yahoo.com -- sucking

Yahoo.com is seriously sucking for me right now. It's not a yahoo-wide problem. It affects me and maybe some small percentage of other yahoo users.

I can log in to mail.yahoo.com. signing in to www.yahoo.com doesn't work. After the login, I get redirected back to the yahoo site but I'm still not logged in.

Pidgin can't auth to yahoo when I'm connecting from New Zealand. However, if I use a socks proxy in the Philippines, I *can* login to pidgin.

I thought maybe the email reading issue were an NZ issue. It isn't though. Via the socks proxy in the Philippines I connected to us.yahoo.com and modified my setup so that I wouldn't be auto-redirected to the NZ yahoo pages. that works when I'm connected via proxy (I see the US yahoo page). However when I browse to yahoo from NZ, I still get redirected to Xtra. That's a stupidity (although I think not on Xtra's side, it's a yahoo bogosity).

When I read my email via the socks proxy, the URL indicates that I'm going to a U.S. server, but I receive the same (well, very similar) error message:

"Sorry for the inconvenience.
You've stumbled upon an unexpected, temporary problem. Performing your action again in a few moments will likely resolve the problem completely. If not, we suggest you try re-launching Yahoo! Mail.
If the problem persists, feel free to contact Customer Care about Error Code 1.

Thanks,
The Yahoo! Mail Team".

The only difference I can see between that and the error message when I surf from new zealand (no socks proxy) is that the NZ page says "the Yahoo!Xtra Mail team".

So it's a yahoo issue, not an NZ issue.

I realized, after seeing that error often enough that gmail was pulling yahoo email and that I had changed my yahoo password recently. I changed gmail's yahoo password but yahoo is still whining. I'm guessing that yahoo got confused because there were so many bad password logins from gmail (and from a continent different from what I had told yahoo was my location). I do wonder though how that is supposed to get resolved. Will the error clear itself out eventually? Will it clear itself out before I completely give up on yahoo (abandoning friends who only know my yahoo address and whom I can't ask to change their addresses for me since, well, I can't get into my contacts list either).

*dumbasses*

Selenium RC with generated PHP tests

1. If you don't have it already, sudo apt-get install phpunit
   
2. start the selenium server (at minimum: java -jar selenium-server)
   
3. Generate the PHP testcase from the IDE.
   
4. rename the class from Example to whatever you're testing.
   
5. rename the file to be the same as the classname plus .php
   
6. In the class, add a __construct() which calls $this->setUp() and $this->start()
   
7. After the class is defined, instantiate the class and call its testcase method.
   

There may be syntax errors. The code generation is not perfect. Fix those.

disabling the firefox new addon notification

I use firefox for running selenium-RC and when it starts I want to disable the notification of new addons having been installed.

mzfuser says to: "Go to about:config, create a new boolean value "extensions.newAddons", and set it to false."

That works for me (firefox 3.6 Ubuntu).

Master qualification

"You likely probably might almost sort of maybe be best to do a test case on your hardware first, even if dummy meaningless data populated by a script, it will give you a measurement of your expected performance that is much more meaningful then my ramble above. :)"

JMeter Drupal Proxy URLS to exclude

I often use jmeter to load test drupal websites. One of the first things I need to do is capture a sample browsing session over the site using the jmeter proxy.

When I'm capturing a sample browsing session I usually don't want to grab all the embedded files since that makes for a very large set of http client requests in the thread group. At this point I want the thread group to contain just the top level URLs I actually clicked on but I want the individual entries to have "Retrieve All Embedded Resources" to be clicked.

That will increase the CPU load on the jmeter instances at runtime (they need to parse the downloaded file to extract the resources). I'm happy to make that trade for now. If it becomes a problem I'll adjust to have the embedded resources pre-extracted at proxy capture time but for most jmeter jobs I've done I haven't had to worry about test time CPU load much.

I always forget what the URL exclude patterns should look like. This is posted so I'll find it later.

Drupal sometimes adds GET parameters to URLs even for "static" resources such as css or png files. I haven't gone through to figure out which resources can have GET parameters added to them, instead, when excluding embedded/static resources I just treat them all similarly:

.*\.gif(\?.*|)
.*\.jpg(\?.*|)
.*\.png(\?.*|)
.*\.css(\?.*|)
.*\.js(\?.*|)

etc.

CTEs for clarity (no efficiency gain here)

Some messages are sent to two kannels. I've got the essential data in a postgresql table but I wanted to find the messages which were sent to both kannels (within 5 seconds of each other, most such duplicated messages are sent within the same second, or within 1 second of each other).

The query could have been done without CTEs (using subqueries) but I prefer the CTEs since they move the subqueries "out" of the select statement, making the select much easier to read.

/* set up the CTEs although they're not really common except in the sense that they're the same statement, I'm just using them as *table*expressions* :-) */
WITH lhs AS
(
select id,kannel,tstamp,dest,msg_text from decmtmo WHERE mt_mo='mt'
), rhs as
(
select id,kannel,tstamp,dest,msg_text from decmtmo WHERE mt_mo='mt'
)
SELECT lhs.id lid,rhs.id rid,abs(extract('epoch' from lhs.tstamp-rhs.tstamp)),
lhs.kannel lk, rhs.kannel rk, rhs.dest,trim(rhs.msg_text )
FROM lhs,rhs /* this is what improved, otherwise we'd have the subselects here */
WHERE lhs.id<>rhs.id /* make sure we don't look at the same row on both sides */
AND lhs.dest=rhs.dest AND lhs.msg_text=rhs.msg_text /* MT identity */
AND lhs.kannel<>rhs.kannel /* but different kannels */
AND lhs.id>rhs.id /* avoid showing two copies of the same row, with lhs and
rhs swapped */
AND 5 > abs(extract('epoch' from lhs.tstamp-rhs.tstamp))
/* within 5 seconds of each other */
ORDER by lhs.id,rhs.id

Running remote X11 program as another user and displaying locally

Running a remote X11 program and displaying it locally when the remote program needs to run as another user.

Tonido kernel with NAT (and no su to non-root user)

My "could not su to non-root user" problem with building a kernel with NAT support on the tonidoplug is solved.

On the tonido support forums (requires login, but I'm posting the link here anyway) aleinss helpfully pointed at Logging into tonido as a non root user.

Apparently, with 2.6.31 kernels and later, /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr needs to be 32768 (instead of the previous 65536).

I tested it with sudo echo "32768" > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr but that didn't work. Reboot required, I guess. The solution was to edit /etc/sysctl.d/10-process-security.conf and edit the vm.mmap_min_addr line to say

vm.mmap_min_addr = 32768

Many thanks to aleinss for pointing that out.

cssh feature wishlist -- clicking on one cssh window brings all related cssh windows to the front

It might be possible to do this already (I've customized .csshrc a *little* bit, mainly just to set the default window sizes and locations), but as in the title, what I'd really like is a toggle so that when I click on one of a set of related cssh windows, all of them (including the window into which I type commands to execute on all related servers) should come to the front.

Either that or another two monitors.

Or three monitors and a computer that can support four monitors altogether :-).

php file handle GC and flock

I was confused for a bit because I had code similar to this (details elided):

function myFunc() {
  $h = fopen (MYLOCKFILE,"r");
  return flock($h, LOCK_EX);
}

And when I would call it and sleep (e.g., myFunc();sleep 300;) and then run the same program in another shell the second shell wasn't blocking at the flock call.

strace showed an flock(4, LOCK_UN) being called in the first running instance. Apparently, since I don't return the handle nor do I assign it to a variable that's passed by reference, php decides that $h can be GCed immediately upon function return. That closes the file and releases the lock, so the second instance wouldn't block since there was no lock there.

Toshiba Satellite A75 temperature control -- Maybe

I've had a problem forever with the Toshiba Satellite A75. It's got a 3.3Ghz CPU in there but I could only ever run it at one of the two lowest speeds (1.8GHz, 2.1Ghz) because any faster (even with ondemand having me run mostly at 1.8Ghz) if the CPU ever ran too long at high speeds the kernel wouldn't notice and it couldn't speed the fans up.

The whole machine is old too, so I wouldn't be surprised if the fans they're just not working too well anymore.

I just found the omnibook kernel module project though. And after

git clone, make 
sudo make install 
sudo modprobe omnibook ectype=12

It loads correctly and cat /proc/omnibook temperature says 56C. And once or twice I heard the fans spin up faster (they're on all the time these days). So I'm testing (by setting my maximum CPU speed at 3.3Ghz, but still ondemand).

If the machine is stable this way, I'll scale down to 2.4Ghz or a bit higher maybe. It'll be good to be able to do useful things at a reasonable speed again on this machine. 1.8Ghz was getting so old :-).

Transmission blocklists

I thought I'd setup some blocklists for Transmission. After some googling and looking at this and that blocklist, I decided to go full paranoid and used a whole bunch of blocklists from IBlockList.

The blocklists are gleaned from other tools (Bluetack, PeerGuardian, etc).

I don't care too much about performance (there's a warning on IBlocklist that using too many rules will affect broadband performance :-), so I decided to just install a whole bunch of (possibly redundant) lists.

To get the blocklists and install them in transmission-daemon's blocklists directory (on my machine, ~/transmission/blocklists) I use (not yet in cron, will be soon):


#!/bin/bash

cd ~/transmission/blocklists

URLS="http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level1 http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level2 http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_level3 http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_edu http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_rangetest http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_bogon http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_ads http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_spyware http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_proxy http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_templist http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_microsoft http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_spider http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_hijacked http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bt_dshield http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=bcoepfyewziejvcqyhqo http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=cslpybexmxyuacbyuvib http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=pwqnlynprfgtjbgqoizj http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=ijfqtofzixtwayqovmxn http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=ecqbsykllnadihkdirsh http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=jcjfaxgyyshvdbceroxf http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=lljggjrpmefcwqknpalp http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=nxs23_ipfilterx http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=soe http://list.iblocklist.com/?list=ccp"

for u in $URLS
do
wget -t 10 -c --limit-rate=128k -w 10 -nd --ignore-length -N "$u"
gzip -d *.gz
done


Unfortunately transmission-daemon doesn't notice new blocklists added while it's running, so I also have a separate script to restart transmission-daemon (not in cron yet either since I'm just playing around with this stuff for now :-). I haven't tested kill -HUP yet.

Tonidoplug kernel with NAT

I bought a Tonido plug computer and have been playing with it at home. I want it to be a dnsmasq, squid, openvpn and ssh server. It'll also do some other things, but those are the main things I'll run on it. I don't need the tonido software running there (although that may change if the people at home need to support themselves instead of me setting everything up via the command line).

I'm very happy with it since it's so much faster and easier to work with than my NSLU2 (which is 1/10th the CPU freq and 1/16th the RAM). There was one problem though, I couldn't load the NAT modules. After some investigation it turns out that the kernel doesn't have routing configured and it's missing a whole bunch of modules that Tonido (or sheeva, not clear about which exactly) decided they didn't need to provide.

Fortunately, I'm booting from a USB drive, and it's very easy to make a bootable drive. If I make a mistake and make the USB drive unbootable, I can just extract the rootfs and modules tarballs back onto the drive (before or after mkfs, according to taste) and it'll be bootable again. I would never try to modify the kernel (or even install modules) on the NAND since I don't want to risk bricking the plugcomputer. Although I did do a bunch of sudo apt-get [packages] on the NAND before I realized what I was doing and stopped :-).

Mikestaszel suggested building the module and copying it over, to get ppp working. Taking that hint, I downloaded the source for the kernel I was using and after some misadventures due to forgetting techniques from long ago, I finally got the modules I needed built and installed.

The tonido runs the 2.6.30-rc6 kernel so I downloaded 2.6.30.6 from kernel.org. I used the config file for this kernel from sheeva.with-linux.com. My first try at building the kernel didn't work because of bad magic. After some googling I realized/remembered that I needed to modify the kernel makefile so that EXTRAVERSION would match the one from the running kernel, so EXTRAVERSION=-rc6.

A second try at building the kernels got me closer but it still didn't work. The bad magic error was gone, but some symbols were missing.

I didn't particularly want to build the kernel itself since I'd hoped that just building and installing relevant modules would be sufficient. Unfortunately, NAT requires CONFIG_IP_ADVANCED_ROUTER, and that can't be built as a module. So there was no way around it, I'd have to build a kernel.

After the kernel was configured and built along with the modules I needed (make menuconfig;make;make modules), I needed to make a uImage (google pointed me at this generate uImage for sheevaplug page). That required:

sudo apt-get install uboot-mkimage
make uImage
cp arch/arm/boot/uImage /boot
make modules_install
reboot

modprobe iptable_nat finally succeeded and some testing proved that the plugcomputer was working correctly as a NAT router.

-- UPDATE --
When I installed and rebooted with the new kernel, I found myself unable to run processes as a regular user. The processed would be killed immediately. I can't see how it would have been a problem with how I built the kernel since all I did was allow advanced router features and NAT/MASQUERADE. But there it is. I don't mind running as root on the tonidoplug since everything I do there I'd need to run sudo anyway, but I've switched back to using the NSLU2 for now so I can play with the tonidoplug, building kernels, rebooting at will and possibly eventually getting this latest problem fixed :-).

-- UPDATE 2010-06-22 --
I'm wrong. I *do* mind running everything as root on the tonidoplug. I don't mind running openvpn or sshd as root, but I don't want to run squid or transmission-daemon as root since any successful remote attack instantly gets root privileges.

Orca on Ubuntu Lucid (10.04)

My brother-in-law is blind, so I've been interested in linux accessibility for a long time. Not interested (or talented) enough to actually improve accessibility, but interested enough to keep an eye on the matter.

Long ago, I couldn't get Festival or Orca to work at all on my laptops. Mainly hardware support issues. One particular problem had to do with the software requiring the audio card to allow sampling at a rate that was twice what my audio card could do.

I just tested Orca on Lucid though and it's looking very good. Just enabling Orca took all of 5 seconds. I was a little confused since some things worked (firefox and the Orca preferences) and others didn't (gedit, gnome-terminal running man). Logging out and logging back in fixed that. I suppose just enabling Orca but not restarting didn't allow Orca to get its hooks deep enough into Gnome so it could intercept X11 display and keyboard/mouse events.

It took a few retries and hour and a half to get a reasonable set of Orca flat-view keybindings that didn't conflict with the regular gnome keybindings. I like using the Windows key (Super or Super-L) as a command key for Orca since it isn't used in Linux, exists in all new keyboards and is convenient. I don't much like Orca using the Caps-Lock key for that. Using the Windows key would be a problem if Orca ran in Windows but as far as I can tell (from the Orca website it doesn't run in Windows.

I was a little confused that Orca had firefox-specific keybindings, but they probably had to implement that to have similar behavior as JAWS (the dominant windows screen reader, and therefore the dominant screen reader in the world).

So Orca has some generic keybindings for general flat-view and other functionality. It can have app-specific keybindings. And it's scriptable (says the web page, although I haven't looked at what scripts might look like or how powerful they are).tt

It's also been pretty stable (tested on three laptops, all of which are pretty old). The only instability I saw happened when trying to close the Orca program via the GUI. Gnome and X hung so completely I had to go to a terminal and kill/restart gdm.

That's no big deal though since blind people would normally *always* have Orca on. And when I killed Orca from the command line (orca -q), it died gracefully and didn't take Gnome or X with it.

But all I've done so far is play with it a bit. I haven't used it extensively at all. Instability might become a lot more noticeable after hours or days of use. Maybe I'll try to get my brother-in-law to test-drive it on one of these laptops (instead of his Windows+JAWS laptop) for a day or two.

getting the vodafone usb modem working on ubuntu

http://ip-62-105-171-197.dsl.twang.net/bvportal/forums/index.html?threadId=ff80808122654e6f01227632fff8503c&postId=ff80808122654e6f01228e6f22484bb4

tomcat thread dump at work

At work, if tomcat isn't responding, send it a kill -3 to get it to produce a thread dump.

xhost

I run three or four different browser profiles for security. There's a general browsing profile for reddit.com and links I follow from there, there's a more secure profile for gmail and facebook, and there's a most secure profile for internet banking.

Not only do I run these separate profiles, I also run them as separate users under sudo -H -u [user] [browser] [other-params].

But in order to do that I need to have an xhost setting that allows these browser profiles (running as users other than me) to display on my root display. To enable that, I have this line in ~/.xinitrc.

xhost local:

bash for loop

Oooh, I just saw Bash for loop examples.

I definitely like:

for i in {1..100}
do
...
done


I don't usually need to step forward in increments greater than 1, but for that there's


for i in {1...100..2}
do
...
done


Of course there's also


for (( c=1; c<=100; c++ )) do ... done

which is what i've used in the past, but I always forget about the double parens.

grandr on toshiba satellite karmic dual monitor setup

When I first installed a second monitor on Ubuntu Karmic, the dual monitor setup was trivial. The built-in method (System | Preferences | Display) worked very well.

Lately though (possibly due to a package upgrade) that method stopped working perfectly. It couldn't identify the external monitor model (showing it as Unknown), and when I'd select the correct resolution for it (1440x900), on gnome restart or laptop reboot, some icons on the left of the desktop would be all scrunched up together, dragging a window from the external monitor (left) to the laptop monitor (right) would have the window end up partly on the left and partly on the right. It wouldn't go all the way to the right edge of the laptop monitor. As if the virtual screen width had changed to something a *lot* shorter.

I just installed grandr and ran that. It sees better than an Unknown monitor, and the virtual screen width is back to normal. I don't know yet if this fix will survive reboots. But it probably will. And if it doesn't, well, it'll be a reasonable workaround until I upgrade to Lucid.

gnucash OFX

I started playing with gnucash a month or so ago. I ran into a bunch of problems and it turns out they're mostly due to export file format I chose.

My bank supports OFX-MS-Money, OFX-Quicken and Quicken. I saw a post that said to avoid quicken because there were issues with identifying transactions as having already been loaded (when loading the same transactions twice, either because the same export file was loaded twice, or because two export files intersect). So I avoided Quicken and OFX-Quicken.

Unfortunately OFX-MS-Money has a worse problem. For some reason, the export files produced by my bank (might be the bank's problem, might be a gnucash bug, or it might just be a bogosity in the file format, or an obscure interaction among these and other features), would load into gnucash, but for the checking account, some transactions would be lost. I doubt if the transactions were really missing, but gnucash was somehow not seeing them.

I tried the Quicken file format the other day. All transactions loaded correctly and so importing a month's worth of data was very little effort. Gnucash also asks for particular expense sources (this grocery, that pharmacy, that other restaurant, etc) to be identified as to which kind of transaction they were. That's nice since for future months, those expenses will be correctly allocated to the correct account.

Unfortunately, Quicken has a weakness in that the transaction entries were missing a lot of information. For withdrawals, for instance, OFX-MS-Money would indicate which ATM card (Sol's or mine), as well as what ATM branch the transaction was made at. The Quicken format would just have a description of WITHDRAWAL and a memo field of ATM. And it was similarly silent for a lot of other transactions.

So, while the Quicken imports very nicely and has some great usability shortcuts, I can't use it since I forget what particular transactions are about IN THE SAME WEEK, let alone a month or two later.

Fortunately the OFX-Quicken format (which gnucash calls QFX) has *most* (not all, but enough) of the information from OFX-MS-MONEY, and the accuracy of loading of the Quicken format. We don't have a *huge* number of transactions per month. It only takes 30 minutes or so to load a month's worth of transactions and correctly assign expenses to the correct account. And I don't have to walk through the checking transactions doing a binary search for missing transactions.

At some point we'll have bank accounts at other banks. When that happens I'll be able to compare accuracy of other bank OFX-MS-Money files and determine if the bug is in gnucash or in my current bank's export file :-). I'm betting on a gnucash bug, myself. But now that I've got OFX-Quicken working, I don't care enough to replicate the bug. Maybe I'll do that on the easter weekend, if we don't go anywhere.

common git branch tasks

I like

Zorch's workflow examples on starting a new branch on a remote git repository.

[Here as a reminder so I can search on site:monotrematica.blogspot.com git branch]

NZ School goes completely open source

There's a great story at CIO about how a New Zealand high school switched to open source servers going from 48 servers to 4. It's pretty good to save 11/12ths of your hardware, electricity and server maintenance/sysadmin budget.

fireEvent when keyPress, keyDown, keyUp don't work

Evil Tester writes about fireEvent, so I don't need to

I found this (and Nick Bartlett's summary) when doing a google search for selenium IDE where type, keyPress, keyDown, keyUp, etc weren't working as expected.

I'd actually found and used fireEvent a few months ago when I was working with some selenium tests for the Mahara e-portfolio open source system. But I'd since forgotten.

In the problem at hand, there was an input textbox with an onkeydown which detected what key was pressed and if it was the ascii(13), would call this.blur(). The solution was just to "fireEvent | locator | onblur".

[Posted here so that I'll be able to find it when I do a google search on "site:monotrematica.blogspot.com selenium IDE keyPress keyDown onblur" :-]

Parameterized jmeter threadgroup and loop count settings

as pointed out in the mailing list post,

run jmeter with user specified jmeter parameters, e.g.,

jmeter -J threads=10 -J loopcount=5

and then, in the threadgroup, set the relevant fields to, e.g.,

${__P(threads)} and ${__P(loopcount)}

In the beanshell sampler, parameters can also be accessed via:
JMeterUtils.getProperty("threads");

Gnome panels on external monitor

The new monitor works very well, but some things aren't great. The fact that it's a rectangle (and there is invisible space above the laptop top panel is one. But I'll adjust to that.

I did need panels on the external monitor though. It's not convenient to have tasks on both monitors over on the laptop panel since I couldn't get a panel on the external monitor.

Then I found several solutions at answers.launchpad.net.

I used the gconf-editor solution. But after reading downward, I learned about the Alt-drag trick. That works too, and is much simpler. To put a panel on the second monitor, just create it first (it'll go on the first monitor). Then press Alt and click and drag the panel to the other monitor.

Services not coming up

After a recent package update on my work computer (AMD64), services were not being started on boot (no apache, ssh, etc). Strangely enough, gdm *does* start, so I get to log in to gnome.

runlevel says "unknown" though.

A bit of googling points to this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/497299

and also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/upstart/+bug/461725

I don't understand the whole thing. There seems to be a race condition when init tasks run in parallel. And also bugs in updating /etc/network/interfaces.

It's fixed for me by forcing upstart to the previous version (0.6.3-10). I then pinned that. If a 0.6.3-12 version comes up I may download it and test. Or maybe I won't, since 0.6.3-10 works and I doubt if newer versions in karmic will actually give me much reason to upgrade.

[Update]
Sol's laptop (upgraded to karmic the other day) has the same problem. I'll fix it the same way tonight (can't ssh into it since the services didn't start :-).

[Update]
boy, upstart-0.6.3-11 officially sucks. I updated the toshiba laptop and had the same problem. The Durabook is fine though. That's three computers out of four. Might become four out of five after I upgrade sol's desktop at work to karmic.

Problems with 32bit java on AMD64 on karmic

I prefer to run 32 bit java on my desktop since I only have 2GB of RAM. 64bit buys me nothing, and it eats twice the RSS.

With Jaunty (and Gutsy before that) I'd followed derek's advice on building a 32bit .deb.

I ran a downloaded 32bit eclipse.

Karmic seems to have broken something (probably SWT) and 32bit eclipse with 32bit JDK isn't usable.

Posting this here so I can find Derek's article again and start with that to get 32bit eclipse and 32bit sun-jdk working together again.

[update] It looks like Miroslav Hruz has a solution to the 32bit SWT issue. I'll try that on the weekend (remotely).

[update] I got things working without really understanding (or logging) what I did. After a bunch of uninstall, reinstall, all without notes (and some of it was in synaptic, so not in .bash_history), 32-bit sun-jdk and 32-bit eclipse started working again without me needing to do anything as in the links above. I did export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1 though. Thus ends this unhelpful post :-).

No audio? Is skype running?

I was looking at newly uploaded (from camera) videos of Timmy and John and I was confused because the videos were weird:

Totem said they where *playing*, but the progress bar wasn't moving and there was neither sound nor video.


The time counter (shows how many seconds/minutes into the video/song you're in) wasn't moving.


I thought it was something wrong with the newly mangled videos (made smaller via ffmpeg) so I tried some MP3s. Same symptoms as for the videos.

So I looked around at the modules, and at dmesg. Everything looked good. Until I moved my mouse to the bottom of the screen and the hidden status panel popped up. Skype was running. Apparently, on this machine, it takes over the sound card.

Slow vim startup -- solved

I've had some frustration due to slow vim startup.

time vim -c 'q'

real 0m6.138s
user 0m0.096s
sys 0m0.024s

Found the solution though. a blog post at samdorr.net says to use -X.

So now I have two new aliases in ~/.bashrc

alias vi="/usr/bin/vi -X"
alias vim="/usr/bin/vim -X"

I was a little confused because the slowness was there in screen, but when I opened a new terminal, there was no slowness (even without the aliases). I think it's because I've restarted X since I started screen. So $DISPLAY in the screen sessions is :0.0, but possibly there's some other X authentication cookies that refer to the old X session. Ok, I just looked, there's an XDG_SESSION_COOKIE, maybe that's it, or if not, something similar. So the X authentication still succeeds, but only after a timeout.

The poster at samdorr had a different problem. His server probably didn't have X at all, or maybe vim is trying to connect via ssh X forwarding, back to his graphical terminal :-). But the solution he gives is an axe that solves my problem too since I don't need vim to talk to X at all.

Hmmm, someday I'll just need to catch up to the modern world and use gvim, and probably syntax highlighting even :-).

Vodafone "Vodem" -- very easy

A friend of mine has a vodem (that's a USB HSDPA modem that works with the Vodafone NZ network). I borrowed it and tried it out on my Jaunty (Ubuntu 9.04) laptop at home.

I was confused initially since I had no manual or anything else. My friend said that on windows there's a CD, it installs a bunch of things and then just works. I didn't think to ask if authentication via login/password was required.

After some messing around, I found a hint on ubuntuforums that pointed me in the right direction. NetworkManager in Jaunty automatically detects the modem. It even automatically detects the network. It then presents a dialog asking which country (NZ is already default selected) and which Network to use. There are three networks ("Vodafone", "Vodafone (restricted)", and "Vodafone (unrestricted)"). My confusion was that I chose the first and the modem immediately disconnected.

I should have chosen the third. Upon choosing "Vodafone (unrestricted)", the vodem connects immediately to the Vodafone network and then just works. No further management needed. This is pretty cool. Too bad vodafone data charges are still so high. When the data charges drop by a factor of 10, this will be a real player. For now, it's a nice toy that I'm soon going to return to its rightful owner.

On recruiting software developers

John Fuex has a great article, 19 Tips for Recruiting Great Developers

Now, not all companies are going to be needing the superstars this article focuses on, but the points made there should be relevant to, say, the top 85-90-95 percent of developers.

Perhaps the tips can be relaxed according to the quality of the developer needed by the company (although the company, HR division or recruiter who is conscious of the actual target percentiles [instead of being hypnotized by some mantra about hiring "only the best"], is likely very rare on the ground).

Switched back to gnome

I had switched to xfce4 in Ubuntu because it gave me some memory savings. I found, however, that on my work desktop, I got *far* more savings by installing and using a 32-bit JDK (and 32-bit eclipse to go with it).

I didn't really need to switch back to gnome, but gnome is a bit smoother than xfce in the total experience, and I found myself using gnome applets in xfce (mainly the user switcher, but some others too).

I didn't switch back to gnome immediately since I *much* preferred xfce's Alt-F2 behavior to gnome's. The application chooser is much smarter even than Gnome-do. But then I realized that I could use xfrun4 in gnome. And after testing that at work, I've switched to gnome+xfrun4 at home too.

I forgot how I was running firefox as another user for security :-). After some fumbling, I figured it out again (although, really, I should just have logged back into xfce and looked at the launcher :-).

sudo -u [other_user] -H /usr/bin/firefox-3.5 -a [profile] -P [profile]

The -H is necessary because if it's not given then it'll use your own home directory rather than the home directory of other_user.

Ubuntu 9.04 gphoto2/libgphoto2 borken for my Canon Digital Ixus 700

I use gthumb for downloading camera pictures to my computer. I have a script that takes the filenames produced by gthumb and renames and creates resized copies of the images and videos. gphoto2 talks to the camera in PTP mode.

For a while gthumb worked on my laptops. It's stopped working now though and I don't know why. There are bugs posted with Ubuntu regarding this. Adding yet another bug confirmation won't do any good.

At one point I had gphotofs working enough to mount the camera filesystem. But I didn't want to mess with the filesystem directly. And anyway, gphotofs isn't working anymore now (it runs, returns, but doesn't actually mount the filesystem, and gphotofs keeps running in the background [which is OK, that's what it needs to do as a fuse filesystem provider]).

So now I have a horrendous hack for grabbing the images :-). I installed Ubuntu Intrepid under VirtualBox, gave it access to the USB devices, and I run gthumb there. Then I just scp the files over to the host box and halt Intrepid.

Yech. It works, but is hoogly :-). Maybe this'll be fixed in Karmic.

Overall, I find Ubuntu a pretty good platform for doing everything I need to do, but there certainly are the little niggles like this that demonstrate it's not really ready for regular users. Or it is, but they'll come up against walls every once in a while, get frustrated, and go back to their windows viruses.

[Update]
Ah, pulled in gphoto2, libgphoto2 and libgphoto2-port0 from karmic (downloaded the debs manually and installed with dpkg -i) and gthumb is now downloading the pictures. I understand about lack of resources, but it does seem a bug that this fix wasn't backported to work with Jaunty.

[Update]
I'm now actually on Karmic. The dist-upgrade reverted a separate and necessary fix. Gnome has a gvfs module for gphoto2 and when it's loaded, gthumb can't read the pictures/videos from the camera since the PTP port is already in use (by the gvfs gphoto2 module). Solution is to disable that. There might be a neater way, but I just did

chmod a-rwx /usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-gphoto2.

Screen and scrollbars!

I work with Nigel McNie and was whining (on the company IRC server) to a friend about screen and how I wish I could get it to work with scrollbars. He pointed me at Nigel's page on how he uses screen.

I don't use urxvt, but the invocation given there works with rxvt too (just change urxvt to rxvt in the .Xdefaults entry). So now I've got scrollbars working with screen.

Slightly more secure

On my home computer I've got a reasonably secure browsing setup (firefox 3.5, noscript, adblock, flashblock, made the flash cookies directory non-writeable, etc). But nothing is perfect. So I decided to raise the bar a bit. I moved my main browsing profile to a separate user account (so that even if it gets cracked, it won't have access to my ssh keys (ssh-agent is convenient, but it could be a hole), data in my home directory (svn working copies, git working copies, random other files) or to my other privileges (sudo access on this and other computers).

My trusted profiles (online banking, power company, mobile phone company, phone/internet company, cable tv company, etc) will probably go into yet another account. I haven't done that yet. But I'll get it done tomorrow, probably.

For reference:

to allow the other user to run firefox on the main display:
xhost local:[other_user_name]

and to actually run firefox as the other user:
sudo -H -u [other_user_name] firefox-3.5 -a [profile] -P [profile]

I don't think the -a should be needed there, but it doesn't work right (loading the default profile instead of the profile I want) when it's removed. So I keep it in.

Update - I wondered why youtube and other videos had no sound in this new setup. Today I realized that it's because the browser is running as the other user, and that other user isn't in the audio group.

Fixed with vigr.

Software is hard

Software is hard

FreeNX

Install FreeNX server on ubuntu

Google has also announced a free NX server called NeatX. It's very new and there are no ubuntu packages yet.

Firefox 3.5 Memory usage looking good

This article benchmarks opera, chrome, firefox 3.5 and safari in terms of how much memory they took to perform the same task(s). The numbers are for Windows, but I expect that there'll be a similar improvement in memory use on Linux.

Firefox 3.5 is looking very good. I'm going to download the beta and test the heck out of it :-). Browser memory use has been a *huge* problem for me, particularly since I've been doing a *lot* of Selenium testing. Of course selenium, and firebug and similar developer tools will increase the amount of memory used by browsers by a lot. But if the base browser can use a lot less memory, that'll be a huge help (particularly since Eclipse and tomcat 5.5 aren't memory-thin applications either, and running everything together makes my system slow as molasses as they force each other out to swap).

pidgin stopped working with yahoo

Yahoo changed their messenger authentication protocol and now pidgin 2.5.6 has stopped working with Yahoo Messenger. There's an announcement that 2.5.7 is available at launchpad, but it's not really there yet. I guess it takes a while for packages to become available, or maybe I'm hitting a mirror and the mirror hasn't synced yet.

I hope it'll be there tomorrow so I can upgrade my laptops and my work computer :-). If not, well, web.im works well enough for now. It sure would be convenient though if pidgin were to start working again soon :-).

I'm not yet ready to build pidgin from source. But I may be, by Tuesday :-).

Broadband plan upgrade

I was sick for much of last week. That's why we're upgrading our broadband plan (to avoid 64kbps when we go over our cap). Now, it's only one week til the end of the current cycle, so we're going to have to use up 10G in one week :-). I don't think that's going to be a problem.

Our previous plan was the Explorer plan, with 10GB of bandwidth before we're slowed down to 64kbps.

Since I was sick last week though, but I only took two sick days (Monday and Tuesday). I went to work on Wednesday, but that was a mistake since I got worse on Thursday and had to stay home Thursday and Friday. But I didn't want to not work at all the whole week, so I worked from home. Unfortunately, work involved a lot of vnc work against a vserver at work. So I blew around 2.5GB on vnc :-).

So we're upgrading to a 40GB cap plan. It's only NZ$10.00 more for double the bandwidth, so it's a great deal. There's a real danger that we won't downgrade from this plan :-).

Well, we plan to get a second broadband link at some point. Sol works from home 4 days a week, and I do quite a lot of work from home, so redundancy (even against an extremely unlikely outage) is going to be worthwhile. But that won't be for a while yet. And if we do that, then I'll certainly ratchet the telecom plan down.

I should have started the upgrade yesterday morning, so that it'd take effect by Tuesday (two working days). I didn't though, so we'll have to stay under the 800MB cap until around end of Tuesday or sometime Wednesday when the new plan takes effect. It had better not take til Friday to take effect though.

Update: I looked at the bandwidth monitor this morning and I noticed that we'd already been upgraded. No 2 day wait. That's cool since I *was* wondering what they were thinking with the 2 day wait. The delay was probably a leftover from some manual procedure that required review and approval, a leftover that got brought over to the web based procedure. And telecom finally figured out that the approval and delay weren't necessary since, after all, the customer logged in and authenticated themselves with their password.

Caveats of Evaluating Databases

The title of this article is just the title of the article on Caveats of Evaluating Databases. That title isn't very good. But the article is.

very interesting discussion of tomcat classloader leak that leads to running out of PermGen

Must read deeply and test (-client seems an easy test)

Update -
Ok, -client doesn't work for me. OTOH, this is an old article (2005). No doubt a lot has changed with Java garbage collectors (and maybe less, but still some changes in Sun java API/JVM implementations). -client is actually significantly bad, compared to -server.

Time to look at org.springframework.web.util.IntrospectorCleanupListener

Morons? Utter Morons?

Sounds like Microsoft has outdone themselves with a bug that makes windows unbootable. And fixing it just sets you up for letting Microsoft making itself unbootable again.

Hearsay only, I wouldn't know if this is true since I don't run windows (it sits there eating up some disk space in case I run across some hardware that needs it, and I'd rather not have to waste money on a license since I've already got one good license [actually, I'd have three, except I've blown away windows on two of our three laptops]).

myvodafone fail

I get my mobile phone service from Vodafone NZ because when my family and I arrived in New Zealand, we brought our GSM phones with us, and Vodafone is currently the only GSM provider in NZ. It's a prepaid service since I don't need to make many calls.

Since it's prepaid, I need to top-up my prepaid credit every once in a while. Now vodafone has a service called Hotlink. With Hotlink, it's possible to register a phone number and pin with my bank (highly recommended) and then get prepaid credit top-ups via a vodafone app that works through SMS messages. Hotlink worked very well for us for a year. Lately, however, my sister-in-law came to visit us in NZ and we asked her to buy us new phones since our old phones (well, mine) were approaching unusable due to a cracked screen, shorter battery life, etc.

We love our new phones. However, apparently vodafone's Hotlink app doesn't work with all handsets. Presumably it only works with handsets that vodafone sells or has sold in the past. So no hotlink for us.

Fortunately, there's a website where I can top-up my own phone via credit card payment. I didn't realize that I could top up my wife's phone too, using my account. So I tried to log in to *her* account. I'd forgotten the password, so I clicked on the forgotten password link and it sent a new password to her mobile. Except the password didn't work. I generated passwords three times and none of them worked. FAIL.

And phone support doesn't work since vodafone phone support isn't 24x7. FAIL.

So I logged in to my account (I use the Revelation password manager in Ubuntu to store my passwords) and I noticed that I could pay for prepaid credit to (via credit card) go to any mobile phone. So I used that to send credit to my wife's phone.

But vodafone FAIL isn't done. Vodafone accepts the credit card number on their site instead of having the credit card transaction be processed through a dedicated credit card gateway. In the name of usability they allow myvodafone users to store their credit card information *in*their*profile*. So they're not dropping the credit card information as soon as the credit card transaction is done, they're really storing the credit card information in their database.

Well, they'd better be really security paranoid over there.

Wolfram

I'm not Godel, or even very good at math, but... hahahahahaha

Switching to xfce4 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

I've been using Ubuntu (Gnome) since Dapper Drake. I've liked it and didn't see the need to switch to anything else. I did take a look at KDE (didn't like it) and xfce (didn't like it then either). It's been a few years though, and xfce is now sufficiently like Gnome (except thinner), that I have now switched over to xfce completely.

I would probably still use Gnome except my work is in java lately, and with tomcat, eclipse, firefox, firebug and selenium, I'm finding that 2GB of RAM isn't enough. I can't upgrade my laptops (they all max out at 2GB, I'd need to buy new laptops to use 4GB or more). So I'm doing everything I can to retrieve memory from fat apps.

No doubt there are more ways to save memory. Maybe opera and selenium-server. For now though, xfce is definitely usable. It's growing on me and I expect that I'll like it more than I like Gnome in just a week or two :-).

brief, incomplete and mostly wrogn

Bravo

xfce4 on vnc

I'm liking xfce4 on Ubuntu. I'd looked at xfce before and not been too impressed. It was pretty good, but not good or easy enough to use. So I'd stayed with gnome.

For slow machines, I've used either fvwm or icewm. There are other lightweight window managers, but I liked those two.

At work, I use gnome on my primary desktop (but I may change that to xfce4, actually), and icewm on another desktop on which I have a vnc server. I run eclipse and tomcat on my primary desktop, and browsers, IRC and mail clients on the remote desktop.

I think I'm about ready to switch to xfce, actually. I tested that out on my laptop running gnome, with vnc running xfce. I had some minor problems getting xfce working under VNC until I saw a post on "xfce4 on vnc" on ubuntuforums.

Tried it out. It works on the laptop (both primary and vncserver running on the same box. That should be perfect for work.

#!/bin/sh
unset SESSION_MANAGER
startxfce4 &

Not jaunty yet at work

I had planned to upgrade my work desktop to Jaunty today. But that's now pushed back to Monday. I forgot to bring a laptop to work, so I wouldn't be able to work if something went wrogn with the upgrade (and I prefer to work on a laptop anyway while the upgrade is running to avoid any instability the upgrade might cause).

Was in such a rush to get Timmy ready for school, and take care of John while Sol brought Timmy to school, that I didn't have time to pack up the laptop.

Naturally, the bus was then late and I would have been able to pack *two* laptops if I'd wanted to :-).

Just noticed: Only 1GB!

I've been working on an HP laptop, an HP Pavilion dv1000. For the longest time I thought I had 2GB on it. It was always fast enough for anything I needed, and even when I was running tomcat, eclipse and firefox on it, it was great.

Of course this is in linux. There's a windows partition on there, but it's never used. I keep it on because it's a legal copy and it'd be a pain to have to reinstall it. As is too often the case these days, the laptop didn't come with the install CD. I think there's an image on the hard drive, but in typical Microsoft arrogance, that would blow away the whole hard drive, and then I'd have to install linux again and have it resize the windows partition again, etc. And I'm not sure about that image anyway.

So it's all been good and fast for the year and a half that we've had it. The CPU isn't very fast, but we only use it for browsing and email and the occasional web based program. Previously, only in PHP, so nothing that would stress the memory on the box.

I recently noticed though that with eclipse+tomcat+firefox3, the box was swapping. So I finally looked at what linux thought was installed, didn't believe that it had only 1GB and opened up the box. And it really does have just two 512GB sticks in there.

I don't care too much. I'll just run tomcat and firefox and thunderbird on my other, faster, fatter laptop, and eclipse on the HP. I could run one instance of firefox here and not notice, probably. Particularly as I've switched to xfce4 and am liking it. But for now I'll keep firefox on the fatter laptop.

I doubt if I'll buy more RAM for this laptop. I just don't need it :-).

Upgrading to Jaunty

I upgraded my spare laptop to Jaunty the other day. That worked perfectly. But that laptop has mostly just the basic ubuntu installation and a few additional things (tomcat, sun-jdk, postgresql).

I'm upgrading my own main home-work laptop just now, keeping fingers crossed.

...

Well, it booted into the login screen, so that's more than half the battle right there. It got a bit confused, logging into xfce rather than gnome. It forgot what my default and previous session were, perhaps? But it's easy enough to get into gnome, and there's nothing obviously borken there.

It's a good thing that (since Intrepid I think, but maybe since Hardy) Ubuntu turns off third party repositories before doing a dist-upgrade. That borked a few things for me a few upgrades ago. Things have gotten much more stable with dist-upgrades in the last few versions.

I think I'll wait a bit before upgrading the last laptop. That's sol's main work machine (she works at home) and while she could work on my home-work laptop if her laptop gets borked during the upgrade, there's no need to do the upgrade immediately either.

WPA and network-manager aren't working right for me on my home-work laptop, but it wasn't working well previously either, so I run wpa_supplicant from a rc.local and in the background (&) and without the -B (running it with -B, even from the command line doesn't work and I can't tell why, thus the ugly workaround). Sol's laptop has wicd (at one point all these laptops had wicd, which works perfectly, except it's not so nice about having two interfaces up at the same time, and I use the spare and home-work laptops together with quicksynergy on eth0, so I need two interfaces for these).

I normally wouldn't dist-upgrade so eagerly (I'm happy to wait a few months before doing the dist-upgrade), but Jaunty has a fix for an irritating synergy bug in Intrepid that I've been waiting for (but not so eagerly that I'd pull the packages from the Jaunty pre-release versions and install :-).

On my home-work laptop I've probably got some old-bad network configuration that's confusing Network-Manager, I should fix it. But there's a huge gap between should and want-to right now, I'll stick with the workaround script until I have time to figure it out. Although, it'd probably be more efficient to just reinstall Ubuntu from scratch on this laptop :-) (/home is a separate partition, so I'd just need a backup of /etc so I can get to customizations (e.g., /etc/openvpn/*, /etc/wpa_supplicant/*, some entries in /etc/apache2 and /etc/tomcat5.5, etc).

Damn, eclipse is still 3.2 though. That sucks. I'll just have to stick with my downloaded 3.4 tarball installation then. Or get it from upstream and test it. But I don't have a lot of time for that, and I've got a working tarball 3.4 installation workaround. I'm only maintaining eclipse on 1 laptop and a desktop, so there's not enough maintenance headache/overhead to push me into figuring out how to get it from upstream :-).

Classic Mistakes Enumerated

Steve Mcconnell has a post on classic software development mistakes, enumerated.

From 1996, apparently. Which is why it seemed familiar :-).

intel/amd Hardware virtualization CPU capability

I've often wondered if a computer I'm using (a laptop, or my work desktop) has hardware virtualization support. There are quite a few sites that say "cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags and look to see if there are vmx or svm flags in there", e.g.

http://www.linuxtopia.org/HowToGuides/fedora_core_6_xen_quickstart/fedora_core_6_xen_virtualization_how_to_005.html

and

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/linux-tip-how-to-tell-if-your-processor-supports-vt/

Now I've done that and it's a pain because there are so many flags and they're not in an order that makes it easy to spot the relevant flags. So I did some sed:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep flags | sed "s/ /\\n/g" | egrep "(vmx|svm)"

which is more useful since it replaces spaces in the flags with newlines, so that we can then search for just the flags we need and not be confused by the pollution from all the other flags on the line.

Without the trailing egrep I get:

flags :
fpu
vme
de
pse
tsc
msr
pae
mce
cx8
apic
sep
mtrr
pge
mca
cmov
pat
clflush
dts
acpi
mmx
fxsr
sse
sse2
ss
ht
tm
pbe
nx
constant_tsc
arch_perfmon
bts
pni
monitor
vmx
est
tm2
xtpr
flags :
fpu
vme
de
pse
tsc
msr
pae
mce
cx8
apic
sep
mtrr
pge
mca
cmov
pat
clflush
dts
acpi
mmx
fxsr
sse
sse2
ss
ht
tm
pbe
nx
constant_tsc
arch_perfmon
bts
pni
monitor
vmx
est
tm2
xtpr

As it happens, although I *do* have vmx in there, I doubt if it's actually usable. I've got two laptops with vmx enabled, but I expect that the hardware virtualization is disabled in the BIOS, and there's no toggle in the CMOS settings to turn it on. But I'll try to install Xen anyway, and see if it can use the CPU hardware virtualization support :-).

It's too bad that those are my two slower laptops (2.2Ghz and 1.6Ghz). My fastest laptop (3.3Ghz) is the oldest and it definitely doesn't have vmx support in there at all. Ah well, maybe I'll just play with Xen and hardware virtualization on my AMD64 desktop at work.

vlc on intrepid, no video

I recently installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) on laptops at home. I also installed vlc (well, on one computer vlc was already installed on Hardy and I just dist-upgraded). I would see no video but could hear sound. Some googling a week or so ago didn't help.

Today though I found this:

cannot play any video (SOLVED) on the videolan forums.

That solved the problem perfectly. The solution being, at the command line, to run:

vlc --reset-plugins-cache --reset-config

Linked to here so that its google karma will rise (not that it needs it, since it's already the first result :-).

xchat and DSL router woes

I've had some problems with xchat when working at home. This is on Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

I lurk on irc.freenode.net's #erlang channel (sometimes I ask embarrassingly newbie questions).

The first issue (backwards from the title) is that my home DSL router (provided by my ISP) is crap (but I don't replace it because it's free). The DSL-604T has some sort of issue with some ip_conntrack settings being too low, so that when it receives too many incoming connections at the same time or within a short amount of time (e.g., when running a peer-to-peer client, or when in the #erlang channel, apparently, although I don't understand why that is) then the router hangs and I need to power-cycle it.

There are firmware upgrades for this model, but I can't upgrade the firmware since it might then stop working with my ISP (the ISP has custom firmware in there).

This isn't even about running peer-to-peer, it's about an IRC channel about a programming language!

So I solved that by setting up screen to open an ssh session (at screen #9) to do an auto-port-forward to my work computer. ssh -L 8001:irc.freenode.net:8001 my_work_computer. Then I just have xchat connect to localhost:8001. It's simpler than figuring out how to NAT requests to port 8001 through my work computer and cheaper on bandwidth than running xchat in vnc at work (my ISPs bandwidth caps have increased by a factor of 3 since i first whined about the caps, but I still hit the limit before the end of the month).

So then I remembered that xchat on ubuntu sucks because there's no graphical way to turn off join and parts messages. And on a channel with a lot of lurkers (like #erlang), there are a lot of those.

A quick google search shows that the thing to do is

/set irc_conf_mode 1

And I can have that done automatically by:
Xchat|Network List|Select Network|Edit

and setting the Connect command to "/set irc_conf_mode 1".
It'd be nice if it were settable in the graphical interface, but
since it isn't, this is a neat workaround.

Toshiba Satellite A75-S231 bios password clearing

I've had a heck of a time trying to get a Toshiba Satellite A75-S231 working well with Linux. I first received this laptop (secondhand) around 2006, I think. I couldn't use it productively in Ubuntu (I think I might have checked some other distros, certainly I checked Knoppix too) back then. Whenever I would do something compute intensive it would shut down. It seems the kernel wasn't controlling the fans and it was overheating and the BIOS would turn it off.

I could sort of limp along and use it if I set the cpu scaling to its lowest speed. But that was still 1.8Ghz (no 800Mhz speeds on this CPU). And even at 1.8Ghz, if I did anything challenging that would use 100% cpu for a few minutes, it would shut down.

So I gave up. For a while I lent the laptop to someone who used XP on it, and after that it was stored in its laptop case for a year or so.

Well this year we moved to New Zealand, and since my sister-in-law was coming over, and I'd forgotten what the myriad issues with the laptop had been, I asked her to bring it with her.

I tried to install Solaris 10 on the ubuntu partition. That didn't end well. I'll try it again, but it looks like Solaris 10 probably doesn't know how to run the fans either. I then installed Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). That installed and it didn't hang. It looks like linux got the fan working sometime between Feisty (I think) and Intrepid.

I had another problem with the laptop. I had received it with the bios security password set and my brother, who gave me the laptop, didn't remember what the password was. Back when the laptop was shutting down due to power, I'd thought that if I could get into the CMOS setup, I could find a setting so that the fan would always run if it was on AC power. But first I had to get into the BIOS.

Well, this year, with Intrepid working on it, the urgency of getting into the BIOS receded. I still wanted to clear the passwords though. After a lot of searching, I finally found:

Toshiba Laptop password deletion

On page 8 that shows the jumper to short to clear the BIOS password. So finally I can get into the CMOS setup. As it happens, there's no "keep-the-fan-on-all-the-time" setting. As with many (all?) laptop BIOSes, it's pretty minimal. I can't even set how much RAM is shared by the video subsystem. It's good to finally be able to see what's in there though (and set the boot order of the drives, fortunately, previously the boot order had CD-DVD-Rom first, which allowed me to install Linux in the first place).

This laptop still has other problems. I've never liked how insensitive the Alps glidepoint touchpad is, and the keyboard is pretty weak (there's no right Ctrl key, and I always use right Ctrl instead of Left Ctrl, the ~` key is beside the space bar, which is stupid). But that's the case with all laptop keyboards anyway, compromises are made and they all suck. I can deal with the keyboard though, mostly. And if I can't stand it anymore, I've got a cheap external keyboard I can use with it. I still hate the touchpad, but some tweaking of gnome mouse settings has the mouse being tolerable. I'll probably still buy an external mouse and use that though. The laptop is big enough (and I'm switching to it because I like the widescreen) that it's really a desktop replacement. For travelling, we'll bring sol's much lighter (and still widescreen) HP Pavilion.

As long as I'm going to use an external keyboard/mouse, I'd love to have this Adesso keyboard with built-in touchpad (well, assuming the touchpad is any good, but it probably is, most touchpads are, the -one in the Satellite A75-S231 I've got is just bad, not sure if it's bad for all instances of that model, or if I've just got a dud). I can't find that keyboard in New Zealand though, and frankly, I won't spend that much for a keyboard+mouse. I'll just grab a cheap external mouse.

I'll keep my other laptop (a Durabook) for a spare. Or probably for Solaris (not that I need Solaris, but I might as well play with it and get familiar with it, I'm sure I'll use it since the big client my department does software development and management for is big on enterprise everything).

Photobucket bulk uploader applet now works in Ubuntu

It's probably been close to a year, or a bit more than that, since I gave up on the Photobucket java bulk uploader. Back then, the applet worked in Windows but photobucket didn't care enough to make it work on Linux (there were forum posts about how it didn't work on non-Windows boxes).

I did upload some files from either my wife's windows partition (which we keep for legacy devices that work only in Windows, e.g., a Sony NW-HD1 that was given to us and that doesn't seem to have any linux support at all). I remember using windows under vmware to test the bulk uploader too.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and I'm glad to report that the bulk uploader now works with the Sun Java 1.6 JVM. I don't have 1.5 installed just now, so I don't know if it'll work with that. But I'm glad that I've finally got a working setup.

svn:externals and git

A previous post has a comment from Jakub Narebski pointing me at git submodules. A quick google points me at: Andy Parkins' post on git submodules and svn:externals on kerneltrap.

That's cool. And if the anyone on my subversion using team ever uses svn:externals I'll be glad of the workaround. I hope, though, that git-svn support for svn:externals will mature before then :-).

I'm very happy with how flexible and powerful git is, and how I'm able to work on our svn repository while taking advantage of git capabilities that aren't in svn or are very painful to use. But I'm drowning quite well in java and erlang just now, and I'm not going to be able to spend time figuring out git nuances. Much better to sit around minding my own business while the product matures :-).

git-log --name-status

I've been using git for the past month (I just realized that today was my first whole month at work) and I'm very happy with it. I'm used to svn (and before that, CVS) and I'd gotten around the ugly (so much so that I never used the version discussed in the subversion book for versions below 1.5) merging in svn by using svnmerge (which, while not making merging painless, did make it sufficiently less painful that it was actually usable).

For a long time I looked at git but never actually dived in head first since casual acquaintance with git made me feel dumb. Now that I've been using it for a month though (well, with git-svn, since my current project uses svn), I'm getting used to it, I've got the basic workflow down and I'm slowly learning more advanced workflows.

For a long time too I didn't like git because I thought it didn't have an equivalent to "svn log -v", that is, show the revision number, author, message, and the affected files. git-log showed the first three, but not the last. I was probably looking at an early version of git though, this would have been in 2006 or so. Sometime in revision 1.4, git-log got --name-status, but I didn't notice. Anyway, it required -r if you wanted to see recursive changes. 1.5 has better behavior now. --name-status shows filenames and what was done to them (deleted, added, modified, etc), and the -r is implied.

There are still some things I'm not clear on (e.g., how to do the equivalent of svn:externals, which is probably a SMORTD, a simple matter of reading the documentation). But given that the main VCS at work is SVN, how to work with svn:externals with git and git-svn :-).

I'll get there though. Although it may take a while since, in fact, we don't use svn:externals or similar in our current projects (in fact, the reason I decided to use git and git-svn was because we don't have the regular trunk and branches structure either, and being the new guy, I didn't want to be creating a test branch for myself at the root of the svn tree :-).

In any case, git-reset and friends (i haven't tried the --interactive options to git-commit or git-rebase and friends yet, but I will, one of these days) are great helps and because of their (admittedly, simple) enhancements to my workflow, I'm not going to be switching back to pure svn.

Our project isn't so large that the git vs svn speed difference is a factor, but I have (at a previous job) worked with sufficiently large trees and branches that the speed of git would have been a huge help. On the other hand, as smart as my co-workers were, at that job, I think that pushing git into the organization would have been too big a challenge in the time I had. svn was certainly the better choice there (since svnmerge was available, before I learned svnmerge, I spent far too much time hand-merging between branches).

Recovering, not so gracefully

My laptop's DVD-RW drive stopped working a month or two ago. I didn't mind much since it's not essential. I can always use my wife's laptop when we have DVDs for our son to watch. I ordered Ubuntu Hardy desktop and server CDs via shipit and I got those a few weeks ago. I did want to install Hardy, but it wasn't a big deal, so I waited until I could figure out how safely.

The only thing I really *needed* the DVD drive for was for booting rescue DVDs. I didn't want to try to do an online Hardy upgrade if I couldn't go into a rescue DVD if something broke and the laptop couldn't reboot (that's happened to me once or twice, on doing an online update).

I downloaded the RIPLinux iso and installed it to my USB flash drive. I thought I could use that for rescue. Unfortunately, when I tried to do some grub surgery on my laptop, I made it unbootable. Mainly, because I'm not intimately familiar with grub (I'm a lilo man, myself, and the only thing I really dislike about Ubuntu is that it's inherently grub-centric), but also because it thought my hard drive was at /dev/hdc but Ubuntu sees it at /dev/sda. I couldn't fix that either since RIPLinux would boot and assign the flash drive it was booting from to /dev/sda.

Fortunately, when I went to Pendrive Linux and saw a tutorial on how to install Hardy onto a USB drive FROM the ISO. The recipe there worked flawlessly and I've now got a flash drive that is an Ubuntu Hardy installer as well as a live Linux. If I go to an internet cafe, or someone else's computer, I can use it and not worry about the viruses they've got running around in their Windows installation.

So I've got Hardy installed now. I'll bring the laptop to work tomorrow, update, and install all the development packages I need that aren't on the default Desktop install. I work at Catalyst IT Limited. Online updates and apt-get are very fast at work since Catalyst hosts the New Zealand mirrors for Ubuntu and Debian (and a bunch of other distributions).

Next, I need to figure out how to install OpenSolaris from some device other than the install CD :-).

Java and Erlang

I just got through my first week at work. It's a great environment, lots of geeks around. My primary project is in java, and I'm taking some time to re-acclimate. I'd avoided java in the last 5-7 years or so because I thought it had gotten over-complex. I have now just jumped into the deep end :-). I'll survive, of course, and maybe even learn something. As to whether what I'll learn is going to be worth the trouble, I'm not sure. It probably will be. Although it's going to be painful for a few months.

My secondary project is to be the backup (or go-to, I'm not very clear on that yet) guy on a project that was done in erlang. I've been interested in learning erlang, so I'm certainly interested in doing the project. On the other hand, the guy who implemented it (and who has since left the company for a job in Paris) gave me an introduction to the system and it was overwhelming.

I've just jumped into the deep end twice. I'm going to be gasping for air for a while.

Tom Lane pics

I've always wondered what Tom Lane looks like. He's a great presence on the postgresql mailing lists, always informative, always polite and knows incredible amounts of postgresql implementation details.

Now there are pics of Tom Lane from PGCon2

Ehem, apparently a Mac user :-). I'm not going to be swayed to switch to Mac just because Tom uses one. Well, maybe a little. But not enough to buy one :-).

Java

I just got an offer of employment at New Zealand's largest open source oriented company. I'm looking forward to working with 80+ geeks. I'm going to be working in Java though, with some PHP. I've worked with java a lot in the past, but I'm not up-to-date on the latest developments. As it happens, I've been told that most of the code is still 1.4. That's a mixed blessing. Some things in 1.5 and later are nice, but a lot else is horrible. Still, I'm going to miss autoboxing.

I've got a week to learn some basic things. I'm going to see how much of Java, Tomcat and Spring I can learn in 9 days or so :-)

Nontechnical, but must-post

OK, there have been a whole slew of articles about recent discoveries regarding platypus genes. I didn't post about them because it was enough that I read about them (frankly, I only read one of those links, I only searched for the other links so that I could have a whole slew of links here :-).

I finally broke down and posted about the discoveries though because, after all, who can resist a headline like this?

Platypus Genes Hint at Human Scrotum Origins

Of course, Pharyngula on this whole thing is better. The original study would be even better, but I am avoiding embarrassment by ignorance, and also sleep by boredom, so I'm not reading that :-).

GW Bush: Impeach, Prosecute, Convict, Execute

I've got "Impeach, Prosecute, Convict, Execute" in my email sig, in reference to that Abject and Miserable Failure, George W Bush.

I'm taking that part off temporarily though, since I'm sending out job applications. No need to ruffle the feathers of any strongly anti-death-sentence hiring managers out there :-).

I had also taken off URLs for this blog and my other me since someone pointed to a spamhaus post that indicated it might be used by yahoo.com (and related properties) as an indicator of spam. In fact, I added the impeach, prosecute, convict, execute text because I had removed the blog links and wanted something to take their place :-).

Well, when I stop emailing job applications, I'll put something back in the sig.

Finally, Debian on NSLU2

I won a linksys NSLU2 at a TradeMe auction last month.

I couldn't get it running immediately since the power supply that came with it wasn't the right one. The seller had bought it in Australia and I think he got a unit where the power supply had been switched (maybe it was a U.S. unit and the australian seller replaced the power supply since the outlet jacks are different). In any case, Phil (the seller from whom I was buying), didn't know the power supply didn't work since he never got around to turning it on.

It took a while to get in contact with him (yahoo was filtering my outgoing email to Phil, considering it spam for some reason, probably because of some text on my sig). After some back and forth we finally sorted it out and, he sent a replacement power supply, we had to have that replaced again because the jack was the wrogn size too, and we finally got the right power supply and I got it working today.

I immediately installed Debian on it. That does take a while to install since the CPU is pretty slow, so I guess unpacking, installing and generating cryptographic keys and such take a while. I'm going to de-underclock the NSLU2 one of these days. Apparently, the CPU in there is forced down to half its speed. I can remove a resistor and double the speed. On the other hand, I'll take my time since I have a history of breaking hardware :-). Best to take my time and do things right :-).

I had planned to have it boot from one of my 60GB external USB drives, but there was a problem with that. It thought the drive had bad sectors. It didn't though, I ran badblocks on it (well, actually, mkfs.ext3 -c -c) and there are no media errors. Maybe it's just the low quality drive enclosure making the drive seem marginal. I just installed debian on a flash drive and then (with some work with fdisk, mkfs, mkswap, etc) copied the flash data to the external hard drive. The Slug is now booting from the 60GB drive, after those gymnastics.

I've got a self-powered Maxtor hard drive enclosure with two full size (3.5") drives in there. I'll use that as my secondary drive for the NSLU2. I used a power meter to measure power draw by my laptop, by the NSLU2+USB laptop drive, and by the Maxtor drive, and the Maxtor drive takes so much power I don't want it to be on all day :-). The NSLU2 with one external laptop drive only draws between 7 and 11 watts. That's very nice. The Maxtor enclosure, by itself, draws 26 watts even when there's no activity. That's not so cool since my laptop draws less than that at low CPU speed, and only around 48 watts at high CPU speed with the CPU fully loaded.

I've got just a basic install on the SLUG for now (well, I installed build-essentials, although there's not much profit from building from source on a 133Mhz CPU :-). I'll build it up slowly, probably installing an openvpn server (I've got openvpn on my laptops now, and firewall rules on the router to let openvpn through) and possibly moving my postfix+dovecot+fetchmail+ypops+bogofilter+spamassassin setup to the SLUG.

My thanks to ian sison for pointing me at the NSLU2. He told me about it maybe a year ago, but my wife and I were in the midst of preparations to immigrate to New Zealand, so I didn't try to buy one then. I've had a few months at home, taking care of Timmy and after losing one or two trademe auctions on an NSLU2, I've got one now :-).

I'd love to upgrade the memory on this NSLU2 too, but I can't do it, so I'll need to see if I get to know anyone with the requisite soldering skills :-).

regionset is cool, thanks Cedric

I've moved to New Zealand with my family and after a few weeks getting all set up, I went to the library and got a library card. I then borrowed some children's DVDs for my son to watch occasionally.

I found, though, that I couldn't use them on my laptop. Fortunately, we left the original windows on my wife's laptop (but dual-booting to linux, which she uses almost exclusively). I found that I could play the DVDs there.

After two weeks of messing around with this I finally posted a question on the Philippine Linux Users Group mailing list and got exactly the answer I needed (this answer probably also helping dido sevilla, who had the exact same problem). It seems my DVD drive has a region setting hardcoded into it somewhere. If playing a DVD with a different region setting, it's necessary to change the hardcoded region. Unfortunately, there's a small number of changes available. Beyond that, I suppose it won't change anymore. Fortunately I didn't bring any US region DVDs with me, so I won't have to worry about having one laptop be for US DVDs and another laptop be for NZ DVDs :-).

sudo apt-get install regionset
sudo regionset

and then choose the region (4, for Australia, New Zealand).

For Phil Wynn

Hi Phil,

I've emailed you but I see no reply. Possibly an anti-spam filter is eating things, so I'll post the text of my reply to you here and send you an innocuous email with the link.

---- message follows ---
Re: Trade Me Auction: 148561162 -- Linksys NSLU2 Network Attached Storage (NAS)
From: Gerald Quimpo
To: "Phil Wynn"

Hi Phil,

On Monday 14 April 2008 13:16:36 you wrote:
> Just checking, did you receive the parcel?

Yes I did. I also emailed you, but possibly that got lost (or eaten by a spam
filter) or something.

here's what I said then:
>>>>
>>>>On Wednesday 09 April 2008 07:59:15 you wrote:
> If you dont receive the package within a couple of days, please let me
> know.

I received it the other day. Didn't get around to looking at it til
just now.

Did you get this working at all? Where did you buy it? I've been trying
to get the power jack in and it won't go in. It's not that it's too tight,
it doesn't even seem to be the right size (although it *looks* right,
it won't go in at all though, even when I exert some force).

Do you have the receipt from when you bought it? Might need to
have it repaired or the power pack replaced.
<<<<<

oh, and I signed it "tiger", which is my nickname, but possibly why you
might have ignored it :-).

by the way, i think i'm mistaken about the jack being the wrogn
size. instead, the inner part of the power conection (the part in the
NSLU2 seems not to be a regular cylinder. instead, most of it
is a cylinder but part of it seems to have some metal protruding
or welded on so that the power cable can't mate with it. but i'm
not really very sure about all this, weak eyes and i have no
magnifying glass available.

Gerald


---- message ends ----

Switching to Kmail

I've used Gnome Evolution for many years. I've looked at various email clients over the years (sylpheed, kmail, thunderbird, and very long ago, pine, mutt, elm and mail) and Evolution had the right mix of features that I needed.

Mainly, I stuck with Evolution because it has realtime-updated search folders. That is, it's possible to create a virtual "Folder" that is actually a search into other real folders, with logical criteria. It's like a view in SQL.

I used that for having an "Everything" folder, which was a view into all emails in all real folders (because I cut my email apart into many folders, for easier management, and so that I don't have a single large Inbox with 50,000+ emails in it). I also used it for showing unread email for some very voluminous mailing lists. In evolution, it's not convenient to find the next unread message (well, I never spent the time to find the keyboard shortcut for that, although there probably is one). So I just created search folders that showed only unread messages.

An upgrade to ubuntu gutsy's Evolution has left evolution slightly unstable though. Evolution would crash for no reason, or it would crash because, just after starting it, while it was fetching mail, I would click on the fetch mail icon and it would get confused. Evolution also feels like it's not being maintained. That's no big deal since it's already pretty complete, but I've been seeing it get unstable as crash bugs aren't fixed while some new features get in. So I decided I needed to switch to some other mailer.

I looked at Kmail and Thunderbird. Sylpheed-claws doesn't install cleanly as a package in Gutsy (or in my config, anyway), so I just ignored that.

Kmail has pretty much all the features I needed (and some I wanted):

1. Choice of maildir or mbox (I tested maildir last night on reiserfs and xfs,
I expected reiserfs to be much faster than xfs. Was very surprised to see
xfs (1.5 minutes) beat reiserfs (2.5 minutes) in a simple little "read many
little files and search for a string" benchmark). Fortunately, my /home is
already a luks encrypted xfs.

2. Strong mail filtering functionality. A nice surprise is the automatic
anti-spam support. It supports both bogofilter and spamassassin, and
it creates filters which will register an email as either spam or ham
using the bayesian classifier in either of those. The filters just
classify the email as spam or ham and then either move the email to the
spam directory or keep it in the current directory. I had scripts to
do that in Evolution. Didn't think to do it with Evolution's built-in
filters though.

3. Search/Virtual folders.

It's slow though. Slower than evolution at most things, and I can make it pause with some large tasks (evolution seems to be much more multi-threaded or multi-process or whatever, in any case, it's harder to make the UI pause). And the Search/Virtual folders have a stupid bug (or maybe it's a feature, I don't understand how that could be though). When the preview pane is displayed, clicking on a virtual folder makes all unread email in that folder automatically change their status to read. This is bogus. It might make sense if the email that is selected in that folder is marked read, but not ALL of them. There's a bug report on it. I don't know why it's a wishlist. I think I saw this bug already the last time I looked at Kmail and I backed off from switching then.

This time I switched anyway because Kmail has keyboard shortcuts to go to the first, next, prev,last unread emails. That's enough of a workaround that I can deal with switching. I'll be able to work with my large mailing list email folders. I won't be using Saved/Virtual folders for much else and I can wait for this bogosity to be resolved.

I looked at Thunderbird, but there are too many things missing. For one thing, I can't run a filter on a set of selected emails. As far as I can tell, one has to run a filter on a whole folder. Sometimes though, I need to do subset filtering (particularly when developing a new filter incrementally, on a very large folder, so that whole folder filtering is very slow). I can't run external commands in a filter (can't do that in the filter definition either in Kmail, but you *can* do it in the filter action. Thunderbird can't do it in the filter action either). And there's no maildir support. maildir support is important because if the mailer gets unstable, you lose just one or a very few (depending on number of working threads) messages. An unstable mailer that uses mbox can lose the entire mbox if it really loses its mind. In fact, the reason I decided to switch away from Evolution is because after a security upgrade (pilot error, I had it run the upgrade while evolution was still running, I should have stopped the client) it deleted all email in my inbox with dates after Dec 7, 2008 (approximately, I forget the exact last date).

I may look at Thunderbird again in a few months, particularly if Kmail doesn't fix that bogosity.

Loyalty is short-lived

While Telecom's customer service is outstanding, the actual internet service isn't that great. In particular, the bandwidth cap (in my case 3GB/month) is the sum of downloads and uploads. This isn't what I was told at the telecom sales office we subscribed at. I'm sure the telecom sales guy was just confused. He wasn't trying to lie to us, he just didn't know that the cap is the sum. He thought uploads weren't counted at all and that only downloads contributed to the cap.

As it is, this is going to put a cramp into my posting Timmy Videos to youtube. Or pushing pictures up to photobucket. With me, objective measures win over soft, touchy-feelie values. All things being equal, I'd stick with Telecom because their customer service has been great. But if some broadband provider were to suddenly provide internet access without caps, or with higher caps or no upload limit, then I'd switch immediately. Or maybe wait two to three months for telecom to catch up, and if they didn't come up with a competitive offering, then switch. Touchy-feelie good feelings are great. But bandwidth trumps touchy-feelie :-).

"Lost" some email

In a glitch that I don't quite understand, I "lost" some email. It's not really lost. I keep a copy of everything on gmail. So it's still there. But it's very inconvenient to try to restore what was lost because gmail doesn't have a flexible way of saying, "reset the end of my already-downloaded list of emails to this particular email". Instead, I can either download everything again, give up on the "lost" email, or workaround somehow.

I'll probably give up. The email is on gmail, so I can always get back to it. I could workaround by forwarding all those emails to myself and then, on the receiving side, editing the From: and date sent of each email. But that's no fun. I certainly don't want to download everything again because I'm in New Zealand, and broadband here has a bandwidth cap. Mine is 3GB/month. When I go over, download speeds will drop to 64kbps or so. That's not too bad, but this isn't important enough for that.

I think that evolution got confused because evolution was running, and then I ran Ubuntu's automatic updater and evolution got updated. Possibly there was some confusion regarding evolution-data-server or similar. That'll teach me to keep programs running which are being updated. I think, though, that this is the first time I've been caught by updates updating running programs. Ah well, live and learn. Or maybe not. I'll probably forget and this'll happen to me again.

I've been putting off running postfix, fetchmail and an imapd daemon locally. I've done that in the past, it helps with reliability, automatic backup and spam classification with .procmailrc, etc.

I think I'll put it off some more though. Gmail has a copy of all my mail, and I can get a relatively recent copy of my Inbox (the only file affected) from my rdiff-backup backups. That'll bring my Inbox forward to sometime early this month. Then I'll just have about a week and a half of personal mail left on gmail. I would probably then forward those to myself since there'd be few enough of them.

Quality Service from Telecom

I've been busy with moving to New Zealand with my family. This process has been going on for close on two years now. We arrived a 5 weeks ago, my wife is now working at the foremost open source oriented software development company in New Zealand, we've moved into a new rental home, things are moving forward quickly.

As part of moving into our new home (it's not an apartment, although it is a rental, since it's a standalone house with a little garden and garage) we had the utilities registered in our name, and we subscribed to Telecom for our home phone. We also went ahead and subscribed to telecom's broadband plans. This was mainly for convenience. New Zealand has naked DSL, it's possible to get DSL without a landline phone service. We thought we'd just go the convenient way and get both, and then switch later as necessary.

We probably won't now though, because I've been very happy with Telecom's call center service. I rang the call center and ordered the broadband service. All of this was done over the phone. I then rang again because I wanted to get some dialup service for the week or so that it would take to receive the ADSL modem/router. First of all, on the broadband, I was told that they had a promotion for online subscriptions. Online subscribers would get free 2 months of service. But the call center operator said that we'd get the free 2 months of service anyway even though we weren't subscribing online, because she'd just enter the order and we'd get the promotional 2 months free. She also said that Telecom had a promo on the broadband hardware package. There was an NZ$100 discount on the package (ADSL modem/wifi router and a few ADSL filters) so it would only cost NZ$100. Good deal.

I later called Telecom because I wanted to subscribe to their dialup service for a month, just til the DSL was up and running. I was told that normally broadband subscribers were given free dialup accounts to use until DSL was up. Good deal.

The Telecom call center support person later called me because he said he'd reviewed my broadband application and there was something wrogn with the order for the broadband router. That's pretty good service, good initiative.

So finally I called the call center again, spoke with someone who sounded Filipino (I guess they don't hire just Kiwi accents) and she investigated the error, and fixed it by removing the old order and re-creating it. I had to do the third call since the second support center person (the one who discovered the problem) was in the dialup support section and couldn't help me with broadband.

Altogether, it was very good to see really good, pro-active, genuinely customer satisfaction oriented service in action. I may still jump ship to some other broadband suppliers, but the barrier to jumping ship is now higher than it used to be.

WPA finally

My family and I are in New Zealand and I'm happy to see that, where I'm staying, the telco that installed the DSL (and all wifi-routers that I can see in range, between 3 and 9) have WPA configured by default.

They have to do that, of course, because most NZ broadband has bandwidth caps. For instance, where I'm staying, the cap is 3GB per month. If we exceed that we don't get slapped with excessive per MB charges, nor is the bandwidth cut-off, but speed will drop to 64kbps.

Clearly, leeching off someone else's wifi signal could be very profitable (in the sense of having someone else pay for the download) and very anti-social. So the telco is pretty much required to (1) provide the wifi-routers [because customers will connect wifi anyway, better for the telco to do it right) and (2) make sure the wifi-router is configured to be secure.

It took me a week to get wifi on my (and my wife's) laptop working though. I got very rushed instructions on the password, and then my host left for a week. I couldn't get the password to work, nor any of the obvious variations I tried. My host just got back from his weeklong trip and we worked out the password after he looked in his documentation. After a bit of fiddling with wpa_supplicant, I've finally got it working. As it happens, I *did* try the password that finally worked, but I guess I had other wpa_supplicant settings not quite right.

This has been a good experience. For a week, we just used an ethernet cable to connect to the router, so we were still able to use the internet, but in the meantime I've learned much about the nitty gritty of wpa_supplicant.

In another life I kept my wifi-router open (and then moved to mac auth) because I was interested in watching what people would do with it (and if they'd sniff and spoof vald mac addresses). With bandwidth caps as implemented in NZ though, I'm clearly going to have to use WPA, so it's a good thing to get a handle on how to get it working, for when we rent our own apartment and get our own broadband.

encrypted filesystems finally

I've been waiting for linux encrypted filesystems to finally become easy to use. They finally are. There are a few sweet and simple instructions online (the first one I used was similar to the one I finally used, but didn't mention /etc/crypttab, so I hacked up the ubuntu init files to manually luksOpen).

Steve Parker finally has a very easy to follow discussion on how to setup encrypted filesystems on debian. This works perfectly for me on ubuntu, except I didn't do the encrypted root thing. I only encrypt /home and my external backup drives for now. I'll probably do encrypted root after testing a few times on vmware.