Brews you can use

I finally got around to cleaning my draft lines and taps after <mumble> months, probably over a year. I don’t know whether to be gratified by what came off/out of them, or horrified that I was drinking stuff that passed through, near, around — within the same zip code — as it. Shudder. The beer and cider tastes much better now, although that may be psychological.

I’ve got to get around to doing that more often.

While I was at it, I put the brown ale I brewed on 9/8 on tap. It was still warm and this time overcarbonated, but otherwise very drinkable. I think I’ll be enjoying this one tomorrow evening when it finally cools down. I also racked a stout that I brewed on 9/23.

And now I’m having a little toast. Some petrus oud bruin that’s been sitting in my fridg^H^H^H^H^Hcellar for a year or so. Quite good stuff.

I poured it, and sat down to write this post, when I noticed some of my spam alarms were going off at work. Bugger. Well, I guess I get to celebrate some beer progress with a bit of spam killing while I’m at it.

Like many techies, I have (and love) a TiVo. It’s a 2001 vintage DirectTiVo, and has been showing its age: the video’s been sporadically skipping for the last month, and it started rebooting late last week. It also has a lifetime subscription attached to it, which means ‘repair’ is highly preferable to ‘replace.’ It probably needed a new hard drive, which is a relatively easy operation. Just hook up the old drives in a spare PC, boot a special mfstools Linux CD, and use the included tools to backup the old disk then restore onto the new disk.

Unlike most techies, though, I don’t have a spare computer sitting around, other than a couple dead/dying/decrepit/disintegrating laptops which would need some special hardware to talk to regular IDE drives. Mfstools isn’t ported to FreeBSD (which runs this server) or MacOS X (which all our working laptops run). What to do?

From previous “rescue” operations, we had an external firewire hdd enclosure, so on a lark I mounted my TiVo ‘A’ drive in this, dd‘ed an image of it to a file, then mounted the new disk in the enclosure and dd‘ed the image on to that. Apparently this will work on some single-drive TiVos, but it fails spectacularly on a double-drive model like mine. The TiVo software doesn’t automatically “forget” about missing disks, apparently, and the box never booted in this config. For this to work, I’d need to run the proper mfstools on my Mac or FreeBSD box.

Finally last night, I figured out a virtual solution to the latter.

I’d played with qemu several times in the past. It’s a nice, free/opensource CPU emulator, and a great way to run a new/foreign OS in a sandbox. It’s how I run Windows XP on my work Linux box The virtual hard drives can be simple raw files just like the ones I was ‘dd‘ing back and forth earlier. There’s also an OS X port. Hmm…

It took a little trial and error (mostly the latter) to get right, but I was able to:

1. mount the A and B disks in the external enclosure, and collect disk images with dd
2. Create a new virtual disk by ‘dd‘ing 60 GB of /dev/zero to a new file.
3. Start up qemu with the disk A image, disk B image, mfstools iso image, and the new empty file as disks 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.
4. Copy all data and settings to the new drive with:
   mfsbackup -Tao - /dev/hda /dev/hdb | mfsrestore -zpi /dev/hdd
5. mount the new drive in the external enclosure and dd the new image onto it.

And it worked!

This was more time-consuming than it needed to be since the dds ran at about 10MB/s, but it got the TV back without needing to beg/borrow/steal an extra computer.

I (re?)discovered the MAKE Magazine blog last weekend, and stumbled across a post on my favorite science/tech show of all time. The Secret Life of Machines was the creation of British special-effects artists Tim Hunkin and Rex Garrod, and contains some truly superlative “how it works” demos, just the proper amount of wit (British, dry, of course), and none of the modern Discovery channel style overproduction to get in the way/make you want to throw something heavy at the TV.

Because of its quality and brief run, the show became somewhat of an obsession for me: its theme music (”The Russians are Coming” by Val Bennet, a reggae cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five”) was one of the first pieces of music I sought out back in the heady “illegal file sharing is cool” early days of napster, and I convinced Jess to buy the first two seasons on VHS for my birthday one year. The videos were aimed at the educational market and thus hideously expensive; they also left out the third “Secret Life of the Office” series, which includes (among other things), Tim and Rex demonstrating a pair of makeshift fax machines made from lathes.

The first comment on the MAKE blog post pointed out that Tim Hunkin posted a link on his site to a torrent of the full three seasons. Hey, no guilt. Download ctorrent, spend a day or two downloading 3.6GB of AVIs from random overseas hosts (nobody in the US serving it until I was finished), and start watching.

Best of all, Grace seems pretty interested in them. “I want to watch a show on Papa’s computer.” “Let’s watch the Vacuum Cleaner one.” Of course, comprehension/retention may be a little longer in coming. After finishing “The Internal Combustion Engine” she said: “That was a fun show.”

“Yes I thought so, too…. So, do you know how a car engine works now?”

<thoughtful pause> “I did, but I don’t remember. Let’s watch it again tomorrow.”

“Certainly.”

Well, laptop #3 has bitten the dust. It at least had an entertaining (and well-traveled) life, if a somewhat mundane end. I’d had this one since early 2005; it was a nice little find — 12″ screen, weighed less than 2 pounds. While it was still under warranty, I had to send it back to the manufacturer (in Taiwan) twice for screen replacements. On the second trip, the case was pretty nastily damaged, but still held together through several trips, being thrown to the floor by a toddler, and several adventures.

Until today. I opened the laptop and heard a sickening crack as one of the screen hinges didn’t move, and instead split the base of the screen about halfway across. Crap. Laptops aren’t exactly useful if you can’t open them…

I’d said several times that, after 6 years of running and tinkering with FreeBSD on whatever Intel laptop I could get cheap, that my next laptop will be a mac. Jess is doing some triumphal “he’s been assimilated” blogging at the moment. I’m still getting used to the new macbook

So far, so good. Here’s hoping <raises virtual drink> I can keep from destroying this one.

(And I’m not ruling out FreeBSD under parallels quite yet )

So, I work on a presentation off and on for a few weeks. It’s to a bunch of engineers I don’t know, trying to introduce them to e-mail concepts, internals, basically “how it works” stuff. Second nature to me. I’m a bad public speaker, so that’s a bad sign.

Worse, I’m phoning it in. Everyone listening (and the guy shuffling the slides ’cause I couldn’t get netmeeting to work in time…) is also on the phone. Only I’m off mute. No natural human interaction or feedback.

It’s supposed to be an introduction. I get into micromachine man mode, and blow through the material, in a 45-minute uninterrupted ramble.

But the worst came when I was talking about spam.

(NSFWWCFFW — [not safe for work web content filtering firewalls] stuff behind cut….)
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So, the wee little toy is working out wonderfully. I do all of my web surfing on it, and some typing too, occasionally. Xterm + dropbear ssh means I can do “real work”, a character at a time. I still reach for the laptop when I need a real keyboard, but the pocket size, day+ battery life, and absolute silence of the tablet mean I reach for it most of the time. It’s truly wireless.

Jess calls it my girlfriend.

I finally got around to installing gnugo and Cgoban on it yesterday, and now it’s getting much more use.

I’ve found the game of go fascinating since sometime in college. The rules and objectives of the basic game are simple, but these simple rules generate a wonderfully intricate game. Actual analysis of a full go game is intractable enough that even the best players rely on instinct and attitude for their decisions, and computer go programs have not advanced as far at professional play as their chess counterparts.

The go board is large enough to have multiple, mostly unrelated “battles” going on in different parts. Turns must be allocated to the different battles, and battles need to be prioritized so that you only burn turns on the ones that may come out in your favor. There’s always a conflict between spreading out to occupy more of the board or concentrating in one area to defend it more thoroughly. It’s a game of balance, where both players need to be spread very thin to have a chance of winning.

Sounds a bit … familiar. It’s wildly fun when it’s just stones on a board, though.

So, at a little before 10:00 this morning, I set about finishing up some documenting. Mind-numbing stuff overall, just recapitulating some of the 1.3.6.1.4.1.666.make.this.stop stuff I’ve been messing with off and on for a month… I needed something else to do, so I started up go on the toy, with no time limits. If I needed a break from documentation, I’d check the toy, ponder a bit, and make a move. The CPU on the Nokia 770 is no speed demon, so gnugo takes most of a minute, if not more, to make its next move. That was enough to keep me from getting distracted by the game. Perfect.

One of these days, I’ll need to play a human. I did a bit of that via NNGS (No Name Go Server) back in the day. That showed me how much of a novice I was (and probably still am). I actually got completely wiped off the board once or twice. At least when I’m pounded into the ground by a computer, I don’t get embarrassed; I think that’s what I get paid for, actually.

I just got a new toy.

It’s a slightly-used Nokia 770 off of eBay; pretty cool so far, although the hunt-and-peck “virtual keyboard” is getting a bit old, aud I 7con t truined hl handwvitil eng’nl yxt, so this will be a short first post

Same code and same input, down to the bit, only works on one machine. Reliably fails on all others. Reliably works on the working one. Same OS and system libraries, also down to the last bit.

I have to conclude that God hates me. Only the sick bastard who designed the tapeworm would be capable of such a finely-tuned annoyance.

The problem is no longer merely taunting me, it’s violating causality. Wait, does that mean it is no longer of this universe, so I don’t need to worry about it?

So, I’ve been banging my head up against cantankerous computers far more often at work. It’s been refreshing. Computer problems are so much nicer than the political wrangling, because if a computer’s being uncooperative, you have the option of kicking it in the head. Better still, the technical snags often have solutions, even if only theoretical. I’ve long since given up on the feasibility of large organizations.

(Not that the technical stuff is pleasant in absolute terms; I just found myself thinking “of course 1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.7 means ‘true or false’, I should have known that by now, makes perfect sense.” Stupid over-engineered protocols. And I once thought IMAP was bad…)

I roughly categorize the “engineers” at work by their output; some write code, others configs, there’s word and powerpoint (I lump those together, since they seem to come in pairs), and finally excel. I like to stay as close to the code/config boundary as possible, but have been on the word-ppt/excel boundary for many frustrating months.

Part of me enjoyed getting back to the technical problems enough to give me a bit of a scare. Once I latched on to a stubborn technical puzzle, I couldn’t let go. I was obsessed with getting it solved. It was personal; the problem wasn’t just “not being solved”, it was taunting me, and IT MUST PAY!

At about the time when the urge to put on warpaint and crawl into the #*!ng computer after the #!@*!ng insolent problem, I’d take a bathroom break, go get some water, and calm down a little bit.

The breaks didn’t cutting it for more than an hour or two, so to prevent any awkwardness or HR incidents, I started writing a powerpoint presentation. With an animated slide, natch. That did the trick. I feel much, much calmer now…

Well, that was quick.

I decided to give Linux another shot, to see if I it could reduce my computer futzing, etc. (Me shying away from computer tinkering, Jess making fermented beverages — what’s going on here?). I’ve been using Fedora Core 6 on my primary workstation at work for about a week, without incident. Meanwhile, my FreeBSD laptop gets a bunch of “are you fscking nuts?” comments.

This time, Linux lasted only two hours. Slower boot-up, spotty/fragile support for the Intel Pro/Wireless 2200 — I only had that working for one session, it disappeared on reboot. Couldn’t even do sleep/wakeup as smoothly as FreeBSD; it dropped the network connection and never recovered.

So, back to FreeBSD (as soon as I could get a FreeBSD install CD to reinstall the FreeBSD boot loader) for a while. Both are still installed, so I may give Linux another go when I’m feeling like tinkering