Brent’s Thoughts

I thought I had already put this up here, but a search didn’t show it.  If you need the USB drivers for it here is a set.

jvc_gr-dv500u_xp

We recently got a TE220 with onboard Hardware Echo Cancellation from Voipsupply.com for the price gouging cost of $1,150.

OCT6114-64D.ima

OCT6114-128D.ima

I was all excited since we have had lots of reports of echo on our lines and I was glad to get the district to pay for the add on card for it. We needed to get the PCI-E aspect of the card, but they didn’t have to spring for the Echo Canceller. So I rebuilt my server onto a new machine and got everything lined out. I couldn’t find a straight answer on what I needed to have in zapata.conf in terms of the echo options. Right now I have them off.

I was getting errors in dmesg about a missing firmware for the card, but I let that go at the time because I figured that the trixbox install that I have has the zaptel drivers on it from Digium. Wrong.

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After I got it back from the guy that “painted” it, the clutch wouldn’t work. I had my neighbor, Wayne, come over and help me take a look at it. We figured out that the slave cylinder (under the drivers floor pan) was leaking. We took it off and cleaned it up and figured out where it was leaking, he took the cylinder itself to WKU and had a guy there hone it smooth, while I ordered a rebuild kit from Moss for it.
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Since I could find a whole lot about how to do this correctly, I figured I would go ahead and get it down for anyone else that is looking for it.

The stock Fedora kernel has the pwc driver in it and it recognizes the camera, but it doesn’t seem to operate it correctly.  So I went to http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/files/ and downloaded the latest version of the drivers.  You will also need the kernel-devel, make, gcc packages.

yum install kernel-devel make gcc

Should get them for you.

once you get those follow the instructions in http://www.saillard.org/linux/pwc/INSTALL.en

I would recommend rebooting after that rather than removing the module and inserting it back in.  It seemed to work better for me.  It seemed to come up and work for me after that.

I installed camE on the machine and configured it to upload images to my webpage.  It should be showing pictures of the world outside my house now.

Recently there was a post to Slashdot about a Podcast called “We Hate Tech” in which two guys (supposedly tech support) rant and rave about tech stuff.

I listened to a couple of the ‘casts and just never really got into it. It was a lot of bitching without a lot of content as to why. I have decided to do this in my own style, and I hope to avoid the baseless bitching while still telling people why not to use something.

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Damn, last week was just shit. Not “the shit”, just shit. Nothing would work right. The new network rocks out, but we cannot get the New Accelar to route IPX traffic, so none of our Novell server are visible from other locations. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

The new 380 switch that we have from Nortel is so brand new that there is some kinda bug in the code on it and if it gets rebooted it will not pick up the fiber link that we have running to it until it has been unplugged and the fiber plugged back in. Therefore if the power goes out at our office and it loses power all our servers are off the network. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

Got two new 36 gig drives for a toshiba server that we have. Only took two days to get them in since Toshiba puts its server utils on a 96meg partition on the drive and if they aren’t on there it won’t boot off of it. Unfortunately, it is a real bitch to get them on there. Ghost doesn’t understand the SCSI drives natively and the SCSI drivers for DOS don’t work. Add to that the machine takes about 2 minutes to reboot and you have a really not-fun time with it. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

Boot Drive on Biglinux went down. It was just some scrub drive that I dig up, but it still sucks, plus the extra 9 gig drive that we had from the Toshiba is unrecognizable to biglinux. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

My allergies are acting up, so my eyes are all red and itchy all the time. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

Mirage won’t be here until at least after the 25, if you are to believe the invoice. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

Friday at about 4:30 when I was getting ready to leave work the main server for the district went down with all hard drives non-responding. I think it was due to heat so now we have to work on getting our office air conditioned quickly. SUUUUUUCKS!!! (Well maybe not that bad at least we get better air conditioning.)

I have been fighting IDE hard drive issues with Diablo all week as well. Either the IDE bus is going bad on it, or all my drives are because they keep kicking out of DMA and one consistantly loses the filesystem on it. SUUUUUUCKS!!!

Pretty much what I am trying to say is that this last week SUUUUUUCKED!!!!!!

Well as usual I have spent little time writing in this so I now I have to catch everyone up. First AFNI has cut my legs out from under me while praising something that I created. I gave my speech on SMess and it seemed to go over well, but because my boss did not tell his boss and the people above him it became a political battle in Bloomington. One which I got punished because my boss screwed up. His logic was that if I wasn’t doing anything with linux then I wouldn’t be creating things that got him in trouble and thus he has told me to remove linux from everything at our center. It is made more interesting by the fact that during the presentation that I gave his boss stated that he didn’t care if I had linux machines at the center. So I am somewhat displeased over that. On to other topics though… I have since solidified Diablo from its state of limbo to a linux machine with a fairly nice setup. Several things have helped me to do this. First I picked up a copy of Railroad Tycoon (for Linux, by Loki) at Best Buy for 9 bucks and I am thoughly enjoying it. Second, the first of my hard drives that went defective came back and I have placed that in there to allow for more space. This has made me feel more comfortable with the machine. I also moved the ATI Radeaon card that I had back into since I am not running windows I don’t have to worry about the buggy drivers for it. Diablo finally lies in the state that I planned for it from the start. This leaves a couple things though. When I first built Diablo into what I am calling Version 1.8 the hard drive crashed and I purchased a new one. Later it crashed and I decided to send both of the messed up ones in to the respective companies. Now one is back and the other is on the way. Which means I will have a 60 Gig hard drive extra for the machines. Not particularly a bad problem, but an interesting one no the less. Also Just today I finished Halo on the normal level, so I am off to find some of the cool stuff in it to replay.

Well, a few things have went down since the last few journal entries. I have purchased an Xbox. For those of you that think I hate Microsoft this may come as a shock to you, but there are a couple of reasons why I have gotten one. First I am going to continue with the Linux only on Diablo, so I need something to play games on and I am tired of having to fight with buggy hardware drivers in Windows and all of that garbage. Second I see the most hack-ability..er… growth potential for this platform. Next issue, today I whacked my whole public_html luckly I had a backup copy. Now less than 30 seconds ago I just deleted the entry in my journal for 2002-1-22 and replaced it with this one. DAMNIT!! I don’t think I am going to be able to get that back. I have to go to Bloomington Il to show off a creation of mine to the big wigs in AFNI. It is more an attempt to get them to accept Linux and let me use it. I am not sure if I am going to be happy with this or not. Well I guess I need to find a way to re create the previous entry.

This was the first weekend in probably 6-8 weeks were I have not had something going on. I spent most of the weekend chilling at the house in my PJs working on Diablo. He is tweaked out now. I started out at the bottom and worked my way up to the top. Had to flash the bios on the Dragon board, flashed my modem, and my video card all up to the latest bios. With that done I then preceeded to setup SAMBA, HTTP, Rsync, and Accelerated X on the Linux side. I next booted into Windows and updated all the drivers for the video and everything. Mechwarrior 4 smokes now!!! Got the new expansion pack for it and I have been playing the shit out of it this weekend. Got back into linux and setup some stuff with the media side of things. Ripped a couple CDs and burnt one. Working on getting the Dxr3 board that I have working so that I can watch my DVDs and stuff without using windows. Tried to setup that up, but somehow it screwed my Font server and X wouldn’t run. I couldn’t get it to come back up so I tar’ed the /etc and /root directories up and sent them to another machine and rebuilt it again. Dumped the tar back and had the same machine again. I have completely accomplished my attempt to use Linux for everything. Well everything except for playing games. I had a moment of weakness and almost wiped W2k from my machine and put 98 on it so that I really wouldn’t use it for anything else, but I fought back and rationalized it by saying that I used W2k at work so I needed to keep it on here.
On another side of the coin of life (and one of the sides I don’t mention much) I am somewhat worried about Pauline and I. Friday I told Frank and Ethan that I would take them out to dinner. That ended up costing me quite a bit as Frank inivted Rob, not that I didn’t want Rob to go but I had planned on paying and for the second time Frank threw Rob into that. Also Jeremiah decided he wanted to go as well so I paid for his too. But anyway back to what I was actually writing about… So I told Pauline about that and ask her if she would wait till about 8:30 or so and I would come pick her up and we could come back over here and spend some time together. She said that she was going to go to Morgantown. I didn’t have a problem with that. I ask her if she was going to be coming back over here on Saturday because I thought we could go out shopping and stuff. She veto’ed that idea saying that she was going to spend time with her dad. So I called this morning to see if she wanted to go out with me because I needed to pick up some shirts. I found out that she went to Louisville with some guy to see one of her friends. Not sure how it is that I feel about that, but I am sure that it isn’t happy. Lately I have become paraniod about her and the possibility of her cheating on me. I am not sure why, but the feeling persists anyway. Maybe that isn’t the best thing to say into such a public forum, but I try to keep this as an open journal so I guess I need to. Pauline puts a lot into sun signs and Zodiac in relation to how people act. While I don’t put as much into it I do think that people often times act in manners that could be explained by that, wither it is because of it or just because they do. Regardless one of the things that just about everything I have ever read about Leo signed people is that they like to be the only one in their mates life. In this sense I am truely like that and it drives me nuts to think of even the remotest possiblity that she might be seeing someone else.

Rose Parrish

To most of the people that might be reading this that name would mean nothing to you. Let me tell you if it doesn’t then it is your loss. Rose Parrish is one of the sweetest people that I know. When I was little her and her husband Leo were part owners of a race track in Anderson called Anderson Speedway. Me and my grandmother (Leo’s sister) went there a lot and enjoyed the races and helped to do stuff. After a while Leo and Rose grew tired of being a part of that track and sold their shares. They then started a track in Muncie which they were pretty much sole owners of (at least I never heard of anyone else). Now this whole time since I was little I have loved racing and loved to go to the tracks. My uncle Leo was a flagman and travelled a lot to other tracks and flagged races. Rose and Leo often came back with things for me from races and places. Aunt Rose (as I called her, for the longest time not knowing that she was actually Great Aunt Rose) made me a set of flags, they got me jackets and my Grandma sewed patches of the drivers I liked on them. They got me banks and all sorts of other stuff, but beyond all that they were just nice to me all the time. Once they had started running Muncie Motor Speedway, I started working for them in the concession stands sometimes. It was fun to be part of the help and to be helping them out, plus everytime I worked I got 20 bucks : ). Sadly during the 3rd (I think) year of the new track Leo died. This put a terrible strain on Rosie, but she resolved to finish the season that had started. She finished the lease on the track grounds and then let it go. She lived in Indiana for a few more years and then moved to Tennesee to care for her father as he got older. She lived there for a while and about a year ago she bought a farm that I think she truely loved. About a month ago I found out that she had been diagnosed with cancer and that it was pretty far along. Tonight I found out that she is in the hospital and that she has a living will which states that she doesn’t want to be put on life support. Thus I think that the chances are good that she will not be with us for very much longer.