Random things

Identifying hard drives

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 21:42:08 -0400

I’ve had a Linux server at home with a lot of hard drives in it for many years. One of the most frustrating things about this has been when a drive eventually fails, it’s a pain to identify exactly which drive it is that has failed. This seems obviously in hindsight, but I recently realized that “hdparm -i /dev/sdx” will give you the serial number of a drive. So since I was replacing the root disk with an SSD, I figured that I would put a label with the serial number on the front end and back end of all of the drives so that I could easily identify failed drives without unmounting them in the future. The upside here is that apparently hard drive manufacturers have been putting labels on the front end of the drive for years. The labels have the serial number on them, along with a barcode that I assume also decodes to the serial number.

Rails 3.0.0 and rubygems 1.3.5 issue

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 11:06:12 -0400

If you’re running into a problem like this:

coneill@test:~/buildbot# bundle install
/sw/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/dependency.rb:52:in `initialize’: Valid types are [:developmen
t, :runtime], not nil (ArgumentError)

Then your problem might be that you’re running rubygems 1.3.5. I ran into this yesterday, and couldn’t find any good leads on what the problem might be. This morning tried upgrading rubygems to 1.3.7 on a fluke, and that fixed my problem. Actually, this seems to affect a number of things, since I first ran into the problem when trying to run “rake db:create” the first time. I’m guessing that bundler has an unstated dependency on the newer version of rubygems.

Canon SpeedLite 430EX II Manual

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 15:18:46 -0400

Canon SpeedLite 430EX II Manual:

I wanted to throw away a copy of my manual for this, but it appears Canon has never made it available online. I cut the binding off mine and scanned it. Click the title for a link to the PDF.

Now at tumblr

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 15:12:35 -0400

Migrated posts from Wordpress to Tumblr, but didn’t seem worth the effort involved to move comments also.

This doesn’t meant I’ll post more often, but at least I won’t have to deal with Wordpress security issues.

Aerogarden Labels

Sat, 30 May 2009 20:16:00 -0400

I bought a three pod Aerogarden a while back, and I’ve been experimenting with growing my own seeds in it. I came up with an Omnigraffle template for the labels to go on the top of the seed pods. It’s a double sided template where one side is a label for you to write on and the other side is a cutting template. You can run it through in duplex mode if you have a printer that supports that, but I’ve found that depending on the printer you can get better alignment by running it through the printer twice. Originally I had printed this on card stock, but in hindsight that was obviously a bad idea. It ended up waterlogged and started molding after about two weeks. I ended up ordering some Rite in the Rain waterproof paper which is supposed to be mold proof.

Here is a picture of the Rite in the Rain labels:

More photos: Flickr

I glue these on using rubber cement. I’m not 100% sure with that, because Download Template: PDF | Graffle

Canceling should be as easy as signing up.

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:30:47 -0400

I’ve been a Quicken Bill Pay customer for 5 years, probably closer 10. Their product generally works pretty well, but it hasn’t changed much in the last 5 years, and the generally crummy UI led me to look around for something better. This morning I signed up for Paytrust hoping it might be better since the web page looked slightly better and people seemed to give it decent reviews. I quickly realized that it’s just another front end for Metavante like Quicken Bill Pay is. In fact, they’re both owned by Intuit. I immediately sent an email to support saying I wanted to cancel my account, and got the following and email containing this:

If you still wish to close your account after reviewing some benefits of our service which are listed below, we ask that you please contact us at 1-800-729-8787 so that we may maintain the security of your account throughout the closure process. Your feedback is important to us.

Their website is secure enough for me to be able to empty my bank account from, but not secure enough to cancel my account from? I smell bullshit. A friend of mine suggested a while back that we should have some law in place that says unless there is extenuating circumstances, you should be able to cancel any subscription service via the same medium you used to sign up for it. Perhaps legislation is going overboard, but this “I think you’re too lazy to call us up and cancel” tact that many companies seem to take is really bad customer service. You’d think they would realize that ultimately it just leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths about their company. I can’t see companies ever doing this unless they’re required to.

Better Metacritic RSS feeds

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:22:03 -0400

So I think Metacritic’s game reviews are a great idea, but their RSS feeds only have the title of the game, and a very short sentence. That’s a not great, but the bigger problem is that they publish games to their RSS feed immediately, but don’t score games until there are at least 5 reviews. To work around that, I’ve put together Atom feeds that you can use instead of the official feeds, which include the short blurb that Metacritic provides, but most importantly these feeds don’t publish review information until there is a critic score associated with the game. Here is a list of the feeds that I’ve put together:

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

Metacritic RSS

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:29:13 -0500

You can find the code that generates the Atom feeds at github here.

CAP Theorem

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:38:01 -0500

We’ve been doing architecture for geographically disperse, highly available systems at work for a few years now. We have mostly been coming up with “things that work” without spending a lot of time on research. I ran across Werner Vogel’s post on this sort of thing a month or two ago and thought it would be worth mentioning. It really crystalized for me some ideas that intuitively made sense to me and it is something I can point other people to. We were talking about the architecture of a new system today at lunch and I realized that I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone when I originally read it.

Werner’s entire post is well worth reading, but a more succinct explanation of just the CAP Theorem can also be found here.

Paul's first 3d movie

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:05:00 -0400

I took Paul to see Journey to the Center of the Earth this afternoon. I had forgotten it was in 3d until we were walking in and they handed us polarized 3d glasses. He seemed to really enjoy it, although I didn’t notice until the credits that he was dodging things coming out of the screen :)

Flat tires

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:17:00 -0400

The odd thing is that the tire didn’t actually lose pressure after I ran over this. I only noticed because of the noise of it hitting the fender each time it went around. This was a brand new tube too, and the first front flat I’ve had on this bike in a year. I patched it, but looks like the patch isn’t holding. The tire was only at 20ish PSI this morning, and was soft again when I went to ride home today.

I think Plaxo thinks they're funny

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:44:00 -0400

So I don’t use full screen Expose on my Mac very often, but I was looking for my Time Machine progress bar, and found this:

At first, I thought that the “Trust me…it’s super legit” was some value in the certificate, but it’s not. The cert is apparently from the blue socket wifi gateway we have here from work. I was puzzled as to where this came from, until I realized the icon here must be from the application, and that the icon over the lock is almost certainly the Plaxo icon. I’m sure someone thinks they’re “super funny”, but this is pretty lame, and likely to freak out anyone that sees it at first glance. I’m guessing some developer at Plaxo never imagined that their Mac client would get back an invalid certificate when making a request to the Plaxo servers, but again, this is pretty lame. I’m guessing this is also a Cocoa dialog (or OS level dialog). If so, this is pretty lame on Apple’s part to not force the application name into the dialog somewhere. Here is a screenshot of the details view.

Things you don't expect to see in traffic: Unicycles

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 19:09:00 -0400

I was driving home on Wednesday and pulled up to the head of the line at the corner of Route 7100 and Foxmill Road near Herndon. As I’m sitting there, I see this guy filter forward through traffic, and dismount off of his unicycle:

I was a little surprised to say the least. However, I wasn’t completely shocked, as I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this same guy commuting on the bike path on 7100 once before, in even weirder circumstances. I was looking forward to seeing him mount up, and ride across, but unfortunately (for me), he just walked the unicycle across. I’m guessing that’s probably a lot safer, but unfortunately I didn’t really get to see him riding. Unfortunately the quality of the picture is pretty bad, but you can click the photo to see the higher resolution version at Flickr. I pulled my formerly trusty Canon S400 out of my bag, but it appears that the sensor has bitten the bullet. Well, I’m not positive, but I do know that all the pictures on the LCD show up purplish, and really wavy/fuzzy. I need to decide now whether or not I should buy another Digital Elph, or wait until the 3G iPhone comes out, and just use the camera that is on that. I’m thinking I’d like a separate camera, since on multi-day bike trips it would be a lot easier to keep a camera charged than a phone

Geeky License Plates

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 12:20:00 -0400

When I see license plates like this, I always wonder if they were thinking of the same acronym I am.

Keen Cycling Sandals

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 07:34:00 -0400

I’m a big fan of the Shimano bike sandals, and I’ve been wanting to get a pair of normal Keen sandals for a while. So I was pretty pleased when someone on the PPTC mailing list mentioned this morning that Keen is now making a bike sandal:

REI is selling them for $115.

Update: I picked up a pair of these, but haven’t had a chance to mount cleats on them yet. Once it’s a bit warmer in the morning I’ll start using them for my commute and hope to post a review.

In Verizon Land 40% = 100%

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 22:34:00 -0400

So, I checked my FIOS order status late Friday night, and it was around 80%. I also checked the “Reschedule Installation” option, and surprise they had a slot open for today, 8am to 5pm. I spent a few hours cleaning out the basement Saturday, and then rescheduled. I sat around all day playing Lost Odyssey and finally around 5:10, I called Verizon to find out if the guy was going to show up. As you’d expect he showed up while I was sitting on hold. The whole install took about an hour or so. After he was done I hooked my laptop up to the Actiontec router they give up, and got 15mb symmetric on Visualware’s speed test. Then the installer said I had to install some software on my PC, or else they would cut me off in 30 days. I’m not sure if that’s just bullshit they tell the installers or not, but I tried installing it on my Mac, and it never wanted to finish the install, so he said I could install it any time in the next 30 days and it would be fine. That was about it, and he headed out. One thing I knew I wanted to do was figure out how to put the Actiontec router into bridging mode. I’d read already that they suffer from a really small NAT table, and when they run out of entries (1k max), you just can’t make any more connections for 3 minutes. I found a guide on dslreports, and screwed around with the Actiontec for about an hour, and finally got it put into bridging mode. Seems to be working pretty well at this point. I downloaded some stuff from news and get about 1.7 to 1.8mb/sec downloading. One problem I did run into is that the version of SABnzbd I was using was old, and was chewing up about 1.5gb of virtual memory on a box with only 768mb of RAM. Turns out someone else picked up development of it, and turned it into SABnzbd+. Works really well and out of the box never went over 40mb of memory used. So while that’s downloading, I’m installing the Verizon software in a Parallels VM. After the install finishes I’ll just roll the VM back to the snapshot I made before, and not have to worry about what crap it installed. As far as the title goes, after I got all the routing worked out, I went to check my order status, and this is what I found:

FIOS order status, Part 2

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:01:00 -0500

So my order status has moved to 59%. I’m not real sure how this is supposed to work. Perhaps it is keyed to the time left, or maybe the number of customers waiting for install?

My gift to Steve Jobs...

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:36:00 -0500

I have a simple suggestion: put a single mouse button on your laptops but put two switches under it, one on each side. Have the OS ship configured to treat both sides as the same. Give me the option to tell the OS to treat each side of the single mouse button as left and right mouse button. PS: I’d rather have dedicated page up/page down keys than a two enter keys and a dedicated eject key.

FIOS Ordered!

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 23:32:00 -0500

Verizon’s provisioning system is impressive:

Somehow my order is now 58% complete, even though I’m 5 days into the 30 day waiting period for my install! At this rate I expect it’ll be installed by the end of the coming week. FWIW, I’m getting the 15/15 package, for $70/mo. While this means going back to having a dynamic IP at home, it also means I’ll have upstream fast enough that it’s basically like being on my home LAN most anywhere I go that has decent net.

Great quote from "PeopleWare"

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:29:58 -0500

Lately I’ve been reading more software engineering/development books, especially those with more of a project management slant. I got a copy of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams in the mail today and I’m about 30 pages into it and so far I’m really digging it. I particularly liked this quote which was mentioned in a section about Parkinson’s Law:

In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project team, and the project goals. In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much. When a worker seems unable to perform, and seems not to care at all about the quality of his work, for example, it is a sure sign that the poor fellow is overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work. He doesn’t need more pressure. What he needs is reassignment, possibly to another company.

As an aside, I also finished reading Rapid Development over the holidays, and it’s what got me thinking about this sort of thing in general. I had someone at work the other day ask me why I’ve started reading more about this sort of thing, and I think the first few pages of Peopleware kind of summed it up. Most of the problems on most software projects aren’t with the software, but it’s what most people would call office politics, and what I see as more of as project management and process issues. I didn’t really have to deal with this sort of thing much at RCN, but with larger groups working on projects at TWC, it’s definitely something I have to deal with on a regular basis.