A few weeks ago, my websites were no longer available. Without any explanation or reason from my webhost, any visit to justindow.com or dowhaus.com resulted in a weird “This website is suspended” page. I couldn’t figure out a reason for this, since I could still log in to my account just fine and all my registrations and payments were current. Instead of messing around with their support people, I decided to take the opportunity to change hosts. I’ve been wanting to do it for a long time. I just wasn’t impressed with the speed of their server. Also, they had recently “upgraded” my account to have unlimited storage space, but this also was just an empty promise, since the actual hard drive that housed my account was nearly full, with only about 3 gigs of space on it. So the idea of keeping them around for remote backup purposes also didn’t work out.
Anyway, I moved my domain registration and websites, and am now much happier with the performance. I have much more control over my DNS entries server software.
During the move I encountered a small problem with my Wordpress database that this blog uses. At the old webhost, the database was set to use latin1_swedish_ci collation. When dumping the database there and importing it into my new server, all the German Umlauts and other non-ASCII characters were mysteriously changed to illegible strings of nonsense. I am no SQL expert and wasn’t sure where the problem was coming up. Re-dumping the database to a textfile using mysqldump and then opening the file with vi showed all the umlauts as a weird string. Dumping the database and piping the output through iconv and into a text file showed different weird strings. None of which ever converted back to legible characters, no matter how I tried to view the file (vi, kate, less). I also tried a few different settings on the new database server, like creating the database with the same charset. Nothing I tried seemed to bring my Umlauts back.
I eventually gave up, opened the dump file in vi, identified the character strings that needed converting using this guy’s blog post as a guide, and did a quick “search and replace” with vi:
:%s/oldstring/newstring/g
I ran that on each string in the list and re-imported the dump into the new database. After then having some trouble logging into the blog’s admin area, I found it was useful to rename the Plugins directory. After the plugins get deactivated, adding them back in one at a time worked fine. It choked on one of them, but it isn’t one I use anymore anyway. Now my blog is back up and running and things are looking good.
Meet Maeby and Lucy. They were born on September 16th, 2008, so they are 6 weeks old today. They are super friendly and don’t seem to be afraid of anything. They are busily exploring our new apartment and trying to find ways to cause trouble.
We had been looking for a set of kittens ever since we’ve had our new apartment. We really wanted to get Molly back, but her current owner doesn’t want to give her up, so we had to start fresh. After a few weeks of looking, I realized that it is rather difficult to get kittens in Germany, since they don’t seem to have pet stores that sell them. Most of the kittens in the newspaper ads cost money, or require some kind of strict background check before they let you have them. After being rather discouraged, I came across an ad for 4 young kittens for free. By the time we got out there to pick two out, there were only two left, so the choice was easy. Maeby is a short-haired little cutie, while Lucy has long hair and a pretty little face. They are both very cuddly and figured out the litterbox system right away.
Well it has been a long time since I’ve posted to the old blog. And although I have had plenty to rant about lately, it seems I haven’t had the motivation to actually rant about it. So here is a non-ranting post. I have great news. I got married last week on August 9th. The wedding was a huge success. A lot of close friends came and family traveled from all around the world for that special day. Everything went smoothly and it was the happiest day of my life. Now my beautiful new bride and I are living back in Germany, since I am now working there again with a new job. (Yeah, really a lot has happened since I last blogged. More on that later…). So I just wanted to post up here to let folks know that I am still alive and things are looking up for me personally and professionally.
Here is one of the highlights of the wedding:
Yup, that is Mike V. jumping to grab it. And never one to disappoint, he was successful.
I want to thank everyone that contributed to this wonderful day and all the hard work and money that was spent on it. Thank you Dennis, Tara, Melissa, Jessica, Michelle, Heidi, Karin, Travis, Fred, Luke, Reed, Mike, Rand, Sandy, Dennis, Niel, Alexandria, and well the rest of you know who you are. Thank you very much for everything, and thank you Karen, my lovely wife, for making me the happiest man ever.
It has been quite a while since I updated my blog. That is mostly because I’ve been quite busy lately, completely re-organizing my life. At the beginning of February I moved from the beautiful city of Munich, Germany to the small town of Vacaville, California, which is somewhere between Sacramento and San Francisco, right where I-80 has all the potholes. I’m pretty sure one could get rich around here being an auto mechanic specializing in suspension repairs…
I chose Vacaville, because it seems to be a good central location for finding work in either Sacramento or the Bay Area, and I will probably move to one of those places once I find something. I have a good friend who is nice enough to let me share his apartment with him here in Vacaville for the next couple of months, while I plan my wedding (yes, I’ll be getting married in August!), and sort out what I’m going to do with my life.
I got engaged back in October, at which point it became clear that I need to find a better-paying job than what I was able to get in Munich. Either that or move to a place where the cost of living isn’t so high. I’ve always had a special place in my heart for Northern California, so that is where I ended up. I quit my job in Germany at the end of January, and flew into SFO the first week of February. The weather here is pretty nice, but I do miss the cold and snow in Munich.
At my previous job, I learned quite a bit about embedded systems and gained some experience with openembedded.org, as well as ARM-based Debian and even dipped my hands into an interpreted dialect of LISP known as PicoLisp and started learning some Python. My strengths, however, still lie in system administration and networking, whereas programming and scripting is something I’d rather do as a hobby than a career. I have found a new interest in communications-based software and hardware as relates to routing, wi-fi, 3G networks and so on.
On the desktop side of things, I am now using a Mac as my primary workstation. I received a Mac mini for Christmas, and after bumping it up to 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, the little $600 machine outshines my far more expensive Vaio notebook, and as far as the OS is concerned, I couldn’t be happier. I am able to take care of just about everything that I need to with it. With MacPorts, I have all my favorite Linux-type software available and it is nice that a lot of proprietary hardware just works on it, whereas on Linux sometimes it is a pain to get stuff working. Not that I don’t love the challenge. Of course I’m still running Linux on my server/media center, and couldn’t be happier with it, but in the future I think any notebook computer I buy will be an Apple. I’ll be staying with Linux for the media center, until there is something as good as MythTV or even MythTV itself running well on OS X. And by “as good as”, I mean it has to be free and open source.
That’s about all for now. Things are going pretty well. The weather is nice and stores are open on Sundays, so being back in the States is working out so far.
Note: This is a long boring blog post. It details my frustration of getting this all to work. If you don’t care and just want to get to where I tell you exactly how to successfully install Linux on this computer, click here.
I haven’t done a tech post in quite a while, so here is one that will hopefully help someone out. A friend of mine recently got a new notebook computer, and the particular model was extremely inexpensive, but seemed to have decent specs regardless, at least for a Linux notebook. The Compaq Presario F500 series sports an NVidia graphics controller, a 1.8GHz AMD processor and 512MB of memory, which can be upgraded to 2GB. This seemed perfect to replace his aging Toshiba Satellite that we upgraded all the up to 512MB of memory and still barely putted along at ridiculously slow speeds, regardless of which operating system we put on there and attempted to optimize. So given the very low price of the new notebook, which was even less expensive than the Asus Eee PC’s, I recommended it. It came with Vista Basic Edition on it, but armed with a Linux disc, we were able to resolve that bug very quickly.
The timing coincided with Ubuntu’s 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon release, so we decided to put that on there. It got about half way through loading the installer before it hung. Googling around through the Ubuntu Forums led to the conclusion that that particular version of Ubuntu wasn’t going to work very well. Most forum threads indicated that it would need some kernel boot parameters to function, namely “nolapic” and “noapic”. Well, these didn’t help us much further either. Most of the Google results were for the F500 series of notebooks, but perhaps the sub-model F560US was yet a little different. OpenSuse didn’t seem to want to load up either and the only operating system that would even install on this thing was Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. So we went with that, with the “nolapic noapic” boot parameters for GRUB.
In the meantime, I decided to switch from Gutsy Gibbon to OpenSuse 10.3 on my own notebook, since the KDE implementation of Gutsy seemed to have some pretty bad bugs in the network manager that were very annoying. My friend really liked the look and feel of Suse over Ubuntu, so he asked me if we could put it on his Presario. I figured it was worth another try, since I didn’t want him to be stuck with Ubuntu Feisty until the end of time on that brand new notebook. This past weekend I decided to tackle the project again to see what I could come up with. Faced again with the installer hanging at various points throughout the boot sequence, I found that what finally worked was adding “acpi=off noapic” to the kernel boot parameters in GRUB. I was all excited that it was working until I got the system all installed and set up and tried tackling the wireless card. The notebook has a Broadcom chipset of some sort normally sold in Dell notebooks, so there is plenty of documentation online about how to maybe get it to work with the native bcm43xx driver and extracted firmware from the Windows driver as well as many indications that NDiswrapper would work great. Lets just say that after many hours of trial and error and troubleshooting, I realized that having the “acpi=off” boot parameter was not going to allow the wireless card to function regardless of what driver I was using. After a few more hours of googling and trying every boot option that I could think of that had to do with IRQ and ACPI, it just would not boot at all without “acpi=off”. It was either no wireless or no booting at all with this thing. I decided to give up for the day. I gave my friend an ethernet cable and told him I would put Ubuntu Feisty back on there the next day for him. Of course, as most people that know me will tell you, I don’t give up easily when it comes to computers and I have a gut feeling that it should work.
I decided to start over from scratch with Ubuntu Gutsy again. Mostly because there is a lot of community documentation available for Ubuntu and I know the workings of a Debian system a little better than I do Suse and I figured I would install a command line only system and mess with it until I got it all working. If I could get Gutsy working on it, then I could use what I had learned to get OpenSuse 10.3 on it, like my friend wanted. Again I was able to successfully install and run the system by using the “acpi=off” boot parameter and again the wireless card couldn’t bind to IRQ0 with that setting and I was back at square one. But now I just had a command line system and was able to reboot quickly and get to testing really quickly with every different boot parameter and system setting I changed.
At some point I finally found the answer I was looking for. After literally just trying random boot parameters in conjunction with others and by themselves I discovered that the system boots AND runs AND the wireless card works if you use the following boot parameters:
noapic irqpoll nosmp
That was it. It worked great. I was able to bring up the wireless interface (so far didn’t have a working driver/firmware in there, but I didn’t get any more IRQ errors from dmesg) So I rebooted a few times, added the lines to GRUB permanently, installed the KDE desktop and ran a bunch of tests to see if I could get the system to hang. It didn’t. It worked like it was supposed to. So now back to installing OpenSuse. Well, I didn’t want to go through the entire Suse install process, which takes forever compared to Ubuntu just to find out that my boot parameters didn’t work for Suse, I decided to try the LiveCD that Suse has now. I booted it up (with my boot parameters) and it came up nicely. I was convinced that it would work, and as I was about to pop out the live CD and insert the install CD, I noticed that the Live CD had an “Install” option. I gave it a shot. It actually worked. Upon rebooting halfway through the install process, I added in the boot parameters again and when the system was finished I went into the Boot Loader settings in YaST and added the boot parameters in there. That way I don’t have to enter them each time I boot the computer. If you install using the regular installer CD, when the first menu comes up if you just add in the boot parameters, I think the installed system will remember them for you and you don’t have to edit anything in the YaST settings. I think the LiveCD has a few bugs that the regular install CD doesn’t have. I also had trouble enabling community repositories in YaST, which doesn’t seem to be an issue when you install using the regular CD.
One more thing I noticed: Don’t install the Broadcom firmware from YaST. In fact don’t install it at all. Blacklist the bcm43xx driver and use NDiswrapper. The bcm43xx driver, once the firmware is loaded, causes the entire system to slow down to a crawl and it doesn’t work. So, here is the install process for getting OpenSuse 10.3 working on a Compaq Presario F560US model:
Installation Guide
Insert CD and boot.
When you see the menu to choose which installation type you want to do, choose the regular installation, but before pressing Enter, type: “noapic irqpoll nosmp” without the quotes. Those three words should be at the bottom of the GRUB menu in the Options line. Hit Enter.
Go through the graphical installer. It is pretty straight forward and self-explanatory. Go ahead and accept most defaults as they are. I would recommend setting up networking and everything and getting updates with a regular ethernet wired connection during the install process.
Once it is finished, go to YaST (Administrator Settings). Go to System and click on “Boot Loader”. Click the first item and click “Edit”. Make sure that you see “noapic irqpoll nosmp” in the Options line. If they are not there, add them.
While still in YaST, click on Sofware and then choose “Community Repositories”. Make sure that the main repositories as well as the nVidia and any other ones you think you might want are checked and click Finish. After they are done being set up, click on “Software Repositories” in YaST and make sure that all the repositories you selected are enabled and make sure that the “openSUSE-10.3-OSS-KDE 10.3″, which is the CD or DVD, is disabled.
Click on “Software Management” in YaST, and search for “nvidia” and choose “nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default” and “x11-video-nvidiaG01″ to install. Then search for “ndiswrapper” and choose it to install. Click “Accept” and let it finish the installation.
Google for “Dell R151517.EXE” and download that file from Dell’s download site. Open a terminal and navigate to the directory where the file was downloaded. Type: “unzip R151517.EXE”. This will probably spill files all over the place, so you might want to move that file into a directory that you can easily delete later. Once it is done unzipping, type in the following series of commands:
su -
(enter your root password)
cd /home/user/directory/where/you/unzipped/the/file/
Now, if everything went smoothly, when your computer boots back up, you should see the nVidia logo flash across the screen right before you log in. Once you are logged in, you should be able to click on the KNetworkManager icon in the system tray and see your wireless networks. If you didn’t see the nVidia logo before you logged in, edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf as root and find the word ‘nv’ and change it to ‘nvidia’ and restart the X Server or reboot again. Hopefully someone will be helped by this guide and not have to go through the many hours of trial and error to get this notebook working nicely with Linux.
I had a couple of pleasant surprises the past few days. A good friend of mine traveled all the way to Munich from Amsterdam to visit me on my birthday, and the following day a nice dinner and birthday cake was made for me. Yesterday we were walking through the Englischer Garten and it was a crisp cold foggy day. As we were walking, we came across a little stand selling drinks and snacks in the middle of the park. We were overwhelmed with joy, when we saw that their menu included Glühwein. Of course we had to stay and have a cup of it. An even greater surprise was when we were sitting and enjoying the Glühwein, when we took another look at the menu and realized that they had listed Grog!! Since we only know grog from old pirate tales, it was clear that we had to drink up the Glühwein and order some grog. It was actually extremely good and the perfect drink to accompany a cold day.
There is a 9-year-old kid blogging about his life here. He started a project of interviewing a bunch of different people, with the goal of interviewing 100 different people around the world, famous and not, so that he can then publish a book with the interviews. I volunteered to let him interview me some time ago, and it was finally my turn. So check it out here.
My good friend Luke P. has started a Travel Blog since his arrival in Munich as a collaborative blog among our group of friends. I’ve decided to post my travel experiences over there. You can find it at http://besttravelblogevar.wordpress.com/.
I drove by the Theresienwiese yesterday to check things out, and all the beer tents are up, the rides are set up, in fact they were testing one of the roller coasters as I drove by. This means it is close. In fact, only two more days!!! On Saturday morning I’ll be down there with millions of others to try to be one of the first to get an Oktoberfest Mass of Beer once the Mayor taps the first keg at noon and the beer tents open up for business!
Before I moved to the States back in ‘96, I used to have a cat and was forced to leave it with a neighbor when I moved, since I think it would have been hard for it to adjust to a new environment. I had every intention of getting a new kitten once I got there, but for some reason or another, it just never happened. I always told myself that once I graduated college and got my own apartment and everything, I would adopt a little kitten, because they are just so cute and provide great companionship.. especially if you live by yourself half-way across the world from everyone you know…
Since I am finally half-way settled into my new apartment in Munich, I decided it was time to adopt a kitten. Her name is Molly. She is very cute. At first glance, she looks looks completely black, but she actually has gray stripes. Her exact birthday is unknown to me, but I’m going to go ahead and set it on July 1st. I adopted her from a farm north of town where she would have had an otherwise short and miserable life. Karen helped me pick out the name, because I am terrible with thinking up good names and someday, hopefully, it will be her cat too.
