Author: David Pierron

Compiling on FreeBSD

So I decided with my recent praise of Eric Raymond’s writings and my praise of FreeBSD that I ought to submerge myself more into using the operating system as a desktop … All machines don’t have a GUI installed, and I figured the AMD Sempron that I recently assembled would be a good machine to run this sort of environment on … I decided I would go with the Gnome desktop since that was what Brian Behlendorf said that he preferred … So I do a refresh of the ports tree to get all the latest and greatest ports and switch to the /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 directory and give it the ol’ make install clean … Well wouldn’t you know it, it failed? So then I tried from packages; pkg_add -r gnome2 and that seemed to work, but it didn’t … So what to do?

I then decided gnome sucked … What did Brian know anyway? and installed KDE from ports … Maybe I would have better luck there? Well, yes, after about 12 hours of compiling! I started it a little after 6pm last night, and it didn’t finish until around 7am the next morning … I don’t know exactly when, but that was when I woke up from my cat nap … There was a nice prompt sitting there indicating that we had finished …

I had been reading Eric Raymond’s online version of The Art of Unix Programming off and on during the compile … reading makes me tired … Eric also has a great text called How to Become a Hacker … Which reminded me of the Halloween Micro$oft Documents exposed to him and his making them public, and the reasons which OSI thought should remain on Eric’s own web site here … So yes, much compile time allowed for much more research into Unix Wars and the origins of computing as we know it today … I am still angry that I was playing with mainframes at the time … One of the things they mention in the Revolution OS movie is the ability to have a system like the one you work on at work, at home … I did have that, I was the only one to own a 80386 at the time and I was writing C programs on it … Thing is, it was a DOS environment, but I know now that it could have been a Unix environment … I could have learned all of this stuff much sooner … I am now playing catch up … Then again, I certainly have a much better product to work with now than I would have back then … I should also mention that HBO’s movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley influenced me as well …

So anyway, then came the latest X server from X.org … I fired it up and lo and behold I now had a KDE environment … I suited to taste and then decided I would install Firefox … 30 megs of source there and took about 30-45 minutes to compile … But there were inconsistencies … I had seen this in the gnome-session startup as well … So, something got screwed up when I went from trying to install gnome from ports and then from packages … dependent versions were out of synch, and this just wreaked havoc on the other programs that needed these libraries … So, I decided I should probably fix this, especially if I wanted to run Firefox … So, the gnome page over at FreeBSD had mentioned something about a gnome_update.sh script that would upgrade gnome properly … I got hold of that and have been playing with it ever since … Having it fail a couple times only to fix why it failed and fire it up again … It’s a very powerful script, of that there is no doubt … Finally getting through all the dependencies and having the script get through its first 3 stages, we are now on:

Stage 4 of 5: Rebuilding all GNOME applications, and everything that relies upon them. (The Big Update)
Note: this will take a LONG time (a bit longer than it took to build it all the first time …). If you’ve been planning a day trip, now would be a great time to take it.

So I think we’re in for another 12 hour compile? I think we’ve learned a valuable lesson here … Install it from the CD when you install FreeBSD, it’s much faster … Although, I could have blown away the machine and done that, I wouldn’t have the latest and greatest from ports, and I would have had to upgrade it eventually anyhow …

Incidentally, these compiles are running on the same machine that this site sits on running Apache … I have noticed no slow down in this site’s performance as a result of this machine compiling the crap out of these two huge applications … FreeBSD is the poop …

P25-S526 PN: PSP20U-5091HV

That’s the model/number of my Toshiba laptop … I just spent a bunch of useless time Googling for a problem I have been having … Didn’t find a resolution … Oh well … The problem is, the screen saving features sometimes result in the machine becoming unusable … The screen saver starts after 10 minutes … Then the screen shuts off after 20 minutes … The machine still works and everything … It is running, etc … but when I move the mouse (run my finger over the touchpad) or strike a key, the screen does not turn on … This isn’t all the time either, this is intermittent … What I used to do was hold down the power button, but I found closing the lid was better … When you close the lid it “hibernates” so all I need do is wait for the hibernate, power it back on and resume … It’s a hassle, but it works … I just changed the power off of the monitor to an hour … I figure if I leave the laptop that long, it ought to shut the monitor off anyway … So much for Google …

Yeah … billing

I really gotta automate this thing … I ran the billing for December, and it’s what … December 31st … I really should automate the running of the billing … I am just going to run the billing tomorrow again for January … No payments to apply, etc … If they can automate a script to come into this here bLog and post a comment on every freakin post I’ve made in here, I should be able to automate the billing so it isn’t such a time constraint on me to have to sit down and make sure it’s right … To tell you how old the billing stuff is, it’s written in ASP … I have been writing in PHP for a couple years now … That’s one of the things I started but never got around to completing … So many others things jump up … Same goes for actually running the billing scripts … I have to make sure everything is applied before I run the scripts … and then the automating of people who have a web site one month and then don’t have one the next … Ugh! I definitely have to get some of these projects done that I started … I probably would have had more time if I weren’t deleting all these STUPID comments that this thing is spamming me with … Referral SPAM … the NEW SPAM … sucks … Oh well, off to the New Year’s gig … heck of a drive … Hopefully the new year will be less stressful for me with more time to accomplish all the things that I want to accomplish … Wishful thinking I suppose, especially in this crazy world we live in where everything is immediate … There’s no waiting anymore … Anyway … Happy New Year!

Discount Danny

Remember the good ol’ days? Tastykakes came in waxed paper … Soda came in bottles … Concert tickets were $7.50 for General Admission … All this before there was shopping online … You used to go out to the stores during the holiday season and try to pick up the things that everyone you knew wanted … If it wasn’t there, you could talk to a shop keeper and possibly arrange for a date and/or time to return to find the product you wanted … That’s not how it is anymore … Now, the hottest selling item is bought up before it hits the shelves and it’s posted on eBay for a ridiculous profit … Friend of mine two years ago made a killing with those little tiny remote control cars … Whenever he traveled, he stopped in every place that sold them and bought them all up and sold them individually on eBay (the only place you could get them nearing the holiday) …

So my son wants this ATM Bank thingamajig that’s sold out everywhere … My wife stresses when she can’t get the boy what he wants for Christmas … so she has everyone checking every store they go to to find out of they have this item which costs a little under $25.00 … Can’t find it, can’t find it, so she starts looking online … Welp, my first solution is Amazon.Com … They’re sold out … So I said to her that it must be pretty popular to be sold out on Amazon … So a day or two goes by, and she continues to look … She’s even using the computer while I’m not around (That’s an incredible feat for her … she doesn’t use computers at all, and you’d think with all the computers around here, well, that’s a topic for another post) … So she informs me that all these sites have the thing, but most of them link to Amazon (I guess with a referring link to make their percentage) or eBay … So I’m like, let’s cut to the chase and go right to eBay …

Yup, there they are, on eBay … averaging $59.99 Buy It Now with $12-15 shipping … There was one on there for $45 but it disappeared while we were looking through the various ads and the locations of where these things were coming from … We have to be concerned on the amount of time it will take to get here … After all, 11 more days? So it looks like the bulk of the hoarders are in Washington State, but I found good ol’ Discount Danny in Massachusetts was offering a $24.99 item for a whopping $59.95 discount … So we ordered it, and are paying $71.90 to have that thing arrive at our door … In the field to add additional comments, I almost entered in: “Not such a discount, huh Danny?” … But the wife was happy I didn’t … She thought they would be vindictive and send the item late …

Remember for Halloween you used to make your own costume and stay out until like 9 or 10pm? Around my house, it’s about an hour long and is done before prime time … You can get your costume online now too … I bet Discount Danny sells them … at a discount …

RSS

Made a minute change in the headers here and wondering if that fixes the RSS feed? Some people have said that there are errors in the feed and when I upgraded playing with some of the other aspects of the way this thing runs, I ran across a forum entry about a header that was wrong and I updated it …

New Server

I just moved this site to a new server I assembled … It is an AMD Sempron 2500+ with 512M of DDR RAM (I think it’s DDR, whatever the really really fast stuff is … SDDR?) … I had been loading various things on it for a while, and I decided just to leave it as my development server … The server where I will throw all the sites I design and manage … In the process I upgraded this blog software as well … ‘Two birds’ is it? Another reason is this site is my default home page, and I was getting tired of the wait … I need things lightning fast, don’t you? This is my first AMD in a while … I used to be really big on them until I started hosting … Figured I needed to be all Intel and Microsoft … I have found that the monetary amount doesn’t reflect the production of the product … It’s a FreeBSD 5.3 Server … Command line all the way baby … Took me a while to get PHP fired up and working right … They port it different in the 5.x versions of BSD … But I’m still on Apache 1 and PHP 4 … I figure I could try to go to Apache 2 sometime later … With all the people saying it’s fine, there are plenty that say it isn’t … and when I initially brought it up, I installed Apache 2 and PHP 5 and things didn’t work immediately … So I bagged it and went back to what I was used to, enough to up the op/sys … this guy has a 160G drive in it … I have gotten the emails from Charlie and the drive has 0% used … too funny … I bought the 160 cause the game server’s HD took a dive … Instead of throwing the 160 in there, I put the 40 I was using messing with this Sempron … So the Sempron has the 160G drive and FreeBSD 5.3 and that’s where it will stay …

All this free time working with Octane has given me the opportunity to do these upgrades … plus I am making better money that I can put out for hardware and such things … Getting to be back like the old days … I even finished HL2 and have been playing Counter-Strike again … Ah, to feel like a person again … The drone of the house system was good, but way too life sucking …

Washer Repair

I can’t believe I forgot to mention this! Last Wednesday, December 1st, I repaired our washing machine. My wife put a big carpet in the washing machine about 3 months ago. One of those mats that’s bigger than a welcome mat but smaller than a remnant … I don’t know what you call them, but smaller than a throw rug … Anyway, when that thing spun to dry, you’d think terrorists were attacking my basement … So ever since then, when you went to fill the washer with water, it would just leak out the bottom … I figured it had hit the sides or something and chewed a hole in the basket … So, after a couple months of her taking the laundry to relatives, and the constant nagging that only wives know how to do, the guilt mounted and I went to work on the foul machine …

First thing that tells you I’m not a washer repairman is that I started in the back … Removing screws and plastic snaps so I could get in there and see what was what … As I pried up the back, I noticed there were wires going to the control panel, so I figured I would have to remove the cluster plugs and pull them through … As I was removing the cluster from the motor, I noticed some weird looking thing going to the panel, and it didn’t look like an easy item to remove and put back … To get a better look at it, I pryed the top of the washer off even more … The top is held on by a pressure fit … When I got the four metal springing things that held the top on free to take a better look at this thing, I realized I could just push the top up from the front of the washer and gain access into the basket … DUH!

So I get to work in there … removing the filter on top, the agitator in the middle and there are the three bolts holding the basket on … Either Governor Arnold or the old doorman from 15 North put on these bolts … One was so difficult to get off, I actually broke it … So, I pull the basket out, and I see no big gouges in the side or anything to indicate why water was escaping it … Maybe it was the holes all around it that led me to believe it didn’t hold water either … So now I am in the next chamber (where the water actually is held) and there is a rubber thing that affixes to the center and this inner basket … It’s held on with thin metal bands, kinda like the ones that hold your radiator hoses on in your car … The bottom one had separated from the outer basket … So, I removed the top band so I could get the rubber thing off and get a good look at it … Didn’t look damaged, looked okay … I figured the carpet fiasco simply pulled this rubber thing out of the metal band … So I put it back together very tight, and then assembled the rest of the washer that I had disassembled (Johhny 5) and vwahlah … The washer has been working fine ever since …