I’ve rebuilt my kernel about a dozen times so far (ok, three) and each time it has TURNED OFF my computer when it has come to building the APM stuff. I think that it might have something to do with the “suspend to disk” functionality, but I’m not sure. I’ve disabled that part, and I’m rebuilding yet again.
Tag Archives: tech
APM missing
So it turns out that the FC2 kernel doesn’t have APM in it. I don’t know if I missed something, or if that’s just how it is. But, in consequence, it can’t tell how much battery life I have, and so I’ll never know, until it turns off, that I’m low. Also, my long hope that suspend will *finally* work is yet to be realized.
So, although it has been close to 4 years since I’ve done a kernel rebuild, I guess I’m going to have to remind myself how it’s done and try to build APM into the kernel. I’ll see, while I’m at it, if I can strip out anything else unnecessary. Always makes me a little nervous, but I suppose I can’t break it too badly that I can’t just boot back to the CD and restore it, so I suppose it’s all good.
On a related note, I’ve decided to pursue getting my LPI certification. It looks, at first glance, that level 1 will be pretty much a breeze, but level 2 looks like it contains a lot of stuff I know nothing about. But, one step at a time, and I’m sure that I’ll learn a lot even on level 1. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that I know far less than I think I do.
Dremel pumpkin carving
Inspired by the Dremel tool featured on Slashdot and armed by a complete lack of common sense, I went to Lowe’s to get a Dremel. I learned a number of things.
1) The people at Lowe’s are only marginally aware of Teh IntarWeb, and are completely unaware that their site was featured on a geek website. And they don’t actually have any of the fancy orange dremels in stock. But the regular MiniMite is pretty much the same thing, except that it comes with more bits.
2) The Dremel tool, although terrible at carving, is very good at shaving. That’s where you scoop the pumpkin very thin – perhaps a half inch or less thick – and then shave away the outer skin of the pumpkin to allow some light through. It is also very efficient at covering yourself and everything in a 4 foot radius with a fine mist of pumpkin. Do not attempt this indoors. You have been warned.
3) Chris still has all of my carving tools.
4) The battery doesn’t last very long. Presumably it lasts longer if permitted to attain a full charge, but I really really wanted to get started. So I don’t actually have a finished product that I can take pictures of and show you. Nor will I show you pictures of everything covered in an orange paste. That was unpleasant.
5) When you get those really cool ideas (“Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to work on pumpkins with a Dremel tool!”) you should go with it, rather than waiting for someone else to come out with a product 6 years later. In fact, we talked about this for the zillionth time at our pumpkin carving party on Sunday night. Those silly things you think to invent, someone else will invent and market while you’re thinking how cool it would be.
Ok, pictures later, if I actually get this done tomorrow. Don’t expect great things. But prices on pumpkins should come down next week, and then I’ll get a little more practice.
Fedora: Disclaimer
To be fair, I should mention that the majority of the problems that I had with my update to Fedora last night were related to the fact that I use a non-standard shell (zsh) and a non-standard window manager (Enlightenment). And, since each of these is vastly superior to anything that comes as a standard, I suppose it’s worth putting up with a little discomfort to get them working. However, why they aren’t shipped as default configurations I don’t know. KDE and Gnome, in particular, are bloated monstrosities and deserve only to die.
Upgrading to Fedora – more
I got done with the upgrade to Fedora, and a *lot* of stuff is broken. But, I suppose for the most part, I have a functioning system.
zsh is not behaving correctly – in particular, tab completion. Enlightenment is not quite right. startx is not running correctly, but starting in runlevel 5 started X ok. gvim is not right (I usually build it with some custom options).
But I think I can limp by until I get things as I like them again. Probably.
Upgrading from RedHat 8 to Fedora Core 2
I have tried for the last two days to find out an authoritative answer on this one, so I’m putting this here in the hopes that the next person won’t have to waste quite so much of their time. If you boot to a Fedora Core 2 CD, it will indeed detect RedHat 8 and offer to upgrade it to Fedora 2.
More details later. Specifically, I need discs 1-4, and I have only made 1.3 so far, so I don’t actually know for certain if this upgrade will be painless and non-destructive.
While I suppose I should have just tried rather than wasting all that time, I was concerned that I would lose data in the experiment. Also, I had hoped to save myself the time of downloading ISOs if it wasn’t going to work at all.
So, check back tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll have an upgraded Fedora machine by then, and, hopefully, it won’t be crippled by the experience. I suppose either way I’ll have a Fedora machine. If it cripples me, then I’ll probably back up critical data and start from scratch. I’d just rather not do that, since I invariably lose data in such a transition.
Howto … or … not
I spent more than 2 hours last night following a howto on upgrading from RedHat 8 to Fedora. Of course, it didn’t actually work, and I fear I may have broken a thing or two into the bargain. It wasn’t actually a surprise that it didn’t work, but it was still rather frustrating and disappointing. One keeps a faint spark alive that someday, some HowTo will actually work exactly as advertised. It’s that same spark that makes people believe that if they just elect a new president, everything will get all better again. Or if they just find the right diet, they’ll lose that extra 217 pounds.
Talk to the bot
This morning I started working on a little project that I’ve been thinking about for several years. The goal is to be able to talk to the bot. That is, the IRC bot. Probably ‘rosie’, the bot on the TM3 channel. (No, the channel is not publically accessible, so if you’re not already on there, don’t bother asking.) The goal is to be able to speak to her, and have her respond. That is, verbally.
Most of the software is already out there to make this happen. I’ll be using Sphinx for the voice recognition, and Festival for the speech. I already have Festival working, and have had for many years. Often I’ll have Festival read IRC conversations to me while I’m doing something else. Sphinx, however, seems much harder. I will apparently need to train it to understand me. Although, by default, I’m amazed at how well it already understand me, albeit with a very very limited vocabulary.
I have not yet figured out how to get train it. The documentation is clearly written for developers, not for users. And I don’t yet know how to make it as convenient as Festival – ie, acting as a input/output pipe. But I just started this morning. So we’ll see.
Small photographers, and living in an immaterial world
Ted mentioned today that he’ll be participating in DaddyCon while his wife is off presenting at a conference. Then he linked to a gallery of photos by his kids. Wow, Ted, what a great idea, and what a great perspective kids have. *Definitely* going to let my little person take more pictures.
Also, on the subject of small people, my Sarah made an interesting remark last night, which was a bit enlightening. I often sit with her while she’s falling asleep, and usually I’m working on my laptop, and often talking with folks on IRC. Last night, I was playing solitaire on my Palm. Sarah asked if I was playing alone, or with someone else. And, of course, by the time she has a computer, or a Palm, or whatever we’re using in 5 or 6 years, *everything* will probably be online all the time, wirelessly, so that makes sense for the world that she will live in. Presumably many of you already live there, with your PDA/Phone/Pager/Thingies. I’ve resisted that thus far, and not purely for financial reasons, although that’s part of it.
Being online all the time changes how we think about things, how we interact with people, and a lot of other things. Of course we don’t really know much about these changes, it being a very new phenomenon. One example, however, was brought to mind again this morning. Because I spend a lot of time on IRC, I’ve come to rely on the IRC bots. They store little tidbits of information so that I don’t have to. I rely on rosie for phone numbers and email addresses. I rely on fajita for Apache documentation, and the answers to frequently asked questions. I rely on Monty to … um … well, to be Monty. (If you don’t know Monty, no description is adequate, and if you do, none is necessary.)
So the strange consequence of this is that when I’m *not* online, I really want rosie’s help. She knows things that I don’t know, and would rather not have to look up. Of course, there are already folks who talk to their IRC bots by cell phone, or on their wireless PDAs, and I suppose I’m not far away from that. What I’d really like to do (and I hear it’s been done) is to hook up Sphinx and Festival, along with strategically placed microphones and speakers, so that I can speak to Rosie and Fajita as I move around my home.
Or, maybe that’s just a little too weird.
Snort and Acid on RedHat 9
For the record, in case anyone else googles for this at some time in the future …
Installed Snort and Acid at a customer site yesterday, on RedHat 9. The install went flawlessly. However, when I was configuring it, I could not make it log to mysql no matter what I tried. 3 hours later (to make a long story short) I asked on #snort, and was nudged in the right direction almost unintentionally. Turns out that RedHat has a config file /etc/sysconfig/snort in addition to the /etc/snort/snort.conf file, and settings appearing there (in the sysconfig location, that is) override settings in the snort.conf file. In particular, the ALERTMODE setting in that file was overriding my attempts to get Snort to log to mysql rather than to /var/log/snort. Commenting out that line removed that conflict.
As another note, mostly for my own benefit, I should mention that, in order to get the thing to listen on multiple interfaces, instead of just the one, I had to hack on the /etc/init.d/snortd script, and add:
INTERFACE=”-i ALL”
immediately following the if block that set INTERFACE to various other things. Once again, I’m sure there’s a *right* way to do that, but this worked. Working code, rough consensus, etc.