Microwave Biscuit

A few days ago I posted about using rss2email to get Woot! e-mail alerts. After several days of it running, I’m confident that it works great! Every night at about 12:01 PM I get an e-mail from rss2email with the latest Woot. After posting my prior item, I modified the crontab entry a bit. It used to be:

01 00 * * * r2e run

Now it’s:

00,01,02,03,04,05,10 00 * * * r2e run

One of the nice features of rss2email is that it keeps track of new feed items. I figured I could set the cron entry to run at 12:00, 12:01, 12:02, etc. and then finally at 12:10 just in case. My thinking was correct - I only get a single email and by running the cron job every minute from 12:00 to 12:05 I can make sure I catch the new Woot! even if it’s a minute late getting posted or if my PC clock is off by 30 seconds. I did have to do some further “training” of GMail to not think it was spam but after 2 days of it, the messages come through automatically now.

Via: USB Knoppix 5.1.0 | Pen Drive Linux

I’m in the middle of downloading the required files to create a USB Bootable Linux install on my pen drive. I’ve been meaning to create a USB Linux install for a while and this looks like a pretty good tutorial. It also seems pretty easy. With bootable live CD’s so prevalent it may seem redundant to create a USB Linux install but I think that I’ll have an easier time of storing some of my personal files and such on it. I also have a rarely used 2 Gig pen drive just asking for this sort of setup.

Also on the site is a tutorial for installing XUbuntu but I’ve been meaning to play with Knoppix for a while.

I’ll report my progress…

Via: Debian Package of the Day

After reading this post, I had to install figlet. It’s listed as a totally useless therefore essential tool. It basically will create big useless Ascii text.

Useful? No. Fun, yes!

This happens to me on every Windows PC I ever use. In the Add/Remove dialog you get multiple versions of software like this:

Now, I know that if I were to select either version listed here FireFox would be gone and I’d end up with an orphan Add/Remove for one of them. I wouldn’t care if there actually was two different versions of FireFox on my machine that could me installed and/or removed independently. However, this is obviously not the case. During some upgrade process a duplicate entry was created here.

Ubuntu and Linux aren’t perfect with this sort of thing either but it’s more bothersome to me in Windows. While I’d love to flatten this machine and install Ubunut on it, it’s my work laptop and I have to run Windows on it.

This is why I shouldn’t read the Sunday paper - Local antitrust fight goes to D.C. | Dallas Morning News

I had yet to finish my coffee when I read this article. It got me all worked up. I think that no company should dictate minimum sell prices of their goods. Just the other night I went to the local CompUSA which is going out of business (apparently they are closing half of their stores) to see what great deals I might find. I ended up not buying anything but I was shocked to find that while everything was heavily discounted the Apple stuff was only 5% off which I’m sure is due to Apple’s insistence of minimum pricing. In all honesty, I probably wouldn’t buy anything Apple (unless there was a really sweet deal on one of those gigantic cinema monitors) but it just ticks me off that if I opened up a computer store and wanted to sell Apple products at 20% off I couldn’t.

Like many geeks, I often anxiously await the latest product offering from Woot. Yes, there are several online places that offer an alerting service but why give your email and such away when you can do it yourself?

Howto:

1. Install the rss2email package on Ubuntu.
2. From a terminal type: r2e new me@myaddress.com - This creates a “new” account for rss2email
3. Type r2e add http://www.woot.com/Blog/Rss.aspx - Add the woot RSS Feed in.
4. Type r2e run - that executes the program.
5. Wait anxiously to see if the email arrives. Mine originally got caught in GMail’s spam filter - so I had to tweak it to not think it was spam.
6. If you get your email, schedule a cron job to run around 12 Midnight central time (GMT - 6) that has r2e run in it.

To add a cron entry you do the following:

1. Type crontab -e in a terminal - this is “edit your crontab entry”.
2. Enter the following parameters:

01 00 * * * r2e run

Save and close.

This sets the cron job to run at 12:01 local time for me (if you are in a different time zone you will need to enter a different time for 00).

We’ll see if it works tonight at 12:01 local time.

I have a slightly older laptop that seems to be a little broken. It’s a HP Pavillion zv50000 that I bought for my wife several years ago. The problem with it I think is in it’s cooling. It gets too hot too often which leads to shortened Hard Disk life. In the ~3 years or so that I’ve owned it, I’ve had to replace the hard disk 3 times. I tried lots of things to improve airflow around it by buying some stands, etc. to lift it off the desk but as I said it keeps chewing up disks. I’ve replaced my wife’s PC with a different laptop and this HP was sitting idle under my desk with no hard disk in it. In the March 2007 edition of Linux Format Magazine they have a review of several different BitTorrent clients for Linux. I use Azureus as my bittorrent client but as the magazine says, it’s resource intensive. Right now they “java” process which runs Azureus is taking ~700 mb of memory. I’ve read a few things online about how to trim the memory usage but I haven’t had much success in getting it down. In any case, the article does have some pretty favorable things to say about TorrentFlux which is kind of a web based front end to bt which can be run on Apache. I attempted to install it on my “main” machine but I couldn’t really get it to work - I seem to have some issues with my install/config of both Apache and MySQL. I did really want to try it out though so I decided to attempt a fresh install on my broken laptop.

Here’s what I did - I grabbed the 6.06 LTS Server version of Ubuntu figuring if I was going to have a somewhat dedicated server that would be a good choice. After burning the ISO image to CD I put a spare 20 Gig drive in the laptop and booted up. The server edition of Ubuntu installs blazingly fast - I selected the “Install LAMP Server” option (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and various P’s PHP, Python, Perl). I had no luck in configuring the built-in wireless card to connect to my network so I plugged it in to the network using a cable which then connected it to the network. The default install does not include any desktop so after it finished installing I was at the command prompt which is really how it should be with a “server”. Who needs all of the extra resource requirements for a desktop environment running on a server? I then connected to the server via a browser session and sure enough Apache was configured correctly and I could see the default page.

I am pretty comfortable with the Linux command line and using Apt-Get, aptitude, etc. to install various other software packages that I might want but I did feel that I would personally have an easier time of it with a GUI. So, I used apt to install XFCE (xubuntu-desktop meta package) figuring that was the most light weight desktop to install. After booting up into XFCE, I then went about configuring the server to my liking. I installed ProFTP so that I would have FTP access to the server, PHPMySQL Admin, and then by enabling the extra repositories, I found a package of TorrentFlux. Installed it and away I went!

Now, after all of that effort (setting up a new machine, etc), I had big hopes for using TorrentFlux. I downloaded a torrent file and then uploaded it to TorrentFlux via my “main” machine (after going through some initial configuration). If I had never used any other bt client I might have liked it but I’ve been spoiled by Azureus and TorrentFlux is not nearly as good (Linux Format Magazine rated Azureus the best too). The feature set is not nearly as complete although it is a good idea.

The final analysis is as follows:

1. Setting up a machine with Ubuntu server edition is remarkably easy. The LAMP setup included everything that I wanted for the purpose I was using it. I didn’t need to install any further packages to get TorrentFlux running - all dependencies were met in the base install.
2. XFCE is very light weight on the machine. The loads were minor which is nice for an older machine.
3. As geeky as I think I am, having only a command line to work from is a bit more than I can handle - I need a gui for some things.
4. TorrentFlux is a great idea and I would concur with Linux Format’s rating of 8/10.
5. As much as I dislike the resource intensive nature of Azureus and Java it does work better than just about anything else out there that I’ve found (yes I’ve used KTorrent too).
6. Based on the noise coming from the fans under even moderate load the HP machine will likely chew threw another disk in no time at all.

There is a relatively new round of commercials on TV for NetZero internet service. The “theme” of these commercials is the NetZero mission: The best internet service for the price (paraphrasing here). In the commercials they talk about staying true to their mission which I find completely ironic. For those that don’t remember, NetZero came on the scene in the late 90’s with the concept of free (but ad sponsored) internet access. At one point I signed up for an account as I thought it might come in handy to have dial-up access from time to time. As I remember (I could be slightly off) you browsed in kind of a window that had banner ads all around it. It wasn’t completely awful and of course you do get what you pay for.

So, as near as I can tell their original “mission” was to provide FREE internet access. I’m not sure how their current organization lives up to that original mission. If you poke around their site (link omitted on purpose) there is some reference to a free 10 hours per month plan but good luck figuring out how to sign up for it.

If I HAD to get dial-up access (thankfully I don’t) their deals aren’t bad - they have a pretty good feature set for $9.95 a month. It’s just that the present ad campaign about staying true to their original mission annoys me.

There was a virtual machine that I had set up as an Ubuntu 6.06 machine a long time ago. In a different brand new virtual machine I installed one of the Feisty Herd CD’s and it went so well I thought I’d see what happened when I attempted to upgrade my 6.06 machine. Not being one to read directions or figure out the best way to do it, I just edited my sources.list changed it all to Feisty and dropped into a terminal. I typed sudo apt-get update and then sudo apt-get dist-upgrade. Well, turns out that may not have been the best choice….

I pretty much completely broke the machine. I had major issues with the X server and couldn’t get it to load for anything. I kept getting module version mismatch errors. As previously posted, I opened up a bug in launchpad and the general consensus was that I should try to re-update and see if it got fixed. Unfortunately, it never did. Every couple of days, I’d boot up the VM, run an update and see what happened. Each time it would download a handful of new packages, install them and then not start up the x server with the same set of messages.

Today I decided to go for broke. I went into recovery mode and when it finished booting I typed “apt-get remove xserver-xorg”. Scary stuff, I know, but what did I have to lose? It un-installed all of the xserver packages and then I rebooted. As you might imagine I got a whole bunch of issues but it eventually did boot into recovery mode. Then I did “apt-get install xserver-xorg” and it did so, then started an X session! Woohoo! Now the big test was a full reboot without going into recovery mode. I did that and it all works. I got a nice new Feisty desktop and everything is all well now.

I don’t know that I’d recommend to anyone to do the steps I did, however, I was determined to not give up on this VM. It would certainly be easy enough to just delete it - there wasn’t anything important on it - it was just a testing VM however I felt that I might be able to save it if I just kept at it. Today I got my reward.

I am a firm believer in content over style and recognize the following:

1. People will visit my blog for the information contained, not how “cool” it looks.
2. Just because you can add all kinds of do-dads and such to a blog doesn’t mean you should.
3. Styles and Topography should enhance the experience of the blog not get in the way of it.

With those tenets in mind, I’ve been messing with the theme of this blog a bit. I’m not terribly interested in paying for the right to customize the CSS (WordPress Upgrade) as if I was going to pay for that, I’d just assume pay for hosting and then have the ability to customize everything I want. So, I’m stuck with the built-in theme options. I’ve changed the theme today to “Sapphire” as I find it pretty nice. I may put in a custom header image as I had in the last theme I was using.

If you happened to be visiting over the last 30 minutes or so you may have noticed a whole bunch of themes being tested out. Many of the built-in themes are very nice but most of them had things about them that I didn’t like - image presentation, blockquote style, “code” style, etc. This theme does a pretty nice job with all of it I think.

I’m happy to hear feedback if there are objections or opinions about the current style in use.