urandom

Learning that the Linux Professional Institute offered a chance for taking exams at a reduced price during this year's FOSDEM, I decided to take a shot at the level 1 exams.
I was fairly occupied in the period before FOSDEM when I took that decision, but given that I've been using Linux heavily for over a decade, and after reviewing the objectives, I figured that I should be able to pass it without specific preparation.

Yesterday I received an email that indeed I did, so now I am officially a “Junior level Linux professional”.
I guess I should take a look at getting LPIC-2 sometime. Continue reading "I'm junior now"

While performing some research on the article about lighttpd, PHP and SSL I wrote a few days ago, I found out about a practical joke in Google's search results for the phrase “Once in a blue moon”.
The first result returned is an answer from Google Calculator, and the result they give is “1.16699016 × 10^-8 hertz”.

While this was obviously not a `serious´ answer, it had to make sense somehow — but it didn't immediately occur to me what it might mean. When I found out how often a “blue moon” actually occurs, every 2.7 years approximately, it seemed obvious that the above number had to be the frequency of that event. A little math confirmed this; inverse the above number and you get a number in seconds which is approximately 2.7 and then something.

Nice easter egg from the Google crew.

John, don't get too excited.
I hate to disappoint you, but I got #1 for “mysql takeover” on the very day I wrote about it. I also seem to be #1 for “CEST software”, simply because these are appearing next to each other whenever I post something about software, during CEST months. And I was on top for “converting from metres per seconds to metres per days”, too, but my silly post about it from two days ago already took over. For all I know, there are a few more like these, though none are obvious from search referrals yet.

I guess being on a few planets might be very good to your Google karma. (or should I say, pagerank?)

Still no solution on the issues I wrote about a few days ago.
Mentions of the problems are surprisingly few and in between; either it's not universal or people just don't notice / are not bothered by it.

Something awry on Gmail this evening... I've been having status messages — you know, the yellow/orangish overlay on top of the page that usually shows when an action has finished — telling me that "the system encountered a problem" for a few hours now while reading my email, intermittently.
Now all of a sudden, I'm dropped in the "old version" of the Gmail interface and there's no longer a choice at the top for the current UI, you know, the one with the funky coloured labels and such; which disappearance leads me to believe that it's not just a client side issue. I'm simply curious now how long it'll take them to fix things.

Update As I finished this post and went back to navigating through Gmail, the new UI is back. That didn't take them long...
Second update ... but the service also wasn't fixed, I almost immediately started getting error status messages again. And now I'm back into the "old" UI. As I'll be off for bed soon, I probably won't find out how long it'll take. Not that I'm that interested.

Last monday I had to order a computer for use as a workstation for a graphic designer. When I called Dell and asked for a specification on a Dimension system, the — overall very helpful and friendly — account manager stated that the Dimension range was discontinued for business customers and available for consumers only. He told me that the new Vostro line was their new SMB offer.

When I pointed out to him that not only was the Dimension still listed on their SMB web pages, but that the Vostro was inattractive because it could not be upgraded beyond 4GB of memory, he was surprised at first and then stated that `a 64 bit OS was needed anyway to be able to use more than 4GB of memory'.
But if I needed more memory, a Precision workstation would be a good alternative. Well, any Precision I could configure on the Dell website would end up costing 1.5 times as much as a similarly configured Dimension. (which means that I had to add a graphics card with higher 3D performance on the Dimension as what was needed, since this computer was meant for 2D graphic design)
At this point, the sales representative tried building a Precision configuration himself to specifications I had provided him with, but with maximum discount he could apply the price still came out over 30% (meaning, over 300 EUR) more than a Dimension to these same specs. At which point he gave in :)

I seriously hope that the sales person was mistakenly saying that the Dimension would go away as a Dell business offer (though that means that some review of internal communications would be in order). While I'm sure the Vostro line has it's merit, these are some points that make it a lousy or at least undesirable option in some cases:

• memory size limited to 4GB
• currently, no quad core processor option — while this may not be very benificial a lot of the time it would improve workloads that can make use of threading; in addition the Q6600 on the Dimension was only about 10 EUR more costly than the dual core E6600
• while it wasn't that much of an issue in this case, the actual lack of an option to configure a better 3D graphics card than the preconfigured card

The way I see it, the Vostro should be a valuable add-on to Dell's SMB offering at the bottom segment. Throwing out the Dimension would leave a hole between Vostro and Precision. And I'm not sure where exactly the Optiplex fits in; it appears to be more along the Vostro looking at specs, but it's price tag is closer to Precision — it's main feature seems to be a higher default support level.

The picture below is a hardware test setup I ran this morning, with an old and discarded motherboard which has a Pentium III CPU on it running at 733 MHz. Since that's still faster than any other system I own save for the ibook (which is a G3 running at 800 MHz), I wanted to see if it was truely broken as reported, or not. The issue, which I actually witnessed before, was that on initial boot it tended to restart up, to a few dozen times. These restarts could happen from early post BIOS stage up to while logging on. Once it had been powered on for a little while, the restarts would usually go away.



I assembled any missing parts - video card, memory, and an AT case from which I used the reset button as the power switch to the ATX motherboard - and started by running memtest on it. Which ran just fine for nearly half an hour; but I ran memtest before to try and help diagnose the problem and it had run fine then, too.
So I crossed my fingers and tried running a Linux Live CD from it. Unfortunately, after about half a minute the system restarted once again. The only parts remaining from the original system were the motherboard and CPU, power supply and DVD-ROM (but not the IDE cable). With that in mind, the most likely culprits are indeed motherboard or CPU.

Chances of being able to rescue the parts are nearly nil, but I'm still curious about what could be the actual failing part. Are there any thorough hardware tests around, which could be run (preferably) from bootable CD or floppy?

As I do not have feedreaders installed on every computer I use, and I'm too lazy to type in a few more characters, especially those outside the regular alphabetic range (and in addition I'm rather obsessive about having as few bookmarks as possible), I often visit Planet Debian by using Google.

Until recently, the first result when entering (without the quotes) "planet debian" was actually Debian Planet instead; but since a day or two, Planet Debian has overtaken it. Yay!