The other day I discovered a great deal on a 17″ flat panel monitor (with integrated speakers!) on buy.com (only $150 after googling around for a $10 affiliate discount).
Granted it only takes VGA input, but I’ve had this little VIA EPIA computer hanging around without a monitor that I’ve been meaning to install Ubuntu on. It arrived Friday so I plugged everything together, burned an Ubuntu 5.10 install ISO onto CD, and got the process underway.
Round 1
The installation went smoothly, if not sluggishly (the VIA EPIA is not big iron) while I did the dishes. It finished the first phase of the installation, ejected the CD, and rebooted. Again, things went smoothly until at some point it started producing the following error messages:
/usr/sbin/termwrap: line 140 $tmpfile: ambiguous redirect
/usr/sbin/base-config: line 31 /var/log/base-config.timings: read-only file system
…in succession, followed by:
Id "1" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 mins
…and then the whole process would repeat. Round about that time, Stephanie came over, so I gave up for night and we went out for dinner.
Round 2
I started over again this evening, and this time I got the following error during the partitioning phase of the installation:
Input/output error during read on /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc
ERROR!!!
Well we all know when operating systems output an error message like ERROR!!! we’re in teh trouble. I tried it once more and got the same message. A little Googling around didn’t turn up much except that I might have a bad IDE cable (or possibly hard drive?).
Conveniently my dad just returned my old, circa-2002 X-series Thinkpad, it having been rendered non-functional for the last 2 years thanks to a busted system board, so out came its 30GB Travelstar hard drive and into the VIA EPIA system it went (which conveniently takes a laptop size hard drive). We have liftoff!
Took a heckuva long time (we’re talking 600 MHz here folks) but at least we got to a GUI. And then I went to check out the networking settings the system froze. Hard reboot.
Networking
So I’m probably not going to set this thing up within reach of my cable modem-cum-router-cum-wireless access point, so I ran out and picked up the cheapest USB 802.11G Wireless adapter I could find, a Hawking HWU54G for $34. Now the question is, can I get Ubuntu to detect it and get me online.
Just futsing around, I went to the Ubuntu device database collection. The system freezes again. Hard reboot. Things are not looking promising. Conveniently however Hawking actually offers drivers for Linux but they require the kernel source and following like 5 pages of broken English instructions to get everything configured. Yuck. Meanwhile checking some other innocuous setting, the system freezes again.
Next step: direct cable connection to my router, just to see if I can play around with Firefox. But sadly it doesn’t look like this VIA EPIA was intended to power a Linux desktop.
My 1st post in a series about running Ubuntu on a Mini-ITX.
RSS feeds should be served as application/rss+xml. Atom feeds should use application/atom+xml. If this is not possible, make sure that one of the following set of markers is present in the first 512 bytes of your feed
<rss
<feed
<rdf:RDF AND http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns# AND http://purl.org/rss/1.0/
This post first appeared on From the Belly of the Beasts, a weblog from some of the people who build O’Reilly websites.
Friday night I hitched a ride down to the city with Mark and Linda to see Jimmy Wales give a Long Now talk on Wikipedia. I jotted down a few notes of interest:
Wikipedia was a social (not a technological) innovation, as all the software necessary to make it run (database, webserver, web browser, wiki) had existed since 1995
Wales believes that Wikipedia works because there is a community of thoughtful users that contribute to it, not that it’s some example of a emergent hivemind, etc.
predominant paradigm in social software design: keep people in cages—but complex permission schemes prevent people from doing good
Wales’ job consists of battling against programmers: “we don’t algorithmatize against what we shouldn’t”
Afterwards we went out to Osha Thai Restaurant on 2nd Street, where Stephanie met up with us for some mind blowing green curry. The service not so. Afterwards: drinks and music at 111 Minna.
We were chatting about tracking more accurate feed subscription stats after work the other night, and I made a mental note to poke around my httpd server access logs (thank you Dreamhost for making that so easy). So I’m paging through yesterdays 20MB access log, when the user-agent string for the Bloglines bot catches my eye:
Whut? That prized information, the number of people Bloglines is redistributing my feed to is right there! Ok so it’s not exactly an API. And when I started looking through the user-agent strings, I discovered that there was a wide variance in how these web based aggregators reported their subscribers. Here’s a sampling:
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 5 subscribers)
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; Rojo 1.0; http://www.rojo.com/corporate/help/agg/; Aggregating on behalf of 3 subscriber(s) online at http://www.rojo.com/?feed-id=2392387) Gecko/20021130
kinjabot (http://www.kinja.com; 1 Readers)
YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 1; views 1)
FeedLounge (http://dl0.feedlounge.com:9999/), 1 subscribers, next refresh in approx. 28800 seconds
LiveJournal.com (webmaster@livejournal.com; for http://www.livejournal.com/users/jstnsmnia_blog/; 1 readers)
AttensaOnline/1.0 (http://www.attensa.com; 1 subscribers)
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a standard? Something like:
X subscribers;
The rest (as far as I could tell), were just regular individual requestors. Or web-based aggregators that hadn’t jumped onto the custom user-agent bandwagon yet, *cough* Google *cough*.
With a little bit of moxie (grepped the access logs, regular expression formatting in EditPlus, analysis in Microsoft Access) I can say about 190 people subscribe to my feeds. Which is surprising to me. Here’s how it breaks down visually for my info-porn fans.
Apparently Google Desktop is a force to be reckoned with. I had more of these in my logs (coming from unique IP addresses) than any other aggregator:
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Google Desktop)
And I had no idea Google Desktop included a feed reader.
Like half the world, I’ve got an AOL Instant Messenger account, but I never use AIM to access it, because I don’t want AIM to crude up my computer with icons and ads and DLLs.
So I use the ad-free, open source, and featureful GAIM instant messaging client (now called Pidgin), partly because I like knowing that I’m chatting privately with OTR encryption.
But I’ve been wanting to change my password. And my contact email address while I’m at it. After a little Googling, I discover that all of AOL’s online help docs seem to imply that this can only be done through the AIM client. Err.
So I go through the trouble of downloading and installing AIM, select My AIM > Edit Options > Change Password, and what does it do? It launches Firefox and takes me to a freaking website! Why couldn’t they just have pointed me there in the first place?!
So in case anyone on the intarweb ever wants to change their AIM password or contact email, here’s the URL of the website in order to do so: https://my.screenname.aol.com/
Update: to all the people who’ve left comments saying you don’t have access to/don’t remember the email address associated with your account, you don’t remember the password associated with your account, and you don’t remember the answer to the security question, you are “up shit creek without a paddle” so to speak. Because at this point there is no way you can validate that the screen name you’re claiming is yours is actually yours. Your best bet? Create a new account. They’re free.
The other day I discovered a great deal on a 17″ flat panel monitor (with integrated speakers!) on buy.com (only $150 after googling around for a $10 affiliate discount).
