I’m kind of surprised at this veneration – the concept is nothing new, as there’s already as similar calculator built into Mac OS X and other Unix operating systems, called bc, which is pretty much identical in functionality, with a few quirks.

The first time you load bc up and use it, you’ll probably find that it’s defaults aren’t the best – for example, when dividing a number, you get only the quotient back (the part in front of the decimal place), which isn’t too useful in most cases.

10/3
3

If you set the “scale” variable it will return a proper float with that number of digits:

scale=5
10/3
3.33333

Also, the gnu version of bc prints a gnu advertisement at the front of every session:

$ bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.

The fix for this is as follows – bc (at least the common gnu version) will take a set of arguments from an environmental variable (set in your .profile or similar shell init script) like so:

BC_ENV_ARGS='-q /Users/username/.bc'

The -q suppresses the advert, and the path to my .bc file is a set of commands that is executed before every session. Note that it needs a full path supplied – you can’t use ~ to specify your home folder, as bc doesn’t perform shell expansion on it’s arguments passed in this way. My .bc file is simple – it just sets the scale variable:

scale=5

You could also predefine functions and variables as well in there if you cared to.

# dd if=dban-1.0.7_i386.ima of=/dev/disk3
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes transferred in 192.277221 secs (7669 bytes/sec)

That’s over 3 minutes, using a USB floppy drive connected my MacBook Pro.

(I needed a copy of DBAN on floppy so I could erase an ancient 60Mhz Pentium)

To facilitate this, I bought a Dell PowerEdge SC440 when they were really cheap ($199 base), and with a small processor and RAM bump, it’s actually a fairly solid server. It uses the Intel 3000 chipset, with a ICH7 Southbridge which has 4x 3.0Gbit SATA connectors. It should also be able to take 8GB of RAM, assuming Dell didn’t hobble the chipset – they claim a 4GB max. If you’re looking for a server, this isn’t too bad a choice – if you’re an AMD fan the Dell T105, with it’s optional quad-core Barcelona (Phenom class) Opteron also looks pretty good.

I downloaded a prerelease version (101, rc1b) version, which boots to a live CD and then allows you to install the base system. It’s a very nice install process, and fairly painless. I had no trouble installing on one disk, adding a mirror to the root ZFS pool, and updating on the system, but beyond that I started running into walls.

Apparently, in this version, zfs list by default only shows filesystems and volumes, and not snapshots, unlike every other example I’ve seen from documentation or on the web. To list snapshots as well, you have to use zfs list -t all for everything or zfs list -t snapshots for just the snapshots.

Transferring a files from my Mac and Linux computers was easy via NFS with the zfs set sharenfs=rw rpool/example. I was slightly perturbed that there were no firewall changes required to do this, as I’m used to secure by default systems like CentOS or OpenBSD.

I still don’t really get SMF as Sun’s replacement for init scripts. It seems to only be implemented halfway in this release – you’d think they would go through the system and get rid of all their legacy boot scripts (as Apple did when they developed launchd), but apparently not.

For being a company focused on Web 2.0 developers, I’ve had more trouble trying to get their website working than with any other vendor – here’s an error I got when trying to log into the OpenSolaris Forums. I also had to enter the same login information twice to get to the error:

The OpensSolaris install documentation is sufficient, but doesn’t go much beyond updating the system. You really have to look around for documentation – here’s a few links I’ve found so far:

• OpenSolaris New User FAQ
• Current Documentation at OpenSolaris.org

That all said, it’s a well running, stable system. I’ll post more as I work with it.

Obviously that’s not correct, as the bluetooth card is built in, and should always be connected.

At first I though I just had a bad bluetooth card, but then I started having issues reading CDs and DVD’s in the optical drive and the lightbulb went on in my head.

Both these components are electrically connected via a mezzanine board inside the Mac Mini. There are some good pictures of this here at AppleFritter.com. Basically, to put memory into a Mini, you have to disconnect and lift off the subframe which contains the optical, hard disk, bluetooth, and a ribbon cable to the audio connectors, all of which connect via the mezzanine board.

To fix, I just popped open the Mini again, lifted the subframe and mezzanine board out then and plugged it back in, and everything was back to normal. It must have worked it’s way loose when I installed it, or due to thermal expansion/contraction after using it for the last year.

Moral of the story? If your Mini is acting weird, try reseating the internal components.

Why would you want to do this, when Xen can offer better performance than VMware? Portability – I can run a VMware virtual machine on Mac under VMware Fusion, on Windows under VMware Server, Workstation, or Player.

In my office, I’ve got a Dell Poweredge 830 with 8GB RAM, but my desktop computer is a Mac Mini which maxes out at 2GB RAM. It’s a no brainer to use the Dell for setting up the VM’s and then moving them to other machines when the time comes.

If your CentOS 5 box is running the xen kernel and try to install VMware Server 2.0 (currently in beta), you’ll get the following error when trying to install the RPM:

 You cannot install VMware Server on a system running a xen kernel

As a result, you need to switch to a non-xen kernel.

To do this, you first need to install the kernel. yum makes this easy:

yum install kernel

Then remove xen and the kernel-xen packages:

yum remove xen kernel-xen

Then you have to specify which kernel you want to run in /boot/grub/grub.conf. In that file there’s a list of kernels available to boot from:

#boot=/dev/sda
default=1
timeout=5
splashimage=(hd0,0)/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
hiddenmenu
title CentOS (2.6.18-92.1.10.el5)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
        initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5.img
title CentOS (2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /boot/xen.gz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5
        module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet
        module /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.10.el5xen.img

The line that says default= specifies which kernel to load, where 0 is the first one listed in the file. In my case, I had to change the line that says default=1 to default=0 to specify the non-xen kernel.

Reboot, and you’re good to go – the VMware RPM will install, and VMware server runs just fine.

MarsEdit makes it very easy for me to posting multiple weblogs, safe drafts, etc.

I also dug out my old copy of iListen, which lets me dictate directly into any text window on my Mac. This never worked that well on my older PowerBook because it just wasn’t fast enough and but on the new iMac it works great. I had to upgrade it to version 1.7 which is a universal binary, but well worth it.

Overall, the new system works fairly well. I’ll probably refine it in the coming days and weeks. His

I’ve been busy. Really busy. Busy to the point that I’m worn out and feel like going to be a hermit on some mountaintop somewhere.

So, business is going well. I’m still trying to find health insurance, but hopefully that should be wrapped up by the end of the year.

I replaced my car with a Toyota Matrix M-Theory. Pictures coming soon. Going to get the windows tinted tomorrow.

I’m going to Golf N’ Stuff tomorrow, for my birthday. It’ll be just like when I was 8!

That’s enough of that. I’ll post more soon. Back to the grind!

It seems to me that for a well educated, technically skilled, first world people, there are basically three optimal strategies one can choose in finding work:

1 – Find a job that you love, so that working itself makes you happy, where happiness may include the feeling that you’ve accomplished something worthwhile, even if the day to day work isn’t pleasant. (eg. the physicist or aid worker options)

2 – Find a job that requires minimum effort and time and allows you to spend most of your time doing things that make you happy. (the writer who’s also a security guard option)

3 – Find a job that sucks but allows you to make a lot of money, then retire early and spend the rest of your life doing things that make you happy. (the investment banker turned surfer option.)

Personally, I’m trying to move into a #1 situation. I think I could swing #2 easily as well if I got interested in something other than computers, and did that as my “minimal time” job.

I think I need to focus more on what I do well, and less on the things that I add little to no value to. I do all the accounting work for my business, which takes a bit of time, and I think I could outsource that, or write a program to do most of it for me. Crunching numbers isn’t a “fun” activity, and having someone or -thing responsible for it would really cut down on the stress.

For me, stress turns into obsessive work. If I get stressed, I start working on something. This is very different from Amy, who wants to relax when she gets stressed. When I come home from work, I usually want to start on some project, because I want to accomplish or finish something, which I find rewarding. When Amy comes home, she’s more likely to read, watch TV, or take a nap. Either way of dealing with stress is fine by me – the differences are really in how we were raised. My parents were always doing something, so that seemed normal and I fit into that mold. From my experience, Amy’s parents separate their work and personal time more strictly, so she does the same.

I’ve been thinking about my working situation as well – I work 30 hours a week for Access Tucson, and get benefits from them, but the pay isn’t that great. If I went full time for my business and stopped working there, I could probably make a lot more, but then I’d have to pay for my own benefits, wouldn’t have the 401k set up, etc. I don’t really want to quit right now (It gives me a greater sense of security to both me and Amy to have me working for someone), but I may ask to drop to 20 hours a week this summer.

Oh well, time to work.

Yesterday I visited a custmer who had purchased new WRT54G version 5, and it was a rude awakening. They downsized the hardware (half the RAM and ROM), and removed features – it no longer has WDS. The router now runs VxWorks, not Linux like the previous version, and there is no replacement firmware available. Configuration and setup was very flaky as well- I had to reset it several times to get it working right.

Sveasoft (a well known 3rd party firmware creation group) has more information on this model.

The solution? Buy the WRT54GS (now to version 4), which can take replacement firmware, still runs linux, and has quadruple the memory and rom space as the WRT54G v5.