Thursday, September 28, 2006

Impala Radio

Got an upgrade on my rental car in Raleigh to a Chevrolet Impala. I liked the use of the LCD on the radio to display the presets. I don't care for the car, as a whole, which is funny considering I once went to buy an Impala, but ended up with a Monte Carlo, instead. I guess I didn't like it five years ago either.

The problem with the car? No way to open the trunk from the outside. No cup holder!

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Sci-Fi Film Cliches

Erik Even has compiled a fun list of SciFi cliches, divided in to Two Parts. Good thinking, very clever-- especially Jonny Jungleseed. As usual, ignore the comments: most are from people whose lives are so worthless that they spend their lives trolling the interent for blogs where they can post comments about how worthless the blogger's life is.

Friday, September 15, 2006

"Nothing specified to install"

The next failure that taunted my me in Xen was the Nothing specified to install message. The plan was to execute a text based installation using the xenguest-install.py script. I was able to get through packeage selection, but the install would spluge errors. Needless to say, the error message made no sense, as I had selected packages.

It seems the trick is to select the Virtuallization group. This seems a little strange, as you wouldn't have a virtual machine running virtual machine. Instead, you would have the Dom0 (actual) run two virtuals. Regardless of the reason, it's now loading.

Happy day.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

xenguest-install.py: VmError / No such domain

I have been struggling with Xen for weeks. Everytime I would try to launch a guest install, it would fail. From a root prompt, I would execute:
    xenguest-install.py -n xm-guest-1 -f /dev/vg0/xm-guest-1
    -l ftp://192.168.0.102 -r 256 -p -x text

Everytime I would get the same failure:
    Starting Install...
    libvir: Xen Daemon error : POST operation failed:     No such domain xm-guest-1

In the /etc/log/xend-debug.log I would see:
    VmError: I need 262144 KiB, but dom0_min_mem is 262144
    and shrinking to 262144 KiB would leave only 243948 KiB free.

...Or some such nonsense.

Much to my dismay, if I reduce the memory footprint of Dom0 to 128:
    xm mem-set 0 200
...It works!

Now if I could only get the network to function!

Google Video: Window Washer

Since the life of a window washer isn't frightening enough on its own, what we need is to add a little terror to their daily routine.

Friday, September 08, 2006

How It Should Have Ended

Found the the site How It Should Have Ended Friday night while downloading 5 CD's worth of files for work. Flash animations of alternate ending for about a dozen movies. Very clever.

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Palm Bluetooth "Error: Serial: timeout"

My Palm TE2 has been getting an error when attempting to connect to my SprintPCS phone for internet access. I did some research and found that allot of people ar also getting the message Error: Serial: timeout. Could be bad cable or faulty Modem. (0x0305). I've found a solution for my setup.

The question was whether the problem was the Palm or the Samsung A940 phone. Eventually I isolated it to the phone. Turns out, if the phone is connected to my Scala 500 Bluetooth Headset, it will not allow the Palm TE2 to establish a dial up connection. By pressing Menu, Tools, Bluetooth, and executing a Disconnect against the headset, the Palm is permitted to connect. Once the Palm is done with the connection, I repeat the process, ans choose Connect.