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All sorts of strangeness...
Oct. 13th, 2012 08:59 amFridays are generally pretty quiet, as far as incoming work is concerned, but yesterday was an exception, which continued an "exceptional" trend that began at around midnight between Thursday and Friday.
Thumper apparently ate something that disagreed with him (which is better than having been eaten by something he disagreed with, but I digress...), which made Galina and me particularly attentive to his behavior, especially after he left a few aromatic "deposits" in various places. So every time Thumper got up to leave the room (easily detected, at least most of the time), I'd jump up and let him out, and then back in. In the middle of the night, Shiloh decided she wanted to be part of the fun. (She wasn't sick, but the idea of going outside in the middle of the night apparently appealed to her.)
Bottom line: we didn't get much sleep.
Then the work came, and I had trouble wrapping my mind around it. So I spent a little time continuing to work with my Raspberry Pi.
By Thursday afternoon, I had figured out that I had been incorrectly flashing the SD card used as a boot device by the Pi (which went a long way toward explaining why the unit would not boot ;^). When I finally woke up and figured out what was wrong (I had been writing the boot image to a partition on the SD card, and not to the card itself), things went pretty smoothly. The Pi booted and the HDMI connection to one of the monitors on my desk worked perfectly.
As the whole idea of using the Pi is to let it run "headless" (no monitor, or keyboard/mouse in my case), the first thing to do was to enable SSH so I could securely log in over the network, after which—since I was up and running—I installed the Apache2 web server and an FTP server, following step-by-step instructions that are echoed at various places on the Web. Then I rebooted the Pi and disconnected everything but the power and the network cable. The next step was to log into the Pi from my Windows computer (pretty easy, using a program I've used for years, called "putty").
The whole idea behind the Pi was to get it to run Sputnik, which describes itself as "like a wiki, except that it can do a lot more than that." I had gotten it to run on my Ubuntu laptop, but didn't want to have to keep the laptop running all the time just to be able to access my copy of Sputnik.
Part of the step-by-step instructions for setting up the FTP server involved changing the default user's home directory to point to /var/www (Apache's default directory for files to be accessed from the Web) instead of to a subdirectory of /home (e.g., /home/alexpgp) so that upon gaining access via FTP, you don't have to change directories before you can upload to /var/www.
That was not a problem, in and of itself, but I was loathe to unpack the Sputnik distribution in /var/www, so I unpacked it in /home/alexpgp and ran the installation script from there, and things chugged along encouragingly until some file could not be found, and the process halted. I was stymied.
I eventually got the bright idea of unpacking the distribution in /var/www and running the installation script again (because it seemed to me that the script went looking for files based on the home directory of the user running the script, and I had changed my home directory to be /var/www). This time—to my utter and delirious surprise—the process proceeded to completion.
I launched Sputnik using the bare-bones server that came with the package (something called xavante) and it worked!
At that point, I declared my "computing break" over (the process had taken something like 40 minutes) I turned back to work, and got bits and pieces of it done, but my heart just wasn't in it. Late in the afternoon Hitomi, Galina, and I agreed on dinner at the Ichibon restaurant in Kemah, where we had some sushi. During our conversation over the food, I learned that the American (or perhaps even more widespread Western) practice of providing a portion of wasabi with one's sushi order is something of culture shock to people from Japan, (probably as much as not receiving wasabi on the side is for Americans visiting Japan), because in Japan, the proper amount of wasabe is considered to have already been incorporated into the sushi before it is served.
After dinner, we returned home and had some sparkling wine with cheese and crackers. And good conversation. Our best intentions to follow it all up with some crème brûlée came to naught, however, as all of us were tired.
It was a very pleasant day.
Thumper apparently ate something that disagreed with him (which is better than having been eaten by something he disagreed with, but I digress...), which made Galina and me particularly attentive to his behavior, especially after he left a few aromatic "deposits" in various places. So every time Thumper got up to leave the room (easily detected, at least most of the time), I'd jump up and let him out, and then back in. In the middle of the night, Shiloh decided she wanted to be part of the fun. (She wasn't sick, but the idea of going outside in the middle of the night apparently appealed to her.)
Bottom line: we didn't get much sleep.
Then the work came, and I had trouble wrapping my mind around it. So I spent a little time continuing to work with my Raspberry Pi.
By Thursday afternoon, I had figured out that I had been incorrectly flashing the SD card used as a boot device by the Pi (which went a long way toward explaining why the unit would not boot ;^). When I finally woke up and figured out what was wrong (I had been writing the boot image to a partition on the SD card, and not to the card itself), things went pretty smoothly. The Pi booted and the HDMI connection to one of the monitors on my desk worked perfectly.
As the whole idea of using the Pi is to let it run "headless" (no monitor, or keyboard/mouse in my case), the first thing to do was to enable SSH so I could securely log in over the network, after which—since I was up and running—I installed the Apache2 web server and an FTP server, following step-by-step instructions that are echoed at various places on the Web. Then I rebooted the Pi and disconnected everything but the power and the network cable. The next step was to log into the Pi from my Windows computer (pretty easy, using a program I've used for years, called "putty").
The whole idea behind the Pi was to get it to run Sputnik, which describes itself as "like a wiki, except that it can do a lot more than that." I had gotten it to run on my Ubuntu laptop, but didn't want to have to keep the laptop running all the time just to be able to access my copy of Sputnik.
Part of the step-by-step instructions for setting up the FTP server involved changing the default user's home directory to point to /var/www (Apache's default directory for files to be accessed from the Web) instead of to a subdirectory of /home (e.g., /home/alexpgp) so that upon gaining access via FTP, you don't have to change directories before you can upload to /var/www.
That was not a problem, in and of itself, but I was loathe to unpack the Sputnik distribution in /var/www, so I unpacked it in /home/alexpgp and ran the installation script from there, and things chugged along encouragingly until some file could not be found, and the process halted. I was stymied.
I eventually got the bright idea of unpacking the distribution in /var/www and running the installation script again (because it seemed to me that the script went looking for files based on the home directory of the user running the script, and I had changed my home directory to be /var/www). This time—to my utter and delirious surprise—the process proceeded to completion.
I launched Sputnik using the bare-bones server that came with the package (something called xavante) and it worked!
At that point, I declared my "computing break" over (the process had taken something like 40 minutes) I turned back to work, and got bits and pieces of it done, but my heart just wasn't in it. Late in the afternoon Hitomi, Galina, and I agreed on dinner at the Ichibon restaurant in Kemah, where we had some sushi. During our conversation over the food, I learned that the American (or perhaps even more widespread Western) practice of providing a portion of wasabi with one's sushi order is something of culture shock to people from Japan, (probably as much as not receiving wasabi on the side is for Americans visiting Japan), because in Japan, the proper amount of wasabe is considered to have already been incorporated into the sushi before it is served.
After dinner, we returned home and had some sparkling wine with cheese and crackers. And good conversation. Our best intentions to follow it all up with some crème brûlée came to naught, however, as all of us were tired.
It was a very pleasant day.
