This blog is dead....

...long live the blog.

The long weekend has given me the chance to do some stuff on my computer at home. Here are some of the things I have learned.

I spent some time looking for color profiles to use with the likes of GIMP. I went looking to see if I could find any for my digital camera. Turns out that my camera is so old that it is a museum piece. I spent a couple of hours with Google and could not find an icc or icm file anywhere.

I managed to find some profiles for my monitor by looking in the cab files that contain the software on the driver disc. I have them extracted now.

My monitor also has a non-standard aspect ratio. I tried to set up a new screen resolution but gave up. I did find that I actually have a clearer picture if I set the resolution to the optimum resolution and set the font size larger so I can read everything. I still end up using the compiz zoom feature a lot.

I spent so Christmas money on a new keyboard. The actual keyboard is really nice to use. The extra multimedia keys around the keyboard do not. Actually some of them do, but the one I would like to work does not. That is the zoom toggle on the left hand side. I cannot seem to get anything to register the key press. Even xev does not register it. I suspect there is a low-level something that is missing. Hopefully it will start working as new versions of kernels and other software are available. I am also hoping I can make it scroll, or compiz zoom. The original intention of the keyboard is to increase font sizes.

This keyboard also has an "F-lock" button. Took me ages to work out why the function keys did not work. I have no idea what useful purpose the "f-lock" key serves. If anyone knows, then pass it on.

The keyboard also has a wireless mouse with it too. I must say that I am not very impressed with it. The biggest annoyance has to be the flakiness of the middle button. The middle mouse button gets used a lot, and it is fast becoming annoying. I may end up ditching the mouse in favor of another.

cold and colder

Today was a record breaker here in Bismarck. It was the coldest January 15th on record. This is from the NWS website. I'm going to quote it because I am not sure if the site has a permalink.

RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BISMARCK ND
737 AM CST THU JAN 15 2009

...RECORD DAILY MINIMUM TEMPERATURE BROKEN AT BISMARCK ND...

AT 734 AM CST THIS THURSDAY MORNING THE TEMPERATURE AT THE BISMARCK
AIRPORT DROPPED TO -44 DEGREES. THIS BREAKS THE RECORD LOW FOR JAN
15TH OF -36 PREVIOUSLY SET IN 1971.

At work we were discussing whether it was cold enough to spit and the saliva to freeze before it hit the ground. Unfortunately none of us thought to do it at that time. However, one of my colleagues did show me this.

Throwing hot coffee looks like more fun than spitting.

CentOS Security

Over at Planet CentOS there has been a rash of posts about security, here, here and here. Wise words, check them out.

Reading this got me thinking about using the non-standard packages and compiling from source. I think one of the reasons why sys-admins do this is because they are more comfortable with the package they want to use. This may be personal preference, and the preference may be because it is what they know. As a sys-admin, you rarely get to run the software you want. You have to make do with what you have or what others want. The business wnats you to load this software, and thhis software needs this specific app server which is not your favorite, or one you know well.

Like it or not, that is part of the job. On the plus side, learning new softaer gives more knowledge and experience which is only a good thing.

New look for Suzuki

One of the things I do on the side is support the Bismarck Suzuki School of Music by doing stuff on their web site.

When I inherited it, it was a static website. It meant that updating content was time consuming and, quite honestly, I would have made it look a lot worse.

So I installed Wordpress. It made adding content a lot simpler. Last summer Cheryl, the president of the school, spent hours putting up lots of content. It means that she does not need to know any HTML to add all this content.

When I originally set it up, I used roughly the same style as the previous site. Now I have a new theme up there. It was designed by my brother, and then Douglas Tschetter was kind enough to turn it in to a theme for me.

I think it looks pretty good. So thanks Ade and Doug.

Not again!

Not content with serving us more snow this last month than we had the whole of last winter, the weather may have more in store for us....

URGENT - WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE...CORRECTED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BISMARCK ND
421 PM CST THU DEC 18 2008
...SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM POSSIBLE THIS WEEKEND...
.A SIGNIFICANT WINTER STORM MAY IMPACT WEST AND CENTRAL NORTH
DAKOTA BEGINNING LATE FRIDAY AFTERNOON AND CONTINUING THROUGH LATE
SATURDAY NIGHT. SNOW WILL DEVELOP ACROSS WESTERN NORTH DAKOTA
FRIDAY AND FRIDAY NIGHT...AND MAY BECOME HEAVY BY SATURDAY. SNOW
AMOUNTS OF 6 TO 10 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE FROM THE TURTLE MOUNTAINS
IN THE NORTH CENTRAL...THROUGH JAMESTOWN AND SOUTH TO THE SOUTH
DAKOTA BORDER BY SUNDAY MORNING. FOUR TO SEVEN INCHES OF SNOW IS
POSSIBLE FROM MINOT TO BISMARCK...WITH 2 TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW
POSSIBLE ACROSS THE WEST. ALTHOUGH THE WEST WILL SEE LESS OF THE
SNOW...WIND CHILLS TO 50 BELOW AND STRONG WINDS WILL CAUSE VERY
HAZARDOUS CONDITIONS BY LATE SATURDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT. NEAR
BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE POSSIBLE ACROSS PORTIONS OF CENTRAL NORTH
DAKOTA SATURDAY AFTERNOON AND SATURDAY NIGHT WHERE THE HEAVIER
SNOW AMOUNTS ARE EXPECTED

Past experience has shown that such messages are not always wholly accurate. Suffice to say somewhere in the state somebody is going to get snow this weekend.

yet more snow

It looks like we will be measuring snow accumulations in feet and not inches this winter. I do not know what the running total is so far, but I now have a bank of snow beside my driveway that is as tall as I am. I do not think my boulevards can take much more snow. In fact the section of driveway between the side walk and the road is getting narrower because there is nowhere else to put the snow.

And it is cold! I wore so many clothes walking (more like wading) to work that my cube is full of outerwear.

And then to make matters worse, Kim has posted some photos of her modeling her latest shawls. While they are nice garments, I was more struck by the fact that they were taken outside in December and she is not wearing a coat. I wish I could stand outside like that without pulling on hats scarves, coats, etc.

not the light fantastic

Now that Thanksgiving has been and gone, everyting turns to Christmas.

While we will not put the tree up for another week or two, we are starting to put up some decorations. In that vain, I decided to hang out the lights outside.

Sure it was about 28 degrees out there, but chances are it will not be any warmer in the next few weeks.

So I get out the string of lights, I test them and they all work. Next I hang them out. After what felt like a good long time perching on a ladder and messing with hooks and cables with gloves hampering dexterity, I fanally get the lights hung out. Now its time to turn them on.

So after all that, fifty of the one hundred work and fifty do not. Why does that always happen? You test them and they work, then when they are hung out they don't.

Next I go and reseat all the dark bulbs. I get to the very last bulb on the chain (the last possible bulb to test) and the bulb comes apart in my (very cold) hand. So I have the glass bit but the bulb casing is still in the socket. To make matters worse it ill nt come out. No amount of pulling at it with needle nosed pliers while cursing, perched on top of a ladder in the freezing cold helped.

This morning one of my freinds recounted a similar story. I smiled and said it was murphy. Whenshe hears this story I'm sure she will return the compliment.

electoral parrallels

I am a fan of the now finished telly program "The West Wing". In the final season, the presidential election campaign was, in my mind, spookily similar to the one we have just experienced in real life. Let me point out some similarities:

1. In the West Wing, the Democratic candidate was a Latino, in real life, he is African american. So, both are non-white.
2. In both cases the Democratic candidates are young.
   
3. Both Republican Candidates were old men with centrist tendencies and who were dragged to the right by their parties.
4. Current events hampered the campaigns of both republican candidates (the nuclear power plant in the West Wing, and the financial crisis in real life).

I'm sure there are more.

In the West Wing, the Republican candidate becomes a member of the new Democratic cabinet. If I remember right, he became the secretary of state. So, if the parallels hold true, should we expect McCain getting a job in Obama's administration?

first snow of winter

Winter came to North Dakota with a thud - well more of a whoosh and then a flump!

Snow came yesterday afternoon with high winds. Blizzard conditions ensued for pretty much the rest of the night. During the evening the wind started to gust up to 40-50 mph.

While we were eating our evening meal, the power started to blip off and back on again every so often. As the evening wore on the blips would start to be a couple of seconds then at 8:30 we lost power for about an hour.

Woke up in the morning to find that school was cancelled, and we had a waist high snow drift going all the way down the drive. I dug a trench through the snow to the roadside and then went back in and worked from home for the morning.

By lunchtime, the risk of more snow showers was pretty much gone and I started to shovel snow. After an hour and a half, all I had managed was to clear away the shallow drifts. I still had the big waist high drift to do. Time to call my father in law. He brought over his snow blower and an hour later he had the big drift cleared away too. It would not have been so hard if the bank of discarded snow at the side of the driveway was not taller than the outlet for his snow blower.

After all that I then tramped t work.

Liferea 1.5 has this cool feature where you can read blogs you have subscribed to on Google Reader. Now that is a feature worth compiling source for.

So I did!

Not all that bad of an install - was expecting worse.

Feature kind of works right now but seg faults every 10 minutes. So it is back to version 1.4 for now and I will eagerly await the stabilising of 1.5

Open Solaris

So I tried Open Solaris this week. I tried both the current release (2008.05) and the latest beta for 2008.11. I must say that they have done quite a nice job of it. It installed nicely and was quite simple to get a running system going.

What made me remove it after a couple of days was the lack of packages for it, and laziness on my part. In order to get Open Solaris up and running with all the extra stuff that I get from the Ubuntu community, I would have to spend a long time researching alternative package locations and probably compiling a bunch of stuff. Right now I am not willing to put in that much effort.

I have always had a soft spot for Solaris. I do want to use it and give it a decent shot. Its niche nature, underdog status and all those toys I want to play with make it a compelling thing. It flirts with me and every so often I install it. The thing is I am usually far too lazy and the draw of the seemingly effortless Ubuntu pulls me back.

So I have been thinking I should maybe try and resurrect this whole blogging thing. I have been feeling the urge to write something quite a bit recently, so that is a good sign to start again.

I thought about starting a new blog. In fact I shopped around the free blog services with that intention. I eventually decided to resurrect this one. The other free services did not seem to offer much more than what I have here, and I thought maybe if I started posting here again, then the three people who read it before may come back.

I took a look at Zim; a desktop wiki. In fact it is pretty much the same as Tomboy, only the one compelling difference was that Zim had in built subversion support.

The Subversion support should make it easy to do version control on your notes and potentially have a backup off-site. It would be really nice for things like sharing notes and documentation between people or computers.

The first big issue with this feature is that there is no documentation on how to get this to work. I went through the Zim website and found nothing that was helpful. I ended up having to do some digging around myself. Here is how I got SVN support to work with Zim:

1. First you need to create your subversion repository. Use

svnadmin create

to create your repository.

2. Create your notebook in Zim. Note where you told the files to be saved. Close down Zim completely (not even hanging around in your notification are)

3. In a terminal window, cd to the directory and then run

svn import

to get the initial files in to the repository.

4. Move the original directory out of the way, or delete it if you are feeling brave.

5. Check out the svn repository in to the location where Zim is expecting the files to be.

6. Start up Zim again and open the notebook.

You can now start working away in Zim, writing stuff and saving the changes. IF you create a new page, then it automatically does the svn add stuff for you. You should then pull down the Tools menu periodically and choose the "SVN Commit" option.

If you are nervous that it is not behaving as you expect, you can always check out another working copy and see what it looks like.

Another thing to note is that Zim logs stuff to you .xsession_errors file. tail that file to get

Reading about a road trip while on a raod trip

So, I am sitting in a dark hotel room in Wisconsin Dells. The wife and kids are asleep, and I am catching up on some reading.

It has been a long time since posted anything here. There is only one real reason for that - laziness!

So I am reading about Doc Searl's road trip, and I am thinking that maybe I should do a travel blog of our trip from Bismarck to chicago and back again. It'll be a few days in the making because this laptop is barely powerfull enough to run a browser, and i have a bunc o f digital photo raws to process first. Expect more on Thursday when I am back home again.

The height of annoyance.

IMG_2787, originally uploaded by mr-potter.

This is a pet peeve of mine.

Don't you just hate it when they put the power adapter as part of the bit you plug in to the wall. It is especially so when you will be plugging it in to a power strip. The chances are you will end up covering at least one more poser socket one the strip. The strip is now heavy and cumbersome, and is generally a downright nuisance.

There! I feel much better now.

Spring is on its way

The snow all melted this last week, leaving muddy brown grass everywhere. The first half of the week was a lot warmer than of late. A sure sign that spring is on the way. Here are some others:

• Flocks of honking geese flying North over our heads in big V's.
• Birds singing, woodpeckers pecking.
• A huge increase in people out walking, and dogs taking their owners for a walk.
• Dry sandy roads, and torrents of water running down the gutters.
• An increase in the number of motorcycles, and noisy, old pickup trucks that, quite frankly, should not be on the road whatever time of the year it is.

There was a noticeable lifting of moods with the rising of the temperature. That was tempered by the time change (I may rant about that later). All in all, sure signs that the cold winter is nearly over, and spring in on the way.

Atchooo!

Aerial Angels

Pictures of the snow angel event from the air.

Snow Angels

Today, Bismarck took back the world record for the most people making a snow angel at the same time. We were one of the 9,000 odd people there.

Here's the Bismarck Tribune's coverage - including a rather poor video.

I took a couple of pictures too - but not of us making snow angels. Thats because I was busy waving my arms and legs in the snow at the time.





I also took a movie with my point and shoot of one of the many snow-waves (kind of like a Mexican wave but with snow) that kept us amused during the half hour wait for the twenty second event.

Installing Oracle on 64bit Linux

I have just installed Oracle DBMS server on RHEL (x86_64) for the first time. I have installed Oracle on Solaris and Windows tens of times, but this is my first real Linux install. I must say that I am not impressed. Installing on Solaris is a whole lot simpler. The two big issues were packages dependencies and poor documentation.

The installation would consistently fail during the linking process. Each time it failed required me to find out whay, install the required package, blow away the $ORACLE_HOME and oraInventory, and then start over. The list of required packages was well short. I also had to install both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions of all the libraries it needed. So my dependancy list is this:

rpm -q --qf '%{NAME}-%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE} (%{ARCH})\n' binutils compat-db control-center gcc gcc-c++ glibc glibc-common glibc-devel gnome-libs libstdc++ libstdc++-devel make pdksh sysstat xscreensaver libaio libaio-devel
binutils-2.15.92.0.2-21 (x86_64)
compat-db-4.1.25-9 (x86_64)
compat-db-4.1.25-9 (i386)
control-center-2.8.0-12.rhel4.5 (x86_64)
gcc-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
gcc-c++-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
glibc-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-2.3.4-2.25 (i686)
glibc-common-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.25 (x86_64)
glibc-devel-2.3.4-2.25 (i386)
gnome-libs-1.4.1.2.90-44.1 (x86_64)
libstdc++-3.4.6-3 (x86_64)
libstdc++-3.4.6-3 (i386)
libstdc++-devel-3.4.6-3 (i386)
make-3.80-6.EL4 (x86_64)
pdksh-5.2.14-30.3 (x86_64)
sysstat-5.0.5-11.rhel4 (x86_64)
xscreensaver-4.18-5.rhel4.11 (x86_64)
libaio-0.3.105-2 (i386)
libaio-0.3.105-2 (x86_64)
libaio-devel-0.3.105-2 (x86_64)

I even made a sym link to shut it up too. It's probably naughty, but it worked!

ln -s /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.6.0.3 /usr/lib64/libstdc++.so.5

And that's what I had to do.

So, Oracle went down another notch in my estimation today. It shouldn't be that hard. The whole "Linux is a constantly moving target" line doesn't wash for me. Oracle will only install on certain, certified distro's. They have made themselves a manageable environment, yet they still make it hard.