I’m in one of those annoying places where my brain is full of project and code ideas, and my hard disk is full of half-completed projects.

While I’m really NOT in a position to start hacking away on yet another item, especially when 99% of my active code-writing cycles is going into Spot Specific, there’s some good ideas that I really want to get out/alive.

So, I’m wondering – not dissimilar to the Shot of Jaq contribution scratch-your-itch wikithingy – should I just get them out there (even on said scratchpad, or my own site) and let them roll with the punches, see what happens.  I’m in the fortunate position where time is the one resource I’m lacking, but I’ve got pretty much everything else that I could need. Hosting coming out of my ears, spare hardware, etc. Could probably even muster some geeks and support workers to help with the project…

Anyway, what should one do when you’re sure the software you’re thinking of would make the open source world a better place, but you don’t have time to write it?

Suggestions welcome.

-Dx 

So, I should have learned by now, but noooo…..

This is how it goes:

2h15 on a sleepy Monday morning and I’m trying to install Debian onto one of the laptops in the slowly growing pile I seem to own – no Floppy, no Optical, 1 USB, BIOS boots from USB – all is not lost! Unlike I suspect / on my personal workstation.

/ is a software RAID0, for speed, the theory being that everything on there comes from packages and therefore can be easily reproduced (if somewhat annoying) and I have a package dump, somewhere….
So / is md0 made of sda1 and sdb1.

sdc is a freshly inserted blank USB flashdrive.

First we setup a bootable FAT16 partition on the usbdrive with

cfdisk /dev/sdc

and then move onto creating a filesystem

mkdosfs /dev/sda1

and install syslinux

syslinux /dev/sdc1

which fails….

Why would that be?

Oh yeah, that simple typo in the mkdosfs line…. This is kind of how the story went:

• Shit.
• That’s not good.
• Dude, you’ve done bad things.
• Panic.
• Stop panicing, that helps no-one.
• Panic again.
• Make tea.
• Check partition table for sda is intact (it is – phew)
• insert iRiver H340 40GiB USB2 Portable Media Player and external disk, preloaded with lots of useful stuff for such muppetry as this.
• watch PC power off of its own accord.
• Panic.
• Panic More.
• Press power button on PC.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Wait.
• Wait more.
• Wait lots more.
• Reboot.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Wait.
• Wait more.
• Wait lots more.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Turn off PC.
• Wait 5 minutes.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Turn off PC.
• Wait 10 minutes.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Turn off PC.
• Wait 15 minutes.
• Watch PC hang at BIOS screen before even trying to check harddisks.
• Turn off PC.
• Aquire clean underpants.
• Drink more tea.
• Consider chocolate.
• Wait 30 minutes.
• Remember USB bus is probably still overload and unplug it all.
• Watch PC hang at complain about lost BIOS settings and start to boot.
• /dev/md0 doesn’t exist. no root. no boot.
• Boot from live CD
• rebuild raid with mdadm
• start raid
• fsck /dev/md0
• mount /dev/md0
• Crash course in debbootstrap.
• Aquire more tea.
• Aquire chocolate.
• Aquire cheese on toast.
• Abandon debbootstrap as lost+found could be quicker….
• cd lost+found
• for each in lost+found; ls inside, guesstimate name, mv .. and rename.
• umount
• reboot
• Pray
• reset permissions on /tmp
• BREATH
• Finish tea and chocolate

4h26. Less than 90 minutes of actual repairs and less that 150minutes downtime For a muppeting of such great proportions and 100% recovery, that’s good IMO and pobably less time than it would have taken to blat and reinstall Ubuntu Breezy, then to Upgrade to Dapper, insert all my prefered repos and get all those packages downloading, etc… (I only have a Breezy CD to hand) and finally intergrate all my settings for /etc and the couple of applications that I installed via checkinstall, etc.

All things considered I’ve been lucky – both this time and over the years, I’ve made a shockingly small number of midnight muppets like this in the past 10 or so years, since my Linux trainer period has been over, basically…. I’ll put this one down to missing lejt….
-Dx

P.S. Number of laptops I’ve managed to revive today? 0, of course….

I had a quick Google around and couldn’t find a native ubuntu/breezy package for extract-xiso, the tool to edit/extract/generally molest files from and creating new xbox ISOs, so I made one….

I think I’m going to biuld a private ubuntu-repo for all my tools soon…. maybe….

-Dx

Taken from the source tarball:

This piece of code proves that nerds can have great parties too!
Your ThinkLight is turned into a RockLight that flashes to the beat of your music. So your ThinkPad becomes a PartyPad and there’s no reason left for not sitting in a corner and writing some code at parties.
RockLight consists out of a xmms visualisation plugin and a small stroboscope application that runs indepently from xmms.
You need a ThinkPad and a Linux kernel with ibm_acpi enabled for RockLight.

Building rocklight requires you have the xmms-dev package installed, as well as the usual build-essencial stuff – which, while perfectly acceptable for developers, is faff for “normal” users!

So, if you happen to have a Thinkpad with a ThinkLight this is quite a fun toy. You can build it from source yourself, or I whipped up a ubuntu breezy .deb for the pleasure of you, the lazyweb.

-Dx

[Edit: i386, of course I don't know any of PPC Thinkpads....]

[Edit 2: Updated package to handle installs where /usr/local/bin doesn't already exist - I'll move these to a repository shortly and post here and in a new post when done....]