Zein’s place on the net

I have never gotten around to looking into LVM but the ubuntu vmware images I stared with have an LVM volume and it has caused me nothing but problems

The latest was just after I installed the new kernel and was not able to mount a non LVM volume:

# mount /dev/sdb4 /vol/F
mount: /dev/sdb4 already mounted or /vol/F busy

I also has some error messages in dmesg (device mapper couln’t add device to table)

All these problems just went away when I removed the evms package and did a reboot! I really need to start reading about LVM (and apparently emvs)

I got bitten by this bug today:
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/kernel-package/+bug/35746

It is fixed upstream but I still have to fixup the deb packages and upload them to the deb repository at work

I upgrade the kernel in one of my linux guests to 2.6.18.3 and when i tried to run vmware-config-tool.pl to recompile the vmxnet module I got an error that looks like:

The directory of kernel headers (version @@VMWARE@@ UTS_RELEASE) does not match your running kernel (version 2.6.18.3)

It seems that 2.6.18 defines the UTS_RELEASE somewhere else so I had to add it manualy to the version.h file in my linux headers directory

This will work too

echo "#define UTS_RELEASE \"`uname -r`\"" >> /usr/src/linux/include/linux/version.h

After looking for a simple clean application to hold my book collection and coming up empty, I decided to write one myself!

The application is written in Ruby on Rails (ROR) and will have the following features!

• admin user to update and edit
• book grabber from amazon (enter the ISBN and all the data is entered automagicly -including the image of the front cover-)
• search by author, category ,book title or publisher
• list or grid view
• sexy smart looking with a very clean interface!
• rate books
• wish list
• mark as borrowed with the borrowers name

I have registered a project at sourceforge.com and will upload the source as soon as the project is approved!

here are a couple of screen shots:

I have seen many keyboards in my life. I even coveted some of them.. But never have I seen anything as spectacular as the Optimus Keyboard.

I just upgraded the site to Wordpress 2.0.5. Alhamulillah it was smooth! I really upgraded to make sure I didn’t have any security issues. I will let you know if I find any features that were worth the upgrade!

About a month a go I moved into my new apartment! We had not yet installed the telephone line but I imagined that this was a simple operation… I was wrong! I now expect to get a phone line in approximately 1 month. But even when I do get it, Egypt Telecom will install a wireless carrier which translates to no DSL for me….

But I was lucky enough to find a “wasla” company called Friends that had networked a building about 60 meters away, so we ran a cat5e cable from their building to ours!

At fist the case seamed hopeless as we had about 18% packet loss and the result speed was about 3kBps but after adding an extra switch just at the edge of the other building the losses went way!
I am now connected to the Internet, sure the speed is not stable (10-50)kBs but at least I am connect and I am very thankful for that.