Fruddled Gruntbugglies

Enthralling readers since 2005

Author: lpaulriddle

  • Ubuntu 2 1/2 month review, etc.

    I’ve been using Ubuntu now for about 2 1/2 months. The verdict so far: I like it. When I initially installed it, I was looking for a Linux distro with a reasonably well-integrated and user-friendly desktop environment, and Ubuntu (with GNOME) has lived up to those expectations. I really like the GNOME file manager with its built-in sshfs support, and the menu/taskbar integration works really well. When I install an app, it automatically shows up in my “Applications” menu, and the GNOME-aware apps also take advantage of the task bar. This works even with GNOME apps that aren’t provided with Ubuntu — for example, today I installed gSTM, which is a GUI interface for managing SSH tunnels. It’s not part of the Ubuntu “universe”, so I downloaded a .deb from Sourceforge and installed it (there’s a handy GUI for installing .debs too, which Firefox launched automatically). Once installed, gSTM showed up in my “Applications” menu and also added itself to the task bar when I launched it. Very nice.

    The only thing I’m not quite happy with is my age-old gripe with all Linux distros: fonts. I’ve done all my requisite font-fiddling and I’ve got fonts I’m pretty much happy with now. But the font rendering in Firefox is just horrible. Text is always overflowing table cells and other stuff, and certain web sites just look, well, bad. It’s not bad enough to be a show stopper, but I really wish it looked nicer. I’m not sure what’s to blame: Firefox, X, GNOME, or whatever. But I will say that the fonts look pretty good in most of the other apps.

    Linux GUI distros have to fight an uphill battle, because there are so many different apps (some 20+ years old) coded to all sorts of different GUI standards. There’s no way to get all of these apps to look perfect — it’s like herding cats. But the GNOME people have done a pretty admirable job fitting everything together. The user experience is about as seamless as one could hope for.

  • I hate Microsoft

    So, I’m trying to find a nice, easy, seamless way to access data on my home Linux fileserver from XP. The goal is to have drag-and-drop access to files using the Windows GUI, as opposed to using sftp, which I’ve been doing pretty much forever and am finally getting tired of. But of course, with Windows, nothing is ever easy. My first thought was to use NFS, as I’m already using that to provide connectivity for my Mac, and Microsoft kindly provides a free toolkit (“Services for Unix”) which includes an NFS client. Nope.. our Windows PC runs XP Home Edition (which really should be called “Crippled Edition”) and SFU doesn’t work with XP Home. Of course, I didn’t find this out until I had downloaded the entire 200+ meg SFU distro, extracted it, and attempted to run the installer, which happily crapped out. Thanks guys.

    With SFU ruled out, I fell back on SMB. I already run Samba on the Linux box, so I can just map my home directory to a drive letter and do it that way. That’s not quite as nice as NFS because I have to enter a username and password when I map the drive (although I might be able to work around that). But, there’s a hitch with that too — the XP box already has a couple anonymous shares mapped from the same Linux server, and for some inane reason, XP won’t let me map shares from the same server under multiple usernames. But, I outsmarted it by connecting to the server using an alternate DNS name, and that seems to work fine.

    So in spite of Microsoft’s best efforts, I now have an XP box that’s actually somewhat useful on a heterogeneous network. Party on…

  • Our weird house

    Just when I thought I’ve seen it all with our house, I find more weirdness.

    I’m working on relocating the clothes dryer circuit, in preparation for our new washer and dryer. In the process, I noticed some disconnected copper tubing hanging down the wall behind the dryer. It’s the standard 3/8″ stuff that you might see supplying a dishwasher or ice maker. I’d noticed it before, but I just kinda ignored it until last night. Last night, I figured I’d trace it to wherever it goes, and take it out, as it’s obviously not doing anything anymore. Well.. it goes up the wall, along the top of the foundation (oh yeah.. I forgot to mention this is all in the basement), then outside through the rim joist and siding, right near ground level. Then it goes into the ground. Except the ground at that spot is a concrete deck. The line actually goes into the concrete. Where it goes after that, is one of life’s great unsolved mysteries.

    WTF?? Well, I know that at one point, the basement of the house was used as an in-law apartment. So it’s not inconceivable that our present-day laundry room used to serve as a kitchen, which would explain why there’s an ice maker line there. But that begs the question: There’s already plumbing right there in the room. Why not just tap the ice maker line off that, rather than running it outside, then underground?? This seems too obvious, so I could be completely wrong. Or it could be that some previous owner (or plumber) was just incredibly boneheaded. We may never know. But in any case, the mystery remains: where does the line go? Stay tuned!

  • All’s not happy in the land of calendaring

    Well, it appears I spoke too soon about backwards compatibility with the new Oracle Collaboration Suite and the old Calendar API that I’m using for my iCal downloader stuff. The first bad sign happened a couple weeks ago, when I noticed that a bunch of my Oracle Calendar entries had mysteriously disappeared from my iCal subscription. After investigating, it turned out that an entry in September 2007 was screwing it up. If I downloaded a date range up to but not including that date, it worked fine, but as soon as I included that date, about 50% of my entries disappeared. Hmmmm, not good. Then, today, I noticed that my iCal subscription was about a week out of date. When I went to run the download job manually, it bombed out with the API error code CAPI_STAT_DATA_ICAL_COMPVALUE. The docs have the following description for this code: “There was a problem with what a component contained.” Thanks guys, that’s really helpful.

    So anyhow, it looks like I’m back to square one with the calendar stuff. When I get the time, I’ll rewrite it to use the newer API. Alternatively, maybe OCS has a way to do this without having to write custom code. That would sure be nice. Unfortunately though, until I get around to this, I guess I’m stuck with no Oracle Calendar data on my Palm. Bummer.

  • Subpanel replacement work continues

    Wednesday, I took the day off work and moved the bulk of the circuits off our old FPE “Federal Noark” panel, to the new Square D QO panel. There are three circuits remaining to be done, all of which are connected via conduit, so I’ll need to reroute these before I can rip the FPE panel off the wall. I’ve blocked off next Wednesday to do this, as the wife -n- kids figure to be out of the house most of the day, and I have no meetings at work.

    As with every other project in this house, half the work seems to involve fixing shoddy previous-owner retrofit work I encounter along the way, and this project has been no exception. Here’s what I’ve found and fixed so far.

    1. Old QO subpanel didn’t have its netural bus isolated from ground. New panel has a separate ground bus and an isolated neutral bus.
    2. The basement clubroom exhaust fan circuit was wired with 14 gauge wire but had a 30 amp breaker. It now has a 15 amp breaker.
    3. Whole house fan circuit was doubled up with one of the lighting circuits. Someone probably did this at one point to free up a slot. They are now two separate circuits again.
    4. The wiring to the boiler room/office light switch had individual strands of wire running unprotected behind the paneling. Apparently, when the room was finished, someone removed some conduit but didn’t bother to replace the wire. I replaced it with romex.

    I’m sure there’ll be more to come..

  • Weird mp3act streaming problem solved..

    When I switched my desktop Linux box to Ubuntu recently, I was able to get everything working relatively easily except for one thing: For some reason, I couldn’t stream MP3s from my mp3act server. The playlists would download properly, but nothing would play: xmms would just ignore everything in the playlists. Well, today I finally tracked the problem down, and it turned out to have nothing to do with Ubuntu. The culprit was my web proxy configuration. I run the Privoxy ad-blocking software (ObPlug: Privoxy really makes the web a much more pleasant experience). Now, I used to run a local Privoxy on each of my Linux boxes. But when I installed Ubuntu, I elected not to run Privoxy on the Ubuntu box. Instead, I configured Firefox to proxy through the Privoxy running on my server. That way, I only have to maintain one Privoxy installation. That works fine, but it does make all of my web traffic appear to come from the server rather than the desktop. And therein lies the problem. When mp3act generates a playlist, the URLs for the MP3 streams are all keyed to the IP address that requested the playlist. When xmms requests the stream, it doesn’t go through the proxy, so the requests come directly from the desktop, and the IPs don’t match. So, mp3act refuses to serve the file.

    Solution: When talking to the mp3act server, use a direct connection and don’t go through the proxy. In Firefox, this is configured under Edit->Preferences->General->Connection_Settings. Once I made that change, everything worked fine.

    Very very happy to have this working again!

  • 2006 Pool Season: Short but Sweet

    That about sums it up. Tomorrow we’re putting the winter cover on the pool and officially sticking a fork in the 2006 swimming season. For all intents and purposes, it was really over before the Labor Day holiday, although we did sneak one post-Labor Day swim in, during a warm spell where I was able to briefly nurse the water temperature back up to 80. But it was all downhill from there. Although 2006 certainly ranks as our shortest swim season to date, it was also one of the best. In the peak months of July and August, the pool saw almost daily use, and there were no serious maintenance hassles — in particular, no yellow algae this year. I did have my annual 6-week cloud-up (where the water starts clouding up approximately 6 weeks into swim season), but I believe I narrowed that problem down to inadequate filtration. Increasing the pump run time seemed to clear the water up. Next year will be the real test.

    Regarding the yellow algae, or lack thereof, I credit that to more frequent superchlorination combined with additional pump run time (probably more the former than the latter). The past couple seasons, I just don’t think I was superchlorinating enough. Once a week during really hot periods (water pushing 90), and once every 2-3 weeks otherwise, seemed to do the trick this year. Since everyone seems to have a different definition of what constitutes “superchlorination”, here’s mine: start with a residual of 2-3ppm free chlorine. If the pH is 7.6 or above, first throw in a couple pounds of bisulfate. Then add 2-1/2 gallons of 12.5% sodium hypochlorite.

    Next spring, I get the joy of draining the pool for repairs. Really, I can’t wait.

  • Sump Pump fun

    So, the float switch on the old FloTec sump pump in our basement office died a while back, and I’m just getting around to doing something about it. This particular sump gets very little water in it, even with a dehumidifier draining into it, so my solution for the summer was to just manually pump it out every couple weeks or so. But now, with vacation looming, I want to get an automatic pump back in there. Rather than getting a new float switch for the old pump (that would cost money, you see), I’m just going to replace the pump with a Zoeller that I’d been keeping around as a hot spare for our other sump pump (the one that sees tons of action from driveway runoff). I figure I can still use it as a hot spare, and as an added bonus it’ll see some occasional action in the office sump, so I’ll know it’s working.

    I went to do the work today, and true to form, it’s proving to be a bit more difficult than expected (nothing in this house is ever easy or straightforward, you see). First, the bottom of the sump is so impossibly uneven that I couldn’t find a level spot for the new pump. And, the original pump’s plumbing is some sort of half-assed Rube Goldberg conglomeration of flex ABS, threaded couplings, band clamps, and what appears to be automobile radiator hose (rule two of this house: all previous-owner retrofit work must be done half-assed). So, I have the fun of sorting all this out. I started by dumping some gravel in the bottom of the pit to level it out. Next I have to pick up some PVC and a Fernco coupling or two (to replace the radiator hose) and redo the plumbing. I’ll start by just doing the piping near the pump, and tying it into the existing stuff where it exits the foundation. But long term, I might reroute the run out the foundation.. we’ll see.

  • Retro coding

    ’tis been a while.. but I’m currently writing some code (the Student Parking Registration rewrite) that communicates directly with our system of record for SIS, the HP3000 mainframe. I haven’t done this for 6 or 7 years (although I’ve made tweaks here and there, this is the most I’ve done with it since 2000 or so). And I had forgotten how comically antiquated the whole process is. Now, I don’t write code on the HP (God forbid.. it’s all Cobol), but I do interact with a TCP/IP socket-based server that runs on the HP. And, I have to send data buffers over the socket in a format that the HP will understand. It’s reminiscent of FORTRAN, or Assembly Language, or something like it. The HP is very fussy about field width, positions of parameters within buffers, etc. If I’m off by a character, for example, subsequent fields all end up shifted over too far. Suffice it to say, it’s not much like the stuff I’m doing nowadays – Java, PHP, XML, etc. It’s quite nostalgic. It makes me want to go log into the VAX 4000 and run my old 4-bit assembly simulator.

    Oh well.. back to work. I’d hate not to finish this, and have 13,000 students unable to be billed by Parking Services next fall. That might affect my next raise…

  • FPE panel replacement project underway

    Today I officially began my project to replace two Federal Pacific circuit breaker panels in my house. I’m starting with a subpanel in the boiler room, and after that’s done I’ll move on to the house’s main panel.

    Ironically, the first step to doing this was to replace a perfectly good Square-D QO subpanel in the boiler room. This panel was upstream of the FPE panel (which is totally full — a previous owner added the QO panel to add capacity). The plan is to consolidate both panels into a single QO panel, but the existing one was too small. So step one was to replace it with a 24-slot QO. Next, I’ll move all the circuits over from the FPE panel.

    Wiring the new panel was pretty easy as far as these things go — no big surprises. The QO panels are very nicely laid out, with neutral busses on either side, for example, so there’s no need to cut conductors to different lengths. The only thing I didn’t care for was the placement of the separate ground bus (required by code for subpanels) which was at the very bottom of the panel. A couple of my existing ground wires were not long enough to reach the bus (keep in mind the new panel is several inches taller than the old one). But this wasn’t too hard to work around.

    Phase two, as mentioned, will be to move the circuits off the FPE panel. I’ll need to set aside a day for this, as there’s some conduit that’ll need to be rerouted, plus some wires that will need to be spliced to reach over to the new panel. I’ll probably try to do this the week after we get back from the beach — no sense rushing it with the beach trip looming and lots of other stuff to take care of.