Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I installed Gallery for some of our photo albums. It’s pretty nice, except that there was no link from the top level gallery to get out. So I hacked the ‘gallery.header.default’ file in ‘html_wrap’ to add a ‘home’ link.

I saw from the statistics the the hotlinkers found my new site. They were eating bandwidth with images. So I set up a .htaccess file to put a stop to that. It’s not that the bandwidth is all that big of a deal now that I’m not self-hosted on a DSL connection, but it’s just plain bad manners to hotlink images from someone else’s site.

We got our first comment spam today. It was terribly annoying. So annoying, in fact, that I went and implemented a simple CAPTCHA.

I got us a web hosting account with PHP Webhosting for our web site. Currently, the site is getting something like 500 visitors a day, and serving about 1.7GB a month. This is getting to be a bit of a strain on our little DSL connection. So I got us a new domain name and hosting account. We will now be living at http://www.1134.org. I’ve gotten most of the site transferred over and working. When it’s all set up, I’ll set the old web server to issue redirects to the new URL.

Sadly, we can’t take our ‘cosmo’ domain with us, since it appears that Cogent Networks has disappeared, so I can’t find who to contact about changing the domain pointers. The ‘delegated domains’ list at http://www.nic.us/register/delegated_subdomains.txt gives an address of ‘domains@cogent.net’ for pasadena.ca.us, but cogent.net now points to pcnalert.com. I sent an email on the off chance someone there is still minding the store…

I installed WordPress on our system for testing. It’s pretty nice. I wrote a little Perl script to import the contents of our old home-grown blogs into it.

The CPU fan has been making noise for a couple of weeks. Today the machine hung at about 15:00. When I tried to reboot it, it acted kind of flakey. The CPU heat sink was hot to the touch, and the fan was rattling. The BIOS reported the CPU was at 113F. So I went to Best Buy and got a new fan. Now it reports 105F and 5900RPM.

Got a Canon PowerShot A70 camera. Built gphoto2 because it said the camera was supported. Didn’t work. Had to rebuild the devel/libusb and devel/gettext ports and rebuild gphoto2. Of course, this broke some other things, so I ended up rebuilding all of XFree86-4 from source. Now everything is good. Here are the commands to get a listing of the files on the camera and to download them:

gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A70" --port usb: -L
gphoto2 --camera "Canon PowerShot A70" --port usb: --get-all-files

A couple of things were broken from yesterday’s follies with the sound card. The new kernel was out of sync with userland, so some random things like the ‘ps’ command were broken. I had to do a ‘make buildworld’ and ‘make installworld’ to bring the whole system up to rev.

Put the old ISA SoundBlaster card back into moe. Had to put these lines into the kernel config:

device          pcm
device          sbc0    at isa? port 0x220 irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15

Also, I had to go into the BIOS and tell it to reserver IRQ 10 for ‘legacy ISA’.

Then, ‘dmesg’ showed:

pcm0:  port 0xe400-0xe403,0xe000-0xe003,0xdc00-0xdcff irq 11 at device 7.5 on pci0
pcm0: 
sbc0:  at port 0x220-0x22f irq 10 drq 1 flags 0x15 on isa0
pcm1:  on sbc0

Note that the SoundBlaster is on pcm1. Now I checked it:

moe# cd /dev
moe# cat sndstat
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm)
Installed devices:
pcm0:  at io 0xdc00 irq 11 (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)
pcm1:  at io 0x220 irq 10 drq 1:5 bufsz 4096d (1p/1r/0v channels duplex)

When I tried ‘sh MAKEDEV snd0’, nothing worked, but when I noticed that the SB was on pcm1, I did ‘sh MAKEDEV snd1’ and then it all started working.

Abiword was broken this morning. It was complaining that it couldn’t find:

libintl.so.2
libexpat.so.2

Both of these were present in newer versions, so I just made soft links so that the old name would resolve and the program could run.