SemiArticulate

Random Musings

Archive for the ‘Computing’ Category

August 4th, 2020 by Lucas

New Microphone!

I’ve gone and done it. I’ve purchased a new microphone, so I can do some voice over work for my paid employment (so most of which won’t see the light of the internet).

It is a Rode NT-USB mini.

It sounds so much better than the laptop microphone (or the cheap headset microphone for that matter). And sorry to Capt Nick for NickRolling you!

And yes, I usually put some fluffy towels on the monitors and desk to reduce reflections.

May 24th, 2015 by Lucas

Mail server outage

The Raspberry Pi that is my mail server had its sd card fail, so I’m trying to recover it with ddrescue. This may take a while (8G at 6kB/s blech).

This will mean my home email will take a while to deliver. It also means that the GCC committee list is also out of action. Messages sent should be delivered when service resumes.

In other server related news, after bjorking my juju installation, I’ve managed to recover the main website (the one you’re readng now).

Update 25May15 1631: we are now 4.2G recovered out of 8G. It may be tomorrow night before we are back on line.

Update 26May 1803: it seems to have slowed down due to errors. It may be another day or three. (7.8G out of 8G).

Update 27may. Maybe Friday?

January 18th, 2014 by Lucas

Computer troubles

It looks like I may have spoken too soon with the Computer Troubles.

It turned out to be a bad RAM stick.

May 5th, 2013 by Lucas

GGC Website update planning

I’ve come up with a plan to update the Geelong Gliding Club website, which is running on an ancient version of Joomla.

First, using the migrator1.5.zip (which is really hard to find) to update to Joomla 1.5.

Then using the J2XML import/export tool to update to Joomla 3.1.

After that it should be much easier to update to future versions.

Problems:

  1. Replacement extensions.  Lots of the extensions used in the current version no longer exist at all, or no longer exist for 1.5. JoomGallery looks like a good replacement Image Gallery tool.
  2. Getting the files into Lunar pages. this could be problematic.
January 12th, 2013 by Lucas

Samba4 replication problems

I’ve been trying to get my two Samba4 DCs to replicate between each other.

The output of the drs showrepl command:

root@ns0:/usr/local/samba # bin/samba-tool drs showrepl ns0
Default-First-Site-Name\NS0
DSA Options: 0x00000001
DSA object GUID: 3b0c70a3-2ecf-4fd9-b87d-7fd2fc063d1f
DSA invocationId: cd9f36c5-30ad-4b1c-a35a-ba807406b34c
==== INBOUND NEIGHBORS ====
ERROR(runtime): DsReplicaGetInfo of type 0 failed - (-1073610723, 'NT_STATUS_RPC_PROTOCOL_ERROR')

Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2012 by Lucas

Computer Troubles

It would seem the computer troubles have greatly diminished, if not gone completely.

All I had to do was update the nvidia drivers to use their own AGP driver, and presto, problem fixed.  I can build Java now, and I haven’t seen any instabilities.

October 13th, 2012 by Lucas

Computer Troubles

For a while now I’ve been having random failures of my main system. This blog entry is just to document what I’ve done to fix it. Updates will be posted below.

The system:

Gigabyte AM3+  motherboard (GA-970A-D3)
AMD FX 6100 six core black edition (FD6100WMGUSBX)
Gigabyte/ATI video card ( GTX560)
G.Skill 4x4GB DDR3 1600 (GS-F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL)

The symptoms:

I would randomly get programs failing. Flash would fail (nothing new there, but I digress). Trying to rebuild openjdk6

I’ve completed a full memtest86+ (v4.20), so the RAM looks fine.

131800LOct12:

I’ve tweaked some of the BIOS settings to the recommended. (I don’t know why “Auto” doesn’t set it to the recommended). Stability hasn’t seem affected, but hasn’t fixed the problem. It must be noted that it doesn’t fail in the same place, and not with the same error. I randomly get SIGILL, SIGBUS, SIGSEGV, and a java “shouldn’t reach here” error.

I’ve included the logs from the last build:

August 7th, 2012 by Lucas

WordPress is now working again

It would seem that a few files went missing a few weeks ago, and everything stopped working. All fixed now.

January 29th, 2012 by Lucas

Gliding airspace data

I’ve started a new project to maintain the airspace and turnpoint data for various gliding programs.

The link to the project site is at http://git.ldjcs.com.au/projects/soaring-exchange. It isn’t much at the moment, but I should be able to work on it in the coming months.

Plans for this project:

Maintain the airspace and turnpoint data.
Create a web-based tool for data extraction.

January 24th, 2011 by Lucas

HDCP Master Key

Another act of civil disobedience (see this post), and posterity, I’ll post the HDCP (think HDMI cyrpto):

hdcp-master.txt

Don’t ask me how to use it (there are some technical instructions in the file), as I don’t know and have never used it.

January 23rd, 2011 by Lucas

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded both apache httpd (to 2.2.17) and wordpress (to 3.0.4). It seems to have gone fine, and pretty urls are now working again.

December 4th, 2010 by Lucas

Upgrades

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3.0.2, with a theme update. With a bit of luck I’ll blog a bit more over the coming months.

December 14th, 2008 by Lucas

New WordPress

I’ve finally updated wordpress to 2.7. Hopefully nothing breaks.

July 29th, 2007 by Lucas

PDAs and Gliding

I’ve got a little project going at the moment to get a PDA working with the gliders.

I’ve got See You Mobile running on a borrowed Acer n30. The first attempt at connecting it to the volkslogger didn’t work (I was using a slimline gender-bender). The second attempt with a home-made null modem cable worked, connected to the on-board OzFlarm

I have to devise a way of having the PDA operational in flight, where it won’t come up and hit me in the scone! I was thinking of some straps and excessive use of velcro.

May 2nd, 2007 by Lucas

HD-DVD processing Key

As an act of preservation, and a stand against censorship i post the following number:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

It’s the processing key for most of the HD-DVDs that are out on the market at the moment. This should allow you to code your own player for these disks, escaping the proprietary lock in from the DVD association.

Don’t Ask me how to use it. I don’t know. I don’t have a HD-DVD player, or any HD-DVD disks for that matter.