those 15 minutes
It might be that my 15 minutes of fame are now up. My mug showed up in the recent Mashable article on Gowalla’s port to webOS. I’ve been using Gowalla for awhile now even though it’s been pretty gimped on my Droid until the last few months, I did amazingly manage to score a iTunes card in a recent promotion. The interface for Gowalla and icons in the app are beautiful, they are the spit and polish that make the app really stand out. As a user my wife has signed up to and has push notifications for me, so she can get a message and know where I”m eating lunch and if I’m stopping for gas on the way home. I’m still on the fence as to whether that’s cool or creepy. In any matter Gowalla is and awesome app with a very nice mobile web interface and adds a little fun to recording your travels.
Microsoft Courier, the device I’m looking for
I’ve been looking at the details of the Microsoft Courier and it looks like the digital pad device that I’ve been looking for. Up until now the Dell Mini5 has probably been the closest to my dream device, what it represents it a larger android phone. The device I’ve been looking for is something that is lighter than my laptop ( in weight and interface ) and has the ability to do my contact management (email, address book) and note taking, task management and calendaring. Ideally this all sinks back to a centrally available storage. My Droid has handled most of this but I still turn to my Franklin planner for note taking and jotting down ideas at this point. A blank slate and a pencil is something that can’t be replicated by a touch interface or a keyboard in quickness and ease of use. Previously I used my Franklin for most of my task and calendar management, my Droid and the Touchdown application specifically have replaced most that functionality. Equally important is that I almost always have it in my pocket or hand and I don’t feel out of place, that it’s disrespectful or distracting typing key reminders in it during a meeting.
The Courier in the marketing material ( which of course always makes a device look amazing ) seems to fit into the niche that I’m looking for. A device the could be used to blank slate jot down notes, write arrows, box things in and scratch things out. I’m very impressed by the idea of a pen interface into a tablet type device. It could replace my Franklin as the place I jot down things I want to keep, as well as the note pads I keep on my desk which are just places to jot random crap down to remember 5 minutes to 2 days later. It’s a device that would fill a gap that I have, and I imagine I’m not the only person that is looking for a device that would fill that space. I would call it’s primary focus a digital journal, which is exactly what I want.
Date stamps in cron
Dropping date stamps into output files of cron:
0 1 * * * /usr/bin/nightlythingthatruns.sh > nightlythingthatruns-`date +\%m\%d\%y`.log
Determining Devices in Solaris
To determine PCI devices at the Solaris 10 command line:
prtconf -pv
In my case I was looking for my nic so “model: ‘Ethernet controller'” is what I was looking for
pull the vendor-id and the device-id and you should be able to find what the hardware is at
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/
Virtual Box Disk Clone SLES10
So I wanted to create a copy of a Virtual Box SLES10 .vdi in Ubuntu, it’s not as easy as just copying the file.
On your host:
VBoxManage clonehd Original.vdi NewCopy.vdi
Create a new machine and point to this new image.
In the virtual machine:
When you boot it’s going to drop you to a prompt because the boot parameters are using the UUID of your old system and VBoxManage create a new UUID when you cloned the disk. So at the prompt:
mkdir /mnt
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt
/mnt/sbin/hdparm -i /dev/hda
Get the new UUID and replace the old one in the following two files
/mnt/bin/vi /mnt/etc/fstab
/mnt/bin/vi /mnt/boot/grub/menu.lst
reboot
Android Apps
Apps I’m using on Android
- Barcode Scanner
- Better Terminal
- ConnectBot
- Dolphin Browser
- FTPServer
- FileDroid Pro
- Google Voice
- Open Home
- Pandora
- ShopSavvy
- Task Switcher
- TasKiller
- Twidroid
- Vincent!
Google ChromeOS – What’s up with that
There’s been a lot of speculation about Google ChromeOS and what it’s target is. Many originally thought it was set out to be the Windows killer and have taken that assumption back. The deliberate disabling of the use of hard disk drives in favor of SSD or flash drives makes this very clear it’s going to be a tough sell on the desktop for now.
The current thought is that it’s targeted at the netbook market. It’s my supposition that ChromeOS is really targeted at the tablet market. Talk is that Apple will be coming out with a tablet in 2010 and it’s going to be the break through device. It will only be a break through device if it can be more than an e-reader as the current incarnations of the Kindle and Nook are. I’ve found the Kindle to be a very cool device yet when using it I feel like I’m missing something, the something is the true two way interaction available on a mobile phone or computer. If Apple can make their tablet a light a device as the Kindle, a true two way device like a smart phone and enable the app store they have the pieces to bring a powerful new device to market. Missing any one of those three pieces and it ends up being another niche item, not that the Apple faithful niche is anything to scoff at.
This is where Google and ChromeOS step in. My read is that ChromeOS will be an excellent choice for a tablet device and it’s made to be an application platform from the get go. Google has hedged a safe bet in letting Apple break water with their device. Apple is good at marketing and has the mind share to make a new device type “cool”. Google can then allow hundreds of other device manufacturers to make use of ChromeOS to power multiple renditions of similar devices. These competitors will be leap frogging each others hardware faster then Apple can wait through their release cycle. It something we’re starting to see in the Android phone market and will only work quicker the next time around.
Could not read tty from store
xenconsole: Could not read tty from store: No such file or directory
I see this message a bit more frequently then I would like bopping around from server to server. Generally the problem is that xenconsoled is not running. The fix:
/usr/sbin/xenconsoled
ubuntu snmp spam
with the default settings in ubuntu server /var/log/daemon can fill up pretty quick with SNMP spam like this:
Oct 18 07:01:48 Build01 snmpd[2245]: Connection from UDP: [monitor01]:47674 Oct 18 07:01:48 Build01 last message repeated 19 times
every time a connection is made to snmp the default is to log a message and this is way to much in a normal environment. to turn this off
edit /etc/default/snmpd and change
SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid'
to
SNMPDOPTS='-LS5d -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid'
this sets the default log level above the point where you will get spammed and it will make your disks happy
MySQL AppArmor
So I was getting these messages
“mysqldump: Got error: 1: Can’t create/write to file ‘/db_backups/mysql/table.txt’ (Errcode: 13) when executing ‘SELECT INTO OUTFILE'”
What I’ve come to find is that on a default install of ubuntu APPARMOR will block mysql from writing to any directory other than a few key ones needed by the app.
Edit the /etc/apparmor.d/usr.sbin.mysqld file and add the directories you need to write dumps to:
/db_backups/mysql** rwk,