I arrived into work on Friday morning to find my machine hung and in need of a reboot. With some regret at the lost uptime of my desktop machine I flipped the switch on the case and watched the bootup. Disaster! The 2 drives on the first IDE channel failed to show! After much cursing and general worry I tried again and this time the BIOS booted fine! Woohoo!
This morning, almost the same thing happened. I checked my mail, loaded up the dozen tabs I needed for a fix of information in the morning and suddenly my browser died. Then went Thunderbird. At the same time my machine got a lot quieter and I guessed I had disk problems again!
I brought it back to life again and managed to get everything off it and used the opportunity to install Fedora Core 2.
I installed apt from freshrpms.net but fedora.us looks like a better apt-ge trepository, if for no other reason than it has “Window Maker” rpms! Gnome and Nautilaus were way too slow on my humble machine!
If you’re upgrading from an earlier RedHat release, make sure you update the fonts your apps use. I copied over my Mozilla and Thunderbird directories and they still used “serif” and “sans serif”. Once I updated them to the “Bitstream Vera” versions, as well as the monospace font too, everything looked much better! Now to download the xmms mp3 and mplayer rpms!
Later … Freshrpms has xmms-mp3 and mplayer. Fingers crossed that both repositories can co-exist!
Later Still … It seems to be fine. Don’t forget to install the Freshrpms GPG key too!
Hmm.. Why wasn’t my sound card detected?
Monthly Archives: July 2004
Courtmacsherry – POTD July 18th, 2004
The sea outside Courtmacsherry a week ago.
Girl Playing, Courtmacsherry – POTD July 17th, 2004
Jacinta and I were down in Courtmacsherry on Sunday afternoon last. It was an eventful afternoon, shortly after bumping into Micheál Martin we came to the point of the headland we we walking on.
Walking carefully, aware of the steep grassy/rocky slope down to the thundering sea below we watched in amazement and horror as a little boy, hardly more than 4 years old walked up with a small dog on a long lead. He carried the dog for a short distance with the lead dangling dangerously around his legs.
We stood still watching him approach, and as he dragged the dog down the slope by the light in the picture. His sister and brothers appeared shortly afterwards with a very unworried looking father trailing the group! We walked on a little but watched as the father rested on the ground while his kids ran amock on the slope! *gulp*
Software That Lasts 200 Years
This essay has been linked to death but I just got around to reading it. Printing it out for consumption later!
Vitriolica Webb's Ite
Vitriolica has some great sketches, quite amusing too! 🙂
Even The President Stands Naked Sometimes
Scott Rosenberg has an excellent and alternative take on Fahrenheit/911. Moore may bend the truth sometimes as does “the other side” but it’s the fact that he’s rebelling against the presidency in the US that’s important. He’s commiting “lese majeste”.
When the throne holds an ignorant, incompetent, profligate pretender, lese majeste becomes a patriotic duty.
Timoleague Abbey Window – POTD July 16th, 2004
Just yards from where I took yesterday’s photo This is a photo taken through the tall windows there. If I knew more about architecture and history I could probably tell you all about the origins of the Abbey and the style of windows pictured here, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader!
Pringles Dippers Shocker!
Ohmygod! It would seem that there are problems with the new Pringles Dippers being advertised on TV with duck billed platypusses (is that right? platypussies maybe? Ah, thanks Kevin for this!) swimming behind several beautiful and not-fat young people. I’m not suggesting that eating Pringles will make you fat, but there’s even less chance of it happening with the dippers as there’s less in the box! Good luck trying to fit a dipper+dip into your mouth too. Maybe a little too big for a single dip?
Some people just hate the advert!
And finally, check ateed.com for the music to the ad. It’s loaded via a flash animation so I couldn’t download the music. Maybe someone going through a proxy can get the URL?
Zend in the clowns? – a history of PHP
Zend in the clowns? is a lengthly article about the history of PHP. *phew*
Digital Black & White
Mark points at Digital Black & White | Dynamic Artwork which explains several ways of converting colour images to black and white. I personally use the greyscale tool, or the saturation tool, and afterwards i[ the contrast using “Curves”.
Not withstanding the feel of B/W anyway, it’s great if you’ve shot a load of photos with the wrong white balance setting! 🙂