so busy
Yesterday afternoon, I attempted, what I assumed would be a fast & painless upgrade of the laptop that runs my two webcams from FC3 to FC4. Boy, was I mistaken. For a reason that still isn't clear, the 2nd of the 4 CDs had some kind of corruption that differed each time I reburnt it to a CDRW. What I ended up doing was burning two copies of the second CD, and switching between them each time the anaconda installer complained that a package couldn't be found. This resulted in the upgrade taking about 30 hours to complete. Once that was done, the laptop booted up ok, but I was seeing the following errors whenever I tried to capture a picture:
pwc Failed to allocate decompress table. Can't open "/dev/video0" as VideoDevice!
After some research I determined that for whatever reason the version of the pwc driver that shipped with the FC4 kernel (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4) was not the same version that shipped with the latest FC3 kernel. I had to grab version 10.0.7a of the pwc driver and build it and that fixed the problem.
I had a spare box sitting around, so I figured I'd throw the new TV capture card into it, and load up FC4, since I didn't want to upgrade my primary box so soon, plus it was occupied with other tasks that I didn't want to interrupt right away. Unfortunately, the old Symbios SCSI controller kernel bug is still not fixed, which means that I was seeing horrendous instability (kernel Oops all over the place). On top of that it almost seems like there might be a bug in anaconda's XFS filesystem support (but i'm not certain if this was just related to the SCSI controller bug). After manually fixing /etc/fstab, I got the box functional, and it looks like the TV card is being correctly recognized. All that remains is to hook up the VCR, and hope that I have the right cables. Unfortunately, our VCR is hella old, and has nothing other than composite (RCA) plugs. I guess this project will have to wait until next weekend, as I doubt i'll have the energy, time or patience during the week.
Yesterday morning we went to the bank, and actually got good news. Seems that we'll be pre-approved for just over half a million dollars for a mortgage. Today we checked out a few homes around San Jose. The last one turned out to be the nicest. It had a huge back yard, with plum & peach trees (that were bearing fruit). The inside was really nice too, with hardwood floors, and 11ft ceilings. The only problem was that it was about 1 room too small, at only 945 sq. ft. We plan to start interviewing real estate agents next weekend, and get the hunt underway.
David was in an absolutely horrible mood all day today for no apparent reason. The smallest thing would sent him into a tantrum, and it was like that all day long.
Denise & I made something different for dinner tonight. I took out two salmon steaks from the freezer last night, and fried them up (well not really fried, as I didn't actually put anything into the pan other than the steaks themselves). Then she put coconut milk, snap peas, carrots & onions together, and through the salmon into it to make a soup. I thought it was pretty good, but Denise tried a little and hated the fishiness, and David kept telling me that he didn't like it, but I made him eat it anyway.