| Saturday, 11 October 2008 | Dereel | Photos for 11 October 2008 |
Finally it's getting warmer—almost too warm, in fact, and I couldn't do any work on the verandah until afternoon, when the sun was behind the house. Instead more work on my house photos; the time has come to retire some viewpoints, and to make up for it I'm adding others, and also some panoramas:
hugin is a little strange to use—I'm never sure when to do what—but in two things are fairly clear: I can just use the default values, and that hugin is the kind of program I advocate, merely a front-end to a series of programs, and the real story is in a Makefile (which it considerately saves if you ask it to)—so I should be able to suck the details out of it and add it to my automated scripts.
In the afternoon did some garden work and added another 4 boards to the verandah, after which things got more complicated. We only have 68 cm to go, or 9 boards, and I don't have that many unblemished boards, so I had to cut the ones I had into usable pieces. It's non-trivial working out how to use the remaining partial boards, but it looks as if we'll have enough and even a little left over.
Chris Yeardley along for dinner. It's fairly certain now that LiSP, her ex-ISP, has gone bankrupt, and she's looking for a new ISP. Interestingly, IPStar themselves are offering interim hosting for up to 30 days for free.
| Sunday, 12 October 2008 | Dereel | Photos for 12 October 2008 |
Over to Chris' place to take some horse photos today, returning with a lot of Asian foodstuffs that Fifi had left behind when she left.
Back home and took a look at Chris' Dell Inspiron 5150, on which she had installed PC Linux OS. I don't know what it is about that name, but it irritates me. In any case, what little understanding of Linux system administration relates to Debian and, to a lesser extent, Fedora, so I suggested I install Ubuntu on it. Started that off and went away. When I came back later, the machine had powered down, something that Chris had also mentioned. But this time it had happened without completing the installation. Tried again and watched it: the fan was going all the time, and then it sped up even faster and powered down; clearly the machine (a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4) was overheating. Tried again, turning the CPU speed to minimum, but I was unable to complete the installation.
Instead, took the disk out an put it in my Inspiron 5100, where the installation completed normally, and I was able to continue on Chris' machine—which no longer got so hot. Are there issues with the Linux installation environment that ignore thermal constraints?
Interestingly, the new machine recognized Chris' Belkin USB wireless interface, claimed it was up, but couldn't get it to transfer any date. She said that it worked out of the box with PC Linux OS. I wonder if that's related to Ubuntu or my environment.
On with the verandah, getting another four complicated boards attached before Chris came over to discuss her machine and network connection. Only 7 boards to go now. Inside and finally got Chris back on the network, through IPStar's transition thing. Looks like she'll be looking for a new ISP tomorrow.