This must be a first, a post about things that happened at school on this blog! Here I go.

Monday:

Well Monday was pretty stupid. I will now type up the thing I wrote on a little scrap of paper as I was bored out of my mind because… well, you’ll see if you read on!
I wrote this and it is entitled ‘What A Messed Up Day’. And yes, it is true!

“I am handwriting this from the dining hall. What a messed up day this is so far, and we’re not even a quarter of the way through yet!
It snowed this morning, only a little so the school was still open, however the snow sure enough turned to ice and the majority of the teachers can’t get into school! I walked to school and then found my form tutor had not arrived, so we were directed to the dining hall. We were registered then told to go to our first lesson and if that teacher didn’t turn up within three minutes to come back to the dining hall, and so on. It wasn’t just the majority of us Year 10s, I must add, it was most of the school! My Spanish teacher didn’t turn up and I am now writing this sat at the back of the dining hall where I have been sitting in silence (yes) for the past hour doing absolutely nothing other than writing this. Fun.”

I just re-read that as I typed it and was horrified at the ‘mélange’ (sorry, I can’t think of the English word) of tenses! I think it is still comprehensible, though! Moving on…

Tuesday:

Tuesday was ‘E-Learning’ day, basically have a day off and complete a variety of computer based tasks (small database, spreadsheet, internet research) in 5 hours.

Wednesday:

I can’t really remember what happened then!

Thursday:

I got moved up into the higher German class. It is much better than the class I was in, mainly due to the fact there are only girls in the new class and they seem to be more focussed.

Friday:

Today… not much happened, again. Oh, I’ve been eating wraps at school for the past two days, Thursday’s was chicken tikka and today’s was Mediterranean chicken. Lovely things for just £1.65!

There, that is this week! Pretty uneventful, except for the stupidity of Monday.

This week Brian Dick and the Birmingham Post released their first 'Rugby Round-up.' Though the quality of the recording is obviously lacking, it's a great format and it's nice to see Birmingham Post experimenting with more online media for keeping Rugby fans updated.

If you're watching this on my site, the Video should be seen under this text, if not click here for a bit of Brummie Rugby News.

As the freenode seven migration draws to a close and I have finally calmed down a bit (it wasn’t as spectacular as I’d planned, but never mind), I can get back into the swing of things. I’ve been re-doing my CV over the past few days for work experience and writing covering letters, and it’s amazing how much time that takes. Now that’s nearly over (despite having only applied to one company so far), I can get back into the world of Ubuntu. Not that I’ve been excluding it, of course not, I have 400 and something Launchpad karmas due to the translations I’ve been doing from American English into British English and some French over the last couple of days. Yay!

Other than that, another of my recent roles is bug triaging on Launchpad for Ubuntu, and answering people’s questions, and both of these roles are really rewarding and I learn more, of course! Now it is the weekend (although it doesn’t feel like it as I was ill and thus off school all week last week apart from Monday and Friday) and I have a mountain of things to do:

1.E-Learning work. It is E-Learning day at school for us on Tuesday, and we have five hours to complete a variety of tasks at home related to planning for our work experience.
2.Britain Loves Wikipedia is kicking off on Sunday with a launch event up at one of the big museums in London.
3.I need to finish the website task for my IT coursework. I haven’t yet worked out how I’m going to do it as I don’t have DreamWeaver at home, but I’m surely not going to do it in PowerPoint!
4.I need to write to my French bank and ask them to transfer my money over here.
5.I need to apply for work experience at more than one company.
6.Get back into the swing of the Ubuntu community and get translating French so I can actually join the team, get myself in the right mindset for learning how to sort bugs, learning all sorts of other stuff.

Not much at all really!

Also, I’m sorry for the cryptic titles!

Freenode is still alive! I am on the other side. Everyone who connects to freenode will be using ircd-seven, now, hyperion is at long last gone! I was rather excited, to the extent that I woke up at 6:45 to watch the proceedings! Now it’s all done though, yes!

Ubuntu is switching the default search from Google to Yahoo!

Those of you testing out the development version of Ubuntu Lucid should notice a change in Firefox very soon. The default search provider for new installations of Ubuntu Lucid (10.04) and upgrades will be Yahoo! and not Google. Canonical have struck a revenue sharing deal with Yahoo! which generates income for the company. This revenue should help pay the wages of Ubuntu Developers employed by Canonical, and support the infrastructure required to develop and build the distribution.

So when using the search box in the top right corner of Firefox on Ubuntu, you’ll be taken to a Yahoo! results page rather than the old default Google one. If you are upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 and you had Google as your search provider (the previous default) then this will change to Yahoo!. You can of course change the search provider, this is merely the default for Lucid. Doing so will mean your search revenue won’t go via Yahoo! to Canonical. That’s your choice, clearly.

In addition, the browser ’start page’ – that is the page you see initially when you open the browser – will reflect whatever the default search provider is. So in the top right, if you choose ‘Google’ you’ll get the Google start page, and conversely if you choose ‘Yahoo!’ you’ll get the Yahoo! start page when you first open the browser. Again, you can change the start page to be blank or use some other search provider. These are just the new defaults.

It’s possible that additional search vendors may be added to the list – Bing anyone? – but it seems that for Lucid there will be at least the two mentioned above. Users who already run Ubuntu and are upgrading to Lucid, but don’t use Google won’t notice a difference, but they’re welcome to manually switch to the new Yahoo! search provider if they want to financially support the Ubuntu project that way.

No doubt this will cause some consternation within the Ubuntu community, as many find changes to “their” browser to be tantamount to breaking and entering their home. Indeed when these things were previously messed with there were a few heated complaints and reports of broken-ness.

Hopefully the dialog on this change will remain civil and, well.. lucid.

I’ve got some machines which authenticate their local users against OpenLDAP, and I wanted to reset some passwords from a Perl script.

First I tried just calling modify from Net::LDAP. That worked but just set the new password as plain text. My passwords appear to be “md5crypt”, and normally look like this:

{CRYPT}$1$fywXcrPC$Uakrx8POGBf1WM9l6mkG6/

I could come up with some code to create the correct hash on the machine where I was running the Perl script, but I really wanted the LDAP server to do it for me, for consistency.

A little bit of searching revealed Net::LDAP::Extension::SetPassword, so I gave that a go. Well, that was progress, but it set MD5 passwords. They look like this:

{MD5}13dmpYRmooMYt50wdZBpSQ==

Why did it just decide to use MD5? The answer’s in the OpenLDAP FAQ. password-hash was indeed set to {md5} on the server.

Right, OK, so set password-hash to {md5crypt} then? No! It does not accept that value. It does accept {crypt}, but that ends up like:

{CRYPT}Q.nfbCdTMBuGU

It seems to have the right hash type ({CRYPT}) but it’s much shorter. It’s the POSIX crypt(3) based on DES. Not quite what I wanted.

The eventual answer was found in the archives of the openldap-software mailing list from almost 8 years ago! So once slapd.conf contained:

password-hash  {CRYPT}
password-crypt-salt-format "$1$%.8s"

the correct password hash was generated.

How did I know about the “.8” bit? In an md5crypt hash, the characters between the $1$ and the next $ are the salt, and there’s 8 of them, so that’s why .8s.

You know the drill.

• Log into Facebook
• Look at that little red number in the bottom right
• Get excited “Oh joy! I’ve been included!!”
• Open it up and….

BAM!

• Add your relatives!
• There are polls for you to answer!!
• People claim that <insert random friend> is funnier than you! Take the quiz!!!

Or some other bullshit. We already get ads on the side of Facebook and surrounding the games we play inside Facebook are these phony notifications really necessary?

It’s a disappointment if anything because you are thinking “oh joy!” then you look at it and the reality sets it “aww shit, nobody likes me” and the downward spiral begins! That’s right, Facebook is why you’re depressed!

Fuck you notifications!

Fuck you!

The Blue Lagoon is absolutely amazing.

As a part of life, we all have to pump gas at some point to get somewhere. At least in today’s world we have gas terminals that take debit and they are great because you don’t have to face the angry person in the gas booth who is pissed you had the nerve to make them ring something in. However, there is one place that totally sucks for this in every way possible and that is Esso. Esso has the slowest and most annoying terminals of any gas station out there and to top it off some locations even make you suffer through some terrible commercials as you pump the gas

The pumps are too slow

I don’t know why they felt it was neccesary to make them so slow but have you ever noticed that it’ll be going along fine and then a dollar before the amount you pre entered it slows to a crawl and those last 100 cents take a minute! With it now being winter this is exceptionally annoying! New Sunoco and Petro Canada stations stop almost right on the amount or only 20 cents from the final tally which is way more acceptable!

The pump asks you 20 questions before you get to pump your gas

• Do you have esso points? no
• Do you want a carwash? no
• Do you want a reciept? no
• Do you want to fill up to $100? no

Then we get to the point finally….

• Enter the amount you would like: 20
• Account?
• Pin?
• Select grade
• Lift nozzle

Then! 10 minutes later when it went from $19 to $20 it prints a receipt anyways even though you said no and beeps until you take it!

The commercials are awful
Ok so they have commercials playing to make money yet still charge the same amount as everyone else for gas while having crappier gas pumps then everyone else….AND THE COMMERIALS ARE TERRIBLE. You never see these super shit bottom of the budget commercials on real tv but when you use ESSO and be their customer here you go! Right where you can’t get away from them!

Thanks Esso!

that is all.

I discovered a great blog post some time ago, and typed up a reply but it’s been sat in my drafts for too long. It’s the new year so I figured now is as good a time as any to publish it.

The post details how Michael had some “fun” with the Viglen MPC, a small low-power PC. I tried to leave a comment, but his wordpress blog wouldn’t let me, so I’m pasting it here instead.

Hi Michael. I was the one who filed that bug and the workaround about the IDE driver being missing from the kernel on the Viglen MPC-L, so I feel your pain at the install

However I think your rant at Linux is slightly misplaced. Linux has better hardware support out of the box than any other operating system. Indeed looking around my desk I can see numerous devices that ‘Just Work’ on my Linux based desktops, laptops and servers but on Windows require hunting down bloated drivers & “helpers” and numerous reboots.

Yes, it failed for you on this occasion and the way to get it working isn’t pretty, straightforward or logical to a non-techy or new user. That bug is not specifically Linux’s fault. I believe it was a mistake on the part of the Ubuntu packagers, who disabled the compilation of that module when they shouldn’t have. Clearly a bug which should have been picked up earlier – during testing. Although mitigating that the Viglen (and all other AMD Geode-based ION devices) aren’t exactly commonplace amongst Ubuntu users I’d guess, although thanks to the podcast there’s a lot more of them in the hands of Ubuntu users than there used to be

That the bug exists is frustrating, but it highlights something interesting.The fact that very early on during the install on the Viglen I was able to have network connectivity up, copy the driver file off of another machine over the LAN and load it into the running kernel, then continue the installer onto the disk speaks volumes in my book. Yes, it’s an ugly hack, yes it very unfriendly for new users. But it’s been possible to do these hacky things on Linux for years. Some of these ‘workarounds’ are flat out impossible to do on other platforms. I love hearing about the wild hacky ways people get Linux onto machines. It’s a testament to how flexible Linux is as a platform.

By way of comparison, on my Toshiba (big brand, very common) laptop, trying to install Windows XP fails because it is missing the driver for the disk, so you can’t install XP Pro off a stock XP SP2/3 CD. Vista is missing it too! The laptop doesn’t even have a floppy drive so the old “Press F6 to load a driver” at boot trick is no good either. Windows 7 doesn’t even have the driver built in! At least now the Windows 7 installer supports adding a driver on a USB stick, which is a great step forward. Shame that innovation came more than 2 years after I bought the laptop.

I think it’s a myth that Linux distros don’t have decent hardware support, and one that needs squashing. As for the user friendlyness, we’re working on that!

All the best, and keep listening to the show

My background is not typical of a Systems Administrator. I started my life in IT as a marketing intern, the some time doing basic server administration and Desktop support; to now find myself working fully on Linux Servers. It's a long way from the Psychology and Business degree that I graduated with back in June '07.

I've never been a bedroom hacker, despite very much wanting to be. The majority of my time spent learning has been during waking hours, in the office. I've had a few projects that I've taken home with me, but due to my limited background, I found myself limited to fixing things other people had written, rather than writing stuff from scratch. I'd mostly learnt how it shouldn't be done, rather than how it should be done.

Ironically, this has meant that until now I've been fixing other people's problems, tidying up others designs, and adding my voice to conversations pointing out logical discrepancies and extending other people's ideas. This is one of the great freedoms that Open Source software has given me - I don't have to write anything from scratch - someone else has already done it for me.

However, I'm acutely aware that sooner or later my weaknesses are going to land me in hot water. It may be a casual observation, but most of the time I come across something that completely baffles me, I'll come back to it in a couple of weeks after either doing a bit of research on it or playing with something similar - and I get to understand it. There have been a few moments when I've looked back at decisions I've made and in the meantime have new knowledge that would have made the decision a "no-brainer", when at the time it seemed like a 50/50 split.

The more I experience these moments though, the more I realise that it's all about growth, and experience. I'm sure there are many CS graduates or other programmers out there who have got certain gaps in their knowledge that get filled over time. I'm sure there are many who are going through the same angst that I am, wondering "am I good enough to be doing this.. have I missed something?" In hindsight I'd say that's a brilliant attitude to have, because being overconfident about one's ability is likely to end you up in an even bigger spot of bother.

I guess the key is to never fool yourself into thinking that you've learnt enough. I've got a couple of books in the post, covering 'Pragmatic Programming' and 'Design Patterns' - I'm sure they'll provide me with the material I need to keep plugging my gaps, and improving my technical thinking, whether I end up moving into programming rather than Systems Administration, or some other field entirely.

As many of you know, freenode is migrating to a new irc daemon (more commonly known as ircd), seven which will provide greater functionality in just over 10 days. Just in case you don’t follow the freenode blog, a link to the official blog post is here:

http://blog.freenode.net/2010/01/ircd-migration-sat-jan-30th-2010/

The changes that affect users are documented here.

By far one of the best capabilities of this new system is that it will support SSL, something users of freenode have been asking for for a long time. Also, it includes better functionality to deal with and stop the sort of spam that has been going on for the past few days on the main network, which conveniently leads me on to my next point.

There has been a lot of spam on the network for the past few days, so just in case you don’t know (i.e haven’t seen the global notices that have been being sent out every so often by staff): please don’t click on any links from untrusted sources/in spammy messages, you risk getting K-Lined (banned from the network) yourself – more detailed information can be found here.
If you do find yourself banned from the network (you will receive a message upon connection), please follow the instructions in the K-Line message (i.e send an email to klines AT (NO SPAM PLEASE) freenode DOT net with the affected IP address) and it will get sorted.

Freenode has also embarked on a quest to make its group management better, by way of the new Group Management System being worked on by dedicated volunteers – freenode needs more help with that though for it to be completed soon and for you to benefit from the new functionality and less stressful way of managing your group on freenode – visit #freenode-gms for more information on how you can help if you can help (note: it’s not just coders that are needed, they need documentation writers, designers and more!), and of course all help is greatly appreciated!

This is the Icelandic Parliament building as seen from the parliamentary offices.

I previously blogged about MiserWare, a company making software to save money. Well previously you could only get the Linux version (which for me is great) but now they’ve extended the beta to Windows. They’ve also added an (unnecessary but fun) GUI to the Windows version.

If you have any Windows machines (desktops as well as laptops) then maybe you want to take this for a test drive. Click the image above to join the beta and get the software for free.

Note: I may get a reward if enough people sign up. If you know other people who run Windows, then you too can get rewards if you refer them!

What a fantastic result!

I've just spent the last couple of hours down at the Sharman's Cross Clubhouse with around 100 fantastic bees supporters. It's great that so many would turn up to see the match broadcast over Cornish Pirates' brilliant Internet TV. Thanks to the guys for setting it up - both at the Birmingham and Solihull end, and the team down in Cornwall.

With the new recruits, Birmingham and Solihull now have fantastic strength in depth and hopefully this will encourage competition for places and an re-energised team ethic. Today's performance was the result of only two full training sessions together - and not all of the new signings have yet arrived. The rest of the season is starting to look like it has potential.

Coming up on Wednesday Evening is a trip up to Rotherham - a team Bees are likely to be facing come the relegation playoffs in March/April. With a fixture backlog due to the poor weather over the last few weeks - we can but hope that the squad keeps match fit - and that the new guys step up to the plate alongside the guys who have carried the club through the last few months.

2010 is looking much brighter based on today's result. It was great in the clubhouse; brilliant atmosphere and Ant Elliot gave a speech at the end of the match stating how important it was that we get more people down to Sharman's Cross. If you've not been down and fancy coming along - there's lots of people there more than happy to give you a warm welcome.

For those of you immersed in the world of twitter, Bees launched their own Twitter-er this week, so visit BSBeesRugby for the latest coming out of SXR.

Feel the Buzz!

As we all know the FPS genre is pretty much everywhere you look these days and why not, it’s fun to blow the crap out of your friends with a shotgun right? Well I find most FPS’s of today are a bit too serious and are a little bit “function heavy” for my tastes where either half your keyboard is mapped to 100 things you need to do or on a console you have absolutely ridiculous button combos to get around.

Remember a simpler time?

My favourite shooter of all time had always been Quake/QuakeWorld it was simple and ridiculously fast paced. Quakeworld pretty much created online play we know today and the mods introduced the sub genres of class based (team fortress) , Clan Arena and Capture the flag to the world and you can find these in every FPS you look at today. Thanks id!

However getting a bunch of friends together to play an old game like this proves problematic and the people online still playing it are nuts.

There is another way and it is free…

id Software last year started a beta for a new quake game called QuakeLive. This is a totally in your browser skill match based quake game. It is based of the Quake 3 engine and is run by a plugin for your browser. It takes minutes to setup, few minutes to download the game data and bam, good to go! I started with this game a year ago in the closed beta. Back then they only supported Firefox and IE on windows so I had to play inside a virtual machine but man I was hooked. It is the same fast paced fragging I love except it doesn’t look like shit and people of today actually play it! Anyways the beta now is open and anyone can sign up AND as an added bonus it now supports linux and Mac OS X natively.

What kicks ass:

1. Supports all 3 major platforms, Wintendo, Linux and Mac
2. All the old goodies like Rocket jump and jump running are present
3. Skill matching so you arent totally pwned all the time (still most of the time though)
4. Offline mode for practice
5. Kick ass game modes like Clan Arena and CTF are present
6. Free! Just sign up and go!
7. All of your stats are recorded for you and trophies are awarded

So I’m sorry to say Quakeworld but I may finally have to retire you as QuakeLive offers everything you did plus more and it looks great!

Sign up and fight me! Look for CrazySpence.

One of BitFolk’s servers in the US has had first one and then two dead disks for quite some time. It has a 4 disk software RAID-10, so by pure luck it was still running. Obviously as soon as a disk breaks you really should replace it, preferably with a hot spare. I was very lucky that the second disk failure wasn’t from the same half of the RAID-10 (resulting in downtime and restore from backup). There’s no customer data or customer-facing services on this machine though, so I let it slide for far too long.

Yesterday morning Graham was visiting the datacenter and kindly agreed to replace the disks for me. As it happens I don’t have that much experience of software RAID since the production machines I’ve worked on tend to have hardware RAID and the home ones tend not to be hot swap. It didn’t go entirely smoothly, but I think it was my fault.

The server chassis doesn’t support drive identification (e.g. by turning a light on) so I had to generate some disk activity so that Graham could see which drive lights weren’t blinking. It was easy enough for him to spot that slots 0 and 1 were still blinking away with slots 2 and 3 dead. I checked /proc/mdstat to ensure that those disks weren’t still present in any of the arrays. If they had been then I would have done:

$ sudo mdadm --fail /dev/mdX /dev/sdbX

to remove each one.

They weren’t present, so I gave Graham the go-ahead to pull the hot swap drive trays out.

At first the server didn’t notice anything. I thought this was bad as I would like it to notice! This was confirmed to be bad when all disk IO blocked and the load went through the roof.

I think what I had forgotten to do was to remove the devices from the SCSI subsystem as described in this article. So for me, it would have been something like:

$ for disk in sd{a,b,c,d}; do echo -n "$disk: "; ls -d /sys/block/$disk/device/scsi_device*; done
sda: /sys/block/sda/device/scsi_device:0:0:0:0
sdb: /sys/block/sdb/device/scsi_device:0:0:1:0
sdc: /sys/block/sdc/device/scsi_device:1:0:0:0
sdd: /sys/block/sdd/device/scsi_device:1:0:1:0

From /proc/mdstat I knew it was sdb and sdd that were broken. I think I should have done:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "scsi remove-single-device" 0 0 1 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi'
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "scsi remove-single-device" 1 0 1 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi'

Anyway, at the time what I had was a largely unresponsive server. I used Magic Sysrq to sync, mount filesystems read-only and then reboot. In Cernio’s console this would normally be “~b” to send a break, but Xen uses “ctrl-o“. So that was ctrl-o s to sync, ctrl-o u to remount read-only and then ctrl-o b to reboot the system.

Graham had by then taken the dead disks out of the caddies and replaced with new, re-inserted them and powered the server back on.

Happily it did come back up fine, I then had to set about adding the new disks to the arrays.

I’d already been forewarned that the new disks had 488397168 sectors whereas the existing ones had 490234752 — both described as 250GB of course! A difference of some 890MiB, despite them both being from the same manufacturer, from the same range even. I didn’t bother adding a swap partition on the two new disks which made them just about big enough for everything else.

$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1
mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sdb1: Device or resource busy

Oh dear!

After lengthy googling, this article gave me a clue.

$ sudo mulitpath -l
SATA_WDC_WD2500SD-01WD-WCAL72844661dm-1 ATA,WDC WD2500SD-01K
[size=233G][features=0][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][active]
 \_ 1:0:1:0 sdd 8:48  [active][undef]
SATA_WDC_WD2500SD-01WD-WCAL72802716dm-0 ATA,WDC WD2500SD-01K
[size=233G][features=0][hwhandler=0]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][active]
 \_ 0:0:1:0 sdb 8:16  [active][undef]

There’s my disks!

Stopping multipath daemon didn’t help. Running multipath -F did help.

The usual

$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb1
$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdd1
$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md3 /dev/sdb3
$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md3 /dev/sdd3
$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md5 /dev/sdb5
$ sudo mdadm --add /dev/md5 /dev/sdd5

worked fine after that.

I hope that was useful to someone. I’ll be practising it some more on some spare hardware here to see if the fiddling with /proc/scsi/scsi really does work.

Update:

Dominic (author of the linked article about dm-multipath) says:

I think there’s also a “remove” or “delete” file you can echo to in the /sys device directory, bit more friendly than talking to /proc/scsi/scsi.

and provides this snippet for multipath.conf which should disable multipath:

# Blacklist all devices by default. Remove this to enable multipathing
# on the default devices.
blacklist {
        devnode "*"
}

My favorite cafe in Iceland.

With your pants on the ground!

Anyone catch idol last night? Well usually I do not as I don’t care for it but it happened to be on and the most hilarious thing occured when 62 year old General Larry Platt broke out into his original tune about people who wear their pants on the ground.

This song has been stuck in my head since last night and it is now all over youtube, there are a few videos of last nights broadcast that top the 50k view mark and 1 that is 100k+.

Anyways, this morning I try to share this amusing piece of now internet and tv history with my classmates at work and they all break out into labeling me a pansy for watching idol! Bastards! As punishment for their noncooperation I un muted my laptop and played it a few times in class and they now also cannot get it out of their heads.

That’ll learn ‘em

A little while ago I bought an Acer Aspire Revo 3600 which is basically a small PC suitable for media playback. It has HDMI out and plays up to 1080p HD video in certain formats, so is ideal for connecting to a TV to consume video content. I previously blogged about the Acer, and how I setup the device for use with Boxee on a pre-release version of Ubuntu. I wanted to post some updated detail because people keep asking me how the Acer is going, and how I’m using it.

My use cases are quite straight forward. I wanted a box which would sit near the TV and allow me to play back HD content. I don’t have a blueray player or Freesat HD, but I do already have a Freeview (standard definition) hard disk recorder – a Humax 9200T. As a result I have the ability to record terrestrial television programmes – and the whole family use the Humax to record and watch TV. The Humax has a limited (160GB) disk capacity, so we tend to use it for ad-hoc recording and ad-skipping rather than longer-term storage.

I like the flexibilty that tools like MythTV offers, specifically being able to watch programmes in other rooms on different devices, but right now the Humax does enough that I’ll not be using MythTV. Instead I’ve been playing with Boxee and XBMC to playback HD media on the Acer. The Acer has a standard installation of Ubuntu 9.10 which was installed by downloading the ISO image and putting it onto a bootable USB stick. Everything worked out of the box including wired & wifi network, VGA & HDMI video out, audio over HDMI and everything else besides. It boots fairly pretty fast, but as it consumes about 25W I tend to leave it switched on.

As this sits behind the telly and is to be used by all of the family I didn’t want to have a keyboard and mouse either trailing across the room or a wireless one stashed as they’re often cumbersome and not small-child friendly. I do have the original white USB keyboard and mouse stashed behind the telly permanently connected to the device just in case things go bad and I need to directly control the device. However I rarely use them because I can just as easily SSH into the Acer from the sofa, or another room, or indeed another country

So I bought a remote control. Initially I used a Sony Playstation 3 Bluetooth remote control, but this as proved unreliable so I now use an infra-red remote control. The one I chose is an Ortek VRC-1100 which isn’t pretty or especially technically elaborate, but it works, and works out of the box. It has a mouse control joypad & two mouse buttons and plenty of other buttons which match to the most appropriate logical keys on a keyboard. I’d recommend it for simplicity. I got mine for £15 from Ebay.

As the Ubuntu 9.10 installation process was unremarkable – in that everything just worked – I won’t document it here but provide the following links instead:-

http://releases.ubuntu.com
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Mirrors
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick

In terms of storage the Revo has a 150G disk onboard, but I already have some network storage which is accessible from any machine in the house and is considerably larger. So I’d rather mount that over the network and store programmes there. My storage device of choice is a drobo which is shared with a droboshare using Samba, and it’s mounted on the Revo under /media/drobo with a line in my /etc/fstab which looks like this:-


//10.10.10.237/drobo /media/drobo cifs user=alan,uid=1000,gid=1000,iocharset=utf8 0 0


You can find out more about Samba and fstab at these links:-

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently
https://help.ubuntu.com/9.10/serverguide/C/windows-networking.html
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Fstab
http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/fstab.html

In terms of software on top of Ubuntu, I have used Boxee and XBMC. XBMC is a beautiful piece of software that I’ve used previously on an old XBOX Crystal, so I’m happy that it does what I need. Boxee which is based in part on XBMC has had a fairly major update recently which makes it a lot prettier and more logical than the previous release. At the moment I tend to use Boxee most of the time, dipping into XBMC now and then to compare the two products. Both products have .deb installation packages available so actually installing the software is quite a breeze.

To download Boxee, simply sign up at http://boxee.tv/ and then go to http://www.boxee.tv/download where they have a link to Boxee Beta for 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu, OSX, Windows and Apple TV along with the source code should you want it. Once downloaded, double click the deb file which installs fine on Ubuntu 9.10 and places a Boxee icon on the applications menu.

XBMC is easy to install on Ubuntu 9.10 from the team-xbmc ppa


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xbmc


I have configued both Boxee and XBMC to find my media on the drobo under /media/drobo/TV. This was fairly straightforard in both applications.

The final cool piece in this free software jigsaw is the BBC iPlayer. Now for those people reading from outside the UK this next bit is going to be a bit meaningless to you, feel free to zone out now. The BBC iPlayer terms of use specify that “Downloadable BBC Content is available for download within the UK only.”, sorry about that. But if you’re in the US, you get Hulu and other channels we don’t *shakes fist*.

The BBC provide a wide range of their output for viewing online, some of it in HD 720p. This can be streamed using a browser based flash plugin, or watched on some specific mobile (and less mobile) devices such as the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii. The BBC also have a desktop download client which is an Adobe Air app.

I’d rather not use a fat GUI client to do this because I want to schedule the download of my favorite programmes, so they’re ready for me to watch without me having to go and seek them out. Enter get_iplayer, a fantastic perl script which does a great job of downloading and streaming programmes from the BBC iPlayer.

I have get_iplayer and flvstreamer in /home/alan/bin on the Revo. I also have the ffmpeg package installed which is invoked by get_player after a download finishes to convert the video from flv to mp4. Finally I have the following script in /home/alan/bin as ‘download_programmes.sh’ and have it set as executable.


#!/bin/sh -x
/home/alan/bin/get_iplayer \
--vmode=flashhd,flashvhigh,flashhigh, \
flashstd,flashnormal,iphone --pvr \
--flvstreamer=/home/alan/bin/flvstreamer \
--output=/media/drobo/TV --subdir


Here’s the crontab entry for my user which I maintained with crontab -e.


MAILTO="alan@example.com"
# m h dom mon dow command
0 * * * * /home/alan/bin/download_programmes.sh


Note the email address in the crontab above will be sent a mail every time the script runs. This is useful because I will find out if new programmes are available for me to watch without having to go and look.

So every hour download_programmes.sh runs which calls get_iplayer to run in PVR mode (the –pvr option) and will download programmes to /media/drobo/TV (–output) into subdirectories named after the series/programme (–subdir). get_iplayer calls flvstreamer (–flvstreamer tells get_iplayer where to find it) to actually download the programmes to disk. It will attempt to download them in HD first, but if that’s not available it will go through all the lower quality options (–vmode) because some programmes aren’t in HD or the HD version isn’t online.

If you set all that up it won’t actually download anything until you tell get_iplayer what programmes you want to get. This is quite easy.

Running get_iplayer to update itself


$ get_iplayer
get_iplayer v2.58, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.


INFO: Current version is 2.58
INFO: Checking for latest version from linuxcentre.net
INFO: Newer version 2.59 available
INFO: Updating /home/alan/bin/get_iplayer (from 2.58 to 2.59)
INFO: Downloaded /home/alan/bin/get_iplayer
INFO: Updating /home/alan/.get_iplayer/plugins/podcast.plugin
INFO: Downloaded /home/alan/.get_iplayer/plugins/podcast.plugin
INFO: Updating /home/alan/.get_iplayer/plugins/localfiles.plugin
INFO: Downloaded /home/alan/.get_iplayer/plugins/localfiles.plugin
INFO: Change Log: http://linuxcentre.net/get_iplayer/CHANGELOG.txt
INFO: Changes since version 2.58:


Version 2.59 - 20100113
* Added --future option to allow searching of future programme schedules / EPG for BBC Radio and TV (if indexed).
* Added --refresh-future option to allow indexing of future programme schedules / EPG for BBC Radio and TV when refreshing the caches.
* Running the PVR is now much faster due to caching the cache and history files in memory between PVR searches.
* Updated list of available radio channels.
* Improved display of help where options can be used in more than one context e.g. --long.
* Prevent repeated metadata requests when the metadata retrieval fails.
* Renamed --ignorechannels to --refresh-exclude.
* Added --refresh-include option so that only matching channels are indexed when refreshed.
* Fixed --multimode where existing file check was incorrectly failing.


Running get_iplayer on its own will list all BBC TV programmes available right now – in this case, 719 programmes


$ get_iplayer


get_iplayer v2.58, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.


Matches:
1: ... Sings Elvis - -, BBC Four, Classic Pop & Rock,Highlights,Music,TV, default,
2: 1984 - A Sikh Story, BBC One, Factual,History,Religion & Ethics,TV, default
3: 3rd and Bird - Fly, Muffin!, CBeebies, Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,TV, default

(snip)

717: dirtgirlworld - 9. Dig, CBeebies, Animation,Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,Learning,Pre-School,TV, default
718: dirtgirlworld - 10. Creepy Crawly, CBeebies, Animation,Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,Learning,Pre-School,TV, default
719: dirtgirlworld - 11. Bees, CBeebies, Animation,Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,Learning,Pre-School,TV, default


INFO: 719 Matching Programmes


Downloading an individual programme

This is great for a one off thing that you want to get. Although personally why anyone watches the utter freakshow kids programme “Dirt Girl World” I will _never_ understand.


$ get_iplayer -g 719
get_iplayer v2.59, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.


Matches:
719: dirtgirlworld - 11. Bees, CBeebies, Animation,Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,Learning,Pre-School,TV, default


INFO: 1 Matching Programmes
INFO: Checking existence of default version
INFO: iphone1,flashhigh1,flashhigh2,flashstd1,flashstd2 modes will be tried for version default
INFO: Trying iphone1 mode to record tv: dirtgirlworld - 11. Bees
INFO: File name prefix = dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default
2.57MB / 45.79MB 2959kbps 5.6%, 00:01:59 remaining


Note, this defaults to download the ‘iphone’ version, that is the lowest quality video (in this case it’s 480×272 resolution). It’s delivered over http so get_iplayer just downloads that file directly (pretending to be an iphone).

Downloading a higher quality video


$ get_iplayer -g 719 \
--vmode=flashhd,flashvhigh, \
flashhigh,flashstd,flashnormal,iphone
get_iplayer v2.59, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.


Matches:
719: dirtgirlworld - 11. Bees, CBeebies, Animation,Children's,Entertainment & Comedy,Learning,Pre-School,TV, default


INFO: 1 Matching Programmes
INFO: Checking existence of default version
INFO: flashvhigh1,flashvhigh2,flashhigh1,flashhigh2,flashstd1,flashstd2,iphone1 modes will be tried for version default
INFO: Trying flashvhigh1 mode to record tv: dirtgirlworld - 11. Bees
INFO: File name prefix = dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default
FLVStreamer v1.9
(c) 2009 Andrej Stepanchuk, Howard Chu, The Flvstreamer Team; license: GPL
Connecting ...
Starting download at: 0.000 kB
Metadata:
duration 660.08
moovPosition 32
width 832
height 468
videocodecid avc1
audiocodecid mp4a
avcprofile 77
avclevel 30
aacaot 2
videoframerate 25
audiosamplerate 48000
audiochannels 2
trackinfo:
length 16501000
timescale 25000
language eng
sampledescription:
sampletype avc1
length 31683584
timescale 48000
language eng
sampledescription:
sampletype mp4a
14198.833 kB / 75.76 sec (11.5%)


Note that this is now invoking FLVStreamer to download the higher quality, higher resolution (in this case 832×468) video over RTMP. Once complete it calls ffmpeg to convert the video to mp4 (x264)…


Download complete
FFmpeg version SVN-r19352-4:0.5+svn20090706-2ubuntu2, Copyright (c) 2000-2009 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --extra-version=4:0.5+svn20090706-2ubuntu2 --prefix=/usr --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-vdpau --enable-bzlib --enable-libgsm --enable-libschroedinger --enable-libspeex --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-pthreads --enable-zlib --disable-stripping --disable-vhook --enable-gpl --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-x11grab --enable-libdc1394 --extra-cflags=-I/build/buildd/ffmpeg-0.5+svn20090706/debian/include --enable-shared --disable-static
libavutil 49.15. 0 / 49.15. 0
libavcodec 52.20. 0 / 52.20. 0
libavformat 52.31. 0 / 52.31. 0
libavdevice 52. 1. 0 / 52. 1. 0
libavfilter 0. 4. 0 / 0. 4. 0
libswscale 0. 7. 1 / 0. 7. 1
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
built on Oct 13 2009 22:15:16, gcc: 4.4.1


Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 50.00 (50/1) -> 25.00 (25/1)
Input #0, flv, from '/home/alan/dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.partial.mp4.flv':
Duration: 00:11:00.07, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Video: h264, yuv420p, 832x468 [PAR 117:117 DAR 16:9], 25 tbr, 1k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16
Output #0, mp4, to '/home/alan/dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.partial.mp4':
Stream #0.0: Video: libx264, yuv420p, 832x468 [PAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 90k tbn, 25 tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
frame=16501 fps=4882 q=-1.0 Lsize= 123714kB time=660.01 bitrate=1535.5kbits/s
video:112951kB audio:10106kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.534616%
INFO: Recorded /home/alan/dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.mp4


Note that the file size is significantly larger for the higher quality video:-


$ ls -lh dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.m*
-rw-r--r-- 1 alan alan 46M 2010-01-14 14:51 dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.mov
-rw-r--r-- 1 alan alan 121M 2010-01-14 15:02 dirtgirlworld_-_11._Bees_b00p1mfz_default.mp4


This is all rather good but very manual, what if we want to schedule the download of all episodes of Dirt Girl World? Firstly, go and see a psychiatrist, next we tell get_iplayer what programme we want to download and what we want to call it – in this case ‘Freakshow’.

Mark a programme for future download


$ get_iplayer "dirtgirlworld" \
--pvradd "Freakshow"
get_iplayer v2.59, Copyright (C) 2008-2010 Phil Lewis
This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details use --warranty.
This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain
conditions; use --conditions for details.


INFO: Saving PVR search 'Freakshow':
search0 DirtGirlWorld


That’s it, all done. Now the next time the cron job kicks in (hourly in my case) it will grab all episodes of programmes that match that search criteria. Note, it’s a search criteria. So if I used the term “Doctor Who” it would download episodes of “Doctor Who”, but also other programmes with that text in the name like the behind the scenes programme “Doctor Who Confidential”. You can of course be more sophisticated with your searches, and that’s all covered in the documentation very well.

I’m not saying this is the best way to use get_iplayer, it’s just the way I use it, and a lot of people ask me how I use it. One thing I’d like to do is maybe change the download location to /media/drobo/TV/YYYY-MM-DD or TV/DayOf_Week_DDMMYYYY. Maybe also I could move stuff older than a few days to /media/drobo/TV/Archive to make it easier to get to the new stuff.

Comments and suggestions welcome!

Six months ago I moved one of the domains I host over to Google Apps. I'd heard good things about it, and it seemed a sensible move from their current setup of a shared gmail account.

Despite a first few headaches, things started picking up - but now another problem has reared it's head.

I have the user andy@domain.com - and I want to also send from andy.loughran@domain.com - this is pretty easy to setup - just add a nickname in the admin panel and that's the equivalent of another email alias. I'm currently receiving emails fine on both. However, when I want to send an email from the full name - it gets sent with the horrible addendum (on behalf of andy@domain.com) - evidently to remove this I'd have to setup my own smtp server for the domain on another server. Since Google are already providing the smtp services for that domain, this seems a moot point.

Is there a way round it other than having to pay for the premium edition?

It’s official, we are doing another free culture event called OggCamp 10 on May 1st/2nd 2010 in Liverpool, UK! Go us!

What: OggCamp 10 – Free Culture Unconference
When: 1st – 2nd May 2010, all day both days – times to be confirmed
Where: The Black-E, Liverpool, UK

Bonus Event! The night before OggCamp 10
What: Rathole Radio Roadshow – Concert
When: 30th April 2010, 20:00 till late
Where: Bad Format Social Club, Liverpool, UK

twitter.com/oggcamp
identi.ca/oggcamp
oggcamp.org

More details to follow, keep an eye on our feeds to find out more!

It’s the time of year again where the Ubuntu project asks for new content for the Ubuntu CD. This comes in the form of photos, audio and video clips which are stashed in the Examples folder of every default install of Ubuntu. There’s very little time left to be considered for inclusion, so act fast if you’d like to have your content included.

All the details can be found on the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase page on the Ubuntu wiki. Get creating!

Below is a mail I sent to Larry & Tom from the Going Linux Podcast. It’s some feedback after listening to an episode whilst stuck in a traffic jam on the way to record an episode of Ubuntu UK Podcast. They were kind enough to read out my mail in full, and were very good willed about it, despite it being almost completely negative :S . I’m publishing it here in case anyone else is interested.

Note: I’ve massively simplified what apt-get does, and yes, I have used apt-get in my example and not aptitude or synaptic. This was most appropriate given the episode this is feeedback to.

Hi Larry & Tom,

I’m an Ubuntu user and fellow podcaster on the Ubuntu UK Podcast..

(I realise that this mail may come over as negative, and I don’t mean it to. I want you guys to carry on doing what you’re doing but appreciate that beginners will listen to your advice and act on it. If you don’t read it out that’s fine, I don’t mind, but I’d appreciate it if you’d take on board the content in the manner in which it was intended, some friendly advice

I listened to episode 86 of Going Linux Podcast in the car and wanted to give you some feedback about an answer that you gave to a caller – Greg – about updating and upgrading an Ubuntu server installation onto which the caller had added XFCE.

Firstly I think you gave some incorrect advice about the apt-get parameters, the upgrade process and installing packages. You suggested to the caller that ‘apt-get dist-upgrade’ will upgrade from one release to another – for example from 9.04 to 9.10. This is not correct.

To clarify:-

“sudo apt-get update” – this command is equivalent to the ‘check’ button in Update Manager. It just refreshes the local list of packages from online repositories. No packages get upgraded.

“sudo apt-get upgrade” – this will upgrade packages where a new version is available in the repository. However it will not install any new dependancies which may be required by those upgraded packages.

“sudo apt-get dist-upgrade” – this is exactly the same as ‘upgrade’ only it _does_ add new packages that will be required by the upgrade of the packages. Note: This does _not_ upgrade from one release to another on its own.

However before Update Manager existed, many people would manually edit their ’sources.list’ and then “sudo apt-get update” then “sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”. Some people still do this, but we generally don’t recommend that people do that, although it is “allowed” and “supported”.

If the caller wishes to upgrade from one release to another, the command to use on the server is:-

“sudo do-release-upgrade”

On a desktop, users can use that command in a terminal, or more usually use the graphical ‘Update Manager’.

The reason why we recommend using do-release-upgrade or Update Manager is because they have additional functionality over using apt-get or aptitude. This extra functionality is used to work around certain ‘quirks’ that occur when you go from one release to another.

I’d recommend taking a look at this page on the Ubuntu wiki, which is the official documentation for upgrading Ubuntu systems:-

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes

The second thing I wanted to highlight was the problem with installing packages from random 3rd party websites. You may have heard of the recent malware that was added to a deb package hosted on the popular theme site Gnome Look
(http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/12/09/2215253/Malware-Found-Hidden-In-Screensaver-On-Gnome-Look) which highlights the issue with installing random debs from 3rd party
websites.

The third thing is related to both of the above. Your general advice during the show was “don’t upgrade, reinstall” when looking at upgrades. If people do install packages from sites which host debs which are not part of the repository, and then attempt to upgrade their system to another release there is a real genuine chance that
the upgrade will fail. The reason for that is quite simple, the QA team don’t test every possible combination of debs on an Ubuntu system. Sure, members of the Ubuntu community test out various combinations, but not everything is, and when the upgrade fails, plenty of people blame Ubuntu developers of the upgrade tools.

The key takeaway from this is.. Imagine a world where everyone does clean installs, where nobody ever upgrades because they have no faith that it will work, because people keep telling them it wont. We’ll never get any testing done of the upgrade process if nobody ever upgrades. This becomes a self perpetuating spiral of fail resulting in
less and less feedback to developers when upgrades go wrong.

So, I’d strongly encourage you to educate your listeners about the support network available for Ubuntu. That’s not just the forums, but irc channels and mailing lists. The _vast_ majority of upgrade problems _can_ be fixed, but it takes a little time and patience.

If you ever want a guest on to talk about this kind of stuff, I’d be delighted to dial in over skype or whatever and talk it over

All the best, keep up the great work on the show!
Alan Pope

This past month has been busy busy busy! With getting a job offer, leaving my old job, starting with VMware, the holidays, New years, Birthdays and finally seeing Avatar it has been a whirlwind of a month and I am looking forward to a little bit of winding down!

Go to work, come home, repeat. Until Valentines day next month anyways

As I was adding yet more volunteering roles to my CV this morning, it struck me how much I actually do or have done in recent years. It really is scary. I will now list them, just for my own future reference:

Community Co-Ordinator for the freenode IRC network (http://freenode.net) – July 2009 to present

Co-Ordinator for the South East branch of Digital Freedom in Education and Youth (http://dfey.org) – August 2009 to present

Reviewer and publisher of events for Fossevents (http://fossevents.org) – September 2009 to present

Involved with running lug.org.uk (shared hosting facilities for UK Linux User Groups http://lug.org.uk) – December 2009 to present

Account creator, vandalism fighter (with rollback permissions) on the English Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) – May 2008 to present

Administrator for Students Linux User Group – May 2008 to June 2009

FOSS Community Assistant for DaringToWin FOSS group – July 2009 to November 2009

Of course, all of these roles have been/are voluntary, online roles. I’m not sticking to this though, oh no, I still hope to progress, particularly with freenode, Wikipedia and the Ubuntu community (whom I haven’t mentioned here because I don’t actually do anything!)… one day! I am very happy I have got this far, of course, though! As Delta Goodrem says in one of her songs “Together We Are One”:

Seek out the strength to win, no thoughts of giving in, aim higher, and higher…

Sure, why not? For the leather and light as a feather crowd.

Just a short post to let you know that I changed my identi.ca / twitter usernames from @isabell121 to @issyl0. Note: It’s a lowercase L, not the number 1 (ONE).

It’s all part of my quest to have a better syncronised online identity with the same usernames across a number of projects (Ubuntu (forums, wiki), freenode, DFEY to name but a few) to avoid confusion !

Look what just arrived from the States. This should be good.

Update: It was, although the sheer density of terrible videos was headache-inducing.

This morning, I woke up, checked the school website and indeed it was closed, and set about achieving something that I have wanted to achieve for months: SSHing to my desktop.

It really is brilliant! After some instructions from the people in the #surrey LUG IRC channel (thank you!) and discovering that SSH wouldn’t work unless the computer I was connecting to was turned on, I got it working not only with CLI apps (vim) but with GUI apps like OpenOffice, which is how I am writing this. It laggs a bit with OOo, but that is to be expected!

I also confirmed my internet connection is rubbish (WiFi, I’m at the back of the house) when I pinged my desktop from my laptop and it returned:
18 packets transmitted, 12 received, 33% packet loss, time 17056ms .

I am very happy, now all I need to do is make it work so I can SSH to my desktop when I am connected to another network that isn’t my home internet connection!

I always find it adorable when Jenny talks to me in her sleep, especially when my responses obviously provoke a reaction without waking her up.

Out of nowhere just now:

Her: Erm. Erm. If you’ve separated all the wood stuff how are you going to separate the rest?

Me: What wood stuff?

Her: From my bit.

(voice manages to convey mild irritation at my lack of understanding)

Me: Your bit of what?

Her: Thing!

(Sleep-Jenny clearly losing patience)

Me: Okay then. We’ll work it out.

Her: Good.

(the world has been set to rights)

In the morning I shall endeavour to find out what her bit is and what apart from wood needs to be separated from it.

Feltham Airparcs leisure centre has for the last 2 weeks — and ongoing — closed at 4pm, instead of 10pm, because the emergency lighting doesn’t work.

The actual lighting works fine, it’s just that if the lighting did fail then there’d be no emergency lights directing the shallow end of the gene pool to safety.

So the staff close the place up as soon as it starts to get a bit dusky out.

This song is one that I've always enjoyed listening to, but as it came on the radio last night on my way home from Nottingham, it really struck a chord with me.

In a recent walk down Millbank and over Waterloo bridge, the thing that really hit me about being back in the UK was how much it has changed since I was younger. I remember a visit to the Houses of Parliament at school, and the seeing the beautiful seat of the British Parliament. The guide reiterated the fact that it's called the House of Commons, because it's full of commoners - people like you and me, and that the Queen is not allowed to enter.

Walking past the Houses of Parliament on the 7th December, what struck me was the security surrounding the place. Whilst I agree that the people running the country need adequate protection in order to operate, I also lament the fact that two foot concrete blocks (albeit now fronted with black plastic) are a very visual and political barrier to the House of Commons. If terrorists have infiltrated London enough to drive round a truck full of explosives, why is it that the Houses of Parliament should have such extra protection as compared to other public or private buildings?

I should imagine it would be a step too far for the major political parties - but let's think about removing these barriers and getting back to the freedoms that we enjoyed before the start of the last decade.

All that the Christmas Day attacks proved is that no matter how high we try and make our security, someone is always going to get through. Therefore the sensible thing to do is to have adequate levels of security, and give people their freedom back. I'd rather live as a free man with the risk of being killed by a terrorist, than have my life massively restricted only for the sake of a small reduction in that risk.

Prologin est un concours en France pour les jeunes (moins de 20 ans) francophones qui aiment les maths, la logique et l’informatique pour coder des choses pour gagner un concours. Je viens de le trouver aujourd’hui, mais malheureusement pas assez tot pour m’inscrire cette année ! Il paraît tres tres bien et quand meme j’ai essayé ce matin de resoudre quelques problemes.

Les difficultes varient, et heureusement j’ai bien codé la solution a :

« Vous devez écrire une fonction qui retourne la réponse à la question universelle, sur la vie, l’univers, et le reste. »

qui est bien sur 42. J’ai codé la solution en C, et c’était bien simple. Le niveau de cette exercise (de 2009) etait le minimum, niveau 1, et je l’ai reussi ! Je suis tres heureuse maintenant ! Je sais que ce n’était pas difficile du tout, mais quand meme avec le niveau de connaissances que j’ai maintenant, je trouve que c’est bien que je l’ai reussi !

Mon code, en C, etait :
(J’ai du supprimer les < autour de stdio.h, WordPress ne les aiment pas.)

#include stdio.h
int main() {
printf(“42\n”);
return(0);
}

Et ce code avait donné :

42

Cette année, je vais m’entrainer et apprendre beaucoup plus pour que je peux m’inscrire l’année prochaine (2011).

Having just read Dan's post on what 2009 was like for him, I'm looking forward to seeing what 2010 brings, for him and also for me.


Last year was a bit of an eye opener on so many levels, and one of the things it's taught me is to focus on what I have acheived, rather than what I hadn't - so here's my 2009 breakdown.


January

I decided upon returning from India for Christmas 2008 that I would head back out to volunteer for the charity that I visited out in India. It was a tough decision as I felt pretty loyal to my employer, and although aspects of the job weren't pretty, I'd landed on my feet straight from University into this job and wanted it to last.

February

Feb was a bit of a nothing month; most of the time I was preparing myself for India, though I did manage a couple of trips out to see Macclesfield Town FC.

March

I had an awesome birthday/farewell party and headed out to India. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, yet within days I was up to my eyeballs helping the Doctors with their work.

April

We had two teams of volunteers come out from the UK and help run a couple of Childrens' Summer Parties. It was an absolutely rewarding and humbling. We catered for nearly 300 children, whilst the Doctor's ran a Parenting and Health Course for their carers. I cannot overstate how much this course has changed the lives of the carers and the children. Whereas before the parents were acting based on hearsay and poor advice, they are now confident to use basic medicines, and can get first-class advice from a 24 hour helpline. I had no part in either the course or the helpline, but it was brilliant seeing the benefits.

May

May was probably the first month when we were able to actively help out in the slum communities. Initially this simply meant turning up and gaining the trust of the community. Partnering with the local people already working in the community, I got the opportunity to help entertain and spend times with these kids. They were also my most successful teachers of the local language, Malayalam. I ended my first stint out in India and came back to the UK, to avoid monsoon season, and my Dad's 50th Birthday.

June

With no job, and a monsoon to wait through, much of my time at the start of June was spent helping out relatives with oddjobs and doing a bit of django development. I spent a few hours a day playing around with a few sites and trying to teach myself a few new things. I also got the opportunity to take a bit of a break, as I'd gone straight from University to employed work in the space of 2 days back in 2007.

July

Some of my time in July was spent doing UK-based work for the Charity. The Doctor's were back, so I spent a fair amount of time with them, trying to decide on a new name, and general 'team building.' I also got the opportunity to go on a lovely family holiday to Frace/Spain, though I drove most of the trip, and on our final journey (from St. Jean pied de Port to Shepton Mallet) the car started misbehaving and cutting out at low revs. I'd packed a haynes manual, and with a bit of good luck and some rather crude tinkering by me, we restarted the car each time and made it back to the UK.

August

In August, I helped out in Venue 2 at the New Wine Conference in Shepton Mallet. It's not something that I would have ever done previously, especially with the tagline the Observer gave it - Glastonbury for God. However, I had a really good time and learnt alot about my views on God, and the differences between Christianity and Catholicism. Two days after the conference closed, I was on a plane back out to India. I was fortunate to not just have the Doctors out there with me, but we also had three awesome volunteers. Two stayed two weeks and helped decorate the house and the other one stayed a month and was the only British male company I had out in India.

September

Once my male company had departed, we spent the rest of the month doing a couple of clinics a week for the partner charity. I was quite depressing hearing the horrible stories that so many of the children have been through, and being helpless in so many ways. It was just great that they had someone helping them out. The Doctors are doing an awesome job.

October

September was the month of the medical electives. The previous volunteers were 2nd year students, but these guys were 9 months off being qualified, so there was much more of a focus on the medicine. It was quite interesting to be non-medical at this point, as I was quite how much commitment the medical profession involves. Talking about placements, rotations, some forms that needed to be submitted, and a whole load of other things meant that this month was ultra-intense.

November

This was probably the most impacting month of my time in India. It started with a trip to a more 'classically impoverished' region. That is to say that the poverty was much more obvious and acute. It felt like how I'd imagined foreign charity work to be like when I was a child, but the thing that struck me was the kindness of the people, and their immediate acceptance and hospitality. I felt a bit inept that I wasn't able to help out as the Doctors were doing, by providing them with medical care - however, I played my role as best I could, as a runner for the Doctors and trying to help out where I could.
It also brought and end to my time in India.

December

Having got back to the UK, I immediately restarted work for my old employed, who'd I'd been working for 10 hours a week from India (where possibly). We had a PCI DSS Level 1 audit within a day of my return. The guys had been working very hard, but it was great to be able to immediately contribute my experience to securing a successful outcome.
I also came home to find my father much more involved in the work on the Birmingham and Solihull Rugby Club.

---

So that was my year. It's not got as many defining moments as Dan's - and some of it may have been repetitive. However, I'm hoping that in 2010 I can start to embrace the opportunities that are coming up to get more experience. I intend to go and volunteer in another developing county - but with my experience comes the realisation that I need more before I am able to commit long-term to any development efforts. I'm not sure in which direction 2010 will take me, however, I know I have the full support of my family and friends.

While updating my blog earlier, I noticed a comment stuck in the moderation queue of another article that I hadn't seen until now. Apologies to Steven who has probably long since given up hope of a reply, but here it is anyway.

Sorry to hijack this comment, but I was wondering what the state of your quest for zfs on the BBS2 is? I'm considering buying one myself, for the exact same setup, OpenSolaris + zfs (the alternative is a more traditional NAS like the QNAP 439). I'm especially interested in the performance of the system (as a NAS), and whether you made any progress on the problem with the network card drivers. Have you tried/considered using Nexenta iso OpenSolaris?

thanks!

Steven

I mentioned earlier last year that a kernel engineer was looking into my nasty Realtek RTL8111/8168B issues under OpenSolaris on the BBS2, but I didn't provide an update.

At the time, a kind engineer at Sun had seen this post and passed my contact details onto somebody who could help. For a number of weeks, I set up the BBS2 with a serial console via another box and a small GigE network that the Sun developer could use to try and trigger the bug between the two machines.

This was fairly successful and after a little time, he had managed to get the delay for a network restart down to about 20-30 seconds with modifications to the rge kernel module and was confident that it could be reduced to just seconds. I had on a couple of occassions seen complete network dropouts where the kernel didn't seem to notice that the chipset had died and so didn't reset it. Unfortunately, I couldn't reproduce these at all and so the developer couldn't provide any more help.

Since that fizzled out in April/May, I hope the fixes that Sun came up with have made their way into the OpenSolaris source tree, but I haven't checked the change logs recently. Thanks to both Sébastien and Winson for their efforts!

After leaving the BBS2 for a few months, I decided to install FreeBSD 7.2 after replacing my desktop in October. At first I ran into a few issues with lockups while trying to copy data on, but with some tweaks, including recompiling the kernel to increase the possible kernel address space the system has been pretty much perfectly stable since.

I'll be upgrading the box to FreeBSD 8.0 soon in the understanding that it has improved memory handling for ZFS and won't need the tweaking and recompiling that was necessary to run ZFS under 7.x. FreeBSD is definitely recommended if you're looking for ZFS, though it isn't for the fearless!

Recently I've been working on a different type of cloud infrastructure with new storage options. One of the changes is to now use remote storage over iSCSI rather than FibreChannel directly attached storage.

On some of our CentOS 5.4 systems, we have the following layers above the iSCSI block devices:

• iSCSI block devices /dev/sdc and /dev/sdd managed with iscsiadm
• dm-multipath devices /dev/mapper/mpath1 for /dev/sdc and mpath2 for sdd
• Linux software RAID0 at /dev/md0 over /dev/mapper/mpath1 and mpath2
• LVM2 VG vgexample on /dev/md0

On one particular system, the setup had already been running once without the dm-multipath layer and was been working fine. When trying to enable the dm-multipath layer on this system (well, actually, when Puppet ran) it was unable to bring up the software RAID device /dev/md0.

Running the RAID assembly command gave the following output:

# mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/mapper/mpath[12]
mdadm: Cannot open /dev/mapper/mpath1: Device or resource busy
mdadm: create aborted

Strangely, the array could be assembled with the second device, but not the first (even though it wouldn't start):

# mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/mapper/mpath2
mdadm: /dev/md0 assembled from 1 drive - not enough to start the array.

Running mdadm under strace showed that it was unable to get an exclusive file handle on the device:

 44 15176 open("/dev/mapper/mpath1", O_RDONLY|O_EXCL) = -1 EBUSY (Device or resource busy)
 45 15176 write(2, "mdadm: cannot open device /dev/m"..., 70) = 70
 46 15176 write(2, "mdadm: /dev/mapper/mpath1 has no"..., 63) = 63
 47 15176 exit_group(1)                     = ?

Compared to the above mdadm assemble with the one working device:

 44 15180 open("/dev/mapper/mpath2", O_RDONLY|O_EXCL) = 4
 45 15180 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0660, st_rdev=makedev(253, 1), ...}) = 0
 46 15180 fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0660, st_rdev=makedev(253, 1), ...}) = 0

It turned out to be caused by a partition table that existed on the second disk (from a previous life where it had been partitioned). This could be seen by looking at the devices generated by dm-multipath and fdisk -l:

# ls -l /dev/mapper/mpath*
total 0
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253,  0 Jan  2 17:39 mpath1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253,  2 Jan  2 17:39 mpath1p1
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253,  1 Jan  2 17:39 mpath2

By bad luck, the partition table on this disk was still intact underneath the RAID0 and so it was being read and a device for the partition was created, though multipath itself won't show you this:

# multipath -l
mpath2 (1494554000000000000000000010000006a09000011000000) dm-1 IET,VIRTUAL-DISK
[size=232G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0][rw]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][active]
 \_ 6:0:0:0 sdd 8:48  [active][undef]
mpath1 (1494554000000000000000000010000005e09000011000000) dm-0 IET,VIRTUAL-DISK
[size=232G][features=1 queue_if_no_path][hwhandler=0][rw]
\_ round-robin 0 [prio=0][active]
 \_ 5:0:0:0 sdc 8:32  [active][undef] 

If a partition exists, dm-multipath creates a device and blocks exclusive access to the main device. The easiest way to fix this was to wipe the boot sector from the drive and to recreate the RAID on top. It may be possible to wipe the boot sector without recreating the RAID, but I wasn't going to risk this. To wipe the boot sector, simply wipe the first 512 bytes from the drive (at your own risk..):

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=512 count=1

Happy New Year from Berlin.

After watching the two Doctor Who Christmas episodes I thought I’d watch the ‘behind the scenes’ programme ‘Doctor Who Confidential’. During one segment where they discuss the set used in the Christmas episode I spotted a bunch of machines with what look like Ubuntu boot screens on them. If you’re in the UK (or have access to Freesat in Europe) you can see it on BBC HD at 16:55 on 3rd January, or on BBC Three at 04:10 on 5th January. according to the iplayer page. The frame below was grabbed from 38:29 mins in.

They look like Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) to me. Probably multiple screens connected to one computer as they are all showing the same thing in the actual episode itself.

Here’s a rough list of goals that the projects I’m involved in online have for the next year, or a set of goals they hope to achieve.

Freenode

In 2010 freenode hopes to further expand with the launch of the new ircd, codenamed seven (yes, it does sound too Microsoft-ish for a network aimed at Open Source!) which will include the possibility of SSL connections (something many users have been asking for!), amongst many other things, and the group registration system is getting a complete overhaul which will hopefully be complete in 2010 sometime (I thank all the dedicated volunteers that are helping to make the new system possible)! In 2009, not only did freenode break the 60,000 users barrier, but the PDPC fundraiser raised an amazing £1500 (figures as of 31st December 2009) – thank you to all the people and organisations who have donated, the PDPC (the organisation behind freenode) are always grateful no matter how small the amount you donate!

Note: The official freenode ‘Happy New Year’ blog post can be found here – this is in no way official.

Fossevents

Fossevents has been very successful over the last year with lots of events being added, thanks! In 2010, it hopes to integrate calendar feeds with it, get mapping set up for a better event listing system (that tells you where the event is on a map on the page without you having to go and find it out for yourself from, say, Google Maps)! Of course, fossevents needs more events, so if any of you know any FOSS events (LUG meets, conferences, training…), please don’t hesitate to add them. http://fossevents.org is the place to go for your FOSS event listings!

Apart from a few excellent singles/albums, I can’t help feeling this has been a fairly meagre year for good music. I spent a good while thinking about what releases from this year impressed me most, but had to discard most of them beacuse they were from 2008. Here’s the few things I really liked that came out this year:

1. Tim Exile – Family Galaxy (Warp)

I wasn’t such a big fan of the album, but this track is brilliant, applying the lyrics’ theme of ‘keep changing everything’ to the music. Wasn’t too sure about the vocals to begin with, but they do work.

2. St. Vincent – The Strangers (4AD)

Actually, the whole album, Actor, is fantastic.

3. Bob Dylan – Must Be Santa (Columbia)

Dylan’s Christmas album turned out a lot better than I – and most people – expected. This was my favourite track, as well as being the leading single. Great video.

4. Dent May & His Magnificent Ukelele – Oh Paris! (Paw Tracks)

Fantastic song from a very good album on Panda Bear’s Paw Tracks label. Kind of half-way between the Smiths and a Hawaiian beach party. The video above is a different version to the album one – more pared-down.

Yeah, I could only muster four good things, which is a bit rubbish. Perhaps 2010 will be a bumper year? Ideally the new Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin albums will finally come out in 2010, and maybe we’ll get some new artists that aren’t rubbish (see the BBC’s ‘Sound of 2009′ article from last January for the list of mindless trash that came out this year), too. Here’s hoping!

–
P.S. Almost forgot to mention Susan Lam/Annie Chung’s breakthrough MIDI masterpiece, Golden Hits, available on my netlabel, Bearfaced! It ought to be everyone’s soundtrack to 2009 and 2010.

Wow, seems scary when it’s written like that. Ten years since the 2000 millenium and two years away is the 2012 London Olympics. I’ll be sixteen this year, which also mark the tenth anniversary of a very sad thing that I’m not going to go into on this blog, and also the two year anniversary of, well, another death of two of my good French friends. Ouch.

Moving on, 2010 will see many things change and being 16 will enable me to have greater opportunities: no more child fares on trains (16-25 rail card discounts instead), the ability to buy alcohol in a pub with food and an adult present (not that I will!), amongst many other things. For other teenagers in England, turning 16 in 2010 will mean exams, finishing school and possibly going on to college. For me, however, it will mean transitioning from Yr 10 into Yr 11. Yr 11 is the year of exams, and by the time I take those exams, I could be driving to school on a provisional license and taking driving lessons, according to British law. Gosh!

Finally, I wish you all a Happy New Year 2010 and hope it brings you what you would like it to, hope you all have a wonderful year and hope you achieve what you wish to achieve!

Kevin, tu me manques toujours. Je sais que 2010 serait 2 ans depuis, mais toujours tu es dans mon coeur. Et aussi bien sur Vincent, meme si je ne te connaissais pas aussi bien que Kevin. Hmm, ouais.
Josh, tu es toujours dans mon coeur aussi. C’est plus facile a ecrire en francais.

Since I’m moving south in a couple of weeks (or sooner), I’ve started getting a few homeware-type things. I saw this Green Man doormat in Past Times and, being very interested in British folklore and mythology, simply had to have it. Even better, it came up half price on the till and they let me have it for that price.

I’m also looking for some way to use the internet when I move into my new place; I’m currently split between a wifi router or one of those new-fangled ones that sends the network down your power sockets.

The other exciting thing I’ve sent away for, with the idea of using it when I move, is a voice-changing telephone, courtesy of the good people of China, which could be fun to use when the telemarketers come a-calling. Here’s a rather poor promotional video of it in action.

Google Books now has many, many (all?) back issues of Weekly World News in its online archive.

For those who don’t know, WWN was a newspaper where every story was entirely fictitious. I used to get it, in the early 1990s, when – rather inexplicably – our local Somerfield used to stock it. Getting access to this archive has confirmed what I thought about the Weekly World News – namely that it used to be a lot more believable back then. I think it was published by the same people as the National Inquirer, the only other US tabloid which was available in the UK. It was featured as the only source of ‘real’ news in the cinematic landmark ‘Men In Black’, too.

WWN came to an end a couple of years ago, after declining and becoming increasingly unbelievable. At some point in the late 90s, they clearly decided to completely do away with the pretense that they weren’t lying, and by the end were even putting a ‘this is all a load of cobblers’ disclaimer in each issue. The quality of the stories suffered as a result.

If you flick back to the early 90s issues (around page 20 of the results), though, you’re in for a treat.

Picked up this slightly bizarre record in the charity shop just before Christmas.

It has a superb cover, and I was hoping the 80s hip hop/ska/African military dictator look of the three gentlemen pictured would be reflected in the music. Unfortunately, it’s mainly traditional music of Soweto, although a few of the tracks veer towards a sort of reggae.

I was interested to see this is ‘Zulu Jive Volume Two’ – presumably there was a whole series of these records. The back cover states:

The first ‘Bantu’ recordings in South Africa were made in 1912/13 by the visiting British Zonophone Company Recording Unit. It was in 1931 that Gallo Ltd set up the first South African recording studio in Johannesburg. Initially these studios recorded material from all over Anglophone Central Africa but after 1970 Zulu and South Sotho material began to dominate the recording industry.

After the 2nd World War in the townships that services the gold mines and industrial heartland of the Witwatersrand, the traditional music of the Zulu and Sotho collided with the Afro American rhythm and blues, jazz and blues of the period to form new urban styles such as township jazz, the pennywhistle street music, kwela, and the shebeen inspired marabi [??]. Mbqanga drew upon all these forms for inspiration to become a powerful new urban pop style.

Uh. Great cover though.

Yesterday I happened to be waiting on a tube platform with a non-technical person, and we were opposite one of those new Google Chrome ads, as pictured here.

I’ve seen a few people comment that they didn’t think that a non-technical person would understand what they were all about, so I took the opportunity to ask my friend about it.

“See that ad over there? What do you think it’s for?”

“It looks like it’s for a search thing. A new kind of web search thing. That’s a big list of related things to what they searched for”

“What do you think Google Chrome is then?”

“Well it says on it, a new browser. That’s what you use to search isn’t it?”

“What other browsers are there then?”

“Well there’s the Yahoo! one, and then there’s the Google one.”

So to the extent that she even noticed the ad, she assumed it was just something to do with Google’s search engine, because of the search implications and prior meaning of the brand “Google”.

I don’t think this proves anything, but it was interesting hearing another point of view.

The nice people from the Jordanian chapter of the IEEE gave me this award after my two hour marathon talk. They were really nice and I suggest visiting the IEEE chapter in Amman.

For those of you that are still reading this despite the title, thanks.

It's nearly the end of another very exciting and pleasant year. True, there's been economic depression, and things in that regard haven't been great - but there have been a load of positives.

I'm not going to list all the good things that have happened to me, as I know I'd omit some and end up making some people feel like crap, but I think the best thing that's happened to me has been perspective.

When I began 2009, I'd just got back from a pretty inspiring visit to South India, and had made the decision to head back out there. It was a bit of a dramatic change from the seemingly monotonic day-job - and was a fresh and direct challenge to help a cause that I believed in. Having spend 7 of the last 12 months out there, I feel a pretty strong connection to the area. Imagined or not, it's like another 'mini-conscience' inside of me, making me think of how privileged I am to be able to do what I'm doing either out there, or here in England.

One of the things I spent alot of time doing was trying to reconcile the lifestyle here in England with the lifestyle that I've been calling my own out in India. Whether it be the ridiculous amounts in comparison spent on a cup of tea, to the meals that I was eating and the clothes I was wearing; to even how I was thinking. The conclusion though is that it's impossible to reconcile it. Living a Western Lifestyle is passively harming the people I met in India.

At this juncture, I can see two options open to me.

A) I decide to become a saint and live with as little as possible and try to live a 'perfect' life - avoiding those things in Western Society that I see as damaging to my friends out in India.
B) I live the life that's put in front of me, and work out a way that I can affect the situation as I make my way through it.

Whilst option A is probably the most laudable option, I know I'm going to make mistakes and option A doesn't allow for that. I do not yet have sufficient experience or foundation to be able to fulfil option A without having to rely on someone else. As that 'someone else' would effectively just be living the Western Lifestyle, all I would have ended up doing is passively harming 'by proxy.'

The most important thing therefore is never to lose sight of my overall aim. I need to get myself in a position where I can positively affect the situation, and despite my best intentions I've come to realise that the time is not now. However, my thoughts are with my friends in India over Christmas. Guilt is the wrong emotion - perspective is knowing that what's coming to me I in no way deserve.

After spotting a great deal in PC World this evening, I came home with a T-Mobile PAYG 3G Dongle, £20 got me the Dongle, £10 credit and 30 days service for just £2.

Upon installing, everything seemed fine until I went to use Terminal.. “[Process Completed]“, at first, I thought zcsh was broken, but no other shells were working either, so I reboot in hope that it may just go away, but this is where my problems start, it won’t boot.

After doing a bit of research, it seems the installer replaces libcurl.4.dylib with a 32bit only version - many things rely on this lib, resulting in a broken system.

Now, to fix this problem, you need to replace the lib with the original, you can download a copy of this here: http://www.mike-hughes.net/share/libcurl.4.dylib.bz2

Once you have this, you need to boot your mac up in Single User mode, you can do this by holding Command/Apple + S immediately at boot.

Once there, you need to mount your disk

fsck -fy
mount -uw /


Now, The only easy way I found of getting the file over to the mac in single user mode is to scp it over, but for this you’ll need networking support, you’ll need an ethernet connection;

launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.kextd.plist
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.notifyd.plist
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.configd.plist
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemon com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist


Once you’re connected (You can check with `ifconfig`), you can scp the file over;

scp user@yourhost.com:/path/to/libcurl.4.dylib .


And then simply copy it to /usr/lib;

cp libcurl.4.dylib /usr/lib/


And that’s it, reboot and you’re all sorted.

I’ve tested my dongle since, and it still seems to work, I’ll report back if any more issues ensue.

Almost a year ago, I signed up for daytum.com.

The premise of the site derives from Nicholas Felton’s “annual reports” (linked in the previous post) – keep track of something you do (trips to the gym, drinks, distance walked, whatever; at one point I noticed someone was tracking their trips to the toilet and what they did while they were there…) and the site presents it with some pretty graphs in the same sort of visual style as he uses and also with some basic analysis (time since the last entry etc.). To be honest, I didn’t expect to keep it up (fnar) for anywhere near a year, but for some reason I’ve found it strangely compelling.

To the numbers…

After a year, I suppose now is as good a time as any to have a look at some of the numbers. From New Year’s Day 2009 to midnight on the 28th December, I’ve had:

1. 958 cups of tea
2. 719 glasses of water (with or without diluting juice)
3. 620 glasses of orange juice
4. 474 glasses of Irn Bru

after that, the quantities get a lot smaller (best of the rest: 192 cups of coffee; keeping up the rear: 4 bottles of M&S Christmas Orange/Grape/Cranberry stuff).

That still means, though, that in an average day I get through about 3 cups of tea, 2 glasses of water, 2 glasses of orange juice and a glass of Irn Bru (amongst other things).

Some other stuff I tracked:

1. circa. 485 car journeys (1.34 a day)
2. 230 bus journeys (almost twice every 3 days)
3. 141 shaves (i.e. twice in five days, or once every 2 weekdays if you assume every time was on one)

New things I’d like to see

On the last part, one feature that I think might be useful, analytically, would be separating weekends and weekdays or perhaps taking account of the academic year (i.e. separate terms or term-time and otherwise) Daytum do let you download the data in CSV format, so it’s possible to deal with those issues; I just can’t really be bothered doing it myself.
One other feature I’d use would be a more native interface for my current mobile OS, Symbian S60. Not having to use the phone’s web browser and the iPhone interface (which works relatively well, in fairness) would be nice. Daytum are apparently working on an API though, so it should be possible to build some sort of application to do it.

The last thing is the future – what Cool New Thing™ should I start tracking this year?
I think I’d be interested in the total distance I travel, or better still a breakdown of time and/or distance in a car/on a train/walking. I’ve toyed with using Nokia Sports Tracker on my phone (Nokia N96 all-black) but it flattens the battery in no time at all because it insists on using the phone’s GPS and data connection – a whole day would take a miniature fusion reactor to keep it going. Which kinda sucks.

Something I think Daytum could do better at is showcasing the novel things people use the service for.
There’s a premium version, which gets you more features (separate your stuff into pages, some privacy settings) as well as more categories and items to store data with. I use the free version, mostly because I’d struggle to justify the cost (four US Dollars per month). If I bumped against some of the limits of the free account (here’s the opportunity to promote novel, or otherwise, uses and make some money out of it), I’d consider upgrading.

I’m wondering if you could take all the “fun” manual jobs like smashing things with hammers, and contract them out to normally-desk-bound people, who do it for minimum wage (for the task at hand). So then you have a large work force who individually only do the manual work for a small part of their time each (e.g. one day a week/month), maintaining their usual career the rest of the time.

What other kinds of manual labour do people enjoy? It’s pretty much just smashing things up for me I think.

So I have my shiny new Macbook Pro 13″ for work, a 24″ Dell 2408 to make things a bit more usable and a new Aluminium Apple Keyboard. This setup is working really well as far as work goes, but one thing really troubling me is the poor samba mount performance under OSX, and this was a real problem for me, considering all of my development work is done on a local dev server, and I was accessing its filesystem via Samba previous. In steps AFP…

I chose AFP because support for it inside OSX seemed better than NFS in the fact that it seems far better integrated into Finder (well, NFS isn’t integrated at all). It also lets me use Time Machine, Apple’s own backup suite, which seems to work rather well.

To achieve AFP on a Linux server, working perfectly under OSX as well as having support for Time Machine, we will need the latest Netatalk (2.0.5 at time of writing), and Avahi.

Netatalk

Latest Version

If you are running unstable already, you can skip this part, but for those of us less brave, we need to grab netatalk 2.0.5 from unstable for Time Machine support.

FIrst up, we need to do some basic apt-pinning configuration, this will let us use packages from further up the development tree.

Open ‘/etc/apt/preferences’ (You’ll need to create it if this is the first time you’ve used it)
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 900

Package: *
Pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 800

You’ll need to replace stable with the release you are using (ie. of you’re on testing a=testing).

This allows us to put a higher priority on stable packages, so apt doesn’t see all the new packages from unstable and try updating everything.

Next we need to add the unstable repository to ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’
deb ftp://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main

Followed by
apt-get update

Installing Netatalk

Now we need to fetch Netatalk from the unstable tree.
apt-get install netatalk/unstable

Configuring Netatalk

First we need to open up ‘/etc/default/netatalk’, Scroll down until you find the configuration block looking like the one below and change the values to match what you see here:
# Set which daemons to run (papd is dependent upon atalkd):
ATALKD_RUN=no
PAPD_RUN=no
CNID_METAD_RUN=yes
AFPD_RUN=yes
TIMELORD_RUN=no
A2BOOT_RUN=no

Configure Shares

Open up ‘/etc/netatalk/AppleVolumes.default’, and add shares following the examples below:
~ "$u" cnidscheme:cdb options:usedots,upriv
/mnt/files Files cnidscheme:cdb options:usedots,upriv
/home/mike/dev Dev cnidscheme:cdb options:usedots,upriv
/mnt/files/TimeMachine TimeMachine cnidscheme:cdb options:usedots,upriv,tm


Notice the ‘tm’ option for TimeMachine. Also, the first line creates a share named the same as the authenticated user to their home directory.

That’s everything for netatalk, we can restart it now:
/etc/init.d/netatalk restart

Avahi

We’ll use Avahi to advertise our AFP server, so it comes up in Finder with no configuration needed (other than a login!).

Let’s get the programs we’ll need:
apt-get install avahi-daemon libnss-mdns

Firstly we need to edit ‘/etc/nsswitch.conf’ and add ‘mdns’ to the end of the hosts line, so it looks something like this:
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4 mdns

Now we need to configure the Avahi advertising for our AFP server, we do this by creating a new service (replacing vi with your preferred editor):
vi /etc/avahi/services/afpd.service

And add the following:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>
<service>
<type>_afpovertcp._tcp</type>
<port>548</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
<port>0</port>
<txt-record>model=Xserve</txt-record>
</service>
</service-group>


Save that and restart avahi:
/etc/init.d/avahi-daemon restart

Time machine

Before you can use your new network share for Time Machine, you need to enable support for unsupported network shares on the command line:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

iptables

You need to open 548 and 5353, I added the folowing to my iptables import file.
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 548 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 548 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p tcp -m tcp –dport 5353 -j ACCEPT
-A INPUT -p udp -m udp –dport 5353 -j ACCEPT


Conclusion

That should be it, you should be able to see your share in Finder, on the first time you’ll have to click “Connect As..” - if you choose to remember the details in your keychain then it should connect automatically in future.

I found the performance of AFP to be far greater than Samba at least, and I now have a full filesharing and backup system, so winners all round.

Sunset in the necropolis.