Yup, that’s me.  Inconsistent.

I’m not a full-time blogger.  I am a full-time parent.  In my copious free time, I’m trying to improve myself as a computer programmer.

In just over two months, I’m going to be going back to work.  At that point, I will have less free time, but ironically I will probably have more time for blogging.

My problem is that I usually don’t have anything that I feel is worth blogging about.  However, when I go back to sea, I’ll start sailing.  At that point, I will have my travels to write about.

Of course, if I’m inconsistent, I probably won’t have much of a readership.  Honestly, I could care less.

I was at a local restaurant with my family today. Before we left, I had to do what many parents do before they leave with a baby. I had to change a diaper.

So I take the diaper bag and the baby, and head into the men” washroom.  Imagine my surprise when, in a family restaurant, there isn’t a change table in the washroom.  There was (barely) enough room on the counter to take care of business, so I made do with that.

On my way back to the table, I was told that there’s a change table in the women’s washroom.

Am I the only man who might sometime want to take my son out in public, while he’s still in diapers, without my wife?  What about single fathers (yes, they exist) who need to change a diaper in a restaurant?  In this case I was lucky enough to have enough counter space, but I’ve been in restaurants that don’t have counter space at all.

I’m debating whether I’ll go into the women’s room next time or just change him on the table.

Call it what you like. Open source, Free software, Communist code, whatever.  One of the principles of this software is that anyone can modify it.  It seems like alot of software is leaning towards the bazaar style of accepting user contributions to the code, allowing it to adapt and evolve to meet user needs.

Today, dberkholz seems to disagree with the working of the bazaar.  He states that Gentoo would be improved by closing the development teams to only top-notch contributors.  The question becomes, who determines “top-notch”?  And, if development is closed off, how do more contributors become top-notch?  And how are users to become open-source developers?

Edit: I incorrectly attributed this to srlinuxx. Now corrected.

After getting Gentoo installed on my VirtualBox, I realized that my 20 GB virtual HD wasn’t as big as I had thought.  I decided to double my storage.

Figuring out what to do was relatively painless.  The Linux Documentation Project has a slightly outdated howto document on hard drive upgrades; the process was almost the same.  The first major difference was in the installation of a new drive.  Instead of physically installing a new drive, you need to create a new virtual drive image.  With VBox running but not booted:

• File -> Virtual Media Manager
• File -> New
• Fill in the details for the new image.  Note that, even if you’re going to replace an existing image, you still need to give it a new name.
• OK
• Right-click on the virtual machine, and go to Settings
• Click on “Hard Disks”
• Add the new image as the primary slave

Now you can boot the virtual machine and follow the howto doc.

The second major issue was with the bootloader.  The howto was written in 2000, when LILO was the standard Linux bootloader.  However, GRUB seems to be more in favour these days, so somewhat different commands are required.

Once the files are copied to the new image (as per the howto instructions), I used the following commands:


# grub
grub> root (hd1,0)
grub> setup (hd1)
grub> quit

Where the code i typed was emphasized.  Note also that (hd1,0)  is if your virtual drive is the primary slave; your situation may change.  GRUB has tab-completion, so typing (hd<TAB> will show you your options.

One more change that may or may not be required, depending on your distribution.  If your system uses udev (if /new-disk/dev is empty, you’re using udev), you need to add devices for your console and null (for the few seconds before udev is loaded):


mknod -m600 /new-disk/dev/console 5 1
mknod -m600 /new-disk/dev/tty0 4 0
mknod -m600 /new-disk/dev/tty1 4 1
mknod -m666 /new-disk/dev/null 1 3


These will be hidden by the udev system, but are important for boot.

Once you have done this, shut down the virtual machine.  Then go to the virtual machine’s preferences and switch the hard drives around, so the new hard drive is now primary master.  After a reboot, you should have a working system with a larger hard drive.  Remove the old hard drive image, or keep it as extra storage space.

I bought Ultimate I-Spy for my wife’s birthday on Wednesday.  Now, it’s Friday night and it’s finished.

It was a fun game while it lasted, but it has no replay value.  Once the game is finished, you can restart again but you’re looking for the same objects in the same locations.

Somewhat better is Mystery P.I., which we got on Steam.  Although the replay value is still limited, there is a wide variety of items to find in each location, so even if you replay a level you won’t necessarily get the same items.

My wife isn’t much of a gamer, but she loves her searching games.  Now we just need to find one that will last her more than a few days.

My desktop computer is not working at the moment, so my daughter asked me to install Scholastic Brain Play grade 1-3 (no link available) on my laptop.  When I click on Autorun, I get the following message:

The version of this file is not compatible with the version of Windows you’re running.  Check your computer’s system information to see whether you need an x86 (32-bit) or x64 (64-bit) version of the program, and then contact the software publisher

Now, I’m not an expert on Windows, but as far as I knew, 32-bit apps were supposed to run on Vista 64 (hence the Program Files (x86) directory)

My current laptop runs 64-bit Vista.  This computer is used by my family for gaming, so there’s not much chance that I’ll be converting it full-time to Linux.  Instead, I decided to use Sun’s VirtualBox to run a Linux development box under Vista.

After much wavering between Ubuntu and Gentoo, I finally settled on the latter.  No particular reason, except maybe that I’m not planning on using much GUI, so Gentoo is a lighter-weight system in that regard.  It is quite possible that I’ll add an Ubuntu system as well, as this is the system my father uses and I would like that software I write may one day end up on his default install.

The installation was pretty straightforward.  After installing VirtualBox through the standard Windows installer, I noticed that VirtualBox has a preset for Gentoo systems.  I used that preset, generated my hard drive image (20 GB virtual drive), then mounted my Gentoo iso.  Boot, no problems so far.

My virtual machine is still installing (hey, Gentoo isn’t exactly a fast installer), but I still have two major to-do items:

• Get VBoxVmService working.  This is a system to allow VirtualBox to run as a Windows service.  Unfortunately, information on VBoxVmService is spread throughout forum threads, and it’s hard to follow; even though I seem to have everything set up correctly (according to the instructions), it’s not working.  Even worse, the logs indicate that everything is working, so troubleshooting is going to be an issue.
• Install the VirtualBox guest additions.  These allow for better interfacing between the host and guest systems.

Once I have everything working, I’m going to take some time to get back into “programmer-mode”, it having been almost five years since I could call myself a professional programmer.