Failed hard drives are inevitable. Especially when the drive in question was manufactured on November 27, 2001. You know the time has come to replace it when your log files start filling up with errors like this:
Oct 28 03:53:05 cat kernel: res 51/40:00:fc:33:4e/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error) Oct 29 16:06:46 cat smartd[24427]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW! Failure is inescapable. Everything fails eventually, computers, people, electronics.
I have a few books I've bought for reading using the Kindle app on my iPhone. I'd like to be able to read them on my Fedora Linux based MacBook as well, but Amazon hasn't released a version for Linux yet, which is ironic given that the Kindle's OS is Linux based. All is not lost, there is an excellent project called Wine that enables you to run many Windows applications on your Linux system.
No, not on the lam. On the LAN. I have a fairly large collection of music. Years ago I used iTunes to rip the CD's to AAC format. Recently I've been using Amazon.com for more of my downloads so I have converted the library to high quality VBR mp3 files instead. I like being able to play the music no matter which system I am using, and the iTunes sharing works well for that.
Ever since I switched from Dish Network to a Roku player a few months ago I have had a couple of things I wanted my player to be able to do. The ability to categorize my Netflix queue is at the top of my list and it would be very cool to be able to play video from a local server. The SDK won't help me modify the Netflix application, but streaming from a local source is actually not a huge problem.
A few (ahum) years ago I wrote an article for Linux Journal on building a RAID system. While that exact system no longer exists, I do still have a RAID5 setup that I use with BackupPC to backup all the systems on my LAN. As I wrote about in my KVM article, I have updated my main Linux box to Fedora11. It had been out of backup rotation for about a year, since I have mostly been using my Mac Mini and everything on the Linux box was checked out of a remote Subversion repository.
I've been a VMWare Workstation user for years and have generally been pretty happy with it; but it is significantly slower than bare metal, especially when it comes to disk i/o. One of my responsibilities for work is creating and maintaining a custom Fedora distribution. This requires building new rpm packages and then creating a livecd iso for the install of the system. Lots of disk i/o involved in reading and creating the disk image meant that I was running Fedora9 as my native desktop.
Replace Yourself With Python ais_download.py - setup passwords for product download website mail-grep.py - Use IMAP and python to grep mail for specific strings mail_customers.py - Use smtplib and python to announce new releases to customers release.txt - Template file used by mail_customers.py ssh_thread.py - Threaded skeleton to run a ssh command on multiple servers in parallel with randomized start time.
MSP430 Programming with Linux This is a presentation that I gave at Linux Fest Northwest 2005. It covers PC Board layout in Linux and programming the TI MSP430 microprocessor.
Slide images are here Magic Point source is here This presentation was also the basis for an article published in Linux Journal Issue #142
PICprg is programmer software for Microchip PIC programmers. It is designed to work with any of the PC parallel port types of programers for the PIC16C84 processors. It features a very flexible configuration menu where you can set the parallel port pin for each function, and test them. Setup is easy and only requires a voltmeter. It includes a user friendly setup menu, memory dump screen with hex display.
For me the day began with at 5am, scrambling to make sure I remembered to bring everything -- laptop, Zaurus, cat-5 cable, cellphone, digital camera, USB to serial adapter, camera cable for downloading pictures (I ought to be able to do that with the Zaurus, shouldn't I?), etc. I wasn't sure exactly how long it would take me to make it to Bellingham from Seabeck, but I was pretty sure I needed to catch the 7:10 Kingston to Edmonds ferry.
