freemode.net

The Sum of All Votes    [ Rants ]

Was reading through my (month-old) mail from the cryptography@metzdowd.com list, saw this post below.   Interesting idea, to throw a concept like electronic voting into the collective consciousness as a warning - there's a lot of geeks who are worried about this, but Joe and Jane Average Voter aren't concerned (yet).

Oracle startup/shutdown    [ Software ]

More notes on Oracle startup/shutdown from a sysadmin's perspective:

OpenSSH init.d script for Solaris    [ Software ]

Needed to hack up an improved init script for OpenSSH on Solaris - see below for details.

Redskins = Stink    [ Rants ]

There's really no nice way to put this, so I won't.   The Redskins stunk on Sunday against the Bills.   And the Bills, the worst-ranked offense (well, before this last game) in the league, ran up 24 points on the scoreboard.   Mike Wilbon has a good column this morning on the problems they have, no need to enumerate them any further.

This is not the same team who came up from the dregs of last season to go 3-1 against some hard teams in the first four weeks.   This is last year's team, at its worst, when players from Philly and Dallas and everywhere else relished the chance to run up their stats and be able to get an easy win out of their schedule.   Well, minus the Rams.

How not to run a startup    [ News ]

Saw this article on Loki (the Linux game company) from Linux and Main which busted up after the boom years.   The account given here about the goings-on at the company is absolutely fascinating, hard to imagine that anyone familiar with corporate law and propriety would act like this.

Meter ghouls    [ Rants ]

I parked in a public garage next to work today - couldn't carpool since I'm leaving early - and got to see the Montgomery County meter ghouls walking 'round and picking up the change deposited in the meters.   Why meter ghouls?   They're outfitted in drab gray outfits, carry conical bags to deposit the change in, and generally look somewhere between unhappy with their job and dead to the world.

Seems that Montgomery County could at least do something to make the uniforms less... well, less like they're showing up for a shift of grave-digging duty.   It's probably nowhere on anyone's top 10 jobs list, but most other government employees I've met seem much happier.

Treo 600 - part 2    [ Geekiness ]

More testing - under certain circumstances (for example, using the website navigation links while browsing The Onion, which Handspring was nice enough to include links for on its default homepage), the web browser will barf up a "Browser Error - Failed to pass data to exchange manager. (0x1511)".   There's some generic error codes mentioned in the PalmOS 5 API docs, but they're mostly can't-find-library, low-on-power, low-on-memory, and connection-cancelled generic errors.   There's also a good higher-level description of what the Exchange Manager is.

Another issue - every so often, especially after synchronization and turning the wireless mode on and off, then on again, network connectivity becomes very lagged to the point of generating can't-connect-to-system timeout errors.   Only solution I've found so far is to reset the OS, and then things work rather well.

Flat fees = free use?    [ News ]

Interesting article on El Reg on the online music industry and some futurism-style blather from Jim Griffin of Cherry Lane Digital.   Not sure if I agree with everything that he says, and most of the blather is predicated on a flat-fees-are-good-for-everyone assumption (hmm, wonder why telcos still charge for long-distance calls), but makes for a fresh perspective from an ex-industry-insider.

I do agree that flat fees are generally far more palatable to consumers than per-use charges.   $20/month internet dialup fees are one example, the success of DSL/cable inet rollouts vs ISDN (It Still Does Nothing) is another, but there's enough bass-ackward-minded companies out there with profits and shareholder value to protect that I don't see some glorious digital-rights revolution happening anytime soon.   If anything, a darker, less brilliant future seems to await us in that arena.

Handspring Treo 600    [ Geekiness ]

Just got a demo unit of the Handspring Treo 600 for eval purposes @ work, started playing around with it.   Tested out the browser after poking around, and of course tried to pull up slashdot.   Main page works fine, but if I try to log in, I get a:

"Browser Error - Unknown URL: http://slashdot.org/users.pl"

error dialog box.   Pah!

More to come on this.

Backups over ssh    [ Software ]

Quick reference (mostly for myself :) just in case I need to run backups over ssh.   srchost = source machine, dsthost = destination machine, FILES = directory with files that needs to be backed up.   Assumes there's a "backups" user with appropriate auth to access FILES and perform backups.   Also assumes GNU tar, prepend a '-' to tar's arguments if it's not.

Tape backup
backups@srchost$ tar cvfz - /FILES | ssh backups@dsthost "dd of=/dev/st0"

File backup
backups@dsthost$ ssh backups@srchost "tar cvfz - /FILES" > FILES-`date +%Y%m%d`.tgz

WinXP migration    [ Software ]

Had the pleasure of swapping out laptops recently - traded a Dell Inspiron 8500 (wide-aspect-ratio screen, but the video card could only drive the display up to 1280x800x32 - ugh) for a Dell Latitude C840.   The C840 has essentially the same specs, but has a faster hard disk (5400rpm instead of 4200rpm on the Inspiron), and its video display can handle up to 1600x1200x32.   Oh, and its keyboard doesn't suck.   So I went looking for ways to avoid having to reinstall the OS, my apps and all my registry settings - since I have both XP Pro and XP Home installed on it, I wanted to avoid having to do this twice.

Oliver Cromwell    [ Geekiness ]

Found this article from the New Statesman on Oliver Cromwell, linked from Chris Lightfoot's blog.   I had dropped a wee bit of code into Chris's driftnet software a while back (so I could run it on my Solaris boxen) - small world.