July 2005 Archives

Mental note: taking the laptop on short business trips may be more hassle than it is worth.

A couple of weeks ago I was out in Kansas for an auction -- a quick out and back where I flew out Wednesday morning and had a scheduled Thursday night return. Thinking I might have a boring night out there with nothing to do, I took my iBook. As it turned out, I really should have left it at home.

The hotel ended up being overbooked (I looking right at you, Holiday Inn Express) so I shared a room with a coworker. Honestly, we were in the hotel room for all of about 7 hours because the family selling the property wanted to have dinner with all of us in Dodge City, and that went on for a while. So at this point, the iBook has been nothing more than some extra weight in a bag, which isn't a big deal. That changed.

After the auction, we had a return flight out of Wichita into Chicago for a "connection." They made me dig the iBook out of my bag (just a hassle), which they didn't do in Fort Wayne. Our connection out of O'Hare was cancelled, and at the hotel Thursday night (when I should have been at home in my own bed) I knocked the iBook off of the hotel bed onto the floor and the lid latch will no longer shut. Oh yeah, and I'm getting the click-of-death from the HD.

Be it serendipity or whatever, I already have purchased a new hard drive for the thing but that lack of a functioning lid is too much for me. I never shut the iBook off, instead opting to just let it hibernate with the lid closed. Now I have to shut it down completely, which you'd understand as frustrating if you dealt with change as poorly as I do.

So now I'm in the market for a nice rubber band and 6 hours to put towards replacing the HD. I'll take donations for either.

For posterity (and laughs) I copied over my BSU portfolio from their server to my own. I don't know that I'll ever look at it again, but it will be there if I need to.

Some of the pages are incomplete, and some classes aren't even represented. It isn't meant to be a work of art, but it covers several projects and papers. Enjoy.

I need a place to keep some notes about installing NetBSD 2.0 on my Cobalt Raq2, which was recently upgraded with a 120GB HD.

Settings for communicating across the serial port:

115200 bps
8 bits
1 stop bit
N parity


Here is the output from bootup:

>> NetBSD/cobalt 3.99.3 Bootloader, Revision 0.1 [@0x80f00000]
>> ([email protected], Sat May 14 13:10:34 CEST 2005)
>> Memory: 65536 k
>> PROM boot string: root=/dev/hda1 ro
Boot [wd0a:netbsd]:
Loading: wd0a:netbsd
2618464+148172 [83280+74820]=0x2ca464
Starting at 0x80001000

NetBSD/cobalt (Amnesiac) (tty00)


To get the LCD panel working, as root type:

# cd /dev
# ./MAKEDEV panel
# rm /dev/lcd
# ln -s /dev/panel0 /dev/lcd


(from here)

Edit some network settings:

# echo '348north.com' > /etc/defaultdomain
# echo '10.0.1.5 raq.348north.com raq' > /etc/hosts
# echo 'inet 10.0.1.5 netmask 255.255.255.0' > /etc/ifconfig.tlp0
# echo '10.0.1.1' > /etc/mygate
# echo 'raq.348north.com' > /etc/myname


Also need to create /etc/resolv.conf as so:

domain 348north.com
search 348north.com
nameserver 10.0.1.1


Now I need to get pkgsrc:

# cd
# ftp
ftp> open ftp.NetBSD.org
ftp> cd pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current/tar_files/
ftp> get pkgsrc.tar.gz
ftp> exit
# tar -xzvf ~/pkgsrc.tar.gz -C /usr
# rm pkgsrc.tar.gz


And, of course, my first package:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/webmin
# make install


(which of course installs several other packages)

There's more, of course -- like disabling telnet and setting a root password, but I'll leave something to the imagination.

Many miles away in a land called Nevada, a baby girl named Madison Carol was born a week ago yesterday (June 27th). This baby girl belongs to my cousin Shari, and her husband, Mike. Congratulations, Shari & Mike!

(updated photo)

Like many people, I use iTunes to store and playback music on my computer, blindly updating the software whenever a new version comes out. Honestly, I haven't spent much time playing around with the software other than to "rip, mix, burn" -- the original uses of iTunes. With version 4.9, that changed a little: podcasting support was added.

Over the last couple of days I have been searching around on the iTunes Music Store's list of podcasts and have come to two conclusions: a) there isn't much available in podcast form that I'm interested in right now, and b) finding a podcast I like will be the only reason I leave the iTunes Store enabled on my computer.

I'll address b) first: it is very slick of Apple to tie in their directory of podcasts with the Store -- I personally loathe the idea of buying the DRM'd songs and have never had the Store enabled. This new feature will likely encourage me to leave the Store 'on' if I can ever find some podcasts which interest me.

Which leads me roundabout to a). Here's what I want podcasted: conference calls. Apple has one coming up next Wednesday at 5PM ET, but I'll probably forget about it by then. If I do remember, I'll have to navigate to the Apple site and get to the right page and click the right banner to listen to the Quicktime stream. If I wanted to listen to the broadcast later on my iPod, I'd probably have to search the web for ways to capture audio streams... and then import it into iTunes... and then upload it to my iPod. Forget it.

Apple, just give me a conference call subscription. That way the calls will be automatically downloaded by iTunes and uploaded to my iPod. If I want to listen to prior calls, they'll be there for me in iTunes. Other companies could do this too -- maybe they'd even call you to see how they could use Quicktime Authoring and cut out the middlemen.

Until then, I'll be here waiting.