Category: Geekery

I did not need that.

Last night, my UPS started beeping in the middle of the night. This happened once before recently, and that time I just pushed the button on the front to see if it would reset the problem, but it turned the power completely off. That time, after my linux box booted, the two external USB backup drives came up really slow, which caused the hourly rsync backups to take more than an hour, which caused all sorts of hilarity. So this time I decided to shut everything down gracefully before I reset. And yet, this morning I got up to find that four hourly backups are still running.

I killed all the backups, unmounted the usb drives, ran fsck (which didn’t do anything because it said they were clean), powered them off, powered them on, made sure it said they were “high speed” rather than “full speed”, and mounted them. And yet when I did an ls on each one, it hung for over a minute, and then had a message in the log about resetting the USB controller, and then it was fine. I’ve started an hourly backup, and it’s taken 15 minutes or more already and it’s still on the first drive. That’s not good. I wish I knew what was going wrong there.

My first order of business is probably to order new batteries for the UPS. Each time it starts beeping in the middle of the night, munin tells me that the “charge percent” has stayed at 100%, but the runtime in minutes has dropped to zero. Very odd.

Time to give up, or really give up?

I’m what you would call the last of the hold-outs. Until a year or so ago, I read my email almost exclusively with the command line/curses client “mutt”. I’d been using mutt since transitioning from the previous reigning command line/curses mail client “elm” around 1998 or so. I stubbornly continued using mutt for several reasons, not least of which was that I could ssh home and read my email on my own account on my own server, and have the same user experience whether I was home or at work. A year or so ago, work cut off my ability to ssh home.

I settled on a bizarre combination to replace it: I have a GMail account I can access at work. My home email is accessable through IMAP, and I read it at home with Thunderbird on my laptop, and on the go with SnapperMail on my Treo. I subscribed to all my high traffic mailing lists using my GMail account so I can read them when I’m at work. But because I’m stubborn, I’ve refused to unsubscribe them at home, and so-far have insisted on reading them with Thunderbird. Which leads to vast amounts of wibbling about trying to keep the two accounts synchronized – mostly by using my Treo to mark as read and deleted all the articles that I’d already read on my GMail account and the like.

But this is starting to drive me crazy. So as of today, I’m reluctantly giving up and unsubscribing my xcski.com accont from the mailing lists. I’m going to read them on GMail whether I’m home or at work. All that remains to be seen is:

  • Should I forward my non-mailing list traffic from xcski.com to GMail?
  • Or should I just give up running my own mail server entirely and sign up for “GMail For My Domain” or whatever the hell they call it?

If I take the last option, it would be sad to shut down my mail server. I’ve been doing mail service for a long long time and I was proud of how well it worked and how well the spam protection worked. Plus I’m not sure how the various daemons on my system that send email will work with GMail. Oh well, at least my mailing list mail server will continue to run.

That was relatively painless

I did the taxes today. It was a lot easier than I expected. Mostly because TurboTax did a good job of importing stuff from the previous year, and I took the tack that if I didn’t get a deduction for it last year, it’s probably not worth going through the form this year. Got a nice refund coming too.

Now that the most important time-sensitive use for this laptop is done, I can contemplate sending it in to get this heat-related Airport cut-out problem fixed. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but the fix I got at the Apple Store last weekend was only a temporary fix and it’s happening still, mostly when it gets really hot.

And because I know you’re all breathlessly waiting for another update on this…

I went to the Apple store today and the guy opened the laptop and said that the Airport card was just a tiny bit out of its socket – which he didn’t believe was enough to cause a problem, but I figure that the fact that the problem mostly happened when the laptop was warmed up and moving, makes perfect sense. He also said he put some insulating tape over the card as well so it wouldn’t make contact with the frame.

It’s been several hours and it hasn’t happened since. Woo hoo!

It’s definitely the hardware!

I booted my laptop with the install DVD, started up the Airport, and fired up Network Utility. I used Network Utility to continuously ping my Linux box, and put it down. Then Vicki and I went out to dinner. When I came back, it was still happily pinging, but as soon as I picked it up it the Airport died. I guess that proves once and for all that it’s not Parallels or something else in my installation.

You know, it would be a real shame if it was so broken that they had to give me one of the new glass screen MBPs, wouldn’t it?