MySql access denied for root - doh!

If you are not careful, you can easily demote your root account in mysql to have zero access - "Access denied for 'root@localhost' using password YES". Fear not, it is easily solved by restarting the mysql service with the option --skip-grant-tables. If you're running mysql on Windows, it's easiest to add the row

skip-grant-tables=1

to your my.ini and restart the service. Fix the access rights and don't forget to restart in normal mode or you'll have an all-users-all-access database.
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Haupauge mixed emotions

I was very happy with the ripping quality of my Hauppauge PVR USB 2 external TV card. I was not very happy with its instability however. Recordings regularly end up half-sized or zero bytes.

I returned it and was very happy to get a new one. I was not very happen when I plugged it in however, and not a single life-sign could be detected. Plugging it in to the computer only resulted in the message that a device has exceeded the allowed power consumption level (or something similar). A number of my friends and colleagues have had nothing but trouble with the Hauppauge cards, so think hard before you buy one.
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Good TV transcoding with mencoder

Since I got my PVR working (I'll backpost on this later) I suddenly have a need to transcode my TV captures from their 720x576 MPEG2 space-devouring format to something more manageable, like XVID. For this I use mencoder, the command-line encoding tool that comes with MPlayer.

Two examples:

1) Transcode to 352 pixels width, AR 4:3 square pixels (for computer screens) with deinterlacing:

>mencoder.exe -vf pp=lb,scale=352:264 -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 %1 -o %1-352.avi

-vf invokes video filters, in this case pp (= deinterlace), scale to a fixed with to get the right AR.
-oac chooses audio encoder (lame)
-ovc chooses video encoder (xvid)
-xvidencopts sends parameters to the xvid encoder, here to use a fixed quality setting (between 1 and 31, where 1 is the best)
-o specifies outfile name, here using original filename with a "-352.avi" suffix.

2) Transcode to 640 pixels width, AR 16:9 square pixels cropping black borders, deinterlace:

>mencoder.exe" -vf pp=lb,crop=768:400,scale=640:360 -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1150 %1 -o %1-640.avi

-vf: pp for deinterlace, crop to crop the source (remove borders top and bottom), scale to 640, 16:9
-oac-ovc like above
-xvidencopts: bitrate 1150 kbps (like a vcd) specified as quality instead of fixed_quant. It's a matter of taste which quality setting to use, but they can't be combined.

My only grief now is that my wardrobe server is a dual CPU and mencoder like most encoders is single-threaded and only uses one CPU. On the other hand this leaves the server fully usable during encoding.
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AnkhSVN problems with file:// paths

I spent a lot of time trying to solve a problem with AnkhSVN, the Visual Studio plug-in to the excellent version control system Subversion. It occured after I re-installed the OS on my computer. After endless stack traces like this:


I finally found this on the Ankh page on tigris.org:

"Note that the 0.5.5 release does not support working with local(file://) FSFS repositories. Use the latest 0.6 snapshot if you need this. Remote FSFS repositories work with any version of Ankh."

So I upgraded to 0.6 - but this didn't solve my problem either. I went on #ankhsvn to get help from the source. It seems I upgraded my versions of Subversion and Tortoise when I re-installed windows, getting an incompatible version of Berkley DB along with it. After great instructions from Ankh creators Arild and MacGyver I converted my repository to a file-based (FSFS) instead of a database-based (FSB) file system. I advice all to do the same (using the svadmin dump and svnadmin load commands).
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Long-time Gaim problem solved

I've been getting an error message (since like forever) each time I start Gaim on my Win XP computer at home: "The procedure entry point gaim_account_get_protocol could not be located in the dynamic link library gaim.dll". Gaim used to start just fine after that error, but since version 1.3.0 it wouldn't even start anymore. Thanks to some helpful pointers on SourceForge I've finally solved it. The culprit was an outdated plugin. To fix this error, remove bad plugins from the plugin directory of the Gaim program folder. In my case it was actually two bad plugins (tcl.dll and popup_notify.dll).
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How my Poweredge 1300 got its 2.6 kernel

I've had bad troubles getting my Dell Poweredge 1300 to boot the shiny new Debian 2.6 kernel I downloaded for it. It got stuck when trying to mount the IDE drive (the system SCSI worked fine). After a tip from a colleague i added "acpi=off noapic nolapic" to the kernel option in /boot/grub/menu.lst and now it boots fine! I'm really not going to miss acpi since it's an always on server anyway...
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.bashrc not running

I suddenly realized .bashrc wasn't running on my Debian machine. The solution was very easy - the part running .bashrc was comment out in .bash_profile. The hard part is understanding why this is the default...

More about this here: http://my.brandeis.edu/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001Y5
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