Velo, Rapido: This is about a few different things.

Tagged technology

Bootable

Next task: make a bootable USB thumb/stick/drive/thing to rescue a busted machine (In this case, little old Brahms). dkg, as ever, knows what's what and gave me great advice: Bootable USB sticks are just like bootable hard drives for modern computers. Partition them with parted, use mkfs to create a filesystem on them, use grub-install to give them a bootloader, put a kernel and an initial ramfs on them, configure the bootloader to load them, and away you go. He even offered me his filesystem rescue debirf image with the latest 686 kernel from debian unstable.

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Ask Cherry Crush: Maps and Short Urls

From a friend ... I have some twitter/google map questions. Like, how do i make a short link for twitter posts? You're looking for a URL shortener. There are Twitter (and Status.net/Identi.ca) apps that incorporate them, or you can use one manually. Bit.ly offers you a lot of analytical tools, bk.ly is Brooklyn specific (see also, ph.ly). Technically, there are zillions of them. I use Twhirl, which shortens URLs with Bit.ly.

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Blargh, Blimey, RAM, DVD

Okay, lazyweb: Why can't I play DVDs and why, when I have installed in my computer two RAM modules of 2GiB each, does my computer have 2.9 GiB of the RAMS? Why? On the DVD end, I have installed one million things and gotten from an error in Totem ("no uri handler implemented for dvd") to Totem quietly crashing when I try to play a DVD. VLC spins the disk and then stops. /var/log/messages shows this after trying to run VLC: Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.901791] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906376] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906386] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Sense Key : Illegal Request [current] Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906397] Info fld=0x98d0 Dec 13 13:10:02 luna kernel: [10853.906402] sr 1:0:0:0: [sr0] Add. Sense: Media region code is mismatched to logical unit region

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Software’s Never Neutral

Via dkg, whose excellent essay Technical Architecture Shapes Social Structure you all already read when we first published The Organic Internet, comes an academic variation on that theme: Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching. Normally I'd bookmark and move on, but this is extra interesting ...

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Free as in Google

I haven't been following the Google Books lawsuit and settlement proposal too closely because I don't often think of myself as a book author. Not in the sense that Google Books or the settlement will impact my livelihood. It hadn't actually occurred to me that the settlement might impact my freedom. But a press release from the Software Freedom Law Center caught my eye: Today SFLC filed a letter with the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York objecting to the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement. In the letter, filed on behalf of the FSF and author Karl Fogel, SFLC asks the court to consider the impact of the settlement upon members of the class who have distributed their works under Free licenses. I'm embarrassed to confess I had been thinking that this lawsuit (You are of course familiar with the lawsuit. Right?) was more academic than all that. I was thinking about what it means that Yahoo, Amazon and Google get to go sit in a darkened room somewhere (an expansive board room with a fine catered lunch, more likely) and rewrite copyright law all by themselves. I wasn't thinking about freedom.

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Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System

I'm just saying. Maybe you could call it "what happens when systems go terribly, terribly wrong." And you know I like systems. You can read the thoughtful blog post (and you should) but you can also just stare at the chart until your eyes start to swim.

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Lesson Learned

We've got two packages running, OpenX and Phorum, that seem to make a lot of database connections. Sometimes so many that the whole database runs out of connections. Phorum gets hammered by bots looking to exploit vulnerabilities in the code (and sometimes finds them). OpenX is just greedy. Or ...

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This Time I Mean It

The Frankenserver must go. Today we were having a little bit of woah with the old Phorum installation. Does seem to get derailed, that one. More on that later: the net result was that Apache was choking to the point where I couldn't even ssh into the machine. I phoned Ye Olde Rackspace, who confirmed Franken's unresponsiveness and had the data center reboot it. And for a split second I was able to get in and run top, which showed me a whole lot of apache processes. More than I've ever seen before. I quit top and tried to stop apache: sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop That failed the first time but being a persistent sort of woman I tried it again. And then I called Rackspace to find out what they were doing. We have a support contract with them, you see, and I realized that ... 1) I don't want to work at cross purposes with their esteemed technical whiz-kids, and 2) I don't want to do work someone else is already doing. I've got other things to do. Blogs to read. That was a joke, by the way. I don't read blogs at work. Ever. So I get them on the phone and whiz kid one says to me "well, I'm just going to restart apache here and see what that tells us." What restarting apache tells us. And before I could say "hang on" he did. Just in time to snarl my request for the tail of apache's error logs. It just went down hill from there, the upshot being that I mostly resolved the problem despite Rackspace. I'm done paying $350+/month for Rackspace. They aren't earning it. I've been moaning about this server for eons. When last we left off I was contemplating life without a service contract. I can see now that I don't need this service contract. Liberating revelation, that one. Elastic clouds scare me because I don't understand them. Also because I don't think I can have a static IP on a cloud. VPS I understand. So now I'm sketching my new server and workplan. Here's what I think I'm installing:

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PDF -> XML -> Calc

Forget for a moment that I'm trying to play like I'm more than a tech. Or recall Joanne this morning in the rain in the garden after Lucia and I collected coconut shells to mark out an area to plant her onions in, "so funny, computers seem like the last thing I'd imagine you working on. You're someone who should be working outside! I can't imagine you not working with plants!" If only she knew. So I have a PDF. PDFedit will convert it to a pretty crappy XML document. A round of non-greedy vim searches: :%s:<font .\{-}>::g :%s:</font>::g :%s: bbox=".\{-}"::g Followed by some attention to the numbers: :%s:period:. :g :%s:comma:,:g :%s:zero:0:g :%s:one:8:g :%s:two:2:g :%s:three:3:g :%s:four:4:g :%s:five:5:g :%s:six:6:g :%s:seven:7:g :%s:eight:8:g :%s:nine:9:g (and a bonus to anyone who can tell me how I totally borked my data with the series above ...) got me a really, really simple XML file of "lines" and "words".

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You could just use pipes.

Observation: I'm talking about feeding the borg here in a pretty big way. But I don't know that I have it in me to totally DIY this. Right now, when we post a new article, it is up to the editor to go through and identify all the ...

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