Laurabelle's Blog

Morning: Got up, took a shower. Thought about cooking eggs, but no time. Shuffled groggily out the door to work.

Day: Hacked lots of sticky stuff on a command line, lunch, hacked some more until I ran out of functioning brain cells. Managed to keep myself busy until the end of the day and finish on a high note (promise of a quick-fix problem for a very sweet lady who is effusive with her thank-yous). Am looking forward to the actual thank-yous tomorrow.

Evening: Came home, husband reheated excellent dinner I made yesterday (chili verde and Spanish rice). Didn’t bother heating corn tortillas; they cool off too quickly anyway. Made crust for quiche tomorrow; left mess for husband to clean up with dishes. Compiled 2.6.22 kernel with new nVidia modules; updated software until X started and kdm could actually log me in.

Now, time for bed, maybe a little reading. Norton Critical Edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray came today, though I doubt I am much up to reading it tonight.

This weekend Jeff rode in Waves to Wine 2007: 155 miles from San Francisco to Lake Sonoma, biked over two days. I did not ride, but I went along and volunteered.

Jeff left the apartment at 6am in order to get to San Francisco in time for the 6:30am start. I stayed behind and went to work as usual but left at 11am for Sonoma Mountain Village, the overnight stop for Waves to Wine. I had lunch (bean and cheese burrito and an apple) and bummed around waiting for my volunteer shift.

This is where my afternoon started to go downhill. Envious of the people walking around with ice cream sandwiches, I picked one up myself and found that it was unpleasantly cold and hard. (I am used to ice cream sandwiches being nice and soft!) In fact, it was so hard that I broke my lower permanent retainer! I guess it had been going for a while (it was in for ten years), but this was the last straw. Unfortunately, it left a sharp fragment of metal on one tooth, which was pretty painful on my tongue by the time I got home to my dental wax on Sunday.

My volunteer shift in the bike corral started at 3pm. A NMSS staff member was there with me for the first while and then ran off to deal with something else. She came back briefly, then ran off again and never came back. There wasn't really enough work for two people, but I had no one to talk to, it was hot, I was standing around on concrete getting sore, and eventually I really needed to visit a port-o-potty. On the other hand, it was nice to see Jeff right when he rolled in at about 4:30.

Jeff had had a rather more interesting day than I. Back in San Francisco, he turned his head at the wrong time (a co-worker teased him that a really cute biker chick distracted him) and ran straight into a wooden post in the middle of the path. Jeff and his bike went flying (Jeff still attached to the bike thanks to clipless pedals), and he landed upside down on his helmet. Luckily the helmet worked as it was supposed to (yay helmets!), and he escaped with nothing more than a few shallow gashes on the top of his thighs, from the collision with his own bike.

There was a moment when Jeff wondered whether his ride would stop there, but it didn't, and he was fine. $60 poorer for a new bike helmet from a SAG car, he got back on the road.

At the overnight stop, there was much celebrating and beer-drinking from the New Belgium Brewery tent. Jeff and I slunk off to our tent rather early, as we were both tired, and fell asleep in spite of the festivities (which were not actually all that loud).

The next morning, I dutifully got up for my scheduled 5:30am bike corral shift. It was still dark, and only a few bodies were moving. I saw no staff people and no one at all near the bike corral. Still annoyed at my abandonment the previous afternoon, I went back to bed.

Jeff and I got up just after 7am and joined the long line for breakfast. It felt like everyone got breakfast at the same time; then everyone got their bikes and left. By 8:15am, the camp was deserted.

I packed up the gear and stowed it in the car and then waited around for the tent to dry out from the foggy night. I did a few sudoku puzzles and enjoyed my new music player, at least until the batteries ran out. Jeff left at about 8am; the tent was not completely dry until 11am.

Before I left Sonoma Mountain Village, I left a message on Jeff's cell phone to tell him that I would meet him at the finish. There was some doubt on this point, since I had been feeling pretty horrible that morning, and I was thinking of going straight home. I started feeling better after some time in the sun, and I decided that I might as well wait at the finish line instead of at home.

I was scheduled for a volunteer shift loading bikes at 11am, but I didn't arrive until just before noon. That was just as well, since no bikers arrived until noon. I think that if I volunteer again, I will not worry about being late.

Jeff rolled in at about 4:30pm again. We had dinner, and Jeff and his teammates had some of the very last bottles of beer before the tent closed for good. Soon thereafter the wine tent also ran out of wine, and we skedaddled before it got ugly.

Unfortunately, when I tried to put the rack on the car I found that Jeff had carefully forgotten the screws that hold the folding rack at the correct angle. (Oops.) So we ran his bike back to the trucks to be carried back to San Francisco. (Riders who left their cars at the starting point took shuttles back and met their bikes there.) We drove back home, showered and changed, then got back in the car and headed to Giant Stadium to pick up Jeff's bike.

I suppose it is an indicator of our mental state that we actually might have driven directly to San Francisco to get the bike — which would have left us in exactly the same position. It was Jeff who said, twenty miles down the road, Oh, we've got to go home to get the screws! D'oh...

But we got the bike, and it didn't fall off or get hit before we got home, and I remembered not to drive into the garage before Jeff could get it off, so we win.

Next year, if Jeff does this again, we are getting a bigger tent. Our nice little two-man Hubba Hubba is nice for backpacking, but we can afford a little more luxury for car-camping.

At the end of September Jeff and I will be participating in Waves to Wine, a two-day bike tour from San Francisco to the Napa valley to raise funds for the National Multiple Sclerosis society. He will bike; I will volunteer since the idea of my biking ~150 miles is laughable.

Multiple Sclerosis is an important issue for Jeff, since one of his uncles suffered from it for many years and finally died of it last year. I never got to meet this uncle, and I wish I had. It must take amazing strength of character to withstand a disease when you know you will never recover.

The point of this exercise, of course, is to raise money for research and for programs to support people who are currently suffering from MS. I have a personal donation page, and so does Jeff. If you can sponsor us with even a small donation, we would appreciate it.

It is pure coincidence that I decided to write a post about Unix training on the anniversary of a post about Being a geek. It makes a nice bookend, though, since I'm going to be doing this training for work, and I wrote the previous post just before I started my current job.

I work at a very Unix shop; I spend my whole day on Unix machines (Alphas and Suns, mostly). I was fortunate to have Linux experience before I started; it especially helped that I was comfortable with vi. (vi usage is mandatory; everyone has to learn it.) Most of my colleagues are not so lucky and have to figure it all out while they're just trying to get their work done.

Admittedly I have also learned a lot about Unix utilities in the last couple of years. I did not know about cut or sort before I started, and now I use them all the time. I do everything I can on the command line; I find it faster and easier that way. I assumed that my colleagues would also pick up new tools as they went along, but recently a co-worker told me I don't know how to use cut; I just copy from your calls! I was astonished. If she didn't feel she understood cut, maybe others didn't either.

So now I am planning a small Unix training series. To start off, I'll do three sessions: basic utilities, intermediate utilities, and shell scripting. I am thinking about what I want to cover and especially how I am going to cover it. This whole exercise will be entirely pointless if I only succeed in scaring people off. I want to show people tools that can make their lives easier, not make them learn something new and complicated.

I want to give them the hacker mentality of always looking for a better, easier way to accomplish a task. I want them to make the computer work for them.

It will be at least a month before I give the first part of my training, and that's just as well. I will need the time to prepare.

Last week Jeff and I flew to Texas for my great-aunt Treba's hundredth birthday on August 25, 2007. She lives in south Texas, so we were a little afraid that Hurricane Dean would throw a gear in the works, but luckily Dean headed south into Mexico and left Texas well alone. (I feel slightly guilty for benefiting from someone else's misfortune, but I am still grateful that it missed us.)

I forgot my camera, so no pictures, but I'll give you a run-down of events.

Birthday festivities

Thursday the 23rd Jeff and I flew down (uneventfully) and were met at the airport by my parents. We went to dinner at a little Cajun place near Rockport where the menu is yes or no. They serve a spicy crab boil of crab, shrimp, crawfish, sausage, corn, and potatoes, dumped on top of butcher paper on the table and eaten largely with one's bare hands. The delicious seafood made a very strong impression on Jeff. After dinner we still had some time to kill before the plane bearing my brother and his wife arrived, so we headed back to the airport and played bridge until they came.

Friday we visited the King Ranch and took the tour. I wanted Jeff to see a Texas Longhorn, and he did, though from a bit of a distance across the pasture. Friday lunch consisted of excellent sandwiches at a shop that had been in business for over fifty years. On Friday evening the birthday festivities started with more seafood, fried this time. I tasted frog legs but was not terribly impressed.

Saturday was the birthday party proper. I helped by handing out name tags and boggled at the line of people waiting to see my great-aunt. There was lots of family present as well as friends from in and out of town. I saw family I hadn't seen in a long time and met some that I hadn't ever seen before. Friday dinner, after the party, was Mexican; I think I had carne guisada and a cheese enchilada.

Sunday we attended church with Treba and ate a small lunch as a finale. Then Ralph and Lori headed back to the airport, while my parents, Jeff, and I drove north.

We were not sorry to leave the Quality Inn where we stayed; I was not impressed with the room. The alarm clock and one lamp did not work, even after we complained, and the bathroom door did not shut. We also saw multiple cockroaches. The motel served breakfast, but most of it was so sugary that after the first day we opted to eat at the diner across the street.

The pretty part of Texas

Jeff had only seen west Texas and a bit of Dallas before, so I wanted to show him some of the nicer parts. My parents were not initially enthusiastic, but they agreed to make the long drive. (There is a lot of Texas between Dallas and my great-aunt's town.)

On Sunday evening we reached San Antonio too late to see the Alamo, but we enjoyed dinner on the River Walk. At the motel that evening we played more bridge, and I flatter myself that I improved (though it helped that my cards were better than the previous Thursday).

On Monday we saw the Alamo, ducked back to the motel to retrieve my forgotten hoodie, then visited New Braunfels, where my mother finished high school and where my grandparents had lived for many years. There wasn't very much to see, but we did drive by their old house, visit the ginkgo tree we planted for my grandfather on the golf course, and leave fresh flowers on their headstone at the cemetery. We also ate lunch at the New Braunfels Smokehouse.

To kill time before dinner, we visited the state capitol building in Austin. I had actually never been there (not even in Texas history class in seventh grade; we visited San Antonio instead), and it was fairly interesting to wander around the house and senate chambers and look at the portraits. The center and front of the floor were blocked off, of course, and I couldn't get close enough to read the descriptions on a few paintings. I complained to Jeff that if they were going to block off that area, they should at least make the text big enough to read from a distance. He made fun of me for being a Melton and reading everything.

We ate dinner at the Stagecoach Inn in Saledo. There has been an inn at that location since about 1860, and the wait staff still recite the menu from memory. Most of us had chicken fried steak, which was at least decent (though I think mine is a bit better).

That night we slept at my parents' house, where I grew up.

The house

We slept a lot at my parents' house. My purpose in being there was to give myself a little time to see friends, although I only actually was able to see one. (It did not help that I had forgotten to let people know I would be in town, and of course people have to work during the week.) On Tuesday evening we had dinner with my cousin who lives in the area, and on Wednesday we had dinner at an Indian restaurant with my one available friend. I also spent Wednesday afternoon packing up almost all the books I still had at my parents' house. There were quite a lot of them, since I had stored my books there all through college (and kept adding to my cache!). I asked my father whether he would mail the books if I boxed them up. He said yes, so I did.

On Thursday the 30th we flew back home to California. The flight was blessedly uneventful.

Jeff and I planned a hike in the Marble Mountain Wilderness for our first wedding anniversary. This was to be a three-day, eighteen-mile hike encompassing creeks and lakes and ridges. All the good stuff, really.

The hike started out well, if warmer than Jeff would have liked. We drove up to Yreka on Friday and stayed in a motel that night, then got up bright and early in the morning. We got on the trail at about 9am and trod gently uphill through woods, streams, and warm humid air. Jeff was miserable in the heat, though I was uncomfortable only in the direct sun, of which there wasn’t too much. The air did cool off in the higher elevations.

We didn’t see any animals on the trail, but there were many insects, including a dragonflies and a few gorgeous clouds of brilliant butterflies. I wish it were possible to capture those on static film.

One of the disadvantages of being a Debian AMD64 early-adopter is that there is no real 64-bit Flash plugin. To be clear, there's no 64-bit Flash plugin for any platform, so there's no special discrimination against Linux. Nevertheless, it is an annoyance.

I didn't care much about it until quite recently, but I'm rather keen to catch up on the exploits of geriatric1927 on YouTube, and I don't want to have to boot into Windows all the time to do it. So today I decided to see if there was anything to be done about the Flash situation.

I thought I would have to set up a chroot or devise some other means of running a 32-bit browser, but it turns out that this is unnecessary. As so often happens in the open-source world, someone else has already designed a solution: nspluginwrapper. This little package makes it possible for a 64-bit Mozilla browser to use 32-bit plugins. Sweet!

Unfortunately, as so often also happens in open source, I found documentation somewhat lacking. I figured out enough to get where I needed to be, but even HOWTOs tended to say what to do but not why. (When transporting Ubuntu directions to Debian, this is not helpful.) Therefore I am writing up my own instructions, and hopefully this information will be of use to others in the future. I'm by no means an expert, but at least I can share what I did.

Before I get started, let me explain how this software appears to work. There are two pieces, nspluginwrapper and npviewer. The former installs the plugins for use; this is the only utility the user calls directly. npviewer is presumably used by either nspluginwrapper or the browser or both, I think. In any case, it must be in the user's $PATH or else nothing will work.

For Debian, there is a package called nspluginwrapper. (It's only in unstable/contrib, so you'll have to add that to your sources.list if you haven't already. Or else you can download the file and see if you have the dependencies.) So, install the package:

$ sudo aptitude install nspluginwrapper

So far so good. That should be it, right? So let's try installing a plugin. First you'll need to download the Flash player from Adobe's website; make sure you get the tarball option (tar.gz). Follow Adobe's instructions up to unpacking the tarball, but stop there. Instead of using Adobe's installer, use nspluginwrapper to install the plugin. The command is like this:

$ nspluginwrapper -i libflashplayer.so
*** NSPlugin Viewer  *** ERROR: libflashplayer.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
nspluginwrapper: no appropriate viewer found for libflashplayer.so

Yikes! That's no good. That's not a file-not-found error for the plugin, by the way; that means npviewer can't be found in the user's $PATH. It turns out that the npviewer executable is actually included in the nspluginwrapper package; it just isn't symlinked correctly (as of version 0.9.91.4-3; I reported this as a bug though no bugreport seems to have been opened). So we'll correct this:

$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/noarch/npviewer /usr/bin/npviewer

Now try again to install the plugin. I recommend installing with sudo or as root, by the way. When I tried as an unprivileged user the plugin was installed, but Iceweasel didn't detect it.

$ sudo nspluginwrapper -v -i libflashplayer.so
Install plugin downloads/install_flash_player_9_linux/libflashplayer.so
  into /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/plugins/npwrapper.libflashplayer.so
And create symlink to plugin in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins: done.
And create symlink to plugin in /usr/lib/firefox/plugins: done.
And create symlink to plugin in /usr/lib/iceweasel/plugins: done.

Restart your browser, and you should be good to go! Enter about:config in the location bar to display the plugins you have installed; Shockwave Flash should be front and center.

For instructions on usage of nspluginwrapper, see the nspluginwrapper website. Also see Mozilla Plugin Support on Linux (x86_64).

There, that's all I know! I hope this information is useful to someone else.

Last Thursday Jeff and I got our first box of vegetables from our organic CSA, Eatwell Farm (check out their farm news blog too). It's great so far, and I'm hoping this will work out well for us in the long run. You see, I don't like vegetables very much.

You might be forgiven for saying huh at this juncture. If I don't like veggies, why is more of them a good thing? Well, the fact of the matter is that I like them okay; I just don't tend to buy them. I'll go to the grocery store and kind of hem and haw and end up buying some salad greens that we sometimes don't even finish before they wilt. In terms of variety of diet, this is not a good thing.

The way the CSA works is pretty simple. I pre-pay for a certain number of boxes. On about Tuesday they pick what's ripe that week, and on Thursday I pick up my box of veggies at a pickup location on my way home from work. The farmer gets a steady source of income, and I get very fresh veggies.

Also, my vegetables are pre-selected for me, which for me is a positive feature. There are a lot of vegetables that I'll actually eat if they're presented to me but that I wouldn't usually choose on my own. Also, I tend to spend a lot of mental energy on figuring out what I'm going to cook for the next week. The CSA limits my decision space to finding ways to use what's in my box, so the decision is much simpler.

The first thing to go from last Thursday's box was the strawberries, perfectly red, ripe, and luscious. The zucchini was steamed that night and tossed with chiocciole (funny sort of macaroni-ish pasta) and pesto. Three carrots and half the spinach went into minestrone last night; the rest of the spinach, the arugula, and all of the lettuce (which is just slightly bitter) will be salad. The garlic is hanging up for storage, and the parsley is in the freezer.

So far, the vegetables have been excellent. Jeff was impressed by the zucchini, so much more flavorful than ordinary store-bought squash (I grew up on my mother's garden zucchini, so I was not as blown away). I don't like bitter greens very much, but I have been enjoying snacking on the carrots. The carrots are a bit more flexible than I expected, which weirded me out a bit because I associate flexibility in carrots with old age, but these have been very flavorful, juicy, and much easier to chop than the rock-hard stuff. (And what do I know? I've never grown carrots.)

Speaking of carrots, I think I'll have one now.

The saga of Atalanta continues. (That is the name of my new machine.) Debian Etch was duly downloaded and installed. (The installer froze once, while erasing data on one partition, but succeeded on the second try.)

Unfortunately, the intermittent kernel panics continued. This meant that the problem wasn't software; it was hardware. The freezing seemed to occur during times of heavy disk usage, so we thought the problem was with the disk or, more likely, the disk controller on the motherboard. Jeff plugged the drive into his machine, and it seemed to work fine; he also ran extensive fdisk tests. Fdisk found nothing wrong.

Atalanta got one more chance; we changed the hard drive transfer speed in case that made a difference. Yesterday evening, while I was watching a DVD on Atalanta, she froze again. That settled it.

Of course it had to be the motherboard! I could have gotten on without a graphics card or DVD drive, but it kind of doesn't work without a motherboard. Besides, it's the most inconvenient piece to remove; I had to pack up everything but the optical drive and the hard drive.

The motherboard is now boxed and ready to be mailed back tomorrow. Let's hope the replacement works out better.

Recently I decided to try out Ubuntu (or Kubuntu), since it's Debian-based but with a faster release cycle. I ordered a couple of CDs, and they arrived in due course.

My new computer hardware also arrived today, and I put it together without too much trouble. Then I popped in the Kubuntu disk and started installation, which I thought would be pretty simple.

Not so much. I lost track of how many times I hit reset after the Kubuntu installer froze, mostly while writing the partition table or formatting the disk. Eventually I managed to get the partition table written and then escaped to a shell. mke2fs froze once but then did manage to format the partitions after I rebooted again. On the next attempt with the GUI installer, I managed to get most of the way through copying files ... but it froze again at about 80%.

Honestly, I don't know whether the problem is hardware or software, but I'm leaning a bit toward software at this point. If it were a hard drive going this bad, this fast, I'd think it would be a bit more consistent. (For example, wouldn't formatting the same partition fail more consistently?)

Jeff's now downloading a Debian 4.0 (etch) net-installation CD image for me, and I'll give that a try tomorrow. I hope that turns out better.