If I had U girl, I wouldn’t be one.Apparently the Fairfield Inn knows me as the Playa of the Year, since this is the suite into which they booked me for my stay in Raleigh:
Awww, yeah. |
Odds and ends, no. 55.
These items both lead me to believe that there’s no automated substitute for Knowing What You’re Doing. |
Revenge of balloon-head.FUDCon news.Another sign that one shouldn’t spend a lot of time emailing large groups of people while on decongestants: https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-announce-list/2008-December/msg00000.html Long and short is, though, that FUDCon F11 is in full swing, and coming up January 9-11 in Boston. All the important details are on the wiki, and you don’t even need an account to pre-register on that page. Board news.Tempting fate, though, I pressed on today to announce that Christopher Aillon is returning to the Fedora Board. Two seats remain for community election, and a final seat for appointment. I’m looking forward to the elections, because every single one of the nominees standing for election is a solid contender with a wealth of experience, but there is a diversity of backgrounds, which I hope the community considers when they cast votes. Blearrgh.And with that, I’m going offline for a bit. I’ve felt like the proverbial dog dookie for a couple days now — some sort of sinus thing that I just want to sleep off in the comfiest and most isolated manner possible. And since I’m meeting Greg in Richmond tomorrow afternoon I need to have a spring in my step. Because keeping up with him is perilous, perilous work. |
Back in play, No. 2.Well, one migration just wasn’t enough for me this weekend apparently. My friend (and ace author/Asterisk guru extraordinaire) Jared gave me a new mobo that I could transplant into my desktop system, which had been running an old AthlonXP 1800+ on an Asus mobo. The new one is a Gigabyte mobo with an Athlon64 3000+! (Overgenerosity is one of Jared’s many faults.) I transplanted another 2 GB of RAM onto the new mobo for a total of 3 GB, and then performed all the physical parts of the procedure (tearing my hands up minimally in the process). Everything was fine upon booting up to the point when I got a very interesting error, saying that the UUID for the new root volume wasn’t found. Normally GRUB references the new root volume with a “UUID=” parameter, meaning that it should be virtually impossible to attach any additional storage device and have it override your normal root volume. That was a great change from back when I was doing forensic work and we had to take special precautions. You wouldn’t want to connect a working copy of evidence in the field and then inadvertently write to it because it has the same label as your normal root volume. (Nowadays there are hardware write blockers, but back when I started doing that kind of work over a decade ago they didn’t exist.) So anyway, back to my point, which is that the system wasn’t finding my UUID. I booted off a F10 install disc in rescue mode and could easily see that the UUID for the root volume was fine, and agreed with GRUB, which told me that for some reason the system wasn’t recognizing the LVM setup in my system. The rescue disc had no problem recognizing and mounting my volumes under /mnt/sysimage as usual. I’m not sure why that kernel module wouldn’t be loading properly during the boot process, or why else my LVM setup wouldn’t be recognized — but it could easily have something to do with the brand new IDE controller my drive was using on the new mobo. To fix it, first I chrooted to the mounted system:
Then I rebuilt the initial RAMdisk. I’m lazy and hate having to remember the mkinitrd command line for this, so I cheated and just ran the new-kernel-pkg command as shown in the kernel’s %postinstall scriptlets. I’m sure this was overdoing it, but part of that process is re-running mkinitrd, so I figured what the heck.
That gave me the command I needed under %postinstall:
After a few minutes the command finished, and just in case that process changed the inodes (and possibly the location) for the kernel and the initial RAMdisk, I decided to rerun the GRUB installer too:
Then I used the exit command to get out of the chroot environment, and exit again to reboot. Voila, the machine now started up fine and I was ready to rock and roll. Of course it’s not lost on me that I have a 64-bit capable CPU now, so I really want to blow away the system and use 64-bit Fedora, but I’ll get to that when I get to it. The really funny thing about all this was that right after I finished all that and started writing this blog post, FedEx showed up at my door with my new replacement Dell XPS M1330 laptop! UPDATE: Whoops, copied the wrong scriptlet above, which would not have fixed the problem but actually made it worse. |
The best laid plans, No. 73.I was going to spend some time tonight writing a big warm and fuzzy blog post about looking forward to Fedora 10 and all the good times ahead. That would have been awesome. Instead, it’s my sad duty to report that my spiffy little Dell XPS M1330 took its own life tonight somewhere between shutting down iptables and powering off. The screen turned white for no apparent reason, to which I thought, “Hm, that’s odd, haven’t seen that before.” Then my eyesight seemed to blur a bit and I looked at my glasses to see if they were smudged, and realized they were fine — it was actually “the magic smoke” escaping from the back of the laptop. It did manage to power off, but the powering back on? Not so much. However, the good folks at Dell were very responsive even at half-past midnight on Friday night. They will have a new laptop here in 7-21 days, and until then I suppose I can get along with my crappy home office desktop, IMAP, and a couple well-placed shell accounts. And I feel pretty confident in saying it had nothing to do with Fedora 10, which has been increasingly spectacular since after the Beta. Of course the Fedora Infrastructure team burst into action when they heard my sob story, and made sure I’d have something faster than the old hunk of junk desktop in my office on which to build the Fedora 10 release notes zero-day updates. Thanks guys, you rock hardest. I guess I’ll have a little more relaxing Thanksgiving than I’d planned. I think the worst part is that I’ve spent 9 months building up a nice, healthy covering of beautiful, colorful free software boosterism on my laptop’s lid, and I’ll have to kiss it all goodbye. Maybe the folks at Dell will get a kick out of it and give the lid a good home on one of their machines… Or maybe they’ll make a “mistake” and send the lid on a unit going to Redmond. |
This is what happens, Larry, when you don’t have a good Hallmark card stored up somewhere.I wanted to take a moment to let everybody know about the splendiferousness of somebody very special. Why here? Because at least 71.9% of all the awesome stuff this person does makes it possible for me to do my job as FPL and be a software freedom advocate every day. Who brings forgotten gear to my LUG meetings when I’ve forgotten them in a hurry or from lack of caffeine? Who listens to my rants about sed vs. XSLT and nods knowingly? Hint: not Charo. Who keeps everything domestic from falling apart while I’m playing keyboard jockey all day (and many nights)? Who bakes what are arguably the world’s best chocolate chip cookies? Hint #2: Not Salma Hayek either, although I hear she makes a passable tiramisu. Most importantly, who is never one to be angry when I draw attention to her on the great big intarwebz? HA HA. Why, dear readers, It’s my wife Eleya of course, or as I like to call her, “She Who Must Be Obeyed”! (Or sometimes, “She Who Really Should Blog More Often Because Her Stories Crack Me Up.”) If it weren’t for her, I’d be lost, lonely, considerably more smelly, and quite possibly trapped under something excruciatingly heavy. Somehow this amazing gal’s managed to put up with me through 13 years of marriage. I’m not even counting the years we were together before that — which I’m sure were of questionable value, given that I had more energy and free time then to be a pain in the neck. Amazingly, I’ve gone all this time without suffering a debilitating fracture or stab wound. She’s a saint, a saint I tell you! If I could give her a Fedora award, I would, but that would be very crass nepotism, and of course I’m above that and also too humble to cop to it. So instead I have no choice but to subjugate the planet (at least the Fedora one) to pay heed to her awesomeness. All hail SupaWife! You’re the greatest. Seriously. |
The curse of four eyes.Last week my daughter, who’s seven, went for a regular eye check up. As a result, yesterday we went to order her first pair of prescription eyeglasses. Two, actually — we assume she’ll lose one, since she doesn’t have to wear them for reading. The optometrist told my wife, “Oh, her eyes look just like Paul’s.” And all I could say to Evie when I heard that was, “Oh gosh, honey, I’m so sorry.” |
Editorial fail.Given yesterday morning’s news, I was a little shocked to see this in today’s paper.
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Next up, Jurisprudence for Dummies.News flash: CSI to be entirely cast with morons. Because what could be better than trusting bedrock criminal investigative principles like the chain of evidence and scientific objectivity to COMPLETE IDIOTS? |
But here, do what thou wilt.Even though saddened by Arthur C. Clarke’s passing, I still chuckled when I saw this, and the fact that I did again this morning means I have to post it here:
“Or we’re turning this car around! We mean it! |
