brett's logjam

I finally had had enough of trying to get Linux to work on 6-year old equipment. The problems I’d been having with Arbonne were the last straw. So, last weekend I went out (with Merrystar’s encouragement) and got a Powerbook (17-inch) and couldn’t be happier with it.

Of course, my network decided to retaliate against the interloper:

• My POS replacement wireless router (D-Link DI-524, which I do not recommend) stopped talking to the cable modem. Hours wasted with hard resets and reprogramming and more hard resets finally resulted in a working internet connection.

• I rebooted Arbonne to restore her wireless connection - yes, I know that you shouldn’t have to reboot a Linux box, but this is the only thing that worked to solve whatever Netgear MA301 - DI-524 wierdness was going on - and she lost her boot loader on the reboot. Four days later, with numerous attempts at installing from the same CDs that would work on Tsiolkovsky, I dragged her upstairs and did a network install of SuSE 10.0.

• Tsiolkovsky’s upgrade? Not so good. Installer barfed in the middle and the computer was down for a frantic 24 hours as I tried to restore the bootloader so Merrystar could use the Windows partition.

• While playing around with the bluetooth on the Powerbook, I wiped my phone’s address book clean. Oops.

That was last weekend, which I am never doing again. I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

Anyhow:

• Tsiolkovsky has been upgraded from RHEL 3.0 to SuSE 10.0 OSS. USB now works, though the wireless and automounter are still flaky. The Windows partition is now readable in Linux, which is a huge improvement.

• Arbonne has been converted into a headless server (no monitor, no desktop manager, no graphical environment) and has been renamed Lórien accordingly. Lórien is running SuSE 10.0 OSS, and her network problems continue - I couldn’t get the D-Link G card working at all, and the MA301 continues to fight with the wireless router. Also, I misbought a second 250GB drive, so I’m still running the 40GB drive for /. and the 250GB for /data. Oh, and I can’t access the internet from her for more than 10 seconds after boot with the wireless card. Grumble.

• Hithlum is my new Powerbook. She’s purty. I had originally named her Hísilómë, but all the accents didn’t translate well in the scripts and shells.

• My phone address updated flawlessly once I imported my contacts from Outlook to Address Book.app.

• Tigana remains as she ever has, running Windows 2000 and Red Hat 7.3. She slept through the whole debacle.

My mother’s work is in the latest issue of Belle Armoire. Check it out!

jwz - C’était un Rendezvous.

Garbage truck! PIGEONS! PEDESTIRAN! RED LIGHT! PIGEONS! DEAR GOD! HANG ON!

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

Trip: Please. Go. To. Sleep.

I’m going to close up the Daily Photo site. The daily format has its strengths (see Jim Brandenburg’s Chased By The Light for the idea in print, and Dean Allen’s Daily Oliver for a great online version), but it takes a lot of time and effort. The textpattern engine made it possible to put the site together quickly, but there are a lot of steps to process each picture. Each batch of photos took several hours every month — hours I could be taking more pictures!

I need something easier than that. That’s why I switched to a Mac — if I’m going to run UNIX, I may as well have it tightly-coupled with the hardware I get instead of spending days trying to get Linux working on a laptop. I’d much rather play with my son than play with an OS.

So, since the Daily Photo isn’t delivering what I want, I’m taking it down. Sorry.

I’m trying out the gallery software for solving the whole picture issue. Again, there are good things about it, and some things I don’t like one bit. So, the jury’s still out on it.

(You can take a peek at it if you’re interested. New Trip pictures!)

I suspect that when this is all said and done I will go and handroll something to create static pages on my home server and just call it done. Unless there’s a package that can automatically:

• pull the photos off the CF card,
• back them up my home server,
• copy them into a folder for editing,
• display them on the web,
• (rotating as appropriate),
• (and display EXIM data about the picture),
• allow some comments or captioning,
• not run me over my webhost’s limit,
• offer a RSS / Atom feed for updates,

and all while displaying the pictures in my own picky, idiosyncratic style.

Perhaps I ask too much. Any suggestions?

New Flotsam: switch.

Note to self: do not allow an IVR you design to show up on bypass lists.