Recovery (Not Data Recovery)

Monday we were hit by a car (more a truck) and I have spent the last few days getting over the ‘injuries’. Mostly just a sore neck now, but I had sore knees at the time.

Our Car:

The car that his us:

And because we were hit so hard, the car we ran into:

Not the way I had envisaged ending a game of minigolf, but what am I to do. The rest of the family is ok: mum is a bit shaken and coming to a stop a lights will not be an easy thing to do for a while.

I guess I better describe a little of what happened. We were driving down Cantebury road, 5 minutes from home, when we slowed to a stop a fair distance from the lights. There was either an accident up ahead or a truck doing a slow U turn that had cause the traffic to build up. Once we came to a stop, we heard a load screeching coming from behind us. The next thing I know we were slammed forward. I don’t know how long it was before we crashed into the car in front but dad pulled hard left to get out of the traffic. We hit the car in front of us about half a meter from the driver side of the car: we almost missed it. The guy driver the F100 that hit us was an elderly gentleman, that I guess was not quite paying attention and didn’t slow down.

I was hoping to look at setting up my server for CVS that evening and formatting my computer yesterday or today. What I have managed to do is just sit relax and do some stretching. I still need to format my laptop so that it is nice and fresh for when I go back to work on Monday :(

-= Comments
1. Andrew B Coathup | January 11th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Glad you are all ok. Though you should keep an eye on the whiplash.

You must have been hit pretty hard as F100’s don’t tend to dent easy.

What is the etiquette on displaying someone’s car registration on the internet? I am juggling it in my mind. Still undecided. There isn’t a publicly accessible database that I know of for looking up owners details based on registration.

2. pimaster | January 12th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
I thought about it at the time and I wasn’t very concerned. I have now fixed it up.

3. Matthew Delves | January 12th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Good to hear you are okay. I would suggest doing a Murcotts ( http://www.murcott.com.au/ ) defensive driving course which is always good. Though would be more applicable to the elderly gentlemen rather than you (or any member of your family). Hope you recovery is swift and you get back on the road quickly.

4. Clinton | January 15th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Yikes - that’s some major energy. Nobody wins when cars start acting like dodge-em’ cars… :( It’s good to hear you and your family are okay - may you never have to blog on this topic again!

5. Joshua Hayes | January 24th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Being in a car accident is never nice. I remember when my brother got T-boned by a Grey 4-wheel drive at about 90km/h that ran a red light. It wasn’t pretty. The passenger side of the car was pressed into about where your hand break is. The windows imploded, and the windscreen was cracked just about cracked in half. Luckily enough he only came out of it a bit shaken up and a few scratches and bruises.

I’m glad nobody in your family was injured. Oh yeah and Matt I agree, the old man should go for some driving courses :)

Slow move to linux - Resolving computer names with wins

For a while know I have wanted to make a greater move to linux. My fear has been being stuck without a usable computer (either the replacement would be too slow or the machine would not be in a stable state). Running my laptop on Fedora Core 5 for the past ~9 months has been rather good for testing the waters. I need to reformat the laptop because of issues within the package management ( I tried to get wireless working before it was introduced into the repository, so had to compile from source, also tried to compile alsa from source, not sure why any more ). Fedora Core 6 is also out so I thought I would try to start with a clean slate.

One thing that troubles me is updates are all of the net. If I want more than one computer to be on the same distro and I want to play around with the distro more often, then I need a closer copy of those repositries.

Step 1. Setup Box with those repositries.
I setup a box a while ago ( can’t believe I didn’t blog it ) as a potential server. I’ve setup apache and copied the installers off of the cd into a directory.
The box will update itself from its own server.

Step 2. Connect to the box from another machine.
I have had various problems with this. It is always easy to ping the ip address, but I don’t won’t to be that simple. Enabling samba and wins support in linux is easy enough.
To get samba running you just need to set it as a startup service. There is a services menu item in fedora.
To get wins support in samba, I had to edit /etc/samba/smb.conf ; find ( or add ) wins support = yes

That’s fine. I can do a nmblookup to find the computer name, but why can’t I ping it. I turned on a Windows box and it can ping it, obviously the machine doesn’t know that it can use wins to resolve names.
/etc/hosts is a file to hardcode computer names to ip addresses.
/etc/resolv.conf is a file to specify nameservers
/etc/host.conf I though would hold the answer. Mine has a line “order hosts, bind”. I found out that hosts refers to the hosts file, and bind refers to a DNS lookup. I thought that if I added in there wins I would be set. But it is an invalid entry.

There is another file which took my a while to find (samba doc): /etc/nsswitch.conf. In it is the line “hosts: files dns”
Adding wins in there saved the day (had to restart network services before it was affected of course). I know have the ability (knowledge) to ping the box by machine name. Hazzar. It only took me 2-3 days. Next I think will be CVS. I have set it up before, but need to setup it up on a real machine. Then it will be getting a good sync process happening for the packages (core updates and extras)

-= Comments
1. Jonathan | January 8th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Oh, cool. I’ve been looking to setup a machine with fedora (that is what you have on the server) and I’ve got one with RedHat (Think it’s called RH EL 4.3)
Remember to tell us how you set it up for CVS!

2. Wireless Networking | July 13th, 2008 at 1:09 am
Good article, keep em coming

Whose computer is it?

I sold my soul the other weekend. I have been without a decent music player for a while and I seen the price of an iPod drop. I checked out the state of iPod Linux and thought that I might be able to get by. I have tried iTunes before when I won the iPod shuffle and wasn’t very happy with it. I was using a winamp plugin to put music on it.

The 80gb iPod video presents a different problem. How do I get games and video content onto the damn thing.
So I installed iTunes again. Put some music the old way. Turned off music sync.
Downloaded Happy Tree Friends videos and they look great.
I’ve got some linux pod casts happening and I thought all was great.

I looked through the menu items and found “Add folder to library”. I was intrigued. Looked it up in help and found that it stored a ‘pointer’ to the actual folder. Fantastic I thought. So I added my music collection.

Wrong.

Stupid thing goes and touches all of my files and makes some modifications to the headers.
I know have to change the files back so that my backup routine isn’t out of sync and work harder at getting linux on the thing.

-= Comments
1. pimaster | December 11th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
Or I could have taken logical approach and tried it on a smaller scale.
In my defence, I did try to get it running under VMWare, but I think I had some troubles with passing the USB connection through.

2. Gatesy | December 13th, 2006 at 12:30 am
I never liked the iTunes way much, either - especially the "keep my library organised" option; unless you’re starting from scratch, that’s a killer

3. Xavier | December 22nd, 2006 at 11:47 am
Have you tried RockBox? Not sure if they’ve got it running on the newest of new versions, but it was stable on the 5th gens.

4. pimaster | December 22nd, 2006 at 1:17 pm
Thanks for the tip. From the web site "Nano 2nd gen and 80GB Video 5.5th gen are not supported" so I’ll keep an eye on it.

Yet Another Coding Oversight

So I’ve been writing a fair bit of code lately. But I haven’t done it in a while.

I wrote this beautiful bug:
[java]
checkItem = result.get(item.getNumber());
if(checkItem == null)
{
result.put(item.getNumber(), new ViewItem(item));
}
checkItem.getDetails().add(new DetailsView(details));

No need to know what Items and Details really are. You can think of items having details if you need to know: let’s see how long it takes someone to spot it.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | November 29th, 2006 at 2:33 pm
The last line will always (attempt to) execute regardless of the check for null above it.

Since I don’t know what the intention is I can’t suggest a solution. I’ll also avoid starting a ‘why not do it this way’ discussion

Tis been a while since I bought a new game

.. and today I bought two.

Half Life 2 Episode 1. Installed at 3:00pm, and have just finished playing it (Midnight) (9 hours minus tea and some time to help my dad). Fantastic game. Zombie killing. More Zombie killing. General puzzels to break up the Zombie killing. Watch Zombies take out combine (and vice versa) and clean up the rest. There are also a few areas where you get to admire all of the scenery which takes your breathe away at 1920×1200 with all the perty features turned up.

The other game is Lego Star Wars 2. I’m hoping that it is as good as the first and plan on finishing most of the levels with my brother. It should take a little longer than a day to complete though.

-= Comments
1. Zooba | November 19th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
I hate finishing games that quickly. That’s why I buy my games from EB; if I finish it too quickly I can return it and get another one

2. pimaster | November 19th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Episode 1 was meant to have a play time of around 5 hours. I haven’t been dissapointed and I don’t know if you can return a game that is activated on steam (depending on how brain dead the cashier is) as the game is tied to my account forever.

And just out of coincedence, I did buy it from EB

Looking forward

So I went out today and spent some cash.
2×160 gb hard disks. This time I will raid1 them. Installing windows as we speak and everything is running sweet.
1xIDE/SATA enclosure for the good disk that came out of the machine. Set it up and I will be able to use it for many things.
1xnew old keyboard. Found another keyboard which is almost exactly like the one I had. It has a ps/2 plug instead of dim. But the keys are dirty. Doesn’t matter though since I plan on pulling it apart and just using the circuitry.

Opera news:
Friday 24th is when I want to go.
There are $50 tickets available, but I think I’m going to have to go for th $80 set so that I can be a little further center.
These seats are in the balcony. The floor is just a little too expensive for something I may not understand.
I’ll be looking for people to confirm early so I can get the seats.

Another loss for me

A month after I lost my keyboard, I lose a disk out of my RAID 0 array. I haven’t gotten over my keyboard and it does this to me. I know things come in 3’s, but if anything happens to my screens I may just lose it completely.

Don’t panic too much, I was able to boot it up after 4-5 hours of trying and get the last of my data off the machine. I had a backup from a couple of days earlier, but I wanted to backup the 14gb of Steam Apps that I had.
So I spent most of a day trying to re-install windows, only to finally realise that the disk I was installing onto was the bad one. Poo. Switch disks around and try again. I know have to go and “reset” my life. I also need to go out and buy another disk.

I have started working on a new project on site. We have just been setup with newish sort of machines (P4’s without HT or dual core, even though the sticker says HT. Might be a windows 2k thing). I’m almost liking the keyboard, except the stroke feels too long. I’m tempted to go out and get something close, because living without the windows key is almost killing me.

In non-geek, social news - I have no friends who are able to come see an Opera with me. They either have things to do, have no money or are trying to save.
Just wondering if there are any others in the crowd who may be interested?

-= Comments
1. Andrew B Coathup | October 11th, 2006 at 1:03 am
Buy a new keyboard. Everything has to have its autumn.

A hard drive is just a hard drive. If you have the data, that is what matters. (I am a wee scared I have lost my email in my recent perge on my laptop)

As for the Opera. If you want to go, buy two tickets and take a friend who you will enjoy going with. You will have a much better time with a friend with you, and all it costs you is two tickets rather than one. That is the price for having poor friends. And as for Opera …. :p

2. Matthew Delves | October 11th, 2006 at 10:03 am
I might have to play the finance card. Though I am always a fan. Let me know when you are going to see it and I might be able to drag some friends along with me.

3. Mark | October 11th, 2006 at 10:51 am
Will you be wearing the cape to the Opera?

4. pimaster | October 11th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Last time I decided to just go with the Top hat, white gloves and cane. The funniest thing was that an older lady come up and stated that if I had a cape I would have completed the look.
The friends I was with thought that I paid her.

Yes, I think I’ll be wearing the cape and handing it in to the cloak room.