Information Technology

There are 212 posts filed in Information Technology (this is page 10 of 22).

SDF celebrates 20 year anniversary

On June 16th, SDF Public Access UNIX system will celebrate its 20th anniversary!

Twenty years ago, SDF-1 was a 300 bps dialup BBS running on an Apple ][e computer system, and has evolved over time into a twelve node DEC Alpha cluster running the NetBSD operating system. SDF users, of which I am one (keymaker@), pride themselves on the fact that theirs is one of the last bastions of “the real INTERNET”, out of the reach and scope of the commercialism and advertising of the DOT COM entities. I recall fondly the days before commercial traffic was permitted on the NSFNet, and oftentimes wish that we could return to those days when everyone knew their proverbial neighbours.

If you’re interested in SDF, lifetime membership is very affordable at $36. You can find out more information about SDF here. You won’t find any fancy Web 2.0 widgets, but you can definitely still use Gopher 1.0!

fixing Adobe Acrobat Reader’s “expr: syntax error” message

I just upgraded to Fedora (no longer “Core”) 7 and decided to finally install Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux. Normally I’ve used the built-in “Document Viewer”, but I needed to fill in a PDF form, and only Reader will allow you to do that.

Upon installing Reader, I found it would loop forever, printing expr: syntax error on the screen. Fortunately, someone has already solved this problem:

Fix Adobe Acrobat Reader’s “expr: syntax error” message

Now it works perfectly. Thanks, Javier Arturo Rodríguez!

There are a few other annoyances with Fedora 7. One is that Azureus crashes right after startup using the Sun JVM 1.6.0_01 (Update 1). I’m also getting a strange BUG: warning on system startup which apparently has been fixed in CVS.

I also had to perform an upgrade using Yum instead of booting off the installation CD and doing a binary upgrade, because my system has a Highpoint 1740 SATA RAID adapter and a driver disk is not yet available from Highpoint for this. My procedure for upgrading using Yum and keeping the system functional was as follows:

  1. Upgrade using the procedure described in the Yum Upgrade FAQ as above. This involved a lot of manual dependency munging, specifically me having to massage an upgrade of mkinitrd and nash manually.
  2. Build the Highpoint rr174x driver for the new kernel and install it into the initrd. This involved a magic incantation of the sort cd /usr/src/rr174x-linux-src-1.02/product/rr174x/linux/ && make install KERNELDIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.21-1.3194.fc7-x86_64.
  3. Resolve .rpmsave/.rpmnew conflicts (basically mergemaster for Linux)
  4. Fix up /boot/grub/grub.conf to make sure the new kernel is there (for some reason it wasn’t)
  5. Comment out old /dev/hd*-format devices in /etc/fstab because Fedora has switched to using libata entirely, so even old PATA devices now use the /dev/sd* notation.
  6. Reboot and cross fingers.
  7. Fix up disk device names in /etc/fstab with the new sd* name.
  8. Reconfigure samba so girlfriend can access MP3s again. 🙂

Altogether, not the most painful upgrade I’ve done, but I would have preferred to do the binary upgrade using the installer CD. Only if Highpoint would release its drivers as open source and then they could be incorporated into the kernel tree…

SuSE Linux Enterprise and Mono: Not a recipe for success

As some of you know, I run SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) on my CBC-issued desktop. CBC.ca also uses a combination of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and 10 systems to produce and host the website, and most of the corporate infrastructure is Novell-based (Novell Groupwise is the corporate e-mail system, the file servers are all Netware, etc.) I use SLED because it gives me the right balance of being a UNIX-like operating system, and giving me access to corporate file shares through eDirectory. But let me be clear: I use SLED because it’s UNIX-like, just as we use SLES on the servers because it’s UNIX-like. One element of SLED/SLES that is distinctly not UNIX-like is the package management toolchain, ZenWorks Linux Management (ZLM). And that really bothers me.

Continue reading →

back online with dry DSL

Meredith & I moved into a house at the beginning of April and for our Internet connectivity, I retained my EGate DSL service — only on a dry local loop, i.e. without dial tone. This is commonly known as Naked DSL, and this means I no longer have to pay Bell Canada a minimum of $25.00 per month for telephone service that I don’t really need. Now mind you, EGate still has to pay BellNexxia a $12 fee monthly for providing the dry loop, so that gets added onto my DSL bill. Continue reading →

excessive cash register receipt lengths

I diligently enter all my purchases (at least those that have receipts) into GnuCash. I’ve been keeping track of my purchases since 1994, which means that I can, at a glance, see that I have paid, for example, at least $6,367.08 in GST since then. (Ouch.)

In doing this, I’ve begun to notice how certain stores’ receipts are a complete waste of paper. For instance, I’m looking at a receipt for a birthday card I bought for Dave Raso, and it is ten inches long. That’s right, for one $3.29 birthday card, I got ten inches of cash register receipt.

I’m sure I’ve seen other more egregious examples – if I find them, I’ll post pictures here. What’s the longest cash register receipt you’ve seen for a single-item purchase?

useless “Web 2.0” tools

It’s pretty clear from my journal entries that I’m not a big fan of all these so-called "Web 2.0" websites (and I really have to use the air quotes every time I say that, because I can’t say it with a straight face). Part of that stems from me being a system administrator who really doesn’t care that much about what people put on their website, as long as it’s not total crap, but part of it is also that I despise marketing-and-sales-style buzzwords. I cringe with the same ferocity when I hear "Web 2.0" as I would if someone said "leverage the value proposition to create a win-win synergy" to me.

My biggest complaint about so-called "Web 2.0" tools is that many of them are solutions looking for problems. I used to work with a developer like this; we’d call his overcomplicated 60-table database schemas "enterprise solutions to non-problems". My most recent pet peeve is Twitter. I guess it isn’t bad enough for people to pollute their LiveJournals with inane banter about what kind of socks they are washing tonight; they also need to do it by "phone, IM, or right here on the web!" (to quote their boundless enthusiasm directly) Does the world really need this?

Actually, wait, I take it back! For all its inanity, Twitter isn’t even sufficiently Web 2.0. The website isn’t http://tw.itt.er/, nor is it labelled twittr (beta!) nor does it have a tag cloud on the front page. I guess all we’re left with after Twitter’s failure to leverage the value proposition to create a win-win synergy is just… crap.

a perspective on XML Services for VoIP Telephones

Last Wednesday I attended a talk at the Toronto Asterisk Users’ Group given by Hung Lam, Aastra‘s IP Product Portfolio Director, on the topic of developing XML-based services for Aastra’s IP telephones. It’s clear that Aastra is trying to compete with Cisco in the same space; Cisco’s Unified IP Phone portfolio includes support for their own XML-based information services. In fact, Aastra’s own XML dialect is based largely on the equivalent Cisco dialect.

I won’t go into details about Aastra’s offering in this space; hopefully TAUG will be able to procure Hung’s slides and put them up on its website to give a PowerPoint-style overview of Aastra’s feature set. (The XML Development Kit also includes extensive documentation and sample code for developers wishing to implement their own applications.) I only wanted to make a couple of observations, as follows. Continue reading →