Category: books

As I was getting ready for school today, the phone rang. Not mom, checking to see that we all got out of bed, but the father of a classmate of my son and heir. He needed to know if we could collect his young man after school until their caregiver could take over: the boy’s mother had some non-routine medical situation that needed dealing with.

So we took that on, much to my amusement (the overheard conversations were priceless) and I realized one of the reasons I like my situation, non-remunerative as it is. People can ask me for help and I can give it. I don’t have to say I have other commitments. If I need to read with someone who needs some extra time, I can do that. If I need to back up someone for child care, odds are good that I’m available.

I’ve say through plenty of meetings, handled late-night pages, talked users through tech support issues. This isn’t necessarily more fun, intrinsically, but it feels more valuable.

Weekly Review (Harpers.org):

Scientists determined that sunlight helps fight cancer, [The Australian] that barbecue causes it, [SFGate.com (1)] that overweight people have a stronger biological need to sit than others do, [Rocklin And Roseville Today] and that rats are responsible beer drinkers [University of Florida News] (1).

Get a Mac!:

It is indeed the best way to work if you have an operating system with nine fives of reliability. For those of us whose operating systems have five nines of reliability, however…

bradford% uptime
22:13 up 14 days, 10:2

delong% uptime
22:14 up 4 days, 8:54

white:~ paul$ uptime
5:24 up 12 days, 16:32, 3 users, load averages: 0.61 0.53 0.44
red% uptime
5:26AM up 4 days, 8:38, 0 users, load averages: 0.28, 0.30, 0.27
pink% uptime
5:32 up 1 day, 13:18, 3 users, load averages: 0.16 0.04 0.01

The MSFT charm offensive, spearheaded by Scoble, sometimes yields unexpected insights: he shuts down his Tablet PC every night (aren’t they supposed to be more accessible and easier to work with than desktops?) because that’s the way he’s been using PCs for 20 years. Um, isn’t the idea of these that they are “instant on” with the capacity to suspend and resume as the army of knowledge workers toting them move through their day? So you can’t actually have it on for a full day and leave unfinished work on it.

Microsoft has publicly acknowledged the Tablet PC bug (66) that eats up the computer’s memory until the machine crashes. The out of control memory leak remains unchecked while Redmond’s Red Adairs grapple to put a lid on the blow-out. But there’s no word yet of exactly when a fix will be issued.

“Progress is being made and there’ll be an update soon,” a spokesman told us. “For now, we advise users to reboot the machine on a daily basis,” he added.

{blows against the empire, the value of X}

I started playing with cacti (take a look here), web-based RRDtool-driven system graphing tool, and find it pretty interesting. I am hoping there are ways to add additional datapoints onto it (I passed along the script I use to drive rrdtool — the thing that makes these graphs — in case it’s at all useable.

I especially like the graph colors for CPU usage: looks like the box is on fire 😉

There are some built-in scripts to support data collection on some known devices or anything that runs UCD/net-snmp: OS X and FreeBSD work just fine with it for basic stuff like network monitoring and load.

EFF: Cooking with EFF: KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV for DTV Liberation:

Welcome to the EFF guide to assembling your own personal video recorder (PVR) with KnoppMyth r5a5 and pcHDTV. In our experience, creating your own HDTV PVR with free/open source software is a fun and rewarding experience. In the United States, some of the hardware required may only be lawfully available until July 1, 2005, so there’s a substantial incentive for those who are interested to start promptly.

At the very least, I’ll get the tuner card that doesn’t grok the Broadcast Flag before they disappear.

OSXFAQ – Technical News and Support for Mac OS X:

Ever wanted to gain access to the UNIX command line without having to login into your user account? Sure you could start single user mode at startup, however, you are limited to what commands you can do. Luckily, Mac OS X makes it easy for you to login into the UNIX command line directly from the Login Window.

This was in earlier releases by default: you could log in as “>console” and do commandline stuff without the UI. I can’t recall if you needed to authenticate to run restricted commands and haven’t tested it in X.3.

But I will add this just in case I ever need it.

If you have systems with mismatched capabilities (olde skoole iMacs or laptops with constrained disk speeds/bus bandwidth/RAM) you can farm out the heavy lifting to perhaps one capable machine (in my case as smokin’ hot Blue & White with a G4 upgrade — a sizzling 550 MHz) and have the port mechanism generate pkgs (.dmg, rpm, pkg and mpkg formats are all supported).

I could see this as useful in a lab or small office setup. I plan to make some use of it here.

I followed these excellent docs for setting up automounting in OS X. This was useful for a couple of reasons:

• backups using Apple’s Backup utility
• mounting source code repositories that I don’t need to keep on my ickle 30 Gb drive

So backups work just fine: at 9:30 AM, Backup kicks off, mounts the drive, and updates the backup repository.
But updating my darwinports-installed binaries has been failing: I would get screens full of this.

---> Extracting openssl
Error: Target com.apple.extract returned: shell command "cd �/mnt/red/darwinports/dports/devel/openssl/work" && gzip -dc /opt/local/var/db/dports/distfiles/openssl/openssl-0.9.7e.tar.gz | tar -xf -� returned error 2
Command output: tar: openssl-0.9.7e/util/pl/ultrix.pl: Cannot change ownership to uid 0, gid 0: (null)
tar: openssl-0.9.7e/util/pl/unix.pl: Cannot change ownership to uid 0, gid 0: (null)

Changing uid and gid ownership with chmod(1) didn’t do anything. Then I remembered something from the stub /etc/exports file, something about mapping the root user’s UID . . . .

Sure enough, adding -maproot=0 fixed it.

/opt -maproot=0 -alldirs -network 192.168.2.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

Now all seems well.
Now to bounce the NFS server:

On the server (kill the NFS daemon, restart mountd, and restartd the NFS daemon):

killall -TERM nfsd
killall -hup mountd
nfsd -u -t -n 4

Now playing: Verbum Bonum Et Suave by Anonymous 4 from the album “La Bele Marieâ€? | Get it

CNN.com – Ice storm shuts down Georgia roads – Jan 29, 2005:

Ice was a quarter-inch thick on downtown Atlanta streets as a storm system spread snow, freezing rain and sleet from the Midwest into Georgia and the Carolinas.

That’s CNN Center in the background, where I worked for the last 5 years we lived in the Empire State of the South.

It was about 5 years ago I visited Seattle for a job interview: upon my return, we had an ice storm so severe we lost power for 5 days, making our house unlivable. We spent that time at my sister-in-law’s townhouse — she has since moved here as well — and factored these regular occurrences into our decision.

Now playing: Ave Maria Gracia Plena by Anonymous 4 from the album “La Bele Marie�? | Get it

At my wee job — a few hours a week, just enough to deter me from a life of crime but not enough to make me rich — I was chatting with their one man CTO/IT department (a three person shop, so all of that fits on one plate) about RSI and carpal tunnel. We covered ergonomic keyboards, chording keyboard, foot pedals, Qwerty/Sholes vs Dvorak, etc. We mentioned speech recognition, and he thought it was a bad idea for programmers, but I argued, what if you could use some macros to get around the awkward bits (opening and closing parens, brackets, etc.).
You could issue instructions like
open block
if var interval is less than one set var interval equal to one
and get
{

if ($interval < 1) { $interval = 1;)

It seems dangerously close to “do what I mean, not what I say.â€?

from fortune(6):

When someone says “I want a programming language in
which I need only say what I wish done,� give him a lollipop.