Rich and Strange Aeons

College (and other) friends and I have shared a server for many years, racked in some colo place. This instance, the third, was bought in 2003, and has served us far longer than we expected. In the past couple days we basically got to watch the RAID die in real time. Still not sure if the disk filling up was a trigger or result or unrelated, but today I watched it die with only 88% full disk. I got to see even some of my own files turning corrupt, like being owned by another user.

Robbie and another friend had unkind things to say about hardware RAID. We'd gotten hardware RAID, 3wire, set to redundancy mode for the server. We'd thought we were doing really well, with some tool reporting no disk failures... now someone else says it may have lied, with disk problems we weren't told about.

OTOH other friends say software RAID really wouldn't give performance or even safety guarantees. I dunno. But the damn thing did survive 13 years of probably somewhat heavy use, with our disks from one vendor; we sure got our money's worth.

The question now becomes "what next?" A bunch of us were still using it as an active server, like for mail, so a replacement would be nice. Previous machines were graciously retired and replaced on a plan; I'd kept urging us to go to machine 4 over the past few years, but people were lazy, and I was in no position to physically volunteer.

Of course, today we have VPS. Since I cleverly had mail going to my own domain, hosted on the server, I found I was able to get my own linode, transfer DNS, and get basic mail working, in under 3 hours. Hopefully at this point I won't *lose* mail, though I have yet to get procmail -- or some more secure replacement -- up; I really depend on filtering. And I don't know about spam... we had greylisting going, which probably prevented a lot of spam even before my powerful spamprobe filter; right now I'm exposed. But it's after 3am, it can wait a day or two.

Anyway, someone could probably replace our machine with a VPS quickly... if they had control over our DNS. That's probably one guy, on vacation right now. Whee. Also, while I backed up my own files, I never thought to grab the passwd or shadow files; if no one else did either, actually making accounts for everyone would be a pain.

Ordered a used Galaxy S4.

Installed Arch Linux on my laptop, more or less. For the USB stick version, wifi-menu didn't work, but I was able to get wifi the alternate way. For the actual install... nope, not yet. Firefox has jumped from 21.0 to 28.0 for me, with a side effect that my preferred Garamond font is now used everywhere, but the flashplugin doesn't seem to work; Youtube videos crash, anyway, complaining about inability to find card '0', my sound card. I haven't tried installing media players yet to see if they'd fail too. Touchpad works surprisingly well; scrolling wasn't but synclient quickly fixed that. The Arch wiki *is* pretty good...

Edit: chromium was able to play Duolingo audio; Firefox *still* can't. I installed totem, which played audio from a saved FLV. Scratchy, I think, but that sometimes happened before; at least sound plays at all. And chromium can play Youtube just fine, without plugins, even. Hmm.

No, wait, now Firefox can play Youtube too. I don't even know what I did. Unmuted alsamixer, added myself to an audio group (which you're not supposed to do, but then you're not supposed to need to... ran speaker-test.) VDPAU errors are still being generated, but non fatal ones.

Currently running twm as a lightweight default. It's amazing how few processes I have... but I'd want the laptop sound keys to work. And a wifi applet, and a way to dim the screen...

I've been very unadventurous since the 2nd and 3rd. On the 2nd new sandals chafed very badly, scraping off a lot of skin near my big toe; it's still scabbed over. (I've had related problems before; this is why I often commit the fashion sin of socks with sandals. Sandals air out my feet, socks protect them.) On the third I stubbed another toe unprecedentedly badly, with bruising halfway down, and ongoing mild pain or discomfort. I finally saw a doctor yesterday; she thinks a fracture is unlikely, and anyway all they do is tape your toes together. But she did recommend keeping my foot high ("to keep toxins from pooling") and avoiding hiking. It's like I got a prescription to avoid pedestrian tourism and stay in a place where groceries come to me.

***

S's parents are here, and K brought Starbucks instant coffeee. I just tried some, and it was very dark, burnt, and bitter, just like everyone says of SB coffee in general. I've been trying some local instant coffee with Colombian beans and a price twice the alternatives; it's much better by comparison.

***

Last night I noticed my laptop tingling while plugged in; I asked G about it, and got a remedial education in basic electric wiring, current and neutral and ground. My adapter is only two prong, and my laptop's ground wire had been unaccomodated; he lent me one of his 3-prongs, and the tingling went away. The eee didn't have this problem, but he remembered it as being 2-prong, and it's a hard plastic clamshell, vs. the high-metal casing of the Dell.

I might as well share, in case any readers are as ignorant. The two usual prongs are channels for the current, which is like an artificial river. Electrons come in and flow out, pushed by the voltage, and a device can draw power by sapping the potential like a watermill taps a river. (We ignore AC and oscillating current.) But electrons can leak from the innards to the case, or else fields can draw in electrons from dry air, and so a third wire connects the case to ground, draining off such nuisance electrons before they zap you like a doorknob. The eee, being solidly plastic, is naturally insulated from such problems.

This also sheds light on a cheap metal lamp I'd bought in Boston ($4, with CF bulb) that had also been tingly. I'd figured that was just cheapness -- I doubt it has ground -- but he suggested flipping the plug if it's not width-polarized like many these days.

He also reminded me that grounding in Chile is hard, what with all the fractured dry soil; years ago he'd said the observatory dug down tends of meters and still couldn't find good grounding. He's found that neutral and ground are 20 volts apart, whereas they're usually equal in the US. Neutral is the power company's ground, ground is you, the power company is likely lots of dry soil away.

Socks often crackle or sizzle too; some of that is on insertion, due to crappy oxidized sockets; some of it was ongoing, probably due to the ungrounded plugs. Oh, voltage is 240 here, too.

***

Books: Hans Brinker (abridged), Night's Master (Tanith Lee), Death's Master (ditto), Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of Universe/Modern World, Years of Rice and Salt.

***

I still don't have my laptop Linux in an ideal state, but I don't feel like complaining about it too much. Well, a bit. konsole's colors suck compared to gnome-terminal, and kde-plasma picked up an ugly orange color on highlighted items that I couldn't change. kde/openbox is better, though I had to edit a file to get my keyboard shortcuts. konsole doesn't open urls as conveniently, but gnome-termnal keeps resizing itself under non-gnome.

OTOH, I did get firefox to stop doing so, by turning off its Ubuntu and Unity addons, to no obvious loss of functionality.

***

Cooperative game we've played down here: Flash Point, nicknamed Fire Rescue. More intuitive actions than Pandemic. Apologies if I'm repeating myself.

***

The house is sitting on an ant colony or something, and they keep trying to invade. Two days ago I woke to them crawling over the power outlet and computer. We spray a lot, which works briefly.

This is mostly for the CS types:

Say you're in an office, and someone brings in a stack of 500 papers that needs to be sorted. How do you think they'll naturally approach the problem, and how as someone brimming with CS knowledge would you advise them to sort it?

In 2005 I got my first cell phone, inspired by moving (thus needing a new phone arrangement) and my father's illness (meaning more time in Chicago, competing with my mother's dial-up, and being a different # for friends right when I'd be stressed out.) I was commitment-phobic, so I got a $50 Cingular GoPhone (pay as you go) from Target. A Nokia 6010. By 1995 standards probably rather advanced -- web access! games! apps! -- but even by 2005, rather clunky and brick-like. Still, it served. Battery life without much use was like a week or two, and last summer my other niece attested that hers was indestructible, until she deliberately smashed it into a puddle.

( Read more... )

I have a new font for the titles in my LJ style, Elegante, created by Juan Jose Marcos Garcia. It looks like this -- my pic, I couldn't find any samples online! God knows if anyone else will see it. I have some other cursivish fonts in there. I downloaded it among many fonts, after I upgraded Ubuntu to Karmic, which brought Firefox 3.5.8, which refuses to honor some fonts such as URW Chancery which I was using before. FF doesn't seem to have a concept of 'cursive', either. I also gave up on the steampunk theme for Firefox; the right-click menu was missing stuff more and more.

Otherwise the upgrade went well. Nothing else broke, and the laptop buttons controlling sound started working again!

Well, I've got one complaint; the Pidgin text alerts are different in annoying ways. Not worth describing.

Joke I read: "You know the old joke, who wants to live to be a 100? A 99 year old."

Links:
* If reform fails, expect more health care deterioration Plus busting the budget
* Women in open source
* World poverty stats
* Debunking mammal pheromones
* Unemployment Hits 10.8%, Presidential Approval Drops to 35% -- for Ronald Reagan. Obama's doing a lot better.
* Leading school reformer reverses course on charter schools and No Child Left Untested.
* More Republican confusion on Medicare and government health care
* We're going brooooke! Or not.

* Bujold debunks "Shards of Honor started as a Star Trek fanfic". You have to scroll down a bit or search.
* Speaking of fanfic: Jewish Arthuriana

Tea Party "kill the nigger" level crazy: 1, 2, 3

* Creationists join global warming denial
* Gay rights pulled from Canada's immigration guide.
* Couple sued for not having a lawn
* 95 year old man without records

This post brought to you by the PREVIEW BUTTON. You know who you are.

I have a USB stick, Kingston Datatraveler 4GB. I've had it since November. It was never used that much. It has now become "read-only", unwriteable when mounted. There's no hardware toggle to have caused this. This seems a not-uncommon problem, online. Kingston fail.

So, I run Ubuntu on this here laptop. I'd been holding off on the big upgrade to Hardy Heron, but I finally started it last night. It's mostly done now. There were Problems.

* Some language localization thing, localedef, spun forever until killed, and generally messed things up. This seems common or universal, at least for those of us who went with a kernel update from the previous version in the past week. I don't know if things are fully settled now; for a while zsh was segfaulting and init wasn't taking kill commands. Oh,and localedef hadn't been responding to kill -9, only killall, and eventually not even that. Nothing is supposed to be immune to kill -9 in Unix. Bad, very bad.

* Wireless didn't work, per normal for the Compaq Presario C500, barring user intervention. This actually saw an improvement: this time I was asked for permission to go download a driver, then the wireless worked.

* Sound: this had problems in the past too, with headphones not muting the main speakers without black magic intervention. That problem didn't come back. Instead there was a new problem: massive distortion. This is commonly reported, and fixed by turning the volume down and up in software. I have no idea why that works. The volume then was too soft even at mix, but more software fixed that. The final problem is that the volume control buttons on the laptop hardware no longer work.

* The upgrade included moving to Firefox 3, which has shrunk the size of the toolbar buttons -- okay, at least there's more screen available -- done something to the fonts, so now my serif font looks too small and if I fix that, the sans font looks too big (ok, I don't know if that's Firefox or Ubuntu messing up the fonts), and the address bar is now the "Awesome bar" (no, really, that's what the developers call it.) If you type into it, it does a keyword search in your history and bookmarks, presenting a weirdly ordered list which takes up 5x the screen space of the old one, and returns fewer results to boot. Lots of people seem to love this. Other people like me, who were used to our typing serving as a prefix to what we wanted, don't like the change. There's a very obscure toggle to somewhat restore the old functionality; to get the old appearance you need one plug-in, which ignored me, or another plug-in, which is "experimental" so you have to log into mozilla to get it. From what little I've read the devteam decided to make a UI change and wants to force it on everyone, thus the minimal configurability. Also the "show all history" is now a separate window (minor) and lacks some of the sorting options, such as "by site and date". Finally, some pages don't render well -- my own LJ friends page has the text 'buttons' running right up against each other, and another page has text landing right on top of other text.

Offsetting that is the fact that Page Info is more informative, and has controls for cookies and images and such for that page. But I'm still thinking of going back to Firefox 2. Of course that had stability problems when closing tabs with Flash in them.

Once again, I suffer from the quixotic temptation to WRITE EVERYTHING MYSELF starting with an uncrashable kernel.

So, I use Ununtu on this laptop. I had most things working. Then it wanted to upgrade itself to Gutsy. Okay...

I followed recommendations and wireless stopped working. I was able to undo that, though.

Password prompt no long comes up when I close and open the laptop lid.

And the biggie... the default media program no longer played WMA or AVI files. For comparison,when I installed Feisty, the program said "I can't run these... would you like me to get the software to run them?" So they've managed to degrade performance. I've installed all recommendations I can find, and can actually play video with a couple of other programs -- unfortunately, their interfaces are inferior, and I'd like my old one. Help has not sprung forth, yet.

Also I note the font I'm seeing in this text entry box is different.

Installation happened without any freezes or failures. Sound was picked up. Contrary to expectation, it seems to have found the Wireless device as well, though the wireless has not yet managed to hook up to the network. (Vista could, so I know the laptop is capable of it.) Ubuntu's GNOME seems well designed, too; Windowsish, lots of easy to find administrative options. Though a sour note: each one seems to be its own program, and after closing one option you have to go back to the menu to get the next one.

By default, you have to enter your password at bootup. Or even at waking up after sleeping. Oh yeah -- it picked up the battery, and goes to sleep when I close the lid. And the sound buttons work. And I just plugged in my external USB hard drive, and that opened up in the file manager automatically. *Win*

Of course, I'm in GNOME, and I'd like to play with other window managers. But hopefully FreeBSD can cope with my mother's desktop, and I can try Enlightenment there. Though I suppose I should think about keeping XP on it, just for network setup ease.