Another Opinion Among Many

…for NOT drinking the purple juice with the others! For a minute, I thought that even Simon Cowell was going to say nice things about David Archeletta’s performance tonight. I’m so glad that he chose to reveal the truth. Wow! What a boring song to choose. What an even more boring rendition.

And, what’s wrong with Carly Smithson??? C’mon, girl! You have a great look and a better sound! Why aren’t you opening those pipes up just a tad more? Show us why you should be the next American Idol!!!

But, watch out, sister! David Cook is putting up the stiff on the competition front! Ole MJ, the original pervo, didn’t sing his own song that well! Phenomonal arrangement.

Have you had a problem with an application that you got from outside the approved Ubuntu mirrors? Did it refuse to run? Did you know that you can execute a program from a command prompt by typing its name and hitting ENTER? Did you know that most programs will give you extra info via the -v (verbose) switch?

I have recently had that problem with a rss aggregator named PenguinTV. Its nice and simple and will grab just about any audio or video feed, like Miro, without the heavy system requirements (it uses the default apps to play the media, for example, instead of handling that itself). Its ideal for podcast fetching. The problem is that the version that is available in the software showcase does not work without telling the program some things that it should figure out itself. I tried the solution on the forum post about the same problem that I’d encountered of trying to get the latest .deb from the project’s home page. However, I was getting a “bad syntax” error.

This is because Ubuntu has switched from bash as its default shell to dash (lighter and faster, closer to the original ash shell). On nearly every distribution of GNU/Linux, /bin/sh is a symbolic link to /bin/bash, so nearly all executable scripts in /usr/bin will begin with the shebang #!/bin/sh. With /usr/bin/PenguinTV, open it up with a text editor as root and change the shebang to #!/bin/bash and it will run, as the developer is using bash!

…now if I can only find out why it sometimes core dumps…(I just found gPodder, which might be the ultimate solution)

If you remember, I  mentioned a hard drive replacement a while ago.  I haven’t tried to revive it yet with a tool like Spinright yet, but I may still be able to get something out of it.  That was a hard drive failure.  It doesn’t boot or recognize at all at the moment.

I thought that I was going through that with another one as well.  The hard drive in Frankenputer seemed to have gone on me after another update of Hardy Heron.  I had split the drive up into three partitions, one as the root partition “/”, swap, and a third one as “/home”.  The root partition was formatted as EXT3 and the /home was partitioned as ReiserFS.  After yet another update (development software after all), I rebooted into a corrupted first partition and E2FSCK didn’t help, dropping me to a single user recovery shell.  I ran FSCK manually and was able to get the partition reorganized.  I carried on but this was not the end of my troubles.

One more update killed it for good, I thought.  My drive was not even recognized on boot.  Its the second hard drive and I actually have GRUB, my bootloader on the first drive.  I’ve been letting whichever operating system that does the latest update handle GRUB, which meant that the config file with the instructions for GRUB “/boot/grub/menu.list”, was on the second drive on the corrupted partition.  no problem, I just popped in a Linux install CD (Ubuntu of some version, I recall), and chose the option to boot from the first hard drive to get into Arch Linux o that I could do some online digging about this problem.

Somehow, the corruption of the first partition seemed to have affected the boot sector of the second drive as well, which was causing the problem with the BIOS picking up the drive.  I was able to “see” and mount the “/home” partition, so I figured that the drive just couldn’t be dead, as I had thought.  I immediately attempted to back up as much data as I could access onto DVD, which was quite successful, albeit a tad slow, as the OS and the DVD burner were on the same IDE cable.  On a lark, I reformatted the first partition with ReiserFS, which in my opinion, has a far superior recovery on unexpected shutdown.  Suddenly, the whole drive was once again visible to the BIOS.

I reinstalled Gutsy Gibbon and used my existing “/home” and restored my user and each of the kids.  The only difference was that a few programs were missing, which  can be recovered, and some theme-related files which were in “/usr/share” were not available.

So, the take away from this story is that your hard drive may not actually be bad.  It might just be that your hardware is not perfectly suited to go together and a file system corruption may be the cause of your troubles.

Last night my last living grandparent, James Whitman, passed away in his sleep, after an extended stay at the hospital in ill health.  I will be attending his funeral.

May you be at peace, my grandfather.  I will miss you.  Although we haven’t seen very much of each other over the past several years, I have always treasured the visits that I did make to your home.  I love your dry sense of humor that you shared with your late brother, Stewart - one of my very best friends, despite the vast difference in our ages.  I love the kindness that you showed to my children when we visited.  I will miss the connected, knowing “look” that you sometimes shot my way.  I’ll see you around.

I will, and do,  remember you as I will your late ex-wife, my mother’s mothe, Doris Whitman and your late wife, Marion.  These were two ladies that also touched my life in positive ways.  Also, I will, and do, remember Harold Thompson and Leona Thompson, my father’s parent.  May you all be resting well.  Without your influence, I would be a different person than I am today.  Thank you.

Mom, I’m thinking about you right now.  I grieve for your loss as well as mine.

That’s what I woke up to this morning.  It was faint, but piercing.  The smoke alarm had gone off in the apartment beside us.  Its vacant right now, as the landlord’s renovating it.  So, I went over with a flashlight and, like a peeping tom or a burgler, I peered in every window for signs of smoke.  No signs, so I called the landlord to come over and shut it off.

This, I consider to be proof that a smoke alarm will wake you if there is a fire.  I was next door and the sound could be heard through two walls, as well as out in the yard.

If you don’t have a smoke alarm already, get one! If you haven’t recently, change the battery in yours.  It may save your life!

As anybody who’s bored enough to read even my blog knows, I am no stranger to software testing.  I’m no programming genius (that would be Lloyd, Westi, Matt, Linus, Devin, and others) at all, but I know how to find a bugzilla or bug reporting tool, and I do my best.  I’ve not alpha or beta tested Wordpress since 2.3 was released, as I’ve been concentrating more on Ubuntu lately (and there are some really nice touches that Hardy Heron is going to present to the world, very nice).

I’ve remained subscribed to the WP-testers mailing list, though, and I’ve been reading every post.  It looks like Wordpress is going to be a lot more friendly to the new user and have a lot more power for the power user.  I’m not sure if this blog will go through any more trauma or not.  I may keep with a stable (older) version until support is stopped.  But, I may move another over to 2.5 and see how easy it is to do the hard things.  BTW, there’s a lot of good discussion about it on the latest Wordpress Podcast

Will you be switching right away?

So, I’ve not written anything all week.  As a regular reader, you’re going to just shirk this off as me being me, right? I try not to write drivel for the sake of doing so.  You’ll get my thoughts if I care to share.  I will not insult you by spewing out a canned article just for the sake of a site update.

If it goes a long time between one post and the next, you can email me.  If you are really concerned, you can visit me to see if I’m ok.  If you’re savvy enough, you can find out where I live and do so.  After saying that, I doubt that anyone would be THAT concerned. 

I do have a few ideas brewing in my head, so you might have some really interesting reading this weekend.  Perhaps I will get that NIC card for the lappy and install an operating system.  Who knows.

What are you doing this weekend?