wiredfool

I did Folklife on Saturday this past weekend. It’s a wonderful collection of where we all come from, and some of where we’re going to. Jason Webley (pictured) was busking a bit, and will be having a CD release party at the Paradox on Saturday. Some of the better ones that I heard were: Mango Son, a really fun Carribean/Latin dance band, the Guarneri Underground, a wild afro celtic electric band, and some Samba players.

I’ve got a few more publishable pics from the weekend, but they’re not quite ready yet.

We’re pretty sure that the answer isn’t Bertrand Russel.

Or Ernest Hemmingway.

But 2 teams put that down for “Who are Bert and Ernie named after”

Vermont seems to be a safe bet for anything having to do with a state. And I’m embarassed to admit that of the 4 longest bridges in the world built after the Verrazano Narrows, I only got the country right for 2, and didn’t get any of the bridges. (Although in further research, I did know the expressway that goes over the one in Japan, and there is a 5th bridge that didn’t make the answers. Not that I knew that one either.) But I did know that they crashed more cars in The Blues Brothers than in any other movie.

But in the last round of the night somehow my team came up with a winning combination of knowing something about e-bay, the relative abundance of blood types, and the masonic symbol.

So I guess being a repository of useless information can be useful sometimes.

Did a couple of days work on the garden this weekend, now that we actually have spring weather. This one is minus three pricker bushes, a bunch of weeds, some irises that will be transplanted, and a bunch of evergreen bush encroaching from the neighbor’s yard.

And now there’s a foot or more of compost spread all over it. This is going to be for things that like some shade, since after April, this garden gets no direct sun.

The weather has finally warmed up. The sun is sort of out. The cats are out. And I get 3 bars of signal to the airport hub inside.

I’ve finally moved my daily use desktop machine to OSX. 14 months after it first came out, 14 months after installing it once, and after 26 months of having OS9.04 be what I looked at every day for 10 hours.

I’ve moved other machines already. The laptop. Servers. Random testing on light use machines. But not the one machine that if it stopped working would throw me into disarray. I’m not normally someone to upgrade. I’ve been bitten by the transitional downtime more than making up for any gains that get from the new system. So what’s changed this time?

Well for one, I’m forging ahead without regard to downtime. But apart from that, everything I need is now on OSX. 10.1.4 is fast enough on a g4/400. Frontier is stable. Postgres is nice. Adium is better than AIM. I have three browsers in the dock, and none of them are MSIE. It no longer looks new and wierd, now that I’ve lived with it on the laptop for a while.

In short, it’s fast enough and it does everything I need it to on 2 year old equipment. Which is more than I can say for OS9 anymore.

OsX was not the only unsable process on the machine that was having freezes and a kernel panic. One of the frontier processes running on that machine was suffering from about 3 unexplained quits or freezes per day. I”m not really sure what was happening, since my monitor scipt doesn’t report the difference between a quit and killing and restarting a hung process.

I replaced a 512 meg stick memory on that machine on friday.

Since that time, I’ve had no unexplained quites, freezes or crashes. None. In this time, I would generally expect about 9 interventions by the monitoring script, and possibly one crash resulting in a log from the os crash logging process.

To be sure, this is only 72 hours of data, but it looks very promising. I need to wait about a month to see if the os stability improves.

I managed to wade through the lines for ‘Star Wars 32, the search for more money’ to see ‘About a Boy’ last night.

It’s a riot. The entire theatre was roaring at times. Especially at the dead duck incident. Hugh Grant is the perfect ass. (and he has the coolest toys. A g4 cube with apple studio display (15″) and OSX. A perfect modern condo. A tt coupe.)

They captured the feel of the book just perfectly, even better than the rather good screen adaptation of High Fidelity (also written by the Nick Hornby). For one, they actually set it in Britain. And Hugh Grant carries more of the emptiness of being a nobody that just didn’t come through as clearly in High Fidelity.

Happy Syttende Mai! Happy Birthday Grandpa!

Syttende Mai is Norwegian Constitution Day, so that’s kind of like being born on the 4th of July.

*** Osx Crashes.

First time: Hmmm, that’s wierd.
Second time: I bet it’s hardware.
Third time: Time to replace the memory.
Fourth time: Gives me an opportunity to replace the memory during unscheduled downtime.

Of course with os9, you never thought that it was hardware, since there were so many other things that could go wrong.

FWIW, this one of the screens you don’t want to see.

Download Last Updated 4/17/02

***What it is

If you’re administering a Frontier server on OSX, you need a way to set up port forwarding at startup. This archive contains a startup item that will set up portforwarding for all your machines ip addresses from port 80 to port 8080.

***Installation

Download. Get a command line prompt in the download directory. Use the following commands:

pwd
cd /Library/StartupItems 

if the cd command fails, type

sudo mkdir /Library/StartupItems
cd /Library/StartupItems 

Then type (replace /path/from/pwd with the path that is printed by the pwd command)

sudo tar -xvzf /path/from/pwd/portForward8080.tgz

This will expand the archive in the correct location to be execute on startup. If you want to, look at the script that is run (/Library/StartupItems/Multihoming/Multihoming ) to make sure that I’m not doing anything nasty to you.

Restart your machine to test that the command has been run properly. To check to see that it has been installed, run ‘ipfw show’ from a command prompt, and you chould see something like

[tibaby:~] erics% sudo ipfw show
00101        7        665 fwd 127.0.0.1,8080 tcp from any to any 80 in
65535 12709 53678 allow ip from any to any

The first line is the rule that was inserted, the second line is the default firewall configuration.

I [heart] logs. The more the better. when everything is logged, those wierd things that happen leave a foot print. And lots of times it’s obvious.

And if you can find the bug, it’s much easier to fix it.

*** Company in need of Clue
(or an entire train)

It looks like eHelp is in a fight with their users, customers and consultants.

It appears that one of their new products was purchased from another company, and in the transition increased in price about 6x. Their user community questions this move, and eHelp strikes back by firing their MVP and Certified Instructors for not toeing a company line.

eHelp meet cluetrain. I think that’s the light at the end of your tunnel.