Patrick’s Rants

I’m working on getting some reports done for the bus barn. My boss asked me for a pretty complex set of numbers. Numbers that you just don’t get from a spreadsheet. Don’t get me wrong, spreadsheets are and will be involved, they just aren’t complex enough to get what I want without learning some serious Visual Basic (yech!). I guess I’m just more familiar with running a quick and dirty query against the data. But that’s just me. It took a couple of days (and working in Dispatch, that’s just the nature of the beast) to get multiple spreadsheets dragged into Access (because it’s there) and run the query that I needed. But I did learn that I can use OpenOffice.org Base just as easily.

What I ended up doing was taking the spreadsheet data, exporting that to csv files and then importing into Access. Access is pretty easy to do, inside and Access file (with Access open) click on new table, import and browse to the csv file you want. You can modify the field types and then import the file. Do that with each table you want. Access works fairly quickly importing the file.

In OpenOffice.org Base, first you have to create a new database. Once your database is created you have to open the csv file. The csv file will open in a spreadsheet (OpenOffice.org Calc). Select the data you want, (Ctrl-A for all, Ctrl-C to copy to clipboard) and then on the table section of Base, click Ctrl-V or Edit -> Paste on the menu. Depending upon the size of the table this might take a little while. Repeat for each csv file you want as a table. And now my joins work! (They don’t work when you use the csv files as your database. You must use the built in hsqldb engine to get real database behavior)

Qwest is going to lose my business due to a $1.00 convenience fee. I pay my bill online normally scheduled on the due date. I usually pay using a credit card that I rotate from time to time so that the card remains active – I have one that shows a credit “profile” that I can view if I use it once every 60 days. Since I don’t have a balance on it, that’s how I keep it active. This month they implemented a $1.00 convenience fee unless I sign up for auto pay. No way am I setting up auto pay. I don’t trust them not to screw it up. I don’t trust that something else might not happen to the account that will cause the price jump through the roof one month and I don’t trust myself to not get lazy and let an auto bill start a cascade of overdrafts and fees. It’s happened before. How about the guy with the million dollar water bill or the couple with their tens of thousands of dollars in roaming fees on their iPhones because the iPhone checks your email even when it’s turned off? Or how about the over $14,000 my ex-wife ran up in long distance in one month? Auto pay, no mufugging way. The payment is processed the same whether I schedule the bill or they do so why to they want to charge me to schedule it when I want? It doesn’t matter. I’m going to be costing them much more than $1.00 per month. I’m going to be paying the bill by check. They have to open it and process it – that is when I don’t use the walk in service and take up more than a dollar of their time or when I call customer service to complain regularly about the fee. Then I set up my account to paper bill.

But the $1.00 convenience fee is the final straw. I haven’t upgraded my personal internet speed since I went to DSL – I’m still surfing at 256k. Any upgrade offers Qwest has had include making a deal with the devil company itself, Microsoft. To get a discount from Qwest one must use MSN as the ISP. The only thing worse would be getting my internet service from Enron or Haliburton. I am not sending a dime more than absolutely necessary to Microsoft. $1.00 has broken my inertia. I talked to the cable company about internet and phone service. I’m going to save about $5.00 per month. And my internet speed will go up to 6mbs. That’s about 24 times the current speed with a $60 annual savings. Qwest, this is the last straw. And it only took $1.00.

I have tomatoes growing in the window sill. These silly things don’t know it’s winter still. They started on their own and I transplanted them out the pot they “volunteered” in. Now I have six plants ranging from the experimentally rooted “sucker” at about 5″ tall to 36″. And there are 15 – 18 tomato fruits right now. In February. On the window sill. This is almost more and better than we had all last summer in the garden.

Looking back over the previous entry I realize that I made the install seem just slightly easier than it was. When I wrote,

format the scsi drive, copy over the diskboot.img from my Debian workstation to the scsi drive, then dd the image onto the ide drive.

I forgot to mention that I had already (sorta) done this once. I copied the diskboot.img to the scsi drive and ran the install. The problem with installing to the same drive that you are using the disk image on is – it doesn’t really work. Oh, it pretends to work, mounting the image as a loop back file system, but it doesn’t completely and correctly install. At least not with CentOS 5, which is my baseline. This is why I ended up with the IDE drive in the machine too. It’s also why I installed the OS twice in one night. But enough about that time.

A few days after this server was installed as a crutch, I got another phone call. No network booting. Which is where I started. I went through a couple of things that might be wrong. The ethernet cable was in a location that it could get bumped so I had them wiggle the cable. It worked. Until I got the next phone call. I resigned myself to going into the office to work on this machine again.

I had to grab a chair, connect up a keyboard, mouse and monitor and I sat down in front of the beast. The screen did not come alive. Several boot cycles later I decided the old 18g scsi drive must have given up the ghost. It didn’t work in any of the hard drive slots and Knoppix would not see it when I booted up that way. So following my 2 hard drive install I came home, picked up 2 IDE drives from the shelf (no spare Ultra 320 drives here) and drove back to the office. I cracked open the box and stuck in the 2 drives. It was the same dance as before, boot Knoppix, copy the netboot image, boot from the netboot image and run the install from the crippled office server. I was able to keep the failing server running long enough to get my install done. I rebooted and everything looked beautiful.

Walking to the workstations I realized I wasn’t done. The screens showed a gray hash-marked background with an X cursor. No logon prompt. I spent until midnight or later that night trying to edit this config file and that config file. Nothing worked. And the thing that was bugging me is that I was using the same (copied from the old server) config files, that until the scsi drive died, worked. I finally stumbled upon the fix, you have to go into the gui login on the server:

Now goto System -> Administration -> Login Window
Now click on “Remote”
On the drop down menu of styles select “Same as Local.

This is the first time I have had to set this since I started using K12LTSP in 2002. I’m not sure why this install – done mere days after the last one – required this change, but it did. Even worse, the fix was not at the top of my searches or I might have tried it first.

I also started running into trouble with backups running from the Windows 2008 Server to the Linux server. It turns out that using Cygwin rsync over ssh has some potential problems. The first is that rsync hangs. And my little bash script wasn’t set to only run one copy at a time (by using a lock file) so rsync was running multiple times and hogging all the CPU and RAM. The final solution was to run Rsync outside of SSH and use lock files.

In the end this crutch held me over until the arrival of the new T300 Poweredge (next in the saga)

If you are easily grossed out – take a day off from reading my blog. Today is gross picture day. I don’t usually post photos, but I was asked for pictures of my worm bucket system by a co-worker so I took a few. These buckets started out life as pickle containers.

This first photo shows just a few of my buckets lined up.

Worm aging buckets: One solid bucket, ie no holes drilled as our “catch basin” and one bucket with holes drilled for draining and aeration. This bucket contains mostly finished VC – vermicasting or vermicompost – a little bit of unfinished bedding and lots of worms. I’m currently top feeding with outdated powdered vanilla pudding mix and powdered milk. The level of VC has shrunk about two inches in just a few weeks time. This might take a few months to get to the point where I can just scoop out the castings onto the plants. The remaining worms will be relocated to the more active buckets.

The worms are “swarming” over the powdered milk mix.

View of a much less processed bin.

Two of these bucket tops are cut off to make spacer rings. These are placed on top of a nearly full active bucket. A new empty active bucket is placed above the spacers. The new top bucket rests on the built up waste below. The spacers prevent the bucket from smashing the waste and bedding in the lower bucket. I add a little bit of bedding and slowly start feeding the new top bucket.

Worms continue to work the bottom bucket. Notice the slight indented ring where the top bucket rests.
And if you thought these photos were gross, don’t dare visit RedWormComposting (humorously, he abbreviates his site RWC)

Sara Palin

---

Joe The Plumber
2012

She’s clueless and he’s a liar… I guess 2012 really will be the end of days.

I’d Rather Eat Worms
Than Drive a Ford

(On the bumper of a Ford F250 – wonder if the guy lost a bet)

Dear Wall Street, we’re sorry.