(   )
                          (    )
                           (    )
                          (    )
                            )  )
                           (  (                  /\
                            (_)                 /  \  /\
                    ________[_]________      /\/    \/  \
           /\      /\        ______    \    /   /\/\  /\/\
          /  \    //_\       \    /\    \  /\/\/    \/    \
   /\    / /\/\  //___\       \__/  \    \/
  /  \  /\/    \//_____\       \ |[]|     \
 /\/\/\/       //_______\       \|__|      \
/      \      /XXXXXXXXXX\                  \
        \    /_I_II  I__I_\__________________\
               I_I|  I__I_____[]_|_[]_____I
               I_II  I__I_____[]_|_[]_____I
               I II__I  I     XXXXXXX     I
            ~~~~~"   "~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Wed, 31 Aug 2011

Hurricane Irene

We've had an interesting few days since hurricane (really tropical storm) Irene hit Connecticut. We lost power Sunday morning, and finally got it back Tuesday. This wasn't really an inconvenience for us, as we had a generator and 20 gallons of fuel. That would last almost two weeks - the trick is to realize that you don't need 24x7 power to be comfortable, assuming you are prepared (more about that below). We ran the generator about six hours a day - two hours each morning. afternoon and night. That was enough in 80-degree weather to keep the fridge and freezer cold enough so there was no food spoilage. While the generator was off, we relied on stored water (both potable and rainwater for flushing toilets), a propane stove, various solar lights, battery-powered flashlights and oil lanterns. Since it was late August in New England, we did not have to worry about heating the house, although we have a wood stove if it had been necessary.

Some of our neighbors were not as prepared, and after just one day without power, one was plugging into our generator with an extension cord, and another was using our freezer and had asked us to charge one of their cell phones. In a moment of candor, one of them admitted to making fun of people rushing to buy water and toilet paper before the storm (we were also poking fun at the last-minute panic shoppers, but only because we had the things they were buying in storage already).

One source of disappointment was Internet access - we have a digital phone line from Cox that uses our house's existing copper phone lines and their cable, not the Internet, so I assumed it would provide dialtone for some time after a power outage. This would, in theory, have allowed me to use the SDF dialup account I keep as a backup. That plan only worked for about eight hours. One neighbor with an AT&T (formerly SNET) POTS line had dialtone for about 12 hours - not much better. Gone are the days when you could count on phone service for days or weeks after a power outage. I think most people just don't expect phones to work under those conditions - either they have cordless phones which are dead without power anyway, or they use cell phones. So companies stopped spending money on backup infrastructure. Of course, cell (data) service is much more expensive than SDF dialup, even if it would last perhaps a few more days. So I'm not sure what to do about that in the future.

We had no major storm damage to speak of, apart from a tree that fell on the kid's playscape. All things considered, it could have been much worse.

posted at: 13:46 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Wed, 29 Jun 2011

Slerm Phlogging Script - Updates

I've updated slerm to fix an issue where embedded gopher links of type 1-9 were not recognized. I've also added 'bookshelf.txt', meant to be a list of what you are currently reading, displayed just below the site header.

Here is the link to the tar archive:

And you can see it in action here (if you are using firefox 4 or 5, you will need the Overbite extension to visit gopher sites).

posted at: 00:57 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments |

Tue, 28 Jun 2011

Ideas for Improving Slerm

There are some ideas I've had for improving the slerm phlogging engine [0], the main one being adding full-text search. In fact, this seems to be a drawback to gopher itself - although the Veronica and VISHNU searches [1] are useful, they index only selectors - not full-text [2]. For a lightweight, text-based protocol, this seems a big weakness. It means you have to hunt around gopherspace for interesting tidbits, since selector names aren't always that descriptive. It appears WAIS was meant to address this limitation, although only for locally connected gopher servers via a special client (think pre-internet).

Anyway, if you have any ideas on what would be a useful addition to slerm, leave a comment and let me know.

posted at: 23:57 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Mon, 23 May 2011

Remote Access

I setup VNC access to a desktop for a client recently, which they promptly b0rked by replacing their router and with it all the firewall/port forwarding settings - without telling me. In trying to get access to try and fix it, I explained how I would first need the IP address for the new router. I received this helpful email in response: 

I think we were able to set up remote desktop.  I have the following
info. Let me know if this works.

IP Address bob-24f763ed307
Ext/Int Port 3389 for Remote Desktop

posted at: 00:03 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Wed, 13 Apr 2011

Mail Clients and Editors

My favorite mail client is mutt, and my editor-of-choice is GNU Emacs. The two play quite nicely together, and I still use them for personal mail, via a console SSH connection. This line in .muttrc does the trick:

set editor="emacsclient %s"

Coupled with post.el (which is already in Debian as the package post-el), an emacs minor mode that kicks in automatically when it sees a mutt temp file in a buffer, and email is quite painless.

Work is a different story, calendaring, obscure formats and attachments make using those two awkward at best, especially in a remote console. At some point you'll have to respond to an invite, or view some bloated binary attachment. Gmail works OK, but can be slow and does not support external IMAP accounts, not an ideal situation for me. So far, I've found the only (non-outlook) mail client that handles everything reasonably well is thunderbird 3.1 with the calendaring plugin. Of course, its builtin editor is atrocious, it can't handle quoted text, and always likes to re-format text for you (no pasting code snippets in email). I found a reasonable compromise with the 'external editor' plugin for thunderbird [0], coupled with tbemail.el [1]. You just use 'emacsclient' in the external editor options dialog. It works quite well.

Below are links to local copies ([2], [3]) in case the main sources ever disappear.

posted at: 12:50 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Wed, 06 Apr 2011

Using Old OSes On Servers

Of all the linux distros or BSD's to choose from, I would say Fedora ranks at the bottom for me as far as production server use. It's really meant as a testing OS, to test new ideas before they get incorporated into RHEL. While there are issues with any old operating system as far as community or vendor support, Fedora releases in particular have a very short lifespan (Fedora Legacy, which had been providing support for old Fedora releases, was shut down in 2007). I mention this because I have a client that contacts me every few months for help with some intractable server issue. From just a security perspective, this is scary, FC5 was released in 2006:

[root@www log]# uname -a Linux hostname 2.6.9-023stab051.3-enterprise #1 SMP Wed Nov 4 19:28:06 MSK 2009 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux [root@www log]# cat /etc/redhat-release Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux)

posted at: 20:39 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Wed, 19 Jan 2011

Hacker Wanted

Like most in the tech industry, I get emails from recruiters from time-to-time. Most I file in the bit-bucket pretty quickly. But one I received the other day was interesting for the wording used in the job description:

"Self-learner, hacker, open-source advocate who can work on large scale web systems..."

I have never seen the use of the word 'hacker' in a job description before, especially used correctly, with its original, positive connotation.

posted at: 14:21 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Tue, 21 Dec 2010

Slerm Phlogging Script - Updates

I've updated slerm to fix an issue where users could leave 'orphan' comments (comments not attached to any post) by forgetting to type the name of the post before the comment text. Now an error page is displayed, with instructions on what to do.

Here is the link to the tar archive:

posted at: 20:03 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments |

Wed, 17 Nov 2010

Slerm Phlogging Script

I've added some more updates to my version of the excellent 'germ' phlogging script as created by wt@sdf, and renamed it 'slerm' to differentiate it. The main change from the previous version is the ability to receive email alerts on post comments.

More details and links below, as well as a couple of helper utilities.

more »

posted at: 15:22 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments |

Tue, 16 Nov 2010

Highly Annoying Habits of Non-Geeks

Posted without comment, annoying habits of the non-geek:

posted at: 21:10 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Thu, 19 Aug 2010

Slide Rules

[This post disappeared from the SDF bboard for some reason, so I'm posting it here]

When I was in high school (80's) TI handheld calculators were just starting to be used regularly in math and science classes. But I had a soft-spot for slide rules, as my grandfather taught me to use one when I was 11. He was a civil engineer, and still used them regularly. When I was a bit older he gave me his prized possession, a post-versalog with the bamboo slides and instruction manual (back when instruction manuals were actually hardcover, cloth-bound books). The quality was amazing. Apparently, the more you use the bamboo slides, the smoother the action gets, a property of the natural oils in the bamboo.

I still have that instruction manual, although the original slide rule was lost in a fire. A couple of years ago, I got nostalgic and bought an identical model on ebay for about $20. They are fun to use, if not practical nowadays, and do teach logarithmic principles in a nice, visual way.

posted at: 17:36 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Tue, 03 Aug 2010

This Server is a Tad Overloaded...

A server I do development work on...yikes:

15:32:42 up 259 days, 19:17, 72 users, load average: 300.82, 272.70, 190.05

posted at: 01:24 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Fri, 14 May 2010

Project Work and Crazy Expectations

I've never been a fan of detailed or formal requirements docs for software or other projects, as I've found the customer's needs always change and sticking to a pre-made list is impossible. But there has to be *something* to start with, something reasonably detailed enough to make an estimate (and I recommend doubling that before telling the customer). I got an email from a potential client recently:

"...help me in setting up an already purchased server, programming of some modules in Perl and handling in cron jobs for one of my projects. I would appreciate a quick turnaround time."

Apparently, this was enough detail to come up with a fixed-bid estimate - even after I challenged and asked for more detail.

Another example - a friend of mine wanted me to develop a web-based, database enabled app with user, admin and reporting interfaces, calendaring and email hooks. This was supposed to be an easy project I could put together one night, in my spare time.

Sometimes conveying the scope of a project is hard. Hidden from the casual user is how a software app works under the hood (all-too frequently behind a web browser). When you've been doing project work for a while, you get a sense for where the pitfalls and time-sinks lie, it's just hard getting clients to see them. I'm sure I've heard this analogy somewhere before, but projects like these are like icebergs - the part you see is just the smallest part. Unfortunately, to your clients, this part is all that exists.

posted at: 12:57 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments |

Tue, 20 Apr 2010

Partitioning Woes

Who partitions servers like this? A braindead hosting provider, that's who.

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/sd1 16G 1.5G 13G 10% / /dev/sd3 4.8G 275M 4.3G 6% /var /dev/sd2 246G 564M 233G 1% /home /dev/sd0 99M 18M 77M 19% /boot

I mean think about it.../tmp, /usr/local, and /usr are all lumped into the root partiton. /boot is tiny, given that this is a 300GB disk, and on CentOS (this is a CentOS 5.3 dedicated server) that tiny /boot will fill up after a few kernel upgrades - since the old kernels and related files hang around unless you delete them. And 5GB for /var? Again, it's a 300GB disk...meant to be used as a web/database server - you could be a bit more generous here. While we're at it, LVM would be nice. Sheesh.

posted at: 16:46 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments | tags:

Fri, 16 Apr 2010

HTML Tag Removal Utility - unhtml

I updated 'unhtml' [0] today and copied it into /sys/sdf/bin so others could use it. Unhtml is a command-line utility to strip tags from HTML source. I'm using it to convert pyblosxom posts to gopher-suitable text.

posted at: 17:27 | path: / | permanent link to this entry | 0 comments |