Author Archive for Ben Scott

Unbootable Mac

Published
by
Ben Scott
on October 11, 2007
in OS X
. 0 Comments

Note to self: When your Macbook is having repeated issues waking from sleep, don’t sleep it in the middle of installing a big piece of software that has a complicated installer… On forcing a reboot the damned thing hung at the ‘Starting Mac OS X’ scroll bar screen, and stayed hung. Looking at the syslog at the console showed the last boot activity was coreservicesd crashing. Uh Oh, time for some panicked googling.

Solution: Boot into single user mode using Command-S, mount the root filesystem rw, then: mv /Library/Caches /foo followed by reboot. Everything seems fine now, just need to restart that installation ;-)

Server disk woes over and done with?

Published
by
Ben Scott
on August 15, 2006
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I finally managed to get all the relevant modules into an initrd this evening, and managed to upgrade from the SuSE 9.3 stock 2.6.11.4-21.13-bigsmp to the current rpm from SuSE 10.1, 2.6.16.21-0.13-bigsmp. The difference is immense. On excalibur, which is an IBM x335 with dual SCSI drives in a RAID1 mirror, I’ve gone from 2.4MB/sec to 69MB/sec.

A painless process, albeit made a little hairier by having to play ‘hunt-the-dependency’ with drivers in the initrd as LSI seem to have rejigged things since the old kernel.

If only I’d twigged it was a driver issue that was thwarting me sooner… at last I can type ‘ls’ without people whinging at me!

On the bright side, my VIA based dedicated server from BlackCat seems to be coping with the load of teamspeak plus 3 or 4 forums admirably.

Ominous Smoke

Published
by
Ben Scott
on July 19, 2006
in Uncategorized
. 2 Comments

Saw this on the way to the bus in Cottenham after work tonight - thought it looked rather ominous, but I suppose things are rather flammable given it’s about 35° at the moment.

Ominous Smoke

Public Service Graffiti?

Published
by
Ben Scott
on July 12, 2006
in Uncategorized
. 0 Comments

Spotted this whilst waiting 40 minutes for a once every 20 minutes bus…

12072006026

More money than sense?

Published
by
Ben Scott
on June 11, 2006
in Asides
. 3 Comments

Saw this on the way to the shops for some barbecue supplies.

Silly number plate

Yes, I know it has received the attention it was seeking, but still, to me, this seems like a really rather pointless waste of money. More, well, personal personalised numberplates I can sort of see the point of - after all, I’ve no objection to vanity domains, but this one… It’s a car. We know this from the four wheels and general car like shape. It’s an M6. It says so just above the number plate. No added information, what’s the point?

New Live Header Image

Published
by
Ben Scott
on June 5, 2006
in Site
. 0 Comments

I thought it was about time I put something nice and dynamic in my site header, shamelessly being… umm… inspired by the Live header at Mike Davidson’s blog and the realisation that a 640×480 badly compressed network camera image doesn’t really do the view I have over Midsummer Common in Cambridge justice. I had an old Canon Powershot G2 lying around (it got replaced by something that fitted into a pocket more easily), and a slightly dodgy laptop running XP that was collecting dust. Combine the two with a USB cable and the appropriate drivers and you have a rather oversized webcam. Add in the timelapse mode in PSRemote, using an upload script as my ‘Image Editing’ software and everything is in place locally to squirt a snapshot to my web server every 5 minutes.

At the remote end things get copied from the FTP drop box into the relevant webspace. The raw file is then processed by some PHP and cached ready for use as the header. I would post the code here, but am a) lazy and b) haven’t had a chance to check for obvious screw-ups I don’t want to admit in public!

Of course, the temptation now is to try and do more stuff with the images - motion detection and storing interesting images seem obvious ideas, although I’m sure I’ll think of more that’ll also never see the light of day!

IM to RSS

Published
by
Ben Scott
on May 28, 2006
in Asides
. 0 Comments

Tinkering with my blog and found Sabifoo which seems quite nice. It’s what’s generating this feed, so we’ll see how it goes!

Week 51 tablet firmware & video encoding.

Published
by
Ben Scott
on January 5, 2006
in Nokia 770
. 0 Comments

Got around to installing the 3.2005.51-13 firmware today (available from Nokia) over lunchtime. Flashing went without a hitch, and setting everything back up wasn’t too much of a chore. Restored bookmarks from backups (the utility to back things up seems reliable so far…), but left settings to be set manually as I wanted to get rid of an undeletable mail account that I’d acquired. Everything seems snappier (as with the previous upgrade), and it seems that after importing excalibur’s SSL cert into the tablets store IMAP now works, sort of. No proper folders or decent multiple account support still and SMTP seems mysteriously broken, but it has been checking mail every 5 minutes all afternoon and hasn’t died yet! At this rate it’ll be usable by next year…

While reinstalling software I decided to try re-encoding an XVid for use with the video player again… last time I tried I didn’t get sound. Since then I’ve found Media Convertor, which works as expected, producing very watchable video.

WebDAV b0rkeness

Published
by
Ben Scott
on November 22, 2005
in OS X
. 0 Comments

My boss recently was having trouble mounting WebDAV shares on his iBook (running Tiger 10.4.3) - it had been working fine, but just stopped working for no apparent reason, giving a ‘-50′ popup error. Sniffing traffic on the network showed the machine wasn’t sending out any https requests… there were however some messages in the system logs (UNIX core to the rescue!), and to cut a long story short, a quick ‘Repair Permissions’ from disk utility fixed it. Still a bit uneasy about why this happened in the first place though.

N770 First Impressions & Firmware Download

Published
by
Ben Scott
on November 21, 2005
in Nokia 770
. 0 Comments

Got a Nokia 770 on release weekend, thankfully as they seem to have sold out very quickly. First thing to do with it ? Install stuff of course (after playing with the great browser and suprisingly useless e-mail client). Of course, after I installed an xterm, ssh client and gaim the thing bricked itself. And no firmware to download on the official nokia site. Well, some searching came up with a developers firmware download link. Coupled with the OS X firmware flasher and the USB cable, the following command line fixed things, along with enabling root access via R&D mode: sudo ./flasher.macosx -F Nokia_770_0.2005.42-9.bin -f –enable-rd-mode -R

At least the very slick phone bluetooth setup and setting things up to work with the office and home wireless made the reinstall painless. Lucklily I didn’t experience the WPA key-length issues some people have reported. And I discovered the ‘backup all settings to MMC’ option, which will make life easier in future.

Once it was back up and running again, I battled the e-mail client some more. Seems it dislikes IMAPS (at least to my cyrus mailstore) and/or large mailboxes. POP3S and a pruned-to-7-days mailbox seems to placate it, but I’d really like to see proper IMAP support - Inboxes-per-account, folders etc shouldn’t be that hard to implement, surely?

Realplayer comes installed with it, and copes fine with the BBC radio streams. Not quite perfected settings for reencoding DivX videos for optimal playback yet.

The web-browser (Opera I believe) seems to cope fine with most things I’ve thrown at it - certainly it’s great for general forum whoring, the superb screen making for excellent text, even at small font sizes. On the ‘home’ screen there’s a neat RSS reader along with a slightly random ‘home’ page button (which I don’t think I’ve used yet), and a DI Play button… uh… internet radio I mean ;-)

Overall, worth £250, and a nice first product in what I’m assuming will be a series. A few rough edges, but that’s to be expected IMO. All I’d ask for in the next software release (due in 2006 allegedly) is a better e-mail client, and preferably some PIM functionality (iSync!). Be interesting to see what IM and VoIP standards it will support in this release.