tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57788243591572752272012-02-03T16:15:46.590-08:00IT Infrastructure and Software Development from the Customer's PerspectiveLarry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.comBlogger1491100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-75933596703392393602012-01-27T10:08:00.000-08:002012-01-27T10:08:11.485-08:00

I'm back to playing with Rails a bit. NetBeans for Ruby is gone, so I'm going to do things the macho Rails way and just develop with an editor and a bunch of terminal windows. (One of my open source rules is "do whatever everyone else is doing." Trying to use an IDE with Rails was always a violation of that rule.) rvm is a great idea. I found it really helpful to read about named gemsets early on

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-76884045408849119412012-01-22T08:32:00.000-08:002012-01-22T08:32:51.526-08:00

"Know what you're building" seems like an obvious thing to say, but I don't think we do it that well in IT. For my recent data centre relocation project, we applied that principle successfully to a couple of areas. The network lead wrote up exactly what he was building, and the storage lead listed out every device he needed. But we never did a complete "final state" description of the new data

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-84058539214762467692011-12-30T09:12:00.000-08:002011-12-30T09:12:20.626-08:00

In my home office, I have a multi-function printer that does pretty much everything I typically need, except printing two sides. Here's how I get two-sided printing when I need it. The printer is an HP CM1312nfi. It prints on the side of the paper facing up in the paper tray. The "far end" of the paper in the paper tray is the top of the page. I print the even-numbered pages first. These are

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-90339622017377359822011-12-10T08:11:00.001-08:002011-12-21T08:50:22.737-08:00

I've never had to relocate a data centre in one big bang. You hear stories about organizations that shut down all the computers at 5:00 PM, unplug them, move them, and have them up by 8:00 AM the next morning, but I've never done that. The big bang approach may still be necessary sometimes, but you can mitigate a lot of risk by taking a staged approach, moving a few systems at a time.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-60044062113346982012011-12-10T07:54:00.001-08:002011-12-10T08:05:21.881-08:00

We're pretty much done the current project: relocation of 600 servers to a new data centre 400 kms from the old one. By accident more than by design we left the move of most of the significant Windows file shares to the last month of the relocation period. Windows file shares are known to be a potential performance issue when you move your data centre away from a group of users who are used to

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-12781234510800827932011-11-27T07:12:00.001-08:002011-12-21T09:02:38.416-08:00

Way back in time, someone thought it would be a good idea for the Java run-time to cache DNS look-ups itself. Once it has an IP address for a name, it doesn't look up the name again for the duration of the Java run-time process. Fast forward a decade, and the Java run-time is the foundation of many web sites. It sits there running, and caches DNS lookups as long as the web site is up. On my

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-62988386158246160462011-11-20T21:46:00.001-08:002011-11-20T22:17:03.284-08:00

Here are a couple of gotchas we ran into while relocating close a medium-size data centre: When restarting a server in its new location, it decided to do a chkdsk. Unfortunately, the volume was a 10 TB SAN LUN. Fortunately, we had a long weekend to move that particular server, so we could wait the almost two days it took for the chkdsk to run. (I don't know why the server decided to do chkdsk.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-22773256277221748702011-11-11T08:06:00.001-08:002011-11-11T08:35:11.162-08:00

My current data centre relocation has us moving the data centre about 400 kms away from its current location. This has resulted in a total round-trip change in latency of 6 ms. We implemented WAN acceleration in certain locations to address the issue, and we've learned some lessons in the process. Lessons learned is what this post is about. We have offices all over the province, so not everyone

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-83119929569785910962011-11-11T07:14:00.001-08:002011-11-11T08:02:26.436-08:00

In 2006, I was project manager on a VMware implementation for a health care organization. We virtualized 200 servers in six weeks, after a planning phase of about 2 months. Out of that experience I wondered, "Did virtualization have anything to offer a smaller business?" So I set up a box at home and converted my home "data centre" into a virtualized data centre using VMware's Server product,

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-43206251062881787472011-11-09T14:22:00.000-08:002011-11-09T14:22:49.875-08:00

I'm not a network expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I've occasionally solved problems by poking around a bit with Wireshark. Of course, if my network is down I'm not going to be able to download Wireshark. Fortunately, I remembered to re-install Wireshark on my new computer before I needed it. I installed it using the Ubuntu Software Centre. A new feature of Wireshark that I didn't

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-47891844479435946702011-11-01T17:42:00.000-07:002011-11-01T17:42:21.500-07:00

My son is fascinated with videos. I dream that one day he'll get fascinated by making them, not just watching them. So I've been trying to learn about making videos. Here's what I had to reinstall on my new computer. First, playing video (and audio, for that matter) has worked out of the box much better with 11.04 than with previous versions of Ubuntu. I play my Guatemalan radio station and CBC

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-35922705861367045072011-10-27T20:42:00.000-07:002011-10-27T20:42:26.963-07:00

I'd love to find a new backup solution, but the reality is I have Bacula working reasonably consistently right now, and it's the easiest thing to get set up quickly. So I: Installed bacula-client and bacula-traymonitor packages (sudo apt-get install bacula-client bacula-traymonitor) Copied /etc/bacula/bacula-fd.conf and /etc/bacula/tray-monitor.conf from the old laptop Changed the host name in

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-24245680538837769362011-10-19T19:52:00.000-07:002011-10-27T20:37:48.880-07:00

My new laptop had a way-too-sensitive touchpad. So much so that I installed Touchpad Indicator so I could turn it off. Interestingly, I couldn't use its "turn off touchpad when mouse plugged in" feature, because it seemed to always think the mouse was plugged in. That led me to realize that I also didn't have the touchpad tab in the mouse control panel. Googling, I found that this was a common

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-72151177851532818322011-10-14T18:15:00.000-07:002011-10-14T18:15:46.126-07:00

Setting up my multi-function printer on Ubuntu has always been interesting. When I first got my printer, it was so new I had to download and build hplip, the printing subsystem. It looks like installation is a lot easier now, but to get started you still have to go into a terminal and type: hp-setup That starts a GUI that easily discovered my printer on the network. Unfortunately, when I tried

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-62147202852186495732011-10-14T18:11:00.000-07:002011-10-14T19:38:11.961-07:00

The touchpad on the last two laptops I've had have been way too sensitive. There should be a better solution, but for now I'm installing the touchpad indicator: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator Update: I found that the clicking on the trackpad indicator icon didn't work reliably until I rebooted.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-69357896377425732222011-10-05T14:47:00.000-07:002011-10-05T14:47:23.638-07:00

Microsoft is again considering buying Yahoo. According to one MS executive, the acquisition would allow them to "obliterate AOL." AOL still exists? As a Yahoo shareholder, I hope MS buys. If I were a MS shareholder, I'd be afraid, very afraid.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-12469723615040587562011-10-02T14:16:00.000-07:002011-10-03T06:18:16.236-07:00

I installed VirtualBox from the Ubuntu Software Centre on my new computer. I had already copied over my VM -- it came with all the other files when I copied everything under /home. When I figured out how to run VirtualBox under Unity (it's under Accessories), it came up and knew about all the VMs I had on the old machine. When I started my Windows VM, it complained that it couldn't find "/usr/

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-56500399400307980622011-10-01T19:39:00.000-07:002012-01-30T12:31:28.691-08:00

The backlight died on my Lenovo x300 a couple of weeks ago, so I bought a Dell Vostro with Ubuntu pre-installed. Here's how I got from one to the other: The Dell website said I was getting Ubuntu 11.04, but out of the box the computer had 10.10 on it. My first try upgrading to 11.04 failed. When it tried to reboot, it said the device for / wasn't ready. Fortunately, I somehow got to the old grub

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-57268939049988971542011-09-30T06:16:00.000-07:002011-09-30T06:16:05.774-07:00

I had a real "Doh" moment this week. We're about 80 percent of the way through relocating a 500 server data centre. Things have been going pretty well, but right from the start we've found we were under-staffed on the network side. We have a pretty good process in place, with what I think is just the right amount of documentation. The individuals working on the network team are excellent. We even

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-86314291339550985402011-09-24T15:50:00.000-07:002011-09-24T15:50:31.588-07:00

I'm past the half-way point in relocating a 500-server data centre. The servers are a real variety -- a typical medium-scale business data centre. We're using mostly internal resources, supplemented by some contractors like myself with data centre relocation experience. I chose not to come in and impose a relocation methodology on everyone. There are a lot of reasons for that, some of which were

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-30128210385417574642011-08-30T20:40:00.000-07:002011-08-30T20:40:07.143-07:00

I went to a lot of cloud computing-related talks at Linuxcon 2011. One of the better ones was by Mark Hinkle of cloud.com. One of his slides showed what he considers the five characteristics of cloud computing. Two important ones for him are self service, and a measured service. I think those are two useful criteria for distinguishing between a VMware cluster and a cloud that is distinct from a

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-41402415131770220752011-08-20T08:13:00.000-07:002011-09-25T07:56:17.907-07:00

Linux is 20 years old this year, and Linuxcon was in Vancouver, so I had to sign up. The conference ended yesterday. There were a lot of good speakers. As a bonus, we also got to hear some poor guy from HP give a keynote about HP's great WebOS play, at almost exactly the same time as his company was killing the product line. What I was looking for, frankly, was a business opportunity for a small

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-67680378510873771602011-05-23T10:30:00.000-07:002011-05-23T10:30:55.266-07:00

My son's class at school raised and released some salmon this spring, and he had a project to produce a video about it. I offered to edit the raw video together. That spun into a project where I ended up putting together four short videos. Then I put them all on one DVD with a menu. Of course, it wasn't easy. It turned into another episode of all my spare time for two weeks being spent trying to

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-88642141012322869632011-04-25T07:41:00.000-07:002011-04-25T07:41:25.201-07:00

I had a problem yesterday where Rhythmbox wouldn't rip a CD to .m4a format. I went to the Preferences window to set the format, and it wouldn't appear in the drop-down. Curiously, if I clicked the Add button it would show the existing formats, and .m4a was in that list. After much flailing, I discovered that you need to have both gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad and gstreamer0.10-

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-50021058027189592992011-03-27T17:08:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:08:07.190-07:00

I wrote here about a problem I had connecting to a Windows share that was using DFS from my Ubuntu 10.04 laptop. Turns out I was wrong about the issue being related to authentication. The issue was that my server was sending back a string without the Windows file separator at the end (backslash "\"). I simply patched the code at the relevant place to check if the file separator was missing and

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-50726992502076509032011-03-13T07:38:00.000-07:002011-03-27T17:09:45.474-07:00

See an important update here. The information that follows is still relevant to mount.cifs. With my current client, when I'm working at home, I have to connect to a CIFS share that uses Microsoft's DFS through their Cisco AnyConnect VPN. It seemed like the mount would work, but I couldn't see any of the files or folders below the share. (This is with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.) Fortunately, some

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-4150834211210343322010-12-19T16:09:00.000-08:002010-12-19T16:09:37.280-08:00

I wanted to manage music on an SD card, as that's the way a Nintendo DS gets its music. I wanted my son to have his music on his DS so he didn't have to keep track of and charge an MP3 player and a DS. First, Rhythmbox on Ubuntu 10.04 wouldn't recognize the SD card. Fortunately, I'd stumbled across the solution to that a few weeks ago: put a file called ".is_audio_player" in the root of the SD

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-81747361146571609852010-11-14T07:51:00.000-08:002010-11-14T07:51:02.553-08:00

I use Bacula to back up my servers and desktop/laptop computers. It's always bugged me that I didn't have a little icon on my Ubuntu desktop showing the status of the backup: whether it was running or not and some indication of progress. Most backup systems have this. In Bacula it's called the tray monitor. The configuration file documentation seemed straightforward, but it took a lot of fiddling

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-9648691121177982362010-10-12T18:34:00.000-07:002011-10-01T06:46:33.991-07:00

I need to use Cisco's AnyConnect VPN client. It's worked quite well with FireFox on Ubuntu, although I had to forgo the upgrade to 9.10 because the VPN client wouldn't work with the kernels that came with 9.10. (That wasn't the only reason I didn't go to 9.10, so I wasn't really bothered by it.) I've been using Google Chrome for the last few weeks instead of FireFox. It is noticeably faster on

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-40794026493350199322010-10-09T07:55:00.000-07:002010-10-09T07:55:33.201-07:00

I'm looking for an open source friendly accounting company to do my taxes and give me advice. The only reason I need a Windows box anymore is to do my accounting, since most accountants want their clients to use Windows-based software. I typed something into Google to see if I could find an accounting firm that was open source friendly. I got one of those bogus pages that's just scraped together

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-65226509303974967642010-10-05T18:26:00.000-07:002010-10-05T18:26:09.898-07:00

It occurred to me that there's an easy way for CFOs and CEOs to use the cloud right now, without waiting for the IT department to touch a single piece of equipment. Here's how: Ask your IT department how many servers and how much data you have. (Ask how much data is actually being used, not how much capacity you have.) Then, go to Amazon's site for cloud services and calculate how much it would

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-12888572873908599442010-09-26T21:51:00.000-07:002010-09-26T21:51:18.438-07:00

I like the web site the Terry Fox Foundation has put together for their annual school run to raise funds for cancer research. It lets people donate on-line, of course. Much more interesting is that it lets kids collect and create their own content -- photos and videos -- and post them on their own page, along with a graph showing how close to reaching their fund-raising goal they are. My son

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-31629565759718565922010-09-10T18:52:00.000-07:002010-12-27T09:24:20.261-08:00

A friend pointed me at this awesome blog post from Backblaze, who sell cloud storage: Petabytes on a budget: How to build cheap cloud storage | Backblaze Blog. They build their own storage boxes based on a commodity motherboard running Linux, and standard open source software. Backblaze gets a cost per gigabyte of under $0.12. Yes, 12 cents per GB. And that's per GB of RAID 6 storage. It's easy

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-35731813990693433342010-07-18T10:03:00.000-07:002010-07-28T08:33:28.869-07:00

I filled the disk on my VMWare Server 2 host, which caused all sorts of grief. Part of the grief was that I couldn't get to the management interface at https://vmhost:8333/ui. I solved that problem by killing the VMWare hostd process (after freeing up some space on the disk): Look up the process ID: ps -ea | grep hostd Kill the process: sudo kill pid  Remove the old lock file: sudo rm /var/run/

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-33231507318431496792010-07-17T07:41:00.000-07:002010-07-19T16:54:31.384-07:00

Wouldn't technical forums, technical blogs, etc. be nicer to read if people restricted their value judgements and opinions to their own behaviour, rather than other people's behaviour? Doing so might eliminate a lot of unnecessary flaming. To be really clear, I'm not saying there's no place for opinions on the Internet. I'm just saying technical forums aren't the place for me to express my

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-16006134786880916122010-07-07T21:30:00.000-07:002010-08-02T18:41:50.965-07:00

I have an HP CM1312nfi MFP multi-function colour printer, fax and scanner. xsane worked fine in 9.04. The first time I tried to scan after upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 it didn't work anymore. (Breaking it may have been something I did, rather than the upgrade itself.) First xsane told me that it couldn't find any devices. I reinstalled all the hplip and xsane packages, and that got me a message

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-79192789400592052042010-05-07T19:07:00.000-07:002010-12-27T09:18:27.572-08:00

A friend pointed me at articles from the Privacy Commissioners of Canada and Ontario about cloud computing. They raise some interesting points. By and large they're good articles and raise points that you should consider. I want to put a bit of context around them. I don't think the cloud should be dismissed because of privacy concerns, but I wouldn't blindly jump onto the cloud, either. The

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-17794732799992616502010-05-03T22:48:00.000-07:002010-05-04T05:53:17.793-07:00

My friend Elena Murzello just got her web site going. Elena is an actor who's appeared as Anna in The L Word, Tennat #1 in Da Vinci's Inquest, and a Nurse Educator in the Vancouver Coastal Health's Unit Dose Project, among other roles. (One of these things is not like the other.) She asked me for hints about how to generate traffic to her web site. I realized that I really should blog my

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-79648504631090371142010-04-04T07:20:00.000-07:002010-04-04T07:20:10.472-07:00

I've moved a couple of data centres. And I've virtualized a lot of servers. In all cases, the subnets in which the servers were installed changed. If anything depends on hard-coded IP addresses, it's going to break when the server moves. The next data centre I move, I'm going to search all the servers for files that contain hard-coded IP addresses. The simplest thing to do for Linux and Unix is

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-24553033864396026032010-04-02T19:17:00.000-07:002010-04-11T09:40:54.806-07:00

Over the years I've seen SAN storage cost between C$10 and C$20 per GB (C$ is approximately equal to US$ right now). This is the cost of the frame, a mix of disks, redundant director-class fibre channel switches with a number of 48 port cards in each switch, management computer, and a variety of management and replication software. The cost doesn't include the HBAs in the servers, or cabling.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-15073248036279095132010-01-31T17:11:00.000-08:002010-01-31T17:11:07.982-08:00

I have a netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) 9.04. I switched it to the regular Ubuntu desktop just to try. Before I switched back, I rebooted (the battery ran all the way down). Apparently, this is known to be a bad thing. When you restart, all you get is a blank desktop -- no panels at the top and bottom to allow you to get at any commands. The fix is described in Launchpad here, but

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-31517476199619218052010-01-25T20:06:00.000-08:002010-01-25T20:06:02.223-08:00

The ever-fantastic Ubuntu Vancouver Local Committee is organizing a Support Saturday. Come on down and learn about the world's most popular free operating system. If you already use Ubuntu, get some help to make your experience even better. The details: Saturday January 30th, 2010 11am - 2pm Vancouver Community College 1155 East Broadway (Broadway Campus) Building B, Room G219 Click here for

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-91701004707396329802009-12-18T18:38:00.000-08:002009-12-18T18:38:10.341-08:00

A study in the Harvard Medical Journal shows that healthcare IT doesn't reduce costs, and perhaps provides a very marginal increase in quality of care. The authors speculate that one of the reasons may be that the cost of obtaining and running the system outweighs the benefit. No kidding. That fits what I've seen completely. It's a short article, and worth reading. Thanks to Andrew for pointing

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-80036044294870783692009-11-28T12:39:00.000-08:002009-11-28T12:39:22.821-08:00

The ever-fantastic Ubuntu Vancouver Local Committee is organizing a Support Saturday. Come on down and learn about the world's most popular free operating system. If you already use Ubuntu, get some help to make your experience even better. The details: Saturday Dec 5th, 2009 11am - 2pm Vancouver Community College 1155 East Broadway (Broadway Campus) Building B, Room 219G The poster is at:

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-19864931926060234532009-09-20T17:10:00.000-07:002009-09-20T17:19:51.476-07:00

Sometime in the last couple of weeks the brightness controls on my Thinkpad x300 stopped working.I fixed it by creating /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf and putting this line in it:options thinkpad_acpi hotkey=enable,0xfdffffThen you have to remove and reinstall the module to read the new options:sudo rmmod thinkpad_acpisudo modprobe thinkpad_acpiI'm not sure I'm getting all the brightness I

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-36423349354147830702009-08-11T15:07:00.000-07:002009-08-24T22:07:40.495-07:00

So I had a weird problem -- suddenly my DHCP server stopped updating my DNS server when my main laptop that I use all the time renewed its DHCP lease. It seemed to be working fine for all other machines on my network.After much fooling around and some reading, I discovered in the middle of some document a statement that the DHCP server keeps track of whether it thinks it has updated the DNS

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-9417672192852052009-07-18T09:56:00.000-07:002009-07-31T07:32:16.423-07:00

After a year without problems, suddenly I started having a problem where Firefox disappeared when I switched between the laptop screen and my external monitor. Firefox was still running, but I couldn't make it appear.It turns out that somehow it was ending up on outside the screen and therefore it wasn't being shown on the bottom panel. Here's how to fix:Right click on the bottom panel ("task bar

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-10920623082450527932009-07-10T07:12:00.000-07:002009-12-20T07:57:29.035-08:00

I gave a lightning talk at the Ubuntu Vancouver Local Committee July 9, 2009 on accessing the Internet from an Ubuntu computer through the iPhone. Use the instructions from the Ubuntu forums here. This other page gives the underlying commands used by the script from the Ubuntu forum. You may find it helpful if the script doesn't work for you. During installation, when you're asked to make the

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-70103555836743594702009-06-26T18:26:00.000-07:002009-07-13T10:29:54.021-07:00

I'm posting this from my laptop sitting outside Marc's Karate dojo with my iPhone in my pocket providing my Internet connection over Bluetooth. I can't help but be geekily happy about this. I never bothered to set up the tethering before OS 3.0, so it's new to me. This is old news to the hardcore users.I guess a new thing is that Fido is cool with the fact that I've tethered. Not that I care what

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-24420653913385594432009-06-25T07:37:00.000-07:002009-08-06T13:59:39.059-07:00

I have USA and Spanish (Spain) keyboard layouts defined on my laptop, with USA being the default. When I plug in my external keyboard I can no longer choose the Spanish layout either from the keyboard layout indicator in the panel or via the keyboard shortcut I've defined. If I bring up the keyboard preferences, the Spanish keyboard is still in the list. To work around the problem, I either

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-54221232901237801412009-06-17T16:06:00.000-07:002009-06-17T16:11:11.542-07:00

I just watched the Google Wave preview video. What I find intriguing about Wave is that they may have made version control accessible to the masses. Of course, they don't call it version control. That name is part of the reason why it's never been accessible to the masses.Click here to see my del.icio.us links to the URLs they give at the end of the video.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-72470374366332934842009-06-15T07:19:00.000-07:002009-06-15T07:45:07.525-07:00

I went to Open Web Vancouver 2009 last week. It's a two day, low-key conference about open technologies for developers, testers and others at that level of the business. It's a very well-run, well-attended and interesting conference, and very inexpensive.The most interesting thing I heard about was PhoneGap. It's JavaScript that runs on all the major smart phones, so you have fewer cross-platform

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-9093367375738991142009-05-14T07:38:00.000-07:002009-05-28T07:35:34.304-07:00

Ubuntu 8.04 in VMs under VMWare Server 2.0.1 need the kernel parameter "clocksource=acpi_pm" when they boot. Edit /boot/grub/menu.lst and add "clocksource=acpi_pm" to the end of the line that starts "# kopt=". Don't remove the "#". In this context it's not a comment. After you save the file, run "sudo update-grub" and then reboot.If the guest doesn't have this kernel parameter specified, time

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-62100525535231918482009-05-13T16:07:00.000-07:002009-05-13T16:25:50.462-07:00

This morning I scanned a small French reader that Marc particularly liked. At noon I had to scan two pages for Angela, because she'd left them at home. When I went to scan I got this: "Failed to start scanner: Invalid argument".After much flailing, including re-installing hplip and xsane, and doing sudoln -s /usr/lib/libhpmud.so.0 libhpmud.soI finally got brave and simply moved ~/.sane/xsane to ~

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-29570288367687509412009-05-10T07:51:00.000-07:002009-05-11T09:10:58.133-07:00

I needed a test environment where I could test mounting and accessing Windows shares on a Linux machine, using identities and permissions obtained from Active Directory (AD). After the initial setup, I wanted to run a processes periodically in the background, without user intervention. Therefore, having the user enter the password each time wasn't an option. Also, the background process would be

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-46879722889994500842009-04-30T10:11:00.000-07:002009-04-30T15:40:12.010-07:00

The CBC like many media outlets has been in crisis recently. On top of repeated cuts in government funding over the last twenty years, they're suffering from the collapse of advertising revenue to traditional media, due to the television services' dependency on ad revenue.(U.S. readers: The CBC is the government-funded public television and radio broadcaster in Canada, like the BBC in the UK or

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-13294505788665349612009-04-17T16:10:00.000-07:002009-07-14T10:43:04.290-07:00

I wanted to have a page in Drupal that showed upcoming events for the Parent Advisory Council of my son's school, with a tab making it easy to show past events. The idea was to have one place to go to find out about upcoming events, or to find previous events so you could get materials from the event (e.g. handouts provided by speakers).Drupal has a pretty good module for showing calendars, but

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-43024896050102794832009-04-17T11:14:00.000-07:002009-04-17T11:37:41.350-07:00

As I've been blogging about recently, I've been building a Drupal-based website for my son's school's Parent Advisory Council (PAC). As a geek, the technical nature of putting together a content management system like Drupal for a site is interesting, and I learned a lot. However, what really interested me is the social aspect of it.You can't have a business it seems without having a website.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-62118777184183758192009-04-17T07:07:00.001-07:002009-04-17T07:12:02.809-07:00

The Parent Advisory Council (PAC) website is live at http://hastingspac.ca/ and is in a relatively stable form. Much work remains on the translations, but the bones of the site are there and it's up to everyone else to put up the content (muscle).I think we've got a pretty good site for a volunteer group. Our goal is to increase participation in the PAC to benefit the education of our

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-6320700955797616712009-04-09T16:38:00.000-07:002009-04-09T17:05:40.991-07:00

I had a bizarre failure in some test cases. The test case looked like this:marker = Time.nowt.create(args)assert t.created_at.between?(marker, Time.now)In other words, take the time, create an object, and make sure it was created between the first time and now. Obviously true, but my test was failing.The reason: Rails keeps the create time to the second, but Ruby keeps time to fractions of a

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-40675848721940664542009-04-06T09:32:00.000-07:002009-04-09T17:06:36.981-07:00

Some irritating behaviour that I couldn't resolve pushed me to the big upgrade of my virtual infrastructure. I was running VMWare Server 1.0.5 on Ubuntu 6.06 on a Dell SC440. Periodically all the VMs would just lock up for about five minutes. All the VMs would freeze, and even the time (as reported by date) would fall back by five minutes. The host ran just fine, and reported that nothing was

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-91728377663340017892009-03-26T07:33:00.001-07:002009-03-26T07:51:12.723-07:00

This is just a quick note to document another experience with Solr.Background: To index Word, Excel, PDF and other "unstructured" documents, Solr uses Tika, another Apache project. Tika comes bundled in Solr and is ready to run in Solr. However, if you want to run Tika individually (e.g. you don't trust your installation, or you're just curious) you have to copy a few .jar files around (Java

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-49342837717302413032009-03-22T15:13:00.000-07:002009-03-22T21:22:26.885-07:00

Well, after some long diversions I have Solr working in some simple test cases with Rails. The long diversion was partly caused by not understanding what was offered by the Rails Solr plug-in, so I'm going to give an overview here, and a link to detailed instructions for Solr in Rails at the end of this post.The Rails plug-in for Solr from git://github.com/mattmatt/acts_as_solr.git includes a

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-38027894094599107702009-03-20T10:24:00.001-07:002009-03-20T10:26:22.772-07:00

If you're using the Cydia installer on your iPhone, there's a package for rsync. Just open Cydia and search for "rsync". You won't find a "BSD subsystem" package, because they say Cydia comes with BSD. It might, but it doesn't come with rsync hence the extra installation.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-87876075708620515062009-03-19T14:46:00.000-07:002009-04-17T07:04:09.398-07:00

I'm building a web site using Drupal 6 for my son's school's parent advisory council. The idea of the site is to facilitate community participation. Since we're a volunteer group and we aren't at the same workplace every day, I thought screencasts might be a great way to help people learn how to use the site.This post covers the technical how-to for screencasts with Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo x300.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-40191722885530962842009-03-17T16:34:00.000-07:002009-04-17T07:05:01.861-07:00

I can't claim to be the world's Drupal expert yet, but I'm learning some interesting tricks that are worth documenting and sharing.First, my Drupal installations typically include a lot of contributed modules. They're distributed as .tar.gz files, which you upload to your server and unpack in the appropriate place. This can get tedious and error prone (e.g. I forget to unpack one).I built a

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-7253916798695834942009-03-12T14:03:00.000-07:002009-03-17T16:37:10.269-07:00

I've gone from being a shell/make/rcs guy to quite liking IDEs, or at least useful IDEs. I find NetBeans to be a pretty nice, light-weight (in the good sense) IDE, but it has some issues on Ubuntu and other properly secured OSs. Here's how I've got it to work. This applies to NetBeans 6.1 and 6.5, I believe.First, you have to set up your Ruby platforms so they keep their gems in writable

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-69689586923613348312009-03-12T07:44:00.000-07:002009-04-17T07:06:11.016-07:00

In an earlier post I described how I was running out of memory in PHP using a moderate set of Drupal contributed modules.It turns out I was able to increase the PHP memory on my HostPapa hosted site. The method to use it to add the following line to Drupal's "settings.php" file in each site's "files" directory:ini_set('memory_limit', '48M');Or if the line already exists, make sure the

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-9355748053942198332009-03-03T16:10:00.000-08:002009-03-03T16:18:55.506-08:00

As a follow-up to an earlier post, I should mention that part of the reason I had healthcare data on my personal laptop was to do some data analysis with MySQL. Between MySQL and the command line tools, it was very easy for me to load data from other sources and run queries to monitor or predict the amount of medication we were packaging.When I was done doing the data analysis, I wanted to scrub

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-21132911765071236572009-03-03T15:41:00.000-08:002009-04-17T07:06:38.454-07:00

(For an update, read this post.)I've been working on a few websites: One for my son's school's parent advisory council (PAC) and one for some community health centres. It gives me a chance to get to know what's out there in the open source world for content management, wikis, and other collaboration tools that we're supposed to be using to make ourselves more effective and productive.The first

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-42275258742171762512009-02-17T09:57:00.001-08:002009-02-17T10:39:29.770-08:00

People's personal health care data has to be kept confidential. The reality of working in health care IT is that you have to put work on a USB stick or use a laptop. At least Ubuntu makes it easier to do the right thing.I knew I had to do something about the data on my laptop (Ubuntu 8.10), so I sat down one day to figure out what to do. I knew the tools were there, but where to start? Almost

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-14981115860754667992009-02-12T07:13:00.000-08:002009-02-12T07:29:16.649-08:00

Anne Thomas Manes published a great post about how the economic downturn means the end of big IT projects being done for some vaguely defined "value". There's a good podcast about it here.I think the key messages are:IT can provide spectacular gains in business value only by transforming the IT department (people, processes and technology), not by changing the interface engine between the same

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-76279219418919869162009-02-07T07:28:00.000-08:002009-02-07T07:41:54.037-08:00

A recent kernel upgrade broke the backlight control on my X300 (along with a lot of other laptops, according to what I find with Google). To fix it, I'm running the following every time I log in:sudo xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL legacy

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-8665692979447457872009-02-06T11:29:00.000-08:002009-04-17T07:07:06.528-07:00

I'm using Drupal to put together a site for my son's school's Parent Advisory Committee (PAC). I'm impressed at how quickly you can get something up on Drupal. Getting something the way you want it is a little harder, as is always the case with computers.One stumbling block has been the favicon. First, it appears that the HTML that Drupal generates requires a Windows Icon file type (favicon.ico).

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-58505593670994825262009-02-04T07:26:00.000-08:002009-02-04T07:32:32.124-08:00

I'm using TikiWiki to propose to REACH Community Health Centre an idea about prescribing guidelines. I tried adding the search module. It would appear for the admin user but not for anyone else.It turns out there is also a permission to allow users or groups to search. The module doesn't display unless you enable search for the users or groups. Judging by the name of some of the other permissions

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-89829921494138437262009-01-18T07:34:00.000-08:002009-01-18T07:36:18.976-08:00

I find myself trying to zoom documents on my laptop by pinching and spreading two fingers on the trackpad, like I would on my iPhone. The people at Apple sure have a knack for coming up with powerful user interface techniques.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-28712386070675431962009-01-04T07:58:00.000-08:002009-01-04T08:09:43.965-08:00

Out of the box, the external monitor key (Fn-F7) on my Lenovo X300 didn't work. I found a great post on the ThinkWiki that described how to do it. I followed the instructions up to and including the "set permissions and restart acpi" section.There was one small problem with the bash script that you put in /usr/local/sbin/thinkpad-fn-f7. Lines 39 and 40 didn't get the right values when one of the

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-26052573738415548022008-11-29T16:22:00.000-08:002008-12-01T06:24:43.070-08:00

I upgraded my laptop (Lenovo x300) to Ubuntu 8.10 a few weeks ago. The rumour was that power management was better, and I was longing for a kernel that handled the sound on the x300 without a re-compile of the driver every time I updated the kernel.The upgrade went smoothly, although it took a very long time. The default Ubuntu mirror for Canada seems to be very slow these days. (I've since

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-48003916484858777472008-11-27T16:18:00.001-08:002008-11-27T16:21:45.805-08:00

Two jokes that are just so impossibly geeky that I have to repeat them. My apologies if they're so old you've seen them already.There are 10 types of people in this world: Those who understand binary numbers and those who don't.AndHeisenberg is speeding down the highway and is pulled over by the police. The officer comes up to his window and says, "Do you know how fast you were going sir?"

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-39280994763958538882008-10-15T19:32:00.000-07:002008-10-15T20:01:23.510-07:00

In NetBeans 6.1, I created a new project and the "Run Rake Tasks" menu was empty (it only said "Refresh List"). I found someone else through Google who had the same problem, but no solution other than "use NetBeans 6.5 beta".After fooling around a bit, I simply un-installed Rails 2.1.1 and re-installed it and voila, the "Run Rake Tasks" menu was populated with all its tasks. Bizarre. P.S. It

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-65477072023750409262008-09-30T20:46:00.001-07:002010-05-03T21:16:47.165-07:00

Another key element to our success: Bring candy to nurses. Not only do you make nurses happy because they get candy, but you're also showing that you understand their culture and are at least a little bit willing to move yourself closer to it. Just make sure you don't buy only "granny candy". As project managers and senior nurse educators, we tend to be closer to the end of our career than to

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-61699116505584835822008-09-28T14:01:00.000-07:002010-05-03T21:17:37.418-07:00

The machines we're using to package the medications are the FastPak EXP from Automed (AmerisourceBergen). They have an awesome pre-installation support team. The front-end sales people were so-so -- your mileage will vary, of course, depending on the region. The sales team was Western Canada; the pre-installation support is for all of Canada. The machines themselves have a number of quirks.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-21286097122356608082008-09-20T17:41:00.000-07:002010-05-03T21:18:05.117-07:00

We've begun to roll out a just-in-time unit dose medication distribution system at GF Strong, UBC and Vancouver General Hospitals. Just-in-time unit dose medication distribution increases patient safety by making it easier for nurses to do what they always do: provide quality care, including medications. Nurses are loving the new approach. "You just saved me ten minutes", "I really like it", and

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-32664015468610583582008-09-02T20:48:00.001-07:002008-09-02T20:52:15.611-07:00

According to this, in a test of browsers against media intensive sites, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 takes more memory than Windows XP does (did). Bill (or Steve or whoever): That's not what's meant by the phrase, "the browser is the operating system."

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-83283522927593678972008-08-10T08:21:00.000-07:002008-08-10T08:36:42.479-07:00

I have an old (?) Dell Axim X30 PDA that I use mainly as an address book and MP3 player (I added a memory card so I can listen to podcasts while walking the dog). Now that Ubuntu is my primary desktop OS, I wanted to be synching contacts and sound files with Ubuntu.The SynCE project has done this. The documentation is pretty good, but as usual I managed to make it hard for myself. Here's what I

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-19489884162457435222008-08-05T20:20:00.000-07:002008-08-05T20:26:34.081-07:00

I think Ubuntu 8.04 is ready for anyone who wants a good desktop computer with a decent set of office productivity tools. The installation and update experience with Ubuntu is as good or better than Windows and Open Office does what the vast majority of ordinary users need it to do. My mother is using Ubuntu for e-mail and web surfing and having no problems (beyond what she'd have with Windows

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-89976984010125445982008-07-18T20:22:00.000-07:002008-07-19T07:12:40.502-07:00

Why is providing reliable IT infrastructure so hard? Here's a good example.There was a fire in downtown Vancouver this week that knocked out power to a good part of downtown for up to three days. Angela noted that the Internet was slow the day of the fire. I know there's a major network hub in the area of the fire at Harbour Centre, and I suspected that something had gone wrong there, despite all

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-36311109347091809582008-07-05T07:17:00.001-07:002009-07-31T07:34:29.114-07:00

I type enough in Spanish that I like to be able to switch keyboard layouts between English and Spanish, rather than type Alt-whatever to get the Spanish characters (e.g. ñ, ¡, ¿).In Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), go to System--> Administration--> Language Support and install Spanish. This requires a reboot. Truth be told, I'm not sure you have to do this step just to get the keyboard layout, but if you

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-23408450205385107002008-06-15T07:05:00.000-07:002008-06-15T07:25:21.642-07:00

One of the known issues with Ubuntu on a Lenovo x300 is the sound (up to and including Ubuntu 8.04). There are a few links out there that point to solutions. The one that worked for me is this one in Mikko's Blog. One very important note: Check which version of the kernel you're running before you start.uname --releaseThen substitute your kernel version in the rm command. I also got a bit

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-50278951861508696042008-06-13T20:02:00.000-07:002008-06-13T20:04:20.938-07:00

From the Linux Loadable Kernel Modules HOW-TO: "This is Unix, and explanatory error messages are seen as a sign of weakness."

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-37806957082675634212008-06-03T21:35:00.000-07:002008-06-03T21:38:19.730-07:00

I'm writing this from my new Lenovo x300 on which I installed Ubuntu 8.04. It was way too easy -- just pop in the CD, answer a few questions, and wait. I'll give more reviews in the days to come.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-55720201255026177662008-05-10T06:48:00.000-07:002008-05-10T06:51:39.885-07:00

The Canadian Internet Registration Association (CIRA) sent me an e-mail telling me that they were changing the "whois" data so they don't give out personal information of domain owners. Thunderbird thought it was a scam e-mail.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-4747357134354625172008-04-24T21:23:00.000-07:002008-04-24T21:28:22.244-07:00

...or... The end of the... or whatever.Here you can read about Microsoft explaining their Health Vault product (sorry, I think you might need to register). "We're coining a new term, the Unified Intelligence system." I think experience in IT shows that if you have to "coin a new term" you're selling something that no one wants. Is Tim Bray right, that the options to Microsoft are here "right now"

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-78730856212740967832008-04-24T06:08:00.000-07:002008-04-24T20:56:09.455-07:00

I got a message "Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space" while updating Ruby Gems in NetBeans 6.0.1 on Windows XP. It took a little longer than usual for me to find reports of this problem using Google, but when I did I found that it is a known problem.Someone suggested changing the command line arguments to NetBeans to increase the size of the memory for the JVM,

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-83037578473838686952008-04-21T19:00:00.000-07:002008-11-06T11:43:04.679-08:00

I couldn't get MySQL Administrator on a Windows XP desktop to connect to a MySQL instance I had running on an Ubuntu 6.06 server that I built as a LAMP server. I was getting:Could not connect to the specified instance.MySQL Error Number 2003Can't connect to MySQL server on 'server' (10061)I had to edit /etc/my.cnf (or /etc/mysql/my.cnf depending on where yours is stored) on the Ubuntu server to

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-84963223848181558992008-04-21T18:49:00.000-07:002008-04-21T18:52:43.661-07:00

I love the topic of backups. I say that because it's IT's dirty secret. No one should keep data in one place only, yet it's very difficult to set up a backup solution. Different organizations have different needs, and so backup software has to provide a lot of options. But the need for options means when you just want to get basic backup running quickly, it's a challenge.This post is part of a

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-70551204178456223472008-04-18T20:48:00.000-07:002011-11-19T15:50:08.441-08:00

This is another late posting of some notes when I built some new infrastructure servers on VMs to replace my aging PowerPC Macs that ran my network. The security info I got when my ISP told me I had a badly configured name server requires that you create a /var/named directory: sudo mkdir /var/named  sudo chgrp bind /var/named  sudo chmod 770 /var/named  sudo chmod g+s /var/named  sudo mkdir /

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-2716408806270807572008-04-16T18:04:00.001-07:002008-07-25T20:39:11.221-07:00

Months ago I built a DHCP/DNS server from scratch. Most of these notes I made at the time I was building it, meaning to fix them up within a day or two and post them. Of course, I kept doing other things before finishing the documentation, so here are my rather raw notes. This was for Ubuntu 6.06 running on VMWare Server.Create a new VM with a 2 GB disk, don't preallocate and make sure all disks

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-20974698854448554632008-04-14T20:40:00.000-07:002008-04-13T20:40:26.904-07:00

Many who've worked in healthcare IT believe it's more difficult than IT in other contexts. Everyone has their reasons. I'd like to add mine here.Mistakes in healthcare are really bad. They literally lead to people's health being compromised, or in the worst case, people dying. Projects are about doing something new. Doing something new is about making mistakes and learning from them, or at least

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778824359157275227.post-38525367455492656372008-04-13T19:31:00.000-07:002008-04-13T19:38:12.342-07:00

To make the Bacula catalog job work:Edit /etc/bacula/bacula-dir.conf on the backup serverChange where it says -u -p to -u baculaEdit ~bacula/.my.cnf and put this:[client]password=your_secret_passwordchmod 400 ~bacula/.my.cnf ; chown bacula:bacula ~bacula/.my.cnfNow it should work. Don't forget to do "reload" in bconsole.

Larry Reidhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15950655805971599646noreply@blogger.com0