Paul’s alice.homelinux.net weblog

I’ve been getting some sweet deals on Craigslist as of late. Most recently (and much to my wife’s dismay), a gent listed his 25U APC Netshelter rack cabinet there, for free**! I’d been mildly searching for one, but found that most of them on eBay were going for $500-600 shipped, and was *really excited* to have this one fall in my lap. It even had a 5U APC Smart-UPS, 15″ LCD, and keyboard/trackball drawers.

While I had some 3U, deep rackmount cases, and knew approximately how much room they took up, this cabinet turned out to be way larger than I had expected, and even larger than that which Holly expected. Queue up the t-shirt press; I’m lucky to be alive.

I’ll post an actual picture here once I get the whole thing setup, but this is essentially what it looks like:

Not that bad, right?  Well, it measures almost 4′ high, 2′ across, and 3′ deep.  Yikes.

** Free as in `no money’, not free as in `beer’. In fact, I actually gave him some dough for the equipment, and had to call in a favor from my friend Kenny to help load & unload the sucker.

Holly and I had Kristin’s wedding to go to in Gatlinburg, TN!

Since we were afraid to drive up a mountain to our cabin in Cobbly Nob Resort at night, we left really early in the morning to make it there before dark after the 11-hour drive. And before dark we did arrive, but not before getting stuck in Pigeon Forge traffic worse than the Stevenson, tacking on another hour and a half to move 8 miles. Sucked. We were right to be weary of the drive, though; the route to our cabin was steep!! That will be the last of my griping, though.

The cabin we stayed in was beautiful; from the isolated setting tucked into the treeline, to the 2 hot tubs and pool table, it was bliss. Our place was spotless-clean. Our cell phones didn’t work. A hawk was flying along the treeline. A freakin’ hawk. Unbelievable. Everything was perfect.

(Well, almost perfect. Between the two of us, we couldn’t manage to remember to bring toiletries along, requiring a trip to Wal-mart. No problem.)

Let’s not forget why were there! Kristin’s wedding took place right on top of a mountain, which required a drive up an aptly-named road, Pinnacle Vista. It was a really cool ceremony; heart-filled, short and sweet.

The view there was even more incredible; we watched the sun set over the Smokies with good friends and tasty beverages. Oh, and a chocolate fountain! Very exciting.

Before we left for home, we couldn’t resist a drive through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which had some beautiful views.

While I was reading slashdot, they mentioned a GameSpot article about the return of Bionic Commando, one of my favorite games for the original NES.  Very exciting stuff!

As a tribute to the original, I fired up the ROM in FCE Ultra and listened to all the NESkimos’ covers of the game music.

I had a MythTV box in my living room, working.  It recorded shows, ran emulators for NES & SNES, had a web interface and a channel guide fed by Zap2It labs.  Everything, save for some DVD burning functionality, worked.

That is, until Zap2It recently decided to get out of the game.

Ordinarily, I think this would’ve been OK; I would’ve moved over to the next best thing, SchedulesDirect.org, for listings.  But this is where the horrendous chain of events started.  To get SD.org working, I had to either mess with text/configuration files to “trick” MythTV into getting its listing data from there instead, or upgrade to the latest version, 0.20.2 .  I did so by downloading a fresh Knoppmyth ISO, and choosing the “upgrade” path.

Upgrade I did, and boy did I regret it.  At first everything looked OK; my old shows were still in the database.  Now I’m sitting on what I consider a non-functional box with the following problems:

• There is now an intermittent keyboard problem where the kb repeats keypresses, like a sort of “stuck key” problem, even though none of the keys are actually stuck.  Really annoying, but doesn’t happen every keystroke.  I’m not using lirc, which most people knee-jerk as the problem.
• The tuner no longer changes channels in either “watch TV” mode or recording, which is great if I want to watch or record UPN, but otherwise renders the machine useless.  I have a Hauppauge PVR-150 like most people.  I think it’s an ivtv kernel driver issue, but haven’t gotten anywhere from the forums.
• All the emulators are broken.  I’ve attempted to re-add fceu, but trying to search for games crashes the frontend.

At this current moment, I’m strongly considering taking a bat to the useless piece of junk that MythTV has made my machine.

While beginning yet another session of the PC game “Just Cause“, I opened Steam, launched the game, clicked on my saved game to load it up, waited a few seconds, and…

• Windows has Encountered an Error 0×0009052b

What?! My progress! After the other saved games loaded OK, I knew it was a problem with the one I was saving all my progress to. I had just finished toppling the Montano drug cartel, putting the Riojas in power. I was well on my way to overthrowing the government and taking over all the military bases. Not to mention completing all the “collect” missions. There was no way I was doing all that crap again.

I’ve since scoured the Eidos forums for someone with the same problem, seeing if maybe it’s an easy fix, but no luck. I can’t bring myself to ask for support on their forum to make the save work again. The best I could find is a savegame with nearly everything completed already. In fact, everything I’d want to do in the game is already done, so it’s not much fun anymore.

I guess the last thing I’ll do is put my money where my mouth is and put the savegame here in the blog, in case there is some way to fix it. If not, I’ll just have to say farewell to Rico.

JCSaves.zip

Since Brett referred me to Dreamhost when I had E-mail problems, the account I’ve had for a year now was almost unexpectedly deciding to expire on me, or so says the E-mail I received telling me to “pay up”. Regardless, this launched me into the web panel they provide where I can view stats, configure things, etc. Much to my surprise, not only has the HD space for the account I chose been increasing in capacity by 2GB per week, but I had a hefty 200GB to start with. If I was going to renew this thing, it wasn’t going to be without making use of more of that space, so I decided to backup some music to get things rolling. Here’s how this went, with a few side notes:

rsync does an excellent job of backing up large amounts of files, and can run in Windows with cygwin, or by getting the “complete” cwRsync package. It had been at least a year since I’ve used it before to send backups of large folders across a LAN to a dedicated backup server before, but never across the Internet, so it took some time to get familiar with setting up the command line to do this.

Most of my time, though, was sunk into figuring out how to change the assumptions cygwin had about where “home” is; it escapes me why I had to interpret what the string of “could not create directory” errors meant when I was setting up the RSA keys for SSH to automate. (Turns out the cwrsync package is not automatically setup with the imported Windows accounts in C:\cygwin\etc\passwd pointing to the correct home.) Problem description and solution here.

I did have a chance in my searches, however, to discover a recent and sobering jwz livejournal entry relating to how backups should be done to minimize downtime, and he’s absolutely right. (Language warning, though; has he gotten more grizzled since I’ve found his caller-id code? What happened to everything being cross-platform?)

So, off to task scheduler I go with my cwrsync.cmd file setup to my liking, and let ‘er rip… Well, it’s the slowest frickin’ rip I’ve seen. I have 7922 MP3’s, and this is Day 4 of uploading; the connection to Dreamhost sucks. I probably should’ve taken jwz’s advice when I read it, since it is probably true that “The universe tends toward maximum irony”, but alas I’m in the “RAID” group he mentions so I’m already boned. I’ll probably just do my routine Ghost again to settle my nerves. Still, it’s gonna be sweet to have anywhere access to the ‘library, and rsync makes it easy to do the big upload only once.

Well, I could put something preach-y in about backing up your valuable data, but it seems it’s been overdone. Besides, the people that deeply know they should (aka those that have been burned) already do, and the others will simply fulfill their destiny. Now, where’s my headphones again?

Jeff, Maria, Holly, and I saw Genesis in concert at the United Center tonight. It didn’t beat Incubus, but being a Genesis & Phil Collins fan since I was about 8 (Invisible Touch was the first CD I owned), I couldn’t miss another opportunity to see them in concert.

Here’s the set list:

• Duke’s Intro (Behind The Lines)
• Turn It On Again
• No Son Of Mine
• Land Of Confusion
• In The Cage / The Cinema Show / Duke’s Travels / Afterglow
• Hold On My Heart
• Home By The Sea / Second Home By The Sea
• Follow You, Follow Me
• Firth Of Fifth / I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)
• Mama
• Ripples
• Throwing It All Away
• Domino
• Drum Duet
• Los Endos
• Tonight, Tonight, Tonight
• Invisible Touch
• I Can’t Dance
• The Carpet Crawlers

In the spirit of Festivus, I’m going to start with The Airing of Grievances:

Okay, what the frick. I was really annoyed with the combination / medley of In The Cage,The Cinema Show,Duke’s Travels, and Afterglow, since the songs have really little to do with each other and their subjects don’t mesh well. It was hard to tell them apart, too. And why everyone likes The Carpet Crawlers, I’ll never know. They seriously could’ve picked out better Lamb songs than what they did.

Speaking of not meshing, the sound sucks in the United Center. I knew this buying the [really expensive] tickets, I’m still going to complain. Bass carries and bounces the same way regardless of whether it’s coming from the Hawks’ goal horn or from a thumping bass drum. Since we were in Row 303, it sounded marginally better than sitting in the very back row listening to Wix ruin McCartney.

…

But in the words of the adjacent table’s guest at Mama Luigi’s, “I don’t wanna hear any more negative [stuff].”

…

The concert’s best feature? Definitely Firth of Fifth, which Banks pounded out perfectly, and would’ve added a nice touch to hear virtuoso Steve Hackett hit the flute melody were he up to it.

The Drum Duet was just fantastic. I’ve heard the one in The Longs many times, and always wondered what it was to actually see something like this performed live. It was everything I hoped for.

And not to sound sappy, but Follow You, Follow Me was a song I’d secretly always hoped as a boy that I could enjoy with someone I loved, so having Holly squeeze my hand while listening to it was like fulfilling a dream of mine.

You know what else was neat? The graphics on the big screen. They played with the artwork a few times so that you could see characters from their album covers clamoring up stairs, hitting croquet balls, and the Fox, you know… doing Fox things. It made my time flipping through the album artwork as a young’un seem even more worthwhile.

All in all, if I had to do this again, I’d definitely still get all the tickets and go, but I’d get a better deal on StubHub.