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Category Archives: Technology

I started out listening to Slacker Astronomy, an excellent podcast which gives an entertaining presentation of some of the latest news and events in astronomy. When one of the main characters, Dr. Pamela Gay moved on, however, I had a tough decision to make with my limited podcast listening time.

I ended up subscribing to Astronomy Cast because it mixes in the fundamental concepts of astronomy with some of the latest developments and still maintains a light attitude that makes it an enjoyable listen.

Astronomy Cast is a good place to start if you are new to the topic. Over time, as I learn more from Astronomy Cast, I may “graduate” back to Slacker Astronomy for more up to the minute news.

Then again, maybe I should drop one of my other podcasts so I can listen to both of these. . .

P.S. The most recent (as of this writing) episode of Astronomy Cast The Moon: Part 2 was full of information about the exploration of our nearest celestial neighbor. My favorite link was to the recent Selene mission conducted by JAXA, the Japanese space program. They have a lot of high-definition photos which make great desktop backgrounds for your computer!

Even when I get a back log of podcasts and have to decide which ones to delete, every episode of this podcast stays in the queue.

Dan and Fab have a solid format wherein they cover new releases of Open Source software (mostly Linux distros), recent tech news headlines (including Microwatch), in depth Linux distro reviews and listener feedback (with Dan’s hilarious attempts at various accents from around the world).

Dan and Fab have a great rapport which makes every episode a fun listen that is also full of good content. If you want to keep on top of what’s going on with Linux and Open Source software, download a couple of episodes and give Linux Outlaws a try.

Well, my demo of the Linux Gamers Live DVD didn’t go so well. My crappy old computer did not perform very well, so we ended up borrowing someone’s laptop to perform the demo. Wasn’t too exciting. I just brought up each game on the disk and played them for a bit. We also discussed some other Linux-friendly gaming.

After that FAIL, I needed some success. I finally got some relief with the ReciPants database issue. The problem seems to be with my method for transferring the database from the old server to the new. Here’s a brief synopsis of what I did to get it to work:

Migrated from the old server (with MySQL 3.23) to a virtual machine running CentOS 3 (also with MySQL 3.23).

On the old server:

  • Exported the database with the following command (no extra options used, my mistake was exporting with —opt and/or —add-drop-tables):

mysqldump -u root -p ReciPants > ReciPants-database.sql

On the “new” server:

  • Set up ReciPants v1.2 on the new server, per the Web site instructions — including running the SQL scripts tables-mysql.sql and ref_data.sql.
  • Once I confirmed that worked OK, restored the data from the old
    server with the following command (the -f is necessary, as there is a
    non-critical error early on that will halt the process):

mysql -u root -p -f ReciPants < ReciPants-database.sql

Again, I need to test the above method on MySQL 5.x, but I believe it will work just fine.

At the Central Iowa Linux User’s Group meeting this Wednesday (10/15), the theme is “Linux Gaming.” I intend to demo the Linux Gamers Live DVD on an older AMD 2 GHz box I have.

The problem with that? I need a better video card, more RAM and to download the bootable iso! The on-board SIS video sucks for gaming, the system has only 512 MB of RAM installed, and I deleted my copy of the iso file a couple of weeks ago, thinking I wouldn’t need it. . .

I managed to purchase an ATI Radeon X1550 this afternoon, so that’s one thing off the list. I’m downloading the 3+ GB iso image as I type this. The only thing left is the RAM. I went to two local computer shops today and neither had the RAM I need (either PC2100, PC2700 or PC3200). I’ve got one more local shop to check tomorrow.

Wish me luck.

I’m having a little trouble getting ReciPants migrated over to the new server. The database is in MySQL, the site files are in place, the settings are all configured, etc. I think the problem lies with one of the Perl modules which is required for the site, but won’t install on the server for some reason.

For now, it is running fine on the old server, but I need to get this moved because we have a lot of recipes in it!