Linux on traviscj/blog

carputer brainstorming ideas

Sun, 07 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

As much as I enjoy driving, radio almost always annoys me. There’s a couple of particularly terrible stations and commercials around, but even the least objectionable of the pack really bother me. The focus did come with an auxiliary stereo input plug, which we have used extensively, but even that seems to have some shortcomings. In particular, one of the things I really miss about the radio approach is just that I don’t really need to think that much about it – it is just there while I’m driving around. Starting up spotify after I’ve started off isn’t safe or prudent.

Ditching the consumer grade wireless router

Fri, 24 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

My fiancée and I both spend a fair bit of time working from home, so we notice downtime almost immediately. We had a NETGEAR WNDR3400 which periodically disconnected one or the other of us, or just didn’t seem very zippy anymore. I was originally considering a top-of-the-line router, such as an Airport Extreme, a NETGEAR Nighthawk AC1900, or an ASUS RT-AC66U.

I had been looking into alternatives for a while, and decided to pull the trigger on the following setup:

MySQLdb module in Python on Ubuntu

Sat, 30 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

To install the mysqldb module in python on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install python-mysqldb

TiVo Router Project

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

My girlfriend’s TiVo only has an ethernet port. Well, technically, it only has a USB port. We went looking for a TiVo compatible Wifi adapter but were less than successful. We did manage to find a USB-ethernet converter at Fry’s Electronics, though. But this means it requires a machine there to bridge from Wireless to the wired port, which is a bit of a hassle on her Windows Vista laptop(though, honestly, what isn’t a pain in Vista? </soapbox>).

Computer Ressurection and Elastic Cloud Experimentation

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I was home on Thanksgiving Break with Sharvil, and we decided to revive some old computers. Partly I’d like to experiment with some clustering stuff without incurring CPU time at the AMATH department or Teragrid stuff I’m likely gonna be working on soon with Shea-Brown’s neuroscience research. So, it turns out I resurrected about 5-6 old computers(final tally is still waiting on the number of successful Xubuntu installs on them, among other practical issues(where the hell am I going to put six computers…?): The very first computer I built(a P3 450), P3 700, Dual P2 266, a couple of AMD64 3200’s, and a Sony Vaio P3 733. The cool thing is that the neuron spiking models are basically embarassingly parallel(well, each run isn’t necesarily, but from what I’ve gathered so far, we’re looking for averages over a bunch of them. So, sweet! Again, this would be terrible for actual research, especially against something like TG or even Amazon’s EC2–which is another thing I really need to check out.

A few more exotic uses for older hardware

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

There are tons of posts on the internet about what to do with older computers. In general, they say some of the same things: Linux/Firewall, Media Server, and ‘BitTorrent Box’. (Incidentally, the lattermost somewhat confuses me. I guess people want to download files on a separate machine in case it has viruses or whatever… but if you’re using bit torrent so much that it’s worth having a separate box for, you’re probably still gonna be upset if a virus takes it out. Or you could just use antivirus or an alternative OS. But I digress.) Anyways, for the uses I’ll outline here I’m going to assume that you (at least roughly) fit into the prototype of ‘I have a pretty decent computer sitting around that never really gets used.’ In my case, I tend to upgrade and want to keep the old one around because it’s still a pretty decent computer, but want to use the newer one for bigger and better things. Like reading xkcd and refreshing google news over and over again. Heh.

Ubuntu Hacks -- Flash, Java, e17

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This must be about the 1 millionth time someone’s written a blog post about this, because I waded through a ton of them to get ones that worked. Which means someday, someone will be wading through 10 million websites trying to get their Flash, Java, and e17 working.

For the browser issues, I found this thread on the Ubuntu forums. In short, you download the first file listed(the Browser Install Script), untar it, and run it. It will download and install the 32-bit libraries, 32-bit browser, and plugins from the set of {Flash, Java, VLC}. The only trick then is rewriting your scripts to use firefox32 instead of just firefox.

NSA's RHEL5 Guide

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of my tasks at work is to write up a security checklist of sorts, and from one of Ryan’s notes, I happened across the NSA’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 guide. It’s pretty cool and covers basically everything. Have a look

MRTG

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 13:00:00 +0000

So, another day, another (minor) problem. I had connected to a server with KDE instead of our usual GNOME interface. Which probably would have been fine except that KDE had a screensaver that sucked up the CPU. Which also would have been fine, if it hadn’t been a server that everyone else used. Oops. RRDtool and MRTG would have shown a CPU spike which I could have investigated.