Except, it never seems to be that easy. I’ve been having issues with my reverse lights lately. It seems they work fine right between when the car starts and before you put it into drive. Luckily at the brake tag station, reverse lights were tested before I had to move the car.

I also have a headlight with water in it, and it isn’t secured to the frame very well. It won’t fall out or anything, but it’s loose. The brake tag guy said that he couldn’t give me a tag for that, but if I went home, drilled some small holes so the headlight would drain now and in the future, and made an effort to secure the headlight, all would be good. I drilled the holes, and showed that I had run the suggested bead of caulk (which I don’t thing will work long term, but that’s what he suggested), and drove over. When the tag hit the window I got the hell out, and met up with Amy Jett so she could take the truck for the weekend to move.

Also, I made this for you Linux users and fans of The Lord of the Rings. It’s not hard to imagine the Venn diagram for that – just draw a circle.

 
I’m sure this isn’t an original idea, the “One does not simply _____ into Mordor” being an established meme and all, but I have yet to see an SSH implementation – of course I haven’t looked either.

 
Not that I’m a photographer, or have a tripod, or anything really other than a point and shoot camera, but it really intrigued me. That photo, and many others (Flickr HDR pool) show the stunning results achieved by High Dynamic Range Photography. It’s a pretty simple method, depending on your available equipment, but here’s the basic idea: take multiple photos of the same subject, all at different exposure levels, then combine them in your darkroom (digital or traditional). I’m not even going to touch the traditional method here, that’s not for me.

Photoshop CS2 and later have built in partially automated methods for merging your photos to one single picture, but I tried it, and it didn’t really do anything for me – I’m not that into tweaking various levels and whatnot. There are other apps that work with varying degrees of success, and to be honest, I didn’t even look at them. There doesn’t seem to be a real need now, as there appears to be a new, mean, powerful kid on the block. The name is Enfuse, and it started on Linux, but lives happily on OSX and Win32 also.

You can read a bit more about it and HDR basics (along with some screenshots and software/result comparisons) at this article on linux.com.

So, maybe you photo nerds will have some fun with this. Everyone else should go browse that pool, as there are some really amazing pictures.

Through the subsequent comments/links to external sites, Tim picked out some comments about Hospitals keeping Magna Doodles to communicate with patients that cannot speak. He picked one up on his way over, and gave it to Marcy, who proceeded to write her name on it. Tim asked if she would like to use his now-retired PowerBook, and she said yes.

I spent a chunk of my afternoon today, looking into modifying the keyboard map so that it could be used with one hand (the left, in this case) in OSX. Not a whole bunch came up.

Finally, I ran across an app named Ukelele, a nice, graphical Mac OS X keyboard layout editor that somehow seemed to evade my venerable Google-Fu.

Anyways, I created a layout named Marcy ( download keylayout here ). Here are the installation/usage instructions, and a diagram of the keymappings. I decided to use Caps Lock as the key switcher. Could have used Shift, but this just seemed easier.

Save Marcy.keylayout to /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ or Library/Keyboard Layouts/ in your home directory if you don’t have write access to /Library.
Logout and log back in.
Go to International in the System Prefs, and enable Marcy. This will automatically show the input (flag) menu in the menu bar – to switch to Marcy, just click on the American Flag (or whatever your default it), and select Marcy. That’s it.

 

willt@cog ~ $ date; uptime; uname -a; cat /proc/cpuinfo
Wed Apr 4 17:16:29 CDT 2007
17:16:29 up 238 days, 14:16, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.06, 0.06
Linux cog 2.6.18-rc6 #1 PREEMPT Mon Sep 11 17:51:55 CDT 2006 i586 AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
processor : 0
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 5
model : 8
model name : AMD-K6(tm) 3D processor
stepping : 12
cpu MHz : 400.938
cache size : 64 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 1
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr mce cx8 pge mmx syscall 3dnow k6_mtrr
bogomips : 802.47

I got this processor in ’98 when it came out. It’s been running pretty much ever since.
To be fair, I did give it about a month and a half vacation in 2005 (Katrina).

I think that the most surprising/impressive thing about the above output is that the bike in which it lives hasn’t lost power, well, been out of power for longer than my humble UPS could provide, in ~8 months. This is the pseudo-famously-electrically-unstable Maringy Triangle, chirrens.

I then drove out to Metairie for tuxedo fixin’s for Friday, and my car won’t start. Go figure.
Towing it tomorrow.

Other than that, Happy Pi Day!

Over the past few days, I have taken another step. For a long time now, I’ve been running an AMD Athlon 750 MHz (Slot A!) based system as my main home server. Still running strong and stable, if noisy.

Well, that box got turned off the other day. It has been replaced by a much smaller, quieter, G4 Mac Mini. It had been sitting in a box for a while, and I decided it was time to Linux-ify it.

It was a pretty easy install and is much quieter and faster, and I’m going to go ahead and post up a caveat or two and a config or two for you other G4 Mac Mini Linux (Gentoo specific) peoples.

#uname -a
Linux halo 2.6.18.4 #5 Sun Jan 7 14:51:37 CST 2007 ppc 7447A, altivec supported PowerMac10,1 GNU/Linux

1) Kernel configs: Mine doesn’t have wi-fi or bluetooth, so I turned it all off. Your integrated ethernet device uses the Sun GEM driver. Also, weird thing here, you _must_ enable framebuffer support and compile in your proper video card. Lame, but necessary. A simple lspci yielded the following relevant info:
0000:00:10.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV280 [Radeon 9200] (rev 01)

2) /etc/make.conf (your use flags will vary, but you should add altivec anyways:

CFLAGS=”-O3 -pipe -mcpu=7400 -mtune=G4 -maltivec -mabi=altivec -fno-strict-aliasing -mpowerpc-gfxopt -fomit-frame-pointer”
CHOST=”powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu”
CXXFLAGS=”${CFLAGS}”
MAKEOPTS=”-j2″
PORTAGE_NICENESS=3
AUTOCLEAN=”yes”
FEATURES=”ccache”
CCACHE_DIR=”/var/tmp/ccache/”
CCACHE_SIZE=”2G”

USE=”altivec apache2 ssl php session unicode mailwrapper mysql mysqli nfs zlib -ldap -doc -java -X -X11 -opengl -cups -ipv6 -gdk -gtk -gnome -qt -qt3 -qt4 -kde -alsa”
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=”~ppc”

3) Well, that’s really all. It wasn’t a very bad install, outside of figuring out that framebuffer issue and the inherent dumbness of yaboot.

Part of the Patriot Act states that when a policy is being created or is up for renewal, we must check the insured’s name against the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), which basically means that if you are Cuban or linked to a terrorist organization, we can’t insure you.

Anyways, as a result of the last AAMGA Open Source round-table discussion (I didn’t attend – how did I miss that?), a new site/forum has been set up primarly for us IT guys in the insurance industry. One company has pretty much spear-headed the initiative, and as soon as I heard about this, I went to the powers-that-be, and told them what I wanted to do.

About a year ago, I wrote a quick little web-based app to download the OFAC database from the US Treasury Dept. and input it into a MySQL database so that my users can search it. Wrote the app in an afternoon, both saving us a bunch of money (by not buying ignorantly priced software) and making us OFAC/Patriot Act compliant.

Over the past few days, I’ve been going back over it as I have time, cleaning it up and prepping it. I registered a project (still pending dammit – hurry up) at sourceforge called openOFAC. As soon as I can, I’ll be uploading my files to the repository and sending the guys over at insuranceITpro.com a link to the app, establishing our company early on as a progressive and open-source friendly company.
The last line of the previous sentence sounded like media spin, didn’t it?

We use the following major open source apps as major backbones of our business, I figured it’s time to give something back: PHP, MySQL, Apache, Gentoo Linux, Samba, openLDAP, openSSL, openSSH, Rsync, openVPN, and Firefox/Thunderbird, just to name a few.

Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in my living room (Molly’s, at the end of the bar), getting some work done, and the guy next to me asked if he could pull up a website.
I say sure, open up a new tab in Firefox, and rotate it over to him.

What does he do? He knocks half a pint of Harp into my laptop. Inside of two seconds of The Wettening™, I had flipped my powerbook over and removed the battery and powercord.

So now that all is mostly dry and crunchy, I feel a bit disabled,a bit gimpy. I still have my Treo, and while it may have an SSH client, it doesn’t have applications like Fireworks and Photoshop. In another day or so, I’ll disassemble the laptop and begin the cleaning. Hopefully all will be good. If not, the hard drive should be fine, and homeboy will cough up $1800 towards a new MacBook Pro.

And no, he doesn’t have a fist-sized hole in his chest. I exerted every ounce of restraint and grace during this situation, believe it or not.

We (as people in general, but sysadmins specifically) try to prepare for disasters. In the even that one does occur, hopefully we take something from our experiences and alter our practices / backup routines accordingly.

In my case, my office was fine for Katrina. I did have to get a tape mailed overnight, but overall, not too bad. There is, however, room for improvement. While we were okay in respect to the storm, I did lose a couple of days in simple hard disk addition last week. Then a tape failed. To rectify this situation, and improve the Hurricane Contingency Plan, I have implemented an off-site storage system.

Using rdiff-backup, my data is now backup up through a secure connection to a drive at both my apartment and to a server in our Houston office. Houston also off-sites to my apartment and our New Orleans office, in addition to their tape drive. While the initial copying may use quite a bit of bandwidth and time (at night, don’t really care), the subsequent usage is quite small, especially if I optimize/clean/restructure my files and filestructure for it. This is a pretty old network, and as a result, there are copies of copies of files, installers, etc. A clean-up is in order anyways.

To facilitate this new backup routine, I have also changed how my users utilize their Outlook. One of them has a .pst file that clock in at about 1GB. That’s alot of data to push. What i have done is broken it into 3 separate files:
current.pst: All work-related Email from 2006 (on a backed-up network drive).
archive.pst: All work-related Email from 2005 and before (on a backed-up network drive).
personal.pst: All personal Email (on their non-backed up local drive).

Instead of one 1GB .pst, I have a ~20MB current.pst (which will grow), a ~650MB archive.pst, and a ~300MB personal.pst
So, instead of potentially pushing 1GB of data daily (or as a restore) for this one user, I’m looking more at ~20MB, at least for now. Do the math.
Plus, should any of those files become corrupted, it will help contain the damage.

Much of my personal data was either not backed up, or inaccessible. And then my 250GB data drive failed.
So my home network is about to get a long-needed overhaul.

I would like to take this moment to praise Spiralcom Communications for two reasons:

1) WinTAR-SCSI – A beautiful piece of software that makes it stupid easy to restore GNU tars from a tape on a Win32 box.

2) Their tech support. I apparently misplaced my serial number. Figuring it would be a shot in the dark, I fired them an email about an hour ago. Within 10 minutes, I had my serial. Bravo.

It is this kind of service and response that makes people like me ( you know, the sysadmin that stays up all night and day to get things back up and running ) happier and reassured.

So, my Gentoo Linux box is re-compiling, and my tape drive is in a Win32 box, having all the data restored from it.
Oh, and you other Gentooers out there – Here is a great resource for tried-and-true stable Stage1 CHOST and CFLAGS options, based on your proc.

And dammit, I’m hungry. Grrrbiscuits. New word – use it.