Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:38:00 GMT
Last week I gave a talk on the R statistics
system and Perl for the Pittsburgh Perl
Mongers. The example that threaded through the
talk was something I have written about here before, extracting
useful information from the Internet Movie
Database.
If you’ve read my earlier blog
post
or have used the Grand Unified IMDB Movie Rating Decoder
Ring,
you might find the slides from the talk interesting. They provide
some more details about the R and Perl code used to analyze the IMDB data
and create the decoder ring.
You can get the slides here:
Posted in talks
Tags imdb, perl, R, statistics, talks
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Posted by Tom Moertel
Thu, 07 Jun 2007 04:43:00 GMT
Tonight I upgraded my main workstation from Fedora Core 6 to Fedora 7.
The result is an impressively polished working environment.
Everything is snappy and crisp. I love it. Kudos to the Fedora team!
Getting Fedora 7 to boot, however, took some doing.
After the upgrade, my workstation rebooted – and then hung. The
problem was that the raid456 module wasn’t getting loaded by the
kernel, and thus the kernel couldn’t detect my RAID-5 root filesystem,
and thus Halt.
Interestingly, the corresponding error in the kernel boot log
said that the module couldn’t be loaded because it existed:
error inserting /lib/raid456.ko: file exists
What’s the problem? The file is there, isn’t it? You just said so!
Booting into the install DVD’s rescue mode (very handy), I ran
mkinitrd by hand to rebuild the initial disk image that primes the
kernel with the modules it needs to boot the system. (An older
version of mkinitrd would sometimes forget to add the raid456
module to the image, so I figured maybe that’s what the cryptic error
message was hinting at.) I added the -v flag to the
command line to see what was really going on and caught this
interesting tidbit:
# kver=`uname -r`
# mkinitrd -v -f /boot/initrd-$kver.img $kver
...
Adding module ext3
Adding module xor
Adding module raid456
Adding module raid456 <<== FLAMIN' MONKEY EYES TIMES TWO!
Adding module scsi_mod
Adding module sd_mod
...
The raid456 module was, for some reason, being added to the image
twice. That redundancy, I reasoned, is what caused the cryptic error
message in the boot log. The module couldn’t be inserted because it
already existed! That theory approximately made sense, so I ran
with it.
Thus I had to edit the code for mkinitrd to prevent it from trying
to add the module twice. Then I used my adjusted version of the tool
to rebuild the initial disk image. Finally, I rebooted the system
and – with fingers crossed for luck – entered the glorious world of Fedora 7.
Almost. Neither the nv nor the nouveau driver for X.Org X11 detected the
true geometry of my Dell 2001FP monitor. So I had to slink back to
the non-free nVidia driver to get my full resolution back.
Those two issues aside, the whole process was delightful.
And, now that I’m using Fedora 7, it’s rockin’.
Just what my workstation needed.
Posted in linux
Tags fedora7, linux
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