EP Studios Blog

I shouldn’t be surprised anymore about the capabilities of Emacs.  But now that Sluggo has moved into my closet as a headless server, I have been doing a lot of ssh’ing to the poor beast from my other computers in order to manage files remotely.  Only recently though I discovered I could edit text files remotely using Emacs like this:

C-x C-f /ssh:Sluggo:MyFile

The ssh: prefix is actually unnecessary, as ssh is the default transfer protocol. Once I’ve done this I can just C-x d to enter dired mode and fool around with Sluggo’s directories and files. The whole thing, other than the initial request for my password, is totally transparent — the files may as well be on my local machine. The magic is accomplished using TRAMP, which is built in to Emacs 23. Neat!

After a fair amount of work, the blog is back close to what it was.  I restored all the missing image links but one.  I updated to the latest version of Wordpress (2.9).  I updated the database to UTF-8, getting rid of some funny accented characters, but in place some of the blogs have highlighted question marks in them (these things: �).  I have been manually deleting these, but some posts may still have them.  Oh, well.

I’ve backed up everthing.  Only new problem is that for some reason I can’t upload any more images since the upgrade.  I don’t know why.  That’s why I had to delete one EP Simulator screenshot post; I couldn’t re-upload the image.  The image in question though is here.  Again, I’m not sure what’s wrong, but I have other things to do and it is time to give the blog a rest.

Sluggo has been a headless server for just a few days now. I ssh to it to login, I download stuff from the command line with wget, and so forth. I also remove stuff with rm, no more gui-based file deleting into a nice safe recycle bin.

Soooooo….., when I got the inevitable nattering message on my Wordpress dashboard that my version was out of date, and I should update to version 2.8.6, I did what I usually do, only from the command line. I deleted the wp-admin and wp-includes folders from by blog folder, then… OOPS!! Geez I deleted the wp-content folder by mistake. Deleted as in rm -fr wp-content. I.E. GONE. FOREVER.

I of course did not lose my cool. I had just backed up my Wordpress database with the backup plugin before the deletion, so all I had to do was restore my backup. The backup though is a compressed sql database file. It doesn’t contain the specific wp-content folder. And, worse, the Wordpress plugins were all in the plugins folder which was in the wp-content folder! So no restore plugin was even there anymore!!

Of course I had a backup of the whole website didn’t I? Sure, found it, from 2007! Meanwhile I should mention that every time I tried to view my site during this process all I saw was a blank screen. I copied my old wp-content folder over — still blank screens!

Oddly enough during this process, my posts were still there on the dashboard. Every word of every post. So the posts weren’t in the wp-content folder anyway. I finally figured out that my theme was broken, because it was in the themes folder which was in — you guessed it — the wp-content folder I had deleted. Then, presto-chango, I went and went back to the default Wordpress theme, and, lo and behold, there was my blog back (in its original default Wordpress theme ugliness, but there nevertheless). What was missing were my uploaded images. They too were in the infamous missing folder. I have copies of all them (I think). I’ll take this opportunity to update my blog theme to something more modern and attractive, and restore the images. And work on a better backup system…

(The title of this post should be read with the same cadence as “Thomas The Tank Engine.”) When my son Kevin got his Falcon Northwest computer he passed on to me his old Gateway computer (which is a nice dual core system). This computer had its hard drive wiped and a new install of OpenSuse 11.2 placed on it. I transferred over the Hauppauge TV card from Sluggo and hooked it up to Sluggo’s monitor and speakers in our kitchen, and suddenly the computer, newly renamed MediumHeadBoy, had taken over for old Slug. The only glitch I had with this computer and SuSE was a problem with the on-board sound system. The Hauppauge TV card has an audio output that needs to be plugged into the line-in jack of the sound card. Alas (I’m starting to sound like Jerry Pournelle from Chaos Manor) being a proprietary type Gateway motherboard, SuSE just didn’t recognize the existence of the line-in jack, and so no TV sound. I solved that problem by scavenging an old Audigy Soundblaster card from the original Alienware version of MonsterMagnet and plugging it into the last remaining PCI slot on the motherboard (after some contortions involving a tightly stretched ribbon cable that stretched from one end of the computer to the other — nice design decision there, Gateway!). So MediumHeadBoy works great, and is 10,000 times faster than Sluggo was.

What of the fate of Sluggo? Well, Sluggo is the web server and POP3 server for our network, and I wanted to keep him/it in that role. So, Sluggo now sits in my closet, no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard — just a power cable and an ethernet cable to connect him to the World Wide Web. Sluggo is now a headless server. His runlevel at boot-up is only 3; no more X for him. I can log on to him using SSH from anywhere, or see him in my network folders using Samba on my network. Hopefully he will live long and prosper in his new role as a dedicated server here at EP Studios.

I’m writing this on my son’s Asus eee PC netbook. I’m going to be looking at netbooks to buy for my daughter for Xmas. This is a quick post, since my fingers don’t really fit on this small keyboard. Looking for good combination of price/keyboard/battery life/style. My daughter wants Ubuntu on it. It looks like it is harder to buy a netbook with preinstalled Linux than I thought. Will probably have to pay the Windows tax and get 7 on it. I’ll post a review of whatever I get her after Xmas.

OpenSuSE 11.2 is so pretty on my desktop on SuperSluggo, that I can’t bear to part with it. Unfortunately there is a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work. I got DVD playback to work, but unfortunately Amarok either crashes or refuses to play Mp3 files, depending on which repositories I use to load required files. The Packman repository seems to fix DVDs, but breaks Amarok. Kaffeine though plays Mp3 files, go figure! More critically, I can’t synchronize my Treo phone/PDA anymore. KPilot freezes at the configuration screen. KPilot was always funky anyway. I had somehow gotten it to work consistently in OpenSuSE 10.3 with KDE 3.5, even though to do this I had to push the sync button on my phone within seconds of starting the program. After each sync, KPilot would crash, but at least it worked. Now I have to rejigger my GTD type activities. I could reboot to Windows, where Treos sync without trouble, but what a pain! I then thought I would use Xen in OpenSuSE to virtualize Windows. I always wanted to do that. But, no X, no graphics after doing that — apparently NVidia drivers aren’t supported. Checking the forums, someone recommended downgrading my graphics card. That’s crazy! So stuck I am.

I couldn’t get my Panasonic Toughbook laptop (vintage 2003) to upgrade at all to 11.2 from 11.1. I already mentioned this in my last post on this subject. After much gnashing of teeth, I finally said the hell with SuSE and installed Ubuntu 9.10. During installation I was able to reformat the root directory but kept my /home directory (which I had previously mounted on a separate partition — turns out that was a good idea!). Everything painless so far. Dual-booting with Windows XP was preserved. I kind of like it.

Finally, Windows 7. My experience with 7 is close to nil, but my son recently purchased a computer that came with it.  He installed a game, Mass Effect. When he ran the game, it froze during configuration, and the Windows “Houston we have a problem” equivalent screen came up. I noted the expected “Windows is searching for a solution to the problem” dialog, but ignored it. In Windows Vista I had never seen this dialog actually come up with a solution. I was shocked to see a few moments later a balloon show up on the taskbar stating Windows had indeed found a solution to the problem of Mass Effect not running. We clicked it, a dialog appeared saying there was an update, and click here to get it. Lo and behold, the update downloaded, then installed itself, and the game actually worked!!! Of course there had to be one little glitch in the perfection of all this. The familiar dialog box saying something to the effect that the program had not installed correctly and whether to reinstall with compatibility mode or ignore appeared. I wasn’t sure which program it was referring too (the original install or the update) but we safely ignored it, and everything worked. Surprising.

The other thing I noted in the 10 minutes of seeing the OS for the first time was that the dreaded UAC gray screen of delay did not automatically show up whenever I clicked a button with the 4 colored shield on it (i.e. when an action required escalation to administrator priviledges). Now it’s possible that UAC was disabled in this machine (or is it disabled by default in Win 7?), but I kind of hoped it don’t fire off because the action I was doing, which was simply looking at the devices installed on the computer, did not actually change any settings and therefore really didn’t need permission from myself to proceed. Maybe I am giving Microsoft too much credit, but I do remember reading that UAC (User Access Control, see a few posts back) had been eased up a little in 7. If so, nice work.

Progress on EP Simulator is slow. I’ve been working on multiple screen configuration, since the Prucka/GE system runs on two monitors. Anyway, here is a screenshot (on one monitor though).

I attempted to upgrade both Krell, my ToughBook laptop, and SuperSluggo, my main computer to OpenSuSE 11.2 this weekend. Since SUSE was my first Linux I have remained partial to it, only using Ubuntu at one time on a now defunct partition of my wife’s computer, MonsterMagnet. Anyway, the SuperSluggo upgrade from OpenSuSE 10.3 to 11.2 went pretty well as these things go. I selected the update option instead of new installation — with all the time and energy spent in tweaking my setup I can’t bear to think of wiping it out and starting all over with a new installation. I realize that updating can cause problems, and so I braced myself for a long hard slog this weekend.

Well as mentioned it wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been. The installation program didn’t touch my 2 MS Windows partitions, and didn’t hiccup once during the process. On the other hand, after installation and rebooting, I was rudely dumped into a Linux console with a login prompt blinking at me. No X11, No KDE!  I actually wasn’t too surprised. I knew the Nvidia card I have would require downloading proprietary drivers which can’t come with an open source distribution like OpenSuSE. So I rebooted to the “failsafe” mode of 11.2, and, surprise, surprise! The same thing happened! Just a command prompt, still no graphics! So I used the ncurses form of Yast2 to add the Nvidia repository, installed the Nvidia driver, and rebooted to a pretty green high resolution graphical screen! KDE 4.3 was up and running smoothly. In fact the desktop seemed much faster and more responsive than the 10.3 distribution version. Programs generally work fine, though Amarok crashed on startup. I installed the mp3 support from the OpenSuSE site, after which Amarok starts up fine (but still won’t play mp3s — I haven’t figured out why yet). Overall I am pleased with the upgrade thus far.

Poor Krell the laptop hasn’t fared so well. I had 11.1 running on it, tried the zypper dup route to upgrade over the internet, but entered into an intractable hell of dependency warning messages. I then tried upgrading via the downloaded DVD, but the installation halts with an error message saying the CD can’t be mounted on some subdirectory of /var. I think my partitions on Krell may be too small; Krell contains a Windows XP partition besides the Linux one. But I am not sure. I may use GParted to expand the root partition and see if that works. Otherwise, maybe it’s time to switch to Ubuntu on Krell.

I was saddened, or at least nostalgic, to learn of the discontinuation of development of SVK . There are a few posts on SVK in this blog. It was one of the first distributed version control systems, although it was a bit of a hybrid, still using an SVN central repository. But with SVK I could work offline, and later push and pull the results to and from the repository. This was radical a few years ago. I have since moved on to git, which is distributed version control “done right” (just as SVN is supposedly CVS “done right”). Git is fun to use, reliable, very well supported, and I have found I can’t live without it. But nevertheless kudos to SVK for being a trailblazer in this domain!

I notice that I have a tendency to set out to write multi-part (“to be continued next week”) blog posts and then move on to something else and never come back and write the next part. Now that I have finished the upgrade to EP Office I am happily back working on my Linux partition, and memories of Vista troubles are already rapidly fading. Nevertheless, the crux of the problem I was having with Vista was not really directly UAC related (see Part I if you don’t know what UAC is, or as an alternative try to install software on you Vista computer and wait until the screen goes dark and a thud sound occurs and you are prompted to confirm that you really want to do what you just asked the computer to do), but rather had to do with the difficulty of installing a database application on a Vista machine. There is still no good “single user” installation option on Windows (supposedly will be with Windows 7), so applications are installed as “single-machine” installations. The immutable parts of the installation should go to the Program Files folder, the read-only registry keys to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, and then, what about the rest? Well, customization stuff that will vary by user should clearly go to the individual user’s home folder, their local application data folder and document folders, and to HKEY_CURRENT_USER in the registry. What about shared data? Well, on XP the All Users folder in Documents and Settings could store application data, or, what was more commonly done, just stick all that stuff in the Program Files folder. Since every user was an administrator, it didn’t matter. Vista has a ProgramData folder for shared data. Surely I could put my database there and thus allow multiple users on a single machine to access it. WRONG! It turns out only the original installing user has read and write access to whatever is installed in that folder, all other users can read the data, but can’t change it! Note here that I am not even talking about the backend database for the program. It is actually located on a remote server. It is the frontend Access database that for various reasons has to have read and write permission for the program to work that I was trying to find a good home for. It is possible to change the ACL (Access Control List) of the files in the ProgramData folder, but what a pain in the butt! So what did I do? I put the frontend, mutable Access database file in the user AppData folder. Thus the program can only be run by whatever user installed it on each machine. (It can be run by other users if the “Run As Administrator” option is used, but there is something vile about doing this and changing files in another user’s AppData folder). I considered an option that I think would work as an alternative: Have a central location for the the frontend database file (ProgramData folder?) and when each user tries to run the program, if the frontend is not present in his or her own AppData folder, the frontend will automatically be copied into the AppData folder. It is not important that the same frontend database file be used by each user, the only reason it has to be writable has to do with substituting the window icon from the default Access icon to the EP Office icon which has to be done at runtime. I’m sure this would work, but, at least for now, the process was rejected as too cumbersome.

So there you have it. Hoops jumped through to avoid unnecessary UAC prompts, to prevent under the table virtualization of your program folders (a whole other feature of Vista which I glossed over), and basically to make something work under Vista that worked without problems under XP. Now that I sorta understand how this all works with Vista, I’m sure I’ll have to learn how to jump through more hoops with W7.