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Linux Adventure Part 2

December 2, 2009 in Hardware, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

So far into the story, I tried repairing Windows Vista which failed to actually give me a working entry into the operating system. The Linux Live CDs were non-committed forays into Knoppix, CentOS, and Ubuntu. All failed to turn on the wireless. An ethernet cord would have gotten me online.

So I was stuck with pretty much a brick.

My next step was to venture out to the store and buy a hard drive. The Ubuntu CD included an installer, so I used it to install a local copy. Continued research revealed my problem probably was the fact my computer came with a Broadcom 4312 card. (My brother said my problem was trying use wireless with Linux.)

Without an ethernet connection, I ended up installing Linux STA drivers from source by downloading them and transferring them by FTP.  No good. Multiple times. I never got it to recognize them. Other options called for installing a firmware update on the wireless card. The idea of a firmware update to the wireless card making me stuck on Linux worries me.

Thankfully I got home to where I have ethernet cords. By this point, I had so completely hosed things, so I reinstalled Ubuntu to start over fresh. Now seeing the Internet through the LAN, Ubuntu offered me “restricted” hardware drivers. The b43 set didn’t do anything. The STA set did enable the Wireless option. Even dhclient referenced eth2! However, the wifi status light doesn’t turn on when I enable wireless. Ugh. So the drivers work better but not enough to get it working.

Also, (based on the time stamp of the file I was able to find in a backup of the problem laptop) I haven’t connected a computer to my home network since February, so I didn’t remember what was the password for the network. Finding which computer or external drive contained the information took a few hours. Yay for backups.

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]


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Useful User Agents

October 21, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | 1 comment

Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.)

Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

  1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
  2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
  3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
  4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.


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Why Read Books?

October 19, 2009 in Books / Novels / Writing, Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

That I read books probably lowers my highly coveted geek cred. Instead, e-books read on the computer screen, phone screen, or e-book reader should have long ago replaced reading on dead wood. Unfortunately, I am intentionally avoiding reading books much on computers, phone, or readers.

  1. Why I need a purseNo purse to carry more stuff. I have big fingers, so I need stuff with big buttons. Things like iPhones are maddening to use because I cannot seem to hit the buttons correctly. Things with lots of big buttons tend to be big which makes them a pain to carry.

  2. Never underestimate my ability to break toys. Only the most resilient of electronic toys survive me. It isn’t uncommon for my laptops, phones, or cameras to experience 5 foot falls. Everything I carry with me ends up with marks from the abuse even books. Paper can take the abuse. I have no faith e-book readers could maintain their screens from being around me.
  3. Computers tend to tempt me to fail at multi-tasking. When I shut down my computer to go home, I typically have at the minimum a dozen windows. (Even the client I use to connect to my servers usually can fill that dozen.) Reading on a computer rarely will result in more than a page of reading every 10 minutes. Because blog posts are usually pretty short, distractions have less chance to interfere with reading them.
  4. Books are common enough people accept them as normal. Cool toys attract attention. I’d expect an expensive phone or e-reader or laptop to attract the kind of attention which results in theft. Books are cheap few would care to go to the effort.
  5. Phone are becoming more like computers. What I don’t want is a phone (or another device) which I treat like my computer, aka failing at multi-tasking. Just today I squared 1024 on paper instead of using the calculator on my phone. Having access to the Internet through my phone could be bad for keeping me on task.
  6. Why faux paper when you could use paper? The e-book readers market how much their technology looks like paper. Paper looks, feels, smells, and tastes like paper.
    :)
  7. Spending money on a device to get to read seems counter-intuitive. The devices should be subsidized by the content. But that would mean Amazon $10 books would cost more like $20.

Typically I don’t change until I have a problem with what I am using. Books don’t cause me problems. So I am happy to continue to read books for the foreseeable future.


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TED Talks: Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

June 17, 2009 in Religion / Baha'i Faith, Social / IM / Chat by Ezra S F | No comments

The tumult in Iran is huge news of late. As a Baha’i, news of the persecution of Baha’s in Iran has stepped up because of the Internet. Stories crossed the ocean through email. News agencies almost never picked up these stories. As fast as the Iran government could shut down CNN and NYT and BBC reporters, the same government cannot seem to quell dozens who don’t have press credentials or passports to revoke from sharing the message. So the idea of several thousand sharing a similar message evading the same government doesn’t seem all the surprising to me.

[The Iran unrest] is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. This is it. The big one.

Calling this unrest a revolution seems premature. Still, all this information making it overseas is interesting to watch.


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The LMS is So Web 1.5

May 13, 2009 in Blackboard Vista, Interweb by Ezra S F | 4 comments

The claims Blackboard’s Learn 9 provides a Web 2.0 experience has bothered me for a while now. First, it was the drag-n-drop. While cool, that isn’t Web 2.0 in my opinion. A little more on track is the claim:

The all-new Web 2.0 experience in Release 9 makes it easy to meaningfully combine information from different sources. The Challenges Are Real, But So Are the Solutions

Integrating with a social network like Facebook is a start, but again, in my opinion, it still isn’t Web 2.0.

So, what is Web 2.0? I did some digging. I think the Tim O’Reilly approach meets my expectation best. He quotes Eric Schmidt’s ”Don’t fight the Internet.” as well as provide his own more in depth.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called “harnessing collective intelligence.”) Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again

Users expect a site on the Internet to meet their needs or they eventually move on to a site which does. There are so many web sites out there providing equivalent features to those commonly found in an LMS. There is the danger of irrelevance. This is why every LMS company or group strives to continually add new features (aka innovating). The bar continually gets raised, so LMS software continually needs to meet this higher standard.

Tim additionally provides some other rules which you can see at the above link.

When an LMS reachs the point where the resources of the Internet helps people learn, then it will be a Web 2.0. As long as an expert or leader imparts knowledge on students, the LMS is still something different than Web 2.0. Sorry…. The irony? This is exactly what Michael Wesch and PLE advocates preach.


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USPS Forever

May 9, 2009 in Gov't / Law / Politics by Ezra S F | No comments

The United States Postal Service keeps raising postage rates. Yet, I still wonder about this statement regarding the 2 cent increase going into effect this year. 

When the postal service announced price increases in February, postal officials estimated the hike will cost the average household $3 a year. Forever Stamps not lasting long: Brisk sales before rate hike | onlineathens.com

To cost a household $3 a year, the household would need to buy 150 stamps a year. That is 12.5 a month! Obviously I am not the average household. I bought a set of 20 Forever Stamps about 2 years ago just after they became available. I just used my 5th one for something today. So projecting at the current usage the next year would cost me 4-6 cents if I didn’t have the Forever Stamps.

That’s not exactly budget breaking….

If Internet usage is causing people not to send mail anymore, then I am an exemplar.
:)


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Digital Legacy

October 14, 2008 in Computers by Ezra S F | 1 comment

A book on time management in talking about long-term goal planning suggests we define the legacy we wish to leave. Coming from academia, I typically think of a legacy as a name on a building, an applicant with an alum for a parent, or a scholarship. However, the artifacts left behind by previous cultures are also a legacy.

Our digital footprints both could be part of this legacy or easily lost. I lean toward all this data we spew about the Internet will be lost eventually. I have seen floppy disks and hard drives die, taking with them the only copy of critical data. I have seen companies report their hard drives stolen from their machines in co-location as why customers lost their data. I have seen companies close web sites because they ran out of money. Let’s not forget natural disasters like earthquakes and floods.

So we keep backups.

Who will preserve these backups once we are gone? Are you able to read the data from computers 40 years ago? Maybe we’ll be better about being able to read the data from past when we reach 40 years into the future?

Not likely.


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Recap of Vista Stuff

August 24, 2008 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F | No comments

It has been a hectic week. A recap…

Java certificate fix – Yesterday, August 23rd, the certificate distributed in various Java applets expired. The community discovered the issue and informed Blackboard who put out a fix for the more current products on August 15th. Many customers are leery of having such little lead time to test, verify, and install a fix. Well, Vista 3.0.7.17 was also reported to have the problem, but Blackboard didn’t provide a fix until the 20th after I got my TSM to verify it really still is a problem on the 18th. (The corrected 3.0.7.17.8 version was provided August 21st. Why is in the next paragraph.)

The fix for Vista 3 required us to be on 3.0.7.17.8 (hotfix 8 which we had not yet applied), had references to the “webctapp” directory (in Vista 3 it is applications), and distributed a webct.sh script to add updateWar which didn’t work with Vista 3. FAIL. Thankfully we have modified War files in the past, so adding the updates was more work and accomplished before Blackboard provided a corrected version.

To see the Java certificates in Windows: Control Panel > Java > Security > Certificates. The Blackboard ones are verified by Thawte (the Certificate Authority). The old one is issued to Blackboard. The new one is issued to dc.blackboard.com.

Vista 3.0.7.17.8 – This hotfix was released a couple weeks ago. However, since the priority has been the migration to Vista 8, this was on hold. The previous problem made us step up and throw this into production. The testers went to heroic efforts to get this and the certifcate fix tested. Testing was mixed.

  1. Losing session cookie because of Office 2007 in Internet Explorer. Happened less often post fix, but still happens in some cases.
  2. Autosignon MAC2. Mode to allow insecure MAC works to give the one school using it time to correct update their portal to use MAC2. Originally the plan was to let them work out MAC2 in test.

Slammed by our users…

  1. systemIntegrationApi.dowebct – The school using the autosignon wanted to have the correct consortiaId to create the MAC. Some time back in January they started calling this any time users tried to login because a handful (guess was ~12) have had their username changed. So the autosignon failed. Yes, they were sent us 25,000 requests in a busy day (about 20% of the queues were working on these during the day) to handle potential 12 problems in a term. FAIL.
  2. pmSelfRegister.dowebt – One of the clusters started to have issues. Two nodes went crappy. I looked at the Weblogic console and found all of the failing nodes had no free spots in the queues. 90% of the queues were working on these. Much of this is because the requests were hanging around for at least 4800 seconds (an hour is 3600 seconds). At about 6000 seconds the cluster recovered when the queues cleared.I think the queues cleared because I changed to false a couple settings:
    • Allow users to register themselves as a Student in a section = false
    • Allow users to register themselves as an Auditor in a section = false

    As I recall, we only had about 22 queue spots open (out of 308) across the whole cluster. We got lucky.


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How Do Technology Illiterates Read Blogs?

August 18, 2008 in Gov't / Law / Politics, Interweb by Ezra S F | No comments

A few weeks ago, NPR aired a piece where McCain and Obama advisors about technology expressed the policy intentions of each candidate. Also, Obama was described as being a Crackberry addict. McCain was described as personally being technology illiterate, but he looked forward to someone showing him some web sites.

So now, Google purports to allow you to “track the news sites and blogs Barack Obama and John McCain read”. If McCain doesn’t use the Internet (including the World Wide Web), then how is he reading these news sites and blogs? Someone prints them out for him?


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RSS Is Relatively New?

July 29, 2008 in Interweb, Work by Big Eazy | No comments

The email was an innocuous “Ooh, shiney!” message. RSS feeds are now available for a status site. However, one thing concerned me….

RSS is a relatively new and easy way to distribute content and information via the Internet.

I personally have been aware of RSS since 2002. However, as I am a relatively late adopter of technology, I was not surprised to learn RSS has been around since July 1999. This technology has been available for nine years. 1999 is the same year IE5 became available. That is a few months before Windows 2000 became available. This is before the technology bust which weeded out much of the Internet craps. (Are we due for another one of those?) Next year we can celebrate the 10th anniversary of RSS. Can we really call it new when we celebrate it being around for a decade?

The point of “relatively” was to soften the word new. I was supposed to be mollified by it isn’t really new but it isn’t really old and is closer to new than old. It just sounded to me like whoever wrote it only heard about RSS within the past two years or so. So maybe the message was more “Ooh, shiney!” for them than for me.


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