I just spent 20 minutes attempting to figure out how to install an SSH Server on Mac OS X (10.6.2). Turns out it was pretty much a waste of time, because it was already installed, it just needed turned on. I figure I will make a note of this in case anyone else tries to do it and also struggles. Maybe it’s only me that didn’t realise this at first.
Go to System Preferences, Sharing, then check the “Remote Login” box. Job done.
On this new iMac I have, I wanted to be able to download images from my Canon EOS 400D. Canon’s web site allows you to install updates, but not the actual software. Thankfully, someone found the easy way to get it installed from the update software on Canon’s website.
I got myself a Nokia N97 yesterday. It’s rather nice, and I just wasn’t ever going to get an iPhone to tell you the truth. I’ve ventured away from Nokia in the past and regretted it, so I’ve been sticking with them solidly for the past couple of years and probably won’t go elsewhere unless there’s a really good reason.
So I got this N97. It’s so packaged full with features, I’ll never comment about all of them in one post, so here’s a post about the first main thing I’ve tried that didn’t work totally awesome – transferring music.
The thing comes with 32GB of disk space. Now that’s sweet. I don’t tend to carry about all my music with me, I currently have 17GB of music on my iPod so I figured I’d put that on my N97. The phone comes with various applications for your PC, one of which is called Nokia Music. It’s rather clunky, moreso than iTunes (no, really). And it’s not good at transferring the music over.
I started it going and after a heck of a long time it was still only 30% of the way through. I should have timed it, but the worrying part was that it said that there was 2 hours 42 mins to go, then later there was 3 hours to go, then later still 3hr 12min, then later still 3h 24min. It wasn’t looking hopeful. It got as far as transferring 1159 tracks, and I hit the cancel button.
At this point, those tracks were on my N97.
Later, I started it again, assuming that it would pick up where it left off. Except it seemed to start from the beginning. I let it get to about 73 tracks done and hit cancel – this time, no extra tracks were on the phone. Strange.
So I’ve given up and am transferring them by having the N97 connected as a mass storage device. It’s much quicker doing it this way – it’s transferring at around 3.5MB/sec. Which is still pathetic since USB 2.0 should allow 480Mbit/sec, but it’s massively faster than it was before.
The only potential is that it’ll transfer all the music over, but the N97 might not pick it up and I’ll have to use Nokia Music. I really hope not.
[ Added later ]
The transfer hasn’t finished yet, but I’ve spotted that this is a documented method of transferring the music, and if the N97 doesn’t immediately notice the music, I can refresh the library. Sweet.
Have You Seen This Cat? Or maybe you’ve seen this dog.
Bizarrely, I managed to spot the car that goes around taking photos of everywhere for Google Maps Street View… in Google Maps Street View.
I have finally found some good instructions on how to convert videos to an MP4, such that I can play it on my iPod. Clearly, this works only if you’re interested in doing this on Debian, but since that’s what I use, it’s good enough for me.
Yesterday morning and this morning we had the sunrise turning the sky red.
Morning sunrise #1
Morning sunrise #2
Morning sunrise #3
It was sweet. Here’s a view of Constitution Street in Leith, without roadworks while they take a break for a few months from doing the tram works.
Constitution Street, Leith
Huzzah! I have located the online version of the manual for the Samsung J700 mobile phone. My wife and daughter both have one, they’re not too bad for a cheap’n'cheerful phone.
Sigh.
There’s a facebook “virus” doing the rounds. Not really a virus in the sense that it’ll damage your computer, but one of these pathetic messages that suggest you forward it to your friends. Here’s the content:
Reply Attention all Facebook users
Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,
There have been many members complaining that Facebook
is becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason is
that there are too many non-active Facebook members
And on the other side too many new Facebook members.
We will be sending this messages around to see if the
Members are active or not,If you’re active please send
to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active
Those who do not send this message within 2 weeks,
The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,
If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you send
message to show me that your active and not deleted.Founder of Facebook
Mark Zuckerbe
The thing that’s utterly stupid about it is that if Facebook wanted to know who used Facebook, they’d look in their database to see who logs in. You have to log in to see messages, after all.
I have now received this message four times this morning alone. Some of my “friends” need a good slap across the face.
If you ever worked the support phones while doing an IT job, you’ll find this video quite funny. I find it hilarious, and it’s, like, about 10 years since I did that shit. Brings it all back. Sweet.
So I use definr.com as my dictionary of choice usually. Except today, when it appears to have been replaced by a link to qubes.org. Bizarre.
So it’s been three weeks since I last posted on here appearently. It’s flown by.
It transpired that Jo didn’t have the mumps, instead she had an infection in her salivary glands and this then caused an abcess in her submandibular gland which had to be operated on under a GA.
She’s a lot better now, thankfully.
Other than that, I had another set of “symptoms” kick my ass during the week, but it seems to have passed now. I had the pins and needles in my right hand, mainly in my palm, for about 3 days, plus I had myokymia in my right eye for a day and my balance went a little haywire in the middle of it all. Hey ho.
Things currently appear to have calmed down. I’m now remembering how to play the Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, which I’ve remembered three quarters of during the week; I learnt it many years ago but have forgotten it, and since I don’t read music that well and learn everything by ear, it takes me a few days to remember it all again. But I’m getting there. After that, I’ve decided to learn Fantaisie-Impromptu by Chopin, mainly because it sounds dead tricky but I suspect it probably isn’t.
And finally… I have been watching avidly as Federer gets knocked off his World #1 position. What I couldn’t understand was why the entire planet had forgotten how to work out ATP rankings as everyone, including the ATP themselves, seemed to think that Nadal needed to win in Cincinnati to get World #1 when Fed went out early. I spent a couple of days wondering whether I just couldn’t add until everyone then realised that players drop points when they do worse in a tournament compared to last year. So I felt a little better after that. And watching Murray demolish his opponents on his way to the final has been somewhat handy, especially because it was only a couple of months ago I was wondering whether his temper was going to get the better of him. Today he plays Novak in the final, and it could go either way, to be honest. I’m sitting on the fence on this one for a change.
So I usually don’t get xkcd. I think it’s usually just over my head. Or maybe I’m not enough of a geek to get it. Anyway, the one I do like is #149. It just totally sums up my use of sudo every single day at work. Quality.
It helps, though, that I have sudo on pretty much everything at work. Otherwise… like, #149 wouldn’t hit the mark quite so well.
The second game of chess I played against my father in law ended much quicker than the first. This time I was black and he resigned after move #17. Click on the image on the right to see all the moves plus the final position. The thing is that everything was completely even at move #13. It’s interesting to see how a chess game can suddenly change in the space of just a couple of moves.
Of course, I have no real idea what I’m doing. The main thing I can do is to try out a variety of things while I wait on the next move from the old boy; we’re playing by e-mail, you see. So I have my board on my PC and I just try out this and that on the board itself, then revert it back to the “real” position to try something else. I find this much easier that attempting to visualise it in my head. Hence, if I played in “real life”, I’d likely get thumped.
The most embarrassing things about America is a rather comical article, and somewhat true as well. I’m no expert on America (or, indeed, the United States of America, which I assume they are talking about; that’s another rant I’ll have some other time) but I’ve been there three times (LA, NY, Boston) and know a little about it. Especially the fat thing. People in LA are just unbelievably morbidly obese. I honestly thought everyone in the US must be like that, until I hit New York and discovered that it’s actually not like that everywhere. People in New York actually just look the same size as in the UK.
For some reason, I feel the need to point out that the 7th point mentions N’Sync despite having a picture of the Backstreet Boys. I am fully aware that I’m outing myself as knowing something about the Backstreet Boys here. But I do have 3 daughters, so I’ll blame them.
I don’t often get to the cinema, but I did today. Went to see Kung Fu Panda with my eight year old daughter. Oh – this post should be spoiler free, if you’re thinking of going to see it.
First off, I’ll lay my cards on the table. I’ve met Jack Black. He’s awesome.
And now on to the film. If Jack Black hadn’t been the voice of the main character, this film would rank as pretty lame. There was pretty minimal actual plot throughout the 92 minutes, I can’t think of a single sub-plot in the entire thing. The main moral of the story is just insane; you’d have to be completely naive to believe this could happen in real life. I know this film is for kids, but let’s at least be somewhat believable, eh? And the film also had a lot of slow-mo stuff of the kung fu, which would just confuse the hell out of kids who have no experience of this from older films.
It is watchable, though. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go see it – as I say, Jack Black is doing his usual stuff in it, so if you like his style, you’ll think the film is OK. But just don’t expect another Finding Nemo, which is just in another league to this.
Let’s say you’re like me. And if you’re exactly like me, you have a vmware server running on your Windows XP box on which you have a linux system running.
Mine is Debian Etch. Don’t shoot me.
When I installed Debian Etch, I chose to use LVM as it allows me to easily increase the size of any partition I have when it’s starting to fill up. I can’t be bothered with many partitions; I’m not running a production server here, so I just have one partition for the entire system. It works for me; honest. Anyway, when the disk starts to fill up and I’ve nothing I want to delete, I need to increase the disk size, and I always forget how to do it. But it’s really easy.
First off, you need to create a new disk, which you do within the vmware server console. After that, the basic commands I run to add a new hard disk to an existing LVM are:
pvcreate /dev/hdb
vgextend blackline-2 /dev/hdb
lvextend -l+511 /dev/blackline-2/root
resize2fs /dev/blackline-2/root
Honest; that is it (well, you might need to run these using ‘sudo’ if you are not the su first). First off, if you don’t know what these commands mean, then look at the man page; for example:
man pvcreate
I needed to display various pieces of information so I could work out some of those values in my above example. Let’s take those commands one at a time.
To work out /dev/hdb, I needed to go in to the vmware server console from where I added the physical drive. I needed to look to see what the configuration said that disk was called – it was called IDE 0:1 when I did it, therefore that mapped to /dev/hdb. If it had been IDE 0:2 then it would be /dev/hdc, and so on. If it hadn’t been IDE and had instead been SCSI, such as SCSI 0:1, then I’m reasonably sure /dev/sdb would be the one you want.
To work out blackline-2, I needed to display the details of the volume group. The vgdisplay command is the one you want here:
root@blackline-2:~# vgdisplay --- Volume group --- VG Name blackline-2 System ID Format lvm2 Metadata Areas 3 Metadata Sequence No 8 VG Access read/write VG Status resizable MAX LV 0 Cur LV 2 Open LV 2 Max PV 0 Cur PV 3 Act PV 3 VG Size 6.25 GB PE Size 4.00 MB Total PE 1600 Alloc PE / Size 1600 / 6.25 GB Free PE / Size 0 / 0 VG UUID WBkTAA-ueCR-BGVV-3Rv2-voFa-A3Ep-tLYYYx
That, incidentally, is the output after I added the disk and did all the above commands, just in case you’re wondering. Anyway, the “VG Name” value is all you’re needing.
This looks tricky, but really isn’t. The last parameter is the easiest one to explain, so I’ll do that first. All we’re looking for is the logical volume name, so let’s just display them all:
root@blackline-2:~# lvdisplay --- Logical volume --- LV Name /dev/blackline-2/root VG Name blackline-2 LV UUID eAP1nx-32Z3-W4bO-V57q-aOGM-RNld-PnPKR6 LV Write Access read/write LV Status available # open 1 LV Size 6.03 GB Current LE 1544 Segments 3 Allocation inherit Read ahead sectors 0 Block device 254:0 --- Logical volume --- LV Name /dev/blackline-2/swap_1 VG Name blackline-2 LV UUID sFTHXf-1OfG-ataF-Y6Eg-MW43-csxZ-NpxX1M LV Write Access read/write LV Status available # open 2 LV Size 224.00 MB Current LE 56 Segments 1 Allocation inherit Read ahead sectors 0 Block device 254:1
Here you’ll notice I have 2 logical volumes, and one is clearly for root and the other for swap. Therefore, the logical volume name I needed to know when I was deciding which volume to extend was /dev/blackline-2/root. And as you can see, the VG Name that we got earlier is here too, just to confirm that the LV is part of that VG.
The other parameter is simply telling the command how many “units” of new hard disk space we want to add to this partition. Assuming you’ve done the other commands by now, running vgdisplay is what you’re wanting to do, and you need to look at the values of the “Total PE” and “Alloc PE / Size” keys. Or, indeed, just look at the “Free PE / Size” key, which should just be the same as the total less the allocated PE. I just ran it the now and here’s what I got:
Total PE 3390
Alloc PE / Size 2111 / 8.25 GB
Free PE / Size 1279 / 5.00 GB
So, we have 1279 units to add. And I’m going to add them all, so my command will be:
lvextend -l+1279 /dev/blackline-2/root
Let’s see what happens when I run that plus the final command (resize2fs /dev/blackline-2/root), and I’ll run df -h before and after doing all that:
root@blackline-2:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/blackline--2-root
8.0G 5.9G 1.7G 78% /
tmpfs 63M 0 63M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 72K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 63M 0 63M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 236M 32M 193M 15% /boot
root@blackline-2:~# lvextend -l+1279 /dev/blackline-2/root
Extending logical volume root to 13.02 GB
Logical volume root successfully resized
root@blackline-2:~# resize2fs /dev/blackline-2/root
resize2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
Filesystem at /dev/blackline-2/root is mounted on /; on-line resizing required
old desc_blocks = 1, new_desc_blocks = 1
Performing an on-line resize of /dev/blackline-2/root to 3414016 (4k) blocks.
The filesystem on /dev/blackline-2/root is now 3414016 blocks long.
root@blackline-2:~# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/blackline--2-root
13G 5.9G 6.4G 48% /
tmpfs 63M 0 63M 0% /lib/init/rw
udev 10M 72K 10M 1% /dev
tmpfs 63M 0 63M 0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda1 236M 32M 193M 15% /boot
All done! My hard disk is now 5GB larger. Sweet!
Plenty to do today. Another session at the pool, then lunch, took Lauren to a session at the sports centre, took the younger two kids to a play session, back to the cabin, showered and the kids played, off to a carvery for dinner, then on to a disco, then all back here. We’re bushed!
Jo is managing to get along fine despite having a broken collar bone. It probably helps being 1 year old, mind you.
I tell you what. The swimming pool here is superb. It’s absolutely massive and there are loads of slides. You could literally spend all day in it!
