Mike Pelley's Musings

I read last night that Dennis Ritchie, the “father” of C and Unix has died.  Mr. Ritchie was 70.

Rest in Peace Mr. Ritchie.

root@earth_# shutdown -h now
System halted.

I just completed the five-day International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, Inc., (ISC)²^® Certified Information Systems Security Professional course called the CISSP Common Body Knowledge.  It was five days of some of the most intense training that I’ve ever done.  After a day that started at 8:00AM each morning and lasted until just about 5:30PM .  Then, it was back to study from about 6:30 to 10:00 or 11:00 each night.  Then, on Saturday, a 250 question multiple choice exam with six hours to do it.  That’s six hours and if you need to use the wash room, or eat lunch or take a break it was on “your time”.  It ate into the six hours that you had to complete the exam.

It was like going back to university again.  Like, maybe, doing a semester’s course in a week and then follow it up with a double final exam.  It’s been about 15 years since I went through anything like it.

I think that I passed… Maybe….

Anyway, it is a great course if your job involves computer security.  Take a look at the program at (ISC)²^® Certified Information Systems Security Professional web page.

There have been some changes to the Pelley’s.com weather site over the past few months.  There were main two drivers for these changes:

1. I have been wanting to replace the PC-based workstation that was responsible for gathering the statistics from the weather station; and
2. The Oregon Scientific WMR-968 weather station’s sensors either had failed or were in the process of failing.

Of the two, the second was the real driver given that without the sensors there could be no weather data.

I was never really satisfied with the old weather data on the site.  The software, FreeWX-WI, was growing no longer supported.  It was a great product over the years and Andy Keir had really moved on to new things.  Mr. Keir provided a great product for free and it would be too much to expect him to rewrite the application from VisualBasic 6 to VB.Net or whatever.  That being said, “Thank You, Mr. Keir for your wonderful work!”

That being said, I never spent the time to get the raw data from the application over to the website and then formatted for presentation.  I depended upon the Weather Underground for the presentation and that was Flash based.  While I may not like the fact that Apple doesn’t support Adobe Flash on iOS it is what it is.  I have an iPad so it also affected me too.

However, the real driver was that the sensors for the WMR-968 were failing after about five years.  The winter of 2010 caused the rain sensor to fail.  This wasn’t such a big deal as rainfall generally isn’t a big interest of mine and it doesn’t measure snow, not even what we call snow on the northeastern Avalon, so I wasn’t that concerned.  However, when the temperature/humidity sensor failed – first the sensor itself and then the solar panel and transmitter – and then the wind gauge started becoming erratic it was obviously time to fix the problems.  When I looked at the solar panel/transmitter for the wind gauge it was starting to corrode internally.  A quick email to Oregon Scientific showed that I could get replacement sensors, not always exactly the same, the cost was greater than the cost of a new system, the choice became obvious.

The options I considered were the Oregon Scientific WMR-200 and the Davis Instruments Vantage Vue.  As much as I’d really like to go with the Vantage Vue it was far too expensive.  Especially when you had to add on either the USB interface or network interface.  The Vantage Vue is  really, really nice but the budget wouldn’t accommodate it.  Oh well, maybe next time.

I also wanted to remove the dependency on a PC-based workstation collecting and displaying the weather data.  To get around this, I had to find a USB-to-IP “server”.  They tend to be called servers and I guess that they are.  One of the challenges was that I originally looking to be able to replace the Osprey 100-based video capture card as well (it was also housed in the weather station PC) that took the weather pictures.  This would have meant that the device would have had to have been able to capture video streaming data.  (I had an old Belkin Video Bus-II USB capture device that I would have used between the camera and the USB-to-IP server.)  I didn’t find many USB-to-IP servers that would support video.  They all supported printers and external hard drives but very few would support streaming video.  I found two: the
Lantronix UBox 2100 (since discontinued) and the SIIG USB over IP 1-Port.  Again, price had to win out.

I’m not 100% happy with the SIIG.  I have a weird issue whereby the device locks up and has to be physically powered off and on to restart.  The support from SIIG isn’t all that great.  They email me back to call them but then I can’t seem to hook up with the tech on the other end.  From what I’ve read others haven’t found SIIG support a point of excellence.  I think that this is an issue with what I suspect is the BusyBox firmware.  There isn’t a firmware upgrade listed and since I can’t hook up with SIIG support to find out if they know of the issue.  I’ve done port scans against the appliance and can only find TCP 80 and TCP 515 (printer) – thus, no way to ssh or telnet into the box.  I’ve also tried digging through the web pages but there doesn’t seem to be a back door (which is probably a good thing) to get to some diagnostics.  Anyway, I think that I can live with it for now.

Of course, the SIIG USB over IP 1-Port, Linux and the Belkin Video Bus-II capture device working.  It also didn’t work very well under a Windows XP virtual machine (more about that later) with respect to CPU loading.  I then had to look for a IP Video Server.  There are quite a few on the market, or at least eBay, that you can choose from.  After digging around, I found the Aviosys IP Video 9100.  It was simple and inexpensive.

This still wasn’t the greatest solution because it really didn’t have a way of SCP’ing, or if absolutely necessary, ftp’ing, the web images.  This is where the information from CanVision’s site came to the rescue.  I had the URL for the frame grab.  Next, wget is the solution to download the image from the IP video server.

Why I noted at the start that I wanted to get rid of the PC workstation for the weather station the reality was that I couldn’t get rid of it.  I needed some application server-like device to house the software for the web camera and the USB-to-IP server.  The sad fact is that most of the Linux-based software didn’t really cut the mustard.  In addition to that, most of the software, such as the USB-to-IP server, NEEDED to be run on Windows.  However, I now had the ability to virtualize the Windows XP workstation and I have the licence to do so since it was an early standalone copy.  I run virtualization at home under VMware’s ESXi 3.5 product.  This is a free product that only lacks the fancy features of VMware’s vSphere product but for free it is great.  Those “in the know” will note that this isn’t the most current 4.1 product.  The sad fact is that ESXi 4.1 is only 64-bit and my IBM x225 is only 32-bit.  It also means that I really don’t have any way of accessing USB-type devices.  Well, that is a bit of a lie: you can but it is unsupported and I don’t like that.

Anyway, I now have gotten rid of another piece of hardware.

The final part was the weather software.  As I noted above, FreeWX is no longer supported or maintained.  After searching for new software, and realizing that I had to have Windows for the USB-over-IP client software I decided to stick with Windows, I settled on Sandaysoft’s Cumulus Weather Station Software.  It supports the WMR-200 weather station (at least in the beta version which is really stable) and allows me to upload the data to the weather station site.  It also uses PHP which is important.

So, what’s left to do?  I am still not satisified with the site’s layout.  I still have to work out the PHP programming to have dynamic weather icons to reflect wind force, etc.  And, of course, I still have to resolve the SIIG USB over IP server lockup.

Anyway, take a look at the Pelleys.com Weather Site.

I found this link on Deutsche Welle radio’s web site on 2011 September 24.   Click on the image or the link and see how creative people can be.  My only question is “How do you keep the Post-It notes ‘stuck’?”  Mine keep dropping off my monitor – so much for reminders.  It also shows the age of the creators: block-based 1980’s and 1990’s video game characters.  Not that there is anything wrong with people of that age…  because I’m that age too!

Creativity forges ahead

It started in Paris and has since moved across the European continent. It’s a battle of creative minds called “Post-It War” that sees office workers place stick-it notes on windows to form vivid images.

One could probably guess from my last (even more belated than ever) post that I’ve switched to Linux Mint 11.  Like many others, I’ve been using Ubuntu for some time now.  Up to 10.10 I’ve been more than pleased with Ubuntu.  In fact, I’ve found it much better than Fedora Core or SuSE as a desktop operating systems.  Red Hat (or CentOS for those of you who want freeware) is still my Linux flavour of choice for server operating systems, but for the desktop, they didn’t quite seem to have the “polish” needed for real day-to-day use in my opinion.  In fact, more than 8 years ago I moved from Red Hat to SuSE.  Back then, I found SuSE a pretty great desktop operating system.  When Novell bought SuSE it seemed to have a great future; that is, until Novell did the great nosedive into what seems like obscurity (RIM take notice – you can be the creator and leader and then become a footnote – outside of law suites 😉 )

After about three years of proving to my self that Linux could be used totally for daily use (except for Diablo – Windows XP was still needed) I switched back to using Windows XP exclusively on the desktop.  After looking at Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I decided to go back to Linux again.  I was quite happy with Ubuntu up to the “Perfect Ten” – 10.10.  Then 11.04 showed up and the move to the Unity user interface instead of GNOME Shell.

I don’t know what it is with the wanting to ape the Apple interface (note that it stared with the min|max|close windows buttons moving left – seems socialistic to me) but if I wanted the Apple GUI I’d buy an Apple.  While I’ll contend that you’re paying too much for being “hip”, the Unix underpinnings of OS X are excellent.  That being said, I hate the Apple GUI.

Unity seems to be the desire to create and open source Apple GUI and, while the “classic” Gnome GUI is available in Ubuntu 11.04 it apparently is going away in 11.10.

Hence my search for my next Linux.  After seeing Mint mentioned in a number of places, I decided to give it a whirl.  And I like it.  I get Gnome back and the underpinnings are still part of the Ubuntu.  I’ve been using it for about a month now and everything seems to work just fine – or at least as well as it worked under Ubuntu.  (The Avermedia TV Tuner card in my Dell XPS 15 L501X still doesn’t work under Linux and it seems like it never will…)

I found this fix for fixing what seems to be a broken print-to-pdf in Linux Mint (more on that later).  I found it at Linux Mint Forums by WillGolfForFood

1. Launch your printer panel in the administration and printing.
2. Select the print to PDF “printer”.
3. In Settings, select the change button on the Make and model setting.
4. First one that is highlighted is “Generic (recommended)”. Choose it / Forward.
5. First one that is highlighted is “Cups-PDF (recommended)”. The driver is Generic CUPS-PDF Printer (recommended). Choose it / Forward.
6. Use the new PPD. Apply.
7. Select the print test page to confirm the output lands in your home folder (or wherever you have it configured to go).

First thoughts:

• I really dislike the Unity interface.  The buttons are too large and you can’t move the Unity bar elsewhere (e.g. bottom).  The head developer states that this is by design – so much for the user choice for configuration.
• I had problems installing VMware WorkStation.  You really need 7.1.4 as it fixes some problems.  I had, like others, problems with getting the display working.  That is, the VMware guest would run but I couldn’t display the console.  The fix from this, from a number of sources is to do the following:

export LD_PRELOAD = /usr/lib/vmware/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0/libglib-2.0.so.0
vmware

• The cube is gone from task manager – you can enable it but it is convoluted.
• I think that I’m going back to 10.10.  Less buggy.  There aren’t any features I’ve found that are good enough for me to upgrade at this point.

And yes, I’m actually getting worse in posting.

What?!?!  Two posts in one day!

I’m watching TWIT-TV- a great Internet TV “channel” for your inner geek.  Anyway, I wanted to watch the July 3rd edition as Jerry Pournelle – who I have read since his early Byte magazine days – was on that show.

I plugged my Mini 10v (the original 1011) into my 47LG70 LCD television via the VGA cable.  Lo and behold – unlike my Windows 7 installation that I killed off for – Ubuntu recognized it better than Windows 7 did!  It won’t do 1280p  (likely due to RAM issues) but it runs 720p quite well.  TWIT-TV works just fine with its HD display.  Display selection seems to work better than Win7.

Ubuntu, Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice (despite it being now owned by Oracle – time will tell…) is good enough it seems.

It’s summer so I tend to spend more time outside. This means cutting the grass (natch…), visiting people and places, and reading.

I read both fiction and non-fiction. Last book was the latest Clive Cussler (yes, it is Harlequin Romance for guys) release called The Spy which isn’t one of the Dirk Pitt series. Based around the turn of the 19th century (you know you’re getting old when you think “turn of the century” you think 19th-to-20th century and the yunguns today will think 20th-to-21st. Again, Natch…. Anyway, it is an different time and I like it.

Anyway….

I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.04 (upgraded from 9.10) on my Dell Mini 10v (the original Inspiron 1011) for the last 9 months. I originally installed Windows 7 RC and then RTM and, I have to say, that Windows 7 is MUCH better than Windows XP. Those of you who have used both will agree; for those of you who haven’t you should at a least get the evaluation version and try it. The only complaint that I have is that no operating system for a general purpose PC or laptop is not worth more than $100 new. I’ll go further and say that an upgrade isn’t worth more than $50. So, because I didn’t way to pay for Windows 7 for the netbook and I didn’t want to use XP as my standard OS. I’ve used Ubuntu when it first became popular (I’m an old Red Hat fan but after Red Hat 9 I wasn’t fussy about Fedora – anyway…) and decided to try it again.  I remembered that you used to be able to buy a Mini with Ubuntu Netbook Remix so it looked like a good choice.

I didn’t want to waste too much space on Mini so I only put aside 10 GB for Ubuntu.  Of course, I liked Ubuntu better than Windows 7 on it!  It uses less memory (I still only have 1 GB because putting in a new 2 GB DIMM is, frankly, ridiculous – could this have been a sop from Dell to Microsoft to let them install Windows XP?  “If you make sure you can’t upgrade the Mini to 2 GB it will be fine to sell it with XP” – simply supposition  on my part!) than Win7 and I can get all the apps I need under Ubuntu!

However, as I was transferring some movies from DVD to the hard disk I quickly found I had run out of space.  The answer: simply shrink the Win7 partition and increase Ubuntu partition.  The truth is that I got lazy and tried to try the easy way out – boot with the Ubuntu 10.04 install CD (yes, still small enough for a CD!) and use the partition manager from the install to resize the partition.  Well, I could easily shrink the Win7 partition but the Ubuntu partition wouldn’t resize.

Oh well, reboot to think about how to resize.  Lo!  Grub’s black screen of death.  Obviously, I killed Grub and needed to re-install the boot loader.  Thankfully, I have far too many systems in the house (my wife would suggest that more than on computer in the house is two too many 😉 and it was just to drop down to the office and do a search.   Google, being your friend, gave me the answer and after manually running through the boot loader commands I had the Ubuntu partition up-and-running.

I still had the problem of being out of Ubuntu space.  Back to Google again.  I found the solution with the obvious: GParted (see http://gparted.sourceforge.net/index.php).  This is a GREAT utility no matter what OS you use.  Also on the GParted page is the link to the UNetbootin (see http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/) which is how you can create a bootable Live USB drive.  GParted has the instructions to create the boot USB drive.  Works like a charm – recommended as well!

I was trouble-shooting a problem with what was (is) excessive CPU usage on my Dell Mini 10 netbook.  While looking for why the process  called “background”, which is somehow related to the X.org implementation, someone mentioned that for those of you who use the command prompt regularly a good replacement for the top command is htop.  It is curses based and allows you to use the arrow keys to go up and down the processes listed and then hit F9 to kill the task.  No more typing in the PID (or in my case sometimes mis-typing the PID – damn small netbook keyboard 😉 ) of the task that you want to kill.

You can find more information and distributions at the htop page in sourceforge.