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.

I <3 NevDull. See

I wish the pill slingers would go back to having some voice over rattle off the laundry list of side effects, all of which seem to include death these days. I'm really tired of some asshole actor looking at me sincerely and telling me that his bath tubs in wheat fields pill might give me nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, anal leakage and/or headache, agitation, vertigo, confusion, dizziness, oedema, arthralgia, sore throat, constipation, abdominal pain, rash, weakness and/or renal impairment, coma, seizures, neutropenia, leukopenia, tremor, ataxia, encephalopathy, psychotic symptoms, crystalluria, anorexia, fatigue, hepatitis, Stevens-Johnson syndrome, toxic epidermal necrolysis and/or anaphylaxis. That or perhaps we could just go back to having our doctors prescribe medications as they see fit.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/146

I had intended to write up some lengthy explanation of exactly how wrong Mark Shuttleworth is. But I never got around to it. Basically it all boils down to the fact that there's a hell of a lot more that goes into any release you expect to support for 7 years than just nailing the ship date and then supporting it for seven years. This would include careful examination of the versions of packages you're including. Evaluating where major components are with regard to stability and upcoming features. Oh, and then a hell of a lot of QA which seems to be non existent in Hardy.

I think it will be interesting to see Ubuntu collapse under the weight of their bad decisions for products they intend to support for seven years. Granted Red Hat's resources devoted to old products taper off after four years but those first four years or so are resource intensive when no one cares about a bug in your kernel that's now 9 releases out of date after just a year. Maybe that's what he's really after, ride on the coat tails of a company with the know how, resources, and proven track record providing long term support. If that's truly his goal perhaps he'd prefer just repackaging Centos.

I need to go back and read Greg Kroah Hartman's discussion of how to handle kernel stuff for long life products. It might be interesting to see where that may tie in.

Last weekend was fun. I saw Widespread Panic, twice. The first with a group of co-workers, this was a lot of fun, got to know them pretty well.  Two of them were from out of town so it was definitely a great chance to get to know them before they flew back across the country and around the globe. The second was with a co-worker and his friends, I had nothing else to do so I figured I'd go back, perhaps I'd catch something new from the show I didn't get the night before, perhaps I'd be able to get into the music a bit better.

Otherwise I've been strumming the guitar a good bit, things are coming to me faster than the did when I was in high school. I don't know if that's a function of my patience or more regular practice (an hour a day at least). Restrung the guitar. Bought some used books, another thing I suck at is reading so I figured I'd start reading more.

I think I'm going to find a decent sports bar so I'm not watching hockey at home. I have my doubts as to how much luck I'll have finding somewhere with hockey on.