Schinckel.net

I like John Gruber, who writes for Daring Fireball. He usually hits the mark, but recently he’s been really harking on about the iPhone. Since they aren’t likely to be available over here in Oz for sometime, I’m not that interested, just yet. His latest post, Daring Fireball: On Top reverts back to a less iPhone topic, Top Posting in email replies. I ‘grew up’ using text-only interfaces on the internet, so email and usenet were king (and queen). I used to be a bottom/middle posting advocate, but have stopped for one very good reason. People think you haven’t replied at all when you bottom post. They don’t read down when they see that there is no response at the top. It’s as simple as that. I really prefer bottom/middle posting, it makes it much easier to structure a decent response to someone, yet it had really fallen out of favour. Perhaps I’ll restart this ancient practice. Except that every email client available nowadays is configured to automatically top post. Oh well. It just occurred to me that IM is much more mid-posting-like. You respond immediately to an argument, and the threads are mixed. Email is dead anyway (any situation where you receive 100 times as much Spam as Ham has passed its usefulness).

Aargh! I’ve just spent ages troubleshooting SMB networking on Ubuntu, only to realise that there weren’t any SMB users - which is crazy. Why not just default to having the local users match up with the SMB users. After finally getting that working, I did also get AFP sharing working. Which does appear to just use the users. Still, I need to keep SMB going, for the Windows/Xbox machines that sometimes visit my network…

I use a local DHCP server to also act as my caching DNS, with the nice side effect that it also serves DNS requests for machines inside my LAN that have gotten their IP addresses via DHCP. Until this afternoon, this was my clunky old SpeedTouch modem. Today, I put that modem into bridge mode, and set up my brand spanking new Airport Extreme to do the PPPoE connection, and handle all of the routing, DHCP and DNS duties. It’s newer, right, so it should do a better job? Wrong. It does everything I want, except serve local DNS results. So, if I try to connect to one of my many machines, then it fails. And since I’ve gone from DHCP with reserved leases to a free-for-all DHCP, I have no idea which machine is which IP address! This is very frustrating, and is exactly the reason I retired the Netgear from this task, as it had exactly the same behaviour. It hands out IP addresses, but doesn’t store the machine names. Now, let me remind you this was working perfectly with the Airport Extreme just running in bridge mode. Everything else is set up right (apart from the fact it isn’t really using the DNS settings I set for it!), but it won’t do this. I’m sorely tempted to go back to how I had it all set up before. The only functionality I will lose is that VM machines connected over a bridged airport connection will not get an IP address from the SpeedTouch DHCP server. They do from either the Netgear, or the Airport Extreme, if I configure that way. I’m really annoyed about this. It’s a vital part of my daily use - I have fileservers, including one that stores all Music, and a fax/scanner server, which I don’t want to have to hard code IP addresses into. I’m thinking I may be able to go all Bonjour/Zeroconf/mDNSresponder. I’ll see how that goes.

I’d hardly call myself inexperienced in the ways of computers (I’ve installed several flavours of operating systems on several architectures of computers, from AmigaOS and Mac OS on 68k; through BeOS, Mac OS and OS X on PPC; a sideways movement to various Linuxes on ARM; to BeOS, Windows, OS X and more recently Fedora on x86). So how come I’m having so many issues getting what I want out of a Linux box? Perhaps, to put things in perspective, I’ll discuss exactly what it is that I want. I have a Dell mini tower machine, with nearly a terabyte of hard disk drives, 1.5Gb of memory and some other various hardware that I want to set up as a fileserver, fax and print server and scanner server for my local network, and possibly an outside accessible web server. I also want to run a virtualisation of WindowsXP, accessible via a remote desktop setup, so that Jaq can run her CAD software (Windows only) from her PPC iMac. This should have been easy. It started with hassles even getting the 3.2Gb Fedora DVD image. I would up having to get it at work, as my wget client decided to do strange shit with sizes, and kept saying there were a negative number of bytes remaining. Granted, this is not the fault of Fedora, but it set the tone. Next up was my installation woes. Now, I’ve installed a text-only Linux onto my NSLU2, and administered it for ages. I’ve read several books in the past about X-windowing (and even had a working Xwindows setup on BeOS/PPC, which was not a bad triumph). But I wasn’t ready for the almost never-ending hassle I had to get my Dell machine to actually boot into Fedora. But finally it did. I’d downloaded vmware and Parallels, since I still haven’t chosen between them in the Desktop realm, so most definitely haven’t decided on this untested platform. And neither of them would work. Apparently I don’t have a kernel they like, and I can’t build the vmmon for my kernel, since I get all sorts of weird errors when I try to compile or link. Now, let me suffix that by saying when I was deeply into hacking BeOS/PPC, they had already moved to Intel CPUs, and most software I had to build from source, and generally fiddle with stacks to get it to compile and link. So, I’m not totally clueless there either. So I spent a while trying to get the in-built virtualisation system to work. It starts installing, but for some reason I get bizarre errors on the installation of Windows - that it can’t find a file, and I can’t get it to access the CD drive again. It’s fairly crap, in other words. Especially after playing with vmware Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. Both of which install Windows XP without a hitch. Giving up on trying to survive on this Fedora, I’m currently downloading an older version of Linux - Ubuntu 6.0.6 this time. This is supported under VMWare, but not under Parallels. The only versions of Linux that are supported by both virtualisation systems are RedHat and SuSe, which don’t seem to be freely downloadable. Or maybe I just didn’t look hard enough. But this is not the end of my story. Tracking back a couple of steps, I have been fiddling lots with Fedora. It seems okay, but it is really hard to do the things I want to do. For instance, it would be nice to VNC into the box and do stuff, but I can’t seem to make Chicken of the VNC connect. Nor the little java VncViewer I found provided superior performance. I’d also like to be able to use other types of file sharing setup - perhaps AFP or NFS rather than just SMB. I can get an SMB connection to Fedora, but nothing else. NFS appears to just keep trying, and eventually time out. AFP connections are just rejected. And the frustrating thing is there is no easily discoverable way to turn this stuff on. I’ve even fiddled with files I know are used for this type of thing (that’s how I got Samba going, before I discovered the place to do this). Even SWAT, which the system told me I have installed, doesn’t seem to respond on port 901, where it lives. I know that Linux is different to OS X, and to Windows, but right now I’m not liking it a whole lot. I’d be fairly tempted to just reinstall Windows, but the two 250G hard drives that are in there are already formatted ext3fs, and mostly full of data, since they were in use, in addition to a 160GB drive that still stores my music, connected to the NSLU2. Which, I might add, was much easier to administer than Fedora. I know I’m trying to do more on Fedora, but I’m currently achieving less. Perhaps I just need to sleep.

I’ve noticed a whole lot of missing messages from eBay recently. It turns out that Gmail’s Spam filter has become somewhat overzealous, and has been munching on some emails that are legitimate. Not very cool, when this is communication I need.

Well, my MBP still hasn’t arrived. If I’d been clever, and bought it through the online Apple Store, then it would have “shipped in 2-4 days”. I stupidly went through Next Byte, and it hasn’t entered the store yet. It has officially been three weeks since I ordered it. If I hadn’t paid a deposit, I’d cancel the fucking thing. The thing that shits me most is that they don’t seem to know (or care!) when it is coming in. Surely a company would have some sort of tracking that tells them where stuff is. I’m even more peeved that Apple has updated the machines since I ordered mine. I wouldn’t mind too much, in that I would have originally received the machine before the updated machines came out. But it’s now ages since the update, and I still don’t have even one of the old machines, let alone a Santa Rosa machine. Which, incidentally, would have cut the price I paid by about $300, if I’d waited. Even if the machine I get ends up being a Santa Rosa machine, I’ll still feel cheated out of that money. On second thoughts I could almost get a Santa Rosa machine from the Apple Store, and it would only cost the same amount as me paying the remainder on my on-order machine. That way, I’d get it the next day, upgraded, and piss off Next Byte too. Perhaps I’ll do that if it doesn’t come tomorrow.

Saturdays • Cut Copy • Chillout Sessions 6

I love PostSecret. However, I’m getting close to dumping it from my feed, for one reason only. They update the blog post several times a day to add comments in. This is bad news, as each updated page causes a new addition to my RSS feed. Meaning I see several dozen “Sunday Secrets” posts each week. Only one of which is really new.

Heebie Jeebies • Louis Armstrong • This is Jazz 1 ★

Maybe I’m just being crazy, but I’m not really finding wxPython particularly pythonic. For instance, I’m trying to make a fairly simple application that has a SplitterWindow, and I seem to have to do a whole lot of sub-classing to actually get it to work. Feels more like Java than Python. Which I’m really not keen on doing.

Notice • Gomez • Chillout Sessions 9

Here I go, reinstalling WinXP for the umpteenth time this week. I seem to have some corrupted files which prevents me from running all but the most simple of applications. Including IE, and Firefox, btw.

I’ve commented before on how people use my template conversion, and remove the attribution to myself, and more importantly to Patricia, the original person who did all of the work on the template for vanilla wordpress. What is quite funny is that they remove the tags that attribute me, but usually leave in the AdSense code. Which means anyone clicking on ads on their blog will be doing me a favour. Not that I’ve ever got anything from AdSense. I can’t even log in, since there is a clash between my original AdSense login and my new hosted domain google account. Which they haven’t fixed, last time I checked. Perhaps I should write into the code that attribution needs to be left in. I must check…