May 052008
 

A couple of days ago I upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, also known as Hardy Heron. I not sure if I like it all. There is no Firefox 2 anymore, only the beta of Firefox 3, which basically means 90% of the plugins don’t work. No Google toolbar. Can you imagine?
Also, xmms is gone. I don’t want a media-organizer or streaming audio, I want a mediaplayer, and xmms is damn good at that. So I had to compile it from source, something I didn’t want to do anymore since I made the switch to Ubuntu.
My mouse (a Microsoft Trackball Explorer) worked perfectly in Gutsy via xmodmap, but something has changed in the X-server, and now everything must be done via xorg.conf. Not sure why, but it took me some time to figure it out.

But it’s not all bad. Compiz works perfectly now with the standard ATI drivers in the kernel. No more starting the computer, changing the loaded fglrx kernel module to the manually compiled one, and restarting X. It just works now.

And of course, the whole upgrade process was a breeze. Compare that to upgrading your Windows…

Apr 182008
 

Can you imagine what that is like? Two (2) whole weeks without an internet connection at your fingertips? Just Opera Mini on my cellular, but that’s about it. Don’t think too long about that question, because I already know the answer. It’s what some people would refer to as “hell”. Since today, I’m in heavenback online. Hi crowd!

 Posted by at 00:38
Mar 262008
 

I trying out Adobe’s Lightroom. It has a 30 day trial, so I need to test fast. Lightroom by itself is a very nice product, so I will end up buying the product (gotta save for it first). The later versions of Lightroom (1.3+) can be extended. That is, the export functionality has been SDKed, so when you select pictures (by keyword, by date, by metadata, whatever) and you hit the “export” button, the functionality there can be added to. Somebody created a Export to Gallery script. Very neat, since that’s the software I use for my online pictures. Of course, it didn’t work, the script gave some authentication error.

After looking at the script (it’s in Lua, so very readable code) I figured it had something to do with the old version of the Gallery software I was using. Mine was still 2.1.something, the latest version is 2.2.4. Reading on Menalto’s site, I learned that upgrading from 2.1x to 2.2.x is just a matter of copying the files over the original ones and browsing to the gallery, where the software will automagically present….the upgrade wizard.
It did. Mind you, I backed up the original folders, so I could go back. What a joke, I thought, this has never failed me. So, the upgrade wizard is about to alter the database tables, where it presents you with the command to dump the database. Just in case things go wrong. What a joke, I thought again, but did it anyway. After mysqldump was finished (without errors) I clicked “Next step”. Next to me, I can hear the disk in the server doing its job. And after a few seconds…..I have a very nice error message with some debug information on my screen.

This is where the near heartfailure starts to kick in.

WTF?! I made a dump of the database, but I don’t even know how to restore the s.o.b.!!! Sweat starts to develop on my forehead.

The last message in the debug area is about altering table g2_Getid3PropsMap and not finding it. Great. Let’s do a find in the install-directory and see if there are any files CREATING the table, so I could manually do that. Nope. Let’s go up one folder to the main gallery folder and redo that find. Nope, nothing there. Great. GREAT! What now?
Google for “g2_getid3propsmap table does not exist”. No results. OMG. Google doesn’t know about it. I’m f*cked.
Login to MySQL. Show tables. Long list of tables, and to my surprise, the table in question is there. Or is it? No, it is not! Thank you Menalto.


mysql> alter table g2_GetId3PropsMap rename foo;
mysql> alter table foo rename g2_Getid3PropsMap;

Thank you Menalto, for changing the case in one of your tables.

For the record: resuming the upgrade wizard by refreshing the page in the browser, and things ran fine until finished.

 Posted by at 01:03
Mar 172008
 

I was planned for back-surgery on Friday, and everything went as planned. Except, my release from the hospital was not tomorrow (Tuesday), but yesterday (Sunday). I have a couple of staples in my back now, and they will be removed after two weeks. And for now I have some painkillers, but I don’t need to take them as often as prescribed. Which is a good thing, I guess. Today I already walked outside, to the pharmacy to get my medication and some bandages. That went well, albeit that I was very tired after such a short walk. No pain, just tired.

 Posted by at 16:01
Mar 072008
 

More and more webloggers are blogging about their Twitter updates. Most of them in some automated way. Why on earth would I want to see anyones Twitter-updates of the day in a blog-post? If I want to follow you, I’ll just add you to my Twitter-account. If I don’t want to follow you, don’t bug me with the updates via your blog. Repeating content SUCKS.

 Posted by at 02:58
Mar 042008
 

I completely forgot to tell you how I went with the cifs mounted shares. Well, in fact I forgot, because I did not have any problem since. None. Go figure.

 Posted by at 00:19
Mar 032008
 

Internet makes the world smaller, so they say. You can buy things in other countries, when you have enough trust in the credit-card billing system the seller uses. No problem so far. At the moment I’m looking at buying Adobe’s LightRoom. This piece of software when buying the “download version” is US$299. But I don’t live in the US, so I changed my setting to Netherlands and thus…the euro as currency. To my surprise, the price in euro’s is 296.31, which with the current exchangerate is about US$450. WTF? So I download the same piece of software (US English version), no postal service or overseas shipping is involved, and still the price is 50% higher.

But internet makes the world smaller, so I change the currency back to US$ and have my credit card billed for about 197 euros. Simple.

 Posted by at 17:58
Feb 122008
 

Because I had hangs on Ubuntu with smbfs mounted drivers (the new 1.5TB WorldBook and my USB2 drive from the laptop) I Googled around for some solutions. One thing that I noticed is that most newer forum posts tell you to mount the drives as type “cifs” instead of “smbfs”. Most of the time I can reproduce a “hang” when going to a directory on my WorldBook and clicking on it (in the filebrowser) so that it would start to generate tiny icons of the pictures inside the directory. After having done one icon, the system would freeze until I killed the filebrowser and after a while I unmounted and remounted the drive.
The hang does not occur when mounting the drive as type cifs. The mounting process itself seems (did no accurate testing) faster too. I’ll let you know if this solves the problem completely.

BTW cifs is the successor to smbfs, but it is said that it cannot handle shares from Windows 95 and Windows 98, but that’s not a real problem for most people. Cifs is more actively maintained as well, so bugfixes and security patches are likely to find its way faster to cifs than to smbfs.

Feb 102008
 

Linux (my Ubuntu) seems to have some problems with SMBFS filesystems. I have the USB2-drive of my laptop mounted in a similar fashion as the WD-MyBook, and that has some hangs occassionally too. So I don’t suspect the MyBook (for now).
Other than that, the MyBook isn’t superfast. It’s only connected at 100Mbit now (it has GLAN interface), I don’t know if that will explain it.

The Mionet software on Windows XP stopped working. For some reason it thinks the MyBook is offline. I’ve resetted the drive and the laptop (poweroff -> poweron), but to no change.

Windows Vista has problems with the x-bit in the fileprotections. On Linux my files are created with rwxr-xr-x fileprotection. Probably because of Windows Vista’s excellent (*ahum*) UAC that does not like the execute-bit on external drives, it chooses not to show ANY file with that bit on. Changing the filemode to rw-r–r– does the trick. It took me a while to discover that. Windows XP has NO problem with the execute-bit.

So my first impression: cheap storage, lousy (Windows only) software. No further comments for now.

Feb 082008
 

I bought a Western Digital MyBook WorldEdition II, the 1.5TByte one. Pictures are on my desktop disks, on DVD’s, on the server. I have a lot of audio files I play during the day on the external disk of my laptop. So it was time for something more centralized, since the gf also like to see my pictures, and have room to store hers.

You need a Windows machine to get the thing up and running. The software is a Java-program that basically enables you to communicate with the device. After the initial setup (static IP, etc.), you can just use the machine like any other share on your network (with Windows, or with Linux using smbfs). To change settings, you login to the internal webserver.

The device is mostly quiet, but sometimes the cooling fan(s?) come alive. Not for too long, so it’s not something to worry about. I did not do any timings yet, but the drive seems fast. The connecting-to-the-share process is faster than it is when connecting to a Windows share, which is not really a surprise. You can create different shares, different users, with three levels (none, read-only, full) of access per share.

I’ll keep you updated on how the disk behaves when filling up. I’m copying pictures onto it now, starting with 2004 (older is not on harddisk but on CD/DVD).

 Posted by at 01:49