Particularly injurious to me is that my ISP throttles encrypted traffic, which may explain why dialling into work is so painfully slow. What a bunch of arseholes.
]]>
Equally impressive was the monitoring for the decks - a big fat PA speaker, hooked up to the booth output (yay!) on the DJM 500 (yay! we love the 500) for fingertip deafness control.
Unimpressive was the way that the bar sound system was louder than the dance floor system.
Anyway, this gets me to thinking - maybe a page on basements/bars you can hire out for wee DJ nights is in order. So far I can think of:
Ad-Lib
O'Henry's
The Rockgarden
McPhabbs
The Iron Horse (maybe not, though...)
Anyone got any more?
]]>
smpatch is broken, but you already know that.
The dependency tree required for a working smpatch install is vast - so vast that Sun won't (didn't?) support anything less than a full end-user (SUNWCuser) install cluster for smpatch. Put together a minimal install for a boundary system and want to patch it? Get yo' Recommended Cluster on, dawg.
Any kind of slow-ish or intermittent Internet connection, and you'll have to supervise patch downloads, lest the 'Error: null' beast be awoken from its slumber (just re-run the 'smpatch download' - you'll usually get at least one more patch down before it errors out again). This is typical of the error messages from smpatch - largely useless, mostly misleading, occasionally deceitful.
Circular dependency in your smpatch database (recent kernel/zones patches, for example)? Ha ha haaaa, sucks to be you. smpatch can't figure it out, so you'll just get a load of patchadd failures during the smpatch run and subsequent shutdown. Re-running smpatch won't work, so don't bother. Time to hit SunSolve and work backwards down the dependency tree manually. You'd better hope SunSolve's feeling perky (gateway timeout anyone? Yeah, thought so), 'cause you're going to be there for a long time.
sconadm is as broken as smpatch, but with the added advantage of weird database issues at the Sun side which may stop you registering anything on your support contract. "Registration failed!" it will challenge. "What the fuck?" you will retort. Do not attempt to debug sconadm issues - your sanity is more valuable than your pride. Call Sun and get hold of SWUP_SUPPORT - they'll give you a script to run that will detail all the packages and patches missing from your system, including a Java update you can't install because your Oracle instance depends on a particular JDK version. But maybe that's just me.
Update Connection Proxy? Don't put yourself through the agony.
The enlightened (with similarly enlightened management) among us use PCA and avoid the smpatch/sconadm brain damage. I heartily recommend that you do too.
Giggle as your patches download without error. Rejoice in the HTML patch list output, with links to the READMEs for each patch. Bask in the glory of the caching PCA proxy.
Unfortunately though, the horror runs much deeper than just the automated patch tools...
The way patches are rolled is insane. Any one patch can update several packages, all-but-one of which may not be installed on your host at the time of patching. What happens if you install one of those not-installed packages after patching? That's right. The patch tools see all your applied patches, so won't recommend any of them again despite the just-installed, unpatched package on your system. Cue headaches trying to work out why you just got pwn3d by 1337 |-|4x0rz despite apparently being patched up to the eyeballs.
On no other Unix (that I've ever worked on at least) does a kernel patch clobber your sendmail config. This is a result of the way the patches are rolled, as above. You were told during the patchadd operation that the sendmail config had been moved, but you weren't expecting what was allegedly a driver update to affect userland apps, and you don't have the time to review 1000 lines of smpatch output for each of 30 odd machines at the end of a 12 hour shift caused by smpatch failing. to. download. every. second. patch, so you missed it. Say goodbye to the free space in /var as the mail spool fills up over the next few days. Say goodbye to your email-based system monitoring.
Ah well, I suppose it's a living. Say hi to SWUP_SUPPORT for me next time you raise an smpatch case. There's also a pretty good blog by one of the PST team at Sun which goes some way to explaining the madness: Patch Corner. Not pretty, is it?
]]>Penny Arcade's one of only two webcomics that I visit on a daily basis (the other being XKCD). A lot of it's heavy gamer stuff, and not suitable for general consumption, but some is brilliant in its own right.
As is the latest.
Also, funky 3D puzzle action to slake your geekish thirst.
]]>http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
An Organic Chemist's list of stuff he really doesn't want hanging around in his lab. Sounds a bit boring. Isn't.
I always disliked chemistry in school. Any subject that requires memorising a bunch of seemingly arbitrary facts isn't high on my list of things I'd like to make a career of. How ironic that Unix administration became my choice of 9-5.
Found on Dan's blog
I refuse to be disappointed twice.
If you need to find me, I'll be the guy in front of the DJ booth alternating between jumping around a lot and meerkating over the plexiglass to try to find out just where the fuck you get records like that.
]]>(I'm posting this, because I've seen a number of people on forums who've had the same issue I did, and none of the threads were answered. Hopefully Google will pick this post up.)
The main problem with the signups was that the return address hadn't been specified in MT, so the emails weren't being sent out to external addresses. Unfortunately, MT doesn't appear to email errors to the admin, so I didn't know about this until Koof pointed out that he couldn't sign up. Once that was fixed I created a new account with my work address as the email address, but the email bounced off the Exchange server with a 500 error for an invalid Return-Path.
MT (on Linux at least) sends mail through the sendmail utility (Postfix in my case) as the webserver user, so it wasn't setting the envelope address sensibly. This meant that everything appeared to be coming from the (unresolvable) local-network hostname, which was correctly rejected as invalid by the remote side. To fix this you can set up Postfix to re-write the envelope headers by editing /etc/postfix/generic, and adding, e.g.:
webserveruser@localhostname.localdomain webmaster@example.com
Then add:
smtp_generic_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/generic
to /etc/postfix/main.cf if it's not already there, then run:
postmap /etc/postfix/generic
and
killall -HUP master
to make the changes stick. Once that's done, mail from the webserver user will appear to come from webmaster@example.com and all should be well.
Here at ILikeJam we like Dan, and so have heeded his request that the bumph be made available far and wide.
I give you the Firepower Pill marketing PDF. Long may the Streisand effect continue.
It's not all bad news, though. No Sir.
Turns out the exchange my phone line hangs off is available to Be, so I can get some obscenely fast ADSL on the go. According to my calculations, I should get around 14Mb/s downstream, with a following wind. That's about twice what I was getting before Pipex fell on its arse, and about twenty times what I'm getting right now.
In short, Pipex/Tiscali can bite the big one. I'm grabbing my MAC and putting my Nike Airs on.
]]>No chance. The man's a genius. I nearly laughed my ass clean off. Rent it, buy it, whatever. Seriously.
In other entertainment related happenings, I'm guilty of indulging in some pop-indie type music in the form of MGMT - Time to Pretend. I think it's the synth that's doing it for me.
To atone for my sins, I've signed up for Fabric First to get Fabric CDs delivered direct to my place of residence on a regular basis. Good Times.
* - Sorry. I used to watch a lot of obscure films at obscure times on obscure channels, drunk, changing phase from early to nigh shifts.
]]>Firstly to Andy of the clan Wallace, who married his lovely missus Vicky in a vineyard in Oz on Saturday. Pictures on Andy's Facebook. I think he's been at the Just For Men - check out picture 3.
And to my bruv of the clan Stark and his lovely at-some-point-will-be-missus Mar, who got all engaged and stuff in India yesterday. So it turns out he's not a big gay after all, which asks more questions than it answers. Those pointy shoes...
And finally, congratulations to me. Because I'm awesome.
]]>Apple have probably the finest industrial design team available to humanity, and they very rarely disappoint. I knew the MacBook Air would be no exception, but I wasn't expecting this.
Holy shit that thing's thin. I knew they'd had a quiet word with Intel, and got them to make their processors thinner for the Air, but I wasn't expecting that. It's probably only the second time I've ever been genuinely amazed at the size of a piece of consumer electronics (the first time being when I saw a Nokia 8210 before they were released in Europe).
A lot of people are making a lot of noise about the fact that its battery is non-replaceable, its RAM is soldered-in, and that no-one will buy it because of this, but how many of you have ever replaced the battery in your laptop? And how many have added RAM?
Me neither.
Hell, I own a seriously decrepit IBM Thinkpad that's so old it can't even run Windows XP (it runs Fedora 8 just fine though), and even it's still on its first battery.
Anyway, Apple sell their wares on the back of only one thing: their UI engineering.
OSX, in terms of processing throughput, largely sucks. Apple held on to the PowerPC architecture for far too long while IBM flapped about trying to deliver the clock speeds they had promised. Video cards in every recent Mac have been weedy to say the least.
But OSX is without question the easiest to use and most visually impressive desktop environment available. The click-wheel on the late iPods is the only reason I own my ageing Mini, and their hardware is genuinely beautiful.
The two-finger twist and zoom in the linked video (as seen on the iPhone as well) also looks very cool, but I'm not sure how useful it really is unless you're editing images or video. Time will tell. People have even been messing about with the accelerometer in MacBooks for a while with some interesting results, so I'll reserve judgement on novel input methods in general for now.
I won't be buying a MacBook Air, but I'm glad that Apple are producing things like this because it raises the bar for everyone else. And that can only be a good thing.
]]>Not once have I seen them lay the cheese out in the obviously appropriate manner.
Thankfully, my choice of footlong (BMT on Italian, not toasted, lettuce, green peppers, onion, black pepper) involves no such three-sided dairy products, so their incorrect arrangement is more a minor affront to my sensibilities than a direct assault on my lunchtime sanity. The issue remains, nevertheless.
Subway - Eat Fresh Aggravation
]]>Feels good. Liberating. It's been 5 years in the making.
]]>My personal contribution to the world of Free software is largely limited to a fairly long shell script (multiburn) and a very simple HTTP server (jamserve), but it's nice to know that out there somewhere, someone is using and modifying my software to fit their own agenda. I've been in email contact with a few multiburn users (from various corners of the world, might I add) to work on new features, bugs, etc, but this is the first time I've found anything of mine living a life of its own.
I recently discovered that a German geezer by the name of Mathis is maintaining a fork of an old app I wrote. jmultiburn was a Java GUI for the multiburn script, originally written just for some Java and Swing practice, which was abandoned shortly after its inception due to changes in the way multiburn worked. Mathis's fork - jmultiburn-sermon - is very specific to his particular needs, but having tried it out it seems to work as advertised. I'm quite surprised by all this, as I didn't think anyone had even downloaded jmultiburn in the first place.
Coincidentally, a couple of days ago I threw together a new multiburn GUI; this time using Zenity. gmultiburn suggested itself as a name, for reasons to do with garden ornaments. Due to the limitations of zenity, it's very much 'workflow' based (i.e. you click through screens, selecting the options you want until it's done), but that's not too different to the way jmultiburn worked, so nothing of value was lost. There's a link to the gmultiburn script on the scripts page, but I may integrate it into multiburn if I get bored.
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