Jentoo/wista fun

A while back, I decided it would be a good idea to dual boot my laptop with gentoo and vista.  All went fairly well, never used linux much, because rebooting’s a pain.

I was bored a minute ago, and wondered if I could make the same linux install work in a virtualbox VM.  A bit of fiddling and a google, and I had it booting.  Added one network driver and the install now works flawlessly in both VM and natively.  Cool beans

I am pondering a way to make it automatically boot / timeout into linux when being booted inside the VM, whereas it defaults to vista natively.  I really doubt GRUB can detect virtualbox.

My current plan is to make a CD or floppy image which will boot the linux partition, and put that as the boot device for the VM in virtualbox.  I’m thinking this would work, and I bet I can do it, but it seems a bit ugly.

Anybody else have an elegant hack?  Anybody else ever done what I’m doing?  It seems like a pretty useful thing, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before.

Captchas

I just got a captcha on slashdot, for “Repealing”, to which I don’t have a clue as to the meaning. I then had an idea: Combine captchas (Have I spelt that right?) and a word a day calendar. If you get the word right, it tells you what it means.

Confessions of a vista user… And tuxcast

So, there I was, happily enjoying my shiiny new vista laptop.

Well, not so much.  I’m starting to remember why I dislike windows – I’ve had the odd BSOD (About 3-4 so far, though, not too bad).  But worse than that are the random slowdowns that I have now traced back to something to do with the SATA / harddisks.  But I don’t actually have a clue what it is, or how to find out.  Oh, and bootup takes *ages*

Oh well.

I had an odd moment earlier.  I wanted to watch some things on 4OD, and was poking around it’s website.  My heart sank when I read about how I just had to download and install a small application.  Zero chance of a linux version, and wine probably wouldn’t work…… Wait…….oh.  I still have similar moments regularly.

Finally, I have discovered god in the form of two programs.  WinFF – Why did nobody tell me about this little piece of heaven?  And windows movie maker – the *only* flaw I can point out in it is the lack of a “reverse” video effect.  Apart from that, it is truly perfect for me cutting together clips of friends pratting about to funny music.

(PS: To any people with any interest in tuxcast who might read this, it is not actually dead… There hasn’t been any active development because it does everything I want it to and that it is designed to pretty much perfectly on all the systems I’ve thrown it at.  If it is failing miserably at a particular distro/arch, or doesn’t do something it’s designed to, give me a poke, I’ll probably be able to find time to fix it.  I just don’t have time for slogging away at mostly useless “Ooh shiny” features which I, nor anybody else, will ever use.  So long as tuxcast keeps doing what it’s designed to do, I’m not going to prod it, but I’d rather it didn’t die completely (I.e. not work on any reasonably new setup).  If anybody wants to help out, that’s also welcome, bearing in mind that what many people might see as a limitation, I consider a feature (Lack of GUI, for example).  And bugfixes are especially welcome).

Tata for now.

(Brief update, I *probably* won’t be able to make this year’s lugradio live as it is in term time of both the unis I have applied to.  So, if I do turn up, you know I utterly screwed up the modules I have in a few days, and nobody wanted to take me out of pity.  I will be welcoming a minimum wage job as a cable monkey )

Yeehh…

Well, this is an unexpected turn of events. My last post detailed how I wasn’t so keen on gentoo anymore and my next main OS would probably be ubuntu.

Well, things have changed.

I’ve just got a shiny new amazing laptop, which came, to my disgust, preloaded with vista. But I’ve actually been quite liking it. I’ve not had /that/ much of a problem with a lot of the things people seem to moan about – No crashing/sluggishness (Although I haven’t had it for long. Fingers crossed). The only things I can complain about are moving a lot of stuff around for no real reason (And that probably just takes some getting used to) and the resorce hogging (I seem to have 2 gigs of RAM in use 24/7. But that’s ok, ’cause I have another 2 gigs spare ).

So for now, I am actually quite happy with vista. I expect I’ll try some sort of linux on here at some point, but right now I’ve really not got much inclination to. And I consider it a good thing that I’m happy to use windows when it seems the best thing for the job – I’m not going to mindlessly reject it on principles and suffer with something worse for the sake of it.

Confessions of a gentoo user

*sigh*.  I thought it might come to this, sooner or later.

I am starting to have a lot less time around me than I would like, and my computer habits are changing.  I’m finally starting to spend more time doing things with the computer than to it.  I’m starting to long to be able to apt-get install things, rather than fix configuration files and wait for it to compile.

In short, I think next time I get around to reinstalling for some reason, I’m going with ubuntu (I would change over sooner, but that’s *far* too much work right now…)

(And before all you people, the ones who laughed at me for using gentoo, say “Ha-ha”, I *was* right all along.  I never said you should use gentoo, nor that I always would, I just felt it was fun and appropriate at the time.  And heck, knowing me, I will still run it on my tinkering box for when I do get some free time).

Ciao.

PS/2 to homebrew adapter.  Courtesy of an old DIN to PS/2 adapter, the remains of an IDE cable, my dodgy soldering, and excessive amounts of electrical tape.

Give it some juice, and hook up the probes

Result!  Bonus points for telling me what character that is.  Oh, and yes, I did invert the signal.  I got a headache after being upsidedown for 5 minutes.

Why did nobody tell me…?

Well, several melted microchips, a burnt finger, a bunch of messing about with a multimeter and a lot of googling later, I have a question…

Why did nobody tell me that you need a resistor on the base on a transistor to prevent rather large amounts of current flowing.

Oh well, I guess I’ve learned something for next time – PICs don’t like having 200mA or so pulled through their pins.

Latest project

So, I’ve just started work on my latest project, a digital thermometer. The circuit diagram (Drawn at 4AM, so don’t blame me) is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/23154926@N04/2272526886/. (Blame aidsmonkey for the dragons.)

I’ll be getting the rest of the bits on tuesday, so far I’ve just done the display (On the right, here )

Oh, and tell me, what colour LED should I use for the status indicator? I have red, green, yellow, blue and can produce orange.

GHOP

I’ve just finished my last task on Google’s GHOP, and I thought I’d mention a few things.  Firstly, massive thanks to google for doing this, as they are really giving back to the open source community that (I belive) has helped them a lot.  I’m sure there are many companies out there using open source software and doing very little, if anything, in return.

Secondly, even more massive thanks to the task mentors.  They’ve been patient, friendly and extremely helpful, throughout my memory leaks and stupid questions.  I hope they get some sort of reward from google, in addition to the students.  The ones who I’ve particularly been impressed with have been Andre Klapper, Xavier Claessens, Nickolay Shmyrev, Michael Chudobiak and Fred Peters.

Thirdly, thanks to the other students doing this who have also been very friendly and nice – I’m very impressed how mature everybody seems considering they are generally aged 13-18, probably considered the “worst” age group on the internet by many people (Especially on IRC).  It’s been very interesting to meet a wide variety of people from a staggering amount of countries, including Israel, the US, and all over Europe, to name a few.

One amusing symptom of the mix of cultures, however:

Comment 43, Yesterday (24 hours ago)
btw, what the “shagadelic” effect is?

(If you don’t get this joke, watch an Austin Powers movie or two.)

On a side note, my cello bow’s end is splitting slightly, and although it probably doesn’t affect the structural integrity or playability, I’ve been considering a new bow for a while and this has pushed me over the edge.  The one thing I’m curious about is carbon fibre bows – I’ve never touched one, and barely anyone I’ve talked to ever has.  I’m a student, taking grade 8 soonish, and am looking for a bow for between 100 and 500 GBP – anybody know if a carbon fibre bow is worth looking at in these circumstances?  Any brands to look at or avoid?

Cheers

Cillian

Reason #110 I love linux

for i in `ldd GHOP/jhs/gthumb/libgthumb/.libs/libgthumb.so | cut -d’ ‘ -f3`; do if ldd $i | grep glib | grep “\/usr\/lib” >/dev/null; then echo $i; fi; done

This little beauty, I hacked together to take all the deps of a particular library which was producing linker errors, see which of them were the culprit(s), and tell me.

Though I’m sure windows has a piece of $20 software which does something like this.