Freshmeat rocks!

I can’t link to my personal install publicly, but I “discovered” a new piece of software called tasks the other day. You gotta love random searches on freshmeat. It’s done by one of the major contributors to wordpress (the software this site is based on). It is (in the words of Ferris Bueller) so choice. If you haven’t clicked on that link yet, it’s a “todo” program. Here are the major features that I use:

  • Web Interface – nice for viewing the same tasks from multiple locations
  • iCalendar emulation – it generates an iCal-compliant page that you can subscribe to with any program that supports the webcal:// URI.
  • phpiCalendar – It comes with a copy of PHPiCalendar, which is a very nice web-based iCalendar display suite.

I did have some trouble getting it all set up at first, and I still don’t think I can use Mozilla’s Calendar program to subscribe to my DAV-enabled iCal (something I think is primarily due to my lack of understanding in the ways of mod_webdav), but I wholeheartedly support this software. To the point that if/when the author finishes the “pro” version, I’ll seriously consider purchasing a license. Those of you who know me understand what a supportive statement this is.

LILO

I keep seeing this in my referer logs, so here goes:

If you’re seeing “LI 99 99 99 99 99 99 99” (99 ad infinitum) when you turn your computer on, LILO (the Linux Loader for the uninitiated) is fucked. You’ll either need to use a boot disc (you did make one when you installed that new kernel, right?), or reinstall. When it happened to me, I reinstalled. I didn’t lose that much (aside from my custom /etc/aliases file), but I could have, had I not managed my discs and partitions properly.

If you DO have a boot disc, I can’t tell you exactly what to try , but here’s some ideas:

  • boot with the disc, and reinstall lilo (once it’s up, rerun lilo using your /etc/lilo.conf on your “real” / partition)
  • Once you’ve booted, make a copy of that boot floppy and keep booting off the original until it irritates you enough to fix the problem
  • boot with the floppy, then install GRUB.

Incidentally, I think that third options’ your best bet. I really like grub. it’s a lot more flexible if you mistype the kernel image name (allowing you to re-enter the information on the fly on boot). You also only need to write it to the boot sector when you install it, and when you upgrade it. Unlike LILO, where you need to rewrite the MBR or partition boot sector every time you recompile your kernel.