This is a polite reminder that the URL for my blog is now http://blog.adamsweet.org/, not http://blog.drinky.org.uk. I have left blog.drinky.org.uk as a pointer for now but you should update your links to point the correct URL if you are still using the old one.
That concludes this public service announcement. Meh.
Hello all.
First of all, I’m not feeling well and for that you all must suffer. I’ve been coming down with what feels like the beginning of food poisoning for 2 days, though it’s probably not.
Progress with Asterisk at work. For weeks the phones have been playing up. Can call from one to the other but not vice versa. Adding a third phone means that phone #2 now works, but phone #3 can’t call etc. Weird stuff. Today I looked into the config and found a section for the extension configured at phone #3 which says exactly the error I was getting, so I commented it out and hey presto – 3 working phone extentions. I really like playing with Asterisk, I’m using Asterisk@Home as I’m an Asterisk virgin and I don’t have time to read the whole book to be able to compile and configure it by hand, but it does have a lot of weird issues.
There is also more progress at home. I have pretty much finished my mail system. As I’ve been mentioning for some time, I’m using Vexim as the base and putting a few extra things in, like webmail, whitelisting, blacklisting and so on, nothing outrageous, just a featureful system. This project has been dragging on since January or thereabouts, but I haven’t had much time to work on it and it’s had some false starts. I frigged with Fedora for a few weeks before going back to Debian, then frigged with Courier for 2 or 3 weeks, trying to get it to authenticate against MySQL, but with full debugging on, the log files said the right thing but it wouldn’t let me in, even with the config copied from a working setup. In the end, I swapped it for Dovecot and I had it up about an hour without any experience of configuring it. I will have to decide soon whether I will stay with Yahoo, move to Gmail or use my own server. It was really just a ‘doing it for the sake of it’ exercise, but the moment of truth will soon be upon me. I have to admit, I like the idea of myname@adamsweet.org.
Next bit of movement is in the Alpha stakes. Sparkes gave me a Digital Alpha Server 800 5/400 back in October and I had a go at trying to install Debian on it but didn’t know what I was doing and couldn’t get it to boot from the CD. A bit of idle browsing today told me what I needed to know and I have managed to install Debian successfully, it’s apt-get updating as we speak. Nice one 🙂
For any googlers out there, I used this thread. I had to use the SRM console to boot from a Sarge CD, not the Alpha BIOS though that is possible I believe from a Woody disk. I also installed Woody (using the SRM console) and did a dist-upgrade to Sarge. If you get the Alpha BIOS, there is a setting in there to use the SRM console, which is a blue screen, rather than Alpha BIOS’s white one. I used show dev to show the devices and then picked at the ‘dka’ ones until it booted, using the boot devicename where devicename was the name of the device listed by show map. My cdrom was something like dka400.4.0.5.0 and the hard disk was dka200.2.0.5.0, so the command was
boot dka400.4.0.5.0
When the minimal system is installed and the installer reboots, you have to interrupt the boot process at the SRM console again and change the boot device to dka200.2.0.5.0 to boot from the hard disk as the SRM console remembers your boot device. Subsequent reboots will therefore obviously not require you to change the boot device unless you want to boot from the CDROM again.
Other points to note include that you have to make BSD disk labels rather than DOS partitions for an SRM console boot and your first BSD label should start on the 2nd disk cylinder not the first as per the default, to leave room for the bootloader. Installing straight from a Sarge CD will bypass all this disk label and cylinder nonsense as the partitioner will do it all for you, but if you only have an Alpha BIOS, then you will have to install Woody and then upgrade to Sarge as the Alpha BIOS booting routine isn’t supported by the Sarge installer.
Not sure what I’m going to do with it yet, again, it was more an experiment than any purposeful exercise, but I like the idea of installing Linux on pretty much anything I can get my hands on. I have x86s, PPCs, a Sun Sparc Ultra 10 and now a Digital Alpha. I am also silently hoping to lay my hands on an SGI Mips machine, but we’ll have to be patient there. If you have any redundant hardware that Debian has been ported to then I’m your man, I don’t believe I have PA-RISC, m86k or arm machines, I don’t have a mips yet and well, I doubt anyone is going to give away an Itanuim box or an IBM S/390, but if you need to you only have to call…
So thats that for now. New car is due in the next week or two. Over and out.
One thing that has been annoying me for a while is that I can’t find an car stereo that plays oggs. Most of the things that I want to listen to in the car are in ogg format. Thats LUG Radio, primarily, but also pretty much every Linux CD ripper rips to oggs. They rip to MP3 too if you have the plugin and I do, but I would prefer to use the non-patent encumbered ogg format. Ogg is quite popular in the hobbyist media area as far as I can tell. I have a friend that uses oggs for his work and he’s not a Linux user at all.
Why does nobody make a car stereo that plays oggs? OK first up, the market demand probably isn’t that high, but the ogg codec is free and unencumbered by patents, which means they can put it in without any legal restictions.Ogg also offers the best audio quality for file size ratio. Why the fuck don’t they? If you’re developing a device that uses MP3, WAV and WMA then it’s pretty trivial to include ogg. I want it and I’m sure many other people do.
Apple don’t support ogg because they say they don’t see any demand from their users, well I have an iBook and I want ogg support. I also want a car audio player that does.
The reasons I have come across are these:
It’s completely free to use and gives users another option. More to the point it creates more market for the manufacturers. Certainly for smaller manufacturers it would boost sales.
This isnt the case in my experience at all, I’ve never encountered pirated material in ogg format. So far as I am aware pirated material is normally in MP3, MPEG, WAV and AVI format.
Let’s think of this one another way. MP3 has the market for portable media players and In Car Entertainment. There are ‘MP3 players’ which play oggs. Not iPods or Creative or anybody else like that, but there are a number which do including devices from Teac, Iomega, Saumsung, LG and Freecom. The illegality of doing tape to tape copying didn’t stop many manufacturers from selling double tape decks, nor did software developers stop making CD burning software that could copy audio CDs. Nor did the MP3 player market develop in the era of iTunes or a legitimate Napster.
If anyone knows of one, please leave me a comment.
Manufacturers: Please make a ogg car stereo system. Oh and make it affordable 🙂
Ok, ok, ok. Yes it’s been ages again, 3 weeks to be exact, but I’m pretty pushed for time these days.
So, whats new? Well Shortly after I posted last, I went snowboarding for half a day which was great. Bumps and bruises all round once again.
I have a new phone, which seems to be a redesign of my old one with crapper games, so nothing interesting to say there. The thing I didn’t want to announce last time was that I’m getting a new car. A brand new Mini no less. Well, it’s a company car, but still, it’s explicitly for my use. Gonna push the pennies to limit though I think, a point at which they are already at, but it’s something I would have to do in the next few months anyway, so there wasn’t too much choice in the matter.
By Monday you will realise that I am once again guest presenter on LUG Radio, Season 3 Episode 13. Jono sent me over a pre-release copy and it sounds pretty good. It’s weird being on LUG Radio. The first time I was on, I struggled to listen as I thought I sounded weird and I also noticed how I tend to overpronounce my words, a fact which was confirmed by a giggling friend. It doesn’t bother me, but it’s just weird hearing yourself recorded and knowing that maybe 10 or 20,000 people are going to be listening to you.
The second time I was on, I was barely awake and on listening back, realised that I tend not to say anything of any real value. I’m great at chipping in with the scrotal humour, but not so great at saying anything useful. The third and possibly this most recent time have borne this theory out in my mind. On the other hand, I have to remember that I normally get less than 24 hours notice, 8 of which I am asleep, 8 of which I am at work and perhaps 3 or 4 hours are spent getting ready and travelling to work and back; being pedal to the metal all day leaves me around 15 to 20 minutes emergency research time, so in reality I am doing OK. I just feel that the intellectual content of the show suffers a little when I guest.
So what else is new? At work I am hectic as usual and struggling to get on with Asterisk. I have 2 SIP phones and don’t think one of them is working properly, which is making life really awkward. I had to flash them to make them work in the first place. In my spare time I have set up a new Vexim machine on Debian to try as best as possible to stay within the bounds of a packaging system, which makes a machine handling 150 people’s mail a lot easier to support with patches etc. It’s pretty much working except Courier-POP3 just will not authenticate against the MySQL database, even though it and the various authlib and authmysql parts have the same config as a Fedora machine which does work. Go figure.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Hope you’re all well.