wow, ubuntu installer

I had problems with my ubuntu installation on my laptop. X wouldn't start anymore. I don't want to try to fix it, I'll just reinstall after backing up relevant parts of /.

I had forgotten how cool the ubuntu installer is. Installation is done in the live CD gnome setup. So, while the OS is installing, I'm able to connect to the internet and surf. I could also have played any of the games on the live CD. I remember an older distribution that allowed you to play tetris while the OS was installing from CDs. This is much cooler than that.

I don't know about Vista, but none of the Windows versions up to XP can do that. In more than just the obvious way, installing Windows is a total waste of time.

too bad, no postgresl

I was excited when I saw a link to site5.com's bargain basement web hosting pricing. I'd love to have cheap hosting, that way, even if I had nothing to put there, it wouldn't be too expensive.

Unfortunately, there's no postgresql in those hosting plans. Mysql is good enough for most people, and it's improving, sure, but I can't stand it and will never use it if a better free database is available, and postgresql is that better database. I haven't looked into firebird yet. Haven't really needed to since Postgresql does everything I need and it continues to make great progress. I've heard some good things about it though. I may look at it sometime soon. At least at the feature set. It's going to be hard to set up a comparison with postgresql though, my database at work is upwards of 300GB now and it's going to get larger as I import more of the company's data into it.

Linux Imap email client that does auto-expunge?

I access my work email via IMAP. At work I have evolution with a whole bunch of filters to move mailing list and non-work related email to local folders. That way, the inbox is for work-related email only.



The problem is, evolution doesn't auto-expunge the inbox. So when i run evolution at home (locally, not over X or over VNC) I can still see the emails which the work evolution has already moved to folders. Those emails are still visible in the inbox.



I'm going to have to check on either command line (fetchmail or similar) or graphical (perhaps sylpheed or thunderbird) email software that I can configure to periodically check IMAP, move non-work-related email to folders (or an alternate email address) that can be managed separately, and actually expunge the moved email (not just mark them deleted). Of course, I've been thinking about this long enough that I really should have done it months ago. The problem is, it's not very inconvenient to just vnc to my desktop at work, start evolution and manually expunge with CTRL-E. The degree of inconvenience is directly related to the likelihood of getting motivated enough to actually look for a solution. If the itch doesn't scratch enough, nothing will be done :-).

powered by performancing firefox

Performancing

I don't remember where I found a link to Performancing for Firefox. It was only recently. Certainly within the last two weeks or so. I think I'll switch to using it all the time now. The editor isn't as fast as the one on blogger itself, but it's very convenient. It allows me to post to any of my blogs (well, for now there's just this one and my other me, but that could change as virtual personalities multiply) from just the one screen that pops upward in the browser itself.



I'm still learning the ropes though. I've learned one good thing now though. the default mode was Rich (text-only) editing. I've switched to editing the HTML source since I'm used to doing that already anyway (despite a very basic knowledge of HTML). Took me a few iterations of trying to embed the fainting goats youtube link though to figure out that I needed to go to editing the source (the " icon at top left) .



I haven't played around with this enough to see if there's a way to save drafts *in*the*browser*. That way, I could start out posts in performancing even when not connected to the net. With fast internet wherever I go now though (my friends diggi and barb at camiguin action geckos tour and adventure tell me that there's PHP1000 eat-all-you can internet from Smart now on Camiguin. It's probably very slow, but it's 24x7. so slow doesn't matter much. they were even able to download and view the youtube video of my newborn son (completely impossible previously, with the local telco's dialup internet service), that's going to be a rare requirement. But I'm sure there'll be the occasional trip to Sagada and Banaue. There, there won't be ubiquitous internet for another year or so, I guess.



This reminds me, I've got lots of pictures to upload to flickr or picasa so that they can go on to my other blog. I need to fix those old photoblogs too to point at flickr. Right now they point at geocities sites that I used to store the images. That's inconvenient though since it's necessary to touch the site every month or so so that yahoo doesn't throw away the content for lack of movement.

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Netgear WGR614v2 firmware update

We recently got DSL and wifi at home. I've kept it open (no WEP, no WPA) so I can see if someone will notice and leech off it. I haven't seen anyone riding onto the wifi signal yet, so I'll probably keep it open continuously.

We have a Netgear WGR614V2 wifi router. We saw quite a bit of instability with this. Once or twice it was because the PLDT DSL link just went away for 2 or 3 hours after 10PM. That hasn't happened often enough yet to complain to PLDT about it. The Netgear router, though, does go nuts (to coin a technical term) pretty often. Every day, sometimes twice a day, it just stops responding to ping and routing. It's still on, and I can control it when wired, and the wireless link is good. It just doesn't reply on the wifi interface.

Last night I downloaded and installed the latest firmware update on the wifi router. It's been stable so far, and I'm hoping it'll remain that way. It probably will, it was probably fixed in the first firmware update :-). The firmware update also adds WPA support and some other things. I'm not going to use WPA, but it's good to know that it's there if I need it. It'll also be useful to test ubuntu's WPA support, just so I know how that's done.

Encrypted filesystems and US border laptop searches

So I'm concerned about having my laptop legally stolen at U.S. borders, or sort-of-legally stolen by TSA [or totally illegally stolen by baggage handlers] when I check it in.  Ignoring the two other cases, I considered putting my data on an encrypted partition on the laptop.  That's not so hard these days, with linux (and windows too, except I don't use windows).  But that doesn't fix the first case either.  If anything, it would just raise red flags for TSA and U.S. customs, and they'd confiscate the laptop and probably detain me until I told them the passphrase.  And then I'd go to jail since the passphrase might be something very uncomplimentary to the TSA.

So, no, encrypting /home wouldn't help.  It's probably still a good idea for another use case, where I get held up and the laptop gets stolen.  At least there would be no leaks of proprietary information.  So I may do that anyway.  But it won't help at U.S. borders.

Alright, I've convinced myself.  Now I just need to backup the data so I can wipe out /home and setup the encrypted partition :-).

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Apparently, laptops may be legally seized and searched at U.S. borders, they may even be kept and not returned.

“My laptop was initially searched by one person, but he called for backup” when he saw the blueprints. “It seemed they were convinced I was sent to plant bombs in those nonexistent buildings.” He said he hasn’t seen the laptop since.

It probably happens very rarely, perhaps randomly (although there was the case of someone who had his laptop searched because there was a report of child pornography or similar on him).

One more reason to avoid going to the U.S., I guess. Not a decisive reason, my family and I aren't going to the U.S. until at least after George W Bush is out of office, and probably not even then, unless the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security have either been dismantled or become accountable for what they do. As it is, I'm not risking my laptop in checked luggage (although possibly that restriction is lifted now) and I'm not risking losing it and never getting it back just because it's impossible to get anything out of TSA or Homeland Security (since the judiciary and police will bend over backwards even if there is no case).

There's no important information on my laptop (all my mail is on gmail, and the CIA already has all of my mail, and even if they don't, the NSA does), but I'm not some rich american who can afford to buy a laptop every month. So I'm just not going where they can take my laptop and never return it (and because I've been so critical of George W Bush's incompetent administration, I'm not going to be a random sample, they'll do it on purpose).

security bank ATM bugs

I'm not very happy with Security Bank ATMs. I don't have much choice in the matter since my company has my salary go into a Security Bank ATM account. But I'm definitely not impressed with their ATM software or their commitment to quality, if any.

Long ago I saw a Security Bank ATM bug where, if I were to try to withdraw, say PHP 11,000, the ATM would say that it was out of 100 peso bills (I think, or 500 peso bills) and that it could not process the request. The actual error is that Security Bank has a cap of PHP 10,000 on individual withdrawals. The error message is wrong though.

At exactly the same time (during the same withdrawing session), I also saw a strange bug. I was at the Security Bank branch at Timog and Tomas Morato in Quezon City and the ATM said that it was in Baguio. I don't know what the deal was there. Maybe they moved the Baguio ATM and physically installed it at Timog and Morato. Or maybe they took the install disks or CDs from Baguio and installed them elsewhere. Whichever it was, the lack of quality control is disturbing in a bank.

Just yesterday (8 Nov 2006), I was at the Security Bank on Shaw Blvd (right by Jose Rizal University). The old gentleman ahead of me took a long time to process his transaction. He was confused though, he seemed to think that either he could withdraw PHP 1432.57 (or something like that), or he might have been trying to do a merchant payment. He was trying to do all this at Security Bank even though he was a Metrobank subscriber. So, OK, he was just confused. I pointed him in the direction of the Metrobank branch up Shaw Blvd a bit.

When it was my turn at the ATM, I was concerned because the screen was blank except for some ASCII at the top (which had an A:\, and some random characters, some of them greek). So I thought maybe the ATM was not working. When I pressed a button though (ENTER), a text menu came up asking me which telephone company I wanted to pay bills for. That's bug #2. Why was I being asked to choose a telephone company when I hadn't even inserted my ATM card yet.

I wasn't interested in paying any telco bills, so I pressed CANCEL and it went to the ASCII rubbish at the top bug. I wasn't too confident about this, but the bank staff were still in the bank (but the bank was closed). I figured if something went wrong, I'd just knock on the door and tell them the problem.

So I fed the ATM my card and was able to withdraw money. When the transaction ended, the screen went blank again, with the ASCII rubbish at the top.

I pointed this out to the guards, but they said there was nothing wrong and they had just reinstalled from CDs (or floppy, I couldn't quite understand that part). I guess the guards had been *told* (perhaps by the manager, or some IT guy, or whoever was in charge of the care and feeding of the ATM) that it was OK. In which case, whoever that person was had no clue.

The clearly visible bugs in the ATM detract from the confidence that depositors or account holders have in the COMPETENCE of the bank. If they can't fix the bugs in their ATMs, how confident should I be in their financial and accounting competence? The fact that they *KNOW* about these confidence sapping bugs in their software, and they don't care enough to at least hide them from view (by taking the damn ATM offline until the glitches are fixed) weakens my confidence in them some more.

With Banks (and with other companies too, but with Banks and hospitals and air traffic control systems in particular, where lives or money may be lost) there must be no tolerance of error. Even if the branch manager knows that the ATM will continue to function correctly, the customer doesn't know that.

Damn - I'm in trouble for googling svn

There's an article about how google is in bed with the CIA. I hope it's not true. As it happens, my own sense is that there's probably a lot of overreaching going on there (the interviewee also thinks that the U.S. government probably had a hand in creating 9/11,I mean, that's possible, and Cheney and his gang are evil, but probably not *that* evil).

In any case, if this stuff is true, I'm in sooo much trouble. I keep forgetting (actually, I keep not remembering to write it down or look in my overflowing bookmarks) the URL to subversion. So I keep googling for it (there's another problem, I keep saying "googling" with no (tm) or whatever it is that will appease the lawyers, mainly because I don't know what the protocol is there. I bet I'm going to receive a cease and desist email any day now, from a company that's in cahoots with the CIA, i'm *sooo* going to be waterboarded).

Ho-hum. I do wonder how much of that is true. Maybe a lot. But I don't worry too much about it. I don't intend to come anywhere near U.S. territory until this insanity ends (probably going to be a long wait). I'm certainly not guilty of anything (well, except for saying that Bush is an incompetent nincompoop and his vice president and advisers are evil, that might be a crime now, not really eager to test it), I can explain what subversion version control is, in so much detail it would be torture on the torturers, I'm so enthusiastic about it, but there's just insanity and paranoia there. Best to leave them alone until they decompress and are more likely to leave the innocent alone.

Upgrading ubuntu without reinstall

I see that There's a step by step guide (with pictures even) to upgrading ubuntu dapper drake to eft

I'm going to try that one of these days. But first I think i'll watch someone else do it at work :-). I've been burned quite a few times upgrading distros (mostly mandrake and mandriva) upward. It's possible to do, but a lot of things can break in the middle (with mandrake and mandriva, urpmi being so dependent on perl, there are lots of things in perl upgrading that could break urpmi which would break the whole thing.

Yeah, I think I'll watch someone do it first. I wouldn't be surprised if it goes smoothly. A lot of things go smoothly with ubuntu (although I still need to get sound working on my wife's laptop, I got that working when I had a similar laptop more than a year ago, but I've forgotten the magic incantations necessary).

A* pathfinding fun

On one of the games programming feed aggregators I monitor (or rather, that I have Bloglines monitor), there was a recent post pointing to an A* pathfinding discussion for beginners.

I haven't finished it yet, but it's sufficiently fun that I'm blogging it already :-). I doubt if I'll actually implement it. But I like knowing about random things not directly related to work. It might come up in an interview. If it doesn't, I *might* bring it up in an interview :-). And, anyway, a problem in the future might come up that looks like a pathfinding problem. It's useful to know things that are close to but not exactly in ones normal problem domain.

At work, my company happens to have How To Solve It: Modern Heuristics and I read that slowly, mostly on breaks. Not because I necessarily understand everything I read, but it's interesting, expands the mind, and even if I don't understand, it's useful to know that this or that technique exists so that, if something comes up in the future whose shape looks like it's solvable by the familiar technique, I know which book to look to. Or at least, which wikipedia article to follow :-).

happy halloween - a maniac serial killer who knows were you live

Always code as if the person who will maintain your code is a maniac serial killer who knows where you live

wifi insecurity

By today I should have set up the wifi router to use WEP (I don't see where I can set up WPA on the netgear, which is a bit strange since it *is* 802.11g capable, so it's *new*).

I've decided against doing that for now though. I'll just make sure all computers in the house are firewalled off, and I'll keep the wifi router open. There's not that much bandwidth to share, but I'm interested in:

A. *Whether* someone will piggyback on the wifi at all (we're
in a lower middle class neighborhood and it'll be interesting
to see if anyone even notices that there's some free wifi
available.

B. If anyone *does* notice the free wifi and decides to piggyback,
I'll just sniff the network and snoop a bit :-). I don't care
about any of their data, I won't crack their windows box or
anything (although I may portscan, you come in the door without
knocking, I'm going to frisk your donkey), I'll just see what kind
of traffic they generate.

C. If they start doing peer-to-peer downloading, well, I'll block
them just to see if they know enough to change their Mac address
to get back in :-).

PLDT mydsl, wifi, woohoo!

I was mistaken in my http://monotremetech.blogspot.com/2006/10/pldt-mydsl.html previous post on pldt mydsl not working with linux. It *does* work. The problem I encountered was that when requesting an IP address over DHCP, there is a delay between when the first computer (which got an IP) stops using the internet and when the second computer (which could not get an IP) finally gets an IP over DHCP. I haven't done much more experimentation than that. I got the same problem with the computers reversed. When I was able to get an IP via DHCP on my Linux laptop, when I switched to the Windows computer and tried to get an IP, it wouldn't get one until many minutes later.

My guess is that this is related to the DHCP lease time. PLDT probably just won't provide another IP to a computer behind the DSL modem until the most recent DHCP lease provided to another computer behind that same modem has expired and has not been renewed.

In any case, I've got a new NetGear WGR614 v2 wifi router courtesy of Jijo Sevilla and after a painless (because I didn't try to set any security, I'll do that tomorrow or the day after) setup, my laptop (Ubuntu linux), my brother-in-law's laptop (Windows XP) and my brother-in-law's desktop computer (Windows XP) are now all able to go online, although the desktop computer is wired.

I'm typing this from the bedroom, but I'm going to have to turn this computer off soon. It's just nuts to be surfing continuously for the whole weekend. There hasn't been enough quality time with my family and I haven't even done work-related stuff that I was going to do over the VPN over the weekend ;-).

pldt mydsl

Sol and I moved recently. We loved our apartment, but with the baby coming, it makes sense to move in with her family, for help at birthing, with the baby, and to consolidate costs.

I miss Destiny Internet I had hoped that I'd be able to bring it with me to Sta Mesa, but they don't have cable internet available there. So we decided to go with PLDT MyDSL, the PHP 999 low end version. Installation was pretty quick and the bandwidth is as expected (actually, it's a bit faster than advertised, which is all to the good).

There are some problems though. They don't use PPPOE, instead it looks like all that's necessary is to get an IP via DHCP and you're golden. This works with my brother-in-law's windows XP desktop and laptop. It doesn't work with my linux laptop though (dhclient eth0 just doesn't succeed). I'm wondering what I need to do to get this done (apart from buying hardware, although we might get a linksys wifi router so the two laptops in the house can use the link too).

In the process of trying to decide what router to use, my brother-in-law called myDSL support and asked them what routers work with myDSL. He got a singularly stupid reply from the tech support person there. It seems that (since we just got the connection yesterday) we're not in their database yet as being connected. Paperwork on the way from their DSL installation contractors I guess. But because we're not in their database, they won't help us.

Idiots.

If I were connected to ZPDee or Destiny or Globelines or some other internet provider, they won't help me switch to PLDT because they won't tell me whether the router I've already got will work with their system? I'd be a loss already. But maybe it's policy, they don't want to help anyone share the internet connection. It's still a loss though. People are going to share their connections anyway. I certainly am. Putting a speed bump in the way just pisses off paying customers. That's a stupidity worth a firing.

milenyo overhang

We just had what must have been the typhoon of the decade pass through manila. Electricity went down within an hour or two of Milenyo making contact with metro manila. We stayed home (people told me of their cars shaking in the wind, cars being hit by flying billboards and people blown off their motorcycles by the wind).

Electricity didn't come back until Saturday night and by Friday night we were fed up with the heat and the uncertainty of getting electricity back (plus not being able to charge celphones, see the news on TV, etc. There's only so much AM radio one can stand).

So we decided to go to Roxas Boulevard and stay in a hotel. That worked out really well. The Aloha hotel (which doesn't have a lot of stars but is reasonably comfortable and reasonably priced) had airconditioning, hot and cold water and a great szechuan restaurant on the ground floor.

One night later, the power is back in Sta Mesa and we're home.

I haven't been online (on this laptop) since Thursday and am at Robinson's galleria waiting for Sol and her sister to come out of their Victory Christian Fellowship sunday service. It's always a pain finding good places to sit down with a laptop. There's Starbucks, where they let you charge your battery (extra points for that), but I don't like coffee enough to pay $2 for it.

Fortunately, nearby is Cafe Mediterranean. I'm having a Greek Salad, olives and ice cold San Miguel Beer. I'm also posting this blog article. This, I think, is where I'll wait in the future. I spend more than I would at Starbucks, but I like the food and they just don't serve beer at Starbucks. now if only those two women over there would finish their meal so I can take over their table and plug in to the wall socket right by them.

Matt Cutts SEO tips

I don't know if these SEO tips by Matt Cutts are good since I haven't read them yet. Posting them here though so I can find them again.

Google Browser Sync is very convenient, but it's led to a bookmarks list that is so long I'm just never going to go back to any of those links, probably :-).

catching up

I've spent some time working on requirements for immigration to New Zealand, and I got sick in the process (1.5 days off from work this week, recovering from fever, head cold and coughing, the last being a bit of a lifesaver, strangely enough). And work has been pretty intense too, when I was able to go.

Now I need to catch up. For one thing, my RSS feed reader tells me that I've missed *5* days of The Daily WTF. I'm not going to read everything since it's sol's birthday tomorrow. But I've certainly got to catch up with the WTF's of the week :-).

A Gamer's Manifesto

I'm not really a gamer, but I had to point at A Gamer's manifesto (partly, so I'm reminded), because it's so funny. In the same vein, there are Weird Laws of the United States, which is funny but in whose veracity I don't have any data or confidence in. And there's also Schadenfreuidian slips which is just plain fun :-).

Erlang concurrency discussion

Joe Armstrong has a good and interesting discussion of concurrency in Erlang. One point being, if the multiple/concurrent processes don't share memory but instead only send messages to each other, concurrency is easy and robust. Certainly, it's race conditions and incorrect locking of shared resources that makes concurrency difficult in languages which share memory.

Recently too, Joel had a discussion of MapReduce which, apparently, is something google uses to parallelize massively. Which is related to the Armstrong's article since the concurrent processes don't share memory either, they just work independently allowing massive concurrency scaling pretty much linearly as the resources.

I saw a blog post that said that Google doesn't work that way (and that discussed how map/reduce actually works in terms of the, I think, C++ API). I've lost that link though. I don't know if I ever bookmarked it, and if I did, well, I work on around 5 computers. So it's somewhere, but I don't know where it is. I could use Google Browser sync I guess. But I'm not convinced. I'm a bit paranoid about it (mainly about keeping passwords in there). I'm told that that's optional (a feature I'd expect from such an excellent company as google, certainly. But I'm still thinking about it. Oh, I'm sure I'll capitulate, eventually. But there's going to be at least one tulog before I do so.

Alright. and that's quite enough randomness already.