Author: shacker

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Racing Stripes, Hill Hike, Geek Beer

Someone called my cell phone at 6:30 with a wrong number (I hate that). Was at ‘s house by 10 with to help apply racing stripes to Chris’ Miata. Quite a tedious job, but kind of meditative. Way more difficult than it looks. The vinyl bubbles and buckles and you have to work out all the glitches with sponges and sewing needles.

Left there at 3:00 to meet up with Josh for a planned hike w/dog Stella in the Berkeley hills, to connect up, sweat in the afternoon sun, toss a frisbee to a joyous canine expressing her dog-hood through the bark and the sniff. Josh didn’t know what a Miata is. I asked, “What universe do you live in?” He answered, “You know what universe I live in. The one inhabited by bodhisattvas and free jazz musicians.” Sometimes I forget. It’s weird, Josh and I used to be so close, and he still lives right next door, but we’ve drifted in recent years, our interests so far apart in many ways. Yet we still share a bond, an understanding that goes beyond everything else.
My universe used to be inhabited by free jazz musicians and freaks on the weird-ass literary fringes. Now it’s all digital everything. Or mostly. Sometimes I forget that I’m unbalanced. Josh helps me remember in the kindest ways.
`
Off to the Edinburgh Castle in SF to meet with Andrew Orlowski, a journalist from The Register and Henry Kingman, an old friend from ZD, who later ran all the Linux stuff for CNET but who has just lost his job there (same story everywhere you turn these days). This pub does a trivia contest – the questions were harder than expected. Another of their friends, Robin Bandy, is part of the CLIQ collective, who do all kinds of programming and web hosting. They also offer DSL, and I’ve been shopping. Cool. Looks like I’ll be getting DSL from a tatooed geek collective in my own backyard. Reasonable deals, lots of freedom, good politics.

Great to get to know Andrew and Henry too. Henry had a good job suggestion: SSC, who run Linux Journal, and who almost published The BeOS Journal, which I labored my heart out on a couple of years ago. Hmm… very promising possibility. Andrew told me all about the internal workings of The Register, which I have always admired. What I like about them is that it’s sort of gonzo technology journalism, very different from the usual copycat mainstream tech journalism style. I think they have a great chance of ultimately succeeding because they come from anarchy, are growing organically, not the brainchild of some MBA with a bunch of startup funds and a product no one wants.

Somehow I feel a bit more connected to knowing what I want do next after this night out. Know that I want/need to hook up with something I believe in, something I can rally behind and not just work at for the sake of having a job. Not sure yet what that thing will be, but I don’t think I can go work for a big conglomerate monolith. But neither am I willing to go back to working for a dinky underdog with no hope and no future. Something in between. Increasingly, it’s seeming that Linux provides that perfect middle ground, and that I just need to find the right niche for myself in that world.

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Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

– William Carlos Williams

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BeTips on MySQL

Finally got betips up and running on the linux machine last night at 3:30, sans discussion board. Should have that part up later today. Built a nice back-end so volunteer editors can go in and manipulate tips / process submissions. That should keep the site living and healthy without my intervention on into the future.

Also added a bit about the site change-over to the TrackerBase page.

Before going live, I wanted to get all my MP3s and movies off the big data drives, since going back to get them after this point will mean taking the server down. Consolidated what I wanted to keep onto tink, and popped out Wensleydale (the drive that and the Be community got together and bought for Amy and I for a wedding present, stuffed with MP3s (don’t worry, I saved them all)). Put the drive in my Win machine temporarily, reformatted it with fat32, and put it back in the server. Copied all the stuff to wensleydale, losing all the precious BFS attributes on those MP3s. The attributes meticulously created with RipEnc and ArmyKnife. The attributes the power of which I’ve crowed endlessly about in public. So sad to see all those go to waste. If BONE and BIYS were stable, I’d keep those BFS partitions around and still use BeOS for home MP3 serving, but they’re not. I’m going to find a similar Linux solution.

Of course, fat32 doesn’t support all the characters that BFS does, and the copy process (which took 2.5 hours because Be’s FAT driver is slow) choked on a few files and directories with quote marks etc. in them. Had to go back with ArmyKnife afterwards and fix those. I love ArmyKnife, and I guess using it was the last thing I’ll ever do in BeOS on that machine.

Back in Linux, had to learn how to mount a Windows drive. In BeOS, you right-click on the desktop and choose Mount | DriveName. Doesn’t matter what the filesystem is. And if you want to learn what drives attached to your system are potentially mountable, you use mountvolume -lh or DriveSetup. Linux doesn’t appear to have any such command or utility. Even the GUI tools for drive mounting won’t tell you what’s potentially mountable. Instead, you have to cat through /etc/dmesg to see where your physical drives are, then use fdisk on each of those to find your partitions, then execute a mount command, and if you want that drive mounted in the future, add that stuff to /etc/fstab. What a royal f*scking pain in the ass. And after all that, the drive still isn’t writeable by my normal user, even though I did chmod 777 /mnt/win as root.
God, Linux pisses me off. Be figured out so much about usability so long ago. And the world never cared.

I think that part of what pains me about the conversion of betips is that the site is no longer special. It was the first (if not only) site on the entire web ever to be served out of a database without a database, just using the filesystem and attributes. It was a proof of concept as much as anything. It showed a new and exciting possibility for BeOS. Now it’s just another mysql site. But it’s stable. Getting over BeOS is going to take me a while. Just have to stop thinking about it. Like the death of a loved one…

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Housecleaning

The Register is recapping my bootloader piece. The author, Andrew Orlowski, called me at home to tell me about it and to shoot the breeze. Interesting guy. Invited me to a geek beer thing in the city next week. Cool, I need more industry connections. Maybe I’ll get a job out of it.

In a week of messing around I still haven’t been able to install the logjam LiveJournal client for Linux, so finally started using this command line LJ client written in perl. Cool, now I can LJ in vi!

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BeTips to MySQL

BeOS is just too fragile as a server, tired of dealing with it. betips.net has always been a proof of concept site, using the filesystem as a database to serve a live web site. But it’s just not worth it anymore, so I’ve been porting the whole TrackerBase database to mysql on a linux box and will soon start hosting it there. That server box will share several duties:

– Hosting all of betips.net
– Hosting the submissions and search functionality of kissthisguy
– Hosting large images and other stuff that doesn’t fit on birdhouse

For all of this I’ve wanted a fatter upstream pipe, but my current provider is too expensive. Doing research, it seems that the fat upstream pipes all come at a huge premium. We’re trying to save money, so it looks like what I’ll be doing is to get a speakeasy account with faster downstream and slower upstream (bummer!), give up my seven static IPs, and start using a linksys router for port mapping and firewalling.

The new betips should go live in a day or two, but won’t look much different except for URLs, and the search engine will be a bit different.

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OS Shuffle

Over the past few days:

– Decided win2k was just too slow on the laptop, so built a new 800MHz, 256 workstation.

– Backed up everything I needed from the laptop and moved it to the workstation.

– Put latest BeOS updates on the laptop and moved betips to the laptop, so I could use the betips workstation for a linux machine.

– CGI wasn’t working under Apache2 on the laptop and couldn’t figure it out. Finally copied the whole config directory from the betips workstation to the laptop.

– This fixed the CGI problem (still not sure what file(s) fixed that problem, but now the laptop wouldn’t boot except in safe mode. Fiddled with all the usual boot options, which didn’t help. Finally realized that in the process I had copied over ~/config/settings/app_server_settings. Deleting this allowed me to reboot.

– Backed up years of BeOS work to BFS and ISO CDs. My loyal betips workstation is now officially retired . It’s been a champ, but time to free up some resources (and the laptop is so much quieter to have as a 24×7 server).

– Over the past couple of days I had downloaded two 677MB iso images from Mandrake mirrors to the new Win2K machine. Now I needed to burn them. Duh! The SCSI card is in the old betips workstation and I’m going to want it in the Linux machine. So had to FTP the images to the betips workstation, which took forever because Be’s 3com drivers suck. Then burned the images with Be’s CDBurner. How ironic that the last official job of that machine is to burn install CDs for another OS. CDBurner sure does a nice job though.

– Detached all drives in the old betips and installed a 6GB IDE I had sitting around as primary slave (the only slot left in the IDE chain).

– Installed Mandrake 8 to the 6GB drive, which took forever. I have to say, this is the nicest Linux installer I’ve ever seen. Still had some problems with it, but fairly minor.

– Spent most of yesterday learning and tweaking my new Linux system. Damn, there’s so much great software out there. KDE 2 actually rocks pretty hard. Maybe Linux is destined for usability after all.

– Wanted to upgrade to KDE2.2, downloaded all the RPMs and learned how to use urpmi to do a system upgrade. Very nice.

– Noticed that the installer had failed to give me MySQL, Apache, and PHP, which I had asked for.

– This morning re-attached the Be machine’s other drives, just so I can get to it when/if I want. Booted from CD and ran bootman. Rebooted – oops, linux boot signature can’t be found. Probably because the installer wrote to the MBR rather than the boot partition. It didn’t even ask me. It was trying to be friendly and made a bad assumption.

– Figured I could boot Mandrake from floppy or CD and fix the location of the boot record. Yes, I could boot from CD, but no, I don’t see any way to fix the boot record. Searched the net, searched all options in the installer, didn’t find anything. In the process of looking for the answer, went into the text installer. It said “F12 for next screen” and I wanted to page through until I got to the part where the bootloader is installed. I assumed that F12 was basically cancelling each dialog, not the equivalent of hitting OK to it. So I’m tapping F12 and all of a sudden I see “Now formatting /dev/hdb1”. Crap crap crap! So now I’m reinstalling the whole damn thing again. Fortunately this time I found the advanced install options and made damn sure I’m getting apache, php, myql.

Linux installation is getting better, but they still have a lot to learn from BeOS. Not that they ever will… but every time I’ve messed with Linux I’ve gotten into trouble. Every time. It’s so damn frustrating. Copy and past hell, software installation hell, crashing apps… kind of surprising given all the stability claims I’ve heard. Well, the OS is stable, but many of the apps are not.

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Velocitation

From the online traffic school course I’m slogging through tonight:

“Common psychological occurrences in freeway driving are velocitation and highway hypnosis. Velocitation occurs when you unconsciously go too fast on the freeway. Highway hypnosis occurs when the road literally hypnotizes you. To prevent these problems, drive only when you are mentally alert and rested. Make frequent stops if you go on a long trip. ”

I never heard the word “velocitation” – seems like it’s a govt-recognized condition. Hmm… wonder if one could use it to get out of a ticket. “I have a velocitation disorder, officer.”

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Boy in the Plastic Bubble

It’s so weird using Windows regularly again. So much has changed in the years since I’ve used it. I almost feel like a kid in a candy store. As if I had been living in India for a decade and had no idea what was going on in the U.S., and then returned. And I know that similar changes have gone in Linux over the past few years, tons of cool stuff just waiting to be discovered.