Adventures with Ruby

I’ve bought some new hardware for my MythFrontend HTPC. I wanted some more juice for playing high definition movies and using the gigabit LAN. Due to some problems with a webshop I ended up with an extra Core 2 Duo E6600 processor, so all I had to do was buy a motherboard and some memory. I bought a Asus P5E-VM HDMI with 2GB Corsair RAM.

After doing the usual cable origami, trying to fit everything in the Antec Fusion case, without totally disrupting the airflow, it all booted fine. I just love how Linux (Mythbuntu 7.10 in my case) doesn’t really seem to care what kind of hardware I have, it’ll adapt. I just needed to adjust xorg.conf a bit though to use the new chipset. It took my some time to install all the new packages needed, but it worked as a charm eventually. Read more

Update: Updated the syntax file, redownload it if you got it before December 19th 2007.

More news about my adventures with Selenium. It’s hot and juicy, so lot’s of exciting new things to do. I made a syntax highlighter for plain text stories in vim. Here’s how it looks:

To make it look like this, I adjusted the slate colorscheme and added my own story syntax file. Click Continue Reading to download the files and read how to install it.
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I use a micro ATX motherboard, called a Asus A8V-VM. It fits nicely in the Asus Fusion, but there is one downside to this motherboard. The sound doesn’t work properly in Ubuntu. In feisty it only shows sounds on one side, in gutsy it has a high pitch sound whenever the sounds gets a bit louder. It’s annoying as hell, so here is the solution.

sudo echo 'options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1 model=3stack' >> /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Although this might not be so incredibly useful toyou guys (it’s an old piece of hardware, and not so widely used), I decided to post it here anyway, mainly because I keep losing that one command, and it’s incredibly hard to google for it.

Update: It will probably work on any motherboard with a ADI AD1986A SoundMax 6-channel HD Audio chipset.

As a fond user of mythtv, I recently decided to give a clean mythbuntu installation a try. Before I came to that, let me tell you what kind of problems I had after upgrading to gutsy gibbon. I have a server, playing webserver with postfix, courier and dspam, performing the noble task of webserver (as you can see), file server, but certainly not least of all: it is my mythtv master backend. Master being the only backend in this case. I have a sparkling Antec Fusion as a mythtv frontend. Having done a real skinny installation with feisty, I decided to upgrade to gutsy. Problems arose.

It started with my screensaver. It didn’t detect activity anymore from my remote or from playing videos. So I had to press a button or move my mouse every 10 minutes. Second, and I had that problem from the start: samba shares would not mount properly at boot time. I had no clue, neither did any log file. After a kernel upgrade to 2.6.22-14, I could not get my remote to work (Logitech Harmony 525, posing as a Hauppauge pvr350 remote, using a Philips USB infrared receiver; why shouldn’t it be complicated?). Read more