John Mort's Weblog

With a birthday coming up, and Christmas following a few months later, the prospect of getting things has arisen. I've had my 2nd Gen 8GB iPod Nano for a year or two now, and it's joined the short list of things I have to have on me at almost all times. However, lately I've been running out of new podcasts to subscribe to, and have started looking enviously at videocasts. I used to watch the ones I liked on Miro when I worked from home, but the job I've had for the last half year has me out of my office as often as not, and the kind of stuff I like to watch provokes my wife and daughter to plead for me to make it stop. As a result, I don't get to watch videocasts anymore.

The frustrating thing is that many of the videocasts I'm interested in would work fine in an audio format. I really don't need to see a person sitting at a desk staring at me. So I've come to a bit of a crossroads. I can either drastically narrow my wishlist and throw on an iPod Classic (the 3rd Gen Nano's don't have enough HD space for videocasts) or I can start modifying bashpodder to download videocasts, extract the audio, then create .xml feeds for amarok to point to so I can get my own ghetto audio version on my Nano. As of now, I'm leaning heavily toward the iPod Classic (which is a new dilemma, do I go for the 80GB or the 160GB? I'm inclined to shoot for the larger version but if it ends up being overkill I'll feel silly for going big, but annoyed if 80GB is too small) mainly because sometimes it would be nice to be able to see the video when I'm standing in line or something. On top of this, I'd be able to give Deanna my Nano, since the 1st Gen Nano her Aunt gave her has a really short battery life and less than a quarter of the storage capacity.

I guess I'll have to start looking around to see how capable Amarok is at handling videocasts. It's definitely not worth doing if I have to go back to Windows to get it to work properly.

My boss stopped by my office today to have me fill out a performance evaluation form on myself. The job title on the training sheet I received when I got here was "I.T. Technician", but on my performance evaluation sheet it's "Data Base Administrator". I'm going to have to request those first two words be merged, but otherwise this is a rather pleasant turn of events.

Crap Movie Comics presents IRON MAN

When I first saw Iron Man, I thought I liked it. Thinking back though, I realize I actually just liked Robert Downey Jr. Iron Man wasn't bad, the way most comic movies are, it's more a function of my high bar for suspension of disbelief. I couldn't get past the fact that one guy, no matter how smart, wrote all that software in that short of time. That's what kind of nerd I am. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing Iron Man again, but I wouldn't want to own it.

Trian's computer has been having issues lately. We wanted her to be able to play Civ4, so we grabbed a high-end AGP video card (cheap these days) and also maxed her RAM (also cheap, it's an older computer). Lately though, she's been plagued with freezes and reboots. Either her motherboard or power supply is going, and all the old hardware I had stocked up to troubleshoot this kinda stuff got thrown out a year or two ago to make room for other stuff in the closet.

Today her onboard network card died. When I plugged in one of the spare PCI ethernet cards that survived the purge, the power it required apparently caused the graphics card to not get enough power and thus threw up some warning screens. I could probably play some games to get her computer to work for webbing around, but she insists on being able to play the occasional game, so it's time to consider replacement.

Unfortunately, the return period for the RAM expired yesterday, so we're stuck with three sticks of 1GB DDR 400 that no modern motherboard will accept, the video card can still be returned, so I put in the RMA request for that. So now I just need to find a new motherboard, RAM, video card, and power supply, and she'll be all set.

The name of the game going in was budget. Find a motherboard that will take a cheap processor and RAM, but have the capability to handle heavier stuff so we can upgrade her later on. The video card can be average, as a modern average PCI Express card will curb stomp what she was running. The power supply was the only thing I wanted to put some serious money into, as that has the best potential for longevity, her current power supply having been part of three computer builds.

Of course, newegg had other ideas. I came across the processor I had originally wanted to get when I was setting up my computer, it's as powerful as what I have (3Ghz Dual Core), but much cheaper. It also comes with a combo deal for a 700W power supply that has good reviews. Separately they're $340, but together they're $250 retail, with a $50 rebate on top of that, totaling $200! The combo profile linked to a motherboard similar to mine that normally goes for $100 but is up for $85 right now. With her current computer, I had been trying to take her up to 3GB of RAM, which is economically the max her 32bit XP OS will handle, so I found some low end RAM her motherboard likes (which is more than twice as fast as the RAM she was using) for $20 per 1GB chip. I then found a decent video card that normally runs $120 going for $70, with a $20 rebate making it $50. Bringing this whole computer rebuild to just under $400.

I haven't calculated what I'm going to get back from my RMA yet, I figure around $80 after shipping and restock, but that'll take this down to $320. All that's left is the RAM. The chips are new, and work. I paid $140 for them, and they're still at their current value. So hopefully I can unload them locally for about $100. So although in total it'll have cost us $400 to rebuild her computer, only about $220 of that would be in cash we hadn't already spent. That's not a bad total for the kind of system she'll be getting.

3Ghz Dual Core CPU @ 1333Mhz (upgradeable, but unlikely to happen)
3GB DDR2 RAM @ 800Mhz (upgradable)
GeForce 8500 GT w/ 600MHz clock & 256MB GDDR3 @ 1400MHz (upgradeable)
700W Power Supply

Not top of the line, not perfectly aligned, but very nice, and all for $400, with room for growth.

I can be rather stingy with money, I've been listening to my podcasts on a pair of headphones with one dead headphone for over a week, while I look for the perfect replacement headphones that don't cost too much. I've settled on a pair, going a bit higher in price than I'd like, but since the shipping will be free it'll really cost the same as if I got something in my preferred range.

One interesting thing I noticed while shopping was my reaction to prices. Typically, an item will be listed as $29.99 with the intention of decreasing the psychological impact of the price by having a leading 2 instead of a leading 3 in the number. In my case, however, I found a different pair of headphones listed at $30.00 more compelling, due to the lack of nines telling me "You're being tricked, this is more expensive than it appears!", the flat $30 appears to be a more honest price, and thus is more soothing.

Obviously I went with the $29.99 one in the end though, mainly because of the better reviews.

Again my headphones are broken. The right earbud no longer plays sound on the Sony MDR-J10 I got four months ago, and although I really like the headphones and how they sound and feel (when they work, that is) I'm thinking that it's time to try something different after having them fail on me again so quickly (though they're half the price I ordered them at last time, which makes it tempting).

My main problem with ordering headphones is that I don't want a pair that has a band connecting the earbuds because I want to be able to fit them in my pocket sometimes. I can't use normal earbud headphones though, because they always fall out of one of my left ear. So I need something with a hook that goes around my ear so that when they pop out they'll at least be near my ear so I can still hear what's being said before pushing it back in.

After looking around, I might have come across an alternative solution. These new Twist-To-Fit style headphones look promising. Reading some reviews, I've seen some people complain about discomfort, but I've also seen people say that they're uncomfortable until you learn to wear them properly. I'd hate to spend money on something that ultimately didn't work, but the pair I'm looking at has a 90 day warranty, I think that's plenty of time to try them out.

Has anyone had any sort of luck with this style of headphone?

One of the talks I went to at HOPE 2008 was Mitch Altman's talk, "Hacking Cool Things with Microcontrollers". I was already a big fan of his TV-B-Gone and one of my favorite classes from highschool was electronics. So listening to him talk about the different cool and goofy things you could make yourself really resonated with me.

I only had enough money at the conference to cover my meals, but after his talk I decided to skip lunch and purchase one of his kits in order to re-learn how to solder things, how to understand what a given chip will do, how to read resistors, how to tell positive from negative on resistors and LED's, and how to ground things. I had a couple of CueCat's sitting at home I wanted to modify and this was my chance to learn how to do it. The only question was which kit to buy.

Of course, he had some TV-B-Gone kits, including one that worked from 100 meters away (disguised as an iPhone), he also had some neat solar powered robots and LED cubes, but one of the projects that intrigued me from his talk was the Brain Machine.

The Brain Machine is basically a pair of LED's that sit in front of your eyes and a pair of headphones. The headphones play a tone and the LED's blink back and forth in Sine Waves that mimic brain patterns, some cause hallucinations, others cause meditative states. The easiest way to create the brain machine was to mount the LED's, batteries, and circuit board onto a pair of safety glasses. Coupled with the psychedelic graphics he glued into the lenses, it looked rather silly. But it was still interesting.

So when I visited his booth on the second floor later on, I saw he had several Brain Machine's people could try out, so I killed ten minutes trying one out.

Wow.

I saw all sorts of strange shapes and (red tinted) colors, and it was quite relaxing. This was what I wanted to make! So I purchased the kit, and got to work.

It was kind of amusing, building the thing. I was rather clueless, and people were constantly asking Mitch questions, so I wasn't able to get much help out of him. Fortunately the Brain Machine was popular at the table I was sitting at, so I was able to ask questions of a couple people who were ahead of me in the project. After I had made some decent progress, some other people started sitting down at the table, and began asking me the same questions I was just asking others. It became a sort of chain, I was rushing to keep up with the people ahead of me so I could ask them for help when necessary, and the people behind me were rushing to keep up with me, and others who arrives later were rushing to keep up with them. It took me a total of four hours, but I managed to complete my project without making any mistakes! I elected no to glue psychedelic graphics into my glasses, as I favored the "electronics" look of leaving everything exposed, and late that night when I got to my Uncle's co-op, I wore my glasses and fell asleep to the strange sights the Brain Machine provoked.

It was really fun building this thing, and I've defenitly gotten a bug to start collecting wire and chips and such and see if I can't figure out my own projects. I plan on hacking my CueCat's soon to turn them into conventional scanners. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do with them once I have them working the way I want, but it's still exciting to me to be able to solder things and make things work. Eventually I figure out how to turn this knowledge into some sort of practical use. In the mean time I think I'm going to have fun once I get the tools I need together.

In Japan some company called Avex is selling videos where women just stare at the viewer. The intension is to help people who are so socially reclusive that they never leave their homes get used to having a person look at them.



When I watch the clips on youtube, all I can think of is how perfect these videos would work as something for the TV to do at a party.


Edit:

For those who think this is just a weird porn thing because of the cleavage visible in the above video, they have other models as well who are not appealing in that manner.





I just think it'd be creepy/cool to have people standing on your TV screen doing nothing during some sort of social gathering.

Having a family of my own is an emotional asset, especially in tumultuous times.

Today my fellow IT guy was having trouble doing something with openssl on our fileserver, so he removed it with the intension of reinstalling it, hoping this would resolve the issue. This is something he said he's done with no problem before, but something went differently this time, and the uninstall ended up removing several screens worth of packages. My introduction to this result was when I lost my internet connection, followed shortly by people complaining that they couldn't print.

Fortunately I had an ssh session open to the server, so between the two of us we had two active connections to the machine, we couldn't establish any new ones. My first reaction was to try reinstalling openssl, but yum was gone. Some further testing unveiled several other rather important programs no longer there. Whatever had been removed, the shared drives still worked, and even though we couldn't connect with the client, vmware was still running in the background. So we were effectively coasting, since the file sharing is most of what this machine does.

This is normally the time that you switch over to the backup machine while you try to fix things, the only problem is that we haven't received approval for a backup machine yet. So we had to go to the backup tapes, which is where it gets interesting. Since we had no backup machine, we never had a chance to test the backups in an environment that would could play around and break things in. So we'd never actually done a proper restore, and had to figure it out on the fly, a disaster recovery no-no.

Some searching around online and a few panicked queries in IRC later and we started pulling our data from the previous day's backup off the tape and into a temporary directory, and hit a stumbling block. When I tried to move our backup of /usr into /, it wouldn't let me, claiming that the active /usr wasn't empty. This is probably where we should have calmed down, and figured out how to do things properly. Instead, we decided to move /usr to /usrbak, then move the backed up /usr to /, and it worked! This was soon followed by /etc, /lib, and /var, all of which were missing things, and each time we moved one of those folders over something else would start working again. Then we broke it.

We tried doing the move with /sbin (might have been /bin, the details escape me). First I moved /sbin to /sbinbak, then when to move the backed up /sbin to / and got an error message. After a brief panic, I realized I could use /sbinbak/mv to move the backed up /sbin to /, and it worked! Then I did the same thing to /lib64, which was stupid, because after that I couldn't do anything. It was then that I got that cold, numb feeling of fear.

After some flailing, we gave up, let everyone know that we were taking down the server in an hour so they could finish up what they were doing (because linux, beautifully, was still sharing files like nothing was wrong), and that we'd be up all night reinstalling everything.

After some bitching, I started downloading a liveCD in the hope that I could use that to move the backed up /lib64 to /. While that was downloading I called my wife and complained for awhile, which did a lot to calm me down. Went back to the office and eventually my officemate remembered that the fedora install CD had some kind of rescue mode on it. So we went ahead and brought down the server, went into recovery mode, and were delighted to see it had created a virtual (functional!) filesystem, and mounted our broken filesystem in /mnt/sysimage. From there we were able to copy over /lib64, and anything else we thought might be useful, then rebooted.

Everything looked good as it booted up, but I was pessimistic since when we had been restoring from the tape we noticed many files hadn't been copied, I was certain something important had been missed. But everything was listing as successful, and eventually we got a login screen. We were able to log in successfully, and began testing everything, and everything worked! We spent about an hour trying absolutely everything, and eventually decided we had dodged a bullet. No working until 2am again after all!

During this crisis, we had been given permission to go ahead and order that backup system. So we decided that until we have a functional system to fall back on, we're not going to mess with anything, just backup religiously and let things work until we have that equipment.

Even though everything appears to have worked out (thankfully on the day before I'm leaving for the HOPE conference, not the day of), I was still all stressed out and nauseous, I picked up my daughter from trian's work so she could finish her workday sans child, and went home. Deanna was remarkable in calming me down and getting me back to normal just by being her usual goof ball self. In a previous life this would still have me frazzled and irritable. So I'm really thankful to have my ladies in my life.

Haven't been photoblogging, I stopped because it was difficult to keep it up when my goal was a picture a day. But I miss doing it and it was nice to have a record when I did, especially to glance over a month and remember what had went on. So I'm going to take a stab at it again, only demoting it from a religious obligation to a mere hobby this time.

This picture was taken a couple weeks ago, we went out to get haircuts, but my appointment was an hour before trian or Deanna's, so they went shopping. I decided to wait for them by the river, and at one point saw a boat being towed by a jetski. By the time it had occurred to me to take a picture a river sheriff had taken over the tow.