dead hard drive
It seems that one of the hard drives in my server died last night. Thanks to the raid no data is lost, but the server will be offline shortly this week (tuesday morning probably) to replace the faulty drive with a fresh new one.
Category: Tech
Adobe Lightroom 3
I always shoot in RAW + JPEG. For normal point-and-shoot vacation stuff I’m generally satisfied with the JPEG the camera spits out. But I would never shoot only JPEG. The additional information of RAW shouldn’t be underestimated, and to be honest I often tweak around. It makes a difference if you are working on the original RAW data, or if you are working on the JPEG copy the camera has already processed.
Up till now I’ve been post-processing my images with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop CS3. Since I was planning on post-processing a whole load of pictures I decided to see what software there is out there to streamline the work flow a bit (Bridge and CS3 do the job, and the raw converter in CS3 does offer a wide variety of options, but it is still tedious switching to be switching between both programs and working on multiple RAW images at the same time). While I was away, Adobe released Lightroom 3, so I checked out the reviews and it sounded good. I downloaded the 30 day trial version and to sum it up my experience so far … I’m impressed.
I haven’t worked with Lightroom previously, so I can’t say how much has changed in this version. But I really like the details that make life easier when handling collections of images. Being an Adobe product it also offers interfaces to various Photoshop functions (I only own CS3, I could imagine it offers more options if you have the current version CS5 installed). I could go on and on with things I like about it, but I’ll just sum it up and say: It really streamlines the work flow of post-processing photographs from import to print/upload/web/presentation and if you are shooting RAW it has a whole lot of fun stuff to play around with directly built in.
Since I shoot with a Nikon D80 that tends to produce a fair amount of image noise if I go past ISO 400 I liked the noise reduction features of Lightroom, both color and luminance noise can be reduced greatly with sliders for fine tuning.
It’s a good piece of software, and when the 30 day trial ends I’ll probably go buy it.
Ubuntu upgrade to 10.04 and lirc
Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) came out a short while ago … and because it contained new themes and the latest version of mythtv, I went and upgraded. These updates are tested by gazillions of people, any serious problems would be noticed before release .. right? right?
Well, looks like I did it again. Turned a working tv recorder into a “electronic beeping thing under the TV that doesn’t do much except show a pretty screensaver if you wait long enough”. After fixing up some stuff that the update broke (thanks for overwriting my config files. I’ll just use the version from the backup I made before the update if you don’t mind), I got almost everything up and running again. As of right now the only things broken are a) the theme not displaying any text when I’m in LiveTV or a video (yeah, try to get out of there without any menus) and b) my remote control is also not working.
At first I thought that some sonfig was just b0rked with the lirc config, but after doing a “top” and seeing that lirc_dev was consuming a modest 90% of my CPU, I decided that it was googles turn to find out what was wrong with Ubuntu 10.04. And sure enough, it seems this wa a know problem that made it into release (hooray). Anyone stumbling across this post via goole: go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lirc/+bug/550369, there are fixes for the problem towards the end of the page. Since it looks like they will make it into the 10.04 updates you can also just wait for a few days/weeks and they will pop up as a update automatically. Anyone wanting to fix the problem now: the short version ist: go to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed to set up proposed updates for lucid, and install “lirc” and “lirc-modules-source” from the proposed repository.
As for the broken themes? I’m still working on that, have a few updates and poking around to go before the system is back to the running condition it was before.
*Update*
For some strange reason, I had to set the IRQ of the serial port to 4 any specify it in the /etc/modconf.d directory (was getting busy errors with IRQ 3)
The broken themes were “only” the OSD using bold font. After changing it back to the normal version in the OSD settings everything worked fine.
XEN and Kernel update
Server is up and running again. This morning I finished the xen (3.4) and kernel (2.6.32) updates I prepared yesterday evening. The only pitfall I stumbled across, was that the kernel in the debian repository (2.6.26-xen) seemingly wasn’t compatible with the latest xen in the debian repository (system would hang while booting, I guess that’s what I get for using “testing”).
Anyway, anyone using “lenny” or “testing” and wanting to update xen; here are a few tips to make the transition a breeze:
- The debian wiki is full of useful information regarding xen
- backports.org has a current xen kernel (linux-image-2.6.32-bpo.4-xen-amd64) that works fine with xen 3.4, just follow the instructions on backports.org on how to add it to apt.
- I had to deactivate the “vfb” (VNC console) setting in the domU config files to get my guests to boot, browsing the Internet I saw people having the same problem with the “dhcp” setting.
- If you are planning on updating the guests kernels too (advised), remember to change the “kernel” and “ramdisk” settings in the domU config files accordingly
With these few points in mind, the update is a breeze.
Grid clicker script
I finished up my “grid clicker” script. it is intended to simplify testing of games where you have to click certain patterns (a grid). Typical facebook games like farmville or funfari are great examples of this. just download the file (here is the sourcecode), execute it, and an eye should appear in your task bar. Double clicking on the icon in your task bar will start the script, just follow the instructions and everything should be fine.
And while I am at it: here is a spreadsheet I started for plants/trees/animals in funfari: Google online spreadsheets