Posts Tagged ‘Computers’

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The Ball and Chain (or Cell Phones and the Systems Administrator)

Monday, March 7th, 2011

As someone in a technical field, systems administration specifically, it would be a natural assumption on anyone’s part to conclude that I’d have the latest and greatest gadgets at all times.  In my case, this would be a bit wrong.

In some ways I try to avoid technology.  I certainly don’t fear it.  I’m not intimidated by it.  I just get too saturated by it.  I spend every work day handling computer problems, designed new systems, maintaining old systems – so by the time I get to my personal life there are as many days where I just want to walk away from technology altogether, as there are where I spend my hours working on my own computers and gadgets.

In this, I have a love/hate relationship with cell phones.  I love being able to contact someone from any location, as if I had a communicator from Star Trek.  I hate it, because it makes me accessible at all times.  I resisted the idea of a cell phone for the longest time, because it was nothing more than an advanced version of a pager, an electronic ball and chain that I suffered for my work, because the nature of my job demands 24/7 access.  A pager is not personal.  Getting a phone call is. So, as much of a hassle being paged by a computer or individual might have been, it was no where near as intrusive as a phone call for help.

My current employer came to the conclusion that I needed a cell phone.  They paid for it and the plan and handed to me my ball and chain.  The first cell phone I had was your typical dumb phone from the early 2000′s.  It had a calculator and phone capability and that was about it.  As time went on and the phone was replaced, calendar systems and the like became available, but I never really used it.

Eventually, I got sick of someone else dictating how and when I should use my phone, so I dropped the work phone and took on my own cell phone and plan.  What pushed the issue at the time, was an insistence by my wife and youngest son to join the same plan as family back in Indiana, so that they could talk freely amongst themselves without additional charges.  Since my employer did not use the carrier in question, it helped to make the decision to switch to a private phone.

The first personally owned cell phone I obtained, was a Casio G’zOne Type V.  I’ve griped about some of the design flaws in this otherwise spectacularly designed phone back in 2009, but it really paid off to have a robust phone for the stupid places I find myself in.

Again, time changes everything and it started to become annoying to use this phone for the ever increasing SMS (text messaging) use, thrust upon me by friends and work.  On less sophisticated phones, you have various shortcuts for texting, such as auto-completion and SMS specific acronyms and abbreviations, but my SMS use is as normal to English as my writing.  I needed a cell phone with a QWERTY keyboard.

As my old, reliable Casio phone had me vying for a certain amount of brand loyalty by proof of effort, I first examined Casio’s G’zOne Brigade.  It is a mil-spec phone, water proof to one meter depth, tough as nails, etc., but it’s not a smart phone in any way.  Aside from the keyboard, it was barely different in features from my current Casio Type V.  At the time my carrier was offering the phone for about $300.  That seemed steep to me.

After researching the Brigade up and down, I finally decided that it just wasn’t worth the money for what you got and I stuck with my old phone.

However, another factor was working its influence on me at the time, my old HP PocketPC HX4700, which I was using as a travel computer and personal information manager (PIM), was getting long in the tooth and annoying to work with when attempting to couple it to my Linux workstation at home.  It was the top of the line at the time I bought it, was quite capable for the most part, but trying to sync this thing up with anything but Windows was a real hassle.  My solution for the longest time was to sync with my dual booting workstation when I was in Windows, but that wasn’t convenient as I only booted into Windows when I wanted to play high end video games.  Most of the time the system was booted in Linux, and backups and syncing with Linux was difficult at best.

I finally decided that I needed a new PIM and that lead me back to the idea of a smart phone. The main problem with this, is that I wanted a rugged phone to compensate for my stupidity and clumsiness and there simply was no option.

After talking with a coworker about his smart phone, I finally decided to take a look at the phones myself and perhaps take the plunge anyway, hoping that I wouldn’t break the beast on my first outdoor excursion.  While talking with the sales rep about the various smart phones my carrier offered, I complained about my dilemma and was informed that I could switch back and forth between my old phone and any new phone I had, by simply activating one phone on the number over the other.  That solved my problem.  I could enable the tough Casio when I was going out in the field and enable the smart phone when I was performing my normal routines.

The next issue was even easier to resolve.  I didn’t need the fastest CPU, nor the best graphics made – I just needed a phone smart enough to act as a full PIM and it had to have a solid, reliable, physical keyboard.

I didn’t feel that for the money, Blackberry offered any advantage, so I quickly ruled it out.  Windows CE had turned me off of Windows in the hand held world, not only with it’s poor interaction with Linux, but with its typical Windows reliability. As far as I was concerned it wasn’t even an option in a phone and with the recent fiasco with WinPho7′s update causing problems for many phones and actually “bricking” (rendering completely disabled) many Samsung models, I don’t regret avoiding the platform!  Typical Microsoft lack of quality.

My carrier didn’t offer the iPhone at the time, so it wasn’t a choice – not that I’d prefer it by any means.  Apple is way too closed for my tastes.  If I was taking the plunge into the smart phone world, I wanted a phone as versatile and adjustable as my operating system of choice at the desktop.  Android was the answer.

I looked at Motorola’s offerings and I have to say that I wasn’t too impressed.  Their interface tools felt sluggish and the Droid 2 keyboard just felt…cheap.  The tactile feel was lacking and the slide-out seemed awfully flimsy.  It felt like a toy, rather than a tool.

I finally examined the LG Ally.  It certainly wasn’t the fastest, or with the largest memory available.  It’s graphic display was quick and very sharp, however and the keyboard is probably the best I’ve found in a hand held device.  For $50, it seemed a cheap way to at least test the field.

When I first got the phone toward the end of last year, it was running the older Android 2.1.  This was a bit of a problem with the Ally’s smaller memory capability, as 2.1 did not offer installing applications on the SD card.  However, LG had promised that they were going to upgrade to Android 2.2, so I risked it.  (The update came out in February.)

I didn’t play games on my PocketPC, so I had no need for that on my phone, either.  Hence, the slower CPU than other Android phones hasn’t been noticeable to me.  It’s fast enough for what I do and for what I wanted, I only needed to find the applications to run.  I went through my inventory of PocketPC applications and hit the various Web sites out there, specializing in Android apps.

Android Central, AndroidZoom, AndroLib and AppBrain had more listing of applications than I could get my head around, but I dived in and spent probably a full month going through various offerings.  All in all, it was easy to find a replacement for every app I had used on my PocketPC and then some.  I also learned of the convenience of QR codes and other barcode applications, including shopping software which allowed price lookups by scanning a product code.

So, here I am with an Android phone and I have to say that I love it.  The tie in with all of Google’s tools, have given me an integrated information management system for myself that I had to dive in and use to fully appreciate.  As an example, the built in calendar application on my phone, uses the same Google calendar that I can access either through my Web browser or a plugin I have in Mozilla Thunderbird.  Change an entry on any of them and it is changed universally.  The same goes for phone contact information, notes, even documents, which I also access through Google, or Dropbox.  Dropbox really has been a fantastic service, allowing me to have a synchronized file location between all of my desktop systems and my phone.  As for backing up and synchronizing personal data, after I discovered rsync for Android, I no longer even need to have a physical connection to my Linux desktop to backup the memory card.  I can do it right across the cell connection, from anywhere I have service.  Uploads work just as easily.

I came to really love the ability to do a lookup of information on the Web from a hand held device.  I thought it would be just a novelty for me, but it has become almost indispensable.  Live interaction with Google maps and the built in GPS, as well as E-Book offerings and several user interfaces to the phone itself were icing on the cake.  Like Linux on the desktop, Linux on my phone allowed customization unseen on other platforms.

It was a win in software and a win in hardware for my needs.  Honestly, my only complaints about the LG Ally itself are the small RAM footprint and the camera.  It’s adequate enough to take simple shots that you don’t care about in the slightest, but it won’t replace a point-and-shoot camera.  At 3 megapixels it just doesn’t cut it and image quality is sort of muddy.  The limited RAM on the system has been compensated for by App2SD, but it would have been nice to have more room anyway.

Overall, my smart phone experience has really helped me out in organizing myself and my work and allowing me to have access to information that I normally would not, from almost anywhere.  It is still my ball and chain of contact, but at least it has provided enough secondary function for me, that I no longer resent carrying the beast as I used to.

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Posted in Computers, Personal | No Comments »

Confidentially, You’re stupid

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I received another email today with a bold footer exclaiming the email’s confidentiality. I have to laugh every time I see one of these utterly moronic banners.

NOTICE: This email message is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential and privileged information. Any unauthorized review, use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message.

Think about what this notice is claiming. Putting aside for the moment that the recipient has not signed a confidentiality agreement, you don’t even get to this notice until you’ve already read the previous material! How in the world can one be held responsible for reading the material, when the notice not to is at the bottom of the message? Furthermore, if you contact the sender, you have also reviewed the material, as the sender’s identification is not in the disclosure statement. In responding to the sender, you have proved that you broke the supposed agreement.

Such are merely minor points, however.  That you never signed a confidentiality agreement of any kind is enough to utterly render this notification legally null and void. You cannot insist that someone has entered a contract agreement simply by receiving email from you.

Imagine having a footer which stated, “NOTICE: This email is for the sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain confidential information. If you are not one of the intended recipients and you read this email, you owe Boneheads, Inc. $20,000,000 in contract fees and must pay this amount immediately.”

Any such ludicrous attempt at establishing a contract with a non-signing recipient would be laughed out of court and end up as a footnote on Failblog.org.

To be fair, sometimes it is not the end user, but the email server of the corporation in question which appends these notices. If you work for a company which appears to have its fair share of litigious idiots, you might email yourself to see if this is the case. If so, contact your IT department and demand to know why it is that they want you to look like a blithering idiot with every email you send.

Because that is all these confidentiality notices really say.

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Posted in Asides, Computers | No Comments »

Removing Encryption from Home Directories in Ubuntu 9.10 & 10.04

Friday, March 5th, 2010

I recently assembled a new workstation for home and in the process did a clean install of Ubuntu 9.10 on the system.  Though I have been working with Ubuntu’s very handy ecryptfs setup for encrypted home directories, I had limited such to laptops and had never done so on a desktop system before.  I figured I would give it a try and see what happened.

Performance tests done by others had always shown that there was a slight degradation of speed on ecryptfs encrypted filesystems, which I had fully expected, but I ran into something I hadn’t dealt with on my laptop: directory trees with hundreds of thousands of files.

The difference in speed of accessing individual files a few at a time in ecryptfs was never really noticeable, but I had never tried to stat a tree of 600,000+ files before.  It was as if my brand new system was an artifact from the ’70′s.  It dropped to its knees and cried.

Not believing how slow it was, I tested the issue by copying the directory tree to an unencrypted filesystem on the same physical hard drive and the same task (running ‘tree’ on the directory structure) took only a few seconds, instead of minutes.  It was apparent that any task which had to do a lot of file stat processing, simply dragged to a crawl under ecyptfs.

I was left with the dilemma of how to deal with changing my entire home directory under the ecryptfs system – complete with Ubuntu’s handy automatic mounting – to a standard, unencrypted form.  A bit of searching on the Web lead to dozens of approaches, some as drastic as copying the files to an unencrypted filesystem and removing the ecryptfs software.  That seemed ludicrous to me.  There should be no reason to disable an entire feature globally, to deal with one directory.

I finally came across some handy information on a blog, which gave me a clue as to how the automatic mounting worked in Ubuntu 9.04.  Although not exactly the same as the Ubuntu 9.10 implementation, it was more than enough to give me a very simple way to not only remove the encryption from my home directory, but to allow the system to work for me in creating an encrypted directory to use within my home directory, which took advantage of the slick auto-mount setup the Ubuntu developers had designed.

So, should anyone stumble on this issue, I’ll detail the steps taken here on how to alter Ubuntu 9.10 to switch a full home directory encryption to a normal home directory with an auto-mounting encrypted sub-directory.  The process is amazingly simple.  All text in red are actual commands to type. Green text is a file or directory path. “username” is a token for the name of your account.

  • Logoff the system.  No occurrences of your user account should be active.
  • Login as root or a different sudo enabled account.
  • Make sure that your account’s home directory is not mounted, using the ‘df‘ command.  If it is still in place, use umount /home/username to un-mount the encrypted filesystem.
  • Change the line “/home/username” to “/home/username/Private” in the /home/.ecryptfs/username/.ecryptfs/Private.mnt file using your favorite text editor.
  • mkdir /home/username/Private
  • chown username.username Private
  • Reboot the computer. (You can try restarting the cryptdisks init scripts, but I didn’t have any luck with it.)

When you login now, your previous home directory will be mounted at /home/username/Private instead of at /home/username.  Login the first time using a console rather than X11 (Ctrl-Alt-[F1-F6] from the login screen should be available) and move what files you want from ~/Private to your home directory and use the ~/Private encrypted directory for your sensitive documents.  Moving your dotfiles and hidden sub-directories back into /home/username is a good idea, unless you feel like re-configuring Gnome or KDE.

From this point on, Ubuntu will continue to automatically mount and dismount your ~/Private directory, just as it did for your entire home directory before.

Addendum: The procedure used above is identical in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

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Posted in Asides, Computers | 18 Comments »

Internet Explorer Sucks

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

Internet Explorer just simply sucks!

I’ve had poor results with this browser before, but my experiences over the weekend when working on a Web site I administrate, had me at first pulling my hair out with frustration and then eventually had me laughing so hard over the amazing stupidity of Microsoft and their shitty excuse for a browser – that I finally gave up on it.

I will no longer even attempt to support their shit.

Here’s the quick rundown. I was working on a site which utilizes Joomla as a content manager, meaning that the site design is handled by XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). The task was a simple one, create a new division in the PHP index file for a Joomla user container in the header of the page, move a random image plugin from another container on the opposite side of the banner to the new division and then put a new plugin into the old container. Pretty simple layout for a header: plugin, banner, plugin. If you have any familiarity with Joomla, the most difficult part of this task is creating the new division in the PHP file and matching settings in the CSS sheet to make it display correctly – and all said, this is not a difficult task.

I created the division, assigned the new module, re-assigned the old space and examined the results in Opera. A few minute’s tweaking and everything looked great. I checked it via Opera on Windows – it looked perfect. I checked it with Firefox on both Linux and Windows and it looked perfect. I checked it with Safari on Windows and it looked perfect. I checked it with Safari on the Macintosh and it looked perfect. Konqueror has for the moment a problem with the Flash plugin on one side, but the layout was perfect.

Then I opened Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows box and couldn’t believe what I saw.

The entire banner was messed up in alignment. What appeared perfectly within its confines on all other browsers I had tried, was completely disjointed under IE8. I went to my wife’s system and tried IE7. The same mess.

So, I did what anyone else in this situation would do – I went off to Google.

The first thing I discovered, is that one of the most basic structures of CSS implimentation, the box model, is pretty much completely broken in IE. All CSS compliant browsers deal with a box element as the totality of margin, padding and width of the container as a summation. IE, on the other hand, includes the padding and margins as part of the value of the set width – meaning that the box renders incorrectly, becoming narrower and shorter than what it should be. IE has been doing this since version 3, from 1996, meaning that the brain-dead programmers at Microsoft haven’t gotten a clue over this glaring break from the standards for thirteen years now! By careful adjustment I was able to fix the issues without having to resort to a conditional clause for IE versus every other browser.

The next problem, however, I haven’t found a good fix for. In the random picture division, I wanted the image to simply center. Horizontal centering was easy enough to accomplish, but vertical centering just wasn’t going to happen. For all other browsers to work correctly, I had to add but two lines to the division:

div#picflash {
    display: table-cell;
    vertical-align: middle;
}

However, as usual, IE doesn’t recognize vertical-align and puts the picture at the top of the cell. To correct it, you can use Javascript in a conditional statement, testing for IE, or there are some other CSS tricks to handle it. The best of the tricks and one of the most common used requires making two sub-containers inside the container, and then adjusting the margins of the containers to cause vertical centering. The code would go something like this:

div#picflash {
    width: 165px;
    height: 150px;
    position: relative;
}

.wrapper {
    position: absolute;
    top: 50%;
}

.content {
    position: relative;
    top: -50%;
}

With this in the HTML/PHP file:

<div id="picflash">
    <div class="wrapper">
        <div class="content">
            <jdoc:include type="modules" name="user7" /> <!-- This is the Joomla container...) -->
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

Technically, this is crappy CSS code. Percentages in a division are ignored unless you set the height of the container explicitly. As such, CSS compliant browsers just ignore this.

However, it works in IE, because IE ignores the specification that the height must be specified for percentages to be used. In short, even if I were to put this crap into a conditional statement for IE only, in doing so I’m "fixing" the situation by specifically exploiting a bug in IE! So, instead of supporting a shitty browser with any fix for their breaking of standards, I decided to ignore the broken browser. IE users get to see the image aligned on the top of the cell.

What it comes down to is this: every time a Web designer makes exceptions, via conditional statements, CSS hacks, Java script wrangling, or any other distortion of the XHTML and CSS standards, that Web designer is allowing a compliance ignorant software to control a portion of the Web! They are giving Microsoft tacit approval of their violation of the standards everyone else attempts to comply with. By doing so, they are allowing Microsoft to dictate the structure of the Web – effectively giving them a free reign to continue to break existing standards and any new standards which come out in the proper Web community.

I will not support Microsoft in this disgusting attempt to usurp control of Web standards. Instead, I am designing what little I work with as close as I can to the proper standards (I’m no expert on CSS, but I will try my best!) and adding in the following conditional code to any Web page I design.

<!--[if IE]>
    This site is best viewed with a XHTML and CSS compliant browser.
    <br />
    Try <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html" target="_blank">Firefox</a>,
    <a href="http://www.opera.com/browser/download/" target="_blank">Opera</a> or
    <a href="http://www.apple.com/safari/download/" target="_blank">Safari</a> today.
    Learn more <a href="http://www.lockergnome.com/news/2004/06/15/why-you-should-dump-internet-explorer/" target="_blank">here</a>.
<![endif]-->

The last line is a link to a very insightful article by Chris Pirillo at lockergnome.com, where he briefly summarizes the problem and why it is so important to drop this stinker of a browser.

If you use Internet Explorer, I urge you to switch to a browser which at least tries to follow the set standards, instead of arrogantly imposing Microsoft’s broken implementations.  There is no good reason to continue to support IE by using it.  In the process, I think you’ll find that the other major browsers out there provide a much richer experience than IE ever has or will.  There is nothing innovative in IE.  IE has never set new trends in browser design.  Why settle for half-assed software, just because it came with Windows?  Firefox, Opera and Safari are free to download for all.  Even Google is getting into the act with Chrome. Why not try them all and see which one you like the best?  (Mind you, this is a partial list out of dozens of browsers.  These are just the most commonly known.)

If you are a Web developer, stop stooping to Microsoft’s level and force them into compliance by allowing their browser to falter and fail.   Don’t make exceptions for stupidity.  Don’t make the design of your sites dependant on "the most popular browser" as you’re afraid that you’ll loose business.  If designers stopped catering to Microsoft’s stupidity, they would eventually find themselves painted into a corner and it would be Microsoft which would be forced to fix their problems to become compliant with the rest of the world.

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Posted in Computers | 1 Comment »

A Tale of Two Systems (Three, really)

Wednesday, April 29th, 2009

I downloaded Kubuntu 9.04 the day it came out, to see if the bugs and other irritations of the previous release candidates had been worked out. At first, I installed it on my laptop, a Compaq Evo N800w and everything worked flawlessly out of the box, except for the PCMCIA wireless card, which I have yet to work out. That is, as they say, another story.

I worked on the laptop for a day or so and found myself quite happy with KDE 4.2.2 and the features it had. Though I had originally thought that the Plasma system would be worthless to me, once I found out that many plasmoids could be put in the dock(s) – it was an easy sell. The home directory encryption through ecrypt and flawless mounting of said directory at login, plus the added speed (quite noticeable) and large file size support of the EXT4 filesystem were icing on the cake.

I appreciated the new features and the new look and grew to like it enough to take the plunge. I installed it on my desktop system at home and work.

That’s when my troubles began. The saga went as such…

The systems both ran on an nVidia Quadro FX 3000 video card, which have served me well for some time. My old setup was running KDE 3.5.10 with Compiz-Fusion 0.7.4 without a single problem. I had been running Beryl for some time and Compiz before that and have only had a handful of crashes over the years, no worse than dropping out of X to the KDM login screen.

Kubuntu 9.04 was not destined to be that nice to me.

After installing on my home machine via Kubuntu’s upgrade path from 8.04 LTS to 9.04, things ran well enough for a time. But I started to get random lockups. Not X crashing, or even a kernel dump – it just locked up. After a hard reset, there was nothing in the logs to say why – which lead me to believe it is was kernel issue and a bad one.

At first I thought that perhaps the update process was messed up and I should install from scratch. After reading a few posts on various groups talking about disabling KDE4′s desktop effects to stop lockups, I figured I’d try that first. No luck. I disabled Compiz, going right down to bare bones KWM. No luck. Random lockups, with no rhyme or reason to them.

It smelled like a kernel issue to me, but I had no proof.

I finally decided to update my work workstation, which had the same card, to see if it might be an nVidia driver issue. No problems, even running with two monitors. The motherboards were different as were the CPU’s, but the video cards were identical, which made me put the aspect of a video driver problem on the back burner.

On a lark, a friend of mine gave me an old card he wasn’t using anymore, an nVidia GeForce 7600 GS. The 7600 took a newer driver and has a different GPU, which I thought might help me diagnose things if it worked without a problem. No go. It still locked up. It still smelled like a kernel issue.

So far, my home workstation was the only victim. Something with the motherboard, perhaps? I would have kept thinking that way, except that over the weekend, the work system locked up as well. Nothing in the logs. No sign as to why. I wasn’t even logged in locally to the machine, just remotely across SSH.

Now I had two different CPU’s (both AMD), two different motherboards and two different video cards (both nVidia, but running different drivers) which kept locking up on me. Thinking that perhaps the nVidia commercial drivers were the problem, I removed those from the equation and ran the open source “nv” driver instead on both machines. No luck, they both still would lock up randomly. My home workstation locked up when KDM wasn’t even running, as I tried installing a different driver, so I suspected that the video drivers and X11 were not the issue involved.

However, I had also reached my limit of tolerance. I reinstalled Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on both machines and have had no problems at all since. Yet, the laptop has yet to exhibit the same symptoms…

Though the laptop is using the open source drivers for it’s ATI video chip, it is running with Compiz and KDE4′s full effects and has no problem. I honestly don’t think this is an X issue.

What my mind keeps returning to is one factor: the CPU. Both of the desktop systems, with different motherboards, run AMD CPU’s. My laptop is running an Intel Mobile Pentium 4. I suspect that there is some nasty bug in the 2.6.28 kernel which doesn’t play well with AMD chips. Since I have nothing to go on in the logs and no kernel dumps to submit, I’m left waiting to see if the rest of the world runs into the same. Time will tell, I guess.

In the meantime, I’ll be patient. I can wait for KDE4, as attractive as it has become. Perhaps I’ll even try a different distribution with KDE4 included, to see if I have similar results – only this time I’ll do it on an AMD machine which is purely sacrificial.

I’ve been happy with Ubuntu, being Debian based, but allowing for real-world software at the same time. However, if I remain with the distribution it will be on a caveat: if I don’t have a couple of sacrificial machines to test on first, I’ll wait for the next LTS release.

I should have known better from the start.  A 96 hour ordeal, I could have avoided.

P.S.  For those that thing that 96 hours is a long time, bear in mind that the lockups were random and I was restoring my home directory and other partitions from backups as well between OS versions back and forth.

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Posted in Asides, Computers, Personal | 2 Comments »

Obama Wants to Continue to Spy On You

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

More lack of change, and this one is ugly.  The Obama Administration has been putting pressure on the court to set aside a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs, who are attempting to sue the government over illegal wire tapping.  Rather than rehash the whole thing, just read these two articles at Wired.  One and Two.

Big Obama is Watching You…

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Posted in Computers, Political | 8 Comments »

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