Two Telling Quotes..

"People tend to pay their mortgages. I don't think we are in any remote danger here. This focus on receivership, I think, is intended to create fears that aren't there." - Barney Frank (D), In a speech to the Mortgage Bankers Association

"While I favor improving oversight by our federal housing regulators to ensure safety and soundness, we cannot pass legislation that could limit Americans from owning homes and potentially harm our economy in the process." - Protesting against greater controls against lax mortgage lending, Sen. Harry Reid (D)

And we're running again, well maybe strolling or limping..

Here's an update to the situation.

I did have to rename some things in both grub.conf and /etc/fstab. Since I couldn't figure out how to get the MythDora 5 boot DVD to stop at the grub menu, I booted from a Ubunutu 6.06 LTS livecd and picked the option to boot from the 1st hard disk (I think that's what the menu item said) and it began to load MythDora from the new disk. It ran into some problems due to what I had excluded when I did the rsync copies though and somewhere there was a reference to the old LVM Volume Group name. So I rebooted to the Ubuntu livecd command prompt and used vgrename to change the name to the same one as the dead drive used. I again rebooted with the livecd and chose the option to boot from the hard disk. This time it got further into the boot process but there were still problems with missing directories (/var/run and /var/lock among others). I corrected as much of that as I could and restarted using the Ubuntu livecd. The system is now up and running with the new disk and should have recorded a show last night on the schedule. It's a good thing this was a down week for scheduled recordings.

So now I have a system that still won't boot on it's own. I'm guessing that the MBR is not what it should be since the drive will boot if I use a boot cd's grub to load it. The question is, how do I correct the MBR? On the chance that the copy of grub on the new hard disk was somehow damaged, I used yum to remove grub and reinstall it. I'm going to run another grub-install /dev/sda and see what that yields.

Well that didn't take long..

I awoke to a buzzing sound the other morning and discovered it was coming from inside the case of my newish master frontend/backed mythbox. Mythdora 5 is installed on it. It turned out to the bearing on my main 320G drive. I bought a replacement and got just about everything copied to the new 500G drive. I had both drives mounted and used the Mythdora 5 rescue mode with rsync to copy stuff across. I attempted to duplicate things as much as possible with respect to LVM2 setup, but of course I had to change the names a bit. (I used rootvg2 for the base volume group on the new drive and just made the storage partition an ext3 partition and mounted it directly.)

The problem is that Grub doesn't want to play along.

After the rsyncing was complete, I booted with into rescue mode and ran the chroot /mnt/sysimage command so that I could run grub-install. I had some trouble that seems to be related to the version of grub and it's reliance on /etc/mtab. I found an possible solution for that and finally got grub-install /dev/sda to run without error. The problem is that when I boot, the computer goes through the normal post sequence and just displays:

GRUB

And never goes into the boot sequence for Fedora.

Now I need to figure out how to get this machine back in operation without losing everying and re-installing. Although maybe it comes down to that?

New Myth hardware and Myth 0.21 finally running..

Well I finally got enough spare minutes to get off my butt and get the new MythTV hardware in place. I rebuilt my TV stand specifically so it could accommodate my largish (aging) receiver and the new (even largerish) MythTV gear. Anyway, it's quieter and much more powerful and the new changes to MythTV seem pretty nice. I have a bunch of configuration to do yet and and I have to rebuild the old machine to take over for the failed HD encoder / remote frontend machine that failed. That's another reason why I just had to get this new box into position; I'm down to a single encoder and that doesn't make for much flexibility in scheduling. Plus, all the network shows we watch are broadcast in HD and that is a much better viewing experience than down-converted 480i HD that I get from the S-Video output of my DirecTV rx feeding my PVR-250 in my master backend / frontend.

I'll post some images of the new home once I get channel changing and the old schedules sorted out - I'm having an issue where the new Mythbox has forgotten all most of the Lost episodes that we've recorded in the past. For channel changing, I'm hoping to return to using the USB->USB trick that I used in the past so that I have a direct connection between the new Mythbox and the DirecTV box.

MintyBoost!

I bought a MintyBoost kit from Adafruit because I've got so many devices that charge via some sort of USB cable (4 different phones, multiple Sansa e200's, etc.) I meant to have my 2 daughters help me solder up the circuit board part so they could put their electric shop skills to good use. (See included Mr. Blurry Cam photos) But I just couldn't wait! Sorry girls.

The device can output up to 500ma at 5v so it will charge devices that my lame car USB charging adapter won't / doesn't. Apparently there is a low power USB spec that will output up to 100ma of current and a newer higher output spec.

I've included an action shot of the charger attached my Sansa e260 (booted into Sansa's firmware, which I only use for transferring files since my current version of Rockbox doesn't support full USB functionality yet). If you look closely in the lower left of the screen, you'll see the charge indicator on.

I really expect I'll get some use out of this for my T-Mobile G1 which is a big battery pig if you turn on all the wizzy extras like satellite tracking. A pair of recent NiMH AA batteries have about 2500ma capacity so should be able to charge up the G1's 1100ma pack at least a couple of times before they drop too low to push any more electrons over the USB charge cable.

Things I Learned While On Vacation At The Beach

When I was in middle school (Jr. High we old-timers used to call it) and in high school, my family took to going to some beach area for summer vacations. It was Myrtle Beach for a year or two, then we went to north Virginia Beach for a year and finally ended up going to Sandbridge (south of Va. Beach). In any case, when you're young and living at home you don't think much about vacations, what they cost and the thinking that goes into them.

This year, my wife and I decided it would be good to take our family of 6 to the beach for a week. Here are some things I learned in no particular order:

1. The pictures you look at on the rental web sites make rooms and houses look much larger than they are in reality. What looked like a set of very large rooms in the living area, turned out to be a set of medium sized rooms when we got there.
2. Being across the street from the beach makes medium or even small sized rooms a lot less of an issue. To get to the beach we had to cross the street on our cul-de-sac and cross over a couple of sand dunes and we were at the ocean. If you stood on the deck on the ocean side of the house you could hear the waves crashing on the beach. Hard to beat that.
3. If you aren't careful to plan when you'll arrive at the beach you might just end up sitting on the road in your car crawling along for hours on end. And there very well might not be any other option for getting there. (In our case we needed to get onto the string of islands that make up the outer banks area in North Carolina. While technically, we could have headed further south and taken a ferry over from the mainland, in practice it was too late by the time we got stuck in traffic.)
4. You can get a really bad sunburn by trying to teach 4 kids to windsurf in a single day using 2 rigs.
5. Whatever sunburn you get teaching your kids to windsurf is totally worth it.
6. Avon, NC is a pretty good place to visit if you like the water. There is a great place to launch your windsurfing gear just south of Avon (about a mile or so). It's formally named the Haulover Day Use Area, but generally known as Canadian Hole. What's really nice about sailing in Pamlico Sound is that the depth of the water is generally under 5' in depth. Except in the Canadian Hole; there it gets deeper since it was formerly used to haul boats from the sound to the ocean (hence the name Haulover). Shallow water makes it very easy to jump back up on your board when you fall off and it doesn't tend to freak people out that aren't used to being in deep water and away from shore.
7. It costs a lot more to go to the beach for a week than I would have thought! There's more to it than just the rental unit (duh). Although we did do a lot of fun stuff like rental of ocean kayaks and wind surfing gear.
8. When there's only 1 convenient grocery store to choose from, it's going to be crowded at all hours of the day and night and not have particularly good prices.
9. Buying expensive groceries and cooking for your family is WAY cheaper than eating out all the time.
10. Restaurants at the beach where there are mostly rental houses don't have to have very good food or service. (As one of my daughter's quipped "Fast, cheap or good - pick none!")
11. If you wear eyeglasses and you're playing in the surf with your kids without Croakies, even if the surf seems to be gentle, you're likely to surprised by a big wave. In my case, I managed to hold onto the Waboba ball ($8.25) and not onto my glasses. Duh!
12. A Waboba ball is lots of fun to play with in the ocean or the sound or the pool. Although you need a lot of space to play in.
    

Followup on my one green initiative

I saw the following story about Amazon looking at getting into the college textbook market. This was exactly what I described in an earlier blog posting. Let's hope that this and Sony's recent move to open up their reader to more formats leads to a revolution (or maybe a revolt against the publishers) in the college book market. If you've never (unwillingly) participated in that market, consider yourself blessed.