The Mandelbear's Musings

10:20 pm - ...and Misty_Morning_Dew

Yes, I definitely seem to have fallen into a modern-day version of The Programmer and the Elves...

...still a lowly programmer -- and is now stuck for the foreseeable future maintaining this horrid crock of a Fortran program, written by elves! After all, nobody else can understand how it works. It has variables named Shamrock and Rainbow and Misty_Morning_Dew, and some of the most ferocious assembly language subroutines to be found outside the jungles of Borneo.

And the moral of the story is: Never do the impossible. People will expect you to do it forever after.

Well, maybe not quite that bad. But it's a horrid crock of a form and workflow system built on top of a beta version of Java that are both 10 years out of date... Somebody upgraded Java, and it broke.

So I commented out the one place where it was using the old, incompatible KeyStore class, and it's back to crashing a lot instead of every damned time. That's an improvement. Of course, now it's only pretending to create and verify DSA signatures. But since you can't fill in a form without logging in to the server with your Unix password, there was never any real reason for the digital signatures in the first place.

This still leaves the uncomfortable question of why a horrid crock of a research experiment written by two people a full decade ago is still better for our lab's workflow than anything we've been able to turn up in the open source world. Suggestions?

Or is there still some research left in that topic? Hmm.

07:05 pm - Puttering.

Since I've been at home all day, it seemed reasonable to do a little puttering. So far, I've:

1. Handed Colleen her new EeePC. It does everything she wants except play live365, the screen is significantly larger, and it has a multi-touch trackpad. Win. Happy (slightly belated) Mother's Day, Love!
2. Reconfigured the old EeePC (borrowed from work) with something resembling my own browser bookmarks and preferences. Verified that Pidgin works, though the keyboard is way too small for comfortable IMing.
3. Brought the other Fry's Windows box (Seymore) down from the attic, got it running, (the RAM had been cannibalized) and upgraded it from DeMuDi to Etch. Still don't know what was wrong -- even Windows seems to be working. This makes the third (and last) box I've upgraded this way; it's a little tricky but manageable.

(Of course, now that the Wolfling is "borrowing" the monitor that used to be in the office, I don't really have any place to put either of the two Fry's boxen.)

Still have a noticable fever -- Colleen was right to keep me home. Took a nap instead of a walk; slept at most a couple of minutes, but even lying down and being quiet for half an hour was a big help.

OK, I haven't been very productive, but at least the day hasn't been a total bust.

Current Mood: productive

09:28 pm - @!#$#% hopeless !$@!#$%

Been fighting all day with the new EeePC 900 trying to make the bloody thing play streams from live365, which is the only thing Colleen listens to. No joy. Mplayer and the corresponding Firefox plugin play MP3's just fine; neither smplayer nor amarok will play live365. They work fine on the older one she's been using. Suggestions? (Ubuntu will be considered.)

Made the call to my aunt; she sounded resigned, tired, sad. Not surprising. Making the call was incredibly difficult. Not surprising; I don't like making calls even when they're happy ones.

I'm feeling tired and ill. Dinner didn't help much. Have a headache. Brain feels like it's made of mush. Will take my drugs and get some hugs. They won't help much, but any improvement will be welcome.

It was a pretty good day at work, but that didn't help much either.

Damned time machine. Rewind button is stuck.

11:42 pm - A very mixed day / Uncle Jack

It's been a very mixed day. On the the one hand, I scored one of the last three Linux EeePC 900's at Central Computing, to give to Colleen as a slightly belated Mother's Day present. The stream player is buggy, which caused me quite a bit of frustration setting the thing up, but presumably that will get fixed soon.

On the other hand, just as Kat and I were leaving for Joyce's house my Mom called with the news that my uncle Jack, the older of her two brothers, died suddenly of a heart attack.

On the gripping hand, we had a good rehearsal for our concert slot at Baycon.

Colleen and I are sharing a drink in Jack's memory right now.

I never had a favorite among my three uncles: I always liked them about equally. Jack worked his entire career at NIH, doing research on fallout-induced thyroid cancer. He died at work. He'd been feeling ill for a while, and had a cardiology appointment scheduled for tomorrow.

Sorry, folks; I'm at something of a loss for words right now.

In a bar he rarely visits, an aging hacker sips the last of a glass of Glenlivet, raises it, and toasts "To Uncle Jack!" before flinging the glass into the fireplace.

05:29 pm - Happy hacking

The main bit of hackery for the day was diagnosing Tatooine, an aging Fry's windows box (long since dual booted with Debian) that started out in the office, and most recently was used in the bedroom as Colleen's machine. Replacing Seymore, a slightly older Fry's box.

Tatooine had developed the bad habit of rebooting in the middle of the Windows boot sequence. We retired it when it developed the even worse habit of shutting off in the middle of the Linux boot sequence.

This morning I took advantage of a moderately new Vantec power supply I had sitting around, and gave it a try. Linux worked, of course. Windows still reboots -- something must have become corrupt. (OK, Microsoft has been corrupt for years. But I digress.) I'll have to see if the Windows partition is readable at all; I may be able to run the Windows games via Wine.

I also have to see whether I can make Seymore run now. If I remember correctly, a new power supply didn't help it, but it's worth a try. If not, I can always cannibalize it.

08:27 pm - OK, well, that took longer than I'd planned...

Upgraded my ancient (IBM i series) laptop from DeMuDi (Debian Sarge-based) to Etch. Involved an hour or two resolving dependencies, and then another couple of hours re-hacking my config files to make them tiny-screen-friendly. I've been using wide screens both at home and at work for a while; it takes a bit of squeezing to fit things back onto 800x600. But I remembered how I'd done it, back when that was a big screen...

There are still a couple of bugs, but they're manageable.

08:43 am - That's better

Finally found the time this morning to reboot Nova, the main household fileserver -- it needed doing now because I'd just upgraded the kernel yesterday. While it was down, I moved it onto the APC SmartUPS 420 that had been sitting around since I bought the 1300 for the bedroom, and swapped cables accordingly. This gets me from an uptime of 30 minutes for the rack, to 53 minutes for Nova and 70 minutes for everything else, including the routers and switches. This makes me a happy geek.

08:17 pm - ...but not very productive

This past weekend was a heck of a lot of fun, but not much actual work got done around the house. Worth it.

I did, however, get to a minor bit of system administration that's been in my queue for a while: I took down my office workstation (Harmony), put it on the newer of the two BackUPS Pro 600's (the old one, which I rescued from work, doesn't provide as much information over the serial line), and moved the mirror drive from an external case to an internal tray.

There are still some oddities on that machine -- it really needs a new motherboard and CPU. It's pretty far down on the queue, though.

I also uploaded artbeco's wedding pictures; it's up to the Wolfling to wrap something useful around those. Took several hours; our upload speed sucks. Fortunately there were plenty of other things to do.

05:25 pm - Death of security industry predicted...

... encrypted PDFs at 11.

Bruce Schneier's Security Matters: Prediction -- RSA Conference Will Shrink Like a Punctured Balloon

For a while now I have predicted the death of the security industry. Not the death of information security as a vital requirement, of course, but the death of the end-user security industry that gathers at the RSA Conference. When something becomes infrastructure -- power, water, cleaning service, tax preparation -- customers care less about details and more about results. Technological innovations become something the infrastructure providers pay attention to, and they package it for their customers.

No one wants to buy security. They want to buy something truly useful -- database management systems, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, a company-wide network -- and they want it to be secure. They don't want to have to become IT security experts. They don't want to have to go to the RSA Conference. This is the future of IT security.

You can see it in the large IT outsourcing contracts that companies are signing -- not security outsourcing contracts, but more general IT contracts that include security. You can see it in the current wave of industry consolidation: not large security companies buying small security companies, but non-security companies buying security companies. And you can see it in the new popularity of software as a service: Customers want solutions; who cares about the details?

12:28 pm - EeeP(c)

Asus Eee PC 900 hits the US on May 12th - Engadget

We're serious this time, people. No more kidding around with those international ship dates, we've got ourselves a real live release date from Asus: May 12th. The hotly-anticipated Eee PC 900 with that relatively bountiful 8.9-inch screen is going to sell for a starting price of $549, with Linux and XP versions available at launch.

12:20 pm - It isn't rocket science any more...

...so could somebody please explain to me why there are still applications that allow you to lose your work due to a power glitch or a wrong keystroke?

A little history. When I was at the Stanford AI lab in 1970, there was a text editor that had a number of innovative features. One of those was the ability to automatically save your file after some number of keystrokes. The number was normally 100, but you could set it. The day that the computer was going down every 5 minutes, I set the save count down to 5 and got useful work done.

A little later I was working at Xerox PARC. There was a programming system called Interlisp that had an automatic spelling corrector and infinite undo (including both the ability to undo the spelling "corrections" that turned out to be wrong, and the ability to select which operations you wanted to undo.

That was nearly four decades ago, folks! Right now, the only editor I know of with a keystroke save-count, infinite undo, and good crash recovery is Emacs, and it's very picky about which users it's friendly with. Firefox at least lets you undo closing a tab and saves your bookmarks and configuration automatically without asking.

No app that I know of keeps track of operations and gives you fine-grained selective undo (at, say, the word or paragraph level in a text editor).

Anyone know of a widely-available, open source, cross-platform, simple text editor that at least has auto-save, infinite undo, reliable crash recovery, and is user-friendly enough that a non-geek or a kid can use it to compose email or web pages? Even better if you can actually send email with it, but cut and paste works almost well enough. It's essential that it not be part of a dedicated email program, and it would be useful if when it's used for composing HTML it's possible to flip back and forth between a WYSIWYG and plain text view. (The way you can when composing an LJ post.)

Anyone know of such an editor that understands common version control systems like CVS and Subversion, and uses them to keep track of changes between sessions without asking?

It's not like these are new ideas...

08:35 am - To Fry's, or not to Fry's?

Fry's has a combination CPU, Abit motherboard, and Antec Aria cube case on sale this weekend. $160; figure about $200 with RAM. I could move Dorsai (the bedroom/recording box) into the case, which would be a better fit with the cart it's on, and use the MB/CPU in the office. It would be quieter, and I could use the current box (Harmony) as the guest machine.

OTOH, that's $200 I don't really have right now -- the finances are pretty marginal, and we haven't done a proper budget yet. I'm trying to set a good example here. For that matter, it's time I ought to be spending on more productive things, and there's already a lot to do this weekend. I should wait for the deal to come around again, or buy it in pieces.

Grump.

08:17 am - Welcome to the Twilight Zone

The Y.D. was up before 7am this morning, and the Wolfling (who has gotten a lot better about waking up on time) is taking a shower right now. Pod children? I'm not complaining. If only they could do it on school days!

Seems like a good morning to move computers and UPSs around, since I have to move Dantooine from the office to the bedroom anyway. Leaves me without a public workstation in the office until I can decommission the Mini-ITX system on the old DSL line, but that's become a higher priority lately in any case. Should have been done a year ago.

10:36 pm - Another one bites the dust

The flower_cat's desktop computer (in the bedroom) appears to have finally bitten the dust -- Windows has been flaky for at least a month, and now Linux is having problems as well. Its CPU fan appears to have died, which has probably caused collateral damage elsewhere. This makes the second of our three Fry's XP boxes to die; the third is the one in the Y.D.'s room. I'll be surprised if that one makes it to the end of the year.

I'm reluctant to just go out and buy her another Windows box -- Fry's track record is pretty poor at this point, and she seems to be happy with Linux on the EeePC. And the budget is still blown all to hell from the wedding and FKO; I really don't need the expense just now. I've been trying to justify a new workstation for the office, because Harmony has become noticeably noisy, but I can't do that either right now, especially when I'm trying to save for an EeePC for the Cat.

So I think what I'll do for the moment is move Dantooine in from the office -- it's an ultra-quiet Mini-ITX system. Fanless, which eliminates that point of failure. We do need a Windows box or two, but that's what virtualization is for.

The other advantage of this move is that it will, at long last, completely defenestrate the computers downstairs. That's a Good Thing.

09:54 am - Travels with Plink and Cthulhu...

... not to mention the XO, which hasn't told me its official name yet. Right now it's just going by "steve", which is the name I gave it when I first booted it. I think that, with a reasonable window manager on it instead of the kid-oriented sugar, it will probably be fine. Or maybe with Debian -- I've been noticing lots of ways in which Fedora's package manager sucks compared to apt.

The biggest problem so far is that it seems to use control-O -- even when you're in terminal mode and ssh'ed to a machine running emacs -- to open the journal application. This is Not A Good Thing when your favorite LJ and mail clients are emacs modes. I've been reluctant to find out what other pootentially-vital keystrokes it eats.

On the other hand, my scheme to carry a basically naked machine across the border and pull in my keys from an encrypted tarball from home worked perfectly. Actually i didn't bother encrypting my ssh identity because it's *already* encrypted with a good passphrase. And the tarball's been deleted by now; I only needed it for a day.

Note to self: if we're going to play this game on a regular basis, the travel keyboard and mouse are essential. I currently have the XO's screen flipped around (halfway to tablet mode) so I can use my Thinkpad keyboard and a travel mouse. Works great.

11:43 pm - So here's the question...

... should I try to do a weekend trip with nothing but the XO, or should I take the Mac as well. The XO's keyboard isn't an issue, since I have a good one I can take along -- it would work better with a Linux box than it does with the Mac. The XO's screen and battery life are fantastic.

But the browser is *not* Firefox, and it doesn't do tabs as far as I can tell. The window manager is weird -- basically the whole thing is aimed at kids -- and the IM client only talks Jabber. OTOH, I might be able to dual-boot it with Ubuntu, in which case I'd probably be pretty happy with it.

I'd borrow the Asus Eee from work; it's more like a "traditional" Linux laptop. But then I'd have to get a new one for Colleen...

(Added 0401: I can almost certainly do everything I need to via ssh to home; there's even a console version of my usual IM app (finch, the console version of pidgin). That would have the added advantage of leaving the log files on my home machine. I'm already used to posting to LJ via an ssh connection.)

Current Mood: thoughtful

10:49 pm - After Earth Hour

In the end, rather than haul out the XO, I pulled out a book and read, by the reading lamp in the living room. Most of the lights are still off, as is one of the two computers I turned off. I'll have to turn it back on in the morning, since it's the one that backups are done on.

A small gesture, and mostly an empty one. It may raise awareness a little.

Right now I feel cold, and my legs are stiff. Paying for this morning's walk, no doubt.

07:48 pm - All-in-all a pretty good day

A nice walk at lunchtime, and it looks as though $BOSS is going to buy off on my latest idea for a "research" project. I put "research" in quotes because what I actually seem to do is come up with ideas and build infrastructure that my coworkers can use to do things more traditionally thought of as research. Sort of like the people who design particle accelerators and electron microscopes.

My title is "chief software scientist". It really means "ageing hacker"; I figure that if you have to put "scientist" in the name of your field, you probably aren't one. Dad was a chemist. (On the other hand, his sub-field was spectroscopy, so he was primarily an instrument-builder too. Family tradition, along with folk music, computers and science fiction. *Sigh* -- he would have enjoyed the wedding.)

Left work a little early so that I could meet Colleen and the kids at Kobe, our usual sushi boat place. Emmy's grades came in over the weekend and weren't anywhere near good enough to earn a reward, but we were already planning on sushi for her 16th birthday, so that took precedence.

I'll be leaving shortly to take the Wolfling to school for her HTML final - it was a self-paced class, but there's a written final tonight. I'll be back 9:30-ish; there's no reason to spend 40 extra minutes driving when I could be spending it reading.

08:30 am - Travel Tips: computer security

There's a really great post on tips for airplane travel over on sweetmusic_2 that I've been meaning to point to for a long time. Go read it, especially if you haven't traveled by air much.

This post isn't very closely related at all; it just seemed like a convenient excuse for a link. This post is more directly related to this post on Techdirt.com and related matters, which point out that customs agents on both sides of the US/Canadian border are searching and in some cases seizing laptops and cell phones.

OK, we all know that keeping sensitive data on your laptop is a bad idea. And we all know that you can encrypt your home directory -- at least on Linux and Mac. And you can use something like TrueCrypt to make a complete virtual encrypted disk. Both will protect your privacy pretty well, but if your laptop gets stolen or seized, you still lose the use of your data. Similarly, you can set a master password in Firefox, but it's probably not going to protect your login cookies, it might be breakable, and customs might be able to force you to reveal it in any case.

So here's a better idea: don't have secrets anywhere on your computer when you cross the border. This is the software equivalent of taking all the metal out of your pockets and using a piece of rope for a belt as you go through the security checkpoint.

This relies on having all of your private data accessible via the web. It has to be either encrypted, or on your home server and accessible through an encrypted tunnel like ssh. Because your connections may be slow, it also helps to minimize what you really need: basically your keychain file(s) and your ssh and gpg private keys.

The private keys will all be protected by long passphrases anyway, if you're doing it right. You can encrypt your browser password file with a master password as well. Your IM client probably keeps your account passwords around; find that file too. If you keep a separate file of website passwords, as I do, you should encrypt that. Now put them all in a directory, zip it up, and encrypt the zip file. Note: do not use your gpg private key for this: it's not going to be on your machine when you need to decrypt the secrets! Use AES and a long passphrase.

Mail the resulting zip file, as an attachment, to yourself on any convenient webmail account. Or put it on a website that you control. If you want to be really safe, use steganography to put it inside an image.

Now delete all your secrets, using a secure deletion program that overwrites all the files with random bits before actually deleting them. Clear your browser cache, history, and cookies, again with a secure deletion program. Go.

When you get to your destination, retrieve the secrets file, decrypt and unzip it, and put everything back in the directories where they belong.

I'll be doing some international traveling in a couple of weeks; by that time I'll have some scripts I can post for you.

07:18 pm - A moderately productive morning

Got up at some ungodly hour with a brain that wouldn't shut up about my financial problems -- I'll get to that somewhere downwhen. Spent a moderately productive morning troubleshooting the subdomains of savitzky.net, finally resolved by moving my DNS hosting from GoDaddy to DreamHost (where the actual HTML resides). Subdomains for Kat and Colleen are up, but currently content-free. steve.savitzky.net is, of course, alive and well.

Spent some time last night setting up rsyncd on my fileserver and poking a tunnel through the firewall so I could upload from DH via a CGI script without requiring an ssh connection. That's essential if I want other people besides me to work on websites. The CGI remains to be written but should be straightforward.

Dreamhost's DNS control panel isn't as good as GoDaddy's: no AAAA records for one thing, and not as much control generally. Plus it's tied to their hosting, so it does clever things like make a web directory when you add a subdomain. And the main entry for the zone is always one of their servers, so I had to move savitzky.net off the DSL line and make an A record for dsl.savitzky.net. Darn. Needed doing anyway. It's just a lot less hassle when you can set up the web server configuration at the same time as the DNS; well worth it for a domain that really isn't going to be used for anything but web and eventually email.

10:03 am - Upgrading Argo: Grump

Well, the flakiness seen yesterday expanded into full-blown falling-apart today: I couldn't even boot. And I'll note in passing that an 8-day-old install CD of Hardy alpha required 600-odd updates. I don't think it's stable yet. I'm going to assume both that the drive is unhappy, and that Hardy Heron isn't ready; I put the old drive back.

On the plus side, I found the install disk for my 802-11g wireless card, and it worked in the Win98 partition. So the machine will be usable regardless. At some point I'm going to try both Gutsy (from the text installer) and Lenny. But not right now: there's a lot on my schedule today.

08:52 pm - Upgrading Argo

I've been spending some time this afternoon upgrading my Thinkpad T21, which I purchased several years ago at a surplus joint. One of my coworkers handed me a 60GB hard drive (removed from an upgraded laptop) that was flaky in his machine at home. We'll see. Replacing a drive on an IBM laptop is a cakewalk.

The install disk for the current Ubuntu, 7.10, boots but does something horrible to the display, making it basically uninstallable. Debian Etch does the same horrible thing, but at least it gets installed so you can flip the driver over to vesa, which is where I had it before. My alternate disk for 7.10 had an error on it, but I also downloaded Hardy alpha 5. That worked perfectly, and is currently installing.

I tried both my WiFi cards; neither worked. Hopefully a suitable driver will fix it. One of them (the 802-11g, oddly enough) actually recognized the network, but kept insisting on a password and wouldn't connect. It's an open network, damnit. Or do I have to kick the router? (9:08 that did it! Just fscking worked. I could really get to love Ubuntu.) (9:32 Still some flakiness -- unclear whether bugs or bad drive. Current thinking favors bugs.)

It's also an open question whether any of the usual laptop features will be recognized out of the box; Etch wouldn't even suspend properly.

Finally, I still have to copy over the old Windows 98SE partition; that will require a USB adapter and searching for the driver disk. The machine is going to a non-geek who's used to Windows; whether I can persuade her to switch over is an open question, so it's important to leave both options open. Hopefully I'll be able to do that with the partition manager once I find a USB enclosure to plop the old drive into.

Current Mood: productive

11:08 am - Reviews of the Lenovo ThinkPad X300

Roundup: 5 Takes On the Lenovo ThinkPad X300

After Apple stole the show with their amazing Macbook Air, it was easy to overlook Lenovo's announcement of their own 0.73 inch thick, 3ish pound laptop—that, by the way, features a 13.3-inch display, 64GB SSD, DVD burner, EVDO, WiMax, GPS, 3 USB ports, and a blessed swappable battery.

And at $2,680.00 (2GB configuration), it may seem a bit expensive...but compared to the Macbook Air's $3,098.00 (solid state configuration), it seems like a steal. So what did the reviewers think? Here are five takes on the ultraportable...

Current Mood: impressed

08:48 am - Weird!

My HP inkjet printer has been sitting there since this weekend with a blinking red exclamation point on its control panel, and a little line circling around its LCD display. I've changed its ink cartridges, power-cycled it multiple times -- nothing worked.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I glanced at it this morning and saw that its front panel was all green and ready to go. I printed a page and it worked. Boggle.

09:08 am - Weekend wrap-up

It's been a moderately productive weekend, though not in the ways I'd originally had in mind. The bedroom computer workstation is up and running. I found an old but mostly-servicable office chair in the garage yesterday (it had been sitting under a box of old lighting fixtures and swing-arm lamps for a decade or two), and audio is up and running as well. Kat's kitchen-gadget box is done except for the latches. She put on the hinges yesterday

Our drive yesterday took us about halfway to Gilroy (some 40 miles south along US101), so Colleen decided to go the rest of the way and hit the outlet mall. Didn't find everything we needed, but got some additional Corelle bowls in the Corning store to replace the ones that have gotten broken over the years, plus a couple more of the medium and large serving bowls. We opted for plain white 20 years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen and discovered that our stoneware didn't fit the new cabinets) figuring that plain white would never go out of style. I'm glad we did. They're elegant enough for company, practically indestructable (though it can be done), and light enough that Colleen can easily handle them even when feeling arthritic.

In addition, I've finally gotten around to fixing my daily mirroring script so that it works even if, as in the current setup, the mirror drive is on another machine from the fileserver. This requires calling it from a login session with ssh-agent running; since I usually stay permanently logged-in on one workstation or the other, that's rarely a problem. I'll add the upload to my hosting service later today, since it's easy now.

09:56 pm - Shai Dorsai!

In this case, of course, Dorsai is the computer in the bedroom. (This being thestarport.org, all the machines are named after places that could plausibly have starports. The machines that are used for recording and editing music are, naturally, places mentioned in filksongs: the laptop is Argo, and the other workstation is Harmony.) Anyway, it works: I'm posting from it.

The little rolling desk isn't terribly solid, and because it overlaps the bookshelves on the left there isn't room for anything but my Lenovo Thinkpad keyboard. Which is pretty good, and has pointing devices that there otherwise wouldn't be room for, but it's not a Model M.

In addition, it's running Ubuntu Studio instead of Etch; not all my usual fonts are installed (so windows come out the wrong size and don't quite fit properly), (added 02-24: the font problem turned out to be a bad line in .Xdefaults) and it's running Emacs 22.1. I'm not quite ready to make the transition to the new Gnus. OTOH it's fast as a bat. I'd forgotten just how fast it is...

There are still a few piles of stuff scattered around the bedroom that were pulled out of the corner, and the chair isn't particularly comfortable. The recording rig hasn't been reconfigured yet; I'm not sure where the microphones and preamps belong, and there are no monitor speakers (so, basically, I don't have sound on this machine yet).

But, Colleen really likes having me in the bedroom with her, even though she can't see me from where she's sitting. And it does feel comfortable. Moving back and forth between the two systems is slightly painful: I have to kill the browser, and move my IM presence. Not a full solution. It'll take me a while to make the transition smooth; it will probably involve switching to Ubuntu or Lenny on all the clients.

Current Mood: happy

03:57 pm - Gleep! and the weekend so far

This time two weeks from now my little girl will have been someone's wife for about four hours. Gleep! I'm happy, proud, and all that, but I'm also feeling old.

There were a couple of times this morning where, if I had timed it right, I could have gone out for a walk and not gotten wet. I didn't. I did manage to go out to Office Max and Staples and get a box of printer paper, new ink cartridges for the HP inkjet, and a little rolling computer cart for the bedroom.

The printer cartridges didn't fix the problem. In fact, there appears to have been nothing wrong with the old ones. It's still sitting there with a flashing red exclamation mark and a little line on the LCD that keeps going round and round. I am a grumpy bear. I should know better: eventually everything HP makes just mysteriously stops working and turns into an inert pile of crap.

The computer cart is a win, though. It just fits on the short wall to the left of the bathroom door, which means that my chair will be right next to the bookshelves instead of pulled out into the room. And I'll be able to turn my head only 90 degrees to see Colleen. Win.

I still haven't worked out where I'm going to move the junk that was piled in that corner, or exactly where the rest of the recording gear is going. But it'll be a big improvement, and I'm not complaining.

I've also been woodworking with the Wolfling to build her a simple pine box for her to put kitchen gadgets in. Just butt joints and screws, but she wants a sort of rough look, and it'll match the big box of Penzey's spices that we gave her as a wedding present.

Two weeks! Gleep!

08:43 am - Back in the groove?

Spent some time last night finally re-arranging the recording directory: it now looks like yyyy/mm-event/ where "event" is either a convention, a day or day range, or something like that. If I'm going to be recording practice sessions I should get in the habit of using day ranges -- and perhaps make each month a subdirectory -- for conventions just so things will be chronological.

Naturally, having done this, I had to test it, so when I came out to the living room to do some practicing I set the H2 on the music stand and recorded it. Very rough, and I haven't even listened to it let alone tried to do a normalize-and-split. But I will, because I want to have it done by Thursday. It was all stuff that I need for the album. Added a little more this morning.

I also need to get this onto the web, as the start of the collaboration area. In particular, this session has "The Toolmakers" and "The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of" in their correct keys.

I'm going to be a busy bear this week.

06:15 pm - Going offline

Excellent post by don_marti on becoming more productive by going offline. Git (distributed version control, basically syncing on steroids), ikiwiki (offline-rendered wiki), blosxom (offline-rendered blog), and more. It's related to a lot of what I've been saying about keeping control of your own data. In essence, what you want to do is to separate writing from publishing.

10:10 pm - Better yet

The Wolfling is getting tutoring in math now. Hopefully that will get her through the two classes she needs to graduate. Since her tutor (a family friend) lives most of the way to Palo Alto, the Cat and I proceeded from dropping her off to dinner at Chef Chu's in honor of Chinese New Year. We decided going in that a whole fish, while tempting, wouldn't have given us enough variety, so we had hot and sour soup, tangerine peel chicken, eggplant in garlic sauce, and fried bananas for desert. Yum!

Chef Chu's was my intro to Szechuan cooking when I first came out to California for grad school, 29 years ago.

Coming home, I found that the VIA board had successfully started up X, after the various network-dependent processes timed out. Thus encouraged, I hacked on it for a while and discovered that the onboard ethernet was now eth2. Go figure. I think it has something to do with the hotplug code that I stopped using because it seemed flaky. But it works now: not super fast, but more useable than its predecessor, and totally silent.

The runtime on my UPS is now down from somewhere north of 45 minutes to 39; not too bad, considering.

Hopefully I'll be able to get back to actual (music) work soon.

08:57 pm - On the list for this weekend

The weekend's to-do list is already getting slightly full.

• Fry's run: selkit wants some stuff, and I need a new MB/CPU to replace the one in the fileserver.
• Record a scratch track of The Toolmakers, in the right key this time (Bm), and incorporating the changes I made this morning to the last verse. It said what I wanted to say, but I was dissatisfied with the wording.
• Start setting up the album collaboration area so I can start selling preorder/subscriptions, and so that cflute and others can start working on arrangements. Should have done it a month ago...

Meanwhile, tibicina should be arriving in an hour or so, having finally made it over the snowy passes of southern Oregon. So there may also be music in the offing.

11:41 am - Hmmm.

I don't think it's a coincidence that my fileserver stayed up happily all week, and has frozen twice since I got my workstation back on line. Not at all. I'm guessing something odd in either the memory or the networking.

Fry's has an AMD CPU/MB combo for under $80 this weekend. It'll eat more power, but it'll be worth it for both reliability and print speed.

13:09 Hmmm indeed. Let's see: problems with SATA, problems when the fast workstation with GigE is online, wimpy 1GHz C7 CPU... I/O bandwidth. In many ways I'm relieved to know that it's simply not fixable without replacing the MB. I can do that.

10:42 am - Rough morning

First setback was discovering that the workstation I wanted to use to replace the possibly-flaky fileserver didn't appear able to find either of its ethernet ports when booted from the server's disk. Something in the boot-time kernel config, I suppose, but I didn't have time to diagnose it. If it goes down over the weekend, it goes down. The mirror's reasonably current, but I didn't have time to get it back in operation; the workstation is still in pieces and will stay that way until I get back.

Next (well, actually, while still hassling with recalcitrant boxen) came the FedEx guy knocking on the door to say that he remembers leaving the box of ribbons on the porch. Must have been stolen, then. So that's a loss, and all my fault for having it shipped to the house instead of work; just bad luck that Colleen was out taking the Y.D. home from school when it arrived. I'd figured that, if it was delayed, at least Colleen wouldn't have to go in to the lab to chase after it when she had a con and an engagement party to worry about.

They included my "Coffee, Computers & Song" ribbons, so it may be a business expense I can write off. But I came close to losing it, and drove the Cat nuts as usual by apologizing repeatedly. Glad I have her.

And I missed breakfast, but a protein bar and a bottle of chocolate milk are helping. And did I mention that the airport doesn't have free wi-fi. Paid through Boingo; about the same price but I already have the account, so no credit card needed. At least the airport has plenty of outlets; it's been substantially remodeled.

Spoons: low; Cope: low.

Current Mood: annoyed

08:11 pm - !@#$!@$@#%@# $^%$^#$&#%^#$ MAC !@#$%!

Stupid goddamn Mac filesystem is secretly case insensitive. If you have a directory called Tracks and a file called tracks, rsync complains about not being able to delete the directory when it goes to transfer the file. THIS IS JUST FSCKING WRONG!

The Mac may have Unix in its distant ancestry, but it is not Unix. When I get back from this trip I'm ordering a real computer.

Given a strong desire to be able to collaborate cross-platform, I'm probably going to have to make an ugly hack to work around this stupidity. That doesn't mean I have to like it, and it doesn't mean I'm not going to get bitten in the arse by it somewhere else.

In other news, the ribbons we had overnighted seem to have gone astray; it was apparently delivered to a nonexistant address in another city. Their tracking site doesn't say what address it was actually addressed to, so it's impossible to tell why it went astray. Remind me never to have things shipped by FedEx.

09:10 am - Getting ready for Seattle

Gradually getting ready to go; spent altogether too much time last night and this morning on lingering household computer issues, and not enough on taxes. Hopefully I'll have time to deal with them today while I'm supposed to be working during lunch. Makes sense anyway, since I ought to copy the forms before I send them.

Did a preliminary test-pack -- I'm going to need a second carry-on for things -- mostly gifts -- that are light but bulky. I'm using the flower_cat's new purple suitcase that we got at Costco last year; the second carry-on will be an ancient Hartman duffel that my parents bought in Japan 30-odd years ago for a similar purpose. It'll squish down into the suitcase for the trip home.

I'll be taking up 50 or so copies of Coffee, Computers, and Song -- hopefully there will be some dealers to take some of them off my hands when I get there.

11:17 pm - !@#$@#%#$%%^

For some reason Kat's monitor (an ageing 17" Hyundai) has lost the ability to tell the computer at the other end of its cable what its resolution is. We'd just installed a new KVM switch, so I spent quite a lot of time thinking the problem was in the switch. At first it seemed to be -- last time she had problems, I took out the switch, plugged the monitor directly into the computer, and it worked. This time it didn't.

Swapped it with the 17" Samsung on the public system in the office downstairs. Now everything is happy -- Debian Etch on the downstairs machine is set up for fixed resolution, so it ignores the stupid lying monitor and Just Works(TM).

Meanwhile the taxes aren't done and there's practicing to do.

And did I mention that crawling around under desks is bad for my knees?

Current Mood: annoyed

09:23 pm - Grump

Nova (the fileserver) fell over on its nose while I was printing some business cards. No damned reason for it; top shows that the rasterizer hardly uses any resources at all. (That's no explanation for why it's so slow, especially when printing to the inkjet, but...) It handled backups just fine.

So it's either memory, or something weird on the MB (possibly involving writing the disk). In either case, I don't have time to track it down. Sometime between now and Wednesday I'll swap disks with Harmony (my workstation) and worry about building a new workstation when I get back from Conflikt. One more fscking expense I don't need...

In other news, my XO still hasn't arrived, and I got an email from them saying they didn't have my complete shipping address. More likely their cobbled-together software thinks that "suite 115" refers to a mailbox and not a connected set of offices. (I almost wrote "office suite", but that would be something else again.)

10:51 am - I can haz uptime?

So far the fileserver has been up a little over 3.5 days. That's less of a sample than I'd like, but if it stays up through Wednesday I'll probably have to take it as an indication that it's finished with intermittant crashes. Grumf. The last thing I need to be wasting my time on, between now and when I leave for Conflikt Thursday morning, is putting together a new server.

The contingency plan, if Nova does crash, is to move its drive over to my current workstation, Harmony. It's a little old, but it's been very reliable so far, and nobody's likely to be using it while I'm gone.

In other news, the chaoswolf seems to be turning into a genuine geek-girl. I got her a KVM switch yesterday; her Windows box (which is USB-only, no PS2 ports) was having serious keyboard problems, but she figured out that she could hang a USB keyboard on the Windows box and use the PS2 for actuating the switch and talking to the Linux box, which seems perfectly happy with it. I'm guessing it's some kind of power problem. I'm particularly proud of her for figuring it out herself.

The Wolfling has also been having fun playing with Photoshop; she's taking a class in it this quarter, but she's already at the point where she can figure out how to do things she hasn't been taught yet. More than anything else, this is what distinguishes a geek from a non-geek.

Proud bear.

09:48 am - Better?

When last we met the Starport's harried local BOFH system administrator household hacker, he was trying to figure out why Nova, the household fileserver, kept locking up. It looked very like a software or memory problem.

Running top continuously from home and work revealed that the memory usage never got up to the point where it would cause problems -- heck, it hasn't used swap space in three days. On the other hand, it has been up for three days.

About the only thing I've done differently in that time was to kill off Big Brother, the system-monitoring program I've been using for several years now. My copy is decidedly obsolete, and because it was free but not open source, it never got automatically upgraded like the rest of my software. The last few months it had been crashing, and I didn't use it enough to bother tracking down the problem.

I'm now looking for a good system monitor that's well-supported in Debian. I'll probably end up with either nagios or monit -- any recommendations?

10:04 pm - Further adventures in family computing

The last couple of days I've been helping the chaoswolf install Ubuntu on her ageing HP Celeron system. The initial problem, of course, was to back up the old contents; I tried several hacks of varying effectiveness before discovering that the Seagate drive I was using came with a Windows partition-imaging program on its install CD. Who knew?

Once that was taken care of, actually doing the install was a piece of cake, modulo a crash scanning the partition table and its inability to shrink the existing NTFS partition as much as it should have been able to. (There may be a connection.) There may be some bad memory in that box; it's quite flaky.

The Wolfling seems to be pretty happy with Ubuntu, which is a good sign. Of course, she still has her shiny new XP machine; I'll get her a KVM switch tomorrow.

03:00 pm - Headdesk - it appears to be a software problem

... so Nova, my fileserver, has been up since about 6:30am this morning. This afternoon I noticed that SpamAssassin's daemon wasn't running, so spam wasn't getting filtered. I started it. A few seconds thereafter, Nova crashed.

I'm guessing either a corrupt application file, corrupt database, or something running out of memory. Possibly some combination. Running out of memory (or some other resource) could be a problem; the others may be fixable by purging and reinstalling spamassassin. Could conceivably be some other weirdness, up to and including a bug in Perl, but the fact that problems have been occurring with increasing frequency is highly suggestive of a problem with spamassassin itself.

15:40 Could also be flaky memory, of course. SA is big, so it could have pushed it over the edge into a bad block. I'll run memtest, though that's no guarantee.

20:11 Spamd is pretty small, and top shows plenty of space: 1G of RAM, about 1/3 full, and 2G of empty swap. I'll watch it for a while.

Current Mood: annoyed

10:15 am - So far...

Nova was down again when I got up this morning; I took it as an excuse to disconnect the SATA drives (which I should have done yesterday, but it was getting late). If that fixes it, it's probably a controller issue. If not, it's probably memory. Worst case, I can replace it with Harmony (my current workstation), which has been absolutely solid since I bought it. In fact, that MB/CPU used to be in Nova. Would use more power, but a faster CPU would help for printing and some file operations.

Spent some good time this morning talking with the chaoswolf about upcoming web projects and setting her up with an Ubuntu box. We'll use her old HP Windows box with the new 320GB IDE drive that I originally intended for a USB drive.

11:41 pm - That's better

Nova (the fileserver) hung again this morning; it was hosed when I checked on it from work. So when I got home I turned off email (didn't want it ending up in the wrong place), brought up nova just long enough to update the mirror and take down the workstation that had the external drives hung off it, and moved the new 500GB IDE drive from the external box to nova.

After that, I installed a clean copy of Lenny on the small rescue partition, and spent the entire damned rest of the evening copying files off the mirror. Amused myself while tar was doing its thing by seeing if I could configure a working fileserver out of Lenny, and almost succeeded. Still something wrong with nfs. It may just be something I didn't restart properly. I also had time to eat dinner, do the dishes, and move the boxes of Christmas stuff (including tree) back into the garage. Which in turn involved cleaning out the little closet between the bedroom and the garage, tossing out no less than three huge boxes that once held monitors that we no longer own.

I was a little surprised at how long it stayed up. I suspect that the problem has to do with writing to a SATA drive, and I wasn't doing much of that. But it's back.

Bear fall over now.

Current Mood: accomplished

08:59 am - Foo

The fileserver froze again last night -- this is getting old. I remain convinced that it's some kind of driver race condition: it's not happening with the near-identical drive on the recording box. It could also be due to lurking disk corruption causing it to hang on a read. In that case, a fsck might fix it. It might not.

In either case, I'm tired of fighting it. I'm dropping the fileserver back to a single IDE drive, and moving the (SATA) mirror to another machine. Hopefully by the time I need it, SATA support will be better.

Meanwhile, I have lots of other work to do, and I don't want to have to deal with random fileserver hangs on top of it all.

10:48 It's even having trouble staying up long enough to copy a partition to the new drive. So here's the plan:

( plans within plans; wheels within wheels. Nothing to see here )

Current Mood: grumpy

04:41 pm - Time for some upgrades?

Upgrading the workstations, and possibly the fileserver, to Lenny (Debian Testing) is starting to look attractive. It's running 2.6.22, which is the one I need to support my Seagate SATA-II drives, and it has Audacity 1.3.4, which is the latest and matches the version in UbuntuStudio.

It's usually safe to upgrade the fileserver, since it's inside the firewall. The only reason to hold off is that every once in a while you get a major upheaval and something breaks, usually in one of my local scripts; when that happens it's handy to have the previous version around somewhere. I'll probably wait a couple of months. There's no reason not to upgrade the workstations now.

I'll keep UbuntuStudio around, too, especially since 64Studio is still based on Etch, so the kernels aren't up to date.

11:49 pm - Saturday wrap-up

This morning after my walk I went to Fry's and found that the drives they have on sale were Seagate rather than the Maxtors they had piled up yesterday. Those were still $160, and had a 3-year warranty instead of Seagate's 5-year. Then I made the interesting discovery that the Maxtor's and some of the Seagates were made in Thailand, while the otherwise-identical Seagates in the big piles were made in China.

Hmm.

A quick trip home confirmed that the flaky Seagate drive I removed a couple of months ago was Chinese, and I seemed to recall that the failing one is, too. The Maxtor I've been using as the mirror drive is Thai. Drove back to Fry's and bought a Thai Seagate.

After that, we went to Dave and Joyce's to bring them lunch: barbecued chicken, cole slaw, and baked beans from Emil Villa's. Much appreciated; Joyce isn't especially mobile due to health problems (which, however, should be fixed fairly soon). From there we went to Kathy Mar's bash. Good stone soup.

I did a little singing at Kathy's: "Ship of Stone", "Cicero in the 21st Century", "Desolation -- Oh, No!", and "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts". I'm impressed with how much nose-watering has helped my voice: singing is less painful and doesn't dry me out nearly as quickly as it used to.

09:58 pm - OK, so much for that

All my random, scribbled-on-tiny-slips-of-paper sales "records" have been properly scribbled on large, well-ordered pieces of paper. I still need to go through and make an integrated customer list, but at this point I have enough information -- what was sold where, when and to whom -- to compute my sales taxes fairly quickly. I have a little under 2 weeks (including two whole weekends), so that's OK.

The fileserver still isn't dead, but I don't trust it yet. I'll probably upgrade to a Maxtor 500 just on general principles.

22:15 It died. There's a new disk in my immediate future. In fact, I may just start transfering to the PATA drive I bought Wednesday.

22:37 Hmm. I'm seeing write errors on the mirror drive (sdb). The easy thing to try would be disconnecting it first.

Current Mood: productive

09:16 am - Headdesk - Seagate SATA drives are Windows-only crap

So, of course, after picking up a 500GB IDE drive at Fry's on Wednesday that I turned out not to need as urgently as I feared, it's $50 cheaper in today's flier.

13:14 ... and after having made plans for the damned thing, the fileserver is down again. Did I mention that this is getting tiresome? Did I mention that it only happens with recent Seagate drives? My Maxtor and Western Digital SATA drives work just fine, thank you. I see another trip to Fry's in my near future.

13:51 ... comments to this article have suggestions for the Seagate "FreeAgent" external USB drives; these probably won't work for internal SATA (I know for a fact that sdparm doesn't believe that they're SCSI drives) but I might be able to do it using an external USB enclosure. It's not a satisfactory solution, however.

14:56 ... it may be possible to turn off the offending features by running (get this) a DOS program. Fortunately it boots from a CD using a copy of FreeDOS included in the ISO.

Basically, Seagate does not support anything but Windows and wishes all other OSs would go away. The drive is, nevertheless, listed as Linux-compatible. Their FreeAgent Pro external drives, which have a FireWire port, aren't particularly well-supported for Mac, either. Apparently the only supported way to fix some problems with these drives is to plug them into a Windows machine. Feh!

I really wish my OLPC would arrive.

08:54 pm - Monstrous Glee!

In other words, my copy of ohiblather's TechnoNerdMonster arrived today! It's even more wonderful on paper than it is on the screen, darker, richer-textured, and even more monstrously gleeful.

Now I have to clear off some wall space...

In other news to be gleeful about, my server has been up all day. So I won't have to install my new 500GB drive in it.

05:13 pm - Wi-Fi security? Don't need it!

Security expert Bruce Schneier, in a Wired article titled Steal This Wi-Fi, writes

Whenever I talk or write about my own security setup, the one thing that surprises people -- and attracts the most criticism -- is the fact that I run an open wireless network at home. There's no password. There's no encryption. Anyone with wireless capability who can see my network can use it to access the internet.

To me, it's basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea. But to some observers, it's both wrong and dangerous.