Life at the CLI

While trying to diagnose the exact problem with my laptop’s display (the inverter board or the backlight itself) I noticed that the backlight still flashes when the computer is turned on. If I did my research correctly this means the inverter board is faulty and the backlight isn’t getting the initial power boast to it needs to turn on.

I found a place online that sells the part I need and hopefully my laptop will be back in action in a week.

After several failed attempts to burn the Slackware 12.0 install DVD (and a new pack of DVD’s) I finally quit complaining and burned the 2 install CDs.

A lot has changed since Slack 11, especially in the internals of how Slackware works. (At least my small understanding of it) I think I’ll have better luck getting around on this install if I treat it like learning a new distribution.

I’m starting to miss xorgsetup and some of the other little helpful scripts that come with Slackware. I also miss how all the Slackware config files are nice and well commented and everything basically works out of the box.

Really the only reason I like arch is because it’s much easier to start with a minimal system and build your way up. I also really like pacman, but not as much as the simplicity of pkgtools. Pacman made system updates really easy, but on Slackware I really never had a need to update. I also like the ability to get my package from a single source and not have to track them down across the internet.

I’ve been away from Slackware in part because I wanted to distro hop again, but mainly because I can’t get the DVD iso to burn properly.

I moved across the country a couple of months ago and apparently the DVD’s didn’t survive being in a cramped (understatement) hot car. Every time I try to burn a DVD K3B writes everything successfully, but exits with a “no tracks to verify” error. The md5sum of the burned DVD is also wrong. I get the same error with both DVD+R and DVD-R disks. It’s not a bad batch, because the blank disks worked fine before the move.

The funny thing is that a pack of CD’s in the same container as the DVD’s work perfectly. Both types of DVD’s were made by MAXELL, and the CD’s were made by Memorex.

– UPDATE –

Maybe it’s not the DVD’s. After buying another pack I get the same “no tracks to verify” error in K3B. Once again, the CD’s burn perfectly. So far google hasn’t been much help, and the only thing that turned up that’s even remotely useful said something about disabling DVD-RAM support. I still need to google the exact error, and maybe examine the debug output better.

While cleaning out my bookmarks I came across some neat sites with lots of tweaks for Windows XP. The sites are sort of like the book Windows Annoyances.

• http://www.winsupersite.com/
•  http://windowsxp.mvps.org/
• http://www.fixmyxp.com/
• http://www.shellcity.net/
• http://www.theeldergeek.com/

Is it just me, or does more spam blogs seem to be appearing in the tag surfer lately? WordPress.com admins, please fix this.

I’ve had my HP (dv1331se) laptop for 2-3 years now. So far it’s been a really great desktop replacement, but the LCD backlight decided to kick the bucket.

I messed with the rubber thing that turns off the backlight just hoping that it got caught on something (I even ran the computer without the switch cover on) with no luck. It looks like the backlight bulb (my guess) or the inverter board will have to be replaced. That means paying between $100 and $200 (really rough estimate) for parts, and $150 to take the computer into a shop if I decide not to do the repairs myself… or I could go all out and just replace the entire LCD for $800!

I just hope tracking down parts won’t be very hard since even HP doesn’t seem to sell them.

No matter what happens with OOXML and ODF, the only things that matter to me in a document format are human/machine readability and file size.

The most important part of a document is the text itself.  If the text isn’t recoverable it’s not a document.

As for file size, a document should only have enough information to hold its meta data, describe the text content, and link to or hold embedded objects.

I’ve been feeling a bit weird having my SVN repos hanging out on one partition and the checkout directory hanging out in $HOME. It just seems like a waste of space, and like a bit of overkill for my needs. While I was looking at different version control systems I stumbled across GNU Arch. (not the distro)

Unlike Subversion, GNU Arch has a distributed repository model. At first this method of version control seemed like a chaotic way of developing software, but the more I think about it the more I think it may be just what I’m looking for.

With distributed version control your working copy IS your repository. This sounds perfect for single person development. Another big plus for me is that this type of revision control seems better suited for offline development. Distributed version control systems tend to be speedier since they don’t have to contact a central repository for commits. (according to the websites for Git, and Mercurial)

Here’s some links if you want to learn more.

• http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2006/12/case-for-distributed-revision-control.html
• http://blog.ianbicking.org/distributed-vs-centralized-scm.html
• http://rg03.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/distributed-versus-centralized-version-control-systems/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_Control_Management
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_revision_control_software

At one point in time I was looking for how to create those little boxes that popup to show a picture. I didn’t know what they were called, so of course I didn’t find what I was looking for.

Anyway, wikipedia has some links to some of those types of scripts.