Linux: When massive load on the disk makes the system freeze

The bad news are that Linux has been behaving pretty badly when the disk is under heavy load. The good news are that all you need is a kernel upgrade. First, let’s run a simple experiment: $ dd if=/dev/zero of=junkfile bs=1k count=20M Don’t expect anything dramatic to happen right away. It takes half a minute [...]

Video encoding. Some useful command lines

This is just a few command lines I use every now and then. Just so I have them when I need them. Convert a lot of Flash Video files to DIVX, audio rate 128 kb/sec mp3: for i in *.flv ; do ffmpeg -i “$i” -ab 128k -b 1500k -vcodec mpeg4 -vtag DIVX “${i%.*}.avi” ; [...]

Making an encrypted DVD (lazy man’s version)

This is how to make an encrypted DVD, which is automatically mounted by Fedora 12 (and others, I suppose) when the DVD is inserted (prompting for the passphrase, of course). The truth is that I don’t use this automatic feature, because only seeing the suggestion to save my passphrase as an option makes me prefer [...]

Fedora 12, 64 bit: Small fixes

Many posts in this blog are just things I wanted written down in case I needed them again. This post is about very small things that don’t deserve a post of their own. To be constantly updated. Upload to web with Picasa 2.7 Didn’t work at first. Couldn’t sign in. Try later. Right. The fix, [...]

When TI’s CDCE62002 fails to lock

I really banged my head on this one: I was sure I had set up all registers correctly, and still I got complete garbage at the output. Or, as some investigation showed, everything worked OK, only the PLL didn’t seem to do anything: The VCO was stuck at its lowest possible frequency (which depended on [...]