Happy holidays wishes

Best wishes back to everyone!

New teeth

Today, our daughter was finally released from her brackets...









After removing this...





And some extensive polishing...











Here is the result :-)

What is it with this year's Christmas?

I just ordered my third not-to-be-missed Christmas cd. All of them by artists that are special to me. First there was Aimee Mann's 'One More Drifter In The Snow' album which I thought for a long time would be the only one.
Then suddenly there is news from Pugwash who are suppporting a good cause (fighting Epilepsy) along the way. Download or buy Tinsel and Marzipan today! I included their Jolity album in my order to save on shipping costs :-)
And inbetween these there was unexpected news from The Nines. Suddenly there's their Winter Snow and Icicles EP.

Rediscovering Snakefinger

Thanks to a kind person who posted some Snakefinger albums on Usenet I am now very much enjoying some old stuff like the Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers albums that I have never heard until now. Great stuff, some is a bit like Brinsley Schwarz (a 'pub rock' band that I know a bit longer), some is C&W and other songs remind me of Steely Dan.
Funny thing is, this puts his carreer in a whole new perspective for me. Cool: I can revisit all his albums and listen to it from a new perspective :-)

Broken DVD file

From PLG I downloaded a music DVD that 'everyone' is having troubles with. It looks like there's 'something' wrong with the second VOB file and I thought that I had it fixed (using a tool called 'super') but when I came round to burning it turned out the repair was also borken.
So yesterday I wasted some time trying to find out what is wrong with the file but got nowhere. I can split audio and video but I can't put it back together because the file seems to be wrong somewhere, although it looks okay enough in PowerDVD.

Disaster recovery tested, but not planned.

Last saturday I was updating our Sun servers with some patches when one of them gave an error after a reboot and didn't come up anymore. There was a problem with the database that defines how the disk mirrors are configured, but it took me a while to find that out. I'll keep this short and say that I now have a lot more experience with booting from cd, repairing filesystems and software mirroring (I had to build a new database from scratch). Obviously this took way too long for one person who is learning along the way so we decided to switch the application that used a database on the faulty server over to the shadow database on our 'disaster recovery' server which is located in a different city. Monday I got the server back on it's feet, tuesday we moved the database back to the server and tuesday evening we switched the users back. Wednesday everything was running smooth again.
So, we can cross the disaster recovery test off our list for this year: it worked!

Nice start of an otherwise dull Friday

Yesterday evening the part of the city where I work lost power for two hours. So when I got in this morning some servers were down and others were up but not functioning correctly (to be fair, a big numer of systems were up and running with no problem). The main problem is that the order in which some systems are started is important and that order is not taken into account when the power comes back on.

Update xubuntu from 6.06 to 6.10

This seems to be quite an adventure. It's lovely to play with on a laptop that's only used to play around with, I'm glad I don't really need it for work.
The Edgy Eft distribution (6.10) needs special treatment for the update that I found here.
I did that and apart from some annoying things (like a question that is asked after I thought finally I could go downstairs to whatch some tv) it probably went smoothly enough, although it took all evening to complete. That is, I think it was completed as I had only a desktop to look at with no activity so I switched it off for the night.
I quickly found out that the wireless stuff needs some more tweaking as something with the ndiswrapper package is changed or something like that. When starting up the Synaptic Package Manager I got an error message, luckily with the needed commandline (dpkg --configure -a). It looks like a lot of stuff needs to be configured first, or maybe it was not done yesterday because I shut down the laptop.
Okay, the package manager works after the configuration. After some searching I found this document that indicates I have to re-do some work, which turned out to be correct. What I did was:
- selected ndiswrapper-utils-1.8 in the package manager and install that
- sudo rm /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper (a shell script)
- sudo ln -s /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper-1.8 /usr/sbin/ndiswrapper
- sudo modprobe ndiswrapper (wheee! success!!)
The wireless card is recognized and the NetworkManager Applet even asks for a keyring password to be saved. Of course I am scepical so I rebooted and waited for the loadndiswrapper error during boot... it did not appear! I also don't have to re-insert the card, however I do have to enter the network name and password (in fact I have to enter the password twice now, once for the applet and once for the keyring thinghy).

Nod32 to the rescue

Not proud to mention it, but our daughter caught a variant of the Troj/Zlob-QK Trojan. This was not caught by the free-AVG scanner. We installed Nod32 and easily got rid of the rubbish.

The Tapes, part two.

I have finished part two of the pictures of The Tapes. They are available here.

The Tapes (dutch band)

Inspired by a post of their albums on the usenet (yes, I'm too lazy to digitize my own vinyl) I scanned my negatives from dutch band The Tapes today.
I saw them play two times, in 1980 in the "Paard van Troje" in Den Haag (The Hague) and in 1981 on the Rotterdam "New Pop" festival. The band disbanded in 1982 (read some more in dutch here). Some members continued playing with other artists but as far as I know they never reformed, which in a way is to be admired but on the other hand the world could do with more good music. Releasing the old albums on cd would be a start.
Anyway, the first batch of scans is here on Webshots. The second batch will follow. Let's hope it's the start of a revival.

LAN party

We had a great time yesterday. Daniël still wanted to hold a LAN party for his friend and we finally decided the autumn break was well suited for that. So we gathered three pc's downstairs and connected the network with no real problems. The hardest work was choosing the games and installing them. The day started when we drove to Daniël's friend Eric to get his pc and stuff. He was having some connection problems caused by ZoneAlarm which he had not configured correctly (basically, he was refusing local connection attempts so we shutdown the program which solved all problems).
After a while the rest of the friends arrived and the fun really began. The pre-installation and figuring out of the games paid off here, unfortunately Eric was lagging behind here a bit because he had yet to install some games and we hadn't figured out the ZoneAlarm stuff yet. After we ordered pizza the games went on for another few hours until we gently told the guys that maybe home would be a good idea.

Strange Angel

Saw a strange movie this weekend: The Lost Angel.
The movie starts with a nice tempo, intriguing killings and it has interesting characters but in the end there are so much holes in the plot and unexplained sidesteps that it left us feeling frustrated. For instance: Billie is called out of her bed because something is afoot with the secretary. When she arrives she asks what is going on, only to hear that there is not much going on. The policeman is sitting in his car so how does he know that there's something going on? Also, the team is under investigation by Internal Affairs but after Billie throws a nice punch at one of the IA detectives in the interrogation room noting more is heard from it.

BHV

Friday I had my yearly training BHV (Bedrijfs Hulp Verlening), which consisted of putting out fire and evacuation training in the morning and EHBO in the afternoon (mostly reanimation training). And yes, the resuscitation rules have changed again this year :-/
Anyway, an interesting day and many lessons learnt.

Silly moment during lunch break

Camera phones are there to be tried out, no matter what. Good thing I had finished eating but damn, Joris was fast clicking the shutter.

Quarter Inch universe

I finally got hold of a copy (yes and I do mean a copy, I had to because it was sold out) of the Mecano collection "The 1/2" Universe". This is a collection of their music from the beginning of the 1980's. I had (and still have) two ep's ("Subtitled" and "Untitled") a single ("Escape the Human Myth") and an album ("Autoportrait"). I still really like the first EP's and the single. The Meccano imagery on the sleeves, the way the music sounds a bit 'rough' yet extremely well constructed and performed, and the lyrics with their fascination with Russia and communism. A few years later, "Autoportrait" never did much for me.
Fast forward 23 years and listening to the first cd of the collection on the iPod I am still fascinated by the music and lyrics (the wife keeps complaining about the charcoal accent of the singer). But then comes the second cd and although the singer's voice is very much improved, during the first tracks I keep thinking of the fast forward button. Halfway through there are a few good tracks but after that you cut to their first 'punk' single and a few live tracks (which often sound distorted).
Well, I have a feeling of disappointment and feeling 'glad I didn't actually buy this'. It's great to have this stuff available on cd (well, ehhh, it's not available anymore) but it's not a compilation I will listen to often.
I think I can (and will) compile one single cd from this containing the music I really love and will keep loving.

Working on the Wireless

Now it would be nice to get the wireless card to work (the wired network card works without tweaking). I have a Linksys WPC54G v3 card which means I'm in for a lot of fun. I first wanted to try to get it working without using ndiswrapper, but I also use WPA encryption on my wireless network. So first, according to the ubuntu WifiDocs I start with:
sudo apt-get install network-manager
sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome
But it's not much use as the system doesn't detect my wireless card.

In the meantime, I found this message on the forum which is fairly recent and seems to do the trick. Will have to use ndiswrapper but what the heck, if it will work.

Yep, wireless is up. Basically, the instructions in that last thread make it work. It makes you use the windows drivers in ndiswrapper and use wpa_supplicant to take care of the WPA.

This looks so much better

Okay, back to the Toshiba Tecra 8000 laptop. I found that although Xubuntu claims to be the Linux distribution for older hardware, the standard installer requires too much power. After reading on forums I found I probably needed to use the 'alternate' boot cd. And yes, that does the trick: the first menu option after startup is 'text mode installer' and that works like it should. Hey, if I want to install a system I have no need to wait 15 minutes until a desktop is loaded (in memory) that I won't be using for the install anyway (I do get the impression that installation takes a bit long in text mode, though). It's great to have an alternative but I'm a bit disappointed that the normal installer just 'hangs' instead of telling me I don't have enough memory.

I had to change the display setting to this:
sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf :
- Monitor section, change HorizSync to 36-52 and VertRefresh to 36-60.
- Screen section, added "1024x768" to all display subsections
I found the Linux on Toshiba Laptop site to be very useful for this.

uugghhh

Bad night sleep caused by what seemed like an eternal thunderstorm.
... need ... more ... coffee!

Good old Snake

After downloading a torrent from an old Snakefinger concert I attended I (finally) took up to scanning my old negatives. I posted some on the torrent site and also offered to put some pictures up for the Snakefinger Myspace page. There are already a few on there (in the slideshow) but I decided to also put them on our Webshots page.

Will have to wait

Bought a home theatre system today. Joy with cables all through the room. Rest of the weekend will probably be surround bliss. Laptop will have to wait.

Finally

Was bored today and therefore butchered the Ubuntu 6.06 installaton on my old laptop (Toshiba Tecra 8000). It was dreadfully slow so I uninstalled so much stuff that it finally just stopped working (nothing happening after reboot).

So then I discovered Xubuntu which looked like it might be what I needed. Downloaded the image, burned it and fired up the thing. I thought I had it installing (which is quite a feat since Linux thinks my display can only do 480x300 or something like that, I had to guess that the right selections were selected because there is no scrolling on the installation screens) but came back after shopping to find it was still... only 0%.

Turns out it's a known problem (like http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1534301), which is boring because Xubuntu is meant to be made for old computers. Oh well, more tomorrow.