However, when it detects that output is going to a pipe rather than a terminal, it normally turns colourization off.

You can turn it back on using the “–color=always” argument; and if you’re piping to “less”, then “less -R” will cause it to recognize ANSI colour escape sequences. For example:

  hg diff --color=always | less -R

You’ll need a known good firmware image in .bin format (e.g. WRT54GV4.0_4.21.1_US_code.bin from the Linksys site), and your PC should be connected to your router via one of the ethernet ports.

1. First see if a hard reset fixes the problem (power off, wait a bit, power on, hold down the reset button for 30 secs).
2. Assuming it doesn’t: configure your PC to assign itself a static IP address for the relevant network interface – e.g. 192.168.1.70.
3. In a command prompt window, run the following command:

   ping -t -w 2 192.168.1.1

   This continually pings the target address, with a timeout of 2 milliseconds.

4. In another command prompt window, go to the directory where your firmware image is located. Type the following, but do not hit enter:

   tftp -i 192.168.1.1 PUT <name of firmware image file>

5. While keeping an eye on window 1 (with the ping command running), power off the router, then power it back on. While the router is off, ping obviously will have no route to the destination. But within a couple of seconds of turning it back on, you should see a response – e.g.:

   Reply from 192.168.1.1: bytes=32 time=9ms TTL=255

   As soon as you see a response – perform the actions in step 6.

6. In the window with the tftp command ready to be run – hit the Enter key. tftp may take a while (a minute or two, at 10 Mbps) to upload an image – but hopefully it will complete, and report that the transfer was successful:

   Transfer successful: 3122208 bytes in 55 seconds, 56767 bytes/s

If it doesn’t work, there’s a variation you can try: configure your network interface to use a lower speed. In “Network connections” (from the Control Panel), right-click on the relevant connection and select “properties”. Click the “Configure …” button near the top right. Select the “Advanced” tab. The exact setting you’ll have to change then depends on the exact hardware and driver you’re using, but for mine, theproperty to change is “Speed & Duplex”.

Advanced settings for a network interface

It should be set to “Auto” or something similar. Set it to “10 Mbps half duplex” and try tftping again. (Remember to set it back once everything’s working again!)

Other examples which spring to mind of the empty-headedness of allegedly “Left wing” politicians include the human-rights- and natural-justice-denying Anti-Social Behaviour Order system, which allows anyone to obtain a court order preventing anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, “alarming,” or “threatening”; and Tony Blair‘s apparent inability to distinguish fiction from reality. (While PM, in the interests of promoting “a more diverse school system“, he tried to prevent a state-funded school, Emmanuel College, from being forced to provide an adequate education to children, instead of teaching them Creationist doctrines. In 1999, the New Humanist reported, his government “recruited a Feng Shui consultant, Renuka Wickmaratne, for advice on how to improve inner-city council estates. ‘Red and orange flowers would reduce crime,’ she concluded, ‘and introducing a water feature would reduce poverty. I was brought up with this ancient knowledge.’”)

Not that the political Right are any less guilty of imbecility, of course … but I really should be finishing an essay on project management methodologies, so I will have to leave the marvellous world of right-wing religious delusions for another time.

Bowles, Samuel. 1998. Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and Other Economic Institutions. Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 1 (March): 75-111. doi:10.2307/2564952.

Farina, Francesco, Frank Hahn, and Stefano Vannucci. 1996. Ethics, rationality, and economic behaviour. Oxford University Press.

Harsanyi, John C. 1955. Cardinal Welfare, Individualistic Ethics, and Interpersonal Comparisons of Utility. Journal of Political Economy 63, no. 4 (January 1): 309. doi:10.1086/257678.

Hausman, Daniel M., and Michael S. McPherson. 2006. Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy. Cambridge University Press.

Rabin, Matthew. 1998. Psychology and Economics. Journal of Economic Literature 36, no. 1 (March): 11-46. doi:10.2307/2564950.

In Stu’s post here, “No button text in Firefox”, he suggests you ensure that the following lines are uncommented in prefs.js in your profile [or you could set the options to false using about:config]:

user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_cache", true);
user_pref("nglayout.debug.disable_xul_fastload", true)
user_pref("nglayout.debug.enable_xbl_forms", true)

Experimentation reveals it’s the third one, .enable_xbl_forms, which causes the problem – but I’m not sure how it got set. (An article at the mozilla developer centre, “Setting up extension development environment“, recommends enabling the first of these, but not the others.) It’s possible some developer add-on enabled it, or that I just clicked on it accidentally in about:config.

“I added samplerate=44100 to the transcode section of my parameter string and the speed is back to normal!”

I also found I had to encapsulate the output as mp4, and then re-convert the mp4 to get raw mp3.

So the parameter string used by VLC ended up being:

:sout=#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=44100}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=out.mp3}}

And attempts to use the “–prunepaths” option to avoid indexing these seem not to work due to the spaces in the filenames. But there is a fix … From the Cygwin mailing list comes the following tip — you can type something like

  updatedb  --prunepaths='/proc  /cygdrive/c/Documents.and.Settings/MyName/Local.Settings/Temp'

to avoid these — prunepaths accepts regular expressions, including the use of a dot (.) to represent any character including a space.

My fix looks something like the following (line breaks inserted for legibility):

updatedb  --prunepaths='/proc /cygdrive/c/program_disk/cygwin

 /cygdrive/c/Documents.and.Settings/[^/]*/Local.Settings/Temp

 /cygdrive/c/Documents.and.Settings/[^/]*/Local.Settings/Temporary.Internet.Files

 /cygdrive/c/Documents.and.Settings/[^/]*/Local.Settings/Application.Data/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/[^/]*/Cache

 /cygdrive/[^/]*/System.Volume.Information

 /cygdrive/c/data/System.Volume.Information

 /cygdrive/c/backup/System.Volume.Information

 /cygdrive/c/shared/System.Volume.Information

 /cygdrive/c/program_disk/System.Volume.Information

 /cygdrive/g

 /cygdrive/h '

Have decided that rdiff-backup in Windows (probably mirrors in general, too) is just a bad idea: it’s too flaky, and when it fails it leaves your repository in an unrecoverable state. Better to backup to a single archive file I suppose, at least it won’t get corrupted. Will check out dar and duplicity instead.

]]> http://bookweevil.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/backup-annoyances-with-rdiff-backup/feed/ 0 bookweevil http://bookweevil.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/bug-in-partimage-on-ubuntu-with-lvm-installed/ http://bookweevil.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/bug-in-partimage-on-ubuntu-with-lvm-installed/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 03:10:12 +0000 bookweevil http://bookweevil.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/bug-in-partimage-on-ubuntu-with-lvm-installed/ ]]> Hm … when I run partimage interactively, I get the message “/dev/dm inode doesn’t exists [sic]“.

It appears that partimage’s method of detecting partitions (namely, reading /proc/partitions) is not compatible with Ubuntu’s way of doing things. This page seems to be the best description I’ve found of the problem:

From: Franck Ladurelle <ladurelf@…>

Subject: Re: LVM support in Partimage

Newsgroups: gmane.comp.sysutils.partimage.user

Date: 2005-06-06 08:00:05 GMT (2 years, 17 weeks, 4 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes ago)

| Hello partimage folks!
Hello,
| From a first point of view, I think, implementing LVM support should
| be a minor issue, because a Logical Volume is “just another
| blockdevice” (isn`t it?). From my (limited) point of view, it should
| primary just be a matter of “detecting” those logical volumes within
| partimage and specifying those device paths. Am I right here?

Yes. Partimage already work with LVM/RAID but only in command line. If
you have a filesystem on /dev/md0, the GUI won’t show it but you can
backup/restore your data with

“partimage save/restore /dev/md0 /whereever/you/want/your/image”

| Can someone tell, how (which part of the code) partimage detects
| devices/partitions?

Partimage extracts this from /proc/partitions like with an “awk ‘{print
“/dev/“$4}’”. The matter with LVM is that you have a dm-X entry without
the corresponding /dev/dm-X file. You have to link to /dev/mapper which
should be easy but I never took time to do this.

| BTW: In cvs – is “partimage-cvs-newtree” the “stable” branch and
| “partimage-cvs-004″ the “unstable” one ?

This changed a few days ago. Repositories are now “partimage-0.6″ for

partimage 0.6.x (stable) and “partimage-cvs-004″ for 0.7.x (unstable).

| Probably, the project could use some code/ideas from lvmdiskscan and
| lvscan for implementing LVM support ?

Once your LVM is up and working, this is not needed.

| Furthermore, i recognized, that the stable release had no problems to
| find partitions on my hp smart array (/dev/cciss/c0d0px) – the latest
| downloadable static release (0.7.1) i found for download doesn`t
| recognize them anymore (unfortunately I couldn`t compile 0.7.2
| successfully). Did the device/partition detection code change over
| the time?

I can’t remember when I did this but now partimage 0.7.x will use parted
libraries to handle device/partitions.

Have a nice day!

Franck

So the possible fixes are:

• Upgrade to a 0.7 version of partimage (available from Sourceforge, seems to be an unstable version still). Franck’s post above suggests that he thinks the problem was fixed as of 2005 … but this still hasn’t found it’s way into the stable version.
• Don’t use the GUI – only the command line. If you specify a partition device on the command line, the problem doesn’t arise. E.g.:

partimage -b –nodesc –finish 3 save /dev/sda1 sda1.partimage

• Use mknod as a quick fix to create a /dev/dm node that will keep partimage happy, as described here:

mknod -m 644 /dev/dm b 240 0

• Add this quick fix mknod command to /etc/rc.local so that’s always performed on startup.