My Mud Is Dead
Almost a year ago, I announced Mudding Is Dead. I held on to my mud for as long as I possibly could even though no one was playing it. I built a new server, and put it online a few weeks ago. The new server had a new OS, new compiler, new libraries, new everything. I had to recompile my mud to get it to work under the new architecture. It didn’t compile cleanly. I spent maybe 30 minutes messing with the code fixing the east stuff, and then I hit a snag that wasn’t hard, but required some reworking of the internals of the mud. Entirely possible. Entirely easy. Not entirely trivial. I have the skill to fix the problem, but I just don’t have the time.
I sent an email to the staff (only one of whom cared enough to reply) telling them that the mud was dead, and those people that had shell accounts on the server would need to get their stuff because at the start of the new year, I was going to blow it all away. Today was the day that arrived for me to blow that stuff away, and I did. There were some really great things in the mud, so I did, of course, back it all up to a tarball.
While I was backing things up, I came across idea files, databases, notes, and other stuff… Man… we had some awesome ideas in there. We also had some awesome ideas that never got implemented.
It was really sad shutting down and removing everything. I knew that it was inevitable, but that makes it no less sad. My good friend died a long and wasting death. I knew that it was coming, and I made him as comfortable as possible during his passing, but it came time to shed a tear, bury the body, and say a final goodbye.
Fare Thee Well, Spear of Insanity. You will be missed.
Guelphism
Random word list:
spermatozoic
paranitrosophenol
Guelphism
Slovintzi
masque
Word chosen: Guelphism
Definitions:
1. a member of the political party in medieval Italy and Germany that supported the sovereignty of the papacy against the German emperors: opposed to the Ghibellines.
2. a member of a secret society in Italy in the early 19th century that opposed foreign rulers and reactionary ideas.
Free association word list:
Pope Bennedict
Modern Inquisition
Spanish Inquisition
torture
waterboarding
interrogation
General Attorney
nomination
Senate
vote
approval
balance of power
unbalanced
spying
telecom industry
EFF
Steve Jackson Games
Secret Service
Word chosen: EFF
Writing:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was started when Steve Jackson Games was erroneously raided by the Secret Service for things that they had nothing to do with. One of SJG’s authors was working on a role-playing supplement called “Cyberpunk” for the GURPS RPG. During the course of the author’s investigation, he came across plenty of information on hacking, phreaking, cracking software, and the people that do such things. Most of this went into the game as rules on running these situations. Turns out that the Secret Service thought it was a how-to manual, and raided SJG’s office.
SJG lost all of their computers, all of their in-process work, lots of equipment, and Steve Jackson damn near lost the company. He had to cut back so severely that he had to lay off half of his staff! In the end, SJG persevered, and is thriving quite well.
The EFF was the organization that helped bail SJG out of their legal troubles, and went after the Secret Service to get justice for SJG. Ever since those days in 1990-1991, the EFF has fought the battle to keep our electronic communication mediums open, honest, secure, and private from the prying eyes of the government.
I’ve been a moral supporter of their efforts for years and years, but I only recently joined the ranks of the monetary supporters since it was only recently that I was able to do so. I hope to be able to continue my membership with them for quite some time.
If you have any fears about privacy in our digital age, and what people are doing to protect that privacy, please check out the EFF. They’re a great group of people doing great things for this nation and its citizens.
Their web site is located at: http://www.eff.org/
extraocular
Random word list:
well-acquainted
extraocular
iodopsins
half-erased
nonpoisonousness
Word chosen: extraocular
Definition: Inserted exterior to the eyes; — said of the antenn[ae] of certain insects.
Free association word list:
eyes
bad vision
lasik
lasers
burning
slicing
dicing
chopping
Mr. Popeil
Weird Al Yankovic
UHF
VHF
VHS
DVD
high-def
television
analog signal
FCC phasing it out
ham radio
ham fest
electronics
computers
upgrades
operating systems
lots of problems
wasted weekend
Word chosen: wasted weekend
Writing:
I run Ubuntu on my work laptop, and Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) came out a few weeks ago. I sat back and read the forums to see if anyone had issues with an upgrade. I was also waiting for the mirrors to cool off, so I wasn’t fighting millions of other computers for bandwidth during the upgrade process. The time seemed right to do the backup. I was going to do it last weekend, but I was on call, and I didn’t feel like putting my system out of commission while on call.
This weekend was the big weekend. I backed up my laptop Friday night, and fired off the upgrade process. It had about 1.5 gigs to download, so I walked away. When I got up Saturday, the upgrade was downloaded and the install was going. I sat in my office for about an hour answering the random questions about config files as they came up. After it was done, I spent another hour fixing my customized config files (which were saved by the upgrade process.) I also had to fight with my video drivers. It took a couple of settings changes and two reboots, but I finally got it worked out.
Then I started eye-balling my personal laptop. I was running Windows XP SP2 on it, and I decided that I was tired of Windows. I still wanted to keep a Windows partition around for the rare game that I play. I downloaded the latest version of gparted, and Ubuntu Desktop, before leaving for my RPG Saturday night.
I got up Sunday morning, and started backing up my Windows stuff to my external hard drive. While that was going, I burned gparted and Ubuntu to their respective disks. Once the backup was done, I decided to clean up Windows as much as I could to see how small I could make the Windows partition. After spending most of the day tracking down random temp files, backup files, unwanted software, and all that good stuff, I had my Windows down to 25 gig. That sounded huge to me, but I didn’t want to wipe and reinstall Windows. I decided to go with a 35 gig (out of 100) partition for Windows.
I booted off of the gparted CD, and gave it the commands to remove all partitions (linux, linux swap, and two tiny partitions that came with the system that I’m not sure what are on them,) and then resize the Windows partition. Ugh. gparted couldn’t do it. The Windows partition was 1032 sectors in size, and gparted can only handle partitions that are 1024 (or less) sectors in size. Unfortunately, by the time it realized this, my Linux partitions were gone. It did that first since that was the order of instructions that I gave it.
Since I was using GRUB as my bootloader, and the GRUB configs were on the Linux partition, my system wouldn’t boot. I threw in the Ubuntu CD, and booted from it. I installed Ubuntu, so that it would install GRUB, and then allow me to boot the system. This went fine, but was a waste of about 25 minutes.
Once I was back in Windows, I fired up Partition Commander, which can handle those larger partition sizes. I told it to move and resize the Windows partition. This started crunching along, and then failed with some error number (don’t remember the number) that was totally useless to me. I was beginning to wonder how I was going to accomplish my goal.
I booted back into Windows to find that several DLLs had been mangled. I threw in my Windows CD, booted into rescue mode, and restored the DLLs. This allowed my system to boot back up, but there was a problem with the driver for my PCI-Express BUS, which I assume my video card connects to. I assume this because my video was not working properly. I was running 16 bit color in 640×480 resolution on my 17″ widescreen LCD. HUGE icons and text ensued.
I spent the next three hours trying to rescue Windows, but it was beyond hope. It was at this point that I decided to wipe everything. I booted off of the gparted CD again, and wiped all partitions. Then I created the three partitions that I needed (35 gig for Windows, 84 gig for Linux, and 1 gig for swap.)
The next step was to boot from the Windows CD and start the Windows install. I was nervous doing this because it was a CD that I burned from my laptop as part of the “create rescue CD” software that came with my Dell laptop. I did not have a serial number or anything like that anywhere. Fortunately, the software didn’t ask me for one. (I did find it a short bit later on the bottom of my laptop, though. Good to know that it’s there.)
The state of things right now is that Windows XP SP 2 is installed and patched up-to-date. I have a fairly decent list of things to install on Windows. I’ve gotten a few things off of the list, but the rest will come tonight after I get home.
Once I get Windows back to where I want it, the next step is to re-install Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) on the Linux partitions, and get all of that setup and configured. That will probably happen Wednesday night as we have a meeting with our doula Tuesday night.
As an aside… We have a print-server-in-a-box with network, and two parallel ports on it. It takes some funky Windows drivers to be able to use it. Kiara pointed out that I probably wouldn’t be able to use it if I went with pure Linux. She was right. However, a quick google for “linux netgear ps110″ lead me to a few pages that pointed out that the ps110 was an embedded Linux device running lpd. Hah! The funky Windows drivers were doing nothing more than translating Windows print commands to Linux print commands and talking to lpd. I tested things on my work laptop, and within a few minutes, I was able to print to the printer. It even sent the data over the network about 10 times faster than my Windows laptop. Schweet!
Hopefully the rest of my upgrade/install attempts go more smoothly than they did on Sunday.
maundy
Random word list:
disqualifies
fannier
hyperfastidious
interveniency
maundy
Word chosen: maundy
Definition: the ceremony of washing the feet of the poor, esp. commemorating Jesus’ washing of His disciples’ feet on Maundy Thursday.
Free association word list:
Jesus
savior
Heaven
conversion
Heather
Katie
Mrs. Setzer
The Dark Side of the Moon
Space Shuttle
Space Station
solar power
repairs
good job!
space role-playing
Alternity
current Saturday night game
crazy
bat-shit crazy
Phil the Robot
escape from the Inhibitors
…for now….
FTL travel
Word chosen: current Saturday night game
Writing:
I could write for hours on this topic, but our current Saturday night game that Kolvedic is running is a hoot! We’ve been playing it for several months. I could try to summarize everything that we’ve been doing, but I think I’ll just describe (from my point of view) the characters (and one NPC) that are on our ship, “Smooth Operator.”
Spice is playing a homicidal mercenary named Greer. She’s all in favor of killing the easy targets, and really hates getting into tight spots. However, she’s always there when we need her, and has pulled us from the fire a few times.
Jhianna is playing Lephanie. Lephanie is an archaeologist that specializes in Forerunner technology, civilization, language, culture, etc. She’s also an open book. She will blather the honest truth to anyone that is asking her questions. She, like all of us, has some Conjoiner technology in her body and head. This means that we can talk to each other over a wireless network. It also means that other Conjoiners can do the same with us. More advanced Conjoiners can probe into our minds and get us to ask questions. Some of us can resist… Lephanie doesn’t have a chance!
Eric is playing Michael, who is a psion that seems to always have trouble follow him (which is not a unique trait in this group.) He always somehow manages to get loose from the trouble, but not without a little death following him. Michael is very proficient at causing physical harm to people, and I think he enjoys it a little.
I’m playing Marcus, who is a former hero of the Empire, and, through some twists, decided to join the rebels. Well, he still wishes harm to the Empire, but not her people. Things have come up that have caused him to maybe switch back to the Empire’s side. He’s really not sure right now. Marcus is a leaf on the wind, and we’re in the middle of a hurricane. He’s just trying to keep himself pointed in the direction of the moment, and is trying not to get anyone on his ship killed. He’s the captain of the ship, and he feels responsible for everyone on board. He had hoped to have retired from the military to smuggle goods to the rebels as a merchant. That pretty much didn’t happen. Now, he’s just struggling to keep his head above water, and try not to let anyone around him drown.
We had two NPCs on board, but one got fed to the Green Flies as part of a (we think) necessary step to stop the Inhibitors. The other was a psion from Earth that can through some strange technology see the future in bits and pieces. We had the leave him behind on the capital ship, Tellus, so he could guide them through building a faster drive system to get them unstranded from the middle of dead space, and on their way to the nearest star system with their hull full of refugees.
Now, we only have one NPC. It’s Phil. How to explain Phil? We first met Phil, and he called himself “The Sentinel.” He had been alone in a Forerunner complex for over 20,000 years, and had pretty much gone bat-shit crazy from loneliness. How did he survive so long? Well, he’s a robot packed full of Forerunner technology… mostly weapons. Ouch. Somehow a few of our people decided to snag Phil (the name Eric gave him) and leave with him when we released the Green Flies to fight off the Inhibitors in the Tilo star system.
I could go on and on trying to make things about this game more clear, but it’s such a mess right now, that I’m not sure any level of explanation will make it clear. Don’t get me wrong. I’m having a blast on Saturday nights. It’s a great time, and I can’t wait to find out what happens next because, with Kolvedic running the game, it’s damn hard to predict. That’s part of the fun.
Good times, man… good times….
RSS Issues
I just added a bunch of categories to my blog system, and I’m going through and updating my older posts by adding categories to them. For some reason Serendipity thinks that it needs to update the post in my RSS XML file.
I’m going to continue doing the category changes, so you’ll just have to deal with the extra RSS feeds coming through. I hope to be done by the end of the day, and then things will return to normal…
NaBloPoMo Code
Just in case there’s a fellow Linux geek out there that wants the code that pulls five random words from the standard word list that exists on most Linux (and Unix) boxes, here’s the Perl that I whipped up…
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
$|++;
sub shuffle {
my $array = shift;
my $i;
for ($i = @$array; --$i; ) {
my $j = int rand ($i+1);
next if $i == $j;
@$array[$i,$j] = @$array[$j,$i];
}
}
print "Loading used words...";
my %usedwords = ();
open F, "used_words";
while () {
chomp;
$usedwords{$_} = 1;
}
close F;
print "DONE\n";
print "Loading dictionary...";
my @allwords = ();
open F, "/usr/share/dict/words";
while () {
chomp;
next if (defined($usedwords{$_}));
push @allwords, $_;
}
close F;
print "DONE\n";
print "Shuffling dictionary...";
shuffle(@allwords);
print "DONE\n";
print "Finding words...";
my @words = ();
foreach my $count (1..5)
{
push @words, $allwords[$count];
}
print "DONE\n";
my $print_words = join "\n", @words;
$print_words .= "\n";
print "Saving words to used words list...";
open F, ">> used_words";
print F $print_words;
close F;
print "DONE\n";
print "\nRandom Words:\n";
print $print_words;
Enjoy!
PS: Use at your own risk. I accept no responsibility for the use (or misuse) of this code. This code is guaranteed to do nothing more than take up space on your hard drive. If it eats other files, formats your hard drive, installs a rootkit, cures cancer, or destroys the world, then it’s not my fault.
NaBloPoMo
I’ve signed my doom for the next month. I just signed up for NaBloPoMo, which means that I should be posting every day for the month of November. I’ve been meaning to sign up for this for about two weeks, but I keep forgetting. Someone mentioned to me that it was nearing that time today, so I finally got off my tookus and signed up.
I’ve been really really slacking with the blog lately, and maybe this will kick me into high gear.
I thought about doing a “conspiracy theory of the day” set of blogs, but I decided to avoid doing that. I have several books (plus the Internet!) on the topic, but I just don’t have time to do the proper research on the conspiracy theories. Maybe I’ll throw in one or two here and there, though.
My plan is to do free associative writing. I’ve written a Perl script to pull out 5 words from the Linux dictionary word list (/usr/share/dict/words). I’ll pick one of those words, and then free associate single words or short phrases about the word that I pick. I’ll do that for about two minutes, and then I’ll pick a word/phrase from my list, and write about that for at least 5 minutes, or until I’ve exhausted my thoughts on the topic… whichever is longer.
There are 479,625 words in the file. That should result in some interesting things.
If this is your first time here, and you want to know more about me, then read through the archives. I think you’ll get a pretty good idea about who I am from my writings.
Here’s to hoping that I can post 30 days in a row!
PS: My son is due on the 21st, so my posts around that time and after that time may revolve around him… Just a fair warning.
First Test Still Going
It appears that I jumped the gun on my reporting that the first court test of the GPL had been side stepped. Looks like Monsoon Multimedia is going to comply, but BusyBox and the SFLC aren’t going to let them off the hook for past transgressions. Looks like they’re going to go for some sort of settlement as punishment to Monsoon Multimedia. As Daniel Ravicher says in this article, “Simply coming into compliance now is not sufficient to settle the matter, because that would mean anyone can violate the license until caught, because the only punishment would be to come into compliance.”
I fully agree. Breaking the law until you’re caught should result in punishment of some sort. It would be like letting a serial thief off the hook because he promises not to do it again after being caught red handed. There needs to be some sort of down-side to stealing something that someone else was kind enough to allow you to use for free.
Of course, I’ll keep you apprised as developments continue.
New Server
I’m building a new server that hosts this web site, my email, many other web sites, and other miscellaneous goodies.
The hardware is:
AsusM2NBP-VM motherboard
AMD64 X2 4800+ CPU (2.5 Ghz)
1 GB DDR2/667 RAM
160 GB Western Digital SATA 300 GB/s HD (three of them)
Sony 16X DVD-ROM/CD-ROM
Mid-tower case with 450 watt power supply
An extra 80mm fan (case came with 2)
Some SATA power connectors
80 wire ATA-133 rounded IDE cable (the case has a window, and rounded cable are cooler)
Got the hardware put together Friday night. First thing I did was setup the BIOS goodies. I wasn’t paying attention, and I went to set the integrated video card to the minimum RAM setting since it uses system memory. I set it to “disabled” instead of the lowest setting. Oops. After setting up the BIOS, I rebooted, and the system wouldn’t come up. I thought back on what I did, and realized my mistake. I cracked the case, removed the battery, and flipped the jumper to clear the BIOS RAM. Rebooted again, and setup the BIOS again with the proper settings. The lowest setting is 32MB of RAM for video. I really only need about 2MB. That’s 30MB of RAM wasted. Oh well….
Started installing the OS (Ubuntu Server 7.04 for AMD64), and it choked right near the end with a corrupted package. The package was the kernel image… Kind of need that.
I rebooted and ran the built-in CD integrity check. It found the problem. I burned a new CD, and did the integrity check. Same problem. I assumed it was a bad ISO, so I downloaded a new ISO. At this time it was about 1:30 AM Friday night, so I went to bed during the almost 2 hour download.
Got up Saturday, and the ISO was good. The third CD burned was good, and started the install. The problem that I noticed right away was that I had setup two the SATA drives to be a RAID 1 array in the BIOS/RAID controller, but the install package still saw three individual drives. I figured it would see two drives with one of them being the hardware RAID. Turns out the the RAID system on the motherboard is a combination hardware configuration and software RAID. Of course, the motherboard came with Windows drivers for doing software RAID, but this doesn’t help me. I decided to scrap the idea of having hardware RAID since that wasn’t an option. I rebooted, reconfigured the drives to be all independent of one another as far as the BIOS/RAID “controller” is concerned.
Did a configuration using software RAID under Linux, and did the install. The install went fine, but after I rebooted, I had black screen with a cursor at the top-left corner. Crap. GRUB wouldn’t even load. I figured it may be a problem with my software RAID settings, the hardware, the OS, or some combination of all three. I was able to boot from the CD, and then choose “Boot From First Hard Disk” and it would boot. Not an acceptable solution. I Googled and searched Ubuntu Forums for the rest of the day trying to find solutions to the problem. Tried troubleshooting GRUB, and software RAID, and hard disk configurations, and all sorts of stuff. I finally decided that I needed the Ubuntu Alternate 7.04 CD because there were some reports of it having better software RAID support. Unfortunately, Ubuntu’s site does not really tell you what the difference between desktop, server, and alternate are. Turns out that the server version that I was using does have software RAID support, so I didn’t need the alternate CD. While the ISO was downloading, I ran into town to pick up that rounded cable that I listed above. When I got back home, it was already 5:45, and I had to split to get to my D&D game that started at 6:00. I was late getting out of the house, but that’s ok.
Sunday rolled around, and I decided to do an install without using any kind of RAID. Just break the install down to the simplest form to reduce all variables. I used all three drives during the install. The first I put root (/) on. The second was for /home, and the third was for swap and /usr. Same problem. Ok. I knew that it wasn’t the RAID doing this. Had to be a hardware failure, or a BIOS misconfiguration. Like most BIOS books, this one sucked. There is a setting for “HDD SMART Monitoring”. Not sure what that is. I look it up in the book, and it tells me, “This allows you to enable or disable HDD SMART Monitoring.” No shit. WHAT IS IT? Come on!
Anyway, I roll through the BIOS settings without using the book since it’s worthless. I pay careful attention to each screen with all settings that are there. I finally get to a screen that lists all three of my hard drives. “Yep. They’re there.” I say to myself. I almost move on, but I told myself that I needed to pay special attention to every detail in the BIOS. I look a little closer, and I see some instructions on the side bar. It’s telling me that I can use ‘+’ and ‘-’ to change the boot order of the drives! Brilliant! I had already chosen my boot order to be CD then hard drive with all other options (floppy and removable media) disabled. This screen was actually letting me choose which hard drive to boot off of first! I looked a little closer, and my SECOND hard drive was listed FIRST. Huh? I didn’t do that! Why would #2 be the default first choice?? I don’t get it. This was why things weren’t booting! I had put my MBR and /boot/ on the first drive in ALL installs that I did, and that wasn’t the boot drive in the BIOS settings. What I don’t understand is that this is the “boot order” for the hard drives. If #2 failed, then it should have tried #1, and then #3. Nope. #2 failed, so it just choked and sat there.
I finally fixed the boot order for the hard drives to go in the logical order of #1, then #2, then #3. I then booted the system without a CD in it, and the system booted, loaded Linux, and got me to my login prompt! I felt like I was finally making some headway. Yay!
The next step was to boot from CD, setup my software RAID (RAID 1 for /) on #2 and #3. I then setup /boot, swap, and a large backup partition where my weekly rsync of / gets copied to just in case. I then ran through the install (again) and things worked just as I expected. After the install, I rebooted, and the system came up just like I thought it would on Friday night. Yay!
I then spent a few hours on and off during Sunday to get various things installed and configured on the box. I’m going to spend my evenings this week and this up coming weekend getting everything that I need installed, and as configured as I can get it.
The next step will be to get it online full time with a static IP at the colo. This probably won’t happen until I’m back from Breckenridge in the second week of Oct. Once this happens, then I’ll start copying the gigs and gigs (about 15 or so) of data that I have on the old server to the new server and making sure that things work. After a week or two of doing this, I’ll do the cut-over, and then take the old server offline after a week or two delay which will help me ensure that I didn’t miss anything.
I’m itching to get home tonight, so I can start throwing packages on the new server to get it all going. Should prove interesting!
First Test Sidestepped
Looks like the first test of the GPL in a court of law has been sidestepped. I’m glad that Monsoon Multimedia has promised to do the right thing. I hope that they follow through with their promise, and publish their code changes.
My only gripe about this whole thing is that it was a solid case in support of the GPL, and setting some precedence in an actual court ruling would have done wonders for the free software movement.
Ah well…. Maybe next time.
