Distracted and Awake, Barely

I should be in bed right now. In fact, I should have been in bed two hours ago, but I was distracted. It was a quiet night following a hectic day, and I took advantage of it. I watched some television with Meghan, drank a little scotch that I received for my birthday, and descended into our basement to hack on my computers for a bit.

I fully intended on simply coming down here to write up a blog post, but once again, I was distracted. The SunFire server log reports were telling me that SSH was receiving a lot of illegal login attempts. Easy enough to resolve, right? Just log in, install Shorewall, and configure. It turns out that my configuration-foo is a bit rusty, and I needed to spend time browsing through examples and manpages before I came up with something that works to my liking. That's life, though. With so many different things to learn, skills to obtain, experiences to gather, how can you really expect to remember it all?

An hour later, I can move on to brag about my sons. Connor, now eight going on twelve, has learned how to do a back-dive off the diving board! He was a little apprehensive, but he trusted his teacher and was resoundingly successful! He was so proud of himself, and I couldn't have been happier to share in his experience.

Not to be out-done by his brother, and perhaps because Connor did pull off the backwards dive, Ryan conquered his fear to do a front-dive off the diving board with a little bounce! He had figured out how to do the lean-over dive but was frustrated with continuing to do what the kids call a "scaredycat". It's slightly painful belly-flop with your hands and legs extended toward the surface of the water so you resemble a cat being thrown into the pool. Prior to Connor's success, Ryan fussed and cried about the attempt, so his subsequent success was a big deal! Again, I couldn't have been happier to see it happen!

Nora has also earned accolades as a walker! She is no longer bound to the earth by all fours, rather hobbles around the house in an unsteady gait on two feet! So proud! Our children are growing up so quickly!

Since this is a fitness blog of sorts, I may as well report on my own swimming today. I took advantage of my "day off" of running (due to running my runstreak at midnight this morning), and hit the pool for some easy laps.  My legs definitely enjoyed the time off. I swam mostly in freestyle at a relaxed pace with a butterfly and breaststroke thrown in for good measure. I ended on a fifty meter sprint, enjoying the rush of water! If there were a swim plus marathon duathlon, I'd be all over it!

Email Issues: Debugging Emacs23 on Wheezy

Upon migrating my data over to my children's computer, I ran into problems trying to use MH-E from Emacs23. When creating reply emails, a crapload of octal data was being added to the headers of each email. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on, so I started to move aside all of my custom nmh/mh format files, thinking it may have had something to do with incompatible versions of the NMH software.

When that wasn't successful, I switched to the command-line and used the nmh tools directly. No issues. Back to Emacs, I created a new message and noticed something: MH-E was trying to add X-Face/Face data, the image icons that get displayed next to your "From:" header. This was interesting, because I didn't recall creating a ~/.face file anytime in the past. Poking around revealed that Gnome had added my login icon as a ~/.face file! MH-E was dilligently trying to do what it thought was the right thing, and included it in each email I sent. I'm not sure why the process took so long, other than the image used was HUGE. Silly rabbit!

So, the following line in my ~/.emacs file guaranteed it didn't try this again:

(setq mh-x-face-file nil)

If I ever need to start including an X-Face or Face header, I'll update that with the appropriate path.

The second issue I ran into was found while trying to research the answer to this first one, the `dir' file for info wasn't being displayed from `emacs' when it worked perfectly well from the `info' command-line application. I uncovered this bug, and did a quick test. I decompressed the /usr/share/info/dir.gz file. It worked! (I also took the opportunity to edit the file and use English instead of German for the introduction. Not sure how that happened.)

In comparison between Debian Wheezy's version of Emacs and info file integration  (emacs23) v.s. the Homebrew install I have running on my MacBook at work (emacs24), I'd have to say that the Homebrew install is winning out here. I may have to make a local build to keep up, or pull in some backports.

Never been so happy over bad hardware...

Some time over the last few months, my personal computer at home took a nosedive into disaster. Through power outages and careless monkeying with circuit breakers, it refused to boot to a working prompt, and when it did show signs of life, it looked as if my most precious information was lost forever: my home directory partition. Yes, I know that a filesystem is more robust than that. There's no such thing as a complete and catastrophic failure when it comes to generic issues with home computers. My heart sank, none the less, when I couldn't run the standard file system check (fsck) utilities on the problem partition.

This evening, while the children slept and my wife was out visiting with her sister, I crept downstairs to see what I could do to recover my personal, electronic life of close to two decades. I powered the system off, held my breath, and powered it back on. beep. I watched in anticipation as GRUB announced that it found something bootable. YES! My heart skipped a beat when I saw the display flip to frame buffer and a higher screen resolution. OK. I grinned when the status updates indicated that there were working filesystems on the mirrored hard drives! And there! My chewie partition was alive and well, passing the journal recovery! YES!!!

And then I saw the kernel panic! The hardware is fubarred. It could be the CPU, memory, or the motherboard itself. The last message indicated a video card issue, but with memory or CPU failures, it could be deceiving, a false lead. I wouldn't be able to initiate a system back-up this evening to other media, but I did find out that my old life still lived! The $200 desktop PC I purchased for my children will come in handy for recovering my old life. The two disks won't be able to live in the small form-factor machine, but the hardware will be instrumental in reading the data and backing it up elsewhere.

I have hope again that my folly of poorly administered personal backups may not be a complete failure after all. (I had disparate backups scattered over different media, but nothing concrete or systematic.) What's sad is that I know how important such backups are, and yet I still had the hubris to believe that my little Linux system in the basement would live forever. Or perhaps it was simply my busy life as a husband and father that shifted my priorities.

Could I live without the data on those two hard drives downstairs? A few years ago, I probably would have become a hermit in that basement while trying to recover the old vestiges. Now, I realize I have a little more time.

So, what are plans then for the Wookimus network? The Buffalo NAS device is aging and the firmware buggy. Although Meghan still backs up data to the mirrored drives there, these drives themselves are not backed up anywhere. We've paid for CrashPlan, and I'm actively backing up Meghan's iMac with it. I'm tempted to purchase a RaspberryPi and build an OpenMediaVault host and replace the Buffalo, then install Bittorrent Sync.

I think it's high-time for a new personal Debian laptop. The ASUS UX51Vz-XH71 15.6" Ultrabook Silver Aluminum has caught my eye. It doesn't have as much memory capacity as the MacBook, but 8 Gig is plenty for my own use. It's powerful, light, and I've found evidence of successful Linux use. I know that it contains proprietary hardware, but what doesn't these days. I wish I could be more idealistic these days, but not everyone can be Richard Stallman and still make a living; Yoolong is a bit short on power.

Linux Printing Has Come a Long Way

Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has a whole new meaning...

Back in 1999, I had given up on Windows. It had crashed on me one too many times, the hideous "blue screen of death."  I had been playing with a dual-boot system with Debian GNU Linux and Windows 98, but the "burn it to the ground and re-install" cycle with Windows had left me distraught and down-trodden.  That fateful Winter night, I had wiped Windows from the hard drive completely.

Linux had many challenges in 1999, not the least of which was printing.  In general, if you wanted to print from Linux, you had to make certain you had a supported printer or a network-enabled Postcript printer.  I happened to be using an unsupported HP Deskjet 722C, an inkjet printer that used a proprietary protocol over a parallel port cable.  After a bit of searching, I found a filter application for Ghostscript called pnm2ppa.  It was a hack, a crack of the protocol that enabled me to print in color to the relatively expensive printer I was in no hurry to replace.

Over the years, that printer has moved with me from apartments to houses, and it has performed with reliable quality.  Regardless, I had always wanted to pick up a copier/scanner/printer model, or at least pick up a copier/scanner.  Whenever I asked Meghan about it, she would "poo poo" the idea.  What we had worked just fine, plus I knew that buying any hardware that I intended to use with Linux would require some research to ensure it would perform.

At some point, I must have mentioned it to my mom in conversation.  She squirreled that fact away and later produced an awesome and unexpected Christmas present: an Epson Stylus NX420, an all-in-one inkjet printer!  I brought it home excited and unsure, but optimistic.  At worst, I could use Meghan's Mac Mini as a printer server, and at best, I might get lucky.

In the last few years, there have been a couple of very important changes in printer technology in the *NIX world.  The fist is the advent of the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), a new print server software.  It made setting up printers and sharing them on the network quite easy.  The second most important thing that happened was the adoption of the CUPS software by Apple for its new OS 10 platform.  With a popular hardware and operating system vendor championing the product, the printer vendors started supporting *NIX through proxy of Apple!

I shouldn't have been surprised when five minutes into researching driver options for the printer, I was able to find this gem: All-in-Ones (Multifunction Inkjet Printers) | AVASYS CORPORATION.  This company provides not only the printer drivers for Windows and Macintosh, but also provides Debian and Red Hat packages!  The scanner as well was supported by another set of packages!

What blows me away about this is that my mom, who is not a very technical person by any means, had simply picked a printer off the shelf that she thought was a good value.  Not only did it turn out to be good, but excellent!  Thank you Mom and Dad!

Helping out a Debianite!

The week started out busy and stayed that way.  Sunday afternoon, I spent my time helping out a good friend Renee with her Debian desktop.  Years ago, she and her beau (now husband, IIRC) had been pinched for cash and tired of the BSoD's.  Carl, an old co-worker of mine, and I suggested Debian as an alternative.  About once every two or three years, they ask for a tune-up, and Sunday just happened to be that day.  She was having issues playing sound and installing fonts.  Usually easy things to fix, I spent the better part of the afternoon debugging the sound issues.

Carl and I apparently weren't very thorough with our initial setup.  With the Gnome desktop, there is a nice little utility called gksu that prompts the user for either the root password of the system, or ties in to sudo, which apparently I mis-pronounce as "pseudo" rather than sue-doo, to allow a privileged user to enter their own password.  This is the same type of setup that Apple's Mac OS X uses.  Renee and Chris couldn't find the root password (easy enough to change), and gksu wasn't configured to use sudo!  Awkward.  As a result, over 460 packages needed to be updated for security or usability reasons since the release of Debian 5.0 (Lenny).

The second mis-step in our setup was forgetting to assign Renee's account to all the right local hardware access groups, such as "audio", "video", etc.  Sound setup in Lenny was a bit weird anyway, so I downloaded and installed the PulseAudio packages.  Took me a bit of hoop jumping and research to figure out all the right things to do -- turned out that it was a simple answer of adding Renee and Chris to two groups rather than one.  Only took me a couple hours to find that one.

Lastly, of course, was trying to get Flash 10 working in Lenny.  I found "The Perfect Desktop - Debian Lenny" to be extremely helpful.  The difficulty with Debian in general continues to be its strict adherence to what it considers free.  Adobe's Flash Player is definitely not free, and thereby does not warrant support. However, your browsing experience is seriously impinged upon if you do not include the latest Flash and Shockwave language.  Free software has a natural latency to this level of support, it's always behind when trying to provide compatible variants to otherwise restricted rights software.

I can only think of one acceptable alternative to Debian, though: Ubuntu.  Being a Debian-bigot, it's a natural fit for me.  For the average user, not the monkey-wrenching geek like me, Ubuntu has all the benefits of the Debian operating system with the polish and support you would like to see in a desktop operating system.  Ubuntu package selection is a bit more strategic than Debian's when it comes to "fitting in" to the current computing environment.  This has earned Ubuntu the "black sheep" stigma from some hard-core Free Software pundits, one that is undeserved in my honest opinion.  (I can guarantee you that it isn't on Richard Stallman's Top 10 list of Linux derivatives.)

Ubuntu would be a great fit for Renee and Chris.  I'm using it on my laptop and my work-desktop right now!  Works great!  Perhaps the next time they need a tune-up, I'll convince them to switch over.  Wulfgar, if you're reading this and tired of the BSoD's, look to Ubuntu!

Chad