Geek Stuff category archive

And it runs Opera.

Addendum, 10/28/2007:

er, not any more.

It’s all boxed up and going back to T-Mobile. Seems the Wing touchscreens have issues, and the Tech Support girl was real up front that the issues are not, what do you say? necessarily “isolated.” They are related to memory capacity.

I’ve dragged out my old Samsung (which is, frankly, a damned fine phone–it does everything it promises to do) for the time being, and picked out the replacement phone for the Wing (Why did I pick the Dash? It is capable of running Opera Mobile).

I have to say that one of the things that has always impressed me about T-Mobile is the calibre of their tech support and customer service operations. I spent 60 minutes on the phone with them today (not on the brick Wing–on the land line), and less than five minutes was hold time, as I got forwarded from regular tech support to PDA tech support. The support techs knew what they were doing, ask the right questions in the right order, and, most important, listen to answers.

And that’s fairly typical of my dealings with them since back in the old Voicestream days–quick phone pick-ups, knowledgeable reps, and competent answers.

Hey, I know good support. I worked support for eight years.

Addendum-de-dum-dum, All Hallow’s Eve, 2007:

So I shipped the Wing back to T-Mobile on Monday.

I called Customer Service on Tuesday with the tracking number for the shipment.

I received the new phone today. The Samsung’s back in the drawer.

The Dash is already running Opera Mobile as the default browser.

I really have only praise for that level of customer service.

Open Source beats pirated. Of course, as far as I am concerned, Linux beats Windows three ways to Sunday, but that’s another story.

By 2009, all computers in Russian schools are to be run on Linux – which means they will not have to pay for a licence for software, such as Microsoft’s Windows.

Alexey Smirnov, Director General of the Company ALTLinux, said that schools formerly tended to run illegal copies of Microsoft operating systems, but after Russia entered the WTO, the laws became much stricter and schools began to be prosecuted for doing so.

“The situation became rather serious, and something had to be done,” he told BBC World Service’s Digital Planet programme.

“One possible decision was to buy licences for all the software being used – but so much software was being used, it proved too expensive… so the decision was taken to use free software, although not immediately, but over three years.”

Via Adrian Bacon.

The cron job (for “cron,” read “chronometer, as in ‘timepiece'”) is working like a charm.

So much so that I’ve edited the line in crontab to read

0 4 * * * podracer > /dev/null

The “/dev/null” means that the emails that cron sends me about the cron job will be sent right to the bit bucket.

(That’s right, under Linux, programs can actually send you emails to tell you how they are doing and what, if anything, is going wrong, so you can, like, actually shoot the trouble. Unlike Certain Other Operating Systems.)

Geez oh man, Slackware just rocks.

So, at 9:30 this morning, Second Son’s on his way to Radio Slum to get a new router.

Three hours later and one call to Linksys (the router configuration wouldn’t open in my browser, and the support tech had to try a few tricks before we could get in there and open up Port 80 to get the website back on line), we’re back.

I mentioned here that all I had left to do is to get Podracer running as a cron job.

I’ve never had any luck setting up cron jobs, so I decided to RTFM.

I opened a terminal and entered the command man crontab (that tranlates into manual for crontab) and brought up the manual.

After reading the manual, I entered the command crontab -e to open my own personal cron file under my user name.

I entered this line in the vi editor (vi is not for the faint of heart; it’s taken me almost a year to feel at home in it).

0 19 * * * podracer

That means at 0 minutes and 19 hours of every day run podracer. The reason I selected 19 hours was to test whether I got it right.

I did. It’s a little after 7 p. m. and Podracer is happily automatically downloading podcasts even as I type.

When it’s done, I’ll edit crontab so that Podracer runs at 4 a. m. and every day’s downloading will be automated.

As it stands now, here are the contents of my signature file, which tells Podracer what to download (the lines preceded by the number sign are ignored by the program–they are to help me remember what the heck I’ve been doing):

#
#News
#
#Radio Times
http://www.npr.org/templates/rss/podcast.php?id=510027
#Diane Rehm Show
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510071
#Talk of the Nation
http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5
#Voices in the Family
http://www.whyy.org/rss/voices.xml
#Whaddya Know
http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wyk/.jukebox?action=viewPodcast&podcastId=5243
#
#Linux
#
# Geek News Central
http://www.geeknewscentral.com/podcast.xml
#LQ Podcasts
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQPodcast
#LQRadio
http://feeds.feedburner.com/linuxquestions/LQRadioShowOnly
#Linux News
http://linux.quicksurf.com/?feed=rss2&cat=78

I highly recommend Geek News Central for anyone interested in the digital world. Todd Cochrane has a great newscast about geek stuff in plain English.

And he even read my email on the air and linked to Podracer.

Many times, when I’m at the cooling tower place, I don’t spend all my time on the floor. Sometimes, I just sit in an office and write.

Friday, I dropped into the local Milford Radio Slum looking for a portable radio so I could listen to WSDL when I’m doing the writing thing.

Now, I already have a couple of portable radios. One I keep in the church office so I can listen to WHYY while I’m doing the Treasurer thing. One is in no shape to travel because the antenna no longer telescopes and it cannot be safely put in my travel bag.

And I came out of Radio Slum with an MP3 player which also contains an FM radio. It was on clearance and cost only $40.00.

The radio was not strong enough to pull the station that I wanted. (No surprise in a big steel building 70 miles from the station.)

So I decided to enter the wonderful world of podcasts.

The MP3 player has a USB connection.

I connected it to the box and, after a bit of mucking about, I realized that Slackware was seeing the MP3 Player as a SCSI drive and calling it “sdc1” (Linux seems to see everying except an IDE device as a SCSI device).

I got it to mount by entering the following line in my FSTAB.

/dev/sdc1 /media/player auto auto,user 0 0

(Instead of mounting to /mnt, like most other drives, including the CDROM and the DVD writer, it mounts to /media, because it is a media player).

I was then able to manipulate the player like any other drive.

I started nosing around for an aggregator that I could use to automate the downloading of podcasts, and I found Podracer. It works like a charm.

One hint, though: Podracer, like most other *nix programs, must be installed by root (for those poor folks who still use Windows, root is sort of like the Windows “Administrator,” only secure). Howsomever, when it’s run for the first time, it should be run by the user name of that you wish to use to run the program. If you run it the first time as “root,” it will not work for other users. The programmer advertises it as a very simple program, and that, my friends, is truth in packaging.

Right now, Podracer is running and happily downloading podcasts that I will listen to later.

You list the rss links to the podcasts you wish to download in a simple text file in this format (the number sign means that line is “remarked out,” that is, ignored:

# ChuckChat Freestyle
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChuckChat

The next step is to identify podcasts I want and to set up podracer as a cron job.

(I’ll leave out the part about calling Opie and having him point out the obvious to me, but my geek license is officially rescinded.)

Vista flops:

(Windows–ed.) XP was supposed to be off the vendor’s (Micro$oft–ed.) price list by the end of January 2008. Now it will stick around until the end of the second quarter. The cut down Starter edition for very low end machines will stay on Microsoft’s price list till 2010.

Mike Nash, Microsoft corporate vice president, Windows product management, put a brave face on the decision, claiming that, “While we’ve been pleased with the positive response we’ve seen and heard from customers using Windows Vista, there are some customers who need a little more time to make the switch to Windows Vista.”

Or put another way, punters are doing anything they can to avoid having to install and run Vista on their machines.

Helpful hints from Kroll.

The annivesary of the (hoick! ptui!) emoticon.

A crutch for those who are unable to express themselves with words (LOL):

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon.

🙂

Twenty-five years ago, three keystrokes – a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis – were first used as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message by Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman, the university said.

The plug for the hub came out of the UPS.

Thus illustrating a primary principle of organizational dynamics (and, for that matter, politics):

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by stupidity.

I upgraded the laptop last week.

Rather than do an upgrade installation, which can be a tedious process, I backed up all my data files to the file server, including crucial configuration files such as the Samba and the rc.firewall configuration files. rc.firewall is the current iteration of the old Projectfiles firewall.

I then fdisked the puppy down to bare electrons and loaded Slackware 12.0 from scratch, with the default 2.6.51 kernel. In the process, I got rid of a lot of stuff I’ve played with and abandoned over the last couple of years, but which was still hanging around and taking up space.

It was worth the effort. The machine boots faster, multi-tasks faster, and swaps less. Memory intensive tasks, such as doing parity checks on downloaded files and “unraring” large downloads, used to noticeably and annoyingly slow down multitasking.

Now, such tasks sometimes noticeably slow down the multitasking, but they don’t annoyingly slow it down.

After getting the basics working, I installed Dropline Gnome, not because I like Gnome (I don’t like how it looks or feels), but because a lot of the software I do like to use needs Gnome libraries (for you Windows types, libraries are sort of like *.dlls).

I did find a couple of oddities.

I had to run alsaconf to get the sound card working. In previous installations on several computers, I’ve not had to do this.

par2cmdline doesn’t seem to like Slackware 12.0, but gpar2 works just fine to perform the same function.

Google Earth crashes X Server. I don’t use Google Earth much and have plently of other computers to run it on until I finish trouble-shooting it.

In fact, I’m so happy with Slackware 12.0 that I installed it on my file server (that 10-year old Pentium IBM PC 300 that used to run the website) today. From fdisk to back on the network with anti-virus and firewall and receiving a backup from my work computer–three hours, counting smoke breaks. (No, I haven’t installed Dropline Gnome on it and probably won’t–it’s a server. It’s just supposed to sit there and quietly serve).

Is sweet.

I upgraded the laptop (which the computer I use for ‘most everything).

Still a little tweaking to do with the Fluxbox interface, but everything else is back where it should be.

Addendum, Later That Same Day:

I discovered a little problem with the sound card. but LQ fixed it right up.

Windows:

Scott McCausland (AKA sk0t), the ex-admin of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker, was sentenced to five months imprisonment after he confessed to uploading copies of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith just before its theatrical release. He was also sentenced to a further five months of home confinement and slapped with a monitoring order after he was convicted of “conspiracy to commit copyright infringement” and “criminal copyright infringement”.

(snip)

Using monitoring software and wearing a monitoring bracelet were bitter enough pill but switching to Windows is just too much for the Tux-lover, who intends to fight the decision.

So, the sidebar broke this afternoon with some wierd memory error pointing to
/opt/lampp/htdocs/weblog/wp-includes/wp-db.php
when Wilmington Weather tried to load.

After much searching, I found out that the culprit was not
/opt/lampp/htdocs/weblog/wp-includes/wp-db.php.

It was /opt/lampp/share/php.ini. It was limiting the memory to 8 MB (the default setting). I had changed the setting on the old server. Now I’ve changed the setting on the new server to 20 megabites.

Opie told me about this months ago. That’s why I changed the setting on the old server. I should have thought to change it on the new server.

But everything seems to be working now.

Windows, no doubt. Or possibly Ubuntu.

A German chap who demonstrated his frustration with his PC by throwing it out of the window escaped a fine when police oficers decided they rather sympathised with his actions.

(snip)

The unnamed 51-year-old perp explained he’d “got annoyed” with his machine, which struck a chord with the police officer who admitted: “Who hasn’t felt like doing that?”

Accordingly, he was not sanctioned for disturbing the peace, but was made to clear up the mess. The make of computer and offending OS are not noted.

On the work computer, I have Norton Anti-Virus.

The reason I have Norton on it is that it’s not my computer; it’s the company’s. (Were it mine, I’d have F-Prot.)

Norton just interrupted me to ask whether I wanted to run Live Update. So I agreed.

At the end, displayed a message to save all my work and restart the computer.

Now, here’s the obnoxious thing: It then proceeded to shut down all the programs itself.

Immediately. I didn’t get time for a mouse-click.

(Yeah, I did get the option to save my work, but really, now.)

Gosh, I’m really glad I don’t use Windows unless I have to.

To my new server. It’s working.

I couldn’t face another cooling tower today, so I spent the day messing with MySQL and WordPress.

I think everything came over okay, but please let me know if anything doesn’t work right.

Adendum: Later that same day:

I think my two or three regular readers will notice a significant performance improvement.

I’ll work on getting all the newsfeeds and stuff working later. Right now, I’m in I-Hate-Computers mode. I even called Opie for tech support and, between us, we managed to get everything working. (Thanks, Opie.) But, like in real life, neither one of us could figure out exactly what was broke or exactly what fixed it. We were yakking on the phone and hitting keys and it started to work.

In the meantime, here is some information about the new box: It runs

XAMPP for Linux 1.6.2, which includes

MySQL 5.0.41, PHP 5.2.2, Apache 2.2.4, and PERL 5.8.7 .

The operating system is Slackware Linux 10.1

The computer is a Pentium III 1000 gHz computer with 528 MB RAM, two IDE harddrives and one SCSI harddrive, a SCSI tape drive, a CD-ROM drive, and an external USB DVD-RW drive.

(aside to Opie) It was a surplussed Checkpoint Win2000 server.

And now back to the regularly scheduled flame wars.

I have a little network.

Now, here’s what’s wierd:

Orca is the new XP box. It’s my own copy of XP; I wiped it and started fresh.

The printer and a couple of directories are shared. Guest logins are allowed. Local login names and passwords on all the computers are the same (I am a bear of very small memory).

Orca can see and browse all the other shares on all the computers on the network, both the Windows computers and the Samba shares on the Linux computers.

The Linux computers can see and browse folders on Orca via Samba. The Linux computers have full Linux networking capability with each other, because Linux networking works, like, you know, out of the box. Well, out of the box as soon as you get LISa working.

But the other bleeding Windows computers! When they try to connect to Orca, they get a “You are not authorized to use this network resource” message.

I know that Orca’s firewall (NetDefense from System Suite v. 5) is set up properly, since the Linux boxes can see the share folders.

Conclusion: Windows workgroup networking sucks.

If anyone has any idea what’s going on, I’d like to hear it.

With apologies to Opie (see his comment here), XAMPP is installed and working. The non-database elements of the website (that is, everything except the blog) have been copied over to the new server and are working almost fine (almost, because the javascript “updated” statement at the bottom of the boating webpages seems to be choking).

I also got the printer successfully networked to the new server.

There are certain security issues with XAMPP I want to resolve. I don’t make anything public with no passwords, thank you very much.

But, over the next few days weeks months, I’ll be working on moving the database and perfecting the theme.

I just knew there was a way to completely automate this process. Now I’ve learned about BASH variables.

#!/bin/bash

# This script stops Apache,
# gzips the current log files,
# removes the old log files (access_log and error_log),
# creates a new folder named with today’s date and time,
# moves the gzipped log files to that location, then
# restarts Apache.
#
# The name of the folder is “month-day-year-hour-minute” so
# that the script can be run multiple times in the same day
# without stepping on itself (unless you run it twice in
# the same second).
#
# If someone wishes to tailor the script to his or her own
# system, it should work fine as long as the path
# statements are edited to reflect his or her configuration.

NOW=$1

: ${NOW:=$(date +”%m-%d-%Y-%H-%m”)}

cd /usr/local/apache2/bin
./apachectl stop

echo “Stopping Apache”

cd /usr/local/apache2/logs
mv access_log access_log.old
mv error_log error_log.old

echo “Renaming log files”

gzip access_log.old
gzip error_log.old

echo “Zipping log files”

#Gzip removes the original files after zipping them.

echo “Removing *.old files.”

mkdir /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW

echo “Making folder /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW”

mv /usr/local/apache2/logs/*.gz /root/files/oldlogs/$NOW

echo “Archiving old log files.”

cd /usr/local/apache2/bin
./apachectl restart

echo “Restarting Apache”