Monthly Archives: September 2006

Rainbow Connection

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Posted by imolloy on September 26, 2006 – 12:27 am
Filed under Music

Ok. I couldn’t sleep until I heard this tonight, and now I need to make sure everyone else I know remembers the joy of Kermit and being 5.

Rainbow Connection
Why are there so many songs about rainbows
And what’s on the other side?
Rainbows are visions, but only illusions,
And rainbows have nothing to hide.
So we’ve been told and some choose to believe it
I know they’re wrong, wait and see.
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers and me.
Who said that every wish would be heard and answered
When wished on the morning star?
Somebody thought of that, and someone believed it,
And look what it’s done so far.
What’s so amazing that keeps us stargazing
And what do we think we might see?
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.
All of us under its spell,
We know that it’s probably magic…
… Have you been half asleep? And have you heard voices? I’ve heard them calling my name.
… Is this the sweet sound that calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same
I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it
It’s something that I’m s’posed to be…
Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,
The lovers, the dreamers, and me.

Laa, da daa dee da daa daa,
La laa la la laa dee daa doo…
Kermit The Frog

Goodbye, Thor!

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Posted by imolloy on September 18, 2006 – 10:57 pm
Filed under Thor

Yesterday, Alicia and I had to say goodbye to Thor. It was a happy / sad occasion. We were sad to see him go. He was a very good dog who was always happy, wagging his tail, and easy to have around the house. Murphy, when he wasn’t playing and beating up Thor, was a very sweet (larger) brother. We’re afraid he’s depressed now that Thor has gone.

But Alicia and I didn’t fail as foster parents (you keep them), but if Thor had been in the house too much longer, I fear we would have. He was with us for two weeks, and one day. In that time we watched him mature and settle down. He got over a nasty nasal cold, got a bath or two (or was it three), and learned to sit, give high-five and high-tens, and speak on command.

His new family is a big fan of his tricks. Their three year old son is especially fond of telling Thor to speak. Only time will tell how cute the parents find this. But they will provide a very good home for him. The father is a fireman, and will be at home with Thor every other day, all day. The mother was beaming over her children’s instant love for the dog, and the daughter … Thor is her dog. That’s pretty clear. A cute seven year old, aspiring vet. Thor is going to make her the happiest little girl in the world.

We’ll miss him. I’m not sure what hurts the most: wondering if we’ll ever see him again, or admitting to myself (our selves) that for a dog like Thor, they’ll probably provide a better home that we would.

To Thor! Kanpai!

Mud at the Dog Park

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Posted by imolloy on September 13, 2006 – 9:53 pm
Filed under Dogs

Everyone, meet Lilly. She’s a white boxer. I swear. White. The dogs all decided to run, splash, lap, box, wrestle, sit, rest, and for Lilly, roll, in the large mud puddle that has formed in the last few days.

But Lilly wasn’t the only one. There were typically three dogs in the mud; two were ours. I don’t have any good pictures of them (there weren’t nearly as bad as Lilly) before by phone battery died completely.

Here are the remaining pics that were any good.

Laptop Returns

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Posted by imolloy on September 9, 2006 – 9:27 pm
Filed under Apple

My laptop was returned to me before 9:00 AM on Friday, and everything seems to be in working order. Considering I drove it to Indy on Tuesday, that’s not too shabby.

Meet Thor, Part 2

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Posted by imolloy on September 7, 2006 – 10:26 pm
Filed under Thor

Here’s Thor! He’s a happy boy who is always smiling. When he wags his tail, he does this whole-body shake.

Thor, walking towards the camera with Murphy in pursuit.

Mid head shake, or transforming into a pit.

Fast asleep on the human bed, sleeping with Alicia.

Sound asleep on my pillow. Notice Murphy standing over him; Murphy wants to play.

Meet Thor

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Posted by imolloy on September 7, 2006 – 1:30 pm
Filed under Thor

The god of thunder is in the house!

The Tippecanoe shelter is running at or over capacity at the moment, and any dogs brought in will have to be put down, so Alicia opened our house to Thor (The God of Thunder), an extremely quiet, small (well, much smaller than Murphy) labrador mix. The shelter has him listed as a lab-dane mix, but I’ve come to the conclusion they’re on crack sometimes.

We brought him home with us on Saturday, and he’s been a very easy dog to look after. His parents gave him up since they “Didn’t have enough time for him anymore.” I can’t imagine how much time they were willing to spend with him, since he’s a very easy going dog. He doesn’t bark much at all (unless Murphy gets him going), doesn’t destroy furniture, knows what are and are not toys to play with, is house trained (and lets you know when he has to go out), and is the soundest sleeping dog I have ever seen. If you think about moving, Murphy wakes. Murphy had to give him a good nudge with his nose to get Thor (God of Thunder) to even open his eyes at one point.

We’re trying to get him adopted as quickly as possible, since there is no reason a dog as good as Thor (God of Thunder) deserves to be in a shelter. We’re teaching him all the tricks a new family will want, and he appears to be a quick learner. My guess is he was originally taught, but never maintained. He can sit now, shake, and at times will speak on command. We’re still trying to see if the last one is a fluke.

I hope to have lots of cute pics of Thor (God of Thunder) online soon to get him adopted.

Laptop Woes

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Posted by imolloy on September 7, 2006 – 1:20 pm
Filed under Apple, Computers

So, after spending two months fighting a rather simple BIOS problem with Myth, it appears my laptop got jealous. For about a week or two it had been acting a little flaky. There were long pauses with no activity, being completely unresponsive with almost zero cpu, net, disk, and paging activity. It was as though there were some process running around grabbing locks, trying to deadlock as much of the system as possible. Oh, and the whole time, the hard drive gurgled.

Yup, gurgled. Think CD spinning up plus bubbly fountain. There was no disk activity, but it sure was being vocal. On Monday, I think it had enough. I hard rebooted the computer (since I couldn’t do anything else with it) and when the familiar gray-on-gray Apple logo appeared, it just sat there, gurgling at me. After a short period of time the Apple logo got tired of hanging around and turned to colored noise (think Photoshop filter). After failing to boot off of the hard drive, rescue CD, or even enter disk target mode (turns the entire computer into an external Firewire drive) I drove it down to Indy to see a Genius.

It looked like the hard drive was toast, there was nothing he could do there. So, after waiting about two hours (always see the online Apple Concierge *before* driving to the store) I handed them a laptop, and they handed me a piece of paper, with a promise of returning the laptop “within two weeks.” Seemed like a fair trade.

Luckily everything will be covered under AppleCare.

As an aside, I have to say the Indianapolis Genius Bar apparently didn’t get the facial hair notice. Every Apple Genius I have ever seen has had crazy, excentric beards, goatees, etc. Flames flickering up from their mouths, trying to catch their hair on fire, lightling bolts emenating from the ears, or water dripping from a polar ice cap. At Indianapolis, the best I saw was a five-oclock shadow.

Lame, Indy. Lame.

MythTV is Alive

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Posted by imolloy on September 1, 2006 – 10:41 am
Filed under MythTV

Anyone who’s talked with me for the last two months knows I’ve been fighting a (loosing) battle with my MythTV box. The box became extremely unstable, crashing, corrupting my drives, and generally driving me crazy. If I tried streaming 3-4 previous recordings to other computers in the house, everything was fine. The second I tried to add a LiveTV feed to the mix, the box would lock hard. When only watching Live TV, I would get about 1-2 hours max before the box would die on me. Every time it crashed, I would have to reboot and cross my fingers to see how much data on my XFS LVM drives I lost. (A lot over the course of debugging everything).

After tracing through some logs I discovered that my 200 GB Seagate drives were throwing DMA errors, reverting to PIO, and then simply crapping out. I love my Seagate drives though, and have never had any trouble with them. After extensive testing, I concluded they weren’t the problem. They are, however, over 137 GB, requiring a newer 48-Bit addressing card, which the onboard IDE for my motherboard does not do, so I had purchased a Promise ATA133 card.

After extensive Googling, I discovered that Seagate and Promise don’t get along in UDMA-5, and I have to revert to UDMA-4. Slight kick in the nuts to speed, but if it makes it stable, I’ll do it.

That didn’t work.

PIO only? Nope. Still hard locking. Promise and Seagate get along just fine.

I tried several kernels, most custom built with all the drivers I needed (and some with only the drivers). I wasn’t sharing any IRQs. Still, the damn thing hard locked whenever I tried watching live TV, but with the drives throwing the DMA errors.

I decided to save any data I could, burning 178GB+ onto DVD, and clean formatting everything. The root, and both Seagate LVM drives.

I switched to (X)ubunutu since it was recommended by every one, and you aren’t cool unless you use Ubuntu. I’m not a distro fanboy, and Ubuntu didn’t fix anything for me (sorry, no “Ubuntu Saves MythTV Box and Drowning Baby at the same time!” headline for /. or Digg). Ubuntu did, however, take me about 40 times longer to get everything up and running compared to KnoppMyth, the distro I was using.

Well, Ubuntu did not save my box. It still hard locked. I then removed the Seagate drives and Promise controller, using only a second 30GB drive I had laying around in one config, and only the 10GB root drive in another. Both setups still hard locked. It was never my drives (I knew it wasn’t so Seagate) but the PVR-250 capture card. Peeking back through the logs, the TV card would throw the first DMA error, and that would cause all of my hardware (network card, hard drives, sound card) to follow suit. It was like digital dominos.

I begin pondering the notion that I simply have a hardware problem that I may never fix: the TV card and the motherboard do not get along. Considering I have all sorts of crappy PCs laying around the house that Alicia wants me to use or get rid of, I consider turning it into a frontend / backend configuration, but that would require me to buy extra hardware that I don’t want to do.

I power it down and leave everything for about a week. This bloody machine had taken control of my life when it was dying and I need to step away.

Fast-forward.

I was looking into new Motherboards, trying to see what options would work best for a new setup. I wanted ethernet, digital audio out, and compatible with my old proc so I didn’t have to eat that cost too. So, I went to Asus’ page and looked up the exact specs for my P4B266 mobo when I notice the BIOS updates. What the hell, if I’m going to replace it anyway, let’s see what they have. If it prevents it from booting, I’m not out anything. After Dave killed his Shuttle PC by updating the BIOS I had been wary, but now I have nothing to loose.

The change logs don’t have anything regarding PCI, DMA, etc. but I do notice the update adds 48-Bit addressing to the onboard IDE. Excellent, if it works, I won’t need the Promise card. Once I figure out how the hell to flash a BIOS, and get a floppy disk (Nick is the only person who still has one of these things, and I hadn’t the heart to tell him the disk couldn’t be read) I zap the BIOS forward 9 revisions (original 1002 to 1011.003), reboot the machine, start up Myth, and watch LiveTV.

Nine hours later, it’s still playing Live TV like a champ. The old config (pre Promise and Seagate that Dave and I thought was so stable) would always lock up over night if someone left it on LiveTV. I used to think it was the /cache ring buffer filling up and Myth not being to handle it. The new LiveTV setup (basically record into a tvbuf directory and set it to expire) wouldn’t have this problem, but it still crashed. The BIOS update has fixed my problems; I can finally relax and put this thing back into use. What really annoys me though, is when I wanted to add my 200GB drives (I’ve had two laying around not being used since we built it) if I had seen the BIOS update, everything would have been fine. The box would have always worked well.

You live and learn.

I’ve had the change to make some changes to the setup now, and I’ve learned from my mistakes. I have many more partitions (/myth, /myth/tv and /myth/video) to hopefully reduce loosing too much data in the future. I’ve also switched to JFS from XFS, since it Journals more than just metadata, and I trust the competency of IBM more than SGI. Once I saw the 2.6.1{7,8} kernel added an XFS bug that would eat everything, the choice was obvious.

For a Mac user since age 6, I have not seen what the other side has been going through. What the hell is wrong with you people?

In the end though, I have my MythTV box back, which I love, and it has a new name: Warai Otoko, Laughing Man.