Joel Perry Productions

Ok, so first, sorry I have not posted in a while.  First I was out of the continental united states for a couple of weeks in December, then had some pet problems in early January, followed up with breaking the crap out of my leg January 16th. I cracked my Tibia clean through about 3 inches above my ankle and then the tibia split up the bone about 6 inches, followed by cracking my fibula clean through just above the split in my tibia.  I have a lovely 8″ metal plate in my leg with 15 screws now.  so I do actually have a couple of good reasons for not posting.  I just started feeling somewhat better, I got my appetite back this past Saturday and my pain is mostly manageable even though I rarely find a comfortable position to sit/lay. in

Happier news…

Sprint is finally getting an Android phone with the new 1GHz SnapDragon processor by Qualcomm (extra cool it is capable of going up to 1.5 GHz if I remember correctly). The HTC Super-sonic. Hopefully late March, early April!! finally! I’ve been waiting since October…

Next up, back to my lovely PC, most everything seems to be working just fine now, I am running with the default BIOS settings and it works at least; however the PC sits on the BIOS POST image for almost 2 minutes before it actually starts POSTing.  Not sure what to do about that, I think I need to wait for the next BIOS update to fix that, but for now… it works.

So, I used a bootable CD with Paragon Defrag on it to Defrag my Windows 7 boot HDD and then used the Fedora 12 KDE x64 Live CD to install Fedora on the HDD by shrinking my Win7 partition by 100Gigs and then installed Fedora on it.

Now, the next time I booted into Windows 7 I got a message that my copy of Windows was not Genuine.  Not sure what’s up with that, but I haven’t done anything about it, and I have not gotten the message again.

Now back to Fedora… I added the proprietary drivers for my Motherboard’s ATI Radeon 3300HD in an attempt to try to use wine to play Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and a couple of other things, mostly some older games…  after rebooting, I no longer get a GUI, just a blank black screen and about 8 lines down a blinking cursor.  I can type, I can hit enter, but it does not respond.  This has been going on since January 5th or so.  Today I found out that Fedora has Virtual terminals just like FreeBSD, so very cool, I can at least get to a prompt today.  Now I cannot find any assistance online for configuring the ATI drivers so I can get them to work.  I know that a couple of versions ago they changed the command to configure the drivers, but I can’t find any helpful, current, information for this.  I am lucky I found the aticonfig command again.  I think I can figure it out from here though.  It just bugs me that the only info I could find said not to use the drivers, then if you go to Wine’s website they tell you if you don’t use the proprietary drivers that you can expect your games not to run well.  What a pain. (not as big of a pain as my leg though)  after searching for “aticonfig linux” I found some more info…

Will try and update again this week on how things are going, I am also working on my taxes so who knows… right now I am doing it on TurboTax.com but I think I will try a couple of others before I submit, even though I have used Turbo Tax for 15 years or so.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• getting my PC to function…

Not too much going on at this point, another back post of my continuing adventures to come, but first… a nice little list of my Pandora stations (although I am guilty I made some and never listened to them again, but here they are anyway)…

1. 45  <— most listened to, infact 2 weeks straight today
2. Squirrel Nut Zippers
3. Konami
4. Samuel L. Jackson
5. Bit Shifter
6. Flogging Molly  <— keeping me awake right now, breaking the record
7. Du Hast
8. Riders on the Storm
9. The Moody Blues
10. A Hard Day’s Night
11. The Brian Setzer Orchestra
12. Yo-Yo Ma
13. Fryderyk Chopin
14. Type O Negative
15. Tori Amos
16. Franz Liszt
17. Trans-Siberian Orchestra
18. Moonlight Sonata
19. Ludwig van Beethoven

Pandora is the next best thing to Noise Cancelling Headphones!!!

fyi I listen to Pandora on my Sprint Touch by HTC cell phone and love it.

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• getting my PC to function…

not too much content this time (unless I get carried away again).  couple of neat articles I read today (not the most trusted sources for news, but you have to make your own decisions… (both the things I started this post to talk about came from blogs.zdnet.com ) (another note, all links on my site “SHOULD” open in new windows, for some reason they never implemented “open link in a new tab” feature to HTML, or I just haven’t found it yet)

VirtualBox 3.1 - has been released with it’s new “big” feature… “teleport”.  some people might recognize this as being extremely similar to IBM’s Power System’s Live Partition Mobility.  in a nutshell this means:

Partition mobility provides the ability to move a logical partition from one system to another.  Live (or active) partition mobility allows you to move a running logical partition, including its operating system and applications, from one system to another.  The applications do not need to be shut down.  Inactive partition mobility allows you to move a powered off (or deactivated) logical partition from one system to another.

Live Partition Mobility
Live partition mobility allows you to migrate running AIX and Linux partitions and their hosted applications from one physical server to another without disrupting the infrastructured services.  The migration operation, which takes just a few seconds, maintains complete transactional integrity.  The migration transfers the entire system environment, including processor state, memory, attached virtual devices, and connected users.

(actually quoted from the IBM training manual for IBM course AU78 “System p LPAR and Virtualization II: Implementing Advanced Configurations”  a training class I took in July of this year) and so it goes on… (I guess I just killed the “no long post” part at the beginning…)  This has to be the coolest thing I have ever seen/witnessed/done in my life.  I setup an LPAR (logical partition) on a System p server, installed AIX 6.1 on it, then while another person in the training class was logged in and doing something in the server, I migrated it to another physical machine in less than 15 minutes with less than 5 seconds of down time (monitored with a CPU and HDD activity monitors running on the virtual server and a custom script that basically played the worm game and changed colors when the host system changed so we knew when it had actually made the switch)

Words cannot describe watching a multi-gigabyte installation of a server migrate to another physical box and keep working with less than 5 seconds of down time over the course of 12-15 minutes.  I am guilty of not having checked the total used size of the data drive, so I do not know how large the transfer was).  now to have this option in a freeware app that I can run on my Quad-core at home is very cool.  Especially since VirtualBox is currently my VM-app of choice.  Don’t get me wrong, I do/have used Virtual PC from Microsoft quite a good bit, but the configuration options and multiple VHD file format compatibility make VirtualBox the winner in that contest hands down.  Also, I have nothing against VMWare personally; however it is intensely confusing to go from Virtual PC to a VMWare workstation application and figure out what is going on and how to set it up without going back to “what already works… and is simple to use.”   Press release for VirtualBox 3.1

ok, after over 550 words, lets move on to the second half of my post (definitely not going to be a quick post… but then I always have a lot to say about stuff…)

OS and Web Browser share reports… Windows XP and Vista and MAC OS X are down, Win7 and Linux are up.  Firefox and IE8 usage are up, IE6 and IE7 are down, and everybody else, well no comment was made… original article is here on ZDNet - FYI how/where this info came from is sited on the ZDNet page.

right few comments about the above, first interesting how Firefox #’s are combined for all versions, does that mean Mozilla does a better job getting people to upgrade? or that Firefox users are less likely to fall very far behind on versions? same thing goes for the Safari #’s. yes Safari and Chrome are mentioned in the #’s, but no comments were made as to their rise or fall.

(completely unrelated, but I am listening to Pandora right now on my Sprint HTC Touch and they just played “Coloured Rain” by Slade, whom I have never heard before, at least not knowingly.  They are a British Rock band from the 70’s and I could have sworn it was The Beatles when it started playing…) (a note on that note, I Bing’d “wikipedia the beatles” and on the first page I got the Wikipedia page on the Beatles in the following languages, but not English… in order: sco, simple, nl, fr, ro, it.  I know what all of those are, except ro (Russian? it doesn’t look Russian)…  there were other results, including 2 Beatles albums’ pages on Wikipedia in English…)

More from Finndo

• couple of updates to the site…
• just a quick post about the blog…
• bringing the past to the future….