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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
ressu's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, January 21st, 2007 | | 6:48 pm |
| | Sunday, January 14th, 2007 | | 9:12 pm |
Remember kids, always make backups
Sigh, everyone always says that one should make backups of their data. I agree, you should always make backups. The thing is that like with companies, i kept ignoring my backups because there was no immediate benefit in making them. And eventually you will find yourself in a situation where you need the backups and notice that it's too late to make any. Another big problem is that even though the backup is initially set up properly, it's not tested often enough. Just now i noticed that at some point in time (possibly due to various broken hard drives) I have misplaced my old subversion repositories. It's not a big loss as such, but i would have liked to preserve them for my own records. I found some old hard drives, but I'm not sure what is in them. I hope it's the data i want. I'll just need to add a few things to my list of things that i want: a sane backup system. I don't want a full fledged database driven backup system, i don't have enough systems to warrant that. Nor do i want a simple tarball in a directory style of a system, it's a waste of disk space. I want something in between, simple to set up, something that manages duplicate files well (like backuppc). sbackup looks promising, it's simple enough, but it's quite not where i want it to be. Oh well, i doubt that i really learned anything from this and in a year i will revisit this subject after loosing something more important... | | Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 | | 9:12 am |
Web standards
It's been a while since i posted anything.. but if memory serves me right, it was a rant too. A while back i installed 2 handy extensions to firefox: CookieSafe and NoScript. This meant that i was to disable Javascript and cookies and enabling them when required. Cookies were something i was expecting to have trouble with, but it's amazing how much trouble disabling javascript is. Cookies cause all these funny, i logged in but i'm still not logged in kinds of problems. Website developers don't realize that there are people that don't have cookies enabled and assume that their session cookies are present if the user has already visited the website. It's annoying, but i can live with that. What gets to me is the fact that people really over use javascripts. I've seen websites that have javascript generated submit buttons (what the..?). I've seen a LOT of websites having links pointing to a missing page and having javascript to go to the right page (GRR!). But what really ticks me off is flash! It appears that somewhere down the line it became standard to detect the flash player version with javascript. Nothing wrong with that.. A bit further down the line the original flash versions were completely replaced with these javascript tested versions, which now means that if i don't have javascript enabled, i wont see flash animations. What i get to see is "you don't have flash player installed". The reason why this eats me from the within, is that there are ways to do it right. Major players like Google Video, youtube and dailymotion appear to get it right. Maybe they are just relying on pure luck or on the ability of the client to install plugins. Or they do it right. HTML 4.0 introduced an element called OBJECT which allows the website developer to give alternatives for the browser. If you can't display this Flash9 animation, then fall back to Flash7 or this GIF animation and if all else fails show this message. All of this without using any javascript or non-standard methods. This all makes me wonder is it worth doing if it's not worth doing it right? | | Thursday, October 19th, 2006 | | 10:16 pm |
holy spam batman..
Yeah, yeah. It's not often when i blog about spam (since i don't blog too often), but this spam got me writing.. It's a first for me, it appears to include stuff from manuals and logs: packages also make it highly useful to those who's primary interest
lights when the system's cover is in place.
the man pages on tar(1) and uuencode(1) for more information on
programs?
RUN_DEPENDS, it is a list of `exec:dir' pairs. For example,
12.1.4.2. Create the /etc/hosts(5) file
password consisting of groups of numbers. You need to add them both
Library Package
it harder for other vendors to provide a chip with similar features.
host.
the kernel config file to allow dynamic determination of the right,
who wish to make topical suggestions on changes and the general
10.4.5.4. * IDE drives
This will install every port that does not require user input. Then,
In internal modems, the modem designer will frequently emulate the
want to take advantage of that (to get printer status, perform
manager.
edintr
in your kernel's config file. It is included in the GENERIC kernel,
%
Rank Owner Job Files Total Size
For a locked-speed configuration, your ttys entry needs to have a
Data transfer rate is XXX.
To hook up a printer using a serial interface, connect the proper
get the individual files you need, but mostly they are stored in
Adding static routes to your nearest default routers can be
December of 1994 to make this transition, and in January of 1995 we
`bind,' if you have not configured a name-server using the
-P argument. Again, if you are testing a printer that expects
#!/bin/sh
Principal: jane, Instance: , kdc_key_ver: 1
The boot message identifier for this drive is "EXABYTE EXB-8200 252X"
provide a backup site, as well as a direct pointer to the original
The 8237 DMA can be operated in several modes. The main ones are:
each time.
# Treat LF as CR+LF:
When parity is enabled, setting this
printer.
There are many ways to prevent this abuse (including ignoring it)
kernel, in this example, MYKERNEL. The value you put in ident
higher, but the modem continues to operate within the limited audio
set term bytesize 8
in the file which overprint lines, or long logical lines that wrap
many advanced features previously available only on much more
connection) counts as a dual-homed host. But the term is really only
________________________________________________________________
fc#clear-bits
error message about /etc/host.conf if you leave this out.
0x10 write Command Register
remote host falls into a subnet that we know how to reach (Cloned
also add the following.
#
away when the line hangs up, you may have a problem with your cable.
______________________________________________________________________
lib/X11/oneko/mouse.xpm
supplied by the The XFree86 Project, Inc
The terminators discussed in the previous chapter need power to
What happened here? We connected to the FTP server in the usual way
established
linux=YES
(DLAB==0) Information written to this port are treated
Update packet counters but do not allow/deny the packet based on
.if !defined(NOMANCOMPRESS)
modem is able to ask the sending modem to resend a block of data that
prompt at the specified initial line speed. getty watches to see if
disk space that must exist on the filesystem for LPD to accept
If you only have access to electronic mail or are otherwise blocked
Then, try printing again. Check the log file (in our example,
in general, the author remembers reading that The RS-232 Bible
the FDC will know that the byte has been transferred.
lot of problems that others have already found and solved. Even
you will too, nor that any of the companies here will remain "best
In addition, the UART modem control
file system with the names quota.user and quota.group for user and
0xc6 write Channel 5 starting word count
freefall.FreeBSD/pub/FreeBSD/LOCAL_PORTS/
In essence, this means that rather than running a PPP daemon, the ppp
on what options should do what, how and when...
DLAB should be done with interrupts
Issues of hardware compatibility are among the most troublesome in the
FreeBSD includes many applications and utilities produced by the Free
(except for the original 16550) even when there are official erattas
# Version required: 1.14.5
fi
wish to remove them to simplify things.
printer usage. It uses the login, host, and accounting file arguments
:df=/usr/local/libexec/psdf:
must resolve the events in the order they
In this way, the host system does not have to worry about things like
Fourth, test the floppies (either boot.flp and fixit.flp or the two
10.0.0.1 foo.bar foo
computer. The original install menu is displayed on the screen.
accepted.
parallel port, you will still need a software interface through which
options INET # needed for _tcp _icmpstat _ipstat
, Create [y] ? y
1.6 and later boards).
different than getty's speed), getty tries adjusting the line speeds
#
o It controls access to attached printers and printers attached to
the total number of sectors physically available on the track. The
save
icmp
switch 1 2 Result
Reported by: Jonathan M. Bresler jmbFreeBSD
drawbacks of helical-scan apply to both 4mm and 8mm drives.
accounting files for the various printers, tally up the pages
probably continue to increase until more people discover and accept
various system defaults. Some items, like networking, may be
10.2.1.1. * ISA
the Text Filter'').
options UCONSOLE
6. If you ain't got the source, it ain't software! ;-)
follows: a SLIP user dials up your FreeBSD SLIP Server system and logs
interface to the host is identical for both.
Note: If your SB16 is on a different 16-bit DMA channel
controllers cannot handle more than this number of sectors. Newer,
you real trouble. Translations come in multiple flavors. Most of them
Some European mirrors:
The lpq command also support a -l option to generate a detailed long
Saturn-I (ie, 82424ZX at rev 0, 1 or 2):
is the amount of the indentation from lpr -i, default 0
rules can be referred to as a ``rule chain''. And that is a direct cut & paste from a spam (without the offending link and all). The actual spam appears to be about porn, not OSS ;) | | Sunday, October 1st, 2006 | | 11:08 pm |
About creating software for the users (Debian)
It's that time again, Debian is preparing for a new release (just like, oh some, 3 years ago) and there lots of internal fights brewing. It would appear that there are people working towards making debian fully DFSG Compliant, which is nice. The problem is that it would require removing quite a few bits of the distribution that currently makes it usable. Firmwares and other bits that can't be distributed in source form for various reasons are now on the line. I support free software and i know why this debate is going on. But i think there are people who are missing the bigger picture. We are loosing users due to the fact that debian just doesn't work on a lot of hardware. People go for Ubuntu and the alike. Then there are the other people who complain about Ubuntu stealing our users.. See the problem? While the people at ubuntu try to keep the core distribution clean, they also provide easy access to the bits that people want. Providing people with 'what they want' is the thing that brings people to Ubuntu. It's not about selling out, it's about providing a service to your customers. Customers in free software world are the users. It's just like in the commercial world, we have the product and we hope that the customers want it. We can't force feed them, different customers have different needs. Either adapt to the demand or accept the fact that people go for something else because they want it. Come on, lets start working towards providing our customers with the service that they want. Either that or stop bitching about loosing people to other distributions. | | 10:24 pm |
Feeds and reading them
As much as i want to stay informed, i keep getting really annoyed by different feeds. There are a lot of feeds that are completely pointless. While i understand that there might be a need for certain feeds, usually it's just a waste of time. Also i really hate the idea of feeds. It strikes me as odd for the people who want to stay informed keep polling the server. It's the same reason why i hate web forums, there are a lot of forums out there. Many sites consider their own forum the main point of contact for them, which puts a huge burden on the user to keep themselves informed. The only way is to poll the website at regular intervals. Now, if websites wanted to keep their load low and keep people informed they would do things right (currently there are websites that need to limit queries to RSS feeds due to bandwidth) they would provide a way to subscribe to the feeds. There is a thing in the jabber world called Pubsub that is designed for stuff like this. If i wish to publish the songs i'm currently playing in my listen player i could create a feed for it or just publish it to all contacts in my jabber roster... Or i could do it the right way and create a pubsub feed and allow the people who want to see that information subscribe to that. The information is sent to a pubsub server that distributes the information to everyone who wants to read it. Simple, lightweight and elegant. The way how subscriptions work currently is not the only problem in feeds. The second problem is that there are no good clients. They all lack something. Sadly the only client that appears to be simple and just work, is the google reader which is a web based client. What is it with the current desktop clients that they keep ignoring the user.. Liferea, the client i was previously using, had different keybindings for mozilla backend and gtkhtml backends. This is very confusing for users. What bothered me the most was the inconsistent use of the space key. Somewhere it moved a page forward, in other places it opened the link. Thanks google, you guys once again got it right with the gui: Simple and elegant. The only downside with google reader is that it doesn't support authenticated feeds. So i have to replace them with unauthenticated ones. It's not a big loss for me, i tend to talk to the people who i have authenticated feeds for so i can keep in touch with them through other channels. | | Saturday, September 16th, 2006 | | 9:44 pm |
| | Monday, August 21st, 2006 | | 10:16 pm |
captcha hell
I can't remember (and i sure as hell wont check my post history ;) if i ever mentioned this before: PEOPLE, FIX YOUR CAPTCHAS! The problem is that captchas are getting more popular by the day and while i don't agree that it's the most convenient way of preventing spam, it's out there. Almost all sites have captchas nowdays. The problem here is marginal, but it's there because people don't think things through when they do something. Just about all websites with captchas fail when you try to access them without cookies. Try it, you'll love it (or hate it, like i do). I like to surf the web without cookies. Some months back i didn't think cookies were a bad thing and i still don't. I just don't like the fact that when ever i access a website (this is true most of the time) they push a session cookie to my browser. Why? Because.. Well i don't know! Take a look at cookies in your browser, there are a lot of them. Visit a website, any website, and you will get a cookie. I wanted to prevent this, even at the cost that i had to enable cookies for certain websites that i know that need cookies. Most well coded websites are able to handle visitors that refuse to accept cookies, but it's a marginal group that refuses them. Most websites fail without an obvious error, some fail with a non-obvious error. Yes, i could accept cookies for the sites that use captchas, but why? I think i'm just better off without posting comments to those blogs that fail to handle me as an user. | | Sunday, August 20th, 2006 | | 12:05 pm |
Password woes
I'm starting to understand why people don't want to use passwords. Normal home user needs to enter a password once and that's too complicated for them. There are some exact numbers out there, but as far as i remember normal user needs to remember 4 or 5 passwords for their daily life. I'm a system administrator so we did a quick count at work how many passwords we need for our daily work, around 20 we stopped counting. That's 20 passwords for daily work and even more for those one shot style jobs. it's not hard to remember 20 passwords, you don't need to learn all of them at once. But what bugs me is that there is a lack of interoperability in different password systems. Lets take an example a little closer to home: I boot up my laptop. From the moment i power it on to the point when i'm able to do some work it takes around a minute. During that time i've entered 3 passwords. I take an advantage of password managers when ever i can, even if it means that i need to store some pretty nasty passwords in there. Without a password manager, i can't even imagine how many passwords i would need. So what's the point? The point is that 3 is way too much, what makes it worse is that i need to be pretty fast in entering those passwords or some apps fail to start (Gajim comes to mind). It's even gone as far as having to enter my password from time to time to keep a signed presence in gajim. In the name of security i'm willing to suffer a bit, but this is getting way out of control. I could move to smartcards or something alike, but that really doesn't make any difference. gpg can't make use of smartcards and i really doubt that it would give me any less passwords to enter. The problem is that there should be a proper password framework. PAM was a good start, but it fell short. It's not an easy task, trust me. Imagine this: You start your computer, while it boots it will ask you for your username and password. After that, it will mount your encrypted home directory, logs you in and unlocks your gnome keyring. When you leave your computer it will lock itself and at the same time it will lock you keyring, set your im client to 'unsigned' state and so on. When you log in, it will reverse all that. It would be twice as safe as my setup is now, since i don't use encrypted $HOME, just because i would go nuts if i had to enter one more password during bootup. | | Monday, July 10th, 2006 | | 2:21 pm |
I need to post more
Today i was reading through my older posts. It's amazing how many ideas get lost because i don't write them down. Today i was reading through an older post about how Jabber clients suck. I still think that most jabber clients do in fact suck, but there are some pearls out there too. I've grown to like gajim and psi, neither of them is perfect but things are moving to the right direction. The thing that struck me with that post is that i would love to see headlines scroll on top of the windows on my desktop.i use liferea to read blogs and other headlines, while liferea is decent it's far from perfect. One still needs to manually take an action to read the headlines. I doubt i'll never get around to implement anything like that, but it still might be a good idea to post my ideas somewhere. | | Saturday, July 1st, 2006 | | 10:47 pm |
Evenful week
Ok, so it's been a while since i updated my blog. Time to post an update as a lesson to everyone who use computers. So, last friday i noticed some problems with my server, stradivarius. I was unable to read my mail. I quickly dismissed this problem since we were heading out to a friends place for the night. A while later i had to access the internet and i decided not to boot my laptop (for some reason) and used the other computer to browse a bit. Things didn't work like they were supposed to, browsing was more pain than what it used to be and for some reason all of the directories were read only on the desktop. Then it struck me. - "What happens if there is a failure in the filesystem?" - "It gets remounted read-only!" Oh crap! i had a HD failure and we were heading out in a few minutes. So i did a quick check on the system... Just as i expected, the new xen server that i had been working on (for the last 6 months or so) had a HD failure. "Oh great!" Luckily i had prepared for something like this. I never expected the HD that was in place to be the final one, i had bought a SATA HD to replace this one. It just wasn't installed yet. I had installed all of the virtual machines with LVM root, so it should be a piece of cake (yeah right!) to move them to the new system. I popped open the system, put in the new HD and tried booting the system to failsafe mode. Which didn't work, since i only had a Xen enabled kernel installed. No problem, i booted the system with te normal Xen setup and just modified the kernel parameters, it's easy with grub. System booted, create a new /boot to the other HD, copy it over, install grub and create new LVM physical volume and add it to the current volume group. Invoke pvmove on the old HD and all set. Not really, if pvmove tries to move the root filesystem it will freeze the system. Luckily i knew this was coming. Simple reboot should do the trick, but no! There was a new problem, my initrd image didn't contain the mirror modules for LVM. Quick hunt for a LiveCD turned out to be a LOONG hunt for a CD-Rom drive and the actual LiveCD. At this point i was out of internet connections, so i had to work with the stuff i had handy. Luckily i ordered discs from shipit last year and i happened to have an old computer around so i could get a CD-rom from there. So now i could finally finish the move, which turned out to take too long for me to hang around (at this point we were some 2 hours late already). So i decided to do something that i last did some 5 years ago: Turn off all computers and head out for the weekend without any computer related gear. (this didn't actually happen, i have geeks as friends so they had all kinds of geeky stuff around ;) So, when i finally got back the full horror started to reveal itself. I booted the computer fron the LiveCD and LVM continued the move from where it left off. I was about to try and speed things along a bit by checking out the state of the root file system of the Xen Dom0, but i was unable to do that because (stupid me) i booted the amd64 system with an i386 LiveCD. Another reboot and i was able to chroot to the Dom0 system. Bit of tweaking here and there to get things working on the new configuration. Then it was time to wait for the move to finish. Reboot and wait a second for the system to settle. Apt is broken, doesn't matter. Dpkg works. Ok, so i should be able to fix Dom0. Time to bring up LDAP database, a few horrible errors later it boots. Ok, good enough and slapcat dumps the database so everything is in order, i'll fix the rest later. Then we need the NFS server. Few horribe errors, even more horrible than before. No luck here. Quick mount of the Common Home volume shows that it took a beating but it can be fixed. the OS on the other hand is toast! So, now everything starts to become clear. My old firewall doubled as my server, it can't boot without the NFS. I need to bring up the new FW that i had prepared, which just needs a bit of enabling. That works. The only problem now is that i still can't access anything on the internet. It turns out that there were a few missing packages that needed to be installed, from the internet, without an internet connection. I had a problem. After a bit of trial and error, i noticed that my laptop was able to access the internet. There was something else wrong here. I traced, sniffed and searched. It turned out that Xen has a bug in the checksum generation code. it generates false checksums which in turn get rejected by my ISP (i would assume). luckily there was a cure, ethtool (which was a pain to get) that allows me to disable the checksum generation code. After this, it was a matter of salvaging the data that was there to salvage and set up the systems. Which turned out to be a rather routine operation. Now, it's been almost a week since this all happened. What else broke down since. In all the commotion, i set up the wrong bind version. This caused my DNS to stop serving records for my domain. It's kind of interesting to see that it can take a week to notice some stuff that has gone missing. I have gandi as my secondary dns which carried the load while my dns was down, it took this long for them to flush their cache and start failing my queries (which then made my e-mail fail). It was also a pleasure to notice that some of the stuff i run in my home network is so fault tolerant. Like dspam, i never lost one single mail from the stats, which i expected to break down completely. Also stuff like ejabberd didn't even notice the whole breakdown. Currently i'm working on finishing the migration and building a proper backup mechanism so that this doesn't happen again. It's either going to be a second HD (with RAID1) or something similar. Looking behind it's good to notice that the disaster recovery preparations that we have done at work have an impact on my home network too. I look things more from the perspective of, what if this breaks down. Also it's good to note that designing changes so that you don't have any points in time when you have loop dependencies (like my firewall - NFS server) does serve a purpose, in my case Murphys law came in to act and the server broke down before i could finish my migration and disaster recovery stuff. Kids, remember: always do disaster recovery plans for everything. Even if it's just in your mind. | | Tuesday, October 4th, 2005 | | 9:12 pm |
The finnish copyright law
It appears that the finnish copyright farce^Wlaw has passed. I can't really put to words how angry i am about this. I know that the creators of music have the right to get their share of the money. But as it has been mentioned so many times before, this law doesn't stop piracy in any way. It just makes the people who copy music from their copy protected CDs to their MP3 players criminals. They are apparently attaching a note to the law saying that the creators of the CDs would allow a few copies to be made of the CDs. Oh YIPPEE!!! Now i can legally make a copy of a copy protected CD that i own, if they allow me to. WHAT THE HELL!? It appears that from now on, instead of buying a copy of the songs, we are now buying a disc and leasing the right to listen to the music. I love finland right now. Only thing i can do about this is to express my hatred against the legistlators and swear to never ever vote for the people that voted for this law to pass. I urge others to do the same. | | Wednesday, September 28th, 2005 | | 6:07 pm |
| | Sunday, August 28th, 2005 | | 9:56 am |
Linux jabber clients
It appears that gajim is picking up some big userbase. I remember trying it quite a while back, and not liking it. Now with the new release 0.8 i tried it again, and i must admit i like it. There are few problems here and there, biggest one being notifications. The current way of notifications makes noticing new messages random at best. I talked briefly with the developers and mentioned libnotify, which was a new thing for them (no wonder, it's a new thing by itself). So we still have hope for better notification. In any case, if you haven't tried it yet, go for it. | | Saturday, August 13th, 2005 | | 1:32 pm |
Ditching mythtv/freevo/linux for winxp
Sigh, i finally have to admit it. Even though the linux desktop has gone a looong way and there are many set top boxes built with linux, it's still not ready for me. I had to give in due to insufficient support for TV-Out (and because i hate mplayer, but that's besides the point) which doesn't allow XV output to be replicated. I know this is mostly because of the ATI driver. What saddens me is that the most blame goes to xfree86, the horrible structure of the community was driven by vendors who wanted to keep the core too stable and so disallowed major changes to the core. Even though xorg is addressing many of these problems i would guess that it will take a loong time for them to deal with all of the mess. Even still, a year or so after the split xorg has gone further that i could have ever imagined. They have succesfull added support for many devices, organized a split of the source and forming a new community around the fork. Maybe in a few years i'll be able to switch back. By then i hope that there is atleast one PVR framework that doesn't build itself on top of mplayer. | | Thursday, August 4th, 2005 | | 8:04 pm |
Dear Allen,
Thank you for your interesting e-mail. It was delightful to hear from you and your business offer. Even though i'm not certain which of the many addresses you used was your real address, was it kzl234@eyou.com, kzl789@56.com, KZL123123@sohu.com or even NoBye@yahoo.com. Dispite this i feel that you are trust worthy and your business offer made me act immediately on it. First thing i did was to add you to my permanent blacklist and even though you slipped through my bayesian filter (see the score, 0.99 is the cutoff afair) i made certain that you will not get past anymore. It was nice doing business with you. Regards, Sami | | Sunday, July 31st, 2005 | | 11:50 am |
YAY! i got my thunderbird back!
Ok, aside from the massive headache, i feel great. I finally got my thunderbird back when the new build entered the breezy archives. I've been using it for a while now and i've noticed that i'm not trying to avoid reading mail anymore, like i did with evolution. Don't get me wrong, evolution is rather nice too. It's quite close what outlook is and allows me to read mail from exchange servers. What bothers me is that it brought the whole 'avoiding my mail' issue to my linux desktop from windows. (i have to use outlook at work due to various reasons). With outlook (and evolution) when you get too much mail you get overwhelmed and it takes too much effort to coordinate the reading of the mail. Even with the 'new and innovative' thing in outlook 2003 (which is basically threading). With thunderbird i hardly ever get this feeling, with mutt i got that feeling when i read mailboxes that had around 1000 unread mails. Only thing i can think of now is that the people designing 'groupware' clients (outlook, evolution...) should focus on the user experience on larger tasks too. They are really nice when there is just a little of new information coming in. How about identifying the incoming conference or meeting invitations and grouping them somewhere else out of the inbox? Or grouping the mails that werent directly sent to you in a different set (we get a LOT of these at work). | | Saturday, July 30th, 2005 | | 11:05 am |
Overly complicated things
I've really started to dislike many apps lately. It used to be fun to tweak a million options just right to get things working but in the past few years it's starting to be a burden. Applications that should 'just work[tm]' are proving to be more of a pain than before. No i'm not talking about X, there is work being done to make it just work (i remember hearing about hal integration a while back) i'm not talking about the linux kernel, which most of us never even compile anymore, nor about most of the extra modules that need to be compiled. They are precompiled too. So, what am i talking about? The most recent thing i ran in to is mythtv. Yes, that simple little cool box that allows you to watch tv, right? Wrong! Mythtv is guilty of asking way too many questions: "Hey, we have this cool option to tweak this feature called 'hyperdrive engine powerboost via antimatter' we know that you don't have the hardware for this, but would you like to enable it if you had the hardware?". Well, this is not an actual example, but it might aswell be. One real example of what bothers me is the channel data configuration, where the tool asks for channel id, channel name, channel shortname, channel xawtv id, finetuning info and something else that i can't even remember anymore. Ok, i know channel ID, that should be the ID of the channel. Channel name should be the channel name.. Channel shortname.. hmm.. a shorter name for the channel (WTH)? Now it really gets confusing: xawtv ID? Hell, i haven't used xawtv in 3 or 4 years, how should i know what this means. Rest of this is just garbage. This is just one example. There are lots and lots and lots of these kinds of examples out there. The above example lead me to think about a new way to create a PVR system that wouldn't be so complicated. One that allows sharing of channel information, one that allows collaboration between friends (hey think about it, you borrow video tapes too why not borrow recordings). Ofcourse this is in my mind, there is no code and i really doubt that there ever will be. I'll try and write up a spec and post it somewhere if someone is interested. Last but not least. I really have to mention one project (of many) that does not fall under the category of overcomplicated things is Network-Manager. It has made my life so much easier! | | Wednesday, July 20th, 2005 | | 11:06 pm |
| | Thursday, June 16th, 2005 | | 5:34 pm |
Sigh! Atleast now i have backups..
Right, this was inevitable. My HD Crashed again! And even though the last crash was only 6 months ago, I still did not have proper backups. Sadly i lost some data, but i was able to recover most of it. I'm currently rebuilding my computer from scratch.. Somehow this is a good thing and since i try and learn from my failures i now have proper backup system built with backuppc, it's not perfect but at least it is there. Only thing that i noticed that was lost were some bookmarks and my newsgroup subscriptions. Nothing too important. The best thing about this all is that i found backuppc, which is just the cure i needed. I've been on a lookout for a proper backup system that is easy to use and doesn't disturb my daily work, backuppc is just that. It has a few downsides, but nothing too big. At least from now on i'll be making proper backups =) Also, even though it's a pain to build a computer from scratch it's also a good thing. Now i can finally tweak the configuration the way i want it. Even though i tweaked it just the way i wanted when i set it up in the first place, standards and needs change. On a Linux system it's all easy, just re-install and dump $HOME back to where it was and you are all set. On windows it's a different matter. Ah well, back to my daily installations ;) |
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