Since this weekend I’ve assembled my new PC after it being in boxes for a few days. I simply didn’t have the space to do it.

I bought a new one because the old one started crashing a lot … in the end Windows wouldn’t even boot and I worked on my laptop for over a week. It’s amazing how much more you do around/in the house when you don’t have a working computer 😉

Specs of the new one:

• Intel Core2 Duo E8400 (3GHz), Zalman cooler
• 2x 2GB DDR2
• Asus P5Q-WS mainboard
• 2x 250GB WD SATA HD on 3Ware 9500S
• Geforce 9600GT 512MB Zilent
• Lian-Li PC60 Silver case
• Plextor 16x DVD-ROM
• NEC 16x DVD-RW with Lightscribe
• Hauppauge WinTV PCI (Almost 10 years old!)
• 2x Samsung Syncmaster 920N 19" TFT

Should be OK for the upcoming years, and the upcoming GTA IV, I hope 😀 

(And the first game I’m going to play on it is… OpenTTD, yay for such power hungry apps :D) 

Anyone in Belgium in want/need of some USB/serial/Ethernet temperature sensors?

I would like to order 2 for personal use but the shipping cost is quite steep, sharing it would be useful for all…

Here’s the info page 🙂 If you’re interested, please let me know. 

Dell’s Printer Driver CD is "special". If you put it in your windows box, you get Windows and Linux drivers. If you mount it under Linux, you only get the Linux drivers. I guess this is a "you don’t need it anyway" scenario, and as such classified as ‘good intentions’. However, it’s pretty annoying if you want to copy the Windows drivers to a fileshare for the other Windows boxes to access… sigh.

This is on Ubuntu, should be the same for all others. You need bluez-utils already installed, and have your phone paired with the PC.

/etc/ppp/pap-secrets

*       mobistar

/etc/ppp/chat-gprs

” AT
OK ‘AT&F’
OK ‘ATV1E0S0=0&D2&C1’
#OK ‘AT+CMEE=1’
OK ‘AT+cgdcont=1,"IP","mworld.be"’
OK-AT-OK ATD*99***1#
CONNECT ""

/etc/peers/gprs

/dev/rfcomm0 115200
connect ‘/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat-gprs’
noauth
defaultroute
debug
user mobistar 

/root/bin/umts.sh 

#!/bin/bash
rfcomm release 0 2>/dev/null
rfcomm bind 0 00:12:D1:6E:9D:47 1
pon gprs
plog -f
poff

Substitute 00:12:D1:6E:9D:47 with your phone’s mac address (see hcitool scan)

Now running "/root/bin/umts.sh" should do the trick!

While upgrading my Ubuntu from 7.04 to 7.10 to 8.04 I encountered some errors starting up Konqueror or opening a file chooser dialog. The popup would read "No MIME types installed", and there would be no files listed. Autocompletion on the input box would work though…

After looking around, blaming a KDE version upgrade, or configuration problems, or … I found that the /var filesystem had been full at one point in time, and while there was space now, something got corrupted.

Cleaning out /var/tmp/kdecache-<username> should solve the problem for you if you have it too. (No need to re-login, I think) 

This afternoon the airconditioning units of the NMV room at Versatel Nossegem (where I have my kit colocated) all failed together (yes, clustering is great, so you can all go down at once!). This made the temperature rise from a nice and fresh 22°C to 65° in some places of the room.

In the meanwhile everything’s restored, but I just had a server act up a little in such a way that I had to powercycle it to get it back into gear. After this I could clearly see there were some disk problems causing above acting up. Apparently the heat had given my second disk (in software RAID1) some delusions of grandeur:

hda: Maxtor 6Y080L0, ATA DISK drive
hdc: ÿ, ATA DISK drive
hda: max request size: 128KiB hda: 156250000 sectors (80000 MB) w/2048KiB Cache, CHS=65535/16/63, (U)DMA
hda: cache flushes supported
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3 hda4
hdc: max request size: 1024KiB
hdc: 18374966859414961920 sectors (143554428589 MB) w/32640KiB Cache, CHS=65535/255/63

143554TB of IDE disk, with 32 megs of cache! Aircon failures clearly improve your harddisks, I can highly recommend them! 🙁

Still hadn’t upgraded some servers to etch, apparently. So did some upgrades this weekend, and got a call today that my webmail (horde 2 imp 3 based) no longer worked. Only displayed a few errors like Notice: Only variable references should be returned by reference in /usr/share/horde2/lib/Auth.php on line 80.

Luckily I found an old blog post which explains what you need to do to make the code newer-PHP-compliant 😀 

 Turns out we had an MMS stream that needed to be saved again, I used to have some tool that did that but it wasn’t all that great and in the meanwhile my PC got reinstalled so I went to look for a solution again. Streamripper doesn’t do MMS (or so it seems), so I landed at Swiss Army Knife VideoLAN .

What to do:

1. Save your ASF file
2. Open it up in an editor and copy/paste the mms:// url
3. Open up your commandline (if vlc(.exe) isn’t in your path, change to your VLC directory or type the full path)
4. vlc -vvv mms://foo –sout file/avi:bar.avi (replace foo by your mms url and bar.avi by your desired output file)

Could it be any easier? 

Probably, but still. 😉 

Today, I got up early (surely for a weekend) to go to the Tones Dumping Day. Doors opened at 10. I got there at 10:06, and got handed ticket number 129. 129, eck! So I stood there waiting about 3 hours to get my stuff (or rather, my wife’s and my sister’s stuff); still it was pretty much worth it. 1GB PC3200 DDR sticks went from 89.90 to 43.90, that’s quite the steep curve 🙂 So I got a gigabyte… or rather 5, heh. Other stuff was marked down as well, leaving me with a "profit" of over 200 euro’s. Pretty nice!

On our way to Belgium we stopped by Pearl in Basel. I was looking for a Re-volt Intelli-Plug , which is a USB-controlled power plug. As the store was in Switzerland and they have different power plugs there I wasn’t very hopeful of finding it there, but luckily I did 🙂 Also went out there (after being there for >1.5h) with a 4-channel video-output switcher (PC+Wii+NES and only 2 SCART connectors on our TV), some smaller parts, some clipart stuff for Diana, etc. Whew, never let me into a store like that again, there’s way too much “cheap things” in there (adding up the price of “cheap things” cheap gets a different meaning though). Cool store, lots of stuff (even non-computer), a bit far to drive to when not in Switzerland/Germany though 😉 But there’s a webshop… 🙂