random thoughts and observations
I went shopping Sunday at a local music store looking for the keyboard I wanted.
They didn’t have one in stock but I went ahead and ordered one, along with some
accessories. The keyboard’s enroute to the music store right now by UPS. I’ll be
entertaining myself pretty soon. I’m excited. A new toy!
Here’s what I’m getting:
http://www.guitarcenter.com/Korg-M50-88-Key-Keyboard-Workstation-105137087-i1424628.gc
teryc 
I’ve been on the internet lately looking at keyboards. The musical kind,
that is. Years ago I used to play guitar and was good enough to play in a
band but over the years the work I have done in factories has given me
carpal tunnel syndrome and I can no longer grip the neck on a guitar to
make chords. I miss being able to make some music, though, and just about
the only thing left I can do is play a keyboard. I’m not very good at it, though.
I can just play chords. At the moment I have no musical instruments and
I’m beginning to feel the need to make music again.
So, I thought getting a keyboard would be a good Christmas present
for myself. Since I have no family I have to buy my own presents if I want
any, ha. That’s ok though, because I can spend more money just on myself
rather than spreading it thin gifting lots of people.
I’ve been looking at the Korg M50. It seems to be within my price
range and is a real instrument rather than a toy. I want something to last
me the rest of my life also so I’m ready to spend the bucks for it. But not
go overboard. I’m not going to be playing in a band, just entertaining myself
so I don’t need or want the most expensive instrument. I don’t really
know much about electronic keyboards but they seem to sound pretty
good in the demo videos. Good enough for a sit-at-home has-been musician,
anyway. So, I may have a new toy to play with pretty soon. Don’t know
when I’ll go shopping for it. Maybe as soon as tomorrow if I can get up
in time. I have a bad habit of sleeping late.
teryc
For several years I had problems running Linux systems. Problems with my level of
confidence, that is. If something went wrong during an install, I would panic at what to do next because I would simply not know what to do next. I would usually end up reinstalling an entire distribution to try to get things right again. In this article I’m going to give some basic tips on what you need to learn in order not to panic if something goes wrong.
My first tip is to tell you that you must learn the command line, or at least learn enough
about how to use it to begin the rescue of whatever has gone wrong. I know a lot of people
don’t want to learn the command line but there are times when it will save your bacon when
you know what commands to execute to get out of a jam.
You know how to get a command line, don’t you? If you boot up and get a black screen,
try the key combination ctrl-alt-F1. F1 through F6 on most distributions will give you a
console screen to work with if X doesn’t start up.
I used to mess around a lot with trying to tweak my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, trying to
tweak my graphics card to see if I could get more performance out of it, but usually not
really knowing if what I was doing was going to work right or not. More often than not
when rebooting after a tweak of this file I would get a black screen or something obviously
not working right. How to make it right? Well, the first thing that should be done before
even starting to edit your xorg.conf file is to make a copy of it. cp it to xorg.conf.sav or
whatever you want to call it so you will have a saved copy of a known, working configuration
file. If your tweak fails, and it will eventually if you try this, you will have a good copy of
the original to copy back into place to get X working again. I got bit by this many times
before I finally learned to have a good backup copy of the original. This is also a good
practice when editing any system file. Always make a copy of the good, working file
because Murphy’s Law is always in effect.
My next tip is to tell you that you should learn how to use a command line editor.
If you are editing a system file and reboot and find X is not working and you have only
a command line to work with and you forgot to make a good copy of the file before you
started, what now? You will have to edit the file you screwed up in order to get things
working right again. Edit it with what? X is not working. You don’t have your favorite
gedit or other graphical editor to use. What now? This is where you must have knowledge
of a command line editor. I use vim here but there are others. Pick an editor and learn
how to use it. Practice with it until you have at least a basic knowledge of how to use
it to edit a file. Don’t wait until it’s too late.
Ok, so you’ve partitioned your harddisk and installed a new Linux distribution on a
partition to try it out and compare it to the one you use most of the time. Only thing is,
when you reboot after installing you find that the new distribution has taken over the
grub bootloader and your favorite system is not even on the menu. Oops! What to do
now? I’m going to walk you thru it.
I’m going to be talking about grub, the Grand Unified Bootloader, because that is
what I use here and know, and specifically grub legacy. There is a grub2 now so if your
system uses it you will have to refer to its documentation but the tips I give here will
still probably be useful.
When grub boots up it gets its information from a file in /boot/grub called “menu.lst”.
Only thing is, every distribution will have its own menu.lst and sometimes when you
install a new distribution to try out it will install its own bootloader and use its own menu.lst,
making your other distributions disappear from the boot menu. Some distributions look
for and try to include other existing distributions on your harddisk but they don’t always
get it right so you have to be ready to make things right yourself.
There are three ways to go about setting things right again. One way is to edit the menu.lst
of the new distribution you have just installed and put in the file the info to let it find the
other distributions on bootup. Another way is to run grub’s setup but tell it to use the
menu.lst of your favorite distribution instead of the new one you have just installed. The third
method is to copy over the menu.lst from your favorite distribution into the /boot/grub folder
of the distribution you just installed. No matter which method you use you will have to edit menu.lst.
Let’s use the first method I mentioned. Let’s also assume you are booted up into the new
distribution you have just installed and that you are logged in as root user. You will have to be
root to edit menu.lst and to mount partitions.
You will have to know the partition where your favorite distribution is located in order to
get to its /boot/grub/menu.lst. On my system my favorite distro, Ubuntu, and the one I use
all the time, is located on /dev/sda1. I will use that as an example. To get at its menu.lst,
I would, typing into a terminal program as root user, issue the commands “mkdir /mnt/sda1″
and “mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1″. The favorite distro would now be mounted at /mnt/sda1
and can be navigated like any other folder. If you are logged in as root user you could open
up gedit or whatever graphical editor you have and open /mnt/sda1/boot/grub/menu.lst.
Then open up a new tab in the editor and open the file /boot/grub/menu.lst. What you are
going to do is copy and paste the menu items from the first menu.lst into the second menu.lst.
Every menu item begins with a line that says “title” and includes all lines until the next “title”,
or the end of file. My first menu item, for example, is:
title Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-17-generic
uuid 10303124-0581-496b-8e94-815a2cb0b1d0
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-17-generic root=UUID=10303124-0581-496b-8e94-815a2cb0b1d0 ro quiet splash vga=0×324
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-17-generic
and this is what I would copy over to the second menu.lst.
You also have to tell grub where this distro is located on the disk.
Since I already know this is located at /dev/sda1 I would add the
line “root (hd0,0)” to the menu item like so:
title Ubuntu 9.10, kernel 2.6.31-17-generic
root (hd0,0)
uuid 10303124-0581-496b-8e94-815a2cb0b1d0
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-17-generic root=UUID=10303124-0581-496b-8e94-815a2cb0b1d0 ro quiet splash vga=0×324
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-17-generic
In grubspeak (hd0,0)=/dev/sda1, (hd0,1)=/dev/sda2, (hd1,0)=/dev/sdb1, etc.
Usually, anyway. With today’s removable USB drives these disk designations
can change but the main harddisk in the computer is usually always hd0 and
the first partition on it is 0 or sda1.
As far as I know. Somebody feel free to correct me if I am wrong.
Where you copy these menu items to in the second menu.lst makes a difference.
They will show up in the boot menu in the order you have them in the file so you
can arrange these menu items to where you like them but the system which will
be booted by default on bootup if you take no action is determined by the line
“default 0″ which will be located near the top of the file. Menu numbering starts
at zero so for instance if you wanted the first menu item to be the default boot
your line would be:
default 0
and if you wanted the second menu item to boot as default you would use:
default 1
and so on.
After you have copied over all the menu items you want from the first
menu.lst, save the second menu.lst and then you should be ready on next
reboot with a boot menu with everything you want. I know it’s hard to keep
all these hd0’s and sda1’s straight in your head but with some practice you
will finally get it figured out and be able muck about with your OS with confidence.
I hope all that made sense. If not, feel free to ask questions.
teryc
I’ve had a few hits on my blog lately from people searching for
“fatcow error log” so in order for them not to go away empty-handed
I’m going to tell you where the error log is.
Go to the fatcow.com homepage. Click on the Control Panel link
at the top right of the page to log in. After you’ve logged in, scroll
down the page until you see “Scripting and Add-ons”. Underneath that,
click on the “CGI and Scripted Language Support” link. After you do
that you should have another page of links. One of them is “Check Error Logs”.
Click on the link and you should have a view of the error log, or
nothing if you have had no errors. You may have to click the
“refresh your error log” link. And there you go. 
If you connect to your account with an ftp program, you will also find
the cgi error log in your “stats” folder.
teryc
I like to view my server log for my website three or
four times a day just to see what’s going on. Only thing
is, at the moment, I visit my website more than any other
visitors so my own ip address in the log overwhelms the
others in there, making it hard to see who is visiting.
Besides myself, of course. I thought a while about how
to strip the log of my own ip address so it would just leave
the others to view. I investigated the “sed” command as
I thought it might be useful but after some more thought
and investigation I realized the “grep” command would suit
my needs.
I discovered that grep has a negative filter for stripping
out lines from a file. I didn’t know this until I read the
manual. I guess that’s why they always say RTFM. Anyway,
here is an example what I came up with:
The output of the grep command, represented in the above example
by “stripped_20091204.log”, can be any name you want it to be. Also my
example of “access_log_20091204″ is just that, an example, and your
filename will be different.
The -v option of the grep command tells grep to select non-matching
lines, in effect stripping out lines with your ip address in them.
After some more thinking and Google search on this subject, I came up
with an almost one-liner. Assuming you’ve already downloaded your ip log
file and it is called, for example, “access_log_20091207.gz” and you have
gedit on your system and know your own ip address, you could try this
one-liner:
“zgrep -v xx.xxx.xxx.xx access_log_20091207.gz > log | gedit log”
Replace the x’s with your own ip address. zgrep gunzips and greps
at the same time, saving a step.
teryc
Something tells me there is Someone running the show. I see it clearly every
once in a while. A Spirit which feels the beat of every heart of everything which has
a heart. A Spirit which knows the whereabouts of every atom and atomic particle.
It feels and experiences the flap of every bird wing, is the source of every birdsong,
and directs the steps of the ant. It set in motion the Laws that guide every action in
an Infinite and Eternal Universe. It is the Spark at the center of every living and
non-living thing. It is the Source and Wellspring of our own Being.
I say these things without having any particular religion. I suppose I don’t have
one. A religion, that is. But I’ve come to see that everything is a Miracle. Rocks and
dirt are a Miracle. Plants and animals and all living things are Miracles. The Laws of
gravity and magnetism and electricity and nuclear forces are Miracles. How can
these things be? With everything being a Miracle it is easy to see that my continued
existence as a Living Spirit is as easy a Miracle as any of the others. In fact, in this
present existence I have experienced myself as being more than my physical body.
I suppose that is a story for another time, though.
I got to thinking about these things while reading some poetry from my friend
Dave. Dave’s a Reiki practitioner and also a very thoughtful person who thinks about
things of the Spirit. Here’s his healing website http://www.davidthehealer.com/ and
here’s where you can read some of his poetry: http://blogs.myspace.com/kuratazen.
I don’t think I’m anybody with any special knowledge but it seems to me the
people of the planet cannot move forward in Spiritual thinking and knowledge until
both sides drop the blinders. And by that I mean that both the preacher and the physicist
need to do more thinking outside the box because the current boxes both reside within
present walls to seeing any further. You have to tear down the wall to see what’s on
the other side.
Cousin Pam said to remember to see the Purple. She wouldn’t have said it if it
wasn’t important. So, I give you some Purple to contemplate. I may do this occasionally.
Splash Purple and Violet around.
teryc
