therning.org/ magnus

Finally I have built and set up my new system the way I want it. Until about a week ago I was running Debian on a 32-bit AMD with 1GB RAM on a cheap-and-cheerful motherboard from Winfast. From now on I’m running Debian on a 64-bit Intel Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM on an Intel DG965SS.

I did have some problems with getting everything set up:

• Like many others have found out it’s possible to boot a Debian install CD on the system, but it’s not easy to actually install! The CD drive isn’t recognised once the Linux system takes over from the BIOS (or whatever). Apparently it’s possible to get around it by passing all-generic-ide pci=mmnoconf to the kernel at boot time. I didn’t find that out until after having made my first install. My solution was to use a live CD (Kubuntu, because that was the only 64-bit live CD I had around) to stick the Debian Net Installer kernel and initial ramdisk on a temporary partition (that’s the files linux and initrd.gz from here. Then I installed GRUB on a USB disk and used that to boot the installer. Not the most straight forward of paths, but it got me where I wanted to go. (I should note that after upgrading the kernel to 2.6.22 on the installed system I had no problems getting the CD to be recognised after booting.)

• It seems Intel had an intern make a crucial design decision when developing the BIOS for the DG965SS: a harddisk without any partition marked as bootable shouldn’t be consered during the boot process. I quickly turned on the bootable flag on the partition that GRUB is on, but the BIOS is a bit picky; having the bootable flag on a logical partition (/dev/sda5) where it’s the second partition that’s extended wasn’t good enough. After a complete re-shuffle I now have GRUB on dev/sda1 (mounted on /boot) with the bootable flag on. Everything boots just fine now.

• Sound turned out to be no problem once I had screwed on my own head right and put the green plug in the green hole

After an hour in a class at the gym I came back to the locker to find the lock gone and my trousers and jacket missing. After a little while my brain wrapped itself around the situation and I stuffed what was left in the locker in my bag and went out to ask in reception if anyone had handed in my missing garments. No such luck, but one of the “gym people” went back with me to the locker room to inspect the locker. After a quick look around we opened a few unlocked ones and promptly found both my trousers and my jacket. The only thing missing was my wallet. The thief hadn’t taken my car keys, my house keys, my MP3 player, or my wedding ring. All of which were in my trousers. Apparently he (no stereo-typing here, it was a men’s locker room) was satisfied with my wallet, which contained exactly £0, a single debit card, a driving license, a few store cards, a gym membership card, and a few other bits and bobs of only emotional value (e.g. an adorable picture of my wife when she was a kid).

It’s all been reported to the police, despite the obvious lack of value of what was stolen. The bank has blocked the card and they told me of a failed attempt to use it about 20 minutes before I noticed the theft. Now all I have to do is go through the tedious procedure of replacing the stuff and fill a new wallet. Oh, I also need to buy a new wallet. Given that I’ve been semi-looking for a wallet for the last 6 months but haven’t found one to my liking I might have to lower my standards and buy one that doesn’t meet my exacting standards. Well, well… poor me!

It seems I was lucky, another poor bloke lost house keys, car keys (including the car it turned out), and a wallet with considerably more valuable stuff than I keep in mine.

Come to think of it I might also buy a more serious lock than the one sold by the gym, they do look a little weak. I hope this isn’t a new trend, I really like that gym and it’s not practical to carry valuables with you into the sauna…

Where the hell is my email going?

For the last few days I’ve been having problems with my email. The first thing I noticed was that the ORG mailing list got very quite. Then I realised I didn’t get my own postings! The administrator of the list says I’m still subscribed, and no-one else has reported any problems with the list. For testing purposes I’ve tried to subscribe other email addresses on the therning.org domain to the list. The confirmation emails never arrive!

The next thing I noticed was that emails I send through a friends SMTP server don’t reach thernig.org addresses either. I use this server to send private emails from work and this means I can’t email Dita from work.

This is most irritating and I haven’t got a clue where to start looking to fix it

We are amazingly lucky Dita and me. We have some amazing friends and we got to spend Christmas and New Years with them this year. On the 21st I took half a day off and went into Cambridge to meet Dita and pick up a hired car. The next morning (night) we got up at 3am and drove down to Stansted to catch the 6:45 plane to Eindhoven. We arrived on time in the spanking new terminal building in Eindhoven. At least something had changed since we moved.

We went to Aissa to have my hair cut, Dita took the opportunity to catch up on what’s happened since she left TNT. In the evening we went to the cinema and saw Narnia. The next day, Friday, we went to Aachen to catch the last day of the Christmas market. In the evening we met up with Felix and Siarhei at Trafalgar. Good beer, good conversation. Interesting to hear the latest on what’s going on at Philips in general and research in particular

The next two days were filled with “Christmas stuff”. Cooking food, eating food, Tim had some excellent wines, and good friends came visiting. All in all an excellent Christmas!

The days in between Christmas and New Year’s were either filled with activities. We had friends and ex-colleagues to visit, we went to Belgium (twice) and of course we went shopping. All the time it felt just a little bit strange. We were in Eindhoven, but we didn’t live there. Weird feeling somehow.

For New Year’s Eve we ended up in Belgium again, ‘t Hoeveke in Peer. Yet another good nice evening that was over too soon. True to tradition we went to the cinema on New Year’s Day. We saw The Constant Gardner, a very good movie, well worth the admission.

For our last evening in Eindhoven this time around we went to Touch of India with our hosts. A perfect ending to a very good holiday. I hope it won’t take too long until we can go back… or until we have visitors.

As I mentioned I ordered a new computer after the laptop accident. Well, it’s here now! It’s actually been here for over a week now but it’s taken me quite a while to get it set up. Between work and BT’s inability to deliver broadband it’s taken quite a while. It didn’t help that I decided to check out a new Linux distro (Arch Linux) either. (I’ll save the reason for switching away from Ubuntu for a later time.)

Well, this whole thing with my laptop really didn’t work out at all! Royal Mail wouldn’t pay up (and unfortunately they seem to have a good reason not to) so now I’m sitting here with laptop that has both a broken screen and milk on the motherboard. It’ll be anything from £300 to £700 to have it repaired. Given that I payed £600 for it I’ve decided to cut my losses and go buy myself a desktop instead. It’s just a much better proposition to spend £20 for a new keyboard the next time my fingers get buttery.

I surfed over to PCSpecialist and put together a PC for myself. I did consider ordering the parts and put it all together myself, but I just couldn’t be bothered this time around. Also, last time I bought a PC building kit I ended up having to force the CDRW into the case. It pushed onto the mother board, and I was quite worried about the fact that I had to bend it. Didn’t want to run into something similar, or even worse, again.

This time around I did a bit of research on the store though and they checked out. I just found out that Technorati is another place to check for peoples’ experience with stores. Now I’m playing the waiting game. 7 working days and counting. It shouldn’t take more than 10 working days, but who knows.

I’ve moved the development data and my APT repo to a mate’s computer. The main reason is that I still am computerless and this way I’ll have better access to it all, especially from work. The downside is that my mate isn’t taking his server’s certificate as serious as he should and given that https is the only protocol allowed through his firewall it is a bit disconcerting. I’m still trying to educate him I’ll see him again at Christmas so if nothing has happened by then I’ll be bringing the gas torch.

I was hoping my little accident with my laptop would be forgotten quite soon but it seems I’m not that lucky. Currently it’s in Portsmouth, and it’s in worse shape then when I sent it Courtesy of Royal Mail (RM) it now has a cracked screen (according to the repair guy I’ve talked to). Well, I’ve done all I can at the moment, I filed a claim with RM for the extra damage they inflicted. The ball is in their court, I just hope it doesn’t stay there too long.

On the upside I now have very little distracting me from reading. I’ve finished Cryptonomicon so now I can concentrate on the stack of work-related books I still have to get through