Category: Geekitude

As reviewed over on Digital Preview (www.dpreview.com), Canon has announced the EOS-5D. This is the first digital SLR camera to have a full sized 35mm sensor. At a mere $3500, a steal, and clearly out of my budget, but what a sweet camera. 4368×2912 resolution.

The folks over at Penny Arcade are having a rough day. Apparently Gabe doesn’t quite grok the concept of backups in the total Zen sense…

I can remember being so proud of him three years ago when he braved the Morlocks at CompUSA and picked up a little USB backup drive. Now, I’m not even sure he knew what he was buying. This is what he did when he got it: he copied every crucial thing off of his computer, to the backup drive, at which point he imagined some mysterious process was, shit, I don’t know. Mummifying his data. Our data, everything we’ve ever done.
I’m not, like, Mr. Computer guy, but this I know: there are no small men in a backup drive who will rub your data with oils. Oils of any kind.
He brought it to me like a wounded thing, scorched around the front, as though it had fallen through the atmosphere.

Read the strip, and article including Tycho’s response.

Remember the cool game Grow and Vanilla from Eyezmaze? Well, they updated Grow so it’s now a sort of RPG-esque game called, simply, Grow RPG.
Once you finish your build, your little guy goes into the world and tries to fight off all the monsters and scary things that have happened. Hopefully, your town is big enough with enough health points so he can survive the battles!

I always dread setting up SSL servers. The SSL mechanism is complicated, and the terminology is not something I deal with on a day to day basis, so the openssl command line stuff is total greek anytime I need to use it.
While setting up our new server, I realized I needed a self-signed cert just for some internal use (webmail client, etc). I didn’t need it signed by a ‘normal’ CA or anything, I just needed the connection encrypted. I had installed the Apt package for Apache2, and saw that the SSL pieces were in place, but… no cert. I spent several days just dreading doing SSL setup.
Finally tonight I sat down to do it, facing a deadline for a server move next week. Some googling brought me to an article on Ian Miller’s site about using the apache2-ssl-certificate script installed with Debian Apache2. It automates the cert generation, placing all the pieces in the proper place. Then, following Ian Miller’s directions (about 8 steps), and I was up and running with an SSL host in under 5 minutes.
Yet another in the cap for Debian.

For some reason, I had no idea that Debian-Administration.org existed. It has tons of great articles on nifty tricks to do with Debian, as well as up and coming changes and suggestions for administration.
Today’s gem is using the deborphan tool to tell whether any packages have been orphaned by having their parent packages removed or upgraded away. Running it once on my machine shows me 24 packages installed that aren’t used by anything.
Definately a good site to add to the home RSS feed list if you administer any Debian systems.

Everyone and their brother has been making noise about the Optimus Keyboard. A keyboard that has little OLED displays in each key, letting you display what they’re set for – in full color. Reconfiguring for Quake or Dvorak layout or just running pretty animations is all possible.
The problem was the original site was an art mockup of the keyboard – photoshopped to show what it might look like – basically a design setup.
Now it looks like it might actually happen. According to the article from Engadget :

A recent interview with Artemy Lebedev, founder and director of the Russian design firm working on the keyboard, sheds some light on the future of this device: they envision is as an “open source” keyboard, with an SDK and a “keyboard studio” application that lets users customize the keyboard any way they choose (sweeeet!). The company is currently negotiating with several different manufacturers to get the Optimus into production, and they”re hoping to see it getting into our hot little hands in about a year for “less than $200 to $300.”

I’m so there.

This is just wrong. Why was this changed in Linux-land, I have no idea.
Use ‘man ls’ or any other man command.
Hit space a few times to get down into the document.
Now try to go back. ‘b’ or ‘^u’ do not work, because it’s a pipe, not man’s built-in pager.
This is a HUGE problem when trying to find a specific command option. For instance, do ‘man man’, then type ‘/pager’ to search for the word ‘pager’. Great, it shows you it, but it’s buried in text. So you’d like to page up to see the context for it. No dice! Can’t backscroll!
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Update – Apparently this is an issue with the default ‘/bin/more’ program installed with Debian Sarge. apt-get install less replaced /bin/more with ‘less’, which does backscrolling properly.

One of my quasi-joyous tasks in life is bring front-line tech support for my Mom. Fortunately, she’s been a Mac user ever since there was such a thing as a Macintosh (yes, we spent $4k on one of the original 128k Macs. Copying a SINGLE floppy disk on that machine required 4 disk swaps. And used video RAM for temporary storage. Fun 🙂
Anyway. There’s an expectation with the Mac platform that “they won’t do something dumb”. That’s sort of a given with Windows (“Oh yea, that happens. Reboot”), but Macs are supposed to be more sophisticated. Smarter. Not easy to screw up.
This weekend, in the midst of our move, my Mom calls me and says “The screen is blank on the Mac Mini. I reset it, nothing happens, I’m stuck. The screen says ‘OUT OF RANGE’.”
No amount of fiddling caused it to come back, so I schlepped over there to figure out what was wrong.
All indicatations were that Mom had set the Mac to some video resolution that the spiffy LCD monitor we had could not support. “No problem”, thinks I, “I’ll just reset it… somehow.”
And that Somehow became the problem. No amount of fancy keyboard shortcuts, such as resetting the PRAM via a complex keystroke combo via Cmd-Control-P-R, nor starting into ‘single user mode’ and deleting the library preferences files for the user cleared the condition. Upon reboot, it would show the grey Mac screen, the spinny dial, then go to OUT OF RANGE.
I had 3-4 fairly competent Mac geeks on IRC and the phone working on this, and nothing we could try worked. In the end, I had to haul out an old Sony monitor (in fact, the one we had discarded in favor of a new LCD monitor), and hook that one up. Now that we could see the desktop, a simple click on Monitor preferences reset it to 1024×768 at 72hz (it was NOT set to that once we got the Sony hooked up. It was something… else).
My issue here is that a novice user completely crippled her machine, with no possible recourse, and she didn’t know how she did it. A malicious app may have reset the resolution, or she may have mistakenly clicked somewhere she shouldn’t have. This sort of crippling is almost expected behaviour in the Windows world, let alone Linux land, but on a Mac? ALso note, this problem would not have been able to be fixed by calling tech support. It took external hardware to bring the machine back to useability.
How hard would it be to have OSX have a ‘safe mode’ – something that Windows world has had for ages – that brings the system up under common default configurations. A sane video resolution, etc? I’ve tried the ‘no extensions’ boot key combo on the mac, and that didn’t work at all.
If there is a fix for this problem, is sure wasn’t obvious, easy, or found in a simple doc. I’m disappointed. Apple should know better.

The Deep Impact mission went off without a hitch this morning. NASA’s Deep Impact probe smacked into comet Tempel 1 after the probe parked itself in the path of the oncoming comet. The other half of the probe photographed the encounter from a safe distance.
Many very good images and details are on the Deep Impact website at NASA

While setting up the new host for Homeport, I’m doing a completely new installation of Debian Linux. My preferred mail system is Postfix, which uses the standard pile of configuration files and the like.
One of my beefs with Postfix is it requires all files to be owned by root. I also like having my config files all controlled via RCS so I can revert changes and see who changed what. The problem has been that RCS does not preserve file ownership, so a change to a file changes the ownership of that file to the person who made the change.
Easy, right? Just use ‘sudo’ to make the change. Ah, but this also changes the log message generated when checking the file back into RCS – they always say ‘root’. Hard to keep track of what users are doing when that happens.
Ah, but there’s a little known codicil in the Fabe… I mean sudoers(5) man page. Putting:
Defaults: !set_logname
in the sudoers file means that LOGNAME gets set to the person doing the sudo command, and in thigns like RCS, the log entry shows the actual user, not ‘root’ in the history.
Joy!

I’m in the process of deploying a new host for all of Homeport’s services (all the shell accounts, mail, etc etc), since we’re moving in a month. This means setting up a brand new machine in a colo location from scratch.
I’ve chosen the Debian ‘Sarge’ release for my platform, seeing as I run it on my laptop and a few other machines hereabout.
One challenge with this is learning a new directory structure. Under FreeBSD (the OS I’ve been using for most of Homeport’s services), configuration files tend to reside in /usr/local/etc/{service}/{various config files}. /etc/ is only for baseline system configuration files, not add-on apps, etc etc. Debian does things differently, and I found out recently there’s a reason.
Debian adheres to the FHS – the Filesystem Hierarchy Structure, a standards document that defines what directories go where on a specific Unix (or in this case Unix-Like) installation.
I had no idea this document existed, but I’m pleased as punch to see it applied to what many consider the more chaotic of the Linux distributions – Debian. I wonder who else has taken up this standard?

I was having a convo with a friend the other day who was complaining that her laptop just didn’t have enough memory for her to do her job. When she let on that it has a gig of memory, I was floored, wondering what huge monstrous app she was running that was killing it.
“Outlook”, she said.
Now, realizing the platform was Windows XP, I started thinking about my own usage, and how to me this is an indicator, again, about why XP is a terrible system for general development, let alone enterprise-scale applications.
Apparently, 1 gig of memory is not enough to run Powerpoint, Outlook, and the Java application server she was developing on. I can’t fathom how people would consider this ‘okay’.
Sure, the argument is “Memory is cheap” – well, no, it really isn’t, particularly in laptops, when you’re actually running into HARD LIMITS on how much memory a machine can take.
The argument continues, as I see the industry phrasing it, “Well, that’s the price you pay for an enterprise-level application”. Again, a totally bogus answer.
Let me present, for comparison, my own development environment. Also a laptop, but running Linux. As my friend does, I use an integrated calendar / contact / mail client (Evolution). I have a full featured desktop (KDE), a fantastic and powerful webbrowser (Firefox), the ability to happily run Microsoft Office apps (Crossover Office), and a top of the line J2EE development environment and server (JBoss). At the moment, all but the Office adapter is running (because I already have my mail / calendar client running), and my memory footprint is:

top - 13:20:49 up 1 day,  1:18,  1 user,  load average: 0.68, 0.46, 0.44
Tasks: 112 total,   1 running, 111 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  2.0% us,  1.0% sy,  0.0% ni, 96.3% id,  0.0% wa,  0.7% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:    775860k total,   745648k used,    30212k free,    32244k buffers
Swap:   748400k total,      728k used,   747672k free,   257152k cached

I’ve just barely touched my swapspace. This is on a 768meg IBM T40. And, in addition to those ‘basic productivity apps’, I’m also running: X-Chat IRC client, my Jabber client, streaming audio from Radio Paradise, oh, and have I mentioned an entire full screen instance of The Gimp, a Photoshop-like graphic editor?
I’ve seen Photoshop bring a high end Windows XP machine to it’s knees.
Did I mention every single application I’m running is free? Save for Crossover Office, which I don’t use at the moment, this is all free / opensource software. And even for Office documents, I generall use Open Office.
Once again, can someone tell me why Windows XP is better that Linux? Cuz I sure as hell don’t see it here.

In the blog world, it’s not surprising that Blog spam has become an ever increasing problem. People post links into comments on blogs, and if they stay put, they can help up the sites ranking in Google. Annoying as all git out.
Fortunately, we have tools like Jay Allen’s MT Blacklist to help us poor bloggers keep the blogs clean.
Unfortunately, MT Blacklist doesn’t have a lot of good reporting or analysis tools, so like a good doobie, I whipped one up. The short version is in the last 5 days, we’ve blocked several hundred attempted spams, and as we populate the database, more will not get past the filters. It’s email all over again.

Continue reading “Life in the world of blogspam” →

Want to see a Linux desktop and play with it for a while, but don’t feel like burning your own CD or downloading big messy apps? Open Source Region Stuttgart has a mechanism for starting a Linux desktop on your Windows machine just by clicking on a link. It doesn’t actually start Linux on your machine – it opens a window to a ‘virtual’ Linux desktop running remotely. On my Windows XP machine, it was zippy and useable.
Check out the article on NewsForge

It’s pretty common, on very large ‘index sites’, to do a google ad associated with whatever search term / information you’re looking for. The idea is “If they came here looking for this, they must be interested in it elsewhere”.
That’s all fine and well, but a lot of the time it just doesn’t translate. This little google ad appeared when I was searching for some information on Berlin, MA.
I wonder what aspect of the town I can purchase? “I bid $20 on that streetlight!”