I volunteered to digitize a set of old VHS tapes for ADF. I’d say “recently” but it took much more effort than I expected. Resources I thought I had access to disappeared, and hardware failures and quirks were the order of the day. In the end I wound up using a DVC-100 I picked up at a garage sale along with mencoder. To save people time in the future, here’s what I had to do to make it work under Ubuntu 12.

So, having run Octopress for a few days, I suppose it’s time I comment on it. My interest was initially piqued by the static site speed and resistance to heavy traffic. The former, in particular, caught my eye after I noticed how long it took me, on a fat pipe, to load any pages. Even with WP-Supercache I found that pages tended to expire before anyone saw them. My webhost, along with logging for bandwidth or similar restrictions, logged CPU usage.

My work laptop is a Dell D820. When I got it, I installed x86_64 Gentoo on it. I kept it up to date every week, switched to newer profiles as I came upon them, and was fairly happy. After some annoying issues with a cross-build system for work, and finding it worked under a Ubuntu VM, I switched to 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10. I prefer to have my builds as fast as possible, and this was grating on me.

As has been seen, the LOST numbers came up partially in last night’s Mega Millions drawing. Damon Lindelof says that 9,078 people won. Someone will point out, I’m sure, that if the $380 million jackpot was divided among that many people – if the LOST numbers had come up – that it wouldn’t even get to a hundred thousand apiece. However, what if they’d had the first five numbers, and then the mega ball wasn’t 42?

I found myself in need of a cross-compiled Python 2.6 to run some hardware test code on an MPC8315ERDB evaluation board. I found Paul Gibson’s guide and patches for cross-compiling Python useful, but they didn’t support the _ctypes module, which was needed for the hardware interface code, based around a C shared library. In fact, further searching turned up that one should not expect _ctypes to be available for cross-compilation.

It often surprises me, the conceptions those outside the embedded software world have of it. At the one end is the old, hardcoded view; a good example, if a bit old, would be Joel Spolsky’s view of the Embedded Software World. At the other end, prompted by the increasing presence of Java and other applications for cell phones, there is the idea that it’s all Java and that it’s every bit as easy as desktop development.

I recently updated my MSI Wind U123’s BIOS for various reasons, and I ran into an problem whose solution I’m offering up in case of issues from out there. Per the instructions from MSI, I flashed the BIOS, powered down, and removed the battery. MSI’s site didn’t specify how long to remove the battery, so I removed it for a 10-count (a slow 10 count). I put the battery back in, and Windows XP refused to finish booting, instead sitting in the XP startup animation forever.