September 21, 2009: More Rock Band Action

It is Monday.  I am keeping to my “up at seven” schedule which is working out really well, overall.  I am happy with getting up at a more reasonable time every day.  I am signed in to the office long before I am expected but it has given me a chance to play catchup quite effectively this past week and today not only am I not really behind after my trip to Germany last week but my inbox has rarely been this empty.  I am very pleased.

Going to bed early and getting up at seven is perfect because it matches Liesl’s schedule.  She has an internal alarm clock and is awake at almost exactly seven every morning no matter what.

I worked solid all morning and then we decided to steal away for a quick trip to the shopping center.  Last night, right at six o’clock, we had discussed Dominica’s need for additional Rock Band songs and games.  Originally her birthday present was going to be larger (the entire Rock Band setup with different instruments) but because of the upcoming move it is just the guitar and the microphone which we already owned.  So I had decided that we would go get the original Rock Band and Rock Band 2 games so that she would have a lot more to do.  Plus her sister already owns Rock Band 2 so they could play that online together right away.

Nothing too much to report today.  Work and hanging out with the family.  Dominica definitely spent a lot of the day on the PS3.  She is loving her birthday present(s).

SQLite3-Ruby Gem Version Issues on Red Hat Linux and CentOS

So you are attempting to follow earlier instructions on installing SQLite3 to use with Ruby on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (aka RHEL) or CentOS 5 and you get the following error:

gem install sqlite3-ruby
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3-ruby:
sqlite3-ruby requires Ruby version > 1.8.5


Don’t worry, you are not alone.  What has happened is that the SQLite3-ruby Gem has been updated past the point supported by the version of Ruby included with Red Hat and CentOS (this should apply to Oracle Linux as well but has not been tested by me.)  What we need to do is simply to specify the exact version of SQLite3 that we need.  So to install:

gem install sqlite3-ruby --version '= 1.2.4'

And now you should install without any problem.  This is a followup post to the original how-to on Installing ruby-sqlite3 on Red Hat or CentOS Linux which I posted last year.  The addition was necessary because of the change to the available gems and a complete lack of online resources mentioning this error.

September 20, 2009: Long Sunday of Work

It is Sunday and I am up very early today.  Lots to be done and I have a full work day today.  So I was down to the basement around seven this morning and got started with all that there was to do for the day.

Among other project today I managed to install a Windows 2003 server and a Windows 2008 server and SharePoint Portal Server 2007.  It was a big day for installs.

My day was spent primarily in the basement.  Not a lot of time to get away from work unfortunately.  It was after seven in the evening when I was finally able to stop working and spend the evening with Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.

We just spent the evening relaxing and watching some shows from our media server.  I used the laptop to work on trying to get a SharePoint site working.  It has been a while since I have worked with SharePoint and a lot has changed since the version that I used.  I have to relearn a lot of this stuff.

September 19, 2009: Saturday at Home

After a very long day of work yesterday, today is my day to just hang out at home with my family.  What is amazing is that I actually managed to make it through the day without having to work!  I can’t believe it.  It has been a long time since I managed to have a day at home with the family.

We have no plans for today.  Today was a day just to hang out with the family in the living room.  Liesl and I have really missed each other and today we were together non-stop all day.  It was great.  We played and snuggled.

Liesl is really growing.  She really is moving on to the toddler stage.  She is more dangerous but more fun too.  Very interactive.  She doesn’t really have words yet but she is very conversational.

It was a very relaxing day.  In the evening we decided to watch the “Ocean” movies, Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve.  We don’t own Oceans Thirteen but decided that the first two were pretty entertaining so we got the third installment ordered from Amazon on BluRay.  It was pretty cheap.  I also found Casino Royale for cheap so we are starting our James Bond collection as well.  They should be here on Tuesday.

Mounting and Unmounting CD and DVD Images in Xen

A simple, but often hard to figure out, task with virtualizing with Xen is learning how to mount and unmount, dynamically, CD and DVD image files, also known as ISOs.  This is actually quite simple but the commands are unintuitive.  The first step is to download the ISO file that you while to mount and to place it on the Dom0 filesystem.

The commands that we use are the “xm block-attach” and “xm block-detach” commands.  First we will attach a new ISO file to the CD or DVD drive of a virtualized Windows guest, DomU, on Xen:

xm block-attach 2 file:/tmp/myimage.iso hdc r

In this case we are attaching myimage.iso in Dom0’s /tmp directory to the hdc device of our DomU guest number two.  If you don’t know which guest number you want use the “xm list” command to get a list of all of the images running on your server.  The trailing “r” is for “read only”.  Use “w” if you want your block device to be writable.

Now to detach that same device we will use the following command:

xm block-detach 2 hdc

In this case we are detaching the hdc device’s ISO image from domain number two.