Tuesday, June 8, 2010

coffee pancakes

I tried instant coffee in my pancakes this morning, I just made it part of the dry part.

The batter was brown, and after topping with molasses I couldn't even taste the coffee.

I think it worked well enough, though I do not know if it worked for the wake up effect.

Sunday, June 6, 2010

server from laptop, round two

I got gifted a larger hard drive for the laptop based home server, 160 GB, the original disk is 40 GB.

I decided to do a fresh install using the newest ubuntu-desktop (ubuntu-alternate) distribution, 10.04, and have encountered some challenges.

After the first install the hard disk would not boot, which I found was due to a bad block, so I eventually figured out how to create the file system on the disk myself and verify the disk in the process.

After the second install the system froze when the graphical display came up, so far I have found how to boot into a rescue mode with a text prompt, from which I installed openssh-server, and successfully logged into the server.

At this point it is time to leave it for the night and sleep, next I shall figure out how to disable the graphical display.

The easiest option would seem to be installing ubuntu-server instead, but I wish to serve graphical desktops from this server as well.
Today I was doing some asterisk call routing debugging from remote, so I needed a SIP client.

Initially I used Siphon on my jail broken iPod Touch, which worked well enough to do the testing I needed to do.

Afterwards I decided to try and find a working sip client for the Mac I am using...

I started by looking at sip clients on wikipedia, first I tried Blink, it was noted as recommended by apple, but it didn't successfully connect to the sip server, so I moved on.

Linphone took too long to install.

Finally I tried Telephone, it was quite small and simple, and just worked.

So now I have a working SIP client on my mac laptop.

Saturday, June 5, 2010

windows installation challenge

I have been given a challenge: Reinstall Windows XP on a laptop that can not boot from a cdrom or floppy.
I think I have found a way as well, and will post more when I actually do it.

  • make the hard disk dos bootable.
  • copy the windows install files to it.
  • boot from the hard disk.
  • start the windows install.
Soon the results will be posted, with more details.

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

purpose vs reward

I found a video that seems to explain to me why money does not seem to be very motivating. It is all about purpose instead of reward.



Found via Coding Horror: The Vast and Endless Sea.