I’ve been experimenting with code igniter tonight, a php mvc framework. I discovered it yesterday, not realising that such things were available for php. As its extremely lightweight and seems to speeding up things no-end already, I reckon I’ll probably be using it on some of my new slimshot projects I’m planning on working on soon. I just need to get another life somewhere so I can actually go about implementing all this stuff.
Archive for August, 2006
Slug’s Talking Nicely
Aug 19
I’ve had a couple of problems getting my slug working nice under ubuntu. Firstly, although it is recognised by default and I can connect and browse via samba, when I actually came to playing my media, everything got screwed up, with Amarok trying to launch kmail…… I could copy files to ubuntu and play them properly from there, but straight off of the slug was a no go.I found the solution was to mount it under ubuntu using the command:sudo mount -t smbfs //NAS/DISK 1 /media/slug -o username=user,password=passWhere user and pass are your username and password for the slug respectively and the backslash indicates a space. This poses another problem however, that you don’t want to have to fire up a terminal everytime you want to listen to media, instead its better to get it automounted at startup using an entry in /etc/fstab:sudo gedit /etc/fstaband then add a line://NAS/DISK 401 /media/slug smbfs username=user,password=pass,rw
Again supplimenting user and pass with your username and password. The 40 indicates a space in the name of the share which is on the NAS, which annoyingly took me a large amount of time to figure out!
I want to contribute
Aug 14
I’ve been wanting to create a site which attracts lot of attention for ages. Not to create some profit-making venture, just to know that my voice was being listened too elsewhere and hopefully appreciated. I suppose that goes for my PhD too. It’s kind of depressing however that almost everything ever has been done, and every avenue seems blocked in both respects. How do you contribute to a world that is uninsterested in what you have to say? Being a man of high moral standards (!) I don’t ditch them and say what I think people want to hear, I suffer at their hands silently instead.
Icy Slugs
Aug 13
A couple of weeks back I discovered a slug in cash converters. Well, a usb2 external disk to nas drive converter affectionately known as the slug. Seeing as how I’ve been considering purchasing one, I figured shelling out the £25 was worth it for an experiment with installing linux on it for a bit. The D-Link nslu2 features two usb2 connection points for hooking up usb2 drives, but I didn’t really feel like sacrificing my university external box as this usually comes in quite useful.Enter an icy box, one of the new sata ones, to encompass a normal hard drive – which fitted in quite well with the sata drive I purchased for my machine at uni, but never actually ended up using. In total i spent about £90 on the lot I think.I decided to get on with moving everything onto it yesterday, and first off was the 75Gb mp3 collection – taking a total of about 4 hours…. Next’ll be the 10Gb downloads directory (which I could probably do with emptying really).If I ever get round to installing linux (as it sounds a little bit of an arse) upon the slug, it could be quite sweet to set it up with slim server to finally have a completely silent mp3 stream in my house…..of course, this also would require investing in a squeezebox, or something similar.
Another post about ubuntu? Where will it end?I was fairly excited from thursday evenings antics of getting things working on my machine at home, I thought I’d give it a try with my dev machine at uni. My graphics card, a 9600 (yes ATI, I know!) had been screwed since the day I’d put on Dapper, and to be honest, as I’m not using it that much for GL stuff, I wasn’t really bothered about it. After installing the ATI drivers, them not working and reinstalling the fglrx xorg drivers, I managed to get it working nicely within about 30 mins. This wiki page may help if you’re experiencing similar problems. In my case, my driver was loading, but I was having a problem with libdri.a menaing 3d acceleration got switched off. Anyway, glxgears is now shuvving out a good 3000+ fps so I’m happy enough with that.Aha, I thought, I’ll give the soundcard a bash – a 6 year old SBLive Platinum complete with live drive. Although this (with some tweaking in alsamixer) give outputs on the pci card, the front bay wasn’t getting any output to the headphone socket. I tried to install and compile the latest emu10k drivers from alsa, but then everything got screwed up and no drivers were loading. I removed them and reinstalled what I had before. I carried on with my troubles, inspecting my front bay for any connection problems, notcing one fairly major one…..having the headphones in the mic input – doh! I’d do well to check the obvious things first in the future.
Did I speak too soon?
Aug 10
It seems I may have spoken too soon about my linux joys with ubuntu. After performing a dist-upgrade on my previous beta version of Dapper, I discovered I’d have to go through the same problems of downloading kernel source and linux header packages for my new kernel version.I also discovered after doing this that actually there were further problems on booting Dapper straight up. Apparently the pointers to drives get screwed up somewhere in the process. Although I could boot into X using just the safety mode and booting from there, this wasn’t ideal and I still wanted my lovely little 64 bit install to be working nicely. I dicovered that adding the line ide=nodma to the line of the reference in grub solved the problem.So I’m in, great you might think, but oh no – lets try amarok on for size too… Amarok (A shiny linux media player I discoved) wasn’t playing any of my mp3’s at all, just whizzing through the lot of them. A short search revealed that in using the xine engine, xine needed further codecs to be installed to get sound out too. You’d think that a dependency would be put in place here to sort this out by default. One nice feature I like is the inbuilt submission to last.fm, a great idea in my book – I use it all the time.Anyway, now my Ubuntu is being nice. Oh no, have I just jinxed it?
Ubuntu Working
Aug 7
FInally, after a grand total of 10 months, I have a 64bit version of Ubuntu Linux working upon my home machine.This is great news, not only does it mean that I have a wonderful OS to try out for size, but that I can easily convert my subversion server code and latex source to my machine.As I’ve never mentioned it before, I’ll detail what the problem was here. First up, the graphics card didn’t have drivers which were working which meant that my X800 was pretty pathetic to be quite honest with you. There was a fairly simple solution through apt, which would have been nice if………………the network card on my A8N-VM CSM was working properly, which it wasn’t, due to use of an NFORCE chipset. A build of some drivers were neccessary, which required adding a load of packages (simple if apt were working!).Anyway, several days of man hours later, and this ubuntu thing works wonderfully. If you’re having similar troubles with this board, its probably best to use this page for guidance.
Thieves
Aug 7
You’d think that thieves would be content who’d bent my door back along to try and nick my car, realising actually I have nothing of value. Or that by monitoring my movements over a period of time, the opportune time to get into it would be when I went away to Dublin, Chicago or Singapore for weeks on end. Apparently not, in fact, they think its such a prime example of Vauxhalls lack of security that they would in fact like to come back and try to nick it by bending out the other door right when I’m here. I’m half tempted to leave a note saying “theres nothing of value in here, honest” but I fear it would make it all the more amusing to the little wotsits.
Nothing taken except my self esteem from the last week unfortunately. That and the badge of a £60k Merc near the rec.