wonkablog

I’ve spent all afternoon on my little linksys half-brick, trying to get it up and running.  I have had a little success, which I posted here in the OpenWRT forums, but I’m still stuck.  The basic story is that I can boot into failsafe mode, but any and all attempts to completely re-install the firmware isn’t working.

Thanks to everybody who left a message or pinged me on IRC — I appreciate the help.  I’m going to have to look into that JTAG suggestion.  If nothing else, that would be something good to learn how to do.

Maybe next time I’ll just buy another Mini and use that as a router.  Or I could just put another NIC in my server and have it double as a router, but where’s the fun in spending $15 on a PCI card when I already spent $100 on this cool little router?  Besides getting in at least eight hours of sleep at night, I mean.

I made a really stupid mistake last night, and accidentally ended up bricking my new Linksys router that I just bought only a month ago.  OpenWRT is nice and all, but I wanted to do a bit more with my router, and I wasn’t up to hacking on it over SSH again.  So, I figured I would restore the original Linksys firmware, so I could get a nice web interface, an then things would just work pretty easily for a while until I had more time to poke around.

Well, just as I was uploading the firmware binary, I thought to myself, “Hmm, I should probably have closed out my programs that are accessing the Internet.”  So I closed my Gaim session, and then without thinking, closed all my Mozilla windows too (File >> Quit) including the one actually uploading the firmware.  Man, I’ve never seen LED lights go so crazy before.

I tried re-flashing the firmware by uploading OpenWRT over TFTP, and at first it looked like it was going to work since it actually accepted the transfer.  It still just sat there after that though, and nothing was working (DHCP, web interface, and nmap gave no love). I’ve tried re-flashing it again, but I can’t get TFTP to upload anything now, so who knows what’s up with the thing.

I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this, though I can’t imagine what it is right now, other than never change your firmware 5 minutes before going to bed. Well, that and never void your warranty on something unless you really know what you’re doing.

So, if anyone wants to play with this thing, dop me a line. The next step is probably to get a serial port on there to reflash it, but that’s way out of my scope of expertise.  My networking skills top off at plugging in cables.  And bricking boxes.

Just when you thought it was impossible for me to get even more involved with Gentoo, I was setup today as a staffer. I’m going to help maintain Planet Gentoo and Gentoo Universe under the kind tutelage of Daniel.

I gotta say I’m pretty excited, I’ve always wanted to help out a little more, and this seems like a good opportunity to do just that. Besides, I *really* suck at writing ebuilds, so this job seems right up my alley.

So if any Gentoo devs are reading this that need some help getting their blogs in the planet or universe, send me an email at beandog at g.o, and I’ll probably get a chance to take a stab at it without bringing down the whole website.

My mythbox / server has been acting more sluggish than usual yesterday, and so this week I finally took it apart a little bit to see what the problem was. I haven’t really touched this thing for a long time, so I had completely forgotten what it was made of. Well much to my surprise, it was running the harddrive on an IDE ATA harddive (I’ve migrated everything to SATA .. or so I thought). So, I figured that was a good a place as any to start fixing things up.

PC Club is running a great sale on these Western Digital SATA drives — 250g SATA II harddives with 16mb buffers for only $105! I got two of them so I could setup a RAID-1 mirror on my harddrives. Installation was pretty simple, just had to run mdadm to create the setup, then formatted it, and started copying everything over. I gotta say, these things are fast. I’ve already noticed a good speed improvement, so I’m pretty happy. Plus my data is at least partially more secure. I’m so lazy when it comes to backups.

The great thing about this is I did a fresh install on the new disks (since I figured that would help out too), and I got everything up and running pretty quickly (yay amd64!), but I could not get my TV tuner’s firmware to load at all, no matter what I tried. Finally, I realized I could have just copied my old installation over to the new harddrives, instead of rebuilding from scratch. I have no idea why I didn’t think of that earlier. So I scratched the new install, copied it over, and of course it worked great the first time. Gotta love Gentoo — it’s such a timesaver.

Getting anything 32 bit to work embedded (or at all, in some cases) on a 64 bit machine is quite the fun adventure, sometimes. MPlayer is one reason that I put off switching to athlon64 for so long. I didn’t want the hassle of having a separate 32-bit compiled browser just to watch movies. Well, now I can do it in my native 64 bit Mozilla browser. It’s great.

It’s really not hard to get embedded movies that your 32 bit mplayer can play. Interestingly enough, the patch is only in one file in mplayerplug-in’s source code (plugin-threads.cpp). You just need to change the one line to call mplayer-bin instead of mplayer, recompile the program and install it. Or, you could take the lazy route and use this handy third-party ebuild. There’s a few steps involved though, but all it involves is setting up a Gentoo overlay.

If you don’t already have a PORTDIR_OVERLAY setting in your make.conf, add one now. If you don’t know what that is, just look at /etc/make.conf.example for the description:

“PORTDIR_OVERLAY is a directory where local ebuilds may be stored without concern that they will be deleted by rsync updates. Default is not defined.”

I’m using /etc/portage in mine. Download the ebuild here - http://www.sh.nu/download/ebuilds/mplayer/ which I have also mirrored here for direct download. The md5sum is 8ee0e164646804776560b13e30d642a5.

Then, just unpack the tarball while in that directory, and emerge the program.

# cd /etc/portage
# tar jxvf mplayerplug-in-bin-portdir-20060419.tar.bz2
# emerge mplayerplug-in-bin

You might need to close out your Mozilla / Firefox windows and reaload them just to make sure the plugins load. Then its back to some good movie-watching in the browser.

I just saw one of the coolest movies I’ve ever seen — The Escape Artist. I’ve never seen a story quite like that before, it was amazing. And the acting was absolutely superb.  That kid just stole the show, he is so grown up at such a young age. Great stuff. I love how watching a new, great movie totally leaves you with that cool feeling of “wow”. Netflix has been pretty good to me, that’s the third really good movie I’ve seen from them recently.

I actually found out about this flick from the soundtrack, first. Percepto Records puts these old, unreleased great scores on CD and sells them. Most of the movies in their catalog I’ve never even heard of before, but it usually stands to reason that if it’s worth going through the trouble to get the soundtrack released, then the movie is worth watching. I don’t remember how I saw it on Percepto, but I checked out the reviews, and they seemed positive, so I got the movie. I’m glad I did. I’ve already bought the score, too.

Man, I love good movies. It gives me hope knowing there are some really good ones out there that I’ve never heard of before, and I can discover them for the first time. What a feeling. It’s a buzz.

I setup my DVD collection page again so I can remember which ones I don’t have yet. Feel free to comment on my taste in movies (or lack, thereof). Or if are tastes are simliar, add me to your Netflix friends list. I’m always looking for something cool I may have somehow missed.

I’m an absolute movie fanatic, it’s worth noting. My favorite job always has been and probably always will be working in the movie theater, which I did for a number of years.

Of interesting note, though is that Tower Theater is going to have a midnight showing of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in August. I just found out today, but figured it was worth mentioning for you married types that need to get permission to do something 853 years in advance. Ahh, single life is great. Except for the TV dinners.

Yet another praise post. I decided to make myself a little more miserable tonight (sometimes being single and lonely just doesn’t cut it), so I figured I’d try my hand at setting up remote printing with CUPS. Up until now, my idea of remote printing has been moving the printer from one box to another.

Anyway, from the time I started to the time I got it working was maybe ten minutes. All I did was pop open the cupsd config file, look at the Network settings, use the Gentoo Printing Guide as a reference, and I’m done. I think I had to edit like four lines of the config file. And they say linux is hard. Sure, if you don’t like reading.

So, I’m pretty stoked. CUPS rocks, and it has just refilled my faith in Linux and open source in general. I still don’t have a girlfriend, though. I think I’ll go eat a pan of brownies and cry in the dark while watching Lifetime.

There are some things in life that, once you get used to them … there’s just no going back. Things like underwear, Malt-O-Meal, Neverwinter Nights, and views.

At work we use databases much, much more than I ever have anywhere else. Because of that, I’ve been forced to stretch and learn more ways to do things efficiently because if things are going slow, we are losing $$$. All that’s nice and good, but the part I’m enjoying as a developer is the convenience of that views, stored procedures and user-defined functions give me.

For instance, I’ll use a recent example. We have three tables that we pull data from a lot, and I’m constantly doing INNER JOIN foo ON bar = poop across a lot of pages. Well, a view lets me take the most critical data of those three tables and lump them all into one subset. So now, I can just do ‘SELECT * FROM view-la-la WHERE foo-poo-pah’ and be done with it.

I really have no idea how I lasted so long without these great features. It’s probably because I was stuck using that other open-source database that has said for years that those features weren’t important. Well, that and because sometimes I won’t try something new if I’m familiar with what I have. Until they stop selling my favorite flavor of Cream of Wheat at the store, and then I *have* to try something different. Mmm… Malt-O-Mealie.