Monthly Archives: April 2008

By the power of SED

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It\'s a graph!I think I have just used sed for the first time. Well the first time where I have decided what the problem is and that the solution requires sed, and then using it.

This is a big deal for me. I have been aware of sed, and awk for a log time. I have even used them either when advised by others or as part of scripts that I have run (but not written).

This time, however, I can say it is all my own work. I have some data at work that I need to graph. There is too much to simply load into a spreadsheet, so I have to munge it a bit before I can use it. A simple perl program does that for me, and outputs a csv file that I can quickly load into a spreadsheet and make a graph. Once it I am happy that the data is correct, I then use Gnuplot to generate my final graphs. The problem is that gnuplot likes to have tab separated values, not comma separated. Here comes sed to the rescue.

sed 's/,/\t/g' data.csv >data.txt

Now that may not exactly be rocket science, but I very nearly wrote my own perl program to do that for me.

Hardy Heron, step 2

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After getting comfortable with the Heron on my first machine, I decided to update my Laptop. Ignoring any issues I had had first time round, I simply ran the update manager, and pressed the button!

That, it turns out, was a mistake. nvidia-glx again failed to upgrade, and that caused most of xorg to fail to upgrade properly. This time, however, I did not try a reboot before having tried to fix the problem.

The solution in the end was to manually create an empty file that was missing and stopping the old nvidia-glx from un-installing. With that done, I was then able to upgrade that package, and all the remaining un-configured packages were sorted.

Having read somewhere that the new xorg is able to sort out its own configuration, I decided to give that a try and rm’d all my xorg.conf files. That’s right, no backing up. Back ups are for wimps!

X did start just fine, but using the vesa driver, at some horrible low resolution. At this point, I realised that maybe backups of my config files would have been a good idea. 🙂

I finally got the Nvidia driver installed, but it would refuse to use the correct resolution. At this point I remember having the same problem last time I set up the Nvidia driver. The problem is that the Nvidia driver will not use any resolution that it does not find in the EDID. Setting UseEDID to ‘no’ has no effect. The only solution, from what I can remember, is to use a utility in Windows to extract the EDID to a file, and then use the option for the Nvidia driver to look to that file for the EDID.

Luckily, as this was an upgrade, and not a re-install, I still had the EDID file from before, and once again, I had xorg running at the correct resolution.

That meant that the whole operation took a lot longer than I wanted. Next time, I will try and remember to downgrade as much as possible before update. If I had switched to the nv driver, and kept a backup of xorg.conf, I could have updated this system really easily. Well at least I now know for next time.

Do the Apple iPod Shuffle

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iPd shuffleI know that I have written about Apple before, but now I am a customer! The shuffle shown is my new music player. As soon as I had opened it up, I plugged it into me Ubuntu system to charge it up and load some songs. All my songs are in mp3 format, so that was not a problem.

Rhythmbox recognised the shuffle straight away, and loaded the songs without issue. I then used the player on my way to work. Part way there it started playing up. When I got to work, when trying to sort it out, the device locked up completely. The instructions suggest at this point that a full reset is required, which needs iTunes. Fortunately, I still have a working Windows installation with iTunes, so I upgraded to the latest iTunes, reset the device, and got iTunes to load some songs.

The device has been working just as it should since. When it comes to changing the songs, I will try Ubuntu again, and see how it goes.

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) First Steps

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I decided to upgrade one of my machines to Hardy. Well the upgrade borked. I think it had something to do with nvidia-glx, so I can’t really blame Ubuntu. I probably could have figured it out, but I decided as this is a LTS version, I would go for a fresh install.

As expected, the install went fine. The final result is a very nice system. Somehow it seems faster and a little smarter. I think I would have to say that I am quite happy with this release so far.

One problem that I did have was with rhythmbox. Before the upgrade I had a problem where it would not suffle play my music. I hoped that the upgrade would fix this, but the problem persisted. I was just about to delete any config file in my home directory that may have something to do with rhythmbox when I decided to have one last Google for a fix. It turns out that the shuffle play will only work with playlists. Anything in the play queue will be played it is in the queue. Makes sense I suppose, but when you are not aware of it, it may catch you out. Once I deleted the contents of the play queue, it started to function as expected.

I will hold back from installing it on my laptop until the final release at least. I also want to install the server version on my home server. That has been running Debian for years, so I need to plan my way carefully with that one to avoid too much downtime.

Powered by Google!

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For some time, I have run my own mail server on the stuphi.co.uk domain. The idea was that I could offer email to my family as a service, and I would have full control. Spam filtering would also be under my control. One slight downside was that I did not like the available web interfaces to email. Roundcube and Squirrelmail both seamed a bit lacking.

In parallel to this, I have had a Gmail account for some time. The main reason for this was so that I could subscribe to multiple mailing lists, and avoid exposing my own address to them. Also, the web interface to Gmail and search facilities are the best I have used, in my opinion.

A little while ago, I found out about Google Apps for Domains. After a little reading, I decided to take the plunge, and sign up.

The end result is now I have handed over the email handling of my stuphi.co.uk domain to Google. I did check with my users that they were happy for this to happen, and they had no complaints. I can now have all my spam issues handled for me. A nice web interface for my mail, and I can still use my traditional mail clients using IMAP.

There are those that think that allowing a large American Corporation to handle all my email is not a wise idea. I have always considered email to be the electronic equivalent to a post card. It is not a suitable medium for secure communication, and therefore only use it for trivial matters that I am not concerned about keeping private.

So far I have been happy with the switch. I will keep the option of running my own server open, in case the situation changes in the future. I should have kept some notes on the transition, but in reality, it was not hard. If you all ready run an email server, then you will be able to follow the process with ease.