After seeing the work Dave had done on Reynard City (site down at present, though I understand it's coming back at some point, honest) it got me thinking. I've been reading a handful of webcomics on an almost daily basis for several years, but never actually paid anything for them. And I probably should. So I've finally thrown some money at Userfriendly and am considering buying some Sinfest merchandise. Jerkcity don't seem to have a donation or merchandise option and to be honest I'm a bit scared about what they'd spend the money on. :)

I've done a minor update and released a newer version of my usblauncher code for the USB missile launcher. You can grab it as usblauncher-0.0.2.tar.gz - it just adds some code to tell the kernel to release the device from the usbhid driver, meaning those with USB keyboard/mice can become armed and dangerous without loss of input functionality.

I've compiled my own kernels for as long as I can remember. I do so for almost any box I use, rather than running distro supplied kernels. I think this dates back to to the days when that was just what you did, but it also ties in with the fact I often want to run the latest and greatest (eg for laptop device hardware support).

One of the things I've always avoided is the initrd. I've never really seen the point; I compile my root device driver into the kernel and thus it all works. I've seen some suggestions that the in kernel RAID array detection code isn't really being maintained and that in the future it'll require userland tools to configure a RAID array, so I've been a bit worried that I'll eventually have to learn about initrds.

In fact, that day came this weekend. My large IDE disk is dying and I decided I needed something to replace it so I could have a proper poke. So I bought a pair of SATA disks and found a cheap Highpoint RocketRaid 1520 (don't buy one of these; I mistakenly thought they were better than the good old SI 3112, but they're not. And if anyone knows of a cheap (sub £30) SATA-II PCI card then let me know. I don't think they exist.)

The RocketRaid is basically just a HPT372A (hpt366 driver in Linux) with software RAID on top. Previously I've ignored such things and just used the normal Linux RAID support, but I thought I'd give this a try with the aid of dmraid. This can read several different ATARAID formats and uses device-mapper to map the drives appropriately to keep Linux happy.

So, I install dmraid and it happily finds the RAID array and configures it all up (though I end up with the wonderfully named /dev/mapper/hpt37x_dabhghbgeg which is a bit unwiedly). All good. Except, of course, that I have to run some userland to get the RAID array up, which means I need an initrd to sort it all out if I want / on it. And I do.

These days I want initramfs rather than initrd (and I needed to remember to set CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD=y in my kernel config as it's needed for initramfs or an initrd). I found the initramfs-tools package and installed it, then had a poke around for info on getting dmraid working with it. Debian bug #367661 discusses such things and I've attached the patch I used from Ubuntu to the bug report.

Then I did, as root, update-initramfs -k 2.6.17.6 -c -v and it magically created a /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17.6. Passed that as the initrd in grub and it all magically works; dmraid fires up from the initramfs, the kernel gets to mount the RAID partition as / (and the other partitions as swap and lvm) and it's all good.

Except the fact one of the disks seems to have been damaged in transit and eBuyer are being slow about issuing an RMA number. Oh, and the fact the RocketRaid sucks and only seems to get 15MB/s or so. Meh. The initramfs stuff is all happy though, and a lot easier than I expected.

Everyone in or near Norwich should ensure they're at The Murderers this Wednesday (19th July) from 8pm for Dave's Reynard City launch party. Yes.

I need a new TV. I've have my current one for 6 years now and it was secondhand when I bought it. Plus it gets this little green patch now and then (which it's been doing for a couple of years). Not hugely annoying, but everything helps in justifying a new one.

My current TV is a normal 25" 4:3 set. I've worked out that if I go widescreen I need a 31" set to get the same height, which seems perfectly doable. The tricky bit comes in that I'd like HD, as hopefully the new TV will last me at least as long as the old one has. HD's only recently been launched in the UK - Sky brought out their HD service just in time for the World Cup (though I understand lots of people who'd pre-ordered didn't receive their upgrades in time). Telewest also have a recent HD service. Of course NTL, who I have, don't yet (despite them having merged with Telewest) and the Freeview DVB-T trials are only in Central London. Anyway, I won't have HD signal for a while, but I want to be ready when for when I do (and I'll be hooking a media PC up to the screen anyway, so will be able to take advantage of it via that method).

Sky appear to have decided on using 2 HD formats; 720i (1280x720, progressive) and 1080i (1920x1080, interlaced). So having support for those would be nice. In addition I'd like 1080p (1920x1080, progressive), for things like the media box and in case content becomes available in that format (HD-DVD/BluRay?). This doesn't seem like a huge request. Lots of TVs in the UK are marketed as HD Ready. What does that mean?

Essentially it specifies that the minimum native resolution of the screen is 720 lines and that there is a digital (DVI or HDMI) input that can support 720p and 1080i input and copy protection (HDCP). There is no minimum width; the set is allowed to scale the image to fit whatever it has. I've seen HD Ready sets that have a 1024x1080i native resolution - not wide enough for a native 720p image let alone 1080i. However most HD Ready sets seem to do 1366x768 as the native res, so fine for 720p but not 1080i/p. sigh

I managed to find a TV from Philips, the 37PF9830/10, which does native 1920x1080p. Amazon even sell it, though for an eye watering £2,248.28. What does this get you? Integrated Freeview decoder? No. MPEG2/4 playing of movies from flash media? No, just image viewing. A nice big monitor for your computer? No, Philips' website only lists 1024x768 as the max computer res and I've seen reports in forums that 1366x768 is possible, but no higher. There's a 42PF9830/10 (42") that adds movie playing and ethernet, which sounds good but adds who knows how much to the price (I couldn't easily find a UK price). Plus it's probably too large for me even if it was affordable.

My naive hope is that with the Sky push lots of people will have got sorted for the World Cup, or will go HD for Christmas. Meaning that come the new year I might have a better available choice of proper HDTVs and the pricing might be sane. I can dream, right?