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Article posted on Aug 22

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• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 22, 2003, 8:48 pm

I have under 11 hours to finish up stuff at home in preperation for Burning Man.

At 07:30 Team Circus Circus (myself and yosemitesam) meet up with Team Scout (Johnny Royale and Miss Conduct) for breakfast. At 07:30+pancakes, Team Scout heads for the playa, while Team Circus Circus stops by my place, grabs my stuff, goes down to Washoe Valley, finishes up $MISC_RANDOM_CRAP, packs up Hail Mary One (no, it's not just a clever name) and the trailer, prays to the Great Transmission God, and heads to the playa at 18:00 or so.

I have a crapload of stuff to do beforehand, but instead I'll watch SG-1.

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Article posted on Aug 19

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 19, 2003, 11:09 am

cough.

cough.

sniff.

cough.

COUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHWHEEZESNIFFSNIFFCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGH
COUGHCOUGHAAAACHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHCOUGHHACKHACK
HACKHACKHACKHACKCOUGHHACKCOUGHHACKCOUGHHACKCOUGHHACKCOUGHHACKCOUGH

sniff.

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Article posted on Aug 16

Sad Times, and Rainbow Bridges

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 16, 2003, 11:02 pm

I've been reluctant to post this because I know it may be met with misunderstanding and outrage, but I think it's important and might make some of you view how to handle the loss of a loved pet from a new, life-affirming perspective.

Sophie passed away recently. She was a wonderful cow who loved ear rubs and fresh grass, and would frolic when I let her our of the barn each morning. She crossed the rainbow bridge far too soon. She made me so happy when she was alive, and I miss her terribly already now that she's gone.

I don't like the traditional methods of dealing with a deceased pet. Cremation seems so inhumane. I mean, burning your pet's body? I think that's kind of medieval and causes a lot of pollution. Burial is better but it felt like I was just throwing her away to rot if I did that. So I thought about the story of the cow jumping into the fire and realized that Sophie would have wanted to give me every last little bit of joy possible, and I should do something truly personal with her body. I decided to make a fancy dinner with her.

I apologized for cutting into her beautiful hide and prepared to skin her in preparation for a funeral meal. It took a lot longer than I thought and was pretty messy since I had no idea how to get the skin off or which bits I needed to remove and she was already kind of stiff, but I finally was left with a couple of decent cuts of meat. While I ground and formed her I also sliced up some veggies for myself and my surviving cow, Sandra.

Sandra had been withdrawn and upset. Normally she's a little scamp, running around constantly and trying to poke her nose into everything. She loves her fresh greens and will sit up and beg for a bit of lettuce, but for the past day she hadn't eaten anything at all and hadn't moved except to come up and nudge me when I changed the water in her trough because she missed Sophie and wanted someone to pet her. I hoped that if I stayed in the barn and shared dinner with her, she might cheer up a little.

Finally, Sophie was done.

I said a prayer of thanks over the food and we sat down to eat. It was a delicious meal, and I took every bite while thinking of all the wonderful moments that Sophie and me and Sandra had together. Goodbye, Sophie.

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Article posted on Aug 13

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 13, 2003, 6:20 pm

My car now has 20,000 miles on it. Woo. I never thought I could put that much mileage on a car in only 1 year 4 months. (Yes, I know that's not much for some people. But it is for me.)

I just got back from Home Depot. Picked up a couple packs of those childproof outlet inserts for the common colo cage (a subtle reminder for customers installing in there that they need to let us know what port they're plugging into, so we can note it for remote reboot). Anyways, they now have self-service checkout lanes. The idea is to make checkout faster, but I still have my doubts. It took a good 10-15 seconds PER ITEM to complete, plus the usual credit card thing. What happens is you scan the item, it announces the price (in a soothing female voice), thinks for awhile, asks you to put the item in the bag, senses you did, and repeats. My biggest pain was I had 5 identical items, but I had to scan each one individually. Overall, it took about 4 minutes to do this transaction. Still, it was faster than dealing with a human Home Depot checkout, where line wait times average about 3 days.

As I was leaving, I heard, in a stern male voice: "Unauthorized item in bag area." A woman had placed her purse next to the bags, which appearantly was forbidden. It made me think of robocop:

"Please remove your purse from the bag area. You have 20 seconds to comply."
"You now have 15 seconds to comply."
"I am now authorized to use physical force."

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Article posted on Aug 9

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• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 9, 2003, 1:47 pm

Damn Windows workstation.... Alt-F4 does NOT appearantly take you to the 4th virtual screen.

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Article posted on Aug 2

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• Posted by Ryan Finnie on August 2, 2003, 11:21 pm

I tried linux kernel 2.6.0-test2. Here are my findings:

* Functionally, it looks pretty similar to 2.4. I didn't get the change shock that I experienced migrating from 2.2 to 2.4.
* pcmcia-cs no longer manages the kernel pcmcia modules, meaning I had to compile them from the kernel itself. Thankfully, the orinoco_cs drivers seemed to work well out of the box. However, pcmcia-cs itself would not compile. There is a fix here.
* I can now actually get useful information from ACPI on my dell laptop! From dmesg, it appears that the kernel recognizes the brokenness of ACPI on the Dell 2650 and makes some fixes on the fly. So now I can see if the lid is closed and see the current status of the battery power.
* Gentoo rocks. Its statup scripts check what kernel is running and does things appropriately, like mounting /sys for you on 2.5/2.6 systems.
* Amazingly, the 3rd party nvidia drivers work out of the box.
* Mouse woes.... The kernel recognizes my touchpad as a Synaptics, finds its capabilities, and sets up /dev/input/mouse0 (with a legacy link to /dev/psaux), but when I use X or gpm, it doesn't do anything. Same with my PS2 port on the back of the laptop. The only mouse I can use is a USB mouse.
* Sound isn't working. snd_intel8x0 loads correctly, and programs appear to be playing the sounds correctly, however nothing is coming out of my speakers.

I could survive with the last 2 issues, but they are annoying, so I've switched back to 2.4.21. But I do miss that rush of feeling from having a working ACPI. Oh well.

And on the linux front... if you are a fellow sysadmin who uses pam_ldap to do multi-machine authentication, you know about its dreaded problem: if the LDAP server is unavailable, nobody can log into the machine, INCLUDING LOCAL USERS. But browsing Red Hat's bugzilla, I found this. It works! Such a simple fix, why had nobody been able to fix that for over 2 years? I guess I shouldn't say that, since of course I was in the group of people "who could not fix it".

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