undertakingyou

I blogged a while back about WICD, the wireless manager that I had switched to a because it seemed to do better than network-manager. All that has changed.

There have been several little issues.

First, I was dissappointed that wicd would let me use the wireless or wired. Not both. I realize there is not often when I need to do that, but when you need to test a wired network for connectivity and still having internet. When trying to avoid wicd and just using the command line for a quick ‘eth0 up; dhclient3′ wicd would disconnect the wireless.

Second, when coming from resume there would be occasions where wicd reported no wireless AP’s. I wrote a little script to get me wireless back which stopped the wicd daemon, removed the wireless driver module, modprobed the wireless driver and then started the wicd daemon. After doing this I could get back on the web.

The last one though was to much. I have a Motorola DROID and love it as a smart phone. I have rooted the phone to give me tethering capability. When you do that the Droid sets up an ad-hoc wireless network which bridges to the 3G connection in the phone. The problem lies in the fact that wicd won’t connect to  ad-hoc networks. I google searched and even the mighty google only said “wicd won’t let you”.

So much disappointment there. All three of those issues are solved with network-manager again. If anyone has any solutions for wicd let me know.

The other day when compiling a kernel for a friend I had an interesting issue, Grub had been installed on a drive other than the root drive. Installing grub became something of an issue. Even though I ran update-grub after compiling the kernel I could not boot. But instead of an error like ‘grub error 22′ I was given a grub prompt. With that I could set the root drive and say where the kernel image and the initrd was and voila I was in business. Pretty sweet.

Once again a great example of *nix offering people solutions that are meant to work even in the most un-ideal situations. Anyone else have any good Grub 2 experiences?

Further reading: ubuntu community docs on Grub 2

At the Utah PHP Users group meeting on Thursday night Mike Place presented on Stackable. I wrote a post on Stackable a couple of weeks ago. At tonights meeting not only did MP give a great overview of what Stackable is and gave out some really fun deadline dice, but he also talked about some new features that I think are pretty exciting.

First, my favorite new feature to be added in the next 6 to 8 weeks: DNS. Yep, stackable will have dns with full control through the dashboard. This will be a great improvement and super useful feature.

Second, integration of SVN, so you can have commits to your project that will push onto your webserver. When you are ready to deploy push that branch live using stackable’s simple versions feature and start a new branch for development. Super cool.

Last to talk about DJANGO stacks coming soon. MP wouldn’t give a for sure date but it is in active development. I don’t use django, but if you do you should be happy.

There were some other things. ROR stacks in the future. A resellers option in the future also. Possibilities of supporting different databases as well. Really, the guys at Stackable are willing to listen to ideas of what can be done to make this the best hosting solution ever. You should check it out.

As part of my new business adventures I bought several domains. Then came the thought of hosting several domains and that was a nightmare. Not because it is hard but for the most part I usually encourage people just to use some generic hosting through xmission, godaddy or whoever-it-is today dot com. But I didn’t want to have several hosting accounts out there for my own stuff.

Also, as a system administrator I want to have full and granular control of what is going on. This made me think that I either need to have a colo-ed server of some kind, or a VPS. This would give me great control, and I could have as many websites on the machine as I want to, or until the server crashes. Whichever comes first.

Now, I like to support local businesses, especially ones that support open source because that is just who I am. After some looking around and finding that my budget would curtail things like colo-ing a server, I caught wind of stackable.com. A subsidiary of xmission that is offering a cloud computing solution something similar to Amazon EC2.

So, what is Stackable. Stackable is cloud computing offering a sort of managed hosting option. You the consumer can set up as many ‘containers’ (servers) you would like to pay for in your account. Each container is running CentOS 5 and you get shell and ftp access to the container itself.

Once you have your containers set up you can set up sites. When you set up a site using the dashboard it creates the appropriate directory structure in your container home folder for the doc_root, creates the appropriate virtual host files for apache and reloads the httpd service.

Lastly, you can create as many databases as you need for your applications. These are held on different xmission servers and you are given all the information that you will need to use the database.

Once you have all your pieces in place you are ready to point your DNS to your site ‘DNS Address’ and away you go. It works well. You are using it right now

So the good: It is quite reasonably priced and helps out a local Utah business. It is designed to let you quickly set up a site and get back to what you need to do. The dashboard is actually quite easy to navigate, and you are given a section to restart, stop, start services on your server as needed. The support staff for stackable is actually on the ball. They know what they are talking about and get back to you quickly. Very refreshing. They use the xmission data center which is quite nice (they will give you a tour, you should check it out). In addition to that all the containers are on servers using raid for drive redundancy and the container home folders are on some network attached storage that is backed up nightly. All that security at no effort to myself.

What is not good: To sign up for the service you have to actually request an invite. It is not at the point of ‘active’ deployment yet. While the hosting portion itself works fine there are some things missing. Many of these are outlined in stackable’s faq but I could share a few. It seems that it is only set up at this point to support PHP, MySQL, and Apache. You get your lamp stack and can go on your way. If your site is running Ruby on Rails, Python or Django, etc. you will have to wait, they will implement that in the future. Also, there is no root access. At first, I thought this was a holdup, but after thinking about it for a while, I can do most of my admin stuff from the web-dashboard. So for me, this is no longer a show stopper but it could be for some as you don’t have full control. Lastly, there is extremely poor documentation. For example, I pointed the DNS of my site to the container IP address and was not getting anything served out as webpages. What I needed to do was point my DNS to the ‘DNS Address’ of the ‘site’. Not documented. Had to use the help email.

All in all I am so far very happy with stackable.com and look forward to seeing the project mature. Cudos to xmission.

My father-in-law, Kyle, upgraded his laptop to windows 7 tonight. I am surprised he didn’t upgrade sooner with how much he hated Vista. It makes me wonder if Vista was a big planned marketing scheme, but I digress. On to the real topic.

He asked me why something didn’t work prior to the upgrade so took a look at the machine. I was actually pleasantly surprised. I found a few things quite refreshing,
* The directory structures are a much welcomed improvement. By contrast however I couldn’t add something to the start menu because I couldn’t find the directory. All the forums I found refereed to non-existent directories.
* The power shell is actually useful. And familiar commands such as ‘ls’ and ‘man’ actually work. It makes me wonder if that has something to do with this article from slashdot.
* The system monitor in the management pane is actually useful and customizable.
* They fixed the problem with windows explorer not burning DVD’s (the original complaint) so Kyle was happy.
* I was pleased to find that the computer ran rather snappy. Didn’t seem sluggish at all.
* It is pretty, but you know what, most of the tray icons and things look like the ones in ubuntu Karmic.

Otherwise I was perplexed that in the upgrade it moved the entire Vista windows folder to Windows.Old and I was able to run programs that were in the ‘Program Files’ folder within that. I am not sure why, it seems very strange to me because Windows relies so heavily on registry entries to run anything.

It seems to suffer from some of the same old problems. The home version is watered down to the point of being crippled and you still have the default share of C$. Also viruses are a concern, but otherwise I was actually pleasantly surprised.

This article from Groklaw literally makes me sick.

How can they do that? How can someone take a patent out on something that exist completely outside the realm of what their company even does? Has SUDO ever even been used in any version of any of Microsoft’s products.

Really, I am sick. My stomach is just twisted up. I see this as a direct slap in the face at freedom.

I upgraded to ubuntu 9.10, or as I like to call it kosmic kangaroo. I think this was pottentially my most problematic upgrade.

First, let me clarify, I did fresh installs. So it really isn’t an upgrade, but still. I tried it on the desktop first. If my wife can’t check her email during the day . . . oh well, right? She wouldn’t say that. But oh well. The desktop install was really smooth. Had a small issue with sound but I got that worked out.

The laptop on the other hand was . . . a problem. The MacBook Pro was quite a pain in the butt. The real issue is grub2. It took two install tries to get the machine to boot. It boots now, so that is good. But it took a bit. Other things: the wireless doesn’t resume after suspend. I have to remove and modprobe the module and restart wicd.

For my friends machine we tried to have two hard drives in there and the machine would not, would not install grub. We couldn’t get the thing to boot at all. We tried RAID, LVM, LVM with /boot outside the LVM, no LVM at all. Grub just kept saying it couldn’t figure out the filesystem type, and wouldn’t install.

After the install I think the only ‘new’ thing that I really like is the further integration of pulseaudio. It is much easier to set up the pulse audio stuff. Otherwise, just the standard re-installation changes.

I have been super excited about an Android phone coming to verizon. I am forced to have Verizon because I have a company cell phone and that is who our account in through. But now I am happy about it thanks to the Motorola Droid. Very cool. I was standing in line Friday morning to be one of the first to get the phone. Which is really against my usual nature. I usually wait especially on critical stuff, like my phone. But here is my thoughts so far:

Pros:
* It is Android which is Linux under the hood. Really, a huge selling point for me.
* There really is a lot of Apps and so far I have been able to do everything that I want to.
* Verizon didn’t dick with the GPS stuff like they did my BlackBerry. I can use my turn by turn GPS directions
* Syncing calendar and contacts has never been so easy. It is almost sinful.
* Touch screen is awesome, the slider keyboard is smooth and comfortable to use.
Cons:
* Battery life is just ok. I took it off the charger this morning with 100% and now at 9:00 PM I am at 60% battery. I have a 24 hour job and I really need to have 2 days of phone usage.
* When dialling: to search for contacts I go to dial and then I have to enter the contacts tab, use the keyboard to quick search a name, and then select it. It feels very cumbersome.
* It seems there are no speed dials and while I really like the keyboard, it would be nice for it to be a little more like a phone.

Well, so far that is it. I like it way better than I did my BlackBerry and Palm Centro. So far, Droid wins.

Ok, so really, why have a clock that is in binary. I can’t read it any faster. In fact there are enough timepieces around me that I really don’t need another clock at all. The only reason that I like to have it is because it is fun to brag to my friends and co-workers “hey, I can read the binary clock”.

Really though, there are some practical uses. I do have it in a dvtm session so I can see the current time at a glance. I also am getting way better at reading binary.

Install was fairly easy. I downloaded the tar from here and untared. Then run the binclock.py and you have the clock. A couple of side notes. I did have to edit binclock.py so that the begining read: #! /usr/bin/python. Prior to doing that I got an error. Also, so that I would not have to type the full path to the py file I did a symlink to it from /usr/local/bin and now I just have to run binclock.

I picked this binclock over the one in the ubuntu repos for one simple reason. Looks. Really, if you are going to have a binary clock so that you look cool to those that don’t read binary why not have one that looks good? I would even contend that it must look good lest you look like a dork. Gotta protect your image here.

At the Utah Open Source Conference I heard Jared
Bernards presentation on using the command line to do anything that you could
want to do. I found this intriguing and he showed how to even watch movies
using just a commandline system. Very cool.

One of the systems that he said to use was dvtm. dvtm is a ‘window
manager’ that allows you to view multiple ‘windows’ at once. It also gives you
a ‘maximize’ and ‘minimize’ ability.

The good:
* Gives you verticle and horizantol split unlike screen
* Captures mouse inputs to change ‘windows’

The bummer:
* Caputers mouse inputs. If you have a ncurses program that can use the
mouse you are SOL because you can’t use it. dvtm catches the mouse prior
to the underlying program. Got really agrivating when I couldn’t scroll.
* No easy way to kill a ‘window’ once you have made it.

So far dvtm doesn’t annoy me to the point that I stop using it. I don’t think
it is in my arsinal of must have programs though.