Planet TechShow

Happy fuzzies

2008-11-20T02:52:17+00:00

There is nothing like having happy fuzzies.

Ferret Math

2008-11-19T00:40:51+00:00

Ferret math is a curious mathematical oddity whereby one ferret mysteriously becomes many. It can happen a million different ways, but almost certainly it will happen to most ferret owners. This is how it happened to me just this past weekend.

When last I wrote, my friend Benny had to be put to sleep. They think he had cancer and we knew for sure he had an enlarged spleen and a heart murmur. He sure was a great little fellow though.

Benny’s death left Stinkerbell all alone. Somehow, in the midst of mourning, my wife and I ended up at the local SPCA *just to look*, the idea being that ferrets are such social critters and we didn’t want Stinkerbell to be lonely. Well, it was probably that we were feeling pretty lonely too. Ferrets my be pretty small critters, but they have huge personalities and leave big holes in your heart and life when they are gone.

At the SPCA we found 2 little female ferrets who badly need a home. Unfortunately, my landlord was a little slow on the draw returning their phone call, and they have some other draconian adoption policies which prohibited us from adopting the 2 of them right then and there. The people at the SPCA have their hearts in the right place, but they obviously know nothing about ferrets whatsoever.

Somehow (ferret math here we come), a couple hours after that, I ended up looking at ferrets at the local PetCo with my wife and daughter. After a quick ferret-jedi hand wave, 2 of them were riding home in my car. Don’t ask.

The first of the 2 we called “Cake”. He was a beautiful cream colored ferret with a loving personality. We brought him home, introduced them all together for some good play time and, after the ferrets were finally worn out, we put them to sleep in the cage. They were all happy and getting along famously. Unfortunately, the next morning, Cake would not get up. He wasn’t particularly sick looking, just didn’t want to move. We took him back to the pet store who got him to their vet where he died some 20 minutes later. The vet believes that Cake died of insulinoma and had some tumors as well. And he was just a baby. It was sad.

The other ferret we brought home that day is “Teddy”. He is aptly named because he is just like a big cuddly teddy bear. He’s only 5 months old or so and very affectionate and REALLY soft and nice to hold. I think it is a ploy to get him a good home, and it worked. Although Teddy has not been to our vet yet, he appears to me to be quite healthy and exhibits normal youthful ferret behavior, ie he can’t sit still when he is awake. This is a good sign. He also gets along with Stinkerbell pretty well (although not famously yet).

If your counts are correct, that’s 2 ferrets down in less than 24 hours and 1 pleasant addition.

I had mentioned during this ordeal, I think when we were looking at ferrets at PetCo and picked up Teddy and Cake, that I had always wanted an albino ferret. Well, after I found out the bad news about Cake from the vet on monday afternoon, my wife was calling around to see what ferrets the other local PetCo’s in the area had and the next closest store had 1 ferret there. It was a 9 month (I think - old for a petstore) albino ferret which we learned later was born on my birthday. Of course I went to look at him and, you guessed it, he had to come home with us too. We named him “Puff” because he is SOOO soft, and white like a little powder puff. Although a bit older than Teddy, Puff has crazy energy. Initially I was hoping that he could keep up with Teddy, because Stinkerbell is getting old. I am quickly realizing that it’s Teddy that is going to have to keep up

I don’t know what more to write about my fuzzies here except I am happy to have them all. One dog, one cat and 3 ferrets. It takes a little patience and a lot of love to be owner of a fuzzy farm like I have, but the rewards are immense. Losing them really sucks, but not having had in my life at all is surely worse.

Now go and pet *your* fuzzy.

RIP Benny

2008-11-16T04:15:58+00:00

The bad part of being a pet owner is that, in eventuality, you have to deal with the death of a friend.

Today I had to put my friend Benny to sleep. He had been quite ill much of his life with some undiagnosed illness and mass in his lung, not to mention his heart murmur. Today my wife noticed his rear end was paralized. It was time.

Benny was a great ferret. Jubilant in his youth, he was a happy and loving companion for his whole, short life. We’ll miss him.

Linux and Netbooks - what’s the truth?

2008-11-16T02:26:11+00:00

There has been a lot of flak these past few weeks over the supposed failure of Linux on netbooks. Articles claiming returns are 4 times higher than those running windows, some vendors recalling netbooks to replace linux with windows, etc. But what I notice is there are a lot of inconsistencies with the “facts” with one article contradicting another. It’s almost as if someone is feeding fud into this environment. But that could not be right, could it?

Hmmm…. A year ago Asus dropped the eeePC on the market and the netbook exploded hailing the “demise of the desktop/laptop” as oem’s made a mad dash to the bottom of the hardware stack. What was scoffed at by MS resulted in them, in conjunction with the failings of Vista, to revive XP after they attempted to end the life of this way out dated os a few scant months earlier. Apple has gone record calling these netbooks “crap.” And that we will never see such shoddy products from Coopertino. Yet, they are lowering the prices and functionality of their low end laptops to compete.

When I first heard the claim that Linux based netbooks were being returned 4 times more than windows based netbooks my first response was: “How many Linux netbooks were sold compared to those running XP?” Those statistics have not come out yet. But why is it that I consistently see Linux based netbooks sold out on Amazon and NewEgg? Why is it I see such glowing reviews of these Linux based netbooks? And why have I heard not to stellar reviews of XP on these things claiming they are sluggish and stripped of features?

I agree with the sentiment that many people don’t understand what a netbook is. It’s not a replacement for a desktop or laptop but an adjunct. They are ultra-portable systems you can take to the can, the classroom and on the go for simple tasks that make up 90% of what people do with their systems. They are not really suited for gaming or video editing or even graphic design, even though I can do all these with my eeePC if I wanted. It seems those people who want to nail them down to replacing their laptop or desktop are the ones crying foul the loudest.

As for carphone recalling their linux netbooks, it appears that is not the case at all
, even though they may have stopped selling the linux based systems.

I have heard it commented that this is a new market not only for consumers and Linux, but for consumers and netbooks. A market I suspect will come into it’s own shortly as consumers begin to understand what a netbook actually is and they get more comfortable with Linux. Some have posited that it is incumbent upon the manufacturers to better educate the consumer on these products and while I can agree that better instruction cannot hurt, I thought that the documentation and the configured home page all about the eeepc was a great start.

We shall see what the future holds, but I still see more success for both netbooks and Linux. Both have worked to change computing as we know it.

An interesting project perhaps?

2008-11-14T02:30:33+00:00

The posts today are flying from my fingers! I guess watching Kitchen Nightmares has somehow gotten my brain and fingers working in conjunction with one another…

I mentioned that with my router troubles I had taken some pleasure in watching the people in my neighborhood connect to my unconnected router because it was unprotected and try to surf through it. It would sit there and blink like a dozen crazed fireflies half the night long.

Well, that got me thinking. If (and I do mean *if*) I can do some sort of reset magic and get my old router to function a little again, what about setting up a sort of science experiment? I am thinking of setting up a lone linux box, connected only to that default and unprotected router (except maybe a real admin password) and have that doll out connections to these people and have all web traffic redirected to a local page. The thought had crossed my mind to have all the web traffic redirected to a local goatse page, but perhaps that is too nasty. Maybe just collect all the statistical info I can get from their machines and redirect them to a page notifying them that I did just that and that and this connection wasn’t going to get them anywhere.

So, to that end, I am looking for ideas and suggestions on how to accomplish that feat. Perhaps squid? That might be a little heavy though, and I am under the impression that somehow we can do this with just iptables? There has to be an easy way. So, again, please let me know if you have hints, tips, or suggestions. This just might turn out to be some real fun!

OpenNetMon

2008-11-14T00:59:12+00:00

I just mentioned how my internet connection went down in the middle of the night. Of course I don’t check my network when I get up in the morning until I get to work and try and get access to my email. At that point, if it’s something I can’t walk my wife through, I am out of luck until I get back home. That sort of scenario is most annoying, not only for me but also for the rest of my family who depend on the internet connection for their communication, entertainment and research as well.

That being the case I decided that what I really need is some sort of notification when that type of thing happens, so I can address it quicker. I started looking into different network monitoring packages and came up short. At work I use Nagios, which is a great piece of software, but tough to set up and overkill for what I really need. There are several others as well, but nothing quite fits the bill and everybody you ask tells you to use Nagios anyhow, so using anything else is not exactly confidence inspiring.

Several years ago I wrote a junky network monitoring script in bash. I decided to harvest a little bit from that and my newfound knowledge of the workings of better programs and have another go at it. I put together a very simple framework that I’ll call “OpenNetMon” unless something better happens along. This framework, written in bash scripts, allows me to write different modules for different types of monitoring, and different types of actions and chain them all together with specific servers and services that I need to be watched. It was very quick to get going, has a lot of flexibility, and so far, seems to work pretty well. I slapped the pieces I needed to use onto my account on Danns server (Hi Dann) and I have it checking icmp, http, ssh and imap access on 5 of my servers every 10 minutes. It takes less than 3 seconds to do so, including maintaining a service status change log and emailing and paging me with service changes.

Not quite sure where this is going just yet, but if you’re interested in tinkering on this project, just let me know.

How to ruin an uptime

2008-11-14T00:35:52+00:00

I had this old Belkin wireless router at home, and I knew it was on the way out for some time now. The symptoms were it would occasionally just stop allowing any new connections. A couple weeks ago I purchased a nice little Netgear wireless router to replace it with, but as luck would have it, I didn’t do it fast enough.

I have told stories here about my penchant for procrastination at home. They are all too true I assure you. It’s sort of like that old adage that the mechanic’s car always is in need of repair Likewise, so it is with the System Administrator as well. I went week by week without the gumption to actually configure this new router and dig through the pile of ethernet cables and power wires to replace the old one. I will have to note, however, that I did take a perverse glee from seeing people in my neighborhood connect to my new and powered on but not connected router and try to surf the web. More on that later….

Back to the old router. As you may have guessed, I waited just long enough for it to die while I was not in a position for an immediate fix, throwing my wife and daughter into the thralls of several hours of internet withdrawal. For some reason, at 3:30 in the morning, it dropped it’s connection to my cable modem and steadfastly refused to grab an address from it again. My internal network was working just fine and you could connect to the wireless here, but could not get out through the intertubes whatsoever.

The fix was lengthy, mostly because of poor planning and much haste to get things running again. I put the new router in place fast enough, but, of course, I had to configure it for my specific network needs. This is where the trouble was. I had to change the base addressing to reflect my normal subnet. That was easy. I also had to change the password. That was a snap. I added in my port forwarding information. I turned off the router’s dhcp (I run a dhcp server). I had to fight through several resets of the router and cable modem to get the cable modem to hand out an address to my new router. The real rub came with my dyndns though. You see, in order for me to get into my email, my mail config points to my dyndns address. Well, due to my piss poor planning, all my dyndns account information was (you guessed it) stored in my email. Can’t get into email because no dyndns, can’t set up dyndns because account info in email. Sheesh, what a pain. I spent maybe an hour trying different account names and a dozen old passwords until I found the right combo.

None of that tells you how the uptime was ruined though. That was just an absolutely stupid moment I had. I take great pride normally in pointing out to windows users that you almost never have to reboot a working Linux/unix system. It’s just not necessary unless you can’t get a shell somehow. Well, I must be working too close to the windows guys because before I figured out why I couldn’t get into my email, I spent a good 20 minutes or so troubleshooting and getting increasingly frustrated until, you guessed it, I played the old “lets just reboot the server and see if that fixes things” card. How humbling it was to lose my 195 day uptime and of course the reboot helped nothing. It really was one of those “I could have had a V8″ moments.

So what are some things to be learned form this? Normally I keep a file tucked away that holds all my various logins and account information and passwords. Of course, my dyndns info was missing from this. You can rest assured it’s there now. Although it does not sound like good security practice to do that, there just is no other practical way I can think of to manage all that info than to keep a list somehow. The other thing is, by all means, when you start to get frustrated with a problem, step away for a moment and/or ask someone for advice before you make it worse. I guarantee that if I had stepped away and maybe called Dann or something, I would have realized what a dope was being before I finished dialing the number. Instead I just blundered my way through because I was tired and irritated causing myself even more downtime than was necessary.

Enlightenment 16, Awesome and Dual Displays

2008-11-12T02:31:52+00:00

During a bit of my lunch today I set to checking out e16 and awesome at the behest of a comment to my previous post on the type of dual display behavior I wanted. I did not pull down e17 because that was not in the standard Ibex respositories. Anyway, I bounced into e16 first. It was just as I remembered it. Going on what? 10 years now. There have been some changes though. There was compositing effects and nice little touches to the interface. On the dual display it was slick and fast but I was not able to achieve the effect I desired. Again, that is dual displays operating independently that I can pass windows between. Now granted i did not dig too deeply into any documentation. I tried both the twinview and Xinerama, but no success.

I spent some time playing around though. E16 is nice, but not enough to replace Xfce on my workstation at work. Oh well.

Awesome fared even less time. I’m not sure whether it would achieve the results I wanted because I did not spend any time playing around with it. Awesome is a very minimalistic window manager that presents you with multiple desktop, 9 I believe by default, from which you launch applications via an xterm. I’m not going to say Awesome is not awesome, but I don’t think it is for me. While I prefer lighter weight desktops, I like a little pizazz.

Oh well, the quest is still on. I blame Linc of course for this failing.

Multi-headed blues

2008-11-10T00:23:56+00:00

At the beginning of last week I posted to our identica that I was bummed over the Nvidia twin view in that I could not drag windows between the different screens. Fab from linuxoutlaws recommended Xinerama. So I eventually got around to that. It was a painless configuration and I did get the ability to move windows between the screens. The only downside was that now I cannot switch virtual desktops between the screens independently. That does not work for me.

It would be nice if there was a way to have independent screens between which I could pass windows back and forth. When I switch to the second virtual desktop of the first screen, the second remains on the first virtual desktop.

I also noticed that with twin view, if I attempt to open a link from the second screen, it will not hit the firefox on the first screen. Instead, it will complain that there is already another instance of firefox running. I wonder if there is a fix for that?

Two problems there I will have to investigate. Anyone have any ideas?