Archive for August, 2005
I’ve been thinking lastly on trying to get another job, why? I am not really disappointed with the company, DMR Consulting, but I guess this is not what I want, I mean the kind of job…the most exciting thing here in a usual day is to add or remove
SAP roles to a user…from time to time there’s something interesting like an
Oracle server is not working properly, it is shutting down and so on but most of these problems are not for me cause I’ve have not enough expertise on
Oracle but guess what? I have solved at least 3 or 4 of lasts problems with databases but someone seems to think I am not up to this yet so instead I’ve got to deal with a Windoze NT box and an HP Optical Drive, a solution to solve storage space problems in
FileNET, actually it is an obsolete solution sold some years ago to the client where I am.
This obsolete solution has never been working, I mean never, at least 3 “technicians” have been trying set it up without no luck so the time has past and now it’s really obsolete because the optical unit can only hold 25 discs of 5GiB each, it’s like 75GiB and also you need someone to switch discs when they will get full…why don’t they use a DVD burner? (just kidding 
)
Now, this shit is all mine, since two weeks ago I’ve been trying to understand how the whole package is supposed to work but must be something screwed up because when I scanned SCSI devices from
FileNET’s tools it showed me the same optical unit in 7 or 8 different SCSI addresses I should get the server re-installed because I shouldn’t trust the previous technicians…
I’ve been told that I can migrate the server to a Windoze 2000 Server cause I said the NT doesn’t really help to configure nothing instead I have proposed to switch it to Unix/Linux cause I guess it will improve the performance and I’m pretty sure I won’t have so many troubles configuring just an optical unit. The answer was “I see Unix as a black box” and I thought…How the heck do you see Windoze?
Of course this is not enough to quit from a job but there are other points, I guess they are considering me less than I consider myself, it seems like when something important is coming I am not in and it hurts, but instead I got responsible for CDs…OK important CDs holding DMR’s information in this project and people comes to me to borrow them and so on but…you know what I mean right? I am not a blockbuster employee, also I’m in a methodology committee so imagine 5 or 6 people talking about what methodology should be followed in a project, file naming formats, templates for documentation, etc…reaaaaaaaally interesting.
Then when I started to look for a job in my usual sources I found it depressing…what am I up to? there’s not much to get without years of expertise and I am pretty sure I will have same problems in most of the companies which are hiring. Most of available opportunities as Unix admin are for commercial Unixes so I have no expertise there…Windows based jobs are mostly discarded and there’s not too much about Linux and free BSDs systems…
Summarizing…I need more action, I am 26 years old and sometimes I feel like I’m 40 and sometimes like I’m 18, I feel like 40 when I have to write reports, assist to meetings and so on…and like 18 when someone comes to rent a CD ;P.
Well, just some loud thoughts…maybe I will stay but I don’t know for sure, I have started to rewrite my CV using
\LaTeX\ and will start to send it ASAP. What I really know is that if I’m gonna switch I have to do so before I need to buy expensive winter suits! .
Ok…I have bid for some
Royaltek devices, actually just for two or maybe three and I’ve lost. While reading my mail this morning I have found a subject with “Venta al siguiente pujador del artÃculo de eBay 5802000902: RoyalTek RBT 1000 Bluetooth GPS Receiver XTRACK2” what comes to say (for those who don’t speak Spanish) “Next bidder selling eBay product 5802000902: Royaltek RBT 1000 Bluetooth GPS Receiver XTRACK2” after reading it I felt like if someone was trying to tell me to buy it cause last night I was thinking about whether or not I need this device.
So I have finally got it , 92€ is not that expensive I was really looking for its big brother Royaltek RBT 2001 Sirf3 Bluetooth cause it’s newer and has better features like 20 channels, newer chipset, etc. but it’ll cost about more than 120€ in
eBay and about 190€ in
eXpansys. I guess RBT1000 will fit very well my needs and also I’ve already got the experience from
pof who used it to plan his last holidays at USA.
Now I just have to wait for an email from seller telling me about shipment fees and so on, I hope they’ll support
PayPal cause it’s the easiest and fastest way to make payments.
Hmmm just last thought, my notebook has got bluetooth…hmmm I will be able to do nice wireless maps! you know? 
I have spend most part of the last weekend with some friends (
pof,
Esteve and last but not least
minid) at their home. Besides geeking a little, I asked pof to borrow me his GPS cause I wanted to see how it works with my
Nokia 6600.
While I was yesterday getting back to home I switched on the GPS device (a
Royaltek BT1000), I have paired both devices and I waited till it got triangulation and started to show me everything the speed I was traveling, direction, etc. The whole set seems to work well together but is left yet to plan a route using the software I’ve got currently installed on the phone and see how lost I could get! heheh I hope it will be less than I use to…
Seeing everything’s working, I have decided to buy one via
eBay but I’m not up to these devices yet so I’m trying to see what are the valuable features I should look for. I have find out following are interesting ones:
- Channels: I guess as much channels you’ve got better will be your chances to get reliable results from your device.
- Battery: As in any portable device, battery life is really important.
- NMEA support: I did not know nothing about this but with a standards compliant devices, interoperability grows.
Maybe some of you could tell me some other interesting features a GPS should have, keeping in mind I will use it with either my mobile or my laptop so I don’t want a full car navigation system, let your comments! 
I was reading yesterday about geeks after looking for geek images in
Google Images and I’ve found a really good definition on what’s a geek and some differences with nerds,
read it here.
I have realized I fit more like a nerd than like a geek, cause I’d love computers but what I really love is the technology they bring to me, what they really allow me to do and most importantly they allow me to spent my free time without even care about anything else. I usually only find interesting geeks or nerds because we’ve got many common points and chats can grow, but I am not a sociable person cause I was the kind of child who walked around children in parks waiting they realized about my presence and invite me to play with them, I am not like that now but I’m not the kind of person who uses to start conversations. This doesn’t make me a shy person, I usually am confidence while talking with other people but I just don’t know what to say, I don’t know about politics, I don’t like sports, etc. This is nothing to be worried about cause everyone is the way he is and have to stay happy with himself. Anything can be improved.
Well I guess I have traces from both I’m just hoping I’ve got the right things from each one ;P.
I’ve been learning today about power management with
Gentoo Linux, basically I followed
these two
documents and I end up here:
- Software Suspend v2: It works really well, I’ve defined my swap partition as is told on the howto and everything I have to do is execute the command hibernate and it switches off, then I boot from grub with needed option and it resumes the system as it was. Wonderful.
- Runlevels: I’ve created an alternative runlevel to pick it up while running on battery, it is suggested on the Power Management Guide from Gentoo’s documentation, just follow the instructions.
- cpufreqd: I’ve replaced powernowd with cpufreqd because it provides more flexible configuration which allows me to keep a low power profile while running on battery.
- init scripts: I’ve created two init scripts to enable power managent on the hard disk and the wireless card, I was using noflushd before to manage the hard disk but I guess hdparm can do its job, this is all from Power Management Guide.
- Laptop-mode: I haven’t tested it yet cause I’ve only added it to the new runlevel (battery) so till tomorrow I could not tell anything about it. Tomorrow I’ll meet a friend after work and I’ll show him my baby. There’s one thing I’d like to change from laptop-mode and it’s that right now this software will manage when my box will shutdown while running out of power and I’d like to use hibernate instead to save all my work, maybe I’ll do a script to check the battery status or try to see if ACPI generates any event about the battery running out of power.
A week ago I ordered an
ASUS W5A G003P on
LifeInformatica but I went to one of its Barcelona shops then after a week it finally got on my hands.
I’ve been working on it since Friday night, partitioning, installing, compiling…you know? usual stuff you do when you get a new box and taking some
pictures. By now I’ve got a near 100% working OS,
Gentoo Linux on which I’ve spent most of the time.
Let’s see what’s working and what’s not…
- SpeedStep: I have it working with sys-power/powernowd to which I’ve passed -s 200000 as parameters to get a nice frequencies table.
- Intel Wireless PRO 2200BG: It works with net-wireless/ipw2200 and net-wireless/ipw2200-firmware, it’s been currently used with WEP without any trouble.
- Graphics: I’ve configured
X.Org to use the vesa driver cause the Intel 915 is not yet supported by the version provided by the gentoo’s portage system but it will be because I’ve seen already some reports about.
- Ethernet: Any problem here, it is a Realtek 8139 which disapoints me a little cause these cards are well known by their low quality but also by being supported by any OS in the world.
- Bluetooth: I’m able to ping my mobile phone (a Nokia 6600) via device hci0 and using the command l2ping. To get the blue led, which indicates the bluetooth is switched on, working I’ve used a patch to
acpi4asus found
here. The bluetooth device is a regular USB bluetooth adapter.
- Optical Unit: A dual DVD writer works with both IDE and SCSI-emulation with app-cdr/{dvdrtools,cdrtools,dvd+rw-tools}.
- USB RF receiver: Just works with regular USB drivers.
- Touchpad: It needs an extra software to get most features working under X.Org, x11-misc/synaptics and some configuration found
here.
- Sound: It seems to work under kernel 2.6.13 provided by sys-kernel/mm-sources, its driver is known as HDA from
Intel.
- Integrated Multi-card reader:I haven’t spent any second on it but seems not to be working with drivers like USB massive storage, I will try with pcmcia IDE drivers and will look to windoze hardware profiles.
- Webcam: I haven’t even tried to get it working and I have doubts about it will work.
I’m now trying to see how well ACPI by now suspend to ram (S3) is not working, it seems to suspend but when I tried to get the system back it didn’t work. Let’s see how suspend to disk will do.
From BSD side, FreeBSD is doing well, I got almost everything working under it but SpeedStep is not yet working because sysutils/est, the kernel module to support it, does not recognize my CPU. I will try to spend some time on it cause maybe I just need to include some identifiers.
I’m finally getting back to my computers room and I started to install my server an AMD Duron 700MHz with 512MiB of RAM, two UDMA100 40GiB hard disks, two 3Com ethernet cards…it is running
NetBSD 3.0_BETA. In order to provide some level of data redundancy I followed
this chapter from NetBSD guide which explains how to install NetBSD over a RAID1 using
RAIDframe providing a RAID software solution among many other things. There’s an important note on the RAID installation chapter which I’d like to mention cause no seeing it will cause your RAID having a dirty parity after every reboot. The use of shutdown(8) is totally recommended cause it will properly disable your swap space and will run the RC shutdown script which is the way to shutdown a NetBSD.
At this moment I’m currently working on configuring some services which I’m use to have at home like
Squirrelmail (with
Apache and
PHP),
BIND and others which I will comment in further posts.
I’ve been playing a little with
FreeRADIUS cause it’s something I’d like to have working in a near future to provide some level of security within my WLAN environment (WPA + authentication) to replace my current WEP configuration. FreeRADIUS now authenticates users locally without using any special mechanism like eap, sql, etc.
I’ve been visiting a friend since last Friday till to today, at
Madrid. As I always do I carried most of my gadgets in this trip and I have to thank a lot to my T|C because it’s been my travel guide using
Métro for PalmOS and I also took some notes on visiting the city from
this web site available in both English and Spanish, it’s very nice to get in touch with the city before even stepping on it.
I have enjoyed a lot this weekend, I’ve visited lots of places (I will upload some photos to
flickr) and yesterday we went to a
Nacho Cano’s musical show I was little afraid because I’ve never watched one but I liked it a lot, it was worth to pay for.
What I found not too much interesting was
The Skeleton Key movie not for watching it on a cinema but there wasn’t too much else to watch, Hollywood is not doing nothing brilliant lastly.
