High Level Design

While working at Nortel I got used to using sun keyboards which have the caps lock and control swapped. I never use caps-lock but I use control all the time. If you want to swap them on windows it’s really easy, you just have to install this registry file by double clicking on it. SwapCapsControl_WindowsXP

Computers

I switched to subversion quite a while ago, and so far I’ve really missed CVS. The features in subversion are great, but ultimately I put my work in it because I want to protect it from getting lost. Subversion repositories seam to get corrupt on a regular basis even if I’m not using them. This may not be the fault of subversion, and maybe more so the fault of BerkelyDB.

In the past I’ve done a lot of svnadmin recover /var/svn/open But that started failing with my ‘copies’ table and the usual ways of repairing it didn’t work. Fortunately I have rdiff-backup’s and I was able to go to a version a from a day ago which is in a good state… again no commits/branching/etc actions were performed in between… unfortuately with berkdb, read access actually writes.

I just switched to subversion 1.1 so that I could use the newfsfsfile system instead of berkdb.

It was pretty easy to convert: Backup the old database: svnadmin dump /var/svn/open > /root/svn.dump Create the new repository with fsfs backend: svnadmin create --fs-type=fsfs /var/svn/open Load the dump into the new repository: svnadmin load /var/svn/open < /root/svn.dump

Linux

I had 3 DVD’s from my wedding that I wanted to master into one DVD after taking only the good clips. Also, I had a WMV video that I wanted to burn into the same DVD. I managed to accomplish this with a windows machine and a linux machine.At first I tried to use my iBook also, but found out after a lot of frustration that there is very little support for importing DVD video into an editable format (MPEG-2 for example).

Anyways, the trick was to stick with Sony’s ImageMaker software to import all the video from the camcorder. Then I used WinMPG to convert the WMV file into an MPG2 file, and then it was also imported into ImageMaker.

After I had my DVD setup the way I wanted, I needed to make an image which I could use on my Linux machine because it is the only computer I have that has a DVD burner. Fortunately, the images produced by ImageMaker are standard ISO format. The trick is that for a 4.7G image, the software breaks it into 2G max size files so I ended up with DVDImage.img DVDImage1.img, and DVDImage2.img. On Linux, you can recombine them like this: cat DVDImage1.img >> DVDImage.img cat DVDIMage2.img >> DVDImage.img

Then it can be burned by using the following command: growisofs -Z /dev/cdrom=DVDImage.img

Computers, Linux

Got a new TV recently, its a Sony Grand Wega 50″ which looks very slick. It has LCD technology instead of CRT so I can play xbox games to my hearts content without having to worry about burn-in.

Geeky, General

I’m setting up a new website just because I want to be able to add content to it more easily as I go. Wordpress seems good and it can handle RSS if anyone is bored enough to want to watch. I’m planning on adding problems I solve for computers so that someone else can get their answers quicker than me.

General