Monthly Archives: October 2006

Geek, Linux

Sweet Jesus

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After a few weeks of living without a 3d accelerated X server, I’ve finally got it resolved.

# m-a a-i nvidia-kernel
# depmod -ae
# apt-get install nvidia-glx

Then edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver inplace of nv.

I’ve also upgraded Carla’s machine to the new Ubuntu last night/this morning. At this rate, I might even fix my keymap too!

Edit: I should add that I’d pegged my kernel to 2.6.16 because I hadn’t found the newer releases of ivtv for my Tuner card, and as I was using a debian binary kernel, but had upgraded everything else, including gcc, it complained everytime I tried to fix it.  Apparently the solution was open my eyes, breath a little, relax, and let it do it’s thing properley.  The above really isn’t that magical.

Life

Re: Dead President

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As club curator, founding member, and a Past President, I am hereby taking
your resignation into consideration. Due to the unpreparedness of the club
to transition to a new president, I regret to inform you that we are going
to change your official status to Outgoing President and you will be
placed into a 3 month probationary term as acting president while we make
other arrangements.

At the end of the aforementioned 3 month period, taken to be occurring on
or around the Consumerism Celebration in late December, we will be
evaluating this specially formulated presidential term. There will be an
outgoing interview of our longest running president as well as the
establishment of formal relations with the Outgoing Presidents new
business partner.

We appreciate your understanding in this matter, and hope your new
ventures provide new challenges with which you can test the skills you
have acquired while working for our cause, as well as grow into your new
position.

Dave

Past President

Geek, Linux

Weekend Fun

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So the datacenter is preparing to move from the 9th floor of the building to the basement, where they’ll have more space, better power infrastructure, better AC, etc etc etc. Part of the prep for that happened Friday evening.  They shut down between 2 and 5 to do god knows what. What I do know:

  1. Tank refused to boot due to a cooked CPU Fan
  2. Dozer came online without too much of an issue, but the suspended VMs didn’t.
  3. Apoc refused to boot the Xen-ified kernel.  This took the most amount of time to fix, and it ended up being due to a kernel update that came down with the same package name as what I’d installed before.  It is known to be broken, and apparently they’re not planning on fixing it.
  4. They moved two of the AC units to the basement where they will sit unused for the next month, while everything slow-cooks itself to death in the existing facility.

I guess for the full move in December I may need to plan some maintenance for my rigs. I just need to keep telling myself this is fun. It’s a fun hobby. It’s a fun hobby.

Work

Emergency Stop!

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Or how I learned to stop worrying and fucking google it.

Retrospect is a strange piece of software that I can only imagine was designed for industrial applications.  I make this guess based on the idea that it has an Emergency Stop button much like the ones near machinery that has the ability to chop body parts off.

494 The Emergency Stop button in all it’s unlabeled glory.  I wouldn’t have even know it existed/what it does if it hadn’t already been pushed on the machine I was attempting to make work.

497 The nice warning you get when you press the magic button. I’m sure that whoever pressed the button before me saw this message.  Why they might ignore it, I’m not too sure.

500 And now, the magic button in the pressed state.  Notice the phrase “Execution is Deferred” in the lower left. Intuitive!

I’m still not sure that I get why they would do this, but at least now the defined backups should actually run at the times specified.

Random Thoughts

Economics 101

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“We teach there are no absolutes, no right or wrong. And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.”
Now, I’m no economics major, but from what I remember, limited resources derive their market value from a number of factors, including how many of them are on the market. So if there are fewer children (via abortion) wouldn’t that raise the inherent value of the remaining children, instead of diminishing it?

I’m a bad man.

PostScript: Considering the consumerist nature of our society, and the resulting binge-buying that goes on during product shortages, this could be also applied to the original topic of the linked article. School Shootings. Such unexpected disruptions in the availability of CommoditizedChildren (CC) send the value of CC much higher not only due to quantifiable drop in availability, but also because of the sudden increase in demand as people are reminded about how much their supposed to like their CC. Because of this deeply ingrained reaction to product shortages, much like the Tickle Me Elmo, soon we won’t be able to buy CC at any price, because people will horde them and backorders will pile up.