Geek Stuff category archive

Someone gave the Bellefonte Cafe a computer.

It was a Windows 2000 box with a bad case of BSOD.

I brought it home, threw CentOS on it, and took it back this morning. According to Second Son, they have their internet turned on and are happily computing away.

I need to head back over there and set up CUPS and they’ll be good to go.

Regular readers might ask, “Why not Slackware?”

Slackware requires you either to know or be willing to learn a little about what goes on under the hood. You don’t have to be able to do a ring job, but you do need to be able to check the oil.

Oops:

Some users of T-Mobile’s G1 phone found that typing any word on the phone’s keyboard — in any application — sent whatever they typed to the phone’s command line shell.

Those commands were then executed with root user privileges, meaning there were no limitations on what the commands could do to the phone. For instance, texting the word ‘reboot’ would actually cause the phone to do so.

“We fixed the bug on Oct. 31 and are currently rolling out the fix to G1 devices,” a Google spokesperson told Wired.com. Not all G1 phones may have been fixed though as T-Mobile is rolling out the patch in stages and there could be some phones still to be updated.

Via Todd.

This is really neat. I had heard of it, but did not realize it has progressed as far as it has. The project is headquartered in Great Britain and is farther along in mapping Europe and the British Isles, but their map of my little corner of the world is excellent, right down to the detail of the exit ramps for the Interstates.

One of the organizers of the project was on the last TLLTS podcast.

Cell phone that perp right into a cell:

Looking for help from witnesses who would rather text than talk, the (New Castle County police–ed.) department is the first in Delaware to offer a tip line for citizens to report crime by sending anonymous messages on their cell phones.

Officials are hoping Text-A-Tip will reel in young people who are reluctant to talk to police.

“What we’ve seen so many times is our detectives are out there on major crime scenes, and the kids are out there on the street corner texting each other about what happened,” Senior Sgt. Michael Walsh said. “We’d like to be able for them to text us.”

They actually click through the links:

While the researchers hijacked hundreds of millions of Storm worm e-mails pitching knockoff drugs and bogus sites designed to foist malware on unsuspecting users, their actual results were based only on a relatively few missives that actually made it into recipients’ in-boxes. The research team estimates that about three-quarters of all e-mail sent by the Storm worm was snagged by junk e-mail filters, ISP blacklists, and other e-mail security applications.

“Under the assumption that our measurements are representative over time, we can extrapolate that… Storm-generated pharmaceutical spam would produce roughly $3.5 million dollars of revenue a year,” the team concluded.

Via Geek News Central.

This morning. Had to turn the one printer back on and reset the clocks on the microwave and the DVD player.

But the UPS’s worked. The servers, the modem, the router, and the hubs stayed up and the internet connection held.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am a rabid fanboy of the Opera browser.

In addition to Opera’s slick and flawless functionality, I like the eye candy aspects; there are hundreds of Opera skins available.

The Opera “O” takes on a whole new meaning.

You can see the new version below the fold.

(Slightly edited because my memory returned.)
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Since I resurrected the one computer and migrated the website to it, I ended up with an extra computer–the old P3 that was my webserver.

I’ve set it up as a test machine and have been playing with other versions of Linux, other than Slackware, that is.

I had already messed about with Mandriva and was completely and totally disenchanted.

For other adventures, go below the fold.

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Sometime tomorrow, I will shut down my server and move it upstairs to the server room.

Currently, it’s sitting on a table in the kitchen.

I will be offline for about half an hour, probably in the morning after church.

But I’ll be back.

Both of my regular readers can look forward to that.

The new server is now online. I just pointed the router at it.

Now I think I’ll go try out Debian on the old one.

If you notice any freaky stuff, please use the email link at the top of the page to notify me.

Addendum:

Oh my. This is so much faster than the P3. Nothing like RAMs to improve perfomance.

The new server reboots cleanly with no glitches now. I’ve cleaned up my mispellings in

/etc/rc.d/rc.local

and will stop playing sysadmin and start annoying persons in public for a while.

My server has been dragging. I’ve had to reboot it three times today for non-responsiveness.

This box is a Pentium 3 with 256 MP RAM. I think I’ve stretched it as far as I can.

Since I have a Pentium 4 with 3.5 GB RAM available, I’m working on setting up the website on it. By tomorrow afternoon, it should be on line.

In the meantime, if you notice the site slowing to a crawl, know that I am working on it.

Then I’ll set up this box as a test machine.

Where I’ll put it, I haven’t figured out yet. If I put it in the server room, I’ll have to get a new KVM switch capable of handling more than two computers.

Everywhere you turn in this house there seems to be some old broken-down used computer that I’m managed to bring back to life.

Last week, I described how the Family Computer went squirrelly.

Yesterday, I finally browbeat Second Son into bringing down one of the spare monitors from the attic and set about seeing what I could recover.

The problem was not as bad as I feared. You can read about it below the fold.

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For some reason, I can’t mount my external USB hard drive, which is in fstab as “/media/usbdrive,” by typing “mount /mnt/usbdrive.”

I have to type “mount /media/usbdrive.”

Damn computers. Expect me to splet things write.

Makes inroads:

Reader Christian Nielsen wrote from Sweden to tell us he and his girlfriend have named their baby Linux, after the operating system . . . .

(snip)

This raises so many questions. Will Richard Stallman insist that the baby be called GNU/Linux? Does a baby named Linux go to sleep and wake up without problems? How often does he outgrow his footwear and require a reboot?

Reportedly, they had another name picked out, but, when he arrived, they thought he was as cute as Tux:

Via Linux Outlaws.

I’ve had to reboot the server twice today because it was dragging.

It’s not the OS.

Slackware is rock solid. It always works and never crashes.

Both times the database passed all the checks.

Guess I’ll have to see whether I can salvage the P4 that’s sitting downstairs on the treadmill with the dead HDD and turn it into a server. Somewhere I have an HDD sitting in a drawer.

Programmers who are not creatures of some corporation have a sense of humor and are allowed to display it.

I’m burning an ISO with K3B.

When I started the burn, K3B told me that the image had an invalid file size and to “continue only if you know what you are doing.”

I don’t, but I continued. The worst that can happen is I throw away the disk.

By the way, I once reported a bug to the K3B developer (it had to do with retarding the computer clock when using the “Copy DVD” feature to copy from one DVD drive to another). We traded emails off and on for about six months. He’s a hell of a nice guy and jealously desirous of making K3B the best burner program around.

In the World of Window$, I’ve used Nero, Sonic, and Roxio. Nero and Roxio are about the best of the Windows bunch. I have licensed copies of all three.

K3B is better and easier to use than any one, two, or three of them.

When entering the command

mysqldump -u [username] -p[password] –opt [databasename]

Man, I hate trouble-shooting SQL.

Now, I know more about SQL than most computer users. A good part of my work at Checkpoint involved supporting SQL databases, both in Crystal Reports and in M$SQL (I preferred Crystal). MySQL is not all that different. Structured Query Language is, after all Structured Query Language.

But what I know how to do is change the oil and check the fluid levels. Fuel injection is a mystery to me. So are the inner workings of SQL.

When I have fuel injection problems, I take my vehicle to Jack Smith’s; I know Donnie will get it right the first time and fix the problem.

I got no Jack Smith’s for SQL.

When I have to shoot this kind of trouble, it’s like reading a Proust novel in French using a French-English/English-French dictionary.

Oh, well. I’ll figure it out. I always do.

And when I do, I’ll write a script (it’s actually half-written) that makes a folder over there
—–>,
on my second hard drive, named with today’s date (year-month-date-hour-minute) and backs my database up to it. Then I’ll make the script a cron job so it runs every night.

No more three months of lost blogging for me.

(I know that Opie is the only regular I have who’s going to have any idea what the heck I’m talking about. That’s why all the links. We were all newbies once.)

Click to read the updates.
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From time to time over the next few days, I’m going to be working on my firewall. While I’m messing with it, you’ll probably get a 404.

About the onlu thing I can’t reliably do on Linux that I can do on Windows is play Windows media files, the ones with the extensions *.wmv and *.wma.

This has nothing to to with Linux. Rather, Microsoft, in typical Microsoft fashion, keeps messing with the codec to keep those files proprietary in the hopes of further enslaving users to Windows.

Now, I can play some older *.wm? files. Both mplayer and VLC are capable of doing that.

Normally, this doesn’t bother me. I either ignore *.wm? files or stream them over the network to a Windows box.

But I finally got tired of commuting into the next room to watch the occasional video, did a quick webseach, and test drove Crossover Linux from Codeweavers, which uses Wine to run Windows programs on Linux or Mac boxes.

I could have set up Wine myself, but I didn’t want to learn anything; I just wanted the watch the darn video. After testing Crossover Linux for almost two and a half minutes, I went back to Codeweavers and registered the product.

Here’s picture of the result: That’s Windows Media Player v. 9 on the left, the Midnight Commander file manager on the right, this website viewed in the venerable Lynx text-based web browser at the bottom, of course, a shameless plug for the Linux Distro of Iron in the background.