this girl drives a tank

As this summer gets ready to slip away for another year, I find myself astonished at how fast time really does fly. I thought I had time for everything that I was obligated to do and then squeeze in time for things that I like doing (learning c, linux, reading, bzflag, blogging, working out...) but somehow all those fun things have taken a pretty permanent looking backseat.

I might as well spill the beans, somewhere toward the end of Spring I was waking up sick quite often and generally feeling not myself. My doctor confirmed my suspicions that I was indeed pregnant and for quite a while after that things were pretty topsy turvy.

All is well now, I am feeling fine and despite being a bit anxious for he big day (mid December). I am not sure where this leaves me as far as my Linux and programming adventures go. I don't have the time to do it properly but somehow that doesn't bother me as much as it would have, at say, the beginning of this year.

I am not sure if I will even continue to write this blog, and I feel guilty about that, perhaps dear reader you should check back less often now and I will try to keep you updated as best as I can.

I bought a CD today by the Canadian band The Stars, it contained a lovely cover of the Smith's wonderful song "This Charming Man".

Smiths version Stars version

Today, I turned on my laptop after not using it for several weeks and decided to do an upgrade. It needed to download 750MB's of packages so I let it go and worked on something else. It wasn't plugged in but the Gnome battery monitor icon was blue which generally means ok. I think it changes to yellow then red before drastic measures need to be made.

I glanced over at the laptop sometime later, about 20 minutes I think and noticed the battery monitor had completely disappeared from the Gnome panel. I thought that was odd but perhaps the applet was one of the things being upgraded, then I looked in my terminal and saw that dpkg was configuring initrd and was running update-initrd. Then the laptop suddenly shut off :-)

Upon rebooting I get the old "cannot find root filesystem" error and the inevitable kernel panic. I have no idea really how to recover from this, except maybe booting to a live distro, chrooting and running that command manually. If that won't work, and I don't even know if that is the right thing to do, then I will have to re-install :(

Once again apologies for not writing but my Mother hasn't been well lately and I had moved back home for a while, happily she is fine now and I have returned home to face several daunting computer related tasks.

Firstly of course is email. Yucky, I think most of these will get marked as read, I don't have it in me anymore to read that much, especially as more comes piling in everyday.

Secondly, I have to do some massive updates on several machines that run Debian unstable. About 800MB per machine. Maybe I should look at some local repository but it never until now, seemed worth it for only 3 computers.

I feel awful for not writing enough but I am overwhelmed by how hectic this year has become. I have a full time job, plus a bartending night job, a wedding to plan and then just last week a conference in Ottawa to attend with work. It's been pretty crazy, then on the weekends I take care of my niece which means driving her to soccer practice and jumping up and down on the side lines shouting stuff to keep her spirits up. (she actually is a sneaky little poacher that hangs out at midfield waiting for the goalie to to kick the ball down to her end and then running in and scoring, complete with cartwheels and high-fives.)

I have had very little occasion to even check slashdot or newspyle for my geekynews so I am basically out of the loop. Microsoft could have bought Yahoo for all I know (trust me, it's coming)

I installed a little app called hpodder which creates a directory for podcasts to download to. Unfortunately it cannot load the podcasts onto your IPod directly via GTKPod so you have to do that manually but still it takes most of the grunt work out of putting podcasts onto your iPod and staying current.

One of the best podcasts I have ever heard is called the Ongoing History Of New Music which is a fabulous show hosted by Alan Cross, who started out as a DJ and has since moved up to become the program director at CFNY. If you like music at all, check out this show.

Growing up with brothers inevitably leads to ACDC or Led Zeppelin being hammered at you every time they get partying but sometimes I actually don't mind. Cactus is a band that originally intended to have Carmine Appice, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart as the main attraction but that combination never got going for various reasons.

I had never heard of the genre `southern boogie' but quite like the name and wondered what it sounded like, even today the music still stands up and is quite exciting and very 1972'ish, `southern boogie' sounds something like this...

This is a rather good Jon Stewart interview by Bill Moyers. I find it uncomfortable that as a Canadian I have in recent years, followed American politics far closer than I should, but there you have it. Now, I realize that relying on Crooks And Liars, The Daily Show, and Keith Olbermann for my slant on American politics might be a bit ideological and naive but the alternatives do not seem much better.

A lot has been made of Bush's attempts to muddy the line between Church and State but the slow merger of Media and State, to me, is at least equally disturbing.

Even as Stewart himself dismisses his show as nothing more than televisions equivalent of a political cartoon, it is almost sad how the current administration almost writes the stories for him.("Dick Cheney shoots a 78 year old man in the face")

From the interview...

JON STEWART: Yeah, it's kind of astonishing. There is I used to have a real disconnect, I think, with the administration, I couldn't figure out what was going on. I think it's suddenly become clear to me. They would rather us believe them to be wildly incompetent and inarticulate than to let us know anything about how they operate. And so, they do Constitutionally-mandated things most of the time, but they don't — they fulfill the letter of their obligation to checks and balances, but not the intent.

For instance, Alberto Gonzales, and you've been watching the hearings. He is either a perjurer, or a low-functioning pinhead. And he allowed himself to be portrayed in those hearings as a low-functioning pinhead, rather than give the Congressional Committee charged with oversight, any information as to his decision-making process at the Department of Justice.

And I used to think, "They're doing this based on a certain arrogance." And now, I realize that it's because they believe there is one accountability moment for a President, and that is the four year election. And once you get that election, you're done.

BILL MOYERS: They're right, are they not?

JON STEWART: They're completely not right. The election moment is merely the American public saying, "We'd rather you be President than that guy." That's it. The next four years, though, you still have to abide by the oversight process that is there to prevent this kind of bizarre sort of cult-like atmosphere that falls along. I mean, I accept that kind of veil of secrecy around Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but I don't accept that around our government.

I should apologize for not writing much but it was only partly my fault. Yes, I have been extremely busy with work lately and it seems now, not only my weekends are fully booked, but many evenings also, but I have hit some bugs in Debian that have put my computer in text mode only.

Firstly there was a problem with the non-free NVidia driver which suddenly stopped working. I thought no problem, I will use the free (but non GL) `nv' driver instead. This didn't work as it was unable to do the resolution I needed for my flat panel.

Next, my desktop manager, XFCE4 also was slightly broken in Debian unstable and I had updated to the broken packages on my personal computer and the household computer Sarah, my brother and my fiancé all use. This left everyone grumbling at me :-)

I managed after a day or to, to get the Nvidia issue sorted out and installed KDE as a temporary fix for the XFCE4 issue. It is a tad slower, at least I notice it to be, but in general the rest of my household really like KDE a lot and don't want to switch to XFCE4 when it gets fixed.

I wonder what they find easier about it? I am not going argue with them as keeping my users happy has always been paramount for me :) As for myself, I don't mind KDE at all, but don't see much of an advantage in day to day use over XFCE4.

Someone who obviously knows what a slacker I have been this year, with regards to studying programming, was kind enough to send me a very good C programming book in PDF format. I will assume this was a gentle hint and hopefully find some time to get back into C.

Now that Debian has released `etch' I decided to upgrade both my servers to the newest versions. I have my main server where all my movies, music and email live, and a file server where all my backups go. I decided to start with the file server just to see if there were any major problems. Everything went smoothly except after the upgrade I could no longer ssh into the machine.

Since I use ssh keys to access the file server, when debconf asked me this question I figured there was no harm in answering `yes'

Password authentication appears to be disabled in your current OpenSSH server configuration. In order to prevent users from logging in using passwords (perhaps using only public key authentication instead) with recent versions of OpenSSH, you must disable challenge-response authentication, or else ensure that your PAM configuration does not allow Unix password file authentication. If you disable challenge-response authentication, then users will not be able to log in using passwords. If you leave it enabled (the default answer), then the 'PasswordAuthentication no' option will have no useful effect unless you also adjust your PAM configuration in /etc/pam.d/ssh. Disable challenge-response authentication? <Yes> <No>

After the upgrade I could no longer ssh into the machine except as root and spent the next hour or so trying to figure out why. I learnt quite a lot about ssh in the meantime but as it turned out, the problem was that the upgrade had left me with /usr/bin/zsh as a broken symlink, and consequently, every time I tried to ssh in, I was authenticated and then promptly kicked off the system because I didn't have a valid login shell. Once this was fixed, I was back in business.

The upgrade on my main server went much more smoothly, with only this little `lpd' bug causing a little hiccup. It is a bug with the printing daemon, but seeing as my printer isn't hooked up yet, I will ignore it for now.

I must confess, Debian releasing another version has hardly had much impact on my day to day operations and perhaps that's a testament to how good of a distro Debian really is. I went from having a rock solid server platform, to having a rock solid server platform with newer software with just one dist-upgrade command.

Many thanks to the DD's.

I have been given an external hardrive by a friend that contains about 110GB of music. This is indeed a very nice gift as many of the bands I do not have and/or have never heard of before.

Several problems are now presented to me. We estimate that out of his 110GB, only around 60GB is music that I will actually add to my collection. First I have to go through his drive and identify what exactly I do not have.

Next I have to check that the artists I do have, are not of worse quality than his versions. Obviously if something I have is encoded at 128KB/S and his are at 256KB/S I will replace mine with the better quality ones.

What can get tricky is the same song, with a different filename, and/or a different encoding. Almost certainly the filename problem will arise as I like to have no spaces in my filenames and he comes from a Windows world that has spaces in filenames all over the place.

There seems to be just too many variables to juggle for me to look at any sort of script to handle some of the grunt work so it looks like it will be one of those long drawn out tasks that you pick at every evening for 20 mins or so until months later, it is finally done :-)

On the bright side though, it is tons of fresh music for my hungry ears.

Don Marti of LinuxWorld wrote to tell me that it was indeed a bug in the CMS that they use causing the Joey Hess article to be split into tiny pages, so it turns out my cynicism was rather premature.

Joey Hess is long time Debian developer who has done lots of work on the new and improved Debian Installer and has also written a `wiki compiler' known as Ikiwiki.

As it would be an understatement to say Joey is well respected amongst his peers, I was happy to see that Linuxworld had asked him to write an article about Ikiwiki.



The site has decided however to split the article into 10 pages, and you can see, some of the `pages' have become rather terse. I really don't get why websites do this and in fact even suspect that this dissection of content might even be done by the CMS and not by a human.

Either way though, somebody at LinuxWorld must have noticed this? I don't know what the reasoning is, perhaps as the advertisements appear to be dynamic, making the user click through 10 pages will expose them to far more banners than a 3 page article? How clever, except that they have no way of calculating how many users are turned off and will make the old `mental note' (as I do sometimes) to not even bother with that site next time, or worse, not even finish reading the article.

Its a shame a really as the presentation does a disservice to an otherwise great article.

By contrast, here is a somewhat sobering article about Bisphenol A that appeared in today's Globe and Mail, the content is balanced across 4 pages and yes, there are a couple of flash advertisements, but in general the site does not get in the way (too much) of the content it is trying to present.

Most of you probably know about the Amazon owned Internet Movie Database, which is quite a useful resource for movie buffs. I am even now somewhat trusting of the user ratings, something I am usually take with a grain of salt.

Often times though I just want to quickly see what movies an actress/actor has appeared in, or who directed what or look up a title without opening up a web browser and waiting for it to load the page. It turns out you can easily do this by installing the entire database onto your computer, granted it will take up a lot of room (over a GB for me) but the convenience seemed to outweigh the space requirements, so I decided to try it.

I tried to build the command line tools, following the README file's instructions. The first time it wouldn't build at all and I had to increase MAXTITLES in src/moviedb.h. The database then built without any complaints and downloaded lots of data, but when I tried to run the collection of tools it compiled, only a few of them would produce any results, for example the `lindex' and `list' commands worked ok but both `title' and `lguide' commands produced no output at all which wasn't very useful to me. I spent about an hour reading the documentation and FAQ but couldn't get it to work properly and finally gave up.

Humans consume 35 billion gallons of beer every year, however I contribute very little to that number. When it is hot, I do enjoy a glass of Corona with some ice cubes in it or perhaps a pint of half beer, half 7-up (again with ice) but generally if I do drink, its vodka and cranberry or simply white wine.



In medieval days women brewed much of the beer, as it fell under the category of food, they would even sell beer to raise money for weddings, known as "bride-ale" which gave us the modern word "bridal".

My fiancé finds this amusing and thinks I should hold a fundraiser for our wedding at his bar, with me serving pitchers or beer to the drunken well wishers. This of course has a snowball's chance in Hell of happening.

This is a rather cute animated (flash, sorry..) presentation by Hitachi pimping their perpendicular recording technology..

On Monday evening while making a salad, I managed to slash myself with a really sharp paring knife right across my wrist. Oddly enough there wasn't much blood but it did leave a horrible deep gash in my wrist and as my roommate Sarah noted, it looked like a total suicide job. She then informed me for the rest of the week she is putting me on suicide watch :-) I got 2 stitches put in yesterday and apart from a dull throbbing, I seem no worse for wear.

---

I am surprised that Google has not offered the ability to theme your personal home page before now, but you can now choose from a very limited selection of themes.



I am not sure about the other themes, but this particular one, you can choose your time zone and the sun will adjust accordingly...really useful stuff :-)

Of course if your not a fan of Google, you could always "Search The Web With Kevin!!"



Awesome!

I found an article/rant that attempts to explain some of the differences between BSD & Linux.

I have run BSD very briefly on my laptop once but decided that I wasn't quite ready to learn a whole new operating system just then and ended up nuking it. I am not sure I agree with all of the things he says, and it is difficult to compare one derivative of UNIX with all the flavours of Linux but still its not a bad read.

He makes an argument that the BSD ports tree is highly centralized

"But all those files in that big directory tree are maintained by the FreeBSD project itself. When somebody wrote KDE, for instance, it didn't magically appear in ports trees everywhere. Somebody had to write all the necessary `glue' to build a port for it, then commit the files into the FreeBSD CVS repository so it would be in the ports collection. So again, there's some level of assurance that it works with other things in the ports collection. Any dependencies it has will be there, because it can't declare a dependency on something not in ports."

I must be missing something because I see the Debian package archive in much the same light.

When I first started using Linux it was out of curiosity more so than necessity. Windows 2000 worked well enough for me but didn't really expose me to much of its under structure. My younger brother was into Linux at the time and when my Windows installation inevitably did get hosed, he offered to fix it, that is to say, he formatted the hard drive and installed SuSE 7.3.

I was quite impressed and proceeded like most newbies to investigate all these programs I found in my menus. This is how I discovered BZflag for example.

It didn't take long to realize that there was some pretty serious stuff going on too. I remember seeing `ping' in action for the first time and marveling that one could send `packets' all over the globe. Of course that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as *nix diagnostic tools go.

Much of the following year or so was spent re learning the things I was able to do in Windows on Linux and eventually being able to what I term bootstrap myself, by that I mean install and configure a distribution from scratch, and have it actually function. As I look back this time could have been spent a little better or at least could have benefited from some structure. I think choosing a tutorial or book and sticking to it would have greatly reduced the number of months I could be labelled as a n00b.

In light of that, for the next few years I have some goals that I feel are not too grandiose but will help me greatly down the road as the problems Linux present to me become more and more complex and challenging. (IE: getting X to work used to be one of those problems.)

Here are what I consider (rightly or wrongly) essential *nix computer skills:

Shell Scripting

This is an area in which I am pathetically weak. Several weeks ago I had a an rsync job that kept dying because of some obscure Realtek/rsync bug. I wanted to run a script that checked for rsync's exit status and retry if it was non zero. Simple enough no? Well not if I didn't realize my script spawned a subshell that didn't know about the return status of my rsync command. Finally after some prodding from irc gremlins I came up with `keeptrying.sh'

#!/bin/sh
STATUS=1
while [ $STATUS -gt 0 ]; do
    sleep 3;
    echo "rsync failed!!" ;
    echo "retrying........";
    /home/aec/bin/videosync
    STATUS=$?
done

The whole exercise took far longer than it should really and at this point in the game I should darn well know this stuff.

C Programming

This is one area that I am actually not so hard on my self. Given that I have no formal education in computers and learn from the internet and irc only and yada yada yada..., I think so far I have done pretty good. Lots more to learn of course but I find solving problems with C less daunting than this time last year and hope that trend continues.

Scripting Language

You could I suppose make an argument that sh, bash or zsh are scripting languages, in their own right. After all they use an interpreter and are fully programmable but the major difference (as I see it) seems to be the inclusion of libraries. Languages like Perl, Ruby and Python have huge and very interesting libraries that fledglings like myself can use to cobble up a little app to scratch a very specific itch. I have been told that I should have tackled Python before C even, but its too late for that now. Perl, from what I have seen still remains rather complex at first glance but then I haven't really given it a fair shake yet and I am not sure what to make of Ruby. And where does Lisp fit into all of this, is it essential even?

So these are some thoughts on my learning as it stands today. The best boost I could get right now more than anything would be the time to sit down and do all of this. Even though my life this year has suddenly become more hectic and chaotic than I have ever experienced, I still feel a need to learn, if only to serve myself, but being able to competently contribute to Debian or BZflag would certainly put the icing on the proverbial cake.

You can still pick up SuSE 7.3 for $18.39...

As you might know I love lyrics and love country music lyrics even more. Whilst trudging home through the slush and the sleet one evening, I heard on my iPod what was quite possibly the best Johnny Cash lyrics I have ever heard in a lovely little ditty called "Flushed from the Bathroom of Your Heart":



"From the backdoor of your life you swept me out dear
In the bread line of your dreams I lost my place
At the table of your love I got the brush off
At the Indianapolis of your heart I lost the race


I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart


In the garbage disposal of you dreams I’ve been ground up dear
On the river of your plans I’m up the creek
Up the elevator of your future I’ve been shafted
On the calendar of your events I’m last week


I’ve been washed down the sink of your conscience
In the theater of your love I lost my part
And now you say you’ve got me out of your conscience
I’ve been flushed from the bathroom of your heart
"

While on the subject of music, at lunch today I decided to hit the Mall. I was only intending to pop in to HMV (a rather large music retailer) to pick up the new Arcade Fire album, but somehow walked out with 5 CD's and about $80 lighter. I bought: The new Arcade Fire albumin: Neon Bible:
Interpol: Antics
Interpol: Turn On The Bright Lights
Goldfrapp: We Are Glitter
The Avalanches: Since I Left You

About this time last year one of the more interesting (from a user point of view) Debian General Resolution was passed and today I feel its effects more-so than any other time.

At the heart of the matter is the Free Software Foundation's vs Debian's position on the GFDL, particularly the `invariant sections' clause. An `invariant section' might be the front and rear covers of the user manual that perhaps contains the authors name and the publisher. The FSF maintains that modifying these sections isn't a socially useful activity and might misrepresent the authors. Debian feels documentation is essentially like software in this respect and a user should have the right to change anything they see fit.

For my part I am not happy to see documentation moved into Debian's non-free repository, already the autoconf and automake manuals live there, but as long as I still depend on a closed source driver for my video card, I will still have non-free enabled. (I would like to find a video card that has a 3D capable open source driver, but as of yet know of no such card.)

As much as I love Debian I feel they did the wrong thing here, and these issues still warrant further examination, despite the seemingly endless flame-wars discussions on the relevant mailing lists.

The point some people make is that if you rip the manual out of Emacs and package it separately, simply enabling non-free will solve your problem. However this is not good for people who refuse to run non-free software and are left with an application that is crippled without its documentation. (Emacs without its manual would undoubtedly be crippled).

I bring all this up because for almost 2 years now, Romain Francoise has maintained a snapshot of the latest emacs CVS release. Being able to run Emacs22 on my Debian Sarge server is really a great thing, and having it packaged for me, with almost weekly updates is even better, so I was somewhat saddened to learn he has orphaned the package, along with Bongo, the really cool little Emacs media player.

Both of these packages I use every day, day in and day out so I will have to either hope another Debian developer picks up the packages or checkout and regularly build the software from source on my desktop, laptop and server which might prove to be a tad tedious.

I hope Romain doesn't leave Debian entirely as he is one of those developers that responds to bug reports, listens to users and has provided me with some of my favorite software.