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GRAFFITI -- January 03, 2005 thru January 09, 2005>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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January 3, 2005
0715 - Good morning. If we're lucky, I got everything right for the annual directory rollover. Because of my automated links above, I have to do a little dancing and redirection to make some of the transitions painless. I think I got it right, but I'll check out more of the links later on today. If you spot anything, please drop me a line. Also, since we're in a new year, I decided to pull a new headshot from the archives to grace the upper left. Marcia got that shot at the same sitting that Molly decided to be cute: she sat up and back and leaned into me, yielding the snap at right. Of course, Lucy's no slouch in the cute department. The other day she wanted up on my lap here in front of da machines. The webcam was running and I think the little camera hound knew it.
Lifehacks is a number of things. First off, it's a topic that Jimmy O'Regan of LinuxGazette.net fame brought to my attention with an email to the TAG (The Answer Gang) mailing list late yesterday evening. Jimmy wrote this:
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I'm looking for everyone's lifehacks. For more information about what a lifehack is, scroll down -- I've included the introduction to an article I was writing for another site (*cough*) that I couldn't make relevant -- but in short, it's things that make your life easier, like Ben's quote catcher or my screen scrapers (they save me ~5 minutes per day that I can waste on IRC instead :) . So drag out your ugly scripts, or at least say what they do in principle. (No, I don't have any that haven't been made into articles already :) Lifehacks [[www.lifehacks.com/wiki/FrontPage][Lifehacks]] are an idea that was put forward by [[www.oblomovka.com/][Danny O'Brien]] at the [[conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4802][O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference]]. Lifehacks are the result of taking one of the basic principles of self-help -- find out how the experts work, and emulate them -- and applying it to geeks. One of the least surprising discoveries of the Lifehacks research is that "Overprolific Alpha Geeks" spend most of their working lives using the shell. Two of the [[craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt][conclusions]] of the talk are that geeks will have private blogs/RSS feeds. Why would you use private blogs? Most people need to provide their bosses with periodic reports. Because feed aggregators are available for almost every imaginable platform, reading feeds is not an issue. Having reports available in a private blog offers two immediate benefits: each report is archived in a known location; and the feed reader provides notification of new entries (as well as keeping its own archive of entries). Making reports available as a feed can also boost productivity and increase communication -- sysadmins, for example, can generate many of their reports from log files, and add this to the feed so their boss no longer needs to wait around for a formal report; programmers can use scripts in CVS (or other version control systems) that generate a report containing a list of changed files and the log message for every commit. A popular use of blogs is as a whiteboard -- people thinking out loud, inviting passers-by to offer suggestions or criticism which may help to improve an idea. By maintaining different blogs with varying levels of availability, people can share ideas with the appropriate audience without revealing things they would prefer to keep secret. The most basic advantage of writing down an idea is that you no longer have to worry about remembering it. Even writing to a completely private blog, as a "todo" list, has advantages. Writing an idea forces you to clarify your own thoughts: the simple act of writing an idea down to remember it can lead to you expressing it well enough to share it with a wider audience. Once an idea is written, it can then be refactored -- you can share it at a later date, when you have developed it further. Another advantage is that each blog entry is automatically dated, so each idea can be compared with public blog entries from the same time, so you can discover why the idea was relevant; and if nothing else, a blog provides you with a single place where you can archive your ideas and [[www.lifehacks.com/wiki/SecretScripts]["secret scripts"]] in case you need them again. Semi-public blogs, available only on a company or department intranet, allow co-workers to keep track of each others activities and to offer and receive suggestions about ideas without publicly exposing company secrets. Information put on a semi-private blog may later become suitable for public consumption, such as a note about a bug in a product, or information about server downtime. |
I followed the links in Jimmy's email and my brain exploded. I replied to his email:
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Thank you. Thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU! This is the sort of thing that I've been doing unconsciously for the last 20 years, and what's been lacking is the vision to make it a conscious process. Every machine I have does webserving, I drop stuff into the serving space for testing, for review, for remembering. I put stuff on my public site so that when I forget I ever knew how to do a thing, I can google for the answer and find what I wrote once upon a time (that's happened THREE times in the last year). I rsync everything, everywhere. Cron takes care of most of it, occasionally I'll manually run a set to a sometimes running box, and then shut it down and put it in the basement. Mostly that's private stuff, and not the things that can be replicated or are static, committed to DVD+R (like the ogg collection). I run phpGroupWare at work with Calendar, TroubleTicket and Todo modules active. I publish fun and useful links in my webspace on the internal server - everything from a demo of how the Windows messenger error looks when Samba+ClamAV+Samba-vscan catches an inbound virus, to the mods I might make to my cube to get a nerf-weapon war type of battle-cube. All of my email accounts are IMAP, I have 5 active places, and I copy stuff from account to account, in and out of the assorted todo sub-folders as I want to apply the topic to the part of my life in question. I don't have a useful PDA. I've had FUN ones, linux-based, but I'm thinking I need a real one, one of these days. Useful AND used. All the Linux ones provided tools to sync/work with Windows boxen. Um, sorry, don't run that one, got any other choices? I'm leaning towards Treo. Any thoughts? I have one "blog" that I'm experimenting with, using Wordpress. There are parts of it I like, but for many purposes I really like the read-in-time-ordinal of journalling rather than the reverse mode of Blogging. I suppose that's why I've never really mentally connected with RSS feeds, even though a great number of people I know think that feeds are the greatest thing since sliced bread. Are these "problems" for me? Am I just in the wrong phase of a Candlestick-Two Faces conundrum? Thoughts, please... I *LOVE* the idea of using a blog as a log watch aggregator. That ROCKS! What's in my ~/bin: 87 scripts, mostly ugly hacks to run CLI and GUI tools in a specific order. For example:
Since the USB card reader doesn't ALWAYS see media inserted, a quick cfdisk brings that problem to an end. I mount the card, copy the contents to the directory I specified on the commandline. Ick, no test for correct input, eh? Unmount, prompt, call another script to convert all to 640x480. use GQview to pick and choose. Those I keep, I may edit using GIMP from within GQview. When I'm done, I have the 640x480 snaps that I'll use on the website. Exit GQview and the script continues. Make thumbnails of the remaining files. Copy everything into my local copy of the webtree. Blow the whole processing tree away, leaving me with camera originals on the disk. I don't use this one much anymore, because I have a new camera and a new method of doing some of that stuff. I haven't automated it yet because I've been too busy to save time. Sigh. I have another little script, a three liner that drops me down into the current year's working directory in my web space, pops a firefox window pointing at http://localhost/xxx/xxx/blah.php, and fires up bluefish with the most recently edited page in the window. I have a number of scripts dedicated to setting up ssh tunnelling for VNC connections to windows desktops at my last-but-two employer out in CA, where I still consult from time to time, and it's much easier to answer Netscrape or LookOut questions when they can SHOW me instead of trying to describe things over the phone. I have lots of little scripts for rsyncing chunks of my local machine to other places, for web publishing, for backup, for sharing data. I need to spend more time being efficient, writing still more tools to do my work for me. THANK YOU, Jimmy, for bringing this one up! .brian |
Inspiring, really. As long as it doesn't get in the way of actually getting work done, as such, I'll be pleased to find myself dealing with some ot my activities on a more conscious level in terms of how I can automate it. Yowza! Have a great day, even if it is Monday.
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January 4, 2005
0640 - Good morning. I spotted this during an update to Vimes, the Debian Sid workstation around here:
45% [5 openoffice.org-bin 26682792/43.8MB 60%] 650kB/s 50s
Yow! It looks like the rumor that Comcast was going to be upgrading the download speeds in January came true. Yeah, that's 650 kiloBYTES per second. Mid-evening when the kids are all gaming and swapping file with their peers. When I can find a mirror that's fast enough (between ISPs and the assorted Fed mirrors there are plenty around here), That speed means a full 650MB ISO image in ~1000 seconds (16 minutes). Not as good as a couple of client sites last year, where I was able to pull an ISO in under 4 minutes (on a full rate T3), but plenty good enough for now.
I am not a currently happy camper about configuring roaming profiles in Samba (in the DC role). There are 3 more ways to configure things than there are websites describing the process, each different. It's like being in the mazes in one of those old Adventure games. The good news is that I realized that all I *really* wanted to do was turn them off. So I set the logon path = to blank, and removed the [Profiles] stanza from the shares. Then everything started working the way I really wanted it. The DC will be serving an assortment of XP and Win2K clients, most mobile, and I just don't need the hassles of debugging remote profiles on top. I want the DC to do authentication, time and share serving. That's it.
I am a happy camper about Linux Server Hacks. I've put the rsync backup tricks from that book up in yet another new form today to solve one backup problem, I'll be doing more servers in the same style soon. I highly recommend that book.
Now to work with me. Have a great day!
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January 5, 2005
0625 - Good morning. Yesterday was a success in general, incorporating some cow-orkers suggestions about securing the Samba server I built. It went pretty well except for the part about migrating a Samba DC that's been running to a new IP address while clients are connected to it. The fundamental screwed-ness of NetBios and Windows Networking in general came to the fore, with Win-clients claiming they couldn't see the box by name, when they could by number (and Linux clients could see it by name and number). It took me a ... while to sort out the mess. Turns out that ... blowing away the confused client, and dumping wins.dat on the Samba server made everyone nice again.
During my lunch break, I took the time to read ESR's latest screed, a paean to the electric guitar joy that is Joe Satriani. That made me take a fair amount of my evening and listen to a quite a bit of that bloke's amazing fretwork and sheer control last night. I'd have to say, though, that Circles is my personal favorite on the breakthrough album, Surfing With The Alien. Crushing Day and the title cut rock pretty hard, too. My connection to Joe is only two degrees: I worked with his brother-in-law, Neil, for a number of years. At Nellcor, we had a C-league softball team in Hayward, we were the Surf Aliens and while we weren't the best ball players out there, we did well and we clearly had the most fun, though some of that was pretty dangerous, in retrospect (the "fun", not the baseball).
Well, I've not much else to contribute at this time, so I'll be on my way. Have a great day!
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January 6, 2005
1139 - Good morning. Yes, before noon counts as morning. All yesterday evening I was reviewing finances with an eye towards setting budgets and goals for the next couple of years. During the day I was moving equipment and setting up things for an old/redundant systems & monitors give-away to employees, before sending the remaining stuff to a local charity in the next couple of weeks. This morning I was in a bit of a rush because I ... um, overslept through not setting the alarm. I was out of bed by 0630, but that still put me in the teeth of the traffic. Sigh.
Bill Gates had problems with his Media Center Edition demo at CES yesterday, according to reportage linked by Slashdot, then had an interview with c|Net where he calls people who are in favour of IP reform "communists". What, not enough money for you YET, Bilgatus of Borg?
In recent years, there's been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, "We've got to look at patents, we've got to look at copyrights." What's driving this, and do you think intellectual-property laws need to be reformed?
No, I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist.
Well, I need to get back to work. Have a great day!
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January 7, 2005
1132 - Good morning. I was up and out earlier this morning, but with a mission, to move some important services from one DMZ subnet to another, we wanted to get started and finished as early as possible... that worked out fine. Now I've a moment to say hello. Hi! Now, a quick dip into the mailbag and back to work for me:
Subject: Hello From: Kristine
I have an older computer which my friend's son installed Linux on. I enjoyed using it. Then I didn't use it for a while, and now I am giving it to my son, Matthew. He wants to learn to program. He is currently programming on his Texas Instrument calculator and making up his own games.
Linux is asking for a password on start up and I no longer know what it was. How can I get back into my computer?
Any help is appreciated by us both!
http://www.google.com/search?q=recover+linux+root+password
There are a number of links there, and one or more of them might match up appropriately with your level of expertise. Fundamentally, you'll have to have some other form of Linux that can boot from the floppy or CDROM drive to get to the original system on the hard disk and modify the password for the root and any other users. If this explanation doesn't make sense to you, then I most surely am not going to be able to help you via email.
In that case, I suggest that you find a local Linux user, possibly from a Linux Users Group (see this page for help finding one: http://glue.linuxgazette.com/ ) who can provide you with assistance hands-on.
Now to get through my work mailbox before lunch. Have a great day. Happy Friday!
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January 8, 2005
1036 - Good morning. I'm experiencing a slow-start morning. We were up and about by about 0800, but haven't gotten jack-all done at anything yet ... well, at least I haven't. Marcia's been working away at getting Molly's page posted. All three of us had been hassling her about Sally and then Lucy getting their own sub-sites, but Molly - nothing. Yay!
We're prepping for Marcia's upcoming California trip. She's got a busy, busy working schedule with just one free late evening that she's spending with South Bay friends Pat and Nathan. And as we started making progress a few minutes ago, I spotted a large bird in the back yard. I called to Marcia and got out the camera, by which time it was on the fence. Is it a hawk? An owl? Pretty, anyway.
I've not much else to say. I've too many projects and not enough time, which is better than the alternative. But I need to pick one and get started. More later, when I've done something useful.
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January 9, 2005
0929 - Good morning. Well. I didn't get a darned thing done yesterday except nap and rest and nap some more. The dogs dig that, at least. I stay engaged and on target quite well, but it was some downtime for maintenance, I guess. I could fill a fair size list with tasks that need and/or want doing, but none of them have that certain ...je ne sais quoi ... oh, end-of-the-world quality about them. So I did none of the above. That also means that I don't have much to say here that's bright and useful today, but here are some links...
Rick Moen brought Stanley Milgram's experiments back to the front of my consciousness a couple of days back. Milgram ran, um, interesting experiments on people's willingness to inflict harm on others in obedience to authority. I was sure that I'd seen that referenced on Bob Thompson's site before, but searching there turned up nothing. Ditto over at Jerry Pournelle's place. Worth reading, that Milgram piece.
Note this, you Grateful Dead fans, if you've not been to GD Live, then go and enjoy. They have about 160 concerts in MP3 and SHN format, spanning the years from 1965 to 1995, and the downloads are free. Please do read the note from the Dead, bottom center on the home page, about acceptable uses. I've been listening to a bunch of that over the last couple of days.
We've got shopping to do, and organization, packing and whatnot before Marcia's trip to California. We're up and out of here shortly after 0500 tomorrow morning. You might get a light-posting week out of me as there's a lot to be done around here with the mutts and all. Now on with the day, have a good'un.
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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