Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today was the grand opening of the newly-remodeled playground in Victory Park. Lucinda had fun playing there, and she also got a little balloon animal.

Added an optional title to the blog program. The title defaults to ‘Web Log for <yourname>’. The title field overrides this. Also added a few new fields to the logusers table:

alter table logusers add column l_logtitle tinytext after l_lastname;
alter table logusers add column l_textwidth int(11) default 100 after l_displaynum;
alter table logusers add column l_textalign char(1) default 'L' after l_displaynum;

I added a title field to the log, so individual entries can have their own optional titles.

mysql> alter table weblog add column title tinytext after parselevel;

Then I added logic to edit.php and weblog.php to add and display the titles.

Going to experiment with recording audio with Lucinda’s Mac:

http://www.visualclick.de/

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=1f1f7qj.boz2xg1u22znqN%40%5B192.168.0.2%5D

Tried to scan, and xscanimage was broken. Had to recompile from ports and reinstall. Had to edit /usr/local/etc/sane.d/epson.conf to point the ‘epson’ backend at the USB scanner. Tried to print, and ran out of black ink. Put in a new cartridge.

Got a new 256MB PC133 DIMM from Staples to replace the one that had gone bad. $54.06 with tax. Sent in for the $20 rebate from PNY.

Lucinda knows how to tie her shoes now. She is, of course, very pleased with this.

I installed the ‘audio/mad’ port which can convert MP3 to PCM:

moe# madplay -v -o raw:Entropy.pcm Entropy.mp3
MPEG Audio Decoder 0.14.2 (beta) - Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Robert Leslie
     Title: Entropy
    Artist: MC Hawking
     Album: A Brief History of Rhyme
      Year: 1994
     Genre: Rap
   Comment: www.mchawking.com
 00:03:21 Layer III, 128 kbps, 44100 Hz, joint stereo (MS), no CRC
7722 frames decoded (0:03:21.7), +0.2 dB peak amplitude, 7 clipped samples

Then to burn them to a CD:

moe# burncd -f /dev/acd0a audio  mighty.pcm emchawking.pcm creation.pcm crazy.pcm LedZeppelinMedley.pcm JesseHelms.pcm Entropy.pcm fixate
next writeable LBA 0
writing from file mighty.pcm size 20664 KB
written this track 20664 KB (100%) total 20664 KB
next writeable LBA 9149
writing from file emchawking.pcm size 36306 KB
written this track 36306 KB (100%) total 56971 KB
next writeable LBA 25108
writing from file creation.pcm size 24408 KB
written this track 24408 KB (100%) total 81380 KB
next writeable LBA 35887
writing from file crazy.pcm size 24304 KB
written this track 24305 KB (100%) total 105686 KB
next writeable LBA 46621
writing from file LedZeppelinMedley.pcm size 54301 KB
written this track 54302 KB (100%) total 159988 KB
next writeable LBA 70415
writing from file JesseHelms.pcm size 33480 KB
written this track 33481 KB (100%) total 193470 KB
next writeable LBA 85144
writing from file Entropy.pcm size 34749 KB
written this track 34749 KB (100%) total 228219 KB
fixating CD, please wait..

Here is the rundown on the instability problem. The system hung and had to be unwedged on:

2003/11/01  08:28
            20:14
2003/11/02  05:44
2003/11/03  21:59
2003/11/05  13:13
            17:56
            21:48
2003/11/09  15:38
            19:50
2003/11/11  11:44
2003/11/12  09:09
2003/11/15  11:45

The average uptime between hangs was 28 hours, with a maximum of 78 hours.

Found out how to read audio CDs:

dd if=/dev/acd0t1 of=test.dat bs=2352

This reads track 1 off the CD and puts in file as raw PCM data. Also, it is necessary to create the ‘acd0tX’ devices:

cd /dev
./MAKEDEV acd0t99