teh bigbro blog(tm)
Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
04 2010

Tue, 20 Apr 2010

Today D decided that after months of tearing around the house pushing her buggy, she could walk all on her own. Nothing is safe any more - particularly the poor dog who is learning that his erstwhile relatively quiet life can now be disturbed by a screaming running infant. Comedy++

posted at: 21:16 | path: | permanent link to this entry

I've not done a Link of the Day thing for ages... but perhapas that's because meebo.com is the first webapp to impress me in some time.

meebo.com

Meebo is an IM aggregator, allowing you to communicate with all your contacts on different IM networks, including Google Talk, Facebook and many others, from one place. Killer feature is that your conversations follow you around from machine to machine, and iPhone push support works well, allowing you to carry on IM'ing from the iPhone App.

Mon, 19 Apr 2010

...is a pile of epic fail (on Linux at least.) I like the idea of full-text searching - but I also like my laptop to not have the CPU at melting temperature all the time and the fans running at full speed as thunderbird burns through CPU indexing what I can only assume are the same messages over and over and over again. I also like to start blog posts with a hearty generalisation, even if the behaviour is something relatively specific to my situation - it grabs the reader's attention and makes sure they read the remainder of the article ;-)

Normal behaviour, and better use of your CPU can be restored by disabling full text search / indexing. You can do this by setting the advanced configuration option mailnews.database.global.indexer.enabled to false, or as this has obviously become a big enough problem for enough people, the Edit | Preferences | General tab now has a checkbox marked Enable Global Search and Indexer. Unchecking this will also turn off this feature.

More usefully, some exceptionally bright spark has made a plugin called GlodaQuilla available. It's experimental but has not yet set fire to my laptop or caused my pets to explode - your experience may be different of course and any use of experimental plugins is completely at your own risk. I did the following and now have a full indexed search of the subset of my mail that interests me, along with a much more responsive machine (and some 500MB of disk space no longer used by the full-text index)

1. Install GlodaQuilla in the usual fashion
2. Restart Thunderbird
3. Disable indexing completely (see above for how to do that)
4. Quit Thunderbird and wait a few moments to make sure it's definitely no longer running
5. Delete the old full-text database taking up space on your hard drive. It's a file called /home/$username/.thunderbird/random.default/global-messages-db.sqlite on my Ubuntu Linux machine. You'll need to find your own global-messages-db.sqlite yourself, but the path above should give you a clue as to where it is.
6. Start Thunderbird and right click on a folder containing mail you do not want indexed. (e.g. my Archive/ folders contain old mail that I don't really need searched or indexed.) Uncheck 'Inherit' and you can now individually enable or disable indexing of the mail folder.
7. Once you have set which folders you do and do not want indexed, remember to re-enable indexing and restart Thunderbird, just to be sure to be sure.
8. Leave your computer for a period of time, if possible, as Thunderbird will need to rebuild indices for those mail folders you left with indexing enabled. This may take some time. Expect performance to be poor during this time. You can track activity by selecting Tools | Activity Manager from the menu.
9. Enjoy a nice, fast, performant full text search of the mails you actually care about searching and indexing.

Sat, 17 Apr 2010

I set up my eeePC 701 as a fileserver in the house over the Easter weekend. It runs Ubuntu and with a little configuration happily shared a few USB disks over the home network with SAMBA and NFS. Most importantly it ran pretty cool and didn't use a lot of power - important for something that was going to be left on all the time.

All worked well until the last couple of days when I noticed some pretty strange messages appearing in the logs. A reboot resulted in GRUB giving me the dreaded Error 17. Further investigation seems to indicate that the SSD has shed its mortal coil. Poo! Cue research to determine whether it's more cost and time efficient to get a replacement SSD or just buy a Mac Mini.

posted at: 22:33 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 08 Apr 2010

...possibly some of the most delicate software in the known apple universe. Once again either it or something separate has caused corruption on the time machine backup disk, and once again nothing has recovered my machine short of 'reboot' typed at the command prompt. It seems that if anything goes wrong with Time Machine it just sits there consuming resources giving the user no clue that anything has even gone wrong. Thanks a bunch Apple. I'm hugely confident that my data is safe with you and your dubious software.

Fortunately, last weekend saw me set up a Linux based server solution which allows me to back up most data to a known working, safe solution that I can recover data from. And if there's an error with it, I'll find tons of info in /var/log/syslog most likely, instead of the cast canyon of nothingness that Apple seems to see fit to provide users with. I won't even mention the stupidity of Apple's Disk utility giving time estimates as to when it might be finished - I've seen Windows copy operations estimate time better.

Yes, this is a bitter article and yes, I find Apple's hardware and software to be generally of a decent standard - but I'm trusting my data to this backup solution and this is the second time I find myself putting the pieces back together. I have zero faith in Apple Time Machine any more.


posted at: 23:46 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 05 Apr 2010

...that I had ordered the Disney channel on Sky for the benefit of my small child. Apparently I was almost right... ;)

posted at: 18:45 | path: | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 01 Apr 2010

We at HEAnet labs have been testing 3G mobile broadband USB dongles for some time now, and the key weakness identified is the problem that data download is asymmetric. This means that while you can download content at high speed, uploading content is much much slower. This means that 3G dongles are unsuitable for things like uploading large photographs or video information to the interwebs. This severely restricts their usefulness - or at least, it used to.

While the technology of 3G and in particular the USB dongles means you are limited to an asymmetric connection, by changing the polarity of the USB power feed you can alternate between high speed upload and high speed download. This means making up a USB cable yourself, but as John Beale helpfully demonstrates, this is pretty easy. Just (carefully) swap the black and red wires.

This still leaves us with the problem that the connection is asymmetric, but that's easily solved by using iptables and a second USB dongle with the polarity set to normal. Effectively, we want to configure iptables to route the download traffic through USB dongle A (which is wired normally) and route the upload traffic through USB dongle B (wired with the polarity reversed.) Thanks to PaulJ on the ILUG list for providing a basic config for iptables:

ip route add default \
   nexthop via dev weight x \
   nexthop via dev weight y
change x and y so that x/y == bandwidth ISP1 / bandwidth ISP2

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