mike.mainguy

I set out to upgrade my older laptop to ubuntu 9.10 and I knew was going to have problems. Historically, the video card in this thing was a royal pain in the butt and just never seemed to work quite right. I loaded the OS, logged in, and was rewarded with a jumpy/twitchy user experience. I started researching and found a thread about some tweaks a few folks made to make things better. It turns out this didn't work for me, but a minor tweak to the tweak fixed me up. Notably, I downloaded the radeonhd driver from synaptic, changed the xorg.conf (created above) to use radeonhd instead of radeon, then removed the bit that seems to have been autodetected by X11 for thier hardware. This seems to have fixed my problem (for now). In addition, I can run the compiz visual effects (yeah expo). Here is my config: Section "ServerLayout" Identifier "X.org Configured" Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0 InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer...

I've been writing software for quite some time ( first computer ) and have seen a lot of strange stuff.One thing I realized is that there are fundamentally two types of bad programmers. #1 bad programmers that gets better. #2 bad programmer that don't. I can tell you I'm a #1: I routinely do things that are not optimal and "could have been done a better way", but don't beat myself up about. It is what it is and as long as the code "gets the job done", I'm OK with that. In addition, I'm OK with developers writing occasionally bad (wrong/suboptimal) stuff because I believe most folks can learn and get better. To this end, I found this amusing Bad Code Offsets But occasionally I run across a #2: There are people who do things in broken and difficult manners and no amount of exposure to "better ways of doing things" will yield fruit. These folks, once they find "a way", it becomes magically "the only way" and...

I just read some news about If microsoft, Linux, and OSX were cafe's I'm wondering... would people pay a few bucks to hang out with some linux (Ubuntu?) folks to help them fix their windows boxes so they run well? I know a lot of people who don't care which OS their running as long as things "work" and don't break. The latest few ubuntu releases sure seem like good candidates, I wonder if you just charged a cover charge to "non technical folks" and used that money to pay the rent as well as diet coke for the "technical folks" if you could make a business out of this. They techno weenies can run around being the gurus and helping folks out and the other folks can get super customized machines. Could even maybe even set up virtual windows machines on them so quicken and other non-wine software works. Interesting idea, not sure I have the business chops to make it happen. I know we've been running linux here for almost 2 years and the ...

I was just rereading a few posts from many moons ago (yeah, like 6 years) and realized that my employer at the time was postpending a crazy addendum to every one of my email messages. I really wonder how many people read this thing and exactly how legally applicable it is since the messages are now archived all over the dang internet. As an example from 2003: http://www.servlets.com/archive/servlet/ReadMsg?msgId=411933&listName=taglibs-user Perhaps this thread from a few months before that caused the company to start applying the extra stuff to the message: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/struts-user/200312.mbox/%3CC29830220D2FA74BA88CB5C62C946B32C0AF03@uskihsvpex05.kih.kmart.com%3E !Doh!

In honor of veteran's day I thought I post a "war story" to illustrate point. As a buck sergeant in the US Army many moons ago (1995), I was deployed to Hungary in support of IFOR to enforce the military portion of the Dayton agreement. At some point, I was forward deployed with a team mate to go to all of the personnel service detachments and set up their digital communication links back to germany (and subsequently the US). While standing around on the tarmac in preparation to get on a plane heading to Tuzla, a few of the other soldiers grabbed their ammo and packed it into the middle of their 'A' bag. I thought nothing of it, but the guy I was with walked over and asked what they where doing. It turns out the Air Force did not want us flying with ammo and they wanted us to give their ammo to them. These other soldiers (old school combat arms guys) where NOT about to give their ammo to some tech sergeant who may or may not remember to give it back, so they ...

I have a couple of old linksys wrt54g routers lying around. They stopped working 100% over the years and I just bought another one instead of trying to fix the one I had. Surfing the internet I stumbled across a linux firmware image for them that allowed you to reconfigure them to do some wicked cool stuff http://www.dd-wrt.com/site/index . Since I just donated an old laptop (without a wireless adapter) to my son and I've been wanting a way to get my old ps2 hooked up the the wireless router, this looked like just the trick. I downloaded the firmware images, flashed the router, and suddenly I had a little linux router I could configure and tweak to my heart's content. I could do really cool stuff like connect wirelessly from my router to another wireless router and bridge the networks together. This means my ps2 upstairs can now connect to my old linksys and it will forward all the traffic to my new wireless access point downstairs (sweet!). It also allowed me to bump up ...

We run debian (or ubuntu) as our platform of choice, and largely this is great. If we want software we just apt-get install the package and we're ready to go. The downside is, however, that occasionally a package won't exist (or only an older one will exist). In my case I wanted tomcat 6 on lenny. Previously what we would do is each server install would require a set of instructions to follow (untar foo into bar, symlink this or that, etc). This led to a situation where we had 4 different ways our various server where set up. In order to make this "better", I wanted to build a .deb to make the install/removal/upgrade process easier. I could have done the "right" thing and build the proper package from the source, but it turns out it is relatively simple to build your own .deb binary, so I did this instead. I used these instructions http://tldp.org/HOWTO/html_single/Debian-Binary-Package-Building-HOWTO/ After about 4 hours (there were some false starts)...

We currently user nagios for network monitoring, but it has a buttload of crazy config files to even remotely work correctly. As an alternative I decided to give opennms a try to see if there wan easier way to keep track of thing. Note, my home network is probably more complicated that many small businesses as I've got around 10-12 computers/printers/wireless bridges/media servers/etc running at any given time and I have android, linux, windows, Mac all connected at various times. The reasons for trying opennms where: #1 free (as in both speech and beer) #2 it purportedly supports autodiscovery (please work!) #3 it's java based (no shell scripts??) So I installed via synaptic, and promptly dicovered that it requires postgres out of the box. I additionally had a couple of "gotchas", which I'll document here. Off the bat, I tried to start via sudo /etc/init.d/opnenms start and it immediately complained and said I needed to do some extra setup steps. Let...