Category Archives: Computers

LISA15

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The LISA 15 conference is in full swing. I was up at 0600, and on the road at 0630. People to see and things to do before two half-day tutorials today: Go for SysAdmins, and Software Testing for Sysadmin Programs. Both were interesting and potentially useful and applicable to my work. Tomorrow, I’m doing the System Internals course, but if there is too much overlap with Ted Ts’o’s course from last year, then I’ll bail at midday and attend the Systemd tutorial in the afternoon. Tuesday I’ve got a couple more tutorials on tap, followed by three days of conference talks, BoFs, and evening meetings. Busy, excellent week ahead. I’m tired already, just thinking about it.

Yep, I’m going to learn a lot,  but really, the best part for me is seeing all these wonderful folks that I only cross paths with once a year at best. I’m quite thankful for that part of this event.

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualty reports during the last week, for which I am grateful. Ciao!

Kindle, revived?

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I have a 2012 Kindle touch. It’s been my bedside reader, light and easy on the eyes as I wind down from the day. I think it’s a better late-night device for me than a backlit screen device would be. However, week or so ago, I noticed that my kindle had stopped behaving. It wouldn’t turn on. Then it would, just to display a dialog box saying something about the application crashing or stopped or somewhat. I figured it was down on charge, so the next morning I put it on the charger and headed to work.

That evening, with the status light green (full charge), I pressed the wake button: application crashing or stopped message, again. Sigh. Okay. I pressed and held the wake button for a long while, to execute a reset of the device. No joy. Upon re-awakening, no dialog, no wakie, no books, no nothing. Just a stock wallpaper. Hmmm.

On the weekend, I popped the back off the Kindle and had a poke around. An easy to identify battery, with five screws. I know how to do a proper deep reset, thank you very much. Out came the battery, and out it stayed for a few hours. Then I reassembled it. Pressed the button, expecting a full resurrection. Nope. Blank screen, nothing. I set it to the side and walked away. I guess that three years and change out of a relatively inexpensive device was going to have to be good enough. I started thinking about how/what to replace it with.

Last night when I got home from work, I caught sight of the display in the corner of my eye as I sat at my desk. The wallpaper was back! I pressed the wake button, and immediately got the stock battery nearly empty, plug me in dialog. So I did, and let it sit.

Tonight: full charge, full function, and everything’s fine. I’m pleased.

Oddly Low-key Introduction

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If you play in Apple’s sandbox, you’ll know that today was release day for the latest version of OS X: El Capitan. For a variety of reasons, I decided to upgrade on release day (admittedly after pulling a full, bootable, copy of my system using my favorite tool for the purpose, SuperDuper! Highly Recommended!).  An hour or so to pull down the 6 GB download, another 30 minutes or so to apply the new OS, and my Mac Air was rebooting!

Happily, I got a login prompt at the far end. That’s always a good start. I typed in the credentials, expecting a splash screen all about El Capitan, OS X 10.11, and what insanely great things I had installed on my hardware. Well, um, no. Not as such. Credentials for iCloud – gotta enter them, even though I barely use iCloud. Then I was regaled with legalia – four different many-page things on privacy, etc that I was to pretend I agreed to. I “agreed.” Now, surely, on to the good stuff…

Well, um, no. Not at all. For some reason, the system just dropped onto my desktop, with the VPN prompting me for credentials, a copy of Word opened (weird, haven’t had to use Word on this box in months), and a dialog telling me that Mail had failed to upgrade, click to continue. So I did, and boom. Error message and close. No Mail for you. Well, fine, I use Thunderbird anyway, but I restarted Mail to get that refresh done. 15 minutes later, all good. So I shut down, started up, and logged back in … Now, surely, I can have lights and music and frighteningly good looking young people in videos telling me about my new OS… Nope.

#WTF, Apple. Losing your touch, much?

The new OS is “working”, I suppose. I haven’t found anything broken yet (having hardly looked). Not breaking anything would be sort of the minimum bar, I guess. But what’s the upgrade? Or, more pointedly, “Where’s the beef?” Yes, that ad for Wendy’s came out the same year as that wonderful Ridley Scott-directed Apple Mac 1984 advertisement. Where. Is. Beef?

Apple, you’re welcome to reply in the comments…

About daynotes.com

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Carl Sanders wrote:

Was wondering why www.daynotes.com was down.

The registration for the site expired on 23 September 2015. It’s in limbo for a while, then it’ll go on the block.

Daynotes.com was a domain purchased by, and leading to a website designed by, and originally maintained by Tom Syroid, back in September 1999. By sometime around the mid-naught’ies, Tom dropped off the Internet, and with few exceptions, has not resurfaced. A few times we tried to get the site registration transferred from his name (and with difficulty, since the email address he registered with exists no more), so that we could transfer it to a less-expensive registrar than Network Solutions. Those efforts failed. So, over the years, as often as not, I’ve footed the bill to keep that site up and alive. I only find out it is expiring when someone asks, because I’m not any of the registered people.

So … Daynotes.com:

  1. I used to be able to go to the NSI site and renew without logging in. That appears to not be the case any longer.
  2. There is still daynotes.net, which is nearly identical in content, and I am the registrant, and continue to foot that bill.
  3. If someone wishes to figure out how to pay NSI to renew the site, go for it. I’ll continue the hosting – that’s very little effort.

So there you go.

Ch-ch-changes

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Computational changes, at least…

During the past week, I migrated all of the public sites (including this one) from a machine running Scientific Linux (SL) 6 (an RHEL respin out of CERN), and onto a different box running FreeBSD 10.2. I did this for a couple of reasons.

First, SL6 was pretty slow to get updates from Red Hat and rebrand them, and release them to the world. I’d initially gone with SL because CentOS was suffering that problem. Then CentOS was picked up directly by Red Hat, and has become much more responsive. But I was ready for something different.

Reason the second: I’ve been running FreeBSD at home as my main system OS for a while now, and bringing the public-facing machine into the same venue seems appropriate. I’ve got a good handle on the security thing, and I like that it’s a well-maintained but lower-profile-than-Linux OS. I also especially like that I’m running on ZFS, which is a rockstar among file systems.

So that all got done during the week. Then, today, I replaced the D-Link gateway/router with an Intel i5 NUC device running Sophos UTM Home Edition. It’s a full-featured firewall with AV, web filtering and inspection, IPS, etc. And it’s free for home use. It’s a far more secure edge device than any consumer-grade router/gateway, with better logging and a huge feature set. That said, I’ve got … issues with the selected hardware platform. The NUC has but one network interface, so the second is a USB Ethernet device and it’s unstable. I’ve had to setup a scheduled job to refresh the hardware every couple of minutes to pick it up, dust it off, and start it running again, when it falls over. Which it’s doing. I may change the hardware on this sooner rather than later.

In between computer and networking gear swappage, I spent Saturday washing cars and doing yardwork. It’s been a tiring weekend, and I’m glad it is winding down. I can relax tomorrow at work!

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualties during the last week. Ciao!

Mailing list etiquette, updated

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I am pleased to report that the Contact Conference mailing list owner got back to me, pleasantly and quickly, apologetically acknowledging the faux pas. One can merely hope that others will pay heed. Mailing list membership should always be recipient-instigated, and double-opt-in.

If you’re going to Contact, btw, I’m jealous. Just sayin’ …

Mailing list etiquette…

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7 zillion years ago (Internet time) – aka 2002 – I attended the Contact Conference at NASA Ames. It was wonderful, made sad only by the fact that a part of it was a memorial for Poul Anderson. Niven, Pournelle, Vinge, and many others were in attendance as well.

However, enjoying a conference over 13 years ago does not excuse the email I received today:

Welcome to the [Contact-conference AT listsDOTcontact-conferenceDOTorg] mailing list! …

My reply to the list owners went something like this:

 I should never, ever, ever, get a Welcome to… email from Mailman without first subscribing on my own. A *good* option would have been to send ONE email to all of the recoverable members of the old list, asking if they’d like to subscribe to the new list, and provide a URL for that purpose.

I’ve already unsubscribed myself, thanks, but you should consider sending an apology to the rest of the list, and provide clear, simple-to-understand instructions for unsubscribing to help those new list members who, like me, really didn’t want to be on a mailing list just because they attended a Contact conference a decade or more ago.

Just because it’s the Internet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be considerate.

Sigh. It’s not hard, people. Mailing list etiquette has been cast in concrete for ages…

Magic Blue

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Or some silly color name like that. Anyway, that’s the exterior color of Marcia’s new car. She decided that hauling around her quilting friends and her quilting stuff in a low-slung, two door convertible was getting less and less convenient. So after driving a few different vehicles, she ended up with a Volvo V60T5 – one of their little sport wagons. Nice lines, I think, and she’s happy, which is a good thing.

I’ve spend a number of hours this weekend working on a project for $OFFICE, and got the front yard brown stuff mowed a bit flatter, too. Mostly brown, anyway: we’re hoping for some more rain sooner or later. We wrapped up June with about 14 inches of rain, which is about 4 month’s worth. Since then, only a couple of inches all told, and everything is dry. The trees are dropping leaves, too.

In entertainment news, Marcia and I are watching the modern Doctor Who series front to back, working on catching up to today by sometime in the middle of the coming current season. We started off with Eccleston’s 2005 doctor, and we’re a couple of episodes into Tennant run. Additionally, I finished a play-through of Witcher 3. Fun game.

Labor Day weekend here, so tomorrow’s a day off, and I plan on doing not much of anything, if I have any say in the matter. Wish me luck with that.

*      *      *

DoD has reported no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Tiring

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It was a good week. I pulled out another five gallons of mostly tomatoes on Tuesday, and made a pot of red sauce with most of them. Others I took to work and assorted other Friends of Tomatoes. Then there was Saturday…

Saturday started off with Marcia having decided that since she had terrible luck fishing at Centennial  Lake, nearby, we should BOTH go, early on a Saturday. Early, in my case, meant waking up not before seven – it was a long week. So, out of the house before eight, and at the water’s edge casting by about 0830. This, however, pissed Marcia off righteously:

A small bass on my second cast

A small bass on my second cast

Yeah. Marcia still has caught nothing but weeds at Centennial, but now at least we know there’s fish there.

Once back home, a bit before noon, I got out into the back yard and pulled in TWO bloody five gallon buckets of mostly tomatoes. Here’s what the haul looked like after I’d washed it up:

Ten gallons of veggies

Ten gallons of veggies

The pyramid of larger tomatoes on the left has already been rendered into another full pot of red sauce, including sage, rosemary, and thyme (also from the garden). The only other ingredients in the pot of sauce are a couple of diced yellow onions and a head of garlic, minced, some olive oil, and about a teaspoon of salt. The whole house smells of delicious right now.

Last night was work: about five hours of supporting onsite network upgrades that got me home about 0245 this morning. But the work was, in the end, successful. So we’ve got that going for us.

Today: shopping, replacing a broken faucet, working on that red sauce, and still to come: a haircut.

*      *      *

DoD announced no new casualties in the last week. Ciao!

Stormtime

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Yes, yes, according to the calendar, it’s called Summer. But around here, it’s Stormtime. The calendar season of Summer coincides with the combination of heat, humidity and passing fronts that yields lovely, lovely thunderstorms. Well, *I* like them, more or less. Lexi, however…

Lexi hates thunder

Lexi hates thunder

For a while, she just sat there in the corner of the sectional sofa, facing the cushions, and shaking. Finally she yielded and tried to hide behind me (or between me and the cushions). That may have involved trying to excavate a cavity either in a cushion, or through my kidneys. Hmmm.

The other less fun thing about lightning is that the excess electricity can cause problems. Turns out one of the really loud flash/bangs was lightning striking a neighbor’s house. No fire, thankfully, but half of their electrics are out, and the surge cause me some interesting issues. I was working remotely at the end of the storm … then I wasn’t, when the FiOS connection went dead. No phone, no Internet, no TV. Normally not a real problem, since books are good. But I had remote work to complete last night, and remote work to do this morning. I did all of the reset steps – no joy. I did them again, no joy. So I sent an email via my phone, waving off the second stage of last night’s remote work. This morning I was up at 0600, and at the office before 0700. Did all of the work that needed doing, and simultaneously spent an hour on hold with VZ, only to find out that the earliest tech visit was to  be on Tuesday afternoon. Sigh.

I came home this morning after completing three hours of patching, rebooting, and testing. I walked the dog again, then went out to do the shopping. Back home at a little before noon, I executed another deep reset of the ONT (the external FiOS equipment), and wonder of wonders, it worked! Yay! So I cancelled the tech visit for Tuesday, and sent an email noting that I would complete a specific task myself this evening for work.

I did get the mowing and other outdoor work done yesterday, better done when the lawns are drier. Yesterday’s storm dropped over 1.5″ in about 2 hours. I hauled a bunch of zucchini and a few cucumbers out of the garden, and made some neighbors happy, as well as having zucchini for supper here.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the family and friends of Pfc. Monterrious T. Daniel, 19, of Griffin, Georgia, who died on June 12 in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, in a non-combat related incident.