I had been unpleasantly informed by mdadm that sdc has been failing. Yey, another one – I thought. Not wanting to disrupt most of my day, I decided to try hot swapping the disk.

I mentioned [earlier]{ubifs-on-sheeva} that I will be giving a talk at Flourish Conf next month. While preparing for the talk I decided to I wanted to share my terminal with the participants of the Workshop via telnet. The more popular alternative would be to use screen built in sharing, or maybe vnc, which would require more memory and CPU overhead… and additional accounts using the former method. I only have a SheevaPlug to work with, so I am trying to be as conservative as possible.

I picked up a SheevaPlug recently. In a few weeks I’ll try to use it as a git server in a classroom setting at Flourish Conf, where I will be speaking about [Git]{tags/git}.

This platform consists of a 1.2 GHz ARM processor (Feroceon 88FR131 rev 1 (v5l)), 512M of SDRAM, 512M of NAND flash, 1Gbit ethernet, USB, SD card reader, and … well, that’s it.

My aunt asked that I get my mom hooked up on skype for my mom’s B-day. That involved getting a webcam and hooking it up on my parents’ Ubuntu system. Since I’ve never done anything with webcams, I didn’t know where to start. This blog entry is about trying skype and the webcam going on my Debian Sqeeze laptop.

One of my old(er) USB-connected disks started to make a noise. So, it’s time to replace it.

Here are the steps I took to create an encrypted USB volume that I can attach to my laptop.

I will be attending the Linux Symposium/2009 in Montreal in under a month. It’s been for for 11 years now, and I am looking forward to the break from work.

I hear that the conference is not yet sold out… so you can still attend.

Following a random tweet on identi.ca I upgraded my proprotional fonts on Debian/Sqeeze to ttf-droid.

I expect that some day this font will be packaged by Debian, but for now I had to:

    wget 'http://launchpadlibrarian.net/21202254/ttf-droid_1.00%7Eb112%2Bdfsg-0ubuntu1_all.deb'
    sudo dpkg -i ttf-droid_1.00\~b112+dfsg-0ubuntu1_all.deb

Because I am a big console junkie I don’t use proprtional fonts much, but they do look nice on the web.

Ian just posted the screen casts of the Linux Kernel Walkthroughs that I ran last week.

I will be running [another]{linux-kernel-walkthroughs} Linux Kernel Walkthrough for OCLUG at TheCodeFactory next week. This time the topic is “booting”.

I am frantically preparing slides using (slightly modified) Rusty’s svg to png presentation scripts. The svg’s are naturally created in Inkscape, and the png’s are useful because I can display them in a regular image viewer like gqview. I’ll write more on this later.

I’ve noticed my laptop disk filling up… particularly in $HOME/work/*. Lots of little contracts, each involving at least the linux kernel tree of one vintage of another, are to blame.

To solve this, I decided to pickup an external drive. I am using USB 2.0, because my laptop, Thinkpad x41, has no eSATA or even firewire. So I cannot compare the performance over another connection, but I can have a look at which filesystem (xfs or ext3) will perform my workloads best.