I guess we’ll need to wait just a little bit longer to throw HD-DVD on the cart.

UPDATE: “He’s dead now!”

It’s time again for another Techie Time post. I will sometimes use these to post notes about technical issues I’ve run into that had nary a single hit on Google for help. So, in the event someone else has the same issue, welcome!

For anyone uninterested in the subject, you can look away now. You were warned.

For the past few weeks I’d been keeping my work system completely updated with Fedora 8. Suddenly, at some point, I noted that ‘rpcbind’ wasn’t updating, failing with an RPM script error. Here’s that error:

error: %pre(rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 4
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8

Eventually, this error caught up with me and NFS started not working and was wreaking havoc on our network. Here’s what I had to do to get the latest rpcbind installed:

rpm -q --scripts -p rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm > /tmp/scripts

Within that new file I took out just what I needed and edited it a bit. In particular, note the ‘-o’ with useradd and groupadd:

/usr/sbin/userdel  rpc
/usr/sbin/groupdel rpc

# Now re-add the rpc uid/gid
/usr/sbin/groupadd -o -g 32 rpc
/usr/sbin/useradd -o -l -c "Rpcbind Daemon" -d /var/lib/rpcbind -g 32 \
-M -s /sbin/nologin -u 32 rpc

The ‘-o’ is necessary because this RPM kept failing because “32″ was not a unique userid. Thing is, it’s not in /etc/passwd (note that it removes it first!), so why it’s complaining I can only guess has to do with LDAP, though I haven’t had time to test yet.

Next, I forced the RPM to install without scripts, then ran the script:

rpm -U --force --noscripts rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm
sh /tmp/scripts

Anyway, I hope that helps someone else.

Have you seen these ads by Budweiser, where the CEO (or owner or whoever) is going on about how brewing a lager is so much more difficult because you can see through it and therefore see any “imperfections” in the beer? He then basically says that darker beers can get away with slacking off because they can hide impurities in the beer.

Uh, Budweiser … those “impurities” are from the use of actual, good malt and what gives the beer something you lack: FLAVOR. Claiming you have it tougher than darker beers is like Poland Spring saying they have it tougher than tap water.

OK, an odd post to make when I don’t have much to say here lately (or time to do it), but I had to share these home-hitting PSA ads from Canada. Holy. Shite.

I will never carry a big vat of boiling oil around a kitchen. Ever.

[via Digg]

No cheating and clicking over to YouTube to find out!

(UPDATE: Wow, looks like I stumped all one of you reading this site!)

• I thought I remembered hearing that Guitar Hero III would have a new guitar with buttons for tapping, closer to the guitar body. I noticed that at least with the wireless 360 guitar, the neck is a separate piece from the body. Hopefully in future games, if they support finger tapping, you can just buy a new neck for your existing guitar.
• The next Guitar Hero better have Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster”. And something — anything — by Joe Satriani. If you know GH, go listen to that song and you’ll understand why it’d be fun to play.
• The folks at Infinity Ward are geniuses. They put the crack-like addiction of leveling up into an incredible FPS, Call of Duty 4, and made matchmaking a pure pleasure on XBL. Thank God the game itself doesn’t require a monthly fee to keep your skills and leveling intact.

It’s time again for techie talk. Yes, this is because I was unable to easily locate this information using Google, so doing some digging of my own lead to this discovery.

If you’re creating your own custom LiveCD for Ubuntu (we’re doing this at my FTJ in order to allow customers to boot a LiveCD with a demo/training version of our product right from a CD), you’ll probably want to get rid of that annoying ‘Install’ icon that sits on the default user’s (”ubuntu”) desktop. Deleting it from the desktop and saving that configuration aside doesn’t get rid of it. Instead, you need to alter some scripts.

First, if you’re following the Ubuntu LiveCD customization wiki page instructions, you’ll have an ‘edit’ directory with the contents of the CD available for editing. Comment out lines 49-54 in the file ‘edit/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/10adduser’ that read:

for file in /usr/share/applications/ubiquity-gtkui.desktop /usr/share/applications/kde/ubiquity-kdeui.desktop; do
    if [ -f "/root/$file" ]; then
        chroot /root install -D -o $USERNAME -g $USERNAME $file /home/$USERNAME/Desktop/$(basename "$file")
        break
    fi
done

You will then need to ‘chroot’ back into the ‘edit’ directory and remake initrd:

mkinitramfs -o /initrd.gz 2.6.15-23-386

Replace the final arg in that line with the applicable kernel version (look in /lib/modules).

Exit from the chroot jail and move this file to extract-cd/casper:

mv edit/initrd.gz extract-cd/casper/

Continue with the rest of the instructions on that wiki page. Done! Hope this helps someone.

For some inexplicable reason, I found this link stuck in my drafts. So let’s see, if I had to list possible reasons I have this link sitting around:

• If I’m ever sitting on the shitter for the 20th time of the day, wondering what the fuck crawled up my ass, I know what to tell the doctors I have.
• When I’ve finished reading “Witchcraft For Dummies”, I know what horrible ailment to curse enemies with.
• I’ll write a spec script for a new horror movie (see title of this post).
• Mental note: Never visit Brainerd, Minnesota

Pretty cool movie news: A ‘Goonies’ sequel has stepped even closer to likelyhood.

Anyone who hasn’t seen the movie ‘The Goonies’ usually doesn’t quite get why it has reached such a cult status amongst many who have seen it. And then there are certainly some who’ve seen the movie and thought it was just OK or simply downright sucked. So, what makes the movie so “magical?”
(more…)

Some of you may know of my 30 seconds of fame when I helped Robin and crew release TeamFortress 2.9 for QuakeWorld back in … wow, 1998! Anyway, back in those days my cousin (known in-game as “Kinlord”) and I ran a clan called “Clan Braveheart”, where we played primarily as Demolitions Men. One of the silly characteristics we had was often “speaking” (as much as one could speak with typing) in a Scottish accent. I think it was pretty well known by many of the TF gaming community, and definitely Robin, John and Ian, that we did this.

Lately there have been a lot of videos coming out, introducing us to characters of the upcoming release (finally!) of TeamFortress 2. However, one character has yet to be introduced to us: The Demolitions Man. I emailed Robin (who now works at Valve), commending him on the fine work on the game and the videos, then jokingly asked if the Demoman would have a Scottish accent. Well wouldn’t you know it,

I don’t give a shite if it’s coincidence or not (Robin won’t commit either way to me), but I’d like to think this was a brief shout-out from Robin to Jason and I. If you don’t think so, then shag off!

(UPDATE 2007-10-09: And here’s the video! Comes out this week, shaggas!)