Andy's Blog

Stumph Invasion

We had a whole lotta Stumphs in the Bay Area this weekend. Anjali, Stan, Pratima and I joined Kevin, his dad, and his sister Meg for dim sum at the Hong Kong Flour Lounge in Milbrae. It was pretty cool.

-Andy.

This week is going to kindof suck

I'm a little bit stressed going into this week -- two other engineers and I are training our replacements, and I'm on tap for a lot of said training. I really want to do a good job, but of course, I'm so busy *doing* my job, that I have had a hard time finding time to prepare. And in general, I don't like being unprepared for things.

When I last left my own personal outsourcing saga, my team and I were interviewing people over in India to take over the support portion of my job. Well, we hard a hard time finding people who we felt were qualified enough for the job, for one. And for two, the new division boss wasn't too hot on the idea of going to India for this job, so that whole idea got scrubbed. The people that are taking over the support role are current EDS employees, who are looking for new gigs. So, no going to India for me.

-Andy.

Getting even more dispirited about the election

I read a fascinating article over at Ars Technica today, about how Google news appears returning bias results when you search for "John Kerry", as opposed to when you just search for "Kerry". The crux of the issue are all of these right-wing websites that Google indexes, which have no problem writing John Kerry's name everywhere, as they blast him to pieces. What is truly disheartening about this isn't that Google sucks, but rather the nature of these so-called conservative websites. I read a few of them, most notably "useless-knowledge.com". I don't know what amazes me more: that a small group of people are willing to write utter bullshit about a political rival so that their guy can get elected, or that a slightly larger group of people actually believe this stuff.

At least I can be thankful that the average voter is an idiot (thanks Tex), so they probably don't read any of this crap...

No, wait, that's really not good at all.... :( I just want this election to be over, so that I can go back to not caring.

-Andy.

NetNewsWire 2.0: Finally!

So, I am glad that Ranchero Software finally released NetNewsWire 2.0, even if it is only a beta. I bought 1.0.8 about a month after I started blogging, and I was starting to get a little unhappy with it, because the software appeared to be stagnating. But I bought a copy so that I could encourage further development! But, my purchase has paid off, because 2.0 is awesome. It finally supports Atom feeds, which means that I can finally have Chris' blog polled from NetNewsWire. It has a new swanky tabbed interface for viewing HTML articles right in NetNewsWire (which is vastly superior to popping open new Safari windows). Plus, it seems like it is faster at going out and polling for new articles, which is quite welcome.

Those are the new features that have immediately jumped out at me. Well, there is one more thing -- I had numerous beefs with the built in blog editor, but I used it for posting to my blog anyway. In NetNewsWire 2.0, Ranchero has gone ahead and put this feature out of its misery, and removed it from the product. But am I mad?!? Heck no, because they have gone ahead and rolled out a dedicated blogging client, MarsEdit. I've been using it for the last several days, and so far I am pretty happy with it. It is already won me over with how easy it is to paste URLs (much faster than in the old client).

If you have a mac, I definitely recommend checking these two applications out.

-Andy.

PowerBook G4 owners: take note

Apple has a new tech note out, "PowerBook G4: Faint White Spots in Display", the crux of which is that if your PowerBook's serial number falls within a certain range, it qualifies for a free LCD replacement. This is of course, assuming that your PowerBook is exhibiting the "faint white spots" phenomenon. So, I called AppleCare this morning, and the gentleman on the other end of the phone told me that my PowerBook did fall in the affected serial number range, and that my options were to send it to Apple, and they would repair it if they felt that the display was defective, or I could take it to an Apple authorized repair center, which could presumably make the judgment about the display and go from there.

Reading more about this issue on the web, I don't think that my display suffers from the "white spots" problem. I think that the lower-right quadrant of the display is a little dim, but that is all. Basically, I don't think that I'm getting uniform brightness from my display, which sounds like a different (and probably not covered) issue from the white spots. Of course, it could all be in my head....

-Andy.

The coast

This is another picture from when we hiked to the coast a few weeks ago. I will give it up for California in one respect -- it doesn have some serious natural beauty going on.

-Andy.

How the corporations screw 'ya

After doing some research on the 'net, I found that Fujitsu offers a 5 year warranty on their enterprise SCSI drives, which is pretty amazing. The drive in redefine that is failing was manufactured in March of 2000, so it is 4.5 years old. So, I called up Fujitsu today, to see what I could do about getting my drive repaired under warranty. The first piece of information that the nice Fujitsu woman asked me for was the model number of the drive. I give it to her (noticing that it ended in the letters "DL" as I said it), and upon hearing this, she immediately went into the song and dance -- "Did this come with a Dell computer?". To which I replied that it did, and she of course told me that I had to deal with Dell directly.

It seems that one of the ways in which Dell gets a discount on parts is to negotiate a lesser warranty with the manufacturer. They then turn around to me, the customer, and sell me an entire computer with a 1 year warranty, that I would need to pay to extend, even though if I were to buy the parts myself, individual ones may have longer warranties.

On a lark, I contacted Dell (I saw "on a lark" because I knew that my computer has long since been out of Dell's warranty), and the Dell representative told me that my computer was in fact out of warranty, and that I could look into buying a replacement part from Dell if I wanted.

I'm not really pissed off about any of this, I just find it interesting. It is also another case for building my own computer that I hadn't really considered before.

Another interesting thing that I learned when researching my soon-to-be-completely-dead disk is that while Fujitsu warrants the non-OEM version of the drive for 5 years, they go on to say that it was only designed to last for 5 years. Basically, after 5 years, any additional mileage that you get out of it is due to your own personal good fortune. I find that to be interesting for an enterprise-class device, which can oftentimes be in service for far longer than initially planned. It also makes me suspect of 10,000 RPM (and higher) drives. My gut tells me that the higher rotational speed of the platters hampers drive longevity. The 7,200 RPM IBM drive that I am using now as a backup was manufactured in September of 1998, and has been in continual operation since I have owned it, until June of this year. I think that IBM really knew how to make disks, once upon a time...

All of that being said, I am still running off of the suspect Fujitsu drive. Since fixing the bad sector, it seems to be performing okay. I beat it to hell today upgrading a whole bunch of ports, and I haven't seen any more SCSI errors. I think it is just a matter of time, however...

-Andy.

redefine update

So, I did a bad sector check in the SCSI BIOS (Adaptec's SCSI chipsets are awesome), and the check found one bad sector on the 9Gb Fujitsu disk, which I told it to remap. The machine seems to be fine now, but bad sectors are indicative of pending drive failure. So, I'm going to have to come up with a long-term solution to this problem. For the time being, I have resurrected my old 4.5Gb IBM U2W SCSI disk, and slapped that in redefine. I've setup a cron that rsync's the relevant bits from the 9Gb disk over to the 4.5Gb, so I can boot off of that in an emergency. But I think that going forward, I need to come up with some sort of RAID solution, so that this machine can drop a disk, and I can wait until the weekend in order to deal with it.

But this caps a "bad computer day" for me. Not only did redefine have some issues, but towards the end of my work day today, a server that I was working on went south. A co-worker was doing a package install at the time, and we suspect that the package had something like "rm -rf $INSTALL_LOC/" in a post-install script. Of course, if the "$INSTALL_LOC" variable is null, then the shell will translate that command to "rm -rf /", which on any UNIX box (and Solaris in particular) is quite a bad thing to do.

sigh

-Andy.

Tennessee Valley Hike, afterwards

I know that Anjali has already posted this picture on her page, but I wanted to post it on my blog, consarnit. Kevin, Anjali, Stan, me and Pratima (from L-R) all went on a hike on the Tennessee Valley trailhead all the way back on the 11th. It was a pretty fun day, with plenty of Stanjali action. The reason why I'm not posting about this hike until now, however, is because iPhoto ate itself when I tried to upload the pictures from the hike, and I'm just getting around to fixing it now. But fix it I did, so I can get back to posting pictures on my blog again.

-Andy.

Awww, damnit

It looks like redefine's (the server that hosts this blog) SCSI disk is failing. This machine has a 9Gb U160 10k RPM SCSI drive as its primary boot and root partitions, and a 160Gb IDE disk serving as /home. I was messing around from work today, trying to update my ports collection, and the machine has been acting strange. A hit from the dmesg command shows a lot of messages like this:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Dump Card State Ends >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): SCB 0x6b - timed out
sg[0] - Addr 0xb184000 : Length 4096
sg[1] - Addr 0x7f85000 : Length 4096
sg[2] - Addr 0xd546000 : Length 4096
sg[3] - Addr 0xf127000 : Length 4096
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): Queuing a BDR SCB
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): Bus Device Reset Message Sent
ahc0: Timedout SCBs already complete. Interrupts may not be functioning.
(da0:ahc0:0:0:0): no longer in timeout, status = 34b
ahc0: Bus Device Reset on A:0. 5 SCBs aborted

Dang. Everybody who has data on this box should officially back it up, starting now.

-Andy.

PVR status

So, the Linux/PVR box that I built is having problems with the kernel panicking, the audio not sounding to great (it is a little tinny), and the remote still not working in MythTV. But having a PVR has totally changed my life (well, maybe I'm exaggerating). But still, I'm watching way more TV than I have been -- but it is a better, more concentrated form of TV. I managed to snag the Star Wars documentary "Empire of Dreams: The Story of the Star Wars Trilogy" on A&E for example -- something that I never would have sat down and watched without a PVR.

That being said, however, this crashing thing needs to stop. I suspect that it is something wrong with the driver for the capture card (the 'ivtv' driver) -- possibly that it is not SMP-safe. I'm having a hard time getting the error message when the box crashes, however, because when it goes down, it goes down hard. And I don't have a text console on the thing that I can just read the error message from. So, I'm going to investigate the netconsole feature of Linux, to see if that will help me capture the error.

I think though, that there is only so much debugging that I am going to be interested in doing before I just break down and buy a Tivo. This one from pioneer is really tempting, if it weren't $800 freakin' dollars...!

-Andy.

Brandtson live at the Pound S.F.

Last week Monday, Mike and I went down to the Pound in S.F. to see Brandtson play. Brandtson's label, The Militia Group, included a sampler CD with the issue of Alternative Press that had Fall Out Boy on the cover. I checked that disc out, and really liked the Brandtson song "Escapist". So, I bought their new album, "Send us a Signal". Many listens later, I passed it on to Sara and Kevin, and apparently, I scored direct hits with both of them. Kevin found out that they were playing S.F., and even though he flaked out, Mike and I still went and had a good time.

This band is very tight, and put on a pretty great show. I wasn't bringing my A-game in terms of energy level that night, but I was still impressed by what I heard. This band is able to change tempos on a dime, and thus can shift from hard rock to more of a lo-fi style quite easily. It seems like they were trying to accentuate their harder stuff though, and while they did play a number of songs that I like, such as "Who Are You Now?", "Mercy Medical", and "Over And Out" -- they didn't play "Escapist"! Argh! That song is the whole reason that I even got into this band in the first place.

Now I'll just have to see them again, so I can see that song live.

-Andy.

Far - Water & Solutions (& the DVD)

So, I managed to pick up Far's re-release of their final album, "Water & Solutions" in DVD format. I had some problems finding it, but when I was up in Berkeley with my parents, I found a copy at Rasputin music. That means that I have been sitting on it for awhile, but I finally got a chance to check out the DVD yesterday. I don't own very many music-oriented DVDs, so I can't say if this is great in relation to all music DVDs, but it certainly impressed me. The live footage of Far playing at the Metro in Chicago looked pretty sharp, and sounded great. So far, I am happy with the content that I am finding on this DVD, and it has been a great way for me to explore a band that I really like again. If you are at all into Far, you definitely should pick this re-release up.

I still remember the one time that I was lucky enough to see Far live. It was at a place called "Peabody's downunder" in the Cleveland flats. That place was pretty small, and the Far show was lightly attended. But they played a termendous set, and just blew me away. I think that after all of these years, that is still the single best live performance that I have ever seen. It was really, truly amazing.

Far's lead singer, Jonah Matranga has been doing a solo thing since Far dissolved, called "onelinedrawing". I have been picking up his CDs over the course of the last several months, and I have been quite happy with them. Jonah just knows how to make great music -- it's that simple. His latest CD, "The Volunteers" is decent, and growing on me. I would recommend checking it out.

-Andy.

The spammers cometh

So, Mark noticed on Friday that the spammers have found redefine, and as a result, several of our blogs have been "crapflooded" -- i.e., the comments to our posts were filled with spam. Rushabh suggested that I install MT-Blacklist, which I did today before going into the city. So far, it has been useful in de-spamming my blog (deleting comments in the MT user interface is painful), but the jury is still out. The problem with any sort of blacklist is that you have to keep the definition file updated (which doesn't appear to be easy to automate), you can get false-positives, and the spammers can always be "one step ahead". Ultimately, I think that I may either just disable comments, or move to a forced-registration system, like what Carl is using now.

-Andy.

My Tivo Linux project: an end to major hostilities

Just like President Bush has declared an end to major hostilities in Iraq, I am declaring the same in my battle against Linux and MythTV in order to built my own Tivo. Last night I was able to get MythTV running to the point that I was able to view the program guide, watch TV (with information about the program that I was watching), and for the coup de gras, I was able to pause live TV.

Sweet.

I am re-purposing my Windows XP machine for this project, and if I am happy with the results, I am going to buy some hardware that is suitable for my entertainment center and can be dedicated to that task.This hardware is somewhat low-spec: dual Pentium III 500’s, 384Mb of RAM, a PCI GeForce 4MX video card, the aforementioned WinTV PVR-250 and a 40Gb IDE disk. My odyssey started over the weekend, when I installed Gentoo Linux on my test machine. Long story short, Gentoo was not the right distribution for me at this time. I wanted something that would install fast, auto-detect my hardware, and the present a minimal amount of pain in order to get MythTV running. Gentoo didn’t fulfill any of those needs – while I managed to get it installed, I couldn’t get the MythTV packages to install. In fact, the install broke on the 2nd package, the perl XML-SAX-Writer package.

So, I ditched Gentoo and went for Fedora Core 2. This has been going much better – to the point that all of the necessary packages installed cleanly, upgrading to the latest kernel was a snap, and I was able to compile the ivtv drivers suitable for the capture card. I did have some problems getting my old SoundBlaster 32/AWE recognized, but I did manage to get that to work after some fighting (I threatened to boot into DOS, and then Linux shaped up).

But, just like in Iraq, even though I have declared an end to major hostilities, there is still more work to be done. I don’t have the TV output from the GeForce card working yet, nor has the remote control that came with the capture card been configured in Linux. I’m sure that just like in Iraq, those last two little bits won’t pose any significant problems… Right?

-Andy.

Norway is like, the most beautiful country ever

I believe that this was photo was taken from the Flam Railway, which was an incredible train ride through some really beautiful country. Norway is great like that.

-Andy.

Tivo, Schmivo

Every time I go to Chris's house, and see him using his Tivo, I want one. But every time, I find some reason (or 3) why Tivo just isn't right for me. Well, I was just at Chris's place at the end of July (for an entire week), and so he really had me on this whole Tivo thing. And then, last month, Tivo started offering some rebate thingy, which made it even more compelling.

But still, I resisted. I was going to write a long blog post about why I resisted, but instead, I'm going to write about the solution.

I have thought about just building my own Tivo-like device before, but I didn't think the end result would work well enough for me (I am a demanding TV user). But when I was up in Seattle, Fredrik told me that he built himself a MythTV box, and that it was working great. So, he totally sold me on it.

I've spent the last couple of nights surfing up PC hardware, because I don't really having anything suitable for integrating into my entertainment center. This whole project has kindof morphed into me buying a Cube PC, because I have always thought those things are cool. I would have bought one years ago, but I got into the whole Apple thing instead. Unfortunately, to assemble the Cube PC that I want would cost about $1k (when all is said and done). That is a little bit much for me to spend, considering I'm still not 100% sure that this is all going to work.

So, I decided to just go ahead and buy the cornerstone of the PVR, the TV capture card, and see if I could get it all working in my old dual Pentium-III 500Mhz machine. The card of choice amongst the Linux crowd is Hauppauge WinTV PVR-250. I saw over on Gizmodo that Circuit City is selling the thing with some massive rebates, so today I pulled the trigger on that. I had to go up to Hayward in order to pick the darn thing up, which was okay, because I got to throw Mike a bone.

So far, I have managed to install the card on my Windows XP partition, and in less than an hour, have it at a point where I could watch "The Daily Show". Over the long weekend, I will be installing Linux, and seeing if I can produce a workable prototype. I'll try it out for a few weeks, and if it seems like the whole thing is going to work, then I'll buy some sort of entertainment PC. This will also buy me some more time, so I can find the exact PC that I want.

It is gonna be great.

-Andy.

Monica's family boat

Chee Wai's girlfriend, Hong Eng, recently sent me a few photos from our trip to Norway. I am still experimenting with this iPhoto/blog integration, so I thought that I would post one. This is a shot of Monica's (Fredrik's girlfriend) family boat. It is a pretty cool boat, and Monica's father and uncle used it to give us a tour of the Lofoten Islands and Rost. It was all really swell of them, and one of the highlights of the trip.

-Andy.

That previous post

I am playing around with some new software that I downloaded, instead of going to bed (I have a cold -- I really should sleep). The software is called "Photon" by Daikini software. Photon purports to be some sort of application that makes it easy to post pictures from iPhoto onto a blog. The documentation on their website is non-existent, so it took me awhile to figure out how it works. After several test posts, however, it looks like I got it working.

The biggest drawback to this system is that while you can export a single photo from iPhoto to the blog, then you end up with an entry like the one that I just made. There is no text that surrounds the photo, to give it more description. I know that Carl very rarely writes verbiage to accompany his photos, but I'm not Carl. The second major drawback is that I like for the thumbnail of the image to itself be a hyper-link, which takes the reader to the larger version of the image. It doesn't look like Photon supports this method of doing things.

So, I'm not sure if I'm going to pay the $10 or not. I'll have to play around with it more, I guess.

So, about the picture? There really isn't any story -- on my last day in Seattle, I was hanging with Justin and Sarah, and transitioned to hanging with Rushabh, Kristen, and Ted. I didn't have too much time before I head to head to the airport, so I suggested that we check out the University of Washington campus. It happened to really work out, since Kristen is a student there, she was deputized as a tour-guide for our group. I can't remember which building that is, but the picture looked good, so I posted it.

-Andy.

A building on the University of Washington campus