Ness’ Outpost

I took a step back from all the convinces of modern day life and bought a fountain pen.

Not that I’m giving up electricity and computing or anything but this pen is somewhere in the middle. It uses a medium nib (the tip part) and ink cartridges instead of filling a well in the body of the pen from an eye drop dispenser. I can buy a well adapter if I ever wanted to use scented ink or blood to “seal a deal” — but I don’t see that happening in the near future.

I did a little research on introductory pens and found a site that recommended a Lamy Al-Star pen as a great starter pen that is rugged for daily use and the ink writes really well on moleskin paper - which is my notebook of choice.

So far I’m happy with it — when I opened the pen and punctured the cartridge I got ink on my fingers.

I’ve been working on a hardware upgrade for nesser.org over the holidays. I’ve almost migrated all the things that I use from the old machine to the new.

I’m running a RAID 1 array of hard drives. This allows me to mirror all the data from one hard drive onto the other in case one of them physically fails. I will be able to recover my data from the other and rebuild the array once a new hard drive is inserted.

Lots of software upgrades have taken place and I’m finally running a current Linux operating system again. The hardware is power efficient running a VIA Esther processor at 1500MHz and the CPU runs fanless, but of course the power supply does not. This makes it nice and quiet as well.

RAM has been bumped up to 512 from 128 in the old machine with a massive 80Gig hard drive.

It just shows that you don’t need a huge power sucking work horse to do basic things like web serving, email, and data base work. That is unless you are serving for a site like Digg or Slashdot. I have a feeling that my network pipe would be the bottle neck and not my hardware in case I ever get swamped with traffic. But I haven’t left it to chance either, my firewall ensures that only a trickle gets through and not a tsunami of network traffic.

All that is left to do now is the following services. I’d like to get them finished up before new years eve so I can decommission the old machine to the dumpster for the new year.

• SVN
• Trac
• munin

Penelope was due for her 95k oil change service and I had noticed some “chirping” noises in the wheels since I need to roll down my window to access the magnetic key fabs for my building. I had been ignoring that for quite a few weeks now because some days my 2002 Chevy Cavalier is a symphony of groans and squeaks.

That “chirping” noise was the front brake pad warnings - I should have known better since it went away when the brakes were applied. Apparently when they inspected the pads on the lift I had 3mm left therefore a brake job was in my future as well. I knew my rotors were warped since the car bounced around pretty well when braking was taking place so I had to bite the bullet and make the decision on the spot.

When I bought the car the dealer did a brake job for me at 65k so those pads only lasted me 30,000 km - which I found out from Scott at Richardson Chevrolet is near the norm depending on the parts used.

The rotors were already warped, having only 3mm of pads I didn’t want to drive it around since I could etch the rotors with the calipers if those 3mm wear out, I don’t have a jack, stands or a garage to do the work in myself. I was stuck, so I had the guys at Richardson do the work.
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It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html

I picked up some new tires at Active Green & Ross today. Monday night was pretty slippery so I decided it was time to replace the Goodyear/Handcook mix that came on my orphan’s rims when I got her about a year ago. Since I’m on vacation this week to study for my PPE exam I had some time to burn.

I bought some Uniroyal Tiger Paw AS65’s which are rated for 110k km. It was one of those buy one get one 1/2 off deals, but I still had to pay for balancing and valves of course so it becomes less attractive. But since I plan on riding out these tires until they or the car end I think it’s best to pay a bit more than going for the bargin basement tires.

I watched the HBO documentary called “Hacking Democracy” last night and it was quite eye opening. They showed how a Diebold optical scanning voting machine was able to have it’s memory card altered to effectively “stuff” the ballot box in the favour of a candidate while maintaining the accuracy of the total vote count.

Without having looked at the software — because it is illegal thanks to the DMCA — I will speculate my thoughts on this situation.

The machine relies on removable memory cards in the same way that your camera does. This allows machines to be disconnected from a computer network, but relies on “sneaker net” to transfer the number of votes from each individual machine to the “central tabulator” which reads each memory card and sums up the totals for every machine in the election.
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Lauren took me out in her car in the WalMart parking lot and showed me the ways of the clutch.

I drove us home and only had to work over the starter a few times when I stalled her. I’d be alright with a standard, but it’s a skill that needs practice. Which isn’t something I’ll be doing any time soon.

How are your data backups? Do you have a data backup? Do you have an off-site data backup?

What would you do if your machine were to have a hardware failure? Knock on wood it doesn’t happen, but here is a neat method of storing every bit you have on your hard drive using good old fashioned GNU tar

Maybe now would be a good time to back up your data because bad things do happen to good people.

My Father replaced the router in his home network which caused this web/mail/file server to have a weekend of downtime. Luckily Lauren and I went for dinner in Niagara and I updated the network configuration to bring the system back online.

Doug bought a Linksys router (brought to you by Cisco) and he thinks it’s faster. Which it likely is since the router runs on a GNU/Linux core. I had to update the network config of the new server since Dlink uses a different subnet than the default Linksys install. Doug was pretty impressed that the Linksys was plug and play — DHCP kicked in and all the windows boxes found the new network, leaving my static IP linux machine off the network, and unexposed to the external IP.

Since you’re reading this — the problem is fixed.

I’m re-rung! This time with a size 7.

And just in time too because this weekend I’m off to the autoshow in Toronto to geek it up with some mechanically like minded people and then it’s off to Laruen’s for dinner.