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…

facebook: a data miner’s wet dream

It seems like over the last two months, everyone I know has been talking about Facebook. (I guess that’s not surprising in my particular locality; according to Wikipedia, Toronto has the largest concentration of Facebook users, numbering 50,000). Personally, I’ve stayed away from Facebook, not only because I perceive it to be the Web 2.0 (or are we on 3.0 by now?) version of MySpace, but because people’s expressions of excitement at having found long-lost acquaintances are exactly what turn me off. I’m not interested in reconnecting with people that I’ve lost touch with for years; there’s probably a legitimate reason for the loss of contact, and I’m happy letting sleeping dogs lie.

It occurred to me recently that there are far more valuable reasons for avoiding Facebook, however; a database that contains a ream of personal information about your interests, hobbies, friends, political affiliations, and so on is a ripe target for marketers interested in data mining the hell out of it. What weaselly marketing guy wouldn’t salivate at the thought of being able to correlate any arbitrary aspect of a user’s profile with another, and deliver targeted content or advertisements to that user? Or to resell that data to large corporations to be able to tailor advertising campaigns towards the psychology of a given market segment to induce members to buy a product? The possibilities are endless – and disturbing. Continue reading →

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.

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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.

daylight savings time disasters averted… was there any real danger?

As most North Americans know, Daylight Saving Time came earlier this year due to the changes introduced by the US Energy Policy Act of 2005. My colleague Gabriel and I have probably cumulatively spent 80-100 hours on patching CBC.ca systems to handle this change, and so far (keep your fingers crossed!) nobody’s noticed a thing.

My personal view of DST, however, is that the whole thing is folly; and furthermore, attempts to justify the DST change as an energy conservation measure are ludicrous. In fact, you can listen to an interview right on CBC Radio’s The Current with Prof. Ryan Kellogg of the University of California at Berkeley, who’s done a study stating exactly that.

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