Wayne D's Blog

I wrote this post because one of the first thing people familiar with linux who buy an EEEPC want to do is to open a terminal window and Googling for open eeepc shell terminal window or open eeepc terminal window didn't show the answer other than using a convoluted method using the file manager.

If you want to open a shell terminal window on the EEEPC running the stock Xandros install you type CTRL-ALT T and you get a bash shell prompt on your EEEPC. That's it, there is no more.

The CFL has a new promotional video out and when I went to Youtube to view it I was disappointed with the quality. Then I saw the small "watch in high quality" link. That's neat, a little bit of Googling led me to how to embed high quality Youtube videos on mydigitallife.info. Below are the high quality and low quality versions of the CFL This is YoOur League promotional video. Can you see any difference? I'm suprised that Youtube doesn't offer the option of high or low quality video in the embed code.

High Quality

Low Quality

(June 2, 2010) Almost two year's after the original post I realized that the CFL promotional video was entitled This is Our League not This is Your League. Oh well, it's fixed now.

What used to make me mad and raise my blood pressure now becomes fodder for the blog grist mill. How is that for a mixed metaphor?

I had a couple of checks to deposit and needed to get some cash to buy some Clamato juice on the way so I detoured off my regular route home to stop at the new CIBC banking centre on Jane Street across from Canada's Wonderland. I drove around the back to the drive through bank machine but after seeing the three cars lined up waiting to use it I instead decided to park and go the machines inside. I walked to the front door and stuck my card in the obligatory slot to open the door. Nothing happened, the door stayed locked. As I walked around the front of the buidling to check for an alternate entrance someone else walked up to the door and also tried the door with more persistance than I did. I went back to the car and drove back to the drive through bank machine only to find an armoured car blocking the driveway to the machine. As I exited the parking lot I saw another group of people trying to open the front door. Epic fail on communication with your customers in this case CIBC. High profile location, no profile service just confused customers.

I had to contribute to the carbon footprint of the planet by going out of my way to an alternate CIBC branch on the way home which led me to the closeby No Frills store to buy my Clamato juice. I grabbed the juice and headed to the express checkout line where I ended up behind a lady who obviously had more than 16 items in her basket. It didn't matter because the customer in front of her had decided not to bring the case of bottled water with her to the checkout but instead had asked the cashier to get someone to fetch it for her. We waited while he paged, once, twice, sent the employee who responded off to fetch the item and then return. It took about 5 minutes. Once her arrived the item was scanned and then the water bottle customer asked how much the bill was. She then proceeded to dig through her wallet looking for money. One $20 bill appeared and then a second. The bill was $50 so more digging ensued. Eventually realizing she was cash poor she began searching for her bank card. Sigh, at least there was a cute baby in line behind me, we chatted the first woman apid and then while the 24 items in the express line lady blocked the aisle with her cart. After paying for my purchase she relented and let me move her cart out of the way so I could escape the store leaving her to finish packing her groceries.

Nuff said.

I took this picture yesterday, it looks even worse and itches like mad.

Now that hard drives are so cheap I decided to copy a whole stack of archival DVD's onto a hard drive. I wanted to use a shell script because the copy was running on a machine that didn't have a monitor or keyboard attached. The idea was to feed it DVD's every time the drawer popped open until the stack was done.

Step 1 was to add a HAL callout to run a script whenever the DVD was inserted. I create a file called 31-dvdinsert.fdi in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/ which is where these things go in Centos or Redhat 5 systems. The name isn't that important but the extension .fdi is. Forget the .fdi and it won't work. On this particular system the DVD drive resides at /dev/hdc, using ls -l /dev/cdrom will show you where it is on your system. The contents of the file were:

XML

Next I created a shell script in /usr/libexec called dvdinsert

Code

The purpose of this script is to call another script to do the actual copying. HAL callouts can only run for a very short time before they are terminated. This script passes the Volume name of the DVD inserted to dvdinsert1 which is run as a detached process. THe contents of dvdinsert1 are shown below.

Code