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Paul's Time Sink

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Upgraded to Fedora Core 4

Paul Westbrook | 31 July, 2005 22:28

I have finished most of the upgrade to Fedora Core 4 from Red Hat 9.  This was relatively successful, as you are reading this now.

I did encounter some problems with this upgrade, and I am going to attempt to document them.  My notes may not be that clear, as I only got 4 hours of sleep in the past two days, because of this upgrade.

PHP
Fedora Core 4 includes PHP5.  This mainly worked for the scripts that I run, but I did have to do some modification in order to get pLog to work.  It appears that when pLog is run within PHP5, it uses more than the 8Mb of memory allocated to scripts.  While in PHP4, this was not a problem.  I increased it to 16Mb and the problem went away most of the time.  I am still seeing it periodically.

Also PHP5 is more strict on php syntax, so there are a lot of notices in the logs.  I am working through these warnings now, and I hope to check something in soon.

Also, It looks like the version of php that is included with Fedora Core 4, does not include GD.  To get gd, you should run "yum install php-gd".

Cyrus-imapd
This took me the longest to get working.  I had been using cryus previously for my imap server, so I was assuming that the upgrade would be seamless.  It looks like the db4 database format changed sometime between RH9 and FC4.  I used the steps on this page to get the imap folders working correctly.  This was a pain for my account, as I have a lot of nested folders.  In fact, I haven't finished this step yet
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sha1sum for Mac OS X

Paul Westbrook | 30 July, 2005 13:23

I have finished downloading all of the disk images for Fedora Core 4 on my mac.  I wanted to verify that the files were not corrupted.  Fedora provides the sha1 checksum for each of the images for this purpose.  Mac OS X doesn't provide md5sum or sha1sum tools at all.  Fink does provide a way to install md5sum, but not sha1sum.

This web site provides a small package that includes md5sum, sha1sum, and ripemd160sum,  I was able to compile it just fine.  The only problem that I had was during the "make install" step the Makefile attempted to set the owner to a nonexistent one in Mac OS X.  Even with that problem the programs work fine.

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Bits on Wheels

Paul Westbrook | 29 July, 2005 20:59

Bits On WheelsI have decided to upgrade my server to Fedora Core 4, from Red Hat 9.  So I started to download the images with http.  The download was taking too long, so I decided to switch to use BitTorrent.  I wanted to download this on my mac since I have been having problems with stability on my linux box.

I am trying Bits on Wheels, and it seems to be a pretty cool Mac OS X BitTorrent client.  It seems more stable and the interface seems faster than Azureus.  It has a need feature, where it will show a 3D representation of the current transfer swarm.

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Fixed dates in rss 2.0 feed

Paul Westbrook | 28 July, 2005 21:07

It has been bothering me that my rss aggregator is displaying the time that it loads my posts, and not the time that I wrote them.  So I decided to fix this.

The problem was that the rss 2.0 spec states that the date should be in GMT, while pLog was printing it out in the local time zone. This diff, fixes this problem in the 1.0.2 version of pLog.  This also has been added to this bug.

Update: I have checked this in to the 1.0.2 tree.

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Work on Sentra

Paul Westbrook | 27 July, 2005 19:43

Yesterday and today I had some work done on our 1993 Nissan Sentra. The suspension on the car has been pretty bad. Yesterday, we had the front and rear shocks and struts replaced on the car with ones from KYB. This has improved the ride of the car significantly. In fact it has brought the ride closer to that of the 2000 VW Jetta that we used to own.

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Old electronics

Paul Westbrook | 27 July, 2005 19:15

6411A couple of weeks ago, I change cubicles at work.  Since I had to pack everything to move, I took the opportunity to throw away stuff that I didn't need anymore.  One of the things that I threw out was the box for the Pine D'Music SM-200C.  This got me thinking of how fast technology changes.

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Using NewsFire now

Paul Westbrook | 26 July, 2005 08:42

Ever since I have installed the GarageBand 2.0.2 update, Shrook has become extremely unstable.  When I launch it, and leave it in the background, I get a Bad access exception in CFNetwork while doing a http read.  I don't know what was included in the GarageBand that would cause this problem.

But since Shrook is not working, I downloaded and registered NewsFire.  I haven't used it since the author made it shareware, because I had paid for Shrook.  But, after registering it is a great RSS client.

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mtop

Paul Westbrook | 23 July, 2005 13:17

I just read an article in the July 2005 issue of Linux Magazine on mtop. This is an interesting tool that connects to a mysql database and allows you to see the queries as they happen.  This can be pretty useful, especially if you are trying to track down sql statements that take a long time.

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Internal DNS

Paul Westbrook | 23 July, 2005 12:31

I just noticed something interesting.  Since we use DHCP in out network, I was curious what ip address were allocated to the devices on my network.  So I ran the following command: 

nmap -sP 192.168.1.0/24

I noticed something interesting.  A lot of the machines have fully qualified domain names.  I was curious why this was happening, especially since I didn't create these entries.
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I want a camera phone

Paul Westbrook | 22 July, 2005 20:45

There have been more and more times that I want to get a camera phone.  This week, I was in a cab traveling from the London, Ontario airport.  Then on the side of the road was a building where locomotives were coming out of large doors.  It turns out that this was the ElectroMotive Canada plant.  That would have been a cool picture to take.

I have been holding off on getting a camera phone because I haven't seen one that has all of the features that I want.  I want one that has BlueTooth and can sync with my Mac via iSync.  Since I want to stay with Verizon, and they don't off any phones with these capabilities, I am not changing phones. 

Also, Verizon seems to like to disable the BlueTooth implementation in their phones. They seem to restrict it to only being able to use it for hands free kits.

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Replacement iPod headphones

Paul Westbrook | 22 July, 2005 20:11

Previously, I mentioned about how the headphones that came with the iPod Shuffle were uncomfortable while I was using them on a long flight.  I mentioned this to my wife, and she got me replacement headphones for Father's Day.  This week I had a long flight, so it was the first time that I really got to try them out.

The Sony MDR-EX51LP are ear bud head phones that are very comfortable.  I had a 5 hour flight this week, and I had the head phones in the whole time, without any pain.  They do sound a little different than the Apple headphones, but they didn't sound bad.

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Hotel broadband

Paul Westbrook | 19 July, 2005 22:35

When I checked into the Hilton in London, Ontario, I asked if broadband internet was available in the room.  They said that both wireless and wired internet was available.  I connected with the wireless, and it works fine, but it seems a little slow.  I wanted to see if I could get a faster connection with the wired connection.

There is a box on the desk that is labeled nStreams Technology Data over Voice Access Hub.  It looks like there is something in the hotel's phone head end that multiplexes the data signal on top of the voice line.  This sound very similar to DSL.

The speed of the wired connection was not that much better.  I assume that the connection to the external network is just not that fast.

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tractors at the airport

Paul Westbrook | 19 July, 2005 20:47

Jazz TractorWhen we landed in Toronto today and saw something interesting at the Toronto airport.  Air Canada Jazz uses tractors to move the planes around the airport.  This is the first time that I have seen these be used, but I think that it is a great idea.

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Lance in France podcast

Paul Westbrook | 19 July, 2005 20:26

I haven't been watching the television coverage of the Tour de France, but I have wanted to keep up with Lance Armstrong's progress.

SIRIUS Satellite Radio has made their coverage of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France available as a podcast.

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Updated Honda Navigation DVD

Paul Westbrook | 18 July, 2005 00:15

I bought the updated DVD for our 2004 Honda Odyssey, and the 2.20 version arrived on Friday.  I was hoping that, in addition to the updated maps, it would include some software fixes like improving searching speed.

The upgrade went very well, with no problems.  We didn't drive to any areas where the roads have change recently, like around the San Jose airport, so I don't know if the maps are significantly improved.  But we did notice a speed improvement when searching for places.  The other thing that they added is that when getting directions, the navigation shows the exit numbers when directed to exit a freeway.

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