robbat2 | Recent Entries

Now for the first time, I have a desktop machine, in my own house, running Gentoo, and being used as my everyday machine. Previously I've had large numbers of servers at home, and desktops/laptops with Gentoo at the office, but never actually at home. This has been because I've needed Windows for my schoolwork and previous jobs, and a remote X server + PuTTY served my needs fine.

Now that I no longer need Windows everyday, I've ditched it. There are a still a few things that need migration.

4Gb of old ICQ history I'd like to export to text/XML.
something to sync contact data from my Handspring Visor Edge to my Nokia 6310i phone (I've got the serial cable) - On Windows, this was handled by an application called WinFonie mobile, which also supported other formats (which would be useful too)
Support for the extra function buttons on my Logitech wireless keyboard and my logitech mouse (Logitech Cordless MX Duo).
Support for the encryption and battery status functionality of the Logitech hardware.

Almost everything else has been smooth sailing so far, as I've kept my profiles and settings from previous Linux laptops and machines at the office.

I decided to take the plunge with Modular-X while installing this machine directly. I ran into two packages not yet converted for modular-x. x11-misc/unclutter (bug 117211) which hides the cursor as needed. media-video/nvidia-settings (bug 114603). unclutter took me 20 minutes and the modular-x fixes are in the tree for it now. nvidia-settings took me a few hours to trace the source of the problem, and I posted a patch to the bug, as I didn't want to touch something that major without speaking to azarah/eradicator.

Now I get to start on my backlog of interesting Gentoo things and bugs that have been lurking in my inbox.

Current Mood: tired

(This post is not blocked in any way, so Marissa can see it without logging into LiveJournal, however all comments are screened).
Marissa, would you please send me the phone number for your hotel, and what room number you are in.
Additionally, find out if the hotel charges you for recieving calls.
If they don't charge you to recieve calls, I'll call you.
I've seen some good deals on calling cards here - $5 for 100 minutes to Mexico.

Yay! All plumbing fixed, so I can take a shower again! I'm annoyed at how long they good however. They were supposed to be here at 8.30am, and done by noon. The guy was here around 10am, and they left 5 minutes ago (15h40).

The restoration company's drying stuff is still here, as while the carpet is almost entirely dry, there is still some moisture in the wall-edging.

I've also got my Nokia cellphone back finally. 5 week turnaround time from taking my phone in for repair and getting a replacement phone back. I'll go by my parents place sometime this week so I can reload it with all of my contacts (as my father has the Nokia cable and software).

OpenLDAP-2.3 is coming to the tree soon, but hardmasked for at least a week while the migration of 2.2.28-r3 to stable takes place. The upgrade may be a little bumpy again, like the 2.1->2.2 upgrade, but I'm working to minimize that.

I'm hoping to have significently more time to devote to Gentoo starting in the new year, as my new job might involve a lot of it. Yes, I'm getting a new job again. More details to come soon.

Ok, so the quick-cement fix that the plumber put in last night appears to be holding for the moment.
The landlord got in a restoration company this morning.

The guy pulled up the carpet, removed the under-padding, sprayed disinfectant (to avoid mould), and rigged up a dehumidifer and 3 blower fans.

The units are really loud - but I'm turning them off to sleep anyway.

The plumber is returning with the landlord tommorow morning, to dig up the front garden and replace the leaking pipe.

I enjoy eating spicy food. The full gamut of spicy - from mexican to thai, and all the way in between.
Since I've moved away from my parents, I've been doing 90% of the food preparation (of the remaining 10% it's been more going out than Marissa cooking). That in itself however is not my problem, it's just that the real problem is more noticable because of how often I cook.

At least once a week, I try to cook something with a kick to it. However whenever I've been on my own, cooking spicy stuff for one has turned out to be on the edge of too spicy. On this front, I've got 3 things of leftover spicy food in the freezer - chilli-cilantro beef; lamb tandori; and tonight's thai green curry (beef).

Cooking for one has also been challenging, in that it's significently easier to get the quanties right with larger groups - to cook for one, you need smaller quantities of everything, and it just doesn't work right. Can anybody suggest tricks or tips on this?

Regardless of how many I'm cooking for, I find it takes 1-2 hours to prepare and eat most meals. How do resturants manage to get their prep time down so much (besides having the vegetables ready to throw in).

Hints? Tips? Recipies with quantities for a single person?

*growl*

It seems the water main on the outside of the main shutoff value is leaking - at a drip rate, but that's enough still.
This in turn is leaking thru the foundation (at the point where the water line comes into the basement), and a large portion of my living room carpet is very damp (only parts are outright wet, but the carpet is reasonbly thick).

I've cleared almost everything out of the living room, it was tough to find space for it.
The only things remaining are the media centre rack and the sideboard with all of our crockery.
I don't have any more boxes to put stuff into, nor space to put the stuff. (I could maybe pile up one or two more boxes, but I'm pushing the limit already).

The landlord has been to see the leak this evening (around 9pm), and there is a plumber on the way.
May have to shut off the water main outside for tonight, to stop the problem.

The landlord has said she will get in a restoration company with heaters and stuff as soon as the source of the water is stopped, as the carpets are new here.

So I guess I've now made negative progress with unpacking?

Anybody looking for me this evening, I'm off at my company chrismas dinner - We're going to Joe Forte's.

FYI, I'm moving tommorow (today), October 1st, into a 2br basement suite (around 35^th and Fraser) with my fiancé, finally having a place away from my parents.

If you need to get in touch with me, use my cellphone, or email me (I'll check it every day while at work).

For anybody hosted off my server, it's not moving yet, but it may do so in a month.

Also I seem to be getting sick, not sure exactly what is the cause, but it feels like a nasty cold/flu. I was up at 7am today for a support callout, and then spend a large part of the day running around doing an install for another customer.

Current Mood: sick

Ok, so day 2 of my new job.
I finished the AMD64 install on the Laptop, figured how to boot the Ubuntu LiveCD into a non-framebuffer command prompt (add "vga=0 debug -b 3" to the kernel parameters in grub). Spent some time configuring the laptop to my liking.

Had a dolphin-friend tuna salad sandwich for lunch, and got one of the end pieces of a freshly baked banana-bread loaf for desert. Bought a whole banana-bread loaf. Helped Ryan get a netboot rig going, enabling him to doing the flashing for his embedded systems much quicker.

Spent most of the afternoon preparing a pair of wireless units (Airaya GRIDs). The two pieces of documentation that were with them turned out to be almost totally unrelated, so it stymed me why they weren't working at first. Also, take care not to walk in front of the antenna, as 5580Mhz @ 21dBm, as you will get a headache very quickly.

Ok, so today I join the real world for my first full-time job. Up until now all I'd has was a large number of part-time jobs, often simultaneously (sometimes making up more than 40 hour work-week).

My new job is basically a network administrator position, for a business-oriented ISP, using high-end wireless technologies between buildings (avoiding high fiber costs from telco and other incumbants). The ISP division is being split off from the original company, which has a desire to focus on the technology only.

Since I knew I was hired a week ago, I've been chatting to the head tech guy on IRC a fair bit, finding out everything that I'll need to know to run the ISP division. The Toronto-based company that bought the ISP division, has their grounding in installing telco/PBX gear for office buildings, and they are also interested in using VOIP over this wireless network.

I came in this morning, got two AMD64 laptops for temporary use, one available to me for a week or so, needing a reinstall (and it should be done installing a complete Gentoo environment by tommorow morning), and the second as a one-day only machine, running Windows. I've spoken to one client, who had some servers located in the same office as me, and wanted external firewalling, so we figured out what to charge them and implemented the firewall rules in the networking system.

The networking system that the original company has developed is phenenomal. It contains everything from automated monitoring systems (with automatically generated trouble tickets for any detected outages), to CRM and billing controls, and networking controls for everything under the sun. There are a few ways that it can be improved, but it's mainly documentation of the system, and a few minor user interface revisions (I'm not certain on them, as there are several ways to reach a given page).

I had a look at the wireless gear on the roof of our office building, and saw the network unit attached to the wireless gear. Went downtown and picked up one of the servers that's currently giving trouble. Unfortunetly we didn't have any spare working cdrom drives on hand, so debugging and fixing it gets to wait until tommorow.

Later in the week there's an wireless unit replacement to do, and that will extend my wireless skillset.

For a good deal of this wireless stuff, I've been reading up on it for nearly a week now, and it's nothing really beyond some common sense in physics, engineering and mathematics behind it.

The VOIP stuff when it comes up will be a lot more interesting, as I realize that I bought a pair of VOIP FXO cards cheaply on eBay some time ago, and I've never used them.

Reading over the history of Gentoo, I realize that while we try to keep politics out of Gentoo, everybody still has a stance of some form.

However, I'd like to gauge as what the average stance of all developers is - without any weight to their standing in the Gentoo community (eg trustees are still only developers).

As a quick poll, could I get any developer and user reading this to please comment on this LiveJournal posting (comments are screened, so they won't be seen), or email me (robbat2@gentoo.org), classifying yourself into one of these groups (example text for some of the perspectives of each group):

Radical Right-Wing ("Burn the fags!", "Open source sucks")
Moderate Right-Wing
Neither left nor right
Moderate Left-Wing
Radical Left-Wing ("Gay marriage for everyone!", "Down with closed source!")
Prefer not to answer ("You keep to your business and I'll keep to mine")

I'll tally the results, and post only the answers here.

I'll state right now that I'd put myself at moderate left-wing, but still politically open-minded.

If you want to state some of your reasonings, or note that you are left-wing on some issue, and right-wing on others, I'd also be very interested in hearing it, esp. the polarized fields of Gay Rights and Open Source Advocacy.

Edit (22 August, 10:42am): I've been asked why I used the stereotypes for the radical sides here, and possibly biased this survey against people selecting the radical options. I know extreme people on both of the radical sides. Maybe it would be better to create two extra options, "Extremist Left/Right Wing", but I think the real size of those groups is to small in comparsion with the others, that it doesn't statistically matter. Sure the extremists make the news, but how much difference do they really make to everything else?

Secondly, I've had two people request a 2D scale, as their opinions differ wildly on the two polarizing issues I've brought up. For Open-Source, but against gay marriage. This is going to make classification difficult, but interesting.

This is a quick update about Marissa.

She's reached Japan fine, and is shortly starting her first training exercises (10am JST).

Her flight was uneventful, and she watched Sahara twice. The first nights dinner was a pay-by-the-plate conveyer-belt sushi, at 100¥/plate, and Marissa ate 16 plates; She's been impressed by the trains so far.

Marissa hopes to find a bit of time to blog later tonight.

FYI (mainly for Marissa). In HTML, you can write "¥" to get the proper yen symbol of ¥. It's easier to handle than 円 ("円"), and more recognizable.

We now return to your regularly scheduled postings. I intend to blog much more often now.

As of 11.23pm PST,

amethest is now in Japan working a year for AEON. I stayed over with her last night, we had a buffet dinner at the River Rock Casino (with her parents), and then I proceeded to repack her suitcases and boxes of stuff for Japan. I really don't know why some people find it so hard to pack efficently - take for example the clothes iron Laura wanted to Marissa to take. Utsonomiya is almost the appliance capital of Japan, and undoubtedly Marissa's co-workers will have an iron - that's 5lbs. right there you don't need to pack. Even worst case just find a dirt cheap one in Japan, and leave it behind afterwards, for the next person.

Last Saturday I proposed to her, and she accepted. I'm not a verbose person, so I don't have much more to say on that matter. She has blogged about the ring and the evening in her journal, so have a look there for more information.

My new job starts 9am Monday 22nd August, as a network administrator/technical engineer for Net-Conex Business solutions. It sounds like I'll have an office somewhere downtown (not entirely confirmed yet), and I'm probably going to spec out the office network.

As always, in the usual fashion, I got a phonecall out of the blue today asking about my availability for doing an urgent small Gentoo deployment. I think I can fit it in somewhere (a few evenings and a weekend), and I can use the extra cash.

However, for now I shall consider sleep, as I am short on it.

Current Mood: tired

Repost this if you believe homophobia is wrong.

I am the girl kicked out of her home because I confided in my mother that I am a lesbian.

I am the prostitute working the streets because nobody will hire a transsexual woman.

I am the sister who holds her gay brother tight through the painful, tear-filled nights.

We are the parents who buried our daughter long before her time.

I am the man who died alone in the hospital because they would not let my partner of twenty-seven years into the room.

I am the foster child who wakes up with nightmares of being taken away from the two fathers who are the only loving family I have ever had. I
wish they could adopt me.

I am one of the lucky ones, I guess. I survived the attack that left me in a coma for three weeks, and in another year I will probably be able to walk again.

I am not one of the lucky ones. I killed myself just weeks before graduating high school. It was simply too much to bear.

We are the couple who had the realtor hang up on us when she found out we wanted to rent a one-bedroom for two men.

I am the person who never knows which bathroom I should use if I want to avoid getting the management called on me.

I am the mother who is not allowed to even visit the children I bore, nursed, and raised. The court says I am an unfit mother because I now live with another woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who found the support system grow suddenly cold and distant when they found out my abusive partner is also a woman.

I am the domestic-violence survivor who has no support system to turn to because I am male.

I am the father who has never hugged his son because I grew up afraid to show affection to other men.

I am the home-economics teacher who always wanted to teach gym until someone told me that only lesbians do that.

I am the man who died when the paramedics stopped treating me as soon as they realized I was transsexual.

I am the person who feels guilty because I think I could be a much better person if I didn’t have to always deal with society hating me.

I am the man who stopped attending church, not because I don't believe, but because they closed their doors to my kind.

I am the person who has to hide what this world needs most, love.

Ok, so while I set out to do regular progress reports in the past, I haven't been very good about it, but I'm trying again now.

I've finally got all of my hardware together at home now, it's all done up on some wire shelving, so that I can run more of it, in a smaller amount of space.

File server - Athlon XP 2200, 4x 80GB IDE (Linux MD RAID5), 100Mb ZIP drive
SCSI testbox - Pentium4 2.2Ghz, 1x 18.2Gb SCSI, 2x 9.1Gb SCSI
MyCable XXS1500 embedded system (AMD Au1500 CPU)
VIA C3 - low power testbox #1
VIA C3-2 - media testbox, with TV capture card + TV output
SGI Visual Workstation 320 - Dual Pentium3 550Mhz, 768Mb RAM, 9.1Gb SCSI, 250Mb ZIP drive.
LinkSys NSLU2
Sun UltraSPARC5
SGI Octane - R12k 300mhz, 576Mb, 9.1Gb SCSI, dual ESI graphics heads.
SGI O2 - R12k 300mhz, 512Mb, 9.1Gb SCSI

At the moment, I'm working on getting the VisWS going again. Back in the 2.4 days I did an identical machine, but that one is long gone. So far it's work writing a new bootloader.

For the record, it IS possible to get a real command prompt for the PROM console, by doing the following:
Go to "System Utilities", "Run Third-Party Program", Select "CDROM" as the source, and enter "Command Monitor" as the command name. You don't need any CD in, just do it, and it will bring up the ARC console.

Current Music: Vangelis - Blade Runner\05-Love Theme

I'm not really a big poster, but this is a great collections of quotes about yesterday's bombing in London.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/tyrell/154027.html

Ok, so I've gone on a trip to Europe. I will be back July 1st. I will be at LinuxTag 2005, spending time at both the phpMyAdmin and Gentoo booths.

My latest itinerary is below, for those that care. The first rail connection is very tight.

16 June, 16h30 - Flight from Vancouver to Munich

17 June, 13h40 - Arrive Munich, clear Customs/Immigration, go to HBF
17 June, 14h29 - Train direct to Bad Reichenhall (Arr. 17h05)
IC/RE 2429 _or_ RE31021+RE2429 (change in Freilassing)
(3 nights in Bad Reichenhall for Robin & Marissa)

19 June, 11h39 - Train to Augsburg, via Freilassing (Arr. 14h35)
RB31314+IC2096
(1 night in Augsburg for Robin & Marissa)

20 June, 12h04 - (Robin only) Train to Karlsruhe, via Stuttgart
(Arr 14h53)
ICE518+IC2068
(4 nights in Augsburg for Marissa, 4 nights in Karlsruhe for Robin)

24 June, 14h04 - (Marissa only) Train to Karlsruhe, via Stuttgart
(Arr 16h53)
ICE516+IC2066
(2 nights in Karlsruhe for Robin & Marissa)

26 June, 09h01 - Train to Milan, via Basel (Arr 16h35)
ICE501+IC253
(1 night in Milano for Robin & Marissa)

27 June, 09h10 - Train to Ravenna, via Bologna & Castel Bolognese (Arr
13h30)
IC565+R11535+R6477
(2 nights in Ravenna)

29 June, 08h38 - Train to Zurich, via Bologna & Milano (Arr 16h51)
R11612+ES9424+IC380 (reserve EC)
(1 night in Zurich for Robin & Marissa)

30 June, 09h33 - Train direct to Munich (Arr 14h01)
EC193
(1 night in Munich for Robin & Marissa)

01 July, 15h25 - Flight from Munich to Vancouver
01 July, 19h00 - Arrive Vancouver, clear Customs/Immigration

I'm back from my vacation.

No update from me about it, read

amethest's postings about it.

A tidbit from the New York Times: Warning: Long, pointy knives may be hazardous to your health.

Seeing the specificiations on the new Cell chip, I think the current crop of super-computers have a lot of trouble heading their way.

This is the #1 supercomputer in the world:
http://www.top500.org/sublist/System.php?id=7101
Rpeak of ~92 Teraflops.

This is the new PlayStation3:
http://www.theregister.com/2005/05/17/sony_unveils_ps3/
Sony claims there are 2.18 Teraflops in this box.

Even being ultra-conservative, and saying the PS3 is only good for 1Teraflop, you only need 100 of them to exceed the #1 supercomputer.
Say they cost $1000 each (including the infrastructure costs per unit), you are only at $100,000 USD, compared to a few million for the existing supercomputer.

Move along, nothing to read

A dis-illusioned software engineer

[Gentoo] Migrations and Modular-X goodness

Marissa: phone number for Mexico?

Plumbing redux

[Gentoo] OpenLDAP and other things

Leak status

On cooking

leaking water main

Company christmas dinner

[gentoo] Moving House

Day 2 of new job

First day at a new job

[gentoo] The Politics of Gentoo

Marissa update.

(no subject)

(no subject)

[Gentoo] Progress report #?

Quotes about London Bombing

[Gentoo] Trip to Europe

(no subject)

Cell chip to make existing supercomputers obsolete?

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