Present Perfect

My home machine's hard drive had been acting flaky as of late. When booting up, sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up and would not be recognized in the BIOS some of the times. Not that terrifying, but nothing you trust to let run for months either.

To be fair, I'd more suspect the power supply to be at fault, but since I needed an extra hard drive for the Dave/Dina box anyway, since the 80 GB in that are pretty much used up, I went and bought a new 40 GB anyway. So all I had to do was copy that drive on the new one, installing the new Red Hat 7.2 as I went along.

This would also allow me to start using rh72 for the Dave/Dina box as well.

Anyways, I used ddto transfer the Windows Millenium partition I still use for games like Metal Gear and for CoolEdit. I allocated a 0.5 GB partition for MS-DOS (Sometimes I get the urge to re-play Wing Commander or Privateer or Sierragames), and I made space for a /boot partition, a / partition, a /home partition, a second / partition for future installs (I'm thinking of trying out Debian), and some swap space.

Here's some things I learnt :

• Using mkfs.vfat is just *NOT* a good way to create FAT partitions. I could only create file systems with 64k clusters, which Windows wouldn't even scandisk ! Since I wanted to re-install Me over the copied partition to make sure it worked, but it insists on running scandisk, that didn't work.
• Windows sucks at estimating copy time. I copied all of my data drive (25 GB), it started out thinking it would last 15 minutes, but then quickly rose to 180 minutes, and then alternating between the two regularly depending on the file size of the file currently being copied. In the end it lasted 6 hours.
• Use fdisk in Windows to check if the partitions you allocated are actually visible the way you want them to be. The first time I copied all of my data, I hadn't noticed that it didn't recognize the logical partition in the extended partition the way it should. So I formatted it, copied all of the data, and after rebooting I noticed I had erased my new /home partition.

So, for future reference, the quickest way to make sure you're doing it right is :

• first allocate your partitions from Linux
• install your Windows partition (or use dd if you have a previous Windows partition and you've allocated EXACTLY the right amount of space, otherwise it's a waste)
• format your data partition under Windows, MAKING SURE fdisk has the right idea of what your data partition is
• copy a few of your data files from your old partition to the new
• install Linux
• check from Linux that your Windows partitions are accessible and OK.
• copy your /home directory
• go back to Windows and copy the rest of your data. Do this just before going to work. If you're lucky it'll be ready by the time you get home.

And I thought it would be a relatively hands-off, one day process. *SIGH*

My home machine's hard drive had been acting flaky as of late. When booting up, sometimes the drive wouldn't spin up and would not be recognized in the BIOS some...

Had to get up at 1 AM because I couldn't sleep and my phone had rung twice. Good thing I did so, because it seemed like the radio station I work for was dropping out intermittently. Sounded like a sync issue.

Connected with the studio PC from my house (thank god for laptops and ADSL) and tried various ways of getting the on-air software to listen to me. Then made a smart move by checking the internet stream - they were sounding fine, so the on-air software, Zenon, wasn't to blame.

Ok, so our signal gets broadcasted on FM through satellite receivers. Our signal travels to London and back through satellite. Call someone from the satellite provider at 2 AM here - no luck. Called someone in London. He answered the phone and called up a technician. So I had someone called out of bed ;)

So I had to wait half an hour for the technician to arrive in London at 2 AM at night. Times like that make you scratch an itch. I wanted to play Doom on my Dave/Dina box, but last time around the joystick acted flakey.

Here's what I learnt in that short half an hour :

• Prboom, a doom port, uses SDL, which is A Good Thing (TM).
• Joystick configuration is done through some user-space tools working directly with the kernel driver.
• If I had read the docs in the kernel correctly, I would have known that I was using the wrong module. I have a Logitech gamepad, with two axes and eight buttons. On loading the analog module, it told me I had four buttons and four axes. I never bothered to check that, and playing Doom didn't actually work because the calibration was way off and button 1 kept me shooting until I pushed it again (kinda like an unwanted autofire)
• I should use the adi module for my gamepad
• the joystick calibration stuff is cool, but I would have liked the software to tell me to PRESS THE BUTTON to do the next step. I was sitting idle in front of my television for two minutes before I realized it was waiting for me.
• It's really hard playing Doom with a joypad when it's about 12 degrees Celsius and your hands are shaking and you really want to get to bed.

So I did something useful in a short amount of time. The downside is, the technician now tells me there is a problem with our satellite feed in London, and the other radio stations on that satellite feed are having the same problem, and he probably won't be able to reach someone until 10 o'clock in the morning ! And we start live broadcasting at 6 AM. I told him to keep trying and call me, anytime.

I've called my boss to say I'm sleeping late tomorrow ;)

Had to get up at 1 AM because I couldn't sleep and my phone had rung twice. Good thing I did so, because it seemed like the radio station I...

Started looking for voice recognition software. Yes, I want to control my Dave/Dina box with my voice ! The goal is to sit on the couch all day, talk to my tv and never get up, except to get beer (*).

I started out with cvoicecontrol. I got it to work surprisingly fast on my desktop machine. Download the program, add an #include <float.h> to the source (FLT_MAX was undefined), run a microphone config program (which tells you to talk and shut up at selected times), run a model editor program (where you define what you will say and what the program needs to launch), and then start up.

In five minutes I was off shouting "Slashdot" and "Chat" into my microphone, and most of the times it actually did what I wanted !

So when I came home last night, the goal was to install it on the Dave/Dina box and watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer, but ONLY by using the microphone.

Big mistake. I installed everything, did everything four times, but the damn thing has a mind of it's own. It didn't start anything. My housebrothers must have thought I'd gone mad because I was shouting "Buffy" more than fifty times in a row. They now I have a craving, but was it this bad ?

Anyways, I'll try again with a better microphone. It hardly records anything, except for b's and p's, on which it distorts.

And of course, there are other voice recognition apps...

(*) Personal Tidbit Fact #490139 : Actually, that's a lie. I don't drink beer.

Started looking for voice recognition software. Yes, I want to control my Dave/Dina box with my voice ! The goal is to sit on the couch all day, talk to...

Another weekend, some more work on my project. I've used vcr a lot in development and I've decided to finally make a module for it.

It was hard and interesting, because it needs a lot of other rpm's to function properly. Not the least of which is avifile. avifile is getting ready for a 0.6 release. This should be a good thing; however, in practice, it means that there are a few RPM's out there for the older version, and there are also a few RPM's of CVS snapshots for the 0.6 version. On top of that, vcr is released against the author's own CVS snapshots, which aren't easily built or rpm'd, and so on ... You get the picture.

I suppose it makes for a quicker development cycle altogether, because with WebVCR depending on vcr and vcr depending on avifile and avifile depending on other stuff, it's a good thing that people can work on their software in an ongoing process.

Still, it's a good reason to gripe about this kind of stuff. Anyways, I finally decided on using an older vcr (Bram released a new version of vcr just as I finished writing an article explaining the RPM's !) with the older avifile from a Mandrake RPM.

Another weekend, some more work on my project. I've used vcr a lot in development and I've decided to finally make a module for it. It was hard and interesting,...

I added a module for Doom to the Dave/Dina project. One thing I absolutely *HATE* about CVS is the disability to delete top-level modules from your CVS root. I mean, it's easy enough to make a stupid mistake, but you have to have file system access to the cvsroot to delete them. So now I have to send a mail to SourceForge support to get rid of the directories I don't need. OK, so it's not really necessary, but I'd like to keep stuff tidy.

In unrelated news, went to see a band called Lift To Experience yesterday. I really love this band. Get their album, The Texas/Jerusalem Crossroads. They're hard to describe, but echoes of Jeff Buckley and My Bloody Valentine can be heard; the former for their inspired lyrics (although biblical) and soaring guitar parts, the other for their soundscapes and loud eruptions. This is just a personal opinion by the way.

Anyways, they seem very inspired and serious about what they're doing, and I'm not that much of a biblical person, but they convey the right sort of passion that is missing so much from contemporary music. Give them a listen.

I added a module for Doom to the Dave/Dina project. One thing I absolutely *HATE* about CVS is the disability to delete top-level modules from your CVS root. I mean,...