Category Archives: Info

Cool things to do and know.

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what’s the story, wishbone…

Man, I haven’t updated in a while but I have been dying to post something.  You know, I keep having ideas that I want to write about, then I start a draft, and either whatever I started to write is just plain wrong or I come to realize it just isn’t as important as I thought it was.   Oh well.

I’ll just shotgun all the updates I have.  Usually, I tend to write more about these topics as time marches on.

First, I feel like I lost a good friend.  My iPod died.  It really died.  I had a 40GB 4G iPod.  It was actually a HP iPod; you remember when HP resold iPods?  Me neither, it was a speck on the historic iPod timeline.  Well, I loved it and literally used it every day.  This year, the hard drive started to make click and whrring shoulds. I could bang it on the table, (don’t laugh… I read about doing that in a forum) and it would work.  Now, the hard drive is crunching and the iPod isn’t booting up.  Oh well.  Once I find a new job, I plan on getting an 8GB Nano since I like to run with my iPod.  I would like to try the Nike+ product.  A good friend told me it was really cool.  I figure that and a heart rate monitor might really make for some serious training. (Rumor has it, you don’t really need the Nike+ shoes… any shoes will do.)

I’ve been playing around with Munin and Nagios on my laptop (which is running FC8).  Again, I started to write a page about getting Munin working with Fedora and SELinux but I still don’t have it all worked out.  However, I am becoming more knowledgeable about SELinux in troubleshooting.  That’s cool.

I’ve also been continuing my Ruby on Rails education.  I love it.  I really want to be an expert.  I got a couple of personal projects on deck that should really help me solidify my foundation.  I just wish I had more time these days.

I split a crap load of wood with a log splitter (not the hydraulic kind, the kind you swing, over and over).  It felt great to do some work like that.  And now we just need some nice cold weather here in Atlanta, so we can have a fire.

We got some nice, new wheels on our 2003 VW Eurovan.  Anyone want to see pics?

I have, I guess what you would call a 2nd interview with a really cool company tomorrow, (Friday).  Wish me luck… these guys are really cool and I am totally blown away by their tech.   It would be a dream job.

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Fedora Werewolf (fc8) on toshiba laptop… the sound saga

Following up on my previous posts regarding my new Toshiba A215 laptop with the goofy sound card :

In my previous posts, I mentioned that I was having a hard time getting the sound working under linux/fedora. In case you don’t know, FC8 uses Pulse Audio which is new. There have been reports of various sound problems related to permissions, users, and other items.

  • Fixing Broken Sound in Fedora

Out of the box, Fedora is using ALSA sound drivers. For all intents and purposes, every looks like it should work.

  1. all daemons start
  2. sound card is detected
  3. kernel modules are loaded
  4. test sounds appear to be played, yet no sound is heard

I even went as far as downloading the source for the ALSA drivers since I had seen some mention of a bug with my sound card I have an Azalia SB600. I lived with it for a couple of weeks now and I was really missing my music. So, one a whim I tried the OSS (Open Sound Service) drivers. Any you know what? It works.

Now, it doesn’t work like you’d think. Pulse Audio doesn’t appear to use it and Gnome doesn’t find any sound cards, (Actually, Pulse creates a faux ESD process that Gnome uses). Who cares. I got sound and it works good. All apps I’ve tested work; stand alone and webbased.

Ah, but how to control the overall master volume to direct sound only out to the headphones. The OSS drivers some with their own utilities. There is an ossxmix‘er that works superbly.

Still, not as easy as a Mac, but a lot of fun!

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Fedora Linux (fc8) on my new laptop… the wireless saga

I love it when a plan comes together but hate it when I can’t think of a catchy title for a post. Oh well. In my last post regarding my new laptop, things have been progressing.

My last statement in that post said something about how there is something to be said about having a Mac “just work out of the box” but I’ve seen lots of people post saying that part of the fun of Linux, is trying to get things to work. It can be downright frustrating, of course, but when it works, it works well.

My laptop is a Toshiba A215 (which I just added another 2GB of ram). It’s a great laptop. Vista works well with it. I can’t complain about that, but I’ve been wanting to run Linux full time on it. One of the quirks of this laptop is that the wireless device shows up as an usb device, which is something very strange:

[jpabian@stoshua]~% lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8197 Realtek Semiconductor Corp.

This wireless device is indeed a Realtek RTL8187B. Some people have gotten it to work and others have just given up on it. Those of the people who got it to work have hardcoded the wifi settings in a config file. I wanted to have the nifty wifi-selector that “NetworkManager” provides. I don’t want to hardcode anything (like the Mac). I searched and searched and tried everything I could find to do. I found a lot of really great resources but nothing worked. This was one of the best sites:

  • Realtek Linux wireless driver project

I mean it, I was pulling my hair out. It shouldn’t be this hard. I began to be disappointed with my otherwise ideal laptop. I started to read about other wireless USB devices that work with linux. I came up with a plan. I checked out Circuit City’s, Best Buy’s, and Office Depot’s websites to see what they had on sale AND what wireless USB devices worked under linux.

One page I had found (and you know, I can’t find it now!), had a list of pretty much all the wireless USB devices and if they had kernel support or if drivers existed. But it also had a column that reported if it “worked out of the box” or not. Each of the stores I mentioned above had a Linksys on sale, AND it was reported to “work out of the box!” I was excited but also very nervous whether or not it would work. I saw a few posts around where people where having problems with. I picked up the Linksys® WUSB54GC Wireless-G USB 2.0 Network Adapter for $50 after “instant savings.”

wusb54gc.jpg

So when the moment of truth came, I plugged in the WUSB54GC into one of my USB ports and say the following message:

Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> wlan1: Device is fully-supported using driver ‘rt73usb’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> (wlan1): exporting device as /org/freedesktop/NetworkManager/Device/4
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Now managing wireless (802.11) device ‘wlan1’.
Dec 2 17:07:41 stoshua NetworkManager: <info> Bringing up device wlan1

It worked! I didn’t have to do anything! Sure enough, NetworkManager presented me with both my wireless networks (and my neighbors’). I couldn’t believe it. It works great. It works good on the suspend and resume functions of my laptop.

Sure, I really wish that the onboard wifi worked under Linux, but from I’ve read, they’ve only just merged the driver support into the very latest kernel sources so I suspect that support will continue to get better. But for now, I’m very happy with this device.

Now, the only lingering item is sound. Fedora 8 went to using Pulse Audio for the default sound server. Sure looks good on paper, but it doesn’t work and I’m not the only one; there are several threads over at the Fedora Forums talking about it. But FC8 is still bleeding edge. It will work sooner than later, I’m sure.

I’ll save that for another post.

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Linux, Vista, and my new laptop

OH YEAH! (He says like the Kool-aid pitcher as he smashes through the wall!)

My new laptop finally came yesterday.  We missed FedEx on Tuesday and I waiting all day for them to come back yesterday.  I got a Toshiba with a dual core AMD 64 Athalon X2; it was a Thanksgiving day purchase (an early Black Friday deal that I happened to catch in time).  It’s a beaut and came with Vista Home Premium on it.

If I had my druthers, I would have told them to hold the OS; as I was going to install Fedora Linux on it as soon as I could.  I burned my x86_64 DVD with anticipation of its arrival.

It came right at 1PM.  By 2PM I was booting off the Fedora DVD and getting ready to install.  I knew on the Ubuntu LiveCD, it has Gparted on it, so I assumed this would to.  It did not.  A quick websearch recommended using a virtual term to use ntfsresize and fdisk.  I was too impatient and found the Gparted LiveCD and thought I’d use that.  The drive was 160G so I thought 40G for Fedora and 120G for Vista since I could always mount the NTFS partition in Linux.  I quickly downloaded and burned the image to disk.
Well, as luck would have it (or my impatience) the README on the LiveCD had something like this to say:

 You can’t use Gparted to resize Vista partitions.  You have to use nftresize and fdisk

It gave some basic examples and I followed them and it looked like it worked.  I rebooted and got the message that “No OS found” and the laptop tried to do a network boot.  So I began to install Fedora.

During the installation, I realized that I forgot to set the Vista partion to active/bootable.  I used fdisk to fix that and after the installation, I had a flawless dual-boot system.

It seemed like the install took forever.  My previous Fedora installations had been from CD not DVD so there was a lot more stuff installed locally.  After the install, I had something like 77 updates to download and apply.  That did take a long time.  I couldn’t install the other stuff while the package manager was running so I watch Mythbusters and chatted via Pidgin.

I  wasn’t getting any action from my wireless.  I was using ethernet cable.  Turns out, that Toshiba used a Realtek wireless card that shows up as an USB device.  WTF?  It’s a Realtek RTL8187B.

Poking around in the forums it seems some ingenious guy got the source for the driver and patched it for Linux, or Ubuntu specifically.  It seems to work, as it shows up as wlan0 and I can manually assign an IP to it, but wpa_supplicant doesn’t see it.  Honestly, I ran out of time to tinker with it, but I think I am about 95% of the way there.

I also installed the fglrx drivers for the ATI x1200 card.  This also works great and I got my tiny resolution I’ve been craving.  I now have a nice wide, large workspace.  I plan on getting about 1GB or 2GB of RAM; I’ll just wait until it is on sale.

So, here’s the links I found useful:

I’ll follow up if and when I get my wireless working.  I am pretty confident I’ll get it.  I also received a suggestion via the Skribit widget to do a post about Mac vs. Linux.  That’s a good idea.  There is something to be said about having everything “work out of the box” but I don’t mind the tinkering.

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tmobile wing with a new modded ROM

It was hard to come up with a flashy title for this post, but I figured that I get a lot of traffic from people looking for info on the Wing.

As it stands, ActiveSync stopped working some time this week. I installed some apps and thought that one of them could be the culprit, but searching the forums and Googling clues proved to be fruitless. In the end, I resorted to a hard reset (since at this point, it was really important I sync’ed my contacts) and ActiveSync worked just fine.

So, I headed over to Howard Forums to see what the latest was. Actually, I couldn’t remember how to do a hard reset, (couldn’t remember which button to push) and stumbled into the slipperly slope of installing a modded ROM.

First, if you have a Tmobile Wing, you need to read this thread as it is a treasure trove of tips, tricks, and improvements:

On my Wing, I’ve been using the HTC Touch skins on my phone. I really like the improved look and launcher of the phone, but by doing a hard reset (like I had to do to sync again), I need to reinstall all my mods. This isn’t my screen capture but it looks like this:

 

I liked the look so much better. Then tonight I stumbled upon this link and it was a breeze following the directions:

  • Newbs guide to Herald modification *updated* 11/02/07

For those of you guys that don’t know, HTC Herald is the same as the Wing. That thread has a ton of great info in there for you to check out. If you are new to the Wing or wanted to learn more about hacking it, then you need to READ IT COMPLETELY before attempting anything found therein.

Again, this isn’t my screen shot but my Wing now looks like this. I love it:

 

There is a fair amount of customization you have to do, but it isn’t too bad or hard.  I was again able to resync all my data and contacts so it’s good to go, but still have some minor tweaks.

Make sure you check out Part 2 of the FAQ.

 

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i love fedora

It’s been a couple of months since I had to turn in my Powerbook when I was recently let go due to downsizing.   I actually went through a sort of withdrawal as I really enjoyed using my Powerbook and was really sad to turn it in.

I had an old laptop that I installed Ubuntu on and it was my Linux Webcam server.  I liked having the webcam server on the laptop since I could move it around and easily capture the action, wherever it was.  But now I found I needed something to actually do work on while I was on the job hunt.

Now, I really liked Ubuntu, but there was something about it that left me wanting.  It was hard to explain but as best as I could put it is that it did EVERYTHING.  I wanted to get my hands dirty and I wanted something that was a little more “advanced.”  Even on my Mac, I used Fink and used an xterm  with the command line  often.  Everything on Ubuntu was just too easy.

I cut my Linux teeth I think on Debian 1.2 (I still have the CD I bought).  I used Debian for years.  At work, we used Digital Unix which became Tru64, a bsd-type of Unix.  Then, somewhere along the line, I used FreeBSD as my desktop for years… that is until I got my Mac.  Even up to that point, I used XEmacs/Gnus as my newsreader and email client for work.  At home, I read mail on my FreeBSD box and used Pine until I went to IMAP .

So, fast forward to today.  On my old crappy laptop, (with 16MB of video), I needed something to get by and I didn’t want to install WinXP since I don’t have a license.  I am also learning Ruby and relearning PHP.  So now I have a L.A.M.P. laptop and I develop anywhere the mood strikes me.  Despite the lacking power on this laptop, it was workable.  I really liked it.

I went with Fedora 7 and was in heaven.  In fact, I don’t want a Mac any more.  I want a new laptop running Fedora.  I’ll even go dual-boot with Fedora and Windows.

Fedora Linux

While I find myself in this transitional period, I feel like I am re-honing my skills with the latest flavors of Linux, learning new development skills, and learning the latest in tools.  For example, I have a subversion server that I am using.  I began using Eclipse as an IDE for Perl and PHP.  I am learning, engaged, and feeling somewhat productive.  I’ve began reading USENET again and getting back to the core parts of the Internet that I really enjoy.

I tried the various flavors of Linux before deciding on Fedora.  I tried Ubuntu of course, Gentoo, SuSe, and was going to try Solaris 10 x86 but I have that on DVD and my crappy laptop doesn’t have a DVD-Rom.

The tools that I enjoy using are:

I love it.  I’ve also been turned onto some really slick Firefox plugins.

(Note: I was going to link to the Firefox plugins but the site is down right now.)

Now, I just need to find more  quiet time to really get into it.   If you got other ideas or tools, or even methodologies you find useful, I’d love to hear them!

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mspscan.exe crashes… or ScanSrv crashes

This is totally nuts.  As you might have read, I reinstalled WinXP on a newly formated hard drive and had to reinstall Office 2003 naturally.  When I tried to scan in a doc with Microsoft Document Scanning, as soon as I hit the “scan” button, the application crashed and wanted to phone home to Microsoft and report the error. Here’s what showed up in my Event Viewer -> Application:

Faulting application mspscan.exe, version 11.0.8166.2, stamp 4616c200, faulting module mspscan.exe, version 11.0.8166.2, stamp 4616c200, debug? 0, fault address 0x00008b66.

I couldn’t find anything on Google or Google groups… nothing even close.  I did find two articles in Spanish that didn’t seem to help.   I was starting to sweat since I really needed to send a particular fax, (I use a web-based faxing service so I scan in my docs and then email them to the fax provider who sends them as a fax to my recipient).

I then searched for “microsoft document scanning crashes” and I found something that looked like a clue from somewhere:

To get this to work on our machines using ‘Microsoft Office Document
Scanning‘, we went into ‘My Computer’ from the desktop and under
‘Scanners and Cameras’ shortened the scanner’s filename to 26
characters.  Also put the recent file history settings that were
deleted previously from the registry back in place (couple of them had
really long filenames). It still works.  For us it appears the
presence of recent file history with long filenames had nothing to do
with the ‘…Document Scanning‘ not working.

You know what? It worked.  Instead of going to “My Computer” I went into “Control Panel” and changed:

  • Hewlitt-Packard OfficeJet K80 Scanner

to:

  • HP OfficeJet K80 Scanner

And it worked.  So, here I post this for you in case you need it.    This is apparently something that came up after Office SP3.  Good luck!

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i must conquer the fear of life

My title might sound somewhat philosophical but in realty, it’s the song I am listening to right now.  The title of the song is “The Risen Lord” by Will Oldham.  I’ve rated this song four stars in the past…

So where were we? Oh yeah… I haven’t posted in a long time.  I have been more busy than every since I am unemployed.  It’s been great and I feel super productive.   For the last two or three days, I had to rebuild our home PC.  I ended up buying a new motherboard, powersupply, and SATA DVD burner.  I can’t believe how cheap and powerful computer parts have become… even in the last year.  It’s nuts.   So now I have a rock solid and stable machine at home, and my wife is happy.   Okay, she’s not happy about how much I spent, but when I explained to her we spent way less than if we bought a new computer, she saw the logic and was cool about it.  *whew*

For those interested, here’s my shopping list:

I didn’t include my RAM.  You know what’s nuts? When I bought my Sony DVD burner, it was almost $150.  This Lite-On I bought is more faster and has more features and it cost $39.  Incredible.  I’m happy.  But I’m not too happy with the on-board video on the motherboard.  For now, it is a necessity since I had a hot-shot AGP card.  Now I need to find a deal on a PCI-E video card, then I’ll really be in business.   Oh, and everything is moving to SATA… so if you are thinking about buying a new motherboard to get an upgrade, make sure you have enough IDE ports on the new motherboard or move your data to SATA drives… hence my SATA dvd burner purchase.
So, tinkerin’ around with our computer took valuable time away from some other important things I have been working on.   (You know who you are), but now I am back on track.  I also ended up buying some bad RAM from a guy on Craigslist, (he says he didn’t know it was bad and promised to mail me a check back… I hope he does the right thing).   I manged to sneak my new new laptop RAM into my home computer purchase the other day.

Today, I got a bunch of stuff done so I feel pretty good.  I doubt you, the reader find any of this interesting, so I promise a more juicy, technical post later this week.

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i gave circuit city another chance…

I rarely shop at the big box stores. I even rarely bite on something on sale at a big box store. When I was in college, I opened a Best Buy store when they came to Atlanta. To make a long story short, I felt like I sold my soul to the devil. Since I had worked there, it has been very hard to bring myself to shop there. I know how the employees were treated and I knew the story of the people I worked with. To put it in simple terms, Best Buy wasn’t for me. I wasn’t into selling something someone didn’t need or selling extended warranties, (yeah, they’re a waste of money: pure profit). I don’t want to get into that since that’s not the point of my post. My point is that I understand somewhat the mentality of the retail sales person having been there myself.

As I said, I rarely shop at the big box stores. But my wife has been saying she would really like a laptop. I tried to hook her up with a 1Ghz Ubuntu Dell laptop and it was okay for email, but just a hair beyond her tech level. She wanted Microsoft. Okay, I thought. Now, tomorrow is our 10th anniversary.

I scoured the hot deal websites and found a nice $399 laptop at Circuit City after rebates. This wasn’t a monster laptop but it would be excellent for what she wanted to do; email, surfing, editing, etc. Any real heavy lifting would be done by our home-built XP desktop so this would really just be a satelite.

So I checked online for instore stock and made a special trip to a Circuit City that still had the laptop I wanted in stock. I found it on display and took it for a test drive. I don’t know anything about Vista but I know enough to tell if the laptop would be fine. I thought it was a good deal.

I waved down some slack-jawed EMO kid and told him I wanted a laptop. When I showed him the one I wanted, he went, “Oh…” and then the conversation went like this… (btw… he was identified as a supervisor on his name tag).

EMO: “Oh, so you want this one. What are you going to do with it?”

Me: “Surfing, email… that sort of thing.”

EMO: “Are you planning on upgrading it?”

Me: “Yeah, probably.”

EMO: “Oh, well you can do that. 512MB of ram is barely enough to do anything. In fact, 2GB is barely enough to do anything on this laptop.”

Me: “Yeah? I think it will be okay for what I am planning on doing with it.”

EMO: “Yeah, well.. the processor isn’t fast enough to run Vista.”

Me: “I’m sure it will be fine.”

EMO: “Okay, here’s the details on the return policy… blah blah blah and being slow isn’t a reason to return it.”

Me: “I am willing to accept the risk.”

I was so mad at this little punk. Obviously, he doesn’t know me from Adam, but I think I do know a little about computers. Clearly, he was trying to up-sell me into something else. Thankfully, he didn’t bother asking me about the extended warranty because I would have walked out. I was fuming.

So I paid for it and picked it up. Everyone else at the store was really nice. As I left the parking lot, I began doubting my purchase. Maybe it wasn’t good enough…or I should have gotten more bang for my buck. Then I realized that was this kids job… to cast doubt into someone’s decision to purchase something. When I made that realization, I felt like I had been violated. I swear, I was 10 seconds away from walking out of that store and have them loseWeight Exercise my sale because of this kid. I would have but that was the only store within my area that still had the laptop in stock.

What would have happened if this kid tried to talk to me and told me why he liked another laptop (similarly priced)? He could have opened with, “Yeah that is a good deal on that laptop, but maybe you should consider one of these because…” instead of trying to scare me. Like I said, I felt violated and doubted myself. Maybe I was more mad at myself for letting him get to me.

As a gut-check, I stopped at an Office Depot to see what they had on sale. I still maintain I got a good deal at Circuit City and I am sure it will be great for my wife. I might upgrade the RAM but I’ll wait for a deal on that.

The point of my post is that, no wonder people are afraid of computers and technology because you got chowder-heads at these stores trying to scare people to spend more money. Having been a Best Buy employee many years ago, I am familiar with the sales tactic of F.U.D. and I hate myself for almost falling for it. Grrrr!

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the unattended garden

After a most excellent weekend, my thoughts are heady and deep. Yeah, I did have a great weekend, thanks for asking. Today, on the wind down, I was listening to Ian Brown and Massive Attack. They both sound so good on my new receiver. The guy across the street let me borrow the Ian Brown CD and I was telling him how good Massive Attack was and that he should check out the “Lemon Song” by Led Zeppelin. I used to forward people websites as a way to introduce people to new things. But I backed off of that since many of my reference websites have been left to wither, or as Nick Cave refers to in “Bring it on” an unattended garden.

My case in point. Check out the once awesome and mighty Massive Attack website:

When I first saw this site, I was awestruck. It was one of the more advanced and ellaborate flash sites I had seen. Now, you can’t help but be distracted by the xanax and Viagra spam. Now a days, it isn’t rocket science to block this pharmaceutical spam, but obviously no one in charge of the site gives a rats ass or even is aware of the current state.

So this brings me to my next point. For the last year, I have been cultivating an online presence. As I mentioned before, this was a conscious shift in my thinking. Up until this year, I tried to remain more or less anonymous on the Internet. Then I decided to change things around when I decided to look for a new job.

Some of the fuel for tonights post came from the latest issue of Details Magazine, (no, I would never subscribe to this myself buy my wife got me a free subscription). There was an article about networking in it. The article didn’t have anything new to me or any secret knowledge, but it was a reminder how much networking is an important activity for anyone in the job market and arguably any professional.

What does this mean? Well, if you go through the effort to have an online presence and have it mean anything, you got to care and feed and water it. Now a days, that can be a small chore. Personally, I’m on the following sites to make me look like I actually know something:

All of these are important components of what makes my online presence. Yeah, I know potential employers might be looking at this so, so I try to keep it somewhat clean, but I want to make sure it is an accurate representation of who I am. I can do that without being smarmy and cursing without due cause.

I am surprised to find out that I really enjoy this aspect of the Internet. I guess it really is like taking care of a garden and making sure it grows. You got to make an effort to keep all of it up to date. Actually, it’s not that bad if you enjoy doing it… and i do.

Keep the weeds out and make sure your online presences it lookin’ good. I’ve been at the same company for 12 years so I consider myself to be a n00b when it comes to networking, but I am getting more and more clearer on how it is all supposed to work. I love talking to people so this is a great extension on who I am. Part of it is a little about me growing out to be more of an extrovert, or at least a little outgoing.

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