JDPFu.com 2025

I use comskip to locate commercials in mpeg2 TV recordings. It is a fairly heavy CPU user, enough that I can feel the system slow down when it is used. Of the multiple systems I’ve run it on (the exact same binary), they each show different frame rates that I thought to share today.

About 100 people attended Outerz0ne Con yesterday in south Atlanta (near the airport). This was my first hacker conference ever though I have attended DC404 and other industry meetings. It appeared that many people had a really good time without attending many of the talks. Below I’ll provide my impressions and key things learned from some of the more technical talks. The last talk contained extremely helpful information for anyone running a web site.

You can download the Free PDF version of the Ubuntu Pocket Guide

Maintaining a computer with all the patching and updating required these days is tough. It is almost impossible to keep everything patched on the most popular OS out there, even for nerds like us. For non-computer people, it is impossible. Often, software updates have costs to get the new version too. That’s just another barrier for Grandma.

Which Programs does Grandma Use?

First, we’ll create a list of the computer tools our fictitious Grandma probably uses today.

According to WINE, Quicken 2008 works under WINE – Wine Is Not an Emulator.

WINE Report on Quicken 2008

This means that many people running Windows who would like to run Linux have one less application holding them back. I’m not in a position to try this myself for a week or so, but I definitely will try it. According to the install hints, you just need a few Windows DLLs (from those old licenses you aren’t using) preconfigured in WINE to get it working. Only sound doesn’t work, which I see as a plus.

Watch the comments for my results. Cross your fingers.

Over the years, I’ve been using this blog to help myself remember how to do things and to share some great tools and techniques with you. I figure it is time to recap some of those articles whether they are computer, financial/retirement, or just interesting things.

Today I was migrating a few core services from one server to another as part of the new server build project. Basically, I need to wipe the 1st physical server and reload it with a new, different OS as part of this project. Before that can be accomplished, there are a number of services that I need to migrate to a new VM running on a different server.

Today, I was doing a little online shopping using my Nokia N800. Ikea has a few price cuts on bookcases and they looked interesting, so I wanted more information.

I visited ikea.com and clicked United States – crash. Not just a browser crash, but a forced reboot of the entire device. SWEET! The N800 uses a modified Mozilla browser running a version of Linux, BTW. This isn’t a normal cell phone or otherwise limited browser. I’m not running with any special permissions either. Crashes shouldn’t be possible.

Good job Ikea. My N800 is 3 yrs old and this is the first time it has crashed to a reboot. Impressive. May I suggest you review your web site for errors?

Last week, my main laptop died taking my main xUbuntu installation with it. Ok, it really didn’t take it, since I have backups and the hard disk was fine. Further, because I run it in a VirtualBox VM, picking it up and moving it to a different physical machine was fairly simple, once I had a machine ready for VirtualBox.

Anyway, I’ve spent the last week building a new machine, migrating Linux servers around, rebuilding a Windows7 Media Center machine, fighting with a bad power supply, poor connections in DVDs and network cables. Finally, everything is starting to work as expected. I was feeling lucky, so I decided to update the main xUbuntu desktop VM from 8.04 LTS to 9.10. Yes, I said update, not do a fresh install. BTW the 8.04 install was an upgrade from 6.06 originally.

xubuntu 8.04 —> 9.10

Today I migrated a RAID5 external array from 1 server to my newly built Core i5 server. I specifically chose to use software RAID when I installed it in 2007 just so this migration would be possible and easy.

Basically, everything went as planned with only one small issue.