LabThug's Flog

Flash on 64-bit Ubuntu

2010-05-18T10:50:00.002-04:00

I have 64-bit machines and run Ubuntu Linux on most of them. Since 09.10, my flash suffers from the no click bug mentioned elsewhere. I've done many tutorials, but this is still the quickest most direct way I know to fix it:

Go here and download the item at the bottom:

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html

or

wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Then, go to Command Line (if not already) chdir to the right directory and then:

tar -xzf libflashplayer-10.0.45.2.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
sudo cp libflashplayer.so /var/lib/flashplugin-installer/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so

Then, restart your browsers and click happily!

Multiple table changes

2010-01-13T15:22:00.002-05:00

So, I run into a problem with a java (ewwww) build, where the tables in a MySQL DB were being altered, but the underlying storage engine wouldn't support the request.

So, I'm faced with having to change the storage engine of multiple tables in a single DB. I wanted to do this the easy way, so I asked twitter for help. It even got a retweet, thanks MBGeek.

Sadly, Twitter hasn't yet reached the quickness of a man in action and I dove into the information_schema, where I quickly used this query to identify all the tables needing the change:

SELECT `TABLE_NAME`
FROM `TABLES`
WHERE `TABLE_SCHEMA` = '%DBOFINTEREST%'
AND `ENGINE` = 'MyISAM'

From there, I took the results and dumped them into the best editor around. Then I did the following commands:

VG # to select all the lines in the file
:s/^/ALTER TABLE`/ #Put "ALTER TABLE`" at the beginning

VG # to select all the lines again in the file
:s/$/` ENGINE = InnoDB;/ #Put "` ENGINE = InnoDB;" at the end

Then, C&P the result into a SQL window (set to the correct DB) and fired it off:

"Your SQL query has been executed successfully"

Hell yeah! It probably took me longer to write this than it did to figure it out...

Hit by a train!

2009-10-20T23:03:00.012-04:00

It's been a while since I posted. Lots have been going on this year -- separation (which was discussed in an earlier post), then last month I saw the passing of my grandfather and my mom's roommate, the latter of which was self-inflicted.

Anyway, something just happened that I probably should post because I'm sure it'll generate a lot of questions and I don't like to repeat myself.

What was it I did tonight that would cause me to come back to this blog and post? Oh nothing, I just got hit by a train.

In all fairness, the train didn't actually hit me, it hit my car. It also was only going ~2 MPH when the collision hit.

Now, (ho)WTF did it happen? Well, I was leaving the Lowcountry Innovation Center after wrapping up the last planning meeting for #barcampchs. I was following Lisa Berry and her son (at the time I thought it was jaredwsmith, but figured it out later) on the way to the post-meeting dinner. We got to the corner of Noisette (Ave B N) and Virginia, when I saw a man in the middle of the road with a light. Now, I thought he was a homeless guy begging for change. Lisa never saw him, and kept going. I followed. Considering the train was not lit up and there was no flares, alarms or anything in the area, I got my first glimpse of it as it caught my front end and spun my car to the left. There, it scraped across my passenger front quadrant. The car is FUBARed, but it seems to be all body damage, except for the broken windshield washer container. See the damage below:

Here's a picture of the only other sign to warn you that there's a train crossing in the area.

And here's the train. Do you see it? It's there, my car will tell you so.

The train master showed up before North Charleston's finest. I've been told that I'm 100% at fault because in the state of SC (or at least in the eyes of this police officer), trains operate on their own track and are not considered motor vehicles. This means they can't contribute to a motor vehicle collision.

I feel bad for the signalman. If I had known he was a railroad guy, this wouldn't have happened. He told me he's got a 5 yo and a 2 week-old and that they [CSX] will probably fire him over this. I congratulated him on the new arrival and offered to be present at the hearing to say a few words in his defense.

Anyway, I'm now looking at insurance adjusters, getting collision damage repaired, finding rides to/from, etc. That on top of everything else that's going on. It's gonna be a fun few weeks.

So that's my story.

But wait, there's more... Here's some conversations about it in various chat lands. Might be funny to same, might give more insight...

csclug@conference.butterfat.net

(21:37:06) LabThug_hm: So, LabThug, what did you do after the barcampchs planning meeting?
(21:37:12) LabThug_hm: Me...oh, I got hit by a train
(21:37:20) eugenemah: oy
(21:37:20) mcg: WTF?
(21:37:24) eugenemah: how'd you manage that?
(21:37:29) eugenemah: no injuries i hope
(21:37:33) LabThug_hm: followed [Lisa]
(21:37:38) mcg: ding ding, red lights etc
(21:38:19) mcg: details?
(21:38:37) LabThug_hm: sorry, mom on phone
(21:38:39) LabThug_hm: ok
(21:38:49) LabThug_hm: corner of Noisette and Virginia
(21:38:55) LabThug_hm: no lights, no ding-ding
(21:39:02) LabThug_hm: just guy in middle with lantern
(21:39:03) eugenemah: i remember seeing a train sitting there when we drove in
(21:39:15) LabThug_hm: I thought guy was homeless begging for change
(21:39:18) mcg: haha
(21:39:21) LabThug_hm: train had no lights on it
(21:39:26) LabThug_hm: I was following [Lisa]
(21:39:30) LabThug_hm: he made it across
(21:39:31) LabThug_hm: I didn't
(21:39:35) eugenemah: oh boy
(21:39:37) mcg: ouch
(21:39:41) mcg: big mess?
(21:39:50) LabThug_hm: front end is FUBAR
(21:39:59) LabThug_hm: all body damage though
(21:40:02) LabThug_hm: no engine
(21:40:18) LabThug_hm: unless you consider broken washer fluid container engine
(21:40:33) mcg: good thing you didn't make it a bit more across
(21:40:39) LabThug_hm: aye
(21:41:14) eugenemah: no injuries aside from the car?
(21:41:28) LabThug_hm: it caught my front end, spun me around and tore off the passenger front quadrant
(21:41:37) LabThug_hm: eugenemah: none other than pride
(21:41:40) mcg: how fast was the train going?
(21:41:50) mcg: i bet that scared the bagibers out of you
(21:42:08) LabThug_hm: it was going 2MPH
(21:42:15) LabThug_hm: mcg: I was more WTF than anything
(21:42:27) mcg: slow motion?
(21:42:38) LabThug_hm: yeah
(21:42:44) LabThug_hm: guy with light was supposed to stop us
(21:42:48) LabThug_hm: and put out flares
(21:42:50) LabThug_hm: etc.
(21:42:54) LabThug_hm: which he didn't
(21:42:56) LabThug_hm: but
(21:42:59) LabThug_hm: here's the kicker
(21:43:00) mcg: hmm CSX paying for damages then
(21:43:03) LabThug_hm: in the state of SC
(21:43:08) LabThug_hm: trains run on their own track
(21:43:15) LabThug_hm: not considered motor vehicles
(21:43:22) LabThug_hm: so, I am 100% at fault
(21:43:27) mcg: ugh
(21:43:27) LabThug_hm: feckers
(21:43:39) eugenemah: didn't know that
(21:43:40) mcg: they can't ever be at fault?
(21:43:51) LabThug_hm: only when they jump tracks...maybe
(21:43:56) mcg: failure to signal that a train was there seems like an issue
(21:44:41) LabThug_hm: yeah, probably if I get "One call, that's all" involved
(21:44:55) mcg: the "strong arm" maybe
(21:45:42) LabThug_hm: hahaha, forgot about him
(21:46:14) LabThug_hm: USAA seems to have an online claim reporter
(21:48:21) eugenemah: car still drivable?
(21:48:38) mcg: did [Lisa] stop? ;-)
(21:51:43) LabThug_hm: [Lisa] made it to Madra Rua
(21:51:50) LabThug_hm: never knew what happened ...
(21:51:54) mcg: sigh
(21:52:00) LabThug_hm: car is now in driveway and I drove it there
(21:52:28) KingNeziL: LabThug_hm: whoa, are you serious?
(21:53:00) LabThug_hm: naw KingNeziL, the whole thing is a bad dream and you will wake up soon ;-P
(21:53:15) KingNeziL: you're pretty cool about the whole situation
(21:53:33) LabThug_hm: yeah, I usually am in things like this
(21:53:43) LabThug_hm: and with everything else that happened this last year
(21:53:47) LabThug_hm: I CAN TAKE IT!!!!!
(21:54:11) KingNeziL: damn man, you've earned your badge of courage
(21:54:32) KingNeziL: so the lights and arms didn't block off the intersection?
(21:54:45) LabThug_hm: KingNeziL: there were NONE
(21:54:50) LabThug_hm: just guy with lantern
(21:55:10) mcg: http://collecta.com/#q=labthug hah
(21:55:19) LabThug_hm: hahahahaha, USAA give me 120 chars to briefly tell how it happened
(21:55:28) mcg: hit by train!

itc@conference.jabber.musc.edu

(09:21:35) Olloh: last night I killed a rare spawn and looted the fabled: Kitchen Pass =)
(09:23:11) LabThug_Eris: Olloh: last night I got hit by a train ;-P
(09:23:48) peterst: yeah I want to hear that story
(09:24:00) Olloh: that doesnt sound pleasant
(09:24:31) maheug: train: 1 Labthug: 0
(09:24:43) peterst: I think he won since he didn't die
(09:24:47) Olloh: usually you dont get a second chance to score against train =)
(09:25:10) LabThug_Eris: true
(09:25:10) ***peterst thinks about trains
(09:25:16) LabThug_Eris: I'll fill in later
(09:25:22) LabThug_Eris: insurance, etc. to deal with first
(09:25:54) maheug: train: 1 Labthug's car: 0 ?
...
(11:03:08) LabThug: maheug: If the car hadn't been involved, it would have ended up LabThug 1, Train 0
(11:03:10) LabThug: :-)
(11:03:52) peterst: the LabThug is hard to kill
(11:04:30) maheug: lots of hit points
(11:04:55) LabThug: peterst: God knows I have too many mouths to feed, and too few tears will be shed if I pass, so He's not gonna let that happen yet.
(11:05:55) peterst: I figured you were just too mean :P

You can probably find more looking through collecta.com, twitter search, etc. If you really care about that sort of stuff...

The expanding and microsizing blogosphere

2009-04-03T15:26:00.002-04:00

Thanks to the folks at http://code.google.com/p/microblog-purple/ I know have acheived pidgin<->twitter success. Now, in one app (pidgin), I can keep track of my digital lives on identi.ca, twitter, and facebook (plus all the other chat rooms/friends I have).

My plan is going exactly as I have forseen.....

New Beginnings

2009-03-10T23:19:00.003-04:00

Well, it's been over four months since my last posting. The lack of posting isn't because I had a lack of things to post about, it's just I had the opposite too much going on. Now, I'm finally in a place where I can comment and get back to posting.

Soooo, why the delay? What could possibly have kept me from posting just a few things on this page in over four months? Well, eight days after my last posting, I was told to leave the house in which I was living. This pretty much marked the end of my marriage of 8 years (and relationship of 13) that produced two wonderful daughters.

I spent about two nights homeless before renting out the front room of an ex-co worker's place. Then started the wonderful task of getting items to live with (e.g., bed) and reclaiming the items from my old residence. I left the 61" 1080p TV, the Windows PC, and a host of other items. There are a few things I'll be reclaiming when I can (e.g., Bug Zapper), but the majority of stuff will be left to the past. This period marked a very interesting time -- shuffling through life wondering how I got to the point I did, trying to figure out where this point is, and how I was going to make the most of it. I barely made it through the classes I was taking and honestly most of the other stuff I was doing just kinda blurred together.

I remember leaching WiFi off of neighbors, and turning on my desktop only three times because the upgrade to Ibex FUBARED it royally. It seems my Blu-Ray burner is the source of all my ATA Frozen errors that have graced this blog. I can get the machine to finally boot when I unplug that device. However, I've found that in addition, I've lost my dual screens and my sound. One of my HDD dropped out of the RAID as well, but it seems to have gone back in nicely.

I finally moved into my own place a month ago. It's back on James Island, a region of Charleston that I haven't lived in since my relationship began. In a way, it feels like I've gone full circle. The only difference is that I'm not back at the place I started. I've also been going through things from the past and reflecting...in some ways it's been good...some ways bad. You see the progression you made during that time, and you also think about how things were and wondered why things went for as long as they did.

I got connected to the Internet about two weeks ago through Comcast's Economy Internet ($24.95/month baybe!!!). Last week was wrap up before Spring Break, so I couldn't really sit down and do this until now. It's weird how things happen when they do/how they do. But I'll face what comes with the head held high like I always do.

I'd also like to thank all the people that got me to this point. Watch this space and where I go now. With your continued help, I won't stop.

NIN Concert

2008-11-02T21:00:00.005-05:00

I attended the Nine Inch Nails Lights in the Sky concert in Greenville's Bi-Lo Center last night. This is an account of the event, and my view of it.

First, I attended it with my brother. In addition to suffering through yet another of the many bouts of sinusitis I face, I came to the concert in the midst of a very interesting point of my life (i.e., failing relationships, failing class performance, health issues, lifestyle changes, etc.). The combination of all this put me in the right frame of mind for the band I know and love.

Second, this is the second time I seen Trent and his gang live. The time before was back in '95 at the Carolina Coliseum. They were showing off The Downward Spiral that night. While I did have fun, the fact that five security fucktards pummeled me for crowd crawling left it with an overwhelming sense of anger.

I rode from the hometown of Charleston to Greenville in two parts. The first one was between Chas and Cola with a good friend of mine I saw for the first time in over four years. He too, was facing certain points of this life, so the drive gave us a wonderful chance to catch up and discuss life and its mishaps. I then switched to my brother's vehicle in Cola for the rest of the ride.

We got to the center by about four, so did some tailgating until we decided it was time to pickup our tickets and venture inside. There's nothing quite like the experience of lining up with other NIN fans trying to outdo each other with "how devoted of a fan I am" stories, so I walked around with my brother buying $7 24oz of Bud light.

The opening band was a group called Health, an experimental noise/disco band from LA. Their show consisted of the back screen being split down the half into a blue and pink video of 20-second delayed stage antics. I felt the band was trying to bring an Einstürzende Neubauten feel to the land of techno. However, I could tell many members of the audience saw the jerky guitar rifts and dance steps as attempts of chaining together several short sessions of aggravation into one overall feel of annoyance.

Trent took the stage about 9PM, and followed the already posted set list.

While Nails put on a very elaborate show mixing their style of music to a truly impressive electronic visual display, the thing that really bothered me was the fact that there was very limited crowd involvement. For example, I was in the only mosh pit I saw during the whole show. It spun up throughout March of the Pigs, ended with that song, and thanks to much insistence with me spun up again (with very less intensity and numbers) to last throughout Gave Up. That was it...

Crowd crawling was pretty much non existent too. I saw three attempts. The first guy made it over two people and then was dropped. The second person was pushed over the front line, but it kinda had more of a "I need to GTFO of here" feel. The third person made it twice as far as the first....amazing. There was very little jumping up and down, and lots of the hand clapping was prompted. Trent...I'm sorry.

The songs I really liked were ones that really spoke to me during this part of my life and allowed me to reflect on what is going on. Most of them are old favorites too, so that might explain why I felt the way I did about their performance.

First up is The Wretched. Yeah, this little ditty always struck a cord with me cause I have felt the Hand of God pushing down. In addition, it never turns out the way that I wanted it to, and I do know exactly what it feels like.

Piggy came after a very impressive visual performance, and the blue flames behind the players was a very, very nice touch.

Hey pig
Nothing's turning out the way I planned
Hey pig
There's a lot of things I hoped you could help me understand
What am I supposed to do
I lost my shit because of you

Nothing [will] stop me now
Cause I don't care anymore

Wow...how else could I describe things right now?

Terrible Lie was the next impressionable one. This is cause it too is an old favorite and the fact that "I [seethe] with animosity," am going to end up "all alone in a world you must despise," and He's taking away the someone I need to hold onto, are all things I feel at this moment.

Only is probably the most recent song that got to me during the show. Dunno why, maybe the hope of believing that "I just made you up/To hurt myself" really helps right now. Oh yeah, Digital Domain did the video and deserves due credit for their work.

While those were the most notable ones for me, I will mention Hurt only because I feel Trent did it justice singing it Cash's way. In addition, that feels exactly like what I'm doing to everyone right now.

As I said the show was good, and I'm glad I threw down the money and the ride to see it. And while I doubt I was seen jumping up and down in my Ministry shirt, I do take solace in the fact I was probably pissing off the fans around me, but no where near as much as their apathy was doing the same to me.

The Crap Wars

2008-08-15T22:06:00.005-04:00

So, today I took Thing 1 to see the newly released "Star Wars: The Clone Wars." Here's my assessment of it:

It sucks. It has all the makings of what it truly is, an afterthought for a TV show pilot.

Before I get into it a word about the clones themselves. They seem to wage war like the French. Only they have about 50% the accuracy rate. They've also started taking liberties with hairstyles (and colors)...whooop de frigging dah! The main thing that saddens me the most is that they won't be able to truly show these things being blown into the bits of putrid waste they are.

The first impression that this whole thing is going to suck occurs as it opens. Like the original series, there is no John Williams score. Only this time it's war chaos (the "Fall Back" was fitting). There is also no Words-In-Space!!!! A Star Wars movie ... without them, think about that.

The animation is meh. There isn't texture to the flat planes, but I think that's "the style." When you look you see exactly what it is ... a television cartoon (which cost you a movie ticket).

The plot has been presented before. Anakin is now a Jedi Knight and is teamed with the blue girl tentacly thing that got mowed down in the funky mushroom patch as a Padawan. They have to defeat a whole slew of droids before they can rescue Jabba's son. The only new droids were the mine-bots actually guarding the shield generator so you can pretty much imagine how it plays out. Oh yeah, just for a twist they're led by Sean Connery and he manages to capture Obi-Waaa.

Dooku apparently rescued Asajj Ventress but neither this nor her becomings are explained. The two of them are using Jabba's Uncle Zero to help them kidnap his son Rotta, and are trying to blame it on the jedi. Even if I didn't know what happened to them, I still couldn't have guessed how this would end up.

There are continuity problems (big surprise) with the whole thing, but when he's already done so much to ruin our childhood movies, why stop now. All in all I'll say this whole thing is going to be as ghey as Jabba's Uncle Ziro. The sad part is that the fan base will still watch it, buy the stuff they offer, and pass this blind following gene onto the next generation. God knows I'm doing my part...

Linux Tip o' the Day

2008-08-10T15:56:00.002-04:00

Today was the monthly meeting of the Charleston SC, Linux User's Group. While people were talking, I took the initiative to configure something that's been bothering me for a while. Basically, I do not like the default settings for Gnome's clock applet. I want it to be displayed in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format. With thanks to Juhaz from Freenode.##Gnome, I was able to do this. Basically, it involves configuring:

~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets/clock_screen0/prefs/%gconf.xml

This is the XML configuration file for the clock. To change the way it appears, you need to adjust the following settings to the values listed below.

<entry name="format" mtime="1218398125" schema="/schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/format" type="string">
<stringvalue>custom</stringvalue>
</entry>
<entry name="custom_format" mtime="1218398125" schema="/schemas/apps/clock_applet/prefs/custom_format" type="string">
<stringvalue<%Y-%m-%d %T</stringvalue>
</entry>

My Cells

2008-07-25T01:24:00.003-04:00

I've been going to class and learning all sorts of wonderful things since the 14th. Today, we got to see the results of two days worth of immunocytochemistry work. It involved staining HeLa cells two different ways: with a fluorophor-conjugated secondary antibody and ToPro3 (to highlight the nuclei).

I've been told the picture is good, but must honestly admit that I'm very surprised. During the process, I switched well positioning, mixed the ToPro3 incorrectly the first time, and totally borked the nail polish application.

Here's how they appeared under the confocal microscope:

An old friend revisited

2008-07-11T23:29:00.003-04:00

It's weird the turn of events life brings you. My last post concerned a week-old auction of an old friend.

Well, it seems that transaction fell through and the old friend got put back on the block. So, I am happy to mention that today, my 32 birthday, I have just purchased the Cybermotion Navmaster Self-Guided Vehicle.

http://www.govdeals.com/eas/closeditems_sold.cfm?itemID=1010&acctID=685

Looks like I'll be putting up my sign soon :-)

Old Friend

2008-06-23T01:43:00.004-04:00

Talk about serendipity...

Today I presented a talk on PGP/GPG for the Charleston SC Linux Users Group. Later, I discovered a member was a robotics fan. It made me reminisce about my "days of olde" and I started googling things.

The first result took me here:

http://www.govdeals.com/eas/closedItems_sold.cfm?itemID=1010&acctID=685&CFID=7282408&CFTOKEN=65738827

I'm truly amazed. I'm also very disappointed that I didn't find it a week ago.

For those that don't know, I'll fill in with the back story. It'll also give you some insight into LabThug.

That item is MARVIN -- Mobile Autonomous Vehicle with Intelligent Navigation. He is a CyberMotion (now defunct?) NavMaster K2A mobile platform. That was the star of USC's (now defunct?) mobile robotics lab. That lab was the birthplace of LabThug. See back when I was a student there, I was lucky enough to work-study for that lab. I worked on MARVIN: reprogrammed him to navigate mazes, showed him off to visitors, assisted in hardware repairs, etc. I lived in that lab for 3-4 years. I made friends there. MARVIN was one of them. I wanted to take MARVIN with me when I left. I would have paid (and still will) more than $180 to do so.

LabThug was created because people/things in that lab were being bothered by freshmen (or was it sophomores). So, we decided that a friendly "leave us alone" message would assist in keeping things on the up-and-up. So we made a sign, a copy of which makes up my homepage. It was at moment, within that lab, with MARVIN at my side, that LabThug was born.

And, the rest they say, is history.

Updating Firefox the other way

2008-06-19T01:34:00.007-04:00

OK, I just got around to updating a PC to FF3. While they reached their total without my help, I had heard about problems.

Instead of doing the download thing, I tried the built-in update option. Actually, I tried the start-it-and-see-if-it-tells-you-a-new-one-is-available thing. I've gotten spoiled by that feature. Well, Firefox seemed to over look a few things for people trying to update this way.

It told me I was out of date, which was right; but told me to upgrade to 2.0.0.14. This was fine I thought, "Sometimes to jump major releases, you need to hop through the most recent point one." Of course, imagine my surprise when I restarted and got this:

Haha I thought, let's just try the update again. No dice!

So, apparently you can't update from 2 to 3 this way...at least yet.

Charleston Parks Conservancy

2008-06-19T00:38:00.003-04:00

For those that didn't show ...

I attended a "bloggers event" today, at least that's what the computer printout said. It was in the upstairs of 39 Rue de Jean. Here's how it went down:

I could hear distant talking as I walked up the stairs. Suddenly a blonde in green came into view to welcome me. There were two others just like her. If they said names; I forgot, sorry. A quick scan of the crowd revealed some people I knew, which is always a good thing. Before I made it over to them, the host, Lyn Mettler introduced herself. She also pointed out the food and drinks.

The guy at the bar never told me his name; but when I told him I don't drink and asked for tea, he suggested water. I got a few lemons too, it helped to cover the Cl.

The spread was quite nice: grilled squash & zucchini with ranch, fried artichoke hearts stuffed with 3 types of cheese & marinara, fruits with chocolate sauce. Oh, and little bread chips. Those rocked.

From what I gathered, Lyn was introducing Jeff (or was it Jim...I'm really bad with names) from Charleston Parks Conservancy (CPC). This guy was teaming up with Paul (I'm pretty sure..that or Phil). There was also a guy from Brains on Fire. He was....damn, I have to start stocking up on that Ginkgo Bilbao stuff.

What CPC is trying to do is improve local awareness of the city's 120 parks. They are planning on doing this through their website and a host of other "grass-roots" efforts. In addition to picking 5 Park Angels, they want to create a wiki with each park in detail so users can share stories, etc. They are loosely affiliated with the City's Parks and Recreation Department. They also said they modeled themselves after the Central Park one.

There was also a small presentation hosted from a Mac. It had some sort of iPod hook-up to play relaxing Muzak.

There were questions, but I don't remember them now. Overall this project has a lot of potential, I hope it pans out -- we'll see what happens.

They gave out a copy of the press release, and had a few buttons (I kept the let's get dirty one). In addition, they gave away a crinum bulb. I'm thinking it would be fitting for me to plant it in the park across the street. We'll see how that goes.

Kyle and .... ooh, what was her name, were there handing out pins for thedigitel.com. From what I understand, it's a local news aggregator. Right now, they're just focusing on Charleston, although I'm sure their model could be extended to other cities quite easily.

And hey, guys and girls reading this. If you have the names straight, leave them in the comments :-$.

Why I love Linux

2008-06-10T15:48:00.001-04:00

"smb_fill_super: missing data argument"

and

"CIFS VFS: cifs_mount failed w/return code = -22"

apparently mean the same thing:

"you need to `apt-get install smbfs`"

Gun Show

2008-05-31T23:20:00.003-04:00

I've been told by others that I don't post enough. This is mostly because I'm a firm believer of not filling the Internet with worthless junk. I try to only post items that truly represent the essence/rage of LabThug. Today is a day for posting because it brought forth an item that is dear to LabThug's heart, this quarter's edition of The Land of The Sky Gun and Knife Show. To honor one of our nation's most fundamental rights, I spent way too much money to preserve your ability to "to keep and bear Arms."

For those that are curious, here is what was bought:

The First U.S. Navy Jack is the one thing that I am proud of purchasing most and it is dear to my heart for two reasons. First, I have family members that have served in the Navy. Second, it is a derivative of the Gadsden Flag, and bears the same motto, "Dont tread on me." While Mr. Gadsden was very much a true gentleman from the lovely state of South Carolina and one that is looked upon with honor by LabThug; it is this motto that is very much quintessential LabThug.

What you do is your right, and I really, truly, don't care what it is that you do. However, don't come into my Lab and tell me how I should do things, nor allow any of the stupid shit you do to override my own personal liberties. That is where I draw the line, and if I have to use what else is in that chair to redraw the line that existed, consider yourself warned.

Random Update

2008-05-06T20:51:00.002-04:00

Well, enough time has passed for me to get motivated to sit down and update this thing. A lot of things have happened since the last post. My replacement hard drives finally came in. My PC now has a new Power Supply (the predecessor of which I believe might have been causing my problems due to being underpowered). In addition, I upped the RAM to 4GB, added the new drives, and installed Hardy. So far it looks like everything is working. I even finally have my RAID5 back. It's nice to know I'm finally back to the point I was last July. Hopefully, everything will last longer...

Saw Iron Man Friday night with The Wife and enjoyed it. Got full on sushi first...yum. Unfortunately we came back to puking kids :-( They seem to be better now, which is good.

I joined twitter and jaiku, updated facebook a couple of times, and still did the things work needed done. So yeah, it's been a fun time...

Pride

2008-04-25T23:28:00.001-04:00

My eldest daughter had her first school ballet recital today. They did an interpretation of Alice In Wonderland. Here's the little sweetheart in action:

Enjoy!

Stories from South Carolina

2008-04-24T00:30:00.003-04:00

For those that don't know, I live in the greatest state of the union. There were two stories that came across the news tonight that proved once again just how great my state is.

First up is this little gem. For those that don't want to click the link, it shows our law-makers superior rational abilities in action. First, the background: a few weeks back, they busted up an illegal gambling operation using a law that makes "any game with cards or dice" subject to prosecution. The sponsor of the bill was concerned that similar rules would prohibit such items as Chuck-E-Cheese. However, this bill won't be making it into law due to the fact someone somewhere in our great state could instantiate a scenario that could bring back the most evil of all evils, video poker.

The second story discussed in this entry didn't earn a posting on wcbd's website, and I have to wonder why. It concerned a bill being discussed that would prevent commercial ads from being display on the insides of school buses. Regardless of how you feel about this, here's the point that I would like to make. First off, I ride CARTA to/from work and have for about two years. My employer pays the fare and today's gas prices motivate me to take advantage of this opportunity.

Now, CARTA does allow commercial ads on their buses, and I have no problem them doing this to make a buck. However, their ads only appear on the outside of the bus. True, there are some CARTA materials (including the outdated free-vet-ride one), and a few drug study recruitment posters; but there isn't anything from the .com side. I have often found this funny, because I know CARTA could (finally) make some good money allowing them on the inside.

This feeling has now been further amplified by this non-webpage worthy news, simply because I have to ask the question: Why is it when these ads can't get in front of adults, are we discussing having them in front of our children? What does this really tell us about my state's marketing priorities?

Come on down, move in today.

Hardy Hardly

2008-04-20T00:25:00.002-04:00

Looks like Hardy won't boot on my HTPC either. I'd log a bug, but I can't seem to login to launchpad.

Things a fluttering...

2008-04-16T21:30:00.002-04:00

The package from NewEgg arrived today. It was ordered three days ago. So far I've been happy with their service :-). They've even got a UPS Order tracker feature. What's nice about that is that you can use it for other UPS packages. The weirdest part is that it reports things *better* than the UPS one (IMO). It actually knows where the package is going while the UPS one only says where it departed from.

There's a lot of things going on for me right now. Work, School -- ending one, starting another. The daily should I do this, that, something else entirely. Home, family, all that good stuff.

But it is the fluttering in my chest that I'm focusing on the most...

I help make magic happen

2008-04-14T22:13:00.004-04:00

I am honored to have been a part of this:

http://xark.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/04/magic-doing-wha.html

Hmmmm, I need to figure out tracebacks...

Bbbbbrrrrraaaaaiiiiinnnnnssssss

2008-04-13T21:56:00.002-04:00

A friend of a friend is putting together a short independent movie called "Brunch of the Living Dead." He was filming the "brunch" scene today and needed extra zombies. Me and the eldest daughter decided to join and fill in some parts. Basically, it was us dragging up to the restaurant, sitting down, eating, attacking the waitresses, etc. It was a lot of fun. I'll have a post to the movie when it gets out of post-production.

Seagate Update

2008-04-13T21:47:00.003-04:00

Got a response from Seagate a few days back. Here it is...

Response (Pranab TS200) 04/09/2008 02:25
Thank you for contacting Seagate Warranty Support.

With regards to your query, as you have mentioned that two more drive failed, we would request you to contact our online technical support team at 1-800-732-4283 from 7:00 AM - 9:00 PM (CST) Monday to Friday with option number 1 & 2 and initiate a discussion with them and if they say that the replacement drive sent from Seagate is faulty, kindly get back to us with the activity number so that we can assist you further.

However, if you are looking for the Advanced Replacement Option, we would like to inform you that you will be charged a non refundable fee of $19.99 per unit plus applicable taxes. The fee includes two days delivery service to your address depending on the availability from the time of allocation which will take approximately 24 to 48 hours, a prepaid return label to Seagate along with the appropriate packing for the return of your product.

To obtain this option kindly call us at 1-800-732-4283 Option 1, 3 & 1 (7:00 AM - 9:00 PM CST) Monday- Friday with the Visa or Master card details so that we can assist you further. Please do not provide the credit card details through email for security purpose.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused to you. Awaiting your response. For further assistance email us, we will be glad to help you.

Regards,
Justin
Seagate Warranty Support.

Of course, that justified this response:

First off, in regards to the need to contact tech support, I should inform you that I have an MS in Electrical Engineering. This means that when it comes to computers, you can trust my judgment. Both drives make a Kur-DUNK...click...click...Kur-DUNK (repeat) noise. Both of them fail the SHORT test from the "SeaTools for DOS" application. Both of them hang my system when I try to run that utility's LONG test. I feel these three items gave me enough evidence to correctly diagnosis the problem. If you really think there is something in the tech support script that I haven't already done, please let me know. However, I think I've already gone far enough in this process to know 100% that these drives have failed and need to be replaced while under warrantee.

Also, in regards to the Advance Replacement Option, I would like to inform you that I feel given my miserable experience with your company's products that Seagate should provide this service to me FREE-OF-CHARGE. Kindly write up the work order to allow this. If this is not an option that your company will utilize to keep a customer satisfied, just generate an RMA #, send me a prepaid shipping label, so I can get these drives back to you and have replacements sent out. Please know that the latter option will result in a terribly unhappy and very vocal customer.

"Justin" then coughed up a pre-paid shipping label. I guess this means Seagate is happy having terribly unhappy and vocal customers. Keep this in mind when you purchase your next hard drive.

8 out of 5 Hard Drive Failures

2008-04-08T23:30:00.001-04:00

Well, I finally got around to mailing Seagate a letter asking for my 7th and 8th replacements. This is out of the original 5 they've sent me.

Hello, it's me again. Two (2) more drives of yours have failed on me. I've been through this process several times, but it seems the only thing your company is able to do is send me drives that fail. If you'd like to try again and send me something that will last longer than a few months, please do so.

Usually, you'll send me a pre-paid shipping label to get this process rolling. Considering the history we've had, it would be really nice if you would throw in one of those advanced processing items.

The drives that have failed this time are:

ST3500630AS 9QG225BX
ST3750640AS 3QD132TE

fsck hang

2008-02-04T21:35:00.000-05:00

Well, three replacement drives are on their way from Seagate. But something hung the machine (feisty) solid. Now, it's sitting the same way its been for the last 2.5 hours @ 18.6%. How long should I leave it???? The weird part is that the link lights are blinking like crazy. I pretty strongly believe that fsck shouldn't be hitting the network.

Sigh...

Seagate can no longer make quality drives

2008-01-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

Dear Seagate Warranty Representative:

Three in-warranty drives have failed in my system, two of which were replacements for previous failures. These are the fourth, fifth, and sixth drives to have failed for me out of a five drive order. That's right, I have had more drives fail on me than I have bought. This is beyond unacceptable to me, and I am at the point where I believe any further drives you send will also be faulty. Aside from the loss of my RAID array and its data, I have lost faith in your company's ability to meet its own quality standards.

The drives that have failed are:

9QG5W15M (In Warranty Expiration 17-Jun-2012) (Previous RMA 1000499189)
9QG21T6X (In Warranty Expiration 01-Jun-2012)
9QG165FJ (In Warranty Expiration 12-Jun-2012) (Replacement provided by reseller)

I have determined these drives have failed through the use of SeaTools for DOS (v1.09PH). When performing the LONG test, each drive began clicking and hung the SeaTools session. In addition, my Linux kernel generates errors similar to the following:

ata4.00: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x1950000 action 0x2 frozen
ata4.00: cmd c8/00:01:01:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/e0 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 512 in
res 40/00:00:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/00 Emask 0x14 (ATA bus error)
ata4: hard resetting port

I am beyond disbelief at the abysmal product you have given me and past the point where I can be appeased by a pre-paid shipping label. If you want to keep me as a good faith customer, you will replace each of the above drives through your advanced replacement program free of cost. You can ship the replacement drives to:

<Censored/>

Candidates: Now that you're focusing on SC, do us a favor and ignore the flag

2008-01-08T22:37:00.000-05:00

I live in CNN's next political "State to watch". These upcoming days are going to be a real joy for me.... The one thing that I'm most looking forward to is the mentioning of "an old piece of cloth that means so many different things." However, there is one thing I wish all the candidates would do when it's mentioned, ignore it.

Yep, ignore it. Ignore it simply for the fact that this is truly an issue that doesn't matter. Not only that, but you aren't going to understand enough about the core of this issue to make a statement that means anything of subsistence. Ignore it, it doesn't matter.

First off, I should point out that I prefer this flag way more than the one that's this post's topic. Also, living where I do, and being the person that I am, I am familiar with a majority of the issues and can see this flag as others do.

As I mentioned, this flag doesn't matter. Hell, it's no longer the same flag most people think it is. Yeah, when it was flying above our statehouse, it was the First Confederate Navy Jack. This is the same flag that was flown by the members of the KKK, and has become mired between Pride and Prejudice. However, when it was removed from the statehouse, our legislators changed the flag that could be flown to The "Battle Flag" of the Confederacy. This is the flag that still flies today on a confederate monument detached from the statehouse. It is also the only confederate flag that is allowed to legally fly on our statehouse grounds. Yep, it doesn't matter.

Now, I'm am not saying that it doesn't matter to the people that feel the way they do towards it. I'm not even trying to convenience any of them to change the way they feel. I'm just saying that for the candidates of this race, "it does not matter to you, ignore it." The only candidate that can tie any claim to being concerned about this flag is Seneca's own John Edwards. Sorry Johnny, but once you joined "the folks on top," you lost your voice on this issue. So for you and all the other players, "ignore it."

Ignore it simply for the reason that you should be focusing on the things that do matter to our NATION: such as the Ira[q|n], health care, our economy, and yes indeed, maps for our schools.

I'm sure someone's going to pull Obama into this claiming that there is some "special reason" why he should be allowed to say something. I'm sorry but there really isn't. Being the way you are makes you just as different as the rest of us. Pointing out differences to override someone else is the reason this flag got into trouble to begin with. It's time for him above all the candidates to ignore it, admit it doesn't matter, and move on.

Finally, there is the fundamental reason why the candidates should ignore it. They should ignore it quite simply because there is only one flag they should focus on. This is the flag they are running for. This is the flag they want to fly. It is quite different from the flag that flies down here. Those differences are what they should be focusing on. This was a state's issue, and we have dealt with it already. Wasting their air will never turn it into a federal case. Ignore it, it doesn't matter. Please, for the love of all that is great about our nation: IGNORE IT.

This is how Seagate treats its faithful

2007-11-28T22:11:00.000-05:00

Keep this in mind when you pickup your next hard drive.

Original Complaint:


Dear Seagate 

I would like to first state that I have been a faithful end user of Seagate products since the days of your 30MB MFM models. I have not only used Seagate exclusively, but recommended them to others.  It is this fact that makes this latest problem I have encounted that much more frustrating. It is because of this frustration that I am writing to you instead of talking with one of your customer support representatives on the phone.

Back in July of this year, I purchased five ST3500630AS drives for a new machine that I was building. The drives would be operating in a RAID5 configuration for integrity purposes (I would also like to point out this form of operation is one of the ones listed for these drives on your website).  However, one of the drives was DOA and replaced.  Back in September (14th), a second drive in this set failed and was replaced by me. Today, a third drive in this set (9QG21D69) has failed. I base this on the fact that when I run your SeagateTools program, the program hangs during the long test and the drive begins clicking. Also, my Linux kernel has been reporting errors when attempting to read information.

What is more troublesome is the fact that when it failed, my RAID5 array failed with it. This is because another one of the drives (9QG21T6X) also dropped out of the array simultaneously and I did not have the foresight to prepare any hot spares.  While I do not think this drive currently has a physical failure, I am now at a point where I fear one is forthcoming.

Because I NEVER expected a 60%, or even a 20%, failure rate, there were no other backup locations for the data on this array. Therefore, I have lost all the digital contents I have accumulated since the 30MB drive listed above. Documents (work and personal), programs, code, media, pictures/videos of my family, EVERYTHING is now gone. 

I do realize that Seagate is not responsible for data loss, and I am not expecting your company to help me recover anything. However, I have to question whether I would be in this current situation had I gone with another vendor. Why I am writing because I want to replace this drive (for obvious reasons). The last time that I replaced a Seagate drive (9/14), I had to pay a ~$20 fee for the "Advanced Replacement" option. Given my history of Seagate purchases and the recent experience I have encountered, I feel the *least* Seagate could do is provide this option to me without charge. I would appreciate someone in a position to do so looking into this matter from start to finish, and responding with a solution that fits this extremely unsatisfactory situation.

Thanks,

First response:


Discussion Thread
Response (Babli TS198) 11/28/2007 03:27
Dear Adrian,

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

With regards to your request, we are sorry to inform you that we will not be able to process advance replacement without the charge. However, as one time exception we will be able to notify the relevant team to send you the pre paid return label to avoid the shipping cost.

If you want to opt for this option, kindly email us back with your complete shipping address to process the Order number to replace the drive with the serial# 9QG21T6X.

For further queries you could always e-mail us or call us at 1-800-468-3472. We would be happy to assist you.
 
Regards,
Shannon
Seagate Warranty Support.

First thing I note is the "(Babli TS198)." I wonder if this is our recipient and internal transaction number. What do you remember about the stated serial number?

1st Reply:


My physical address is:

<YeahRight/>

As previously stated, the serial number you replied back with (9QG21T6X) is the disc that cannot reproduce a physical failure. It is drive 9QG21D69 that has truly failed. Based on your level of response, I would like to request a "pre paid return label" for *both*. I'm really surprised my loyalty is only worth this much. This truly has been an experience.

UPDATE (2007-12-05): I tried several times to just reply to the e-mail, but their system always rejected it. This occurred even when I replied the way they said (between the stupid "REPLY BETWEEN THESE LINES"). So, I call up and talk to an off-shore phone operator name "Michelle" (I think). It was your typical phone operator complaint call. First, she thought the drive was the DOA one. Then, she informed me that Seagate wouldn't send a prepaid label because the drive isn't DOA. It took a good long while to clarify the difference between 9QG21T6X and 9QG21D69. I would like to point out that while I was irritated, I didn't raise my voice, nor use any words your grandmother would be ashamed of.

There's now a return order placed, with no prepaid card. It's really sad that this is the way faithfulness is rewarded.

UPDATE (2007-12-06): Looks like I did get a prepaid label after all...yay!

Bored Robot Programmer

2007-11-08T15:05:00.000-05:00

This is what Robot programmers get to do when they get bored:

This would have been me if I had "stayed the course."

Hope for our future

2007-10-07T22:37:00.000-04:00

My 6 yo daughter really made my day today. I've always talked to her about particles of matter, cosmology, etc., but this takes it to a new level.

She has a make-up (due to earache) spelling test tomorrow, and expressed some concern. I decided to write her a "Good luck, I'm proud of you, Love Daddy" note. It came time to put it in her book bag (so she can find it tomorrow when at school), and in I went...

Do I put it on her folder? What about her library book (Space Shuttle)? I finally decided on her copy of "The Illustrated A Brief History of Time/The Universe in a Nutshell" bi-book.

It's things like this that let you know the future is going to be a good place.

History favors John Edwards for Democratic Winner

2007-09-11T22:49:00.001-04:00

A friend of mine was discussing this with me the other day. He brought up an interesting fact. If you look at the last 40 years of presidential elections, the winning democrat has had attributes that only belong to one of the front runners. Let's examine further...

First off, let's review why we picked 40 years. First off, it's slightly longer than a generation is considered to last. I've also heard that there are more people born since JFK was killed than before his election. I would like to point out though that since John F. Kennedy was elected, the percentage of eligible voters participating in presidential elections has declined in almost every election. I've also heard that society has a hard time remembering after 20 years.

Anyway, in 1967 Lyndon B. Johnson was president. He was from the South (Texas). He was considered liberal. Because he's president, we'll chalk him up as a winner.

The next election was in '68 and had Hubert Humphery loosing to Nixon. Humphery was from the North (Minnesota), and was considered an anti-communist liberal.

After that, George McGovern lost (big-time) to Nixon. Again, he was from the North (South Dakota) and had a reputation as a dovish liberal.

Now we get to the first election I was alive for ('76) and have Mr. Peanut beating out Ford. Jimmy was from the South (Georgia), and ran as a moderate favorite son. While he did win, we also need to keep in mind that he lost the re-election. Whether this bucks our trend or is because he's a victim of outside events is beyond the scope of this blog. We'll still consider him a winner for our purposes.

The next few elections were not nice to the democratic party, with both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis losing. Both were Northern liberals.

The democrats struck gold with their next winner, Slick Willie. You'll see our pattern emerging when I point out that he is a Southern (Arkansas) moderate. He also was awarded with the re-election and the honor of presiding over the longest period of peace-time economic expansion in American history. We are also now within a time frame where society can now remember this.

Albert Arnold "Al" Gore, Jr. is the next democrat contender. While I know he "lost," I'm still going to put another Southern (Tennessee) moderate in the winner category.

The next Northern liberal is our good buddy and owner of three purple hearts, John Kerry. We all know how that one turned out.

So there we have it, history showing it's predominately Southern moderates that win for the democrats, while Northern liberals bring them shame. So let's look at the current field...

Barack Obama (Northern liberal)
Hillary Rodham Clinton (another Northern liberal)

and finally John Edwards coming from his home state of North Carolina (which is below the Mason-Dixon line) with a relatively moderate view.

Now, I'm not trying to insinuate that history is dictating Edwards will win. However, remember that those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it. If it's right, let's hope the party we've focused on learns from the past.

BTW, I still have some bamboo available. Anyone want it?

Bamboo -- Come 'n Get it!

2007-09-04T00:59:00.000-04:00

I don't hate bamboo, I just hate the fact it covers almost a quarter of my back yard. For those that don't know Bamboo is a very quick growing grass. It also grows to an outrageous height of around 20 feet (although I swear some of my shoots are over 30). When the stuff pops up, you can kick down the shoots to keep it from spreading. I've used this trick to limit this plant's growth to just the back corner of my yard. However, I still have to look at the stuff that grew before I moved in.

Sunday, I finally cracked and decided to cut it down. You get a very surreal feeling when you use a chain saw to mow your yard. Now, I got through a lot of the stuff before my herniated discs started whining about how much work I was doing. Sadly, I now have a pile of this stuff that needs to be gotten rid of. Here's a pic of how this pile looks:

From the back side:

Here's an "up close and personal" shot:

I don't think my back will make it through a "hauling away" session, so here's my plan. If you want it, it's yours. The stuff is located West of the Ashley River in Charleston, SC. All you have to do is let me know you are coming (so I can hide myself, the family, and our dog), and then show up and take it away. If you want to give me some money, that's cool. If you just want to make it disappear, that's fine too. All I want is for this stuff to go away so I don't have to do anything with it.

Why would you want this bamboo you ask? Well, aside from timber, there's lots of uses for bamboo. You can make tiger cages, pretend you're one of the ninjas from House of Flying Daggers, feed your panda, anything you want. Just come and get it. I don't care what you're going to do with it, just take it away so I don't have to.

Here's a pic of the area the bamboo came from. As you can tell, I didn't get all of it. If you want to continue the cutting, feel free.

If it's not gone in two weeks, I will consider this attempt a failure and tend to the task myself. Serious though, spare me the grief. Re-sell value alone should make you happy.

Linux Boot Failure

2007-08-02T22:57:00.000-04:00

OK, here's the error I get booting Gusty Tribe 3 on my theater PC:

Here's the one for Feisty:

Any ideas?

Also, two things at work have really pissed me off. First, a helpdesker gave me the classical "You're not LYNX (the "managed" PC of my institution) and your running an unsupported browser (IE7)." The funny bit is, I got it working less than 5 mins after I hung up.

The other concerns my new hire. I wrote out this "pre-interview" email so I wouldn't have to interview all 20 people. HR tells me the email is too "lengthy and intimidating" and will "reduce the number of my applicant pool" and that I should engage with phone interviews with all of them instead. I remind them of the fact that I don't have the time and that I AM trying to reduce my applicant pool. Now, my supervisior wants to talk to me...yay!

Weird time

2007-08-01T23:21:00.001-04:00

I fell asleep when I got home and just woke back up recently. This is going to wreck my sleep pattern for a few days ... yay.

It seems like the new PC is working better than it was. I reset the BIOS (after "tweaking it" to the point it wouldn't boot) and turned off all the items I'm not using (ATA controller, serial port, etc.) So far things have been running smoothly. I've even had a chance to connect the Hauppauge to my incoming cable. I can get all the channels I normally do through Comcast. However, this is just "standard cable" (analog) so I'm not impressed with it. Luckily, DirectTV is having a special on their services. Might have to check that out once the new TV gets here (hopefully Friday).

The only thing pissing me off is the sound card. It's still doing the popping thing. Creative says its a problem with nForce's way of supplying data to the PCI bus and recommends DECREASING your FSB speed. However, when I drop it down to 270 MHz, it still pops when playing a Blu-Ray. The problem with 3D stuff is gone though...wheee. For those looking at buying a X-Fi Audio Elite Pro, keep this in mind before you throw down the dough. Provantage requires one to "contact the manufacturer" before issuing an RMA. Considering they have a "product compatibility problems" clause, I have a feeling this thing might end up on ebay.

Also, my Blu-Ray software (PowerDVD) seems to have a problem enabling HDCP on my monitors. NVIDIA control panel says it's already running, so I'm not sure what's up with that. Maybe it's got something to do with the $19.95 "upgrade" they're offering.

It was noted in the comments that I should run Linux on this thing. I would, if it ran. Gusty Tribe 3 can't open a tty and kills job control. This then causes some exception it doesn't seem to recover from. This happens EARLY during boot so aside from displaying a pretty progress bar, ubuntu is going to need some tweaking to work. I'll post a pic when I have one. Considering that I have to still make the nVidia MediaShield RAID controller work on some form of OSS, I feel that's where I should focus.

First though, back to 300. SP<pop/>AR<pop/>TAA<pop/>AAAA<pop/>A!!!!!!

Another Day

2007-07-24T23:45:00.000-04:00

New monitor was mailed yesterday. It's still going regular post so Costco.com's helpdesk truly blows (I asked them to expidite). I also asked them to tell me whether they charged my TV yet, and I haven't heard about that either. It still hasn't posted to the card, so maybe I'll be calling AmEx again ... yay!!!!

I reinstalled Vista on the new PC. Now it just hangs to black instead of showing a BSOD. Then again, I have been really slow on installing new devices...

Long day

2007-07-22T23:37:00.000-04:00

What can I say. Went with the family to Chuck-E-Cheese pretty much as soon as I woke up. Came back and finished mowing the grass. Looking at ways to make a linux based PACS server work for my employer. The stuff I'm using comes from here. Documentation is what you'd expect from an institution's research project...non-existant. Anyone have an exmple config/pacs_connect.cfg and/or config/pacs_Database.cfg they'd be willing to let me look at?

The defective monitor was returned to Costco. Apparently to exchange and item with this company, you have to return it and order a replacement. There was a one cent difference (their favor) between the money I got back and the amount I had to pay.

Speaking of replacements, I still haven't heard for Antares Digital about the new drive.

Not like that matters much, the new PC its going into needs a RAID driver before I can use it.

Dunno what's worse, that or the fact The new theater PC hangs when I login (unless in safe mode) and is BSODing.

JOY!!!

It's here ...

2007-07-20T00:36:00.000-04:00

... and put together. Portatech did end up switching out the motherboard. I guess because they threw in a GeForce 7100, they didn't feel the need to tell me what they had done and/or refund any money. Luckily, there were enough slots for everything. I did run short of a power hookup because the GeForce 8800 Ultra requires 4 of them. A quick run to Compuzone fixed my issue though.

Everything is now in it, and it's running. It BSODed on me twice, but has been problem free since being updated. It's sweet too. I just want the speakers and it's "monitor" to arrive :-D

Tired

2007-07-19T00:07:00.000-04:00

It's been a long day, three meetings (two back-to-back) and the other one last longer than an hour. Tried to change some wiring in the house and it was 4" too short...yay.

Tomorrow will be a better day though. An approaching package tells me so.

Oh yeah, I went ahead and bought that monitor from costco.com. It's going to take them 20 days to get it to me.

Everything's Blue

2007-07-17T23:48:00.000-04:00

The Blue-Ray burner arrived today (one day early). It's in another snazzy retail box. Hopefully the PC it's going into will also follow the trend and get in a day sooner.

The server is now downstairs connected to the router. So, it can route packets, and will be building source trees as soon as I can download them.

Still haven't heard any word from Antares about the new HD, guess it's time to send a note.

Mulling over returning/exchanging the first Acer monitor that I opened. The second one has NO dead pixels at all.

I'm also mulling over whether I should get one of these as a monitor for the newer computer.

Something's Installed

2007-07-17T00:59:00.000-04:00

Finally got DragonFly on the new server. I had to disable the RAID and configure the BIOS to only recognize one HD in the machine. There is no working Wi-Fi and because the livingroom doesn't have an ethernet hookup, I have no network. But it's up and running :-D

I have my DB classes tomorrow. I never got the video working. Should be a fun class.

Slogging on

2007-07-14T23:21:00.000-04:00

I woke up early today and began the process of linking the bsdinstaller into the DragonFly BSD tree. My goal is to have `make iso` supported from /usr/src/. We'll see if it works. I've got a patch of my progress so far, but am still waiting on the old build machine to complete (so I can even begin to think about testing). I'm sleepy now though.

Funky Friday

2007-07-13T23:24:00.000-04:00

It seems like its been a long day. Lets see, first I helped the kids play Slip-N-Slide while wife went shopping. When she got back, I called Portatech about the motherboard situation. First the phone was busy, and after trying a few times with the same response, I finally got through. Notified them that I wanted 4GB on 64-bit Vista Ultimate and asked which motherboards of their stock would support this. The lady put me on hold for a minute and was going to transfer me to support. Then she asked for my phone numbers (I gave home and cell) and name, and told me someone would call me back within an hour.

I went outside to meet the FedEx guy. He's having trouble finding the house even though he is right in front of it (one of the numbers fell off our mailbox). He hands me the server barebone computer \o/.

Take it out and look it over. It's got a window on the side, and some other snazzy stuff. However, the power supply is 100W less than advertised :-@. That's probably because it isn't exactly the same case as I asked for :-S. It still powers all five HDs :-D, but one cycles between "beep" and "ka-DUNK!" :'( Honestly after the way the box looked when it got here, I count my blessings that there isn't more dead drives.

Send e-mail to Antares Digital informing them of such and wait for phone to ring. My brother comes over, it's been four hours since calling, and I'm worried the contact window is running out, so I call back. When I finally get through the time is over and I get a machine. Foolishly, I don't leave a message.

Then, the UPS guy shows up with the webcam (as I expected), and the two 24" widescreen monitors. The latter were a delightful surprise. I get my brother's help to move the 21" CRT off my desk and replace it with one. There's a few dead pixels (one, red, 1/4" up the left side; several on top & bottom edges at 1/3 of the screen increments. Even with it only hooked up to my old GeForce MX2, it still looks sweet.

After waiting for mumsy to show up, we leave for my breakfast dinner (family tradition). Home Team BBQ is pretty good, but I didn't eat much for some reason. Might have had something to do with the 2-year old in my lap :-)

When I get back, I see the phone rang because of an Out-Of-Area number. Of course none of the people that were still here answered it and the person on the other end didn't leave a message. I get a little mad at this until I check my mail and see that not only has Antares Digital replied back with an RMA number and the address, but Portatech has mailed something that will arrive on the 19th. My credit card doesn't reflect any activity since the 11th (but that just showed up today), so I'm assuming their research lead them here (PDF).

Youngest daughter lets me put her to sleep instead of momma, so I'm heart wrenched over that (awwwww).

Tried to install DragonFly BSD on some part of the server after eldest daughter and wife went to bed. Unfortunately the installer still thinks pkg_* are in other locations. And of course the source configuring this variable has already been fixed...

Motherboard Oh Noes!!!111OneOneOne

2007-07-12T21:35:00.000-04:00

Ok, lots of stuff shipped today. The only items from my birthday order that are still not heading their way to my door are the GigaWorks THX S750 speakers, and the portatech.com computer. Sadly there is a problem with the computer. Here is the note I got about it today:

The motherboard (intel-dg965ryb) from your order, will not work properly with 4 gigs of ram installed with os-vista-ult-x64 as ordered. We have found that the maximum ram this motherboard supports is 3 gig with this operating system. However, it works properly with 4 gigs of ram when using windows xp home edition 32bit.

Well, I'm going to point out that this is the first computer that I've bought since '98. This computer can expect to be used for just as long, and because so, must be able to last that long. This is why I'm going with 64-bit, 4GB of RAM, and the ultimate edition of Microsoft's 64-bit operating system. If I have to switch out the motherboard to do so, so be it. I will not settle with a watered-down edition of an outdated 32-bit Operating System.

It's my birthday

2007-07-12T00:26:00.000-04:00

Yay?!

It's been a weird one. Lots of things going on right now that I need to work through. It was my day off, but work still called me up with some problems they were having. I was able to push them off until tomorrow so that's good.

The Sound Card/audio experience arrived today. This was a snazzy large retail box. AOL, QuickTime, etc. seem to be bundled in some fashion to this device. Dunno if that's good or bad.

The bad news is that I got an email from smksuperstore saying my order was put on hold because it failed a test. The weird part is someone from SMK / PCBOOST.COM already sent the same order number on 7/9/2007 (check the blog). I'm hoping it's really the portatech.com order that hasn't been sent yet (and they can resolve the tests of course).

Alice said it best, "Curiouser and curiouser..."

Another day, another package

2007-07-10T19:15:00.000-04:00

Today the Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 from PC Alchemy arrived. One day early too :-D

Too bad I still don't have a PC to put these things in...

More Arrivals

2007-07-09T22:32:00.000-04:00

Today two more items for the new computing infrastructure showed up at the house. They both arrived while I was cutting grass. The first package to arrive contained the five 500GB SATA2 HD from Antares Digital. I must say that I'm a little worried. Here's what they were packed in:

Yep, that's only one ply of bubble wrap and a layer of crumbled packing paper separating 2TB from the crumpled area on the corner. Joy!

The other thing that arrived was the shipment from Comp-U-Plus. The wireless keyboard & mouse, and my new trackball. The keyboard is smaller than I thought it would be. But that's good, right?

The good news is that the server barebone (from SMK) shipped today. It's being sent FedEx ground and should arrive on the 13th. At least I'll have something to work on this weekend :-) Of course I'll be putting those HD in it, so I won't know until then whether they work :-(

While reading the mail from SMK/PC Boost, mail from Costco arrived. Looks like my dual 24" are shipped as well. They'll get here on the 16th.

Maybe there will be joy in Mudville after all \o/

EDIT: Deidentified picture, added info about second arrival

More Computer Stuff

2007-07-07T23:36:00.000-04:00

I finally finished with all my purchases. Here's what I've gotten today:

Based on their outstanding service, I decided to use Amazon again. This time to get a webcam. For some reason (maybe because I used the gift certificate I forgot about last time), the order isn't going to ship until the 12th ... very weird.

I also picked up two 24" Acer monitors from Costco.

My birthday present -- new computers

2007-07-06T19:20:00.000-04:00

My birthday is coming up. I've been saving up for a year and a half to get a really good computer infrastructure in this house. Last Monday (7/02/2007), I finally bought everything. I'm getting two computers. One fileserver with 2TB of space, a desktop with the latest-and-greatest components, and the newest networking system I can get. Here are the components:

From Antares Digital:

Five 500GB Seagate SATA2 Hard Drives

eVGA geforce 8800Ultra 768MB 2.1GHz PCIe VGA Card

From SMK Super Store:

The server barebone computer consisting of:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz) (Socket AM2)
- Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe Socket AM2 nForce 570 SLI DDR2-800 eSATA A&2GbE ATX Motherboard
- Cooling Package w/ Whisper CPU Fan, 2 Stealth Case Fans & Arctic Silver
- 120mm Stealth Case Fan (Ultra Low Noise)
- Atlas Precision Brand - 512MB DDR2-667
- Thermaltake Tsunami Aluminum Case - w/ 680W PS - Silver
- Standard 450 Watt Power Supply
- Priority Processing
- Extended - 3 Year Warranty

From Provantage:

A SoundBlaster X-Fi Elite Pro

GigaWorks THX S750 7-piece Dolby 7.1 Speaker System

From PC Alchemy:

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1800 MCE Combo ATSC/QAM/NTSC, PCIe x1

From Portatech:

The new desktop consisting of:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 ( 2 x 2.66GHz - 1066FSB)
- Intel DG965RY
- Cool Package - Stealth (Ultra Quiet Fan, 2 Stealth Case Fans, Artic Alumina Compound)
- Kingston Technology - 4GB - PC2-6400 (DDR2-800) (Dual Channel Kit)
- WD Raptor 74GB 10000RPM SATA Hard Drive (Commercial Grade - Ultra High Performance)
- Windows Vista Ultimate (X64 - 64 Bit Edition)
- Thermaltake Mozart Home Theater PC Case (Silver/Black)
- Echo Star 680 Watt Power Supply (Dual-Core Certified)
- 52X CD-Rom (Reads CD Discs)
- Standard - Build, Burn-in, Test & Ship Out in Approx 3 to 5 Business Days
- 3 Year Warranty

From Amazon:

From OpticStor:

LG Electronics GGW-H10NI

From Comp-U-Plus:

LOGITECH CORDLESS COMFORT DESKTOP LASER ERGO SPLIT KEYBOARD W/LASER MOUSE

LOGITECH CORDLESS OPTICAL TRACKMAN USB WITH PS/2 ADAPTER

That was Monday, here's what's happened so far (as of this post, 2007-07-06T21:53).

First the good news, today the doorbell rang and the items from Amazon arrived. They certainly get Gold Stars for having their act together. This is a company that "gets" the Internet. Order was "processed" during the night, and handled and shipped the next morning.

For the most part, everything else is in transit. Except the items that are on backorder: the graphics card, the speakers (until 2007-07-30), and the Blue-Ray writer.

Now, the bad news. Google Checkout (which Comp-U-Plus uses) informed me that my AmEx was denied. So I called AmEx's 1-800 # that same night. Got some Indian guy that told me two things had raised flags, the Comp-U-Plus and Portatech. He cleared them. I asked if anything else was going to be "flagged." He started into a script about how this happens for security and he's not allowed to describe why or which items get flagged. He also reminds me this is the reason they called me (when I really called them). So I thank him for his time and hang up. I rework the Google Checkout. The trick here is not to click the link to "retry your card," but to click the button at the bottom that says "use this card." I then go to bed ...

I get some confirmation mails about some of the products, but hear nothing from Portatech and SMK SuperStore. Assuming "no news is good news," I think nothing of it.

What I didn't know is that both of these vendors had sent me mail, but because it used the phrase "problem with your credit card" and "follow this link" MSN's spam filter grabbed it. I didn't bother looking in the junk mail folder (how many of you check yours?), so I give it until today. Both their websites still said the order is processing, so I assume something is up.

After calling AmEx again and getting an Indian woman, I find out both SMK SuperStore and Portatech were denied. I "clear" them and hang up. Call SMK SuperStore first and get a Californian woman. I explain what's going on. and tell her about my birthday. She puts a "rush" on it (although I already paid for Expedited service) and says it should be out by Mon. I then call Portatech and get the same woman (both are apparently a front for www.pcboost.com). We both have a quick laugh and she promises to do the same thing to this one. So, I hang up.

Now, my birthday is going to come and I'm going to have all these parts and nothing to do with them :'(

DAMN THESE FALSE POSITIVES. It's 2007 can't we be accurate by now?!

User Communication (cont.)

2007-06-22T14:33:00.000-04:00

In a previous post, I began a discussion about communication. That post focused on errors in communication in the first 2 portions. This post will focus on errors that arise on the tail end of the communication process (parsing through and extracting info from the transcription, and extracting the original entity's meaning).

As before we'll use examples. This is a three-step email that I sent to a doctor that needed help sending a message with a link to a mailing list. Apparently this greatly differs from sending an e-mail to a regular person somhow. Here's what I wrote:

1) Create a new e-mail message to "list@domain.tld" (no quotes). This address will then forward your message to the people on the mailinglist. This forwarding action happens automatically behind the scenes and requires no actions on your part.

2) Type the body of your e-mail as you normally would. The link that needs to be placed in your message is shown below. Feel free to copy-and-paste it into the message.

http://server.domain.tld/path/to/page.html

3) Hit send.

For some reason it still couldn't be done. What is it about the above that's difficult to understand? Based on what I said, could you send a link to the mailing list in question? Please leave any appropriate feedback.

My last example in this thread is a conversation that I had with a recently hired supervisor. I was trying to explain what happened behind the scenes when a submit button was pressed on one of our patient registration forms. After discussing the database save and the other web component that displays what is recently entered, I moved on to the printouts and how I would like to replace these with an email message. This is because the print subsystem keeps losing the ability to communicate with the printer in question. This is also going to be worse when I move the server into our network's DMZ. At this point, I noticed a funny look on her face.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I don't understand a word you just said," was the response she mouthed, inaudibly.

Now, I know she knows what a database is (After all, her first question to me when she joined our team was "Why don't you just use SPSS for all your databases?"), so I tried to get in her head and figure out what caused this misunderstanding.

"I just don't understand why all that happens before the user submits the page," she finally told me.

"Before?!" I asked.

Apparently, the past tense and the fact that "the information entered" was used wasn't enough to clue her in.

"It doesn't happen before, this happens after." I replied.

"Oh, ok, it makes sense now."

I started this thread with four steps, but one thing this whole experience has taught me is that context matters most in communication. If you can't transcribe your idea in the appropriate context, your message has no hope for success.

User Communication

2007-06-07T22:33:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I posted...

I want to share some interesting communication examples I have experienced over the last few months. First, a quick refresh. The task of communication requires the following steps to occur:

0) An entity must conceive an item they wish to communicate (usually done in their mind).
1) This entity must transcribe this item into a medium that can be understood by others (e.g., print, video, web, etc.).
2) Another entity must parse through the medium and extract the transcription (i.e., read, watch, surf).
3) This entity must then extract from the transcription the original entity's meaning.

Now, some people will say you need another "confirmation" step where the second entity confirms with the first as to the true meaning of the message. You could also go into a long diatribe which covers understanding. However, I just want to focus on these four things.

Our first example was picked up during a bioinformatics symposium. This was a note left in my hotel room from the maid. Here it is below:

Now, what did she transcribe (write)? Is it "all or the Plug in ale being use behind to T.U"? WTF does that mean? This has got to be a problem between steps 0 and 1. However, thanks to the extracting abilities my informatics background has taught me, I can decipher further. Here's what I think she originally conceived:

"All of the plugs behind the TV are being used"

Now, I was able to come to this conclusion because of the context of the note. It was placed on top of the power supply I had left in the room. I had also disconnected a plug for a lamp so I could power up the supply. However, this conclusion is radically different from what was transcribed (in haste I hope) on this piece of paper. What conclusion would others arrive at without that context? What did you think it said? Many just gave up and pointed out the idiocy of this person. My wife made out the words "plug in" and "behind" and joked that she was requesting butt sex. I think though this is a good example of how delicate the communication process is. It's amazing how the same sequence of words can mean different things to different people. Sadly, this person forgot that when you write something for another person to read, you need to write it in a way so the other person can understand.

Example two is a alphanumeric page I got from our receptionist. I can't digitize the screen so here's my transcription of the message she left (minus the identifiers):

MAY TWO PRINTERS WHERE I AM WANT PRINTER FOR ME.

Yeah...she wants a printer? Unfortunately for her, I don't have any. Here's what her page really meant:

The two printers where I am won't print when I use a certain program.

The only way I figured this one out was with a face-to-face. Now, I did start off by asking what she wanted a printer for, but she didn't catch the jab. But how in the world can you extract the original meaning from that?

What I'm trying to convey is that communication is very much a two-way street. You can't just jot down anything quickly and expect someone to "get it." You have to know your audience and use terms they can understand (and/or terms that are syntactically valid for the language you are using). Hopefully, this post has made you more aware of this fact and you'll strive to produce better messages.

Next post, we'll look at the other side of the pie. When you have Steps 0 - 1 correct, but something's messed up on steps 2 & 3. I hope you'll join me for that.

Why "If you can't say anything nice ..." hurts development

2006-12-19T22:28:00.000-05:00

Come on now, admit it. Your mom/dad told you at some point "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." The thing is, neither had any idea how detrimental this philosophy is to the real world. While I will focus on the harm it causes the development community, you could extend my ideas to any thread of social interaction.

Basically, there are two main reasons why I feel mom/dad should have received a lecture after stating that gem:

1) It instills a mindset into the recipient that speaking your mind is not welcomed in the world.

2) This mindset further expands itself within the recipient so they are no longer able to receive (and act upon) "hostile" criticism.

Let's examine further...

Words have an everlasting effect on children -- it scares me how quickly my 6 y/o daughter repeats things I didn't mean to say. In addition, endless studies (which I won't take the time to quote) have pointed out a correlation between verbal abuse and self-esteem. The contrapositive of that is also true, positive reinforcing words instill wonderful feelings within their recipient.

Because of this everlasting effect, simple phrases become absorbed deep into subconscious behavior and alter a person's persona. Now knowing that, let's rethink what that glorious phrase really means to a child -- I'm not allowed to say anything that isn't nice.

The worst example of this tends to happen to extremely introverted people that hide behind the "No one cares what I think anyway" phrase. Sadly, this travesty of justice keeps these people from reporting problems they see, solutions they've conceived, ideas they've dreamed up, and a whole slew of other items that can help a project achieve its goal.

Some people will say something that isn't nice but feel the pressure to employ that wonderful effect called "sugarcoating" (placing as much "nice" words around a "hard to swallow pill"). I've seen it in plenty of relationships with my users. For example:

Wow, this page is really neat. I like the layout, all the links work, the articles are great. You've really done a good job. However, you misspelled the word "Emmeekaguramookavich" in paragraph 32. Hopefully this will be an easy fix.

Keep up the wonderful work,

Now, for me the above comment has this long drawn out way of asking me to do something. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful for the appreciation you're showing me, but the first sentence suffices at doing so. As far as how easy a fix would be, don't you think I'm better qualified to answer that? After all, I am going to be implementing it. Finally, are you expecting me to hand you anything but the wonderful acts of work that I create? Not only do these extra words discombobulate the communication effort, I now have to repeatedly skim them over every time I refer to this message for what I need to do. My time is in high demand, so please speed up my ability to help you by not buttering me up.

Then, you get the side of the spectrum where I sit, the one where the person either never heard this advice or (like me) concluded it was full of crap. We're the ones that don't hesitate to blurt out to your face, "This sucks!" and "I wouldn't even feed this to my neighbor's dog." We're also the ones who will then go over every point as to why we came up with our assessment and expect you to fix them. But however, you won't because of my second point.

For example, instead of taking what I said back to your drawing board you'll be labeling me as a jerk because of my "hateful diatribe."

This same thing happened to me at a previous job. I asked a junior developer to create some custom form that would sort by name, allow you to add new ones (and then more importantly resort once they were added/edited). After a week, I got back something that I used and then immediately told him "didn't work" because it didn't do the one thing I wanted (the resorting). When I said these points, he literally called me "rude", turned around, and went back to his desk. Now, I was able to code what I needed by the time he got to his desk, so I didn't push the issue. However, I wonder if my second point about this little phrase was to blame.

Basically, when you grow up in the mind set that "you can't say anything nice," you conclude that there is something wrong with the person saying these "un-nice" words before you actually listen to what he/she is saying. You can see examples on many Internet based threads. The typical pattern is this. User1 says "this module sucks because it doesn't do blah which I really need." This thread will then quickly fill up with replies stating how User1 is a "n00b", "Id10t", how they should "use something that has blah", "code it", "be happy with what they have," etc. While it is amazing that these same people lash out using such un-niceities, the fact remains that until someone comes along that can accept such criticism (and possess the resources to add blah), blah never gets added to this module. The module is further hindered because many of the developers that do have the resources to add blah are probably turned away from working on it because of the aura that now surrounds its request.

It's getting late and I need to wrap up so I'll finish here and ask that "if you can't say anything nice, shout it loudly!"

The Standard of End-User Experience

2006-12-13T21:53:00.000-05:00

Recently a lot of people around me were dropping the "standards" word. This might have something to do with the release of IE7, FF 3.0, Opera 9.0.2, etc., who knows. While this is fine and dandy, I would like to know what standard they are referring to. From what I remember from my networks class, there are two types of standards:

De facto (becomes a standard "by fact or practice" because so many people do it/use it/etc.) IE's "manufacturer-specific non-complaint enhancements" are a perfect example of this. Even though they fit the above quote, they are still a standard because IE and its ~90% market dominance has made it just that.
De jure ("by law") are the standards released by a lawmaking body (in this case the IETF or W3C). "Compliant HTML" fits this category. Please note that IMO RFCs do *not* fit within this category. RFC are Requests For COMMENTS. Standards are based on these, yes; but they aren't in the finalized form that a de jure standard needs to be.

Now, following either one of these is great, but by limiting yourself to just one you are going to eventually run into trouble with the other camp. Take, for example, the "Craptive X" features. Yeah, they are great when you are in the ~90%, but if your not, you know why I chose that name. The opposite is also true, there are websites that are making fully compliant HTML/XHTML/XML/CSS/javascript/etc. However, those sites "render" badly, if at all, in IE. Heck, there are even differences between the ways FF, Opera, render the same "compliant" code.

Now, some developers employ a remark along the lines of "Use another browser" to conceal the fact they can't/won't/whatever make their site work for whichever portion of the surfing population is affected by their shortcomings. There is even an increasing portion of this populous that go out of there way to sniff out these "inferior browsers" and redirect users to the homepage of whichever their favorite browser is. The funny part is that many times, other browsers (and the people who use them) get caught up in the fray and face these stupid redirections even when their tool can display the information coherently.

What I do like are the developers that have the mindset of remembering their end-users. The ones that have found the "Middle Path" and take the time to test out the way their site renders on *all* the different browsers. These are the developers that are worth their weight in Lutetium. For these are the people that remember the only standard that truly matters -- the standard of the end-user experience.

This standard isn't just limited to web-development either. We all know that applications that are actually beta tested are far better than those that were only used by their creator before being released. Heck, ask any interior designer who really gets the ultimate decision on which color scheme to use. Why can't we all remember this?

This standard is important. Does your creation make the cut?

Scalix and Digg

2006-09-28T23:01:00.000-04:00

This is the 2nd time typing this. Apparently Windows Movie Maker is causing deadlock problems on my computer...

The other day the below post came through Digg.

http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/Scalix_is_sneaking_Linux_in_through_the_corporate_mailbox

It was talking about an Open Source Exchange alternative. I do want to know how these things stack up, so I checked it out. The article just talked about the e-mail stuff. I want to know more (shared calendaring, contacts, etc.) so I had to check out scalix's website. I came across a link for a "product demo", so I clicked on it. I got the following error message:

"No native WebEx Event Manager is available for your platform."

That's the entire message. No list of supported platforms, contact numbers, or any other information on how to debug, etc. Taking what they said literally. I thought this meant that they didn't support Linux (in my case Ubuntu) and felt that the fact this was an OSS application, it warranted a comment. Being who I am, I felt the need to be sarcastic.

I got a response saying that message "really meant" I needed to install Java. Now, I have a big problem with stupid error messages, especially ones that mean one thing when they say something else. This waranteed another response, and I continued my sarcastic trend by comparing the message to women.

Apparently, my original replier didn't like this (even though I thanked him for deciphering the message for me). Instead he calls me an "ass" and says I'm immature.

Now, I admit being sarcastic is hard to detect over the Internet. Being sarcastic on Digg is no exception, and this is the ideal case to prove that. I should have simply:

1) Asked how to get the webex thing working on Ubuntu and
2) Thanked the person for telling me and wondered why the error message couldn't have helped me further
3) Erased the wondering part, and then said something along the lines of "this is why Linux rulz and all others droolz...blah"

This is why Linux isn't making it. Instead of addressing the valid points I had, the fellow Luser decided to chastize me for pointing them out. Now granted, this isn't the offical "WebEx support center," but it still illustrates a point that's bad in all crappy software. The people writing it praise its good points, hide the bad. Then when someone points out the "man behind the curtain" (in this case the weak points) they attempt to discredit him/her rather than fixing what needs to be fixed, or at least admiting that it needs to.

So, I've learned not to be sarcastic on Digg.

Hopefully developers will learn to produce things that won't lead me to make sarcastic comments.

Somehow, I doubt that's going to happen.

BTW, blogger's auto complete labeling could use some work. It completes a lot more than needed even when I erase what it just put in...

Friday

2006-09-22T22:05:00.000-04:00

It's Friday. I'm coming down with something. Spent most of the day working with Beta software. Lots of fun....

Tests and Ubuntu crud

2006-09-20T22:31:00.000-04:00

I got my test back yesterday. The score was a 91.5 out of 100.

Evolution crashed on me again a few days back. I had bug buddy go through and do its thing. At the end I had it CC a copy of the bug report e-mail to myself. Guess what? I never got a copy. I'm pretty sure bugs@gnome.com (or whereever it goes) didn't get a copy either. Let's hear it for Bug Buddy.

My friends are convincing me to dump Ubuntu and switch to Fedora. They are supposed to be releasing FC6 soon. I might give that a try. What I really want is something that works.

My Lovely State

2006-09-17T23:33:00.000-04:00

I live in South Carolina. It's a wonderful place that always ends up on the worst side of whichever list is created. Take today, we had our second paranoid schizo get arrested for keep his sex slave in an underground dungeon:

http://www.wltx.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=42049

Sigh, how many other states/countries can claim that honor?

Gun Shows

2006-09-16T23:42:00.000-04:00

Aren't these things great :-D

Getting Sleepy

2006-09-16T00:42:00.000-04:00

Last night I fell asleep early and didn't post. Today I stayed up late and posted after midnight.

Yesterday, I helped a former co-worker restore a misbehaving mount point. It was one of those "Stop digging" cases. He started off needing to update an application. Then, when that didn't work, he updated the entire OS. Then, when that broke he installed a different flavor of Linux. Then another. Then his current version of Linux informed him the mount point consisted of a "zero length partition." I'm not sure if Fedora just isn't able to read Debian formatted drives, or if it was something else. When I got there, we reinstalled Debian and did an fsck. fsck takes a long time on 1.6TB. After that he could access the files.

Today, I had the pleasure of installing a vendor's app on a 64-bit 2k+3 server. The installed wouldn't work because it was designed for a "different version of Windows." The app also spontaneously crashed after a certain point. Eventually, I was told to disable "Data Execution Prevention" for the app and it started working. Sadly, I was then told not to teach people how to use it. Personally, I don't see the logic in that call, but what can you do?

Night.

An Old Friend

2006-09-13T22:36:00.000-04:00

Last night after posting, I went to visit a friend I haven't seen in about five years. He was pretty much my best buddy in High School and lived right across the street from me. Sadly, he's one of those people that hasn't "broken his mold." He's still looking for a better job, better place to live, while still playing video games late into the night. I hope he finds what he's looking for and soon.

While I finally got Evolution to get the right time on my PDT appointment (I couldn't edit the time using the interface, and changing the time/timezone/combo on the actual .ics file didn't help either so I just deleted it and made my own). The honor of today's code complaint goes to the guy that's posting tomorrow's www.thedailywtf.com, Eric Sink. He had a blog posting that made reddit because he was able to make 100% code coverage (http://software.ericsink.com/articles/Code_Coverage.html). While this is a commendable feat, there is something that just isn't right about his example:


if (condition1)
{
  return result1;
}
else if (condition2)
{
  return result2;
}
else if (condition3)
{
  return result3;
}

Here's a hint, it isn't the fact that I left off the exception part he had so that he would get past the "not all control paths return a value" message. It's the fact that if he wrote the code right he would only need one return value.

Think of the poor sap that uses this function five years down the road and discovers it doesn't work with his exciting new app. How much harder is it going to be for him to find the bug when he's putting a command to debug what is returned by the function with it laid out that way? Compare it to this:


returnValue = INVALIDRETURNVALUE;
if (condition1)
{
  returnValue = result1;
}
else if (condition2)
{
  returnValue = result2;
}
else if (condition3)
{
  returnValue = result3;
}
return returnValue;

It's simpler to follow, prevents the C# error, and allows for easy use later down the road. This is what proper software engineering is about. Not just getting it working, but making it right for the people that extend/maintain/etc. the code after you.

Double Dose

2006-09-12T21:11:00.000-04:00

Well, I didn't post yesterday because I went to bed early. Therefore, this will consist of my grips for yesterday and today.

Yesterday I was greeted to an error message at work. It consisted of the phrase "Access is denied." Turns out the machine had been plugged into the wrong network jack. What this has to do with permissions I'll never know. I also tried to get audio for YouTube working on Ubuntu. Why does Linux make everything so hard? What is ESD and why does it not perform the way it should? Why, instead of fixing it, did someone come up with alsa?

Today was the first test in my Biostatistics class. Thanks to the crappy service at Norm's I got there five minutes late. I was still able to answer all the questions though. I'm sure I got the last question right. However, I wasn't sure how to "show my work." I know that doesn't make sense, but I used basic math to answer. I'm sure the teacher wants the logical probability proof. Oh well.

Today's bad software gripe goes to Evolution. I got an appointment from a vendor on the West Coast (I'm on the East). Instead of being smart enough to translate the timezone correctly, I now have an 8AM PDT meeting at 8AM EDT. I wonder who'll be there at that time? Of course, this seems to be on par for Evolution. That thing crashes at least once a week. It hasn't done it lately, so I'll get a double dose tomorrow. Also, whoever designed it's e-mail address interface was smoking some rare form of crack, it's God Aweful. Try to remove one recipient from a list. Go ahead, I dare you.

Another Sunday Post

2006-09-10T23:13:00.000-04:00

This is the real Sunday post...

Well as I mentioned, I got gallery working. I downloaded the 2.1.2 release. I must say that I'm not that impressed with it. Like most software out there, the phrase "rough around the edges" applies. I had to can the first install to get Postgres installed and running. When I tried the second install, it would only get to the fourth step before generating a new "login authentication" code. I think the apache thread is regenerating and that caused it, but I only looked through enough code to make the authentication check only return true.

Now, everytime I try to do something ... anything ... I get a stupid "Security Violation -- The action you attempted is not permitted." message (we'll explain why it's stupid below). The funny part is that if I hit refresh, it takes. So, immediately, I have to wonder if the bug is in the first message or the "taking" of the second try. In addition, the drop down under the images only appears on every other showing of the thumbnail page. This is really annoying. To top it off, there isn't a way to go from pic-to-pic on the edit photo page. So the whole change a photo's caption process is like this:

1. Choose picture to edit and enter "edit picture" mode.
2. Make change and click Save.
3. Notice error message, click refresh.
4. Notice "save successful" message at top, click the album title link at top.
5. Notice that drop downs aren't there, click refresh.
6. Navigate to next picture and repeate steps 1-5.

Now, why is that security message stupid? Well, which action did I (or the computer program on my behalf) perform that is causing the volation? Why is it "not permitted" (am I not part of an appropriate group, do I not possess the right token, etc.) How can I obtain the appropriate security level? Can you give me anything else to work with?

That's my beef with gallery2 atm. And yeah, I know the Open Source credo "don't whine, submit a patch, you didn't pay for it, we're better than proprietary." So much for software that "just works."

Don't get me started on YouTube's "agree that all videos flagged ... will be viewable" confirmation. Infinite loop ... yeee-haaaw.

PostgreSQL and Gallery Working

2006-09-10T01:15:00.000-04:00

Petr Janda was nice enough to send me clarification on how to get PostgreSQL startup scripts installed on DragonFly. Now that and Gallery are working on my server. Hopefully Ang will get some pictures uploaded soon (considering she was the motivation to get this working).

I'm fixing a friend's mom's PC. Her modem died. The machine is running 98 (SE at least). By chance, I went to windowsupdate. You get a wonderful feeling when you have to install the ActiveX control. Let's see 8 years and never updated. No wonder we have so many spambots around.

It's late. This is going to come up as Sunday's even though it's really the one for Saturday. Aren't Saturday nights that you spend at home fun? At least I wasn't alone.

Oooh nice. Tried the Spell checker. Got this error:

[Error:
name: TypeError
message: Statement on line 205: Could not convert undefined or null to object
Backtrace:
Line 205 of linked script http://beta.blogger.com/app/scripts/dom.common.js
return iframe.document;
Line 1 of eval script
getIFrameDocument(iframe).onkeydown = func;
Line 114 of linked script http://beta.blogger.com/app/scripts/spellcheck.js
setIFrameEvent(iframe, "keydown", keyhandler);
Line 256 of linked script http://beta.blogger.com/app/scripts/spellcheck.js
BLOG_setKeypressHandler();
Line 1 of eval script
BLOG_selectErrors([["Janda", 5, "Jandy", "Jenda", "Kaunda", "Canad", "Canada"], ["PostgreSQL", 66], ["startup", 77, "start up", "start", "stirrup", "statue"], ["DragonFly", 106, "Dragonfly", "Dragon Fly", "Dragonfly's", "Dragonflies"], ["Ang", 176, "Ange", "Angy", "Nag", "Ag", "An"], ["windowsupdate", 395, "windows update", "undissipated", "undisputed", "anticipated"], ["ActiveX", 468, "Actives", "Activates", "Octaves", "Arctics", "Activeness"], ["spambots", 550, "spam bots", "steamboats", "steamboat's", "speedboats"]]);
Line 169 of linked script http://beta.blogger.com/app/scripts/message.js
Goo_HandleResponse(transaction, msg_id, transactionStart, opt_handler);
At unknown location
[statement source code not available]

]
undefined

BLOG_selectErrors([["Janda",5,"Jandy","Jenda","Kaunda","Canad","Canada"],["PostgreSQL",66],["startup",77,"start up","start","stirrup","statue"],["DragonFly",106,"Dragonfly","Dragon Fly","Dragonfly\'s","Dragonflies"],["Ang",176,"Ange","Angy","Nag","Ag","An"],["windowsupdate",395,"windows update","undissipated","undisputed","anticipated"],["ActiveX",468,"Actives","Activates","Octaves","Arctics","Activeness"],["spambots",550,"spam bots","steamboats","steamboat\'s","speedboats"]]);

PostgreSQL on DragonFly

2006-09-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

I run DragonFly (http://www.dragonflybsd.org) on my server at home. Today I wanted to install PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) and run it as a back-end database. I've found out that pkgsrc, which DragonFly uses for its applications, doesn't install PostgreSQL start/stop scripts, meaningful config files, etc. In addition Google reveals no HOWTOs on getting it running on either pkgsrc or NetBSD (where pkgsrc was born).

Looks like I've found something to occupy my "free time" this weekend.

Why does Ctrl+Shift make blogger show the preview? I'm way too used to that key combo selecting words at a time.

Another day, another post

2006-09-07T23:34:00.000-04:00

Not much today. Class was fun. I was told to sit next to the "problem kid(s)" to "help them out." That's always lovely to hear.

I should mention to the reader(s) that at home I live with my wife, our two daughters, her mom, and her grandmother. Being at home is always a wonderful experience, and I treasure it greatly.

Back off to bed. Hopefully tomorrow I won't be in such a sarcastic mood.

My first Blog

2006-09-06T23:45:00.000-04:00

Well, I've finally decided to give this "blogging" thing a try -- wheee! Of course, I had to give it my own spin and call it a "flog." This is simply because this thing is going to be my blasting board. Because I'm quite the "critical person", I expect my thoughts, etc. are going to be quite heated (and sure to piss off a few folks). I'll leave the comments open to the public so you can voice your opinions along with mine. We'll see how long it takes for the spammers and trolls to change my mind.

I decided to go with blogger instead of building my own. This is simply because I lack the time. Yeah, I know there are other ones besides blogger. I don't know why I chose blogger instead of them, I just did. I'm on the beta because I like to try out the new goods. However, I also get all the new bugs. It acts polly-wolly-crappy on both Opera 9 (can't get past the login) and IE 7 (can't save my color scheme), so I'm using FF 1.5.0.6 to post this. Nothing makes me happier than when a site makes me use this fanboy browser...yay! We'll see how long I can stomach it until I give in and try something else.

Oh well, I better get to bed now. I've got both work and school tomorrow, so I better get a good night's sleep (and it's already 0:00).

Later!