Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Both kregexpeditor (removed since the KDE 4 upgrade) and grip (unmaintained since 2005, relies on old libraries) are missing from Ubuntu karmic. I expect to find alternatives to grip, but for now I’d like to keep using it. And I’ll give up kregexpeditor when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.
The hardy version of kregexpeditor still works on karmic, and I’ve used pbuilder to port the jaunty package of grip to karmic. Both are now in the repo.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. One of the awesome features of the last several Ubuntu releases is support for ecryptfs, an encrypted filesystem. At Talia we depend heavily on GPG, OTR, SSH keys and other forms of encryption and secure identification. Loss of those keys and other confidential data to laptop theft, corporate espionage, or the US Customs Service is a big concern for us. This week I secured my laptop, as a prototype of our new corporate laptop setup. Here is how I did it.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I read an article in the Dec 2009 issue of Linux Magazine, one of several Linux-focused magazines we get at the office. I’d like to link directly to it, but it the magazine’s own website doesn’t offer the article or even a reliable permanent link to the issue number. Hint: hey guys, sort that out.
The article was about configuring ACPI hotkeys to support your specific laptop. IE, the buttons for “sleep”, “brightness up”, etc. For most laptops this already works on Ubuntu. On my Dell Vostro 1500, every button except for “sleep” worked right after install. This is Linux, so there is always some way to fix that.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Since upgrading to Ubuntu 9.10 I’ve noticed poor performance of VirtualBox guests with Intel VT-X hardware virtualisation enabled. This has been noted in a few places, but I didn’t enable VT-x until recently so I can’t be sure that the problem began with Karmic. I can be sure that it is happening to me now.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I previously wrote about running apps as root on a normal user’s desktop. I still recommend that you follow those steps, but one thing has changed with the release of karmic and the inclusion of the qtcurve widget style.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Friday I upgraded from Kubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackalope” to Kubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. Here are my notes on the upgrade.
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Some time in October 2008, I started a program of diet and exercise. Mostly the latter, but diet has played its role. My long-term goal was (and is) to avoid the fate of the elder Wagners; a big belly and a bad back by the time I'm 50. Much of my height is in my torso, which means I have an unusually long spine for someone of my height (190cm, or 6'3"). My back started to go out with uncomfortable frequency, and I had to do something about it.
My doctor gave me two choices for treatment: medication, and physiotherapy. It's always tempting to ask the doc for a pill that lets me keep doing what I'm doing, but not pay the consequences, but such a thing doesn't exist. So I chose the latter.
The doc sent me to an NHS physiotherapist, who examined me and concluded that I lack the musculature through my torso to adequately support my back. She prescribed a set of exercises that I could do at the gym and at home. Since I'd been paying for the gym for almost a year (but not using it), I decided to give it a shot.
I started working out 3 times a week, doing 40 minutes of cardio at peak heart rate (~170 bpm for me) plus some stretching and weight lifting through the chest. At home, I started a daily 20-minute warm-up routine in the morning, mostly sit-ups and push-ups. That first week I was miserable but determined. 5 push-ups was a struggle. Jamie has been an angel to support me, taking care of Pascale every morning while I do this.
About six months in, I decided to track my weight loss via fitday.com. At that point I set a goal of 10 kilograms from when I started until my next birthday. I started at 95 kg, or 210 lbs. Fitday can work in metric but graphs only in imperial. The results:
Happy birthday to me! I turn 32 tomorrow, and I'm down to 84.5 kg. I can also now do 40 push-ups in one go, or 100 push-ups and 150 sit-ups in 8.5 minutes (thanks for that routine, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) rezendi). I can run for 40 minutes without stopping, up and down hills and on dirt trails. I can pick up my daughter and carry her for a two-hour walk without my back going out.
My dad has the habit of taunting Jamie when we visit. "Do you like the belly? You'd better get used to it, because Tyler's going to have one just like it! Ha-ha-ha-ha!" You meant only a joke, Dad, but you lit a fire under my ass. I'm going to prove you wrong.
Lessons learned:
Your body is not supposed to support itself solely on your skeleton. You should rely on the static interplay of the muscles to move. When you aren't in shape, you spend a lot of time resting on your joints. Now I spend a lot of time resting on slightly tensed muscles. This is much better. I have very little joint pain now.
The physiotherapist was right. My back hasn't gone out in at least 10 months.
Score another one for NHS care. Time from seeing the doctor to seeing the physiotherapist: 3 days. Amount of money paid to NHS beyond what comes out of my paycheck: £0.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. We are currently moving our customer hosting platform from our old colo to our new one. The servers run cPanel on CentOS 4. The process of moving these services goes something like this:
- install new servers at new location of same or similar model as the old servers, and load them with a basic CentOS install
- rsync oldserver:/ to newserver:/ including customer files
- reboot new server and fix whatever goes wrong (MAC addresses changing, etc)
- move BGP announcement of hosting IP range to new colo
- shut down and remove old servers
The actual process is more complicated. During step 2, I hit a problem with cPanel’s /home/virtfs directory tree.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. We recently moved our primary backup machine to another location, and have overhauled a lot of our network infrastructure. This meant a lot of work updating the Bacula configurations on those machines. I’ve been unhappy with Bacula for some time, so I replaced it with BackupPC.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. I recently switched my primary mouse from a Logitech V450 to a much simpler Logitech RX650. The RX650 is a basic OEM mouse. It is larger than the V450 and doesn’t have the useful space below the mouse to store the compact USB receiver. It only has a range of 1.5m from the receiver, compared to 10m for the V450. So why did I switch? Because the RX650 uses 27 MHz for communication, whereas nearly every other cordless mouse on the market today, including my old V450, uses 2.4 GHz.
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It's only taken 57 years, but Britain has finally given justice to Alan Turing.
Perhaps you don't realise the debt you owe to Mr. Turing. Most focus on his contributions to the code-breaking efforts of World War II. Without him the war might have gone on much longer. But those of us who work in computer science every day know that he contributed far more than that. He is the father of modern computing. He formalised the concept of the algorithm, and of the machines that can run them, the Turing machine. All binary computing essentially descends from the Turing machine.
He gave us the Turing test, the means by which we judge the capabilities of an artificial intelligence. If you enjoyed Blade Runner, then you've seen a Turing test. It will be the standard we use to judge the AIs of the future as well. Read any science-fiction novel that even mentions a real machine intelligence, and it will probably be described as a "Turing-capable AI".
So before you click the next link, forward the next meme, or render the next frame of your HD-video animation, think of Mr. Turing. And thank Gordon Brown for finally doing the right thing.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Firefox has a very annoying “feature” – it remembers any HTTP authentication tokens for as long as Firefox remains open. Any by “open”, I mean “the browser is running”, not “the tab/window is open”.
Why is this bad? For several reasons.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Although I administer most servers via SSH, I also use Webmin. Webmin is convenient for almost any simple administrative task, and is often better for some jobs. For instance, it is the easiest way I have found to browse Postfix email queues. Perhaps most importantly, it can save you from having to learn yet another daemon’s unique configuration language and syntax.
It can also be very handy if you have to fix something from your smartphone, where the command line isn’t always the best choice of tool. Enter: the Virtualmin Mobile/iPhone Theme.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. You really shouldn’t allow SSH logins via password. This is doubly true for root. On most of my hosts we allow SSH for normal users with a password, but restrict root to SSH keys only. And we always protect against brute force attacks with fail2ban.
If you aren’t already using SSH keys and SSH agent, you should. SSH agent forwarding allows for secure sideways authentication. For example:
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You may have noticed that my tolaris.com technical blog crossposts to LJ. I've done this because I rarely post to LJ anymore, but I still read it and have friends here. Friends who want to know what I'm doing, and who may prefer to comment via their existing LJ accounts.
But some of you may not want to read all this technobabble, so I've chosen not to post entire entries here. You'll only see up to the tolaris.com equivalent of an lj-cut (the "more" line). I hope this strikes a fair balance between those who like this kind of stuff, and those whose eyes cross at the first use of a technical acronym.
Technical note: the "tolaris" tag will not point to all tolaris.com crossposts. The plugin I'm using doesn't allow me to add arbitrary tags. But it does allow me to import my tolaris.com tags automatically, which is pretty neat. Sorry, tongodeon. I know how much you like accurate tags.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. Cleaning up after the KDE 4 upgrade continues. Today I tried to port kregexpeditor from hardy, but pbuilder stopped with a library conflict:
kdelibs5-dev: Conflicts: kdelibs4-dev but 4:3.5.10.dfsg.1-1ubuntu8 is to be installed
I’m sure I could have resolved this, but I decided to test the hardy package before spending any more effort. The package installed without complaint, and the binary runs. I’ve added the amd64 and i386 packages from hardy-backports to the repo for jaunty.
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I was interviewed yesterday by Sanden Totten of Minnesota Public Radio about the recent arrest of 3 American hikers who wandered into Iran. His post is available here, with audio from the interview.
Curse that family lisp. I never hear it when I'm speaking, but every time I'm recorded or amplified I can hear it and am stunned for a few moments. It almost derailed my last talk in Baghdad.
You may recall when ioerror became our first tourist. We took him to Ahmed Awa. He took photos. We did too.
Edit 2009-08-05 22:33 UTC: Multiple people tell me that I don't have a lisp, and that I'm just crazy. I guess I'm happier being crazy than lisping.
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Originally published at tolaris.com. You can comment here or there. After my recent adventure with reverse-path filtering, I didn’t expect to see it again so soon. And then I took another look at a long-standing annoyance in our OpenVPN network.
I set up OpenVPN so our offices and laptops could securely access internal resources. This lets me print documents directly to another office, for instance. Or access web-based applications that we don’t make available to the public. Or remotely SSH into a PC and fix a problem.
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I finally figured it out! I've been trying to remember the name of a series of travel-size games I had a kid. They were little plastic games in a audio casette shape. A board unfolded from the casette, and the spinners usually acted as dice or some other form of random number generation. The games had little magnetic pieces that folded into a flip-up storage area.
Finally, I have found them! They are called Flipsiders, and I had five:
Some of them were actually very fun games, and they were excellent for travel. I admit that I wasn't that partial to Ghostly Estates, but I played a lot of Dragon Master. If anybody has these and is interested in selling, contact me. Consider this offer valid indefinitely.
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I'm back from Baghdad. I'll post photos and write up more later. But for now, you may wish to know that Marwan, an Iraqi colleague of mine since 2004, is answering questions.
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