Stereophonics – Have a Nice Day

Posted less than an hour ago, keep updated here.

While better than the last version, going by the summary it walks and quacks like a three strikes law. It’s been said elsewhere – why are we basing (pun?) laws on baseball?

Either way, I like that there’s more onus on the rights holder to drive the action with the ISP as an intermediary, instead of forcing ISP’s to be judge, jury and executioner. I also like the idea of capping the maximum penalty, so we don’t get repeats of the multi-million dollar RIAA vs Someone’s Grandma court cases as in the states.

It’ll be interesting to see what further analysis shows… stay on the edge of your seats people!

The Dandy Warhols – You were the last high

So I upgraded my Eee-PC to Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala and it hasn’t been without its problems. It seems that the best way to upgrade Ubuntu is, as always, back everything up, install anew and restore your data.

The main issue I had was that the screen would randomly go black, audio would still work but everything else was unresponsive. Switching to another terminal (e.g. ctrl+alt+F2) resulted in a screen with a full height cursor that was a couple of pixels wide… typing returned vertical white lines.

The fix is to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (e.g. sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf)

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Becomes:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "intel"
Option "ForceEnablePipeA" "true"
Option "FramebufferCompression" "off"
EndSection

I’ve lost my other terminals, and ACPI is still broken – it won’t wake up after you’ve closed the lid – but apart from that it’s working a treat.

Shapeshifter – Dutchies

I have google wave invites now. If you’re interested, use the contact form

facemeltingukulele – Little Wing acoustic

Just got back from an exhausting family reunion in Whangarei. We stayed out at Ruakaka beach. Choice hangi, it was good to catch up with the relatives who did show up (ALL of my first cousins who didn’t: for shame!), and I found out that I’m distantly related to a mate of mine!

Don’t have anything else interesting to say, so here’s a photo of my niece:

Sadie deals with an icecream

Orbital – Illuminate

I’ve been struggling recently with some extremely bad shin splints, and after watching various videos about how to strap your legs to mitigate them, and reading other advice such as

• Get properly fitted running shoes
• Adjust your running technique to a mid-strike and/or barefoot running
• Do some fancy stretches

all of which are definately parts of the overall solution, you just have to read a medical description of shin splints to realise that strapping is still going to be the most direct and effective solution. The problem is that it’s wasteful and, if like me you have hairy legs, painful.

I already have fitted running shoes to help with my plantar fasciitis, and the arguments for stretches are partly due to an imbalance between calf and shin muscles and partly due to flexibility. I have extremely flexible leg muscles thanks to years of Taekwon Do, so it’s just for strength building as far as I’m concerned.

The solution I want to talk about though? Compression socks. I got the Skins sox, which at NZD$80 or so aren’t cheap but I consider them an investment. I wear them during activity and the following night for recovery, but you can do either/and/or. So far they’ve worked a treat.

Midnight Oil – Beds are Burning

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been offered and accepted a position at Araneo Wireless as a Linux administrator. So my financial uncertainty is dealt with for now

Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here

It’s official, I’ve been made redundant. Fortunately I have 6 weeks payout, plus a month’s leave to be paid out, after that I have income protection insurance, so I’m not overly worried about starving on the streets just yet.

It’s very frustrating seeing an incompetent executive layer make some of the most retarded business decisions conceivable, especially in a company you genuinely enjoyed working for, surrounded by bright and interesting people. So for now, I feel liberated from the increasing levels of bullshit – never thought I’d be smiling after losing my job.

Alas, life’s journey continues. Maybe I’ll look at overseas employment for my next chapter.

Muse – Take a bow

I just found out that they’re reducing our team from 3 to 1. Chances are good that I’ll get the position, but just in case I’m now hunting for jobs, dusting off the CV and getting in touch with my recruitment agent.

I find out in a couple of weeks… September 11th actually, how ominous.

Islands In The Stream

Hi readers,
it’s been a while. Apologies again for the lack of posting lately, but my webhosting was maxed out until I was able to move it to this newerer fasterer plan. Plus you haven’t exactly missed much. Let me sum up the last few months:

work
sleep
drama at work with an overheating server room
work
sleep
relationship breakup *sigh*
started growing my beard back for winter
work
sleep
more drama at work
sleep

In more positive news, I’ve been spending a lot of time focusing on my Ukulele studies, and I’m at the point now where I’m starting to record myself playing in order to snowball the improvements made through practice. I did miss out on the Winter Workshops being held by the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra though

Either way, I might be popping some videos up on Youtube – embarrassing! But I’ll try to focus on some kiwi tunes at least. Also, Ukulele Acquisition Syndrome is in full swing, I want at least 3 more ukes:
1) an upgraded gig uke, likely selling off my Oscar Schmidt
2) a D-tuned makala dolphin, keeping my options open
3) another makala dolphin to hack, I’m hoping to make a resonator

On the technology front, I have sold my main PC and downgraded to an Eee PC and an Eee Box. I have yet to upgrade both in the memory and hdd stakes, so they’re both performing fairly averagely for me at the moment. Subjectively, the PC is better than the Box.

I experimented with the uke recording using the webcam in my eee pc, but the software (cheese webcam booth) doesn’t allow you to specify your output formats, so it defaults to .ogv, something the Atom cpu seems to grind with at 640×480. Also, getting the mic levels right is difficult, and there’s a bit too much background hiss.

So I got one of these gorillapod things for $30 at Harvey Norman. There was a similar product that appeared to be rebranded (Samsung?) for $15, so I got both and surprise – they appear to be exactly the same, so there you go. I’ve fixed this to my Canon A560 and the improvement was instant:

me playing my makala dolphin

In other news, I’ve lost almost 9kg in the last few months. I don’t know why, but my appetite just isn’t what it used to be, and I’m paying attention to my body now: if I feel full, I simply stop eating. Not shoveling fast food down my throat every other day probably helps too, plus having breakfast every day would be having an effect on the metabolism… either way, that’s almost 30kg down from when I first got back from France, that’s huge!

signing off, hopefully the next update won’t be months away

Moby – Disco Lies

Flax search is a search engine based on the powerful Xapian search engine. Basically it’s Xapian pre-configured with a nice UI and some extra features, and their business model is custom configuration and support, while offering Flax Basic as a taster. At the moment Flax Basic is developed primarily for Windows as a desktop search tool (a’la Google Desktop) but it can also be used as an intranet search engine, and it can be installed on Linux, like so. As root:

apt-get install python-cherrypy3 python-processing html2text
cd /opt
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/flax-source-1.0.0.tgz && tar xvf flax-source-1.0.0.tgz
mv flax-source-1.0.0 flax
wget http://flaxcode.googlecode.com/files/HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz && tar xvf HTMLTemplate-1.4.2.tar.gz
http://xappy.googlecode.com/files/xappy-0.5.tar.gz && tar xvf xappy-0.5.tar.gz
cd HTMLTemplate-1.4.2/ && python setup.py install
cd ../xappy-0.5 && python setup.py install
cd ../flax/src && python startflax.py --set-admin-password

They recommend starting startflax.py with --conf-dir=. to get it reading conf files held within the same directory, the python scripts seem to look in data/conf/ so simply issue:
mv *.conf data/conf/ (or cp *.conf data/conf/, or cd into data/conf/ and make some symlinks… your choice)

Then finally:
python startflax.py

Browse to http://localhost:8090/admin and login with the username ‘admin’ and the password that you configured, et voila! It’s all yours.

These instructions assume you have all the dependencies and tools necessary, the first apt-get should get you mostly sorted though. YMMV!