Went for a walk along the Charles yesterday, what a great day, and it’s was nice and quite down there and a great to relax, chill and get away from the hustle and bustle of the city. And the MIT’er were out sailing too and it almost looks they were sailing on the ice.
And those are seagulls perched on the ice.
I was in the process of figuring out and documenting the process of compiling and installing an Xen enabled kernel on Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10. This was for a specific project that’s not going to come to fruition. I’m not going to bother as I also don’t feel like having my laptop burn a gaping hole through my lap as I wait for the kernel to compile, and well you know I still have some use for the 2 lads downstairs. And after years of compiling kernels, I really can think of more productive uses of my time.
The quickest way is to grab a Debian Xen enabled kernel, this isn’t recommended by Ubuntu and if your not comfortable hacking your system and having to compile modules (drivers in Windows speak) for hardware or proprietary hardware that Debian doesn’t include support for, then don’t even think of doing this and just use KVM.
Here’s how Chris did it for a system running a AMD64 processor, if you’ve an Intel processor you’ll need to use a different kernel:
If you want a later kernel (2.6.27 or 2.6.28) poke around:
http://kernel-archive.buildserver.net/
That’s the approach I’m going to use, as I know that if I’ve problems or issues I’ll be able to figure it out. Anyways, the start of the orignal draft is below, preceded by a minor rant. When I get around to getting Xen on Ubuntu to work with a Debian kernel I’ll add a new post here. Continue reading Xen for Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10
The missues is big into Ryan Adams & The Cardinals. I’ve been listening to him too, but thought he was a bit too “countryish” for my tastes. So anyways we go see them live at the Orpheum last month, and they are one mean guitar band. Very good gig and well worth seeing.
Check out their tour dates at:
If your outside North American, your out of luck for this tour. But, they post a lot of live clips from their concerts on their Twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/cardinology
And some video clips at:
Ryan also has or had a blog which he has had an on-again/off-again relationship with. He often does little videos of himself writting and singing new songs or just jamming away, but he’s deleted all the blog entries as he’s in the hate-stage of blog relationship. 
But, I think he’s used to great affect to reach out to his fans and to create a relationship with his fans that he wouldn’t have otherwise. Hopefully he’ll start blogging again as it’s great to be able to see an artist at work! 
I started Firefox in safe-mode and now my WordPress editor is working fine. Methinks, maybe Google Gears was fecking up the editor somehow. Uninstalling Google Gears, exiting FF, restart in normal mode and see if my hypthosis is valid.
Yup, that might have been it. Some weird caching issues (even after clearing out the regular cache) or Google Gears was out of sync, and woudn’t sync properly, with the upgraded version WordPress. I’ll reinstall Google Gears at some point in the future and see what happens
Some links to stuff I’ve either read or plan to read which I think is interesting:
Python is not Java, tips for Java programmers starting w/ Python:
http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html
Python for Bioinformatics:
http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/formation/python/index.html
BioPython:
http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html
I need to know Selenium better, it’s possible that I might consider using it for a project I might be working on (that sounds like it might have some UI bugs/issues/problems):
http://seleniumhq.org/
10 things every programmer should read (this will take a while to wade through):
http://blog.objectmentor.com/articles/2009/02/26/10-papers-every-programmer-should-read-at-least-twice
Xen Cluster Mgt using Ganeti for Debian Lenny:
http://www.howtoforge.com/xen-cluster-management-with-ganeti-on-debian-lenny
Ganeti admin guide and install guide:
http://ganeti-doc.googlecode.com/svn/ganeti-1.2/admin.html
http://ganeti-doc.googlecode.com/svn/ganeti-1.2/install.html
David Byrne (of Talking Heads) interviews Thom Yorke (of Radiohead):
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke?currentPage=all
With a great quote, that shows how well the record companies treat their performing artists (that’s sarcasm in case you don’t have a sense of humour). First Radiohead made zip/zilch/nada from EMI sales of digitized versions of their music:
Yorke: In terms of digital income, we’ve made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that’s nuts. It’s partly due to the fact that EMI wasn’t giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff …
Yorke: … It’s about whether the music affects you or not. And why would you worry about an artist or a company going after people copying their music if the music itself is not valued?
Then he talks about how the music iteself isn’t valued, but the business processes surrounding the marketing and selling of music:
Byrne: You’re valuing the delivery system as opposed to the relationship and the emotional thing…
Yorke: You’re valuing the company or the interest of the artists rather than the music itself. I don’t know. We’ve always been quite naive. We don’t have any alternative to doing this. It’s the only obvious thing to do.
I recently upgraded this WordPress installation from 2.7 to 2.7.1 using Dreamhost’s upgrade tools. However, the friggin’ feckin’ post editor is busted, at least in Firefox 3.0.6 on Ubuntu Intrepid. I can still use the QuickPress editor, which is only good for basic posts. If I want to add images or files, I’d have to manually upload them and link to them … anyways what a pain. If your planning on upgrading to WordPress 2.7.1 I’d suggest you wait a wee bit.
The problem I’m having is that on the “New Post” page, where the categories sections should be is instead an embedded (maybe an iFrame) of the WordPress Dashboard. When I try and type in the editor the pages changes to a near blank page with only the editor buttons showing. Grrrr …
I’ve tried the following steps (recommended on various sites and forums) to no avail:
However, it works fine in KDE’s Konqueror browser. When I get the time, I may compare the generated HTML, and see if I can determine what’s causing the problem. Here’s a screenshot … sheesh now I can’t even insert a screenshot using Konqueror gotta do it manually. Look at the “Categories” section on the right-hand side:
By default Emacs saves a copy of the previous version of a file you are editing in the same directory as where the original file is located. It saves a copy with ~ appended to the end of the name. ~ is pronounced tilde. However, some tools and programming environments don’t know how to handle these tilde files and this can cause various problems. Someone mentioned on the Boston Ruby list that “Rails 2.3 router picked up emacs tilde ~ file before *.erb.html file …“. And the solution is pretty easy, you just tell emacs to save the ~ files in a different directory:
http://amitp.blogspot.com/2007/03/emacs-move-autosave-and-backup-files.html
Now I wonder is there a way to have it only do this for certain types of files, or only to do it for certain workspaces, that way if I’m edit a file in a directory named ruby it will save the files elsewhere, otherwise save the file in the CWD.
I won’t be able to make it, but if your interested in Linux and are in or around Boston/Cambridge, the BLU is having one of their installfests:
Boston Linux Installfest XXXII
When: Saturday February 28, 2009, 2008 from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm
Where: MIT Building E-51, Room 061
2 Amherst St, Cambridge
Plenty of free parking in front of the building.What you need to bring: Your computer, monitor, power strips and your
Linux distributions. We do have copies of some distributions.
In general we have expertise with most distros, but if you need special
expertise, please email the BLU discussion list in advance.COST: It’s free! However, we DO have expenses, and contributions are
welcome. Please consider contributing $25 per machine.Our volunteers will help you to install Linux on your own system. While
Linux runs on most systems, some systems do have configurations and
hardware that may not be supported. Please consult the following web
pages for hardware compatibility. While we prefer you to bring your own
distros, our volunteers will normally haveLinux.ORG: http://www.linux.org/hardware/index.html
Hardware HOWTO: http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO.html
Linux Frequently Asked Questions: http://www.linuxdoc.org/Generally our volunteers have sets of the latest Fedora, SuSE and
Ubuntu distributions:
* Fedora – http://fedora.redhat.com (Fedora 10)
* Open SuSE – http://opensuse.org (OpenSuSE 11.0)
* Ubuntu – http://www.ubuntu.com (Intrepid Ibex 8.10)
* Debian – http://www.debian.org/In addition, you can run Linux on your Windows PC through a virtual
machine manager, such as Virtualbox. You can install this in your
Windows machine and run Linux as a guest OS, or install it in your Linux
machine and run Windows as a guest. VirtualBox 2.1
(http://www.virtualbox.org.) is free and is available for Linux, Windows
XP and Windows Vista. Additionally, there are some VMWare clients that
are also free for Windows.Please refer to the BLU website (http://www.blu.org) for further
information and directions. Parking is available in front of the
building on Amherst St. Enter the building, and take the elevator to
your left down 1 floor. Room 061 is opposite the elevator.
I thought this was pretty funny:
It was up last week.
This assumes that you want to use Php with Apache2 on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.
First install libapache2-mod-php5:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
Which will install the following extra packages:
The following extra packages will be installed:
apache2-mpm-prefork php5-common
Suggested packages:
php-pear php5-timezonedb
And will remove apache2-mpm-worker (if you have it already installed).
The following packages will be REMOVED:
apache2-mpm-worker
This will install core Php packages, if you need others search for them:
apt-cache search php |more
And install what you need.