Unfortunately, it is too new for the currently-supported Ubuntu drivers. I used Ubuntu’s NvidiaManual docs to manually upgrade to the 173.14.12 drivers from NVidia’s site, and then things were happier. Except video playback. Files and DVDs seem to work okay, but the colors are off, notably, people get rendered with blue or purple flesh.

I tried Googling up the fix, but didn’t get far. One page mentioned that I could run nvidia-bug-report.sh and send the debug log to linux-bugs@nvidia.com. Support from a hardware developer? For Linux? Stranger things have happened. I sent off a report on Friday night and on Saturday morning got an e-mail back from Aaron pointing me here:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=107009

Verily, when I start X I have:

0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
      "XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
              client settable attribute
              client gettable attribute (current value is 0)

And when I run a video and get blue people:

0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
      "XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
              client settable attribute
              client gettable attribute (current value is 164)

Yet, they can be fixed like so:

0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvattr -a XV_HUE -v 0
Found Xv 2.2
XV_HUE set to 0
0-16:40 djh@noneedto ~$ xvinfo | grep -A2 XV_HUE
      "XV_HUE" (range 0 to 360)
              client settable attribute
              client gettable attribute (current value is 0)

Having the work-around moves this issue from awful to annoying. I tried resetting XV_HUE and invoking different players. I found these players producing the blue flesh bug:

• gxine
• (Totem) Movie Player
• mplayer

It was starting to look grim, when I found that one player doesn’t mess up the hue setting:

• VLC media player

Hopefully this bug gets worked out over the next few months. I’d like to give Aaron Plattner and nVidia a great deal of credit not only for grappling with this issue but for providing customer support for their products. Now I know which brand of video card to be loyal to!

When people ask me what I do I answer either “computer stuff” or “Unix systems administration” and when asked what that means I answer that I keep the servers up and running. If you happen to be curious about my technical background you can review an old copy of my resumé online.

SAGE members and survey participants now have access to the 2007 System Administrator’s Salary Survey at http://www.sage.org/salsurv/. It is nice to check in an see how well one’s compensation aligns with that of one’s peers. I like the summary:

“A technically challenging profession that pays its entry people as much as US$50,000/year is an interesting one. System administration appears to be a fine way to make a living. Experience, education, and enhanced skillsets seem to be the growth path of choice.”

My current employer is known for its generous compensation, and the current survey is an affirmation of that. More importantly I’m enjoying my experience of my present employer and with any luck may actually hold this job for a few years.

I still hope to eventually return to Chicago to work. The San Francisco Bay Area has the highest average salaries, though Chicago averages not much less. The catch is that most Chicago jobs are in the financial services industry, and that is a less enjoyable work environment than the Silicon Valley culture.

Updated: Due to much feedback, I now know of three ways to do this . . .

1) On BSD systems, you can use jot(1):
sleep `jot -r 1 1 900`

2) If you are scripting with bash, you can use $RANDOM:
sleep `echo $RANDOM%900 | bc`

3) For portability, you can resort to my first solution:
# Sleep up to fifteen minutes
sleep `echo $$%900 | bc`

$$ is the process ID (PID), or “random seed” which on most systems is a value between 1 and 65,535. Fifteen minutes is 900 seconds. % is modulo, which is like division but it gives you the remainder. Thus, $$ % 900 will give you a result between 0 and 899. With bash, $RANDOM provides the same utility, except it is a different value whenever you reference it.

Updated yet again . . . says a friend:
nah it’s using `echo .. | bc` that bugs me, 2 fork+execs, let your shell do the math, it knows how
so $(( $$ % 900 )) should work in bsd sh

For efficiency, you could rewrite the latter two solutions:
2.1) sleep $(( $RANDOM % 900 ))
3.1) sleep $(( $$ % 900 ))

The revised solution will work in sh-derived shells: sh, bash, ksh. My original “portable” solution will also work if you’re scripting in csh or tcsh.

<form action="http://googleplex.example.com/search">
    <input type="text" name="q" />
    <input type="hidden" name="as_sitesearch" value="example.com/docs" />
</form>

So, where you might use site: in the search field, you use as_sitesearch as a hidden search parameter. I figured this out by squinting at the Google Advanced Search page.

“So, my advice to Yahoo!: continue with your plan to outsource search to Google, just like you did before 2002, and plow those increased profits and reduced costs into your own innovation, strengthening the areas where you are #1, exploring new ideas that will make YOUR users insanely happy, and generally focusing on what makes Yahoo! great, rather than on what doesn’t.”

I kind of figure that building search is a waste of Yahoo!’s energy, and that if Microsoft wants to ditch their own failed effort and give Yahoo! a chunk of cash for its also-ran technology, well then hooray for Yahoo!

I was also reading about Sugar, which I have gotten to play with on the OLPC XO-1. It is somewhat frustrating to deal with because I really really really like having access to the file / folder metaphor for tracking my work. I do like the “history” interface to “activities” via the Journal, and the built-in collaboration, although I have not had a chance to actually “collaborate” with any one, seems like a really big win–the sort of thing that has a lot of potential not only for education but in the office environment that we adults use as well. It is too bad that collaboration via shared applications is such an under-developed idea. That strikes me as the sort of thing that ought to be within Microsoft’s grasp to run with, and a nice answer to the Google “spreadsheet in a web browser” mentality.

Yay.

0-20:57 djh@noneedto ~$ env TZ=UTC date
Tue May  6 03:57:07 UTC 2008

The env bit is not needed in bash, but it makes tcsh happy.

Update: Mark points out an easier solution:
date -u

Knowing you can set TZ= is still useful in case you ever need to contemplate an alternate timezone.

(Thanks, Saul and Dave for improving my knowledge.)

0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~> cd public_html/toldme
0-11:17 djh@ratchet ~/public_html/toldme> svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/
[ . . . ]
Updated to revision 7839.

When I logged in to post this little note, it blocked me and ran the upgrade procedure, then I had to log in again, and here I am!

There’s a further note about the secret key setting:

Since 2.5 your wp-config.php file allows a new constant called SECRET_KEY which basically is meant to introduce a little permanent randomness into the cryptographic functions used for cookies in WordPress. You can visit this link we set up to get a unique secret key for your config file. (It’s unique and random on every page load.) Having this line in your config file helps secure your blog.

It leaves me to wonder: if the secret key can be randomly generated by a machine, why not go ahead and do that and then stash it in the database? There may be a good reason for that . . .

In unrelated news, I upgraded to the newer Ubuntu release at home yesterday. The only trick I have noticed so far is that it runs with Firefox 3.0, which is beta, and I lost use of my foxmarks plugin, for now. So, I’m waiting until that is supported before I upgrade my workstation.

I was the first citizen of my precinct to try the electronic ballot. To explain the touch screen, the staff boasted “it’s just like an iPhone!” I dug around in English and Chinese and explored the “large print” zoom feature, then I had to ask how one actually casts the ballot. (The user interface places commands on the bottom of the screen, but the “review screen” had a big box in the middle that said “press here to review your paper ballot” and below that the standard “review” button to review the electronic ballot . . . I kept pressing the little button, until the guy showed me that the big box in the middle is also a button.)

I was pleased at the paper trail. On my way out, I noted that the optical scanner had counted three ballots thus far, so this morning’s exit poll is running at least 25% Green.

First, enter your sudo password:

sudo echo

Now, this paste just might set up everything you need:

sudo apt-get install libpng3 libtiff4 cupsys alien
cd /tmp
wget http://download.canon.com.au/bj/i250linux/bjfilteri250-2.3-0.i386.rpm
wget http://download.canon.com.au/bj/i250linux/bjfiltercups-2.3-0.i386.rpm
sudo alien --scripts bjfilteri250-2.3-0.i386.rpm
sudo alien --scripts bjfiltercups-2.3-0.i386.rpm
sudo dpkg -i bjfiltercups_2.3-1_i386.deb bjfilteri250_2.3-1_i386.deb
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libtiff.so.4 /usr/lib/libtiff.so.3
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libpng.so.3 /usr/lib/libpng.so.2
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart

Then, go set up your printer in the GUI, and specify this PPD file:

/usr/share/cups/model/canoni250.ppd

(Or, in retrospect, since it has a GNU license on it, you could just download the PPD directly off my web site.)

If things turn out less-than-straightforward, definitely review BlackNight’s page for details, and if this does work out for you drop him a thank you note in the comments!

The Internet continues to play a very big part in my life. My web site grows slowly every week. I keep my diary on-line for others to read. I write CGI applications. I’m a hard-core Unix geek, administering two of my own systems, writing my HTML and perl scripts in vi, wowwing friends with afterstep. I work for the networking group at NCSA, for the CSIL as a labsitter, and worked last summer at an ISP in Chicago called EnterAct, where I may very well return this summer.

I now use only Unix, and my old Amiga systems from time to time out of nostalgia and respect for history. I own two Unix boxen, four Amiga systems, and the old Commodore 64. While most of these are antiques, I still lend some systems out to others from time to time to facilitate their computing needs.

My fanatical Unix snobbery does mean that I know very little about Windows 95 or Mac. Because I have good computer karma, I still tend to negotiate such systems better than the average Joe, but I’m by no means a wiz. Instead I enjoy spending my time tinkering with completely open systems like FreeBSD. I am proud and inspired by the idea that there are now several very competent Operating Systems available even for normal users that are built and maintained entirely by volunteer effort. It is my goal to continue to learn and ultimately contribute to this effort as I can.

“Wow.”

“Click to focus? Arr!!”

And of course, I shout:

“Focus follows mouse!!”

I hear, beyond cubicle walls, a chorus of agreement.

Back at my desk, which I have recently switched from XP to Ubuntu, I note that I’m clicking to focus. Fortunately, I spent the morning tweaking mutt, which I started using again, after many years, because it deletes e-mail faster than Thunderbird does.

I like this place.

I hear muffled discussions of multiple desktops. I think I’ll figure out how to FocusFollowsMouse in this Gnome stuff real quick before I return my attention to work-work.

ObSolution: In Ubuntu / Gnome, go to System > Preferences > Windows and enable “Select windows when the mouse moves over them”

I am a big fan of Google and their myriad products, but sometimes they get on my nerves. I like having Yahoo! as an alternative. I love Flickr. I would hate to see Yahoo! swallowed up my Microsoft, leaving the biggest players on the Internet being a choice between the Google and the Microsoft.

I prefer an online world that isn’t simply black and white, but which also has a weird shade of purple to it.

I got started graphing various Linux distributions against each other, XP versus Vista, and trying to figure out the best keyword for OS X. Then, I wondered about FreeBSD. Against Ubuntu, it was a flatline. So, I asked myself: what is the threshold for a dead or dying Operating System?

Amiga vs FreeBSD:

Ouch! Can we get deader?

Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS:

To be fair, the cult of Amiga is still strong . . . BeOS is well and truly dead. But how do the BSDs fare?

Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD:

NetBSD has been sleeping with the BeOS fishes for a while, and OpenBSD is on its way. And that’s a league below Amiga!

In Red Hat land, only Fedora beats “the Amiga Line”. For Unix in general, nothing stops the Ubuntu juggernaut. But there’s a long way to go to catch up with Uncle Bill.

(Yes, it is a rainy night and the girlfriend is out of town.)

Postscript: Ubuntu versus Obama

We’re basically looking at LinkedIn (they even import your LinkedIn profile) except that you can set a price at which you would be willing to interview with a prospective employer. The idea being, maybe you are happy where you are but you’d be happy to talk about being somewhere else, though your time is valuable. (Employers, of course, already know that recruiting is an expensive undertaking . . . it is not hard to see them pony up . . .)

Apparently this is from “Peerflix refugees” so I’d peg it as “an interesting innovation that rips off an existing proven idea that is probably ahead of their ability to execute.”

I accepted the invite, to check it out but mainly so I could invite a friend who is job hunting. I figured if Powerset and Yahoo giving it a go . . .

First Impressions:

• Very rough: when I declined to invite everyone I know on LinkedIn the site closed its own window.
• Lame: the “invite-only preview” site is protected by a shared HTTP authentication username and password . . . then you log in.
• Also Lame: you can’t view any of their web site (like “About Us”) without the HTTP authentication credentials. Amateurs!
• Steals your LinkedIn profile very nicely, but requires your password. Wonder how soon LinkedIn will block them.
• I don’t see why LinkedIn couldn’t just add the “set price to interview” as a feature within about two months.
• Feels very much like a LinkedIn rip-off.
• Snickering towards Doom: Their own “Jobs” page reads, in total: “VP of Business Development”
• Doomed: The site is very slow, even as a limited preview. Methinks their engineers aren’t so great.

Actually, now I feel dirty. I’m changing my LinkedIn password . . .