*Coder Blog

If you live in or around Michigan, you’ve probably noticed the most recent string of snow storms. On Sunday we got about 10 inches of snow, and yesterday added about 2 more inches to that, along with a forecast for snow off and on for the rest of the week. As you can probably imagine, everything is covered with the stuff and the scenery looks particularly nice right now.

Last night was even more remarkable though. We were in between storms, and it was perfectly clear out with close to a full moon. Coming from an area that never got snow, it’s amazing how bright it is at night when the sky is clear, the moon is full, and there’s white colored stuff all over the place. It was so bright, that there were distinct shadows on the ground…err snow.

I was wanting to get a photo of it, but my digital camera here has been kind of acting up lately and I doubt the grainy shots it takes in low-light situations would have done the evening justice.

Hmm, this is a bit higher than expected…

Picked up from Nothing Up My Sleeve.

Woke up this morning to find that the Internet connection here had gone down. I looked on the router, and it didn’t have a WAN connection to the wireless modem, which I thought was kind of strange. The modem is in an unfinished part of our basement (in a cabinet) right next to our sump pump, because it needs to be pretty close to the antenna outside and my office was too far away. I tried cycling the power on the modem, but that didn’t seem to work. Then all of a sudden the connection started flickering a little. It’d go on and then off a few seconds later.

I thought I might know what the deal was, but wanted to be sure, so I ran the cables out of the cabinet into the home theatre room and put the modem there. Sure enough a few minutes later the modem came back to life and the connection was fine. Figures that the best place to have the modem is a place that gets too cold for the thing to run. I checked the environmental specs and it will run down to 32°. It got down to 15° last night here, so that must have done it. Opening up the cabinet door probably warmed up that space just enough for it to start working again, thus the flickering connection.

Just another thing we didn’t have to worry about out west.

Over on the Cult of Mac blog, check out what happens when you have a desk with a glass top and the glass breaks! I couldn’t imagine walking into my office to find that heap of a mess with all my hardware on the floor.

Speaking of hardware… Most of the pieces of my new G5 have arrived. The Cinema Display, 1Gb RAM upgrade, the All-In-One, and the iSight adapter for the new monitor all came within a couple of days after ordering. The G5 itself is still on hold. They expect it to ship by 11/17, but who knows when it will get here.

Of course with my luck, Apple has since added an nVidia 6800 GT to the configuration options and it’s only $40 more than the ATI 9800 XT that I ordered. I asked about changing my order, but they claimed it would delay delivery by 2-3 weeks. I figured the 9800 should be plenty fast and it probably isn’t worth the wait.

In case you haven’t heard, Linksys recently released a “network storage link” called the NSLU2. Basically it’s a box that you can plug in up to two external USB 2.0 drives and it serves them out NAS style. The box is running a stripped down version of Linux, which gives hackers interesting opportunities to customize the NAS to do other things such as acting as a CVS server, a print server, or an iTunes music server for Airport Express devices.

I already have a file server here at the home office, but if I didn’t, this product looks pretty cool. $80 for an embedded Linux box is pretty cheap, and it has a reasonable 32Mb of RAM to work with. If you’re interested in reading more about hacking it, check out the 4 part series of Hacking the Linksys NSLU2 over on Toms Hardware. Also, check out the page Jim Buzbee (the author of the articles) dedicated to his hacking attempts here. He has some interesting dmesg and /proc listings displayed.

This past weekend, Katrina had a conference up in Traverse City and I decided to tag along since I have been wanting to see more of Michigan. We had a great time up there. It’s a very beautiful part of the state, especially now that it is autumn. They have a few wineries up there, but the area is famous for its cherries. They even combine the two with many wineries selling cherry wine. We bought a bottle but haven’t had a chance to try it yet. We also couldn’t leave without buying some cherry jam and of course some chocolate covered cherries.

On Sunday, we went to the Sleepy Bear Dunes. We went on a pretty good hike, and it was nice to feel some real sand beneath our feet again. It was almost like being back in Santa Barbara. There are about 4 square miles of dunes, which is nowhere near the size of the dunes in Oceano, CA, but they were still fairly large. The contrast of Michigan forest next to the dunes was pretty amazing, and the National Forest Service set up a nice scenic drive through the forest area bordering the dunes.

Anyway, if you are ever in the area, check out both the dunes and Traverse City. Later this fall, we are hoping to drive up to the Upper Peninsula as everyone has been telling us that the colors are amazing.

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything here. Moving has turned out to be more intensive than I was expecting it to be. Things out here in Michigan are going pretty well for us. Our house still has random boxes scattered about, but at least we are at the point where we can be comfortable in some of the rooms.

I’ve starting the process of getting Gaucho Software off the ground. A lot of the work thus far has been more focused on system administration…setting up the web, database, DNS, and mail servers here and making sure everything is redundant and secure. I’ve found that RRDTool and Cacti together make a great tool to monitor all of the servers.

Since my office is in a finished bedroom of our basement, there are extra precautions that I have been taking in case the basement floods at some point. The sump pump is on a battery backup itself, so flooding should never be an issue, but I’m from the west, and just the possibility of this happening freaks me out. The servers are all wired so there are no wires below the table they are on (except for one plug going from the UPS down to the electrical outlet). The UPS is new…our power has gone off a few times since we moved in so I thought it would be a good thing to have. I ended up getting a Belkin Enterprise Series 1100VA UPS and that has been working great so far. I’ve plugged three servers and all the network equipment into it, and it’s still running at only 25-30% load. This will give me about 45 minutes of backup battery for everything, which should be plenty.

One thing I was going to miss when moving away from Tucson are the monsoons we would get there in the summer time. Monsoons are very intense storms, and they were incredible to watch. Little did I know that Michigan has some pretty good storms as well. Early this morning there was an incredible show. I awoke to see our bedroom glowing and lighting up like there was a TV turned on in a corner. Lightning was flashing more frequent than once a second, and there was so much thunder that I couldn’t distinguish it separately…it was just a constant combined rumble. Anyway, I think the storms here will do for some good entertainment. The only drawback is that most of the lightning here stays up in the clouds, where the monsoons in Tucson would generate a ton of cloud to ground lightning. Below is a picture I took from our back yard an evening last August during a monsoon.

I’m a big fan of classic computers. Even though I’m not too nostalgic of a person, there’s something about older computers that really gets to me. My first Mac was a Mac 512Ke, which my dad still has packed away at home because we couldn’t bring ourselves to part with it. There’s also a Mac II somewhere at my parents’ house along with the current family computer, a G4 Cube. A few years ago, I purchased a Mac SE/30 for $5, and that’s probably the best $5 I ever spent.

Well, when leaving Ephibian yesterday, I asked if they wanted part with any of their old Sun boxes. They had an Enterprise 450 and an Ultra 10 that haven’t been turned on for over a year (Ephibian is mostly a Linux shop now). Well, they ended up offering me the Ultra 10 at a very low price, and I didn’t hesitate on taking it.

It’s not an entirely impractical purchase like the SE/30 probably was. I need to get a new server for Gaucho Software, and I think this Ultra 10 will be enough of a box to do it. It has a 300Mhz UltraSPARC IIi chip in it, 384Mb of RAM, and two hard drives (4Gb and 3Gb), which I plan to replace soon. I spent most of last night doing a fresh installation of Solaris 7 on it. It’s interesting to see just how bare-bones of an OS Solaris is; even gcc and top don’t come standard, and bash which seems to have taken over as the shell of choice had to be installed separately as well. Personally, I’m a tcsh guy, so I’ll be installing that when setting up my user environment, after I finish installing all the primary packages that I want on there.

One thing I still need to think about is what desktop environment I’ll be using on it. My current favorite is KDE, but that seems like it will be too resource intensive and though I’m sure it will run, it isn’t really practical for this machine. In the past I’ve used GNOME, Enlightenment, WindowMaker, and even TWM (which is no longer maintained) on a SPARC 5 back in the day. At this point, I’ll take anything over CDE, which comes standard. I’ve never understood why Sun and HP both decided on bundling CDE as their primary desktop environment.

Finally, does anyone remember XEarth? I was browsing SunFreeware and came across it. Where are the apps for like this for Mac OS X today? Granted, there are some very nice shareware offerings, but I have yet to find one that is freeware like XEarth.

Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve had a chance to write here, mostly because I have been really busy lately. As some of you may know, Katrina and I will be moving cross-country in July. Katrina has just completed her Ph. D. in Mathematics at the University of Arizona, and accepted a job opening as a professor at Central Michigan University. Come July, we’ll be moving to the small town of Mt. Pleasant. A couple of weeks ago we flew out there and purchased a house, and we are both pretty excited about the move.

What will I be doing in Michigan? Well, I’m taking this opportunity to start my own software company called Gaucho Software. I’ve had a lot of success with XRG, and believe that I will be able to create more useful software applications for Mac OS X. Look for a new application to be released sometime later this year.

So now I’m in a transitional period. Yesterday was my last day at Ephibian, where I have worked for almost 4 years now. I plan to take advantage of having some time off before WWDC at the end of this month and the big move after that.

I’m sorry to say that I disabled posting writebacks to my blog this morning. In the past several days, I have gotten far more SPAM postings than messages from real people. While I have liked hearing from many of you, it’s just too much work to continue maintaining. I have, however, kept the links to writebacks that have already been posted, so anyone can still read those.

In the future, I welcome comments in the form of email. My email address is in the sidebar.