Z8NA and lm_sensors, again

So I was setting up another Z8NA and wanted to get sensors working. After running around in circles, I simply installed from source and now it Just Works. Which is so much better, compared to last times results. BTW, I also install lm-sensors 3.3.4 by hand from source and got a z8na.conf from here.

cd ~/work/sys
wget http://khali.linux-fr.org/devel/lm-sensors/config/sensors3-Asus-Z8NA-D6.conf 
sudo cp sensors3-Asus-Z8NA-D6.conf /etc/sensors.d/z8na.conf
wget http://dl.lm-sensors.org/lm-sensors/releases/lm_sensors-3.3.4.tar.bz2
tar jxvf lm_sensors-3.3.4.tar.bz2
cd lm_sensors-3.3.4
make
sudo make install
sudo sensors-detect
sudo sensors -s
sudo sensors

For what its worth, kmod-w83795 RPMs are available in my repo.

Don't write a program that does $X

A much better idea is to write a library that does $X, then write a front end program that uses that library. Your design will be better. Your program will be more flexible. Code reuse is much easier.

Introverts

So I just stumbled across a video about introverts and thought I'd share it.

Creating a DVD

Creating a DVD is easy but also harder then it needs to be. I wish I could just say "I have an NTSC TV. I have an .avi over there. Make it so." But alas there are all sorts of fiddly bits that need dealing with. So I need a GUI front end that understands the fiddly bits. But installing on CentOS one can get complicated.

First you need CentOS 6.

Then you need ffmpeg 0.7, available from the NauLinux school repo. You might already have ffmpeg 0.6.5 installed, in which case you'll need rpm -e ffmpeg-libpostproc --nodeps before doing yum --enablerepo=naulinux-school install ffmpeg. (If you skip this step, you end up with an error that looks like Unrecognized option 'vf'. Or at least you will if can find stderr, which might be in ~/.xsession-errors).

Finally you install devede, which is written in Python but is surprisingly non-fail. Linux tech has a repo. Set up that repo, then run yum --enablerepo=linuxtech-testing --enablerepo=rpmforge install devede.

Vixie is a smart guy

I found out something interesting the other day. A crontab entry has a DOW (day of week) column and a day of month (DOM) column. Because I'm a bad sysadmin, I'd never read the full manpage and assumed that if you specified both your entry would be run once every 7 or 14 years. I also suffer from NIH, so I'm writing a cron replacement in pure-perl that includes all the stuff I think a cron should have, like watching a directory for new files. So I finally read the full man page. And it turns out that Vixie was a smart guy. Having an cron job that runs every 7 or 14 years isn't useful so the DOW and DOM columns don't affect each other.

I other words

0 0 1 * 0 do-something

is in fact the equivalent of

0 0 1 * * do-something
0 0 * * 0 do-something

which is so much more useful.

This is another formulation of the "don't allow the user to do stupid things" principle I talked about a while back.

Total silence

I bought myself a fanless PSU for my birthday. I'd been eying one for a while now. Corey now has no fan on the CPU, a SSD and a fanless PSU; total, deafening silence. I had to move Corey into a different case because the PSU wants to be vented from the top. So now I've changed corey's CPU, motherboard, heatsink, hard drive, RAM, case and PSU. But it's still the same ax!

Of note: when you switch on a computer you've just assembled, one of the first bits of feedback you get is the fans going WUURRRwuuurrrrr. But not if your computer has no fans! It took me at least one panicky minute to figure this our.

Gloating

I just have to share this:

~ (fil@billy:)$ uptime
 13:48:21 up 719 days, 13:48, 11 users,  load average: 0.37, 0.22, 0.18

This means my rented VM host hasn't been rebooted in close to 2 years. Wheee!