I reinstalled my WinXP last weekend, and have been annoyed by this the entire week already. My last install just did it like that, too. Anyway, how to fix:

• Open regedit
• Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Keyboard Layout
• Create DWORD called Attributes and set the hexadecimal value to 00010000
• Reboot

Enjoy!

Open up a command prompt and typing sc delete <servicename> will remove a service. (and sc create will create one)

One has to wonder why you can’t do that through Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services though… 🙂 

Last post may 6th eh… Hmm. Let’s blast out some posts.

Via Fabian, a nice 4-2.5"-disks-in-5.25"-form-factor storage backplane . Funky. I guess 2.5" disks are still slower and more expensive than "regular" 3.5" ones, but this is a nice start 😉

When I read this , I thought "yea, if you give them free chocolate, they’ll get some fat fingers and you’ll be able to see on the keyboard what they typed", but no… no such sleuthing required. People just tell you their passwords if you give them chocolate 🙂

Goddamnit, VMware server just gave me a few more tens of grey hair. It appears to be a hell of a job to get your Linux clients to keep time correctly… well, unless you know exactly what you need. So here it is, courtesy of 2 hours of googling and trying out + magic words from Ruben :

• Set your kernel timing to 100Hz
• Add the following to your kernelboot commandline: clock=pit nosmp noapic nolapic

Done! Woot. etc. *sigh*

(topic title courtesy of Bernard ) 

I guess it’s not always as easy as it seems…

Time for another rant… when writing PHP code, PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE use <?php instead of the short-sucky <? tag to start your PHP code. This is disabled on many machines, including all of mine. This means whenever I find such an application I want to use, I install it on my server and it goes bork. Sometimes, everywhere <?php is used except in 1 or 2 places, making the thing fail when you’re least expecting it.

This  implies you have to use <?php echo instead of <?= too, and yes, that is more work, but it’s certainly much nicer, as I don’t have to open each and every .php and .inc and .whatever file, replacing <?= by <?php echo, <? by <?php and then <?phpphp by <?php, right?

Yes PowerAdmin , RackTables , ZenPhoto , I’m looking at you. 

Edit: Oh look, WordPress doesn’t make &lt; out of < in the post title – bug reported. I think.

Since today I have DVB-T working. I have a Pinnacle PCTV 300i PCI card, which is a Analog PAL + DVB-T tuner card. It is supported onder Linux, however I couldn’t get the DVT part to work.

Geert had a Hauppauge DVB-T USB stick since a few days which I could borrow, to make sure I had good reception with my old trusty analog UHF/VHF antenna. After some fumbling with the kernel modules and firmware his USB stick was up and running with reception, but my PCI card still didn’t want to budge. Armed with the knowledge that reception was good but the thing didn’t work, I asked the question in #linuxtv on freenode (again, I already tried a few times). Luckily, mkrufky/Michael Krufky was there to help me, but unfortunately his first few attempts I had already tried, modules already loaded etc. However, after I pasted something particular out of the dmesg output, bells started ringing…

[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tda9887 1-0043: tda988[5/6/7] found @ 0x43 (tuner)
[21|23:11:10] < sid3windr> tuner 1-0060: Chip ID is not zero. It is not a TEA5767
[21|23:11:16] < sid3windr> and then tuner 1-0060: microtune MT2050 found, OK
[21|23:11:28] < sid3windr> (this last one appears twice btw, perhaps that isn’t normal?)
[21|23:12:24] < mkrufky> it’s supposed to be a mt2032
[21|23:12:39] < sid3windr> oh?
(…)
[21|23:16:37] < sid3windr> HAHA
[21|23:16:38] < sid3windr> it works
[21|23:16:53] < sid3windr> mkrufky rocks. 

He already left the channel, but I’ll be sure to let him know. The module misdetected the tuner type, so here’s how to force it: 

It’ll still say the same in dmesg, but! tuning will work. 

root@khalid:~# cat be-Veltem
# VRT Veltem
# T freq bw fec_hi fec_lo mod transmission-mode guard-interval hierarchy
T 482000000 8MHz 1/2 NONE QAM64 8k 1/4 NONE

-> scan be-Veltem (scan from dvb-utils), and you should find 11 channels provided by VRT. If you’re closer to another broadcasting station (check vrt.be for the list), you can adjust the frequency there.

DVB under Linux still seems to be a bit quirky at times (and ick, tuning time is quite slow), but it works in MythTV. I’m watching remote, and the image stuff is rather slow at the moment. Have to figure out why, but my backend server is also resyncing one of its md arrays, so it’s a bit loaded… 

I’m going tomorrow. If you’re there, lemme know! I’ll probably be seeing nghtwsh, thevoke, daviper, wonko, geert, ghosty, and some others that may be there 🙂

If you’re running Debian Sarge, have a >2TB ext3 volume and your fsck.ext3 exits with signal 11 leaving the damn thing all dirty and stuff, get 1.39+1.40-WIP from backports.org . This fixed the problem for me on my home box (2.4T) and one of the servers here at work (4.7T). Takes a long while to fsck, but at least it gets through instead of crashing somewhere half way!