Something that I keep meaning to write about is the topic of practical data backups - how to back your data up in such a way that you won't go bonkers trying to manage it, but if you blow a drive you'll be able to restore something at least. The thing about backups is that they're at once easy to overthink and confuse yourself horribly (which means that you'll never make or use them) and easy to do in such a fashion that they won't be usable when you need them the most. At the enterprise level, there are at least …
While I’m sitting here hacking around, here’s the exact command that I needed to run to get the Arduino development kit to install properly on Windbringer:
It should be noted that I’m using Layman to manage my overlays, which is why I had to specify the environment variable on the command line.
I discovered that GCC v4.1.2 didn't support the Atmega328, which is what my Arduino Duemilanove is based upon, so I had to upgrade GCC to the latest stable release for Gentoo. To generate code for the Atmega328, you need v4.2.2 or …
Ever since version 2.6.29 of the Linux kernel was released I’d been having problems with Windbringer crashing on shutdown. After triggering the system shutdown applet in Gnome X would terminate, sometimes I’d see a debug message from NetworkManager as it tried to shut down the network interfaces (and sometimes the ALSA sound drivers, oddly enough), sometimes I wouldn’t see anything. The end result, however, was that Windbringer would have to be manually powered off, thus forcing a (lengthy) file system check the next time I booted up.
ObDisclaimer: I don't design user interfaces for a living.
Originally, I was working on a post about Linux - about why I switched to it, and pontificating about why more people haven't. After writing about half of it I let the article soak for a while and returned to the text later, and I realized that I was having an un-earned grey beard and suspenders moment. There is no point in talking about why I started using Linux because the reasons for it are, in truth, not particularly relevant in this day and age of plentiful processor cycles and disk space …
As computers go these days, it is not unusual for the amount of free RAM to reach a critical level at which no other processes will fit into what little unused memory is left. Modern operating systems will then start swapping pages of memory to disk to make room; the data can be read back in later if necessary. This is a procedure called swapping, and it can take several forms. Windows maintains a large hidden file somewhere on the drive (usually in the root directory of C:) which it uses for this purpose. Linux, UNIX, and UNIX-alikes most often …
I haven't been posting lately due to the fact Real Life (tm) has been keeping me away from the Net and generally too busy to write about what's been going on. Two weekends ago Lyssa and I spent the weekend with Solo of the Lost Boys and Shimizu, the latter of whom was in town for a couple of weeks. No one's seen any of the Lost Boys for a few months, so we jumped at the chance to hang out and talk shop for a couple of days. We spent much of that weekend running around northern Virginia, discussing …
As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I recieved as a Yule gift an OCZ NIA, a hardware device aimed at gamers which acts as one part EEG and one part biofeedback monitor. The idea behind it, in short, is that the user trains eirself using the included software to generate specific patterns of electrical activity in the brain and facial muscles that the drivers use to trigger certain system events. There's just one thing: there are no Linux drivers.
While upgrading Windbringer's systemware yesterday, I suddenly ran across a rather odd problem: all of the icons on my Gnome desktop suddenly turned into the default Gnome "blank page with a corner folded down" icon, which meant that Gnome wasn't able to figure out what sort of file a launcher really was. Even more oddly, the names of the launchers themselves turned into (for example), "gtkpod.desktop" rather than "GTKpod", which meant that double-clicking on anything resulted in the contents of the launcher being opened in a text editor. Everything inside of the Gnome application menu could still be executed …
Maintenance on Leandra is finished. I took her offline around 2100 ESET5EDT on Saturday night to remove a dead DVD-ROM drive, remove a pair of 512GB memory modules that weren't doing anything, and swap out her 250 GB hard drive for a 500 GB drive. The RAID array has had 250 GB added to it; specifically, the logical volume holding everything but the /boot and / partitions has had 250 GB added to it. 15 GB from the free pool was added to /usr (so that more software could potentially be installed) and the rest of the free disk space was …
I'm a big fan of the open source pilot-link package to back the contents of my smartphone up to offline storage on the off chance that something goes wrong and I need to buy a new phone or restore data from the last backup. Ages ago, someone figured out the protocol implemented by PalmOS for uploading and downloading data from handhelds and worked it into a command-line app that does it all for you: it backs up, restores, installs, uninstalls, and basically does everything but let you make phone calls from your laptop (though there is other software available that …
