November 2008

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Memories of Edwards AFB and the Shuttle

November 30, 2008 in Current Events, Ideas | No comments

Way back when, I worked over on Edwards AFB in a smaller campus known as “North Base”. We were located in World War II vintage hangars and I remember vividly a few events like an asbestos abatement project and the shuttles landing right outside the back of our place. We used to all walk out the back door and onto Rogers Dry Lake to watch the landings. As you can tell by the photo, Rogers Lakebed is huge; perhaps 17 miles straight across north to south. From a vertical distance it looks smooth and without any bumps or bruises. Up close it has lots. I remember the Air Force having to do projects to straighten it out, prepare it for various flight test missions, and also stabilize it after frequent rainstorms eroded parts of it away. It was all rutted and messed up looking. This story about the Endeavour made me remember working there; seeing the flights like the B1b.

I also did a bit of work on the boundaries of the Lakebed categorizing and classifying prehistoric and historic sites. If you did not know it, prior to the Edwards AFB facility; the area had a rich history in salt mining, historic settlement, even a historic railroad.

You feel its immensity stepping onto it. It has that larger than life feeling. Kinda like when I walked up to the edge of the Grand Canyon for the first time. But that introspection hit me even harder because the Grand Canyon is incredibly ancient and you feel its geology moving in your soul. The lakebed always seemed alive, flowing, moving though. The big forces in desert life acted upon it. Erosion and deposition are the holy twins of the desert ecosystem.

I’d like to go back one day to see the lakebed up close again; but somehow I doubt it will happen. Those days seem stuck in the backwater of things that were.

The day for Turkeys

November 27, 2008 in Current Events | No comments

Happy Day! We’re bbq’ing a turkey outdoors on the grill. Great way to do it and the turkey stays nice and moist. Also removes the whole negative “dry meat” syndrome. Cooking time is about the same and the Weber cooks things much more evenly believe it or not.

Using Linux in an Windows World

November 26, 2008 in Current Events, Linux | No comments

Here’s the scenario. I am probably the only US employee at Celestix Networks that uses Linux on a daily basis as my preferred OS. What helps me with it is that I am the product manager for the entire Linux strategy so its case of what my friend Vern called “eating your own dogfood”. But there are issues or at least challenges. One is email and collaboration. We use an exchange server which for whatever reason Evolution cannot reach using the exchange plugin. We’ve implemented a Brutus MAPI server but still cannot seem to get it right.  There are not a lot of documentation or discussion level details on what exactly you do after getting a Brutus server install going. On the Linux side there are debian package to download and install which add a connection entry to evolution for Brutus. But what happens next? There are no use case documents I can find for Brutus.

A second thing which has thankfully diminished over the course of time are the basic things like printing. Witness that our shared printer hanging off a Windows 2003 Server is accessed from Ubuntu by merely searching for available networked printers and attaching to it. Since its an HP, it works very well.

A third thing is accessing network shares. On Windows, I would do a “net use” command or just open start -> run and type in “\\nameofserver\share”. But don’t despair. One can mount a server using gnome commands almost as easily. Servers that are successfully authenticated against using AD logins are included on the gnome desktop.

Finally, file sharing. With the advent of OpenOffice 2.x and now 3; this is easier by degrees. Yet some files still do not show up correctly or require editing using Windows. Things like Visio files. For these rare occurrences, I use VirtualBox or VMware Player.

Collaboration and Mail (remix). This is an issue “when” the exchange server does not work. I just use IMAP support which thankfully remains operational and accessible. For calendaring and contact management, I just use either my Windows Mobile 6 Smartphone or Outlook Web Access. The WM6 phone is a life saver in a few ways and its the center-piece of collaboration for me.

So those are the challenges. What are the perks? Well, I hear “water cooler” arguments almost every day about this antivirus and that malware. Those things don’t bother me. I hear stories about terrible tales with IE 7. Firefox is gentler and works with our products and web tools quite well.  I think if I worked in support or sales it would be tougher; but we use web tools a lot like SalesForce which runs happily in Firefox just as well as IE. I also use web tools for collaboration over silos constrained to a specific OS.

You can do it too! You have to find the challenges and the perks.

Tarski and this Blog

November 22, 2008 in Weblogs | No comments

Rarely do I blog about blogging; but I have to mention the theme that this blog operates off of and say a word of thanks. I’ve found the Tarski theme to be a very nice wordpress world to live in. Thanks to everyone at wordpress as well. I’ve been maintaining this sordid self exploration and peurile engagement for some years now. This is the best I’ve seen my dusty travels presented yet.

Thanks to Ben at Tarskitheme for the nice and versatile theme. I love the flexibility and looks.

The crazy repeating keyboard

November 21, 2008 in Uncategorized | 1 comment

Ubuntu 8.10 is not an evolutionary step; its more like a smaller baby step forward. The interface is not consistently different and there are things which kinda bug me about it. There is this crazy problem with keyboard repeating which drove me crazy. Any letter seems able to stage some crazed repeating thing on laptops or desktops. One letter becomes three way too quick and the gnome keyboard preferences don’t do anything.

I tried a few different things like running keyboard rate commands, xset, but finally think I licked it by inserting this into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section “ServerFlags”
Option “AutoAddDevices” “off”
EndSection

Then logging off and back in again. When you do this, some or maybe most of the special keyboard commands won’t work; but the magic is that the gnome keyboard preference will work. Now you can set them to what you want and you can tell the difference. Now, simply comment out the above three things after making changes that work for you and logout and back in again. For me, this fixes the crazy keyboard things.

This seems to have been around through a few iterations of Ubuntu and I have never noticed it in my Debian Lenny desktop at work.

Other than that, there are a few things I have started using more and more. These were around before but I have gained an appreciation of them. One is SSHfs. This is a great way to mount, use, and securely manage a remote file system. The second is TrueCrypt. Install it and manage those files you want secure.

That’s my ongoing report for Ubuntu Ibex. I like it; but its not some big step forward as I thought it would be. Its more like a nicer environment bounded by somewhat growing amounts of splurg and sloth. Gnome is getting very heavy duty these days I think. Luckily most of my systems, laptops included, seem to do fine. As a last word, suspend and hibernation just work now.

Thanks !

What’s better than SSH?

November 16, 2008 in Linux | No comments

You all know the drill. You want a way to mount remote file systems. You can do NFS if you want because you built a nice little Ubuntu server which provides the legendary NAS-like functionality. You can do samba mounting if you want. I’ve found issues with Openoffice 3.0 on samba mounts though where files cannot be “saved as”. I don’t want multiple copies of all the files all over the place. These are all excel, word, and powerpoint files I use for work each day. Better to mount the one directory and then do edits once and rsync to my work laptop.

Like I said, I can do NFS mounting if I want; but that does not do much for me remotely. Enter SSHfs on Ubuntu. Here’s the few tricks to this treat.

  1. apt-get install sshfs
  2. add yourself to the fuse group
  3. create a mount point perhaps off of /media or something
  4. optionally add the commands to the /etc/fstab

By adding the mount commands to /etc/fstab, you can simply do as a user mount /nameof/mountpoint and voila! Now you are all securely mounted up. You can increase the timeout for SSH by adding a user level config file to $HOME/.ssh and add something like this ServerAliveInterval 120 and that will increase the timeout.

Want a step by step? Do a google. I’m purposefully not including links because I learned by doing and you can too! This is a great way to securely mount stuff, edit files, make changes, then save it all.

Tougher than Not…

November 14, 2008 in Uncategorized | No comments

The days lately have been pretty busy at work. We’re preparing roadmaps for calendar year 2009 and its kept me busy defining our strategies for new and updated products around our core platforms. I’m more of a classic product manager at work and tend to get involved in all phases of our products, their support, knowledge bases, maintenance. I think the company appreciates the effort and my boss tends to tell me often that the work is superb and he appreciates the extra effort.

Its Friday night though and there is no work to do tomorrow. I have a few things I want to get done over the next days. One is to have some man sodas that will smooth the week away. They always leave me in a relaxed state, having some alone time, considering not very much at all.

I’ve been messing with Ubuntu 8.10 for about a week now. Its mostly good but there are some frustrations. The keyboard repeat rate seems all fubared and often makes a clickety clackety thing and adds extra keys when I least want them. This does not exist on Hardy. The core operating system seems nice but its hardly revolutionary. Its more of a small jump forward in the punctuated equilibrium of Linux distributions. It also seems more full of fluff and stuff. Almost like a Winnie the Pooh of a distribution almost bursting at its seams sometimes. Still, its light years nicer than the rpm distributions I’ve grown to hate and I like its release mantra.

I could go back to classic Debian but it irritates me as well with its staggered release schedules. I could run Sid there though and that would be fun :)

I’ll try to return to this environ this weekend and write something of more reason. For now, its Man Soda time!

The Console on the Linux

November 10, 2008 in Linux | No comments

So, for you windows users; you probably think something that’s typed into a console must be less comprehensive, less wondrous, more basic. Well, on Linux, console applications are a wonder to behold. There’s a few that just steal the icing off the cake. Like:

Screen – screen is this wondrous little tool that is big. It can make you more productive, make sure you don’t lose work, and give you a chance to start a thing at work, let it work at the task while you drive home. Then whammo! Done!

Rsync – well, rsync is something that has to be delved into to be appreciated. Its one of those tools which seem so basic. A file synchronization tool; but it does so much more.

MOC – what da heck is MOC? Music on Console of course. Way back when, I used this other one called mp3blaster which is not a living thing any longer; but is still plenty cool. Then there is MOC. MOC rocks the music collection by freeing you from graphics applications. Grok the Moc.

BTW, if you use Windows, I’m sincerely sorry… You cannot play in this playground. Go get the Ubuntu and join in. There is no activation key to fret over and the price of admission is well worth it.

Lives of Quiet Desperation

November 9, 2008 in Ideas | No comments

I’m mesmerized by Bob Kull’s story and cannot wait to read his book. This happened before with Into the Wild and I felt it stirring with Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey and Thoreau’s Walden Pond.

There is something elemental, riveting, that transcends. Perhaps its something I need or want or vision. Perhaps I need that journey that Bob describes. We each partake of the journey differently though. Many of us though cannot do solitude. An anthropologist friend once asked me if I knew the difference between solitude and loneliness. I said no. He said,

Solitude is being alone and loving it. Loneliness is being alone and hating it

This has stayed with me since my days of solitude in the forests and deserts.

Update….

Someone else told me about this differentiator between the two as well:

Solitude is being alone and not lonely; Loneliness is being lonely and alone. It strikes me we can we find solitude even in a mish-mash of people but something else calls, beckons. Somewhere some of us (me included) need that solitude even if we never find out the real truths. Perhaps as others have pointed out, there are no real truths. But it may be the search and not the result that matters. Thanks to Will for the email.

Ubuntu 8.10 Upgrades

November 8, 2008 in Linux | No comments

I recently did the upgrade on my work and home laptop to Ibex or Ubuntu 8.10. It seems to work pretty well; but I don’t see an innovation to things any longer. We get smaller gnome updates which I like because it stabilizes things. But gone are any exciting moments like 8.04 shipping with the beta of Firefox 3.0.

Perhaps I need to go back to Debian Sid to regain that excitement and thrill. Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 are usable and I can be productive and I’m getting spoiled with the 6 month release cycles.

When I go to use Vista, I’m always kinda shocked at its interface and its strangeness. UAC on; its almost unbearable. UAC off; it works. But its still Vista. Perhaps Windows 7 will be different…

Meanwhile, the brown one seems to work; but I’ve read of issues with wifi. The promise around the Linux side of things is that developers “use”. And being users they get hit by the same things we all do. Perhaps that’s an incentive to fix things quicker.

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