As a followup to my previous post, I think this will be my last post into the Blosxom section of my blog.

Instead, I've spent the last week or two feverishly coding plugins for a new Wiki+Blog, using Kwiki as the engine. The end result is far nicer, both on the administrative end, as well as the front-end and features as a whole.

The goal is to create more of an information repository, rather than just a simple blog.

The new code is at: openthought.org

The RSS feed is at: openthought.org/?action=RSS

Mostly none of the old site has been moved over, I may do that for some of the more interesting entries. Also, I'll probably use mod_rewrite to redirect the old RSS url, though I haven't added that yet.

Have fun :-)
-Eric

As has been aptly pointed out, I haven't posted a thing in durn near a month. Well, here's the problem.

Believe it or not, I've actually developed more of a desire to have more things written down. Interesting links, pictures, and quotes. Not only my usual mumblings about this or that in Linux, more even more of a general "I got X working by doing Y". How life is going, with the ability to add onto it later.

It's become clear to me that I don't just need a blog, I need a wiki. But I don't want two seperate sites, as I'll often want to blog about what's it's in the wiki, or wiki about what's in the blog.

As soon as I figured out what I really wanted, I completely lost the desire to write at all, I feel like I'm wasting what I type. Instead, in the last few weeks, I've been pounding out some code for the site that I really want.

I'm using Kwiki as a base, but building a number of plugins to get it to function the way I want... Kwiki is a wiki, so I needed a blog and comments plugin, and of course one for RSS. In all, I've written or modified 7 plugins, and it's nearly ready for use.

I have not yet decided how exactly I want to migrate stuff from the existing blog. I certainly don't want to lose it. But do I migrate as is? Or maybe I can migrate a few at a time and make them fit in better with the whole wiki+blog thing. I guess option #3 is to migrate everything, then slowly modify them. I dunno.

Anyhow, things are comming along... in the not too distant future something cooler should be online.

I get FIOS installed today. What's that wooshing sound? That's the sound my massive bandwidth makes! Heh.

The installation was certainly amusing. He asked to see where the line needed to go in the house. I showed him the server closet, and then another room full of spare parts. He stared for a little bit, then asked "Are you into computers or something?"

He later asked what I did. I mentioned something about Linux... he had never heard of it. I tried explaining that it was an OS just like Windows or a Mac with OS X, then told him I did Linux at work. At which point he said "So you work for Linux?"

Hah. Well, something like that.

After he got everything setup, we went out to my laptop to try it all out. I was able to connect to the DLink Router they setup with no problem, the next thing he wanted to do was configure the router. He told me to do it since I could probably do it faster than him anyway :-)

So, the first thing we did is get rid of the PPPoe, and go straight to "Dynamic". I'd of course prefer a static IP, but dynamic with dyndns (I use dnsexit, actually) isn't too far off.

I went with the 15Mb down / 2Mb up... and I seem to be able to get fairly close to that on the so called "bandwidth testing sites". Now for the real test... downloading an ISO. I tried a .edu site, and was seeing a little over 1.3MB/s down. Which is a bit closer to 10Mb, rather than 15... probably a limitation of the server I was pulling it from.

So is it worth it to get the full 15Mb, over the 5Mb service, for the additional $10/month? I'm not sure ATM, I'll think about it over the next month or so and see what all I download. I certainly see a difference in downloading files. Maybe I'll just do it to annoy the AT&T COO who said this:

"In the foreseeable future, having a 15 Mbps Internet capability is irrelevant because the backbone doesn't transport at those speeds," he told the conference attendees. Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown "no discernable difference" between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone."

I would just like to say that the above is untrue, as I believe I've just proven... and I reiterate my stance that he's simply jealous because he's stuck at lousy download speeds of DSL :-)

A classic from the LP.

"With your vote, we'll remove you're politician, and release him into the wild, unharmed. Relatively."

Hah. Nice :-)

So, in a bold and brash move, someone actually mentioned Perl at the Perl Mongers Meeting last night. In fact, in addition to Patrick talking about Parrot, we actually wrote Perl code as well. It must be a first.

Jeff had an issue where the wonderful admins at his workplace weren't getting the DNS straight on a new DNS server. So, given several hundred names, and a list of the correct IP's, how does one show the admin's which names don't have correct IP's on the new DNS server? Why, you use Perl of course.

The simple, boring, 10 minute answer is this code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Net::DNS;

my  =  or die "First argument should be the nameserver\n";
my        =  or die "Second argument should be the file\n";

open FH,  or die "Can't open ]\n";

my  = Net::DNS::Resolver->new( nameservers =>  );

while (my  = ) {

    my (, ) = split /,/, ;
    chomp ;
    check_dns(, );

}

sub check_dns {
    my (, ) = @_;

    my  = ->query(, "A");

    if () {
        my () = ->answer;
        if (->address ne ) {
            print " is off! Says , should be \n";
        }
    }
    else {
      warn "Query on  failed: ", ->errorstring, "\n";
    }
}

That takes a nameserver, and file, as arguments. The file has one name / ip per line. It then looks up the hostname at the specified nameserver... and if the IP the nameserver returns is not the same as the IP listen in the file, it displays an error.

The real fun was, how little code can one use to perform this task? Golf, as they say!

Todd used a bunch of shell commands, and had it in some 75 characters. Well, that doesn't really count, that's like being on a different golf course, but saying you finished with fewer strokes ;-)

At the meeting last night, I was able to get it down to 95 characters of pure Perl:

perl -MSocket -nle '($x,$y)=split/,/;$y;$z=inet_ntoa((gethostbyname($x)));print if$z ne$y' h

I've since shortened it to 81 characters by using a different method to perform the DNS lookup:

perl -MSocket -nle '($x,$y)=split/,/;$z=inet_ntoa inet_aton $x;print if$z ne$y' h

And then, 75 characters by dropping the need for $z, and getting rid of some spaces:

perl -MSocket -nle'($x,$y)=split/,/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton $x)ne$y' h

Is it possible to not assign variables in the split? I'm not sure, but I think that may be the only avenue left for shortening it more :-)

Update: Okay, we can in fact drop the variable assignment in split, and use the default array, @_. I was originally hoping split set $a and $b the way sort does... it doesn't seem to. But, using @_. we can get it down to 73 characters:

perl -MSocket -nle'split/,/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton $_)ne$_' h

Update 2: Aha! We can get rid of split, with a good 'ol regex, bringing us in at 69 characters:

perl -MSocket -nle'/(.*),(.*)/;print if(inet_ntoa inet_aton$1)ne$2' h

Update 3: Woo! Save a char by using -p instead of -n, 68 chars:

perl -MSocket -ple'/(.*),(.*)/;$_=""if(inet_ntoa inet_aton$1)eq$2' h

I'm a late bloomer when it comes to cell phones. I've never really needed or wanted one. I tend to enjoy being away from the world when I'm eating out for dinner, for example. Yeah, I guess I can turn off the phone. But afterwards, I'd immediatly turn it back on, and want to deal with any messages there. If I *can't* check messages or email, I tend not to care... if I know one is there, or have the ability to check them, it bothers me until I do :-)

Alas, for various reasons, I'm giving in, some of the reasons being:

• The occasional desire to get in touch with someone while I'm not at home
• I run a business, where I do consulting and hosting. People like being able to get in touch with you, not just when you're next to a landline
• If something goes wrong with the hosting, I need to be able to fix it, where ever it is I am

So, I've begun poking my head around the various offerings. I've been learning about things like GSM and CDMA. Apparently, CDMA allows for more users on a single tower, and has a broader range per tower. But, GSM is more popular internationally, and claims a higher digital voice quality.

Then there's all the providers... Verizon and Spring use CDMA. Verizon has a large presence in the North-East, where I spent most of my time. Cingular and T-Mobile, using GSM, do have coverage as well. T-Mobile tends to be more-so near highways, but otherwise, often considered to be rather poor coverage. Cingular seems to have an even network around the US... maybe not as good in the North East as Verizon, but better in other areas.

It gets tough though, as you can run into pockets of people who will suggest any of the above. Some people love Verizons network and connectivity. Others love Cingular for the same reason. Some like TMobile because it works well enough, but is cheaper.... especially when including data into the plan.

The thing that gets me with all this is cost... it kills me that I'll end up spending so much to be able to have a phone that allows me to connect to the Net in the case of an emergency.

We'll probably get a phone for Shana at the same time... so, for the both of us, family plans tend to start at $60/month. Data, for one user, is at least another $20. So, we're suddenly spending $80/month. And then there's at least another $5-$10 in taxes. Yay! So, we're almost at $100 for two people to carry around phones, one of whom can use it to get on the Net for a brief period of time. Ugh!

Anyhow... the next issue at hand is in choosing a phone. There's a ton of them out there. And if you look at say, the CNet reviews, you can find at least 5 things wrong with each one, and an additional 2-3 if you read what the users have to say in addition to the actual review.

So, what level of imperfection are you willing to tolerate in order to gain the privilage of spending $100 a month to be able to have people interrupt you during dinner?

Well, in any case, if I'm going to be doing Internet work, it's going to be over ssh. And with ssh, a keyboard is nice. The Treo's and such are tempting, but they're quite large, and they run Windows. I was really just considering dealing with one of the standard LG phones, or perhaps a flipout keyboardthat the LG-9800 offers. With it, you can use the free BitPim to upload wallpapers and ringtones, modify the filesystem, and other goodies that seem to come disabled (so not only am I spending $100 on phones, I'm spending that much on phones with features taken out!).

But, in poking around the Net, I ran across this rather cool looking Nokia, the E70. It sports not just a keyboard, but over 7 hours of talk time, WiFi access (b, g, e, and i), a 2MB camera, a 352 x 416 screen with 16 million colors, 75MB of space and a mini-sd card slot, and it supports Java so I should have no trouble getting my ssh client.

After all is said and done, it seems like a winner of a phone. I'm leaning towards going with Cingular... as Tmobile doesn't really seem to be cheaper, you just get more features for your money (ie, it's still $60 for a family plan, but you get 700 minutes, instead of 550). So, I'm leaning towards the better coverage, since I don't really need the extra minutes.

The unfortunate part of all this is that the Nokia E70 isn't available yet... Nokia claims it's fixing some software bugs it discovered, they claim it'll be out later this quarter. We'll see how that goes :-)

I ordered a slick alternativy CD from Amazon called Copeland / In Motion. I popped it in the CD player on the way home from work, and was a bit surprised to hear what appeared to be a "country twang".

I was a little unsympathetic with the plight described in the first song about winding up in jail... but I knew something wasn't right when I learned the name of the song was "My Cellmate Finds me Sexy". Hrm.

It turns out that they sent me the right CD case, but the actual CD contained therein was something from a group called "Cletus Judd". Interesting.

What exactly is inside a hard drive? Well, I let myself be talked into manually destroying some hard drives, rather than using the simple Derek's Book and Nuke.

So, we pop all the cases off, then do some terrible things to the platters which hopefully prevent most people from being interested in the Word documents we send around here at work.

The one thing I found interesting was that... in addition to the head, platters, and some other gizmos and gadgets, there's not one, but two rather powerful magnets inside. And they're attached to the base of the head, a few millimeters away from the platters.

I had never really known how careful one had to be with magnets around hard drives. Well, I don't think I own a single magnet anywhere near as strong as the ones I pulled out from inside of the drives.

They make great toys though, I have a chain of them now to dangle off various metal objects :-)

So my heat pump / air conditioner decided to continuously run the fan. Even when the heat/air was turned off. Well, I'm lucky enough that my next door neighbor runs a full time business repairing those sorts of things. In the meantime, I figured I'd like to make the fan stop running.

You'd think that would be simple... but no button on the thermostat affected it's desire to keep running... and it even kept going after I turned off all the power on the circuit breaker it was on.

Or, so I thought. I ended up just wondering over to chat with my neighbor, and discovered that heatpumps have their own circuitbreaker, outside. Probably so that they can be turned off, and when someone sticks their head in the unit, they don't have any fear that it'll get turned back on :-)

Most folks remember him as the inventor of the telephone. And, having invented something interesting, he also must have been a US citizen. Only partial truths!

Below contains a number of tidbits I picked up largely from Wikipedia.

First, Bell was born it Great Britian. At 23, he went off to Canada. And 3-4 years later, then began researching at Boston University.

It's debatable whether he was the first inventor of the telephone. Outside of the US and Canada, many countries credit the telephone invention with the Italian inventor, Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci.

But, that by no means makes Bell a dunce, this was a bright dude.

Bell is listed in the 100 Greatest Britians, 100 Greatest Americans, and 10 Greatest Canadians (they don't get so many people up there ;-)

One of his inventions is a photophone, which sent sound over a beam of light. He didn't really go far with it due to poor communication quality.

He also invented the metal detector and HydroFoil.

He was also a big proponent of Eugenics, a philosophy which promotes compulsory sterilization of those who, as Bell put it, were a "defective variety of the human race." These ideas were adopted by many states -- in fact, by the 1930's, half of all states in the US had eugenics laws. The ones from California were used as a model for Eugenics in Nazi Germany.

Bell did a lot of work with deaf education, but that was exactly the population he didn't feel should be allowed to procreate.

Ironicly, his wife was deaf, and they had kids. None of his kids were deaf.

Bell labs, and the decibel, were named after Alexander Graham Bell.

I've been using muttng over mutt for the last few months. Basically, the idea boils down to the fact that there's been quite a few really useful mutt patches available for some time, but fewer and fewer of them were being added into the main mutt tree.

Finally, some folks got fed up with this, forked mutt, and imported a bunch of patches. It's hard to say for sure, but at least 15-20 patches are in there now, on top of everything that mutt already does.

Of course, you could get much of this functionality in standard mutt by applying these patches yourself... go ahead and try though, trying to get 15-20 patches to apply and not clash is quite a task :-)

Some of the more interesting features that I make use of now are header caching -- which means opening a folder with several thousand emails no longer takes 20 seconds to open (my sent mail, some 6600 messages, took that long).

It offers a sidebar, not unlike the folder list found in Thunderbird/Evolution/Outlook/etc... you can show and hide it with a single key combo, and it allows you to flip through your various mailboxes in a hurry, without actually having to flip screens by hitting 'c', then '?', then browsing.

They also went through, and made a number of "sanity" changes to the config file syntax. For example, mutt seemed to flip between using 'pgp_*' and 'gpg_*' for various config options. Muttng renamed them to the more sane 'crypt_*' (oh the irony).

And just a tiny little thing that makes a world of difference to me is the menu context patch. If you're in a folder with 100's or 1000's of messages, and you find yourself scrolling up or down through a bunch of them for whatever reason, the messages themselves only begin scrolling once your cursor hits the top of bottom of the screen. So, it's really easy to flip past the one you want. Sure, right after it slides by you scroll back down, and open it with no problem. But what if it were even easier? The menu_context option says not to scroll messages when the cursor is at the top or bottom of the screen, but instead, when it's N messages from the top of bottom of the screen. I have mine set to '5'.... meaning there are *always* at least 5 messages above and below the cursor (unless you're at the beginning or end of the mailbox, of course)

Simple pleasures, perhaps. But, anyone who knocks it just hasn't had the opportunity to use a mail client that allows you to tweak absolutally every aspect of it :-) Indeed, that may be it's one primary fault as well, the fact that you can tweak every option :-) Once you take the time to sit down and do it though, it's really hard to beat.

Oh, and muttng can act as a news reader too, but I haven't yet had a chance to try this out.

Well, sort of.

As Don recently mentioned, I've recently grown interested in working on some gigs of my own. So, on one end, we have things like the webhosting that he mentioned, as well as hosted groupware and other goodies (if you're reading this, I'll give you a discount on hosting, just ask :-) (note to current customers: it's the deal you're currently all getting... and no, there's no miracle 'free' plan, sorry ;-)

However, I've also been getting involved in side sysadmin and programming projects.

One such project deals with a small business who actually manages to pull in some 15 million hits a day on just one of his sites, which is more than Slashdot. It's been fun working on a setup that can handle that sort of traffic, without actually using a load balancer :-)

A new project that's come up is to create a simple-to-use program which can do all the following:

• Get information about movies/streams of any type, from static mpeg movies to proprietary Microsoft MMS based streams
• Given a url, verify said file/stream is working
• Given a time (in seconds), get a screenshot of the video at that time

Really, there's tools out there that can do most of the above... I don't actually have to write a video parser. What doesn't exist is an easy means of doing the above.... one has to take the existing tools, come up with the right options, and put it all together.

Having never really spent much time dorking around in the video world, I hadn't realized the complexity of many video tools. Have you ever looked at the mplayer manpage? It has nearly 40,000 words across 9000 lines.

It was a lot of fun putting this together... when building it, I had my sights on developing a tool that would allow someone to easily do what Google Video's has going. That is, given a set of video url's, verify each works... and if so, display the length, format, set of screenshots, and so on, all the goodies that you can see in this Movie on Google video's.

I honestly don't even know what they're going to use it for, I was simply given a list of options it needed to have available, and recognized that hey, they could implement Google Video's if they wanted :-)

I went out to see The Violet Burning last night. Kevin Max was playing as well.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover Brennan Strawn from Monarch actually opening for the other two.

The Violet Burning were their usual "alternative with a twist of punk" selves, a great show. Kevin Max was good, though they are bit more of a pop'y style of music than I usually prefer in bands... I'll probably get their stuff in time though. Brennan Straw was a surprise, and put on an accuistic guitar show (unlike his usual piano based music). He has a new album coming out in a month or so, which I look forward to.

Apparently, you can't just take a working CentOS/RHEL system, and add RAID to it. You'd think that would work, but no. You'll boot, and get a message like this:

Unable to find volume group volgroup00

Followed by things like "LVM Exiting", "Kernel Panic", and other crazies.

The issue is with /boot/initrd. Your initrd image is created at installation time. The initrd loads all sorts of stuff *before* the filesystem is loaded.... so anything necessary to load the filesystem is in it. Including things like ext3 drivers, LVM, RAID, and so on.

Well, if you don't setup RAID during your inital installation, for better or worse the RAID drivers are not added to your initrd. And if your system doesn't have RAID drivers, it's not going to be seeing the LVM on top of the RAID.

I was lucky enought to have a initrd with RAID laying around, but I also suspect there's a way to re-create it. Good luck :-)

Just thought I'd mention what I'm sure each and every geek is wondering... on the new Hershey's Chocolate World ride, there are 9 Wireless AP's. Six don't broadcast the ESSID. Three do, and they are "CDA3". All nine are WEP encrypted. Enjoy the ride :-)