Category: Geekitude

GM gets closer to a decent EV car.

Now this is a GM product I might actually buy. And I ain’t talkin Genetically Modified.
At the Detroit Auto Show, GM has unvailed the ‘Chevy Volt’. It’s somewhere between a concept car and production, in that they’ve hired a line manager for the vehicle, but they’re having problems finding a supplier for the 100,000 mile Lithium Ion battery.
GM is calling it a ‘Plugin Hybrid’, but to me that’s a terrible misnomer. It’s an EV car with an onboard generator. It’ll run about 40 miles on full battery power, at which time the engine kicks on and starts recharging the batteries. It can plug into wall outlets and recharge in about 6 hours. The onboard gasoline / ethanol engine isn’t even mechanically connected to the wheels, it simply runs a generator.
And, it doesn’t look so bad either!

The bullet that whizzed by.

yawlWell, a few days ago I mentioned a problem I had with ‘yawl’ involving a blown hard drive. Fun this wasn’t, and unfortunately I was so swamped with work, I didn’t really have a chance to work on the machine, so it sadly sat, turned off, while I wrestled with the vagaries of Java and EJB3.0.
With some slack time this weekend, I set about seeing what I could recover from the smoking ruin that was the 20gig drive in the machine. Booting the machine revealed only ‘Grub loading’ then ‘Error 17’. Many folks on the net have said this is a blown bootloader, usually happening after a failed upgrade. I know I hadn’t done any upgrade, this was something more serious.
But what to do about it? I couldn’t boot it, it was time to go for a repair CD. Fortunately, I had some experience using the Sys Rescue CD, an opensource toolset that fits on a CD (in fact it’ll fit on a flash drive), and contains most tools an admin will need to repair or maintain a system that has had Something Bad happen to it.
One burned CD later, I had the machine booted. cfdisk happily reported “You have a nice 20gig partition that’s empty! Want to install anything to it?” Not an auspicious start.
I could not mount the faulty partition, so really the only thing to do was to hand it over to fsck and mutter a few incantations.
fsck had a grand old time with the filesystem repair. First indications were good – it actually found the partition, and said there were files on it, though one of the two superblocks was completely missing (linux filesystems have a primary and a backup superblock – sort of the ‘master directory’ for the partition – for just this reason). Without the backup superblock, the entire filesystem would have been gone. Phew.
A good 20 minutes later, after much gnashing, queries about whether I wanted to fix the deallocated blocks and other fun filesystem issues, I had a mounted, readable filesystem. The SysrescueCD is a fully functional single user Linux environment, so I could mount, manipulate, and archive the newly repaired filesystem. I don’t trust it to run on its own – the damage touched just about every open file on the machine (including things like kernel modules), so I doubt the machine is stable. But, I could bring up the network interface and copy off my ~/docs/ directory – where I keep all my business documents. I had a backup of it, but it was quite old.
I feel a lot better now that I’ve gotten my important documents off the machine. The next step will be determining what to do with the box. I’ve already received a replacement 160gig drive I’ll be installing (nothing like an 8x space increase!), and I’d like to archive some ‘less critical, but still nice to have copies of’ files, but for now, I just barely ducked that bullet.
NB -interestingly, this is the only mildly catastrophic hard disk failure I’ve -ever- had. The only other recent failure I can think of was dropping poor hunter while at band practice. It twitched the drive, which I replaced. But I consider laptops to be ‘volatile’ environments, and everything was backed up – no loss. I suppose I should be knocking wood everywhere, but I prefer to think I’m careful enough and don’t do Stupid Things with my machines.
Or maybe this is pure hubris. I gotta go run my backups.

And a fine good morning to you too.

Well there’s truly no great way to celebrate the post-consumerist-feeding-frenzy joy that is Boxing day than waking up and settling down to get some work done, and finding out that at some time during the night yawl seems to have blown it’s drive.
As things stand now, yawl is not my primary work machine (clipper is), so I’m not horribly inconvenienced. But I did have things archived on there I’d like to back up, and yawl was also the host to the external drive that is the backup for boomer, our big colocated server. But most importantly, yawl also acts as my music streamer from Radio Paradise. This, of course, ups the priority quite a bit.
Ah well, time to download a new System Rescue CD and see if I can at least copy some files off the drive.

All hail USB rechargers!

Gosh, the fellow who figured out that USB devices had enough oomph on the bus to recharge the plethora of mobile geek devices we carry around should get some sort of award. With these gadgets, I’ve lowered the number of small chargers and other hardware I need to haul around with me when travelling. Here’s a couple basics…
My bluetooth headphones have a small Mini-B style plug where the microphone normally plugs in. Pop out the mic, and plug in your Type-A to Mini-B cable in, and voila! It recharges! Conveniently, this cable is the same one I use to download images from my Olympus C770 camera, so there’s the first ‘combination of functions’ solution.
By far the most useful item is charge and sync cable for my Treo. First, it allows hot-syncing between the Treo and clipper. I’m forever losing sync cables and getting lost in the maze of wiring on my desk. This cable not only syncs, but it -retracts- into a the size of a keyfob. No tangling! It lives happily in my backpack pocket. That alone would be handy, but it also charges the Treo from the USB port. Yep, no more carrying another charger around, I just need this one cable. Hooray! As I type, the Treo is sitting on the desk next to me happily vampiring off some of clippers’ spare wattage.
What am I missing? Not a lot. I’d like a decent USB based charger for the battery in my camera, but that is probably not too likely, alas. As it is, I’ve been able to limit my power supply portage to just the laptop brick, which is fine by me. Besides, on cold nights, that brick makes a dandy foot warmer.

When the geekery works!

About 2 months ago, I picked up the Blueant X5 headphones, and had high hopes of them being my primary audio interface to my machines. Unfortunately the Treo fell down pretty hard as my primary music player, but I’ve managed to shift over to other sources, and today I had my first “okay, that worked really well” moment.
As most folks know, clipper is my primary platform now, and, despite it being saddled with WindowsXP, has been doing pretty well by me. One of it’s drawbacks was that it did not have a bluetooth adapter in it. I played around with a USB BT dongle, but was very frustrated with the support stack for it. I eventually picked up a card specifically for the Dell D620, and installed it. Ahh, much better – built in bluetooth and no dongle.
A little fiddling, a call or two to Blueant, and I had the headphones configured properly for basic stereo music listening. This has been very pleasant, as I can listen comfortably without dealing with cables or plugs or the like. The only drawback has been that the microphone arrangement has a very low sensitivity, so it hasn’t worked well using X-lite. Despite this, getting 8+ hours of listening time on a usb-charged battery really does go a long way to making them useable.
Today, I was sitting in a hotel lobby (a comfortable environment for me), doing my work on my laptop, availing myself of the free wireless, listening to music, when a call came in on my Treo. The X5 headphones happily switched into ‘handsfree’ mode, and trilled a little “You have a call” sound. I touched the button on the side of the headphones, and lo! I was talking to my wife. The call went along, and when we were done, I touched the button on the headphones again, and RadioParadise was once again in my ears. At no point did I touch my cell phone.
It’s nice when technology actually works. Now if I could have my laptop always streaming audio, and function for 8+ hours on a charge, and have ubiquitous network access, and NOT feel like I’m holding a small fusion reactor on my lap, all would be perfect!

Chasing the Power

Every once in a while I get a good dose of greeniness, and look around my little corner of geekiness and sort of wonder “How much juice is this actually using?” After asking Cat what our monthly electric bill was ($300!), I decided this question needed a closer look.
A month or two ago I had picked up a Kill-a-watt (terrible name, ain’t it?) power monitor. This little gadget plugs into a wall outlet, and tells how much power is being used by things drawing through it. Today I jacked it into the single outlet that feeds my nest o machines, and powered things up.
The meter dutifully reported the load as things came online, and steadied out at about 280 watts. All in all, that’s not too bad for 3 computers, 3 lamps, and associated peripherals, but I was curious how that load was distributed. What was actually pulling all that juice?
Unsurprisingly, the single largest draw is yawl, my 2.2gig P4 Linux box. It accounted for about 85watts of power (without monitor). The second biggest draw was, oddly enough, lights. I have 2 compact flourescent desk lamps (about 15watts each), and a single halogen desk lamp (35 watts). I knew the halogen light was pretty dreadful, and this pretty much confirms it. That chalks another 65 or so watts. Which leaves me with 140 unaccounted for.
Well, the two laptops were about 30 watts each (pretty nice considering the horsepower in clipper and hunter). Down to 80 now. This last chunk was pretty much the combined load of the LCD monitors, various chargers and other desktop doodads, a pair of external USB drives, and the like.
So what’s to be done about it? Well, I’ve been considering moving to LED based lights for a while. They’re small, cool, draw -very- little power, but have the current drawback of being ridiculously expensive. A single bulb equivelent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb would cost around $52. The equivelent compact flourescent bulb costs around $5. The advantage to using LED is the current draw is miniscule. For the equivelent amount of light, the bulb would only consume about 2watts of power, AND have the advantage of being dimmable – something impossible with CF bulbs.
If I replaced my 3 desktop lamps with LED lamps, I could cut my power consumption by a third. I also have 4 other lamps in the room that could be replaced as well. The question is, is it worth it?
I’m still puzzling this one out. If anyone has suggestions for good sources for inexpensive LED fixtures and lamps, please let me know!

Bad Dell designers! No biscuit!

In many ways, working with clipper has been quite a joy. Everything works well, I only have to reboot once every 2-3 days (hey for Windows, that’s pretty good), and it’s pretty zippy.
But part of my job includes teleconferences every morning, which requires a headset. Headsets need to be plugged into the Mic and Speaker jacks.
Some Dell designer decided that:

  1. The jacks should NOT be color coded. Basic black works great for everything! I now know intuitively that the Microphone jack is toward the ‘back’ of the laptop.
  2. The jacks are NOT duplicated on the docking station. This is just daft. The docking station is supposed to be used to dock and undock the laptop with a minimum of hassle. NOW I have to plug and unplug my headphones -everytime- I dock or undock the laptop.
  3. And, of course, I situated the laptop to the -right- of my monitor stand, so it’s in the way whenever I need to do this. I blame Dell for that one too, while I’m at it.

Flickr Command Line Uploading – sort of!

So the ongoing project right now is to upload all 4000-some odd photos that I have stored on various machines up to my Flickr account. The sheer volume of images is quite staggering, as each uploaded pic has to be put into the appropriate set and tagged. Some of the uploading tools have been somewhat handy, but since the vast majority of my pics are stored remotely on a linux box, GUI tools aren’t much help.
There’s really no decent ‘command line tool’ for batch uploading pictures, but I think I’ve found a fairly decent way using Flickr’s upload by email function.
Using a simple hand-entered script and Mutt‘s powerful command line functions, a directory full of images can simply be emailed to flickr, tags, text, titles and all.
Here’s a sample run uploading a single directory. The tags can be set in the Subject line of the mail, or via the email page on Flickr. You pre-set the tags, then submit the images:

dbs@boomer:~/pictures/maine-may9-1998$ for i in *.jpg
> do
>   mutt -a $i -s $i yourprivateemail@photos.flickr.com    echo $i done.
> done
dave-1.jpg done.
dave-n-michael.jpg done.
don-finishes-up.jpg done.
final-dock-assembly.jpg done.
house-1.jpg done.
lake-1.jpg done.
lake-2.jpg done.
ready-to-unload.jpg done.
scott-steel.jpg done.

Simple, eh? Then I go to Flickr’s ‘organize’ function, toss the new images into a set, and then I’m ready for the next batch. The images show up on Flickr in a matter of seconds, so I can do any size directory, from submission into a set, in about 2 minutes. The script is entered on the command line, so to upload the next directory, I reset the tags on flickr, cd to the new dir, and just up-arrow to the script, and hit enter. Boom!
Of course I have something like 400 directories to work through, but if I do a dozen or so a night, I’ll get through them eventually.

It’s all about the tools.

In a previous post I admitted to the world that I, an avowed Linux weenie, was now using a Windows desktop for all my geeky endeavours. This continues to be true, but I’ve taken the steps necessary to make my environment comfortable to work in, without going the easy route of “I will do everything in my power to make Windows look and feel just like my Linux box.” To me this defeats the purpose of potential learning experience of working with a new environment.
So about those tools…

Continue reading “It’s all about the tools.” →

I for one welcome our new silicon overlords.

I feel like I’ve taken the bluepill. All I see around me is a sham, the wool that has been pulled over my eyes.
But, ya know? It’s going okay.
A grandiose change has happened to my work environment at Chez Geek. Due to the long-running contract with ${customer}, we worked out a deal where due to the instability and possible imminent death of hunter, I was issued a new laptop. The laptop, however, runs Windows, and it was made abundantly clear by said ${customer} that they’d prefer I worked in the same environment as they do, that being, of course, Windows.
So here I am, with a spanking new laptop named ‘clipper’, and running it as my full time primary machine. After my initial revulsion at the concept, I have to concede – it’s going quite well.
I shan’t go into the details of what is different between WindowsXP and Linux. That subject has been debated, chewed on, spat up, kicked about, and shot out of a cannon plenty over the last few years. But what I’m using this machine for is exactly what Microsoft has been working on for 15+ years. A stable, high powered desktop environment that can interract with a multitide of peripherals, platforms, and hardware without very little fiddling or complaints.
Over the next few weeks I’ll talk more about some of the applications and challenges I’ve been hitting with this migration, but for now, I seem to have reached a happy detante. My view for the moment is “This is stable, it works, it does things I could not do under Linux, but I still have all the power of my Linux machines handy just a few network segments away. I can deal.”
I’m sure this will be the case until I get my first virus or malware installation, but for now, I’m a happy bluepill.

Idiot AP Reporters

What is it with supposedly ‘technical’ reporters? They apparently haven’t clue ONE about the material they’re writing about.

Take for example an article appearing in the Herald Tribune – Europe. The subject is a good one, Tim Berners-Lee discussing research into the future of the ‘net. A worthy topic, but the short article contains this little gem:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist who is credited with creating the Internet, said in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. that the way the Web is used should be examined by a broad spectrum of experts.

NO. WRONG. TBL had nothing to do with the ‘Invention of the Internet’. TBL is credited with first linking hypertext documents with a mechanism for linking these documents to remote servers. He wrote the first webserver, and the first web browser, and coined the term ‘World Wide Web’. This is an application that runs OVER the internet.

LDAP and Thunderbird

I have an ongoing project dream. Someday, have a fully functional suite of opensource-driven services available to our community that gives, if not the full functionality of something like Exchange, but gives enough so that the users can interract and exchange information cleanly, without having to jump through hoops or pay ridiculous amounts of money or subscribe to proprietary, predatory application suites.

I made another step toward this lofty goal this week.

Continue reading “LDAP and Thunderbird” →