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Every darned one of ‘em.
If you have been happily using the two NVIDIA display driver packages with yast2:
If this is you, and you recently upgraded, you may find your nvidia display doesn’t work anymore, and fails every time to load a graphical display, kicking you back into text mode. This is really frustrating, because if you’ve been using yast2 to handle your nvidia display drivers, you know that for a long time you could upgrade the kernel without recompiling your display driver. To any linux user of nvidia products, this is a simply blindingly amazing feat of technology. Let’s just forget for a second that users of other operating systems do this everyday in a completely unremarkable way.
Well, NVIDIA thought, just for kicks, they would rename the yast packages you need to use. For no apparent reason, they are now called
So to get your NVIDIA display back, go into yast, uninstall x11-video-nvidia and nvidia-gfx-kmp-default, and install x11-video-nvidiaG01 and nvidia-gfxG01-kmp-default. Then it will work again. Unless you have one of the legacy cards described in http://www.suse.de/~sndirsch/nvidia-installer-HOWTO.html .
Why did they change the name? Who knows. Why did they make the new default packages the new weird name? Who knows. What does G01 mean? Who knows.
I have a new blog for my personal stuff. It’s called something designed to not be googleable back to my name. At some point a random headhunter mentioned my ancient personal page I created in my junior year of undergrad. This freaked me out a little--that people who are thinking of employing me might actually try and find my weird personal ramblings on the internet.
So if you are one of my friends and know my email address, I’ll happily tell you the address of my new personal blog (which currently contains hardly anything.) I’d just ask you pretty please don’t link to it with any personally-identifying links that might associate it with me in a google search.
And if you are, or are thinking about, employing me: I have no personal life, don’t waste time writing a blog, and exist only to work super hard for you. YOU! You are the most important part of my current or future life. Luv ya.
I decided that in the end, even though I’ve neglected my little blog here for so long, I shouldn’t be ashamed if the first post a put in a while is a technical one. So here goes:
If you want to kill one or many processes that all involve the same command or similar command, you can do it with the handy unix command pkill. It will kill all processes containing the string you give it as an argument. Use the -u option to restrict it to a particular user. For instance:
pkill -u joeuser java
to kill all processes with ‘java’ in their name started by user ‘joeuser’.
Another related handy command is pgrep which only lists the process id’s of matching processes and doesn’t actually kill them.
pgrep -u joeuser java
At work the other day, one of the engineers in lab mentioned that braiding power wires was a good way to keep them all together and have any interference affect them all equally, so that the relative voltages would remain constant. It’s a more complicated version of the twisted pair.
Anyway, I realized I had 4 cables, and I only knew how to braid 3 strands. So of course I spent the next few minutes figuring out how to braid more than 3 strands. It turns out it’s easy. You just take the rightmost strand, and moving to the left, weave it over, then under, then over. Then do this process again with the new rightmost strand. And then the new rightmost strand, etc., etc. You can do the same thing with any number of strands, always start with the right and weave to the left. My finely-crafted Windows Paint picture to the right shows the basic idea.
Here’s a new picture of me, on this last day of 2006 (picture taken in the wee hours of the morning.) I know this picture is a bit bizarre, but it’s nothing compared to me as a muppet with orange hair. In fact, whenever I would pull up my blog and see myself as Beaker, it freaked me out a little. To protect my self-image and prevent a tragic descent into an alternate Muppet identity, I decided to post a merely normally-odd picture of myself. Here I am at home in Maple Grove, Minnesota.
This Christmas has been blissfully uneventful--a nice break and time to relax. I got a bunch of awesome presents. Nothing excessive, but just what I needed. I read a lot, a luxury. I usually am able to afford only about 10 pages every evening, but managed to work through a couple of books over the past 10 days. I took time to indulge my addiction to P.G. Wodehouse, which I originally got from my father at an early age. (”I learned it by watching you!”) I can’t think of another author so expertly skilled in the use of the English language purely in the pursuit of mirth and frivolity. Perfect.
I’ve also started a project to gather together all of my old emails from various programs, accounts, periods of my life. I want to put them all together and print them out on actual paper. I have an idea that I periodically like to look at my old correspondence in a nostalgic way. Even if I did migrate all of these emails to a new email program, it’s really not the nicest way to walk down memory lane. Also, I can see the writing on the wall--anything that you really want to be able to see for years to come should be on paper, not on a computer. I already have files from college that I can’t read because they’re in some arcane format for some program that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m sure a computer forensic expert could always read most of my emails, being mostly text, but I want pleasant, easy access to them. I’ve already written a perl script to pull out all the emails and attachments and format them in html. If I manage to make something usable then I’ll write more about it. My goal is to have “chapters” relating to all email traffic between me and each of the various people I’ve written to.
Also, if anybody knows of a program to print out all of one’s emails for browsing, I’d love to hear about it! Tell me now before I go crazy with another project. :)
Happy New Year everybody!
If you’re a hardcore fan of Matt Clapp, you may know that at one point in the near-distant past of graduate school, I dressed up as a certain Muppet with orange hair for Halloween¹. Well, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with the effect, and I liked the idea, so I decided to try again.
So I present to you the new and improved Beaker. Hair and nose are more reddish, but much more muppet-like this time around. 
I’ve added a picture of the real Beaker here for comparison. Not bad eh? If you don’t know, Beaker was the assistant to Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, the brilliant Muppet scientist. Beaker’s expression is due to the fact that he has the classic grad student role--the go-to guy for handling dangerous acids, extremely high voltages, or Muppet-eating animals.
At the costume party I went to, old friends and new seemed to receive the costume well. Some commented that my eyes were perfectly Beaker-like with no costume help, which goes along with past comments that I’m like a muppet in everyday life. Notice the classy gaffer tape name tag. Less apparent is the gaffer tape used in place of buttons on the cheap costume-store lab coat. The name tag is covering the original HI-larious silk-screened name on the lab coat, “Dr. Seymour Bush, Gynecologist”. So it wasn’t just that I needed to tell people who I was supposed to be, I needed to, um, change the tone of the costume from the original.
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¹ Original costume included a valiant attempt to dye my own hair orange (failure, hair was too dark and ended up looking like I was starting to rust.) I also couldn’t find a suitable costume nose, so I used a small Nerf ball with a nose notch cut out. It fell off constantly. This was later put to good use as a cat toy for housemate Peter the Cat. The high point of this costume was “borrowing” a lab coat from a certain professor who shall remain nameless, and then spilling wine on it at the party.
Here’s my bookshelf--nearly finished! Everything’s there except for the head casing and base moldings that will make it a true thing of beauty. An interesting photography note: the slow-sync flash was a nice compromise between natural light and the flash.
And here is a close-up view of the shelves. Not too shabby for pine!
And I can actually use it to hold books now! For the first time! So exciting!
This establishment is nothing if not Pr f ssional.
For a long time, life in my apartment was simple, clean and uncluttered. In short, I didn’t own a couch.
.
This went on for months, until one day I decided that it might be nice if women were to want to visit me in my apartment. So I bought a couch!
Here I am welcoming propsective ladies. Hey gals, look, a couch!
Here I am “taking time out” as we used to say in the yearbook trade. Either that, or it’s an alcohol-induced coma.
That’s one comfortable couch!
Hey all, just thought I’d let you know about my new online photo album at http://photos.itsayellow.com .
Right now there’s just pictures from Barcelona, and no pretty main page. But I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret. I may still tinker with the theme of the photo pages.
The cool thing about the photo pages is that the cursor keys (left, right) navigate backward and forward through the pictures, so you can flip through quickly.
Enjoy!
Recently I’ve become aware of Panorama Tools, which are a collection of programs for putting multiple overlapping photos together into one large composite picture. It’s excellent software, giving great results--it’s difficult or impossible in many instances to tell that a resulting photo used to be multiple ones. The problem with it is that it’s not very user-friendly, and very technical. The learning curve is steep. And to me at least, it’s unclear whether the software is still supported, and where the definitive version is.
Because of this, there have sprung up a few graphical-front-ends to this panorama code to make it easier to use. At first, I was only aware of the shareware offerings: PTGUI (€65 to register), and PTAssembler ($39 to register). I’ve tried PTGUI, and it works, but after 30days I wasn’t willing to shell out the $70, so I uninstalled it.
Well, help is here, there is a program called Hugin which is a totally free frontend to the Panorama tools. It’s at version 0.5, meaning presumably things still need to be cleaned up, but I can vouch for the fact that it is already very nicely usable. And of course, it creates great results.
Here are some examples of my first attempts:
This picture was made from two separate photos that I didn’t take with the intention of stitching them together.
Here are the originals.
A more impressive example is the inside of Santa Maria del Mar, in Barcelona. I couldn’t physically get this much field of view with my camera, because the lens isn’t wide enough, and I couldn’t back up anymore because I was inside. However, by pivoting the camera and taking a bunch of pictures, I could stitch them together with Hugin and get this great shot. This picture is a composite of 9 separate overlapping pictures. Also, the final composite picture is nearly 10Mpixels, while my camera is only 7Mpixels. I assume if I ever want to make a poster, this would be the way to cheat and get more pixels than my camera can take.
Finally, there’s this beautiful composite of the Monastery on Montserrat, also near Barcelona. It was originally 4 separate photos. It’s not perfect, as you can see that because the original pictures had different exposures, the sky has a funny gradient on the right side. Also, if you’re very observant, you can see that the lower-left corner is completely made-up. I love the “Stamp” tool in photoshop. The original panorama had no photo for the area that is now in the lower left part of the composite, so I copied some mountainside to it in photoshop. Also, there didn’t used to be any sky in the upper right, which was a bit easier just to copy outright.
Here’s what it used to look like. Hugin actually produces a copy of each of the component pictures accurately warped and with alpha channels on each photo to allow you to put them together yourself, if you want. If I had spent the time, I could’ve fixed where the seam was between two photos to correct for the strange way the sky changes on the right side of the picture. But it’s pretty cool the way it is, and I was getting lazy…
I love almost everything about Picasa, but there are some drawbacks:
A very cool thing that I discovered is that Picasa supports uploading to a number of different online photo services from Picasa itself. That is, you don’t have to download a bunch of different lame programs from each online photo place, Picasa will upload your Picasa photos with its own interface to their site. This seems to work well for Kodak EasyShare at least. When you have pictures in your Picture Tray, just select “Order Prints” and you can upload stuff to the online photo site of your choice. It’s nice.
“Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written, but…”
There was some sitcom or book or play or something where the protagonist was reviewing his/her diary and every entry started that way. Well that’s how I feel now. It’s been a very long time since my last Journal entry. I was starting to feel so intimidated by the long pause, like to write something after so long, it had to be really good. Well, I scrapped that plan, and instead decided just to write something, anything, just to break my long online silence.
I got back from an amazing, amazing trip to Barcelona. I have to thank my hosts, Anna and Pau, and their families, and friends. Their hospitality and friendliness far surpassed any tourist experience I could’ve expected. I also was happy to see my friend Ruth, who drove all the way from Paris (not just to see me, but she drove a long way nonetheless!) At the end of the trip, instead of merely being tired from an adventure and ready for home, I found myself sad to go and missing friends.
Here are some pictures!
Anna, Matt, Walky, David at comida at Anna’s family summer beach house in Calella de Palafrugell
Anna and Pau at el far de Sant SebastiÃ
Anna, Pau, Judit, Matt at the beach in Barcelona. (Our backs are not to the sea!)
Re-enacting some event from the Barcelona Olympics
Matt and Ruth at Cadaques
Matt and Ruth: Wackiness!
Anna and Matt on the roof of Casa Mila
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture I: No, no, Pau.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture II: Sigh.
Anna and Pau on the roof of Casa Mila: Picture III: Awwww, but we really like each other.
Hurray for cultural rapprochement!
The best going-away committee ever.
I finally biked all the way to work, on an exhibition trek on Sunday. It took me roughly 50min., and my bike computer said I biked 14.4mph on average, making the trip 12miles exactly. Now, there was still a bit of meandering while I found my way, and I’m a little out of shape, so hopefully in the future I will both bike at a faster rate, and slightly fewer miles because I know my way.
Since I took almost an hour to bike there, I decided to take the VTA Light Rail (now with 30% less Rail!) back. To my surprise, it took almost as long to take the Light Rail to Mountain View as it took me to bike the other way. How is this possible? I wondered?
Well, as the map shows, (thumbnail seen to the right,) the Light Rail route from Mountain View to the Tasman station is 9.75miles. On the official timetable, the train takes 30minutes to get between these two stations, making the average speed of the VTA Light Rail 19.5mph. Not so vastly different from my out-of-shape biking speed. If you add the time for me to get myself to the train station, wait for the train, and go from the end train station to work, you quickly get to at least 40minutes, not so much different from biking the whole way.
So the trade off seems to be biking: more excercise, more need for a shower, train: more sitting around, less stink. I don’t mind the stink, since my goal is still to get some excercise. I’ll probably start half-and-half and then possibly work my way up to biking both ways, especially when it stays light out later in the evening. At least my work has a shower.
I’m going to Barcelona!
For a while I’ve had way too many Frequent Flyer miles with United Airlines. It was making me a bit nervous, because I know that either United will go out of business, or decide that it’s lowly loyal customers don’t deserve such luxuries as free flights. Especially now that you can get miles for anything, including using your credit card, I assume that Mile Inflation has to happen soon, and they’ll be worthless. So I decided to use as many miles, as soon as possible.
But if you actually try to use your miles to go anywhere interesting, you’ll soon find that every time you try to look up a travel date, you will get the message “Date not available” for pretty much every day you look at which is less than a year away. This is really frustrating.
Enter AwardPlanner. It’s a website that’s basically a travel agent that will use your frequent flyer miles to book your flights, (as well as regular paid travel if you want.) The price to have them work for you is a little steep: $100 for a year of their service. They used to have a fee of $40 for one trip, but in the past month they seem to have stopped offering that. Anyway, a trip to Barcelona in April (when I wanted to go) is at least $1000, or $2000 for Business class, so to me $100 didn’t seem so bad if they could get me a roundtrip to Barcelona for only miles. Especially since I couldn’t manage to do it myself. One caveat: they don’t guarantee anything: even after you pay them $100 they might not find you a flight only on miles.
Anyway in the end the nice lady “Janet” got me a beautiful roudtrip itinerary from San Francisco to Barcelona, using only my United miles. First class domestically, and Business class transatlantic. In addition to these great accomodations, she also booked a 3-day stopover in Virginia so I can attend my cousin’s wedding on the way back. It’s possible I could’ve figured out how to book such a complicated itinerary using my miles myself, but I really don’t think I could’ve. I also know I wouldn’t have had the patience to wait with United on hold for as long as it would’ve taken.
So come April, I’ll be in Barcelona for about 11-12 days. My tour guide and gracious host will be my friend Anna, who was a housemate for about 3 months when she was a visiting student in Baltimore. It’ll be great to see her again. Here she is on the 4th of July, embracing America after years of being a self-described extreme America-skeptic. Actually that’s probably a nicer way of putting it than she self-described herself, but it’s ok because she seemed to have a good time and come away knowing that a few of us are actually pretty nice. So now I’ll be able to better appreciate her country, and learn all the wonderful things about Catalunya. (She is “not Spanish but Catalon!”)
In addition, it will be a real post-post-graduate vacation. I had a blast for 4 or 5 days in Mexico for my friend Marcel’s wedding, but I think getting away for almost two weeks is necessary to fully reward myself for escaping grad school. It’s almost like I’m some kind of adult now, what with the travelling and enjoying myself! I can’t wait.
I have a linux box at home which I like because it can act as a file server, a web server, and many other things. Having a desktop unix machine means I can also remotely logon from the outside world via SSH, which is cool. I have normal cheap DSL at home, and my IP addres changes every once in a while. I use DynDNS, a free service, to associate an unchanging name to my ever-changing IP address. A program on my computer notices if my IP address changes, and notifies dyndns to update my name to the new IP address. This means that as long as I use my dyndns name, I can always reach my computer from the outside world.
Editor’s note: for the rest of this description, I’ll use “Windows computer” for the computer you’re sitting at, and “Linux computer” for your unix server you’re trying to connect to.
SSH is only a text window, which is great for most things, but sometimes I want access to graphical programs running on my Linux computer. Originally, I tried to accomplish this with a free X-server on my laptop: Cygwin/X. It really is free, and it really works, and you can really run X-windows programs from your ssh shell and have them show up on your Windows computer. There are some quirks. For one thing, the last part of the install using Cygwin’s “setup.exe” (a distinctive name if I ever heard one) hangs for me on my Windows computer at the end of the install, if I’m using setup.exe version 2.510.2.2, which at the time I’m writing this is the “stable” version. They offer a lot of ways to try and make things work in their troubleshooting, and I tried them all with no success. What did work, however, was to use one of their “unstable” newer versions which worked beautifully (I used version 2.523). Since Cygwin has ported basically almost all standard unix programs to work on a Windows computer, you can also install a lot of other free software if you want. Part of the default install is bash, a much better command prompt than Windows’ standard command prompt cmd.exe. I also installed tcsh because I’m used to it, and the open version of ssh, which is up-to-date, powerful, and free. In addition I installed of course the X-Windows support.
The best way to connect to a Linux computer to start running X programs on your local Windows computer is to first ssh, forwarding the X connections through your secure ssh “tunnel”. To do this, you first start the Cygwin X-server on your Windows computer. It is a “server” because it serves your computer’s resources (display, keyboard, mouse) to programs that want to show up on your computer. Then, with an open cygwin shell (one usually starts up when you start up the Cygwin X-server) ssh to your Linux computer, and be sure to use the “-X” option to make sure you are tunnelling X connections through ssh. Like so:
ssh -X linuxbox.mynetwork.com
Where linuxbox.mynetwork.com is your Linux computer. Then, any X program you start in that ssh session, like for instance xeyes, will show up on your Windows computer, and be running on your Linux computer. This works fairly well for two computers on the same local network.
If you’re much farther away from your Linux computer, for instance somewhere on the internet, this can quickly become way too slow. Also, you have to start everything from scratch every time you reconnnect, because all of your programs will die when you disconnect.
Enter VNC. VNC is more like viewing your desktop on your main Linux computer from afar and being able to control it from afar. The main difference is that the desktop still exists on your Linux/Unix computer and all the programs are still running even if your remote connection disconnects. So you can start up some graphical program, have it do something that will take a long time, disconnect from your Linux computer, and reconnect later to see what happened while you were gone. It also means you don’t have to restart all of your programs everytime you reconnect. It’s really what you usually want.
VNC is also usually much faster than X if you’re far away from your desktop computer. I’ve been connecting to my computer in California from Minnesota, and it’s almost real-time. Almost. X would be much much slower.
To start a vnc session between your Linux and Windows computers, first you need to ssh to your Linux box. You need access to a particular port in a range that starts with 5900, on your Linux box. To do this, we will “tunnel” the ports securely using ssh. VNC uses different display numbers to identify different sessions. We’ll use display 2, because usually that’s free (display 0 is usually the screen you see when you’re logged in on the console of your Linux/Unix machine.) The port you need to access for VNC is number 5900+display, or in our case for display 2, 5902. So we securely forward that port to our Linux machine by using ssh as follows:
ssh -L 5902:linuxbox.mynetwork.com:5902 linuxbox.mynetwork.com
This opens up an ssh session to linuxbox.mynetwork.com, and connects local (Windows) port 5902 (the first number after the “-L”) to port 5902 on linuxbox. This works as long as you can ssh to your Linux computer. You don’t have to do anything else, like open ports in a firewall surrounding your Linux box. ssh does everything. You can also do this with Windows graphical ssh programs. You need to specify an “Outgoing” port forwarding, and 5902 on the linux box, and 5902 on your computer.
Once you get this ssh session open, all you need to do is type
vncserver :2
and you should have started up a new session on display 2. If this is the first time you run vncserver, it will ask you for a password. Use something reasonably secure, like maybe your account password.
To connect to this vnc session, you need a VNC Viewer on the Windows computer. A good free one is TightVNC. Remember, for what I’m describing, you only need the viewer. Usually it’s one self-contained program.
Now, since we’ve tunnelled our port 5902 to the Linux box’s port 5902, to any programs on our Windows computer, our local port 5902 is what we want to access. So when the viewer starts and asks for the computer to connect to, we’ll connect to:
localhost:2
Which is shorthand for saying, “Connect to port 5902 of this very computer”. ssh will then take everything it sees on port 5902 of this Windows computer and make it show up on port 5902 of the Linux box. Like magic. Hopefully, it will ask you for your password, and Voila! A window will open that shows your desktop of your Linux computer.
That’s the main functionality. Now for the finer points. You probably don’t want full 24-bit or 32-bit color being forwarded across the internet, because that’s just slow. So use the following vncserver command instead:
vncserver -depth 16 :2
That will use 16-bit color instead, which if fine for most uses. You can even go really primitive and use a 256-color palette for even faster performance:
vncserver -depth 8 :2
But this kind of sucks.
Another thing: Most likely the VNC session will use a custom Desktop, i.e. a plain vanilla X-session with twm, an old but reliable window manager. If you want to see a normal session, with something like KDE or Gnome, you’ll have to doctor some files. Personally I like KDE, so what I did was to doctor my xstartup file inside the directory ~/.vnc to be like so:
#!/bin/sh xrdb $HOME/.Xresources xsetroot -solid grey xterm -geometry 80x24+10+10 -ls -title "$VNCDESKTOP Desktop" & # twm & startkde
As you can see, I commented out the line with twm and added startkde. Now when I start a new VNC session, I get a new kde session.
KDE is also cool, because it allows you to take an existing console logon and make it available for remote viewing using VNC. To do this, to the the KDE Control Center, Internet and Network, Desktop Sharing. Check “Allow uninvited connections” and “Allow uninvited connections to control the desktop”. Uncheck “Announce service on the network” and “Confirm uninvited connections before accepting”. You may also want to check the box for “Always disable background image” in the Session tab to speed things up. Also, you might want to choose your port in the Network tab instead of having it assigned automatically, so you always know which port to connect to from the outside world using your ssh tunnel.
The final tweak is probably beyond the scope of this document (or would be even longer than I’m willing to write.) Just be aware that there are a lot of compression options for VNC, especially if you’re using a TightVNC server on your linux box and TightVNC viewer on your remote computer. TightVNC can use JPEG compression for things, which speeds up everything a lot, but can make your desktop look like you’re viewing it through a smudgy window. Both normal compression and JPEG compression can be adjusted by a number from 1 to 9, so you can fine tune how much compression you use to balance speed with prettiness.
Some more tidbits: TightVNC and other programs make available VNC servers for Windows computers too, so you can see and control Windows computers’ desktops remotely. I’ve never tried this and don’t know the security/usability implications. I’m sure there’s also some implementations for MacOSX, because that’s basically Unix underneath too.
ADDENDUM: Apparently, if you have an alias for your network address, (in a ‘hosts’ file perhaps) there will be problems with ssh tunnelling. You may receive an error on your Linux console saying “open failed: administratively prohibited” if you use an alias for your computer in your hosts file.
For instance, when I’m in my house, my Linux computer has a different, local ip address because it’s inside my firewall. I have this called ‘mylinuxbox’ in my hosts file, so I can have a name for what would otherwise just be a local ip address (i.e. 192.168.x.x). If you try to say “ssh -L 5902:mylinuxbox:5902 mylinuxbox” you will get the cryptic “administratively prohibited” error on your Linux console. The correct way to do it is to use the full non-aliased form inside the -L argument:
ssh -L 5902:192.168.x.x:5902 mylinuxbox
where you would replace “192.168.x.x” with whatever your local ip address is.
For those of you who know me, you know that one of the longest-running of the Scattered Random Projects has been the bookcase that I’ve been building. It’s probably been over 2 years since I started it in grad school. I’m not overly concerned with this lack of progress, because really it’s just nice to have it there to putter around with every once in a while when I need to take my mind off of other things in life. Sort of a “It’s the journey, man, not the destination,” kind of thing.
Well the other day I was looking around my new apartment, and realized that I still have a lot of crap sitting around in piles. “Wouldn’t it be nice if I had a more efficient way of storing all of this crap, especially the books,” I thought to myself. Later, while noticing that one of the things taking up space in my apartment was unfinished bookshelves, I had what many authors call a “Eureka Moment”.
The task of finishing these bookshelves has gotten more complicated, now that I live in an apartment, and not a nice rowhouse with a full basement/workshop area. Really, the only task left for finishing the bookshelves is the literal “finishing”, or applying varnish to the outside. The sort of horribly messy task best accomplished in a garage, with unfinished concrete floors and separate ventilation from human-inhabited spaces. Since I don’t have a garage, I had to improvise an isolation chamber for my bookshelves. With suggestions from my co-worker Nader, I created the Bookcase Fortress of Solitude. Basically, this consists of a plastic-enclosed 6ft. x 6ft. area with an open window.
I must say it worked out rather well. After arduously hand-sanding the whole thing with 220grit sandpaper, I just finished one coat of polyurethane over the whole structure (or “carcass” in the woodworking lingo) and it looks pretty good. It only took two and a half hours for the sanding and varnishing. Probably the sanding took a lot longer because I had to remove all of the greasy hand-prints of the movers.
We’ll see how long it takes before I can finish the second coat! Now to leave my apartment for a few hours so I don’t gas myself…
This is an actual ad I saw on Yahoo! Mail. Are these people not the most suburban, creepiest people you’ve ever seen in your life? I do not want to see what this family is hiding in its basement. Makes you wonder exactly where AC Nielsen gets their ratings data…
Party! Without a tripod! While tipsy!
In Zihuatanejo, Mexico. And I got to come too! Thanks Marcel and Jaime, and congratulations!
I can’t resist! Here are pictures of my new car. It’s my first ever new car and I love it. It’s a Titanium Gray Mazda3, it’s fast and nimble and fun. And a manual, of course.
Here I am going, “Check it out! There’s a snazzy looking car behind me!” Or possibly, “Did I touch it? Oh my gosh, is that a fingerprint?”
I really love the instrument cluster. The new Honda Accord is weird and annoying with its split display and digital speedometer. I love the look of the Mazda instruments at night. This picture shows a bit more blue than it has in real life, but it was difficult to take such a low-light picture to look exactly right. Note that 0MPH is at 6 o’clock, and 60MPH is very close at 9 o’clock. Psychologically, that makes it really easy to speed without realizing it. And yes, the mileage does read 425 miles total.
So, almost two months later (after moving to the Bay Area) I decided that I was long overdue for a little physical activity. My preference has always been to excercise in the morning, because I’m too tired and in no mood after a day’s work. Unfortunately, I also am not one to wake up very early. This was perfectly fine in grad school, when I could occasionally show up to work just before noon; however, this kind of schedule is usually frowned upon in most real-world jobs.
I finally had the bright idea to combine getting to work with excercise, finally putting my bicycle, which has been sitting patiently on my porch, to some good use. The problem remained to find a way to bike to work without getting killed by pre-coffee over-aggressive commuter drivers. The last time I tried to bike to work in the South Bay, a lot of my route was on Central Expressway, at the suggestion of my ex-bike-messenger friend Andrew. Frankly this scared me to death, and I was especially eager to find a way to avoid “sharing the road” with cars running at 3-4 times my speed.
With a lot of web searching and assembling various web sources of bicycle-friendly lanes and paths, I found the John W. Christian Greenbelt 1 which lies in a straight line along the path from my house to work, is about 3 miles, and is a bike / pedestrian path only--no cars. Score! The following picture was made with http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/, an excellent website for creating maps with routes using google maps. 
I decided to try biking it today, and it’s a really nice ride. And it appears that any day now, there will be a pedestrian /bike bridge past Manzano Way over Calabazas Creek. (The eastern edge of the greenbelt.)
I’ll leave you with a picture of me enjoying a well-deserved Jamba Juice at the Mercado Center in Santa Clara after almost 10 miles of biking. 
If I look a little bedraggled, remember I am totally out of shape. Also, I was up dancing until 4:30am last night--maybe San Francisco is that much more fun than the South Bay…
(For more Bay Area biking info: http://bicycling.511.org/routes.htm, http://bicycling.511.org/maps.htm, City of Sunnyvale Bike Maps)
Somehow, I think I just moved across the country. It sort of felt like I was taking another vacation to California, but I just realized that I have no return ticket. Huh, I’m in Mountain View.
I start work tomorrow. Yes friends, I live on the edge. No vacation for me! Much-deserved downtime is for wimps!
Seriously, I always intended to do a fabulous vacation, but my new boss needs me, you see. And there’s that whole pesky situation that I haven’t been paid since July. This way, I can become comfortable and prosperous, vacationing on the Continent only after I can properly play the role of bon vivant. See you then, my darlings!
This picture was taken with my fabulous new camera. Thanks to all of those that made it possible! Here is your first piece of documentation of Matt’s New California Life. I’m staying at friends’ house until they return from Europe and kick me out or until the movers arrive with all of my stuff. So no, the beautiful spread you see me sitting at is not an impulse buy after my first few hours in California.
At some point I must go out and eat. And figure out what I wear to work tomorrow. Business casual? Nerd formal? Or the barely-suitable-for-society Nerd casual???
This is the look of a defended Ph.D.
Very few journal entries have showed up here lately because I’m writing my Ph.D. thesis. This is very adult, very responsible work. But I can’t forget my roots: 
Former roommate in the supporting role.
Recently the picture on my television was “bouncing” or jittering up and down. Whacking it on the side or stamping your foot on the floor would make the picture stable again. I began to think that possibly my 9-year-old Panasonic CT-20G21U 20-inch television had come to the end of its useful life. Or at least the effort needed to fix it would be far more than what it was worth. At any rate, with all the foot stamping, I was starting to be reminded of a carnival act in which the horse was supposed to solve math problems.
It had other problems too, like color “blobs” or regions which looked like they were more purple than other regions. I was pretty sure that just meant the tube needed degaussing, but my TV doesn’t have a degauss button, so I wasn’t sure how to do that. Some webpages suggest that you can get TVs to degauss by turning them off or on, or possibly by unplugging them, but that never seemed to work for me. So another problem.
Then I came across the Panasonic TV Service Modes page. On it, the author tells how to get into the super-secret maintenance mode of certain Panasonic TVs, and make adjustments to all sorts of crazy things affecting super-low-level functioning of your television. My model wasn’t listed, but as it turns out, it worked anyway. So I got into “Serviceman Mode”. I quickly discovered that there weren’t any adjustments that I was comfortable messing with. So I exited the Serviceman Mode. On exit, the TV did what looked like a full reset.
Voila! Unexpectedly, the purple blobs and vertical picture bounce went away! My only guess is that the full system reset may have degaussed the set. It’s possible that my set was so magnetized that even the vertical hold was suffering.
So if you have weird problems with your TV set, maybe they can be fixed by degaussing. And if you can’t figure out how to degauss your set, try googling for a way to get into its service mode. (Or its sexist “Serviceman” mode.)
Sci.Electronics TV Repair FAQ by Samuel Goldwasser
For some reason, I always thought that the standard portrait of President Eisenhower looked exactly like the guy on the label of Elmer’s glue. Then I looked up the picture of the Elmer’s glue “guy” and was a little surprised to find that it wasn’t human. Although I still kind of think they look the same. In a weird way. I’ll let you decide:
I think it’s the ears.
If you run a Windows computer and are more ambitious about fixing problems then throwing your hands up in the air and sobbing softly, you should know about http://www.sysinternals.com/ . It’s an excellent collection of freeware windows diagnostic programs. They give you excellent access into the inner workings of your Windows computer.
The utility on the Sysinternals website I found recently is called PageDefrag. Hopefully you’re on top of things enough to know that every drive in a windows system needs to be defragmented once in a while. Defragmentation is the process where some program gathers all the pieces of each file on your hard drive that may be scattered around your hard drive, and puts the pieces in one place, speeding up future accesses of your files. If you’ve defragmented before, you may know that any files that are “in use” are not defragmented by the standard windows defragmenter program. Some files that are always in use are the most important ones to the proper and speedy functioning of your system. These include, most notably, the page file (swap) and the Registry. Enter PageDefrag. It’s a very simple program. You run it, and it tells you if some of these important files are fragmented. If they are, you can schedule PageDefrag to defragment these files on the next boot of your computer, before they start being used by the operating system. Since these files are accessed all the time, it’s a great efficiency boost to your system if they are defragmented.
Other programs on Sysinternals that I love:
Today I had to deal with the problem that the official channels of buying software at my esteemed university were taking too long. This particular software has a 30-day trial license, which I started using when I initiated my order for the full license. Well, 30 days later, the provisional license ran out, and still no official permanent license from the university. I’m really on a tight schedule, and can’t spare any day to sit around and wait for software to come to me.
So what’s a busy soon-to-be-graduating grad student to do? Well, it turns out that it’s far easier to find programs on the net that will generate valid registration code numbers for programs that use such numbers to unlock important features. If you’re able to find these programs, you will be able to say astalavista to the box you’re trapped in (in Slovakia). Ahem. cough
Anyway… My point is, that when I go to these sites, it’s always about getting just close enough to accomplish your task, but not so close that you pick up some viruses or a million popup windows from the website. It occurred to me that it’s the online equivalent of dancing with a hobo. Now, I can’t say for sure, because I’ve never danced with a hobo, but it seems like a similar situation. I’ll leave it as an excercise for the reader to complete the analogy in all its details. Describing dancing with hobos with too much specifics would merely give those of the base persuasion plenty of fodder for lewd guffaws and knowing glances, and that’s not the goal here. We are in search of intellectual clarity.
To summarize, don’t get software from hobos more than you absolutely have to. It’s a dirty business. Even if it does give you every single toolkit! Every single toolkit! Ahem. Don’t do drugs kids, stay in school.
Sometimes I generate a pdf or PostScript receipt of an online purchase which I then save somewhere on my computer. It’s nice to have around a record of my purchase, just like a real paper receipt, especially if I need to return something, etc. Other times I have actual important things like electronic tax returns, etc. that I need to keep around.
The problem then becomes: What if someone steals my computer, or breaks into it? Then they get to see all these files and potentially use the sensitive information for mischief.
Thankfully there’s ccrypt. It’s a simple program that runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOSX. All it does is ask you for a password to encrypt your files. It then encrypts them and adds a suffix “.cpt” to their filenames. Done. To decrypt your files you just supply the same password. (Make sure you remember it!) It isn’t nearly as complicated as PGP or GPG. But it still uses real encryption, so the security of your files is limited only by your choice of password, not the encryption method. The normal program is command-line, but there are some additional packages that allow you to integrate it into the GUI desktop of some notable operating systems.
Note that encrypted files look like random information, and thus are not very compressible. If you want to compress your files, you should do this before you encrypt them.
You’re going to think I’m making this up, but I swear to you I am not. These two pictures were imprinted on plastic bags protecting items that came with a Dell Precision 450 Workstation.
I laughed at them by day, but they gave me nightmares at night.
The first one reminds me of grad school.
This is as much for my reference as for everybody else!
Recently my tivo hung on the boot screen. (“Your recorder is starting. Please wait a moment.”) Luckily, since I am a big nerd, I had upgraded my tivo to a larger hard drive, and in the process had created a backup image of my tivo’s hard drive. So I could restore the backup image and fix my tivo! Here’s what I did:
MFSTools v2.0: http://mfstools.sourceforge.net/
Full backup and restore directions (The Gory Details): http://www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html
If you’re like me, you’ve heard the “Riot Act” referred to, as in “He was so mad he read the Riot Act.” I’ve never known exactly what that meant. I assumed it was some sort of archaic slang describing a riotous situation. Well there was actually a Riot Act, a law passed in 1714 in England. And it’s pretty impressive. The idea was, you read the very specific text in The Riot Act, and if the crowd didn’t disperse, you were free to arrest the whole lot of them or possibly worse. Now, just in case you ever need to disperse an angry mob, here is the text:
You had to read it verbatim, or else it wasn’t valid. You’ve got to wonder if the sheriff had a copy with him at all times in case of emergency, or if he tried to speak it from memory in the face of an angry crowd.
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/R/Ri/Riot_Act.htm
A form of it is still the law in Canada! http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/C-46/41821.html#section-67
Now if you get that mad, you really can read somebody the Riot Act!
If you want a batch file to spawn another program and then go on with its life (or end, if there’s no other commands) you need to specially ask it to. Normally, if a batch file spawns another program, the batch file will wait at that point until you close that program.
What you need is the batch file command called start. Like so:
start "A Pretty Title for your Program" myprogram.exe
The first argument is always a title, and the second is the name of your program if you don’t specify any switches inbetween.
As an example, here’s a batch file I made called acroread.bat which is useful for starting Adobe Acrobat from the command line without changing your path, or typing in the full path to the executable.
rem @echo off start "Acrobat" "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Reader\AcroRd32.exe" %* exit
Normally, if you were to double-click on that batch file, it would leave a cmd shell up until you closed Acrobat Reader. start prevents that. Note that if you’re actually running this from the command line you should omit the exit command. I included it because this batch file is being spawned by another program, LyX, in order to view PDFs, and I never wanted to see a shell prompt. LyX for Windows 1.33 currently doesn’t like spaces, so I couldn’t specify a location for Acrobat Reader with spaces. I made the acroread.bat file to fix that, and put it in a directory in the path that has no spaces.
Orig. reference: http://www.americatoday.com/hanar/dosb.htm
As I’ve been mentioning on and off in the Technical blog of my website, my laptop has some hard drive connector issues. Gateway finally came through and sent me my new free mylar connector cable after it was back-ordered for a few weeks. Well, because my laptop is so capricious, it’s actually been working for the past few weeks straight without any problems. So in the spirit of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” I’ve been waiting until the next failure to install the new cable. What a cheery thought! I’m sure it will happen in some situation where I will desperately need to google the translation of, “Please don’t kidnap me! I’m a grad student and have no money, and I have a rare brain disease and so will not remember any of your faces or the location of your beautiful camp.”
Worst-case situations aside, I have discovered the joy of backing-up my laptop using Acronis TrueImage. With a USB enclosure and a cheap but good 200GB hard drive from www.newegg.com, backing up is a snap. It takes about an hour to back-up my 40GB of data onto about 20GB of archive files on the USB hard drive.
The absolute best thing was the one time when my hard drive connector flaked out, and the computer crashed and took the filesystem with it. Since I’ve been backing-up every week, I had a days-old backup on my USB hard drive. Acronis TrueImage allows you to create a boot CD, so that even if your hard drive is hosed, you can boot from its CD. Then, all you have to do is to connect to your archive files on your USB hard drive, or connect to a Windows share, DVD-Rs, or whatever, and it will completely re-do your entire hard drive to the way it used to be when you backed up. Data, operating system, applications, settings, EVERYTHING will be back the way it was. In an hour. If you’ve ever tried to reinstall your computer from scratch, you know that it takes at least a day’s work, and then even more to remember how you had all of your settings and preferences setup.
I find such data security especially comforting with a laptop, which gets banged around, carried everywhere, and generally abused.
The only down-side with Acronis TrueImage is that it’s a Windows-only application. The boot CD understands Linux filesystems, so conceivably you could make backup images of your linux drives by booting with the boot CD. It seems like a pain to have to bring down your system in order to back it up, though.
I have always loved the SoBe radio commercials with “Freddy”. They’re just random enough, but also funny enough for me to keep clicking on the website to hear them again, because I no longer hear the SoBe ads in my area.
My favorite is about a little bunny. It’s more dramatic to hear it from the radio, where everything else is so run-of-the-mill that an “official espokesperson” talking about Feng Shui really stands out.
I really like the program LyX. It’s a front-end to LaTeX. And yes, those capitalizations are intentional. You see, sometimes when nerds write programs, they think they are being very clever when they name them. You should also realize that nerds define “cleverness” often as self-recursive acronyms, or acronyms that negate themselves. These may have been amusing to some at some point in the past, but now they are actually very tiresome, even to other nerds such as myself.
But I digress.
When you write a document in LyX, it’s like being halfway between Microsoft Word and LaTeX.
With LaTeX, you have an excellent type-setting program that makes the most beautiful equations, and is great for complicated documents that involve structure. For instance, section numbering, reference numbering, basically any numbering is automatically done by LaTeX. So if you insert an extra reference somewhere in your document, for example, it will automatically be added and numbered in the proper place in your Bibliography. It all works beautifully. The only problem is, when you write your document in LaTeX, you feel like you’re writing code. The reason for that is that you basically are writing code, the LaTeX code, most probably in a text editor. This always struck me as the wrong environment for writing fluid English. To write well, the aesthetics of the prose are important, and I always feel the aesthetics of a text editor are much too Spartan to have a positive influence.
With Microsoft Word, you see your text as you type it in a somewhat pleasant way, but the document structure aids (i.e. renumbering) that LaTeX intrinsically takes care of are very difficult to do. It is possible to have logical structure in the Word document, but very difficult. At every turn Word tempts you to just type in the literal numbers yourself instead of trying to understand Word’s arcane way of handling auto-renumbering. It really is a pain and requires self-discipline to make Word handle things in a professional manner. And for God’s sake, never try to make a floating figure in Word. If you edit your document after placing a floating picture, it will often fly in a very spectacular way off-margin or to another page. I am not lying.
Enter LyX. When editing a document, it appears as though you are looking at a very simple web page. This is nice enough to give you a feel for how your text will look. But it is not an exact representation of the finished product. To see the beautiful results of the LaTeX text formatting (which looks much better than a Word document) you have to “push the button” that generates one of many final forms of your document (PostScript, PDF, DVI, etc.). And with LaTeX, changing the final look of your document in complex ways (two-column vs. one-column, figures interspersed through the document vs. all figures at the end) can be accomplished by one line of text or by a GUI pull-down menu in the LyX interface.
The other great thing, is that often a LaTeX style file is available if you’re writing for a journal. If it is already included in the stock LaTeX/Lyx installations, all you have to do is select it, and then all margins, fonts, fontsizes, styles will automatically be set and you don’t have to worry about setting them yourself. For me, the IEEE journals style file is already supported in both programs.
Where things get tricky is if you have an external style file that you need to integrate into LyX that isn’t part of the default installation. For this, you’ll have to follow directions to add the document class to LaTeX first. Then, you’ll have to whip up a LyX template (which can usually be done by copying another template in the LyX distribution.) Then you’ll have to “reconfigure” LyX by selecting Edit → Reconfigure in Lyx. It is all covered in the LyX help file entitled “Customization” but is still a little tricky. Basically the thing to remember is that the LaTeX document class defines the final rendering of the document, and what options are available, and the LyX template tells LyX where to find the LaTeX document class, and what options to make available to the user in Lyx with pretty GUI, and how to show the layout in LyX. Not so hard, but unfortunately if you’re doing it yourself it will require some experimenting.
I was trying to figure out a very odd Finnish mock-documentary about Finland that I saw on Minnesota Public Television in 1990 or 1991. I remember the odd, dry, but very funny Finnish humor. I wasn’t successful in finding the show but I did find the following:
From http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/prepo.htm
“ Reponen considered Viljo’s friend Heikki as the prototype of a Finnish man - he is dressed in an undershirt and sweat pants, where he has a bottle of Koskenkorva liquor in the hip pocket. He has also old black shoes without socks, a peaked cap, and he smokes a cigar and is constantly searching his mystical friend Viljo, who never appears. The minimalist dialogue and the humor in the character opens perhaps only to Finish television audiences. “
HEIKKI: Have you seen Viljo? LEO: No. HEIKKI: Aha. What are you doing? LEO: Thinking. HEIKKI: Aha. What are you thinking? LEO: This and that. HEIKKI: Aha. LEO: That kind of things. HEIKKI: Well... good luck.
(From "Scrubs")
Cut to…J.D.‘S BEDROOM – EARLY MORNING
J.D. lies in bed, cuddled up to a body pillow.
J.D.'s Narration: As I fondled Katya, my pillow girlfriend, I thought about how things had changed for all of us…
I called Gateway Technical Support because I finally decided to fix my hard drive issues properly instead of with rubber-bands (2005-01-30 Technical).
I call up Gateway, and right off the bat I can tell the guy is a little funky. I tell him what my problem was, (a faulty connector,) and he thinks for a while before telling me that I’ll probably have to send in my laptop for service. That’s ok, I think, because I’m still under warranty. But then he tells me to get my credit card ready, because it’ll be $44 for shipping and handling of my laptop both directions. I freak out a little and ask him why I paid all that money for my 3-year warranty. He replies a little too glibly, “Hey, we’ll get’chya any way we can,” and then chuckles.
He then asks for me to confirm my shipping address. “Do you live on 2222 Some Street?” (Names changed to protect the innocent.) What? I thought. That’s not my address, and for a second I thought it was my old California address. I lived there 6 years ago, before ever dealing with Gateway. “How do you know that address?” I asked in somewhat of a panic. “Oh we know everything,” Tech Guy says. “In fact, I even know the hospital where you were born. Do you?” It must of been a rough day, because, still in shock, I replied, “You mean in <some city>, Wisconsin???” “Yup,” he replies. “Really????” I asked, shocked. “NO!” he laughs back at me. It’s at that point I realize the address he spoke of was actually my parents new address in Minneapolis, where I had my laptop shipped a year ago, and not my old California address.
OK, well, that fun over with, he puts me on hold a while he deals with “a shite-load of paperwork”. Then, coming back on the phone, he informs me, “It turns out, we’re just going to send you a new cable assembly.” Worried about paying $44 for a little cable, I ask him, “Am I going to have to pay for shipping for that?” “Nah, he says, we’ll ship that to you for free.” “Great,” I say, relieved. Tech Guy continues, “The reasons it’s free is, that basically your Gateway 200 is a piece of crap. You wouldn’t believe how many calls like this we get for that model.”
“Oh, good. I guess.” I’m left wondering, did Tech Guy bring a flask of something into work today?
The image to the right shows the hard drive cavity in my Gateway 200X laptop. I recently upgraded my hard drive, (as described previously in 2004-12-01 Personal (Technical),) and in the process had to access this area. The “interesting” or “horrifying” thing about the hard drive connector is that it uses a thin mylar cable connecting to a low-profile connector. This low-profile connector is not very durable. In fact, when I used to work on touchapds for laptops, we used basically the same kind of connector. The specs say that these connectors can only be opened and closed something around 10 times before they lose their ability to clamp on the cable. Well, in the process of debugging my hard drive problems, I must have opened and closed this delicate connector at least that many times. To compound the idiocy of using such a wimpy connector, it is impossible to get the hard drive in and out without removing the ribbon cable from the connector. How to replace the hard drive.
Basically the result of this was a series of crashes on my computer or refusals to boot because the hard drive was “not found”. Simply pressing on top of the connector to close it tighter would cause everything to work again. Unfortunately, one of the times my laptop crashed, it took most of the filessytem down with it. Obviously a more permanent solution was necessary. But this would require a new motherboard for my laptop, and I decided that dealing with Gateway warranty support was an adventure I didn’t wish to embark upon with such a major fix.
So, obviously a hack was in order. I thought about fashioning some sort of clip to go around the connector to clamp down on it. This seemed complicated to do properly, and I wasn’t sure what was underneath the board where the connector was, and couldn’t be sure it would be ok to clamp something there. So I settled on putting something springy on top of the connector that could push down on it when the hatch covering the cavity was screwed on top. Foam wasn’t stiff enough or resilient enough. I decided to use two thicknesses of rubber-band taped together into a bundle. With the help of double-stick tape, I stuck this to the top of the connector. It seems to work!
I’m a little worried that the rubber-band will start to decay like rubber-bands tend to do, and then become brittle. I think it might be wise to invest in some sort of advanced backup program, such as Acronis True Image, or Norton Ghost. Just reinstalling my computer took me two days. Sure, my personal data was backed-up, but reinstalling the operating system and applications took a long time. Both of the above backup programs can image the whole hard drive and restore that image even if your computer is unbootable from the hard drive. They both include a boot cdrom to restore your hard drive. I’m starting to seriously think this is a good thing, especially the more I come to depend on my laptop. It gets hauled everywhere, and generally takes more abuse than my desktop, but at the same time is more important to be running. Especially now that I’m heading toward the end of my PhD.
P.S. Crashed once. doh. Where’s that USB hard drive I ordered for backups?
Apparently, Wiha is short for “Willi Hahn” or “Willi Hahn Corporation”. Those wacky Germans! Oooooh, just look at those torx drivers, babeee! That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
I like the fact that Adobe finally has updated its PDF reader for Linux, after possibly a decade of no development whatsoever. Way to go guys! Oh, and by the way, the scroll wheel on the mouse still doesn’t %$&*ing work!!
Ahem. Anyway, the default behavior when you move a page, either by scrolling or by using the “hand-grabber” mouse cursor, seems to be to completely redraw the whole page. It’s annoying. If you move the page even a few pixels, the page will keep redrawing and strobing.
To fix this, first recover from your epileptic fit. Then in Adobe Reader 7, go to Edit->Preferences->Startup. Select “Use page cache”. This will fix the issue. It probably uses more memory, but at least you won’t be having fits on the floor from the strobing display of your pdf file.
At some point, my Palm Tungsten E started to develop problems. The “On” button started to feel a little mushy. I figured it was just the actual button device getting old. Which really shouldn’t happen after only a year, but what can you do. After some more use, I came to a time when I couldn’t turn on my Palm. So at that point I started to push harder on the button (because I am a big lug and that’s how I solve such problems.) Well, I eventually got the thing to turn on, but then the “On” button felt very mushy. That’s when I started to get nervous. And it turns out I had a reason to be.
At some point a few weeks later the thing wouldn’t turn itself Off. Which is a more serious problem, especially for a battery-powered device. Finally after all attempts to persuade it to turn off and stay off were unsuccessful, I determined that there was a serious problem.
Now of course it was out of warranty, because Palm doesn’t give you a very long warranty. And sending it back to Palm to be fixed cost only slightly less than buying a new Palm. ($125 to fix, $180 to buy a new Tungsten E) I don’t really have money to burn for either option, so I figured I’d have little to lose to try and fix it myself.
I opened it up and found that the “On” button device is very delicately soldered to the surface of the Printed Circuit Board inside. There’s no substantical anchoring, (such as a through-hole solder joint,) to secure this piece of mechanical electronics that will take abuse. (Ahem!) So basically what had happened was that the front two tiny contacts had come off from their surface-mount solder pads from my pushing on it. Well, no problem, soldering is what I do for a living. I soldered it back together.
But it still didn’t work. Hmmm. I turned it over and found that two 3-terminal surface-mount devices had been scraped off the circuit board, along with the traces that went with them. Ugh. How did that happen? Probably by me when I was trying to take the stupid thing apart. Luckily I found one of them. I knew the package shape was SOT-23, and that it had the digits “337” on it. Hmmm. Not much to go on. My epiphany came when I found this website. Apparently it’s a common problem: Surface Mount Devices (SMD) are so tiny, that only 3 digits will fit on their small surface area. Well if you go to the link above, you can type in those 3 digits and find out the few devices that are possible with that code. Then knowing the package type (in my case SOT-23) you can narrow it down pretty easily to one device.
I found that the two devices scraped off my circuit board were NDS337N n-channel MOSFETs (50 mA, 2.5A peak 20V). Being near some big capactiors and the “On” switch, they must be used in switching the power of the Palm. Of course, the simplest thing would be to buy them from Digi-Key. Unfortunately they are either obsolete parts, or not sold in the US. So I had to find something close that I could actually buy. I decided on the similar NDS335N n-channel MOSFET (70 mA, 1.7A peak, 20V). I’m hoping that nothing inside my Palm goes above 1.7A. This is not necessarily true (e.g. an on-rush of current after turning it on,) but at that point it was my only option, short of throwing the thing away.
Luckily I have an AWESOME roommate who was nice enough to let me open up her Tungsten E to see what things should look like. In the picture to the right, you can see what the area near the “On” switch looks like inside, viewed from the back of the Palm. In the upper left-hand corner you can see two tiny devices with three leads and faint “337” marked on them. They and their associated traces were scraped off on my Palm.
Here is my fix. Not much to look at, you can see the two devices (marked “335”) and the associated tiny jumper wires to replace the damaged traces.
I put everything back together, and nothing worked at all. Hmmm. This step of this project is an illustration of how optimism is vital to an engineer. Many times a project looks like it is completely, hopelessly broken. The temptation is stop and cry, but an experienced engineer will pause before crying, and try 10 other things. The exerienced engineer knows that there is invariably something mind-blowingly simple that is really keeping the project from working, instead of the very complicated problem that the engineer has been attacking for days. So donning my Optimistic Engineer hat, I thought, well maybe the battery has just run down and it needs to be charged. (The problem I was solving, after all, was that the stupid thing wouldn’t turn off originally.) After a few minutes of charging, it would turn on, show a normal screen, then instantly turn off. OK… After an hour of charging, it would turn on and stay on! Victory!
After leaving it off the charger for a night to make sure the battery wasn’t damaged and would hold its charge, I declared it fixed and put the case back together. $180 saved, by a few dollars of parts and a few hours work. Not bad.
P.S. The place I linked to above, PDAParts.com is way cooler than I first realized. They seem to sell all major internal parts to PDAs including mine. I could’ve replaced the circuit board on my Tungsten E for only $60 if I’d had to.
P.P.S. After re-syncing my Palm, the mysterious “Always turns itself back on again” bug reappeared. Apparently it was a software problem. So I did a hard reset to clear the memory, and re-synced after removing the Backup directory in my User Data directory on the PC. Then it worked fine. Some program was evidentally responsible for the horrible behavior. This little excercise wasn’t a complete waste of time, though: I fixed my on/off button which looked as though it was about ready to completely fall off.
I just wanted to give props to Kaffeine, the KDE-optimized audio/video player. It’s a front-end to xine, a free audio/video engine. Together they play just about any video format that I’ve thrown at them. And Kaffeine does it with style. It’s one of the most satisfying, solid, and stylish open-source programs I’ve used. (See also Firefox.)
Make sure you know how to spell it. It’s German. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
I have to publicly thank my generous roommate for bringing XM Radio into my life this Christmas.
I must admit, at first I was a little nervous about the $10/mo. service fee. But after just a short taste, I am so hooked. Not since getting a Tivo have I found a piece of technology that will make my life so much better.
It’s not only that there are 200 channels, in digital quality. It’s that the programming is awesome. There are three different alternative music channels that I actually like to listen to. They have no commercials. They have no DJs. They have lots of music, and as far as I can tell, they don’t understand the conecept of “heavy rotation”. It is like a radio dream come true.
My SkyFi2 unit also has a bunch of cool goodies. Like the “memory” button, which you can push if you hear a song you like, and it will add the artist and song name to a list which you can look at later.
There’s also a whole channel for the BBC World Service, and a Public Radio Channel. There are channels for every decade from the 40s to the 90s. Plus lots of other music that I haven’t had the chance to explore yet. Did I mention that you can always listen to the same radio stations wherever you are in the Continental US?
It is way awesome. You should get one. I’m actually trying to think of excuses to be in my car so I can listen more!
Not very many people know this, but my dad has had the privilege to meet and hang out with many famous foreign dignitaries. Here he is sharing a laugh with a famous World War II ally: (Dad’s friend probably has a lot on his mind--he doesn’t seem so jolly.)
Later, he invited a foreign leader from China to speak at the local Lion’s club meeting, and was lucky enough to have the pleasure of hosting and introducing the distinguished gentleman:
In his later years, as a fair and just law practitioner, he recognized that everyone needs good representation for our legal system to work. He served as pro-bono counsel for many, including a few having problems with the United States government.
I found pictures of all of these famous events, and specially prepared them for my dad as a Christmas present. In an unrelated aside, I should mention that my dad has a very weird sense of humor, and has been pining for prints just like these for years, ever since he realized that such historical prints could be prepared effectively with a computer.
It turns out the major problem cups was having with my Windows machines trying to print was not that they were remote, or Windows. It didn’t like the fact that it was getting sent “raw” preprocessed data suitable for sending directly to the printer.
So I downloaded Adobe's PostScript driver for Windows and the ppd file for my printer from http://www.linuxprinting.org/ . I installed the Adobe PostScript driver, and when it asked for the network address of my printer, I entered the http:// URI for my cups IPP daemon.
As soon as my Windows computers were sending PostScript to my linux box and cups daemon, printing worked.
So that’s something to try if your remote IPP printing isn’t working with cups. I tried various methods to make cups print the raw stream, but really I just have no clue how to make cups work, so at some point I gave up and was just happy that printing works again.
If you consider yourself fairly knowledgable about Windows, you might think that starting the Indexing Service to index the files on your hard drive would make doing a file search faster. Well, normally it doesn't.
If you naively go to the “Search” button on your folder view or from the start menu, and then type in a filename in the “All or part of the filename:”, Windows is going to start cranking through your hard drive, looking over every file. It doesn’t matter that it’s already been indexed by the Indexing Service. It’s going to search stupidly anyway right at that moment.
On the other hand, if you type a special search query into the box marked “A word or phrase in the file:”, Windows will instantaneously give your results, because it will use the Indexing Service. For instance, if you type the following in that blank with your C: drive selected:
@filename *.txt
In the blink of an eye you will get a list of every text file on your C: drive. If you try that the old way, in the “All or part of the filename” blank, you’ll be in for a long wait, and a lot of disk thrashing.
Similarly, if you type the following in the “word or phrase” blank:
!good
In another blink of an eye it will find all files that contain the word “good”.
I couldn’t find the definitive guide to this query language from Microsoft, only much more complicated references. But there are many pages on the net involving a page name of “ixqlang”, which are probably copied from some original Microsoft source. Here’s one such copy.
Using the “@” identifies a property of the file you’re looking for. Some examples:
@size > 10000 @write < 2004/10/01 @filename *.txt & @size > 10000
Those past three examples look for a.) anything bigger than 10,000 bytes, b.) anything modified before October 2004, and c.) any text file bigger than 10,000 bytes. More detail can be found in the ixqlang references.
Apparently, the new MSN Desktop Search Bar is just a fancy user interface to this pre-existing functionality that Microsoft saw fit to deprive us of for so long.
If you have a laptop or a flat screen monitor, it can be vexing that sometimes Windows just doesn’t put your monitor into power-save mode even if you tell it to do so after a certain amount of inactivity. With an LCD screen, you’re wasting precious life of your backlight. It doesn’t matter if what’s being displayed is black, the backlight is still on unless your monitor is in “Suspend” mode. For a laptop, your power is being used unnecessarily.
I’ve seen a couple of people who have interfaced the windows screen-saver mechanism, which always seems to work, to the activation of Suspend mode. One such person offering a free solution is this guy. He offers a screen saver that will put your laptop screen into power-save mode, turning off the backlight, instead of just painting pretty picutures. Great.
An even better side benefit is that he offers a program, monsus.exe, that will suspend your monitor when it is run. We can use this to create a keystroke way of instantly turning off your monitor (if your laptop manufacturer hasn’t already been nice enough to give you this capability.)
First, copy monsus.exe into C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT, whichever exists on your system. Then, create the following batch file:
@echo off rem wait one second ping 1.1.1.1 -n 1 -w 1000 >NUL rem now suspend the monitor monsus 2
Just make a text file with the above text, and then name it monitoroff.bat. Put that also in C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT depending on your system.
Now I’m not sure if you need to logout to make sure those files are in your path, but I think you do. So logout and login again.
Now, open up C:\WINDOWS or C:\WINNT, find the monitoroff.bat file, and drag it to your Start Menu, to some subdirectory where it will be out of the way, but you know where to find it. This will create a shortcut to monitoroff.bat in your Start Menu. Once it is created, go to that shortcut in your Start Menu, and right-click on it, and select “Properties”. You’ll see a blank for a “Shortcut key”. Type in some key (Not ESC, Enter, TAB, PrintScreen, SPACEBAR, DELETE, or BACKSPACE) and you will notice that Windows adds a “Ctrl+Alt+” before it. Whatever key you put in this blank is now the hotkey to activate monitoroff.bat. Press OK, to finish editing the properties.
Now, by pressing Ctrl+Alt+<your key>, you run monitoroff.bat at any time, no matter which program is focused. It will wait one second, and then turn off your monitor. Voila!
The reason I wait one second, is that if the monitor gets disabled, then releasing the Ctrl and Alt keys will be interpreted as a keyup event and turn the monitor back on. You can release the Ctrl and Alt keys very quickly to try and get around this, but then when your computer wakes up, it won’t know that the Ctrl and Alt keys have ever been released, and think that they are still down, which will be confusing to you.
You can also do this trick with the hotkeys for any program in your Start Menu. It’s a very quick way to start any program.
I use KDE with Fedora Core 3, and it seems that Mozilla Firefox doesn’t know how to respect my choice for default email program unless I brutally force it to.
The way to force it is to add the following “hidden preference” to the file user.js in your user directory for Firefox:
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto","/usr/local/bin/thunderbird");
If your executable for thunderbird is not in /usr/local/bin, then replace the second string with whatever the full path to thunderbird is.
user.js is like prefs.js, except that firefox will explicitly not ever write to user.js, even though it will write and modify prefs.js.
Here are some other hidden preferences that I use in firefox:
When you press tab in a web page, only move the focus between form elements--don’t focus on the hyperlinks in the page as well:
user_pref("accessibility.tabfocus", 3);
Show more “unhidden” preferences in the Advanced tab of the Firefox preferences window. These new preferences let you control how to display links in firefox that were sent to it by external programs:
user_pref("browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs", true);
The first of the following two prefs turns on autoscroll, or what normally happens in Windows when you push the scroll wheel as a button, see a scroll icon, and then can scroll the page proportionally to the location of the mouse. The second preference is very important. It turns off pasting the contents of the clipboard into the URL location if you push the middle click in the middle of the web page area. Normally, if you at any point middle-click in the middle of your webpage, it will load whichever url is in the clipboard into the browser. This is usually gibberish. This hidden pref turns that “feature” off:
user_pref("general.autoScroll", true);
user_pref("middlemouse.contentLoadURL", false);
If you’re like me, you have big oafish paws and don’t like to hit very tiny little buttons on your screen. A more genteel way of saying this is that onscreen buttons you use all the time should be bigger than others to help you get to them faster with the mouse. This is referenced back to Fitt's law, which is a model to describe how fast people can point at a target of given width. (The short version: People can point to bigger targets faster than smaller targets)
Anyway, really what I want to talk about is how to make the “Back” button in Firefox much wider. All you need to do is add or modify a file called userChrome.css. This file will live in your Firefox user directory. On unix, this directory will be ~/.mozilla/firefox, and in Windows, it will be in C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox. Note, that in Windows, your Application Data directory is normally “hidden”, so you will have to go into your folder options to make hidden folders visible.
Within the firefox user directory, go to Profiles/????????.default/chrome. In that directory you should find your userChrome.css. If it doesn’t exist, you can add it yourself. There should be an example file in that directory called userChrome-example.css. Rename this to userChrome.css and then you can add to it the css code described below.
This file is a great way to make changes to the way that firefox looks without too much hassle. For instance, if you want menus to highlight with navy blue like Windows XP, (instead of the pseudo-3D default behavior,) see these instructions.
To make the “Back” button bigger, add the following text to your userChrome.css:
/* make Back button big! */
toolbarbutton[label="Back"] {
min-width: 10.0ex !important;
}
The first line is just a comment. Next, we say that we’re going to apply a style to a toolbarbutton with label property equal to “Back”. We assign a minimum width that is in “ex” units, which is proportional to whatever font we’re using. And finally we say that it’s “!important” to make sure that we override the default behavior as defined in the mozilla css code.
In a similar way, you can get Thunderbird to make the “Send” button very large on the compose window. Find the thunderbird userChrome.css in a similar place in the .thunderbird (unix) or Thunderbird (Windows) directory structure. Then add the following code to userChrome.css:
/* make Send button big! */
toolbarbutton[label="Send"] {
min-width: 10.0ex !important;
}
Voila! Now you can write embarrassing drunken emails, and still have no problem mousing to the “Send” button. You’re welcome.
I want one!
That is all.
Update: It appears that iriver is no longer selling the h140. I may have to settle for the gratuitous color screen and no remote of the h340.
Hmmm. Well printing on cups via IPP from Windows machines broke on Dec. 2 for no apparent reason. My laptops still talk to cups on my linux box, they show up in the logs, and their jobs show up fine as “Completed” in the cups queue. But they never get sent to the printer. And there are no errors. Just silently it all doesn’t work. I can still print locally from my linux machine fine. In the cups access_log and error_log it looks as though all clients are connecting and submitting jobs fine, but in page_log, none of the remote jobs show up as being printed.
Anyone who might know why this is happening? If so leave some comments. Or post a reply to my plea for help. I can’t think of anything I changed before it stopped working. It’s possible I up2date’d something, but I can’t think of anything related to printing.
If anyone has an idea how to start debugging this I’d be happy to know too. I made the logs capture everything with the “debug2” setting, but it still didn’t show anything unusual except the absence of printing.
I like the fact that “Gasssss” is the international word for the sound that an Illy espresso can makes when you open it.
This isn’t really a personal post, but I thought I would write down the resolution to a technical issue I brought up on my last journal entry.
So the Gateway tech finally excercised tough love and told me to go call Toshiba. Which I thought at first was the end of the line, but as it happens Toshiba was awesome and helpful.
Toshiba’s tech support number is long distance, which “back in the day” would’ve annoyed me. But now that we live in the age of cell phones, long distance is the same as local – it’s all just minutes. Great. So I called Toshiba tech support and was not put on hold. That blew my mind from the beginning. A woman actually answered and immediately wanted to help me. After a few seconds of me sputtering and not knowing what to do because I wasn’t on hold, I told her the problem, and she identified the issue in about 15sec.
Apparently for some reason Toshiba laptop hard drives have two model numbers. The drive I’m trying to get to work has its main model number which is MK6022GAX, but it has another identity as HDD2184F. The “F” signifies that this drive has non-standard firmware and interface. In this case, the “F” means the hard drive was specially made for Compaq laptops.
The woman told me to look at the Toshiba drive I have that already works, and its model number was HDD2171C. The “C” means that it is a standard issue firmware/interface. It’s the type of drive that I can buy from any reputable source.
Which I guess is the problem. I bought my hard drive from ebay, and I guess this guy had a whole lot of Compaq hard drives, which he mistakenly thought were the same as any other Toshiba drive, but the Toshiba woman told me the hard horrible truth.
So now, I can finally rest. And possibly am one step closer to my dream of having 60GB storage space on my laptop.
I know all of my readers are relieved.
As Jim Anchower would say, it’s been a while since I rapped at ya.
But that’s ok, since I’ve been living a grad student life, where fun-time slows and my social life runs at half the speed of a normal person. Einstein described this. If I were to go back and meet my friends in the real world after 6 years of grad school, I would find that they would’ve had the equivalent of 60 years of fun, while I would’ve felt like only a few weekends had passed. Yeah, I know, it blows my mind too.
I think I’m going to make a T-Shirt that says “Grad Life” in big stencil-font letters. Although people would either not get it, or get it and think it was really sad. I guess there’s no cause to bum people out unnecessarily.
Speaking of what grad students do for fun, lately I’ve been obsessing about why I can’t install a 60GB hard drive on my laptop, even though the drive works on every other computer, and my laptop is supposed to handle that size hard drive. The BIOS refuses to even recognize that a drive is attached to the computer. I have this psychological problem where I get really upset if I feel as though an inanimate object is beating me in a test of wills. That must be why I’m an engineer. Or maybe it’s because I’m an engineer? At any rate, I find laptop debugging very frustrating because everything’s all sealed up and not available for me to monkey with. The other realization I came to which made me sad was that there was no computer repair outfit I could bring my laptop to who would do a better job of figuring out this problem than me. Here’s hoping that somehow Gateway tech support comes through. I’m crossing my fingers that I’ll find a technician who knows all the secrets, and isn’t constantly asking me if I’m sure that I turned on the computer.
Which reminds me of my plan to issue “Not Technically Stupid” ID cards. You should be able to pass some kind of test and get one. Then when you’re on the phone with Tech support, you can give them your ID number and they can immediately start talking to you as a bona fide knowledgeable person. Instead, most of the time I’m talking to technical support people, they spend a long time going through a series of questions to make sure I’m not one of those people who use the CD-ROM drive as a cup holder. I hate that.
I had my turkey on Thanksgiving with my crazy extended family. It was actually OK, because I was slightly removed from all of the craziest of problems, while still related enough to be sympathetic. The food was amazing, even if all of my relatives are so politically conservative that they serve a dish called “Republican Corn”. Although I must give credit: If there’s one thing those Republicans do well, it’s making a corn dish. Yummy.
I executed /sbin/chkconfig --list | grep on to see all of the things that the system automatically starts on boot at different runlevels. I then went through them to find any obvious things that I don’t use.
To turn something off: /sbin/chkconfig <process> off
There’s a bunch of other stuff pertaining to nfs that I can probably get rid of also. I also probably can get rid of portmap, since I don’t use any RPC protocols (I think.) But I think I’ve done enough damage for one day. I have to make sure I would never want to use nfs someday…
Part of my printing woes involved printing text files. If I printed text directly to my laser printer, it would always go off the edge of the page, as if the font was bigger than the print formatter expected it to be.
Then, I observed the same thing when converting text to postscript with the excellent program enscript. Viewing the postscript file in ghostview would show the text spilling over the intended margins. This led me to believe that maybe it wasn’t just a printer issue, but a postscript or font issue.
It turns out it was a font issue. The issue is with a package called urw-fonts-2.2-6. This package is the Fedora Core 3 version of the free fonts which are the equivalents of the basic PostScript fonts. It appears that with this version, ghostscript displays bigger Courier fonts than it should. So it thinks that a certain number of Courier characters will fit on a line, but when displaying them they spill off the right side. Since my printer is PCL and not actually PostScript, ghostscript is doing the rendering of text files before they are sent to the printer to be printed. Thus both viewing in ghostview and printing directly to my printer show the too-large fonts.
My solution is to “downgrade” to urw-fonts-2.1-7. Now everything prints and view fine.
Enscript is an awesome program for printing text files. The best feature of it is to put two text pages per sheet of paper, side-by-side with the paper in landscape orientation:
enscript -2jr myfile.txt
That will print directly to your default printer. With the --output=output.ps option, you could output to a file called ‘output.ps’.
It even prints a nice header at the top of the page by default. You can customize everything, make interesting headers, etc. But I find that just by not printing text files in huge font and avoiding using many sheets of paper is reason enough to use it.
Here is my custom header that I use for enscript: [[download:m?]]. To use it, you download that file, and typically put it in /usr/share/enscript (or wherever your enscript *.hdr files are) and then execute the follwoing command:
enscript -2jr --fancy-header=matt myfile.txt
I just got back from another wedding. This one was for my good friend Ryan and his lovely bride Kelly. One of my friends remarked that once all of the single people get married off, we’ll have no reason to rendezvous from across the country to the same spot anymore. I hope that’s not true. Hopefully we’ll at least all be a lot richer than most of us are now, so jet-setting across the country for the weekend will be totally possible and fashionable.
For a blessed occasion (and this wedding was definitely the blessed kind, in an actual church) there certainly was a lot of gambling that transpired. Or at least poker playing for plastic chips. It probably depends on your religion to figure how God feels about simulated gambling with no actual money involved. I played more poker in a short amount of time than probably ever before. And I must say that the absence of any real money was very liberating. I think what I learned is that I’m very cheap, because before, even playing with a $2.00 buyin made me nervous about every chip. But with nothing at stake, I could try out different strategies and be a bit bolder. Gone was the awful feeling of losing actual money for no apparent reason other than voluntarily engaging in an activity for which I have no skill. I still wasn’t very good, but at least I think I got better. It helped that we are all intellectual nerds and somewhat systematically trying to learn from each hand. Normally I hate that kind of deconstruction of a fun activity, but in this case I really was trying to figure out how to play better, so it was welcome.
Speaking of deconstructing, I feel the same way about art. After being logical and systematic about my technical job all day, one of the best things about music or movies or plays or literature is that it can be full of mystery and intangibles that feel deeper than mere facts. Which is why I’m always a little bit surprised to find academics or those who fancy themselves academics trying to break down some work of art into little observable, identifiable pieces. It almost seems to me as if they’re trying to pretend that subjective art is objective and scientific. I’m glad I don’t believe that it’s possible, because it would be a shame.
I finally not only got the printer to work for my linux computer, but also convinced it to serve the printer for our windows laptops.
I use cups, with a fairly normal configuration, but I made sure to Deny From None, and Allow From All. (I have an intranet behind a firewall so this is ok.)
I made sure to also disable my iptables firewall on my linux machine, also ok because I’m behind another firewall. You can keep iptables if you want, but you need to unblock port 631 for trusted computers.
I tried to use samba for a while, but found it excruciatingly painful. My windows machines could print to the printer via samba – sort of. There seemed to be a lot of miscommunication and freeze-ups on the WinXP side of things.
In the end, the best way to have the windows computers connect turned out to be as an “Internet Printer” in Windows terms. Or using cups IPP in linux terms. See this tutorial for an excellent explanation. The key for me was to discover the proper way to word the url. For a linux IP address of, for example, 192.168.1.2, and a printer named ‘myprinter’:
http://192.168.1.2:631/printers/myprinter
This form uses port 631, which is the where cups listens for IPP. The subdirectory and printer name were what I didn’t realize I had to add before.
On the windows machine, I went to “Add a Printer”, checked “Add a network printer”, checked “Connect to a printer on the Internet or on a home or office network”, and then entered in the blank the URL above. I then hit next, and when it asked for a driver, I gave it the native driver for my printer that I downloaded off the internet into a directory, using “Have Disk…”
The page I linked to above says that for Fedora you need to add configuration to cups to make it print a raw stream from the windows machines. On my more recent Fedora 3, I found it worked right off the bat with no extra configuration.
I have a APC Uninterruptible Power Supply, and so I thought, what better way to run it with linux, than with their native PowerChute Business Edition, for linux! Boy was I wrong.
Apparently (from APC tech support) this software doesn’t run any UPS over the USB link, even though almost all of their UPSes nowadays use USB to talk to the computer. Also it has absolutely no documentation. If you go to the official link on the APC website for the documentation for this software product, it will direct you to one file which is a single page of information entitled “Troubleshooting” which discusses a particular problem with a particular hotfix for Micros0ft Wind0ws. There’s a readme file, but that only tells you how to install it and turn their monitoring agent on, but after that, there’s a whole java web interface that I guess you’re supposed to guess about. (The tech support guy actually told me how to use it.)
A much more civilized approach is to get apcupsd, which after trying to get PowerChute to work, is the equivalent of running through a field of daisies on a sunny day. Or whatever you like doing on a sunny day.
If you have to use any USB device on a linux 2.6 system, required reading should be the following: Beginnings of Comprehension and Enlightenment. Especially the latter will help you to take a random generic USB device, and turn it into something far more identifiable, such as /dev/palm, /dev/lp-brother, or even /dev/ups. Much magic happens in /etc/udev, such as assigning device names to loaded drivers (/etc/udev/rules.d) to defining permissions of devices (/etc/udev/permissions.d). And it’s not just for USB. For instance, my nvidia graphics card drivers are loaded by udev and have their permissions also set by udev. Knowing udev means living a richer, happier life with a linux 2.6 kernel.
Another great tool specifically for USB information is usbview. It’s a great help in writing rules for udev. It updates in real time, so you can unplug and plug USB devices and see how they show up.
Recently on a computer at work we had some jerk trying every common username and password through ssh, and we wanted to be sure that the little guy hadn’t actually gotten in and mucked anything up. A colleague alerted me to chkrootkit, a program you can run to check for “rootkits” which are basically automated hacking programs. It’s the first thing to look for if you’re concerned about someone hacking your system.
Well, here’s the start of my pale-blue-colored online journal. The color of the background is subject to change, but I thought it was more interesting than white.
Right now I’m trying to write my thesis for eventual graduation in February (knock wood). Which is why it’s the perfect time to avoid writing--I mean, do some serious soul-searching. Yeah, that sounds better.
I’m not sure if I’ll have anything Earth-shattering for the world at large to read, but at least possibly my friends can see what’s going on with me once in a while.
I have friends who are cool enough to have blogs instead of something like this, which is obviously just an online journal. They have pseudonyms for all of their friends to protect their identities. I guess since you all know me then nobody’s secret identity will be protected anyway. So using first names shouldn’t be a problem? Pseudonyms seem like too much work. Then I’d have to remember them. What a hassle. And as my roommate can tell you, I’m bad with names. Which is good because she’s bad with faces. It reminds me of a movie.
Speaking of secret identities, everyone should see The Incredibles. I love Pixar because they were the first people to invest computer animation with heart and soul. And this movie was a lot of fun, and very funny.
By the way, I’m not using Advanced Blogging Software. This is really a wiki. As a person who is a perfectionist to a fault, I love wikis. The whole idea of a community keeping things documented with few barriers between them and publishing is great. I have my own personal wiki to keep track of todo lists, movies to see, things to remember, basically EVERYTHING my feeble brain usually forgets. And it’s nice to be able to add stuff to the same virtual notebook wherever there’s a web browser, which is most places nowadays. So this won’t be a full-featured blog, but I may add capabilities in the future if I’m really trying to avoid work.
OK, sleep is good. Without sleep, you’re as happy as a chicken in a tree. There’s my very first obscure inside reference which maybe two people will get.
Installed Fedora Core 3, checked the box marked “Install All packages”. With kernel and applications, it only takes about 6GB. Cool.
I only installed to my biggest hard drive, giving 20GB partition for /, and the remaining 60GB for /home. I left my user data on the other two hard drives in my system so that I could access it later.