Bit Decay - Meta

New Computer Mostly Working

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 08:30:00 -0500

I bought some parts over the weekend to build a new computer. I got a motherboard, an AMD X2 processor, some RAM and a SATA hard drive. I put it together on Sunday and have been installing Gentoo ever since.

I finally got things configured to the point where I could log in to my own account on the machine last night. I got my web applications working this morning. I'm still mounting the old hard disk via NFS on the other machine, though. I want to figure out how to do LVM before I set up additional partitions on the hard drive.

Computer Woes

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:18:20 -0500

The computer that died was an AMD Athlon XP 2000 which was a pretty fast machine. I've been trying to setup up my next best machine other than my laptop to take over some if its duties until I can replace it. Unfortunately, that next best machine is a Pentium III 700 - about a third of the speed of the other machine. Builds are taking a very long time. On top of that, the 700 is the machine everyone else uses (two kids logged in directly on two different X consoles and my wife logged in via xdmcp) so it's really being taxed.

In any case, I did manage to get my TV tuner card installed and working with MythTV. Live TV works (viewed on my laptop - I doubt very much this machine is fast enough to actually watch TV on it) and I have it scheduled to record a movie tonight.

There's a computer show scheduled locally for this weekend. I'm hoping to be able to go there and see if I can put together a replacement system. If not, I'll probably end up buying from newegg.com. I have a saved configuration that I think will work.

Update:I tried running the MythTV client on the 700 last night. Not too bad! It was only using about 40% of the CPU. My 2.2GHz laptop runs at about 30-35%!

A while back I updated MythTV and switch to the modular X server on the 2000. At that point, the machine became unusable for watching video. I could never figure out what I lost during that upgrade but could never get MythTV to play smooth again.

Dead Computer

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:04:38 -0500

My main computer died last night so I'm now shopping for a replacement. I moved the hard drives to another machine and managed to get my home page working (the links across the top are driven by perl and postgresql). I'm surprised the blog software is working.

Server Problems

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Tue, 27 Dec 2005 13:31:19 -0500

I've been having problems with my workstation lately. Apache seems to "forget" about me after it's been running a while and starts returning 404s for any page off my homepage. Since the blog is on my workstation and not on my main server, that makes my blog randomly unavailable.

I've narrowed it down to a problem with the LDAP configuration. The apache server is spitting out messages saying "Can't contact LDAP server". I'm not sure exactly why that is, though.

Another Outage

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:54:48 -0500

This afternoon at about 5pm my DSL went out. I am now at Verizon's mercy. They are not my ISP but they do provide my local phone service. Apparently, they only promise to look into it within 24 hours. I have no idea when this will be back up.

Update: 10:13pm and the net is back! I wasn't expecting it back so quick.

Site Outage

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Mon, 12 Dec 2005 18:21:12 -0500

My web server wasn't serving my pages for the last couple of days and that includes the blog. I had done some Gentoo updates over the weekend and decided to figure out what was causing some problems with my LDAP setup. In the process, I broke a few other things. Apparently, apache restarted while things were broken and couldn't figure out where my home directory was. I just restarted apache and all appears well.

Things I'd like for Christmas

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 19:26:22 -0500

I thought this would be a good place to keep my Christmas wishlist. I'll add to this as I think of things I'd like to have. (No, I'm not expecting any readers of this blog [if there are any] to buy any of this for me unless that reader was a family member or friend.)

A calendar. I remember seeing their first set of posters and I think I still have them zipped up somewhere.

A gold coffee filter for my drip machine. The one-cup brewer makes excellent coffee. I'm hoping this gives similar results in the drip machine.

A new thermometer for coffee roasting (any on the page). I melted the lens on the one I bought by leaving it in the hot air stream too long. This caused it to loosen and allow the disc with the markings on it to spin throwing the thermometer out of calibration. I've pinched it tight again so it works ok but the lens is a bit distorted from melting.

A portable CD player that can play MP3s (and OGGs, too, if you can find one).

A small season ticket package. This is a great place to see a game and the Patriots are a good team. They have won three Atlantic League championships before any of the other teams have won two.

Hockey tickets to a Devils, Rangers or Trenton Thunder game.

Colaboration at Work

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 17:17:54 -0500

At a recent group meeting at work, someone brought up the topic of colaboration software. He thought it would be a great idea to have things like forums set up for us to support each other at work. Since many of us don't actually work together but we do work on similar technologies, there should be plenty of opportunity for us to help each other out. We could also have project related forums where information about a project could be stored to be available to anyone. A few other people in the group, myself included, had been involved in places where this type of stuff was encouraged and worked out well.

The manager running the meeting liked the idea and solicited volunteers to run with it. He met with us today to lay down some ground rules which were pretty much that he couldn't guarantee funding so costs should be kept low and it had to be open to everyone for reading but we should enforce accountability by requiring registration for posting. We decided to use some spare PCs as servers and open source tools to get things started.

I set up Serendipity and PhpBB on a Windows 2000 server with Apache and MySQL. A couple of us have started blogs and we'll conduct further meetings virtually via the forums. I'll post updates here as we progress.

Serendipity Updated

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Wed, 23 Feb 2005 18:01:35 -0500

I just updated Serendipity (my weblog software) to the latest version. I've been getting trackback spam from someone who seems to think my readers (if I have any) are poker addicts. Hopefully, some new spam control code will keep these from being accepted.

About Me

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 08:44:00 -0500

Several bloggers I've come across have put up a post to describe themselves. Here's mine.

Continue reading "About Me"

Power Supply Problem

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 18:39:31 -0500

My system died last night. Apparently, the power supply fan decided it didn't want to spin anymore. Fortunately, the power supply didn't appear to take anything else with it.

New Blog Software

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 22:27:20 -0500

I just installed Serendipity to replace Blosxom as my blogging software. I imported the old entries.

Blosxom was a fairly simple perl script that provided a plugin interface for adding extensions. The basic software only presented your blog entries to the world. You had to find other means to edit the entries. There were plugins to do this but it looked like it would take too much of my time to figure out how all of the plugins worked that I would need to get the interface up to my liking.

Serendipity appears to work out of the box. All I had to do was install mod_php and it works. I'd prefer a perl solution but I haven't been able to find one. At least it allows for PostgreSQL instead of requiring MySQL like most of these programs. I really did not want to have to install another database.

First cut at a style sheet

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Sat, 13 Nov 2004 00:35:00 -0500

I just put together a first pass at a style sheet for the site. It looks a little better but still needs work.

About this blog

nospam@example.com (Thomas Pfau) — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 22:06:00 -0500

My name is Tom Pfau. I decided to start this blog in an attempt to clear my thoughts and also to keep a bit of a journal of interesting things that happen to me.

I am using the Blosxom software to run this blog. It's the only blog software I could find that was written in perl and I'm not about to learn PHP just to do this. I'd rather have the entries in a database but I suppose I can live with this for now.

This is quite raw at the moment. I'll eventually get around to adding some CSS to make it look better.