No, not really Q.  Nor ‘Q’ as in ‘Q’ueer, either.  Yet.

I seem to be a cellphone whore.  About two months after changing from my RAZR V3C to a Samsung A900, I’m back in Motorola’s camp with the Q.  Windows Mobile 5, CDMA of course, and… shiny.  Only slightly more than I paid for my RAZR over a year ago.  Ah, technology…

I’m a massive geek over such things anyway.  I’ve been playing with it off and on since getting home.  Picked it up around 3PM, activated at work before I left, and it’s been love ever since.

Oh, I’m fickle.  I know I am – it’ll be roses and prettiness for the next few weeks, before I’ll never use it for anything other than the cellphone function anyway.  Then I’ll be sitting in a puddle of my own urine in a corner of the bathroom, sobbing over our broken friendship.  “I tried to change for you!” I’ll sob, dripping listlessly into the bathroom the congealed mess of my tears and mucous.  “But I couldn’t!  Not for you, or anyone… please don’t ask.”  The bathwater staining red as I crawl in with my severed veins bubbling forth life’s liquid effervescence.

What I really mean is that it’s already forced me to install Outlook (2003, the latest copy I had) in order to use Active Sync for anything more than minor transfers.  There has to be a better way of getting contacts over… yet my technological prowess will admit no defeat, even when it steadfastly refuses to recognize or copy over the *one* thing I’m attempting.  I could enter all of my paltry 50+ contacts by hand in the few hours I’ve been listlessly slaving over this, but I shall never admit that it’ll break me.

Next week: Ruination!

“Upgraded” from Movable Type to Wordpress.  Pretty simple process.  Considering the output of my blog was a text file about 50K in size… pretty small for the collectively posted entries spanning, well, over a year now, isn’t it?

Have to see what I can do with it now – installing plugins and such.  Seems more responsive, and has a caching option to render pure html pages instead of forcing everything through PHP it seems.  Plugins for almost everything, really…

… isn’t it always so? I mean, most people^Wtechs will see family and probably end up cleaning spyware/trojans/crap off of family computers… I just go out and shop for the kids, and perhaps do some more online…

In the middle of all of that, I end up paying some attention to the outstanding issues with my setup.

Done a lot lately on the server – everything is moved over to the new IBM server here. Sorted out udev – seems it doesn’t keep static entries, it just assigns drive letters based on the order that things are plugged in/detected. Finally solved my anally-retentive issues by removing the last drive (in bay 5, which was still marked as /dev/sdc simply because the intermediate drives weren’t there), and putting the next ones in, before turning up bay 5 again.

/dev/sd[a-f] all in order. Allows me to make up the proper RAID partitions according to how it *should* detect them on reboot…

md3 : active raid5 sde2[2] sdd2[1] sdc2[0]
27711872 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

md2 : active raid5 sde1[2] sdd1[1] sdc1[0]
7823360 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]

md1 : active raid1 sdb3[1] sda3[0]
12699264 blocks [2/2] [UU]

md0 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
3911744 blocks [2/2] [UU]

Left to do: Make sure it reboots fine, and turn up sdf as a hot spare for md[2,3]. Maybe get it to monitor to my cell as before.

I can’t tell if the additional memory usage is a result, though – mysql, httpd, and mail all seem to be top users there, regardless.

Last year I bought a used MP3 player off of someone… an older Rio I think. Well, using it again lately on walks to work, I find that the battery is… temperamental. Emphasis on the mental. It doesn’t want to hold a charge.

So, today I took it apart. (Man, these things are made a little shock resistant…)

Find the battery isn’t as integrated as I thought, I can unplug it from the board and take it out… so I look up the model number on it.

Keep in mine, I paid $20 last year for the player.

The cheapest I can find a replacement battery is $21.95.

Well, this is getting further disassembled and added to the parts bin…

Learned hotswap as well, lately. Mainly when ‘make’ complained about ‘device full’.

Oh, the joy was felt.

cat /proc/scsi/scsi
(figured out adapter ID 4)
Plug in drive
echo “scsi add-single-device 4 0 2 0″ >/proc/scsi/scsi
(Adapter 4 channel 0 device 2 (third bay, so 0 1 … 2 is the new drive I assumed, and I was right)
fdisk /dev/sdc
mke2fs -j /dev/sdc1
mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt
mv /var/www/* (website files, and where the largest amount of space was being used) /mnt
umount /mnt
edit /etc/fstab
mount /var/www

Not bad for 10 minutes figuring and doing. Haven’t tried taking one out that way, though. May have to mock up a simple perl script for it.

… someone else with the same issue.

Setting up another system, and this time going through the various changes I had to figure out individually last time. (procmail, sendmail, apache, bind, etc)

Come to mimedefang 2.63. Made and all flawlessly, only the included examples/init-script or init-script.in fail with errors:

./rc.mimedefang: line 346: unexpected EOF while looking for matching “’
./rc.mimedefang: line 366: syntax error: unexpected end of file

(So I use slackware and I’m following the convention for startup scripts…)

Anyway, it seems the reason is, on line 246, it’s missing the last left-leaning apostrophe that the other lines have.

Figured that out after some caffeine and dutiful commenting until I narrowed it down.

Comment if you find this helpful. (my stats for this blog comes up on some strange search results).

I’m up to 2299 in WiiSports Tennis, and I haven’t played against any except for the same two computer Wiis for months.

I’m getting just as frustrated with Bowling – how the hell do you make it spin nicely? Sometimes it seems so.. random.

I just did a few speedtests on my connection – not bad, especially if you kill torrents to do so. However, I found this: speed test application and installed it on my home server. And then tried it over the LAN.

Apparently, the counters don’t go that high.

Also thinking of finishing my car a little and getting something different… difficult.

Trying to troubleshoot something lately, and thought I’d leave this out there.

Reason: Wanted to import the certificate into thunderbird to get rid of an error when I opened it. (my default account on home server is imaps)

Command eventually settled on:

openssl pkcs12 -export -inkey /etc/ssl/certs/imapd.pem -in mail.pks > pkcstest

It’ll prompt for a password and that’s it. You’ll need to enter that same password when importing.

Only when it failed did I realize why I still get the popup – the *name* is still invalid. (temporary internal DNS issue I don’t want to mess with), so… end result no better. Sigh.

“She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.”

Graham Greene would have annoyed me, and I him. Too many perfect adjuncts of structure and thought. I should, perhaps, stop reading.

So, I bought a RAZR. Yes, I decided to baa my way along and go with it.

Bought it from someone online. Was from a U.S. provider, suspended, it said, when I tried to phone somewhere. Well, it was cheaper than normal, which was probably an indication… but I decided even if I had to pay 25-40 to have it unlocked, it would be within tolerance.

So.

I found out how to get into the provider’s menu system. That’s easy enough and the code was simple (111111). But the ‘Subsidy Code’ was the next issue. Apparently it’s generally a generated one associated with the individual ESN on these (the v3c CDMA one). Only the provider knows.

What the hell, I had a computer, and the mini USB cable for my now defunct camera, so I went looking, and found this.

So, resigned, I began gathering the software and preparing to try and flash the phone to recover its functionality. I needed to do this so I could get into the base menus and program it for my chosen provider. Well, reading through the whole thing and already having my phone connected, I see part of the process involved essentially editing portions of the memory… and they gave the location for the Subsidy Code.

Well, hell, that’s all I needed, wasn’t it?

Checked that location, 6-digit number there. Tested and it worked getting me past that code. Happy day! Took it in and got my current number switched, so now it’s active.

And I’m reading up on the other small hacks you can do.

Remember kids, knowledge is dangerous. To you, or them? I forget.

This reminds me of nothing so much as 20 years ago, and editing saved games off of floppies with a hex editor. Gods, I’m *old*.

Yes, I may be perfectly happy sitting at home, mixing hard alcohol and energy drinks so that I stay up until the early hours, while doing absolutely nothing.

My brain has been mushified; let it stay that way.

First, bblog. Now, Movable Type. Perhaps, WordPress?

Places to muse upon infinitessimal stupidities. The thing is, they’re all me/mine/