Author: Kirk

TED Talks Again

A few interesting TED talks:

  1. Are we in control of our own decisions by Dan Ariely.  Another take on Barry Schwartz’s awesome idea centered on the “Paradox of Choice” (here’s a TED talk of his own from 2005 on the topic – HIGHLY recommended).  Dan’s point is that what we set as defaults in forms, webpages,or any means of collecting information can have a dramatic impact on the results collected.
  2. Searing photos of war by James Nachtwey.  This is the kind of presentation that makes me sit up, look around, and ask “Am I really spending my time wisely today?”  It makes me want to go out and really put myself out there, to try to make the world a better place.  It appeals to the idealist in me.  On a realist level though I do believe I’m going to provide as much support as I can to MSF this year.
  3. The LIFE project by Frans Lanting. An interesting use of photography to tell the history of the world in Frans’s eyes.  I’m not sure it is as effective as he hoped it would be.  I know that when I started watching it I wasn’t “wow – zoom!” about the photos themselves.  He certainly paints a vivid story though, with technically interesting pictures.

Maybe I Need A UPS

Well that was fun.

Power outage = blown integrated network card = no network access on server + limited PCI slots = removal of one TV tuner for temporary network access.

Good lord, now we can only record one TV show at a time!  How can we live like this, forcing us to prioritize our TV habits!

Now if I want a long term solution (which I do): new network card = new motherboard = new CPU + new memory.

It’s a rebuild!

So forgive me if things are weird or missing on theBside over the next little while.  I have both the old and new server up and running and am moving data as I can.  The transition should be seamless.  Should be.  Just might be a slow one.

Not sure about a UPS as the surge came through the network cable (I think), and I already have a surge protector on the server.  However I’ve also lost a hard drive due to a power outage before, so maybe I should just pony up the cash.

I think I’ll keep a list of valuable and used resources on here in case this happens again, or if anyone else is interested in what I’m doing.

  • Decided to use Ubuntu Server rather than desktop, as it comes with a few pre-configured applications I wanted to install
  • Decided to not use Mythbuntu this time, as I don’t like the XFCE environment, and can easily add the Mythbuntu repo if I wanted their custom stuff
  • Followed this guide to get the old PVR’s database synchronized/replicated with the new one going forward (don’t give the full bin log path on the slave, just the filename as per SHOW MASTER STATUS)
  • Will use rsync to automatically synchronize the mythtv recordings between the two, since the databases are sync’d (set up rsyncd on new server as per the Ubuntu Community Doc)
  • Will use symlinks to a separate partition (/srv) rather than /var/lib/mythtv for the root of myth – it just feels more accessible and it is easy to put on its own filesystem
  • Used reiserfs rather than xfs, though I’m not really sure why – I may change this before proceeding (Update – changed to xfs, may follow this for tweaking if performance seems to be less than ideal.  MythTV itself says to not use reiser for fear of corrupted videos.  OK then!)
  • Followed this documentation to get LDAP replication setup (don’t forget to change phpldapadmin’s config.php)
  • Followed this guide on setting up mailing lists in my LDAP directory, and this guide to change the reply-to field for the mailing list (don’t forget to run postmap /etc/postfix/generic when you change the generic file!)
  • Gallery2 installed – have to uncomment the alias in the apache config file.  The login.txt file goes in the directory in apache.conf too.  Update /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini to have more memory.  /etc/gallery2/config.php includes the baseURI if it needs modification (remove the internal hostname).
  • Roundcube setup – don’t forget to install roundcube-mysql and edit the debian-db.php.
  • phprecipebook – seems I had two people register themselves on the old system.  I thought I had disabled that – hack maybe?  I’m now on the latest version so we’ll see if that happens again.  I decided to create a special user for the recipedb, rather than use the root account (bad idea Kirk, bad!)  just create the symlink in /var/www and update the database info in the custom file.
  • Migrating Mythtv is going to be more complicated.  Just to make sure I’m not doing an inadvertent upgrade too, I upgraded my old server to 9.04.  Let the package maintainers handle the upgrade steps I says.  I then followed this tutorial on migrating to a new host.  I ran into the duplicate entry problem described in the comments.  I followed this idea of replacing the INSERT commands with REPLACE INTO commands and I was able to import the SQL commands nicely.  I ended up discovering the hostname was in some of the tables, so I decided to just follow the first tuturoal’s advice – pull specific parts of the databse, drop the mythconverg database, reintall the backend, and then apply the specific updates as per the tutorial so I don’t lose my recorded history.
  • Getting MythTV to work: follow the suggestion in this link to stop the incessant spam mail every 10 minutes – how did this bug get passed beta?!?

Father vs. Dad

Calling someone a father seems to have a very different meaning or tone than when calling them a Dad. Perhaps this has been obvious to everyone else, but recently I’m really seeing a difference. Maybe it is the recent Wendy’s ad where the baby’s first words to its mom are “Mama burger for $1.50” or something like that, to which the Mom says “You’ve been spending too much time with your Father.”

Calling someone a Father seems to include a negative connotation that calling them a Dad doesn’t seem to have.

I’d like to rename Father’s Day to Dad’s Day going forward at Goggs Avenue. Make it so.

Open Source as a Requirement, You Say?

Love to hear how the idea of Open Source software is starting to trickle down into politics.  Asking a private company to create a proprietary product that is used to collect health information is like asking a private company to create a proprietary product that collects votes – and we all know how well that went (and continues to go).

When are people going to wise up?  Just because the code is available doesn’t mean it is inherently worthless.

Of course I understand that there are many other factors to take into consider, including pockets to be lined, palsm to be greased, jobs to be saved 9and lost), etc.  Ain’t capitalism grand?!