I’m So sick and tired of this idea that this country was founded on some Christian establishment or ideal. Its so far from wrong it astounds me. Up until the 1950’s, the national moto was E Pluribus Unum, (”from many, one”) , and In God We Trust was not added until an Act of Congress in 1956. I know our school systems are bad, but since I wasn’t there THAT long ago, I know they are not teaching this. So where does this non-sense come from? The Media? ie: Fox News? or what? It’s absurd and I can’t take it anymore. I will call anyone out on this anytime I hear it… and this reason alone, I will NOT vote for McCain.
At my current place of employement, gigabit is deployed everywhere. I’d rather not get into the details as to why it is, but it goes without saying that its not really needed *everywhere*. None the less, I had cacti up and graphing for a couple months, before I thought I’d really like to see cacti graph a fully utilized gigabit port. Well, it turns out that the default configuration of the ucd/net snmp network interface ports on cacti will not graph a gigabit port. It will appear to work, but seems to wrap around at about 120Mbit. The reason is, cacti by default uses 32bit counters for this setting. It has a drop down under the network interfaces when creating graphs on a device, to use 64-bit counters. This is required for gigabit ports (if you want to get a true representation for the graph). I will see if I can grab some screen shots of this when I get back to work.
But overall, I love cacti and even after looking at similar tools, I much prefer cacti over anything else.
My wifes Uncle stopped by the other day to look at my PS3 and decided if he wanted to get one or not… He was asking questions which I’d rather not go into… But the topic of his questions is a common theme I feel among Windows users. Paying for things. I do not nor will I ever condone pirating software/content. (I do however download TopGear which is only shown on the BBC in the UK…. but, thats because I can’t buy it here.) And his questions, some of which I completely agree with, others not so much.
Like, I would love to be able to copy a game to a hard drive and run it completely from that and not from the actual disk. When its just me handling the disks or only a few adults… Thats not a big concern for me. However, He has kids and I believe I’ve even said on this blog, that I would not want kids handling disks if I can help it. Digital copies(iso’s) of them would be the much preferred method for them to access the content in my opinion. Something they can’t scratch or otherwise ruin. Failing having the storage space required for doing that, I would want to make use of my Fair Use(tm) Rights, and make a backup copy of the disks, and only let them use those. So when they ruin that one, I can throw it away and make another copy for them to slowly destroy. This I believe is a completely legitimate and legal reason to want to perform these actions. But with the idea of being able to do all of these things the illegal ones also exist. Being able to copy dvd’s also allows people to rent them for a dollar or so, and make their copy and return the original, then they didn’t really “pay” for the copy they now have. To those that do this, I say you are the reason for the copy protection and DRM measures the movie industry (and music) have been trying to put in place. Yes, technology is always going to obsolete their measures, but none the less… features in my PS3 have been crippled simply because people like you exist. I have no problem paying for content, assuming the price is right and its not overly burdensome with DRM. DRM is the reason I’ve been still buying normal CD’s instead of digital forms, because I can always take the CD and rip it to digital forms without DRM. I applaud Apple for bringing DRM free music to iTunes, and if I didn’t dislike the interface so much I might actually use it. I also however dislike the price tag of certain things. Game prices on the PS3 are actually quite expensive in my mind… being only a casual gamer myself (more on that later…) I love the demo downloads for the PS3 that let me try the games before I actually buy them. It was because of that, I bought Resistance.
Anyway, I guess I’m just not one of those people… I understand the benefits of Free Software, and the importance of paying people for their work. If you don’t like paying for software, its time to use the stuff your allowed to use without paying for it. Otherwise, cough up the money.
Why is it these hardware manufacturers have such a hard time letting go of this idea that they’ll loose something if they were to let the linux community distribute their drivers, or even more… if they’d just release the specs for their wireless hardware and let the open source community develop the drivers independantly. Anyway, I’m documenting my setup on my Lenovo N100 page. Check it out for my final how-to on getting wireless to work in hopefully an easily maintainable way.
Finally! I’ve completed my first phase MythTV install. Currently the case I have it in is fairly loud so I don’t really want to move it into the living room. So its sitting on the floor next to my desk, and currently I connect to it with a mythtv frontend install on my local box. So far it all works flawlessly. I must say I’m quite impressed with its simplicity. At first its somewhat daunting, but once you get your head around it it’s not so bad. Now I need to figure out what all the settings mean, and how they’ll affect me. Currently I’ve got it setup using about 2.4GB per hour of recorded video. Which should give me roughly 87 hours worth of recorded video not bad I’ll be expanding it probably in 6 months or so with another 250GB drive which should be fun Anyway, I need to get ready to head off to school.
I liked his letter so much, I thought I’d link it up from GrokLaw. I must say I agree with his statements 100%. I loved the how simple he made the explination. Makes the reasoning straight and to the point, why people don’t understand this is beyond me. Why the commonwealth is still debating over it is even more beyond me. Microsofts always made promises… who knows if and when they’ll actually come through with it. The best way to keep them honest is to make them use ODF too. (Not through laws/restrictions) Simply, market presures will be fine. After all, if you let them win with their ‘Open’ XML format standard, he who makes the rules can always change them. Pardon the skepticism, but they’ve done it in the past (even recent past), whats to stop them from doing it again? It needs to stop, Mass. has a chance to make a stand and really show Redmond that we’re serious, that we want them to abid by rules of the industry not whatever they feel like. To actually do whats in their *customers* best interests. It really shouldn’t be this hard to fathom.
Been a long time since I last posted… not sure why really, just haven’t felt like writing lately. I’ve worked out a deal with school and redid some of the payment options, so I’ll be getting back underway with school starting monday. However, one of my classes is all about Windows. Lately my Windows install on my laptop has been driving me nuts. I don’t understand anymore why people like that operating system… Why people willingly put up with the crap that happens with it… you install a couple apps and they’ll over run your machine making it crap slow… whats wrong with that picture? I don’t understand… why would you subject yourself to it? I guess not knowing that it doesn’t have to be that way is one thing, but please for the love, when will it die! Joking, joking… partly atleast Windows has its place, its not on my desktop however. I won’t willingly subject myself to that much torture. I do understand why others use it, for the apps mostly, familiarity and hardware support tied for second. The day will come (hopefully soon, but I won’t hold my breath) that Windows won’t be the only common thing on the desktop anymore, the market is big enough from multiple players. When that day comes we’ll see real innovation, after all, what innovation really needs is healthy competition. I guess the question that remains is, Will Windows and Microsoft know how to play a game with the turf being equal? If you’ve been paying attention to the MS vs ODF ordeal, it seems they’re pulling out every last stop they can come up with to prevent the turf from being equal for *all* sides. Their latest is an attempt to “open” their new Office XML format, thats turning out to be not so “open”. They must think people are dumb. The “open” format they’re trying to push, still prevents people from writing GPL’d apps that support the format…. Now how open can an “open” format be that still has restrictions? Silly Microsoft, tricks are for kids.
I’ve been back and forth between creating my own System Trending app using RRDtool, and using some other prepackaged ones like Orca and Cacti. I love the look of cacti, however it wasn’t exactly intuitive the first time I tried to use it. So I gave orca a try, and I really didn’t like the idea of having to scp off the log files, to a collecting host. I would much rather have the collecting host poll hosts its configured to watch. With that in mind… I don’t like SNMP either for a system. For appliances and network devices its great, quick and easy. Because the vendors usually have specific MIB’s that can be used. There are generic ones for systems, but I would like to extend this to track applications on the system as well, this will require custom scripts, and with SNMP, custom MIB’s as well. Which I really don’t want to mess with. Keeping the monitoring system as basic as possible, using one monitoring system to grab all of this is what I had in mind. After spending a week or so creating some custom python scrypts to perform both functions of gathering data and pulling it to a central location, and creating graphs was quite extensive, and I really would like to atleast somewhat finnish this project within the next couple weeks. Creating my own solution proved to be a bit more complicated than I would have hoped. So, going back to using an existing project I took another look at cacti. This time around it proved to be much easier to understand. Not sure if its because I took the time to learn more about rrdtool specifically or what. However, this time I was able to create some data gathering scrips for cacti to execute and an xmlrpc server that answered the requests on the other end. They seem to be working currently and I’ve only really been working on them for a couple hours over the last day or two. I *hope* to have working client scripts and gathering server written by the end of the week for most of the basic functionality. Just need to do a little more reading and playing with python and the parseconfig module(?). Should hopefully have something by this time next week. I’ll keep you updated.
No, I don’t mean MythTV has a bug, (not saying it hasn’t ever, or won’t ever have a bug, as they’re just part of software developtment) This is more, me having the MythTV bug again. I want to build a MythTV box! I just have to convince Elissa it its a good idea :). Within the next couple of days I’m going to post my System Configs as a way of forcing me to make the purchase… One part at a time should be doable. Or if all else fails… my christmas bonus should finish it off (I really don’t want to wait that long… as it would be useful for recording shows that we watch but the times they’re on arn’t always convenient. Especially now with school and work scheduals what they are)
This question has been popping up lately… my thoughts: Its those dumb proprietary companies that feel the need to own. The answer: YES! without a doubt we still need the GPL. Why? because not everyone in this world stands for what the GPL does. The GPL is freedom, freedom from being controled by some corporation or government or person. The Internet is freedom, and it was built on free software. People by nature demand such things, however, people also get very greedy and will pervert ideas to where they make sence for why you need to give up your freedom. Clue to the proprietary companies that want to write software for Linux, Go ahead, but you need to follow the rules… if *you* don’t write *every bit* of the code yourself, *you must* follow the rules laid out by the the license of the software you use. These rules are no different than what you end up doing in traditional software, Linux however has all the cool stuff thats free. Its easy to see why they want to use it, but for some reason don’t think they should have to follow the rules (which can include giving away all your source code as well). If you don’t like it, stay out of the kitchen. Those are the rules. Take it or leave it.
I also however dislike the price tag of certain things. Game prices on the PS3 are actually quite expensive in my mind… being only a casual gamer myself (more on that later…) I love the demo downloads for the PS3 that let me try the games before I actually buy them. It was because of that, I bought Resistance.
