Archive for the 'Geeking out' Category

Reorganizing the home office

Friday, September 18th, 2009

It’s a task I’ve been putting off for years — reorganizing the home office — but I’m finally doing it. The rack and servers that sat behind me for years is now finally in the basement, thanks to my Dad helping me run two 20A circuits for the equipment down there. Here’s what the room looks like mid-reorganization:

Home office reorganization in progress

Sure, my desk is still a mess, but that’ll also get taken care of once I put up some new shelves to better organize stuff.

The one thing I still can’t get over is how silent the room is, now. The fans from the various computers and the Liebert UPS were loud! Over the years, I just got used to the low level noise and tuned it out, but now with the contrast of the room without the noise, it’s eerie.

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Optimum WiFi at ETD in Kinnelon NJ

Friday, September 11th, 2009

As I try to get some work done waiting for car repairs, I discovered that the ETD on Route 23 in Kinnelon, NJ, has Optimum WiFi within range. Being a Optimum Online customer, I get free access to it.

My initial opinion of this particular hotspot is really unpredictable latency and packet loss. Speedtest.net results:

Optimum WiFi speed test at Speedtest.net

It’s not bad – I’m posting this blog entry from the connection – but the latency and packet loss makes interactive sessions like SSH really painful. Still, it’s usable to get some work done – email, web browsing, etc.

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What should I do with old vintage BX cable?

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

I’m doing a bunch of electrical clean-up in the house and have a bunch of scrap vintage BX cable and boxes and switches – I’d hate to just throw these out in the recycling if they’re still worth something, to somebody.

It appears that the going rate for copper/steel BX scrap is around $0.20/pound and I probably only have 20-30 pounds of scrap so far, so it’s really not worth the aggravation of finding a scrap buyer.

Should I just dump this in the recycling bin? Anyone have better ideas?

Getting Adaptec afacli working on Ubuntu

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

In order to get afacli working on Ubuntu Hardy, I did these things:

1. Get afa-apps-snmp.2807420-A04.tar.gz from Dell.

2. Get libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 from Debian afacli depends on libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3.

Since I’m running Ubuntu x86_64, I put libstdc++-libc6.2-2.so.3 in /usr/lib32. Installing the rpm package under Ubuntu provides rpm2cpio which I used to extract afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm like this:

$ rpm2cpio afaapps-4.1-0.i386.rpm | (cd / && cpio -iudvm)

That’s it. You now have /usr/sbin/afacli.

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I take that back, Wolfram Alpha is made of win!

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Last week, I wrote that Wolfram Alpha still couldn’t answer such important (ha) questions such as “How is babby formed?

As you might expect, Wolfram Alpha’s gotten smarter already. Look:

Wolfram Alpha knows!

That’s what I call awesome. Well done, guys.