Matthew's Weblog

Cringely has a great article about bowling that has given me something deep to ponder about my work life…

I learned an important lesson that day; success in a large organization, whether it’s a university or IBM, is generally based on appearance, not reality. It is understanding the system and then working within it that really counts, not bowling scores or body bags.

In the world of high-tech start-ups, there is no system, there are no hard and fast rules, and all that counts is the end product.

The high-tech start-up bowling league would allow genetically-engineered bowlers, superconducting bowling balls, tactical nuclear weapons—anything to help your score or hurt the other guy’s.

Anything goes, and that’s what makes the start-up so much fun.

And now for the navel-gazing.

What an interesting idea… a ‘camera’ that sees through wallboard.  With the troubles we had during our remodel, this tool would have been really great to have….

from ImproveFirefox.com

To utilize separate profiles:/path/to/firefox -P "another profile name" -no-remote

To create separate profiles:
/path/to/firefox2 -profilemanager -no-remote

So we had a power outage at our house, and I had to shut down my Myth backend server for the duration, and decided to try and fix its sometimes-spotty NIC at the same time.  Every so often I got a completely dead response so trying to scp something there was painful… so I swapped the hardware.  Unfortunately, when it came up, the machine realized the card was a new one (3c905, they’re still astoundingly reliable) and complained.  First it told me it was the wrong MAC address, then it gave up and assigned it eth1.  Unfortunately, all my settings were bound to eth0 and when I changed the /etc/network/interfaces to reference eth1 instead, some parts still didn’t work… mysql complained, and mvpboot just was unwilling to do anything.

Bad news.

I finally found a thread about replacing a NIC in (I think) Ubuntu 8 but when I tried the solution, the file they referred to (

/etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

) didn’t exist.  Back to Google.

Next I found an older forum exchange about ubuntu 6.06 NIC replacement breaking the network, and I was able to find that file:

/etc/iftab

and in it was the old MAC address.  Commented the line out, restored the settings to be eth0, rebooted, and bingo I’m back in business.  Wish I had found it last night…

So I finally got invited to the Boxee alpha, and had to move the apps to the ATV.  I couldn’t find a clear way to get the frappliances until I found a forum entry describing the process.  It’s still kind of kludgy given the rest of the stuff I’ve seen from the app/company… you’ve got to download the atvusb installer and then expand it and then pull the frappliances out of the build:

Path to find the apps in the atvusb-creator is: atvusb-creator\atvusb-creator.app\Contents\Resources\payloads\patchstick \plugins

copy them onto your ATV where your other plugins live in /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/PlugIns

and then restart the finder.  Worked great.  Now to find out what all the hubbub is about…

Thin Film Solar possibilities

Interesting new basic content delivery system from Amazon

Big improvement possibilities for wind power

Homeowner-owned fiber… aka Homes with Tails

Significant numbers of people exiting Amazon and starting companies

Voice Search for the iPhone

Warnings of problems with e-voting machines that thankfully appear to have not come true

Great technical ideas and inspirations and policies for a new president

Plastic solar cells

How Spam is Improving AI

Improving display technology

Improving solar cells

Selling tickets in Boston – Ace Ticket interview

Is GM’s Volt Ready to Roll?

Solar Roofing Materials

Obama’s online tools

Electrocaloric hopes – plastic that cools

Hydrogen storage for solar energy?

Cloud infrastructure providers

John McCain, Battery Booster (it’s been a long time since I posted)

How do we manage (or do we manage) video prioritization over the network

Online schedulers with natural-language processing

Trying to get Ubuntu NFS shares to be readable via Mac clients…

Turns out they’re considered unsafe… or in NFS parlance, insecure. Need to change each line in /etc/exports to include the insecure option:

/mediafiles/movies *(ro,insecure)

found the key at http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/wednesday.ws for why it wasn’t reading my .bashrc file…

and ~/.bash_profile [or ~/.profile] should source ~/.bashrc:

source ~/.bashrc

which made it work!

They also had tricks to make X windows start login shells instead of non-login… http://www.osxfaq.com/tips/unix-tricks/week105/tuesday.ws

…was far easier than I expected.  I thought I was going to have to add all kinds of switches or settings, either on the client or server, but no.

$ ssh -p port -X mylogin@myserver.com
$ fwbuilder &

and I was running.  Now that’s how I like it.  But, just in case it was hard, I had references:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-unix-tunneling-xwindows-securely-over-ssh/
http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/XoverSSH/X-over-SSH2.html
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Remote-X-Apps.html

A truly illustrative but terrifying comic…