I received my new laptop last night and after exorcising Vista successfully I am now happily running Ubuntu with a few minor issues. When I right click on the time and click the Adjust button, it presents me with the password dialog box for “time-admin”, I enter my password and nothing happens. Obviously this program is not installed, and I have tried apt-get install time-admin and it’s not in there, but apart from that everything’s smooth.

I received my new motherboard today, an Abit F-I90HD, minus the RAM that needs to go in it to get working. So now I have a motherboard inside my shuttle case with an awesome CPU (E6600) and graphics card (8800GTS), but no RAM. Tomorrow’s a RAM shopping day.

I also have a motherboard not in any case, with CPU, RAM, on-board graphics , a spare IDE cable and a case to put it in, so tomorrow I’m going to put the components in a spare case.

As for my old computer (which really isn’t that old), I’m selling the parts. There’s a motherboard (Gigabite GA-K8NS-Pro) with an AMD Sempron 3100+, one DDR2 333 stick of 512mb RAM, one DD2 400 stick of 512mb RAM, an nVidia 6600GT and a Creative SB0230 Sound Card. I think my uncle John wanted the video card, but everything else is up for grabs. My brother’s offering me $50 for the motherboard with the CPU, which is ridiculous (I hope you’re reading this Scott).

At the moment only one of the four “computers” in my room is operational, and that’s my laptop. Tomorrow’s going to be fun. Goodbye weekend.

I’ve waited two weeks for my motherboard and RAM to turn up from Just Computing. The first week of waiting was due to them not ordering it, and this week has been due to the supplier making Just Computing jump through all kinds of hoops to let them order stock from them (no wonder why there were reluctant). Apparently my parts are somewhere in Adelaide. If anyone sees an Abit FI-90HD Motherboard coupled with 2x1GB Corsair 667 RAM, please notify me and I’ll come around and pick them up.

I ordered a laptop two days ago through my dad. It turned up today. The only problem thus far is that it automatically installs Vista as soon as you turn it on. Vista, for those of you who have been living under a rock, in a coma or under an enormous effect from some psychotropic drug, SUCKS. I need not detail the why, as you may just type “Vista” into Google and get results like this: [url=http://apcmag.com/5049/10reasonsnottoget_vista]10 Reasons Not to Get Vista[/url]

In hindsight I should’ve ordered a laptop with no OS installed, and if that was not possible then I would ask for XP to be installed. On Dad’s request, I have run the Recovery Disk Creator using Vista, and after that’s done I’m going to stick in a freshly baked Ubuntu CD and exorcise Vista off the hard drive and put Ubuntu in it’s place.

In other news, the guys at TravelLink Technology (including me) have decided to stop shaving until the development of the project ends. We’re going to be taking a picture every day throughout the project’s development of our faces and also the relationships between the tables. The legacy system’s relationship diagram stretches over an A3 page and the font is about size 8, so that’ll give you some idea of how many tables there are. I’m going to grab the pictures and put them up on the site as I go along, but I’ll make that page another day when I don’t have Vista to exorcise.

Wish me luck, see you on the other side.

Another work of fiction based on my obsessive need to tell people not to press the damn button over and over again! I suppress it usually.

One day on the way to work I was walking my usual route through town. I walked up to a set of traffic lights and found one of my friends pushing the button over and over again. I walked closer and said, “You know it doesn’t matter how many times you push that button, it isn’t going to change any faster. “Hi Ryan.” He replied. “Did you know the energy you put into pushing that button could be better spent increasing your cranial capacity?” “I do now”, he said, still pushing the button. “The first time someone pushes the button it inserts a single function into the cycle of the lights, basically telling the “don’t walk” sign at the other end to change to a “walk” sign if the button is pressed. You could press it a billion times, although I don’t think you’d have enough time between light changes.” The light changed, and we walked across the street. “Do you know the powers of 2 from 1 to 20? The first 20 elements? The Theory of Relativity?” “Do you know how to change a tyre?” He retorted. “I’ve done it a few times. “What about how to get a girlfriend?” “You’re one to ask.” “At least I don’t turn to mush when they talk to me.” “That’s a lie and you know it! You’re worse than me!” As we arrived at the next set of lights, my friend continued pushing the button. “I’ll wave to you at my Nobel Prize ceremony.” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.” “Asshole!” he shouted at me. “Proud of it!” I shouted back, walking into the building.

On another note, thanks to AgentGreasy for posting a comment regarding my Google Search post previously.

Today I was looking for the correct syntax of “<=>”, I wasn’t sure if it was <=> or <==>, so I typed both of them into Google and got back a blank result, not even a “Your search – <=> – did not match any documents.” message. I felt unloved!

So my question to Google is: “Why aren’t you returning results for this string?”

If anyone is knowledgeable in this subject, please fill me in. I had the idea that I could enter anything into Google and get back unimpeded results, but this does not appear to be the case.

On Friday afternoon at work I ran into an error 21 on one of the computers I had just installed Ubuntu onto. I googled what it meant and it said “device not found”. So I wracked my brain (and google) during the spare moments of my weekend because it bothers me when I get a problem that I can’t solve, and I couldn’t find a good solution where I went “That must be it!”. Also on this same computer I couldn’t get the 7.04-desktop CD to launch into X, it was scrolling the screen with -bash: /dev/null permission denied errors, which the disk did not do on any other computer that I installed it with.

Today at work I downloaded the absolute bare-minimum installer for Ubuntu and actually got that to boot AND install, and I was very happy about that. Then after the install I still had a big ugly grin on my face, thinking I’m top-shit and this bloody error message pops up, AGAIN! I threw the pen that I was spinning on my fingers across the desk and paced to my desk and back again.

Ran my hands through my hair and an abstract piece of a post I was reading on the weekends came to me. It had mentioned something about checking the cables and the drives making sure that they were set to master/slave and so on. But I wouldn’t have that issue because the only hard drive in this machine was a SATA drive, which automatically detects(?) the configuration. Then I thought I would open the box up and make sure of that, so I went to the other building, grabbed a screwdriver, opened the case up and spotted the SIX sata connectors on the motherboard. I thought if I switched the cable over to another one, say from SATA 1 to SATA 2, it’s something I haven’t tried and it might work.

I switched it over, left the sides off and booted, and saw the wonderful “Press ESC to go into menu” of grub.

And then I saw another error! Something to do with IRQ, and apparently suffixing the kernel line in the bootloader with “irqpoll” fixes it, and so I did. Ubuntu is now running awesomely on that PC.

So in short: Try swapping over the cable to another connector on the motherboard.

Also if anyone knows how to get ATi cards working in harmony with Beryl, that would be nice to know. I’ve googled it and tried the examples and it errors, something about texture failing… I’ll try writing down the message tomorrow.

I’m going to keep this short, it’s Sunday nearing 10:30pm and I think I’m coming down with Monday-itis.

This is not a bad Wizard commercial, it’s simply a suggestion.

PHP is already taught in schools around the country, and most likely around the world. What I don’t see is any support for Ruby on Rails in schools or TAFE colleges, which sucks. Ruby on Rails is a very easy-to-learn language and a vast majority of the commands are written in plain english. Compare:

[code='PHP'] mysql_query("SELECT * FROM blogs WHERE user_id = '1' ORDER BY id DESC") [/code]

with:

[code='Ruby on Rails'] Blog.findbyuser_id(1, :order => "id DESC") [/code]

I’m sure there’s better examples out there than just that. It’s a beautiful language that students would enjoy. So why not teach it in schools and TAFE? Have a whole TAFE course devoted to Ruby and Rails. Now that would be worth it.

For those of you that don’t know, there’s a show out called “Pimp My Ride!”. On the show, people give their cars to a group of pros (Xzibit and his crew) and they pimp out the ride, adding overkill entertainment systems and generally making the rides look sweet.

My mum’s friend Charmaine was having computer troubles a while back, I thought I would be nice and go over there and check it out and, hopefully, fix the issue. The Computer, and I use that term very loosely, was running Windows 98. 98 was released in, you guessed it, 1998, making it nine years old.

That’s about 90 years in real life. It’s old. It’s fragile. It whines at everything. It’s ugly.

To top it off, the computer is running on 200mhz with 32mb of RAM. It has a freakin’ turbo button for God’s sake! I suppose I should mention now that she’s on dial-up too.

Now if you look at [url=/img/pimpmycase/old-case-back.jpg]the back of the case[/url] you will notice many things:

1. The case is U shaped, meaning the top and both sides come off in one piece.
2. It’s old and dusty.
3. There’s no PS/2 ports.
4. There’s no USB ports.
5. It has an RS232 port.
6. It has a parallel port.
7. It has a serial port.
8. It makes your eyes water.

Originally I brought around my m-robe, thinking I’ll be able to put some programs on the computer and fix her problems, but without a USB port there was no chance of that happening.

During the first time I was there Charmaine talked about eventually upgrading the computer. She mentioned that she might consider it more after she returned from her trip to Canada.

She returned a few weekends ago and her husband gave me some cash for a new everything. Here’s what I got her: Motherboard: Asus AM2-940 M2N8-VMX $65 RAM: 1GB DDR2 667 5300 $45 Monitor: Viewsonic 17″ VA703B 8ms $215 Power Supply: 550 Max. SHAW PSU $25 Case: CM Ammo RC-533 $89 Keyboard: Multimedia Slim Keyboard $7 Mouse: Generic Optical Mouse $7 DVD Drive: Samsung 18x Black DVD-RW $38 CPU: AM2-940 x2 Dual Core 3600+ $88 Harddrive: 80GB Maxtor $50

Total: $629.00 Budget: $650.00

I only got the CPU because they were out of the 3200s and I didn’t want to wait another week for them to order in the parts and go to the trouble of having to go down there again.

This is a whole system and that’s an awesome price. Now for a very-near bleeding edge kit you’d pay something like $2.5k.

Anyway, there’s some pics of the new case and associated other things at [url=/img/pimpmycase]Pimp My Case[/url]. Enjoy.

I couldn’t find anything similar to this on Google, maybe I just wasn’t googling the right things.

So at work they installed some new computers recently which both have one network interface each and both are set to dhcp and both are running Ubuntu 7.04.

At work they have two connections to the outside world, one is a Telstra link (192.168.0.9 -> 192.168.0.82 -> Internet), and the other is an Internode connection (192.168.0.254).

The first two addresses in both sets of brackets are gateways. 192.168.0.9 is the DHCP server for the whole 192.168.0.* network, as well as the first gateway. 192.168.0.254 is a router which connects to Internode. 192.168.0.82 is another router, which the DHCP server (192.168.0.9) uses as it’s default gateway. This means that every computer that 192.168.0.9 assigns an IP address to, it will set it’s default gateway to 192.168.0.9 which forwards to 192.168.0.82, which is the wrong connection! Confused yet?

Shortly after realising this we noticed that if we did: [term] route del default gw 192.168.0.9 route add default gw 192.168.0.254 [/term]

…it would set the default gateway to 192.168.0.254, the correct one! We figured that if we rebooted it would remember this setting. We were wrong. Upon rebooting it reverts back to 192.168.0.9 and we were back at square one.

Anuj suggested that we make an init.d script and Adam suggested using update-rc.d to get it to run on startup. So that’s what we did. (Ours was originally named “route_del”, I thought I’d give it a better name here.

[code='/etc/init.d/fix_routes']

!/bin/bash

route del default gw 192.168.0.9 route add default gw 192.168.0.254 [/code]

And then entered the command:

[code] sudo update-rc.d fix_routes defaults [/code]

And rebooted. Upon rebooting the computer the default route was set at 192.168.0.254 and we weren’t connected to crappy Telstra any more!

Edit: Adam, the guy who basically runs [url=http://offbeat-zero.net/pulse]WSI[/url], has informed me that if I add the lines: [code] up route del gw 192.168.0.82 up route add gw 192.168.0.254 down route del gw 192.168.0.254 down route add gw 192.168.0.82 [/code] to /etc/network/interfaces just under the definition of my network interface (eth0) it will do the same thing and is much less of a hack than our solution.

“Yeah, it’s a tomorrow problem.” I said yesterday in regards to installing Ubuntu on the development server at work. Little did I know that it would cause so many hassles.

First of all the mirror at http://au.archive.ubuntu.org didn’t have some packages, so I changed that to mirror.internode.on.net and that seemed to fix everything except for the nginx package. So I changed “dapper” to “feisty” in /etc/apt/sources.list and it found it and installed it. Then it decided to remove/alter some key features. That wasn’t good. I tried compiling imagemagick, and that failed with a “cannot compile executable” error (which there are only ~700,000 results for on Google!). Then I tried doing apt-get install build-essential. That needed libc-dev which needed lib6c-dev, which needed gcc, which needed libc-dev. See my conundrum?

So I hooked up the dev server to the Internode connection and pulled a cool 1mb/sec off their mirror and downloaded 7.04-server in just under 6 minutes. So I burnt that to another disk and went to install it, it got up to “Selecting and Installing Software” and hangs at 85% on update-manager-core.

EDIT: I have just tried installing it on my server, and it hangs at precisely the same point. I’m going to leave it on overnight and see if it progresses any further.

EDIT #2 (14th June 07): I was watching Medium last night and I heard the CD-drive open. I turned on my screen to see ubuntu had finished installing. Apparently it takes a while at that point. Also, you may need to do “sudo apt-get install update-manager-core”. I didn’t, thankfully, but I did see it automatically included in one of the installs I did this morning.

It’s a tomorrow problem.

They also have a weird network setup. Five of the computers in the office seem to be on a Telstra connection (around 50kb/s), which goes something like PC -> another PC -> another PC -> Routr -> Internet, and the rest of the computers in the office are on an Internode connection (around 900-1200kb/s) which goes something like PC -> Router -> Internet.

All of the computers are plugged into the same switch, yet it’s connecting to a different network. Maybe I’ll have to have a play around with the route settings tomorrow.

I was on the train last night coming from Adelaide to my station and around Nurlutta (about 6 stops away from station) this Aboriginal guy gets on. Instantly this smell infiltrates my nostrils and I fight back the urge to show the guy what I ate for lunch. The worst part is he sat across from me. He mumbled a few things and I completely ignored him.

BUT THIS SMELL WAS UNHOLY. Score +1 for proof there isn’t a God. Think of everything bad you’ve ever smelt and concentrate it on one person. I am not over-exaggerating. This is what he smelt like, everything unholy and more.

So I moved one seat up so I could be closer to the door and get the fresh air faster than anyone else in the train. I tried to slow my breathing, holding my breath and so on, but it kept coming back. When the door would open I would subtly lean towards the door and take long deep breaths of the lovely fresh air.

The worst part is that when I got off the train, I could still smell it faintly on my jumper.

It should be a criminal offense, classified under the bio-weapon law umbrella, it was DEVASTATING. I can not stress that enough.

How can people even get to that stage? How can people even let other people get to that stage? Wouldn’t they notice something?

I know this is getting too much of a habit, putting two blogs in one post, but what are you going to do about it?

I ordered some computer parts for my computer and a friend’s computer, from [url=http://msy.com.au]a certain computer store[/url]. WARNING WEBSITE MAY DESTROY ALL HOPE. It was a clear list of what I wanted, and I assumed they would just email me back and tell me when they were ready to be picked up. No such event occurred, so I phoned them up yesterday and was told that they don’t hold parts for people for more than 2 days. They could’ve at least told me that in an email, but no response. This is poor customer service, and I’m considering taking my money (a lot of it) somewhere else.

Here’s what I ordered:

Friend’s Computer Motherboard: Asus M2N8 CPU: AN2 Sempron 3000+ RAM: 1gb-667 Generic Monitor: 17″ Viewsonic VA703B-8ms Power Supply: SHAW 550W Case: Coolermaster Ammo RC533 Keyboard: Slim Black-Sliver Keyboard Mouse: USB Optical

Parts for mine: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Graphics Card: 640MB 8800GTS Leadtek

That’s about $1,000 right there. So now I have to re-order all that crap in, I might stop by their store today and verbally order it.