John Mort's Weblog

trian's computer has been freezing up lately. Thankfully she has been hearing a click before it will freeze, so I'm hoping it's just a hard drive issue. Assuming that's it, it's stable enough to pull the data off it later, and I happen to have an extra hard drive in my computer after juggling data between every hard drive I've ever owned. So I decided to give her that drive and install an OS on it for her. I figure, if the computer freezes while I'm setting it up, then it's obviously not the HD. But if I get through the install process, then it probably was the HD.

Beginning this process was an exciting time, I managed to force the ribbon cable onto the hard drive upside-down, pushing one of the pins in. A year or two ago, this would have caused me to throw out the drive. But I've been taking apart my hard drives as they die (one part paranoia, one part to harvest the magnets & disks for future use) and realized that the pins were attached to the controller card and there was a chance I could probably push it back out. Off came the controller card and indeed it was simple enough to just push the pin back in.

Then when I turned on the computer it had me go in the BIOS because I shut it down abruptly last time, it wanted me to check the settings. I ineptly set the processor speed too high, saved my changes and rebooted, only to have the computer not POST. Wonderful. Out come the PCI cards, change the CMOS jumper, start dinner, replace the CMOS jumper, back in go the PCI cards, reboot, fix the BIOS, and we're installing.

41% finished formatting the HD and no freeze, with any luck this will be the solution and my computer will be my computer once again.

So awhile back the hard drive on the laptop I use as a server died, sort of. It stops responding after running for a few minutes. I slapped a new hard drive in it, reloaded everything, and went on with life. Unfortunatly, there appears to be a problem with my MediaWiki data.

I wasn't sure which version of MediaWiki I was running, so I just installed the latest and rebuilt the database from the last dump I took, when I browsed to the wiki everything displayed, so I thought I was fine. Then yesterday I tried adding some info to the main page and got this:

Database error
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

    (SQL query hidden)

from within function "Revision::insertOn". MySQL returned error "1048: Column 'old_id' cannot be null (localhost)".

So I'm out on a business trip in Reading Pennsylvania. As usual, my hotel's "high speed internet access" is slower than dialup, severely limiting what I can accomplish remotely in my off-hours. Thinking about what I could do tonight to kill the time after work was done, I checked some local websites while I was on site and had a real connection and discovered all the local features, sites, and museums, close after 5pm. There's a local outlet which I checked out, but couldn't find anything in my size. (guys, if you want to get an idea of what it's like to shop for clothes as a woman, visit an outlet) Since there were no movies in the theater I wanted to watch by myself, I figured maybe I'd just grab a six-pack, hole up in my hotel, and watch some wrestling (wrestling is really cool after you've had two or three).

Finding said six-pack in Pennsylvania is an ordeal. Gas stations, nope. Grocery stores, nope. Pharmacies, nope. Eventually I went to one of those beverage centers and all they had were 24 packs. At that point I'd pretty much given up, getting a little drunk just isn't that important, when I saw a bar and figured I'd give that a try before figuring out something else to do with my night. Score.

I thought NY alcohol laws were strict, our liquor stores have to close at 7pm. This place is crazy though. It's like they want you to either drink a lot or not at all.

Damn, George Carlin died?

It's interesting just how things degrade in linux when there are problems. My server is acting up again, I'm pretty sure it's the hard drive again. I established an ssh connection to it this morning, loaded screen, and fired up finch, irssi, and an ssh session into my desktop where I started an rsync against /home on my server to prime it for a regular scripted rsync.

Coming back to it a couple hours later, I see that the rsync failed somewhere along the line, and attempting to restart rsync gives me:

rsync error: unexplained error (code 255) at io.c(454) [receiver=2.6.9]

Cannot exec '/bin/bash': No such file or directory

Interestingly, when I got home I decided to try plugging the hard drive that appeared to die this morning into my drive reader again in the vain hope of retrieving data. I realized on the way home that the drive was formatted as ext3 which my windows computer at work couldn't read, so it might not actually be dead. The drive mounted on my machine at home and I quickly copied everything I could off of it, first just the important stuff, then one massive copy.

At that point I figured why not push things and plug it back into the thinkpad, this time with a non-broken chassis. It booted up! So, for fun, I'm going to go ahead and run it like this for now, just to see what happens. I'll of course be backing up everything I do on it, this is essentially untrusted hardware, but if it's still working I figure why not drive it into the ground?

I just stumbled across Cradle of Filth's latest video and noticed something interesting. Apparently the visual quality of their videos is inversely proportional to the quality of the music.

Take one of my favorite songs off Midian, for example.

Cardboard scenery, one-take acting, goth-clown makeup, the scary voice dude sitting there holding cutting implements for some reason but having nothing else to do with the "story" except to look "spooky" at the end, headbanging played in reverse to make them look more awkward and less unreal. The video is rather crap, but I love that song.

Now take their latest:

It sounds like they're moving away from Heavy Metal toward some kind of weak Goth/Pop hybrid. The lyrics are incredibly banal, when they're not repeating the same two or three words over and over they're shouting random common phrases that make no sense when strung together. But the video, in a word, Beautiful. I'd let it run in a loop as my desktop background if I could. Any given scene could be plucked out and look like a work of art. Fantastic.

I haven't heard the rest of the album as I haven't really listened to music all that much in the last few years, but if that song is what they're using to represent the album, I think I chose a good stopping point.

This morning the hard drive in my server died. I had done much work on it this weekend and neglected to back it up. Serves me right. All the absolutely critical stuff (which isn't all that critical, just really unappealing to re-create) had been backed up previously, thankfully. So rebuilding was on the menu today. Since my server is a laptop, I figured I'd bring it to work to let the OS installation stuff run while I was working. Unfortunatly, the hard drive chassis disintegrated when I removed the hard drive from it, and I don't want to put another hard drive in without a chassis. I'm sure I have a spare one or two at home, so it's not too disruptive.

Since my server would be down, I figured I'd leave my desktop on and just ssh into that to get the backup files if things were quiet and I had time to load the files. Strangely though, when I try to ssh in, it doesn't prompt me for a password, just a username and then it times out. Increasing verbosity tells me nothing. I had just run an update, didn't pay attention to what packages updated, but hopefully this is just the result of a bad update since I was able to ssh into the machine this morning before the update.

I just wish I didn't have the thing sitting there running and not being used all day.

We got an Xbox 360 earlier this year. I've never been a fan of consoles but gaming on them is more social than with a computer, and we were looking for a form of family entertainment, so we got one.

I recently started playing around with the Xbox settings and discovered that you could stream media to it. When I tried setting it up it gave me a code and told me to use it to download software onto a windows computer. Since I've been moving all my media off trian's windows computer, I looked around to see if I could stream to the 360 from my linux computer instead.

My first discovery was the x360mediaserve project on sourceforge. It wasn't too hard to get working. Download, unpackage into a folder, search for a config file example, eventually find one and set it up, ./start, it is done.

Unfortunately, the name was a bit misleading in that it only streamed music. So I searched around and came across this Ubuntu thread which told me how to do what I just did, but also had commenters mentioning TwonkyVision. Setting this up was about the same as x360mediaserve, only to configure it you have to google around and discover you're supposed to browse to http://127.0.0.1:9000/config. Then once you tell it your ip address so that Xbox can find it, you need to eventually discover that the loopback address needs to be replaced with your computer's IP address. A little annoying, but doable.

Twonky has worked wonderfully so far! I've streamed music to the Xbox with it and it'll run through a whole album no problem. I'm going to try playing with the folder structure to see if I can get it to organize them by artist, but otherwise it's perfect. It also runs video with no problems so far. I only had to download some codec's to the Xbox to get certain video files to work at first, but now those foreign TV shows and physics lectures and documentaries I've found on the web are actually getting watched since there's a screen worth viewing them on.

I'm really pleased with the Xbox 360's ability to act as a media center, I haven't figured out how to stream web-based video to it yet, so we're still stuck huddling around the computer when we miss an episode of Lost, but for anything I can download onto my computer so far it's been able to handle it. Though I still need to try .flv files. Another nice thing is that it knows if you stopped a show partway through and asks if you want to pick up where you left off if you go to view it again.

They sell a remote for the Xbox that's supposed to make navigating it's media center functionality a bit easier, but I've found the game controller sufficient. Though it does feel a bit silly to be poking at that thing when you want to pause or rewind a show.

So I've been playing Guitar Hero a bunch lately, and my wrist has started to hurt. Of course, since I play on an Xbox 360 my first thought is, "Well I guess this is a good time to go for that lefty achievement." rather than figure out how to fix this wrist before damaging the next one.

Thankfully I have some measure of sense, and have stopped playing for now. At first I thought it was carple tunnel, which had me feeling somewhat incredulous, since I've been using a computer my entire life and I fucking type correctly. But whatever, I grabbed one of trian's "I don't type correctly" wrist guards and wore it for a couple days at work and received no benefit aside from the experiential acknowledgment that I didn't have to change the way I type at all while wearing the thing. Actually, that's a lie, I also noticed that my it wasn't bending my wrist that hurt at all, but actually twisting it. What the hell is that?

If you hold an air guitar, you'll notice that the hand that fingers the frets gets twisted around. That sort of motion, in either direction, is what's uncomfortable. So I did some searching around online and discovered that it's more likely I have a (hopefully mild) case of Wrist Tendonitis.

One of the benefits to being a livejournal user is that your account is also an OpenID. For instance, if I wanted to log into tanga.com, I could create an account with them, or I could just use my livejournal ID by clicking "Log in with OpenID" and using xpashax.livejournal.com in the OpenID field. This would take me back to livejournal.com, which would (provided I was logged into livejournal, if not it'd log me in first, and) ask me if I want to send my information to tanga.com, I'd say yes and then I'd be in. No need to maintain yet another userid and password. While this might seem a bit convoluted to go through two steps to authenticate rather than just one, but considering you'd have a cookie to keep you logged in, and the fact that you could log into several websites with the same ID, it's actually rather convenient.

The only problem, of course, is what happens when, I don't know, some Russian corporation with connections to the Russian mafia takes over livejournal and you decide you don't want your personal information available to whomever they decide to sell it to, and cancel your account. You've just lost access to all those accounts you had (unless they happen to have a method to convert your account to another OpenID and you had the forsight to make these changes before closing the account). Now you have a problem.

I've come across a solution. Since I have control over john.mort.net, I can use that as my OpenID. Of course, right now the site sits on my Uncle's machine, and he doesn't allow anything other than flat html files to sit there, so I can't run an OpenID authentication server there for now. But there's another option, I can redirect OpenID requests to livejournal by adding the following lines to the <head> of my main index file.

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://xpashax.livejournal.com/" />

Now when I want to authenticate to a site that accepts OpenID, I can put in john.mort.net and it will redirect to livejournal to authenticate me. So if later on I decide to kill the livejournal account and want to authenticate to blogspot instead, I would just create a blogspot account and change those lines on john.mort.net to:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://xpashax.blogspot.com" />

And other than the fact I'm authenticating at blogspot instead, nothing changes in any of my other account where I've been signing in as john.mort.net. Pretty cool!

One of the hard drives in trian's PC is tapping. She has three hard drives in there, one has the OS, one has program installs, and one has data. I set it up this way so that it would run faster when I was playing games, but now that it's her computer it doesn't really run games anymore, and those games it does run won't benefit from this setup. So provided the tapping drive is not the data drive, I can just merge the other two onto the good drive. If it's the data drive then there will be a time of panic. Even though it's not a really a crisis right now, every time I hear it tap it stresses me out a little more.

Today my T23 which functions as a server had some disk corruption, not fun, but I fixed it. I've finally got the T20 working, which is nice. It's only a 750mhz machine with 750mb RAM, just powerful enough to web around with, and more than sufficient to remote desktop to a more powerful computer or ssh into my server with, and that's all I really need to survive watching HGTV with trian.

I also swapped around all the batteries I have for the TX thinkpads. I have two which are so dead the thinkpads don't even recognize it when it's plugged in. One holds a five minute charge, the other looks like it'll last awhile. It was completely empty when I plugged it in, and has slowly been charging up. I thought at first it'd probably only last 30-45 minutes, but it's taken so long charging up I suspect it might last 90-120 minutes! That would rock!

In any case, it's really nice having a functional laptop again, even if it's super weak.

The Chumby looks really cool and looks like it'd be fun to have at work, I almost added it to my wish list but then I saw the price. It is far from worth $175. At that cost I'd rather not even get it as a gift, they'd have to drop the price by at least half before I'd even begin to seriously consider it.

/me just discovered the Eye-Fi SD Card

Basically it's an SD card that has a wireless interface device built into it that communicates with a dongle that doubles as a card reader. You can map the dongle to a folder on your computer, or point it to a web service like Flickr, and when the camera with the card in it comes in range of the dongle it wirelessly transmits the photos off the camera to wherever you mapped the dongle. This effectively eliminates several of the steps for handling pictures, which is useful if you use your camera every day.

People have been reporting that it even works in linux under Wine, which is awesome. I currently have a 1GB SD card, and never fully utilize it, so this being 2GB makes it ideal for my purposes. However, since I already have a fully functional camera and memory card, I can't justify spending the money on it. Definitely going on my wish list, though.

Since our tax return was generous this year, the financial overlords (a.k.a., trian) have finally approved my building a new system, and even upped my budget from $800 to $1000! So I've been pouring over hardware stats and wikipedia for the last week, struggling to learn everything I haven't been able to afford since I last built a system and thus didn't keep up with.

For awhile now I've been trying to figure out how to fit a quad core cpu into my budget. My thinking is that even though there really isn't any practical use for a quad core system right now, if I have a quad right now, once programmers start taking advantage of such environments my PC will be able to take advantage of such features, and thus it will have more life. Thing is, I only have so much I can throw at a CPU since I also need the motherboard, RAM, case, power supply, optical drive, etc.

High end quad cores run over $1000, which make them not an option. So I poked around on newegg and found a few that run for ~$250, but they're 2.4ghz. Newegg also has some dual core 3ghz processors for about that much, and thus I have a dilemma. Do I take a slower processor that can handle a larger workload that might be useful in the future (but also might be too slow for all practical purposes), or do I take a significantly faster processor that can only handle half the workload, but who's speed might make it tolerable in the future?

So over to freenode I go and visit ##hardware where I'm told:
< wols> no one can foresee 4 years of hardware
< wols> and I can tell you that in 4 years your GPU will be very obsolete no matter what
< L4m3r> yeah, stupid me built a 939 system, and I'm not gonna be able to afford a new box any time soon
< wols> Mortuis: rule of thumb: anything you don't need for 18 months is wasted money when bought right now

So, it looks like the smart move is the dual core processor. Which is hard for me right now, because I was sort of getting attached to the idea of being able to watch four processor graphs going to work on my system, but really they're right, it's better to go with what I know will be useful. And the reality is that with the motherboard I'm looking at, there are a lot of processors available, so in theory if I really did need to move to quad core I would be able to just swap the processor.

Unless something comes along and makes this motherboard obsolete and not worth upgrading like my old one, which in hindsight was built for what would be useful at the time, and has served us rather well, surviving a few hard drive and optical drive failures.

In New York, we only wear black because nothing darker has come out. Well we've finally succeeded! New York researchers finally made a material blacker than black!

Since our DVR stopped working a couple weeks ago, we've experienced a sort of thankfulness for not having TV available all the time. It's just been sitting there, being broken, eating power because I haven't turned it off just in case it suddenly wanted to work again. Unlikely, but I wasn't willing to rule it out.

Today I decided that I wanted to take it apart and see if I could harvest the hard drives for my computer, that and poke around, see if a DVR has anything else that might be interesting inside it. So I decided to call the DirecTV support one last time, just to make sure our options at this point were limited to buying a new box or purchasing a service plan that would cost about the same amount as a new box.

DirecTV starts you off with a VRU that runs you through some basic troubleshooting, making sure you're on the correct channel or that your box is on, etc. I was tempted to test the rumor I heard about how you could bypass a VRU by swearing at it, the theory being that profanity would indicate agitated customers who are thus swiftly moved to a sympathetic tech. Instead I just went through the motions of doing what it said until I was moved on to a technician.

Bambi greeted me and we did more basic trouble shooting. I reset the DVR while she was on the phone, as if this was a magically different attempt than any of the other times I reset it. After doing that a few times I started applying what I remembered from working in tech support myself.

I asked if there was an update around the time the DVR stopped working. While she was looking it up I mentioned a forum post I saw on their website that started the same day my DVR stopped working where several other people with my model had the same complaints. She noted that there were updates the day before and a week after my DVR stopped working. So we tried forcing the DVR to download the newer update in case the problem was bad firmware. I was extremely nice and accommodating the whole time, waving off her apologies when certain operations took a long time, basically making her job as easy as possible.

Tech support is generally a thankless job. You get a lot more abuse than praise, so being nice to a tech can go a long way. I talked tech with her for awhile, we talked about how the DirecTV model DVR's weren't as good as the models they used to subcontract, but how the software updates since then had made them more usable. It wasn't manipulation for manipulations sake, I really prefer to be friendly with people, but I also knew that endearing myself to her would make it more likely for her to pull whatever strings she could, and it worked!

After downloading the firmware and restarting, the DVR still hung, so she decided the next best step would be to send a technician. When trian called tech support last time they told her it would cost $80 to buy the service plan which would enable them to send a technician, so I asked if this visit would cost us anything and she said it wouldn't. She then took a long time to enter my information in their system and determine the soonest a technician could come out. Many apologies later she said a technician could come in a week. I checked again to confirm that the visit wouldn't cost anything because my wife had been told it would cost $80 and she said that normally it would!

So there you have it, being nice can pay off. If it didn't I've have called back and tried again, different tech's have different levels of knowledge, and some techs have more power than others to pull strings. So if you get an unhelpful or combative tech, it's often helpful to call back and try for someone else.

Of course, now I'm a little apprehensive about having the TV working again. We all agree that life is better without it dominating our evenings. It's definitely a better experience to watch shows like Lost and Heroes on the TV than on the computer. But not having access to the TV has forced us to spend more time together. With the DVR back, we'll have to use discipline to only record/watch shows that we really want to see, and not junk TV. There's still a chance that the technician won't be able to fix our box and we'll still be without it, but even if he is able to fix it, I think this experience has given us an awareness of the effect the TV has had on our lives, and the importance of leaving it off most of the time.

Looks like the spamfembots have made their way to facebook. I got a friend invitation on facebook from some random woman today. The url in her profile to "her private pictures" it an escaped hex url that takes you to a tinyurl redirect. I happen to have previews enabled on tinyurl so I clicked it anyway and confirmed that it goes to some website that sounds a like porn. I highly recommend going to tinyurl.com and enabling previews in case someone ever sneaks something like this on you.

Very fun little clicking game.

Cursor 10

One thing I dislike about is registration limits for the primary. It's a closed primary, and that's fine, but what doesn't make sense to me is party switching. The deadline to register for a party if you aren't registered to vote is January 11th, which is roughly around where all the other states set their deadlines to switch parties as well. Not New York. Here the deadline to switch parties if you are a registered voter is all the way back around October 25th! Why are these not administratively equal tasks?

Of course I'm only annoyed about this because when I had decided to register for a party and support a primary candidate this year it was October 26th. Is this to punish those of us who decide to have no party affiliation?

So now that I have youmail working with Adblock Plus, I have been wanting to address a pet peeve of mine. I really hate cellphones. Mostly.

I enjoy having the security of being able to call for help if my car breaks down (a frequent occurrence when I was driving cars that were > 15 years old), I also enjoy trian being able to contact me when she needs to. I just hate the random interruptions, infrequent they may be. It's not that I don't want people to be able to contact me on my cell phone, it's just that most of the time a message will do.

I think I've figured out a solution though. Something tells me that I read about this somewhere, but I can't remember where so I'll tentatively take credit. Tomorrow I'm going to make a silent ringtone, make that my general ringtone, then assign audible ringtones to people on my contact list. I already have a certain ringtone for family members, one for friends, etc. But this time I'll set one for everyone I want to talk to, so that unimportant calls will only vibrate my phone which will make them less obtrusive and can be passed to voicemail with none of that latent psychic stress that occurs when you know you have a message waiting but haven't checked it yet.

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."
~Robert Frost

I just want to toot my own horn here. I use youmail.com as my cellphones voicemail. It's a free service that lets you set a different voicemail message based on callerid, can get e-mail alerts when you receive voicemail and can also listen to your voicemail via their webpage.

Anyway, some time a few days ago, I lost the ability to listen to my voicemail on the website. I thought maybe there was a conflict with a new Firefox version or something, but a few days later the problem was still present. Their help pages didn't mention anything, so I wasn't sure if it was a site issue, so I tried loading the webpage in Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, and it worked just fine in IE.

The next few days I tried calling their support line, but after being on hold for awhile I would get forwarded to their voicemail. Today was the first day I got some time and was able to call them shortly after their callcenter opened. The woman I spoke to guided me through some basic troubleshooting (stuff I'd already done) to no avail. But one thing I did try was creating a new Firefox account and accessing the page and I worked as normal.

I hung up with her since the problem obviously had to be with one of my extensions, but which one? I hadn't installed any new ones lately. So I methodically went through and removed all the extensions I hadn't been using one by one, no dice. Then I removed all the webdev extensions I use, thinking maybe something in one of them was messing with the DOM, no dice. Next I started removing all my flashblock, autoplay stop, and then adblocking extensions, and found my problem. It was actually adblock plus that was causing the problem.

Unfortunately since I just removed it, I wasn't sure offhand which library definition I was using for adblock plus, but I figured the youmail.com people might want to know about the problem and called them back. I happened to get the same tech so I let her know and she told me I was awesome. Apparently she had been talking to one of their dev's and they were regretting not getting my contact info in case I figured out what the problem was. So now their team can do their testing to figure out which definition file is causing the problem and chastise whoever maintains it.

So yeah, I'm awesome, youmail.com says so.

Who needs a plastic toy guitar when you have a Model M?

What the computer sees:


What the player sees:

And polarbee thought Alaska weather was bad, apparently Salt Point is too crazy for weather.com to figure out.