Ole Bakstad's blog

Today I went to Omega Verksted at NTNU with the plan to check weather or not a TP cable is working. With some help from Espen Øyby, a friend, I got the design ready. After designing the circuit on the computer we printed it on a special paper, which we then laid on top of the circuit board. A couple of minutes in a powerful light it was ready for acid. When we took it out of the acid and washed of the photoresist I had my circuit board.

The entire thing is a quite simple circuit. It consists of 9 LEDs, 9 resistors, 2 AND port blocks and 2 female RJ45 inputs. After soldering everything  together it worked!

If your interested you can see the design layout here.

A while back i ordered computer components for a server. Since school has been quite busy lately I haven’t had time to actually do much with it, but the last couple of days I’ve finally got it running.

The specs:

• 2.7 GHz AMD Athlon X2 64 bit
• 4GB of DDR2 ram
• 2x 500GB
• 4x 1000GB

I’m running 2x500GB in RAID 1 as system disk and the 4x1000GB in RAID 5 for storage. The server will primarily used as a private file server, but  I’m also running Apache, MySQL etc. on it too. I have (with much help from Harald Nesland, thank you!) got a DNS server working, and I’m now hosting the domain logarit.me (“logaritme” is Norwegian for “logarithm“).

Did you know March 14th is the PI day? No? Well it is!

Hurray for π!

To celebrate this awesome day I just ordered a π-watch and the a π-mug.

More stuff at http://www.piday.org/.

Have you ever wondered how you could FAIL twice in one day? Sure you have!

Here are two tips to get you going:

Tip one: The ATI graphics driver install

When installing the ATI drivers for your graphic card in Ubuntu: Never ever check what graphic card you really have, take a guess and stick to it. Be sure to spent at least 2 hours trying everything from hacking with the aticonfig-tool to reinstalling the same driver. After two hours (or more) you’ll might find out that you have a X1600 card, instead of a X1300, then the solution becomes fairly obvious. Instead of using 2+ hours you could have done it in about 30 seconds with the correct drivers. But hey, whats the fun in that?! :_((

Tip two: The famous 5-minute WP installation

When you’re about to update WordPress from the 2.6.x to the 2.7.x be sure that you don’t have any backup what so ever! This is a key step to get this guide to work. If you have backup of your wp-config.php, theme files etc. there is no fun in doing this. Delete them right away!

Now, download then newest wordpress version. Before you continue with the actual install you have to make sure that some of the folders have some strange permissions (Why? I don’t know). If you don’t do this your FTP-client (I assume do use FTP) will just overwrite the files and all the fun is gone. Instead you will have a mix of new and old files side by side! Now you have to upload everything from the newly downloaded version of WP and check that the FTP-client is set to overwrite all files.

When the upload is finished you try visiting your blog page, and what do you know, the update has fucked up! At this point it’s important to get frustrated and just delete the whole shebang and try the good old reinstall. The reinstall seems to work, all the files is installing in the right way and everything is great! Now you go to you blog page. What do you see? “There doesn’t seem to be a wp-config.php file. [...]“. “wtf?!” might be your first response, but then you remember, you deleted all the WP-files a couple of minutes ago, including wp-config.php of course.

One should think that missing the wp-config.php isn’t that bad, basically it’s just information to log in to your MySQL database. Well, if you want to make things really interesting you have cleverly disguised your WP-database with a non-describing name. After some minutes looking through your databases you find the database with contains the WP data, and everything seems to go your way.

FINALLY! The blog is back, or wait, what the hell is this?! – The default wordpress theme?! Yes, that’s right. Don’t you remember? You deleted all your old theme files – and you don’t have any backup! Oh well, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours to get a working theme up and  running again. Enjoy! :(

Summary

Yesterday sucked monkey balls :(

Today I ordered the Nokia e71. I’ve always wanted a mobile phone with a full qwerty keyboard, but never got around to buy one. The phone runs symbian s60, and runs it very well. It got 3G, W-lan and GPS, all the fancy things you might want in your phone (see full feature list at nokia.com).

Well that’s it, I’m off to play the waiting game now!