It's Not Rocket Surgery

QA Help Wanted

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 22:24:28 +0000

MySQL Sun Oracle needs QA help. How do I know this? Because I’ve used their products.

We use MySQL 5.1.x “Enterprise” on several servers at work. We have several production servers that are replicated to slave servers as hot spares, reporting servers, and to a disaster recovery server. As part of our setup one of our backup servers needs to replicate from two different servers and databases to two different local databases. So, I need to run two instances of MySQL. There are three basic ways to accomplish this: run two instances of MySQL directing each to a different configuration file with appropriate port, directory, pid file settings; use mysqladmin to manage multiple instances; use mysqld_multi to start multiple instances. Mysqladmin has been deprecated and will be removed in 5.4, so I’m not investing energy in that solution. Option one will work, it just means more files to manage. Mysqld_multi allows using a single configuration file with definitions for each server instance. It’s straightforward and pretty easy to set up.

Mysqld_multi is a Perl script that parses a single config file containing multiple server instance definitions. There is just one problem. It doesn’t work. It throws the following error:

Unmatched right curly bracket at /usr/bin/mysqld_multi line 171, at end of line
syntax error at /usr/bin/mysqld_multi line 171, near "}"
Execution of /usr/bin/mysqld_multi aborted due to compilation errors.

As a programmer, and sysadmin, I expect that an error like that must be the result of some combination of version incompatabilities or poor configuration. Since I had just upgraded MySQL to the latest version this made sense. I updated all the packages on the server, rebooted, tried again.

Unmatched right curly bracket at /usr/bin/mysqld_multi line 171, at end of line
syntax error at /usr/bin/mysqld_multi line 171, near "}"
Execution of /usr/bin/mysqld_multi aborted due to compilation errors.

After way too much effort I pulled the script into a language aware editor and found that the script did, in fact, have an unmatched right curly bracket. I removed it. I ran it again, thinking that this couldn’t possibly be the problem. A large technology company like Sun Oracle wouldn’t let a product out the door with this kind of fundimental bug. They must have run this script at some time and found this error. No, they didn’t. Once the errant bracket was removed, the script ran. Perfectly.

Coincidentally, I just received our quote from Sun Oracle for “enterprise” support for MySQL. Seems kinda high.

Android App Inventory Update

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:27:50 +0000

The last time I took a look at what was running on my G1, the list looked like this:

K-9 Mail
Weather Channel app
Greed
Locale
AppManager
TasKiller
OI Safe
T-Mobile MyAccount
FaceBook app.
Twitdroid and TritterRide were on my phone for a while. But, as little as I use Twitter, I found it was easier to just put a bookmark on my home page and use the web site directly.
Mobile Defense by Neevo.
Cyanogen ROM image.
Retro Clock and Retro Date widgets.

I posted this list last September. A lot has changed since then. For one, I dumped the Cyanogen ROM and when back to the straight factory issued 1.6 firmware. After several total reinstalls from scratch episodes, I decided I needed my phone to work reliably more than I needed the benefits of the alternative ROM. I do miss the ability to move apps to the SD card.

The Retro Clock and Date widgets are still here, front and center. Joining them on the home page is the Weatherbug widget. The Weather channel app really lost performance with the admob ads running. And the Weatherbug widget just looks and works better.

I’m still using the Facebook client. It seems to work fine, especially for as little as I use it. I’ve been trying out more Twitter clients. I’ve tried Seesmic, Swift App, and now TweetCaster. I like Swift App quite a bit, but TweetCaster has displaced it recently. So far, I really like it. Greed is still my Google Reader client of choice.

I am still running Mobile Defense, OI Safe, and T-Mobile MyAccount.

If I am actively buying, selling, or just shopping on eBay PktAuction is on my G1.

The most recent change is that I dumped Locale. I had been running a beta version for a while. It work well enough, but since it relied on the GPS, it was a battery hog. The beta expired, and Locale is now a pay app. Which is fine, but the price is $10. I really like the concept behind Locale, but it doesn’t work well enough to pay $10. And reports on the new version have not been positive. So, I search for replacement, and found Setting Profile. It does basically the same thing, and costs $3. It does not rely on the GPS for positioning, but either on cell signal triangulation, a specific cell tower ID, or a WiFi AP SSID. Although none of these provide the precision of the GPS, they are more battery friendly, and less fiddly when going in and out of buildings. It has taken a couple of days to learn how to set up profiles, rules, locations, but it’s working pretty well. I recommend it as an alternative to Locale.

That’s the inventory highlights. What’s on your ‘droid?

Plug Into Plug Computing Update

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:23:42 +0000

This is an update to an earlier post: Plug Into Plug Computing. There have been several new products and resources that have shown up since that post.

In the software arena, OpenPogo is moving to PlugApps. In response to the limited NAND memory available in the PogoPlug v2, the hackers in the OpenPogo project have created a new project and site, PlugApps. This is a Linux distribution that will boot from an attached USB drive, rather than replacing the supplied OS on the PogoPlug, TonidoPlug, or SheevaPlug. The site includes information to help decide if OpenPogo or PlugApps is the right direction for your plug hacking needs.

There are two wikis I didn’t know about when the earlier article was written:

PlugCompter.org and ComputingPlugs.com

And new products (or announcements, at least):

Marvell Plug Computer 3.0 has been announced. It has a 2Ghz ARM based processor, integrated wireless, and a hard drive. This is currently an OEM product, so there is no indication if or when it will show up as a consumer product.

Global Scale Technologies, reseller of the SheevaPlug dev kit, have added 3 new products for pre-order (March delivery):

GuruPlug Server

Linux Kernel 2.6.32
1.2Ghz CPU
512MB RAM
512MB NAND Flash
Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
U-SNAP I/O
1 Gigabit Ethernet port
2 USB Ports

GuruPlug Server Plus

Same as the Server except the follow port configuration:

2 Gigabit Ethernet port
1 eSATA
2 USB Ports
1 MicroSD Slot

GuruPlug Display

Linux Kernel 2.6.28
1.2Ghz CPU
512MB RAM
2GB NAND Flash
4MB SPI Flash
Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
Wi-Fi 802.11n
U-SNAP I/O
1 MicroSD Slot
1 HDMI Port
1 100Mbit Ethernet
3 USB 2.0
1 Mini USB 2.0 OTG

Pricing ranges from $99-$149. These are dev kits, with no application software, just the base OS.

And a mainstream media mention:

Popular Science

A TonidoPlug Is Plugged In

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:31:52 +0000

I have added a companion plug computer to my 3 month old PogoPlug (Version 1), a TonidoPlug. For the same $99 + shipping I paid for the PogoPlug (the new version 2 PogoPlug is now $129), I got almost identical hardware and a lot more software. I’ve had the unit up and running for a couple of days, so this is not an in-depth review.

The TonidoPlug is built on the same Sheevaplug platform as the PogoPlug version 1 (and others), with the exception that the TonidoPlug has more RAM. Both units came nicely packaged, the consumer plug manufacturers have paid attention to Apple here. As with the PogoPlug, there isn’t much in the package: The plug computer, a power cable, an ethernet cable. Plug it into power, your router, add a USB drive, and you are up an running. Actually, you can set up the TonidoPlug without the USB drive attached, but some functionality will be necessarily absent.

The hardware is basically the same, so what makes the TonidoPlug special? Ubuntu for one. The plug is running Ubuntu 9.04. So it has a very recent Linux kernel, and messing around the plug via SSH is similar to any other Linux server. Apt-get is there, as well as other standard Linux tools. More on this later. The main difference between the PogoPlug and TonidoPlug is the Tonido software suite. This is a collection of apps running on the TonidoPlug, and administered as plug-ins in the Tonido admin app. This is in addition to the plug administration app to handle the low level setup of the plug (adding SMB shares, mounting drives, etc.). The apps include: Explorer (file explorer), Torrent (bittorrent client), WebSharePro (file/drive sharing), Workspace (PIM, group collaboration), OpenID (OpenID server), Photos (photo sharing), Jukebox (mp3 server), Money (personal finance), Thots (basic blog), Desktop Search, Backup. In addition for $19.99, you can add an SSL cert to run these apps over SSL.

PogoPlug is mostly focused on file/drive sharing. And it does it well. I have used mine to make my files available to me wherever I have internet access. And I have used it to make photos and other files available to other people via an obfuscated URL. This has worked well to transfer large numbers of large files to people with minimal computing skills. But, that is about it. And this functionality requires the intervention of the PogoPlug.com services to make the connection to your PogoPlug.

The TonidoPlug is much more autonomous. It does support a re-director service to connect you and others to your TonidoPlug via a sub-domain. But, you can use DynDNS.com or any other dynamic IP service. Or, if your plug has a static IP, you can point your self managed domain name to it. It’s your choice. I tried out the WebSharePro, OpenID, and Torrent apps so far. The Torrent app works well. It’s similar to using the Transmission web client. WebSharePro is taking a little getting used to. I haven’t figured out yet how to set a readonly share that I can send a link to someone to gain access. It appears to require setting up individual users, with usernames/passwords. I’ve only just started using it, so I won’t say it can’t do it. The OpenID server seems to work fine. I was able to log into serverfault.com using my TonidoPlug OpenID URL. I like that. That is all I have had time to explore so far.

As I said earlier, the TonidoPlug runs Ubuntu 9.04. So, if there is room, it should run most anything that will run on the ARM version of Ubuntu. I installed Webmin and Firefly using guides found in the TonidoPlug user forums. It took some tweaks to get them both running. Firefly picked up my iTunes library, but doesn’t appear as a shared library on the network. More tweaking needed. Webmin works fine. The TonidoPlug is probably a friendlier hacker plug than the PogoPlug, but with more out of the box functionality than a plain Sheevaplug.

Look for a slightly used version 1 PogoPlug on eBay soon.

Plug Into Plug Computing

admin — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:44:00 +0000

Since my last post I’ve continued to use and play with my new Pogoplug. I’ve also run across more resources for “plug computing”. There are 4 main “plug computing” devices available on the market: The Pogoplug (the original which I have, and the new 2.0), the Sheevaplug, and the Tonidoplug. Each of the three address a different user base. Although the Pogoplug and Tonidoplug have the most user overlap. The Pogoplug has been marketed as primarily a disk/file sharing device. Both for users on the same private network, or over the internet. It provides this capability with a proprietary web interface, or driver software to present the shared drives as local drives. The Tonidoplug is marketed as “CLOUD-IN-A-PLUG“. It comes with the Tonido software suite that provides multimedia sharing, collaboration tools, torrent downloading, etc. Aimed more at shared application services, than just disk/file sharing. The Tonido software is available seperately, to run on the Sheevaplug. The Sheevaplug is a different animal. It is the bare hardware the Tonidoplug (and others) is based on. There is an OS (Ubuntu Linux based), but no end user “cloud” apps. It is sold as a development kit. This is plug computing for the DIY crowd. If you want to develop your own “cloud” in a plug system, this is the place to start. Or, if you are looking for a cheap way to learn about embedded development. And finally, the Seagate FreeAgent DockStar. This is a dock for the Seagate FreeAgent Go hard drives that incorporates the Pogoplug software, and unknown hardware to provide disk/file sharing over the local network and internet.

There are two other plug computing devices based on the Sheevaplug hardware:

CTERA CloudPlug – This is aimed at the business sector, it includes an eSATA port in addition to the usual USB. It also has an online cloud backup capability.

Quadaxis QuadPlug – Looks similiar to the other consumer plugs, also based on the Sheevaplug hardware.

In addition to the off the shelf products there are several online resources to augment these products:

Playing With the Pogoplug

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:18:19 +0000

I purchased a Pogoplug device last week. I have been playing with it for a couple of days. Being a tinkerer, I kept it in it’s out of the box configuration for nearly an hour. I unboxed it (sorry, no unboxing video, although it is packaged quite nicely), plugged it into my router, power, and a spare USB drive sitting on my desk. I logged into my.pogoplug.com, created a username/password and it found my pogoplug and I was able to access the drive and it’s files from my browser. I was expecting to be able to see a mountable drive like a typical NAS device like the Linksys NSLU2 device. But, the Pogoplug requires downloading client software to be able to mount the drives. Not a big deal, but it limits it usefulness in some ways.

But, there is a way to make the Pogoplug play other roles in your home IT infrastructure. OpenPogo is the place to stop to unleash your Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is a small Linux server running a very small OS configuration. It resides on a small partition in flash memory. There is a larger, unused partition on the flash memory. Following the instructions I have made my Pogoplug a bit torrent client, a TOR server, a media server, and a DynDNS update client. I can now offload bit torrent downloads to the Pogoplug, share my iTunes library, and access it by a domain name rather than IP address.

There have been a few hitches, nothing worth describing. It took a little work to set up the Transmission client daemon to add enough security to allow access from outside of my network. The TOR server setup was pretty quick and seems to work well. Firefly install and setup was very quick and seems to work great. There is a danger of overtaxing the small server with too many torrent downloads.

If you have some basic Linux skills and can manage to use Google, there is a lot you can do with this unit. I’m just getting started.

UPDATE: OpenPogo is giving away a Pogoplug go here: http://openpogo.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=212. Or follow them on Twitter, @openpogo for more info.

Aerial Photo Slideshow

admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:58:36 +0000

A slideshow of aerial photographs I took a couple of years ago:

Do You Really Want Me to Buy This?

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 02:58:03 +0000

My kids have been using an old PC I built 4+ years ago. It’s a an AMD Athlon XP 2800, that has a new habit of shutting down randomly. It was originally a Linux desktop and later a server. Now it’s retiring as a Windows XP Pro system. I wanted to replace it with a new off the shelf system. I don’t have the time, or desire to build another box right now. With Windows 7 arriving this last week, there were a number of sales on new systems. So, I did some shopping around to see what was available for $500 or less. I settled on an HP system that was going for about $479. It’s a basic system that will be good for my kids computing needs. I waiting until today, Sunday, to see if there were any new sales. Sure enough, the system I wanted was available at Office Depot and Office Max for $399. At Office Depot, the sale involved a mail in rebate. But, Office Max, which is only a mile away, had an instant “rebate”.

I walked in, located the system and was approached by a salesman. He was typical of the type of technology guru that find employment in the consumer electronics departments of big box retail stores. He assumed I was a technology idiot. I told him what I wanted, and he went off to see if there they had any left in stock. He gave me a sales flyer with additional “deals” if you were buying a new system. He returned a couple of minutes later with the “last” one they had. He asked me if I was interested in a copy of MS Office Home & Student for $70. I told him I would be interested if it were the Mac version. (My wife can use it on her Mac). His response: “No, we can’t do that. Why would you want to, anyway? It won’t work on this PC.”

If you have ever bought any consumer electronics item then you heard the inevitable extended warranty sales pitch. He quickly outlined the benefits of spending 25% of the cost of the system on an extended warranty. I gave him the only sensible answer to the offer, “Thank you, no i’m not interested”. He took another tack on explaining the benefits. I then informed him that in the last 25+ years of owning computers (starting with a VIC-20), I have never needed to use the standard warranty on a new computer, much less an extended warranty. This did not deter him. He brought out his A game argument. “We are losing money on every one of these systems. The only way we make money on them is by selling the extended warranty. I’m not trying to pressure you for my benefit. I’m doing this for the companies benefit.” So, I am supposed to feel guilty that the company has chosen to employ a moronic business model (“We’re losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume!”) and spend another $119 to help the company stay afloat. He then passed me off to the register clerk to finish up. He then threw a nice condescending “Good luck!”, as he walk off.

I’m a pretty tolerant person, (my wife would have walked after the response to the Office question) but I was about to tell him where to re-stock the PC, and walk. In this economy it seems to me that when you have a customer in front of you ready to spend money, you treat them with a lot more respect and deference. Apparently, I am just an “old economy” customer who doesn’t understand the “new economy”.

CyanogenMod Wiki

admin — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 19:58:12 +0000

If you like living on the Android edge, there are a number of alternative ROM images to try. I’ve ran the CyanogenMod image for several weeks before switching to “Donut” last week. If you want to give it a try, take a look at the new wiki. Several step-by-step tutorials, reference info, troubleshooting guides. It’s better than a lot of commercial software out there.

Doing Donuts With Android

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:27:47 +0000

I had been running with the Cyanogen mod ROM on my T-Mobile G1. And other than an aborted attempt at running one of the experimental versions, it’s been pretty glitch free. But now Android 1.6, or Donut has been released for Android devices. And, Cyanogen had been slapped with a cease and desist from Google for distributing the proprietary Google apps with the open source Android version he had been producing. So, after a few weeks of work, Cyanogen is back with a new version that by backing up your existing apps, it updates the non-proprietary portion of the OS. A very clever solution.

Unfortunately, the upgrade didn’t go smoothly for me. I ended up doing a factory reset and am now running the stock Android 1.6. I’m going to run it for a while, before trying to ‘upgrade’ to the Cyanogen ROM. So far, I miss the small speed bump of the Cyanogen ROM. But, I do like the new market. Otherwise, I haven’t seen much different from 1.5 that impacts day to day usage.