Skip to content

Pinch me: August, Virginia, and pleasant weather!?

I must be dreaming. Three days in a row with no need to close windows nor run the air-conditioning. Gorgeous weather, can it really be August near Washington?

Temperatures are still getting up to 90 in the afternoon, but there is so little humidity that it’s comfortable to be active, work, or even exercise without being drenched in sweat in a few minutes. Very unusual, very welcome. The cats have been enjoying more outside time with us, and I have been pulling weeds and doing a little yard work. Erci is still prepping for her RHCE/RHCT class and exam, and writing papers for her MBA financial class. Yesterday she got out for a couple hours of errands and I enjoy turning the music up and catching up on some house-cleaning.

Scott get’s pedantic for audio geeks after the fold…
Continue reading ›

Dope Smokers or Violence: Which is Worse?

There is something very, very wrong with a society that thinks it is acceptable for police to violently kick down the door to a private family’s home, shoot the family dogs and physically restrain the family while they conduct a search for drug dealer materials or other incriminating evidence, all because a large package of cannabis sativa was discovered in the postal system with their address on it.

Let’s suppose for a moment that this family actually is part of a massive Cannabis distribution ring. In a sane and just society, the police would have to get a warrant to search the premises. No violence is called for in any way because Cannabis simply does not imply violence. Ever meet a violent offender who is stoned on Cannabis? It just does not happen. The use of violence against Cannabis users and dealers is completely unjustified and should be punished to the maximum extent of the law. The very nature of Cannabis being a controlled substance needs to be called into question. The discovery of this stuff in the postal system is a problem too, but that requires a whole story all to itself about the privacy of the United States Postal System.

All of this becomes much, much worse when the news reports that the family were completely innocent, had no knowledge that this package was coming to their house, and basically had no idea what hit them until police broke down their door, shot their dogs, and tied them up while an illegal and warrant-less search was conducted at their home. We probably would not have heard about it if the family did not also happen to be the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland and his wife.

Why was violence justified?

NewsChannel 8 Story

Damn, that’s one ugly bug

So we wasted entirely too much time trying to figure out a really complex to diagnose bug at work. Turns out that the startup script for NTP v4 hangs hard if there is no networking enabled when ntp is started on an openSUSE 11 system. Because we run our openSUSE servers in a Xen virtual environment over VLANs, and we don’t bother telling SUSE what ipconfig it should have because Xen fires up the VLAN configs for the O/S; we end up with our dom0 SUSE servers hanging on boot. No error, no warning, no indicator that it was NTP that was part of the problem (brute force sequential chkconfig service off for each service is how we found it).

For the moment we have ntp set to off, then we manually start ntp once the system is up. We’ll do some VLAN bridging and default IP config later so this does not happen again, but wow – ugly. Very happy it is resolved.

Yes, it is a bug. Anything in the startup scripts should not hang hard; properly configured the service will fail and continue allowing the system to boot.

Google Calendars sync with iCal

For those of you using Google Calendars and Mac OS X Desktops with iCal, you can finally keep them in sync without any 3rd party software. Google supports CalDav format now. Instructions are on the Google Calendar CalDAV support page.

I have mostly been relying on my Palm Tungsten C and Palm Desktop (v4.2.1) for Mac software to handle my personal calendar, but Palm Desktop has been unsupported for a long time now and is really showing it’s age. People at work have been sending me meeting.ics files (from Outlook I think) that can be opened in iCal on my Mac OS X laptop/desktop, but I had to manually transfer (cut & paste) those to my Palm Desktop software in the past. I may finally switch to iCal now that I can see all the google calendar events and sync my Tungsten C to iCal via Mark/Space‘s Missing Sync for Palm OS ($39.95).

Hat tip to John Gruber for pointing out the new CalDav support in Google Calendar, and huge thanks to Google for making multiple calendars so easy to use and share. This now makes five google applications I use all the time: search, maps, calendar, blogger, and analytics. I’d dump blogger except for the local Soka Gakkai calendar and my old Dive Blog which has not been converted to WordPress yet; but Google’s other applications simply work. Very, very sweet.

Internet via Comcast seems slow today, but…

Many websites I am visiting seem slow today, taking 60-80 seconds of wall clock time to load. Ouch. Yet a quick visit to DSLreports.com reveals:

3947Kbps into my house seems to be pretty good, how does that compare with other results out there; it has been a while since I tested. I am really happy with 54ms latency, which seems to be a more pertinent result. So the basic pipe does not seem to be the problem, I’ll have to dig a bit more to find out why page load times are slow.

Update: This has now been solved, it is a slow DNS response over WiFi networks problem. I am not sure why WiFi makes simple DNS requests slow, but I measure ~1 second responses to initial dig requests via WiFi, and ~150 milliseconds via ethernet. So I set up a caching DNS server on my laptop, which in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is trivially easy:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.isc.named.plist

sudo launchctl start org.isc.named

In Tiger or Panther you’ll need some more UNIX skills, but it is not very difficult to set up a caching name server on any flavor of Mac OS X. Vastly faster web browsing now!

Playing with Wayfaring

Just fiddling about with Wayfaring.com, I started putting together a map of local vineyards near my home.

Local Vineyards:

Locations we visited in Japan in 2005:

Fun Thought for the Day

A co-worker saw a license plate frame that said: “My next license plate will be made by Bush and Cheney.” Now isn’t that a pleasant thought? Happy Monday!

Missing “Maia” by Richard Adams

I have lent out or misplaced by beloved copy of Maia by Richard Adams. If I lent it to you, please ping me when you get a chance; I’d like to lend it to a friend, who is stuck in the hospital with lots of time to read. amazon book cover for Maia

Generation Kill on HBO

I’ve just started watching Generation Kill on HBO (time delayed on my PVR). Right off it feels pretty much right; I was never a Marine, but I’ve worked with Marines, Army, and Navy when I was in the Air Force and people really talk and act this way. I am not very far into it, but it has promise.

Update: Now that is freaking surreal, one of the Marine snipers chants “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo” as he shoots an enemy RPG team, it happens about 45 minutes into the second episode.

Once more, with feeling!