random neuron misfires

I’m a big fan of rsync, and I use it religiously to back up my data on several machines in parallel. I tend to lose data often, due to odd, unexplained hardware failures. I’ve been using rsync for years, and I know it inside and out. I’ve spoken at LUG meetings about rsync, tricks, tips, and how to use it for more than just backups. The point is, I’m not exactly “green” when using rsync.

I maintain a local mirror of Gutenberg etexts for a local project and my own use. I normally refresh it weekly with an rsync script. The 149GiB mirror of Gutenberg sits in my home directory, under a directory called “Gutenberg”.

After not sleeping well for about two weeks with the pressure of potentially-overdue client deliverables, I’ve been very “foggy” lately, not thinking straight, not as creative as I normally am.

I finished two large client deliverables tonight (3:00am), and decided to spark off the Gutenberg script to top off my mirror. I ran the mirroring script in my home directory. The script includes a –delete argument, which allows any local files which no longer exist in the remote Gutenberg repository, to be deleted.

Let me say that again… I ran this script from my home directory.

After about 20 minutes of churning, I decided to check my mail one last time before I went to bed. “How odd”, I thought, I can’t open a shell. I tried a root shell. Same story. I tried opening any other app, nothing. I had keyboard, just no ability to launch any applications or shells from the GUI.

I forcibly exited out of X, and looked to see if my profile was corrupted or something.. and did an ‘ls’ in my home directory. It was blank. Empty. Devoid of about 18gb of data + my Gutenberg mirror. Gone.

I do have a fairly recent backup of my home directory, a week old, and I did manage to back up my mail and documents on the 9th, so I only lost 2 days of mail, at most. Its still several hundred useful messages, but thats better than losing 8 years of mail archives that I use daily.

The reason this all screwed up, was because I deliriously ran the Gutenberg mirror script from my home directory, not from the Gutenberg directory inside my home directory. Ugh.

I hate data loss, and I need more sleep.

We bought a snazzy Hewlett Packard PSC 2510 printer several months ago for the office, and to print some photos of Seryn for the grandparents and our own photo albums.

This is way more than just a printer! Its printer, scanner, fax, copier.. but thats not all!

It also has a card reader built into the front. Not just ANY card reader, one that can be mounted and mapped from any computer on the network. From the reader, you can pop in a card, and email anything on the card to anyone you want, or send it to any computer on the network or Internet you want (“push” style). It has a built-in webserver and ftp server also (there’s a little security problem with the ftp server too).

It also works on 802.11b networks, which is how I have it configured here. At some point, the printer was power-cycled, it refused to connect to the wireless network again. Printing the configuration page showed that it was indeed configured to talk to the proper access point and it was getting signal. Plugging it into the wireld network allowed it to work perfectly fine, but not on the wireless network.

I hard-reset the printer back to factory default settings, and plugged it into the wired network, and reconfigured it using the Mac software. Upon restarting the printer after applying the wireless settings, still nothing. I tried dozens of possible alternatives to getting it on the wireless network, including pointing it to one of my other WAPs, disabling WEP, and other things.

After many calls to HP (including one where they insisted the printer was no longer covered by warrantee, even though it was bought about 4 months ago from Best Buy), they decided to ship me another PSC 2510. I received it the day before Thanksgiving, and their paperwork states that they needed the other printer back in their possession within 3 days. This means I had to test the replacement unit fully, box up the damaged unit, and ship it back to them the same day.. on Thanksgiving. Obviously that wasn’t going to happen.

After testing the replacement unit (a “refurbished” unit from Malaysia), I noticed that it too had the same problem. After performing the same factory-reset, reconfigure, reboot procedure, it would fail to get onto any of my wireless access points, but it would work perfectly fine on wired.

The Indian technicians I spoke with that night (there were 3 of them) were downright rude, condescending, and insulting to my intelligence. I have already debugged the printer problem. It doesn’t work on wireless. No, I can’t ping it, because IT DOESN’T WORK ON WIRELESS. They had me go through all sorts of ridiculous tests to verify that it wasn’t working. See, there’s this blue light that lights up when it has a network connection, wired or wireless, and that light wasn’t coming on. The “tech” insisted I needed to reboot my computer(s) to make that light come on. Then he insisted I needed an updated version of Windows. It was all quite funny.

In the end, he decided to schedule delivery of ANOTHER replacement printer for me. After that frustrating call, where the tech insisted I had to disable WEP and encryption on all of my computer equipment, I decided to try some other things. The technician also directly lied to me about committing to sending me a document that claimed that this printer would ONLY work on a network without encryption.. which is funny, since the drivers allow you to configure WEP for the printer.

In the end, it turns out that you CAN NOT use their drivers to configure the printer to work on wireless. You MUST use the printer’s built-in web interface to configure wireless. Don’t ask me why it makes a difference, but if you set the printer to use wireless, and configure the settings via their driver wizard (Windows or OSX), it will not work on wireless. If you reset the printer to the default settings, and then point MSIE (yes, the printer’s webserver ONLY works with MSIE, grr!) at the printer, and configure wireless settings FROM THERE, it seems to work perfectly fine.

So I called again, and cancelled the delivery of that third printer, and I sent back my original printer, the one we bought at Best Buy to HP to refurbish and send to someone else as a “new” replacement.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the printer’s capabilities and output.. I just wish the ink wasn’t so damn expensive to buy. I may try using one of those ink refill kits at some point. I’ve heard some stories about those though, that are keeping me away from them for now.

Today I received a new gadget in the mail.. a palmOne Wi-Fi card, from Judd Montgomery, author of J-Pilot. It retails for $129.00 from Palm, but you can find it cheaper on Froogle. This particular one was funded by trading in points at the Palm Pays Back program.

Within a few minutes, after installing the software, I was up and running on my internal wireless network here at the house. A few minutes of tinkering later, and I was using it to HotSync to the OSX machine on the WAN, using MarkSpace‘s product MissingSync (a time-limited evaluation copy, based on pilot-link no less ;)

Syncronizing with J-Pilot was just as quick and painless.

Everything went together without a hitch, and was very straightforward. My internal wireless network is pretty complex; I have 3 wireless access points, each with their own bridging and ebtables (not iptables) setup for limiting/allowing traffic across the various “skins of the onion”. No trouble at all getting the Palm on my WAN.

Then the battery went dead. Apparently this card consumes so much power, that it took my full-charged Tungsten T3 handheld and drained it to 0% battery in about 10 minutes of use. That won’t be very useful if I have to syncronize a LOT of data over wireless (such as a full backup).

Now I’ll have to write this all up and add it to my growing collection of Palm HOWTO documents I’ve authored.

A member of one of the pilot-link mailing lists was having trouble getting his shiny new Samsung SPH-i500 PDA/Phone working with Linux, specifically SuSE 9.1 Professional.

After trying to diagnose the problem remotely over ssh, going through several dozen tests of kernel changes, userland software changes, and other configuration changes, it was decided that the best course of action was to ship me the phone, and have me work on it directly on my own hardware. Debugging things remotely can be tedious and frustrating at times.

After I received the phone, I unpacked it and charged it up for a few hours. My normal production Debian system is configured to talk to dozens of Palm devices, so I plugged it into that first, and tried to sync.

It worked first try!

So now I had to figure out why this phone wouldn’t work on SuSE 9.1 Professional. After a long and tedious installation on a test drive in my laptop, I was up and running with SuSE, replicating the exact same environment that the owner of this phone was running.

Another quick test with my standard tools on SuSE, and it worked straight away too. Odd. So now I had to figure out what was broken at the upper levels..

More testing revealed that the culpret in at least one large piece of the puzzle, was a broken version of gnome-pilot, the “glue” behind the PIM Evolution. Upgrading the gnome-pilot package to the latest version (from source, compiled on SuSE), fixed the issue, and I was able to sync.

Lets hope that when the owner gets his phone back, we can make it work on HIS end as well.. I took dozens of pictures of the phone, and lots of screenshots. I’ll put those up in a gallery of some sort later on.

We have a new house. Well, not new.. it was built in 1927. Its a really nice, solid place. Its a Craftsman-style home, with the solid oak built-ins, solid oak floors, 8′ diameter custom octagon skylight in the foyer, and lots of other neat things.

It also needs a lot of work. The previous owners made some really bad design decisions when they lived here, and we’re trying to undo those.. ahem.. “mistakes”. Some of these are minor, paint, wallpaper, and other things. I can take care of these myself, and fix them up, strip the walls down, spackle, prime, paint, and whatever else is required.

Some of them are more involved, like blocking up a kitchen window and two outside archways with solid concrete and stucco. The other larger piece are the bathrooms. We desparately need to get proper bathrooms in this house.

The original “big” bathroom is off of the guest hall. When we first bought the house, I noticed that there was a set of 3 large windows on the bathroom side of the house. Odd, because on the inside, I couldn’t find those windows on that wall at all. It turns out, the previous owners covered the beautiful windows with plywood, and then glued on the fiberglass shower enclosure on top of them. They wallpapered around that (wallpapered directly onto plywood, mind you).

That was the very first thing I ripped out. I ripped the walls down, pulled the shower enclosure out, pulled the “massage tub” out, and threw it all away. Now we have some light in the room.. but no tub. The other odd thing, is that the right-most window, is actually in a closet in the room adjoining the bathroom. All three windows go together, because they are framed on the outside of the house in a very unique piece of architecture.

So that wall has to come out, to bring the window back into the bathroom. That means the bedroom closet has to get removed. That bedroom will lose its only closet.. but the window belongs in the bathroom!. ARG!

So we decided to take the situation to a professional kitchen & bathroom designer, and see what he could do to help us reorganize the space to get a proper bathroom back in there. This means keeping all the windows in the bathroom, putting in a proper whirlpool/massage tub, a proper sink and vanity, a stand-up shower (not in the tub), and moving the door.

$700 of our dollars later, he came back to us with a drafted plan that looks like it might work in the space we have. It involves moving a door, losing part of a hallway closet to make room in the bathroom to fit the massage tub, and losing the closet in the adjoining bedroom. So far, so good..

The cost? $35,575.00! Adding up the cost of appliances, which were mostly top-of-the-line, we get to about $9,000.00 (and 1/3 of that is the cost of the tub). We can’t quite figure out where the other $24,575 is coming from. It can’t possibly be labor. The room isn’t that large, and what we’re asking for isn’t that complicated.

If it is, I’ll be doing most of the deconstruction in the room, to defray that cost. We have a growing child to care for, and a lot of other house renovations to pay for. We can’t afford to drop $35k into a single part of our renovation.. not in this market, not in this economy. Not if we’re going to plan to recoup that cost when/if we decide to sell the house.

Obviously, we’re going to shop this one around quite a bit.

There’s so much to be done around these months… holidays seem to be more closely packed together.. family and friends seems to be ever-present, and with the cold setting in, that means fixing up any leaky entrances in the house, windows, and getting the fireplace in order for the long, long, long cold winter in New England. You see, we have three seasons here… June, July, and Winter.

I’ve also been getting tired of Orkut timing out and failing on me. They should have worked out the scaling issues, but now its worse than ever! It takes me about 30 attempts to get to
the main page, another 20-30 reloads to get to the Communities page, and so on. I get all manner of “Bad Donut”, “No data” and other errors before I’m actually shown real content.

Consider that network a failed attempt at a social network… or maybe a successful attempt at how not to build a social network. I can’t help but think that their use of .Net and ASP on Microsoft servers is giving them the most performance grief. Blackbox servers with 40% of their processing and memory going to support an unused GUI environment… is not a way to run a server.

I always wondered why parents refer to their kids as being “12 weeks old” or “18 months old”. Why not just say “3 months”? Or “a year and a half”? I guess I’ll never find out.. after all, I’m only 1716 weeks old myself. Maybe in 300 more weeks I’ll gain the insight.

The online album of Seryn’s growth is finally publically available. We’ll be putting images into this for at least the next 18 years or so, so get ’em while they’re hot! She’s growing fast. Its amazing to see the different signs every day that evolution is taking its due course. Every day we see her learning more and more about her environment.

A couple of weeks ago, her right hand discovered her left hand, and they’ve been hardly inseparable since. Instead of the traditional “sucking-of-the-thumb”, she shoves her whole hand in her mouth to soothe herself. It doesn’t matter which one, just as long as one gets in there to gum on. She seems to be favoring her left hand for that, but she carries a mean fist with her right.

This week, its laughter and lots of talking. She goes on for 5, 10 minutes at a time, just singing and making words and trying to string together what sounds like sentences. I thought there’d be a stage of “babbling” or little yelps and other sounds, but nope… she went straight on to telling us stories. I wish I had a video camera to capture these moments, because in a few weeks, they’ll be gone, and nobody would believe she’s actually trying to talk!

We are out there every day walking with her, and she’s wide awake for most of it. She loves looking at the trees, anything else tall and in the way. We carry her in a “Baby Bjorn“, which is this interesting little “reverse backpack” kind of device that allows them to face your chest (at early age) or face away from you, attached at the chest (for slightly older ages).

When we walk with her in the bjorn, she kicks her legs down and swaggers her body from side to side with each step, kind of like she wants to walk, or she’s trying to compensate for the motion with her limbs or something. Its quite a site to be seen. She loves her walk.. well, the first half of it anyway. On the way back, she’s limp, sprawled over the top of the bjorn like a ragdoll.

A 12-pound ragdoll. A heavy, 12-pound ragdoll.

But she’s the cutest. Every day is a whole new day of experiences to share and learn and grow with her. I’m actually a parent!

Credit goes to “Time Bandits” (a really great movie), which is exactly what I’ve been feeling like lately. Where does the time go?

I’ve been working on a lot of things, mainly focusing on my sideline business ventures, renovating the house, and more Palm-related goodness. A community person donated a Tungsten T3 device to me to help the pilot-link effort to get the new applications supported on the device.

I already own a Tungsten T2 Palm handheld (which Palm conveniently does not list any longer), but it doesn’t have the new applications on it; Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes. I’ve been getting used to it, crashed it about 3-dozen times, and generally like the layout. I’m still kind of torn between the T2 and T3, for different reasons. Progress on the new applications is moving along… albeit slowly.

pilot-link 0.12.0 is really coming along well. So much better than previous versions. Unfortunately, my time to actually commit to working on the code has dwindled quite a bit lately. With Erika going back to work part-time, and me taking up the role of “Daddy Daycare”, my time to work on “personal” projects is further decreased. I need to fill in the gaps and make up for the financial differences, since we aren’t going to be using traditional daycare.

Along those lines, we’ve found that Mark/Space is using libpisock, the core library behind pilot-link (and dozens of other applications, such as J-Pilot, KPilot, gnome-pilot, PilotManager, and others) in their commercial product, “Missing Sync“.

We’ve asked for, and recived their modifications to pilot-link. None of their changes are useful to us, and most of them have been superceded by significanly-better code in 0.12.0 anyway, but it is good to see that they are the first company who has actually admitted to, and complied with, the licensing to pilot-link. There are at least 5 others that I know of, who are using pilot-link in their commercial code, in direct violation of the license.

I’ve been working on some new business ventures lately, along with my growing client base of web design and hosting work. There seems to be a lot (and I mean a LOT) of untapped business areas ripe for the plucking (pun actually intended in some cases).

I’ve registered 18 (yes, 18) new domain names to work with, some will have new businesses behind them and others are just for playing and for personal or community projects. I have some really slick ideas coming up, hopefully before Winter this year, that I’d like to launch.

I’ve also been partnering with a lot of people, communities, and businesses to help drive some of their content into these new business models. So far, I’ve received unanimous approval for my efforts.

More soon, as I find out more. Its going to be a really busy Fall and Winter season.

Many lives were lost, many emotions poured out, and many families ruined. Our lives will never be the same. On this day, we take the time to remember the lives that were given to keep our country safe and our children’s lives safe. This was not a choice they had to make, it was made for them.

Today is the 3rd anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. It is a time of mourning, and of retrospection. I’d like to give something back, to help educate those who may not know the details surrounding the events of 9/11.

As many of you may already know, I have taken the 567-page 9/11 Commission Report (in PDF format), and converted it BY HAND to validated XHTML.

In the process I corrected several thousand punctuation mistakes, mis-hyphenated words, and the flow of the document in general. The content itself was not changed, just the way it was presented. The goal was to make the document readable on portable and handheld devices.

I also added a linked TOC, mini-TOC for each chapter, and cross-linked every annotation and footnote in the original document. I also reformatted the output itself, to better display on mobile devices, such as PalmOS
handhelds. There are a lot of other changes here that make the document much more readable on handheld devices. The information contained within, is far too important to disregard or be lost in a huge PDF on a .gov website.

From this base, I converted it to Plucker format, and then again to iSilo format. You can see all three versions here:

Plucker format

iSilo mobile format

Converted XHTML

Both of the mobile versions are available on MemoWare and Palmgear as well (these links go right to the reports themselves on these sites).

Please feel free to download, redistribute, share, and link to this version as much as you’d like (of course, if you do, please make sure to give me credit, where credit is due, as supported by US Copyright law). If I’ve missed any relevant newsgroups, forums, blogs, or websites please repost/forward this post there.

It is the only version of this document indexable by search engines and the like. It is also much more useful than the original, being heavily cross-linked within itself. I put a LOT of work into this to make it a professional work. Please respect the amount of time I’ve spent on it, by not hijacking it without crediting me.

Thanks everyone. I hope you enjoy the work. Please let me know if you’d like any additions, features, or other versions converted for other platforms.