Darn Mandrake
Bah! Last night I updated my dad’s computer from Mandrake Linux 10.0 to 10.1. A small upgrade, one would think. Nothing is further from the truth. First of all, the update ended with messages about not being able to update KDE components and SANE stuff. Okay, I can fix that. Work some of my Mandrake-magic and all is fine. At least, I thought it was fine…
Apparantly, sound was disabled. That was my dad’s first complaint. Nice. I had this problem each time I upgraded his computer before, so at the moment I know where to look for the trouble. I edited /etc/modprobe.conf, rebooted (I don’t know how to fix Alsa-problems without rebooting… it usually is something with the kernel-modules) and fixed it. But… Bah, KDE starting problems. Enough. I downloaded the mini install CD from Mandrake and are now in the process of backing up the /home. I know, that’s not necessary, but all the filesystems are still ext3 and I’d like to change that to ReiserFS. And make all partitions part of a LVM2 partition.
You know, that’s just one of the times that I’m glad I know some bash-shell-scripting. I’m working on my own pc now, waiting for my dad’s pc to finish backing up. Consider this line:
BLA1=0; BLA2=1; while [ $BLA1 -ne $BLA2 ]; do echo -n "Not equal - BLA1: "; echo -n $BLA1; echo -n " BLA2: "; echo $BLA2; BLA1=$BLA2; BLA2=$(ls -l /mnt/extra-drive/backup.tar.bz2 | awk '{print$5}'); done; echo "Done!" | mail -s "Done backing up!" tim@cidev.nl
Yeah, all that in one line. Hehehehe. Fun with a command-line-interface 
Book collection, the trouble with ‘em
I use a nice programme called Tellico to manage my book-collection. Well, I’m still in the process of adding books. At the moment, it contains 272 books and I’m guessing I’m about at two-thirds of my total book collection. It’s an easy programme to manage my books in, but primarily I would’ve liked to show my complete collection on the Internet. Yeah, I’m a show-off.
It is possible though, to a certain degree. But the end result isn’t to my liking. I.e., it’s not possible to sort the result, not possible to search through the result, not possible to have the collection presented as genres, et cetera. Don’t get me wrong, Tellico is a nice programme and I could build that kind of an interface myself and all, but I would’ve expected there to be already one available. Someone would’ve used those nice standards like BibTeX or BibTeXML? Guess not… Ah well, I might spend some time on it… When I have some spare time somewhere…
