Author: Dave Shevett

A recent series of changes at Yahoo have made the Yahoo Messenger portion of Pidgin misbehave. There have been various workarounds (such as using some of Yahoo’s non-converted servers), but finally the ‘proper’ fix is in the pipeline.
I just did an Ubuntu update, and it included the patch that has been working through various versions. Thanks bigtime to the Pidgin team and the Ubuntu maintainers for backporting the fix into Ubuntu Jaunty.
For full details on the patch, see this page which discusses the issue and gives good suggestions.

With all the bruhaha going on about finding the ‘lost’ NASA moonlanding tapes, a conversation came up on a tech list I’m on regarding some of the misinformation floating around. Scott Dorsey, a man who has been involved in audio tech for many many years, sets the record straight:

Continue reading “NASA Moon Landing Tapes – A Tech’s Perspective.” →

Posting this one for the masses of humanity out there that are just slobbering for a quick fix to this problem.
There’s a twitchy problem in GTK under Linux regarding sound that sometimes lets the ‘bell’ sound get handled by the motherboard beep – a sound that is INSANELY LOUD, and no amount of muting, volume adjustment, or sound board fiddling will silence it.
The beep can happen during ‘vi’ sessions, in Eclipse when ‘search’ fails to find something, in X-chat when backspacing to the beginning of the line, or in Pidgin during the same situation.
The fix is remarkably simple. Tell the X-server to mute the hardware beep:

xset -b b 0

To check to see if it’s set, use the ‘xset -q’ command:

dbs@clipper:~$ xset -q
Keyboard Control:
auto repeat:  on    key click percent:  0    LED mask:  00000000
auto repeat delay:  660    repeat rate:  25
auto repeating keys:  00ffffffdffffbbf
fadfffefffedffff
9fffffffffffffff
fff7ffffffffffff
bell percent:  0    bell pitch:  400    bell duration:  100

That’s it! If you put this in your ~/.bashrc or whatever you use for a startup, this will mute the hardware beeping sound, but leave normal soundsystem stuff working.

So I’m sure ya’ll are sitting on the edge of your seat wondering how my iPhone upgrade has gone after the the other day’s fun. Seems this wasn’t a problem limited to just me, which is cold comfort, but it is what it is.
In the end I did get the phone re-activated, and carried on with my day. After a bit I noticed that the phone was ‘hot’, and the battery was draining at an alarming rate (full to 1/4 in under a half hour). This is a sure sign of a stuck thread or process. A quick reboot is usually all that’s necessary to clear it.
Three reboots later, and a phone that wouldn’t stay charged overnight, the problem still persisted. There was obviously a problem – but I had no way of telling what was going on.
Enter “Free Memory” – an iPhone application available in the AppStore that lets you not only do a little ‘cleanup’ on cached data on the phone, it includes a process list, showing what processes are currently active. Apple is very stingy about releasing ‘utility’ type applications through the appstore, so this is a rare find.
After installing Free Memory, I watched the process list, and noticed two applications bouncing back and forth regularly in the top slot. One was ‘ReportCrash’, and the other was ‘Mail’. Things began to fall into place pretty quickly. I have a split mailbox setup, where the iPhone reads not only my IMAP folders on my personal mail server, but is also coupled to the Exchange server at work, which is set up to ‘push’ content into the phone (I get realtime meeting invites, etc directly on my phone – rather nice actually). It was obvious that there was something ‘out of sync’ here, and the push update was causing Mail to crash, which would try to update via push again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
So now I had something to focus on – Mail. Initial tests were showing that my IMAP connections were not completing successfully. I’d try to sync the 40-50 messages in my queue, Mail would crash, and it’d try again. I was having regular mail crashes under 2.2, but it was always a matter of just restarting Mail, and it would complete successfully. This time it wasn’t.
Some magic combination of changing back to my ‘view inboxes’ screen, going into Exchange, back out again, then back to IMAP seemed to clear whatever condition was causing this. My iPhone ceased eating it’s battery in half an hour, and is now nice and cool to the touch.
What do I think of the 3.0 release? It’s good. There’s nothing that completely rocks my socks off – I’ve used the cut and paste, which works fine (but as many others have said… a lot…. this is a feature that should have been in from day 0), and Spotlight is pretty nifty as well. I’ve noticed some other small things, like the SMS app no longer ‘wedges’ during a send – it backgrounds the sending so you can work on something else (like another text) while the first one is sending, etc.
My new Bluetooth headphones should be here in the next day or two, and that’s when I’ll explore the feature I most want – A2DP enabled playback. Booyah.

Well this isn’t going so well.
I’m all excited about the iPhone 3.0 update. I docked my iPhone, started iTunes and saw it download the update pretty quickly. This is good, I think – that means the servers are handing out the updates just fine.
Not so fast. The update appears to have gone just fine.
The problem is there’s another step that is apparently hammering the bejeezus out of the iTunes store, and is failing to allow the phone to be re-activated after the update. My phone currently has the USB->iTunes connection graphic on it (“Connect me with iTunes!”), with an emergency-use-only slider.
Until the iTunes store gets unpaniced, I have a useless phone.
Thanks Apple.
(**Update**: Apparently I’m hardly the only one seeing this.)
(**Update again**: It appears to be the activation server that is getting hammered. Not sure if this is an Apple problem or an AT&T problem)
(**Update the third**: I made it. You just have to keep trying on the activation screen. Eventually it’ll get through, and things look fine now.)

It’s been no secret that the computing power in our friendly server cluster has been falling behind demand. We have 30-40 users and dozens of websites being driven by a pair of 1U servers that, to their credit, are doing a bang-up job.
‘boomer’, our main server, is but a poor Sempron 2400+. It has performed beautifully for 2+ years, but during the day, it’s showing signs of needing some relief.
We added ‘guardian’ about 6 months ago to handle front end mail loads (greylisting), DNS traffic, web proxies, and basic firewall duties. It’s a single 2.4gig Xeon box, and has done a great job.
I’m now deploying several Java applications for customers to use, and I really need some more CPU/Ram to run with.

Welcome ‘nimitz’. Thanks to a long term loan from Alex, we’ll be able to put some rockin dual AMD Opteron action in place. This box will act as an application host, primarily using Tomcat to serve up CONGO installations.
As I type, it has rebooted to it’s ‘nimitz login:’ prompt, and is ready to go.
Oh, why is it called ‘nimitz’? Upon powering it up for the first time, I was nearly jolted off my seat by the sheer noise level of the machine’s 6 internal fans. When it’s running, I can hear it all the way downstairs in the kitchen (2 flights of stairs). It’s flat, noisy, and powerful. So, ‘nimitz.’