automaticable

Hey, a post!  I feel that this story deserves some internet coverage somewhere, so why not automaticable!  And maybe this will convince the others to post something, other than April’s Fools Posts.

So, as some of you may know, I have been working for a commercial printing company doing IT for about half a year now.  The company has been in the middle of a massive merge and building-consolidation process.  All-in-all, everything has gone quite well.  One server crashed, but everything was recovered from backups.  However, working in a small business during poor economic times means working with some painfully old devices.

Last week I was given a pretty simple task.  I needed to set up a networked label printer that had been moved from the old shop.  Easy enough, it should just grab an IP via DHCP, and I can log onto its web interface to set it up – no big deal.  I hooked up the printer and voila, 192.168.2.13.  It was set up.  Went into our router, changed the IP from dynamic to static, and headed out for the evening.  Seemed like everything had gone great.

Now fast forward to the next morning, the pressmen are just getting ready to pull the press data from the servers, and – oh crap.  The press computer is down.  This press prints out 16,000 sheets per hour, and each sheet has 2-3 pieces on it.  You can imagine how fast I got the phone call.  I went straight to the press when I got in to see an error about an IP Conflict.  Our presses are all assigned static IP’s, so I went in to the network config – the IP assigned was 192.168.2.13.  Sounds familiar.

Turns out this label printer (I won’t name the brand, but I can’t say I’m surprised by this faulty setup) does not quite understand the meaning of DHCP and IP conflicts.  When it booted up the BOOTP process assigned it any random IP, regardless of what else might be under that IP.  I quickly unplugged the printer, and the press came back online.  In the end, I hooked the printer up to a more manageable HP JetDirect, and avoided any more IP conflicts.

The ironic part of this story?

A desk label printer this small :                                                Shut down a printing press this large :

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It has come to my attention that it apparently isn’t as far-fetched as I thought that automaticable could be sold for a ridiculous amount of money. Just to clear things up – automaticable is going nowhere. And if this post is news to you: APRIL FOOLS!

It was the professional looking logo that got you, huh?

We know it has been a while since we’ve posted, but we’ve had good reason – for the past 4 months we have been working out a deal to sell automaticable to the most appropriate business. While we have spent the last 2 years providing valuable content about Linux, SEO, politics and Mickey Mouse, we had an end-game in mind the whole time: create a valuable domain that can eventually be sold.

Originally Scott explained that he came up with the name automaticable by randomly pulling words from Google and putting them together. Obviously that wasn’t the case – we’ve had the business AutomatiCable (and, actually, AutoMatI-cable) in mind since the beginning. Since then we’ve sat down with them on a regular basis to talk business, and finally we’ve come to a deal. While we can’t go into anything specific, know that your patronage has netted us a number that includes a lot of zeros which we can’t thank you for enough. Without your help we would not have the traffic to justify such an amazing purchase price.

The transition will come over the next few weeks, which at that point you can expect www.AutomatiCable.com to be your #1 place for all-in-one cables!

It’s the holiday season, and we all know what that means.  Work WAY too many hours just to buy people meaningless gifts that people will use for about a month and then toss away.  One popular gift that in my opinion is the gift that keeps giving is an iPod.  I bought my first iPod 5 years ago after I graduated high-school.  Exactly a year after I bought it, it gave me that dreaded sad iPod face, and would no longer work.  I gave up.  I was distraught.  I didn’t want to have to resort back to CD’s that scratch and become unreadable, and I didn’t want to spend another $300 on a new iPod when I had one that was only a year old.  Why didn’t I just buy that extended warranty when they asked?

So what did I do instead? I got violent, because violence solves everything!  I banged my iPod against my shifter in my car three times and tired it again just to see if it worked, and by golly it turned on, no more sad face and my music was playing!**  I about shat my pants I was so excited!  Now granted, it froze up every once in a while and gave the sad iPod face again, but no worries, do the simple solution again and it works!  Now after about three years, it doesn’t freeze up anymore.  It may not work the first time, but keep trying and it will eventually.

After some investigation on to why this works, it turns out that in the older iPods there is a small connector cable that becomes loose from the hard drive through normal wear and tear.  You’re simply just knocking that cable back into place so the hard drive can be read properly.  I have had this same iPod for 5 years now, and it works wonderfully, and have not needed to buy a new one.  Nothing flashy with it either, it is the generation 4 iPod, right before it switched over to color and became more complicated.  Now, would I LIKE a new iPod? Sure, but I would only really want one if I didn’t purchase it, and it was atleast 20 gigs like the one I have now is.

So before you go out and spend a whole lot of cash on a new iPod because you think you’ve lost yours forever, try this and see if it works!  Any questions, comments, feel free to ask!

**Automaticable, Apple, and the poster are in no way liable or responsible for any and all damages caused to your iPod, Car, or self, or anything else when trying any and all “violent” techniques in hopes to remedy the sad iPod face from the MP3 player.  Reader and User try these techniques AT THEIR OWN RISK.

It’s always been an awkward question for me: “Mac or PC?”  The question is invariably focused on those two choices, completely leaving out the less-common option that I so devoutly use.  The Operating System I refer to –falsely described as ugly, difficult, and useless – is Ubuntu Linux.  For my entire two year relationship with Linux my answer to the Mac/PC question has almost always been followed by the even tougher question of “Why Linux?”

I have always responded to this question with some variation of it being productive for the computer-inclined, but more of a waste of time for those that don’t have the time to work out the kinks.  The recent Karmic Koala release has flipped this upside down.  The previous reasons to stay away from Linux have fallen by the wayside with this ground-breaking new release.  Faced with the new releases of Snow Leopard(Mac) and Windows 7, Karmic has come out with quite a large bit of competition;  I feel well justified, however, when I say that Ubuntu is the perfect alternative for those yearning to move away from the proprietary world.

The largest reason that I have always dodged the concept of migrating from Windows/Mac to Linux is the horrid hardware setup that I’ve always faced.  This has been completely wiped from my concerns with the Karmic release.  A clean install immediately recognized all of my hardware (which is quite the feat – my computer is a mismatch of scavenged hardware from old wrecks).  I continued to put Karmic through the test, as I installed a second video card with the hopes of setting up a dual monitor.  One BIOS change and one reboot later I was up and running on the second video card.

Another thing that has always scared people away from the Linux experience is the lack of software comparable to Windows/Mac.  Ubuntu specifically focused on this issue, and opened up the brand new Ubuntu Software Center(USC).  USC takes the great usefulness of the Synaptic Package Manager, and brings it into a more useable and comfortable GUI.  USC will offer a one-stop place to find software, read reviews, see and make ratings, and finally install.  Rumors also say that the USC has plans to become the breeding ground of an Ubuntu version of an app store.

My greatest worry withWindows 7 being released so near to the same time as Ubuntu 9.10 was that Windows 7 would come out on top in benchmarks.  My concerns turned out to be even greater after watching a Windows 7 demonstration (Windows 7 house party!) and noticing the very quick boot time.  Results have been published though, and www.techie-buzz.com shows that Karmic boots in near half the time of Windows 7.

With all the results in, I can confidently say that this is the Ubuntu release that I have been the most excited about.  With all three of the OS giants giving out the top of their game this year, I believe Ubuntu has finally released an OS that has the potential to break into the common household.  I am not saying that Ubuntu is the end-all to the OS war – Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are great at what they do – but it certainly is a valuable candidate when making your OS choice.   Prepare yourselves – soon the question may be “Mac, PC, or Linux?”

No, not really. Well I guess technically yes, but no, not really.

This is more of a way to force myself to put a post up of the new house with awesome before and after photos. If I say I’m going to do it publicly there is no backing down, right? Well here it is:

Sometime next week anyone and everyone (and I KNOW there is a huge automaticable following that has been waiting patiently for months for a new blog post) who wants to see the massive upgrades to the new house will get a blog post of just that. THERE I promised. There is no backing down.

Hey everyone, I know it’s been a while, but hopefully with this new post I can spark some enthusiasm into my dead beat brothers to start posting here again.  Have you ever wished for something and hoped that it came true?  Around the last couple times I posted, I stated that I got my extension to work in recreation.  I’ve enjoyed this new job for the most part, but as any job, it has its ups and downs.  The upside is some days I get to either work on the dock  with boats all day, or work the “gates” position, handing out wristbands and interacting with guests and kids.  The downside is that at a resort, there are “custodial” positions that I have to work as well that aren’t fun at all, very labor intensive, and the other cast members don’t treat you very well because the position has the word “custodial” in it.

Well, since the extension, a lot  has gone on.  I went home for my brother’s graduation which was amazing to say the least.  I also went on vacation for family reunion and I’m going to talk about that a little more extensively in a little bit, and lastly, I got my 2nd extension just a few short days ago to transfer into Transportation.  As most of you may have heard, there was a fatal accident recently in WDW on July 5th at 2AM involving a monorail.  Two cars were on the same track traveling different directions and unfortunately these two cars collided, killing one cast member, and minor injuries on only a handful of guests.  After about 3-5 days of investigation the monorail HAS reopened.  Am I worried about my new transfer because being a monorail driver is probably what I’m going to be doing?  Of course, but for it to be the first accident in 38 years of the monorails operation, the odds of something drastic happening are very slim.

Now about family reunion.  This vacation in general was something I was looking forward to for the last two years, and it couldn’t have gone any better.   I started out the vacation by leaving a full 4 days early to drive up to Atlanta to meet up with my brother Kyle as well as surprise my parents.  I wasn’t supposed to be able to leave for vacation until the Monday after the festivities began, but I pulled some strings and left directly after work Wednesday night and arrived very early Thursday morning into Atlanta.  My parents didn’t have any idea that I was going to be in Atlanta, so when they arrived Thursday evening, I popped out from hiding behind my brothers car and surprised them all.  It was the perfect way to start vacation.  After garage sale shopping for a day or so, we were off on vacation!  After a short six hour drive we arrived!  We hung out at one of the towny bars for a while waiting for our vacation homes to be ready to moved into, and once we all moved in the fun began!

I lucked out and stayed in the beach front home, so every night I was able to fall asleep and wake up every morning to the sound of the ocean.  The first night I hung out on the beach with cousins, and ended up fishing with them and caught a shark!!  It was so exciting!  It was about 4 feet long and about 10-12 pounds.  Put up a pretty good fight and was so exciting to pull in and hold up close.  For the remainder of the week, there was alot of just hanging out, playing in the water, fishing, and then going to the local raw bar called Eddie Teach’s.  They had THE BEST old bay shrimp and raw oysters I have EVER had, and with $4 pitchers of PBR, we made that our place for the week.  I probably ate about 20lbs of shrimp that week, all at Eddie Teach’s, so if you ever find yourself in St. George’s Island, FL, make sure to check it out!

The last day of the trip we went out on a kayaking trip in the snakelike rivers of the area, got to see some alligators, and just spent some quality time with my relatives.  Overall, the trip went really well and was something that I just really needed after 5 months of working for Disney, and not really seeing anyone that I truly knew.

That’s all I really have for now.  It’s getting late and I have to be up early in the morning.  It’s great to be posting again and hopefully we can get Automaticable back up and as lively as it was before.  Who’s with me on getting this blog awesome again?

Well folks, again last week was a very hectic week for me and I didn’t get around to posting again, but that just means I have a lot to write about!  The last couple of weeks were a real blast because I got a bunch of days off, and used that time to really treat myself to some fun outings.  I have been mainly just chilling with my roommates, but I did get a chance to go mini-golfing at a pretty sweet course during the time between my last post.  If you don’t know me, then let it be known that I LOVE mini-golfing and go-karting, probably two of my most favorite things to do to hang out with friends and such like that.  The place was kind of expensive, but I had buy-one-get-one free coupons, so it turned out to be about average price.  I also got too take some time and actually get some sun down at the pool, and let me tell you, it’s probably the most relaxing sensation in the world to just lay out in either the direct sun, or a partly overcast day and be at peace with yourself and your surroundings.

Work’s getting tougher and tougher with longer hours, early mornings, late nights, and redeployment folks that don’t really want to be in their new location and learn how the new location works. I’m being placed as a point person more and more now, which is amazing.  I love being the leader of a stand and being able to control the flow of how things work, because I have definitely worked in stands where there’s no control or direction.  Now that I’m a point/run I am able to help my team work as a well oiled machine within at least 2 hours.  The start of the shift is usually a little rough because people don’t want to listen to me, just because I’m a college program student, or they’re extra hours or redeployment people and feel they’re exempt from learning anything new, but as soon as I inform them that they can either A) listen and work as a team or B) go home and lose the hours they’d be working that day, they usually choose option A and are glad they did.  I let them know that if it’s a new position for them that they’re on, I’ll be right there next to them to help them if they have any questions, as well as train them on how to work that position effectively and efficiently as possible.

I have also decided that I’m going to extend my program.  I just submitted my application to extend about an hour ago, and I’m really excited to hear the results back from them soon.  I either want to stay in my location doing QSR F&B (Quick Service Restaurant Food and Beverage) or move on to Attractions or even Parking.  We’ll see how things play out.  If I am accepted to extend my program, I’ll be down in Orlando until August 14th.  This is another 3 months added onto my program, which will be perfect because with work and classes right now, I have no time to really network myself and try to get myself into the professional internship, but this extra time on my program will put me in a position to where I can do that.  There’s just so much going on right now, and all of it good and that excites me!  Well, as the excitement continues, I’ll try to keep better track of what’s going on and keep all you kids back home updated!  Take care everyone and I hope you all had a wonderful St. Patrick’s Day!!!

Ubuntu 9.04 “Jaunty Jackelope” is set for release in less than two months, and is currently in the “Alpha 6″ testing stage.  Arguably the hottest new feature is stable support for Linux’s new filesystem, ext4.  The new filesystem has been shown to have significant performance gains over any other Linux filesystem to date.  But think twice before you upgrade to ext4–many users have been reporting considerable data loss.  From a user’s comment:

This has happened to me twice, the first time erasing Firefox settings, and the second time erasing gnome-terminal settings. Both cases were caused by a kernel panic locking up the system. Also, both times the program whose settings were affected was in use during the kernel panic.

This has been a wide-spread problem, particularly for Ubuntu users testing the new Jaunty alpha releases.  It manifests itself after a system crash, where open files will simply be emptied and erased.  It is particularly prevalent in users’ settings files, such as those used for GNOME or KDE.  Fortunately, there cause of the bug is relatively well-known, as kernel developer Theodore Ts’o explains in his detailed comment:

OK, so enter ext4 and delayed allocation. With delayed allocation, we don’t allocate a location on disk for the data block right away. Since there is no location on disk, there is no place to write the data on a commit; but it also means that there is no security problem. It also results in a massive performance improvements; for example, if you create a scratch file, and then delete it 20 seconds later, it will probably never hit the disk. Unfortunately, the default VM tuning parameters, which can be controlled by /proc/sys/vm/dirty_expire_centiseconds and /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centiseconds, means that in practice, a newly created file won’t hit disk until about 45-150 seconds later, depending on how many dirty pages are in the page cache at the time. (This isn’t unique to ext4, by the way — any advanced filesystem which does delayed allocation, which includes xfs and the in the future, btrfs, will have the same issue.)

Essentially, the data for truncated and overwritten files is often cached in memory before actually hitting the disk, for performance reasons.  However, the file truncation doesn’t get cached, and if there is a system failure between the two operations, your files will simply be wiped clean with all previous and new data gone.  This happens frequently for desktop settings because hundreds of small hidden files are updated to maintain user preferences.  As a result, there is a relatively high probability that a truncation and rewrite operation could be happened at any time– including during a system failure.

By POSIX definition, this isn’t really a bug in ext4.  The state of a file after this type of crash isn’t clearly defined.  According to Theodore, it’s really a bug in the way desktop environments are writing their settings files:

[...] If your application is stupid, and has hundreds of dot files in your home directory, each one taking up a 4k disk block even though it is only storing 4 to 12 bytes of data in each singleton dot file, and you have to [write to disk] for each of your one hundred dot files — and worse yet, your application for some stupid, unknown reason is writing all of these hundred+ dot files every few seconds, then [writing to disk] will be very painful. But it is painful because the application is stupidly written — not for any fundamental filesystem fault. It’s like if you had a robot which was delivering mail to mail box numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and crossing the street for each mail box; on a busy road, this is unsafe, and the robot was getting run over when it kept on jaywalking — so you can tell the robot to only cross at crosswalks, when the “walk” light is on, which is safe, but slow — OR, you could rewrite the robot’s algorithsm so it delieveres the mail more intelligently (i.e., one side of the street, and then cross, safely at the crosswalk, and then do the other side of the street).

Regardless of what a permanant solution should include, there are a series of patches which are set to be included in the final Jaunty kernel to address this issue.  The patches are set to handle the crash situation similar to ext3– keeping the original version in-tact.  However, it comes at a price of performance.  Ext4 won’t be any slower than ext3, but the patch will negate many of the performance gains that ext4 previously achieved.

Once again, ext4 will likely be patched and fixed by the official Ubuntu Jaunty release.  However, it isn’t present in Jaunty Alpha 6, and hasn’t been pushed as an update yet (as of 3/12/09).  There is lengthy and ongoing discussion in the original bug report about possible long-term solutions.  In conclusion, be very careful if you choose to test out the new ext4 filesystem until it is patched.

After much anticipation, my new netbook (which I got a screaming deal on) was delivered this afternoon. It’s a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Netbook with Ubuntu Linux, though this version of Linux is slightly different than your standard install. While it is technically Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy), it has its own interface which I will do a walkthrough of below, outlining all the differences I can find between this Dellbuntu (my own term) and a standard Ubuntu install.

This screen shot walkthrough will look at the unedited, uncustomized Ubuntu install on my Dell Mini 9. I’m sure I will do plenty of customization down the road, but for now you get the virgin version.

The Standard Desktop

The desktop is very clean and appealing to start off with. There are no folders or icons on the desktop itself, which will be quite a surprise for anyone coming from a Windows environment. The large bar across the top is called the Launcher and presents most of the essential programs in a graphical interface. Below are shots of each tab individually.

The Entertainment Tab

While this menu has the typical Music Player (Rhythmbox) & photo manager (F-spot), this is the first time we really see the net-focus on the netbook. Having a specific icon for LastFM shows the imporantance of working in the cloud…which is essential since the Dell Mini 9 comes with only 4GB of memory standard.

Also, notice how I had to specify that the music player and photo manager have actual names. Dell has completely debranded most default programs, which we will see more examples of soon.

The Games Tab

The games tab has many of the typical Ubuntu games so there isn’t a whole lot to discuss here, however there are a few things to note. First, and most disappointing, is that Wormux, my favorite of the Ubuntu standard games, is not included in this install. I’m not sure why they would do that while adding Potato Guy instead! Let me tell you, potato guy is one of the most annoying and pointless “games” I’ve ever run across. Stay away!

The Learn Tab

I don’t know who came up with the Learn tab, but I don’t think I’ll ever seriously use it. I guess the Japanese Study Tool and Stellarium might be good for a handful of people, but these do not seem like programs that were worth including in a default install. Actually, more interesting than that is the fact that all of these programs have Kubuntu-style names in the normal programs menu. What this means I’m not sure.

The Productivity Tab

The productivity tab includes all the default OpenOffice.org programs, plus a handy folder called “Dell Contract.” Of all things I want in a quickstart menu like the launcher, I DEFINITELY want fast access to my Dell Contract at all times. Thanks Dell!

The Web Tab

The web tab is probably the most interesting of all, which is to be expected from a netbook. Can you tell who Dell partnered with to bring netbook services to the Mini 9? Let me spell it out for you…Yahoooooooooo! Not only do they have an entire quicklaunch section dedicated almost entirely to Yahoo pages, but the “Web Browser,” or Firefox, defaults to Yahoo.com for the home page, has the Yahoo Toolbar installed, and defaults to Yahoo search from the quick search bar. While I have no problem with companies partnering with each other to do promotions, Mozilla is largely funded by Google search which is shown by defaulting the Firefox home page & quick search bars to Google. Without this funding, development for Firefox in general would be at risk. But this is an issue for a separate post.

The Keyboard

While the entire set of hardware behind the Dell Mini 9 Netbook is interesting and generally super high quality, what is worth sharing the most is the keyboard.

This keyboard is super tiny, but also extremely functional. My one problem, which I have yet to get over, is the positioning of the apostrophe/quotes key. Dell moved it from its normal position next to the colon key to the bottom row next to the left arrow. See it? Yeah, that will take some getting used to.

That’s it for now. I’ll update if I find anything else that stands out from typical Ubuntu installs. Until then, let me know if you have any questions in the comments and I’ll get back to all of them asap.