At your Runlevel

Posted on January 15, 2009 by Arthur

Earlier, A New HopeI was reminded of the typical run-levels on Linux systems, particularly on Debian-flavoured distributions. For future reference1:

  • Run level 0: System Halt
  • Run level 1: Single User/No networking (“Safe Mode” for Windows connoisseurs). In this mode daemons won’t be started.
  • Run level 2: Full Multi-user
  • Run level 3: Full Multi-user, same as two, but commonly used for text console login.
  • Run level 4: Full Multi-user
  • Run level 5: Full Multi-user, same as two, but commonly used for full-blown X-Server login.
  • Run level 6: System Reboot

There are specific commands to tell the environment to go to any of the earlier mentioned run-levels: however, as a normal user, the only way you generally switch level is via the ‘shutdown’ command (which as you guess either changes the run-level to 0 or 6. As the Debian Administration mentions, this is probably a command you want to learn by heart. Well, at least you should be familiar with the following command:

shutdown -h “now”

So, yeah, you have a daemon that got stuck during boot-up and how do you get into Run-level 1? Most Linux distros nowadays use GRUB as a bootloader (without peeking at Wikipedia, I think that stands for ‘Grand Unified Bootloader’), so if you’re a LILO user, sorry. Anyway: GRUB allows you to interrupt the boot-process and issue extra command-line parameters (press the ‘e’ key) before booting the computer. On simple Debian-based systems (Damn Small Linux): To boot right into Run level 1 the only thing you need to do is to replace the last number of the main boot command (‘kernel’) to a 1 (most likely it will say either 3 or 5). You can also append ‘single’ to the commandline, apparently. Debian-based flavours that run X-Server and that (Ubuntu fellows, I look at you): to boot into single mode, just press ESC and select (any) of the recovery modes presented to you by GRUB.

1 Nowadays, Debian Administration is not one of the most stable sites it appears…

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Click. Clack.

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Arthur

SomeAlt. Control stuff I ran into earlier.

I read that Windows 7 (Microsoft much-touted successor of Windows Vista) is positioned as the ‘Linux Killer’ (original article at Computer World). From that article:

The threat to Windows comes entirely from “netbooks” — lightweight, inexpensive laptops that typically use Intel’s low-powered Atom processor and don’t come with substantial amounts of RAM or powerful graphics processors

The last time I checked, was that Linux’s was actually taking out more bytes (ha-ha) out of the Windows Server market, which is basically because the open-source operating system is so easy to install on older hardware and that. Well, that is if you use Debian, of course.

A NASA team announced the discovery of cosmic radio noise six times louder than normal. Apparently, this noise happened in 2006 and after plenty of peer reviews, it appears that this (yet unknown) noise was not related to anything that humans do on earth. However, the researchers are still not sure what created this noise.

You thought we suffered economic hardship? In Zimbabwe, the government just introduced a $50 billion note, which (apparently) just buys you a loaf of bread in that same country. I am curious who’s portrait is prominently showing on that note, but on preview, I don’t think too many politicians (except for the dictator kind of types) would want to have his (or her’s) face on a bill that’s probably only usable for wiping one’s nose.

And the best is for the last: If you’re into fractals (sure you do), here’s an open-source Fractal Flame Editor (Windows only: for other OSes look here). Surprisingly, it’s written in Delphi 5.

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Nemesis of the 3rd kind

Posted on January 11, 2009 by Arthur

The Windows Vista Nemesis III, First stagesounds remind me of several sound effects of a game (Konami’s Nemesis III) I used to play on an MSX-2, a whole long time ago. Compared to the other games in that series, this episode was actually one of the ‘easier’ ones, and I finished that game. Like the other Nemesis games, it had a weird storyline but with one fun surprise: In the time travel stage the player ‘travels’ backwards and has to beat various boss monsters from the previous episodes, complete with the original sound effects.

Naturally, somebody was so kind to complete the game and post the results on YouTube:

At one time I was considering replaying some of the Nemesis games, particularly Salamander. I briefly mentioned this in 2005 but my feeble attempts ran amuck because I found out that playing these games was too hard using today’s analog controllers. The widely popular (in the Eighties that is) digital controllers produce that typical ‘clicking’ sound which helps when counting ‘the number of options’ or even, the number of ‘clicks’ one had to make to get to safety during a boss monster fight.

Without a doubt: the Nemesis (or Gradius) games were the finest 8-bit games made by Konami.

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Haute hyperedroit

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Arthur

I saw ‘Religulous’ (imdb) the other day, which I thought was entertaining but awkward. I like Maher’s ‘Real Time’ show and I think his work is generally funny, but he’s definitely no Michael Moore. If you plan to watch it, you can apparently now also find the movie online.

If you want to get rid of hardware, make sure that you physically destroy the hard-drive or just use the right tools to do this (earlier on xsamplex), by using DBAN for example. Since data can stay so persistent on harddrives, maybe harddrives makers should consider adding a ‘kill switch’ which will destroy a harddrive in an instant.

Back in December 08, IpodNN featured an iPod Touch clone, which was apparently on sale in Canada. I’m all for competition, but looking at the picture/screenshot, I wonder why the device’s internal camera is called the ‘PC Camera’? I find that an unfortunate name.

And oh, yeah: the price of gas just went up and now might be a good time to send a team of explorers to Saturn’s moon Titan. Maybe one of the US carmakers should start investing in space technology. I see a bright future for Ford Warp-Drives that come in one colour. Black.

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Backup

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Arthur

One of the weirdest stories last month, was the one about JournalSpace losing its data and then just plain calling its quits because the inability to recover that lost data. There’s an endless discussion going on at Slashdot and at MetaFilter1. The moral of the story is to properly backup your SQL data: most databases come with excellent tools to dump your data to text, binary or whatever format your prefer. And while you backup, always ensure that a database dump goes off-location, in case a fire breaks out in your server room.

I’ve mentioned this before but I generally keep sources all together, organized by programming language and highly tagged by date and such. Every 6 months, I make a quick inventory and make the proper backups if needed. I never use my source control/revision as a backup means: that’s not the point of a revision control system2. In the years of moving sources off computers and loading them back on new ones, I’ve lost a couple of sources. From all the sources I lost, I regret losing the PHP-based Scr*bble/WordPlay server. Well, actually, I have a bare snapshot of the sources but they are incomplete and I can’t do anything with it. To make it worst, back in 2001 or 2002, I forgot to export and dump the data definition and data. Where things went wrong was that the specific sources and data were stored on completely different locations (I developed on both Caldera OpenLinux and Windows 2000). What happened in my case was that I thought that all the sources were on OpenLinux but that the actual ones were stored on the Windows 2000 computer. I recognized this, of course, after I had formatted the Windows 2000 computer3.

We humans are extremely good in storing stuff in our brains, but we tend to only remember those crucial things after disaster has struck.

1 JournalSpace’s official report is right here. 01/18/09: JournalSpace’s official report is gone. It looks like the domainname was sold to a third party.

2 A source control system is only for saving your sorry ass when you made an error in one of your versions of your software so that you can revert your stupid sorry ass-changes and start over again. Sure you can use it as a backup means (CVS historical data can be moved to different computers easily, for example) but if you thought it to be there for disaster-recovery reasons, you’re mistaking.

3 Sidenote: this was on the MyNote 930. That computer had a full history of whereabouts too, and was eventually passed on to the local recycling plant.

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The 100 Lunar Pound Question

Posted on January 2, 2009 by Arthur

To my surprise, Some Coins in the Shape of a NineI found out that New Years Day started with a (white) bang in Nova Scotia: In New Brunswick we got away with a couple centimeters and mainly the cold wind. Justice was served, I believe and I’m looking forward to a snow-free Winter. Uh. Yes.

Talking about Winter: I hear that there is a shortage of ice skates (nee, speed skates or ‘Vikings’) in The Netherlands. At Christmas. Where are Bob Geldoff and his gang of crack-musicians and crack-singers to help these poor people out? On the other hand, there is something about skating (nee speedskating) on natural ice that is, as long as you watch out for ‘wakken’ (spots of thin ice).

So it’s 2009, it’s a new year and there goes nothing above ditching those new year’s resolution and gain another 10 metric milligrams (for people used to the Imperial system, that is 100 Lunar Pounds). Change your science teacher can believe in! This year’s The Edge question is all about change too: “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” (Earlier on xsamplex). If you’re bored for the next couple of days: there’s plenty of reading to do there.

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And have a safe…

Posted on December 31, 2008 by Arthur

…New Years Eve with a bunch of home-made ‘oliebollen’.

Home-made oliebollen

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This Year In What

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Arthur

Earlier, Salmon River, Truro, NSI lightly remarked on a couple of top ten lists (see here, opens in new window). Personal observations:

  1. Science: The most remarkable scientific breakthrough I thought happened a month ago, when astronomers made the first photo of an exoplanet. Most of the current discovered exoplanets are discovered using gravitational lensing, a technique that apparently marked a turnaround for Astronomy. It looks like Astronomy is going to be exciting for the coming years. Another item prominently in the news was the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider. I’ve not mentioned it too many times here, but it was definitely the centerpiece of my dry jokes.
  2. Tech.: I was truly impressed with the latest KDE 4.2 beta and I hope that the KDE team can pull this release through in the next year. Android, Google’s mobile platform is a good second.
  3. News: I’ve been trying to stay out of US elections, but yes, without a doubt Obama’s election as the 4xth US president was 2008’s main theme. There were more events happening around the world and even today (see Israeli attacks on Gaza) but none were as prominent as the US elections. As a skeptic, I hope Obama proves me wrong.
  4. Canadian news: I’ve not mentioned anything here, but the big surprise was that the 3 Canadian opposition parties managed to agree to form a coalition. I’m not sure why I never brought it up here: I may have been too busy.

This year marked a personal turning point with us leaving Nova Scotia and settling in New Brunswick. Pain heals slowly over time, I hear. I’m leaving the statistics for next year but my best post this year was the one called ‘From Thunder back to Sun’. A remarkable post was the ‘Evil Twin’ one, which featured a short visit from the twin, and us celebrating a birthday in a little livingroom in the city of Saint John. There was also his second visit to Canada this year, which brought us back to Truro, Nova Scotia, albeit for just a couple of days.

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This Year In Blog

Posted on December 29, 2008 by Arthur

Top ten lists of 2008 tire me out: Some of them are interesting but most of them are generally not. A summary here:

1 I can’t wait for Hollywood writers and directors make a movie out of this. Who’d be playing Dion, I wonder.

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VHS.

Posted on December 27, 2008 by Arthur

Over the Christmas days, I read that the last (US) VHS supplier bailed out from selling VHS tapes and if I believe The Register, this effectively means that VHS (Wikipedia article) is no more. VHS literally became a standard after it won in that (frequent) mentioned ‘videotape format war’, and despite generally lower quality audio and video, VHS was quickly adopted by the consumer market.

So, yes, JVC was the original developer of the VHS system and on one day in the early 80s, our dad ended up buying a brand new JVC VHS player and recorder. It was so brand new (and obviously expensive) that Dad explicitly told us not to tell our fellow-classmates. From then on, I remember frequent visits to a local video store and being introduced to the concept of ‘renting movies’ and ‘rewinding rented video tapes’. This didn’t last too long though: If you’ve lived in a large family, you’ll probably know that picking a movie that everybody likes is harder than simultaneously pressing the ‘play’ and ‘record’ button on the video player1.

Those early days, I also remember seeing the giant video discs (“LaserDiscs”) created by Philips: these were the predecessors of the current DVD type of discs. I thought these were amazing things but I could never imagine people actually buying these particular devices for their homes.

Additionally, this reminds me of the terrible slow adaption of CD-ROMs in the computer industry: The very first CDs proudly showcasing Grollier’s Encyclopedia ‘On One CD Disk!’ were so totally not popular. I’m certain that it was Microsoft (and the games industry, of course) that managed to convince consumers to adopt the CD as a new storage standard. The rest is history.

1 As an alternative to the “three-finger salute” (SFW, honestly), I’d like to introduce the ‘Two-finger salute’, which is the gesture of simultaneously pressing the ‘Play’ and ‘Record’ buttons on an Eighties video/audio tape recording device. And honestly, why did you have to press two buttons to start recording?

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Uh. Yeah.

Posted on December 22, 2008 by Arthur

Nowadays, King Street, Saint John I check the weather on the iPod Touch using an app made by the WeatherChannel: besides forecasting the weather it also prominently features an advertisement for the Chevrolet Aveo. I find that a kind of funny, considering the crisis the US automakers are ‘weathering’ today.

But yes, what can I say about the weather besides that when earlier mentioned WeatherChannel iPod Touch Application prominently shows a red banner that reads ‘WEATHER WARNING SNOW AND DRIFTS WITH BLOWING SNOW LOLS OMGZZZZ’ it is probably going to be a bad hair-day (CBC report 1 and CBC report 2). Earlier this morning, I was not able to open the deck door so I had to find an escape route, walked around the house through knee deep snowbanks to pick up my snow shovels. Both of course were ‘conveniently’ stored in or around the backyard, which was already covered by a snow blanket as high as the Saturn V rocket. Note to self and tip to other snow lovers: if you have 2 or more shovels, you probably don’t want to keep or store them together. Digging out a path through the snow on the deck wasn’t the hardest part though: I had a harder time walking out of the driveway because of the mix of heavy snow and ice thrown back into our yard by the snowplows. I feel sorry for the people who have to clean up the sidewalks, though: when I was walking back home, our street’s sidewalk was still buried under a thick pack of ice (50 cms or so). This brought me up to the following idea for the EA video game studios in Canada: How come we still don’t have a ‘sidewalk snow clearing’ game?

Looking back, this was probably the second worst snowstorm I have seen during my stay over here. What makes it worst is that, what, it’s the 4th snow storm of the year and it’s only December. And I thought Truro, Nova Scotia was bad.

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Special, uh, Bulletin

Posted on December 21, 2008 by Arthur

A weekA nuclear attack ago, there was a discussion on Metafilter about the 25th anniversary of the release of the (TV movie) ‘The Day After’. In the comments section, you can find several links to full versions of several movies related to the cold war and nuclear aftermath(s) (The Day After, Special Bulletin, The War Game, Countdown to Looking Glass and Threads. The quality is so-so: Watchable but not worth putting it on your portable HD device.

I think, it’s safe to say that most people who grew up in the Eighties are familiar with ‘The Day After’: looking back, however, I find ‘Threads’ a more solid representation (and depressing) of a nuclear war aftermath. No doubt that there were Dutch documentaries like these too, but, of course, none that I can remember. Years after, when doing military service I laughed off the plausibility of our success rate or even the battalion’s survival during and after a nuclear attack. That skepticism was generally shared among my fellow soldiers, and most likely, fellow Europeans.

Maybe this is the main difference between the US produced ‘The Day After’ and the UK produced ‘Threads’: American movies always seemed to focus on the explosion and not on the life after that (“The Nuclear Winter”). Hollywood has a knack in compressing thousands of years of suffering into 2 minute voice-overs.

While I’m at anniversaries: today also marks the 20th anniversary of the Lockerbie disaster (Wikipedia).

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I, Recurse

Posted on December 17, 2008 by Arthur

So, yeah: I was sitting at work and the snow starts falling down in the morning and before I know it, it’s chaos in town. On my way to King’s Square, I was most of the time sliding around or trying to evade snowbanks. However, the good part was that the buses were still (surprisingly) mostly on schedule. So, let me think: this is the 3rd time we had more than 15 cms of snow. Saint John promised me cruise ships, tourists, tropical weather and palm trees with plenty of Bounty chocolate bars. Oh.

So, a 64-bit operating system needs a 64-bits VirtualBox and if I want to install Ubuntu or any other Linux flavoured distro, it needs to be a 64 bits version too. That’s logical? Back in the days, I used to manually select Debian packages, but if you’re in a rush and can’t live without apt-moo, you may just as well start with Ubuntu Server. I was surprised to see that during installation, Ubuntu’s installer offered to include Postgres 8.3 in the setup. This Debian Lenny (which is still in testing) is supposed to include version 8.3 too and Lenny is scheduled to be released in 2009. That sounds so far away.

This is probably a good time to phase out my current Debian Sarge server (“Elsie”)1 and host my Linux stuff in a virtual machine (VM), unless somebody is finally going to see the light and start building low-powered Linux server machines for 100 dollars or less.

1 I consider “Sarge” to be one of the best Debian releases. You can still download and install Sarge if needed. Most likely not. Whatevers.

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