number 9

Just rang Lloyds to see if I’d been paid. They have a robot slavegirl who deals with that kind of thing, she tries her best.

• robot slavegirl: please enter your very long account number
• me: beep beep beep…
• rs: thank you. now enter the nth digit of your passcode
• me: beep
• rs: and the nth+2 digit
• me: bee – oh bollocks
• rs: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please enter you very long account number.
• me: (silently fumes and repeats the above)
• rs: you entered n and n+2. Is that right?
• me: shit. Good job I’m not on handsfree
• rs: I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Please say ‘yes’ or ‘no’
• me: yes! fuck sake
• rs: ok, please select ‘recent transactions’, ‘balance’……
• me: (can’t find the little cheatsheet that lets you just press numbers to avoid this farce) uh, ”recent transactions”
• HUMAN IN ROOM: is that a real person?
• me: no, it’s a bot
• rs: I’m having a little trouble understanding you. Please enter your very long account number.
• me: AAAAAAARGH

UKUUG
is next weekend, and although I can’t spare a whole weekend I really want to catch the Xen talks on Saturday morning.

I’ve been following Xen for about 18 months and to my shame I still haven’t got further than building a dom0 kernel and running that as my desktop for 9 months…

In my defence, my weapon of choice has no dom0 and very sketchy domU support, but NetBSD has been stable in dom0 for nearly a year now, and I’ve had NetBSD around the place since last century.

My main problem has been the lack of a serial console on my netbsd gateway (all my mini-itx boxes are headless as they all live in the front room where there’s no room for monitors).
It’s made upgrading the box very dangerous (every buildworld invariably kills the box ) and dicking about with Xen out of the question.

Adding a serial console to NetBSD:

1. needs a buildworld (see above)
2. is badly documented (rare for netbsd)
3. kills your EPIA boxes (I found this when I tried to install on a new EPIA, luckily. That was when I started using FreeBSD again).

According to the bug report, the bootcode errors are now fixed. But I have a better plan.
I need grub anyway for Xen, and grub does serial consoles fine.

Slight problem was that grub can need a bit of massaging to work with non-linuxes, but that’s no biggy now as the NetBSD/xen howto , bless it, has a section on serial consoles.

(in all honesty, my WRT54G arrived last night, so it’d probably be simpler just to flatten the old NetBSD box and sell it to make glue, but I would like a Xen box and it seems like a good candidate).

I made about a hundred and seventy pounds on ebay recently. It’s promptly burnt a hole in my pocket, hence the SLUG I mentioned the other day.
(It arrived. It’s small. I haven’t got round to plugging it in yet :/ )

I’ve fancied a 54mbps WLAN for ages too so I thought I’d go all out and get some cards and a WRT54G while I was at it

It’s a 10/100 4-port switch and does SPI and NAT, supports dyndns.org so that’s most of what I need. (I kill hard disks and PSUs at a scary rate, so solid state network kit looks very attractive compared to a standalone *NIX server at the moment )

It amazes me how little reality checking goes on when bidding on ebay.
A WRT54G is 43 quid on amazon.co.uk, including VAT and shipping. Brand new with a 1 year manufacturers warranty. So why do they regularly go for 50-60 quid on ebay??

I thought I could make a fast buck. What’s wrong with this picture? :

1. buy one on amazon
2. list it on ebay
3. if it hasn’t made me a profit with an hour to go, pull the auction and send it back to amazon for a full refund

Mentioned it to Ceri, he pointed out you could just put the listing on before you even bother to buy it from amazon and just let the guy wait for it. I bow before his superior bastardry.

I’ve beeen a BSD boy for the last 3 or 4 years, before that I used redhat and it stank (this was around the 2.2 kernel heyday when the Thrash of Death was still a real problem).

Recently FreeBSD had been getting in my way for a number of reasons, none of which were really it’s fault:

1. getting Centrino support is convoluted
2. none of the boxen I support at work are BSD based
3. too many third party apps only build on Linux – gumstix being the most recent example (no, I still haven’t bought one, but see later).
4. there’s a lot of cool stuff that is extremely hard to get for FreeBSD

These days I don’t see the OS as anything other than a tool for maintaining what you run on it. If package management, good hardware support and stability are there, I’ll run anything that runs what I use.

Then the other day a Jiffy bag of Ubuntu CDs turned up, so I gave it a shot.

First off, the installer is extremely nice. Not nice in a ‘pretty mouse pointer’ way.
In a ‘I understand that a) you might have a wireless network you’d like to use to install and b) it might be in adhoc mode’ way.

I have NEVER seen any other OS be smart enough to offer that as an option.

Credit where it’s due, that’s a debian-installer feature, but I tried installing Sarge the other day and it didn’t know what a Centrino ipw2100 card was (fair enough, that’s a licensing thing) and didn’t seem to want to let me set my ESSID to anything other that NETGEAR (which is a bit unhelpful).

Anyway, I click through the defaults and had a nice GNOME desktop extremely quickly.

Pros so far:

• sudo by default is a Good Thing (despite the whole X issue thing)
• hotplug/gnome-volume-manager etc is fab,
• linux LVM is truly excellent. Think GEOM with docs
• apt-get is easily the second nicest packaging system on the planet
• when you find some obscure cutting edge software, it probably runs on your system
• linux has really nice module support. Plugging in stuff and having it found is not rocket science, and I don’t feel less of a man for not wanting to recompile a kernel everytime I get a new widget
• boot time is very fast. the ubuntu guys took it on and made some real improvements in that area.
• there are howtos and docs coming out of your ears. Freebsd base system doc is great, but the kernel has always lacked good entry level docs like these
• USB2 wireless device support? oh yes.

Few cons:

• gstreamer seems to be everywhere and strikes me as really shit, both in stability and decoder support, compared to (eg) mplayer
• some stuff is missing from apts radar unless you tell it to use obscure repos. Just uncommenting the universe repos gets you scary warning about unauthenticated packages.
• nautlius url support (for DAV-over-ssl, but even ftp) is highly buggy
• apt packages can take a bit long to get updated compared to FreeBSDs ports
• I miss not having the source to hand, whether or not I need it. Xen needs custom kernels and I don’t want to rely on someone elses debs to use it.
• Docs are a bit shambolic. ubuntu does piggyback heavily on Debian, and the differences aren’t clear. I’m reading Debian packaging howtos and wondering if I’m invalidating my warranty… Little things like the wiki SSL cert being signed by an untrusted CA add to the shabbiness feel.
• iptables. Truly the sendmail.cf of packet filters. Why in $DEITYs name can’t someone port PF? PF is nice. I don’t care how the internals are implemented, I just want a config file I can read. Gaaah.

But by and large, it’s great.
With my new found penguinophilia I want out and bought an NSLU2 - it’s ARM based, teeny and cheap (45 quid on ebay) so it’ll be a good training toy while I’m waiting for gumstix to get affordable ( 99 bucks went up to 57 quid this week. arse.) Also has two host USB2 ports which is a definite plus.

It’s in transit, so in the meanwhile I’ll read up on a few howto things

While I’m playing with network appliances I’m sorely tempted to get a WRT45G too. The NetBSD gateway I’m currently using takes far too long to boot. Not so sure about that one, I do like knowing what my firewall/gateway is up to. We’ll see.

Well my predictions of Americas imminent financial collapse have been spectacularly wrong (100 bucks is now 56.5 ukp, up from 54.2 when I posted my ‘master plan’).

Also I’ve been watching anti G8 demos on the news, and while I vaguely feel most of those on the demos have their hearts in the right place, campaigning to ‘end capitalism now!’ seems as meaningless as trying to repeal the law of gravity.

Still, at least I know how little I know.
Economics and a basic financial Clue seem to have passed me by entirely. For some reason I saw physics as a good way to understand the world, which was a bit silly with hindsight. The worlds problems are caused by peoples
needs and greed(s), not neutrinos.

So I’ve decided to take a bit of time to read up on economics. Go go gadget wikipedia!

Also this online book , which is hopefully written by a bona fide capitalist bastard (who might know what he’s talking about).