Maintenance

Forgot to post this when it happened, but beet's SSD died last week, and I have been unable to recover any data. Unfortunately, there was some data loss for one project. Not unrecoverable, but an annoyance nonetheless.
While waiting for a replacement drive I put a old-school drive in beet and got it up and running. The replacement SSD has arrived and I'm now waiting for an opportunity to put the new drive in to beet.

We've been having spontaneous reboots on several machines in the last two months or so.
We've had an electrician double-check the power we're getting and all is well.
Looking in to potential computer-based issues I discover that many people experience this kind of thing with SSDs on Sabayon, Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, and likely other distros. There do not seem to be any real solutions, but suggestions include the usual:
1) Get the latest firmware for the drive. Right now we have at least 2 different model of SSD in our machines (haven't checked Martin's yet): OCZ Vertex (96GB running f/w v1.6) and Vertex2 (115GB running f/w v1.29 or 1.33). Firmware and general info on OCZ drives can be found here. Firmware is here
2) Adjust fstab and /etc/rc.local like this

I'll come back to this next week.

<egg_on_face>
Figured it out. The problem was I stupidly changed the security update config to reboot after a security update gets done. It explains everything. The file has been edited, the package updated. Now I wait with my fingers crossed...
</egg_on_face>

SM working on MoL has been seeing LibreOffice Writer crash frequently when editing a complex document with comments. I've worked with similar documents without problems, though.

I looked around for alternative word-processors, but neither Calligra Words nor AbiWord handle comments. Noting that Writer works fine for me on Precise + Gnome 3, and fine for CB with Gnome 2, I've now installed Gnome Shell on Radish, and we'll see if that solves the problem. Never liked Unity anyway.

In the process of doing this, I noticed that an HCMC style deb is failing to update itself when doing apt-get upgrade.

Tested projector with new build/Intel Graphics and wireless keyboard.
Turns out that the projector looks fabulous as long as you use its native resolution. The bad news is that its native resolution is 1024x768. Any other 4:3 resolution that works with the Intel Graphics chip looks terrible on the screen.
To get mirroring to work, you need to plug the HDMI plug in to the DVI port on the computer (via the HDMI-DVI converter) and use a VGA cable for the monitor itself. Any other combo is fraught.
Wireless keyboard/trackpad has a nice feel to it but is a real pain to use as it loses its connection regularly. Pressing the connect button MAY work, but it doesn't always. I tried elevating the receiver, which helps some (but not enough). Martin replaced the batteries and reports that performance is better.

If you want to do a presentation in B045 using our equipment:
Projector plugs in to the orange DVI converter and then in to the DVI port on the computer. Monitor plugs in to the computer via the VGA cable.
Connect wireless keyboard: plug the receiver in to the computer using a USB extension cable and elevate the receiver so it's within line-of-sight of the keyboard. Turn on the (keyboard) power and depress the connect button. It should work more-or-less right away.

Made an attempt at using my maverick script to build the new machine (beet) but there were so many changes (package dependencies, config deprecations etc.) that I gave up and started on an oneiric builder - A LOT HAS CHANGED under the hood!

Spent a few days working on that and deployed beet with the new HCMC oneiric build. It seems OK, but still requires a few tweaks after a person logs in. I have a script on the desktop that will set things up and delete itself when done. One apparent bug that I'm tracking down: one cannot shut the machine down from the login screen. I think it's a lightdm problem at this point.

I'm continuing work on the oneiric build in preparation for pangolin as I intend to upgrade the lab to pangolin once it lands.

To show hidden files in Finder windows (e.g. .files and the Library folder)

launch the terminal and enter: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
hold option, click on Finder icon in dock
from popup menu, choose relaunch

to hide hidden files
launch the terminal and enter: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
hold option, click on Finder icon in dock
from popup menu, choose relaunch

Over the past week or so, I've
- bought a new iMac, extra RAM and Applecare
- migrated my personal account from the old iMac to the new one (the last "3 minutes remaining" to almost an hour)
- configured various apps (e.g. create an IMAP connection rather than a POP connection in Thunderbird) and hardware (magic trackpad thingee, and possible bug with the mapping of the command and option keys on the split keyboard on startup not being what I set them to in the Systems Preferences/keyboards/modifier keys)
- had to get AW to come in with a mondo-big screwdriver to open the hatch for the additional RAM cards when they arrived.

At the end of the day, NVivo froze while shutting down. This meant that none of the day's changes were written to disk, because apparently it stores them up and writes them at the end of the session. We found a .tmp file in docs and settings -- can't remember the exact path, but it was named like the actual data file -- and this turned out to be a complete copy of the altered data, with the exception that the dates of recent changes had not been recorded. Backed up the original day-old file as "...last known good", then copied the tmp file over to the original filename, and everything should be good to go, but when M comes in next, she should have a good look to make sure nothing else has been lost.

The other day I had a problem upgrading my machine. No matter what I tried I continually got an error like this:
files list file for package 'libvpx0' is missing final newline

I left it alone, figuring that it was a package-related problem, but it persisted for a few days. A bit of Googling turned up this page: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/apt-get-dpkg-error-files-list-file-missing-final-newline-271118/ which provides the answer.

It turns out I had two corrupted list files: /var/lib/dpkg/info/libvpx0.list and /var/lib/dpkg/info/libtiff4.list. I removed the list files and ran apt-get upgrade again and everything happily upgraded.

So, "missing newline" problem is solved by removing the offending .list file from /var/lib/dpkg/info