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Saturday, 16 March 2024 | Dereel | Images for 16 March 2024 |
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More garden work
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Topic: gardening | Link here |
Jesse Walsh along today again, this time with different tasks, notably pruning the bushes, notably the Buddleja × weyeriana that has grown out of all proportion.
Putting ryoms to the test
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
I'm about half way through my review of “Roll your own mail server”, and I'm running into trouble. So far I've been reviewing with my own knowledge of the material, but how he's moving into areas that I don't know. That's good, of course: that's why I'm interested in the book. But how can I review this content? I had thought of moving through more quickly, but I really need to try this stuff out for myself.
OK, what do I need? As the author recommends, two systems that initially talk only to each other. Fine, revive tweedledum.lemis.com and tweedledee.lemis.com. Set up virtual machines.
OK, where? hydra is the new machine, of course, but I haven't configured VirtualBox for it so far. It proves that I had already installed the software. How hard can it be?
Oh. The GUI has changed, of course. After working my way through that, I discovered that I needed at least to tell VBox where the files are. Did that, but it didn't find anything.
Oh, of course, I have to add the machines. Why? No idea. And not much help. Go to Tools, click on the green + symbol, climb down the directory tree to find a file with a name like eureso/eureso.vbox.
Click Start. Oh:
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Clearly it's too polite to complain, but if I ask for Details, I get:
Result Code: NS_ERROR_FAILURE (0x80004005)
Component: SessionMachine
Interface: ISession {c0447716-ff5a-4795-b57a-ecd5fffa18a4}
What does that mean? The web knows, lots of conflicting reasons. The one that matches is that I wasn't in the vboxusers group. OK, add that and try again. Same message, but with different details:
Could not launch the VM process for the machine 'eureso' (VERR_ACCESS_DENIED).
Result Code: VBOX_E_IPRT_ERROR (0x80BB0005)
Component: MachineWrap
Interface: IMachine {85632c68-b5bb-4316-a900-5eb28d3413df}
What does that mean? Maybe the web knows that too, but what I found suggested that I had a VM that was too old, and that's possible.
OK, why am I using VirtualBox anyway? That's an old, worn-out virtual environment, I'm told. The new one is Bhyve. Read up on how to install that at FreeBSD as a Host with bhyve (just below FreeBSD as a Host with VirtualBox), both well hidden in the Virtualization chapter, and not helped by the web, which didn't include that link, just the Wiki page with mainly FAQs, the first of which is Is it "bhyve", "Bhyve", "BHyVe" or BHyve?.
Oh. It's non-trivial, and it leaves me wondering whether I shouldn't stick with VirtualBox on eureka, at least for current purposes. The trouble is that I have migrated all the VM files from eureka to hydra. Once again logistics are getting in the way of doing anything.
Microsoft does it again
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Topic: technology, opinion | Link here |
It's middle of the month, past the time where Microsoft crashes and restarts distress and somehow manages to stop my rwhod from running. They're getting more cunning all the time. In the past I have had to reinstall the program, but recently I haven't even been able to do that: the file was marked immutable or whatever Microsoft calls it, and I couldn't delete the old one. I had to start as “Administrator” and manually remove it before I could reinstall it.
But even that doesn't work any more. First, I can no longer start
a shell COMMAND.EXE as Administrator. Have they changed something, or
have I forgotten something? Something about “right click”, but not the way I remember it.
A quick web search came up with 13 ways to use "Run as administrator" in Windows 10. Thirteen! Is that an unlucky
number?
But even as “Administrator”, I can't delete it! But I can rename it to an appropriate expletive. What a pain this Microsoft is!
Kangaroo visit
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Topic: animals | Link here |
It's been a while since we've had a kangaroo come visit:
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Sunday, 17 March 2024 | Dereel | Images for 17 March 2024 |
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New “Laksa” noodles
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Topic: food and drink | Link here |
Penang laksa for breakfast today, but no noodles in the freezer. Where are the fresh ones? I didn't find them, only this kind:
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OK, the eternal question with a new kind of noodle: how long do you cook them? These instructions were interesting: soak for 15 minutes, then boil them for 5 minutes. That makes more sense in light of other noodles that just want to be soaked, like the Twenty-twenty noodles that I had actually been looking for. OK, try it out. Yes, for once it works. But somehow they don't seem to be laksa noodles, just ordinary rice noodles. That's probably because they're from Singapore, which already has a very different kind of laksa.
Reprocessing old photos
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Topic: technology, photography, history, general | Link here |
Ten years ago today I drove along the Great Ocean Road with Jörg Micheel and his son Richard. Lots of photos, of course, which I processed with the means at my disposal in those days.
Can I improve on things? The biggest difference is the “optimizer”. In those days I used the Ashampoo optimizer, which frequently improved things, but left something to be desired. In November 2021 I switched to “Perfectly Clear”, which, though discontinued, seems to be better.
OK, I already have a script for reprocessing old photos, and it works most of the time (very old directories have different structures). Part of the script generates a web page that compares the images before and after optimization. But what about the difference between Ashampoo and Perfectly Clear? Today spent a surprisingly short period of time modifying the script for a three-way comparison. And it seems that this reprocessing was a particularly good example. I had noted at the time that the extreme lighting had caused problems, particularly with the koalas. Here the original, the results with Perfectly Clear, and the results with Ashampoo (run the cursor over the first or third image to compare it with Perfectly Clear):
That's a particularly clear example for the improvement.
More VirtualBox setup
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Topic: technology | Link here |
Yesterday I established that I couldn't run my old VirtualBox VMs on hydra, at least not without changes that I didn't want to make. What about tweedledum? No, it didn't want to know about that either.
OK, run on eureka. Install a standard FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE system, even with ZFS, and as close to default as made sense. The only changes were to enable NTP. Everything went well, but of course the network interface didn't work: the default network is NAT, and what I want is a bridged network. I've seen this before, but I now wonder why these defaults just don't work.
OK, shut down the VM, set the network parameters. Oh. It only offered me the “choice” of interface re0. But eureka doesn't have an re0, just xl0 (which I don't want, and which in the past has been its preference) and em0 (which I do). Where did re0 come from? That's on hydra! But the VirtualBox is running on eureka! And I couldn't start it again, with a meaningless error message that looked like the one I had seen before.
Dammit, does nothing work? Yes, I had started VirtualBox to display on hydra, but that's no reason for it to look at anything else on hydra. So I need to go back to eureka and see if I can get it to work there.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have a horror of reverse chronological documents, so all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days, but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry a day or two after I write it. | Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a “blog”, and there is deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise I'll assume that it's OK to do so. |
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