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Tue, 27 Mar 2012

Ebooks Cost Too Much

Some time ago I read the dead-tree version of the book Daemon, by Daniel Suarez. A very good book, and one I was glad to see now had a sequel. I was less pleased when I went to the Barnes & Noble website to see how much the ebook would cost (I have a 1st gen nook) - $9.99. Just out of curiosity, I checked the kindle price, and it was the same. I'm sorry, $9.99 is way too much for an ebook. I'm willing to pay more for physical books, but not an ephemeral digital version, even if it's in an open format like epub. I can't be alone - I would buy *many* more ebooks if they were at or below $3.00. It seems to me publishers are losing money by jacking up ebook prices (I've noticed authors selling direct through Amazon or B&N to tend to charge less, it's just the publishers trying to hang on to an obsolete business model). In the end, I picked up an almost-new hardcover for $1.93 on half.com (just under $6.00 with shipping), and I have the physical book.

posted at: 17:51 | path: / | permalink | cost, daemon, ebooks, epub, nook | 0 comments

Mon, 19 Mar 2012

WTF is Tracker and Why is it Using All of My Memory?

Recently, I updated by Debian testing XFCE desktop. Nothing unusual there, I've been using Debian for many years and after the gnome3 disaster, have pretty much settled on XFCE. This update brought in a surprise, however. My desktop with 3GB of RAM was sluggish, and 'top' showed I was using all my RAM *and* 500MB of swap. Hmmm...


slugmax@foo:~$ ps ax -o rss,user,command | sort -nr | head -n 10
1445784 slugmax /usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
...

What. The. Fuck. I'd never heard of 'tracker-miner-fs' before, yet here it was soaking up half my RAM. I look to see where this thing is starting.


slugmax@foo:~$ ack-grep -a tracker /etc/
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-store.desktop
24:Name[sl]=Shramba tracker
53:Exec=/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-store
64:X-GNOME-Bugzilla-Product=tracker
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-miner-fs.desktop
50:Exec=/usr/lib/tracker/tracker-miner-fs
...

So a bloated Gnome utility is being started by my XFCE session manager? Sure enough, checking the XFCE settings reveals the desktop search tool tracker has been set to autostart at login. Here are the packages installed, probably brought in as a "dependency", since I had given Gnome3 a try.


root@foo:/etc/xdg/autostart# dpkg -l | grep tracker
ii  libtracker-client-0.8-0    metadata database, indexer and search tool - library
ii  libtracker-extract-0.12-0  tracker extractor library
ii  libtracker-miner-0.12-0    tracker data miner library
ii  libtracker-sparql-0.12-0   metadata database, indexer and search tool - library
ii  tracker                    metadata database, indexer and search tool
ii  tracker-extract            metadata database, indexer and search tool - metadata extractors
ii  tracker-gui                metadata database, indexer and search tool - GNOME frontends
ii  tracker-miner-evolution    metadata database, indexer and search tool - evolution plugin
ii  tracker-miner-fs           metadata database, indexer and search tool - filesystem indexer
ii  tracker-utils              metadata database, indexer and search tool - commandline tools
...

But why was this enabled in XFCE, by default and with no warning? A bit of searching showed some other guy wondering the same thing about his KDE desktop. So lemme get this straight, a bloated Gnome desktop search utility (reminds me of the last bloated desktop search utility from Gnome, called "beagle") is being started with my XFCE desktop session? I stopped using Gnome to get away from these ridiculous, un-customizable and unusable utilities meant for the unwashed masses. GNU findutils and pdfgrep work just fine for me, thanks. Mutt lets me search my email in a myriad of ways. So next time at least ask me if I want this thing.

posted at: 00:37 | path: / | permalink | bloat, debian, desktop search, linux, memory, tracker, wtf | 0 comments

Tue, 28 Feb 2012

Argh, No Snow

This time last year we had two feet of snow on the ground, now none. In fact it hasn't snowed appreciably in the northeastern US since mid-December, not at all normal for a New England winter. Most people are pleased by this turn of events, but my wife and I enjoy cross-country skiing. We have only been able to go out twice this winter, and then only by traveling north to Vermont during a lucky week in January where they had six whole inches of snow.

posted at: 17:21 | path: / | permalink | cross-country skiing, northeast, snow | 0 comments

Sun, 19 Feb 2012

Alt.sysadmin.recovery Manpages

More sysadmin humor, the alt.sysadmin.recovery manpages.

posted at: 16:06 | path: / | permalink | humor, sysadmin | 0 comments

Don't Mess With the Sysadmin

A funny reminder not to mess with your sysadmin. Reminds me of the BOFH stories.

posted at: 15:38 | path: / | permalink | humor, sysadmin | 0 comments

Fri, 17 Feb 2012

WTF: Ubuntu, Debian and Gnome

After my rant on Ubuntu a few years ago it actually improved quite a bit. You still had loads of mysterious processes running, but at least they advanced things to the point of not slowing the desktop down (or maybe hardware just caught up), all the while keeping the same basic interface. I suppose they had gone just too long without messing things up, so in comes Unity (or Gnome3 if you are running the current Debian testing default desktop), and things are back to slow, clunky and unusable. At least for me - I tried it and abandoned it after a few days. Worse, the interface is radically changed, with no fallback. But hey, it looks good!

I can't complain too much, at least Ubuntu has Xubuntu, and Debian, well Debian just needs a minimal install, then you can add x-windows and your desktop of choice. It's still disappointing, however, that the default desktop in both is so broken.

posted at: 20:54 | path: / | permalink | debian, epic fail, gnome, gnome3, ubuntu, unity, wtf | 0 comments

Thu, 16 Feb 2012

Perl CGI Programming, the Right Way (redux)

Argh! The excellent Perl CGI course I first mentioned here is offline. Archive.org to the rescue.

For simple web apps, it really can't be beat as a starting point.

posted at: 18:54 | path: / | permalink | cgi, howto, perl, programming | 0 comments

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: / | permalink | hurricane, irene, preparedness, storm | 0 comments

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:

slerm-1.3.tgz

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: / | permalink | code, germ, phlog, slerm | 1 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: / | permalink | code, ideas, slerm | 0 comments