hireing myspace inspired designers considered harmful

To see what happens if you hire people who think the average page on myspace looks good to redo your news site you only have to look at the horror of the new site of the vrt.

Even with adblock and noscript tuned I cannot make it into a descent form. A sad day for webdesigners in .be.

Form over function indeed...

Installing debian on a DG33TL G33 system

Someone commented rightfully that I should explain how I got debian installed on the DG33TL.

There are 4 problems:

1. The standard kernel hangs at boot. This is because of a mmconfig related problem. To fix this use "pci=nommconf" as kernel boot option which will ignore the mmconfig information but still enable acpi so you still have a SMP machine.
   
2. The CD/DVD chipset is not yet supported. It is a "Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Unknown device 6101" which not even 2.6.23.9 seems to want to talk to. To solve this I booted from CD, but then continued to install from a USB stick.
3. The standard kernel uses the experimental firewire driver, which gives me an oops. The older firewire driver works perfectly.
   
4. The ethernet card is not recognised. It is a "Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 294c" which works with the 7.6.12-NAPI version e1000 driver.

So to install I used the CD image from Kenshi Muto to install. Afterwards the standard kernel needs the newer e1000 driver. At the moment I'm running 2.6.23.9.

Note to self: direct rendering on G33

If you cannot find out why oh why the Xorg server refuses to play nice and enable direct rendering, remember to check if libgl1-mesa-dri is installed...

So I'm almost there, installing debian on the G33 motherboard (an intel DG33TL) was non-trivial (I'll file a di bug soon), but now the advantages are becoming clear: the video is quite fast, very clear (DVI output) and the Q6600 cpu is just too fast.

Now to restore my backups and I'm back in the game!

The patient is healthy but dead

Three weeks ago I was scanning in all our old analog pictures from the APS cartridge. I've found a nice guy who rents out an APS capable scanner in .nl.

While I was scanning this in on Adele (my iMac) I thought: let's reconfigure Frost (the Debian build machine, backup server, iTunes server and fileserver), so I did a final backup to a FW external HD and inserted a Debian net-install CD. Which failed to install.

A bit confused I tried an older Debian release, which got slightly farther, but it still failed with a write error. So in the end I booted a recent Ubuntu installer, apt-getted the smart utilities and got a report on the disk. The disk claimed it was healthy. However it used 100% of its replacement sectors and gave read errors all over the place. Oh and a write error on sector several sectors.

Lessons learned:

1. Ask for smart support in the Debian installer
2. Install the smart daemon on the next server

So now I'm looking round for a nice Q6600 based server, using an intel motherboard with buildin graphics (maximum Linux compatibility) 4GB ram and 1TB of disk. This turns out to be a problem. None of the big vendors want to sell me a powerful, silent, computer with only Intel buildin graphics, they all insist on throwing in some nVidia or ATI incompatible POS :-(. And the smaller companies all want to sell me 'Gamer' PCs, with the same POS cards. So I have to find somebody who will build to spec but will still give me some warranty...

Not having Frost means that I am not able to do any Debian uploads :-(. Not that I'm not buzzy: I've got 3000 pictures to name, tag and date... (and in some case reimport because iPhoto things that they are raw pictures instead of the 48 bit tiff images that they are)

enter the permuted index

Wouter did you ever see the two indexes of the Common Lisp Hyperspec? There is a normal index and a "permuted" one, which almost always does exactly what you want.

to iceweasel or not?

At $employer I have to use meetingplace a lot, so it was rather irritating that it did not work.

After a bit of digging I hear that it works with firefox 2.0 and java 1.6. But only the original firefox, if you use iceweasel (or any renamed version I think) the 'browser test' works, but then it will tell you that you have no java installed. Clearly the application searches for firefox, does not find it and decides to give a bogus error message.

Now. Is this a iceweasel bug? I think not, but having browser detecting and adapting pages will always exist I fear so changing them all seems difficult. So let's call it a safety feature :-)

Finally online again

My new employer pays for an ADSL line for me. A second line, adding a ADSL connection on another copper pair I was told. Perfect I though, let's order it. Little did I know what problems I would get into.

Two days ago our ADSL went dead. No messages, no calls, no nothing. I call the provider (mobistar) who tell me we cancelled the contract and then hang up on me! The day after I contacted the company that does the ADSL stuff for $employer, asking them if this was their doing. Their reply: "search, search... no we have no documents on you, it must be something internal to $employer, we know nothing". Two hours later I get an email from them asking for dates for the installation of the ADSL modem. On the 21st at the earliest.

Coincidence, right? I send an "un-fuck this right now!" email shortly after. 24h later I still have no reply.

No looking forward to 2 weeks without internet we started searching. So after some hacking and a good idea from my wife it turns out skynet "just" re-enabled my account of 2 years ago, same userid, same password. As if I never left.

Not good...