I’ve had a spare data cruncher (Dell Precision 479 Xeon 2.8) sitting under my desk for awhile. Not being terribly interested in OpenBSD that it came to me with (sorry Eric), I blew it away and installed Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron x86_64. It seems quite stable and is perhaps quicker than 7.10. That isn’t my point, though.

This weekend I installed the 32 bit version on a Dell Inspiron and it seemed to due the laptop good. Resume from sleep is definitely faster. Today I thought I’d take a real leap and upgrade in-place my 64 bit Thinkpad T60. I didn’t want to have to fool around with configuring LVM and associated encryption so I thought I’d just sudo update-manager -c -d to upgrade to the Hardy Heron Beta.  I’m happy to report that everything seems to work fine.  I was a little nervous on first reboot while waiting for a sign that dm-crypt was working.  After entering my dm-crypt password I noticed that there was a ext3 drive check in progress.  It was subtle compared to the same process in Gutsy since it didn’t drop out of the gui to do it.

Everything seems to work fine.  Audio, DVD, VPN, all work fine.  Sleep and resume seem considerably faster though on first resume my wireless card wasn’t found.  Hope that gets fixed.  Also, I’m happy that wake-on-lan works on all of the machines I’ve tested so far, which wasn’t the case in Gutsy.  Several machines would wake in Windows, but not in Linux, which was a bummer.  I don’t consider myself lazy, but wake-on-lan is awesome.  I hope that it works with dd-wrt so I can wake my home desktop remotely.

So, be it here known that it is possible to in-place upgrade an LVM/dm-crypt encrypted machine from 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon to 8.04 Hardy Heron.

I’ve been having some trouble lately with RoadRunner from Time Warner Cable.  Their DNS servers are ridiculously slow and I decided to take some action and switch to OpenDNS.  Details follow.

First, I configured my Buffalo router running DD-WRT to use OpenDNS and to update DynDNS of my dynamic IP address.  Then I  configured  dnsomatic to update OpenDNS  so that my custom network settings will follow my home network as the address changes.  Actually, my dynamic address at home hasn’t changed more than a couple of times in more than a year, but it’s nice to have a static domain name to use when connecting to my network from elsewhere.

I think my tubes are considerably faster and I’m not getting the flaky name resolution failures that I’ve been getting recently.  Plus, when I don’t have to support TWC in their ignorant and greedy bid to redirect DNS requests from nonexistent domains to their advertisements.

We finally had the 110′ American Sycamore taken out today. We solicited bids from about 6 companies ranging from $800 to $3000. We went with JB Tree Service, (919) 918-6017, and we’re really happy. They had great insurance, were prompt, quick, and did great work. JB was awesome and we’d highly recommend them in the future. Thanks for recommending them James. For $1350 this is what we got.

flickr photo set

Here is a matrix showing prices and insurance.

I got to Portland for Code4Lib early today and had a chance to explore the city with some of the usual suspects (UCSD and UNT Denton).  I learned a couple of things.  First, Rogue chocolate stout is awesome.  Second, I should replace the mess of php and javascript at work with Django.  As a bonus, I learned that packing a few terabytes of data into the trunk of a state car and driving it to DC isn’t necesarily a bad idea.

I was just ruminating with a colleague about Ron Paul supports and how, on average, they seem to be sort of obnoxious.  This is something that’s been bothering me for awhile.  I wondered if perhaps libertarians were generally obnoxious, self interested people.  That may be so, but my friend pointed out something very important- anyone passionate about any candidate is likely to be obnoxious.

That made sense to me.  I think some candidates are better than others while some are outright horrible, but am not in love with any of them.  I mean, I wouldn’t think of attacking anyone who didn’t support my candidate.  Obnoxious though I may be, I try not to be obnoxious about my politics.

And, on a related note, Ron Paul is done.  Give it up.

Are you or is someone you know fantastically knowledgeable about pop culture including, but not limited to obscure television shows from the 1970s, British punk banks, manga, or 1950s sitcoms?  I am not.  I have friends who are.  I used to feel unhip, uneducated, and narrow due to my lack of pop culuture trivia knowledge.  No longer!  Today I recognize pop culture as trivial!

I am certainly unhip, most likely undereducated, and not terribly narrow.  However, my total disinterest in pop culture is, I think, a separate issue.  Really, do people amass vast knowledge bases on pop culture because they find it interesting or because they want to impress others with deep understandings of esoteric and basically insipid topics?  I will no longer pretend that I find these things interesting.

Actually, ‘today’ was in late October. I just noticed this draft and thought I’d push it out. It didn’t work out, obviously.

We’ve been playing around with budgeting and tracking spending.  I actually have a box of receipts on my desk from the last month or so that I had planned to go through and categorize in Google Docs or an Open Office spreadsheet.  It’s daunting looking at this big box of random slips of paper.  I have no idea how people track spending.  I carried a check register in my wallet for awhile and tried to record each transaction as it occurred.   Not very successful.

Now I’m trying GnuCash.  Brandi had some experience with Microsoft Money and it seemed ridiculously overcomplicated for our needs.  I also don’t use Windows so it wasn’t really an option and GnuCash is free.  I downloaded transaction from American Express and imported them easily, but my credit union, North Carolina State Employees’ Credit Union, only offers CSV downloads.  GnuCash doesn’t recognize CSV.  So, I wrote a python parser to convert the CSV file to QIF, which GnuCash does understand.  Here’s a link to secu2qif.

We’ll see if we get anywhere.  While I was parsing I did notice that both the state and federal revenue services have issued  us refunds, which was a nice surprise.  They were both quite quick, I think.   Boy, that mortgage interest deduction was a nice benefit.

I think I’ve finished trashing bad music. My trash contains a little over 5GB of MP3 and OGG files. So long!

I’ve also been listening to a lot of my dad’s music lately- Del Shannon, Dion, The Drifters, Eddie Cochran, The Four Tops, The Cascades, and others. I try to imagine what the music meant to him, what it reminded him of, or if he identified with something in it. I’ll never know, but I expect he’d approve. Anyway, it’s pretty good stuff so I’m not complaining.

I think Don Henley was right- I should leave it all behind and sail to Lahaina. Maybe Hanalei would be better…

A couple of weeks ago I decided I needed to retool some of the NCGDAP data processing tools I wrote when I started at NC State in 2005. For awhile I’d been using subversion, but fell out of the habit. I was pretty confused to find that I had at least 4 versions of everything I’d written and no idea which was latest, which features I’d already incorporated, or (embarrassingly) what everything did. I’d clearly been shirking some system administration duties.

After some time spent with diff and a text editor, I was down to one version of each application. I also spent some time trying to make sure I didn’t have to do it all again. I sometimes work on my Thinkpad at home, at conferences, and on the bus, which eliminates keeping things solely on a network somewhere. Knowing that I sometimes forget which files have been modified, I wrote a bi-directional rsync over ssh process to sync my Thinkpad with my desktop and can run it from an icon on my Gnome panel.

I also wrote a nightly cron job to backup my work desktop to a network drive. The NCGDAP applications reside on the data processing server so I Samba mount that directory at boot. I installed and configured network-manager-vnc finally. It was ridiculously easy compared to vpnc, which never worked correctly. At home, I configured sshfs mounting of my work desktop from my home desktop so I never have to make a local copy of anything to work on it.

Last by not least, I finally got around to installing Cygwin on Brandi’s Windows XP laptop. Now, she can click an icon in her start menu that starts an rsync over ssh backup job to my desktop. She had been copying her My Documents directory and pasting it into her home directory on my machine using Samba, which took eons. I also added it to Windows Task Scheduler, which is utter crap compared to cron. After the first 8 hour run (~80 GB of music), it takes seconds and I don’t have to wonder about compliance.

Here are links to some of the things I wrote:

Cygwin rsync script, backup batch file to run Cygwin script, laptop sync bash script, sshfs mount script, sshfs umount script

For the record, I’m neither a programmer nor a system administrator. I’m just a librarian.