Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I was up late last night so my cell phone ringing woke me up at 10am. It was Mom. She wanted to know if I was still up for looking at houses/town homes/condos. I just woke up so I mumbled that 11 or 11:30 would work for me.

When Mom came over we headed out to the South Cobb Drive area. It was pretty disappointing to see most of the places with signs like “From the 450’s” or “From the 700’s” - a little out of my price range.

We drove around all over that area including the east-west connector and I quickly came to the conclusion that condos and town homes are only found near the highway. All of the new housing developments only had gigantic homes. Does everyone buying a house need six bedrooms?

We had lunch at a little Chinese place. I had the sesame chicken.

I need a real estate agent. First I need to figure out exactly what I can afford. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to figure out. I use MS Money religiously and track (to great detail) literally every cent I earn and spend. I fear that I’ll be forced to cut back on my 401(k) contributions which are currently maxed out right now. I took a look at exactly how much I’m putting away to that every month and it’s staggering.

I’ve been using ‘exifer‘ to rename my photos with a more meaningful name. Instead of something like ‘PIC5127.JPG’ it renames it to something like ‘20030131_182705.jpg’ which is a date and timestamp of when the photo was taken. A while back I read a great review about another program called ‘Downloader Pro‘ which does something similar but is more powerful. I think I’m going to switch.

I also updated Adobe Photoshop Album with the latest patch to version 2.01. They still did not fix a glaring bug with the photo orientation. Newer cameras embed the correct orientation in the image directly. Photoshop CS recognizes this and handles it correctly. Photoshop Album does not - not even with the latest patch that was released a couple of weeks ago. This is unacceptable. Adobe Photoshop Album sucks!

Before the super bowl started I decided to record it. I used TivoWebPlus to use the search module to look up the game and create a recording for it. I did a keyword search for ‘football’ and the TiVo rebooted! So much for my nice uptime.

It failed with the following error:

Filesystem assert: err || cb == 0 at fsactive.C line 470 in TwStatus FsActive::MappedRead(FsRunList*, long unsigned int, void*, long unsigned int)
Filesystem flagged as inconsistent!
Tmk Assertion Failure: err || cb == 0
TwStatus FsActive::MappedRead(FsRunList*, long unsigned int, void*, long unsigned int), line 470 (fsactive.C)
Tmk Fatal Error: Thread tivosh <10795> died due to signal -2
cea4c0 cfd604 cfcd00 cd270c bc7adc bc61e0 bc27e4 c23268 bfa548 c58428 c23268 bfa548 bc46d0 bc27e4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c00020 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 bfa1a0 bfcbf8 c43cc4 c69330 c6c9fc c4e948 c4ee94 c21f5c bf94a8 c23268 bfa548 c451d0 c489fc bc0a40 400778 d79090

But when it rebooted, I realized I had a much lager problem. I got the dreaded ‘Green Screen of Death’. It advised me to leave the tivo plugged in and connect a phone line while it tries to correct itself. Since I can’t connect a phone line to it, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

After powering down the TiVo, I opened it up, extracted the HD, and hooked it into my linux box.

I mounted the partition and started disabling some of the hacks I installed. My initial theory was that I installed a hack that it didn’t like. This didn’t fix the problem. Some searching on the internet revealed that the green screen of death is usually the result of a corrupted MFS filesystem and the best thing to do is to let it correct itself (you don’t need to let it dial out). This idea was solidified when I looked at the kernel log file and saw that it was attempting to do a filesystem fix during the green screen.

Because I’m impatient, I modified the etc/rc.d/rc.sysint file to load up the telnet server and network drivers before the green screen. I wanted to log in and watch while it fixed itself.

When I powered it back up, I was able to log in and look around. Sure enough it took about fifteen minutes for filesystem fix and sanity checks to complete. Once that was done, everything was fine.