it upgrades the kernel. Sigh - would be nice if you could do this somehow from the install CD. Booted again in rescue mode, removed the kernel, rebooted, tried to install again - it still didn't want to install a kernel.

It took me pretty much the whole day to fix up both machines - big waste of time. It should have been a routine upgrade.

In the same week, my Dave/Dina system at home started mysteriously hanging roughly every six hours. The week before, it was consistently hanging whenever any video had lots of white in it. It kept getting worse, and the hard drive started throwing errors as well. Sigh. It also started hanging a lot faster. By the time Peter and Tinneke arrived, it wouldn't run for more than an hour.

So, among other things, I bought a new hard drive - and some extra RAM for the home machine, now that I'm running VMWare a lot - to copy Dave/Dina's music over. Only, sadly, the drive was already too far gone, throwing input/output errors for most directories. Luckily, I had made a copy of everything on it just two weeks before - for Peter's birthday. See - being a nice person pays off. Peter had brought his USB drive to Barcelona and I ended up with a full restore of the music.

Flat with nine drives
but they're dead, Jim

We ran memtest on a bunch of memory chips, and it came up with errors, but not the kind we're used to. Then Peter started to spin an amazing tale about bulging and leaky capacitors. And yes - the capacitors on the board looked a little brownish and bulgy. But I could hardly believe that whole ranges of motherboards were broken because some board maker stole the secret formula for the electrolyte. It sounded like bad James Bond. But Peter was convinced, and showed me some webpages documenting the problem. And a few days a similar story was on SlashDot - so I guess it must be true.

Anyway, long story short - Dave/Dina is currently broken, leaving us without music and series to watch. So, time for some new hardware soon...

Have I ever mentioned before that I hate hardware ? The only good thing about hardware is that it lets me transfer chunks of creation in my mind to something...

Almost a week spent in Old Country. Arrived and got picked up by Wiebe and Peter at the airport - great to have friends. Went out for some drinks and gave Peter his birthday present. Went to meet my new godson, Arthur.

Babies are cute

Went to a reunion of our university radio, was good to see a bunch of people again, though some were dearly missed. Also enjoyed a concert from Belgium's most underachieving band -
Grrr Tfff, the punk folkers from Gent.

Spent part of Saturday in Leuven to make newly born Finn's acquaintance. Went out for dinner on a boat with Tamara - pretty good food. Sunday was spent watching Atame again (which is starting to show its age) and dinner at my godson's house with the family - excellent steaks.

Chunks of monday disappeared into my dad's computer - upgrading, putting in a decent DVD writer that allows the machine to boot, upgrade packages (his laptop was still on Red Hat 8). The evening was spent with Ellen at an Art Brut concert in the AB. Excellent stuff. Apparently they've been talking to the kids since 2003. A short Tuesday later I was back at home in Barcelona.

My dad's take on computer security

Almost a week spent in Old Country. Arrived and got picked up by Wiebe and Peter at the airport - great to have friends. Went out for some drinks and...

I am confident this is a great piece of software. I am confident that this piece of software works great on some machines.

But something inside me wishes it would demonstrate both qualities on my machines. Each time I try it, I fiddle with it for a few minutes, and give up in disgust and go back to system-config-network, or manual configuration.

This time around, though, claims of it being properly fixed/rewritten/hugely improved drew me to trying it again - because I'm sitting at my parent's place in Belgium where there is one wired and two wireless networks (for this house alone), as well as a slew of other open networks in the street that all seem to have NETGEAR as the ESS-ID. So, why not give it another try ? I'm on FC 4, the instructions explain how to install this wonderful new version on FC4, this should be easy!

The first thing that always bothers me about NetworkManager is the name. Some people feel that programs with capitals in them are cute. Those people live on the other side of the fence from where I live.

The second thing is that I don't know what to start after installing it. I can't find anything in the menus that brings up NetworkManager. I just checked again - there is Desktop>System Settings>Network which brings up system-config-network, and there's two things I never noticed before, but only just now noticed because I tried to look really hard for NetworkManager - Applications>System Tools>Internet Configuration Wizard, which brings up internet-druid, and Applications>System Tools>Network Device Control.

Ok, let's try Net[tab] again. Start up NetworkManager.

[thomas@thomas ~]$ NetworkManager
You must be root to run NetworkManager!

Oh, excuse ME! There's no real NEED to use exclamation marks to get your point across!

Run as root. It doesn't say anything, nothing happens. What else does Net[tab] give me ?

Let's try NetworkManagerInfo. Pops up a notification area. Shows me one network. Can't find the one I know is there.
/var/log/messages gives me

Oct 21 11:11:53 thomas NetworkManager: process_scan_results: assertion `res_buf_len > 0' failed
Oct 21 11:11:53 thomas NetworkManager:           (): nm_device_wireless_process_scan_results(eth1): process_scan_results() returned an error.
Oct 21 11:12:13 thomas NetworkManager: process_scan_results: assertion `res_buf_len > 0' failed
Oct 21 11:12:13 thomas NetworkManager:           (): nm_device_wireless_process_scan_results(eth1): process_scan_results() returned an error.
Oct 21 11:12:18 thomas dhcdbd: dbus_svc_init: dbus_bus_request_name failed: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.AccessDenied Connection ":1.11" is not allowed to own the service "com.redhat.dhcp" due to security policies in the configuration file
Oct 21 11:12:18 thomas dhcdbd: Failed to initialise D-Bus service.

Switching to the network it discovers doesn't work, and of course that means I'm left without a network connection again.

Sigh, It's like February, 2004, and 2003 all over again.

I know I shouldn't complain, and help by bug reporting or bug fixing, but on a stock FC4 system I should be able to expect it to get some simple basics right, no ?

Oh, and btw, the service script is also called NetworkManager. In a directory of 78 files that, in good tradition, are named in lowercase, NetworkManager had dropped two scripts called NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher. I'm sure people will say I'm nitpicking and this is a trivial thing. For me it's just a sign of how NetworkManager has, as goal number 1, to be "different" enough from everything else. A goal in which it succeeds admirably by being even less functional, for even more time, than the tools that I've grown to work with in Fedora.

I am sure I can be convinced, six months from now, to try it again, when someone praises it highly enough. Until then.

I am confident this is a great piece of software. I am confident that this piece of software works great on some machines. But something inside me wishes it would...

In no particular order:

• taking a sip of your drink while simultaneously making a sudden forward movement because you try stepping over something, causing the drink to go down the wrong pipe
• changing the kitten's litter box, but when you pick up the bag of kitty litter in the outside closet, you pick up only the handles while the sand stays on the floor because the floor had gotten wet and the sand sucked up all the water through the bag, causing it to tear
• ld on mingw not liking a leading ":" in your PATH, which libtool puts there because it doesn't check for empty variables when adding to a variable, and wasting way too much time tracking down the cause. Need to submit patch
• having an argument late at night when you both should be asleep right before the morning your girlfriend is leaving for the Old Country

In no particular order: taking a sip of your drink while simultaneously making a sudden forward movement because you try stepping over something, causing the drink to go down the...