Posts Tagged ‘technology’
command-line, instructions, irc, learning, linux, software, software freedom, technology, ubuntu
In learning, linux on May 26, 2010 at 3:28 pm
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. Read the rest of this entry »
instructions, technology
In learning on April 22, 2010 at 7:51 pm
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. Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, software freedom, technology, ubuntu, whining
In linux on December 13, 2009 at 6:34 pm
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
Read the rest of this entry »
learning, organic internet, software, teaching, technology
In learning, various on October 6, 2009 at 9:17 pm
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 (and I haven’t even read it yet.)
learning, letters_home, politics, software freedom, storytelling, technology, truth_in_advertising
In learning, misc, various on September 10, 2009 at 5:12 pm
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
art, design, process, systems, technology
In various on July 14, 2009 at 4:34 pm
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.
command-line, linux, software freedom, technology
In learning, linux on May 19, 2009 at 4:12 pm
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 needy.
So I got smart. I limited the database users that those tools connect as to just a handful of connections. Which solved one problem: we stopped getting errors complaining that there were too many users connected to the database. But we started finding that the site would slow to an absolute crawl from time to time.
Talking it through with a friend, he pointed out that what I was probably doing was causing all the rejected database connections to queue up and wait. Kind of not the ideal solution, though I bet I could further fine tune things to prevent that as well. A better idea, since the Phorum forums are entirely archival at this point, was to restrict any and all post requests in the directories where Phorum is running. In htaccess you’d say something like:
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^(POST) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ – [F]
</IfModule>
So that’s where I’ve left things for the moment. We’ll see how we fair.
PS. How much do I love that you can make a firefox search bar out of anything?
linux, software, software freedom, technology, ubuntu, whining
In learning, linux on May 13, 2009 at 8:13 pm
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: Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, linux, myself, software freedom, technology, ubuntu
In various on April 15, 2009 at 10:43 pm
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”. Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, mapping, technology
In various on February 5, 2009 at 3:31 am
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 hyperlinks that belong in the article. Then the web producer takes the article and runs it through some HTML filters and actually anchors those links. Someone, usually, produces a list of keywords. It is all a little arbitrary, the keywords part.
You might already know this, but arbitrary makes me insane. Seriously. I need structure. And, we’re working on doing a better job of covering elections and so one thing I want is a scheme for tagging stories about a particular district. Also, there are a lot of geographic news aggregators out there. EveryBlock, Outside.in and I’d like to get our stories onto their maps more consistently. And, we have these district pages about our elected representatives, and they’re pretty thorough, but instinctively writers and editors link off to electeds’ own home pages instead of our internal pages about them, which isn’t the end of the world but doesn’t do a very good job of keeping people on our site.
So what I want, is to take a story that is still raw, and process it a few times, in an automated sort of a fashion, before it gets laid out. I’d like, for instance, to search for places and geocode them. Search for elected officials and candidates and link to our own pages about those people. And at least on the geocoding front someone said I could “just use pipes.” And so I’m trying to figure out how that would work. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t. I’m pretty sure I’d need to create a database of locations myself before Yahoo pipes would even begin to try to put the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building or the Board of Elections on a map.
But that is what I’m thinking about.
command-line, myself, software freedom, technology, whining
In various on February 4, 2009 at 12:12 am
One: kid brother is trying to password protect photos of our nephew. Our nephew. Kid brother did not bear spawn. But he’s struggling with htaccess and authentication. Among other things that make it kind of difficult (besides just starting from scratch being difficult) he’s stuck with FTP access. So here is the story, loosely.
Let’s say you have a directory. We’ll call it “hamish” just because that is a nice word. Yiddish, I think, for “cozy” or “familiar.” So you have a folder called /srv/apache2/example.com/hamish/ and you want to password protect it. You need a password file. You can make it in a text editor, call it .htpasswd and stick a line in it like:
waffle:N.KP5MOATfaew
If you know what a waffle is, or was, species-wise, you’ll be able to work with me. Otherwise, just figure someone’s user name is waffle and their password is not maple syrup. Unless it is. You could just use that line for now, or you can generate your own using the htpasswd command or using a random web gui. The latter method does present certain security issues, but it is convenient. The other file you’re going to need is the .htaccess file, and assuming your .htpasswd looks like mine and is called .htpasswd and lives in /srv/apache2/example.com/hamish/ then your .htaccess will look about like this:
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Not Just Anyone Can See This”
AuthUserFile /srv/apache2/example.com/hamish/.htpasswd
Require user waffle
Upload those two files and you’re good to go. Anyone who knows from waffle will be able to log in. It is true that you can do a lot, possibly even a shitton, with htaccess, but the easiest place to start is basic authentication.
Two: whining. Which goes about like so: last night, we were through debating the relative merits of naming an unnamed collaborative project Palante Tech (we decided against usurping Palante just yet) and we were almost through debating Flickr and Facebook and privacy and I said something about Gallery and how it frustrates me that I can’t get webdav to work. And dkg said something like “well, if you’re using F-Stop you can just export directly to Gallery. Why not do it that way?” I was just whining. I didn’t expect a solution. But sure enough, if you enable the remote module in Gallery 2 (and probably Galleries one and three as well) you can use f-spot to tag and name and order your photos and then export them to your gallery. I don’t really have many photos that aren’t of my wedding, so I haven’t uploaded any yet, but I’m definitely done storing my own photos on Flickr as of yesterday. Meantime, I’m uploading even more photos of Vermont fields.
Maybe I’ll eventually get rid of that dagged WARNING: block core.NavigationLinks doesn't exist. error, too.
If I whine about tags and tagging in WordPress will someone fix that for me, too? I want to choose from my existing tags. Grump.
technology
In various on December 18, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I manage a web server. Sometimes, I think I do a way better job than anyone who managed this server before me. Other times, I think I’m grossly under qualified. There is a lot that I don’t know. Too much, I sometimes suspect.
One thing I do know is that I’m paying a lot of money ($360/month) for a dedicated server that I’m pretty sure I don’t need. When I started to shop around for alternatives, I started to hear a lot about Virtual Private Servers from folks like Mayfirst. Actually only from Mayfirst — I didn’t shop around that intently. It wasn’t until I got a beer with Scott the other night that I had the perfect alignment of stars I needed to get me over my comprehension hurdle. Here’s the thing about not understanding everything all the time: it is hard to know what questions to ask. I know I need root on a machine. I need to be able to tweak the apache configuration at will. Can I do that with VPS? The answer is “yes” but somehow it took me a while to get to where I even knew how to ask that question. Read the rest of this entry »
money, privacy, security, technology
In various on December 8, 2008 at 9:52 pm
If you people knew how many personal finance posts I’ve started and walked away from, you’d … well, okay like five, but still. You’d something. I want to talk about saving and budgeting. I want to know how other people manage it. Are you structured? Loose? Are you putting money away for retirement? Based on a formula or a loose number or just “what my employer matches”?
I have a theory that we don’t, as a society, talk about money enough. We talk all the time about what we have, but we never say “shit, she’s got how much set aside for retirement? eeek.” Sometimes, gingerly, we talk about debt. I kind of know who of my friends is juggling credit card debt.
Mostly, I have no idea how people manage money or how much time my peers, my non-profit or self-employed early thirties peers spend thinking about financial planning. I spend approximately not enough time. N + I got about as far as deciding what we can put towards a mortgage and putting the difference between that and our rent aside. We decided to do that. We haven’t done that. We just kind of generally “try to save money” and haven’t assessed it beyond that. We do save money, but we haven’t set any goals in any practical way.
And, we haven’t done a very good job of combining our finances. We’re hovering in this half combined state, probably because we don’t have a budget and we both feel like we were doing just fine saving money before and it is a lot easier to contribute explicitly to joint expenses. Also because we just haven’t sat down and done it. That would be the other reason.
We do have a google spreadsheet, which is not the most f/oss solution, but there is a limit to how much tech support I can provide my spouse with. I’ve been eying an even less free solution, Mint.com because (and I”m just being honest here) it has pretty graphics. But: the only way to use Mint (which is basically like Quicken. Or Microsoft Money. Basically.) is to provide Mint with your bank login information and so far as I know my bank has no way for me to set up a second, outbound only, username. So Mint has a lot to say about privacy, but it still comes down to basic trust. I can believe them, or not believe them, but to use the service, I have to trust them with the same login information that I can use to withdraw my whole account. Or wire every penny to an offshore account.
Suddenly OAuth is sounding more and more appealing. OAuth is a scheme designed to let you decide who can access an account. If you want Facebook to be able to access your Flickr account, should you trust Facebook with your Flickr account password? Or should you tell Flickr “Yes, do allow Facebook user moi to access my account.”? In the latter case, if you decide that it is totally creepy and not at all okay that Facebook never, ever deletes your account, you can go back to Flickr and say “stop sharing with them, please.” Since I have a hard time pretending that I trust any one nifty webby service (delicious, flickr, facebook, twitter) more or less than any other, the whole OAuth hoopla kind of passed me by.
Now, however, I can see how the standard might be incredibly useful. Which would you rather do, trust some website to do right by your private data? Or trust your bank to cut that random website off when you ask them to? That’s what I thought.
Meanwhile, dear readers, have any of you decided to just go ahead and trust Mint.com?
command-line, linux, software freedom, teaching, technology, ubuntu
In various on December 5, 2008 at 1:19 am
Someone (Hsuan, to be precise, but that isn’t the point really) came to me recently with a corrupted SD card. Normally, I don’t do corrupted SD cards. I so do not want to be that guy that sits there and fixes what is broke. That doesn’t appeal to me at all. But when there is a command line involved, or a real mystery … I can find it hard to resist. You can see why my career as something other than a widget twiddler is not really taking off.
The answer, if you like to skip the narrative (hmph) is photorec. Which actually does amazing things for all manner of data recovery.
Here’s what I had before me:
[0 amanda@stillwell CANON_DC]$ find . -type f
find: Filesystem loop detected; `./DCIM/101CANON/101CANON' has the same device number and inode as a directory which is 1 level higher in the filesystem hierarchy.
So whatever, PhotoRec. Great. But people always want to know why. I do. So why? Why? David Henry, who I do not know, and yet kind of do know (the internet is sneaky that way) had a pretty good explanation, which I can’t really improve on:
I was long puzzled by filesystem stuff, until I realized much is done by elves!
Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, technology
In various on December 2, 2008 at 9:12 pm
Worth trying: sar -q for a rundown of queue lengths and load averages. Also pstree and I need to sort out what this:
I reniced the gzip process with a low priority level to reduce the load it’s putting on your server. I’d recommend running these scripts with a +19 niceness during periods low traffic to reduce the impact they’re having on your server.
means.
learning, scheming, software freedom, teaching, technology
In various on November 30, 2008 at 8:10 pm
When the free lunch comes with a seminar on affiliate marketing opportunities and other ways to make a buck with pyramid schemes, it is a very special kind of free, nothing like kittens or beer or flying birds or freedom. Google is that kind of free, whether you believe that or not. And, I’m falling for Google Calendar. I’ve fallen. Fallen so hard that I’m documenting it for you.Because one thing it does nicely is import events from a CSV file. The catch is that if your CSV file is set up wrong, you just get an error that says “Sorry, Calendar is unavailable right now” when that isn’t the problem at all. So, if you tried to be sneaky and note the required fields with an asterisk or a wee “(required)” you’ll just be told to come back later. You won’t be told that Google can’t read your document.
Anyway. This Works.
Here’s the thing: today, Google is hanging on strong. But we’ve been over this with Flickr and del.icio.us. You may recall that both were acquired by Yahoo in the last year or two. And you may recall that Yahoo was about to be bought by Microsoft back in May, a buying that didn’t happen when Yahoo stock was at $37/share. Last I checked it was hovering around $9/share (actually, it is back up to 11). My sources (okay, the guy on the bus) say that the campus and soda machines are worth about $8/share which means that somewhere around $8 it starts to be worth it to takeover the whole thing and start selling off the chairs at a yard sale. Which means that I have no idea who is going to “own” Flickr or del.icio.us in six months. Not me, I know that, because neither is free.
So I’m trying to migrate. It helps that Yahoo’s system means that I am never entirely sure how to log in to my Flickr account anymore. I don’t take notes when I do login. I can never remember my username (actually, I have two). So I installed Gallery and if I ever figure out how to it to talk to Ubuntu in the webdav tongue, I might actually use it. And I’m trying to figure out a good substitute for del.icio.us, which is now just “delicious” anyway, which is lame.
learning, scheming, teaching, technology
In various on November 30, 2008 at 7:41 pm
free association, that was. I’m not even going to explain. I tried, this morning, to go off on a decadent adventure in the freezing rain but it didn’t work out as I had planned. Choice Greene turns out not to have seats, the expanded Pioneer still doesn’t sell cranberries and there was a line out the door at Choice. So my own living room it is. We did finally turn on the heat.
Oliver wrote, though. mailx v. mutt
I’ve been playing around with some shell scripting on my laptop and reading about command line email clients. The book I have talks about mail and mutt but only talks about how to read and send email with them,
mutt seems pretty good for sending but with out the program on my laptop I don’t know if it will retrieve them too. Do you know of any such programs that can download the messages from a pop or imap server? When we get to Guam in a week I’ll try downloading those two programs and looking at the help and man files but since time in port is so limited I figured I should make sure I’m getting the packages I need now since I’ll next have web access around the 22nd of December.
I envy his high seas. My people are mutt people when they aren’t using Eudora. I haven’t used Mutt since I worked at bway.net, and I found it frustrating because it wasn’t Pine and Pine was better because I knew how to use it. Funny how that works.
Mutt, though, ought to be a functional IMAP client. This is a good rundown of how to connect, but I think you are saying you want to store your IMAP messages offline. Store a copy.
Marius Gedminas, a generally helpful person and the author of a handful of generally useful tools, wrote a good response to some questions about fetchmail and mutt and IMAP that actually spells out some common points of confusion really well. So that might be helpful, just in terms of putting things in context. Another good read is Dave who eventually gives up, but first stews up a combination of mutt, UW IMAP, Isync and mairix.
I should dig in a little deeper. I’ll let you know how it goes.
audio, radio, technology
In various on November 20, 2008 at 6:20 pm
On dkg’s advice, I picked out an iAudio 7 for my birthday present (N. had solicited said advice and provided it in a birthday card) and I’m hoping to get all my podcasts onto in advance of my transcontinental flight home so I can listen to Radio Lab and that famous TAL episode about the economy.
That is all I wanted by the way — something for travel, to plug headphones into and wrap myself in on long train trips and bus trips. So far so good: it launched rhythmbox when I plugged it in. Now to sync it …
databases, learning, lebanon, software freedom, teaching, technology
In various on September 16, 2008 at 10:24 pm
A casual acquaintance (his father married us, which is not especially casual, I guess) traveled a semi-public breakup on Facebook. First his relationship status changed (“is no longer engaged”; “is single”) and then his status went through a bit of a wringer (“I thought she loved me back _UCK!!!!”;” _UCK! _UCK!_UCK!”*). I pointed this out to N. who called it weird. It is. It is also nice to know that if you choose to “befriend” me on facebook, you’ll have to decide whether to pretend you didn’t notice that I went through a wringer or to say something kind about it. I suppose you have other options, but I’m lucky to be old enough that most people seem to sit on that particular fence and not the one down the road between “say something snotty” and “take advantage of the situation”. What is also nice is that when the Rabbi’s son finally did send round a note about how he’s looking for a place (less than a grand a month, share okay, he has a dog and a bike or two and he’s a genuinely nice guy; anyone?) he didn’t have to explain. Sometimes not having to explain is worth a lot.
We’ve all been through wringers, and when someone you love is attached to a lot of tubes it is really really nice to know that everyone knows. That little bit of “okay, I don’t have to explain.” smooths some rough edges in the rest.
My point is, that Calc’s date functions are sorely lacking (hah! you thought I was going to talk about life, didn’t you?) as far as I can see. Read the rest of this entry »
learning, sustainability, technology, truth_in_advertising, ubuntu
In various on September 16, 2008 at 12:33 pm
The thing is, this is my fault. Or halfway. I didn’t say “well, if you want to run Windows I don’t know what kind of machine you should buy but I know you need to buy it with it’s proprietary operating system pre-installed.” What I said was “eBay is rotten with open-box resellers. Get a ThinkPad.” When he said “I have Windows XP I can install.” I didn’t say “That isn’t how it works, honey. It won’t work and you won’t be able to get support and I don’t really know the first thing about troubleshooting Windows anymore and I don’t really have anyone I can ask because the people who I know who are willing to go out of their way to help me figure out my Ubuntu installation are doing it because:
- They like me. People like N., too. So someone ought to be able to help him get his laptop running?
- They believe in software freedom. And they know that helping me iron out the creases in my own machine will make it that much easier for other people to run Free Software. Because together we report bugs and sometimes even propose fixes to them, we offer to help other people over their own hurdles. And because here, in the notebook, I write such brilliant and useful advice about how to use your Free Software better yourself. And that is worth something to all of us because it makes our software better.
So who gains when I spend a day (two, going on. Gah.) figuring out where on earth to get the device drivers that a Lenovo ThinkPad needs to run the version of XP Pro that came with a Dell tower. Most notably, he’s missing functional networking drivers. Which makes it really hard to get online and figure out what else is missing. N might gain (he’ll have a usable machine), and Microsoft will gain (I’m assuming that Consigliere is phoning home). And I’ll gain a little knowledge. Next time someone I know wants to install XP on a laptop that came with Vista, I’ll know what they need to do to get it working. Which makes it easier for people to use Windows. Which helps Microsoft.
The real question is this: of all the people who I ought to be able to persuade that Ubuntu is worth the extra work (extra work for him. Windows is just extra work for Moi since I’m the one doing it. And eventually I will have worked it out and that will be that. Or: maybe I won’t. You can’t run Windows Update without a good product key for XP. I’m not sure we have that.
What I’m kind of thinking of doing is saying, look here: I know you need this laptop. How about I partition it, put Hardy Heron on one partition, put your thieved XP that was only ever meant to be installed on the Dell desktop it came with.
PS, speaking of fools … I’m just wondering (I know I said the same last night) when we can get back to that conversation about privatizing social security. Because it sure seems like an excellent idea to me right now.
art, artists, mapping, media, technology
In various on September 10, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Reposting from the IdeaLab. Most of what I write there is either drivel or a comment, and I think I write sharp comments but they’re not really that intriguing out of context. What I didn’t say on the idealab was that I’ve noticed these trends, one being a fascination with aggregation that comes early in a person’s introduction to the vast world of internet resources out there. Aggregation without human intervention. Aggregation like “what if you could subscribe to all the action alerts about polar bears in the whole world instead of engaging with an organization and building a long term strategy to help Americans rethink our relationship to nature.” Except that second clause gets lost in the translation. Also, the people who want to talk about emergent behavior and the wisdom of crowds. And then they show a picture of some bees, and they don’t point out that hives have Queen Bees. And Queen Bees posses intellectual superiority. So do good organizers. Just data, data without analysis, is not superior. It is just data. Smart people, maybe people with communities that make them smarter by challenging them, but smart people are the ones who make things happen. Is what I say, but didn’t say because somehow I don’t know how to say that in a language that is professional enough. This will forever be my challenge, I am guessing.
I spent Tuesday in Washington DC at Websites Without Walls. A nine hour trip for a four hour meeting always makes me nervous, but we’re passionately interested in seeing New York City match Washington DC’s astounding wealth of open public data. Never knew that the District publishes an astounding wealth of usable public information? Me neither. I made the trip to find out more.
While New York City busies itself posting PDFs of city agency documents within 10 days of their publication, the District of Columbia’s Office of the Chief Technical Officer is churning out no less than 261 live data feeds and maps, and has mandated that no city agency may acquire software that cannot publish to the data warehouse.
Two hundred sixty one and growing, while the British Government’s Power of Information Task Force is sponsoring a contest with a $35,000 prize to the best idea on “how to reuse, represent, mashup or combine the information the government holds.” To get folks started they’ve put together a comprehensive list of public data sources in the UK.
The data that Washington DC makes public is the same data that city agencies use internally every day. Unfortunately, it seems to be so obvious to the current administration that this is public information that they don’t have many insights about how other cities might find the political will to follow suite. One interesting observation: that DC has managed to sell the data warehouse as a way that the city can retain control over data. By providing the data as feeds that civic projects can re-purpose, the city has the power to correct data and see those corrections percolate out in a way they never could with figures published in hard copy.
Other tasty morsels from Websites Without Walls? NPR’s API is up and running and mighty robust, Stephanie was the most used word in congress on Monday.
Another challenge: I ran into a thousand people I know and love at the landing of the Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea on Sunday night. Because my old networks have come unraveled, I don’t really see Jenny or Joe Tuba or Ashira or Will or Aresh in any natural or organic way. And so I run into them at things like that and we say “it is so great to see you” and then we go back from whence we came. But in between they ask me what I am doing and I don’t know how to say that I’m obsessed with data driven local media. It doesn’t seem all that interesting with Swoon‘s work towering over us and the Swimming Cities rocking gently on the pier. I don’t know how to reconcile these things.
command-line, learning, sed, technology, whining
In various on September 4, 2008 at 6:12 pm
What if I had a shitton of ancient shtml files that all, somewhere near the top of the body, contained a line like “BEGIN MAIN CONTENT”?
What if I wanted to wipe everything above that and substitute some include script? I’d use sed, right? Read the rest of this entry »
art, audio, radio, technology
In various on August 27, 2008 at 5:28 pm
VOICES OF AMERICA
Aug. 25, 2008 – Nov. 5, 2008
free103point9 is pleased to host, Voices of America, a participatory Internet radio project that reflects on the media spectacle of the 2008 US Presidential Election through the lens of the Voice of America Radio Network, a US government broadcasting service intended for an international audience. The new site and custom application will launch in late August, 2008. Here’s how it will work:
* RECORD up to one minute samples of election coverage on an over-the-air Voice of America station
* UPLOAD and TAG your recordings
* DOWNLOAD from the searchable pool of available recordings
* REMIX the broadcasts and UPLOAD them back to the website
* LISTEN to the recordings and remixes online anytime or to the radio broadcast at the Audacity of Desperation exhibition at the Sea and Space Gallery in Los Angeles on Election Day
Voices of America (VoA) is created by Lee Azzarello and Sarah Kanouse. VoA is happy to be a participant in The UnConvention, a project of Art Through Technical Alternatives, Carleton College, Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, University of Minnesota Institute for New Media Studies, and the Walker Art Center.
databases, design, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu, whining
In various on August 26, 2008 at 7:05 pm
OpenOffice has a database app. It has come a long (long, long) way over the last few years but uff is it ever just not there yet. I do need the query browser. Things you can’t do with OOo Base include add a fulltext index. Not with the gui because the gui doesn’t know that much, and not with the query browser because it balks. CREATE FULLTEXT INDEX `FILER_NAME` ON `commcand` (`FILER_NAME`); gets me an error (“syntax error, unexpected $end, expecting BETWEEN or IN or SQL_TOKEN_LIK”) in Base’s interface (“Run Query”) but worked just fine at the mysql command line. Same for “SHOW INDEX FROM tablename“. Works fine at the command line, OOo balks.
So OOo Base isn’t just translating between the two.
I’ll probably update this post as I come up with more new and different things to complain about.
learning, linux, software freedom, technology
In various on August 21, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Alyosha Dubinskaya, do you have any idea how much I love to get questions like this? I mean like this:
Amanda, what is google analytics?
i read this
http://www.google.com/analytics
and it doesn’t explain anything to me.
i just installed no-script for firefox today
and am shocked at how many places there is a script from google analytics!
Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, php, technology, whining
In various on July 28, 2008 at 12:53 pm
Okay, so I’m getting someplace. I’ve got my chompy stuffs into an array. I’ve got it all in PHP. But now I need to sort a multi-dimensional array by a value in the second array. I’ve got an array (events) that contains each event as an array. And I want to sort by the date of each event.
<?php
#$datafile = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."[...]/featured_data.pl";
$datafile = "testdata.pl";
$upcoming = array();
if(is_readable($datafile)) {
$lines = file($datafile);
foreach($lines as $line) {
$explody = explode("|",$line);
array_push($upcoming, $explody);
}
print "<!--";
print_r ($upcoming);
print "-->";
$ordered_events = array_reverse($upcoming);
foreach ($ordered_events as $value) {
$str ="> <a href=\"/http://www.abcnorio.org/pcgi-bin/suite/calendar/calendar.cgi?request=detail &website=default&event_id=".$value[22]."\">";
$str .= $value[8];
$str .= "</a> ";
if($value[0] == $value[1]){
$str .= $value[2];
} elseif($value[1]-$value[0] == 365) {
$str .= " every " . $value[5] . " ";
} else {
$str .= $value[2] . " through " .$value[3];
}
$str .= " (".$value[10].")";
$str .= "<br><br>";
echo $str;
}
} else {
echo "Could not open ". $datafile ." for reading.";
}
?>
learning, linux, openoffice, technology
In various on July 15, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I’m monkeying around with OpenOffice and VLOOKUP and HLOOKUP and just LOOKUP. I have a spreadsheet with a column of values like:
FRIENDS OF REESE BERMAN
COMMITTEE TO ELECT MIKE FLYNN COUNTY CLERK
LIMA DEMOCRATIC PARTY
FRIENDS OF ANDY TORRES
COMMITTEE TO ELECT PETER A TULIN
COMMITTEE TO ELECT PETER TRIPODI
FRIENDS OF ROBERT H. GIZA
FRIENDS OF BRANCATI
ALPAC (ALCAS POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE)
FRIENDS OF YONEL LETELLIER
And a spreadsheet with columns of values like …
Reese Berman
Ed Brancati
Mike Flynn
Robert Giza
Yonel Letellier
Andy Torres
Peter Tripodi
Peter Tulin
And I want to connect “COMMITTEE TO ELECT PETER TRIPODI” to “Tripodi, Peter”. MATCH will take regular expressions but I can’t quite figure out how to combine a cell reference with a regular expression.
Actually this works: =MATCH(CONCATENATE(".*";C2;".*");$A$2:$A$11;0)
Where C2 is the candidate’s last name and A2:A11 is the array of committee names. So I’m getting somewhere.
Giving up, am I. This helps:
IF(ISNA(INDEX(Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;MATCH(CONCATENATE(".*";C24;" ";B24;".*");Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;0);Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788));INDEX(Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;MATCH(CONCATENATE(".*";B24;".*");Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;0);Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788);INDEX(Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;MATCH(CONCATENATE(".*";C24;" ";B24;".*");Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788;0);Sheet1.$B$1:$B$788))
design, linux, mapping, technology, ubuntu
In various on June 13, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I got all worked up about Many Eyes until I discovered that I couldn’t quite load any of the visualizations because my Java setup isn’t what it should be. Then I actually met someone from Many Eyes and got inspired to ask for advice. I got some:
One of our developers uses Ubuntu and here’s his Java set up: Sun-java6-plugin on Hardy in the multiverse. It can be installed via the package manager directly (sudo aptitude install sun-java6-plugin) or via Add/Remove Applications (“Sun Java 6 Runtime”). The info page on the package is here.
So now you can check out Many Eyes, too. Except that nothing is so simple. That plugin for Gutsy? It doesn’t exist.
Or it might. I’m really not sure.
http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy/i386/sun-java6-plugin/filelist
command-line, learning, linux, postfix, technology
In various on June 5, 2008 at 4:53 pm
The Frankenserver walks again …
I finally figured out that the frankenserver, which serves web service for example.com and examplefoundation.org doesn’t know that it is not the mail server for these domains. The whole rest of the world knows it, but not the frankenserver.
I’m trying to figure out the right way to tell ye olde frankenserver (or perhaps postfix) that mail must leave the house. To be more precise: if WordPress (or OpenX or Urchin) generates mail for amanda@example.com, that mail can be delivered to some other address as defined in /etc/aliases, but it can’t be delivered to amanda’s actual mailbox off on Dreamhost.
If /etc/aliases sayeth “amanda amanda@gmail.com” then mail generated on the server for amanda will be punted to gmail, no problem. But if amanda isn’t defined the mail evaporates into the ether (or something). I want postfix, locally, to know that it should treat mail for example.com like any other mail–look up its MX record and send it there.
I’m not sure how to convey that to Postfix, however.
command-line, learning, linux, ruby_on_rails, technology
In various on April 22, 2008 at 1:56 pm
This is about programming, which only a programmer would know. Ruby is a programming language, rails is … rails. It is a library of code written in Ruby that you can hook all together in a row and make do things, quickly. So they say. Like so many things, most Ruby on Rails sites for beginners assume we all begin at the same place. I’m beginning at a place where this particular tip sheet is useful.
Our project is this: the Clinton Hill CSA has a database that works. It does things people need for it to do. I want to move it from its old host to our Dreamhost account, but since it won’t just launch, I need to understand what I’m looking at a lot better.
Soooo… Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, software, technology
In various on April 16, 2008 at 5:03 pm
After yet another edit collision on the Frankenserver’s homemade CMS which does no type of file locking, I’m looking one more time at Bricolage. There is something I don’t get, something about why it needs its own instance of Apache, but it seems to.
I don’t know why I missed this the first five times around, but it actually isn’t supposed to be impossible to do that, to run two instances of Apache but call one of them Bricolage. I still don’t like when programs speak their very own language, but I try to be a flexible person.
learning, technology
In various on April 8, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Who’s Running for What is live, and it happens to rule. It also (happens) to rely heavily on Javascript pop-up windows, which are a little unwieldy if you haven’t worked in Javascript for the last ten years.
Read the rest of this entry »
learning, linux, ruby_on_rails, technology
In various on April 7, 2008 at 1:08 pm
While back, Scott loaned me some Rails books. They’ve been holding up my bookshelf ever since. I have, however, inherited a working Rails app that I need to migrate to Dreamhost, so it is time for me to learn this beast, at least a little bit. Rabble made it look so easy, but I have no idea what I’m doing.
Here is what I’m slowly figuring out:
rails someapp will generate a stack of basic files that form the foundation of a rails application.
dispatch ./public/dispatch.fcgi and ./scripts/server seem to do about the same thing. In my case, they seem to generate the same run of errors:
[0 chcsa@karnov ourCSA]$ ./public/dispatch.fcgi
/usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:317:in `activate’: can’t activate actionpack (= 1.13.6), already activated actionpack-2.0.2] (Gem::Exception)
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:335:in `activate’
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:334:in `each’
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:334:in `activate’
from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:496:in `require’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:342:in `new_constants_in’
from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.0.2/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:496:in `require’
from ./public/../config/environment.rb:54
from ./public/dispatch.fcgi:21:in `require’
from ./public/dispatch.fcgi:21
I think what the machine is trying to tell me is that my app is expecting a different version of a Gem called actionpack. Or (maybe?) my app is trying to activate gems but on Dreamhost they’re already active? Dreamhost has a list of installed gems that includes actionpack (2.0.2, 1.13.6). So the next concept I have to grasp is “activating” “gems.” I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
update Line 54 of config/environment.rb does say require 'action_web_service', while the list of installed gems shows only an actionwebservice. See what I mean about having no idea what I’m doing?
Actually, I think the next thing I have to wrap my head around is test, development and production environments. Am I supposed to setup three databases?
command-line, subversion, teaching, technology
In various on April 3, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Today, I was sneaking in to change the name of the Hardrive on an intern machine from “Macintosh HD” to “Dunk” since despite my best efforts to change things around here I still seem to be responsible for communicating with our mostly inaccessible freelance sys admin dude and I get tired of calling machines by an enumeration of past users (The machine that was most recently Mia’s but before that was Josh’s is about to get a new user, since Mia’s moved on to bigger and better things, but actually was it Oate’s workstation for a minute there?) so I’m naming machines after famous circus elephants. Maybe if I can persuade our MIFSAD to at least contemplate adding RAM to any of them I’ll move to fast cats gone wild (Montcore, Jorge, Tatiana), but … a colleague said something to me about catching me touching a Mac. I’ll grant that I’ve been pretty severe about insisting that I don’t do desktop support, but it isn’t because I’m a hater, it is because I can’t be our in house desktop support person and still do my job and I’d really rather do my job. No big thing.
I do have a Mac question, though, because my job will be easier when at least our graphic designer gets the hang of subversion. I tried to find for her a starting point like some instructions on the intertubes, but found instructions that called for Fink (noooooooooo) or involved building things from source (nooooooo). So I asked around instead. Here’s what I know so far:
- BBEdit supports SVN but only for one by one file editing — you can check out and edit one file and then check it back in, but you can’t update your local working copy. So it is a nice hook for once in a very rare while use, but it isn’t really a Subversion client.
- RapidSVN is a GUI SVN client, but it has
dependencies that include subversion itself which, of course, is available for MacOSX in eight ways.
- Over at Apperceptive, staff, techie and otherwise, use a command line svn OSX’s terminal app. They installed the collabnet package, though OSX Leopard ships with it already in place.
- Deanna uses Eclipse, which works just fine for her purposes, her purposes being mostly interfacing with repositories maintained elsewhere, which is pretty much what I’m after.
- Jonah suggests SmartSvn for people who need GUIs. It is java based and does have a gratis version but is not Free
as in software. Software freedom isn’t a requirement here (it is s’posed to run on OS X for crike’s sake) so I’ll take a look at that one.
- Matt has his students using the SCPlugin from Tigris. They’re all running Leopard, which has a command line client already installed. SCPlugin works from the Finder, as a contextual menu — it shows up under
More...-->Subversion. Once working copy is checked out, the user can to right-click on files to commit or revert. Browsing logs and rolling back aren’t really there (or aren’t all that fancy). Also via Matt, a nudge towards the collabnet Mac package for commandline SVN.
- Phillip uses SVN on a
Mac both via the terminal, and integrated with BBEdit. MacFuse works great for connecting to remote directories that are already under version control. Pre-leopard users will need the Mac package to run Subversion clients locally.
Here is what we actually did:
- Install the CollabNet binary
- Create a .bashrc that adds
/usr/local/bin to her path.
- Make a directory in Sites to contain our working directory.
svn checkout http://svn.example.com/svn/repository
learning, linux, openoffice, teaching, technology
In various on March 25, 2008 at 1:50 am
=IF(AND(EXACT(E491;E490);EXACT(F491;F490));D490;SUM(D490;1))
You (we) are in column D with our formula. If column E matches the line above, and column F matches the line above, then use the value in D, above. If they don’t match, iterate up one.
That took me way too long to figure out.
art, artists, learning, local, NYC, photography, technology
In various on March 20, 2008 at 1:48 pm
If you work with teenagers, you probably know at least one that would love to be taking a black and white photography class, right?
Intro to Photography & Darkroom Technique
Ten Saturday Sessions
April 19 — June 21
11:00am — 2:00pm
This class will introduce the basic techniques of black and white photography: composition, exposure, film development, and printing, while exploring the documentary and creative potential of photography as a medium.
AGES: 14 to 17
FREE — Space is limited
For more information please contact Kate DeWitt at 212.254.3697 ext. 25
Registration form available at:
http://www.abcnorio.org/arts_ed/photo_registration.pdf
books, technology
In various on March 18, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I learned something new yesterday. A few things, actually. One thing I learned I already knew, but that is the best kind of learning, right? It goes like this: we’d all do well to ask “why?” a lot more often. “Why?” and also “in what sense is this a problem?” Most of us don’t ask enough questions and we let things slide by that we wish we understood because we’re sheepish about asking why. That only works, mind you, if you listen to the answers you come up with and ask yourself whether or not you make any sense.
The other thing I learned, though, was that Firefox bookmark keywords rock. Seriously.
If you make a bookmark like http://worldcat.org/search?q=%s and give it the keyword “book” you can just type “book tufte” into your location bar and get a list of all the books on Worldcat that match that search. That is so much easier than installing another search engine and switching between them. Sooooo much easier.
local, mapping, organizing, technology
In various on March 12, 2008 at 5:21 pm
The People’s Production House is looking for programming help with a very cool project:
People’s Production House has been conducting interviews with people from across New York City to document their experience of the digital divide. This mash up will put these stories in context. It will locate 1) the location-specific audio recordings on a map of the city, overlaid with 2) data on Internet access (as gathered by the FCC, BroadbandCensus.com, and through our own research), 3) Internet infrastructure (as gathered by the NYC Economic Development Corporation), and 4) poverty levels (from the US Census) or other factors associated with lack of access to information technology. Over time, we would add in 5) other redlined resources, such as banks or healthy food. This will provide a clear representation of the digital divide — who it affects and how –– and tie it to other social issues. While this proposal is specific to New York City, I foresee it being used in many other cities, perhaps even internationally. It could be a great method of cultural exchange for people at any of the multiple edges of the growing network.
learning, teaching, technology, wordpress
In various on March 9, 2008 at 6:15 pm
From the mailbag, for the “no stupid questions” files, for the people searching the internets for answers.
i have a report back i’d like to post to the website but when i try to post pictures, i get the same message i asked about a week or so ago, i.e. “File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.”
The pictures are smaller saved versions of the original jpeg files from my iPhoto download.
do you guys have suggestions?
Read the rest of this entry »
learning, linux, software, technology
In various on February 21, 2008 at 1:52 pm
I need a VNC client for Ubuntu.
The Ubuntu repository has 5 or 6, and I really have no idea how to distinguish them. Normally I’d hit up Social Source Commons, but I don’t see any Linux VNC clients there.
It looks like the difference between the options has to do with the display protocol. DirectVNC uses the “remote framebuffer protocol” while xVNC4Viewer uses X and sVNC “provides a client for SVGA.”
I’m lost. The package descriptions aren’t really helping: Read the rest of this entry »
art, storytelling, technology
In various on February 18, 2008 at 6:12 pm
I almost called this “Beyond Tufte” since everyone just loves Tufte, but I didn’t. Here’s the thing: In a past life, I spent a lot of time facilitating workshops on technology. How to understand the technology that flummoxes you, ways you could be using technology better in your organizing work. And one thing I often butted up against was that I was supposed to be doing technology workshops, and sometimes I’d get a room full of people who really needed help with story telling.
I came up with a few good activist story telling workshops, but I’ve mostly stopped doing trainings since I started working full time with Gotham Gazette. If I were still doing workshops I would be even more excited about Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design.
Modern life is saturated with ever increasing amounts of information, advertising and media with little time to digest what is being said. Against this background, NGOs and advocates too often find the information they want to communicate, either buried in long reports full of professional jargon and statistics, or overlooked in an endless stream of media releases.
“Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design” is a manual aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. This project aims to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design – a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organization and education.
It is really well done. You should check it out and pass it on.
command-line, postfix, security, technology
In various on February 10, 2008 at 6:30 am
I’m using iptables to block incoming requests from the machine out there who’s got my SMTP server on auto dial. sudo /sbin/iptables -A OUTPUT -d xx.xxx.xxx.xxx -j DROP. I know it isn’t the Right Way, but I want my logs back and I’m hoping he’ll eventually notice that he really isn’t getting through and stop trying. Could be wishful thinking, which makes it that much more ominous that I can’t get sudo /sbin/iptables -D INPUT 1 to work (I screwed up, see, and did INPUT not OUTPUT the first time ’round.)
PS. can someone please tell me what is so great about Emacs that I should be scorned for using Vim?
command-line, learning, linux, postfix, security, technology
In various on February 7, 2008 at 10:45 pm
Still kind of wondering if I could/should just close off smtp connections in an xinetd config, but tail /var/log/maillog seems to be saying that my little friend at 81.189.52.37 is having less success connecting of late:
Feb 7 17:35:59 s47822 postfix/smtpd[6537]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:35:59 s47822 postfix/smtpd[6544]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6523]: lost connection after CONNECT from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6523]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6538]: lost connection after EHLO from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6538]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6522]: lost connection after CONNECT from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:00 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6522]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:01 s42782 postfix/smtpd[6506]: lost connection after EHLO from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Feb 7 17:36:01 s47s42782822 postfix/smtpd[6506]: disconnect from unknown[81.189.52.37]
Or am I missing something? This is an interesting list of main.cf settings to investigate. And this is a rundown of what they actually mean. Does adding reject_invalid_hostname or reject_non_fqdn_hostname do anything for me?
command-line, learning, linux, teaching, technology
In various on February 5, 2008 at 11:28 pm
From the kid brother files …
Forgive me if you already know this command but if you don’t it is really handy. script will allow you to record every keystroke in terminal until you type “exit” (I think it object if you try to enter vi or pico or stuff like that). This is handy if you are trying to solve some problem or download some packages in the terminal and want a record of what you have done. (just type $script filename.lst and it will record your activities – I’m sure that if you don’t already know about the command you are smart enough to figure out the rest)
Right off the bat, some observations: are you really using vi and not vim? Did you know that you can usually look up the manual page of any command line linux goodness with $ man {command}?
And, if you’re using bash as your shell, your command history is stored in .bash_history. Try typing history at the command line.
My problem is this: in the shell you can hit the up arrow to scroll through your last dozen commands (sis note: that is the history I speak of above.) but script records all these up arrows and makes lines on the final document that are hundreds of chars long. So, is there a command that escapes this recording and just records the final command you settled on rather than the dozen you scrolled through to get to it?
It doesn’t look like script will let you do much besides log your keystrokes. What kind of packages are you downloading? I’ve been using aptitude over apt precisely because it does a much better job of showing you what you installed. Not that I remember off the top of my head how I did that or anything. But I did once. See such a list.
Are you downloading with wget? Try history | grep wget when you’re done downloading things. That ought to give you a good list of what you wgot.
Other fun facts? ctrl-r will search your history for you, so if you say ctrl-r and then start typing a command, it will offer you recent command history that matches what you are typing. Play with it. You can customize the number of lines that are stored in your bash history. Here’s that section of my .bashrc file:
# don't put duplicate lines in the history
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTCONTROL=erasedups
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
# store more lines in history
export HISTFILESIZE=5000
# and don't store dumb stuff
export HISTIGNORE=pwd:exit:cd:ls:history
I think I drifted before I ever got the part about not logging duplicate commands to work as expected, but you get the idea.
technology, whining
In various on February 5, 2008 at 6:54 pm
In which s27248.example.com is my box and 11.22.33.444 is my IP address. So AOL is right to complain to me. Now I need to figure out how firstlady.ca [70.54.215.82] is managing to use s27248 (a fine name for a box if ever there was one) as her SMTP server. I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.
Read the rest of this entry »
technology
In various on February 4, 2008 at 4:47 am
I don’t want to have to understand this, and it just keeps coming back to me. Sometimes I can connect just fine, sometimes I can’t. It frustrates the hell out of me, especially at 11:30 when I want to be working. Or I need to be.
I kind of think that I’ve been having more problems than usual lately. I was online earlier today, but for the most part my wifi hasn’t been working for the last week or two.
I don’t know what the problem is. /var/log/messages has this to offer: Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, technology
In various on January 30, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Another good reason to use ssh keys? My key is still on the server of a group I haven’t worked with in three years. I have no idea where I’d start looking for a password, but when the called me in a panic because their site had been “oWneD bY soM3 dw33b” I had no trouble getting onto their server. That might not be what you want, for me to be leaving keys under mats on servers the world over, but it is surely convenient. Passwords are tiresome.
Since I always end up having to look this up, here is a fun secret: for key based authentication to work, your .ssh directory usually needs to be owner only access:
chmod 700 .ssh
If you don’t know, now you know.
command-line, technology, whining
In various on January 29, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Was the mustache game fun? (tell me I didn’t miss anything).
Will they who come after recognize that these little text files named “meep” and “feh” came from me? Is this my footprint?
Why does grep think that text files aren’t?
25 Binary file ./suggests/insert.php matches
26 Binary file ./suggests/insertcat.php matches
Is it grep what thinks that? Similarly, is there a batch operation that will let me fix the file formats of thousands of files with ^M where they mean to have line breaks? Read the rest of this entry »
meta, technology
In various on January 24, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Sometimes I delete comments that I don’t like. Sometimes I delete whole posts while I think through comments I didn’t like. That is just me being fickle, and if I actually know you, like if you live upstairs or just off Nostrand or whatever, I’ll call you to tell you why your comment set me off. I don’t have a comment policy, though. Not really.
What I do have is a spam filter, apparently an overzealous one. I know dkg butts up against it from time to time (too many links, I suspect), but I didn’t realize that Onion had also gone head to head with akismet and lost.
If your comment doesn’t show up immediately, it is caught in the spam filter and you should nudge me. I’d turn off the spam filter, but I get about a thousand (yup. a thousand) spam comments a day and I lack the strength to filter through them all. ok?
command-line, technology
In various on January 16, 2008 at 8:15 pm
This is just plain weird, from my error logs for a site that about five people ought to be accessing:
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:39 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:39 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:40 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:40 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:41 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:41 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:42 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:42 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:43 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
[Wed Jan 16 14:48:43 2008] [info] (32)Broken pipe: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
Apache has a helpfile on this particular error, but I wouldn’t call it the most illuminating manuscript out there:
Invalid argument: core_output_filter: writing data to the network
Apache uses the sendfile syscall on platforms where it is available in order to speed sending of responses. Unfortunately, on some systems, Apache will detect the presence of sendfile at compile-time, even when it does not work properly. This happens most frequently when using network or other non-standard file-system.
Symptoms of this problem include the above message in the error log and zero-length responses to non-zero-sized files. The problem generally occurs only for static files, since dynamic content usually does not make use of sendfile.
To fix this problem, simply use the EnableSendfile directive to disable sendfile for all or part of your server. Also see the EnableMMAP, which can help with similar problems.
I’m using ext3, which I don’t think qualifies as a “network or other non-standard file-system.”
So what gives? I don’t know where to start. Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, technology
In various on December 26, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Another thing I repeat:
/^.\{5,100}$
Find short lines, but not blank ones. Most of those lines are headlines, so
:s/p>/h3>/g
Replace all occurrences of “p>” (like <p> and </p&g;t) with “h3>”.
Two problems: one, I can’t repeat the search (I can, but it takes two keystrokes, which is one too many for me) because the search term has been replaced by the search and replace term. two, I can repeat the search and replace action (okay, ditto: two key strokes, : and an up arrow) because it is an ex search.
There has to be a way to search for lines that match the first search term and execute the search/replace on lines that I agree are headlines. I just don’t know what it is. This is close, and a reasonable enough substitute, but it isn’t purefect.
:%s/<p>\(.\{5,100}\)<\/p>/<h3>\1<\/h3>/
learning, technology
In various on December 20, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I’m not a very good sysadmin, or perhaps I’m the best sysadmin ever, but when I got here our server was sending out all kinds of spam. It was redunculous. I managed to cut a lot of it off, but I still see signs of the wolves circling at the door.
Dec 20 14:30:42 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=fox] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:42 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=frank] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:43 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=giants] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:43 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=grace] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:44 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=gregory] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:44 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=hannah] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:44 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=hendrix] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:44 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=hola] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
Dec 20 14:30:45 s47822 saslauthd[3997]: do_auth : auth failure: [user=howard] [service=smtp] [realm=s47822.example.com] [mech=shadow] [reason=Unknown]
And I’m contemplating shutting off all outgoing mail from The Box. The box only sends two kinds of mail: messages to me about how its day went and “tell a friend” messages when someone likes an article.
I don’t have a question or an answer, but I do want to know how to assert more control over who and what can use SMTP on this server.
command-line, linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on December 15, 2007 at 4:18 am
Kaiser’s rehab hospital goes by the acronym KFRC. If you grew up in San Francisco you know why that cracks me up. The rehab hospital has a farmers market out front with amazing tamales and enchiladas. This is something I miss about the Bay Area, in general, tamales at the farmers’ market. On that note, the Union City Raizes do Brasil batizado had a potluck afterwards with papusas, which are something else that just are not as easy to come by in New York City. He’ll be fine, that is becoming more and more clear.
If you, dear reader, ever find yourself or a loved one in a hospital, and you find yourself feeling disempowered or overwhelmed (or if you find you are feeling “just fine” which is actually a clear sign that you are in over your head) I have got loads of advice for you, because I am an expert in patient advocacy. I might know eff all about medicine, but I know from insisting that someone be cared for adequately. I have loads of suggestions about articulating your own needs (“Well, I could use a massage and here are three places that I know for a fact sell gift certificates”) and about the importance of getting a calendar set up to regulate visitor so that you don’t wind up mobbed one day and all sad and lonely the next.
Meanwhile, I am really taking a shine to sed -i -e 's/foo/bar/g' ./* except that I need it to recurse through directories not balk at the first directory it hits and then sit there. Since I also don’t want to search through .svn files, and since for bonus fun a lot of files that make up our site are sans file extension, I’m reading this and contemplating something with -exec.
I was kind of hoping that I could use a little bit of find ./ -not \( -name "*.svn-base"" -o -name "foo" \) '{}' \; -print but as it turns out what I really need to do is more like find ./ -wholename '*/.svn/*' -prune -o -exec grep "somestring" {} \;.
UPDATE (5 Mar 2008)
Here is what works: find ./ -wholename '*/.svn/*' -prune -o -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/free software/free free software/g' {} \;
Another UPDATE (3 Apr 2008)
Another search that works similarly (but without sed) grep -ir --exclude='*.svn*' "software freedom" /srv/apache2/
command-line, technology, ubuntu
In linux on December 12, 2007 at 5:13 am
Hypothetically, let us say that you just paid cash for a wireless router from a guy who goes by the name “Sir Yoda.”
Let us say then, that you were looking forward to using this router. Google knew the default password. Off to a good start. Anything plugged into the Barricade seems to be online. On a roll. The point of doing business with a guy named Yoda was to be able to take Brahms downstairs to where the table is big and you can eat ice cream without fussing with coasters. You want wireless.
What little bits I already worked out back in May got me as far as some errors to search on (errors like There is already a pid file /var/run/dhclient.ath0.pid with pid 14919232), which got me to:
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
Which worked. I’m connected, though sans encryption. Next challenge? Read the rest of this entry »
learning, teaching, technology
In various on December 12, 2007 at 1:07 am
I’m looking for the cleanest and most reliable way to undo what Word so kindly hath wrought. Curly quotes begone. And I need it to be easy, because it is not for me.
Here’s the situation: we get lots of text coming in from all kinds of places. Usually, for the most part, it comes as Word documents. We’re a scrappy and scattershot operation and we don’t have any formal workflow. Editors edit, and our art director who is also an editor takes their MS Word files, copies into Dreamweaver, formats links and paragraphs and the dumps Dreamweaver’s output into our home-brewed content management system.
In house editors all have AutoFormat turned off, but we still end up introducing a lot of curly quotes and em dashes. They come in articles submitted by freelancers, or they come when someone is writing from home and hasn’t turned off AutoFormat or I don’t know where or how, but they just keep coming. And they break things up all over the place.
So puzzle 1 is how to handle that. I’ve been advised that one can search for straight quotes " in MS Word and Word will find curly quotes, so I ought to be able to write a quick macro that will clean up articles. A good first step. What I really need (want?) is to set something up that will automate the HTMLification process overall. The guy who does it doesn’t complain, but he does it totally manually and there is no reason that it can’t be scripted (and curly quotes removed in the process)
Puzzle 2 is this: in addition to em dashes and curly quotes, we do occasionally use accents in articles and emails. I’m slowly wrapping my head around charsets and, um, stuff. Because I’m pretty sure I need to understand them better in order to address this.
Later I’ll be meeting “sir yoda” to buy his router. For now, I’m having a hard time getting on line (it is cold in the study and I’m pretty sure my mother has cheese and olives out downstairs that I could be partaking of if I weren’t off in the cold study) so until I buy Yoda’s wireless router off of him (go Craigslist) I’m leaving you, dear readers, with a seriously half assed post.
And, for the loyal among you who are following this closely, dad is moving to rehab sometime tomorrow. Still a long climb ahead but for now we’re done tearing our hair out and wondering how much worse it is going to get. The new question is, how long is he going to stay like this before he starts to get better. They say he’ll be fine, they just don’t know when.
teaching, technology
In various on December 7, 2007 at 9:10 pm
Or, why I hate proprietary hardware.
hey lady-
i need to get an additional router thingy so that i can broadcast a signal from a base station in my office area, then bounce it down the hall with airport express. do i have to buy an airport base station for that, or can i buy something cheaper? if the latter, what’s best?
Base station? Airport express? These are just proprietary terms for hardware running an open protocol. “Base Station” isn’t even a proprietary term, though Apple has managed to brand it anyhow. Maybe I’m overstating things. Maybe Apple is the only one out there using the “right” words. Point is, all that hardware is running 802.11b (or 802.11g or 802.11n) and it is interchangeable. An Apple Airport Extreme Base Station is a wireless router. You have to have a decoder ring to sort your Express (802.11b) from your Extreme (802.11n), but you’re comparing apples to apples (not Apples, damnit) if you compare the Airport Extreme Base Station to any other 802.11n router. Which you should do before you buy one.
Dangle Day is fond of saying that he can’t fix your computer because he’s not that kind of computer scientist. He’s bullshitting. He can totally fix your computer. I can totally decipher CNET’s wireless protocol comparisons and stuff, but I kind of don’t feel like it. Here is the thing: wifi is a pain in the butt and I don’t really understand it. I wish I understood it just well enough to make it work for me, since as I’ve noted before Ubuntu’s Network Manager can be a real pain and is the one thing I’ve restarted my whole computer to kick start because I can’t figure out how to kick start it otherwise. Umm, actually I’ve never looked at what is launching it in /etc/init.d so I shouldn’t whine quite so loudly.
I know that wasn’t the answer you were looking for, but I am not the droid you are looking for.
Anyone else want to take a stab at this one?
ecology, myself, news, NYC, politics, technology
In various on November 14, 2007 at 5:41 pm
anarchy, myself, software freedom, technology
In various on November 6, 2007 at 2:43 pm
Check it out and comment if you’d like. Michelle Murrain made some good points privately about the importance of backing up a requirement like that (like what? go read it.) with real support resources and not just dumping it on people.
Go read it. Maybe later I’ll get it together to say something about the IAS conference, theory, software freedom and anarchists. Later. I will say, ever so very briefly, that it was a pleasant surprise to discover that a lot of people had read the Organic Internet.
(And yes, I realize I didn’t reblog the post. You should still read it, and if you like it say so. Also if you don’t. )
organizing, software, technology, whining
In various on November 1, 2007 at 7:25 pm
After all my moaning about trying to get technology support from a forum, I should probably report that I did sort out my most recent flummox, something I could not have done without the drupal support forums.
Meanwhile, we’re using two proprietary products in our work, and I’ve been consistently struck by the limitations inherent to proprietary software as illustrated in both cases (one an email list delivery tool, the other a live chat application. I’m not going to name names because that isn’t really the point at all.) Both are hosted apps, which takes a huge load off of my shoulders (especially the list delivery. whew!) but it also means that I really can’t touch the source code on either front, no matter how obvious the fix might be. I want to rejigger our chats so that new responses appear at the bottom of the screen rather than the top? They’ve filed that request away. Maybe one day they’ll get to it. I want to make “Multipart MIME” a default list subscriber format, instead of “HTML” or “Plain Text”? That’s nice that I want to do that. I can make a list of about a hundred things I’d just go fix if I were running the software myself. I don’t have that option, and in one case we’re paying a fair bit of money to beta test someone’s chat software. Not as much as a lot of their customers, but enough that we feel it when we right the checks. In the other case, I double-dog can’t complain because we’re getting a fantastic service, gratis.
Nonetheless, I’m feeling the frustration of fundamentally not being at liberty to fix what is broken. On a very practical level, this is what happens when software isn’t free.
letters_home, miracle-drugs, nutrition, Stating the Obvious, sustainability, technology
In various on October 31, 2007 at 2:37 am
The other day I had a (virtual) conversation with Arif that went something like
Arif, to no one in particular: when did we become a nation that DIDN’T see the inherent problems with the practice of driving bees all over the country?
Me: Since forever, dude. Since we realized that Science can fix everything, one problem at a time. actually, as long as I’m quoting, what I said was really “Round about the time that we began routinely subscribing to one-size-fits-all solutions provided by experts, I think. ”
Arif: trucking bees all around the country to pollinate enormous farms.
insane. totally insane.
Me: it isn’t very articulate, but this shit always brings me back to memories of a trip to the Hoover Dam while I was in college. For some reason my friends and I decided to sit through the multimedia presentation in the Hoover Dam amphitheater thing. We sat there under portraits of Presidents past and listened to a recorded lecture and watched little lights go on and off on a scale model diorama of the Colorado River.
It was so simple and beautiful–the problem: floods are a pain in the ass for farmers. The solution? We built a dam. Now we control the Colorado River. Man 1, Nature 0. Thank you for listening and enjoy your visit to the Hoover Dam.
They didn’t talk about any of the massive ecological damage that the dam cost, both upstream and down. It was all about how we are so smart that we can apply our scientific and engineering prowess to any problem and it will be solved. Not enough bees? We’ll bring bees by truck. And so it was that Australia was overrun with jackrabbits, San Francisco with eucalyptus that turned out not to be any good for railroad ties anyhow.
All of which (the Hoover Dam part anyway) got me thinking about Megan and her blog that I had to swear off of (secret: that was my New Year’s resolution, swearing off of Megan’s blog. I don’t even know what to make of that.) because whenever she writes about relationships all hell breaks loose in the comments section and people start holding her up as this poster child for “if you don’t wear stockings, high heels and makeup and get your ass married by the time you are 22, you’ll live a life of pathetic sorrow, just look.” And, for reasons I can’t explain, I can’t not weigh in. I suddenly start imagining that it is worth my energy to persuade the random strangers on my friends’ old roommates’ blog. I stay up late thinking about it. It isn’t good. So I swore off, but like any good addict, the littlest things will send me back for more.
Today, I looked, and she has a whole post about One Thing Engineering, which is really what I meant. Not one size fits all, but one problem at a time. It is craziness and we perpetuate it.
Also, since I’m rambling a little here, I want to point out that a study came up this week that does indeed uphold my hypothesis. I just tried to search for it and found another study. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. A varied diet rich in whole grains, fruits and vegetables with a bit of fat, chocolate and red wine on the side, a moderate amount of exercise. That is all. You can call of your scientists, I’ve got it covered. I’m calling a vibrating platform the closest thing engineering can get to a moderate amount of exercise. We already knew this: the more active you are into your dotage, the less likely your poor bones are to succumb to osteoporosis. Break a sweat a few times a week, walk even though you’d get there faster by car. It is really simple.
PS, Megan, did I ever tell you that I seriously considered dropping PEIS for civil engineering? I did.
drupal, technology, whining
In various on October 19, 2007 at 10:25 pm
I’m working on migrating our forums into drupal and struggling with a simplish thing. Not so much struggling as idly contemplating, but you get the idea. Right now, our homebrewed CMS requires someone (not me, thank fsm) to create a forum for the article manually each time an article is added. That is crazy talk, in my book.
In my book, anything you do more than twice and don’t script is crazy talk, and Oates has had to do this at least a thousand times. My head just exploded. Seriously. Read the rest of this entry »
learning, technology, various
In various on October 4, 2007 at 4:22 pm
My butt hurts. Or my hip. Haunch? My haunch? That is the extent of my personal communication for the day. That and that my butt hurts. Did I already say that? Making appointments, I swear. One with Fan and one with Dr Minkowitz.
Next item: ensuring email deliverability …
In addition to not running my own mail server, here is what I am doing to ensure that mail we send out actually gets to people:
* We defined a sender policy framework for our domain. Loosely, that means that we’ve spelled out the different mail servers that send mail for our domain.
* We’re cleaning up our HTML, and looking at help pages like this one from What Counts to help us figure out what to do.
I’m looking for other resources on good practices for HTML email content.
art, technology, various, whining
In various on October 1, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Beth Kanter pointed me to a few videos about Creative Commons licenses and how to use them, but I am still going to share my little rant, thinly disguised as a series of Frequently Asked Questions. These are questions frequently asked of me, by all kinds of people (many of who ought to know better). Questions like … Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, linux, technology, ubuntu, various, whining
In various on September 18, 2007 at 6:31 pm
I do these things to make myself crazy. I use command line tools and free software and I call it cool. From time to time, however, I hit against these walls where there is something I cannot do and cannot find my way around doing and I spent an eternity trying to do them or find documentation on them and still …
This is bordering on one of those rants where I’m all “I will punish you by not using your tools anymore if you don’t help me, dammit.” except that there is no one to punish and no one to yell at. Still, I may file this one under “Free Software Doesn’t Work” for the next time someone tells me that there is nothing (nothing!) that Windows can do that Linux doesn’t do better.
And then I wind up being scolded by some free software zealot as though I’m saying I can’t be bothered to figure out why my OOo Spellchecker uses british spelling. I want to edit a flowchart. I have it in graphml format and in svg format and both Inkscape and Dia will open the svg at least, but I can’t find anything like reliable information about how to get DIa to do more than show a single snapshot of the whole svg. I can’t muck with the individual nodes, which sort of defeats the point.
learning, linux, technology, various, whining
In various on September 13, 2007 at 7:59 pm
As long as I’m suffering, puzzling through trac installation, I may as well lobby for some votes.
Look here, friends. If you use Dreamhost, you know you can vote for things you want them to do. I don’t really know whether they count votes or just do this to make the likes of me feel better, but on the off chance that our votes are counted, maybe you’d consider doing me the immense favor of casting your vote for one-click installs of Trac?
What do you say?
Here are a couple of other suggestions presently in the box that I think could be helpful to the likes of me who’d like to be using Trac on Dreamhost:
learning, linux, mapping, technology, various, whining
In various on September 11, 2007 at 8:16 pm
I’m puzzling madly over this.
How to get a chart to move over, then down. And over. Then down. It should be straightforward, but I can’t work it out. I’ve tried a lot of things. Read the rest of this entry »
learning, linux, technology, various, whining
In various on September 7, 2007 at 8:19 pm
Without getting too deep into why I can’t use Visio (I don’t have MS Office) or OmniGraffle (They don’t make that for Ubuntu) or Dia (I’m fussy), I settled on Graph::Easy because I am a dork and thus anything that you install via CPAN …
So you have a million manuals and even a cool demo site, so I know that my text works fine. Yay. Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, subversion, technology, ubuntu, various
In various on August 7, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Having thoroughly fouled up a repository in the process of trying to upgrade WordPress, I’m returning to the original project: nest my SVN repositories. I suspect that it is going to be easier than I originally thought. Starting with a broken repository, it goes like this:
Confirm that shit be haywire with …
[0 amanda@stillwell blogs] $ svn status
Move your wordpress files out of the way for safe keeping:
[0 amanda@stillwell blogs]$ mv wordpress /home/amanda/Desktop/wordpress
Try an svn cleanup without the stray directory:
[0 amanda@stillwell blogs]$ svn cleanup .
Now that things are unlocked (still not unlocked? You need the book.), get the original out of SVN (it is already gone from the filesystem, since you moved it)
[0 amanda@stillwell blogs]$ svn delete wordpress
[0 amanda@stillwell blogs]$ svn commit
Now, you’ve got a halfway clean slate and you can…
svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/branches/2.2/ wordpress
Copy your themes, plugins, wp-config.php and .htaccess over from your back up (or get new ones, if the new version requires them — don’t forget to think for yourself here …) and then get them talking to your original repository. You might even want to read the official instructions for more info on what you’ll want to keep.
We aren’t done here and I’m not convinced that this is going to work. Sigh. What I ended up with is three directories in “blogs” — plugins, themes and configs — that are part of the repository that I manage. So those are in my general repository’s subversion tree (is that a sentence?). I have copy them over to where they need to be in wordpress/wp-content/ when I change them. So there is a manual step, but we’re a lot closer than we were before. I am anyhow. Can’t speak for you.
You get the idea. If you don’t, you should do some reading.
Moving right along, both phpMyAdmin (which makes you weak) and Spam Karma 2 are inexplicably committed to opening some (but not all) php files as external documents. Blank ones. I blame my Apache config, but it still makes me tired.
PS. why, oh why does neither of these lines:
export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
export HISTCONTROL=ignoreboth
effectively prevent my bash command history from logging a zillion duplicate command?
technology, ubuntu, various, whining
In various on August 3, 2007 at 4:57 pm
I’ve commented before about the regex searching in Quanta (the feature list promises this, the help files say that you ought to rethink how badly you need to do it and then offer no further assistance …)
Now I’m needing more love and not getting it. Sight.
Quanta is still the best thing going in the GNU/Linux programming suite world (You know different? I’m all ears!) and yet, it kind of stinks.
All I really want is basic functionality of the file tray, tag completion, color coding variety. Quanta does most of these things. Or it does these things most of the time. It also supposedly supports some kind of built in SSH action, but I can’t seem to find it. FTP is the only protocol available for remote projects, and Google isn’t helping so far.
command-line, learning, technology, various
In various on July 23, 2007 at 3:25 pm
I need to learn to resist puniness in my post titles, but I haven’t yet learned. I’m learning a wee bit about DNS, from dkg, because I’ve got some domains around that our local DNS server isn’t resolving properly. Or wasn’t. Now they are, but later, when they aren’t again, I’ll want to come back to this.
Here’s what dkg had to say: If the DNS servers offered by the DHCP server on your LAN are giving stale info, it’s probably worth tracking that down and reporting it.
Here are some handy ways to do it:
first, document that the suspect DNS server is giving the wrong IP address:
SUSPECT=x.y.z.w
KNOWNGOOD=4.2.2.1
QUERY=foo.example.net
dig @$SUSPECT $QUERY
dig @$KNOWNGOOD $QUERY
Or, rather:
dig 192.168.1.3 gothamgazette.net
dig 4.2.2.1 gothamgazette.net
then, you might also want to ask the authoritative nameserver for the relevant domain:
dig ns @$KNOWNGOOD $QUERY
dig ns 4.2.2.1 gothamgazette.net
if $QUERY is third-level domain (e.g. foo.example.net, instead of example.net), it may not give you an answer, but instead might give you an AUTHORITY section instead. You might then want to re-run the nameserver query against the second-level domain (e.g. example.net).
Having learned the authoritative nameserver for the domain, try querying that nameserver directly:
AUTHORITY=(fill in response from the dig ns here)
dig @$AUTHORITY $QUERY
dig ns1.dreamhost.com gothamgazette.net
does it match the answers from the known good DNS server? does it not match the answers from the suspect server?
pay attention to the TTLs of each response, also. It’s entirely possible that the suspect server legitimately cached an old value, and it is just waiting for the TTL to expire. Do subsequent requests to the suspect server decrement the TTL properly? The value should be in seconds.
Try the suspect server again when its published TTL has expired. Does it still give the bad answer? If it does, you might want to look up who controls the nameserver, either by PTR record:
dig -x $SUSPECT
or by whois allocation record:
whois $SUSPECT
If the nameserver is giving out bad information, it might be worth telling the tech or administrative contact of the controlling organization that they’re offering substandard DNS service.
It’s also worth publishing a note about in a blog (or somewhere similar) with concrete details so that other people who find they have similar trouble with the same providers can be assured that they aren’t crazy.
Note that your nameserver might be run locally, possibly in a NAT’ed RFC 1918 address. In that case, you should contact your local adminstrator about the problem. If you *are* your local administrator I’m not. Whew!, you should either repair the nameserver, or fix your DHCP service to suggest a functional nameserver in the DHCP Options (option “domain-name-servers” in ISC’s dhcpd.conf, identified by tag 6, according to the offical DHCP parameters spec [0]).
The nameserver is local, a Windows 2003 server. I’m probably the only one on the network paying close enough attention to be frustrated, but I’ll still post here …
learning, news, politics, technology, various, whining
In various on June 16, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Before I signed up with Constant Contact I asked around a bit. The consensus seemed to be that no one much cares for them and no one can really articulate what is so wrong with them.
One woman (alternative energy, DC. Her card is on my desk at work) said that you couldn’t slice and dice as much as she wanted. Fair enough. We send a lot of emails and didn’t really need to slice and dice that much. For what it is worth, it is pretty hard to slice and dice at all. She did have a point.
Now that we are thoroughly off of their platform, I thought that others might benefit from a brief run-down of why Constant Contact did not work out for us. For one thing, their customer service is for shit. There are all kinds of questions that they must know the answer to, some where deep down, but they will insist, insist, insist that there is no answer. For instance …
- Their interface doesn’t work with Safari, for no good reason, and though they obviously are doing some browser sniffing they claim to be unable to provide any type of requirements or list of browsers that do work.
This is the catch: when you try to use Safari, you get a message saying that your browser won’t work with their software. It isn’t just that it doesn’t work, they’re doing browser sniffing and saying “Safari won’t work” explicitly. And they won’t tell you what they’re sniffing for. It is crazy making.
Safari incompatibility isn’t the end of the world except that our editor has something wrong with her Firefox installation (I haven’t looked at it beyond confirming that it sure doesn’t seem to work.) and I just don’t think it is so much to ask to get a list of known good browsers.
- Their “compliance department” maintains a secret blacklist. Should you choose to link to someone who once wronged them, they’ll lock your account, not mention that your campaign was never sent, make you wait on hold for ten minutes and then tell you only that the linked URL is forbidden. Nothing else. No explanation of why it is forbidden, specifically. No apparent understanding of how unnerving it might be to have your account locked without warning.
And no, they can’t tell you who else is on the blacklist. You’ll just have to wait and see. At least one irreverent NYC newsweekly is on there, though.
After a fair amount of hemming and hawing, they did finally explain that the blacklist item we’d triggered was a former customer that had been using the system to spam people. You aren’t supposed to do that. Fair ’nuff. But all we did was link to them.
- While we’re on the subject, their interface is for shit. You can figure that out for yourself when you do a trial, but it certainly makes the list of reasons to use just about anything else.
And the slicing and dicing? It is pretty bad. Say you have a subscriber and you want to figure out why he gets three of everything. You’d want to search your lists for a particular contact, right? Good luck.
We’re on What Counts now and it rulez.
[tags]whining, technology, learning, politics, news[/tags]
Brooklyn, command-line, learning, linux, local, software, technology, ubuntu
In linux on June 15, 2007 at 1:31 am
N’s got a super-sketch-spyware-adware-trojan beast on his computer (that is what you get for browsing with IE, says I) — the kind of thing that you get from clicking the wrong button and launching some kind of ActiveX installer. It won’t go away. No amount of Spybot Search and Destroy or Spyware Doctor will make it go away (speaking of Spyware Doctor, later we can talk about how I feel that the Google Pack is all or nothing. What if I don’t want Google to take over my screen saver? Sure, I can uninstall it later, but why not let me choose in the beginning?).
We’ve given up trying to eradicate it, so I took a field trip to Mikey’s Hook Up where knowledgeable people took a break from their ping-pong game to ask me a few questions and point me towards a reasonably priced external hard drive so we can back up our home drives from his computer and start over. Got that? Knowledgeable people, enjoying their workday. I can’t tell J&R and Best Buy apart, but I am pretty sure that no one really tries to help you at either one. They sure don’t at Radio Shack. And you don’t get to play ping pong on your breaks at Best Buy. It is okay to shop someplace where the staff aren’t being forcibly crushed into a homogeneous model of “Perfect Customer Service” that involves no service whatsoever.
Back to the hard drive, though. I know that we could bring the malware with us, but, having evaluated the risk, we’re not that stressed out about it. Moreover, since the option is to just erase everything, we may as well try.
Since our fancy new LaCie (designed by Porsche, ooh la lah) drive has a gazillion gigs available, I get to back Brahms up, too.
Here’s what I did. I’d love to know if you’ve got a better idea:
[0 amanda@brahms ~]$ cd /media/LACIE/Brahms/
[0 amanda@brahms Brahms]$ sudo tar cvpfz backup.tgz --exclude=/proc --exclude=/lost+found --exclude=/mnt --exclude=/sys --exclude=/dev --exclude=/media --exclude=.Trash /
Note that Ubuntu mounted the drive of its own accord. It is not inconcievable that a person could have to mount a drive themselves if it doesn’t just automagically appear. If you don’t like my only relevant archive, you could try searching the internets.
I made up the “.Trash” part because I couldn’t find any documentation of how the tar --exclude option handles regular expressions. If I backed up the trash, okay, I backed up the trash. Worse things have happened.
Still, I’m wondering. Did I do the right thing? I created separate (duplicate) backups of a couple of directories where I store working documents (my home directory and /var/www/html but those were a little more straightforward.
PS, can i just tell you how much it warms my heart that Princess Oh-my-god-she-saw-me-without-makeup Melissa also is totally over ga-ga weddings. It isn’t just because I’m a difficult and belligerent punk, it is because people go out of their heads and they need to just not.
command-line, learning, technology, various
In various on May 24, 2007 at 3:55 pm
I’m taking a break from a puzzle I really don’t need to be spending this much time on. Here goes:
I heard a rumor that microformats are cool, and, I want to links to a calendar. Seems simple, and a good place to start understanding RDF. Here’s what I’ve got: the original calendar, which basically works for the time being; a script that pulls the links to the calendar (some of it, anyhow) into well formatted RDF (you’ll want to view the source, no doubt).
So, um. What do I do with that? I’ve been playing with some PHP scripts that will parse the RDF six ways to Shaolin but won’t just display anything I can display as html in the <a href=”URL“>Event Title</a> format.
I can generate a huge multi-dimensional array that doesn’t lump items together at all. I can generate a smaller array that only has the Titles and URLs, but they’re not distinguished in the array.
I need to sleep on it, because I think I’m missing something, either about RDF and parsing it or about PHP and arrays. Since I’m a long way from actual sleep, I’m hoping that you, dear reader, will chime in with some brilliant insights (a code snippet or two, perhaps?)
In the meantime, I did come up with a not altogether inelegant solution: I rewrote the script (the one that was generating well formatted XML) and now it generates a nice little HTML snippet. Now if anyone could tell me why this: my $feat_start = POSIX::strftime('%d,%m',@feat_field[0]); doesn’t work, or how this 2454232 is May 11, 2007 if it isn’t a date that strftime can work with … I’d be much obliged.
security, technology, various
In various on May 15, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Just in case you were wondering whether you should change your email password to something a wee bit more random, I have a story from a friend. We’ll leave her anonymous for now.
Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, drupal, learning, technology, various
In various on May 14, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I’m goofing off with Contemplate, trying to play with displaying taxonomy terms in smarter and more structured ways. I’ve gotten as far as sorting out that (correct my syntax on this one, please!) Drupal node taxonomy is stored as a recursive array of objects. Here is one example: Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on May 10, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Used to be, I worked for Mainichi Shimbun, where I learned odd things, including that the Japanese term for “desktop” in the digital sense is “deskutoppo.”
I also don’t really understand why my computer crashes so much and I wish I knew more about command line WPA. It seems wrong to install things willy nilly. Read the rest of this entry »
audio, learning, software, technology, ubuntu, whining
In various on May 7, 2007 at 4:13 pm
It is no secret that I’m kind of flummoxed by audio on Brahms. I recently got annoyed enough to send a moderately unhelpful “someonehelpmefixthisplease” query to a list I’m on. I got some response to the tune of “read the Ubuntu forums” which prompted me to try a friendlier list (and to threaten any forum-deflectors with a swift kick to the shins). Maybe it was the threat of violence, maybe it was just that radical techies are good people, but I got some great responses, which I’m filing here for future reference.
Read the rest of this entry »
drupal, software, technology, various
In various on May 7, 2007 at 2:01 am
Note: The diversion part of this post got carried away and I need a central spot for comments on the toolbox, so I copied it …
I had a chat a while back with Tim at Social Source Commons about my Recycle-A-Bicycle toolbox, in which I’ve stowed almost all the software we’re using at my soon to be old gig.
dkg pointed out that Calcium isn’t even as free as it used to be (or maybe I skimmed over something in my early readings of the license) and that prompted me to notice that there isn’t really a good way to comment on the SSC blog. Comments here leave something to be desired (like a preview) but at least you can leave them.
You can read the interview here (there?) and if you’ve got thoughts for me … Read the rest of this entry »
linux, technology, whining
In various on May 5, 2007 at 2:08 am
I’m still getting the hang of managing a high traffic webserver, but learning that MySQL has some good administration statements. So do other databases (programmers do like to say that MySQL is lacking in all sorts of ways that I am only slowly learning to appreciate) but if you’ve got MySQL, SHOW TABLE STATUS is an incredibly useful tool. If you’re not sure whether a database (or table) is still in active use, for instance. The data_free column offers a clue to which tables are wanting optimizing (meaning that a large number of rows have been deleted).
[tags]whining, technology, linux[/tags]
drupal, learning, technology
In various on May 1, 2007 at 10:09 pm
We’re in the process of moving ABC no Rio to Drupal, starting with the Visual Arts Collective.
We want to do exactly what you might expect that the Visual Arts Collective of a community center might want to do: show off work that appeared in recent exhibits.
Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on April 23, 2007 at 2:13 am
Used to be, I’d moan and groan a lot about how nothing since HomeSite has had a halfway decent regular expression editor. Made me cuckoo. Quanta only handles one line at a time, and don’t get me started about KFileReplace or I might have to tell you about how the helpfiles for regular expressions in KFileReplace, rather than actually explaining their RegEx syntax, basically just says that you shouldn’t use regular expressions. Wha?
But today, I learned about :arg and :argdo and I’m in vim heaven. See for yourself: http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/usr_26.html
[tags]ubuntu, linux, command-line, learning, technology[/tags]
learning, linux, technology, whining
In various on March 29, 2007 at 2:01 pm
I’m sniffing around for ideas on how to mount an OSX Disk image (a .dmg file) in Ubuntu, and I stumbled on this thread which has some other good Ubuntu ideas. I was tempted to ask there for advice, but apparently, before I’ll be allowed to comment I have to try out:
Audition to become a commenter. To become a registered commenter on this site, you first need to be approved by our team. We’re looking for comments that are interesting, substantial or highly amusing. So write a comment, polish up your words and choose a username and password below. Your comment will only appear once (or if) you’re approved.
I call bullshit on that, but it could be for the best. I think I can live without Lifehacker and they can live without me. Hmph.
So I’ll post my question here, where I’ve already passed the try-outs:
I want to mount an old OSX Disk Image, but it won’t just mount. I’m not really sure how to begin deciphering the missing piece. Is there a filesystem doodad to install? (speaking of which, what is the technically correct way to refer to a package like smbfs? It isn’t a file system, it is a thing that lets you read a file system. Not a utility either. So what?) OSX is based in FreeBSD so it can’t be impossible to mount .dmg files, but it sure isn’t obvious to me how to make it happen.
[tags]technology, whining, linux, learning[/tags]
command-line, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on March 16, 2007 at 3:10 pm
Used to be, I had a Mac. I complained some, I liked it some. Whoopee.
One thing it did that I liked, was it streamlined local name based virtual hosting. If you do any kind of web development, that can be pretty helpful, name based virtual hosts on your local computer. Now that I don’t have a Mac anymore, I have to do these things for myself.
Without a super full understanding of how Apache interacts with, um, other stuff, I got about as far as making a virtual host entry, knowing full well that I was missing something but not having the first idea what I was missing.
I finally buckled and talked to dkg who, of course, explained the fifteen different ways that I could get name based virtual hosts working locally. I opted for the /etc/hosts option, and added a line to my hosts file that maps “http://thisproject.local” to the loop back IP address 127.0.1.2.
The text of each file is below, but I’m still secretly stumped. I’m missing something about how this all works, as I never defined that IP address anyplace else, and while http://thisproject.local works just fine, http://127.0.1.2 still maps straight to /var/www/index.php.
Here is my /etc/hosts file (part of it, anyhow)
127.0.0.1 localhost brahms
127.0.1.1 brahms
127.0.1.2 thisproject.local
And here is the Virtual Host definition that I enabled (note that I store the actual website files in a way that I find useful, first by project, then by URL. Some projects have a few URLs.)
NameVirtualHost *
<virtualhost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
ServerName thisproject.local
DocumentRoot /var/www/thisproject/www.thisproject.com
<directory /var/www/thisproject>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from all
</directory>
ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/thisproject_error.log
# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
# alert, emerg.
LogLevel warn
CustomLog /var/log/apache2/thisproject_access.log combined
ServerSignature On
</virtualhost>
I’d love some help figuring out how to make this entry more accurate. I’m definitely still missing some things, but I like to writeup what I get working.
(While we’re on the subject of puzzles, Ultimate Tag Warrior seems to be choking somehow. Not sure what the deal is, but I did tag this article with “command-line, technology, learning, linux, ubuntu” and I bet those tags are going to get swallowed. I’ve upgraded WordPress a few times, so I suspect I broke something. )
command-line, learning, linux, technology
In various on March 14, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Continuing with my purely hypothetical project, taking over a server that I didn’t build …
I’m wondering about Yum. Say you’ve got a RHEL4 server, and there aren’t any functional package managers running (up2date is there, but that only looks for kernel upgrades) and you want some package management. I installed Yum from RPMs, but now that it is installed, I don’t have any kind of handle on who to trust for packages. There is no debian stable for RedHat.
I found good instructions on adding repositories to yum.comf, but no reliable advice on which repositories to add.
command-line, learning, technology
In various on March 14, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Say you’re responsible for a server, and you want to take a look at mail that this server is sending out. How do you do that? Hypothetically, lets assume that you didn’t build this server, you just took it over and are trying to reign in all kinds of ghastly nonsense.
First, you need to know what kind of SMTP server or mail transfer agent (MTA) you are running. Odds are pretty good that it is either Sendmail or Courier. If you really aren’t sure, try searching your running processes for either of those: ps aux | grep "sendmail".
Actually, it isn’t that vital to know, but it is useful information. What you really want to know is, what kind of mail is passing through your system.
If you have webmin, it is pretty easy to look through your queue. Just sniff around in webmin for something that looks like “Mail Queue” or something. No big deal. Webmin, however, makes you weak. I know you think I’m kidding about this, but I don’t kid.
If you like the command line, or you want to like the command line, try looking up the man pages for mailq. You might also want to take a look at your mail log (mine is in /var/log/maillog). You’d be amazed at what you find.
If you’re really new to the command line, you might want to learn a bit about bash operators to make this process easier.
software, technology, whining
In various on March 2, 2007 at 9:22 pm
It has been a while since I bugged Marius to make some adjustments to make Gtimelog easier for me to use. He did make some adjustments and he left me (and you) an updated version of his Time Tracker.
It wasn’t in the Ubuntu repositories, though, and I was too lazy or embarassed (or both) to ask what the heck one does with some .deb file. Here is what you do with it: dpkg -i filename.deb Simple as that.
If you are studying apt and dpkg, here is a nice how-to that got me over that particular hump.
This was all such a victory of the lazy web, you don’t even know. I mean, I wrote a blog entry about something that didn’t work the way I wanted it to, and a total stranger read that blog entry and fixed the something for me.
Thanks Marius!
letters_home, politics, software, technology
In various on January 19, 2007 at 4:03 pm
I was about to write to my mother, because I know she’ll actually think about my question and answer it (and because I think she knows the answer) but I figured that maybe one or two of my other three readers would have something to add, too.
I’ve been brainstorming good analogies to proprietary software, to what it means when Amazon holds a patent for the one click checkout, or when Microsoft owns a patent for the FAT file system. When every concievable element of a web retailer’s site is technically in violation of some patent or another.
One metaphor that I really like is about Monsanto and ADM vs centuries of agricultural knowledge and learning. Hundreds of years of agricultural stewardship and experimentation with crop hybridization and seed saving can be capped off in one fell swoop by ADM taking those successful seeds, making a hybrid and patenting that. Suddenly they own the patent, even though their contribution was a tiny step laid upon the work of generations. Add in the little things that slipped under everyone else’s radar like the Iraqi constitution’s explicit protection of GM seed patents and I can make a nice argument that they are stealing all the honey.
The Public Patent Foundation has some other good examples–drugs that many different scientists were actively working towards before Pfizer slipped in and grabbed a patent that would keep the rest off the market, but I’m looking for a few others examples of public knowledge being patented to allow a sole company to clign tight their already-large slice of the pie.
I’m also looking for good examples of software patents that could resonate with activists, if you want bonus points.
LDAP, technology, truth_in_advertising
In various on January 17, 2007 at 1:44 pm
Dot Organize is circulating a call for stories about data that just won’t sync, along with a proclamation: http://integrationproclamation.com. If you’ve ever had a database vendor tell you that it isn’t possible ot connect your donor information to your list software (and that they don’t have list management software that will meet your needs); if you’ve ever stared blankly at the results of your online event registration and wished that you could track that information in the membership database that works just fine for everything else you do, you should write to Tate and sign the proclamation. There is no “one true database” out there that can meet every event registration, case management, subscription, membership and donor communication and leadership development need of yours (and if there is such a thing, it probably works for about three other groups nationwide). Tools that do one or two of these things should, however, talk to one another.
If I’m not making any sense but you think I might be onto something, try Jon Stahl’s recent entry on the proclamation.
command-line, learning, linux, technology
In various on January 8, 2007 at 4:24 pm
Or was that Recovery Is Possible? For a bit more on using a live CD to rescue a machine, see my notes from January.
I had this fantasy (oh, what a fantasy) that puzzles like this were behind me, but I found myself, once again, staring at a wackadoo screen that was decidedly not Windows launching. Something about a boot disk and not being able to find one. Read the rest of this entry »
drupal, noise, scheming, technology, whining
In various on November 30, 2006 at 4:28 pm
DKG has at various points talked about projects designed to “fix” email (which is fundamentally broken by spam) that would charge a penny a message. The idea is that when you start adding a nominal cost per message, spam becomes a wee bit more costly. Some smarty pants out there have even floated an incredibly complex proposal for a bonded system, where it costs me a nickel to send you an email, and if you accept my email, I’ll get my nickel back. So I can spam you, but I have to pay for the privilege, while sending real mail is entirely free. Or costs a nickel sometimes, like when you write a nasty late night letter to someone you don’t like and they decided to keep your nickel to be spiteful.
Fundamentally, it sounds like a good idea. Or at least an interesting one. Logistically, it starts to fall apart quickly, but I’m more of an idea person so I’m still interested.
Since we rebuilt the NOSI site, kicked out a zillion spam accounts, and cleaned out seven zillion spam comments, we get about six new user acount per day on NOSI.net. Once a week, a real person requests an account, so I don’t want to just delete the account requests wholesale, I actually look at all of them. Or some of them. Michelle looks at some of them. Most of the requests are pure spam and they piss me off. I’ve been thinking that it is time to institute a nominal fee for drupal site accounts. We could keep the money for NOSI or just give it back if you don’t put seventeen links to various reduced price pharmaceuticals in your signature. According to my records, if we had a dollar for every account on the NOSI site, we’d be rich right about now. Would you pay a dollar to comment on the NOSI site?
(While we’re on the subject of me and my bright ideas, another great idea of mine is a variation on Andy Singer’s car alarm that fits comfortably around your neck and jolts you with an electric shock every time someone touches your precious vehicle. I am hoping the persuade someone to introduce a bill in the City Council that would require all car horns to sound exactly as loud inside your vehicle as outside. So Pepsi Truck Guy wants to say hello to Other Pepsi Truck Guy? Fine. And he can go deaf doing it. And every SUV with Jersey plates throwing a horn-hitting-tantrum in his rush to get to the next red light? I want him to wake the baby sleeping in the back seat. It might be easier if the NYPD could figure out how to enforce existing laws that do say your horn is for e-m-e-r-g-e-n-c-i-e-s and not general communication, but that will never happen. I haven’t actually gotten past my ow fantasy stage on this one. The car alarm folks have gotten a wee bit farther–there is actually technology that, while it doesn’t deliver electroshock therapy, does ring on your key chain instead of out in the street.)
storytelling, technology
In various on November 30, 2006 at 2:36 pm
I started to write this post last night but got distracted thinking about jury duty and my arrest a few years ago (which is now the subject of a lawsuit being heard by a jury this week. We’ll see what comes of that.) I’ve started to write a lot of posts, but I get distracted easily. It is part of why I can’t seem to get it together to write anything meaningful for the NOSI blog. I’ll try to get to the point quickly this time …
I ran into an old friend in the jury hall, which meant I could drag a buddy with me to the Yemeni Luncheonette (145 Court Street. Excellent.) He’s a designer. Or was. Working as a project manager at an interactive shop that does mostly big car companies’ websites.
I’d been thinking a lot lately about my own experiences in corporate advertising: I worked for months on an account that was building the website for a subsidiary of a certain energy giant. The subsidiary did not exist. This was very confusing because this certain energy giant was, well, giant. And we couldn’t figure out what on earth they were doing with this bizarrely unrealistic business with no customers and … one side concern of their overall inefficiency was that we were way behind schedule on this website that was going to allow online enrollment, but their terms of service kept changing as they attempted to appease various public utility commissions. Because we weren’t using anything even remotely resembling a content management system, every time the terms and conditions changed, we had to alter each of four instances of the T&C. Even then I knew it was inefficient, but we didn’t know any better. I think that eventually we figured out how to use a single file and server-side include calls, but that was a late breakthrough.
So while we were walking back from Lunch, I got to talking to Jeff about the work he is doing now, and I asked him, because I was wondering, what kind of content management systems his clients are using. And he said this interesting thing. What he said was, and I am just going to paraphrase here, was that most of his clients had at some point purchased a proprietary content management system, often at great expense, but that in every case he could think of the CMS had proved in-adequate for their needs and been abandoned.
Did you get that? If you didn’ tread it one more time. Non profit organizations are forever chasing the Joneses. They want to use corporate tools (because corporate America is so efficient …) and they’re convinced that the big kids are using expensive propriatary “solutions.” They aren’t using them. They’re paying for them. Not the same thing. It isn’t just non-profits that are being sold a bill of goods.
linux, technology, ubuntu, whining
In various on November 22, 2006 at 2:23 pm
I keep thinking that I’ll eventually figure SMB out and use my deep and thorough understanding of it to write a clear post that will make legions of people just like me say “ahhh, I wish I’d read this before I tore all my hair out trying to make … work!”
It hasn’t happened yet, though. Read the rest of this entry »
organizing, technology, wordpress
In various on November 10, 2006 at 5:53 pm
File under lazyweb. This time, I’m looking for really good examples of social justice organizations (not individual activists, and not technology oriented organizations) using a blog as part of their communications strategy.
Here are some good examples, but I could really use some international ones:
Southwest Workers Union
South Western Organizing Project
What have you got?
audio, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on November 6, 2006 at 4:56 pm
I am continually mystified by sound and my laptop. It is one of the small handful of things that doesn’t just work and that drives me somewhat nuts. For the most part I can’t get any sound in Flash. That means I can’t watch YouTube. YouTube is primarily a distraction, I tell myself. I do not need YouTube, I tell myslf. But Arif just posted a piece about organizing videos online and I’d like to watch the KFTC video that he talks about. I’d like to hear the narrative while I watch it. I think that might be a good use of my time.
UPDATE: I forgot that half of what got me started on this is that I recently tried to explain to someone that I don’t get sound out of Flash and I did get sound at that moment. That really flumoxed me. And made me look silly.
I have more interesting audio projects that I thought I’d be working on, but if I don’t fundamentally understand how to control the audio on my laptop, I don’t know how much audio I’m supposed to do.
So that is a project for the coming weeks. I’m going to tackle the sound system and try my very best to understand it. If you already do, I could use some guidance.
scheming, technology, wordpress
In various on September 13, 2006 at 4:56 pm
I just did some Word Press fiddling for a friend’s Chiropractic Practice, in Minnesota, and I am knee deep in trying to build a new and much, much better site for the Youth Bicycle Education Network (okay, okay, you can peek if you must. it isn’t some kind of big secret), and I have learned a few things:
Read the rest of this entry »
agriculture, ecology, organizing, politics, storytelling, technology
In various on September 8, 2006 at 8:24 pm
I finally watched The Meatrix. It is pretty good, smart in that “sums it up” sort of way that is so hard to do. It being factory farming. The True Majority Oreo animation is another good one, this time about budget allocation. Phillip hipped me to Gap Minder for some very smart animations that illustrate UNDP data about distribution of wealth.
I’d love to see more smart animations that make sense of complicated political issues (yup, using the lazy web again, I am.) but also, I was reminded of a fairly obvious thing. I get most of my produce and eggs from a single farmer in New York state. I buy my milk at the greenmarket, also from a small farmer not far from NYC. When I buy meat (which I don’t do often), I get it via the Clinton Hill CSA. I pay a bit of a premium for local, sustainable food, most of which is organic. I think it is worth it, not because organic produce is better for you than conventional produce but because organic produce and produce that doesn’t travel thousands and thousands of miles to get to my door is better for the air I breathe and the rivers I’d really like to swim in. The thing I was reminded of, watching the Meatrix, is that while I do pay more than I would at the local Associated for my parsley and nectarines and turkey sausage, I don’t pay that much more. And so I wonder, where do all the savings go? If it is so much more efficient to raise swine on a diet of antibiotics in hermetically sealed warehouses, why isn’t beef at the Pioneer substantially cheaper than land and labor intensive CSA meat? Seriously:
CSA: $6.50/lb for top round roast from a grass fed cow
Pathmark: $5.49 for top round roast (though it is on special at $1.99)
Or, is Pathmark totally lying about “regularly priced at” prices? (not inconcievable, I know). Where is the money going? Secretly, I realized halfway through writing this that meat is one thing that is pretty cheap. Frighteningly cheap when you think about it, at your average grocery store. Of course Pathmark never, ever, actually sells top round for $5.49 a pound. It is always on special. Top Round at the Associated this week is $2.49. I even went downstairs and fished a circular from the Pioneer out of the recycling bin: top round, $1.99 a pound. So I retract my previous position. Factory farmed meat is much cheaper.
And still I ask you, who else is using graphics to tell a hard to tell story really, really well?
technology
In various on July 25, 2006 at 1:42 pm
A year or so ago, an electrical storm fried the cable modem at CVH, and then fried a router and a few hubs downstream from the modem. I spent a long time trying to figure out a way to blame it all on the setup there: too many hubs, not enough surge protectors. When in doubt, blame Dirk (or Arif, I think he’d wired that office.) I was sure that in a reasonable network setup an electrical storm couldn’t toast that much equipment. Read the rest of this entry »
mapping, politics, technology
In various on July 17, 2006 at 5:35 pm
School officials in Sutter, Calif., order students to wear RFID tags around their necks; parents object and the principal backs down. School officials in Osaka, Japan, track students with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags worn around their necks or tucked in their belongings. The government of Mexico tracks court officials with RFID tags implanted in their shoulders. Finland changes national laws to allow cellphone tracking of children. A woman in Kenosha, Wisc., discovers her estranged husband has hidden a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker in her car. All are current news items.
I know I should be expressing shock horror and outrage, but honestly? I would really like a little RFID tag rattling around in my downtube someplace, and possibly tucked away inside the case of my Thinkpad. $20/month might be pushing it, especially if that price is per chip, but I’d almost pay it.
As an aside, the article poses another interesting question about the potential for chips in workplaces, monitoring workers. Aside aside, it might be an improvement over the current USPS system which requires postal carriers to scan a bar code sticker at various set points along their routes, thus tracking their routes. Apparently the locations of these scanners are hard to keep track of, and so our local carrier has taken to scrawling “Scam Point” in magic marker on the outside of buildings containing such as bar code. Leaving aside the spelling issue, I’d love a solution that encouraged USPS carriers to keep their Sharpies capped. Back to my original aside, though, the article poses this food for thought: “Initially, the front line will be in the workplace. How will union leaders value workers’ rights with human tracking as a bargaining chip in contract negotiations?” which is positively fascinating becaues it assumes that union leaders are the ones out there valuing workers rights. I’m not saying they aren’t, but considering that less than 10% of the private workforce is unionized, at least in the US, it is going to take more than just union leaders to protect workers rights. Mostly, I am always bewildered by liberals who act like the Unions will save us as though the AFL-CIO had anything like the power they had in the 70s. Part of this little Orwellian dystopia that we are slip-sliding towards includes some strange doublespeak about how unions are looking out for us, and never ever mentions that we’ve collectively allowed our legislators to eviscerate workers rights and the power of most labor unions in the process.
And, PS, Yessss. I do realize that a dose of basic f*ing manners would go along way at the USPS. There is some middle ground between writing all over someone’s front door and implanting chips in mail carriers. I was being facetious, okay?
command-line, learning, technology, ubuntu
In various on June 30, 2006 at 3:50 pm
Sorry dad, this one is definitely for the what the hell is she talking about? files. Maybe later I’ll write about sleeping under the cowitch tree and Frank Quan’s coffee and waffles and the Grace Quan, and that will be interesting. But for now, I give you …
Ubuntu Networking.
If you want to be able to use the internet and you aren’t a command line cowboy, these commands will help you find your way, since most Ubuntu How Tos expect you to know what kind of modem you’ve got before you set out.
lspci will list all PCI devices. Your internal modem and wireless card are probably still PCI devices. I had to scan the output for 802.11 because there was no mention of WLAN or wireless in the output.
You can also look under system > administration > device manager for a list of known devices on your system. Now that I know I’ve got an Atheros AR5212, I can actually get some useful information from the Network Manager hardware list
Most instructions aimed at making Network Manager work on Ubuntu instruct you to restart all the time. Since some instructions don’t actually work, you may find you’ve restarted for naught. Restarting takes a while, and if you happen to be, oh, doing anything else, you lose it all. And so I bring you sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart: you can restart networking without restarting Ubuntu.
For what it is worth, what did finally work was to comment out most lines, ‘cept these:
# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
in /etc/network/interfaces and then to restart. Then my wireless interface appeared in the Network Manager panel applet.
Next Challenge: dial up modems, pppconfig, wvdialconfig and more.
And then? Why did Knotes start leaving its Notifications Area icon floating on the desktop rather than docked in the Panel Notification Area? And how do I put it back?
Here is the deal: Knotes launches on startup. I like it, Gnome Stickes stink. For a while, it would launch and put its icon up with the other icons normally. Then one day the icon was floating off to the left and over the desktop. I quit Knotes and relaunched it and the icon went back where it belongs, but ever since then, when I startup the icon is floating in a very weird place on the desktop and not in the panel where it belongs.
PS, Dad, if you can figure Flickr out, you can upload somephotos of China Camp. That would be useful, don’t you think?
technology, truth_in_advertising
In various on June 19, 2006 at 8:28 pm
A thing that makes my head explode a little bit, is when people talk about Free and Open Source Software and they talk about volunteer software developers as though everyone working on FOSS development is a volunteer with no self interest and nothing to gain from their work. The truth is that there are a great many reasons why someone might give software away that have nothing whatsoever to do with altruism.
Smart programmers negotiate contracts that say their work will be released under the GPL. They do this all the time, and they do it because no institution in their right mind will pay someone to develop software or program or otherwise geek out and then own the copyright to the product of that work. Institutions that pay people to write code do so because they want to use the code (or because they want someone to be able to use the code. More on that in a second). A programmer with some clout can say “yeah? well I want to use the code, too. So we’ll GPL it and then we can both use it.” that is smart, and it hasn’t got a thing to do with working for free.
Programmers develop software that they need. If an application isn’t open source, you’ve got to wait for the manufacturer to give you what you need. If it is open source, you can fix it yourself. If you are capable of fixing it, that is a much more attractive option than sitting around waiting. There is a reason why Apache runs so well and OpenOffice is still so clunky: the folks working on Apache need Apache to work for them. The developers working on OpenOffice (not to pick on OpenOffice–they might be the least clunky FOSS office software out there) are developing an application they hope other people will be able to use. Which is why the clunkiest bits are at the margins: mail merge, help files. The core of OpenOffice works spectacularly.
Foundations fund software development, and they do it with the expectation that the end product will be available for use by some set of organizations that the funding foundation is looking to support. Some foundations retain copyrights to the work they’ve funded, but some insist that the products of a developers work be released under an open source license. The programmers working on projects so funded: they don’t have a choice.
You can’t ditch the GPL: a significant tenet of the GNU General Public License is that it follows the licensed work everywhere. So if a developer doesn’t want to start from scratch, if they’d like to take existing software and build upon it, they can’t quietly copyright their new work. They don’t have to release it at all, but that is another story.
If you want help, you have to share the credit: some people, even programmers, like to work in groups. Working in groups is easier if you know you’ll all share equally in the product of your labor. Doesn’t matter much what the product is, that tends to stay true. The easiest way to ensure that even if we all hate each other in the end, we’ll still have our software? GPL. It isn’t just programmers that care: if you want me to read your use cases or spend time reporting bugs in your software, I want to know that you are planning to share the outcome with the likes of me.
Yes, there are people out there developing free and open source software from the pure goodness of their hearts, but even they have some interest in knowing that the fruits of their labor won’t be snatched up and sold for millions by someone else, leaving them stunned and bewildered.
And yes, I realize that the vast majority of programmers working in the contexts described above are proud of their open source licenses, but they aren’t just volunteers, writing code while you and I stuff envelopes.
All this self interest, it isn’t a bad thing. It is a good thing. Open source software development is one of the best examples of a thriving cooperative economy out there. It is the precise and exact opposite of, say, the GM Seed industry which is forcing their product down the throats of farmers and extracting grand sums from farmers who, intentionally or not, grow plants from “their” seeds. If farmers across the world had had the wherewithal to GPL seed hybrids developed over centuries of rural agricultural practice we wouldn’t have a GM seed industry at all. We might even have a thriving abundance of wholesome agricultural practices.
Next up: the reason that drupal developers don’t just do whatever you tell them to do. Hint: it isn’t because they are all volunteers and volunteers should be treated with velvet gloves.
letters_home, linux, nuptuals, scheming, technology
In various on June 2, 2006 at 12:53 pm
I want to advise my readers (all four of you, three with my father out of town), that I, Amanda, am capable of heretofore unheard of digressions. For instance: ever since we announced our engagement, people have been asking us what we want for an engagement gift. We don’t know. The things we want in a more general sense include a large funnel (with maybe an inch opening) that is suited to decanting dry beans or flour. And a house. So we’re good on the 75 cent gifts and the $750,000 gifts, but that middle range, we don’t want much. We’re both working adults. We have a colander, a very nice one. We have a full set of All Clad pans and an iron skillet and two nice ladles and six teapots (yes. six.) and a nearly complete set of china.
So I’m trying to make a list of things we want, and thanks to Carrie McClaren I found this site, FindGift.com, which will let you register for gifts in a general way (we need a cutting board. you can buy a sustainably harvested bamboo one that was made by some radical collective in Chiapas where they don’t even grow bamboo and it is probably an invasive species, or you can buy one at Crate and Barrel or Target or you can make one in shop class. I care a little, but since I can’t register at the “radical Chiapas collectives boutique” I don’t see why I need to tell someone where to buy a cutting board from.) FindGift.com wants to know what our wedding website is and we don’t have one yet, and I’m trying to make one but I’m still finding my bearings on this new computer, so I don’t have a favorite text editor with syntax color coding yet, with which to write simple HTML “Later this will be our wedding website. It isn’t yet.” for now.
I have Quanta, but it is written for KDE, and I’m realizing I don’t really know what that means. Leaving aside the fact that what really interests me about getting married is the implications of running KDE applications on Gnome, what are those implications?
I know it has something to do with libraries, graphical something maybe? Programming libraries? Qt vs GTK+. They are, um, different.
I think that what it means to run Quanta on Gnome is that I’ve got to add and run a whole separate library (what does that mean, in English, though?) to support Quanta. That Library’d be there already in KDE. Which is perhaps why Knotes takes so long to load? (I like it better than Gnome’s stickies app).
linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on May 21, 2006 at 6:55 pm
More tinkering.
There are people who feel strongly about Gnome vs. KDE. I feel strongly that SuperKaramba has a better weather widget than Gnome’s (which as far as I can tell just doesn’t exist).
I also got attached to knotes and haven’t found something I like in Gnome, though Knotes works just fine in Gnome so far, so maybe I don’t know what it means for software to be explicitly “for KDE”.
[UPDATE:] I’ve been through this with Gnome before. Right click on the panels (top or bottom) and use the “add to panel” option to add a weather widget, sticky notes (i still like knotes better) and whatever the hell else you want to the panels. I looked high and low for the weather widget and it wasn’t until I was bored on a transcontinental flight that I stumbled upon the dang weather widget.
linux, technology, ubuntu
In various on May 18, 2006 at 2:33 pm
I think I might (sorry jack) eventually change the name of my wee x40, but I’m still settling in. Currently named Brahms, but I really did adore Sweet Pam and Lao Aviation. Naming a device should not be taken lightly. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that it is here and, so far so good. I had to kill the whole XP install, probably for the best. I’ve got dapper drake running and except for the part where it seems like I have to set the wireless password four or five times before I can get online, it seems to be entirely functional. The battery croaked after 30 minutes of use and a few hours of sleeping in my bag, so one thing I definitely need to figure out is whether the problem is the battery or that the Dapper Drake isn’t suspending properly.
Next step: audio.
The Apodio Project has put together a list of tools, but NGO in a Box is also working on an A/V box and I might look at what they’re putting in that box.
learning, linux, noise, technology, traffic
In various on May 8, 2006 at 9:41 pm
I’m working on a deadline, which means that I really am doing some hard core procrastinating. For starters, I am testing out forward track — it is sort of cool, but there is no way to tell whether or not someone actually followed through on their pledge to write to the mayor.
If you want to know the admin login, let me know.
If you are a flash expert, and you want to help me make it NYC specific, ditto. Let me know!
learning, teaching, technology
In various on April 3, 2006 at 3:23 pm
A lot of questions came up in Istanbul that I don’t have good clean answers to and that I have been mulling for a week now. One was from an organization that runs the Ukrainian Voice Portal. Voice as in voices as in activism and civic participation, not voice as in VOIP. Maybe that is obvious, to you, but I kept hearing “voice portal” and thinking VOIP. Similar things exist here, among them Democracy in Action and Citizen Speak (more on those below) and a range of variations in between and beyond (for tens of thousands of dollars you can do anything, but that end of the spectrum is so out of reach that I’ll let it slide for now). CivicActions and Development Seed and May First do drupal deployment work and can build you a site to do these things.
The folks from the Ukraine were asking some good questions, probably questions that any of the folks working on the projects above could help answer. Questions like “how do you measure the impact of a campaign?” both practically and theoretically. That is a question that gets asked a lot and one that advertising folks spend a lot of time thinking about, but that doesn’t mean I know the answer. I don’t think Drupal does very good tracking, though I’m open to dissent on that point. I know this is one of the questions Leda has been asking with dotOrganize, but I don’t think she’s got answers yet, not real succinct ones. What she’s got (we’ve got? I’m part of the requirements working group) is a lot of folks saying “yes, I need and no, I don’t have.”
I started to pull through a list of folks who’ve given this question more thought than I. I came up with these three:
April Pederson at Democracy in Action
Democracy in Action (or DIA) is a fee based site and service that provides a range of online campaign tools, from email blast services to letter writing campaigns and fundraising campaigns. Their system includes graphs so that a person can track responses to each appeal letter that gets sent out and see which are most effective.
Jo Lee at Citizen Speak
Citizen Speak is a much simpler platform than DIA, but it similarly allows users to track responses by how many people actually come to the site and sign each petition. Jo’s done a lot of thinking about how to improve the set up and I believe it is now available as a drupal module.
Jonah Paretti at Eyebeam Research and Development
Individually, Jonah has done a lot of really interesting work on tracking contagious media and Jonah worked on a project at Eyebeam called “Forward Track,” which allows you to map the spread of a campaign on a map. I believe they’ve only got it running on a US map but it is an interesting (and free/open source) project.
But I know there are more than that out there. Who is asking the right questions?
PS: confidential to Dad, I’ve started using a letters home category. You can limit your reading to tales of travel and other life adventures. Scott, Arif, if you get sick of the personal ramblings, I introduce you to the technology category.
family, technology
In various on March 31, 2006 at 6:37 pm
Due to the miracle of the internet, I can find my brother’s ship at any moment. I am open to the possibility that few beyond my family care two shakes about GPS tracking of Oliver, but I think it is cool. From the Matson website you can click on “track entire fleet” which launches a java window. He’s on the Moku Pahu, which, unfortunately is not owned (only operated) by Matson, which means that you can’t also see a picture of the ship on their “About our Fleet” page. You have to right-click to do anything in the java window.
linux, technology, todo, ubuntu
In various on March 31, 2006 at 4:23 pm
It is finally clear that I have to get a laptop, I can’t put it off much longer. I want to run Ubuntu (or generally speaking, Linux) which means I need an intel processor and a keyboard with a right mouse button. I need a portable thing, I’ll probably invest in a dock and a KVM switch so I can use Noah’s keyboard and flat screen when I’m home.
I want to use it for audio editing, but I think that just means an external sound card.
Folks I met in Istanbul this week were all big fans of their ThinkPads, Thomas Krag raved emphatically about his ThinkPad x31 and recommended the x40 highly. I know that Jamie and Josue have matching Dells. I could read hardware reviews and make myself crazy but while I’m doing that I wonder if any one has any sage advice on new laptops and the purchase thereof?
In addition, I am wanting to take the skype plunge, which means I need some kind of headset type thing. Right? How does skype work? That is question two, what is the cheapest way to start talking over skype?
letters_home, linux, technology, travel
In various on March 27, 2006 at 12:50 pm
I sat next to a very nice lady (I was going to call her chatty, but I think I started the chatting and I want to be sure I’m being fair, not painting her as some flighty bee.) on the flight to Istanbul and of course she was very curious about this “meeting” I was on my way to. “What is it about?” (good question.) “Will you be speaking?” (I don’t think so, but you never know) “And what exactly do you do again?” (mmm. I would also love to know.) She was on her way to view the 4 minute total solar eclipse that is approaching. March 29, I think. I think I’d have to be in Southern Turkey to see it myself.
And then I got here and people were asking roughly the same questions, in a sociable, get-to-know-you kind of way, but I still didn’t have an answer. “You know, I was in Simon’s Town, chilling with the penguins and it was really nice out and I didn’t ask a lot of questions,” didn’t seem like a very professional answer.
I’ve asked around and finally landed on someone who knows more than I about where I fit. So now it is all clear. I am an invited guest (it says so on the agenda) at the OSI Information Programs Meeting. National Coordinators of OSI Foundations in former Soviet countries and a few other places (Western Africa–the region, South Africa–the country) are here to talk about their Information Program work. Intellectual Property, access to knowledge, digital divide. Access to ICT (Information and Communications Technology) tools — open source software, challenging telco monopolies; as well as access to information. They are here, these foundation directors and program coordinators, to talk about their work and compare notes and learn about tools that they or their grantees could be using or could be using better. Tools like eIFL–Electronic Information for Libraries– which is actually an organization, but also a tool, in that “how could we be supporting your work” sort of a way. Tools like CiviCRM, a membership/online advocacy database project. Other tools, too, but those are on the radar. It is (secretly) sort of political to trumpet CiviCRM and not talk about what else is out there–there is a lot else out there– but one thing about civiCRM being open source and based in open source software is that it is highly localizable (meaning you can translate it) and there is already a Polish version.
Okay, okay. I knew it was the OSI Information Program National Coordinators Meeting. But I hadn’t really asked any meaningful questions about what that actually means. That was what I learned when I got here, what the Information Program does, what the National Coordinators coordinate. That sort of thing. I was being cute, but I don’t want to give the impression that these guys are a bunch of free wheeling flakes. They aren’t at all.
What am I doing here? Listening and meeting people, mostly. I am going to demo CiviCRM, but I didn’t know that until last night at dinner. Trying to steer clear of Dirk’s egregious inability to pronounce anyone’s name.
Read the rest of this entry »
command-line, learning, linux, technology
In learning, linux, various on February 27, 2006 at 8:07 pm
I just realized that Jack was looking around for this, which isn’t live yet. Wasn’t. Is now or you wouldn’t be reading it …
Got a Linux server but you don’t know your password? It happens. Usually it happens because someone set it up two years ago and since then it has just worked.
And then one day, for some reason, you couldn’t connect to the file share. One thing you can do is try booting with a live CD but if you just need to reset the password, you’ll need to first boot into single user mode. Because Linux is Linux, nothing is ever simple, starting with the fact that just knowing that you are running Linux doesn’t tell me what boot loader you are running. The boot loader is the program that loads when your computer starts up–this program, in turn, loads your operating system (er. actually it loads the kernel, which loads the operating system, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself). Windows comes with a boot loader, the Mac OS comes with a boot loader. Linux comes with a choice. The odds are good that your boot loader is either Lilo or Grub.
Briefly, from there, here is how you do it if your boot loader be grub and if your boot loader be lilo this’ll help, though I think that’s got directions for Grub, too.
command-line, learning, linux, technology, ubuntu
In learning, linux, various on January 19, 2006 at 2:01 pm
File under famous last words … sure, boot it from CD. Great. And then? What?
This, is what:
http://arainyday.se/notebook/windowsrescue.php
http://www.ubuntuguide.org/
More specifically:
The live CD boots its own operating system. If you want to access files on an existing hard drive, you need to find and mount that hard drive. fdisk -l will show you any attached disks (such as an internal hard drive) that can be mounted. sudo mkdir /media/windows will create a mount point or a place to find the hard drive in your linux file system and then sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 will actually mount the drive to be readable in that directory. If your old hard drive is FAT not NTFS, you’ll need a different command: sudo mount /dev/hda1 /media/windows/ -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000 (fdisk -l should tell you how the drive is formatted)
Now you have to decide whether you are going to start by backing everything up. A bit of advice if you are actually trying to restore a fried system: you want to start by backing everything up. So, to back things up you need some kind of external drive. Probably a USB type of something, which you’ll need this handy command for: lsusb.
Which tells you that it can see that USB DVD-RW, but doesn’t tell you how to mount and write to it. I got tired of trying to figure that out, though I’m sure that some sequence of four commands would have gotten me up and running toot sweet.
Instead I went back over to the spanking new eMachine they’d bought, enabled a share drive (actually someone else had already done that part) and looked up its IP address (open a DOS prompt and give the ifconfig command). Then I enabled the ethernet interface (system > preferences > networking) and connected to it as a windows share (places > connect to server ... ; the service type is windows share, use the IP address of the destination computer in the server field.) and started copying things over and burning them to CD from the working computer. Not ideal since some kind of trojan horse is likely what brought down the old machine, but it works, and the new computer doesn’t have anything on it yet so this was safe enough.
Question for the kids at home: how could I have actually mounted the DVD writer?
learning, linux, technology, ubuntu, whining
In various on November 23, 2005 at 3:21 pm
It is the little things, you know?
Something, somewhere in this beastly machine ought to be able to tell me that a file is currently being edited by someone else. Instead, OpenOffice just crashes each time I try to save the document. That is bogus. It should know better.
linux, technology, truth_in_advertising, ubuntu, whining
In linux on November 11, 2005 at 1:55 pm
It is really the little things, like there isn’t a flash player for Linux on PPC. Ask too many questions and they’ll tell you that you don’t really need flash. Who needs flash? Well, me. For one thing. I like it. With a lot of searching the Ubuntu forums I finally confirmed that it really is a PPC issue. Nice to know I am not crazy, would have been nicer to know that without so much work.
So there’s two things you can do with Ubuntu on a PowerBook: skype and flash. Alas.
I’m hoping these fine gentlemen can get me situated: UbuntuPPC.info
mapping, scheming, technology
In various on November 11, 2005 at 10:02 am
local, meta, technology, wordpress
In various on November 10, 2005 at 7:11 am
This is a meme thing, an everyone is doing it thing, but also a useful thing.
For example, a skilled journalist who writes about welfare is moving on from her post at City Limits and needs a website. That is what got me thinking about this — my five photos on Flickr are not that interesting, though I’ve also been trying to navigate the best way to get photos of our community garden online.
I’m starting with the WordPress FAlbum Plugin. The Greene Acres site is drupal and needs updating first.
As I understand it, my photos should be either here:
/notes/wp-content/plugins/falbum/falbum-wp.php
or here:
/photos
though I’d also like to try here:
/notes/photos/
We’ll see what comes of it.
linux, technology, ubuntu
In linux on November 8, 2005 at 9:15 am
I wish had some journal entries from adjusting to OSX. I hated it. H-a-t-e-d it. Now I miss it so. Quanta does not do multi-line searches, which is helping my perl syntax immeasurably, but that isn’t why I switched OSs.
Today, special, I am trying to figure out package management, Quanta, CVS, Cervesia and Kompare.
amanda@tamari:~$ sudo apt-get install cervisia
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Package cervisia is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
libcvsservice0 libcvsservice-dev kdesdk-doc-html
E: Package cervisia has no installation candidate
amanda@tamari:~$
I have a few questions: is this a repository issue? Am I calling it wrong?
Is this going to be an issue anyhow since I am using primarily Gnome and I think all the good stuff is wanting KDE? Does Quanta work better in KDE? The whole window manager thing secretly confuses me a little bit.
PS, on an unrelated note, I would really love if my input here was color coded and stuff. I miss using a nice, rich, text editor. Vim, quanta, bbedit, textpad — I’ll take any of them over this dang textarea.
art, photography, teaching, technology
In various on October 25, 2005 at 8:34 am
Tags: photography, technology, art, teaching
What is lost when photography is taught as a technical skill and not a miracle of light and image? I read a good essay about this recently that I’d like to find.
learning, linux, technology, ubuntu, whining
In learning, linux, various on October 21, 2005 at 2:43 pm
Tags: linux, ubuntu, technology, whining
I installed Ubuntu on my (a) PowerBook g4, for all the wrong reasons (neooffice is so slow on OSX, Linux is kewl) and I am trying to adapt, but I have hit the following walls:
* IMAP: I finally decided to go the IMAP route since I am forever failing at syncing my various laptops and checking email efficiently. I set up some folders and things are going fine, but I am confused: if I create filters locally, on one computer and/or move files into folders, will that stick on the server? Also, if I make a folder locally, will THAT stick on the server?
* Plain Text: How the heck to I make the text formatting disappear in the Thunderbird compose view? Grrr. Also, how do I force everything to plain text, coming and going? I know I worked this out on my Mac, but I don’t remember how. I think it was tricky.
Thunderbird is also ignoring my quote messages inline settings for the account in the Local Folders, which peeves me.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plain_text_e-mail_%28Thunderbird%29
Never give up: the Thunderbird Knowledge Base set me on the path to the answer for this one, It is a combination of edit > preferences and edit > account settings ... that you are looking for here. Settings are sprinkled all over but it is at least possible to turn off all inline quoting and RTF emailing and force all messages, incoming and outgoing, into Unicode. Whew.
* Threading how do I get a “threading” button to appear on my toolbar? How do I make Thunderbird always thread all folders by default?
* Key Mapping: I don’t have an “alt” key, I only have one control key and suddenly my fabulous open apple keys are moot. To right click without an external mouse I have to mouse over and press f12 which is just weird. I want to do some basic keymapping along the lines of “the open apple is the control key” not map this function and map that function.
* Repositories: I don’t have a command line mysql client, and there isn’t anything listed under Add Programs that fits the bill. I don’t really know how to look at that gui interface and understand how to edit my repository list and I don’t know how find that in a text file, though I know it is there to be found.
* Music: I can’t get Rythmbox to play music off of the network. My music is on the network, is that so hard?
* Saving Files did I already gripe about not being able to navigate to an smb share in the open office save dialog?
audio, learning, technology
In learning, various on October 20, 2005 at 3:05 pm
Tags: audio, technology, learning
Truth is, I have been trying to figure out how to edit audio on my computer for five years. Maybe more. First I got a cd burner, figuring I’d need a place to store large digital files. I got a discman. I got SoundForge, but it turned out that I didn’t have the right sound card. I don’t understand about sound cards, but it wasn’t going to work. I even interned at a radio station and learned how to edit analog audio, mark with chalk, slice with razor, tape together, transfer to cart. But I can’t figure out how to do it without a whole radio station at my disposal. I’ve drifted since then, but I keep coming back to this project and I want to make it work. I really do.
But I don’t get it, I don’t understand. There are terms that mean nothing to me, and these terms, they seem to be core to my being able to do this.
I have a sony mini disc walkman with a line out. I have recordings of different things and a general idea of how I want to edit and arrange them.
I want the audio on a computer. I also have a tape deck and record player that I want to use to create digital content, but that is a later issue. Except that it isn’t.
Also, I have a little bitty mic thing that I got at radio shack because I couldn’t find the mic that Lex loaned me. I am not sure whether it is capturing very quality sound.
I have the following computers at my disposal:
* a powerbook g4 with osx 10.3 and garage band (gregory suggested this might work)
* an unreliable xp dell that has audiology on it (unreliable in that Dell support has confirmed that it has a bad motherboard and that is why it can’t be counted on to turn on when you go to turn it on. for now, we just don’t turn it off. i don’t want to get too attached)
* a powerbook g4 with ubuntu — my fantasy was that I could use this machine but after spending about five minutes on the skype forums I have established that skype doesn’t make a build for PPC, I am suddenly wondering whether architecture is going to be an issue
I have no external sound card, nor do I have a way to import audio (I spent some time on the mac today, trying to figure out where to plug the line out into, couldn’t get garage band to hear the audio).
I think that I need these things:
* a better external sound card — the apodio guys seemed to think that I could get “a decent” sound card for < $100, but I have no idea what a decent sound card is. How do I know?
* a better mic — this can wait, or maybe I’ll pick Tianna’s brain about this at some point. I want a better mic for future projects. First I want to get what I have onto the computer.
* software to import audio — what do you use?
* software to edit and manipulate audio — what do you like and use?
I am hoping that you kids can help orientate me. I don’t want to buy anything that will be Mac specific, because I don’t plan to have the mac forever. I know that a few of you have pro tools, I am hoping that you can at least suggest something else.
