It is all about me!

you have nothign to prove, except theorems

Since my root privileges have been revoked at my previous job, and my (10$/year) hosting will soon expire I thought it would be a good time to move more of my stuff onto my private VM.

The host where VMware server is running has a pretty good track record:

host:~# uptime
13:20:05 up 112 days, 4:40, 2 users, load average: 0.35, 1.64, 1.12

so I figure I can depend on it :)

I went ahead an did a dist-upgrade (etch to lenny), but lo and behold the machine does not come back on the network after the reboot. Raaz-clat! Why DID I have to change kernels? Surely I could have kept using the old stuff…. oh man… so then and there I start to feel depressed. The thing is I can’t access the console for my VM since I am not root anymore. All I can do is sudo /etc/init.d/vmware restart and some sudo manual kills.

The root cause of this is that the lsilogic scsi controller is not supported in the 2.6.26 kernel out of the box in Lenny.

Luckily Pablo77 has the solution up at howtoforge. Simply edit the your_VM.vmx file replacing “lsilogic” with “buslogic” like so:


...
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "buslogic"
memsize = "376"
...


We are back in business….

I have a massive dose of caffeine waiting for me by the side of the computer. Good Arabica made into an elephant dose espresso. Seriously, every morning I keep putting more and more coffee looking for the death dose of caffeine. So far I am surviving. I am amazed at the power of caffeine. It is a completely legal drug, but the effects border on the magical. I get such a mental rush that I feel like I can take on anything.

This is why it is important to time the coffee intake with useful work being strolled about in front of me. Useful and important work. Then I drink the coffee and … bam!!… work happens I don’t even need to force myself, it just happens.

So basically what this means is that I can’t tell you about Girls and Linux right now. I must close this evil computa and take out the black notebook that has “Research” written on it. D. says I should just force myself for 20 minutes. After that I will be able to work.

Vamolos…

I stayed a bit late tonight to “talk” to the neighbour’s wifi router.
A nice BELLnnn style router with WEP encryption that took about 20 minutes to crack.
I shouldn’t abuse it too much and save 40$/month ;)

There was also another AP called “NETGEAR”, but this is what happened when I tried to associate with it.

23:12:54  Sending Authentication Request (Open System) [ACK]
23:12:54  Authentication successful
23:12:54  Sending Association Request [ACK]
23:12:54  Got a deauthentication packet! (Waiting 7 seconds)

I presume there is a list of MAC addresses that the AP expects to get.
Since my invented MAC is not on that list I get rejected.
I could snoop some more on this NETGEAR and spoof my MAC to one of the guy’s computers. But then we would have two devices with the same MAC talking to the router at the same time… he might get wind of me being there if half his packets are not destined for him….

The signal from my new internet provider is kind of weak… one bar two bars… any bars is good when it is free ;)

I woke up late and didn’t feel particularly motivated to bike to the office. My left foot hurts like crazy for some strange reason. Is it the inappropriate shoe ware that I had during the soccer game Tuesday? Or did I kick something that I should not have kicked?

I feel like doing something useful this afternoon, but I am not sure what. I am trying to repair the vfat partition on the laptop, but I am not sure how successful I will be at that. Opening a file from windows then hibernating + opening the same file from linux is apparently not a very good idea.
Let’s see what the windows diskcheck will fix.
I saved the whole partition data using diskdump:

dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/media/external_disk/hda2.dump

if the repair doesn’t go well I can dd all the raw data back into /dev/hda2…

Should-I read a book or something?
I didn’t bring any network coding papers so that kind of limits the options.

Just be happy it is summer man. Just be happy.

In a civilized desktop environment like GNOME or KDE one can “mount” remote disks via ssh (sftp?) natively from the file manager. So if I want to listen to some music that resides on a remote server all I have to do is connect and I am presented with the files as if they were local.

Mac OS can’t do that…. at least I don’t know how to make it do it.
But Mac OS is UNIX so we can fall back to the classic tools tar and ssh.

What I did was create a little bash function in my ~/.bashrc (on the remote host) so that I can easily copy folders full of music to the machine that I am currently working on.

sendtocrypto() {
   echo "Sending $1 to host.mcgill.ca ...."
   tar cvf -  "$1"  |   ssh user@host.mcgill.ca "cd ~/Music/; tar xvf -"
}

Explanation: Create a tarball (Verbosely) and send output to File - (stdout).
Then pipe that into the ssh command.
After connecting to the remote host you cd to where you want to put the files and eXtract, Verbosely the File - (stdin).

Since I have the public key of the host with the music inside ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on host.mcgill.ca I don’t have to type the password.

UNIX is so simple ;)

I love debian. Debian has been my friend for most of my adult life.
Sure I run XP on the laptop, but that is only because suspend didn’t work until 2.6.20 !
Apart from personal computing, debian is the only OS that I would trust to run on a server.

And all this time I have been thinking — how do I make money off of this knowledge?
I thought about becoming a linux support guy, which works and did that for a while.
It is good business, but it suffers from a serious fault in scalability.

You can only work SO much in one day.
As an employee the money making scales as X*h where h is the number of hours you work per pay period….
If you are good you can make X>30 maybe X>40. I don’t know? I made <20 since it was a “student job”, but I am sure people make a decent living from sysadmin / support jobs.
Whatever the X, even if you become a fancy shmancy consultant and get X=1000 … oh well then things are alright. ;)

Then you have the option of managing your own employees.
Then the money formula will scale with N, the number of employees you have.
(The contracts will scale but you will need more people so the two are linked)
I have little experience in this, but I bet it would be hard to find qualified people… linux isn’t that popular yet and you have to pay them well… so I dunno.
If someone has good management skills the IT middle management position in HIS OWN COMPANY could be a quality way of life.

Then we have my kind of ideas, where I have a server running and somehow whatever runs on that server is SOOOOO useful to my clients that they want to pay me money.
I just login once in the morning to look at the stats, check the log of bank transactions and then go have a day in the sun.
Machine works, Ivan chills.

So I have one of them ideas this evening. Please excuse the lengthy introduction.

Business model: start an ISP company that also sells freenx access to your own VM on our central server — with INIFINITE STORAGE and no transfer limits to and from your home computer
What will be the costs like:
power= 10$/month per server
storage= 100$/Tb
uplink internet= ?
bell lease= 22$/month per customer

why download/stream from home when you can stream to one of our media proxys and get faster speed
we can cache most content …
maybe even run a bittorrent tracker –> not to THROTTLE the users but to help them get more stuff

urLinuxVM.com
yourlinuxvm.com ?

root is uid=0
regular users are high numbered like 1000 (linux) or 501 (mac os)
uids are absolutely necessary for everything UNIX does (name service, permissions etc…)

If you are mounting a foreign filesystem on your computer, then maybe the uids won’t match
This is a weird situation where two UNIX filesystems that are similar are actually LESS easy to use than if it was a completely foreign file system (like vfat or ntfs).

I have found a workaround for my needs.
I basically changed my linux uid to be the same numerical value as my Mac OS user.


#sudo usermod -u osx-uid ubuntu-username # change Ubuntu UID to 501
sudo usermod -u 501 ivan


and this in my /etc/fstab:

UUID=40... /media/mac hfsplus ro,suid,exec,auto,users,uid=501,gid=501 0 0


I would like to have “dumb” file system drivers for other UNIX filesystems that simply ignore permissions like windows ones…

A while back I had shrunk the mac partition to leave 10G extra space in the end. There is a utility that helps you partition the hfs+ partition.
The ubuntu install was straightforward with the special option that I told GRUB to place itself in /dev/sda3 NOT /dev/sda which leaves the MBR intact. Next I installed rEFIt and after some reboots I have a nice dual booting system.

There were two hardware issues:

1/ Wifi wasn’t working (some broadcom proprietary drivers). iwconfig wasn’t showing me anything and i wasn’t connecting.
SOLUTION: disable the proprietary driver, reboot, enable the prop. driver, reboot — WINDOWS STYLE ;)

2/ Sound wasn’t working
SOLUTION: I opened /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
and appended at the end:

options snd-hda-intel model=imac24


that’s all folks…. now I just have to figure out why Ubuntu thinks I only have 3G of RAM and there will be no more mac bullshit

My parents had been complaining about their computer for a couple of months now so I decided to go to the local computer shop and buy a PC for them. I opted for a Dell Optiplex GX280 for 170$ which came to about 200$ with tax. P4 2.8Ghz 1Mb L2 cache, 1G ram, 40G HD, 2 sata ports, 3 bays for HD drives.

I come home, plug in the old 15” LCD I had lying around and put the Ubuntu 9.04 install DVD. A couple of minutes later (~20) the install process was done. Some more mucking about (30mins) and I had flash player and java installed.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. Graphics, sound, EVERYTHING worked out of the box. I was thinking about how I am going to have fun installing linux on this machine this weekend, but there was nothing to do really. I didn’t even open a single command prompt.

Today I plugged in a USB wifi adapter (TP-Link TL-WN321G) and it also worked out of the box. I see when I type dmesg that it found the correct firmware and set it up for me. Now that is BORING. No kernel modules to compile, no trying to find the correct firmware and extracting it from windows binaries….

WOW. That is all I have to say for Ubuntu 9.04.
I will be delivering the box sometime tomorrow so we have to wait and see how things will turn out in the end. In order to smoothen the transition for them I installed a Windows XP look alike theme. This is what the desktop looks like now.

Vlad told me a couple of months ago that the time of linux on the desktop had finally come. While the latest debian is getting better and better (i mean more user friendly), I don’t think anything comes close to Ubuntu. The boys in Redmond better watch out…

Negroponte on non-linear books
(around 9 mins into the video)

Example 1: Recipe with various level of detail
Example 2: Alternate versions of same material
Features:
- embed media
- video-text sync

new idea:
sumrize dot com
one par resume of some page

this is also cool Dan Ariely on free will and the default options in forms.