Category Archives: heart-it-or-fart-it

Where I express my opinion in no uncertain terms about what is the appropriate activity to do regarding something.

words cannot describe the pain

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that is the general experince of debian/ubuntu, raid and LVM setups for / and /boot and getting a working bootloader out of the installer…. grr… how come this NEVER works….

update: well, i now have a booting system… I even applied the updates, which fixed a few oddities with “Desktop Effects” (it’s called BLING dagnammit… i want to control my “Desktop Bling”… who on earth wants “desktop effects” when there’s the option of bling?). Unfortunately, the current kernel doesn’t boot at all… gets an oops suggesting running with irqpoll, which doesn’t help either. So back to the older kernel it is… and time to file a bug report. I think there’s a bug somewhere in the partitioner, LVM and RAID setup that gets mightily confused at some point that really ended up in a bad place. Now though, going through *very* carefully, I have grub booting off a RAID1 ext3 /boot no problems… even all my other file systems have come up okay… urgh.

MySQL Bug Deskbar plugin

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Over at my junkcode section, I have mysqlbug.py which is a plugin for the GNOME deskbar panel applet.

If you’ve used Quicksilver on MacOSX, then you know the kind of app that Deskbar Applet is.

This one lets you type “bug 1234″ and be given the action of “open mysql bug 1234″. If you type “edit bug 1234″ it gives you the option of editing that bug number.

We’ll see if this proves useful.

Many thanks to kamstrup (one of the Deskbar developers) on #deskbar on gimpnet for helping me out with the plugin.

I totally heart Deskbar. It’s awesome.

Maemo 2.0 (Nokia 770 Internet Tablet OS 2006)

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Installed the Beta on my 770 the other night – rather cool I have to say. A few small niggling things, but it is BETA.

Things feel snappier, the thumb keyboard thing is actually pretty good, the handwriting recognition seems faster, perhaps a bit more accurrate (but still nowhere near even the Newton MessagePad 120 – with version 2 of the OS of course).

I still need to get the screen fixed on mine though, as soon as you get much black (or blue) you get ugly stripes and it becomes unreadable.

Can’t wait to get GPE PIM stuff working. Oh, and actual syncing with Evolution.

Ubuntu and more than 1 audio device

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Welcome to a new category of blog post: heart-it-or-fart it.

This is an extenstion on the “Inciting Hatred” category, also allowing for praise.

I have a headphone socket on my laptop that seems a bit loose or a connection is dodgy. So, I’ve pulled out my old-and-trusty iMic – a device that came around so you could (for example) have sound input on a bunch of Macs that didn’t come with it (like my old 500mhz iBook). It also happens to have great audio out.

So, plug it in. little thing pops up saying “found new sound device, would you like to open the sound preferences panel”. So far, so good. So that’s what I do, open it, select my audio device and close it.

Then, if i’m lucky, it’s actually seleted it. More likely I have to go back and select it again, kilall esd, select it, relaunch rhythmbox.

Then i can play.

Maybe one song.

Then it skips over everything else in the playlist without playing them.

Quit rhythmbox, start it up again, works. for one song.

rinse, repeat.

Or, if you’re more lucky, you’ll get a fraction of a second of sound out of rhythmbox before it skips over everything. you even get a red stop icon next to the song. If you click on it, you see “Playback Error. Not negotiated”. Hrrm… not a very good error message there.

Oh, the other thing, if you succeed in playing your playlist, you then get, at the end, ALL OTHER SOUND EVENTS that happened for the ENTIRE TIME your playlist was playing. Because what pleases me more than ever is hearing 80minutes worth of gaim sounds one after another.

In the old days i would just “killell esd; esd -d /dev/dsp1″. This doesn’t seem to work anymore.

Verdict: fart it.

(oh, and before anybody says anything – i will be filing a bug report. just the sort of bug that you’re amazed that it was let out as a non-beta release)