06.25.09
Adding a user to Samba
To add a user to the smbpasswd file they must already exist in the passwd file. Use the useradd command to add a user. Then user “smbpasswd -a username” to add the user to the smbpasswd file.
04.28.09
When did the carrot become a stick?
Those of us that remember the old days in the 1990’s when Microsoft could do no wrong (much like the Google of 2006) remember the days of easy licensing and the brilliant aura each new product had as it was introduced. Microsoft was on fire and each new announcement meant the end of some drudgery or a more expediant way from point A to point B. Windows 95 was hot and each version of Office got easier to use because the esoteric features in the prior version no longer crashed.
You wanted to upgrade, upgrade was good. Upgrade was better. Upgrade = carrot.
Sometime in the early 2000’s (or was it the late 90’s?) when market saturation was beginning to set in and Novell and Borland were both put in their place, Microsoft realized they could not keep the market growing and the revenue climbing forever. They needed to attack their customers and their own products in order to continue selling. Things started changing and have been more burdensome ever since.
CALs or Client Access Licenses were required to access NT servers, software assurance hit and upgrade pricing disapeared. It became necessary to pay for support on some products. Then all these old products that shone like beacons as they were introduced were cut off from support. If you want support, you need to be on a recent version. Then things like Office were well established and probably all but the most esoteric 10% of features worked as they should and things didn’t crash nearly as much as they used to. That was good.
But the upgrades became more incremental and stopped being the dramatic improvements they once were. This is probably momentum coupled with mass. The upgrade track Microsoft would have us on now would probably do great things for the their t bottom line if we all complied.
Upgrades cost money for not much improvement. Upgrade= stick.
Beware of the geek who does not complain.
Some people think geeks complain a lot. I believe some geeks complain because they can always see a better way of doing something or can imagine doing it optimally. Sometimes that means complaining because it wasn’t done their way. Even a solution that everyone agrees is good-enough is still probably sub-optimal. In the case of software this may because of sub-optimal tools on hand used to create it. And sometimes, even a really clever hack is still a hack.
Many geeks see the world as it could be, instead of how it is - which may explain why so many geeks like science fiction. Maybe a little too much. Doing what geeks do and approaching things as they do is our way of changing the little bit of a sub-optimal world we can have an effect on. The geeks who are working hard and are not complaining are busy taking over the world.
03.28.09
Shopping for a car with a manual transmission
My car, a Hyundai Elantra was recently in an accident. We were rear-ended by another driver and pushed into another car. The Elantra was declared a total loss. The Elantra was a good car, basic transportation with excellent fuel economy. It also had a manual transmission. I went looking for a new car with a fairly open mind, but my first requirement was that the new car would have a manual transmission.
What I came to discover is that most manufacturers make a manual transmission available on their lowest trim line model and if you are lucky it is an option on the mid-trim model. A manual transmission is seldom available on the highest trim or luxury car models. Typically you will not see a manual transmission on a six cylinder motor either. Now if you compare vehicles across trim levels from your chosen brand you will find the mpg ratings for the manual transmission models are always the best. Finally if you watch TV commercials or see a print advertisement and check the mpg ratings you will see the advertised mpg ratings are typically taken from the manual models! You might think I’m after a little bit of truth in advertising, but what I would really like is the manual transmission available on the higher trim levels.
There are some noteable exceptions to this - some expensive cars manufactured in countries that take driving very seriously have a manual transmission available for very nearly all models.
02.26.09
My own radio station redux
The Griffin RocketFM wasn’t cutting it. I hooked up a small USB audio adapter and a Ramsey FM30 Stereo FM transmitter and now I 
am cooking with GAS. The Ramsey FM30 has great power and range - all around my house and a bit beyond so I need to be careful not to get a visit from the FCC.
I had an old BBE sonic maximizer so I put that in the loop between the USB sound adapter and the Ramsey and now the Audio is almost commercial quality. (there is still some noise getting in somewhere - probably from dirty power). The BBE boosts the highs and the lows enough to make the music sound a little more robust.
This is exactly what I wanted for working around the house and in the garage. I’m looking forward to the summer.
The only thing I would like to add is the ability to Text-to-speech the local NOAA forcast and slip it into the playlist on a regular basis.
02.15.09
My own radio station with NSLU2, Griffin RocketFM and SqueezeCenter
I’ve wanted to stream from my SqueezeCenter to a radio for a while, this looks like one way to do it. It works but I’m still looking for alternatives.
The Griffin RocketFM is a USB device that can be plugged into a computer to broadcast sound over FM to radios in very close proximity. I found code and instructions for using the RocketFM under Linux here: http://tipok.org.ua/node/9 . (Thanks to Tipok.org.ua by the way). I followed the instructions there and built this little code on my Slug (NSLU2) and installed mpg123 on the slug. (apt-get install mpg123-alsa). Then you set the frequency the rocket is supposed to transmit at like this:
/usr/local/bin/rocket -freq 106.6
Then start mpg123 to play through squeezecenter, which I already had installed.
mpg123 -b 512 –gapless -T http://192.168.1.1:9000/stream.mp3
You don’t have to use all the switches, but I found these are working well for me right now.
Make sure SqueezeCenter is set to play something then tune in the radio to the station you set and you should be hearing it on the radio. Sometimes it takes a few seconds to buffer the stream and start to play.
I was amazed it worked at all, but it works OK. Great use for a slug as a personal radio station. I’d like to see if there is a way to get more range out ofthe RocketFM but I’m sure the range is limited by law.
02.10.09
I would pay more for a reliable hard drive
Dear Seagate, Hitachi, and Western Digital,
I would pay more for a highly reliable hard drive. I realize it would cut into your revenue stream to make a hard drive that would last more than about three years, but I would pay for that benefit.
Yours Truly,
-Nate
01.19.09
Using large Partitions: preparing and formatting.
This is really written as a reminder to me since I seem to have to go in search of this information whenever I need to format large disks.
Using parted for GPT.
The parted tool is very utilitarian but it gets the job done.
GPT is necessary for disks with space probably greater than 4 Terrabytes. (I can’t remember if it is 2 or 4 or 4.5) but it would probably be a good practice to start using it on anything over 2. GPT replaces the old style partition tables. The old FAT and BIOS restrictions are some of the last vestiges of 16 bit computing cruft we carry along with us into the 64-bit world.
The version of parted I was using didn’t have support for XFS. This example is borrowed from the Coraid web site:
shell # parted /dev/etherd/e0.0
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) print Disk geometry for /dev/etherd/e0.0: 0kB - 3001GB Disk label type: gpt
(parted) mkpart primary 0 1000G
(parted) mkpart primary 1000G 2000G
(parted) mkpart primary 2000G 3001G
(parted) print
Disk geometry for /dev/etherd/e0.0: 0kB - 3001GB
Disk label type: gpt
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 17kB 1000GB 1000GB
2 1000GB 2000GB 1000GB
3 2000GB 3001GB 1001GB
(parted) quit shell
# cd /dev/etherd/ shell
# ls e0.0* e0.0 e0.0p1 e0.0p2 e0.0p3 shell
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/etherd/e0.0p1 shell
# mkfs.xfs /dev/etherd/e0.0p2 shell
# mkfs.reiserfs /dev/etherd/e0.0p3
in this case the disk in question is an AOE disk, but if you had a large SCSI array you would just substitute that instead of /dev/etherd/e0.0.
Parted can make the filesystem (mkfs) for you, type “help” at the (parted) prompt. EXT3 was not implemented in the version I was using.
`tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 | grep UUID” is how I find the UUID of the drive. If there are other ways to find the UUID of a drive I would like to learn them.
once you know the UUID for a drive you can mount it using just the UUID using the -U flag in the mount command:
mount -v -U 2ab524bc-3640-4dfd-bf4c-0373172e0159 -t ext3 /mnt/ether/
in the command above
-v yeilds verbose information about the mount command
-U tells the mount command to use the UUID of the device and is followed by the one we want to use. (those UUIDs are long aren’t they?)
-t tells the type of filesystem we are mounting. In this case, ext3. This is not always necessary
finally /mnt/ether/ is the directory I have set up for testing this etherdisk drive.
You can add the entry to fstab to cause a mount. Just remember if you are using aoe to make sure the aoe module is loaded first! Other large disk types won’t have that problem. This is what the entry should look like:
GUID=a241eee7-13e7-425d-854e-fa5ec1ee4c62 /mnt/largefs auto defaults 0 0
Now we have great big open file systems to save all that crufty old data on.
12.21.08
The Dark Knight
I love this movie, and I can’t get it out of my head. The Dark Knight is easily the best movie of 2008. The thing I like about it is how it explores a lot of scary concepts with the plot while also being very visually exciting.
The two themes that interest me most are the collision of the Joker who has no rules or remorse and is literally an agent of chaos collides with Batman who has to stop him. Batman has lines he will not cross and at least one rule - he will not intentionally kill. Then within this theme you have Batman who can (he has the financial resources and placement) override everyone’s privacy to gain the means to find the Joker. For me this touches on the Patriot act and whether as a people we trust our government enough to give them this power. Batman chooses to take the power. Does he do the right thing and surrender it in the end?
Heath Ledger is a good joker, but I don’t think he is the only person who could have played the Joker (Crispin Glover - yeah, no kidding, I think he could have done it). Ledger’s take on the Joker is perfect for this movie and fortunately not over-the-top. The Joker is almost believable as a criminal even though the concept of a makeup wearing super-criminal is silly.
I think the writing for this movie touches on genius and now that I’ve seen it several times I see where the subtle groundwork gets laid to make the plot work.
This movie leaves me wanting more Batman with Christian Bale and Christopher Nolan. On the one hand I am afraid they might lower the bar if they do another one, but if they can top ‘The Dark Knight’ I think they should. And I think the Bat-Man should go up against overwhelming odds.
The Dark Knight is a truly great movie that explores important ideas in a fanciful way.
11.13.08
New rough unit of measurement - HDEQ.
We need a new unit of measurement to roughly estimate quantities of data, The HDEQ or Hard Drive Equivalent. For now, I think it should be the equivalent of a 1TB hard drive (let’s not split hairs over whose version of a Terrabyte).
Why do we need this?
You may have noticed a lot of people adding things like “please consider the environment before printing this” to the bottom of their email.
With the HDEQ we would have an offhand way of asking “I wonder how many HDEQs are filled up with this message?” and we would have a pretty good idea of what we meant.
It would come in handy in other places where we need to estimate how much storage will be needed or is in use or where we need to discuss the economics of storage. In a few years when 10 TB disks are commonplace, that will become the new HDEQ.