2ND NOTICE AGAIN

At LiveJournal.com right now, the site reports

LiveJournal is currently down due to migration to a new server facility. The window of planned downtime is from 8 AM to NOON PST (4PM to 8PM UTC) on Tuesday, November 18, 2008.

For more information, bookmark our status site. Thanks for your patience during this time.

(The status site, meantime, is claiming Scheduled Maintenance: Feb 4, 05:00 - 07:00 UTC/GMT, though 07:00 GMT has come and gone.)

After a hugger-mugger of up-dates to my Linux installation, I found myself unable to access the Windows NTFS partition on my computer while running Linux.

I had been using the NTFS-3G driver to support such access. NTFS-3G, in turn, uses the fuse file-system API to support such access. Red Hat doesn't support fuse with their kernels, and I don't want to manually rebuild support for it, nor to wait on someone else to do so, whenever Red Hat releases a new kernel, so I support fuse by way of dkms. Thus, to access the Windows NTFS partition, I was using packages

• dkms-x.x.x.x-x.noarch.rpm
• fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm
• dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm
• fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm

Anyway, when I would try to mount the Windows NTFS partition, I would get a message that /lib/modules/2.6.18-xx.el5/extra/fuse.ko did not exist. There was actually a directory entry for it, but that entry was a redirection to a non-existent file.

As it turned-out, something had gone wrong with my up-dating from RHEL 5.2 to RHEL 5.3, and not only did I not have the most recent versions of the kernels installed, but there was a version mis-match between the kernel to which I was booting and the associated -devel[opment] package. dkms was thus unable to automatically rebuild the fuse file-system interface.

I installed the most recent versions of the kernel and their associated -devel packages, rebooted the system, uninstalled and then reïnstalled fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, dkms-fuse-x.x.x-x.nodist.rf.noarch.rpm, and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm. (I doubt that I needed to uninstall and reïnstall fuse-x.x.x-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm and fuse-ntfs-3g-x.xxxx-x.elx.rf.i386.rpm, but I didn't and don't want to bother puzzling that out.) I was then again able to access the Windows NTFS partition.

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3, and appears to be celebrating that release with, well, server dysfunction. The mailing lists are buzzing with anger over the slowness of the automatic up-dating routines. This morning, I spent several hours on a high-speed connection trying to down-load a disc image (and finally gave up). A few days ago I was being denied access to any downloads as if I had no active subscription. Their bugzilla tells me that my password has expired, but the link that they sent me to up-date it results in some sort of proxy error.

Barring some remarkable act of contrition on the part of Red Hat, I won't be buying any more subscriptions from them. I'll switch to something such as CentOS.

Spybot-Search&Destroy produced a false positive yester-day. It notified me that KHALMNPR.EXE was a Trojan horse program. In fact, KHALMNPR.EXE is a basically benign program from Logitech.

The Spybot-S&D folk know about this problem, but are not planning to effect a correction until Wednesday. If you've already let Spybot-S&D effect the ostensible repair, you should be able to reverse that using Spybot-S&D; you can also reïnstall the Logitech software.

Perhaps we should demand an apology on this score from Al Gore. After all, he told us that he took the initiative in creating the Internet.[1]

[Up-Date (13 Jan): I was informed by Gaal, in a comment to this entry, that the Times had somehow fabricated this story. (The BBC presenting the story as if it were their own research, but the chances that they would have independently fabricated the same details are slim indeed. So the Times has been caught-out in one way, and the BBC in another.) Meanwhile, the BBC story has been significantly edited, so that the sentence quoted above no longer appears, and we are instead told

A recent study by American research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions.

]

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[1]Note that Snopes.com demonstrates that Al Gore did not claim to have invented the Internet. But what Gore did claim (and they even quote this) was

During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.

Snopes, which can be very much about spin rather than clarity when it is their ox that is about to be, er, stabbed with a horn, wants to claim that there's room for debate about whether his claim of creätion is justified, because the Internet is not a homogenous entity and didn't spring into being at once. Well, not much in this world is homogenous and static, but it is simply disingenuous to claim to have taken the initiative in creäting something that already existed because one pushed to fund its further development.

• eBay listing 360119465093
• eBay listing 360119465243
• eBay listing 360119465608
• eBay listing 370136164655

(I notice that the listings for tiogacentergeneralstore include several sets of listings rather like this set.)

WordPress version 2.7 has been released.

About eight months ago, when 2.51 was new, I reported a bug that had been giving me grief, a mishandling of the HTML <q> element. WordPress.org automatically set the target of fixing this bug by version 2.7 — which, frankly, to me seemed rather unambitious. It's one thing not to expect to fix a bug in the very next bug-fix release, quite another to put it off for two minor versions.

In any case, I've been looking forward to version 2.7. Now it's out… …and the bug is not fixed. In fact, I've learned that about two months ago, the target was changed to fixing the bug by version 2.9, another two minor versions away. And there seems no assurance that, about half-a-year from now, that target won't be reset to version 3.1.

I didn't get a chance to ride the bicycle that my father gave me. The vehicular gate to the parking area of the apartment complex in which I live was mysteriously disabled; and a few days later, on 25 November, exactly one thing was stolen — that bicycle. Whoever stole it came prepared with something that could cut through a heavy-duty security cable.

I learned of the theft on the morning of 26 November, as I was packing my car for a trip to visit my parents. The complex manager promised to review the video recorded by the security cameræ. Since the bicycle wasn't visible from the street and the thief or thieves were prepared with cable cutters, I'm pretty sure that the theft was by a party including someone who had been on the property earlier, and that said person or persons had disabled the gate. He, she, or they were probably attendant to the position of the security cameræ.

As unhappy as I was, I considered not travelling, but I knew that I would make my parents very sad if I didn't come. So I went ahead.

On top of ordinary reasons for visiting them, I had been asked to help them get their computers up-graded from Windows XP SPs 1 or 2 to SP3. Although SP3 installed without difficulty on my Windows partition, the installation aborted on each of their machines. Well, we have SP3 on their machines now, but the processes have been trips through mine-fields, with many explosions.

We ultimately resorted to formatting the principal hard drive of my father's desk-top computer, and installing everything from scratch except in-so-far as we have over-written much of the new contents of the Application Data folder with the old contents. It seems to be in reasonably good shape now.

Things went smoother with respect to my mother's lap-top computer, but (at this stage) the OS knows that the built-in sound card is some sort of audio device, but does not recognize it as a Playback or Recording device. In fact, the OS likewise cannot tell what sort of audio device a SoundBlaster PCMCIA card is. I've tried many things, and visited many sites looking for a fix, but have so far failed.

As I've fought with the computers, my mother has repeatedly acted as if my father has been pushing me too hard to solve the problems, while actually my father has at various stages pushed me to quit working the problems hours before I would normally want to stop. I greatly wish that neither would act this way.

Also making me unhappy is the reduced opportunity to talk with the Woman of Interest. My parents are Morning People, and operating on something like their schedule greatly reduces my window of opportunity to speak to her. Then, because I use a head-set, people don't have a good visual cue that I'm using the phone. People have a propensity to start talking to me without first listening to whether I'm in conversation. And, finally, a fair amount of my normal telephone interaction with the Woman of Interest involves one or both of us being relatively quiet for extended periods. (We have unlimited connection time within the Sprint PCS network,[1] and so leave the connection in place and interact as if separated by a room partition.)

My brother and his long-time girl-friend also came for Thanksgiving, but left on the week-end. Yester-day, they got a quick civil marriage. Later, they will have a bigger ceremony to which they can invite friends and family. What precipitated the marriage seems to have been that my brother was offered a job in Tucson shortly after being laid-off from his job in Austin. I think that his girl-friend reälized that she should seal-the-deal. (Yes, she seems to have been the one most reluctant to commit.) My parents and I really like her.

With my brother moving to Tucson, my father is now speaking wishfully of my moving here as well. But he does understand that I would much rather live in or near the forests of the Pacific Northwest than in the Arizona desert.

Yester-day, my cousin Lyn (a really nice guy, who suffered some sort of in utero cerebral damage) came to visit my mother. I tagged along as they ran errands yester-day, and to-day as they went to Sweetwater Wetlands and to Tohono Chul Park.

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[1] Actually, we're limited to 44640 minutes per month (or sometimes as few as 40320 minutes). Perhaps not enough if one loves eight days a week.

Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the ATI Catalyst™ Linux Graphics Driver on my RHEL 5.2 system. When I later booted to Linux after restarting the computer, the GUI was grossly dysfunctional. What it displayed was little more than a few simple rectangles — no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor.

It took me some time to get at a solution, but I present it here for the sake of anyone in a similar fix.

The problem seems to have been with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, configured for my system when it was running an earlier version of the software, and simply renaming this file is apparently sufficient to resolve the problem (though initially I reinstalled version 8.10 of the driver, and version 8.11 seemed not to have a problem with the version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf created anew by version 8.10).

Because the GUI wasn't really usable, I booted an RHEL installation CD, entering

linux rescue text

at the boot: prompt; this gave me a Linux CLI session that could access the Linux partition on the HD. I had the Linux partition mounted as /mnt/sysimage; that put xorg.conf at /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11/xorg.conf, whence it could be mv'd.