Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Enthralling readers since 2005

Author: lpaulriddle

  • Gorilla Glue Test

    We have an automatic cleaner for our swimming pool.  It’s the kind that runs on water pressure and uses a booster pump.  I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it.  When it works, it works great, but when it doesn’t, I’m constantly swearing at it.  It’s got a lot of moving parts (belts, gears, you name it) and it seems like something breaks on it every year.  Anyhow, this year it was the automatic backup valve’s turn to break.

    The backup valve is a big conglomeration of gears driven by a paddle wheel.  It’s actually quite ingenious.  The gears drive a rotating port that changes the flow of water through the valve every several minutes, which causes the pool cleaner to “back up,” which is an essential feature as it’s continually getting stuck in the pool’s corners.  One of the gears is held in place by a small retaining clip, and at some point this year the clip came off and disappeared into the great unknown.  The result was that the gear no longer stayed on the shaft.  It would stay there for a while, but eventually it would fall off and the backup valve would stop cycling.

    Lacking a matching retaining clip, I wasn’t sure how to fix this without shelling out megabucks for a new valve.  So I decided to try Gorilla Glue. We picked up a bottle of this a while back, and it’s pretty impressive stuff.  One of its interesting properties is that it expands as it cures, sort of like that expanding aerosol spray foam stuff.  This can be a pain when you’re using it to repair furniture, as the glue tends to ooze out of the repair as it cures.  But, it’s exactly what I needed in this case.  I just stuck the gear on the shaft and added a dab of Gorilla Glue, and it expanded into a small blob, holding the gear in place perfectly.

    So anyways, Gorilla Glue claims to be waterproof.  During pool season (which runs from Memorial Day through around the end of September in these parts), The pool cleaner spends 90% of its time at the bottom of the pool, submerged in chemically treated water.  I made the repair somewhere around the end of June, and it’s been mostly submerged ever since.  At the end of pool season, I’ll take the valve apart and see how well the repair has held up.  I’ve had no problems with the backup valve since making the repair, which I take as a good sign.  But I can’t think of a better way to see how waterproof this stuff really is.  Stay tuned!

  • Blog administrivia

    OK.. figured out a somewhat better solution for links to blog posts. Use relative URLs, and use named permalinks. Then, I should be able to move the blog in the future without breaking self-referential links (providing that the new blog either runs WordPress or can support WordPress-style permalinks). I still need to go through and update all my old links, which looks to be a tedious process, but with any luck it’ll be the last time I need to do it.

    I discovered the other day that it doesn’t work to set up a CNAME pointing to ‘lpaulriddle.wordpress.com.’ I just end up getting sent to the main wordpress.com homepage. Using an HTTP redirect (or meta refresh) seems to work. However it doesn’t appear that I can set up a redirect with my current domain hosting provider, at least not without signing up for web hosting that I don’t want. However, I’m going to be shopping around for a new home for my domain within the next couple months anyhow, so I’ll check into this as I’m evaluating new providers.

  • Blogging again…

    Hopefully I’ll pick up the blogging pace a bit now that I’ve moved everything over to wordpress.com.  In preparation for un-password-protecting the blog, I’m going through all of my old posts, and the only thing I’ve noticed is that all of my links to other blog entries are broken.  Nothing unexpected, but I wonder if there’s anything that can be done to prevent this from happening every time I move the blog (it’s moved 3 times now, and it’ll probably move again).  Probably not, but right now all my links reference posts by number, and it might help to change them to use named permalinks.

    My latest pet project at home is preparing us for the impending cutover to digital TV.  We’re far too cheap to pay for cable or satellite TV (although FiOS may be hard to resist), so I’m concentrating on getting a nice setup for receiving over-the-air digital broadcasts.  Following some instructions I found on the Internet (where else), I built two homemade UHF antennas.  The author of this web page uses a single antenna with a rotator.  At our location, though, we’re smack-dab in the middle of the Baltimore and DC TV markets.  So I can set 2 antennas up in the attic, one aimed at Baltimore, and another aimed at Washington, and pick up pretty much every station within 50 miles, without the hassle of a rotator.  The only issue is combining the signals.  The antennas work great separately, but I haven’t tried using a combiner yet (I try to avoid going up in the attic this time of year..).  Using a combiner in this kind of setup is always going to result in some signal loss, so the question is, will the resulting combined signal be acceptable?  I don’t know, but it’s easy enough to try, which I plan on doing soon.  If the combiner setup doesn’t work well, the other option is to run separate antenna feeds to each TV and then use a switch similar to Radio Shack Cat. No. 15-1968 (each TV would need its own switch).  I know this will work, but it obviously involves extra work and expense.  But it’s still preferable to a rotator, IMO.

    Sort of on the same topic, I picked up one of those much ballyhooed digital “converter boxes” awhile back, to use with our old TV.  Total outlay was just over $20, thanks to the $40 coupon from Uncle Sam.  This is an Apex model that is being sold at Best Buy.  It works as expected, and includes all the standard features you would expect from a digital tuner (TV guide, signal strength meter, etc).  However, I kind of wish it had come with a universal remote.  The included remote control works fine, but it’d be a nice touch if I could also turn the TV on/off and adjust the volume with it.  As it is now, I’m stuck with 2 remotes until I can find a cheap universal remote that can also work the converter box.

    More later..

  • That was easy…

    Searching for a new home for my blog (and didn’t want to pay for web hosting, at least not yet), and it came down to wordpress.com vs blogger.com.  Blogger.com had the early edge because it works with my existing Google account, and offers free domain name mapping.  WordPress.com charges a nominal annual fee for domain name mapping, and requires a separate account.  However, Blogger.com didn’t have an easy way for me to import my existing WordPress blog.  With wordpress.com, it was as simple as exporting the old and importing the new, and everything came in completely intact.  Other than the URL, I can’t even tell the difference between this and my old self-hosted WordPress blog.

    There’s also the question of whether I need domain name mapping in the first place.  It’s not like I expect this to be a high-visibility or high-traffic blog.  I think I’ll just set up a CNAME for this under lpaulriddle.com, and be done with it.

    In any case, looks like I’ll be setting up shop here for awhile.

  • Latest Ubuntu Upgrade

    I just upgraded my Ubuntu box from 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and after 3 upgrades (I started out with Dapper Drake) I remain impressed with how easy and painless it is. This time there was a hiccup, though. But, it’s not something that I’d expect an average user to encounter.

    First, a bit of background. My desktop machine gets a lot of its files via NFS from a remote server. The server runs a base of Debian Etch with a bunch of stuff from the testing/unstable trees. The two computers are both on the same LAN, and the server currently runs kernel v. 2.6.20.1. Ubuntu 7.10 currently uses 2.6.22.

    After completing the upgrade, I rebooted my machine into Ubuntu 7.10 for the first time, and logged on. It took about 5 minutes for all my menus and apps to come up (some of the apps came up before I had any menus, making me wonder if the upgrade had botched something.. but everything did finally appear). I quickly figured out the cause of the problem: all of my NFS mounts were timing out.

    I did a few more tests, and I found out that I had no problem mounting and unmounting NFS directories from the server. But when I tried to run ‘ls’, my terminal just froze and I got ‘NFS server blah.blah not responding’ in the kernel log. No amount of rebooting, re-exporting filesystems, etc. seemed to help. I wondered if it was some sort of subtle incompatibility between the two different kernel versions, although I’d never had this kind of issue with NFS before in my almost 20 years of dealing with it. (Wow, has it really been that long?)

    I’m aware that there are two versions of NFS nowadays, the older version 3 and the newer version 4. The 2.6 kernel supports both versions, but I’ve always run version 3 because it has always worked for me, and I’ve never seen a need to change. Plus, when I go to configure my kernel, all of the NFS v4 stuff is labeled as EXPERIMENTAL, which makes me shy away from it. This time, though, rather than futzing around trying to get my old NFS v3 setup to work again, I decided to try v4. I built it into the server’s kernel and rebooted the server. I then followed the very helpful Ubuntu NFSv4 Howto, which explained the differences between v3 and v4 and walked me through the setup.  It worked, and it doesn’t hang any more.

    It’s a little troubling not knowing why the upgrade broke my NFS v3 setup.  Searching around on Google wasn’t too helpful.  I suspect it’s some kind of issue with the 2.6.22 kernel, but I did not want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting it..  I just need my computer to work.  So I’m glad NFS v4 fixed it for me, otherwise I’d probably have to downgrade back to Feisty.

    NFS issue aside, the Gutsy upgrade was very smooth, and I continue to be happy with Ubuntu.

  • Ubuntu hard drive upgrade

    I just finished upgrading the hard drive on my Ubuntu machine, and it wasn’t as easy or straightforward as I was expecting.  So I figured I’d write up some notes for the next time I do it.

    First I backed everything up. Then I shut down the computer, put the new drive in, and booted up with a copy of Knoppix I had lying around. Under Knoppix, I opened up a shell and mounted my old root filesystem:

    # mount /dev/hda1 /mnt

    I then mounted the new root filesystem on /mnt2, and copied all the files over:

    # mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt2
    # cd /mnt
    # tar cvpf - . | (cd /mnt2; tar xpf -)

    Then, I installed the grub boot loader in the MBR of the new drive:

    # grub
    # root (hd1,0)
    # setup (hd1)

    At that point, I shut down the computer, removed the old drive, installed the new one in its place, and attempted to boot back up. Happily, it found the grub boot loader and proceeded to load the kernel. But then it hung trying to mount the root filesystem.

    It turns out that a couple releases ago, Ubuntu started referring to disk partitions by UUID rather than using a specific device name such as /dev/sda1 or /dev/hda1. Both /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab still contained UUID references for the old hard drive, so I had to go through and painstakingly replace all the old UUID references with the updated UUID for the new disk. I just used vi and did a search-and-replace, although there’s probably an easier way. Once I did this, everything booted up just fine.

    I can see the advantages to using UUIDs, but it does add an extra layer of complexity when doing something like this. At least I know what to expect the next time around.

    Coming soon: my adventures upgrading from Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon).  There were a couple of snags, but it was mostly painless.

  • Tax planning 101…

    OK, so our 2007 taxes are done. Up till now, taxes were always something I did after the end of the tax year. At that point, all the forms are available from the relevant taxing authorities; tax software is available; I know exactly how much we made, how much we paid in taxes; etc. So with all the ducks in a row, I would typically knock off a given year’s taxes by the end of January of the following year. Now, I’ve decided to take this a step further, and turn taxes into a kind of ongoing thing that I work on over the course of the tax year. Being the obsessive financial control freak I am, this is always something I have wanted to do, but it’s always seemed prohibitive. Estimating the current year’s income is not a big deal and can be done with varying degrees of accuracy, depending on how much time you want to spend. But what about tax forms, software, etc.? These are typically not available until late in the tax year. So how do we do this? Enter the spreadsheet.

    I’ve always used tax software to prepare our taxes. Tax software is great for what it does: it streamlines the tax preparation process, generates IRS-friendly hardcopy, and facilitates e-filing. Where it falls short, IMO, is in its ability to play out “what-if” type scenarios. What happens if I use FIFO vs. average cost in computing a capital gain? What would happen if I take the standard deduction vs. itemizing? How close am I to getting tripped by the AMT? etc. I want to be able to tweak certain numbers on my forms, and instantly see the end result in taxes owed, refund, etc. With tax software, I have always found it cumbersome to go through, tweak things like this, and see the results. This is the kind of thing a spreadsheet excels at (no pun intended). So, for 2007, I took the plunge and wrote up a spreadsheet to do my initial tax calculations, falling back on the tax software to verify that my numbers are correct. It wasn’t too hard, and I really like the instant gratification I get from changing one number and immediately seeing the result. I also realized something else, after using software exclusively for so many years: doing the spreadsheet really gave me a better feel for how the tax code works, and why certain things are the way they are. Software, by its design, insulates the user from a lot of what is happening behind the scenes. This is good in some ways but bad in others.

    After the initial spreadsheet exercise, I realized that the spreadsheets would also be useful for tax planning during the current year. The key to this is keeping up with changes to the tax laws since the previous year, and adjusting the spreadsheet to accommodate them. Most years, there aren’t many changes. The IRS re-indexes the tax brackets every year for inflation, which changes the tax tables as well as employer withholding tables. Using this data, one can compute paycheck withholding and come up with a pretty clear picture of salary income for the coming year. Projecting the other stuff (investment income, etc) involves a bit of hand-waving, adjusting various things to account for inflation, etc. The important thing to keep in mind is that most peoples’ tax situation does not change much from year to year. As the year progresses, I’ll just keep updating the spreadsheet to replace projected numbers with real numbers.

    Doing this opens up a lot of planning possibilities. I now have a much clearer picture of how many withholding exemptions to claim on my W-4, and as the numbers become more accurate over the course of the year, I’ll be able to do more accurate year-end planning too. And, my taxes will be more-or-less finished at the end of the year.

    This exercise has already helped me out this year. It alerted me that I’m losing a capital-loss write-off that I’ve been able to claim for the last few years (since selling off some of my wife’s really bad mutual funds :-)). Well, after several years of carryover, I’ve finally churned through the loss, and will flip back into the black in 2008, losing the write-off and creating an extra several hundred dollars in tax liability. So, time to bump down the withholding exemptions and tighten the belt a bit. Better to know that now, then get surprised with a huge tax bill (complete with penalties etc) next year.

  • Server shuffle again

    My server shuffling is finished, and went off (almost) without a hitch. Slight hiccup installing my new Zonet USB 2.0 PCI card. When I first popped it in, it worked fine. But for some reason, after I finished all the hardware shuffling and booted back up, the Linux kernel no longer recognized the USB 2.0 EHCI host controller on the card.  I ran ‘lspci’ and the card was there, but it showed only the UHCI (USB 1.1) controller.  And of course, I had just cut the UPC off the box and mailed in the rebate submission, thus rendering the card un-returnable.  Funny how those things work.

    Anyhow, before I tried anything drastic, I upgraded my Linux kernel from 2.6.20.1 to 2.6.23.14 (the latest revision as of this writing), and damned if that didn’t fix it. Not sure if this was a one-time glitch, or if the newer kernel actually fixed something related to this. But in any case, I’ll keep an eye on it. I can’t complain too much.. the thing only set me back 8 bucks.

  • Weekend update

    Kind of a lazy weekend so far. It’s too cold to really want to go out and do anything, so everyone is just puttering around the house. Yesterday I drained the pool water back down below the tile line. First time doing that so far this winter. Since closing, the water had crept back up several inches. Before that, we hit Macaroni Grill for an early lunch to celebrate my b-day, and I picked up some telecom equipment at Home Depot so I can work on rewiring the phone jack in the master bedroom. I have never wired a 66 punchdown block before, so this is going to be a learning experience. I think I am going to use the 66 block to replace the existing screw-terminal phone junction in the boiler room, which is a bit of a bird’s nest. It’s going to take a little planning. I will probably end up taking a day off work to do it, on a day when I can have the house to myself.

    Today I have mainly been working on spackling and sanding the trim in the master bedroom, in preparation for painting. Most of the prep work has been concentrated on the trim. Years ago, someone decided to mount a phone jack near the entrance to the bathroom, so they tapped into an existing jack behind the bed and ran phone wire along the trim to the new jack. The wire was meticulously tacked along the baseboard, up one door opening, over three doors, back down, across more baseboard, up and over the bathroom door, and finally back down to the jack. It was really quite impressive, especially considering they could have run it through the basement, which would have taken about half the time, used about half the wire, and resulted in a nice, concealed wiring job instead of a massive eyesore. But, I digress. Anyhow, I pulled out all the wire, which was (of course) covered with several layers of paint, leaving me with a big patch and spackle job. But it’s almost done now, and soon we’ll be painting. Can’t wait.

  • The server shuffle

    I’ve decided to do a bit of server shuffling this weekend. I’m basically going to do a case/motherboard swap of concerto, my 700mhz server at the office, with my 450mhz server at home. That will give me a little bit more CPU at home to run stuff like GnuCash and OpenOffice inside my VNC desktop. The motherboards in the two boxes are very similar, so this should be a really easy swap… no new kernels needed, etc. Ironically, this will put concerto back on the original hardware that ran it, which should more than suffice for what it runs now, namely Apache, MySQL and Samba. One difference between the two motherboards is that [I believe] the 700mhz board does not have an ISA slot. That means I won’t be able to use my really-old ISA 56K modem card at home any more. I don’t think I’ll miss it, though, and if I do, PCI modem cards are cheap.

    Yesterday I ordered a Western Digital “My Book” 750G external USB hard drive from newegg.com. I need something portable to use for backups of important documents, digital photos, videos, music, etc. The sale price was $175, including free shipping. That works out to just over 23 cents per gigabyte… amazing. And a few years from now, that’s probably going to seem expensive.

    Of course, to get any kind of transfer speed out of a USB hard drive, USB 2.0 is a necessity. My old machines only support USB 1.1 on-board, so I also needed to buy a USB 2.0 PCI card. These are amazingly cheap now too. Grand total of $9.99 – $7.00 mail-in rebate, or $2.99. Technology is a funny thing. Compared to 10 years ago, the price of milk and gas seems sky-high nowadays.  But that same 10 years ago, I paid $3000+ for a 300mhz Pentium-II with an 8 gig hard drive, which seemed unthinkably cutting-edge at the time.  Computers (and electronics for that matter) are cheap, cheap, cheap now by comparison.