Category: diary

Simply messing about with computer Hardware

I got the new dvd-writer and 120G hard drive late Wednesday, but I
sprained my ankle Wednesday night, and Thursday I spent in bed with my
foot elevated, and Friday I spent catching up from the things I didn’t
do on Thursday.

So this morning I got up, took care of the important email, and
shut down the computer.

I was replacing the old dvd reader with the new dvd writer, so I
just looked at the cables and jumpers on the old one and put the new
ones on the same way. This turned out to work.

I have tested cd reading, and it’s fine. DVD playing is even
better than with the old one, at least for Zone 1 DVD’s. There’s
apparently a firmware patch for the Creative DVD reader, but you can
only install it under windows. So I’m saving the drive in case I ever
put it on a Windows system and run it. Or I’ll give it to someone.

I’m now looking into testing the dvd-writing. The current page
that looks useful is this one.

I also installed dvdplusrw. It looks like at some point cdrecord
did dvd-RW but not DVD+RW. This may no longer be true, but also the
interface for dvdplusrw might be better. (They’d have to work hard to
make it worse.)

It’s lunchtime now, so I may not get much more done on this today, but
it looks good.

Complicated messing about with computer hardware

I tried 2 different jumper settings and still didn’t get the bios to
recognize the new hard drive.

Also, since I’m retiring the SCSI enclosure that had the CD-writer in
it (also the busted tape drive), I need to find a different cable for
the scanner, so it can connect directly to the SCSI card instead of
daisy-chaining through the enclosure.

I don’t think I’ll do any more on either of those things today.

BRS

Emailed Bruce about Alan.

Emailed status to the Board. Mary Briggs doesn’t see why I don’t
ask for more discount on the summer sessions.

Music Publishing

I promised to copy the da Rore for Anne, and in order to practice the
divisions it’s easier to have a transcription with the tune and the
two divisions in score. So since I’ll see Anne this afternoon at West
Gallery, I’ll try to get the transcription made.

I want to check out the lily 2.2 lyricsto command. It looks like it
would help. Lily
documentation says that you write melisma and melismaEnd around
notes that are all on one syllable. But I think upgrading to lily 2.2
is too much work for this morning.

BRS

Did the treasurer stuff from last night, and also wrote my check,
dated Friday, while I was at it.

personal email

emailed John and Judy about BabZ’ concert space. Remember to check
her website after May 1

Alison claims her last email got lost. I don’t see where it could
possibly be, unless it got sorted into spam for some reason, and
deleted since she sent it.

Rore

Still working on the simplified divisions. I got something in
conrad.abc this morning, that still needs some simplification. In
addition, there are some places that need “L:” statements, and some
minor underlay problems.

After lunch — fixed the fixes, and put it in score with the Rore –>
original. Probably still have to simplify.

I haven’t had any new illumination about the translation.

Concert bookings

The wedding planner called, and I said she and her clients could
come to tomorrow’s rehearsal, which I’m sure was a mistake, but I
won’t do it again.

Surfing

Found which has transparent decals that can
be used to put decorations on harps, and bumper sticker paper. I
emailed Bruce the pointer to the bumper sticker paper.

Rore

got the madrigal score proofed, so I can practice with the MIDI.

Rore

The reason for more is partly that I didn’t finish proofreading the
bass part or the score yesterday. But mostly that John thinks I
should write out a simplified version, for if both Bassano and Dalla
Casa are too hard.

email

Judy about June 5 recital, John about Camusette mistake, Sarah about
listing inconsistencies,

BRS

Tried calling the Central Square Bulk Mail guy about the permit. The
voice mail maze wouldn’t connect me. The web site says you shouldn’t
pay until you are doing your first mailing, because it lasts for a
year after you pay. So that means we don’t expire until the end of
May. I mailed this information to the board.

SPF attempt

I looked at the LJ article about rejecting mail based on SPF, and
decided to try upgrading postfix. That resulted in the following:

apt-get install postfix
546 apt-get install postfix-pgsql postfix-mysql resolvconf
558 apt-cache search spf
559 apt-get install libmail-spf-query-perl
560 apt-get install libsys-hostname-long-perl

I hope I did the resolvconf install right. I haven’t taken anything
up and down yet.

The README file for libmail-spf-query-perl says:

describes the files under sample/

* postfix-policyd-spf

If you run a recent snapshot version of Postfix, this policy
server will plug right in. You don’t need to run spfd.

But dpkg -L doesn’t list any sample directory, or a file named
postfix-policyd-spf. So I don’t know how to plug it in. Google
managed to find me the file, and it’s a perl script that I wouldn’t
know what to do with if I had it. The Postfix manual has an example
of implementing a policy daemon, but it looks like it expects a file,
and I don’t know where the file is. So I need more instructions.

Lunchtime. But the next time to look at this, use
http://spf.pobox.com/postfix-policyd.txt, which has a pointer to the
postfix documentation in it.

Copying

Had to copy the Bransles I borrowed from John. The secret seems to be
upping the “Quality Calibration Threshold”. It makes most of the
staff lines come out on the copy.

Also scanned Sunny’s rabies vaccination certificate. Saved it as
~/documents/sunny/rabies04.png.

BRS

Sent the board a request for news items. I’ll be sending the New
School a check, but I’ll wait a couple of days and see if I want to do
any more work on the new accounting system.

Car

The air conditioner doesn’t work, and it’s an obscure electrical
problem that they have no idea how long it would take to find. By my
normal standards, this means it’s time to find a better car. By this
year’s standards, it may mean I have to live through the summer with
no air conditioning. But if anyone knows of a good, cheap, small car,
I’d be interested.

Power woes

We’d been having outages all week, and NSTAR called yesterday
morning to say the power would be out from midnight to 8 am. It was
actually 1:30 to almost 10 AM.

More mozilla woes

Some lock file didn’t get removed (I’m guessing) when I shut down last
night for the power shutdown without exiting mozilla. So I couldn’t
get into my own profile, and the more or less random button pushing I
did ended up removing my profile, so I’m without all my bookmarks.

Music Publishing

Did a practice version of the van Eyck Comagain, with the
variations in score, to make it easier to play a phrase in all
versions. Used the etf files from Frank’s edition.

Some day will do it barred the way van Eyck did. Some of the lily
beaming defaults don’t work right.

Reading

Needed a real Jane Austen, so I downloaded Pride and Prejudice from
memoware, just before the Power went off.

1632 turned out to be violent and badly written so as to be
unreadable.

Pop server changing

I edited /etc/fetchmailrc to reflect the mail from your-site.com that
the incoming mail server was changing (from mail.laymusic.org to
pop.laymusic.org). I didn’t have one about bostonrecordersociety.org,
but I edited that anyway.

Both machines can be pinged. I have sent test mail to both
accounts, and so far it hasn’t shown up.

I don’t seem to have the hang of running fetchmail with the verbose
option these days. I always used to be able to do it.

Got it; you have to kill the daemon. Just stopping the job
doesn’t do it.

And the test mails showed up.

BRS

The new Mozilla version crashes on the bostonre account.
I managed to get it to start and put back the homepage and bookmarks,
but it’s very odd. That didn’t happen for the lconrad login.

Updated web home page.

Emailed Anne Riesenfeld about scheduling the summer sessions.

Got postcard from Sheila using BRS mailing permit. Need to call
post office about changing that.

Personal business

Appointment for car on Monday.

Appointment for me with Anne Rodman.

website

Started comparing html to db. Much html missing, very little db
missing. This is surprising.

Cantabile

Put part assignments up at the
walk page; emailed wfh list about them, and about the passes and
t-shirts I ordered yesterday.

Music Publishing

Emailed Frank, so I ABC’d “Woe Betide my weary body
I’m sure the Ann
Heyman arrangement is copyright, so I won’t worry about putting it up.

Webpage:

Finished getting data from backup into postgresql. Need to replace
missing data, and catch up.

Software installs

Read Linux Journal, and downloaded:

• SQL-Ledger, which looks like it might be an improvement over
  gnucash. I did the basic install, but it hangs when I try to create a
  user.

• Blosxom, which seems to be basically working.

Practicing

Singing

Gershwin, A foggy day

Recorder

Non Gemme, non fin oro with divisions for Hope’s class. Also vanEyck
Comagain and Country dance tunes for Walk for Hunger.

Serpent

Probably doing both “Estans assis” and Watertown at Walk for Hunger.

Reading

Jane Austen Juvenilia. Makes Northanger Abbey look really good.

Installed 1632 from “Hell’s Faire.iso”

Movies

Have the second disk of West Wing.

Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon.