Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Lack of Fun with Email Server

    This is lovely. At just after 5:00pm Pacific Time, our email server simply stopped communicating over the network. TCP/IP and IPX connectivity simply vanished, though the Groupwise NLMs continued to chug along, oblivious to their castaway status.

    Over half an hour later, and I’m still waiting for the “DOWN” command to complete so I can reboot the thing. And no, I’m not terribly inclined to hard-reset this box. It’s ornery enough as it is without throwing graceless drive dismounts into the equation.

    And even when/if I get it running again, there are two more worrries: Restarting the voicemail server, and wondering what the hell went wrong… and if it’s likely to happen again.

    Gee, couldn’t be that corporate-mandated Service Pack install, could it? Nah. That couldn’t possibly be it. No way.

  • Fun With Webcams

    Here’s a little story about a cam named Jed…

    Or something like that. Anyway, yesterday afternoon I decided to take a stab at bringing a webcam online. Any webcam at all. First I went to that wonderfully-supported but broken-thanks-to-DLink DSB-C300. Still broken, in that the kernel module sees it just fine but it hoses the entire USB system within mere seconds of use.

    Fine, we’ll try the Logitech cheap-o-cam. Yes, the latest CVS drivers can indeed talk V4L to it, and it still provides the yellowest, grainiest image known to camkind.

    After a frustrating hour spent on each of those devices, I went online in the faint hope that support might be emerging for the Intel PC Camera Pro attached to Ryoko. What do you know, there is such a project. Too bad it’s in such miserable beta that the best I could get from the cam was a really washed out greyscale image.

    And then the jackpot: A userspace app that snags raw image data from my prized 3Com Homeconnect! But wait, that’s at home…

    I dragged the little black beauty into the office this morning, and after recompiling the kernel so I could get the USB /proc stuff to work I was able to snap images. Yay!

    As an extra bit of fun, I hacked up a little script and an fcron job that takes snapshots every minute and saves them to a specific file on the test server I’m using.

    Another couple hours of puttering around with this thing, and I may even be able to put up a webcam link again. I’m probably going to spend time trying to make the image a little bit prettier and making a proper web interface to it.

    And up from the Web comes a bubblin’ crude…

  • Microsoft’s Master Plan – Revealed!

    This from a discussion of the possibility of transparent/translucent concrete:

    It’s a conspiracy I tell you!!!

    Microsoft have been developing transparent concrete for a while now..

    fine aggregate = Windows CE
    course aggregate = Windows ME
    binding agent = Windows NT

    Mix them all together and you get

    Microsoft CE-ME-NT
    /. – Transparent Concrete

  • Just another reminder that checking the configs is a good thing.

    Due to my inability to match the configuration of the webserver files and the machine that generates the random email address, that particular feature was broken within 24 hours of my putting it into service. Whoops.

    It’s all better now, I assure you. From now on, all features get fully tested before being announced. Honest.

  • Back From The Grave

    Some things I just can’t let go of. One of these is my sense of nostalgia, especially for drivel I’ve set to paper or electron storage at some time in the past. You wouldn’t believe some of the crap I still have cramming old three-ring binders in my closet.

    In other words, the Thoughts channel is back, and repopulated with the four journal entries from the old Zero database. Read and enjoy. I mean hell, you’re reading this, so you might as well go read those too.

  • Fun with Redirects and Multiple Servers

    Instead of leaving Zero’s webserver shut down, I’ve decided instead to have her index page redirect to this journal page, just like the index page here on greyduck.net itself. Slick, huh?

    There’s a method to my madness, of course. Now I can use Zero’s webserver to do various “extra” things that Invite’s servers aren’t really set up to do, like provide the randomized email address trick. (It should be working now. Feel free to test it! The link is right below the Calendar.)

    The relationship between greyduck.net and zero.kgon.com is now firmly incestuous. Fun, no?