Ramblings from bkero

Test Post

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 06:13:33 +0000

Testing microformats in this theme, and testing mastodon syndication.

Extracting secrets from AWS-Vault

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 17:58:17 +0000

Recently I was in the situation in which I needed to do some automation involving AWS-Vault, which is a tool for securely managing AWS access keys on developer workstations. Until now I had been using the file backend, which relies on encrypted-at-rest files to store the secrets.

Since there is obviously no caching involved here, every time I wanted to use a secret I would need to type in the passphrase to unlock it, with no cached copy of the passphrase involved. Coupled with a bug that my team faces when applying Terraform (sessions cause remote state S3 bucket reads to fail, worked around with the --no-session option), there was no way that I could create a loop for it.

Hackerbeach Days 1-3

Thu, 02 Jan 2020 06:13:33 +0000

For the last few days I’ve been spending time in El Rodadero, Colombia before setting off to Palomino for Hackerbeach. Another participant arrived today, and joined me in relaxing before the primary Hackerbeach work in Palomino. It’s peak season here in El Rodadero, which means all the restaurants, the malecón, and the beach are filled to the brim with people, mostly traveling Colombians who come here for what is justifiably one of the most gorgeous beaches in the country.

Hackerbeach Day 0

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 20:34:35 +0000

It’s been hell, doing a 4 flight stint for the better part of a day with no off-plane sleep. I read recently that airplane humidity is typically around 20%, which is drier than the Sahara desert. Lesson learned: always bring and fill your water bottle. When you’re dehydrated, the mucus membranes have trouble keeping a layer of mucus, and can let more dangerous external matter through. That results in a sensation, that, when you swallow, can be unpleasant.

Working WWAN on the X1 Carbon Gen 6

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 19:56:37 +0000

When I initially received my new X1 Carbon I was very excited at the new hardware. More pixels, more lumens, more cores.

After I got over my initial euphoria, I noticed that some things didn’t work, and confirmed such by a very helpful Archwiki page.

Some of the things that didn’t work include ACPI suspend-to-RAM sleep (since corrected in a BIOS update), the the fingerprint sensor (still outstanding), and the WWAN LTE Cat9 card that Lenovo seems so proud about. It has all the LTE channels you could ever want and can achieve speeds of up to 150Mbit. It’s a pity that the Linux drivers are not up to snuff.

IndieWebCamp 2018

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:52:19 +0000

I’m looking forward to attending the 2018 IndieWebCamp. It’s a small 2-day event happening in Portland and is exploring the topics of independent web hosting and technologies to knit them together.

If you’re in Portland, you should attend too!

https://2018.indieweb.org/

Introduction to Linux Containers presentation materials

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 16:27:26 +0000

Press ‘c’ to see the presenter console for the slides.

The Dark Arts of SSH presentation materials

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 23:17:26 +0000

Here is the presentation material for my talk entitled The Dark Arts of SSH. Please note this is a single HTML rendering that includes presenter’s notes.

Linux Kernel Compilation presentation materials

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 22:20:39 +0000

As promised to my audience, here are the slides from my presentation titled Building your First Linux Kernel.

Installing RemixOS to an internal drive

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 21:04:21 +0000

After initially running RemixOS, the new Android build for PCs, I decided that I would rather play with booting it natively from my SSD instead of from a USB device. Performance should be better, it would free my USB thumb drive up for other duties, and it would make booting more convenient.

This turned out to be a relatively simple operation. What follows is my methodology for doing that. Please note that these instructions assume you are running Linux.

Trying out RemixOS

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 19:39:29 +0000

I’ve always been one for trying out new operating systems, so when I heard news about the latest desktop-conversion effort from Jide I wanted to give it a try.

RemixOS is a proprietary offering based on the work of android-x86, which aims to bring the stock Android experience to commodity PCs. RemixOS adds on interface and convenience changes to make the operating system more usable on PC hardware. This includes UI changes such as multi-windows and a classic ‘desktop’.

Goodbye Mozilla

Thu, 16 Jul 2015 22:23:44 +0000

I am leaving my responsibilities in the capable hands of my teammates. Although I will no longer be here, the work will still get done.

I’d like to thank all of you who helped me along the way. In particular, the release engineering team for introducing me to the reality of operations at an impressive scale. I’d also like to thank IT for teaching me how large of a scope an org can have, and for civilizing this operations cowboy. I also owe a great appreciation and shout-out to my teammates in Developer Services (especially fubar and hwine) who have had my back through some rough outages.

Size of mozilla-central compared

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 16:50:28 +0000

When I posted a graph comparing the size of the mozilla-central repository by Firefox version my colleague gszorc was quick to point out that the 4k blocksize of the filesystem meant that the on-disk size of a working copy might not accurately reflect the true size of the repository. I considered this and compared the working copy size (with blocksize =1) to the typical 4k blocksize. This is the result.

Trends in Mozilla’s central codebase

Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:56:49 +0000

As part of my recent duties I’ve been looking at trends in Mozilla’s monolithic source code repository mozilla-central. As we’re investigating growth patterns and scalability I thought it would be useful to get metrics about the size of the repositories over time, and in what ways it changes.

It should be noted that the sizes are for all of mozilla-central, which is Firefox and several other Mozilla products. I chose Firefox versions as they are useful historical points. As of this posting (2015-02-06) version 36 is Beta, 37 is Aurora, and 38 is tip of mozilla-central.

My Gear Post

Wed, 04 Feb 2015 02:45:12 +0000

Whenever I encounter people as I travel, they are often curious about my luggage. It seems to be invisible. They’ll often ask where my bag is, assuming that it must have gotten lost in transit. Their eyes go wide and confusion sets in when I tell them that the bag on my back is the only one.

It is my estimation that at least some people would be curious about what gear I travel with. They ask how I’m able to pack all the necessities into such a small space. There is no great secret to traveling light. All it takes is a little research and compromise in creature comforts. If you have browsed the postings of other nomadic hackers, there might be little to be gleaned from this post. Here’s a basic rundown, with almost each article deserving its own article.

Working around flaky internet connections

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:36:42 +0000

Unfortunately not all WiFi connections work perfectly all the time. They’re fraught with unexpected problems including dropping out entirely, abruptly killing connections, and running into connection limits.

Thankfully with a little knowledge it is possible to regain productivity that would otherwise be lost to a flaky internet connection. These techniques are applicable to coffee shops, hotels, and other places with semi-public WiFi.

Always have a backup connection

Depending on a WiFi connections as your sole source of connectivity is a losing proposition. If all you’re doing are optional tasks it can work, although critical tasks demand a backup source should the primary fail.

Attempts source large E-Ink screens for a laptop-like device

Mon, 26 Jan 2015 18:11:51 +0000

I use my laptop in some non-traditional environments, such as outdoors in direct sunlight. Almost all laptops are abysmal in a scenario like this. E-Ink screens are a natural response to this requirement. Unlike traditional TFT-LCD screens, E-Ink panels are meant to be viewed with an abundance of natural light. As a human, I too enjoy natural light.

Besides my fantasies of hacking on the beach, these would be very useful to combat the raster burn that seems to be so common among regular computer users. Since TFT-LCDs act as an artificial sunlight, they can have very negative side-effects on the eyes, and indirectly on the brain. Since E-Ink screens work without a backlight they are not susceptible to these problems. This has the potential to help me reclaim some of the time that I spend without a device before bedtime for health reasons.

The cost of ‘free’ relocation cars in New Zealand

Mon, 12 Jan 2015 04:03:08 +0000

As many of my friends know, I’ve been spending the last few weeks in New Zealand. Primarily it’s been for a small holiday, but also in preparation inimitable Linux.conf.au 2015 conference. Leading up to that, one of the goals of my visit was to experience the variety of places across both islands.

A few weeks ago someone clued me in to a service called TransfercarThis is that this is a service for people who need to rent a car for one-way travel. The way it works is this: rental car companies often get one-way rental requests. At the end of the rental, the vehicles must be relocated to cities where they’re in demand. Therefore they need you (the lone backpacker) to help them get it there. Often these requests get posted with little notice. Thus you must remain flexible if you plan to catch one.

Finding the perfect ancillary travel device

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 12:23:19 +0000

As would be familiar to anybody who knows me, I’m always interested in new tech, especially when it’s running free software and portable enough to be in my every-day carry arsenal.

For the past month or so I’ve been looking at a few devices as a secondary to my laptop to carry with me. In a few weeks I’ll be joining those already there at third installment of Hackerbeach, on the Caribbean island of Dominica.

September ’14 Mercurial Code Sprint

Thu, 09 Oct 2014 21:15:17 +0000

Joining me at the sprint were two of my colleagues Gregory Szorc (gps) and Mike Hommey (glandium). They took part in some of the serious discussions about core bugfixes and features that will help Mozilla scale its use of Mercurial. Impressively, glandium had only been working on the project for mere weeks, but was able to make serious contributions to the bundle2 format (an upcoming feature of Mercurial). Specifically, we talked to Mercurial developers about some of the difficulties and bugs we’ve encountered with Mozilla’s “try” repository due to the “tens of thousands of heads” and the events that cause a serving request to spin forever.

The ‘Try’ repository and its evolution

Tue, 05 Aug 2014 18:38:29 +0000

Recently (the past few years actually) we’ve been experiencing that Mercurial has problems scaling to it’s activity. Here are some statistics for example:

24550 Mercurial heads (this is reset every few months)
Head count correlated with the degraded performance
4.3 GB in size, 203509 files without a working copy

One of the methods we’re attempting is to modify try so that each push is not a head, but is instead a bundle that can be applied cleanly to any [mozilla-central](https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central" target="_blank) tree.

Mozilla’s “try” repository

Fri, 20 Jun 2014 22:22:25 +0000

We have quite a bit of infrastructure around this including Tinderbox Pushlog (TBPL) and more. This post deals with the infrastructure and problem we face while trying to scale the ’try’ repository.

A few statistics:

The try repository currently has 17943 heads. These heads are never removed.
The try repository is about 3.6 GB in size.
Due to Mercurial’s on-wire HTTP protocol, this number of heads causes HTTP cloning to fail
There are roughly 81000 HTTP requests to try per day
To fix problems (mentioned below), the try repository is deleted and re-cloned from mozilla-central every few months

There are a number of problems associated with such a repository. One particularly nasty one has been present through several years of Mercurial development, and has been tricky in that it is seemingly unreproducible. The scenario is something like:

Measuring the performance improvement of Mercurial (NFS vs local disk)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 20:08:01 +0000

The Mercurial developers were concerned about race conditions and concurrent write/reads causing service inconsistency between hosts. This became evident when stale file handles started appearing in our apache logs.
An extension we wrote (pushlog) was also being served off of NFS. This is a problem not because we have multiple hosts writing at once, but because the file is kept in memory for the lifetime of the hgweb-serving WSGI process, and we’ve experienced that sometimes requests to the pushlog can be served old information.
During times of peak activity there was non-trivial IOWait which caused clone times to increase.
Netapp licenses aren’t cheap. 😉

This took a lot of effort and coordination with the release engineering team to ensure that downtime was kept minimal and there were no feature or performance regressions along the way.

Solving connectivity problems

Sat, 25 Jan 2014 12:18:00 +0000

This year the prestigious Hacker Beach event is taking place on the island of Lamu off the eastern coast of Kenya. The island is serviced by a single UMTS tower located above the hospital in the main town of Lamu City. However, our accommodation is on the other side of the island.

Our accommodation had a previously installed directional antenna on the roof to provide internet access. Unfortunately the access was very slow, with only 14% signal strength. This was complicated by strong winds blowing against antenna, causing it to be pointed in a wrong direction. This further reduced the cellular reception, sometimes making it disconnect completely.

Day 51

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:05:18 +0000

For the next week (and the previous week) I’m spending time in Paris. This turned out to be largely a convenient set of circumstances, since I had an excellent experience when I was here two weeks ago, and I wished I could spend more time here.

I was fortunate enough to be here for two concerts I wanted to attend, namely Morcheeba and Parov Stelar. Both were at the excellent venue L’Olympia. The concert halls were different than I’m used to in the US, being much smaller, serving actual beer in pint sizes, and being a much more stream-lined affair in terms of coat checks, getting in, and getting out. The Morcheeba concert had excellent music (Ross Godfrey can play some mean guitar solos), however the overall experience had a certain quality missing that I cannot put into words.

Concerning Hackers and Beaches

Thu, 21 Nov 2013 10:04:31 +0000

For the uninitiated, Hackerbeach involves a group of hackers (historically 15-20) gathering in a tropical location for a month to hack on various open source projects. It can be thought of as a month-long hackathon or code sprint for nomadic open source developers. All of the code so far has been focused on the open web ecosystem.

Last year it took place on a small island of Vietnam named Phú Quốc. It was a loosely organized event with no set dates (besides the month of January). Hackers from all around the world showed up, found places to stay, rented motorbikes, and met up at coffee shops for coworking in paradise.

Day 1 (2013/09/26-2013/09/27)

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 07:00:05 +0000

Woke up with a sore throat. A bad omen for a long travel stint. I hadn’t packed the night before, so it was all done day-of, which surprisingly didn’t result in me not packing important items (that I can think of yet). Maybe I’m getting used to this, or maybe I’m just being more reserved in what I consider necessary.

Managed to get to the airport 2 hours early and thanks to my GlobalEntry card, was able to bypass the security line affording me enough time to sit at Rogue and enjoy some nourishing lunch before catching my 10 hour flight from Portland to Amsterdam. Sadly, I was unable to sleep on the flight, but did catch up on the last 10 episodes of Adventure Time, re-watched Cloud Atlas, and played Shadowrun Returns on my N7. SR had just enough personality to make me realize why I fell in love with the dark, gritty cyberpunk world all those years ago. I wish I had more consciousness to appreciate it. Sadly, I only got an hour or two of sleep which I feel made my oncoming illness worse.

Flying in India

Thu, 23 May 2013 02:03:02 +0000

In order to enter the airport, you must show proof of identity and flight documentation (such as an itinerary) to uniformed, armed guards stationed outside the entrance of the airport. After reading a bit, this heightened security must be due to some of the recent bombings in Mumbai. Metal detecters are everywhere in the country, including the entrance to shopping malls and other high profile public places. Ironically, none of the places that employ these devices actually CARE about the result. At each location I visited I continually set off the alarms, and none of the attending parties ever batted an eye.

Hiring an Auto in Bangalore

Thu, 23 May 2013 02:02:50 +0000

That said, they’re an excellent way to access the city. They’re affordable, readily available, and their open-air nature really allows one to take in the spectacles, cacophony, and (sometimes) smells of the city.

One of the perils of being a westerner in India (or really anybody that one can identify as not being born and raised locally) is that often others will try to take advantage of you. This certainly isn’t restricted to auto drivers either, as this will also happen on the street, in shopping malls, at the airport, and generally everywhere.

Modern push notifications with Weechat and NMA

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 21:49:19 +0000

Sign up for an account on www.notifymyandroid.com. Log in, click on ‘My Account’, then ‘Generate New Key’
Install the NMA Android app (around $3 USD) onto your android device. Launch the app and login
Install pynma.py and nma.py to $HOME/.weechat/python.
(Optional) Symlink nma.py to $HOME/.weechat/python/autoload
In weechat:

/python load python/nma.py
/set plugins.var.python.nma.apikey "$myapikey"

(Optional) To inly send notifications when detached from the screen: install and load the screen_away.py, then

/python load python/screen_away.py
/set plugins.var.python.nma.only_away on

Now you too can be harassed by inane IRC highlights no matter where in the world you are! Thankfully, the NMA Android app has a ‘quiet hours’ in case you’d rather not be woken up in the middle of the night.

Running 512 containers on a laptop

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 00:28:22 +0000

LXC is a management system for lightweight virtual machines called containers. LXC relies on the Linux kernel for several key features including process isolation and resource limitation. Compared to virtual machines, LXC containers have a few limitations, however none of them affect the vast majority of use cases.

My laptop (Thinkpad X220) is by no measure a speed demon, although it still has the required resources to host a seemingly arbitrarily large amount of containers thanks to a few key deduplication technologies. Kernel Samepage Merging or KSM allows fragments of memory with identical contents to be merged together, thus freeing up memory for other uses.

IRSSI Push notifications to GNOME desktop and Android device

Sat, 24 Dec 2011 23:06:34 +0000

IRSSI configuration

Install these scripts into $HOME/.irssi/scripts (and symlink it in $HOME/.irssi/scripts/autorun) to have them autoloaded when IRSSI starts.

Android configuration

Sign up for a notifo account, download the android app, and sign in with it. Make note of the username and API key, as you’ll be configuring irssi to use them.

You’ll be loading the scripts in IRSSI and setting 2 notifo parameters:

/script load screen_away.pl
/script load socketnotify.pl
/script load notifonotify.pl
/set notifo_username $USER_NAME
/set notifo_api_secret $API_KEY

Now receiving highlights while you’re away (detached from the screen) will send them to your android device.

Ganeti, dealing with node failure

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:16:47 +0000

Get paged
Stop panicking
Be sure to log into the broken node to verify it actually died. If the VMs are still running correctly on it, and it’s simply a networking problem, if you proceed to bring them up again you will encounter a bad state known as ‘Split Brain’. This is difficult to recover from, so please verify the dead node is truly dead.
If there is more than 1 node left, try logging into the cluster IP (kvm.infra.scl1.mozilla.com vs kvm1.infra.scl1.mozilla.com)
If there is only 1 remaining node, voting won’t work, so ganeti-masterd will have to be started by hand:

root@vm1-1:~# ganet-masterd --no-voting

Once your master node is online, we need to set the failed node to Offline mode.

Sharp Netwalker, new Lucid Image

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:31:16 +0000

Updated mirror for Netwalker Lucid Image

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 01:16:50 +0000

Additionally, I will be adding the Maverick images as soon as I’ve uploaded it, and have an updated Lucid image to improve stability.

Sharp Netwalker Ubuntu Lucid Image

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 15:51:52 +0000

I wanted a recent Ubuntu distribution though, which I couldn’t find provided for me online. So I rolled my own, and am reasonably pleased with the results. All of the hardware works, although there are some annoyances, such as no battery meter in the GNOME notification area, and the wireless card isn’t supported by NetworkManager, although still works with iwconfig and wpasupplicant. Additionally, the hotkeys on the top are not bound to any programs.

Routerstation Pro Backfire Nightlies!

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:09:12 +0000

Upgrading GuruPlug Kernels

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 09:02:45 +0000

After a failed flashing attempt(don’t attempt to tftp flash u-boot.kwb from within U-Boot!) I needed to use JTAG combined with the included JTAG adapter. To do this, make sure that the UART cable is unplugged, and the JTAG cable is plugged in(unplug/replug the USB adapter just to be safe). First grab the guruplug-installer package, then grab a known-good copy of U-Boot.

$ cd Downloads/
$ tar zxvf Guruplug-installer.tar.gz
$ cd guruplug-installer
$ sudo ./runme.sh ../uboot.guruplug.bin
(lots of scrolling text)

At this point U-Boot is restored, and all that’s needed is to upload a new kernel(and maybe rootfs). Your old kernel won’t work with this new version of U-Boot, so make sure that you have a kernel compiled and ready to use. If you don’t feel like patching(and manually fixing the failed patches) I’ve provided a 2.6.34 kernel for you, complete with modules. To upload the new kernel you’re going to need to attach your GuruPlug to your network with it’s top-facing ethernet interface(near eSATA port).

Defcon Badge Hackery

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 21:32:59 +0000

Some of the OSUOSL employees attended the recent DefCon 18 conference. One of the more uncommon features was the conference badge.

In addition to being a ticket for entry into the conference, it’s also a hackable piece of hardware complete with 128×32 LCD screen, and microprocessor. The source code for the badge is available online.

Corbin Simpson, a developer at the OSU Open Source Lab spent a large portion of his time at the conference developing and uploading new software onto his badge. His first badge hacking project was to upload new images to show his appreciation for the lab.

Restoring GuruPlugs

Thu, 20 May 2010 05:29:30 +0000

At which point I decided I wanted to try to restore the original kernel, so that I would at least have a working system with which to test. Therein lied the rub. The files posted here are completely broken.

Thankfully, a friend of mine also ordered a GuruPlug. So I grabbed his images. Here’s how to ACTUALLY restore your GuruPlug if you flash a bad kernel to it.

Download the extracted uImage. This was created by the command ‘dd if=/dev/mtdblock1 of=uImage’.

RouterStation Pro OpenWRT upgrade

Mon, 10 May 2010 20:30:15 +0000

The RouterStation Pro comes preloaded with a relatively old installation of OpenWRT Kamikaze. Being a sucker for bleeding-edge software, I definitely wanted to check out code from the main Subversion repository to get it up-to-date as far as development goes. Here’s how I did it.

bkero@ponderosa ~ $ svn co svn://svn.openwrt.org/openwrt/branches/backfire
bkero@ponderosa ~ $ cd backfire
bkero@ponderosa ~/backfire $ make menuconfig

Now you select some options to specify that we are building an OpenWRT image for a RouterStation Pro:

Chrome private browsing mode flawed

Sun, 02 May 2010 16:13:48 +0000

Looks like I’ll be going back to my real incognito mode of simply using another firefox profile and deleting it afterwards.

Munin-cron overlap fix

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 18:58:35 +0000

One solution I tried was to turn up the time between tests from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. This still had generated problems, as munin-cron runs still weren’t done after 10 minutes, and any greater time between polls meant subpar graph granularity.

My final solution was to modify munin’s cron entry to the following:

*/7 * * * *     munin test ( ! "$(pidof /usr/bin/munin-cron)" ) && test -x /usr/bin/munin-cron && nice -19 /usr/bin/munin-cron

I ran a test to see if there’s still a PID active from munin-cron, and if not check to see if the munin-cron executable exists. If it does exist, run a munin-cron job with the nicest setting possible.

Apache Retreat 2010 Picture gallery

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:58:27 +0000

I’ve recently come back from the Apache Retreat 2010. Here are some pictures that I took!

Part III: Munin[node] in cfEngine

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:55:06 +0000

A tarball of all relevant files can be found here.

All files are hereby released under the GNU Public License version 2, and are apparently copyrighted by Oregon State University.

There are 2 major parts to this system. The first is the cf.classes file, which simply describes which hosts belong in each class. The relevant classes are as follows:

service_munin_host  = ( larch )
service_munin_node  = ( binhost columbia coos fir fraxinus g1 g2 g3 g4 )
package_munin_node  = ( service_munin_node www_phpbb_com )

The second part is the cf.munin file, which holds all the rules that each host should follow. Included are several support files that do such things as generate the munin.conf file, since that is difficult to do by hand.

Part II: The Munin-master

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:54:59 +0000

First off, you’re going to have to install the munin package. You’ll also need to have a web server installed, I prefer apache:

# For Gentoo,
emerge munin apache
# For CentOS/Fedora
yum install munin apache
# For Debian
aptitude install munin apache

Gentoo and CentOS both install the HTTP root in /var/www/localhost/htdocs/munin. After setup, the graphs will be available at http://localhost/munin

Debian requires a bit more attention. Debian munin installs the HTTP root in /var/www/munin. so after the setup, a vhost will have to be created to access it. To do this(on Gentoo) I created an apache vhost file, /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/08_munin.conf. On Debian, the file is the same but the path is different, /etc/apache2/sites-available/08munin

Part I: Setting up Munin-Node

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:54:50 +0000

Munin showed the most promise and compatibility with many of the services we run at the OSL, such as memcached and varnish. I liked how the plugin system is set up independently on each host, and that each plugin can be managed, configured, and consolidated through symlinks.

For the benefit of the uninitiated the setup on each node goes something like this:

#For gentoo
emerge munin
#For Fedora/CentOS
yum install munin-node
#For Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get install munin-node

Each client is a “node”, and runs the daemon ‘munin-node’. It’s configuration file exists at /etc/munin/munin-node.conf. This file merely tells the daemon which user to run as, which interface/port to listen to, where to log, and which munin masters are allowed to poll statistics.

My cheap gaming rig

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:34:28 +0000

I’ve been to several LAN parties recently, and have been getting a very accurate understanding of how much a pain it is to lug around a 30lb case, 30 inch monitor, and all the accessories. I’ve looked at gaming laptops; they all seem too expensive, too expensive, and too slow compared to something I could build myself, for cheap.

The total cost for the project needed to be under $80. I already have a good gaming rig, and the convenience of such a thing is only good if the cost is low.

Accelero S2 Installation on nVidia 8800GT

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:02:53 +0000

In an effort to modernise my gaming rig, I purchased a second nVidia 8800GT to compliment my first. Benchmarks and reviews indicate that this setup yields comparable performance to many of today’s more expensive offerings. This is a log of the installation and testing of the cards.

The Accelero S2 is an aftermarket heatsink used to provide additional cooling to video cards. Although it was originally intended for lower-end cards, the greater surface area is able to cool an nVidia 8800GT adequately. It has 2 heat pipes routed through the base of the sink and bend into a U-shape, protruding through a massive array of fins. The kit also includes 8 RAM sinks. This is enough for the RAM modules, although you’re on your own for cooling the voltage regulation sections of the card. The Accelero S1 heatsink is physically larger than the S2, and includes additional heatsinks for cooling the FETs. Luckily, I had spare Swiftech MCP15 heat sinks available from a previous project. 3 additional sinks per card were needed.

Gentoo on the Fujitsu P1620

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 20:00:22 +0000

Kernel

Support is in the mainline kernel except for:

Fingerprint reader
Touchscreen
Panel buttons

Wireless

It’s an Atheros 5008 card, supported fully by the ath5k driver. Early driver versions in old kernels such as 2.6.30 have very shaky hardware support, therefore unless you’re running the latest available code, I would recommend swapping it out. I’ve removed the integrated wireless card in favour of an Intel 5350AGN, which has been working well in the laptop. It draws a bit more power, but gives me WiMax support(another big kernel/userland headache), and dual band 802.11n.

Installing Windows Vista/7 the lazy way!

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 03:45:31 +0000

Warning: This information comes without a warranty. I wont guarantee support if you break your hardware. Im not responsible for anything you do with this information. For entertainment purposes only. I`m probably lying.

1. Obtain your Windows ISO. Probably using MSDNAA or something.

2. Make sure your hard drive is partitioned properly. This means leaving one partition open for windows. Make sure it`s easily identifiable from the windows installer(I give Windows 120GB of my 160GB drive). For this demonstration, I will use the 1st partition on my 1st disk(referred to as sda1). You can create a partition for this by using the GParted application to shrink a partition, then use the free space to create the windows partition.

Tiling Window Managers: A Comparison

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:38:49 +0000

I started the journey long ago with >Ion3. My main problem with it was the terrible default configuration. Hundreds of lines of incomprehensible Lua means that it’s very difficult to write a proper laptop status bar. I slogged through, learned Lua, and eventually came up with something that was usable. Then I learned of the author’s bat-shit insane-ness. Not wanting to get sued, I switched away. I wanted something that was easy to understand and script with a “large” install base.

Oregon Zoo!

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:53:51 +0000

I went to the zoo once

AlwaysInnovating Touchbook Photo Gallery

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:56:29 +0000

So far build quality seems good, and it’s battery life is working as advertised(although I haven’t had it for long enough to do a completely battery drain test. It comes with a stylus and 3 magnets for attaching to a refrigerator. The magnets are TOUGH to pull apart. I’d recommend using a butter knife or box cutter to wedge between them. According to my Kill-A-Watt, the entire laptop uses 14 watts with the backlight on and battery charging. With the base disconnected, the entire laptop uses 8 watts charging! That’s significantly below all of the Atom, and even Ultra-Low-Voltage Core 2 stuff I’ve seen. I’d estimate that the laptop would draw 4-6 watts without charging.

Snow Leopard Preview

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:42:21 +0000

I decided to give Snow Leopard gold master(10a432) a try on my fancy Macbook unibody. I had become accustomed to some of the particular quirks and performance of Leopard 10.5 on my hardware, and wanted to see what new features or performance I should be expecting for the next release of OS X.

Booting up the install USB disk, I notice that the background is slightly changed. It’s still Leopard-esque, but slightly different. I’d heard several things about it, one being that it had a much faster install install time, another being that they tucked printer drivers away in a remote repository.