Peter's Blog

The Brain is a radical outliner/mindmapping tool with a very radical user interface, which you can try on their website if your browser supports java. I have tried the 30 day trial and by the end of the 30 days it has fallen out of use. The program itself has not been updated since March 2004 so is either perfect or is not under active development.

I updated my linode to Ubuntu hoary hedgehog. I followed the upgrade steps here except I didn't install the ubuntu-desktop package as its a GUI-less server (although I may regret that one day).

Notes:

• it only took a few minutes to upgrade 250 packages.
• installing one of the packages failed with:

  udev requires a kernel >= 2.6.8, upgrade aborted.
  dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_0.050-3ubuntu7_i386.deb (--u
  npack):
   subprocess pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   /var/cache/apt/archives/udev_0.050-3ubuntu7_i386.deb
  E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
  

  which appeared to be because I am running a 2.4 kernel. I am not sure how free I am to change kernels on a Linode. I ignored the error and life went on.
• libphp4 module installation failed because it could not find a php.ini file. I create one for it to fiddle with and this time it was happy.
• I did shutdown -r now to reboot but this only powered down the linode. I had to go into the Linode control panel to boot it again.
• It came up and I was happy. If it hadn't I would have to do a clean install. I MUST get around to adding a rescue partition on the virtual hard disk.
• It had lost the hostname and I had to use the hostname command to reset it.
• It had decided to upgrade me to apache2 and install the generic index.html which overrode my drupal index.php so I deleted it.
• I had to enable php in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf by uncommenting:

  AddType application/x-httpd-php .php
  

• I had to enable mysql and gd in /etc/php4/apache2/php.ini by uncommenting:

  extension=mysql.so
  extension=gd.so
  

• It has python 2.4
• It still has subversion 1.06 I wanted to try out 1.2 which is why I upgraded Ubuntu.

Looking through the Linode control panel options I discovered that it is possible to request a 2.6 kernel instead of the standard 2.4. I tried this and it indeed booted up but ssh fails to work. I can still log in through the linode console which appears to emulate a tty console so you can watch the system boot and log in that way but if I try to ssh the connection gets suddenly closed with no clues as to why, not even in the sshd log wth full debugging enabled.

There is mention of some odd devpts thing in kernel 2.6 being to blame for these ssh problems but I haven't pinned it down yet.

I resized the disk space on my Linode to free up 400M for a debian linux install, to use to rescue the main ubuntu install if I ever break it. You can change the size of your partitions without losing all your data if you are using ext2 or ext3. Cool.

Linode is looking good.

I have had my rowing machine for about a year now and I am still using it about 30 minutes, three times a week. My stamina is much better than it was when I started and my resting heart rate is about 51 bpm when watching tv. This evening I did 1137 strokes in 30 minutes, not my best ever but not bad considering I did it yesterday as well. Even rowing hard, my heart didn't go much over 160 bpm and I don't get breathless, I can handle it.

I was checking out one of the google search terms that found my site and was interested to see that it listed 100 results per page rather than the de-facto 10. Looking at google, sure enough, there is an option in the preferences for 10, 20, 30, 50 or 100 results per page. I've always found 10 a bit limited but I've set mine to 30.

On a technical level, it looks like the search url has the sequence 'num=100' in to get 100 results.

Also, this is a tip for helping your site into the first page of google results...

I've been looking at Subversion for Source Control and am liking what I see. The documentation is really good, it has enlightened me about the copy-modify-merge methodology and how much nicer it is than the laborious lock-modify-unlock method I use in Visual SourceSafe. It seems that merges are not to be dreaded, they are rare and subversion will not try to automatically munge together two sets of code and generate a mess that won't build. The users are left to resolve merges themselves which is easy if you are the only user

There is even a cool Windows Explorer extension to manage files.

I am contemplating putting my Ubuntu configuration under Source Control. The advantages are:

• configuration is backed up
• each change I, debconf, webmin or whatever makes to the configuration can be encapsulated in a changeset.
• I can easily recall precisely what I had to edit to solve a particular problem.

The only problem I can anticipate is Subversion fiddling around with file permissions, as is normally the case with the lock-modify-unlock model. Maybe copy-modify-merge does not need this? Restoring an old configuration setup is very likely to mess up permissions but hopefully that would rarely be necessary and can be done in a controlled manner.

Being responsible for the IT systems at work, I don't see why the configurations should not be under the same change control as the software we write is. Unfortunatly our servers are mostly Windows so we cannot simply archive the /etc directory

Doing various Google vanity searches I discovered that an image search for Victora Wilkinson brings my baby daughter up on the first page Wife wants her picture to be found so here for googles benefit is Bisi Wilkinson:

I'm not sure that the google image index is updated that often so it could be months before this appears in any search results.

I've been getting about double the google hits to my site in the last few days. I suspect my pagerank has gone up a step but the IE google toolbar still says 3. I think that thing uses servers that lag the actual pagerank.

Someone hit my site while searching for Peter Easy:

• should I be worried?
• should I be insulted?

I've been contemplating how I can keep rowing for half an hour with my heart at 170 bpm, how this tallies with my anaerobic threshold. This threshold is the point where the muscles cannot get enough oxygen from your lungs and start making oxygen from stored chemicals. This process generates lactic acid as a waste product which causes pain and stops you working.

The problem is don't I get this lactic acid buildup on the rowing machine, although I am working hard. Is my anaerobic threshold really high?

I think it is because rowing is an all-over exercise, it doesn't focus on the legs or whatever and my heart and lungs can provide enough oxygen all-over. When I cycle to work I sprint up hills and I definetly pass the anaerobic threshold there, I do feel it in my legs.

So I don't think the anaerobic threshold can be related only to heart rate, it also depends on what exercise you are doing.

I did 1177 strokes in half/hour this morning which is a personal best. Could this be because normally I row in the evenings when I get home from work and before I eat (cannot row on full stomach) and I did it in the morning this time?

Someone at work got a phishing email. Looking through the html, I found this:

 <p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=black face=Verdana><span
  style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'><a
  href="http://www.paypal-3089740289dsdasdfedd.8800.org/navbar/34098.html"><span
  style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=117 height=35
  id="_x0000_i1025" src="http://paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/paypal_logo.gif"
  onMouseOver="click('')"></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></font></p>

I'm no expert in javascript but it looks to me like just moving the mouse over an image is going to cause it to be clicked, taking you to a paypal clone site and filling your hard disk with spyware. Outlook XP disables javascript in emails, and just as well.

Updated work server to ubuntu Hoary. Went ok, apart from the box locking up while rebooting apache and then not restarting because the CMOS in the pc was corrupted. Left with a number of packages that fail to configure but I don't think any of them are vitally important. Apache and DHCP servers still running after upgrade, it didn't bump me up to apache2 like it did on my linode.

Editing my crontab I noticed something that I didn't comment on before but needled me enough to make me want to fix it: crontab and visudo open the 'nano' and 'mcedit' editors instead of vim. Eugh. I figured out the proper way to fix this: execute the command:

update-alternatives --all

which lets you choose defaults from various sets of alternative programs. Go through all the prompts and banish any editor that isn't vim to the depths of hell.