Welcome to prettyprettylights.com. This page is largely here because I get a free domain with my new job. But I’ve been meaning to break into the blogosphere for a while now. Assuming I’m consistent with this the topics could range from technical to a standard journal entry. To kick off, this blog isn’t the only thing that’s finally up and running.

After over a month of being down my mythtv box is finally back up and running. Background: In mid-October my Dell GX240 Optiplex mini-tower blew a power supply. This was just prior to my changing it to Linux MCE. I had the Kubuntu DVD and had begun backing up my favorite programs. Now power supplies are expensive and I was being affected by the Novell layoffs at the time. So the machine has been dead until tonight.

Tuesday a new power supply that I ordered online arrived. However, ti was the wrong size, and didn’t have enough cables for my two hard drives and DVD-ROM. Happily, tonight was the BYU computer surplus sale. I picked up what I though was another GX240 that had been stripped of RAM and hard drives. All I needed was the power supply. But it’s a pain getting them out of these boxes. So I ended up moving the PCI cards and drives to the new box. The upside is that I was wrong. For $20 I picked up a GX270, with has more RAM slots and a faster processor. But the RAM from my GX 240 didn’t match up. A trip to CompUSA and I now have more RAM too (the old box came with 256MB, I picked up a 1GB stick)! Even better, after plugging everything in it booted right back up. No OS re-install! I made some adjustments to the date and time in the BIOS, and had a little trouble with the network card, but I’m back in action.

For reference, the box is running Debian Testing. In Gnome the network shows as being down. Clicking on my network icon brought up the following error: “SIOGIFFLAGS error: No such device.” I opened the network settings and set up eth1 with DHCP instead of a static IP. From there it looked like the card was up and running, but after restarting the network the icon still showed no connection. After some googling on another machine and running a few commands, like ifconfig -a , I noticed that I had an IP address and the settings looked fine. lspci and dmeseg showed no errors. I pinged google and got a response. Turns out the connection is working, but my icon isn’t reflecting this fact. I don’t know why. But for tonight, I’m happy. All I need at this point is a subscription to a TV Listing service and I’ll be good as new. I think I’ll wait a few days to try the Linux MCE install. End of semester is bad timing for big projects.

To finish off, this won’t be the permanent look for the site. But so far this is my favorite theme. I’ve been having trouble with Firefox’s Web Developer plugin. Wen I go to edit this page’s CSS I lose the CSS completely. Never had that one happen before. So expect changes.