Author: shun

Blinding Eye

Grace has been getting sick along with Bryan in the past couple of months. But a problem with her left eye never got any better despite having gone to an eye doctor just two weeks ago (she was told the red-eye was caused by a cold virus that’d been going around). But the problem got worse as she started to have headaches.

Without health insurance, Grace had to pay pretty money to see a medical doctor whom spent an hour using various eye drops and precision equipment (I assume they are pretty “precise” ) examing her eyes. He concluded that it was a pretty serious infection which had now spreaded to her other eye. He proceeded to give Grace a prescription for a couple of different eye drops for treatment and announced that it’d take at least a couple of months to cure.

Thanks to Fiona for taking Grace to the doctor while I was in classes though… It just shows how impossible it is to have only ONE car living in the United States…

Rude People

Rude people suck. That’s a fact.

But some people are rude in suttle ways. Take for example, the Asian chick sitting next to me in m PERL class. She has so many fricking stupid problems with her PERL codes that she almost never stops raising her hands for help during lab time. If the instructor didn’t know any better, she’d have monopolized the instructor. But worse, she fricking picks up her cell phone during class AND whispers into her phone as if nobody’d be distracted if she did that! And she does it like multiple times a day. What an idiot.

But I do have to say that she knows her way around vi pretty well.

I think the instructor is partly to blame for not telling her to stop doing it. Some instructors get pissed at even the ring tones…

Other than that, PERL really is cool. But the instructor kept on saying how PERL on Windows is different… etc. I wish Windows could just go away so that everything can work more harmoniously together — coding, browsing, working, playing… Ok, maybe not playing… There ARE a lot of games for Windows.

Upgrading to Fedora Core 5

After having successsfully upgraded my spared Dell box to Fedora Core 5, I messed up the boot partition and had to do it all over again. So I decided I might as well document it here since the processs wasn’t quite as smooth as one’d hope.

UPGRADING FEDORA CORE 4 TO CORE 5 USING YUM
1. First, make sure

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yum

is up to date. If you are going to upgrade your system with it, you might as well make sure the tool is up to pars.

me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade yum

This is going to download a bunch of other stuff other than

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yum

. So be patient.

2a. Next, make sure sure your

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kernel

is up to date as well. Or else when you upgrade to FC5, it will throw a bunch of errors like this:

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2
Error: Package initscripts needs kernel < 2.6.12, this is not available.
  Error: Package kudzu needs kernel < 2.6.13, this is not available.

So here we go:

me@localhost$

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 yum -y upgrade kernel

For multi-CPU systems, do the following instead:
me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade kernel-smp

2b. Just to be on the safe side, some packages may need to be removed before upgrading. This script should tell you what needs to go:

me@localhost$

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perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if ((/Error: Missing Dependency:.*is needed by package (.*)$/) || (/Error: Package (.*?) needs.*, this is not available./))' /tmp/yum_upgrade | sort | uniq

3. Reboot. Make sure you boot into the latest

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kernel

or else you are going to have the same problems as I mentioned before.

4a. Now delete any old

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kernels

you have still on your system. First, let’s see what’s there:

me@localhost$

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rpm -q kernel kernel-smp kernel-devel kernel-smp-devel | sort

4b. Delete old

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kernels

:

me@localhost$

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rpm -e kernel-version-number

I read somewhere that you should delete

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kernels

by using

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rpm

since it also tidies up your bootloader file for you.

Optional: Update

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rpm

packages:

me@localhost$

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rpm --rebuilddb

5. Now we are ready to get the FC5 upgrade package:

me@localhost$

1
2
3
rpm -Uvh <a href="http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm" target="_blank">http://download.fedora
.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os
/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm</a> (this code wraps for cosmetic reasons. But you should copy/paste this as if it's one unbroken line.)

6. Finally. Show time. Let’s upgrade this puppy…

me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade

Now sit tight and wait. This could take a while depending on your Internet connection. It took me roughly 5-7 hours on a moderately fast DSL.

7. Once everything is downloaded and installed, reboot.

8. It’s probably a good idea to keep your old

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kernels

. But I deleted my FC4 kernels.

INSTALLING VMWARE 5.5.1.x
Nothing is EVER easy on Linux. The same assumption (and proof) goes to updating VMWare after the FC5 upgrade. VMWare complained about not being able to find “the directory of C header files”. To resolve this problem, you must download the

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<a href="http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz" target="_blank">vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz</a>

and run it. Everything will hum just fine after this update is applied to VMWare.

Much thanks to: brandonhutchinson.com and LinuxSky.com (Simplified Chinese only)

Daily Rant

On the way back from lunch to class today, NPR had an interesting program about how infants/children often imitate adults in what they do and pattern their own behaviors after the adults. The program was interesting except this one caller kept on going with her story and her experiences… etc. I mean, often these call-ins are interesting. But I really HATE it when a caller just monopolizes the show by talking and talking and talking… Idiots!… I hated it so much that I stopped listening the program and started reading a book instead.

In other news, the PERL class I am taking is pretty kick-ass. I don’t think I can learn quite as much on my own in a 2-day period. I like these short and intensive classes where we blast through a whole quarter’s worth of material in 4 days! We’ll be covering Regular Expressions this afternoon… which is something I’d been dying to master… and now I have a chance to…

Artsy Past

After having putting off reorganizing my CD binders for months, I finally decided to go ahead and consolidate all my data CDs, separating all the PC discs from my Mac disks. But while I was going through THAT, I realized I actually had more than half a dozen backup CDs of my art and design works from back in college. So then I decided I might as well consolidate all of THAT as well… Ah~ how I miss creating art.

So I threw away a bunch of discs, made DVDs where I could to save space. But I was saddened that one of my Houdini project backup CDs was corrupted (damn cheap CDRs). So on my DVDR, I decided to make 2 copies of the consolidated backup files. Murdza once told me he actually made backups, and then backups of backups, and then backups of backups of backups…. He kept one copy in his fire-proof safe and another at the bank (or so I remember)…. I should probably revisit those files every couple of years and reburn them just in case…

Goner

So… We “got rid” of our Infiniti on Monday. I guess the guy is a mechanic who’s going to be fixing it up and resale the car.

Now comes the impossible task of finding a reliable car that will fit a budget on a string, literally… not to mention the hassles of having to deal with low-life car salesmen… I wonder why car salesmen have to be suck pricks and jackasses, like most of the police officers I have dealt with — that’s not to say all of them are jerks… but clearly pricks outnumber the non-pricks for most people I know to dislike them…

Anyway… Grace found some interesting possibilities… Maybe we’ll deal with Internet car sales people this time… geek-to-geek talks… Plus we are not going to spend hours haggling with the sales people anymore… We’ll go right before the dealership closes (we’ll see how late they can play the good-cop/bad-cop game). Also, we have Bryan on our side this time…. Anytime we smell something fishy, we’ll use him as an excuse to get out of the dealership, pronto…

The Blast from the Past

Being in the web development business, it’s plain impossible to develop sites without having to check your work in Internet Explorer for bugs (not that my code is buggy, but that Internet Explorer rendering engines are simply not compliant to standards). So I finally broke down, booted up my Fedora Core 4 Linux on my 6-year-old Dell (running dual Pentium 3 @ 450Mhz!), fussed with VMWare and finally managed to install Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Oh, how I dreaded having to touch Windows again having stayed away from it for almost a year and a half. Just the installation of Windows 2000 felt like playing with Mac OS 9 again… So primitive and ancient. I especially “loved” the restarts after each service pack, patches to service packs and then hotfixes to the patches that were originally released to fix the service packs… etc. I wasted an entire evening just installing and patching Windows in VMWare. Nothing says “I love my life” like wasting time installing Windows OS!

The upside, though, is that I can perhaps install Internet Explorer 7 beta to see what the fuss is all about (yoohoo! Tabbed browsing… only 2 years late!)…. And then maybe if I feel adventurous enough, I’ll even download Windows Vista Public Beta and try to install it in VMWare (which I doubt will even install given that both the host and guest hardware are pretty damn old… even if by some miracle Vista installs, it’d probably take a few hours just to boot up… ha!).

I hope this is the last time I’ll have to deal with installing Windows ever again…

Season of Sicknesss

Bryan caught a cold two weeks ago. He was really congested for the first few days and got really mad for not being able to breathe through his nose. I read somewhere that younger infants don’t know how to breathe through their mouths if something blocks their nasal passages — this makes me feel better that Bryan got his first cold now.

We had to learn to use one of those suction bulbs to clear Bryan’s nasal passages so that he could breathe better. At first he hated it — he would cry, scream, use his hands to block the bulb, turned his heads so that I couldn’t get to his nose… etc. It was heartbreaking. But after first couple of suctions, he realized that thing did him good and remained calm for the next few suctions. Luckily he got much better after a few days. But man, getting that mucus out of his nose was quite an interesting experience…

The first three nights of his cold was almost unbearably heartbreaking. He couldn’t sleep, eat or even enjoy his toys. He coughed so hard that he’d wake himself several times in the middle of the night — it was almost like we had a newborn again — taking turns to wake up every couple of hours to comfort and soothe him as he cried himself to sleep.

We also learned something new through this new experience — Bryan has associated the verbal sound of “mamma” with Grace as being the mother. And often he preferred Grace to comfort him over me (to which, strangely enough, I don’t feel jealouse). And we know this because he’d call out “mamma, mamma” while unstoppably sobbing, looking at Grace’s direction even when he was in my arms.

He recovered from the cold in about a week. Sooner than Grace recovering from her cold — the same one the Bryan had*.

Then a couple of days ago, Bryan experienced a mild fever. We were pretty scared being that this was his first fever, and we saw that he became very inactive and reluctant to play. The doctor said to observe him for a couple more days and see if the fever goes away or that he develops any rash.

Sure enough, we saw rash all over his body on Sunday**. Now with more evidence, the doctor determined that Bryan had developed Roseola, a very common viral illness for young children.

I guess Bryan’s immune system will be bombarded with more and more illnesses from now on. It’s also time for Grace and I to buckle up and brace ourselves with more sleepless nights and occasional sore throats.

Ah~… Parenthood…

*I am usually considered the weak one in the family. But I was okay throughout the entire cold episode.

**We had to cancel our plans with Jason and Alicia because Bryan didn’t feel very well.

Car, Sans Transmission, For Sale

I went down to Car Clinic today to take some pictures of our J30t and collected our personal belongings from the car. It seems that the only sensible thing to do is to stop investing anymore money into the car and look forward to something more “long lasting.”

I thought Tibor was going to charge me labor and time for checking out what went wrong this time. But he told me I didn’t owe him anything — he didn’t want to charge me for the same problem twice even though he’d already taken the time and effort to examine the transmission and explained to me exactly what went wrong. Nice! Any other mechanic would have told me it’d cost me time and labor.

And then I asked if I could leave the car there for potential Craigslist buyers to come by and check out the car at his shop so that I don’t have to haul it. And he’s more than OK with that idea, too! Now I understand why a couple of online forums so highly recommend his shop… honest, friendly and pleasant to work with. I might have to give him a nice bottle of wine someday!

JASE, maybe you oughta bring the van to my mechanic for a 2nd opinon! 🙂

Immobilized

Professor Farnsworth: “Good news, everyone. Tibor called and said the car’s transmission is officially out of its misery. The bad news is the car isn’t worth much without a working transmission.”

Great. Three quarters’ tank of good gas is going to waste. Maybe there’s a way to “reclaim” some of that fresh gasoline for the loaner car from Michelle…