January 14th, 2008 cmsj
I have a fair stack of data that I quite like, some of which is vitally important, stored in multiple places and generally not at concern for loss without some very bad things happening already.
The rest I’d just like to keep. For example, I wouldn’t cry if I lost all my uni work, but it would be a shame. Same for the working emulation of my trusty Amiga that I used for so long, but now barely remember how to use.
So, not wanting to trust it all to a single hard disk, I bought a second so I can could clone the data onto two disks with RAID1. Not a problem in Linux thanks to software RAID. I knock up a RAID1 with a single partition on the new disk (which the tools like doing as much as they make sandwiches, grr). rsync across the existing / to the raid volume, modify fstab, grub and maybe something else and reboot expecting tenshu to finally live up to its name…
Except that’s not its name.
Not when it’s booting.
It turns out that having created the RAID volume while fully booted, it had been tagged as being for a machine with a hostname of “tenshu”. The initramfs does not know your hostname because your hostname is stored on your root partition, which is a RAID partition that hasn’t been mounted yet. It is possible for the initramfs to have a hostname, and I expect it might even have a kernel commandline option to specify it, but either way it’s not there by default.
As any string comparison function will tell you, “tenshu” is not an acceptable match for “(none)”.
So to fix this, boot the system and it should sit for ages waiting for the RAID arrays to assem ble (this timeout is *far* too long. what the hell takes this long to be detected by the system?!). After a while it will get bored and give you an initramfs shell. Busybox to the rescue!
I suspect you can run mdadm -A /dev/md0 --auto-update-homehost, although I ran mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sdb3 --update=homehost to be specific and because I found those options first.
Reboot and bam, the orange bar of progress skips up merrily.
Assured that my data is safe on the new partition, I can now proceed to trash the original disk and grow the RAID1 to include it.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Ubuntu | No Comments »
January 4th, 2008 cmsj
The awesomeness of this phone continues… as well as a rash of cool apps I’ve installed, I also just tried out the “Home Network” features. What this actually refers to is uPnP, specifically DLNA.
What does all that mean? It means I can view/copy the photos/movies/music from the phone with my PS3, which also means I can not only use the TV out to display arbitrary things, I can also view the media digitally, via wifi through a easily available/usable interface.
This feels like the future!
Posted in Techie | No Comments »
December 28th, 2007 cmsj
I recently got a Nokia n95 from Orange and have been playing with it for a week or two.
Overall I am most happy with the thing. It’s a little bit slow and stranger than SonyEricsson’s firmware in some ways, but it has some wicked features:
* GPS
* TV Out
* Symbian
GPS is obviously useful, you can bring up a map of where you are and look around. The TV Out was a total surprise though, and is incredibly cool. I figured it would just be used for things like image galleries, and while they are specifically tailored for TV output, it works everywhere! You can nagivate all the menus, run apps and so on.
Symbian is just really handy because there are plenty of apps for it and a pretty open development environment.
Short review, but all in all, I’m happy so far :)
Posted in Techie | No Comments »
December 27th, 2007 cmsj
Thanks very much to Jorge Castro for pimping Terminator on his blog. I hope I get the flurry of patches he mentions!
Posted in FOSS, Friends, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
December 26th, 2007 cmsj
Terminator 0.6 is out. As usual you can get all of the goodness from here or my PPA, which has the 0.6 package already.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
November 23rd, 2007 cmsj
While I was in the US recently I took advantage of the exchange rate to buy a handful of goodies for my PS3 in the form of a PS Eye camera, Call of Duty 4 and a Bluray disc of Pixar short films.
To get it out of the way quickly, the Pixar shorts disc is great - I’ve always admired the work of John Lasseter and it’s nice to have all the classics in super high quality, all in one place. Disney suck for plastering adverts and trailers all over the disc and stickers all over the box, but whatever.
The PS Eye camera is a nifty bit of hardware - it’s a good quality camera with excellent framerate and no boring focusing requirements. The games I’ve played for it so far (Creature Feature, Trials of Topoq, Aqua Vita and Mesmerize) are either amusing, fun or creative and pretty. Clearly the PS3 has the hardware to do good motion detection in real-time, so it’ll be interesting to see what other concepts people can come up with to take advantage of it.
Last, but my absolutely no means least, is Call of Duty 4. I picked up the 3rd installment of this series when I bought the PS3 and I was a little disappointed by it. It was mildly entertaining, but single player games rarely hold my interest for long, plus the engine had obviously been slapped together hastily and some things looked really stupid (eyes and teeth particularly). Plus it’s yet another World War 2 game, which we’ve had quite enough of.
The 4th installment is a totally different beast though - gone are the crappy wooden rifles and anti-German shouting. Instead this is a game based around modern warfare and you alternate between different people (at least an SAS new-recruit and a USMC soldier).
Great weapons, interesting missions (including somewhere you get to be a gunner in aircraft), very pretty graphics and a slick overall presentation.
The online multiplayer is good fun too.
I really really like this game!
Posted in Games | No Comments »
November 9th, 2007 cmsj
Terminator 0.5 is out. This is another bugfix release. This one includes some pretty major fixes and some new default behaviours.
Maximisation of the window is no longer the default (but you can pass -m to do it). Additionally, you will just get one terminal when you start Terminator. Ctrl-shift-h and ctrl-shift-v will split the terminals (or you can still right click for a context menu).
Ctrl-shift-q will close a terminal, and ctrl-shift-n/ctrl-shift-p will cycle through the next/previous terminals respectively.
As usual, please head over here for the goodness. Gutsy packages will be hitting my PPA shortly.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
November 7th, 2007 cmsj
Thanks to the hero Kees Cook Terminator is now able to resize its window smaller. A pretty stupid bug to have, but a fairly peculiar fix.
Either way, it’s done now. It’s starting to feel like I just need to polish up some features, fix a few tiny bugs and Terminator will be widely usable (not that it will be used widely because of how crazy it is).
Profile support is still a way off though, unfortunately.
Posted in FOSS, Techie, Terminator | No Comments »
November 6th, 2007 cmsj
Groovy. Airport. Abandons. Alaska. All your base are belong to us. Mooooooo!
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
October 14th, 2007 cmsj
A bunch of us went to see Bremner, Bird and Fortune being filmed on Friday. As luck (or embarrassment, depending on who you are) would have it, we ended up right at the front in some extra seats, so I made it on TV again!
Clearly I had to post a screenshot from the airing today:
Posted in Friends | No Comments »
