Musings of an Engineer

Linux.

I missed it, a lot. The challenge of trying so hard to get something to work and the feeling of accomplishment when you finally figure it out. I love it.

Permissions, groups, users, compilation, configs, packages… All these things add up to something beautifully complex and ever evolving. It’s really amazing how far it has truly come.

This webserver is running on a RaspberryPi, which is totally mind-blowing to me. A tiny little ARM processor sipping away at power from the USB to the tune of around 5W. Wow. What a great time to be a geek! All the cool toys we have!

Chapter 1:

Well, it’s been a while… Lots has changed…

Thought I’d give blogging a shot again. I plan mostly for this to be a collection of code, pictures and general geeky things that I find or make.

Guess we’ll see how this goes!

Ok… wow. Two-years plus is a long time. It’s time for an update.

So… it’s funny, but my last post here was pretty much produced by the same situation today. I upgraded Ubuntu to 10.04, PHP got upgraded, and Wordpress exploded. Now it’s generally functioning, and my server is doing ok too, barring a few quirks.

A lot has happened in two years. I finished school in May 2009, found a job at Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems in Akron, and bought a car… and a whole lot more.

A few days ago, I decided to take the e-plunge, and install the next version of Ubuntu. I always dread the upgrade, because the update manager always makes you choose if you want to keep your current configuration or install the package maintainers configuration. This is troublesome because I always wonder how much the config has changed, and if it warrants me dumping my current one for a new, blank one. At least the update manager shows you a diff between the files, that way you can make a more educated decision. Anyhow, after installing Hardy, Apache didn’t want to serve pages anymore to the outside world, which kind of defeats the purpose. After playing with the sites files and the httpd.conf file for about 4 hours, I finally fixed. (Not sure how…)

Yesterday the snow began to fall and as of today, there will be upwards of 16" of snow on the ground. This has caused a lot of problems on the roads and a lot of delays around the area. Today is definitely a “sit-at-home-and-relax” day.

Besides the snow, a lot else has happened in the last few months. I finished my co-oping period with ABB in December. It was an enjoyable and valuable experience. It does feel good to be back in school though, I was really starting to miss the academic environment that has become so familiar to me over the last few years. Christmas break was pleasant, we spent some time with family, saw some friends, and burned up a lot of time playing Rock Band and other video games.

No, thats not my age! Today my blog celebrates it’s Two-Year Old Birthday. It happened to be by pure virtue that I was browsing in my archives today, and noticed that my first real post (besides test posts which I should delete) was on December 19th 2005.

HISTORY OF MY BLOG/SERVER My first post was actually written back when I had a Blogspot account, which is now owned by Google, and renamed to Blogger. These posts were then carried over onto a new install of Wordpress on my first server. The specs for that machine were: AMD K62 @ 400MHz, 92MB RAM, Windows 2000 Pro and XAMPP for the web services. There were a few other things that my server was doing for me, like running HoTTProxy and VibeStreamer, but all in all, everything was it slow and not very pleasant to use… Once I decided to take the plunge into Linux, the experience was a whole lot better. Basically from this point onward, I have loved my Linux experiences. I make reference in a post about how the server just performs better with Linux, and it is so true! Fast forward a bit, last November I got a new server, since Lake Twp. was going to auction off some old PCs. This machine has really helped me out a lot. It now has a 500GB RAID1 storage array for music, movies, games, and backups of my laptop. Its a torrent box, uPnP server (for getting media to the 360), web server, phone proxy, and probably a couple other things I forgot. There are a few choice pieces of software I miss that are Windows only, but both of them have plans in the future to release Linux versions.

A couple weeks ago Greenpeace had a naming contest name a whale. Well of-course the internet being what it is, tubes and pictures of cats with ill-formed grammatical statements, there was an overwhelming push to have the whale named “Mr. Splashy Pants”. And after the final voting, out of 30 possible names and 150,000 votes, Mr. Splashy Pants took home 78% of the vote.

Now since the internet has chosen a name for the whale, it is time to save him. So lets in an effort to try to keep the Japanese from hunting and killing these amazing creatures, sign the petition, and donate a little money if you support the cause.

Ruckus, a music service that universities and colleges are starting to use to try to keep their students out of hot water with the RIAA. Students of participating institution can sign up with their school provided e-mail address and download music for “free”. The ability for it to be free, includes tight licensing for the downloaded music courtesy of Microsoft’s WMA DRM.

Ruckus is pretty cool, the quality is acceptable, and you can’t really beat “free”, but… as soon as you leave the institution providing the service, the licenses that allow you to play the DRM’d WMA files will expire, and you will have lots of unplayable music files. Along with that, DRM’d WMA files can not be converted to be used on iPods or some other portable media players, and if you use OSX or Linux, your also out of luck. If none of these things bother you, you can stop reading here, otherwise keep reading…

So, the new Ubuntu distro has made it’s debut, and I can say I’m pretty happy with what it has to offer. The upgrade this time was a much less invasive process, compared to 6.10 to 7.04. It only took me about a total of 5 hours of work to get the machine fully upgraded, re-configured, and functioning again. The only thing that is kind of daunting about upgrading, is the fact that the updater wants to replace a lot of the config files with their distributed default ones. If you choose to replace or keep, no data is lost, but it can be a real pain in the butt to track down what is going on when something isn’t working. Overall this time, i felt more confident in what the updater was doing/replacing, so I guess I wasn’t as nervous as last time. From a desktop user perspective, this new distribution has some things that make it a lot more user friendly. I can’t really comment too much on these things however, as of right now I’m only running it on my server. I have seen a little bit of a performance increase, my load has dropped a bit, but the cpu usage has gone up. I’m not sure if this is a symptom of the tickless kernel or not, but regardless, as long as the system is stable and performs well, I’m happy. I would recommend the upgrade for anyone who is thinking about it, and for the people who have yet to try Linux, now may be a great time to take the plunge into OSS.

Most “self-proclaimed gurus” have determined that the only real difference between 64-bit OS vs 32-bit OS is the amount of supported memory… This is the most obvious difference, however this is far from the only difference. I was catching up on my digging this morning, and I came across an article at bit-tech.net interesing article that discusses 64-bit processors. I can’t that I went into the article knowing everything about 64 bit vs. 32 bit, but it seems to be a bit clearer now. It will be interesting to see how 64 bit computing affects us, and how the OS developers embrace the new platform. YAY FOR MEGABITS!