Running Ubuntu 9.10 with Virtual Box and Windows 7? Got scratchy or staticy audio?
Check out this Virtual Box forum post for the fix. Create the .asoundrc file in your home directory and the problem is fixed.
tonight i am once again pleased with myself. last winter i discovered that our furnace blower would literally suck the air filter out of its housing. i learned at the little traverse home builders association fair that the blower motor speed can be adjusted. this i learned in the spring time after the heat is turned off.
summer has gone by now, and i once again needed to fix the little filter issue. the previous owner, thankfully, saved the manuals for most things in the house, including the furnace. after a bit of reading over the manuals and the “technical support documents” all i had to do was move a few wires around.
our furnace has a different colored wire for, low, medium, medium-high and high fan settings. the wires that are not used are plugged into a section of circuit board that is set for “unused speed settings”. simply removing the “high” speed colored wire from the heat jumper and moving the “low” speed colored wire to the “unused speed settings” jumpers fixes the issue of the filter being sucked away.
as a reward i’ve turned the heat on two days early!
For about a year we had been running MediaWiki to do some documenting in our IT Department. We have now purchased Sharepoint from Microsoft and are in the very, very beginning stages of testing it within our department. We needed to get our articles out of MediaWiki. After some searching I found a PDF viewer extension, but it did not work. I later found a python application that would read the articles and them output them do an ODF format. This is what I did with the help of a few sites to get it running. I used an Ubuntu Virtual Machine to run everything from.
sudo apt-get install python-setuptools python-dev build-essential
sudo easy_install mwlib
You may get an error about easy update being out of date, if so run the script it asks you to run to update easy_update. On my first test of this I received the error. On my second test I did not.
mw-render -c http://hostname/mediawiki/ -o test.odt -w odf “AIMS”
to export the article where -c gives the source (your internal MediaWiki site URL), “test.odt” is the output file (which canNOT have spaces in the name), and “AIMS” is the name of the article on MediaWiki you want to scrape from.
I then made a long bash script that ran several lines (about 170) of the mw-render command for all of our articles. I think this was far easier than copying and pasting everything out. We will convert the files from OpenOffice to MS Word at a later time, if necessary. If anyone has a better way of doing this I would be interested. I am not a programmer/coder by any means but this got the work done for me in less time than I thought it would if doing it all manually!
My wife called on her way home to say “the brakes aren’t working”. That isn’t good!! When she gets home with the 1996 Chrysler Sebring Convertible we have, I check the brake fluid reservoir and sure enough, it’s pretty much empty. No need to even drive it, just need to find the leak.
After lifting the car, and getting under the leak is on the left rear brake line after the flexible brake line. If I pump the brake pedal fluid squirts out from the rusted line in the plastic pipeline hangers. The steel lines are horribly rusted. This is cause for several worries:
1) ALL the lines are very rusted and look like the one that is leaking,
it is cracked the length of the pipe in another spot. They both need to
be replaced in the rear.
2) The rust runs from the wheel, behind the gas tank, and almost all the
way to the proportioning valves.
3) The gas tank right now is 3/4 full and has to be drained and lowered
for the replacement of the lines.
4) I am very worried that the bleeder valves will crumble when trying to
open them for the bleeding process if the lines are replaced. Last time
I had bleeder valves break I had to replace the callipers as well.
5) If I have to pay someone to replace the lines, which I probably
should I am worried the costs will outway the value of the car (only
$1,000 IMO).
I found another member on the forum I started, www.sebringclub.net, who replaced his lines, he sent me his info which was very encouraging. He did not mention if he removed his fuel tank or not. I am waiting to hear back from him on that regard. Maybe there is hope! There’s nothing else wrong with the car, it looks fine, has the expected body shape for a 13 year old car. There’s no reason to part with it just yet, if I can fix the leak!
In the victory column, we had a light on a string in the laundry room closet. I’m not a fan of the pull string lights, so tonight I installed a light switch on the wall. No more pull string!
In happy, happy news, this weekend marks the one year anniversary of our wedding (May 31, 2008)! More on that on Sunday. 
The Army Corps of Engineers is starting to repair our breakwall in Petoskey! They have removed the top section of the light at the end, and it looks like are now breaking down the lower section. Pictures here!
In other news, we picked up our water softener today from Home Depot, GE GXSF40H. 40,000 grain. Install will probably be done in a week or two after Jen is out at camp and I only have to worry about myself not being able to use the water while my Dad and I install it. This will be a job done quicker with two of us!
As much as we all wish it wouldn’t rain, we really needed it. it’s been raining for three days now. My bike is still in the parking garage at work. Luckily Jen’s been driving me to and from work when she goes in. Working in the same building has its perks! Of course we washed the car on Monday so that’s what really made it start raining! Tonight I waxed the Cadillac in the garage, and now do not want to take it out, its so clean! I highly recommend McGuire’s cleaner wax!
Memorial weekend was very relaxing. The three day weekend was needed. Spent most of the weekend working around the house, mowing, planting, and pruning. While doing so we remember why we have the freedom to do so.
On Sunday we went to sleeping bear dunes with some friends! it had been a while since I have been there so it was really nice!
Camp starts in a week and a half. This weekend there will certainly be cleaning of the cabin!
My pilot of OpenFire IM at work is going well, so far there have been zero stability issues. The end user initial sign on is slightly manual for a non-savvy computer user but with documentation they usually figure it out. I am pleased. The rollout of our new anti-virus (ESET) client is also moving along smoothly.
Today’s temperatures hit 86*F! First real day with the top down on the convertible. Mowed the lawn for the first time with the new lawn mower. Works like a charm!
Recently at work I implemented blackberry security policies that require users to password protect their handhelds. This was not welcomed by some users, but in the worth the effort in the long run. Many other Blackberry Administrators have said that with a password required and owner info and “if lost call …” text they have actually had lost handhelds returned. Next we will be implementing a similar policy to windows mobile devices and iphones. I expect the same reactions from the users.
i am also running a test of corporate instant messeging using openfire jabber backend and the pandion client. it so far has been working very well!
I recently picked up a computer from a colleague that needed some help. It is one of those older compaq’s that came in various colors. I’m assuming its a late model Pentium 3 or a very early model Pentium 4. When I first powered up the PC it said “Imminent Drive Failure” and I immediately powered off the machine. I pulled the hard drive and connected it to a Windows XP computer with my IDE to USB cable. I attempted to copy the data off (which was list-able!) in Explorer, with TeraCopy. It looked like it was going to work but in checking on the PC later it had gone no where and the XP computer was frozen. I powered off and movd the drive with cable to my Ubuntu Linux PC.
This time I could at least get some errors but none of which were promising. After consulting with friend of mine, i connected the bad drive directly to the Linux PC with an IDE cable and booted. The bios would not recognize the drive unless the jumper was removed on the drive and would only see the drive then as a slave device! Linux booted in about 15 minutes after complaining several times about the drive…sorry I didn’t write down all the error codes, but it said “bad block” several times. ;) I had to force mount the drive which returned “did not cleanly shutdown from windows”, no surprise there. I was actually able to copy all the critical data off the drive from here on out with only one error which I was able to redo the copy and got everything needed the second time around. Go Linux! Maybe it would have worked under Windows XP with the drive connected via IDE cable, but I didn’t bother trying.
In other news I have had issues with Suspend in Ubuntu 9.04 with sound. After a cold boot my sound would work fine with my Turtle Beach cs46xx module. If I went to suspend and then returned from suspend the audio would not work. While I had the PC opened up for the hard drive issue above I removed my Tutle Beach card and installed a Sound Blaster Live! card and now when I use suspend and then resume from suspend the audio works just fine! I guess I better go update my post at ubuntuforums.org 
well I would link to the post but they are having a database error at the moment. 
My MythTV box was way out of date. It was still at 7.10. After doing 7.10, to 8.10, to 9.04, the video for my nVidia card broke. It would not load the module correctly, which I was able to find a fix after a quick google search. the search led me to this post on nvnews.
…added the repositories from this launchpad site, and the key, then do apt-get update & apt-get upgrade. it’ll pull the nvidia packages from his repo. that fixed my problem, but it also required the kernel headers for my kernel i am using: 2.6.28-11-generic. thanks, michael!
I should mention that my nVidia card is a GeForce 6200. Yes, I know its old! But it works!
at the same time i finally spent 15 minutes and fixed my remote problems, that started happening when we moved. Solution here. the lirc daemon would fail to start in mythtv/mythbuntu. but the remote would still work intermittently, with some major delays
Yes, its officially spring, and has been for a while, but the weather has not been supporting that until recently. I have found a robin’s nest in the cedar tree next to one of the office windows. While raking today I found a robin’s egg on the ground, luckily it had been hatched already, or so it appeared!
The homestead has been keeping us busy with little projects. In the last five months the following have been completed:
Still to be done, but not limited to: