eccentric blog

Well, I think it's semi final that I'll be moving to 464 Frontenac Street sometime real soon. Just confirmed that I'll take it here today and gonna go do the paper signing stuff here sometime in the next few days. And then it'll be time to move on out. It'll be kinda strange moving since I've been living where I'm at for so long now. Hopefully everything works out alright, although I'm sure it will...

posted at: 16:41 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

I just found out about this package the other day while hanging about in #debian (irc.debian.org). After you install the package apt-get install apt-listbugs it will prompt you when doing upgrades and list any critical bugs in the packages you are about to update. Which in sid, can be a very handy thing :)

Also if your running testing or stable you can install reportbug which I believe does the same thing.

posted at: 10:25 | path: /debian | permanent link to this entry

Went out and looked at a couple places for rent here in town. Both are prime location to where I work which is kind of nice. I'm going to find out what the utilities are per month and if it's reasonably cheap I might end up down there. Lots of places up for rent this time of year due to all the students moving away. Might have a few other places to look at yet and then it'll soon be decission time. I'm kinda looking forward to the whole moving thing and at the same time dreading it. Change always seems to be a positive thing though...

posted at: 15:53 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Seeing as I got rid of one of the fishes today I thought I'd post a couple pictures (and test how some pictures will look in the blog layout).
  
The image quality isn't very good as my camera doesn't do so well in low light and especially not with moving fish. I managed to catch one of the fish yawning in the picture on the left. Unfortunately the background is the heater. The fish on the right is the one that is back at the petstore now.

posted at: 00:37 | path: /aquaria | permanent link to this entry

Well, I'm going to put a blog online once again. No real reason, just somewhere for me to rant and so on. I've spent a couple hours today working with wordpress and getting it all integrated into the site well enough. I ended up apt-get'ing version 1.02 and then upgrading to 1.2 here today. It seems to do everything I wanted and a little more.

posted at: 19:49 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry

Well I've had two Jeweled Cichlids (Hemichromis bimaculatus), in my tank for the past month or so. Lately they have started fighting as one of them claimed the tank as his territory. With the tank being only 20 Gal, there isn't enough room for both of them so today we'll be sending the bully back to the store so that the other can live in peace. I was hoping for a male/female but it looks like they are both males. Unfortunately it seems pretty much impossible to tell the sex when they are small. The other fish seems somewhat stressed but I think he will do ok once he isn't being chased around the tank. I've piled a whole bunch of rocks in the tank but it has only slowed the chasing.

posted at: 13:49 | path: /aquaria | permanent link to this entry

Over the weekend I noticed the audio quality from the freevo box to be below par. I played around with some settings and it seems the audio output was using MPLAYER_AO_DEV = alsa9:iec958' This used to be the only output that worked with the spdif output, but it seems the default works just fine now as well (after upgrading to the 2.6.6 kernel's alsa drivers). So I've changed the AO_DEV to just alsa9 I also dropped the resampling option since it isn't needed on the default alsa device it seems. All in all the audio quaility is quite good again.

posted at: 13:38 | path: /freevo | permanent link to this entry

Well, I've been working on trying to fix this one simple little issue in freevo that has slowly been eating at me. I was using xmms for music as it seemed to work best with the alsa drivers and SPDIF output (mplayer was doing some odd things with this setup). But it would not skip tracks on it's own unless you interacted with it after playing a track (for instance skipping 10 second in the track). So if you just hit play on a track, it would play the track and then just sit there at the end of it and not skip to the next. So anyways, after spending about 2 hours trying various things and hacking around in freevo's fxmms module I gave up and decided to try mplayer again. After doing a little research I was able to get mplayer working the way I wanted by forcing it to resample everything at 48kHz. mplayer -af resample=48000:0:0 This fixed all the issues I was having with mplayer playing certain mp3's faster than it should. And so, that fixes all the issues I was having with freevo and it's working perfectly. I'm going to try to put together a webpage with some details about the specifics of the setup with the Via Epia M10000 system at somepoint I hope.

posted at: 19:10 | path: /freevo | permanent link to this entry

Had an interesting and somewhat long day yesterday. I was driving my son home in my girlfriends car (my car needs a new muffler and is loud as sin right now), when someone backed into the car with they're jeep. I guess he forgot to look in the rear view mirror before throwing it in reverse? Whatever the reason, it looks to be about $2000 worth of damage to the body. Broken front side panel, messed up front bumper and a bent hood. Oh well, not my fault.

posted at: 12:41 | path: /general | permanent link to this entry