Author Archives: Jeff Pabian

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cisco 7960 and trixbox

I’ve been able to borrow a brand spankin’ new Cisco 7960 SIP phone to play around with with my Trixbox server. This appears to be a really nice phone with a lot of features and a quality product. The phone seems to be pre-provisioned with my company’s settings and I am trying to figure out a way to “unlock” it to use with my Trixbox server.

I would consider this an advanced topic for myself since I don’t often get a chance to get my hands on cool hardware like this. The Trixbox server has some tftp files pre-installed but nothing really specific or the required provisioning files for my situation. The Cisco phone wants to phone home to the preconfigured tftp server. Sniffing the traffic and spoofing DNS is trivial but still a lot of work that I don’t need to do if I can figure out how to unlock this thing. I did find these links that appear to be useful, at least initially.

Obviously, I need to get into the details, but as I do, I’ll post my results.

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another htpc update

What a pain in the ass. I’ve been working on this every night. I was finally able to get get Ubuntu installed on this PC by the method using Knoppix as described before. But I forget to add a regular user, (since root can’t log into gdm), and I still have some issues to work out with grub.

When the PC boots up, I get the grub menu, but it is like it doesn’t see the menu1st file. I don’t know if I missed a step or fumble-fingered something, but I can type in the various things to get it to boot up at the grub menu:

grub> root (hd0,0)

grub> kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda1

grub> initrd /initrd.img

grub> boot

And it boots up fine. Regardless, I am upgrading Ubuntu 6.06 to 6.10 so it’s taking some time to update all the various packages. I have to make this newbie-proof since when I give this to my bro-in-law he’s a complete linux-newbie. Plus this has to pass the wife-approval-factor.

I was able to score an eval PCI wireless card for this project. Ubuntu sees it, but since I have a hardwire, I haven’t spent much time in trying to get it working. I’ll post more details about the card when I get a little further down this road.

But it is going well considering. I feel like I got a chance to get back into Linux after being away for a while. So it has been a fun and good experience.

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austin powers is the snake to my mongoose…

I was watching Austin Powers the other night. I love those movies. As Bob pointed out in the comments on the Invisible Sandwich post, I do get a good bit of laughter from low brow humor. The funny thing is, when Austin Powers first came out, I thought it would be dumb. I didn’t think I liked that sort of humor. My mom and sister encouraged me to see it and they were right. I loved it. I was hooked.

Looking back, I remember I saw a movie when I was in high school. I saw it at one of the first “parties” I went to where no adults were around. I don’t know how many people saw this movie, but I still think it was really funny.

The user comments on imbd sums it up pretty good. 1984 was a big year for me as I began to form my identity. I think I probably saw this in 1988 or so since we had it on VHS. Talk about low brow humor, this movie had it all. I am still laughing as I type this. I agree that it is temping to highlight certain scenes but I think if I did and you hadn’t seen the movie, you just wouldn’t get it since it would be out of context.

This movie was a hidden gem, and growing up I came across other hidden gems. I used to work at a record shop when I was in college and we rented movies. I got to see a lot of really good movies during that time. One of the things that I found somewhat interesting is the connections you could find amongst several movies. I was turned on to Jim Jarmusch in college. He is still one of my favorite film makers. Using him as a starting point, there are connections in various ways between, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Alex Cox, Tom Waits, David Johansen, John Lurie, Nick Cave, Neil Young, Iggy Pop, The Pogues, Elvis Costello, and other actors who have been in various movies with the above people. Aside from the movies, there is other evidence, like The Sons of Lee Marvin and the excellent “Fishing with John” series.

Fishing with John: John and Dennis Hopper

Let me get back on track here for a minute with the funny movies that I have seen over the years. Honestly, I could go on and on about good movies, but I started talking about low brow humor and here I am now talking about Indie films and conspiracy theories. If you’ve made it this far, I apologize.

Okay, so back to the low brow. I’ve never really enjoyed movies like Fast Times or Porky’s. I think I like the low brow with a certain level of intelligence behind it. Animal House was like that. It was low brow alright, but it was put together intelligently and was done well. A movie that I happened to catch on the premium movie channels was:

  • EuroTrip

Despite the alluring, yet misleading cover on the website, I found this movie to be a real surprise. First it was really well done. The story was interesting and situations the characters found themselves in was gut busting funny for me. I liked it so much, I found it used at a rental store, (when I first got a DVD player, the first previously viewed DVD I bought was Duece Bigalow for $1. I still maintain it was the best $1 I ever spent!). What was interesting about this movie, given the humor, was the attention to detail. This movie came out well before Pope Paul John II passed away. And in the movie, they did this whole scene around everyone mistakenly thinking the Pope died. I followed the Pope’s death and the appointment of the new Pope pretty closely and watched the movie afterward, they pretty much got it right. It is a fun movie, but my Dad said it was too much for him.

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tech sundays

Today (and a little bit of yesterday) was good with my tech goodies. With the DST situation, my hacked Tivos were about to have some problems. Yesterday they flashed up a message that said something like:

DST is three weeks early and your Tivo will work just fine, but the time displayed will be an hour off and any manually added recordings will need to be adjusted.

At work, there has been a mad dash to update all the machines that are affected by the DST change. My FreeBSD and linux boxes are all okay. So, last night I found the following link for my Directv tivos:

Hot damn! This worked flawlessly. For those of you that don’t know, if you have a Directv Series II tivo and have hacked it, you can’t have it dial in for its updates… otherwise any downloaded updates will whack your hacks and you have to start all over again. So I, and many many people, can’t simply have the DTiVo dial in and get the updates. You’ll have to do it manually. This worked nicely.

While I was at it, I also upgraded “tivowebplus” to version 2.0 which is a release candidate. I actually had to “downgrade” to 1.3.0 from 1.3.1. I can tell already I need to reinstall hackman. That’s easy (if you have done it before).

I also have an update on my cheapo HTPC. The CDROM/IDE drive issue never worked out. But I did find this link to install Ubuntu via Knoppix. This worked good, but I must have foobarred the grub portion since I am getting kernel panics when booting. I’ll have to monkey with it later, but I did spend a good bit of time on it this weekend.

Here’s some other “advanced” ways to install Ubuntu:

I also got some “eval” networking gear from a person in my office. Therefore I think I might be able to help my brother-in-law with his networking issue and the ultimate location of this HTPC. More on that as I work on it and his situation.

I’ve been thinking what’s the best thing to do with the gear I got from the company. I really want to do an honest eval, but the challenge is trying to come up with real world situations. I’ll sleep on it and see what comes up in my head in the morning.

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invisible sandwich

One of my great enjoyments in life is going to Fark.com and looking at the photoshop contests. They can be really funny. Typically, there will be a dry spell for a while that will only get me to chuckle a bit. Then there will be a contest that either makes me bust out laughing or there will be a couple of entries that make it a worthwhile read. Last night was one of those days.

Most the time, the summaries that people post for submitted headlines are really funny. I wish I was witty like that.

If you’ve been on the Internet for a while, you’ve probably seen those funny pictures of cats with captions like “in yur computer, steeln yur hertz.” I love those pictures, they crack me up. It could be that I am just a cat person but this is one of those little Internet things that helps make life a little less serious.

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one of those days

Today was one of those days that I couldn’t wait for it to end. Comparatively speaking, it wasn’t that bad for me, but it was rough for someone I work with. I’ve been there and know how they feel. There is a certain sense of feeling alone, and everyone piling on you and that you don’t have a friend in the world. It’s tough, but after going through it myself, I think I am better for it. There are some details from between here and there that I don’t want to get into on a personal level, but I got some help for which I am very thankful. I wish the best of luck to those who need it.

Years ago, I read a management book that was based on Chaos Theory. At that point in time in my life, it was very apropos and I thought it was great. But I was in the minority and the ideas that I tried to put forth just didn’t fair as well as I had hoped in the “traditional” corporate environment. I was a new manager and wanted to learn to be a good boss, but not a traditional boss. That was years ago and I have read many management books since then. Leadership is important these days. That’s the hot button these days and the managers that recognize it can be successful.

I’m kind of rambling here, but it was one of those sort of days that one just has to reflect on. Tomorrow will be another day and will be better than it was, but I still care.

Before everything went down today, I read on another blog I like to frequent about EI:

  • The one skill you need for three key areas of career growth

Penelope’s blog is pretty cool. I have found a lot of useful, supportive information there. So, I am in a melancholy mood. Probably, after a good night of sleep, I might have more to say about it, but I need some time to think.

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bootpd, ubuntu

So, as I was saying, having the CDROM on the same IDE channel as the hard disk is not working out so good. I just left the PC doing its thing and I will check up on it in the morning tomorrow. However, based on previous experience I am not expecting this to work so well. However, I noticed that the Dell will try to do a bootp/dhcp request if it can’t find any drives. This is interesting since now I may not need the CDROM at all.

Ubuntu has instructions on how to set up a bootpd server. Luckily, my FreeBSD box already has bootpd as part of the core installation. So between the man page and the documentation from Ubuntu, I should be able to do a net boot of the installation media. Slick.

It is too late and I’ve had enough wine tonight that I know better than to try it out, so I’ll probably give it a whirl tomorrow. Being sleepy and having wine does not lend itself to editing config files. This is the kind of thing that gets me excited; trying to figure this stuff out. At some point, I find this becomes more important than the actual end result. I’ll take it for a drive and report back.

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part II on the el cheapo HTPC

Someone asked me what an HTPC was.

  • Home Theater PC

I would say it is something of a Holy Grail among the Home Theater crowd. If you have a nice HT setup, this might be something you could spend a ton of money on and hours of fiddling and fine tuning. It’s a mix between something that is powerful enough to output HD-type of content yet is whisper-quiet and gets spousal-approval. This can be tough to do and get all three of the major requirements. Some have used quite successfully an Apple Mac-Mini, for example.

But when you got little or no money to spend on it…

In my previous posts, I was telling you about the cheapo HTPC I was going to help my brother-in-law build. And I also wrote that the PC he gave me to work with as way too old to be useful. And in other post, I mentioned I had an old Dell 450 Mhz that I was planning to turn off.

I did turn it off the other night. It was running FreeBSD 5.4. I wanted to upgrade it to 6.X but could never get it to boot of the CDROM. After tinkering with it, I determined that the secondary IDE port on the motherboard was bad. So I cannibalized the old PC my bro-in-law gave me for the CDROM and last thing I did was leave it while it was installing Ubuntu. Later, I’ll continue installing linux on it.

So I started with that old Dell. As I mentioned above about the bad IDE interface, I put the CDROM as a slave on the primary IDE controller and the hard drive as the primary. I seem to remember something about why this isn’t a good idea and I keep on. Sure, the installation goes really slow. So slow that I decide to let it run overnight. This morning, I check in and it is still doing something. I don’t know what but the mouse is sluggish and the CD is spinning like mad. I can only assume it has something to do with both devices being on the same IDE channel.

I remove the CD and reboot and FreeBSD comes up like nothing had happened. What a headache. Actually, it really is just a minor annoyance since once it does install, I probably won’t need the CDROM again since everything is downloaded or shared via SMB. I’ll probably start the installation again tonight and let it run for who knows how long…

My dad sent me a webcam so we can share vids of the family. I’d rather play with that tonight. I got it working under my Mac pretty easily:

And I just installed the Logitech software from the website for my WinXP desktop.

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mother update

I was trying to decide what to write about tonight. I guess I could begin both and keep them in a draft. I was deciding between another update on the HTPC or to write something about my mother.

I’ll write about my mother first. As some of you who are close to me know, my mother had a pretty severe stroke back on 11/03/2006. She had a hemorrhagic stroke which is pretty bad. Her stroke occurred where the brain stem meets the spinal cord. She almost died. She was with some friend for dinner when it happened. They called an ambulance while I was on my way which ended up being the life-saving factor. They did emergency surgery on here. She was weak in the right side of her body and lost her balance, ability to speak normally, and can’t walk. She is 59 years old and the cause of her stroke most certainly appears to be hypertension.

Fast forward to today and I can’t believe how well she is doing. I took her to Walmart last night to help her buy some things she needed, (she is living at nice assisted living place). We had a lot of fun together. That’s the sort of thing I have been missing. It has only been recently that my Mom wanted her cell phone. I used to talk to her on my way home from work or when I was in the car, (don’t worry, I alway use a hands-free headset). I couldn’t talk to her unless I went to see her. Now, she’s called me twice and it was really nice to talk with her. We had a pretty nice time at Walmart, too. We shopped and looked at the clearance isles. I let her by herself while I went to grab some diapers for the kids. I watched her from further away to make sure she was alright. She was and it was great to see her enjoy herself while we were out.

When we left, the sky was clear and the moon was so bright. This was the first time my Mom had been out like that since her stroke happened. Sometimes, it is hard to imagine that she’s had to put her life on hold while she continues to get better. I am really proud of her and I enjoy taking care of her. I didn’t think I had it in me to do something like this and it isn’t easy. But it’s new and I don’t begrudge it.

We got back to her apartment and she was planning on eating some oranges. I hugged and kissed her and left. It was fun but I could tell she was tired. I worry about her a lot, but after we spend time like that together, I always feel better about where she is going.