Author: Matthieu

Eventful night in Toronto

2009-10-03 / / 0 Comments

Yes, I know it’s 5AM on Saturday morning. Yes, I know I should be sleeping. Yes, I want to be sleeping. But I’m not. And for good reason. I’ll start from the beginning.

Friday night was awesome. I left work and drove Marie-Sophie and Sebastien home, then headed over to the Eaton Centre to hang out and have dinner. Later on, I met up with some friends at their apartment. Emma and Alina were just back from auditions for some sketch comedy. We then had a few drinks and headed over to Dance Cave and danced ’til the place closed, singing on the way there and back. Back at the apartment, we had some awesome 3AM pancakes and headed to bed.

Pretty good night so far. But now to why I’m awake at 5AM. About 30 minutes ago, I heard a loud annoying beeping sound. Turns out it was the carbon monoxide detector. So we called poison control, who told us to call 911. Emma and I waited outside for the firemen to show up. They did, sirens and all, and then proceeded to declare it a false alarm. The fire captain then proceeded to have Emma sign away her first-born child and wished us a good night.

And that’s why I’m up at 5AM on a Saturday. Also, now Emma, Alina and Muna have a notice from both the fire and police departments on their fridge :).

Emma checking out the rock damage on her finger

Emma checking out the damage caused by rocking out.

Week in review

2009-09-30 / / 0 Comments

Yes, I know it’s Wednesday. However I feel that the first half of this week has been eventful enough to merit a blog post. I’ll start right from Sunday.

Sunday looked like it was going to be a low-key day. All I had planned was to clean up my room and do my laundry. Early in the afternoon, I got a call from Charlie who told me that they were having a surprise party for Alina’s belated birthday at Diane’s condo. Naturally, I had to go. Had quite an awesome time, between guitar, sushi, mafia and just hanging out, it was a great night.

[youtube_hd 4HjMokTvFFk]

Monday also started off pretty quiet. (Literally, because since David is away on vacation in Europe, we don’t have FrĂ©quence 3 playing in our office) Then I got an e-mail from upstairs telling me that my new Macbook Pro had arrived. I must say, it is a damn fine piece of equipment – glossy and brushed aluminium, no evidence of air vents, backlit keyboard, large trackpad… kudos, Apple. That afternoon, I was about to go into a meeting (where a whole lot of new projects were discussed) when Emma called. The boss was waiting, so I called her back later. Turns out the laptop I gave her was stolen from her living room while she was sleeping. Not a very nice thought/feeling. I went over to her place after work and had dinner with her Alina, Charlie and Muna. We watched the season premiere of House (a week late) and talked, again a pretty good night.

Tuesday I woke up on the couch (a very comfortable retro couch đŸ˜‰ ), got ready for work and said goodbye to Emma. Outside, I found a parking ticket. (No overnight parking on Baldwin St. without permit apparently. Also, I think it’s pretty cool that the parking ticket was printed on plastic… Is that weird?) I then proceeded to drive to work. I took Bathurst St. north from College to Finch, most pleasant commute I’ve had in a long time, probably because it was refreshing to see some old downtown neighbourhoods that I’ve never seen before.

Today was the least interesting day of the week so far, not that it was a bad day, just didn’t particularly stand out. Pretty busy day, sorting through cerberus, making phone calls, installing jabber clients, troubleshooting access points… I also discovered a fantastic FREE personal finance software for Mac, iCompta. As with most mac apps, it’s pretty, and it works very well. (merci Mathieu).

So, thus ends the week (so far) in review. But the week’s far from over. Yet to come are Dance Cave on Friday, Nuit Blanche on Saturday… and a haircut, sometime.

Computers

2009-09-27 / / 0 Comments
  1. MacBook Pro Unibody – Mac OS X 10.6/Windows 7/Ubuntu 9.10
  2. ASUS P5W DH Deluxe – Mac OS X 10.5/Ubuntu 9.04
  3. Dell Inspiron 640m – Ubuntu 9.04/Windows 7
  4. Dell Latitude D610 – Ubuntu 9.04
  5. ASUS P5N73-AM – Ubuntu 9.04 and Debian Lenny hybrid with OpenVZ/KVM
  6. ASUS ITX-220 – Ubuntu 9.04
  7. ASUS ITX-220 – Mac OS X 10.5
  8. Zotac ITX Wifi – Windows 7
  9. Toshiba Satellite A40 – Ubuntu 9.04
  10. Dell XPS M1330 – Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise/Ubuntu 9.04
  11. Dell PowerEdge 1400SC – Kubuntu 8.04
  12. Acer AspireOne – Linux Mint Gloria (Ubuntu 9.04)
  13. Acer Aspire 3623 – Mac OS X 10.5
  14. Acer Aspire 5570Z – Windows 7
  15. Nokia N810 – Maemo/Debian ARM
  16. 3* iMac G3 – Mac OS X 10.4/openSUSE
  17. IBM ThinkPad T21 – Windows XP
  18. IBM Ispirati A10i – Windows XP
  19. ECS P4VMM2 – Windows XP
  20. Apple TV – Apple TV OS (Mac OS X 10.4)
  21. Linksys NSLU2 – Debian armel
  22. Broadcom-based routers – DD-WRT/Tomato

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=8014131&postcount=902

Migration to iWeb and Ubuntu+Proxmox how-to

2009-09-22 / / 2 Comments

My faithful readers (all 0 of them) may notice that the site is considerably faster now. My blog is now hosted on a proper server over at iweb in Montréal instead of on my home server, leaving it free for other tasks.

As seen previously, I was attempting to set up a combination MythTV/OpenVZ server. Well, I finally got it working:

  1. Install Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04, 64-bit) and update until the update manager won’t update no more đŸ˜‰
  2. Install and configure MythTV backend. This step’s difficulty may vary depending on the tuner card. My Hauppage HVR-1600 was supported by Ubuntu out-of-the-box.
  3. Add the Debian Lenny stable and update repos to /etc/apt/sources.list and apt-get update.
  4. Download Linux driver for Intel Pro 1000 PCIe card.
  5. Install vzctl, linux-image-2.6-openvz-amd64,  linux-headers-2.6-openvz-amd64, update-grub if necessary.
  6. Reboot, make sure openvz kernel is running.
  7. Make && make install Intel e1000e driver.
  8. (Optional) Install Proxmox VE by adding proxmox repo.
  9. (Optional) Install mercurial and hg clone v4l-dvb. The main branch was broken, so I used one of the dev’s personal repos. make && make install v4l-dvb; cx18 now works again.

U2 360 in Toronto

2009-09-18 / / 0 Comments

Went to the U2 concert in Toronto yesterday. Absolutely AWESOME show, definitely worth the crazy $265 tickets. They played a great mix of older songs and enough tracks from “No Line on the Horizon” to get me to really like the new album (a bit like when I went to Coldplay’s Viva la Vida show in Ottawa). Sadly though, I didn’t manage to get any pictures or videos, I brought my DSLR but alas, there was no SD card in it. A colleague managed to get some great shots though (to be posted soon).

U2 Ticket


Video by David Cote