tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85766853776602925112012-02-09T10:27:56.636-06:00Are you PyCurious?Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.comBlogger431100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-81783879517363932512011-02-20T14:46:00.000-06:002011-02-20T14:46:52.134-06:00

Here is what I promised earlier. It's got all sort of caveat written all over it, but it seems to work. Comments welcome! This software is totally freeware and I'm not responsible for anything you do or don't do with it, any problems it causes or solutions it brings, etc... Htd.linenos { background-color: #f0f0f0; padding-right: 10px; } span.lineno { background-color: #f0f0f0; padding: 0 5px

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-86415036469073258082010-12-26T10:55:00.000-06:002010-12-26T10:55:46.573-06:00

p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; } A friend of mine has a Windows XP install which runs in a VirtualBox environment hosted by his openSUSE install. It works well for the two or three times a year it gets use. Recently, he needed to have the ability to print from the virtualized environment to his home printer. Since the printer was already set up on the host in CUPS, I thought that this would be

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-41573239781935168552009-10-12T21:04:00.002-05:002010-05-12T14:50:55.523-05:00

For some time now, I've been frequenting a small bicycle/coffee shop, The Uphill Grind in Cross Plains, a small town West of Madison and Middleton. I've tried the coffee at the "other" coffee shop in Cross Plains, and was not impressed. The stuff available at The Uphill Grind, though, is something worth driving all the way out to Cross Plains for (ok, so I'm only 10 minutes away but some of you

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-19117552844609206622009-09-03T11:47:00.000-05:002009-09-03T11:47:56.792-05:00

Previously, I blogged about a friend's situation where print jobs appeared to go off into the ether. I inquired about the situation recently and he said that it mysteriously resolved itself. Weird.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-69112479928355268932009-08-02T08:34:00.002-05:002009-08-02T08:45:45.810-05:00

Over the years, I've had a bunch of printers. My first printer (which I still have, and it still works) is an Apple ImageWriter II. A dot matrix printer. My second printer was an HP DeskJet 520. It worked (but was noisy) when I got rid of it a year or so back. I've had a slew of Epson inkjets (clogged heads doomed them all), a bunch of HP Inkjets (various issues), and some others. For the

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-39718943552675540712009-08-02T08:27:00.004-05:002009-08-02T08:34:09.584-05:00

A friend of mine came to me recently and told me that, for some reason, his printer wasn't working any more. I set this friend up with an openSUSE home server for printing, DNS, DHCP, and internet access (via qtsmppd) and by and large it works great. The printing is managed by CUPS, and the printer is an HP OfficeJet Pro L7680. It's a nice printer with Vivera inks. It is fast and generally

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-63369617681298897182009-07-27T22:41:00.001-05:002009-07-27T22:43:29.975-05:00

One of the pictures from the crazy storm last night. As I recall there was at least one tornado, and some serious wind, hail, and rain. We barely got wet but the clouds were awesome. More photoes here.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-15184494119950520772009-06-25T22:49:00.002-05:002009-06-25T22:58:19.719-05:00

It's been a while since I've commented on KDE. Partly, it's because I've been insanely busy with life and work, but I'm pleased to report that somewhere around 4.2.2 KDE started getting pretty usable. I ran 4.2.4 for a while before upgrading to one of the 4.3 betas, and other than one weird issue, it's actually be quite pleasant to use. By and large everything works, there are still some

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-3295615019138583502009-06-25T22:36:00.005-05:002009-06-25T22:49:35.423-05:00

I had a thoroughly impressive rant goin' on here but I just don't have the energy to type it all out. Suffice it to say that hplip-hpcups suffers from some fairly basic forgot-to-catch-the-errorcode problems, and it ate up an hour or more of my life. As a friend says, I'm entertaining when I have my indignation all worked up, but it's better in person.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-28432618866906608362009-03-04T21:03:00.002-06:002009-03-05T11:05:26.439-06:00

My State Government and especially Adobe have annoyed me. For reasons that escape me, the Wisconsin e-File Form-1, Form-1A, and Form-WIZ, all located at the Wisconsin Department of Revenue e-file page here, all require Adobe PDF Reader version 9. I ask: Why? For those that don't know, I run Linux and only Linux, and Adobe PDF Reader 9 is not available for Linux. Even if it were, I'm not sure I

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-38499075630768448522009-03-03T19:01:00.000-06:002009-03-05T09:02:50.060-06:00

Sadly, it has happened. The 6-bladed razor. Ugh. Blog entry from a blog entry. 6-bladed razor

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-36722223047817440172009-03-01T14:19:00.003-06:002009-03-01T14:38:33.918-06:00

I spent a bit of time this weekend trying to get suspend-to-ram (S3) working on my work-issued laptop. It works great. However, there are (as usual) some issues. The first issue is that it I cannot use s2ram when I'm running X, because for whatever reason s2ram with the right options works great outside of X but when the NVidia driver is in use there is a conflict of sorts (I believe it has to

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-35551330271311011232009-02-21T14:54:00.001-06:002009-03-01T15:48:40.195-06:00

I recently upgraded a 64 bit machine that was running a 32 bit version of openSUSE 10.3. I upgraded it to 11.1. Yes, I know this is a jump of two versions. The update didn't entirely hose the machine, but tons of stuff was left as i586 instead of x86_64, including a bunch of pam stuff. Thus, ssh did not work. LOTS of stuff didn't work. Like half of YaST2. Once I was able to get in, a 'zypper dup

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-62751865997478214182009-02-21T14:24:00.002-06:002009-03-01T15:48:59.893-06:00

As I mentioned earlier, I gave KDE 4.2 a try and it was a disaster. Since then, the team responsible have been producing almost nightly new releases, and these new releases have improved things considerably. Specifically, konsole, while still not without it's issues, is very usable now. The taskbar is usable, and the desktop area is usable. Assuming you turn desktop effects off, things generally

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-637802977712697292009-01-31T10:53:00.003-06:002009-03-01T15:49:12.455-06:00

I recently gave KDE 4.2 a try, thanks to the good folks at Novell. The install went fine, and it wasn't nearly as crashy as it used to be - I "only" got one crash of the window manager. By and large it works better, but it's still not nearly as usable as 3.X was for me. There is no way to highlight a program in the main menu and put it on the task bar. Moving things on the task bar as yet eludes

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-49502843050209241552009-01-07T18:28:00.002-06:002009-03-01T15:49:21.916-06:00

I recently upgraded a number of machines to openSUSE 11.1 from openSUSE 11.0. By and large the upgrade went perfectly, however, a number of issues cropped up almost immediately. The first was that I could not log in. I use an encrypted home directory via pam_mount. The pam options for various programs got good and hosed by the upgrade, and openSUSE's response to the bug I (and others) filed was

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-53592633530330757622009-01-01T12:17:00.003-06:002009-03-01T15:49:55.383-06:00

A recent upgrade to openSUSE 11.1 afforded me the opportunity to give KDE4 a try again. I'm a long-time fan of KDE3 and was hoping for pleasant surprises. I got half my wish. KDE4 may be a bit prettier in places (but not the fonts), but it's neither as consistent or as usable as KDE3 was. It's certainly not as stable or as fast (even with desktop effects turned off), and there have been a bunch

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-25101252734254543162008-12-13T10:53:00.003-06:002008-12-13T10:54:37.848-06:00

I just acquired one of these.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-30319617146477968562008-12-13T08:52:00.005-06:002009-03-01T15:49:55.383-06:00

For the past decade or so I've been using NFS inside my home network. NFS is one of those things that has a low-enough barrier to entry that it's really easy to get going, but it's opaque and esoteric enough that when things go wrong it can be a profoundly unreal experience. NFS has many weaknesses, however, among them security (there isn't any), performance (it's not as good as it should be,

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-15446856267117251622008-12-08T18:18:00.003-06:002008-12-08T18:33:11.460-06:00

As I blogged about earlier, I've been making use of NBD lately as my block-device-over-network exporter of choice (previously AoE). I got pretty reasonable performance out of NBD, easily in the 10s of MB/s - basically the limit of my iffy network hardware, however I wanted to know if there was more to be found. And there is! nbd-server, for one, uses the following basic paradigm: read data from

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-22195247334653141262008-12-08T17:45:00.003-06:002008-12-08T18:18:08.549-06:00

For the last few years I've been making use of drbd to provide a sort of semi-connected network raid1 as part of my overall backup and disaster recovery system. Recently, I've been experimenting with using nbd (network block device) and Linux MD raid1 (with bitmaps) to provide a similar functionality, and have some interesting findings as a result. Essentially, drbd takes some sort of storage (

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-48354549669620537322008-11-14T07:22:00.002-06:002008-11-14T07:28:31.632-06:00

Meme from http://pradeepgowda.com/blog/2008/11/12 and http://www.openhex.org/blogs/nicoe/200811130741_Phrase_from_nearest_book_meme Grab the nearest book Open it to page 56 Find the fifth sentence Post this sentence on your blog along with these instructions Don't dig your favourite book, the cool or intellectual one: the closest. Here is mine: "Where is it written in the Constitution,"

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-65313716571684233932008-10-30T09:55:00.001-05:002008-10-30T09:56:47.478-05:00

No. Comment.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-42060993998212329232008-10-06T16:18:00.003-05:002009-03-01T15:49:55.383-06:00

Today I helped some friends update their Acer 7720 laptop. It's running openSUSE 10.3 and one of the updates is a new kernel version, probably the riskiest of the periodic updates. Unfortunately, upon reboot, the wireless was shot. I spent an hour with their laptop until I hit upon just the right google which said something about the ipw drivers. Now, I had already removed all of the ipw* stuff

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-70908879699411694622008-09-04T20:23:00.004-05:002009-03-01T15:49:55.384-06:00

It's 2008 and printing on Linux (UNIX) still sucks. What follows is a serious grump about printing on UNIX, CUPS in particular, and why photo printing at home is still insane. CUPS has brought UNIX printing into the 21st Century but it's still cumbersome, opaque, and buggy. Only the very latest not-even-released-yet code has a USB driver that doesn't gack all over the floor most of the time.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-47262743060441607682008-07-29T13:02:00.000-05:002008-07-29T13:03:09.293-05:00

This is my '99 Triumph Trophy 900.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-50936729403510063052008-07-19T10:06:00.002-05:002008-07-19T10:10:57.516-05:00

I had the unfortunate situation where I had deleted some files (not many, only 2 or 3 files) and really did not want to re-do the week's worth of work. Google to the rescue. I found ext3grep, printed out the instructions (huge, need condensing for common-case), and built the software. It required a number of fixes to compile, which I'll forward upstream when I get a chance. Did it work? More or

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-71416692463680723092008-07-10T14:03:00.004-05:002008-07-13T12:08:42.029-05:00

Copyright: Copyright © 2008 Jon Nelson Date: Jul 2008 This is an expansion of a previous post ( http://pycurious.blogspot.com/2007/12/some-raid10-performance-numbers.html ). Since that time, I have redeployed using RAID10,f2. The redeployment went very well, but I'm not getting the performance I quite desired. More on that in another post. In the meantime, I slightly enhanced one of my

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-73847446270645557822008-06-24T21:15:00.006-05:002008-06-25T11:16:40.870-05:00

Source: 8.3 GiB, 154362 files on a Linux Software RAID 10, f2 layout. Destination: Western Digital 300G SATA - WDC WD3200AAKS-75VYA0, one partition. For each test the filesystem was re-created. The system was otherwise idle. AMD x86-64 3600+ (dual). All measurements are in seconds. Filesystem Performance Filesystem Copy Delete xfs (defaults) 1133

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-47865153639301577772008-06-22T00:28:00.003-05:002008-06-22T00:47:06.119-05:00

I first looked into dar a few years ago when I needed something to back up a friend's Windows machine at the filesystem level, and make it available to him (also on Windows) later. I more or less arbitrarily chose DAR. Since then, I haven't really used it. While rdiff-backup is working well for me, I'm always looking at other options. One option I was looking at is archive or file-based backups

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-22747830297000367172008-06-21T23:06:00.003-05:002008-06-21T23:43:10.723-05:00

I was recently exploring alternate disk-to-disk backup strategies when I ran across rdiff-backup. I liked what I saw, so I gave it a try. Quite frankly, it was awesome. It worked out-of-the-box (it even comes with openSUSE making it easy for me to install) and worked very well with no surprises. rdiff-backup makes good use of librsync to only tranfer the changed portions of files, and stores the

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-10453500418945811512008-06-12T21:27:00.000-05:002008-06-13T09:17:57.744-05:00

On Mar 10, 2008 I became aware of an AoE driver for Windows ( here ) which was under an Open Source license (GPLv3). Of course, I jumped at it and played with it a bit. However, I immediately felt that one missing bit was that all of the hoop-jumping to get it installed. I grabbed Inno Setup, a Windows Installer Maker that I've used before. It's very nice! However, I couldn't get it to do what I

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-37576341045934520652008-06-04T19:12:00.003-05:002008-06-12T09:50:48.200-05:00

One of the laptops that I work on from time-to-time is a friend's Acer 7720-6569. It's got an absolutely beautiful 17" display, nice sound, and overall the specs are very nice, especially for the money. It's a bit big, and there are some things which don't work quite right. One of them is the fan: I've been lead to believe (by this page) that Acer (among others) uses ACPI to control the fan

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-15838451040117710972008-06-04T19:02:00.005-05:002008-06-12T09:51:15.560-05:00

I was working on a friend's computer which needed a BIOS update. In it's infinite wisdom, the manufacturer provided update files which consume more space than can fit on a conventional 1.44MB floppy. Furthermore, the computer is a laptop without a floppy drive, like most laptops these days. How did I solve this problem? I'll skip all of the horrible, gory details of the 500 things that I tried

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-59786607879365444332008-03-01T08:26:00.001-06:002008-04-27T14:05:26.334-05:00

I really like the KDE desktop. It's clean, consistent, and very important to me - doesn't prevent me from making choices - it presents them, has sensible defaults, but they can still be changed. Additionally, everything seems to work together so smoothly and without-fuss. However, the I do typically change a number of the defaults and here are some of them:USB printers that "can't be found" (

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-48197653402812434072008-02-13T20:34:00.001-06:002008-02-14T07:57:28.425-06:00

Tonight I managed to get the sound working on the Acer Aspire 7720-6569 laptop a friend recently purchased. The long and short of it is that I had to acquire updated alsa drivers (and libasound) and userland. openSUSE 10.3 ships with 1.0.14 and it would appear that 1.0.15 (minimum) is required. A stumbling block I'll mention that may help somebody else is that I had to manually rmmod all of the

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-8784044443692638392008-02-13T11:22:00.004-06:002008-06-12T09:51:43.398-05:00

Last night I ran into some weird problems installing openSUSE 10.3 on a new Acer Aspire laptop - the laptop kept shutting off partway through the install! The laptop is actually a friend's, and he asked me to "set it up" which means throw openSUSE 10.3 on it, all the updates, a few tweaks and so on. The laptop is an Acer Aspire 7720-6569, which has a mobile Core 2 Duo T5450 at just shy of 1.7 GHz

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-36652468826601448542008-02-13T08:38:00.003-06:002008-02-13T08:46:42.579-06:00

I've worked on two notebooks recently where the built-in Intel Wireless did not work. Typically, I resorted to using a pair of USB 802.11g adapters I purchased from Zyxel. In this case, the chipset of the USB devices is ZD1211RW. I plug them in and they work perfectly. However, since one of the laptops was destined for a new user of Linux, I thought - why should this person have to buy/borrow an

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-72905244959395857052007-12-21T07:57:00.000-06:002007-12-21T07:58:26.686-06:00

Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee yummy yummy yummy coffee coffee coffee coffee.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-63542250160217641862007-12-20T20:11:00.000-06:002007-12-21T14:08:09.620-06:00

Why Python? I am a programmer. I have been programming professionally for over 8 years, and I come by it by way of the usual route - I discovered computers (an Apple IIe), learned BASIC, then Pascal, then C. I completed high school "knowing" enough C to be dangerous. I also new a bit of forth and assembly. While in college I learned Shell, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Scheme (a favorite!) and some

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-23700197352511908942007-12-19T22:24:00.000-06:002007-12-31T00:31:50.338-06:00

I've been using Linux software raid (md) for a very long time - more or less since the beginning, and it's quite honestly been great to me. I've always deployed in a raid5 configuration and never gave much thought to the other levels. Recently, raid10 became available. Not raid1+0 but was is considered (by some) to be a non-standard raid10 implementation which allows a non-even number of

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-67057155652586613742007-12-19T20:13:00.001-06:002007-12-20T20:11:36.647-06:00

I've been doing Linux since late 1994 when I defected from FreeBSD. I tried RedHat, Debian, and Slackware. I settled into (not the same as settling for) Debian, and didn't really use any other distro until 2000 or so. I played with Gentoo and a host of others. I learned a great many things - expanded my horizons as they say. RedHat, no offense to their great work, never really did much for me.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8576685377660292511.post-26067703155035509002007-12-19T20:10:00.000-06:002007-12-19T20:12:47.400-06:00

This blog is an experiment. I've been debating having a blog for, oh, nigh on a year now. More, perhaps. This blog may contain personal opinions, technology, grumps and gripes, but will probably involve Python, Linux, Software RAID (md), LVM, Block Devices, shell, and probably a whole host of other things, too.

Jonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03995814881901195370noreply@blogger.com0