Farmed Salmon Is Said to Contain High PCB Levels. The levels, found in 10 samples, are in excess of the guidelines set by the E.P.A. for recreationally caught fish. By Marian Burros. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]
6:00:34 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

Upgraded to RedHat 9
My brother Josh wanted to play around with Linux, specifically RedHat 9. Ok, chase down the images, burn a copy and send it to find out... it doesn't boot. Great.

I went peeking around the software non-capital of Shrewsbury, MA and couldn't find a single boxed copy. So, I did the next best thing and bought a book (The RedHat 9 Bible) which included the three RedHat 9 distribution CDs - not exactly what I was hoping for, but it'll work. Burned a copy and sent it to Josh.

I figured that the next step had to be for me to upgrade my systems to use it. I upgraded my office system yesterday - nice, easy, painless and looks much nicer (anti-aliased fonts for X11). Updated to the latest RedHat stuff by clicking a button on the bottom right of the screen. Slick -seemed to work well.

Since my office system was working, I figured it was time to try the home fileserver.

The problem is that this system doesn't usually have a CD-ROM reader in it. So, shutdown the XP system, take out the drive, plug it into the linux system and boot from the first CD. The install started out just great - went nice and smooth and it was reading the third CD when I crashed last night. This morning I noticed that it was stuck with I/O errors while trying to install a truetype font. Retry didn't work... tried the few days old CD that I burned from an image file... no luck.

As chance would have it, I just happened to make a copy of the third CD using my sisters new computer. I made a complete set there for Josh and mailed them. But I noticed that it took a long time for the third CD to complete (like over twenty minutes). Compared to the first two (which took about three minutes each) this was really a long time. So, I tried the copy of the third CD. It installed the truetype font quite happily and completed the installation - yahoo!

Shutdown, disconnect the CD-ROM, and power up the system... and I see an interesting message while it's booting. It needed to check the consistancy of a disk because it hadn't been checked in over 347 days. I knew this system was stable and just didn't ever crash, but nearly a year? I dusted it out some and pulled out some cat fur and its working like a champ. Cool.

I also noticed notice that some of the custom libraries that I had built and installed are now gone, which means that not quite everything works yet. This'll just take a while to straighten out - the web server (apache) hadn't restarted, the web proxy (squid) doesn't start anymore, and the music playing deamon (mpd) just can't find all of it's required libraries and won't start. I'll get these straightened out once I find a couple hours. Along with getting the XP system up and running again... this system needs to be changed back into a Windows 2000 server system again.

Short story is that the upgrade for RedHat 9 worked pretty well. Some custom installed stuff might break, but that is reasonable. I'm hoping the home fileserver can stay up for another year or so. This is the system that will be getting the personal vider recorder card soon.
4:03:35 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

Toute's progress
Toute is getting more active - she's greeting me at her door (and coming out more often) and gaining weight. She hasn't quite broke down and eaten a lot on her own yet... but she started to eat a little bit on her own yesterday. Great progress based on the checkup at the vets. We dropped a couple of medications, so we're down to only two - that makes things easier. Toute has been purring up a storm lately and starting to meow. Nothing but good news to report so far...
3:42:31 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children
I stumbled across this site while reading about Warrant Issued in Missing Ind. Girl Case.

I have troubles just trying to imagine this kind of thing happening.
3:38:58 PM  #     comment []  trackback []

BBC News: Virus writers turn to spam
Practice safe computing - don't open attachments or follow links in an e-mail message. Typing the url in your web browser can be safer than that simple click - because the link that looks like a simple link can be a program that contains a virus which will also open the same web page (or at least copy and paste it and look at the URL to see if it is what you expected).
10:02:40 AM  #     comment []  trackback []