whoops

accidentally deleted the /usr/share/java file which had all the jars in. now i need to backtrack and remove all the rpms which had those files and reinstall. the reason i was messing about there in the first place was because it didn't seem to be picking up on the jars in the jvm. oh well

jpackage

also - rather than adding all the jar files in WEB-INF/lib i can just install the package (making sure to add it on the server too!). this is going to make my war files a lot lighter and ant file simpler.

hooray - breakthrough!

previously i would unpack a version of java and link all my programs in there. now i have discovered jpackage which allows me to integrate a really nice solid tested java platform inside linux. it has made things 10 times easier, and now i have tomcat and eclipse sitting on the same platform and i just need to put it onto the server too. wierdly all the fonts have gone even nicer all over my system and things seem to have calmed down a bit. it is almost as if i had been working by trial and error a little bit before and now i have stabilised in relation to java.

there are still some tricky bits like building rpms from nosrc rpms but that is fairly easy when you get the hang of it. also getting java3d to work was a bit funny but now i am more confident. happy bunny today!

cpuspeed

my computer kept overheating and turning itself off which is worrying not to mention annoying. then i noticed that cpuspeed had turned itself back on and was trying to control the processor speed (badly). but this made me look at the processes that were running before the conk out and i noticed that eclipse and yum when they run make the processor run at a constant 100% which explains why my fan has been a bit loud. now i have disabled cpuspeed i don't crash any more but can't run these two important applications without my fan making me go deaf!

i may roll back to an earlier version of eclipse (i have already gone from 3.01 to 3.0) but i think the problem may be something else. if i was a paranoid type i might think it was to do with java and suns recent honeymoon with microsoft!

asda bread

i have noticed a few times now when buying "brand name" bread from asda that it is stale. the bread has been useless for sandwiches, and toast is the only thing it is good for. i thought these bread makers were going downhill and obviously started buying asda bread thinking it was all freshly made etc. then one day i bought one of my favourite "leading brand" breads from the spar and it was great! fluffy tasty not at all stale. needless to say i won't be buying bread at asda again and i think these cheap tactics show how the supermarkets are muscling in on everyones territory.

new speakers

at the weekend i nicked my brothers old amplifier and speakers. the amplifier is a pure sound yamaha 180 watt @ 8 ohms and the speakers were minimax. the sound was dreadful and muffled. martin came round last night and we tried the speakers off rosana's stereo and the sound was perfect, so today i went to richer sounds on mansfield road and bought some mission speakers. now the sound is really great so i am listening to loads of tunes to hear all the bits that i have been missing on all the shite stereos i have been listening to.

essex

went to essex for dinner on saturday. it was really nice although i am drinking far too much at the moment. it was a proper roast beef dinner except with no yorkshire puddings!

the whole family were there, my brothers and parents and babies, except for vicky and rebecca who haven't come to a family do yet.

sofias family

sofias family have arrived from spain last night to stay for a week. they have brought loads of lovely spanish food and wine. we are taking sofias sister out tonight for cocktails. i am probably going to get really trashed.

reminds me that i haven't had a holiday for ages (even though i took 6 weeks off in summer). i think i will take it easy this week.

ah ha

there is another line in /etc/security/console.perms which has dri in it and this needs to be removed or it keeps setting the permissions back on the nvidia files. also there is something wrong with the driver that it doesn't copy the nvidia dev files into /etc/udev.

you would have thought someone at nvidia would have tested it worked before releasing it!

just remembered from last time

lines on video are related to not having the nvidia driver set up properly.

FC2 -> FC3

have now upgraded to FC3. it has changed quite smoothly. the main problem is reinstalling the nvidia driver. i have heard there is a community version of the nvidia driver which would make it ten times easier (also i should be using ndiswrapper for wireless instead of driverloader).

anyway, my glxgears does not work due to a permissions problem with the driver and now i can either log in as myself without 3d rendering, or log in as root with. this is quite a setback considering my career is programming 3d graphics

FC2 to FC3

going to upgrade to FC3 today. already started and have a huge load of packages downloading. using yum to do it from this tutorial here.

has new kernel, new evolution and it looks as if gnome is upgraded too. exciting!

please lord do not let me be rendered computerless!

panda chinese restaurant

went for an all you can eat buffet at the panda in sherwood last night. i was suprised that it was pretty good. woke up with a really dry mouth though so it must have been generously salted!

finally got my hard disk

had to drive to mansfield yesterday to pick up my hard disk as the delivery guys wouldn't bring it over again. it had to be sent to graham's house as the company cards are registered there now and simply wouldn't deliver to mine on first order.

it is a bit on the chunky side and has a really nasty bright blue light on it that flickers. i wish there was some way to disable it.

i have already transferred a lot of crap off my computer and freed up about 25 gigs. i am sure my computer is running a bit faster, then again i did only have a few megs left on my drive.

crap expands to fill the space given to it...

cold day today

it is brass monkeys today. the car doors were stuck shut when i tried to open them. thought the door handles were going to snap off! the view from my new house is really far over loads of houses. if i was an insulation salesman i could tell exactly which houses needed roof insulation from here. most of the houses have snow on but there are still one or two...

anyway, global warming seems like a good idea on a day like this!

bought some badminton racquets

after russell introduced me to badminton some weeks ago i have finally bought some racquets. this should save me a bob or two on racquet hire and now i can practice with sofia at david lloyd.

the racquets were so cheap though (£5 for two including three shuttlecocks). i would advise getting better equipment. the racquets are okay but the shuttlecocks are made of cork and if they get anywhere near the rim of the racquet they fly off at weird angles.

can be alright if it means the other person can't hit it though!

ordered my 250gb hard disk

fed up of my hard disk running out all the time so i ordered the HD. bit of a reckless business decision though...

external hard drive

i really want an external hard drive to put all my data. every CD i have seems to break after five minutes especially with my evil son scratching them and playing frisbee.

i need one at least 250GB like this one hd. maybe use the company card....

the trouble with the external hard drive thing is that i can see myself loving having it, and keeping all my stuff there, and being able to plug it into other computers etc. but after a while i will get paranoid about backing up and need a second identical disk to copy everything on to. i will then need a program which compares the content of the two drives and just copies the changes for speed and i have not checked this out on linux yet (yes yes i know it would be easy on windows).

then again, who says my hard drive on my laptop might not fail anyway. i would still be up shit creek. actually what if the web server breaks down? that has all my cvs on it!! (note to self: buy new machine with raid disks)

we cannot let ourselves get worried about these things.

i suppose

i should post when i have solved a problem as well as reporting the problems. after russell read my blog he got the idea that linux is hard work. well i choose to live on the cutting edge so i always have to put up with the fact that upgrades may cause errors. i do try and commit bugs to gnome etc. but linux is great, there are no problems with it on my laptop at the moment.

the thing is when people ask me - "what do you do when windows suddenly does something unexplainable and shit like it always does?" i say put linux on! it is more stable and i never have problems like that any more.

everything is the way i want it on my computer now

moved into my new house

have moved into my new house with views over sherwood in nottingham. it is a modernish house (1973) and is really warm compared to my old house (pre 1900). oh yeah and not having to park my car on the road any more, i hated that! especially in the shithole i used to live in when people would beep at you because you were blocking their way!!! have a garage now too which has basically become a dumping ground for all my crap. need to fix it up with shelving etc. still it is warm and dry unlike my old damp cellar

News story about Linux being for people who steal windows

I think everyone should be able to buy computers free of preinstalled software. I have bought many computers from Dell and it takes longer to scrub their installation of junk than it does to start again. If windows was offered at the same price but not installed that would be great, and Linux users could opt out and just install whatever they want instead.

Some people may steal software, this should not reflect on the majority.

inspiron 5150 overheating FC2

I have given up trying to figure out ACPI, cpuspeed, cpufreq and all that jazz which allows a laptop to function normally. Everything seemed alright for a time, although the fan was constantly at high speed - not on Windows XP though, the machine was always quiet on XP. Then the computer kept overheating and cutting out. To resolve this I eventually disabled Speedstep in the BIOS and it has been fine since. I assume that the computer should work better with speedstep so I need to look at cpufreq daemon.

please forgive me for i have sinned

for not keeping my blog up to date

just got connected

just got my laptop connected to wireless broadband router in spain

and

video is choppy

why linux is annoying

clock keeps changing time, screen doesn't go off when lid closes, screen doesn't blank after a set amount of time, ACPI doesn't work and fan continuously goes.

nvidia 4kstacks driver

woohoo! nvidia have released the 4k stacks version of their linux driver and now i can go back to standard fedora 2 kernels. the linuxant driverloader standard rpm worked fine too which was a worry as that is the only other nonstandard driver i have.

this means i can configure my kernel now, rather than being stuck with an 8kstacks kernel, and benefit from updates. also can use kernel-ntfs etc

resized partitions

just resized partitions so now linux gets 10gb more at 25gb and windows has 13gb. this must mean that i have almost made the leap completely over to linux. i still may need to go into windows to check visual basic stuff and mdb files so for now will need to keep it.

usb problem

in modprobe.conf i had:

alias usb-controller ehci_hcd

alias usb-controller1 ohci_hcd

i found out that it is now:

alias usb-controller usb-uhci

alias usb-controller1 usb-ehci

aumix

went into aumix and turned up pcm2 and now it seems to work ok. what is pcm2????

intel 8x0 soundcard problem

got my soundcard working earlier but now it seems to have developed a crackle. it was playing fine earlier. under FC1 the sound was fine but it used OSS rather than ALSA. i heard ALSA is the way to go so i will have to crack on and try and solve this.

mouse working

got mouse working by doing modprobe usb-uhci which was in my modprobe.conf file as alias usb-controller usb-uhci. wonder why it didn't initialise?

usb problem

USB Controller Intel Corp 82801DB (ICH4) USB UHCI

lists it in /sbin/lspci, but kudzu does not see it

upgraded to fedora core 2

thank god! at last i have managed to upgrade to FC2 via yum. however i now have a few problems...

i am back on to a synaptics touchpad mouse because the kernel has failed to recognise my intel usb (hub?) controller. stupidly i deleted the configuration from kudzu so that i am finding it hard to go back and fix it.

i have an inspiron 5150 and was told somewhere that the 2.6 kernel was going to fix the problem with the ACPI events not firing. it doesn't seem to have yet, needs more investigation but i think a mouse is more important right now.

problem with £ sign

trying to track down a strange problem in either mysql, java or torque. on my development machine my website pulls out pound signs (£) ok. on the server it pulls out a question mark (?). the strings are stored in a longblob.

this must mean there is a problem with the character sets in either java or mysql. however i am having trouble tracking this problem down on google.

on local machine i have mysql-3.23.58-4 and j2sdk1.4.2_03, on remote machine i have mysql-3.23.58_1.74 and j2sdk1.4.2_01 so i suppose the first thing to do is upgrade the remote machine to have the exact same versions.

how irritating!

sftp

still haven't fixed my sftp problem. it seems math::gmp doesn't work with redhat 9 very well. have tried changing the cipher but it makes no difference it still need the perl gmp stuff. gmp is installed on the system fine, i guess perl just can't interface with it.

frozen bubble

wow! frozen bubble is really addictive. thought i had been playing for ten minutes but when i finally stopped it was 52 minutes. sheeeiit!!

david lloyd

aahhhh.....just had a relaxing workout and swim at the health club. lovely

ODBC-ODBC bridge

having trouble with a slow Access OLEDB connection over a network. the mdb file is 120Mb so it is no wonder really. then realised that Access ODBC driver doesn't support remote DSN. no wonder really otherwise people wouldn't have to upgrade to MS SQL Server.

looked at a company called easysoft which make this component to allow remote Access access. also works for linux which is great. oh dear looks like it is going to cost £800.

don't think we'll be using that then!

trying to look for alternatives like iODBC, unixODBC (which shamelessly plugs easysoft) perl DBD. looks like it is going to be tricky to set up the server, let alone trying to find a windows oDBC driver which will connect to the linux dsn.

Why am i getting involved? this is not even my problem!

Math-GMP

found a bug submission at CPAN with exactly the same problem as I am having - here. doesn't look good as it was submitted last july

Math::GMP

currently trying to get Net::SSH::Perl to install on redhat 9. it has so many dependencies and one of them is Math::GMP which does not want to install. don't know what is wrong with it, there doesn't seem to be much on google either.

hooray

finally got the blog entry poster working on fedora. now i can post entries without having to go into a browser

looked at rosanas website today: here