No Open Blockers

When I first started out using Linux, I was introduced to FVWM as a display manager. I quickly became, well, addicted to dorking with my .fvwm2rc config file. I was hooked on how many possibilities and customizations could be made. I’ve since stopped using FVWM for various reasons (not the least of which is their abrasive community) and thought my config file tweaking addiction was cured.

Then I found Conky. The easiest description is found directly on their site: “Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.” The addictive part is that there are hundreds of variables that can be displayed as part of its monitoring. Do I need, at all times, to see the amount of space left on my /home partition? No. Does the fact that I can do it make it awesome anyway? Hell yeah.

In the past week, I’ve had a number of coworkers see it running on my laptop and ask me what it was and how to configure it. The “what” part can be seen in the top right corner of my desktop below (click the image for the full size 1680×1050 version):

The “how”, or at least my settings, can be found here. I’m playing around with a personal github account for backing up and sharing this sort of stuff. I’m still not sure how much I’ll use it, but for now my conky config file can be found there. It’s a bit of a mess, but should be at least enough to give users an idea of what can be done. If anyone knows of any particularly cool use of it that I’m missing, definitely let me know.

I was making coffee earlier and I overheard my wife on the phone.

“English”
5 seconds later
“En-glish.”
5 seconds later
“ENGLISH”

It didn’t take long to figure out she was on the phone with her cell phone carrier. I won’t say which one, but let’s be honest, in the United States they are all pretty much equally bad.

That’s not the worst part. She then recited the phone number of the account she’s trying to work with. Recited, as in spoke out loud.

I’m not a user interface designer. I don’t claim to be. But I can’t find a single reason why someone would think it’s better for customers to speak the phone number rather than simply using the keypad like we’ve been doing for decades now.

Yes, voice recognition may be cool. But cool isn’t always the best option.

Not fully sure why they say MythTV is needed since it’s just using basic commands (unless I’m missing something here), but I’m totally going to do this for the next baby.

I had all summer to gradually start cleaning and packing to move in November. Naturally, I did nothing. I finally started to feel a sense of urgency when my wife threw down a to-do list on my desk. While I’d normally blow it off, she titled it “Phase 1″, which to be honest, scares the hell out of me for what’s in store in later phases.

So, I started in the depths of my office closet where I knew I’d come across some relics of computing past. What I hadn’t realized was just how much I’d find and how far back they go. Below are just a few of the ancient, dust-covered computing artifacts I came across:

• Two copies of Windows 98.
• One copy of Microsoft Works Suite 2001. Unopened; I think it was part of a restore package for an old laptop.
• A copy of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3. At least I wasn’t a complete Windows whore back in the day.
• Four “spare” keyboards (so far) not counting the one I already use to bait my daughter away from my real keyboards.
• An external Iomega Zip Drive and a few disks. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it sports a cool 100MB disk size at a time when floppies and modems ruled the day.
• A 500W ATX power supply. This is actually pretty new. It came with a case I bought but I needed something more powerful. The real question is why I kept it around.
• A Palm V. Amazingly, the screen isn’t shattered.
• A SCSI hard drive of unmarked size that I haven’t got a clue what it may contain.
• At least 25 ethernet cables of assorted sizes. I have no idea how the hell I came to own so many, it’s like the reproduce or something.
• Five laptop bags. I think every time I quit a job, I’ve take the laptop bag as a trophy.
• A 12 foot keyboard extension cable. No idea where it came from, but one has to question the practicality of a keyboard extension so long that you couldn’t possibly see what you were doing on the screen.
• Assembly instructions for a desk I got rid of three years ago.

And the worst of all?

• One copy of Windows Me.

This is all just in the office closet. I have yet to venture into the attic. If I find an external modem up there I’m gonna lose my mind. I really should save some of this stuff and set up a small monument to computing history in my new office.

I’ll cut to the chase: it doesn’t work. But have no fear, there’s an OSS solution.

I recently got into using Amazon for buying MP3s. It’s DRM-free and has a great integration with pandora.com, which lets me hear a new song and click directly in pandora’s interface to buy it. It’s technology at its finest, if not its most dangerous (to my credit card).

Amazon is annoying in the sense that you can download single MP3s as an MP3 file, but to buy a full album you have to use their proprietary downloader. This was bearable until a recent change where all MP3s now have to be downloaded using their downloader.

The problem? The most recent build of their client is for Fedora 9 (or Ubuntu 8.10 if you go that route). So their software is, um, I’ll just say “not up to date”. I was able to hack around to get it to run under Fedora 10, but it’s flat out busted in Fedora 11.

As I said at the outset, there is hope. Clamz is a command line app to download MP3s using Amazon’s .amz formatted files. It’s exactly what you think it is. You download the .amz file from Amazon (at the point in Amazon’s workflow where you should be just downloading the MP3 itself) and run the clamz executable passing in the .amz file. Poof, it just works.

I’m disappointed it has to come to this. I know Fedora 11 is still new, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was never a Fedora 10 build (and still is no Ubuntu 9.4 build) of the Amazon downloader. Serious good karma to the Clamz project for stepping up and filling this need (at least until I find a new outlet for buying MP3s; if Amazon doesn’t want to let me buy from them then I’m not gonna go nuts trying to).

This link seems to be being passed around the blogs, but I first saw it at pjp news.

http://www.commandlinefu.com

It’s a collection of user uploaded and ranked useful commands. The idea is similar to the two entries I wrote on shell tricks but on a much bigger and cooler level. Just quickly poking around the first page of the site has already shown a number of things that are going to come in really handy. They also support all the usual useful channels like RSS and twitter, both of which you can use with a filtered threshold for user votes to limit the incoming commands to the truly awesome. There is some serious black magic to be learned on this site.

Repost: This happened back in Feburary 2009 and was posted as “Disaster Averted” mainly to annoy my students with the fact that class was *almost* cancelled that night. I’m reposting it with a more accurate title for searching purposes (read: I needed to find this again but couldn’t because of my annoying title).

When I got to campus today and turned on my laptop, I was greeted with an all black screen and just the word “GRUB”.

Shit.

Some quick background for my students… GRUB is one of the bootloaders available for Fedora. In short, a bootloader is what takes control from the BIOS at boot time and passes it to the operating system. No bootloader = no operating system. So here I found myself, on campus needing my laptop for class tonight, without anything to help me.

That last part needs some elaboration. Fedora added a really cool feature where the Fedora installation can be installed to a USB drive. While I was at Red Hat Summit last year, I got Fedora 9 installed to the USB drive they gave out as swag. That doesn’t really help much since I kept forgetting to swap out the USB drive on my keys with my newly pimped out Fedora install stick.

My forgetfulness came back to bite me, since when I needed it most, what should have been an extremely conveniently located live Fedora install is sitting in my office at home, a few feet away from half a dozen Live CDs of various Linux distros that also would have been helpful to have around.

That aside, this was actually sort of cool in a way. While studying for my RHCE, I found new and creative ways to destroy a Red Hat installation to practice for the exam. I had managed to run into this exact issue and knew how to fix it, I just needed some form of rescue CD to do it.

The first half of that was easy, I logged into a machine in the lab and downloaded the Fedora 10 ISO from fedoraproject.org (insert generic “Try that with Windows” comment here). Thankfully, the lab machines have CD burners. However, I needed to find a CD first. Having no luck digging around the lab, I went downstairs to the university IT department’s tech helpdesk.

“Are you a student?”

Ok, so it was a fair question to ask me. It’s the last class before Spring Break and I’m not feeling well, so I’m here in a Villanova sweatshirt, jeans, and sneakers.

“No, I’m a professor. I need the CD for class tonight.”
“Really?”
“I assure you, I’m not a student.”

Thankfully, one of my students last semester had introduced me to one of the IT guys in the room who recognized me and vouched for my employment. I can’t really fault them for asking; I’d get annoyed too if a student bust in the helpdesk asking for free stuff.

One burnt CD later and I was into the Live CD. A few commands after that, I rebooted sans CD and was up and running.

Which brings me to the meat of this post, how to reinstall GRUB from a Live CD. It’s actually pretty simple. After booting into rescue mode, run:

grub

That’ll bring you into the interactive GRUB shell (notice the prompt changes to “grub>”).

grub> find /grub/grub.conf
(hd0,0)
grub> root (hd0,0)
grub> setup (hd0)

The find command was just to verify the hard drive where the boot files are located. The setup command completed almost instantly, which actually had me a bit worried that it did nothing. But the output looked pretty convincing:

Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... no
Checking if "/grub/stage1" exists... yes
Checking if "/grub/stage2" exists... yes
Checking if "/grub/e2fs_stage1_5" exists... yes
Running "embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)"... 16 sectors are embedded... succeeded
Running "install /grub/stage1 (hd0) (hd0)1+16 p (hd0,0)/grub/stage2 /grub/grub.conf"... succeeded
Done.

After that, it was as simple as rebooting without the CD. I’ll still need to look around to make sure nothing else is messed up, and even more disconcerting is what caused this in the first place. But for now, at least I’m not stranded on campus with a dead laptop.

In the meantime, hopefully now I’ll remember to put the damn bootable USB stick on my keys… (Update: I put it on my keys that night when I got home from class)

I can’t help but think of this xkcd comic which feels kinda relevant right now.