this girl drives a tank

I have decided to blame my fiancé for the latest batch of hardware problems I found myself in. He had complained that the two computers in my room are too loud and makes it impossible to sleep.

He is sort of right, the desktop has an Nvidia graphics card with an extremely large and loud fan, plus a cheap noisy case fan, plus the power supply fan. As loud as it is, I have grown quite used to it and generally have music on when I fall asleep so don't notice it so much. I also have a server, but that has no fancy video card, only a somewhat noisy power supply.

I now have two Antec Sonata II cases.

They are black and very heavy, solid looking things and quite nice and shiny. I decided to not think about what was going on and rush right in to swapping the cases. Shouldn't be a problem. I have in the old case 3 hard drives and one DVD writer all on the IDE channels. I hauled them all out and put the motherboard into the new case. Then I realized that I had forgot to take note of which drive was a master or slave and what channel of the IDE bus it was on.

There was also another minor issue. The case is set up such that the hard drives are perpendicular to the DVDRW drive, that is, facing you when you open the door. Because I am using all 4 IDE channels I have to make one of the hard drives live on the same cable as the DVDRW. The problem is that the distance between the DVDRW and the hard drive is too far for any of the standard cables IDE cables to reach. The solution was buying a SATA drive and reinstalling the OS on that. Not much of a solution I know.

I had a couple of versions of Debian sitting around but for the life of me couldn't get them installed, every time either the GRUB installation would fail or some file on the installer was deemed corrupt. It turns out that my laptop's DVD/CDRW combo drive is on its way to a certain death. It took me ages to figure this out as I was convinced it something I was doing wrong with all this new hardware.

Anyway I am now fully re-installed and everything seems ok. The case is **really** quiet but now he is complaining that the little blue neon lights on he front are too bright.....grr..

The Arcade Fire made an appearance on Saturday Night Live last night, performing `intervention'. I am going to see this band at the famous Massey Hall on the 15th or 16th of May, a concert I am very much looking forward to.

I found a really odd cover song on youtube the other day, Paul Anka covering Nirvanas' `Smells like teen spirit'. It's actually pretty good as opposed to this most horrible of cover attempts, Celine Dion covering ACDC's `You Shook Me All Night Long'..

/me shudders...

Some good news in the software world, according to this email, we will not have to wait long to see the very pretty xft branch of emacs merged into the emacs-snapshot package. Also, GNU Screen now officially supports vertical splits. The updated package is not yet in Debian unstable but I don't suppose we will have to wait that long for it to arrive.

Finally, I was given a new hard drive to hold my ripped movies. Its a 320GB drive that I formatted with theXFS filesystem. I chose XFS since I had never used it before and it is supposedly very good at handling larger files which movies tend to be. I had to load the XFS kernel module and install two packages xfsprogs xfsdump but other than that it went nice and smoothly. Some people have warned me in irc that XFS isn't that stable but others then said they've had no problems with it so I guess time will tell.

If your any kind of geek you already know who ESR, RMS and Linus are. You might have noticed that ESR has quite publicly stated he will no longer run Red Hat and will favour of Ubuntu instead. ESR's reasoning as best as I can tell, is that Red Hat should in fact first try to obtain a wider user base and then, with a market share that actually has some clout, lobby for Free Software and open formats and all that good stuff.

I am not sure this is the best approach. I do feel like ESR wants Red Hat Linux to become a big player in the desktop market, and I am quite certain Ubuntu has the same goal so I expect ESR will quite enjoy his new OS. However it seems silly to me to sacrifice some freedoms to get to the top and then try to get those freedoms back.

Another thing that struck me was that he had a problem upgrading a specific package and then hand removed some files and then was unable to reinstall said package, he then decided against booting into rescue mode and fiddled some more, finally resulting in an unbootable machine. All this without backing up any data beforehand and using a community driven `testbed' OS and not a stable release.

I have a great respect for someone that wrote fetchmail and the bulk of the code for both Emacs modes for VC and GDB but still, I don't think this was Fedora's fault.

In other news, my niece set a new record (36 times in one day) for text messaging me while I was at work :-) She is in fact quite remarkable at texting, she knows how many times to press each number to get the desired letter without even looking at the phone. Luckily for me and her mom, I let her use a cellphone from work which she can use with no charge just to message me.

For years our company used to use special keys (the kind that had `do not copy' engraved on them) to control who had access to our remote cellphone radio rooms. This got very impractical very quickly as keys got lost, contractors had to go through all sorts of trouble to obtain keys and we often needed keys for not only the radio room, but the rooftop door or a fence etc, etc.

About 5 years ago we invested literally a few million dollars in an electronic system developed by General Electric. Everyone now has a little electronic key that takes a four digit pin code. We can then issue new door codes to these keys every week and every keys' history is transmitted back to us every week. Basically we can now log the exact time every door opened and who opened it. So far so good.

This week one of our contractors had left his key at home and called me in a big panic because he needed to access one of our sites to fix something. I said I would see what I could do and scrounged around to see if I could get a temporary key for him. When I called him back he had already entered the site. I asked him how he did it and he explained that these locks are very simple to circumvent.

As it turns out all you need to do to open one of these is measure what voltage is sent to the two metal pins when you enter a correct code, and use any kind of battery that sends the same voltage. I am no electrical engineer but I know you can buy resistors and such things at Radio Shack that will reduce 9v down to whatever this key needs.

When I told my boss this he laughed his ass off. When I asked one of our engineers about this seemingly incredible design flaw he also laughed and said "yeah, that seems about right".

Here are some songs that I like right now:
Ride: From Time to Time
The Stars: Reunion
South: Southern Climbs

I have tried several image viewers over the years but generally had always drifted back to gqview. First released in 1998, gqview is quite mature, stable and does what its supposed to do but has always missed on a few things that I needed it to to do, like the ability to crop, resize and make thumbnails without having to open a gimp session.



Mirage seems to be just what I was looking for, it is as fast as advertised and light on library dependencies and of course GPL. I also like how you can cycle the images with the left and right keys which makes navigation quite fast. I left the image rendering set to the default `bilinear' which works fine for me. I suppose that the reason Mirage is so fast is that at this point there is no sidebar with thumbnails, perhaps this is a feature to come later. You can also create custom actions that may be shell commands or executables and bind them to any key which opens up a lot possibilities.

take an ounce of raspberry vodka.... My backup server which has no monitor, mouse or keyboard attached to it has suddenly decided it no longer wishes to obtain an IP address automatically. I can issue sudo ifup eth0 and it will go off and fetch an IP but at bootup it fails to do this.

My /etc/network/interfaces file is exactly the same as my desktops and the desktop has no problems at all. I haven't had time to figure out what has changed but I don't like not having a nightly backup so it is something I should fix soonish.

add a splash of chocolate liqueur... Debian unstables' version of gtkpod(0.99.4), has for a long long time simply crashed whenever I started it. There are quite a few bugs filed regarding this but for several months now no upgrade to fix it. I needed to add some new music and happily the cvs version compiles cleanly and so far works like a charm.

top with chilled champagne and enjoy... Unfortunately for me though, my niece got hold of my iPod and accidentally set the language to Chinese (at least it appears to be Chinese as best as I can tell). We tried our best to find the language settings but eventually gave up and used some Apple app to restore the thing to its factory settings, Which is why this evenings activity was filling the iPod with music again.

(in case your wondering, I know this is Valentines but my boyfriend has to work tonight so we will do something later this week.)

I was given a printer this week. It's an HP Deskjet 952c, an older discontinued printer. I don't really need a printer at home as I can print stuff at work anytime I want but I have never printed anything under linux and thought I would give it a try.

I am not sure where to start or what to install. Debian seems to have a driver called hplip and some tools in the djtools package, but I am not sure if that's all I need. There is also a package called printconf that installs and configures CUPS for you. The Debian Wiki seems to suggest this package.

You may recall I had installed Debian on my work laptop and last week had booted it at work, and then went to microwave my lunch. When I got back to my desk, my IT guy was there. He had been in our department and I guess noticed the LILO prompt and had booted into linux. He was sat there looking at the encrypted partition password prompt. He asked me what the password was and I told him it was none of his business. He replied that it was his business as he was responsible for all the software on this computer. I asked him that included Excel and he gave me a funny look and again asked for the password. I then told him it was "MCSE" and walked away to eat my lunch. After lunch he was gone but the laptop was still there so maybe he got bored or something.

Apologies for the lack of blogging over the last week but I have been swamped at my office job and have also been doing bartending at night, plus some gym time in the evenings, so it has been quite hectic. Bear with me for another week or so..

John Clarke wrote to tell me about Network Manager which I installed on my laptop and must say, is quite good at managing wired and wireless connections. It lists any network it can see and simply connects to the one you click on. The only issue I see right off the bat is that you must be inside X Windows to do this, not a major issue but still something to be aware of. (X might fail to load, you need google to figure out the error message, yada yada yada)

Wouter Verhelst, a Debian developer seems not to like Network Manager, he writes:

wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip link set eth0 up
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
195.144.77.32/28 dev eth0  proto kernel  scope link  src 195.144.77.43
wouter@anything:~$ sudo ip route add default via 195.144.77.33
RTNETLINK answers: Network is unreachable
wouter@anything:~$ ip route show
wouter@anything:~$ apt-get --purge remove network-manager



Yes, this really happened, and no, there were no pauses between the different
commands except for the time needed for me to type them out.

To be honest, I don't really understand what is going on there so I will pretend everything is ok and distract you with an elephant.

Work has been a nightmare. I have to do a technical course on HSDPA. My boss has decided I should understand more about the underlying technology of a cellular phone network. I think he's nuts, but oh well. The course isn't that easy and I find myself a few steps behind the rest of the people in the class as they are mostly all field technicians that work hands on with the radios at our cell sites. It did amuse me to note that the teacher actually cited Wikipedia several times. I felt like going home that evening and editing the the HSDPA page to put an elephant in the way.