Christmas gift

It will be 42" LCD TV.
Samsung or LG ?

Winter is here

Lots of snow.
And rather cold -13C.

What we need to be public

Probably 3 things:
doctors
teachers
lawyers

Used to be in USSR ...

What will happen to Harper's government ?

Will it survive the vote on budget?
Interesting.
Definitely, we don't want coalition government.

Google works ok

In a few days - about a week, Google picked up new keywords and new ads are all about new things.
So we know well enough now how it works.

New keywords - asbestos and insurance and mortgage

Why car insurance is so expensive in Ontario? Why so cheap in Quebec ?
Where to get mortgage?
If you are a victim of asbestos - what to do ?
Very interesting.

New gadget

Cheap reader - 75$
But it says - crappy display and no wireless connection.

Games

It is time to retire GameBoy - I have one made in 1997.
New toy is Nintendo DS.
Just needs R4DS card.

MQ series from IBM is such a drag

Requires too much Java/Eclipse crap.

Used to be a good cheap wireless router

This router was a very good device cheap, fast, easy to use, rich features.
Not anymore...

Hylafax on Linux

Ok, dreadful hylafax error "waiting for modem to come ready" fixed by adding this:
s0:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS0
to /etc/inittab
Do not forget to say telinit Q
Hylafax claims you don't need faxgetty running - in fact, you need it.

Ok, so serial port problem is common for Xen kernels

Solution:
add bolded config parameters to grub.conf
kernel /xen.gz-2.6.18-8.el5 console=vga xencons=ttyS16 console=ttyS16
module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5xen ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet xencons=tty

Dell 1650 and CentOS-5 and serial port

Now, phreaking thing doesn't understand it has serial port.
Says this:
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: 8250_pnp: Unknown symbol serial8250_unregister_port
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: 8250_pnp: Unknown symbol serial8250_register_port

So what we are going to do about it ?

Dell 1650 and CentOS-5 and PERC3/Di

After upgrading a few packages, boot started to be painfully slow - SCSI probing all devices
and giving the error:
AAC:AAC received an unrecognized command [601].
aacraid: Host adapter abort request (0,1,0,0)
aacraid: Host adapter abort request (0,1,0,0)
aacraid: Host adapter reset request. SCSI hang ?
... - and so on, probing all devices and finally booting

The solution is to upgrade PERC firmware to 2.8.1.7692 - http://ftp.us.dell.com/scsi-raid/PE1650_RAID_FRMW_LX_R168387.BIN

Worked well - boots ok now.