Abort, Rephrase, Ignore?

When they say “webrick is crap, use mongrel” they really do mean it. Webrick is enough to do a little basic testing to satisfy yourself that this tool might be useful to you, but once you’ve got even 50 machines talking to it, it starts failing all over the place.

Takes extra work to set up mongrel, but TFM is pretty much spot-on in this respect.

Also: don’t bother running puppetd as a daemon. Run it from cron with “–onetime –splay” instead. Hell, have it set up its own crontab entry:

        cron {puppetd:
                command => "puppetd --onetime --splay",
                user => root,
                minute => [ 15, 45]
        }

Use modules. Use them from the very start. They really do make life easier, and if you use them from the start then you don’t have that awkward period when you’ve got 50+ machines using an old un-modular configuration and now you have to very carefully migrate them all.

(i.e., don’t be an idiot, do what I say, not what I did!)

Popularity: 14% [?]

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I grabbed this combo Firewire/USB2 enclosure earlier in the week, and am quite happy to recommend it.

Complete doddle to fit the “old” 300GB Maxtor drive I had sitting around, keeps it reasonably cool when running, not especially noisy, and when hooked up to a G5 iMac via Firewire it “felt” faster than the internal disk.

Of course now it’s mostly full and I’m going to have to do a bit of a shuffle when the laptop arrives, as it really should be formatted as NTFS but the iMac doesn’t speak that natively. Thus it’s FAT32 for now.

At least the laptop also has Firewire, so it ought to be pretty speedy. 7200RPM disk attached via FW400, probably faster than the 5400RPM SATA disk fitted internally, so really a good thing to be able to have 2GB+ files on.

Popularity: 13% [?]

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Dell have already shipped clifford. Estimated delivery date is still the 18th, but I wouldn’t be completely surprised to have it sooner than that.

(clifford is an XPS M1530 in red, T9300 CPU, 4GB RAM, 320GB disk, 256MB GF8600M GT GPU. Pretty much a desktop replacement system.)

I’ve ordered an external enclosure for the 300GB PATA disk in the old gaspode (the house server we barely use any more). With that hooked up to clifford via Firewire it may well be faster than the interal disk (7200rpm Firewire vs 5400rpm SATA), will do very nicely for storing all our video/etc, much of which is synced down to the AppleTV anyway.

If I can get mt-daapd playing nice on the AppleTV (and by all accounts it’s a doddle) then the only thing left here that requires an “always-on” computer is the overnight EPG/favourites upload on the Topfield. Which will be moot in a few months when we get TiVo.

This leads to the very-appealing prospect of my only needing one computer for my own stuff, plus one for my partner. This will be replacing three machines (G5 iMac, Core2Duo desktop, Athlon psuedo-server) with one little laptop that’ll sleep at nights unless I’ve got video jobs to run.

I expect this will lead to a fairly significant electricity saving. Which makes me a happy bunny.

The only change I might think about is getting one of those consumer-grade NAS units. The D-Link DNS323 looks like a reasonable choice at AU$300 plus disks. That’d stay on 24×7, but it’d be the only thing that did.

Backups? We use Jungle Disk for our documents/photos/etc — the stuff we’d be really unhappy to lose — and music is synced down to the AppleTV so we’ve automatically got two copies of everything there. Video, well, if I ever fill that 300GB disk (possible, but meh) then we’ll have more than we can copy to the AppleTV, so there’s some exposure there, but really, who cares? Most of it we’ll only ever watch once anyway, this is more about simply having a library of stuff available when we want it, none of it is irreplacable.

I’ve been working for a few days now using Mandriva under VirtualBox on WindowsXP as a “paid work” environment. This lets me use things like iTunes while also being able to have a UNIXy work environment. So far so good, and I think that’ll work out nicely in the longer term. Best of both worlds, effectively, with no great compromise required on either side.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Tags: Linux, Tech // Add Comment »

3G iPhone at a reasonable price, nice I suppose, might consider it in 18 months when the current contract is up, but otherwise quite happy with my Sony-Ericsson phone. At least the price is now sensible. It’ll be interesting to see what (if any) data bundles the Australian telcos come up with.

MobileMe might be interesting, it depends whether/how they implement things like calendar/contacts sharing. If they get that right — no indication at all in the currently-available documentation, such as it is — then it could be quite a decent option for small businesses/nonprofits who need that sort of functionality but simply cannot justify a full hosted Exchange service.

But it does rather feel like something where they should be bundling a year of service with an iPhone purchase.

Popularity: 12% [?]

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The Australian dollar is nearing parity with the US dollar.

You wouldn’t think it to look at Apple’s prices, which are even more out of whack than usual. Take a look at the middle-of-the-range Macbook Pro (15″ display, 512MB VRAM, 2.5GHz CPU):

US price: US$2499
AU price: AU$3399

That’s ~$900 more to buy locally, or a 36% markup. I’m not entirely sure that it’s worth $900 to buy from a local dealer.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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I have a need for a laptop, but also have fairly poor vision. So while I mostly don’t need a screen magnifier on my desktop machine I almost certainly will on a laptop, and colour-remapping — swapping light for dark and dark for light — is also helpful.

There are two basic hardware options: an AU$1500-2000 15″ generic laptop from Dell, Asus, Lenovo, or whoever, or a AU$2500 Macbook Pro. The cheaper generic machine could reasonably run Windows or Linux.

I already have an old Mac desktop machine so I’ve been fiddling with the screen zoom and “white on black” display mode for a while. Both work quite well. The magnifier is controlled using control+scrollwheel, inverse mode by hitting control-option-command-8, which is a bit inconvenient but not completely impractical.

ZoomText — which easily adds US$400 to the price of that cheap laptop, by the way! — has what feels like a slightly nicer zoom in terms of image quality, and the inverse-mode hotkey is rather more convenient. The “jump to focus” stuff feels more effective, too. It does a fair bit more than the built-in OS X tools do and is much more customisable, but on the other hand it “supports” Vista by completely turning off the compositing window manager.

Linux, ah.

Compiz has a pretty decent magnifier, but for the life of me I can’t get it to activate using just the touchpad and keyboard on the test laptop. And while it has some colour-filter options none of them seem to do quite what OS X or ZoomText can. On the surface one might think that all that needs doing is to select the “high contrast” white-on-blue Gnome theme and maybe make the fonts a bit bigger, but of course that isn’t really the whole story. A proper screen-inverse feature gets everything, so for example those annoying bright white web pages are suddenly a lot easier on the eyes, and it also fixes the “we have ten thousand different GUI toolsets — many of which don’t honour your Gtk+ settings — and we’re not afraid to use them” problem.

You can work around this by fiddling with Firefox plugins like Stylish to apply custom stylesheets to specific (or all) websites, or using the high-contrast stylesheet that ships with Opera, but those will break some websites. Simply switching the colours around at the display level is a whole lot easier, requires almost no configuration work on the user’s part, and can be toggled on and off at will.

So it looks like it’s coming down to cheaper hardware+much more expensive software or more expensive hardware with the required features bundled. The former is probably still cheaper by one or two hundred dollars but the overall experience is still going to be less productive for a Mac-weenie like me.

But at least I’ve come out of this exercise with a newfound respect for ZoomText, if not for the obscene price the vendor asks for it. It’s quite in line with what other AT costs, but is completely still unreasonable.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Tags: Linux, Mac, adaptive tech // Add Comment »

I’ve been using GNU screen for a long time. Probably something like 15 years. But I’ve pretty much always used it in a fairly naive way, no custom configuration, and when working remotely I’ll typically log in to the “gateway” machine, run screen there, and wind up with 20-30 sessions sitting in it and eventually go nuts trying to figure out what exactly any given session actually is.

Which has motivated me to learn a bit more about what’s going on, and, admittedly, to cargo-cult a bit too.

So here’s my .screenrc as it stands now:

hardstatus alwayslastline
hardstatus string '%{= BW}[%H] %{= BW}%-Lw%{= RW}%50> %n%f* %t%{= BW}%+Lw%< %{= BW}% -=%c%{-}'
defscrollback 1000
vbell off
term xterm

The nifty bit is that “hardstatus string” line. What it does is give me a line at the bottom of the terminal which looks a bit like this:

[prod01au] 0* bash 1 sqsh 2 log 15:39

Except generally with a lot more “screens”.

In addition to this I have a few aliases of the form:

alias sqsh=screen -t sqsh sqsh -Usa -S`hostname`

to make it easy to fire off what I need with the right labels. Of course that ’sqsh’ example is grossly simplified, and for sqsh itself I actually use a wrapper script because the database names are not always the same as the hostnames, but anyway…

So now I make a point of running screen directly on each system I touch, which means that:

• I can see at the bottom-left exactly which host it is, whatever crappy prompt settings might be in place;
• I can see which “screens” are running what;
• I’ve always got a couple of useful things there, ready for next time, like a “tail -f” of the Sybase error log;
• I’m much more efficient.

All this is usually running in a tabbed terminal emulator (Apple’s Terminal.app at the moment, but in theory any will do), one tab per host. And it’s dead easy to pick these sessions up from anywhere, of course, which was the reason I was using screen in the first place.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Tags: Tech // 1 Comment »

A few small comments with respect to the 2008-09 (Australian) Federal budget:

• Means-testing the baby bonus feels a bit petty. I’ve never really been that keen on the baby bonus anyway, but perhaps it should’ve been left alone until the question of paid maternity leave is addressed?
• Laptops-for-the-kiddies is a nice idea but as has been pointed out in a number of places there are some infrastructure issues that are going to impede this. Laptops don’t keep running for eight hours without a charge and many state schools simply don’t have the electrical infrastructure to support them. Funding for that would’ve been a Good Idea…
• Means-testing the solar panel rebate seems completely stupid. People who will now be eligible for the rebate are exactly the ones who don’t have $20-30k to spare for solar panels!
• Half a billion for “clean coal” research? Yeesh.
• Salary-sacrifice of laptops has been clobbered. Probably the right thing to have done but from a personal perspective I wish they’d waited until next year. Oh well.
• The “alco-pop” tax increase. Not going to reduce binge drinking, which is (a) a niche problem; and (b) a cultural issue anyway. But there was an inconsistency with the alcohol taxes so it’s not unreasonable. Perhaps they should do the same with all drinks containing alcohol, just to even things out?
• If half a million people are expected to bail from private health insurance because they’re no longer penalised for failing to have it, then that says to me that the real problem with private health insurance is that the product simply isn’t very compelling. Instead of whinging, industry should be trying to figure out how attract customers. That may well require negotiation with Government as it’s a heavily-regulated area. One obvious option would be to offer a low-cost high-excess package, a sort of “catastrophic cover” arrangement. I’m sure there are other things they could do.

Nelson continues to look like a fool in his response. It’s too soon, really, to expect the Liberals to have regained their balance after losing last year, but they’re going to have to start shaping up soon and it doesn’t look like Dr Nelson is the man to do it.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Tags: Politics // 1 Comment »

The question of “which Mac?” has been resolved. In the first instance we’re going to pick up a cheap Macbook, because the old Dell laptop is kinda crappy. My partner can use it for classes, we can use it when traveling, and should my employment circumstances change such that I’d be needing to work both out of the office and occasionally away from home, well, it’d suffice.

Later on I’ll take another look at a Mac Pro, though, as a kick-arse desktop+server-replacement combo.

Fixed the Toppy, which has been giving us trouble pretty much since the ABC renamed to ABC1/ABC2. Nice to finally have that sorted, really just required sitting down and stuffing about with it for a bit. The next step is to chuck on an autoexpiry addon that’ll do things like “delete 7:30 Report older than 48 hours”.

I’ve gotten fairly bored with Warcrack. Don’t have time for the end-game content, so it’s all just more of the same. We’ve renewed our City of Heroes subscriptions to play around with that for a bit, shall have to see how it goes. We’ve spent some time playing today (both sides) and have been enjoying it.

Am considering the merits of cancelling my WoW account until the next expansion comes out. Will give it a few weeks and see how I feel about it.

Popularity: 27% [?]

Tags: Games, Mac, Random // Add Comment »

When I log a case and explicitly write in the notes “I am not in the office today, please contact me by email” what exactly leaves you in any doubt that phoning me at the office is useless?.

As a general principle I want you to send me email rather than call me anyway. If you call me, you have to try to comprehend my accent, I have to try to comprehend yours, and chances are we both end up feeling frustrated. Sending me an email, as I asked you to, saves us both a lot of time and irritation.

Dude, I am the damned customer! We pay your company way too much money to be spending months chasing you around to let us generate a damned license key.

Sybase ASE: an expensive but primitive toy, legacy software at best. And lest you think it’s worth paying for it to get decent support, forget that too. If you really want to give someone money for your database, give it to Sun/MySQL or Oracle. Their software support probably isn’t much better, but at least the software has seen significant improvement in the past decade.

Popularity: 25% [?]

Tags: Rant, Sybase // 2 Comments »