Flemish Sojourn

The familly went for a day-trip to Antwerp today. The city is nicer than I had recalled. Not that my recollection of it wasn’t good; it just wasn’t quite as good as the reality.

We had lunch at this great little place called Kookaburra, which served up one of the best lasagnas I’ve eaten in years. Highly recommended.

It was bloody freezing — literally — and I’d forgotten to bring a jumper, so I was rather cold, to say the least. We walked around town, but didn’t really have time for major excursions, such as the zoo. That’s for another trip, I suppose.

By the end of the afternoon, the snow had started to come down in earnest, so we headed back to the car for the drive home, but not before we’d visited the spectacular Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, which dominates Antwerp’s skyline.

Of course, no trip to Belgium is complete without loading up on epicurean chocolates, so we bought a couple of 500 g boxes at two different shops. Those will make our TV-filled evenings extra cosy.

The car feels like it’s truly christened now. It has more than 500 km on the clock and has been abroad (having been manufactured and shipped from Germany didn’t count). It performed admirably throughout. At the risk of sounding like one of those obnoxious men’s men — you know, the kind who bang on about male subjects like cars all the time — I do really like driving this thing. I’ve never owned anything so expensive or luxurious. I must admit: it is a very pleasant experience.

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Sweet Surrender

The new DVD player for the MythTV box turned up on Friday… and turned out to exhibit the same problem: blinking lights, but no action. After disconnecting the SATA cable and the power cable a hundred times, swapping those cables with those of the hard drive, and disconnecting and reconnecting random leads from the motherboard, I did get the DVD drive tray to slide open once. I put in the FC4 installer, rebooted and got a single line of the boot display to show up, after which the boot failed, citing the DVD drive once again.

A couple more attempts at booting the machine ensued, then the video card started to scream at me that its power cord wasn’t connected. This was accompanied by a subtle, yet distinct air of electrical burning. Somehow — I really have no idea why — the video card has now decided to ally itself with the other rebellious hardware and turn to shit in my hands. It thinks it has no power, even though the cord is properly connected. A new cord and a different socket on the power supply fail to remedy the situation.

At this point, I have to suspect the motherboard after all. Things are breaking in such strange and unpredictable ways, and I’m really not that clumsy that I can realistically blame myself for each new problem that arises. But what next? Order a replacement motherboard and hope that everything magically just works? I’ve poured so much time, energy and money into this project already. It looks like I now need a new video card, too.

No, that’s it for me, I think. The whole project has worn out my patience, so I’m shelving it for now. The working pieces of hardware will become spares for some future computer (since they’re all either incompatible with or superfluous for my other machines), but essentially it’s a lot of money down the drain at the moment.

The whole exercise has left a nasty taste in my mouth. This is the very last time I attempt to build a new PC from the ground up. Unless one has multiple spares of every part on hand with which to test and rule out causes, it’s just not worth the potential grief.

I’m sticking to software from now on; it’s what I’m good at.

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Hardware Curse

The new drive for the MythTV box arrived today and works! Well, let’s not be hasty; the BIOS recognises it. I won’t know whether it truly works until I actually try to put an operating system on it.

To that end, I thought I’d try to start the FC4 install from a bootable DVD. FC5 comes out next Wednesday, but this would at least tell me that the system was finally ready to go from a hardware perspective. I pressed on the eject button of the DVD player to open the tray and… nothing. The LED on the front of the drive blinked a few times, but that was it.

After searching the Internet, I came across a document describing Plextor’s blink codes. It describes a different drive to the one I have, but Plextor’s blink codes seem to be the same across all models.

First of all, I was getting three blinks, which means ejection or loading error.

After manually ejecting the tray, inserting a DVD and then closing the tray, I then get eight blinks, which means spindle failed. None of the suggestions on Plextor’s site provided any relief.

Why me? Why me? I ask.

I’ve already had to send back the TV tuner card and order a replacement. That arrived today, together with the new hard drive. Tomorrow, I’ll have to send back the first hard drive and now also the DVD drive. More bloody delays and frustration ahead. All of these hardware problems would be bad enough if I had bought the parts locally, but having to send stuff back through the post is very tedious and time-consuming.

I’m beginning to wonder whether a working MythTV box will ever see the light of day by way of my hands.

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Ruby/LDAP 0.9.4 released

I wasn’t planning another release of this package quite so quickly, but a user asked me how to restrict the number of results returned by the server, prompting me to ask myself, “Yeah, how do you do that?”

I quickly remembered how to set the number of results, but then discovered that this doesn’t actually help with Ruby/LDAP. The reason is because the server will return the status of LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED along with the search results when its maximum number of results has been exceeded. Ruby/LDAP had the unfortunate property of throwing an exception to the status LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED, as it does with any status that isn’t LDAP_SUCCESS. Any results obtained up until that point were discarded.

The 0.9.4 release corrects this problem in all search methods, to whit LDAP::Conn#search, LDAP::Conn#search2, LDAP::Conn#search_ext and LDAP::Conn#search_ext2. It’s now up to the user to check the error status after performing a search. This can be done by invoking LDAP::Conn#err. If that returns LDAP::LDAP_SIZELIMIT_EXCEEDED instead of LDAP::LDAP_SUCCESS, then the results set was truncated by the server. This allows users to request a tiny subset of results, so as to spare the server from unnecessary work. Of course, if you know your modern LDAP, you’ll know that the paged results control could be used to achieve the same goal, but fixing this issue makes for an easier alternative (and not all servers support the paged results control, anyway).

There are a couple of other minor changes in this release, but nothing user-visible.

You can obtain Ruby/LDAP via the project home page.

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New Hardware On Its Way

I’ve ordered a new hard drive to replace the useless article that I couldn’t cajole into action yesterday. Let’s hope the new one shows more signs of life. I hope it’s not just a case of some obscure incompatibility between the drive and the motherboard, because I’ve ordered the exact same model of drive again.

I’ve also ordered a new TV tuner card to replace the broken one I had to send back.

The package has already been despatched, so I may be able to report more as early as tomorrow. Until then, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the new hard drive will actually spin up.

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