As I struggle to keep up with the dizzying amount of things going on at work it makes me wonder about information overload. At home I decided to look at my Google reader list, I'm subscribed to 68 RSS feeds. I did quickly realize that a quarter of them are from blogs that are never updated and thus don't appear in my reader list, but there's also a fair number of high volume feeds such as Fedora People that I don't have the time to pay any attention to. Ignoring them is fine, however for some reason I feel the urge to constantly zero out the listing of articles left to be read and I can never just mark all of them read I have to speed through them to at least check if there's anything interesting. I'm going to remove them all, if it were truly interesting I'd find out about it elsewhere.

I have no idea how much e-mail I receive during a day but I'm going to spend some time tomorrow reducing that volume.

horrible at small talk.

I mean conversation, not the programming language, but I probably suck at that too.

Hombrew

For some reason I waited a while to bother with any of the Pre homebrew stuff. If you've got a Pre and you've not set yours up for homebrew yet go ahead and open a new tab and DOOOOOO IT!!!! Once you've got it set up you should install FileCoaster, from there it's just another app on your phone to browse the 85+ homebrew apps.

The apps available via homebrew are pretty stellar considering that the SDK has only been out for two weeks. There are a few must haves including :

• FileCoaster - Homebrew "app store", allows you to browse a continuously updated gallery of apps, there's current 85 apps
• PrePackage - Package tracker with support for atleast FedEx and UPS
• PrePod - OTA Podcast downloading
• Brightness Unlinked - Allows you to set the brightness of the screen and keyboard separately
• DevMode Launcher - Easily enable and disable developer mode
• PreLoad - Application, ringtone, wallpaper downloader

BTW, if you want to compare the homebrew catalog to the official catalog there's 32 apps in the official Palm App Catalog, half of those are restaurant finders.

Sprint Coverage in PHX

So last week, I willfully went to Phoenix knowing that the weather could be summed up as "ZOMFG HOT!"... no really 114F daily. Honestly it wasn't that bad, you could tell it was hot out but it really wasn't uncomfortable in anyway, much more enjoyable heat than what we have in RDU where you feel nasty once it starts hitting 90F.

Anyway, so the Sprint data coverage was pretty spotty in Phoenix. I was mostly in Mesa and Tempe. Several times during my trip my phone indicated that EVDO RevA was available but the phone simply refused to utilize data services. Every now and then my phone would switch into 1x data mode and that seemed halfway reliable. Other times it indicated that there was absolutely no data coverage, luckly standard voice coverage was solid.

Battery Life

Battery life pretty much sucked. I don't feel like I was using my phone excessively but I was lucky to go a full 12 hours without completely exhausting my battery.  Perhaps it was the spotty coverage that meant the phone was continuously searching for data services? I think I need to look more closely at the syncing options I've got set up. Perhaps future OS upgrades and/or a higher capacity battery will help. They've got an enhanced battery that adds about 15% to the capacity without forcing you to replace the back cover.

So I've had my pre for a week and a half now. I'm incredibly satisfied with it. Obviously there aren't nearly as many applications compared to the iPhone or pretty much any other smart phone platform but I'm confident that will change, especially given the release of the SDK this week. I'm hopeful that the release of WebOS 1.1 is just around the corner, precentral is predicting that it will be out this week. i doubt it will be that soon, but I'm sure it will be out within the next 30 days or so.

When I played with a pre in the store I thought that the keyboard would be a problem, however after a week or two my only complaint is that I'd like to see an onscreen keyboard for situations where i'm browsing the web in landscape mode. Landscape mode is pretty much the only way to browse the web, in portrait mode everything is far too small to be of much use without zooming and panning. If I could bring up an onscreen keyboard I think it would help a lot, switching to portrait and back just to use the QWERTY keyboard is troublesome, especially if I've got the device closed.

The apps that are available seem pretty well refined and the ability to run multiple apps is killer. I use the Accuweather, Tweed (twitter), Spaz (twitter,laconica), Associated Press, Pandora, Speed Brain, Express Stocks, and Sudoku apps. They all seem to work well, I think Tweed is the only app that specifically mentions that it's going to go pay in the future. Hopefully if they decide to do so they'll implement the ability to adjust how often it polls twitter and ideally add support for laconica. I'm able to run about 8 apps, or "cards" as they're called in WebOS, before things start to slow down. I've had as many as 18 of them open before WebOS mandates that I start closing some before opening new apps.

Battery life is pretty poor, I use the phone for voice 5-10 minutes a day at most. I suspect that Tweed's obsessive compulsive update cycle is what's draining the batter so I've uninstalled it. With Tweed installed I was getting just over a full 24 hours of battery usage. The battery door seems a bit fragile so given that I've got to charge the device daily I went back to the sprint store and ponied up for the Touchstone charger. Now I just drop the phone on the charger each night as I go to bed. The touchstone charger is nice, however when the phone is on the charger it turns into an alarm clock constantly displaying the time with the backlight on the lowest setting. I really prefer sleeping in a completely dark room so this is a bit disruptive. Hopefully in forthcoming releases of the OS they'll provide a knob for that setting. It does work great as an alarm clock and the settings for the alarm are quite rich, you can set multiple alarms, for instance I've got one alarm for weekday mornings and one for weekends, nice!

Soooo basically I'm happy with the phone, I'm really hopeful that they'll introduce VPN functionality shortly and that once the app store goes live someone will have a nice SSH client. If those two don't come around shortly I'll have to give the classic mode emulator a try in order to use Movian VPN and pSSH. Though I'm pretty confident that Palm will introduce a vpn solution shortly, once again PreCentral notes that Palm has a job listing for a VPN Network Engineer.

My last phone was a Palm Treo 650 on Verizon, so far I'm completely satisfied with my Pre on Sprint. I also owe Verizon a bit of respect for how easy they made the porting to Sprint. When I got to the Sprint store the sales rep said he'd need my account number, so I called VZW instore to ask for my account number, the guy immediately provided it and then asked "Can i help you with anything else? If you're trying to port your phone you'll need additional details." I told him I was infact porting my phone and he quickly gave me the remaining details then politely asked "May I ask why you're changing carriers?" I told him they didn't have the phone I had and that their pricing structure was higher based on my needs, he said he understood people make those decisions and thanked me for being a VZW customer for 3 years.

For the past three years I've been using an IBM T42 at work with 1GB of memory. I've had to start using several sites that make gratuitous use of javascript, apparently crappy buggy slow javascript, and the performance of the T42 has become an issue for my productivity.

A few weeks ago someone dropped off an unused T43 on my desk because they couldn't find a home for it. I didn't really think of upgrading to that at first because it was my understanding that the T43 was just a marginal upgrade, just a switch to DDR2 afaik. Anyhow, one day I had a few minutes so I powered it up, noticed it had 2GB of memory so I looked a bit more at it. I found out that it had a 10% or so faster CPU, not that interesting, but that it also had a Radeon X300 video chipset where as my T42 had a Radeon 7500. The Radeon 7500 had several problems with X and i had lost the ability to leave my laptop open and have a second display attached to it around about the time of Fedora 6.

I installed Fedora 11 on it and took it for a spin. I was immediately able to configure both the built in display and the external display, even at different resolutions between the two. Awesome, seemed like a worthy enough upgrade especially given i'd be doubling the memory. So I shuffled bits around and I've been using it for the past few weeks now. It's a decent short term solution, I'll eventually have to upgrade to something modern but it works for now. Maybe by delaying my upgrade I'll buy time and they'll introduce a SSD based system to our standard set of laptops. The increased memory and faster cpu also seem to have been just enough to alleviate the javascript performance problems.

It does seem to run MUCH hotter than the T42, like twice as hot and the fan is ALWAYS at 100% the battery life is also considerably worse. But given that I've now got two battery packs, one of which is the extended life battery I think I'll be ok.

For a while I was using lxde as I found a desktop environment that worked well with degraded X11 performance on my T42 laptop.  One of the ones I tried for a while was LXDE, LXDE seemed mostly complete in Fedora but it was lacking lxrandr

So... feel free to grab it, I intend to figure out Fedora package submission process and submit it there. Though, I imagine the reason Christoph Wickert hasn't added it to fedora is that lxrandr lacks some basic stuff such as an icon, etc. Maybe there's opportunity for a few patches to be submitted upstream.

Anyway, i pushed it out to my github, feel free to take a look

At around 2:45am I set my alarm for an optimistic 8:30am.

8:30 rolls around and while I could get up at that point and feel OK I press the snooze bar hoping that between now and the next time it goes off I'll have magically gone from simply being able to wake up to a point where I feel 100% refreshed and ready to start my day. 13 snooze bar presses later I decide that point is never coming. I wish I'd just gotten up when the damned thing first went off.

Handbrake seems to have some seriously broken build process. I don't understand what is wrong with simple configure make. If deps aren't met tell the user and abort. Instead handbrake seems to feel like it's their job to install libraries typically owned by the system by downloading those tarballs at build time and making local copies of them. It's no surprise to me that the only Linux OS they've made binaries available for is Ubuntu.

I wonder if the unconventional build process is due to Handbrake being a cross platform application available on OSX and Windows too, either way I've lost motivation to build it for Fedora, for now.

Update, looks like they've got instructions http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/CompileGuide#lingui

Dear Customer,

We noticed you hate using our buggy website and prefer having your bill delivered to you electronically via your bank's vastly superior bill pay service. We don't really value your opinion so we're not going to let you do that any more. From now on you'll have to use our shitty site in order to pay your bill. Hope you enjoy it.

Oh by the way, have you heard that Armageddon is coming? The government is discontinuing TV as you know it, better sign up for cable!

Love,
Time Warner

Of course that's not what they actually wrote, but that's basically the end result. Now I have to figure out how to get back into their site which is a pain because when I moved I had to create a new login... really you can't just transfer my service to another address without having two different accounts and logins?

Also last time I had to call them they asked how I was getting TV, likely because they noticed I no longer pay them for cable service. When I told them I use OTA HDTV the lady told me that it would be going away... lies lies lies

and you're imagining Dell's VIA based blade thing. I'm totally on board with the Via blade thing aside from the lack of an integrated switch. They talk about reaching densities of 252 machines per 42U rack, but they don't mention that you'll need an additional 11U of that rack just to wire up both Ethernet ports on each system. 48 port per U switches, maybe there's 64 port per U densities available, I don't really know I'm not a networking guy.

Add integrated switches and I think you've got something. I know I've definitely heard of a lot of customers in the segments mentioned that are moving towards small Atom and other low power systems but in massive numbers.

I had hoped that my clustered xen environment would yield almost no situations where I'd have to take the entire platform down. But after talking with some co-workers it looks like upgrading from clustersuite from RHEL 5.2 to 5.3 in a rolling fashion is not going well. This is a bummer too because 5.3 fixes every bug I've encountered so far and while I've rolled packages on my own to address the serious bugs it'll be nice to get back to a supported set of packages.

Maybe they'll fix rolling cluster upgrades before my next outage, we'll see.

Note: I wrote all of this minus the last paragraph while waiting on hold letting my frustration brew.

November 21st I moved into a new place.  A week or so before that date I scheduled to have my Cable service moved to the new address, I requested this via Timewarner's online customer service tool, when requesting the transfer I noted that I did not wish to have cable TV service at the new place and all I wanted was a cable modem.  The evening of November 21st cable service at my old place was disconnected. November 22nd I met the Timewarner tech at my new place and we hooked up my cable modem, he asked about hooking up a TV, I explained to him that I did not want cable TV service after moving.

The cable modem worked, I thought everything was great. Then I got my December bill, they charged me for three room activation. I called to dispute this since the cable tech did absolutely nothing inside my house other than record the serial number from my cable modem. After waiting 15 minutes I got a hold of someone. I explained to her that I needed to have that charge removed because a) I did not have cable TV service and b) my house was pre-wired, all the tech did was connect the cable coming out of the ground to the cable coming out of the side of my house. The customer service rep asked if I had transferred service, I told her that I had, she explained that since it was a transfer she'd remove the charge from my bill, however if it hadn't been a transfer they would have had to charge me for this.

When I got my January bill I made sure to look it over, then I found that they were still charging me for Cable TV service, I checked the bill from December and sure enough they had charged me for cable for that month too. So once I again I waited 15 minutes to speak with someone. I explained the situation, the customer service rep explained that she did not see a request to discontinue cable service, I explained that obviously someone had gotten the request because I did not have cable TV service at my new place. She asked for a few minutes to look into the matter, when she got back she apologized and asked when I could be around for them to disconnect my cable TV service and that it'd be removed from my bill. I once again explained that there was no need to have someone disconnect service but she insisted.

December 27th the guy shows up to disconnect my already disconnected cable TV. He and I have a good laugh at the insanity when he checks things out, yes it was in fact already disconnect.

A week or two ago I got my bill for February service and I STILL HAD CABLE TV ON THAT BILL and the credit that I was told I'd have WASN'T THERE.

So tonight I called, waited 15 minutes, started into my explanation of the situation. The kind lady stops me as I tell her my angry story, she looks into it, chuckles a bit, and asks for a minute to fix it. Then she tells me that not only do I not have to pay this month, nor my next month's bill, I will then still have a $8 credit. I was prepared to go into a long angry story but she seems to have figured it all out and I'm hopeful that everything will be fine when I receive my next billing statement.

I resolve to never come up with another resolution but to define goals and work towards them more effectively.

The years before I graduated high school I discovered punk, well, whatever was considered punk in the late 90s at least.  Mad Caddies, Lagwagon, NoFX, that sort of stuff.  Any suggestions for decent punk these days?

Apparently I'm one of few where it generally gets the gender right.

I'm attempting to get by in my daily life without utilizing any Google services. I really like google reader, anyone have suggestions for a non google alternative that allows me to check my feeds from anywhere and maintains state across machines?

Around about March we got a bladecenter, a stack of blades and some shared storage. Overall I've been pretty happy with it, I can't say I've had any major problems with the hardware, though I wonder if I should have opted for a step up as far as the storage goes.

The goal with this environment was to provide a clustered xen environment including live migration of VMs for increased availability and flexibility. I'm using RHEL5, Xen, and Red Hat Cluster suite. I've mostly achieved that goal, I can go rip an entire blade out of the cluster and the virtual machines instantly start up on the other node. That's pretty boring but the interesting part is that I can add the original blade and things migrate back to the original balance without taking a second outage. Of course in non emergency situations I can migrate things off of a machine for purposes of maintenance without taking an outage.

Today I squashed the last real show stopper in that after live migration cron would fail to run jobs due to clock issues. The only remaining issue is that after live migration the fake arp isn't sent for some reason until the domU arps for some reason the network has no idea that it moved. For this I've just set up a cron job to ping the default router.

I'm finishing up a puppet module for cluster suite and I'll go ahead and publish that along with all the other configuration that went into this environment.

So, when I'm feeling extraordinarily lazy and don't want to fix dinner I generally hit up Jersey Mikes for a sandwich. Ordered the turkey sandwich, they rung it up, the price sounded high so I asked "7.27?" the cashier said no, $6.27. When I received my receipt it said $7.27. I asked him about it again, he said they must have changed the prices, I pointed out the price on the board still stated the lower price of $5.95. The guy explained "corporate sets the prices" and that he couldn't do anything. WTF? At this point he could have said just about anything else and I would have just given up and walked out the door ignoring the $0.86 error but WTF? Who has the balls to say that you won't honor the price listed on the rather large in store sign? What sort of store has their employees so stripped of power that they can't do what's obviously right? So anyway I asked to speak to his manager, he said there was no manager on duty. I asked for the manager's number and said I'd give him a call. He finally looked at the order and realized that he had in fact charged me for the wrong sandwich. Five minutes later he had the manager on the phone guiding him through the remedy, apparently they don't actually train their employees on register procedures either. Also, it'd be cool if their receipts actually listed the items ordered rather than just the credit card transaction details.

Guess no more subs for me, I don't particularly like quiznos either.

So tonight I was behind someone who answered their cell phone while driving. They immediately put on their blinker, moved over and slowed to a stop. Cool I guess, unfortunately they didn't move to the right, they didn't pull off into the shoulder, they moved to the center most lane and just stopped. GG, appreciate it.

Thursday I ran over a bottle cap, it was odd, I saw it coming in time to react but for some reason I didn't take action. Anyway, I picked up a tube and patch kit, I figure I'll need a tube sometime even if it's ok right now. I've never repaired a flat so we'll see what happens, I'm following Sheldon Brown's guides.