Offmessage

Thanks to the wonder of the API over at Last.fm I’ve been “running the numbers” (as it were) on my listening for 2010. It can be summarised as follows:

• January: The xx and various works by Erlend Øye. Clearly coming down from a heavy Christmas
• February: New Yeasayer! I am new again!
• March: Fang Island, you say? Dramatic! Exciting! Loud! Clang!
• April: Dangermouse is back. Broken Bells is possibly his best collaboration yet. And that whiny git from The Shins isn’t whiny anymore
• May: Dexys Midnight Runners made a third album? And it’s really good? Blimey!
• June: Kevin Rowland wasn’t weird enough. I need weirder. Ahhhh. CocoRosie – there you are
• July: New Wolf Parade! I am new again!
• August: New Arcade Fire! I am new again!
• September: Wolf Parade! Arcade Fire! (still going)
• October: Calm down. Don’t get overexcited. Ooh. Twin Shadow, that’ll do nicely
• November: WHY HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF SUFJAN STEVENS BEFORE?!?!
• December: No. Seriously. Why? He’s been around for years. His back catalogue is massive

And my best albums of the year?

1. Expo ’86
2. ODD BLOOD
3. Fever

Whether I like it or not I have a need for permanently running machine. I bought a ReadyNAS Duo a while back which does almost everything I need, but it’s so underpowered that it can’t handle some pretty simple tasks (like rsync over SSH, for example). That, and you have to get up to all sorts of jiggery pokery to be able to install any additional software. This means that I’ve always ended up with an ancient desktop in the cupboard under the stairs, however hard I try to do without.

The last one of these died recently, and I didn’t have another to replace it. This meant that I had the opportunity to look for something more suited to the job at hand; quiet, low power, and able to cope in a dusty, underventilated and sometimes hot environment (under the stairs).

By a strange stroke of luck an article about “wall warts” appeared in my Google Reader stream at just the right time, and the idea of a tiny computer that consumes only 5W for under £100 was just too much for me to ignore.

I bought the base SheevaPlug from New IT, and it turned up the other day. Obviously the first thing I did was to try and reinstall it. The rest of this post describes how I got Debian and SqueezeCenter running from an SD card on my SheevaPlug, mounting all of its content from my ReadyNAS. There was a lot of trial and error, but the following process worked for me repeatably (once I’d found it…)

Before you start:

• Get a minimum of a 4GB SD card, the highest class (speed) you can find/afford.
• Make sure you have an ethernet connection available for the Plug, as the installer will download Debian from the internet. If you want to do this a lot (I ended up with about 7 attempts before being happy with the results) you might want to consider setting up Squid or similar on another machine to proxy your many downloads of the Debian distro.
• Have a machine capable of running a serial terminal to work on. I used my Ubuntu laptop, with cu (sudo apt-get install cu). Other methods are available (Linux, Windows, Mac).

Before you power anything on connect the Plug to the network and connect the USB serial cable to the Plug and your laptop. Get a terminal open and run:

cu -s 115200 -l /dev/ttyUSB0

You should get ‘Line busy’ or similar. Turn on the Plug and then keep trying the above line to connect. Pretty soon (10 seconds?) you should get a prompt that looks like:

Marvell>>

I followed the extremely good Installing Debian on the Marvell SheevaPlug with some important alterations. Specifically:

• The kernel that currently comes with Squeeze does not work on the current version of the SheevaPlug (at least, it kept failing from me and then I found this article about installing Debian on the GuruPlug that suggested an alternative that worked). Instead of downloading the uInitrd and uImage files from the instruction page, I downloaded them from the Debian daily snapshots. (NB: Unfortunately I have no idea if this is actually important, unfortunately, as changed more than one thing before the successful install. It worked though.)
• If you bought a pre-installed Plug from New IT then you shouldn’t need to change any environment variables before the first boot, so no need to run the first set of setenv commands.
• I installed Sid (Debian unstable) rather than Squeeze, and so had to force my debconf priority to low before starting the install.

So. Here are those instructions in full:

Format your SD card. If it’s a brand new card (or the first time you’ve tried) you won’t need to this but, due to a number of failed installations, I ended up having to do this quite a lot. I’m assuming you’ve got a Linux machine here, I’m afraid.  I ended up with my 4GB card only showing up as 200-odd MB under Windows a couple of times and couldn’t for the life of me work out how to format it back to its original size. So, assuming you have Linux plug the card in. Modern installations will automount the card in /media. Unmount it (sudo umount /media/XXXX-XXXX) and then run sudo fdisk -l to identify the name of the device (for me it was /dev/sdb). Then run parted, delete all the partitions, and reformat it. An example is shown below:

andy@ubuntu$ sudo parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 1.8.8.1.159-1e0e
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Model: xxxx
Disk /dev/sdb: 16GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number  Start   End    Size    Type      File system     Flags
 1      32.3kB  15GB   123GB   primary   ext3            boot
 2      15GB    16GB   1GB     extended
 5      15GB    16GB   1GB     logical   linux-swap(v1)

(parted) rm 1
(parted) rm 2
(parted) rm 5
(parted) mkpartfs primary fat32 1s 16GB

Remount the card (sudo mount -t auto /dev/sdb1 /mnt) and download the nightly snapshot boot images (uInitrd and uImage) to the root of the card. Unmount the card (sudo umount /mnt), and stick it in the SheevaPlug.

Now we’re ready to start.

If you still have the Plug turned on and connected to a terminal you can type reset to reboot the device. If not, turn it on and connect with cu as described above. You need to catch it when it says “Press any key to interrupt autoboot” so that you get the Marvell>> prompt.

Next you need to start up the SD card subsystem, and load the disk images that you’ve downloaded:

Marvell>> mmcinit
Marvell>> fatload mmc 0:1 0x01100000 uInitrd
Marvell>> fatload mmc 0:1 0x00800000 uImage
Marvell>> setenv bootargs console=ttyS0,115200n8 base-installer/initramfs-tools/driver-policy=most
Marvell>> bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000

This should fire up the Debian installer.

In my case this did not fire up the Debian installer the first few times. Instead I kept getting the message “Bad magic number”. Lots of googling didn’t really help. In the end I found that reformatting the SD card and redownloading the uInitrd and uImage files to it worked, but it took me a while to get to this point.

Once you’ve got the Debian installer running you need to set debconf to low to ensure you can get the option to install Sid rather than Squeeze. To do this press escape before you answer any questions from the installer, and choose ‘Select debconf priority’. From the resulting menu choose ‘low’. Debconf controls how many questions you get asked as part of the installation. If you set it to critical or high you don’t get asked many questions, but you lose some control. If you set it to low you get asked loads of questions. In this case, we need low so that we can choose the version of Debian to install.

Now choose the first option from the installer menu (‘Choose language’) and follow the instructions on screen. The installer chooses sensible defaults the entire way through, including disk partitioning, so just let it do what it recommends. When you get to choose the mirror to download from choose one that allows you to choose Sid, and select it. Bytemark (a lovely company based here in York) provide all options, so I chose their mirror. Some mirrors do not offer all versions of Debian, so you might have to keep choosing until you find one that does.

At this point you’ll need to wait. And wait. A long time. The installer will ask you a couple more questions, including right at the end which software you want to install (I didn’t choose anything other than the defaults, but make sure you have open-ssh selected). It’s pretty much plain sailing from here.

Once it’s finally finished enjoy your shiney new Debian for a moment, and then restart it (sudo shutdown -r now) so that you can make your installation the default boot.

As it restarts catch it at the “Press any key to interrupt auto boot” again so that you’re back at the Marvell>> prompt. Then type the following commands:

Marvell>> setenv bootargs_console console=ttyS0,115200
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd_mmc 'mmcinit; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x01100000 /uInitrd; ext2load mmc 0:1 0x00800000 /uImage'
Marvell>> setenv bootcmd 'setenv bootargs $(bootargs_console); run bootcmd_mmc; bootm 0x00800000 0x01100000'
Marvell>> saveenv

You should now be able to reboot by typing reset and leave it to boot. It should boot into your debian installation.

If it doesn’t you have two options. Retry this entire blog post from scratch, or start reading around the subject. These two links are the two that got me up and running…

• Debian installer for SheevaPlug
• installing debian on the guruplug server plus

…and it’s worth also looking at the PlugComputer wiki.

Assuming it is working for you it’s pretty simple to get SqueezeCenter installed.

As root (or using sudo if that’s the option you chose during the installation) you need to get MySQL installed:

apt-get install mysql-server-5.1

Then you’ll need to get the SqueezeCenter itself installed. Check the latest version of SqueezeCenter by have a look at the download index. Latest for me was 7.5.1. So, again as root (don’t worry about “Errors were encountered messages”):

debian:~# cd /tmp
debian:~# wget http://downloads.slimdevices.com/SqueezeboxServer_v7.5.1/squeezeboxserver_7.5.1_all.deb
debian:~# dpkg -i squeezeboxserver_7.5.1_all.deb
debian:~# apt-get --yes install -f

There are (IMHO too detailed) instructions at http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/SqueezePlug. I ignored much of what was on that page, except for the Install SqueezeCenter section. It’s worth looking at some of the pages that page refers to though, particularly if you’re keen to improve the MySQL performance and increase the life of the SD.

Posted without comment, except a painful sigh of recognition and wistful look to the past. Penny Arcade: Dotage.

There is some muttering that this awesome dancing video is a viral ad of some sort, but to be honest, if it is, who cares? Just awesome. More videos from the team behind it here: http://www.youtube.com/user/YAKfilms

For reasons best left undisclosed Isotoma rapidly descended into swapping Big Train sketches this afternoon.  Ladies and Gentlemen – Isotoma’s top 9:

A long hiatus, I know, and this is just a repost from the b3ta newsletter but I just had to share it

Fantastic video for Groove Armada’s latest single.

Stephen Hawking is telling us to be afraid, to be very afraid.  In some sort of Mars Attacks/Independence Day nightmarish vision of the future he suggests:

“If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans”

Thanks for that, Stevey-boy.  I mean clearly, if they have the technology to get to us before we have the technology to get to them, it’s likely that we’ll be cousin Cletus to their Eustace Tilley, but there’s no need to get all doom and gloom about it.  Let’s not just ignore the possibility that Star Trek might be how it turns out. Please?

And anyway, his dire warning does rather ignore the obvious question… “Where the hell is everybody, anyway?”

In 1950 the physicist Enrico Fermi asked that same question in what’s become known as Fermi’s Paradox.  Essentially he asked “If there are so many potentially habitable planets, signs of extra terrestrial life should be common.  So.  Where are they all?”

In 1961 Frank Drake prepared an equation that attempted to address this question by trying to estimate how many alien civilisations are out there, able to communicate with us, at any one time.  Put most simply he took the number of stars in the Milky Way and slowly whittled it down by the fraction that had planets, the fraction of those that had planets that could potentially support life, the fraction of those that actually develop life, the fraction of those that develop intelligent life, and finally the fraction of those intelligent lifeforms that develop technology that we could identify.

The final parameter in the equation (called L) is the length of time such civilisations survive to release detectable signals into space.  Tying all of these factors together gives you an estimate of the number of civilisations that we could/should be hearing from, right now.

Unfortunately using Drake’s equation the only way to satisfactorily answer (for some value of satisfactory) Fermi’s Paradox is to make L painfully short.

In the eighties, particularly among the sandal wearing CND types, it was popular to assume that L was short because intelligent life was inherently self-destructive.  For them this seemed obvious because  human life on earth had only been producing identifiable electro-magnetic radiation for 100 years, yet within the first 50 years of those 100 we had invented and detonated the atomic bomb.  Not for us the utopia of vast, peaceful, galactic federations, but instead a miserable existence that went from soul crushing feudal poverty to mutually assured destruction in a few short centuries.

In 1996 a guy by the name of Robin Hanson formalised the approach to Fermi’s Paradox in logic as “The Great Filter“.  In it he reached the conclusion that if indeed it is easy to evolve to the current state of human intelligence then our future must be, by logical extension, extremely bleak.

Posing this as a logic problem and then reaching that sort of conclusion has lead many people to attempt to provide a rationalisation.  Now that the fear of nuclear holocaust has all but passed we find ourselves looking at other societal ills to explain the inherent shortness of L; cf. “Why We Haven’t Met Any Aliens” from 2006, blaming video games (I can’t help thinking if the author of that particular piece had been from the 18th Century he would have blamed it on the effects of Gin).

Frankly it’s all a bit bloody miserable.

To which I say sod formal logic.  I like to think that they are out there, that they are on their way, and that when they get here they’ll be like Jeff Goldblum and Jim Carrey in Earth Girls Are Easy. Furry, horny and dumb as a box of rocks.

But that’s just my view.

Damn that digital switch over

Context, for them what needs it.

Oh look! Two rather shocking “viral” videos, both out of Yorkshire… I’m guessing they’re not in fact related, but my word, they’re both shit and weirdly similar:

Above, Ethel and Vera star in “A New Cloud”

Above, Edna and Mary star in “‘Ow much?”