the clueless american

I found this meme over at Neil's World and thought I'd give it a try:

1: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 18, find line 4. Write down what it says:
"tempted smile, a smile aware of being borrowed."
(Carter Beats the Devil by Glen David Gold)

2: Stretch your left arm out as far as you can. What do you touch first?
Long before my arm reaches full extension I run into the wall.

3: What is the last thing you watched on TV?
Sum of All Fears last night on DVD.

4: WITHOUT LOOKING, guess what the time is:
18:45

5: Now look at the clock; what is the actual time?
19:01

6: With the exception of the computer, what can you hear?
I hear birds singing outside the window, an occasional scream from the neighbor's kids, and e's latest favorite show on DVD, Felicity.

7: When did you last step outside? What were you doing?
At 15:30 we left to go horseback riding.

8: Before you came to this website, what did you look at?
I checked my work email.

9: What are you wearing?
My "horse riding uniform": old blue jeans, boots, t-shirt, and Disney California Adventure pullover fleece.

10: Did you dream last night?
I'm sure I did, but I have no idea what.

11: When did you last laugh?
While horseback riding...our instructor always makes us chuckle.

12: What is on the walls of the room you are in?
The office has always been my "I love me" room, so it has my diploma, commissioning, solo certificate, pilot training certificate, one of my commendation medals, a picture of a former commander intercepting a Russian Bear in his F-15, and a pic of the C-26. I also just remembered I have my "Hug your Teddy" license plate cover, as well as going away plaques from my USAFA squadron, my first AF job, and from the 102FW on Cape Cod.

13: Seen anything weird lately?
A clip from Oprah (my wife watched the whole show) of "Down Low" guys who refuse to be called gay but like having sex with men nonetheless.

14: What do you think of this quiz?
It's ok so far.

15: What is the last film you saw?
At the theater, Mona Lisa Smile in London. Very much a chick-flick, but about 1000 times better than Open Range.

16: If you became a multi-millionaire overnight, what would you buy first?
A new house for my mom.

17: Tell me something about you that I don't know.
I have a box of 300 Flav-o-Ice popsicles in the spare freezer--same ones I ate as a kid. Every once in a while I get out one, or a dozen, and relive the old days.

18: If you could change one thing about the world, regardless of guilt or politics, what would you do?
Find a way to eat anything without getting fat. (I worked on this for about 15 minutes, with several noble answers, but then I realized I'm hungry again.)

19: Do you like to dance?
I like it ok, admittedly more when I've had a touch of the sauce.

20: George Bush: is he a power-crazy nutcase or some one who is finally doing something that has needed to be done for years?
I don't think we talk about foreign leaders with such disparaging language, so I wonder why the rest of the world feels obligated to do it about our Prez. He's far from perfect, but he was properly elected, all accusations to the contrary. We'll find out in November what everyone else thinks.

21: Imagine your first child is a girl, what do you call her?
Jesse Ellen

22: Imagine your first child is a boy, what do you call him?
Max

23: Would you ever consider living abroad?
Duh, I guess I would. And if you want to know more, I'd do it again, even to a more isolated area like I'm in now.

There's not a new one this week, so I'm taking my questions from August 8, 2003. Why? Because I can :-) BTW, the CAR should be in my grubby little hands tomorrow morning at 1100! I can't wait!

1. What's the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?

London, 2 weeks ago. It was great!

2. What's the most bizarre/unusual thing that's ever happened to you while traveling?

I've seen a lot of crazy things in my travels. The one that immediately comes to mind is what we witnessed during the 3-hour wait to cross the border from Morocco back into Melilla (Spanish town in North Africa). Smugglers make up a lot of the foot traffic, and we got to watch some cops fight with some guys trying to smuggle stuff across in a refrigerator. Once the cops had the prime two on the ground and started to get them under control, other smugglers started throwing rocks at the police to try and save their friends. Very un-first world, if you catch my drift.

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?

Some kind of island resort in the Caribbean or Pacific, one of those posh private ones where you have a huge house and a staff at your disposal.

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?

Each has its advantages. Clearly planes are the fastest vehicles, but when you factor in all of the waiting time and driving to far away airports, it's not quite as fast as it seems. Cars offer the most flexibility but require a lot more work, especially in unfamiliar places.

5. What's the next place on your list to visit?

Lanzarote, Canary Islands, in 2 weeks, but we're trying to get out to Granada as well to see the Alhambra, so that may be first.

From the friday five:

This is the end of the Friday Five. I know most of you have seen this coming and I appreciate you humoring me. I haven't enjoyed it for some time now and because of that I can no longer justify the bandwidth. I'm not going to give it away or sell it or bring anyone on to help; Two-and-a-half years is a good run. Let's let it go.

Thank you to everyone who has participated over the past 2+ years, for taking this silly little idea and running with it. Thanks again to the donators for their generosity and thoughtfulness, and those of you who have emailed me notes of support and encouragement over the last few months.

I'm sorry I only got into it the last month or so of its life. Now what will I do every Friday if not ignore my F5 reminder in the calendar?

Not much time for writing lately, but I don't want this blog to die so here's a quick update:

e's still not feeling sick, but she can't do anything without feeling completely exhausted. She sleeps 8 hours every night and then 1-3 hours more during her daily naps. This baby is wearing her out!

I spent most of my time working on websites this weekend, unfortunately none on my own. We've been working on our church's website and found ourselves up against a 10MB limit, very small for their photo-heavy site. I noticed that we have several hundred MBs of unused space on our hosting plan and two empty slots for domain names, so we offered and the pastor agreed to let us host his site. The transfer went pretty painlessly, but it was a lot of tedious work. Passed some increasingly annoying emails back and forth with Webintellects Tech support about FXP to transfer the old site to the new. I don't think their A-team works weekends because the last word from them was that they don't support FXP but are planning a software release in the near future. When I pointed out that they merely needed to add a line to their proftpd config file and that FXP support had zero to do with software they release, they closed the trouble ticket instead of responding.

I got the last laugh when I remembered that this otherwise great hosting company lets me login to the shell with ssh. I logged in and then used ncftp (which has recursive file xfer) to connect to the old website. I had everything transferred over in a matter of minutes without having to download the 10MB to my home PC first.

Now that the church website is with us, we have a lot more content options since we have php, mysql, etc. I'm looking to change his site over to an easy to manage CMS. I really liked Church Website in a Box, which is a highly customized PostNuke board, but it's not easily convertible to Spanish so I had to drop it. I may go with a straight PostNuke install which can be done in Spanish; depends on how much time I have.

How's that for a "quick" update? More later!

Grrr...I just spent the better part of an hour debugging what were supposed to be brain-dead simple cgi scripts. The first one failed because I had set the permissions to 777 instead of 755. Apparently Apache can reject scripts that have too much permission without giving a useful error. To me that's like saying you won't accept a general power of attorney because it can be used for evil, but I digress...one chmod 755 later everything was working fine, until...

I moved onto the second, admittedly more complex, script and started getting similar errors. I immediately triple-checked the 755 permissions, but that wasn't it. Turns out there were two errors: the script writer had a space between #! and /usr/lib/perl and my host gave me bad info on the location of sendmail. I spent a good half hour with the script perfectly configured except for the fact that they either moved sendmail or gave me a bad link in the welcome email.

Anyway, it's all better now, and our Church's website now has a simple counter on the home page and a form mail that produces some readble output.

I'm sitting here in the parking lot of an office building not too far from our hotel. I've found that Atlanta and Marietta are full of free wireless access points, so until we get a permanent place I have to go cruising to get on the net. It works out well because e still needs her daily nap. With a 1-room hotel, it's a lot better for me to leave altogether than to try to stay and be quiet.

We only have 2 nights left in the hotel before we move along. We found a great new apartment complex last week about 20 minutes away from the base. It will be nice to be the first ones living in the apartment. We've arranged for some rental furniture for the time we're there, and hopefully our express shipment has already arrived from Spain with our household items such as towels and dishes.

Now that the apartment hunting phase is over, it's time to start looking for a house. A prospective realtor just called while I was writing this, and I took a few minutes to check out her site. She's out of town until next weekend, so we're probably going to meet her next Saturday when she gets back.

If I haven't mentioned it yet, we're really glad to be back in the US. There are a lot of things we will miss about Spain, but it's nice to be in our own country again!

Well, I got busted bigger than Dallas last night:

I was sitting in my usual parking lot, using a free wireless connection, when I saw a truck about 10 spots away pull out of the otherwise empty parking lot. I didn't think anyting of it until about 15 minutes later when the same truck came back and parked 2 spots away from me. The guy looked at me and saw I was using the computer, but he didn't say anything. He got some things out of his truck, and then I heard a door open right behind me. I looked at the door and saw that it was SMC--the same name as the router I was using! While trying to look inconspicuous, I quickly turned off the laptop and drove away. In the rear-view mirror I saw the guy checking something--probably his network. Naturally I hadn't done anything at all to their system, but I figured it would be better not to be in the area any more last night.

It's not a factor anymore as we checked out of the hotel this morning to move into the apartment. I don't know where I'll connect to post this entry, but I'll be favoring openly free services such as Panera Bread or atlantafreenet.org. [Update, 2150: I couldn't find anything free, so I'm posting this from outside a Starbuck's. Cost me $10 for 24 hours of access, but maybe that's better than sneaking around parking lots]

I called Comcast today and the first available install date is next Monday. That means we'll have to find some wireless connection, free or otherwise, closer to our apartment. Lord knows I can't be without the internet for 6 days!

Lately I've been bombarded with SPAM comments. The spammer is using an automated system with multiple IP addresses so that I can't just ban one IP to stop them. It's really just a waste of time since unregistered comments don't appear unless I approve them, and I certainly don't approve any spam. I wish there were an easier way to block these people from commenting 40-80 times a day! I'm sure there is something out there in MT land, but I don't have consistent internet access yet and can't afford to spend my time tracking it down. Maybe next week after the cable is installed....

Well, after 3 days of 20-30 spam comments a day, I finally decided to do a fresh install of Movable Type while upgrading to 3.11. This allowed me to easily turn on the comment registration system without having to recode the individual templates. As a side effect, you can see that I now have a new style for the blog. I think I'll keep this style for now, but in the days ahead I'll be slowly re-adding my links to the index page and changing other preferences to make it mine again.

What does this mean to you? Not a whole lot unless you're one of the 3 people who semi-regularly comment on the blog. You will now have to register with the Typekey service in order to comment. Don't worry, they'll walk you through it the first time you try to comment. From then on, it should be very easy to leave a message here.

What a productive New Year's Day we've had in the clueless household! It's 22:40 and I've been wearing my pj's all day. We started off working this morning, dividing the cheeses and pepperoni from Sam's into smaller bags and sealing them up. Oops, apparently I'm thinking of yesterday morning when we did that. I just checked with e, and she confirms that today I really haven't done much of anything.

What I have done, for what it's worth, is mess around with our Audio CD's / MP3 files a lot. Some of our MP3 files are more than 6 years old and were ripped back when the technology was fairly new. I've always talked about re-ripping everything at a higher quality, etc., but never did anything about it until today.

I started out looking at flac, the Free Lossless Audio Compression codec. It basically is able to compress audio files smaller than a WAV without losing any of the quality, unlike MP3 and WMA which are lossy codecs. Well, after reading a lot about flac and downloading it for e's machine (she's the keeper of the MP3 files), I decided that it doesn't compress enough for our needs. The average file compressed between 50-60% at the highest setting. That would be nice if we wanted lossless archives of our CD's, but we'd rather have decent-sounding songs that are small enough to fit on the hard drive.

Being a Linux user and all-around open-source fan, I'd like to make the jump to Ogg Vorbis, but our 60GB Archos jukebox is only able to play MP3 songs which means I'm sticking with MP3 for now.

While reading about flac, I saw a lot of people talking about using Exact Audio Copy to rip their CD's. I generally use Grip on the Linux box and CD-DA X-Tractor (not Extractor, which is different) on Windows, but I'm always on the lookout for something better. As near as I can tell, EAC's main advantages are that it has a database of drives and that it works with AccurateRip, an extension that allows users to compare ripped files for accuracy. EAC is also faster than Easy CD-DA X-tractor, although for ease of use I'd still recommend Easy CDDAX to a new user. Don't forget to get the LAME codec no matter what program you use.

After ripping about 10 CD's with EAC, 4 of which were in AccurateRip's DB, I went looking at the dBpowerAMP Music Converter, or dMC. My initial interest was in its ability to transcode audio files between the various formats, but I quickly became interested in its own AccurateRip-enabled ripping ability. I haven't had the time or inclination to run a test yet, but the dMC rips seem to go a LOT faster than EAC while still achieving accurate results. I'll keep playing with both of them as I slowly work my way through our entire CD collection--or as much as e's MP3 drive will hold. In any event, I'm mostly not using Grip because 1) my Linux box is a slow P3-700 and 2) I still haven't gotten a CD to burn correctly since we stopped using the SCSI emulation for IDE drives. I'll stick with Windows for now and maybe move ripping back to Linux if I ever get around to fixing 1 and 2 above. I've brought up about 40 CD's from downstairs and am slowly ripping them while I type.

I use Evolution on my Linux box, but I just recently upgraded e's computer to Office 2003. She had been previously using SpamBayes and ran into the apparently common problem where Outlook wants to create an unchangeable folder named "Junk Email." If one already exists, it will happily call itself "Junk Email1" and refuse to let you change its name. Unless, that is, you look at this article written by someone who upgraded last year:

Want to rename the Junk E-mail folder in Outlook 2003?

Just in case you haven't seen it, Google's April Fools' day entry for 2005 is up. This one's not fooling me, but it is humorous.

Google Gulp

About 2 weeks ago my XP box really started acting up on me. I noticed that the game I'm playing lately, Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, was getting kind of choppy. I then tried to edit some digital video, my other main use for the XP machine, and it didn't work well either. The AVI capture was choppy and the playback was horrible. I rendered some files as MPEG-2 and burned a DVD, and the video seemed more-or-less OK. That led me to believe I had some sort of video codec trouble, but lots of installing and re-installing failed to remedy the problem.

After testing various things I finally noticed that the HD was operating at about 10% of the expected speed and that SiSoft Sandra reported that the drive was not operating in DMA mode. Seems that XP will automatically switch to PIO mode if it detects a certain number of I/O errors. It will make the switch without any warning; it's also not immediately obvious how to switch back to DMA.

While there are software solutions that give you direct control of the DMA setting, I just did the old Windows standby: I removed and reinstalled the Primary IDE channel. After 2 reboots the Primary IDE channel was back in DMA mode and everything (so far) seems to be working just as it was. After being prepared to format the HD or start buying new hardware, I was so glad that a simple software solution fixed my problems.

Well, AJ won't be happy that this isn't an entry about The Boy, but I thought a little Public Service Announcement was in order.

After I landed this morning the base issued an advisory for severe thunderstorms with hail. Since work was done for the day, my boss gave me the go-ahead to get my BMW home and in the garage before the hail came. I made it, but when I got in the house I saw that the power had been out briefly because a few appliances were blinking while others still had the right time. Apparently that power surge fried the motherboard on my XP box. I've tried everything I can, and it still points to a dead MB. I'll have to get a new one on order while I'm in Arizona next week.

So, the PSA is: protect your PCs with a UPS!

Update, 1 May @ 0140: With all the fun in AZ I forgot to order the new parts until Friday the 29th, but a new MB and UPS are on the way. Hopefully this won't catch me again!

I'm sitting here at work, practically bubbling with excitement over the prospect of my latest endeavor: MythTV.

I've been looking into an open source PVR ever since I first started reading about people hacking their Tivos years ago. Since Tivo is Linux based, customizing the system is only as hard as getting access to it. Naturally it's not easy to do that, especially on a Series-1 no-network-access machine, but not impossible. That eventually led to smart people writing open source PVR projects such as Freevo and MythTV. I don't want to start a debate on which of these is better--that would be pointless. After researching both projects MythTV felt like the right one for me, so that's what I'll do.

I initially tried to price what sounded like a decent but low-cost system by just picking components out of the air. That started approaching 2 grand so I started searching on the web. O'Reilly did a review of how to build a quiet PVR, but it, too, was well over $1000.

The cost put me off for a while until a friend who has a MythTV box said I was shooting way too high if I was spending more than $500. I did a search today for "mythtv less than $500" and came up with The $500 Dollar Mythbox Project. The writer there shows screenshots from his Newegg order for the complete system. I used his system as a max price list for each component and started looking around Newegg myself. Here's what I came up with:

1 CPU FAN|ARCTIC-COOL ACCS2L RTL - Retail
Item #: N82E16835186103

Yeah, it would have been nice to order one of these. I thought it came with either the CPU or mobo, but I was wrong :-(

About the same time e gave me the go-ahead for the MythTV box, she started asking me about a new computer for downstairs. She spends most of her time there nowadays, and the laptop she's been using seems to be getting slower and slower. The same cousin who recommended MythTV to me recommended Mac to her.

After less convincing than I expected, e announced that she was ready to make the switch. I did a lot of internet research and settled on the 20" iMac Intel Dual-Core. It's a lot more computer than e needs right now, but we're sure to grow into it as time goes by.

Since my project is on temporary hold (come on FEDEX!) I've been playing around with e's iMac a lot, and so far I like what I see. I won't say it's perfect--nothing ever is--but it seems a lot better out of the box than your standard Windows install. Who knows, maybe in a few years when my Win machine needs replacing I'll get a Mac instead. I used to think that wasn't possible, but now who knows?

After a seemingly interminable wait mainly caused by my own failure to order the correct parts, I finally had everything I needed for my MythTV box yesterday.

Installing the heatsink was a little harder than I expected, mainly because 1) I've never had an Athlon processor before and 2) the case I bought leaves very little room to work. I tried for about 5 minutes and then decided it wasn't worth the frustration, so I removed the power supply to give me easier access. Even then I had some trouble figuring out how to clip it on. I finally got it in place and re-assembled the box, and then I hooked it up to my monitor and fired up the installation.

The KnoppMyth install is fairly straightforward so I won't go into the specifics, but while the files were copying I realized I had another issue I hadn't anticipated: wireless internet access. My TV and cable outlet are in the bedroom far from the router, so my plan all along has been to use a Belkin wireless USB adapter to access the internet.

I realize that I could have plugged into the wired network in the computer room, configured eth0, and then setup the system before figuring out the wireless, but as the wireless was critical to my setup I decided to tackle it first.

Searching around the internet led me to the Atmel Wireless LAN driver at http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/downloads.html for my particular adapter; YMMV. The documentation/online forums weren't crystal clear for me so I thought I'd include the whole process here. Obviously it would have been a little easier had I initially hooked up the wired LAN.

First I downloaded the driver on a machine that is connected: http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/downloads.html

I then copied it to a RW CD which I threw in the MythTV box. I exited out of MythTV and fired up the terminal. I unpacked the archive by typing:

tar xjvf atmelwlandriver-3.4.1.1.tar.bz2

I changed into the newly created directory and attempted to install from there. There's no configuring to be done, so if you type "make" a menu comes up giving options for installation. The options seem to say that "make install" will install everything, but in 3 attempts nothing was installed. I finally decided to manually install the part I needed by typing:

make usb

Afterwards I typed:

make lvnet

to install the configuration program for the device.

At the end I had a new device named atml0. Now, there's surely some way to rename it to wlan0 or something more related to wireless networking, but I didn't care what it was called as long as it worked.

I configured the device with lvnet, deciding to give it a static IP address on the 198.162.XX.XX network with a 255.255.255.0 submask. I then had to edit /etc/resolv.conf to include 192.168.1.1 (the gateway) as a DNS.

After all was configured I typed "ifup atml0" and started pinging. I was able to get machines on my local network and outside, resolved addresses like www.google.com.

I did a quick restart to be sure my configuration was done, and I was sorry to see that the network did not come up. I dropped into terminal to type "ifup atml0" which made the network startup just fine.

After much searching on Google, the Knoppmyth wiki, and the mysettopbox.tv forums, I decided the most likely solution to the problem of the many I found was to find the module used by the device and then be sure to load it on startup. I knew from my previous web searching that the Atmel driver uses the usbvnetr module, so I opened up /etc/modules and added usbvnetr. I haven't had a chance to restart it yet, but I'm fairly confident the network will be up at the end.

Once the wireless network issue was resolved, I brought the computer into the bedroom and hooked it up to the TV. I fired it up and was disappointed to see: nothing.

After a few minutes of looking around and some internet searching, I realized that I had hooked up the TV to the PVR-250's video in port instead of the video card's TV out. I plugged it in without shutting down the computer and was greeted with a black-and-white MythTV screen. I also didn't have any live TV, but I noticed that the screen said "Composite 0" which didn't sound right. Turns out you need to configure the machine correctly in order for it to work. What a concept! I went to the settings and changed the PVR setting to Tuner 0, then rebooted the machine. On startup the color was ok and the TV worked great! I still don't know about the network because the /etc/modules fix I mentioned above didn't happen until later.

Now that it's mostly up and running I'm starting to play with everything. I've already figured out recording, commercial flagging, and transcoding. I messed around with the web server, and I think that will turn out to be easier than scheduling recordings on the box itself. Some snags to work out are streaming over the net (works fine with Windows but no dice on Linux/Mac), Burning to CD (ran all night with lots of errors and no DVD files at the end), transcoding to smaller format (the parameters on KnoppMyth Wiki must be for PAL because the picture looks distorted on NTSC).

Naturally there was a new version out before I installed the one I'd been given previously. Maybe I'll work on upgrading today. The worst that can happen is that I'll lose everything.

Well, after less than 2 weeks it's time for another change in the blog's look. This after e told me my site was looking a little gay. I said, you mean, like this:

and she said, "yeah, just like that." So now the new style is hopefully a little more manly, like the sheets I used to have when I was single where one visitor's first comment was, "guy sheets." Like I'd have the sheets that lil guy up there would sleep in!

It's funny how things work sometimes. The day after I gave e the go-ahead to give away our old Sony DVP-330 DVD player, I get this email from sonystyle.com informing me that they are on the verge of settling a class action lawsuit against them. It's funny because I basically tolerated the bad unit the whole time I had it. At first I didn't know any better because DVD players were relatively new, and then later on it didn't fail enough to warrant replacing it, that is until about 2 weeks ago. We replaced it, gave it away, and then got it right back so we could copy down the serial number for the upcoming (March 2007) settlement.

In case you're wondering, I downloaded the proposed claim form, and it seems that Sony will either reimburse actual expenses (up to a point, no doubt) for repairing the unit or provide a $40 certificate to buy Sony stuff if you replaced the bad unit before December 2003. I first thought I was hosed because we kept our bad player until a few days ago, but then I realized we bought a DVD player in 2002. It's a portable, but we definitely used it when the Sony wouldn't play a disc, so as far as I'm concerned that was my replacement for the malfunctioning unit. We'll see how it goes when March 7 rolls around.

Click here to see if your crappy Sony DVD qualifies.

Mmmm... Unexplained Bacon: Enable CAC card in Linux and Firefox

Now, this person has comments turned off so I can't write them, but tell me honestly, is this my twin brother? Simpsons, Firefox, Linux, MythTV, DoD employee...I'm going to have to keep an eye on this page!

As it turns out I've already flashed my CAC reader to make it work with e's iMac, which it does..sort of. It recognizes that the CAC is inserted, but when I try to access sites it allows me to choose only one of the 3 certificates, and of course it's not the one I need. Obviously there's still some work to be done, but it's nice to know that I'm one step closer to complete Windows freedom. I seriously almost bought a new Macbook laptop a few weeks ago when I was at the big BX up in Germany, but I stopped myself when I realized that I need a Windows laptop for webmail and other AF-specific items. Now if I can find an open-source way to edit XML IMTs...

I wanted to get this post out there in case there's a MythTV user looking to see if it will work with AFN when you're stationed overseas. The short answer: yes it will.

If you search for 'afn mythtv' you'll no doubt get a lot of results pointing to the same basic post where in Sep 2004 a fellow military member nicknamed "Smoking Gun" wrote a perl script to grab AFN listings data.

I'm happy to report that such a script is no longer necessary. As of 2007 when I moved to Turkey, AFN is now part of the DataDirect lineup. It's available under many ZIP codes, but I happen to use 10101. All you need to do is create your lineup at Schedules Direct using 10101 and AFN Satellite. Assign this lineup to a video source and run mythfilldatabase as usual. You'll now have channels 1-10, AFN NPR on 24, Radio AFN on 25 and AFN Freedom on 26.

If your base cable has a different lineup, no problem. Simply use the channel editor in mythtv-setup or the one in MythWeb to make the channels match your cable setup. If you have unscheduled channels like the Commander's Access Channel you want to view, simply add the channel in mythtv-setup. It won't have any guide information but the channel will be viewable in live TV.

I've been given the go-ahead to get a new laptop, partially because the house is under contract and hopefully will belong to someone else by the end of the month (yay!) and partially because my new job will likely keep me away from home a lot.

I've always said that if I get a job with a lot of deploying then I needed to get a new laptop with all the built-in goodness my 7-year-old model does not possess. After over a year of e's iMac, I was set on a MacBook Pro and nearly bought one when we saw it on the shelf in Germany. Just when I was working up the nerve to spend that much $, I realized that if it were to be my travel computer I'd need to be able to do work on it and that means I'd need to use my CAC to check email and PureEdge viewer to fill out the various gov't forms we use.

I was bummed for a while. I know there are solutions to run Windows on Mac, but the whole point is that I didn't want to run Windows. Still, I was resigned to getting a Windows laptop--got pretty close to laying out the cash for a Sony VAIO VGN-FZ180E/B--when I decided to do some more searching.

It turns out I'm not the only federal employee who'd like to use another operating system. It didn't take too much looking around to find "CAC on a Mac," a technical paper written for the Naval Postgraduate School which describes how to get the Common Access Card certificate working on a Mac. I'd previously used the article to flash the gov't card reader, allowing it to work under Mac and Linux.

I still needed an IMT solution, and the fact that e really wanted Windows for her two favorite traveling programs, AutoCAD and PhotoShop, wasn't making life easier. Then last night when I was ready to give in I found out that the gov't saved the day again. It seems there are a lot of government researchers who use other operating systems. When the grant application program went to the same PureEdge system used by the AF there was a mutiny because the researchers didn't want to buy new computers just to be able to fill out some forms. The government used its no doubt considerable leverage over IBM and convinced them to do what PureEdge had always refused to consider: develop an IMT viewer for the Mac. You can download it, appropriately enough, from grant.gov here. I'm hoping it's only a matter of time before someone ports the viewer to Linux. I'd really love a completely open-source laptop but I think that's not in the cards for me this time. Now, off to the Apple Store! Too bad they don't ship to APO addresses :-( Guess I'll have to wait until I'm up in Germany again or until we get back to the US.

Not that I expect too many people read this blog, but I finally fixed the error that has been keeping me from posting to my blog for over 2 months. In case this winds up on someone's Google query and can be of help, I was getting the dreaded 'Statement has no result columns to bind' error that was preventing me from using my site. After much trial and error I came across a site recommending that I clean up the MySQL tables. I went to http://paulstamatiou.com/2006/05/31/how-to-quickie-repair-mysql-tables-in-phpmyadmin/ for tips on how to fix my tables using phpmyadmin. In my case repairing the tables with overhead didn't help but I noticed my mt.log and tbping tables reported "in use" and the associated MYI files were dated Oct 18th where everything else was Dec 19th. I repaired those two tables and so far everything seems to be working again. Yee-haw!

So congrats if you have a good enough education to understand the blog :-)

I've always thought myself fairly knowledgeable on computers, but I'm starting to feel a little behind the times. It all started when I finally got around to unpacking my Windows box from Turkey and trying to set it up. What I initially thought was a little ding to the case turned out to be that the whole front of the case was smashed in.

I decided to buy a replacement case since it seemed the case was not salvageable. The first case I ordered from Newegg arrived with the front panel completely sheared off. There were six little cylinders on the front panel that were supposed to snap in the metal part of the case, and they were all rolling around the inside of the case, having been neatly sheared off in transit. I asked Newegg if they'd just ship me a new front panel like they did the last time this happened, and after a few days they agreed. Much to my chagrin, the new panel arrived without any of the 6 posts that were supposed to connect it to the case. In other words, it was broken exactly like the one I already had. I got frustrated and completely returned the broken item to Newegg--on their dime much to Newegg's credit.

After a 2-week pause where I was alternately too sick or working too much to work on the computer, I ordered another, sturdier-looking case from Newegg. The case arrived, but again due to work it was over a week before I had a chance to work on it. Now, to back up a second, when I discovered the damaged case I powered up the computer long enough to see that it did in fact work properly and the hard drives seemed ok.

Jump back to the present, or at least a few days ago. I had some time to work on the box, so I carefully disassembled the old case, unplugging and unscrewing everything as I went along. I then carefully installed everything into the new case. I was impressed by some of its features but won't get into a review here. About 6 hours after I started, I fired up the computer for the first time and got...nothing. Turns out I forgot the video card had a power plugin. I fixed that and started again. The CD/DVD lights came on like a normal boot and then the computer just started clicking. The LED on the network card was blinking in time to the clicking and the power seemed to be dimming slightly with each click. No POST, nothing on the video...

After much searching on the net, I decided my motherboard must be fried. I need a new one anyway because after I installed everything the CPU heatsink fell off because the plastic holding it on had also been damaged and gave way after I closed the case up. Not my day, you know?

So, I started looking for a new motherboard. After a fair amount of searching I've determined that Socket 478 mobo's are all but gone. In addition, AGP video cards are likewise toast. Finding a board with both is near impossible. Fine, I said, I'll upgrade the mobo, processor and video card; been wanting to upgrade that old P4 3.0GHZ anyway. Guess what? The first 10 or so boards I checked out have only one IDE connector for my 4 drives!!! Now I'm willing to upgrade my mobo because it's broken anyway, the cpu because I must and the video card likewise, but I am not upgrading to SATA hard drives when my IDE ones are working just fine for me!

So now I'm stuck looking through each type of board because for some reason IDE (PATA) isn't a search option on every motherboard page. I need to find a reasonably priced board that will work with everything I own except the processor and video card, and then I need to find those two items that will work with my board. I don't want to spend too much but don't want to fall too behind either. I don't really feel like going through every spec of the board and learning what the new terms mean, but I'm going to have to if I don't want to "upgrade" to a completely new system. Yikes!