Andrew's blog

During the week I stumbled across a great write up of an awesome looking place called TechShop. Which is a fully featured work shop where you can buy day passes, monthlies or annual membership. If you haven't heard of this place, go and read the write up.

We so need one of these in Wellington. I've occasionally been tempted to sign up to a woodworking night course just so I can use the workshop.

A few of us at Catalyst had a little chat about what would be involved. Currently the list is:

1. Find a suitable warehouse
2. something
3. Profit

Step 2 needs some work...

What do you do if the back of your stereo cabinet is a mess and you've been a network monkey in the past?

Simple, you grab some cable management brackets from your good junk pile[1], some bits of MDF and you hack your stereo cabinet.

I think it came out much tidier, and now I can safely push it back without risking damaging cables!

If you're wondering why some of the power cords aren't plugged in, they belong to devices we don't use very much, why have them plugged in and drawing power if we aren't actually using them?

[1] "Good junk pile" every geek should have one, it is that collection of odds and sods that you don't really need, but which - just might, one day - come in handy. It should be noted however that they don't tend to have a very high Wife Approval Factor.

We have another instalment of photos of Brooke.

Wow, not that overdue this time...

And a big thank you to Andrew & Heather for the loan of their digital camera which most of our photos of Brooke were taken with, we really appreciated it.

Also, Jill (Andrew's Mum) has put up some photos as well. Thanks!

After some peer pressure (i.e., Susanne telling me I had to) I've finally submitted and signed up to Facebook. It is quite surprising how many of my friends are already on there!

Wow!

What is kinda cool is I've got a news feed from this blog going into Facebook, and have our PicasaWeb photos going in there.

Oh well, off to see who else is on Facebook...

Somewhat late, but I've uploaded another batch of photos of Brooke.

Update: Correct the title...

There is another computer recycling event happening at the Wellington Stadium.
I don't know much about it, but here is the contents of the email I received about it:

Not sure what to do with the old computer in your garage? Or the old mobile phones cluttering your drawers? How about free disposal in an environmentally sustainable way?

The Computer Access NZ Trust (CANZ) is organising eDay 2007, a free community computer recycling day for households, small businesses and schools on Saturday 29 September at the Westpac Stadium car park from 9am-3pm. This follows on from the very successful Dell Free Recycling Day held in September 2006.

The average New Zealand household has more than one computer, representing a total of over seven million electronic devices. Their eventual disposal represents a potential challenge to our environment. eDay 2007 is part of a nationwide effort by communities and industry to start to address the electronic waste problem.

Bring in your old computer equipment on 29 September - there is no charge. All computers will be broken down and the parts will be recycled for other purposes. Mobile phones will also be disposed of in an environmentally sustainable way.

Vehicle access for the Westpac Stadium car park is off Waterloo Quay. CANZ is organising the day in partnership with the Wellington 2020 Communications Trust, Remarkit, the Wellington City Council and a number of industry sponsors.

Only computer equipment and mobile phones will be accepted so please do not bring other electronic equipment. If you have any queries about the event, please contact Mike Ennis (partsplus@actrix.gen.nz).

We normally see quite a few people finding this blog via Google. It can be quite amusing to see what search terms led to us.

Earlier this month I decided to check it out again, there were no hits from Google. At all. This was kinda odd, as the googlebots (both for the search engine and for reader) normally hit us quite often.

Looking back through the logs the last time Google hit us was the 14th of March. Which is quite some time ago.

I cruised over to Google and checked Reader, and sure enough the most recent article from our blog is dated the 14th of March. I then tried telling Google to index blog.etc.gen.nz using the WebMaster tools. No dice, it says:

General HTTP error: Domain name not found

Two things happened on that day:

1. I moved from DynDNS to FreeDNS,
   
2. I added AAAA (IPv6) records to some of my hosts, which is why I moved to FreeDNS. DynDNS doesn't support that.
   

It appears that one of those changes caused Google to start ignoring us. And in fact, it is the change to FreeDNS.

Damn.

I think it is finally time to bite the bullet and start running my own nameserver. Which I want to do anyhow to start using DNSSEC...

Some further investigations with the help of a mate (you know who you are) I've discovered that FreeDNS is rejecting DNS queries from Google. I'm not the only one to have encountered this problem.

Update: The issue is FreeDNS. Updated entry to reflect that.
Update 2: Okay, the FreeDNS maintainer is now allowing Google to access our DNS entries again, so we're back in Google. But still, bizarre.

Due to popular request I'm hiding the majority of the geeky blog entries from the front page of our blog. Anything that is only in the Catalyst category won't be shown on the front page, you'll need to click through to that category to see the geeky Catalyst related things.

I'll need to update a few of the blog aggregaters to handle this change...

In our house we have a server that does a number of tasks, one of which is playing a jukebox (using MusicPD) it is hooked up to an amp that has speakers in our study and in our family room. This rocks, turn on the amp, have continuous music that we want to listen to and no chatter.

Unfortunately this doesn't extend to the lounge. Which means that if you sit in the lounge you can only just hear the music (unless you turn it up too loud). I've thought off and on (mostly off) about extending the jukebox to the lounge, the other week Susanne asked about having this, which meant it was finally time for me to really look into possible solutions.

Warning, geeky bits follow...

Since we used to use Icecast2 to stream the jukebox to Susanne's computer in our old flat I tried that first. We have a PC in the lounge that is a MythTV frontend that we could play the stream on, so that aspect is covered. Unfortunately the 5 second lag which was acceptable when Susanne's computer was a long way away from the main jukebox in our old flat was too annoying when the speakers were only a room apart (yes, I could have reduced the buffers, but it would never have been quite right).

So fall back to plan B, stick another soundcard in the jukebox computer and run line level audio to the amp in the lounge. We managed to dig up an old soundcard in the good junk pile (every geek should have a good junk pile), stuck it in the computer and then proceeded to try and configure ALSA to drive it. The plan was to duplicate the same audio stream out to both soundcards. After a bit of researching and a bit of tinkering with asound.conf and it not working I decided not to waste any more time on that path.

I vaguely recalled that PulseAudio was incredibly flexible and allowed all sorts of things. A quick apt-get install pulseaudio pulseaudio-module-hal and bit of reading, and I found that adding the following line to /etc/pulse/default.pa:

load-module module-combine master=<sound card 1> slaves=<sound card 2> set-default-sink combined

Would create a new virtual soundcard output (PulseAudio refers to this as a sink) called "combined" that would replicate the audio to both soundcards. Awesome. (The master and slaves settings were determed by using paman to inspect the PulseAudio devices.)

Then after recompiling MusicPD (to add PulseAudio support, the version in Debian unstable already has it, but stable doesn't), telling it to use that sink and voila, both soundcards are playing the jukebox.

To actually get the line level audio to the lounge I've used some Cat5 we already have running there (with suitable audio flyleads) and we have the jukebox playing in the lounge, in sync with the family room. The sound quality is pretty good, so I won't worry about balanced audio or anything else fancy like that. Gotta love structured cabling.

Another benefit of PulseAudio is we will be able to configure our Linux workstations to use the jukebox soundcards as audio sinks as well, which will mean no more tinny little monitor speakers. w00t!

Update: Say which file to add the load-module line to, and fix a typo.

Why doesn't hardware have changelogs?

Perhaps I've been using open source software for too long, but I like to scan through the changelogs (a log of changes that the authors have made before releasing a new version) to see what has changed. This can give me hints to new features to checkout, or changed behaviour that it would be helpful to know about.

But hardware (and closed source software) typically don't have changelogs. An example is my Brand New Replaced Under Warranty D-Link DGS-1008D. The old one was hardware revision C3. The new one is C4. What has changed? Will it not brick itself like the old one did after a years usage? Is this one going to be faster because they've improved the code or silicon in some fashion?

I'll never know...

Last wednesday Susanne, myself and Brooke went along to the Babes in Arms sessions of Shrek the Third. It is pretty cool, a 10am screening of a movie where babies and young kids are made more than welcome (in fact, the tickets are half price as well). No one cares if they cry and/or scream because their own kids might be doing it as well!

It was quite nice to be able to go to a movie again (it has been a while). Brooke (actually, all the babies in our group) slept straight through the movie, which made it even more pleasant!

We all really enjoyed the movie, it was definitely good fun!

On a geeky note, I did notice the amazing job they did on animating the hair of the characters. A few days later I was reading the latest issue of the Linux Journal and read the article titled Linux Feeds an Ogre, where they discuss how the hair was one of their achievements in creating Shrek the Third!

The IPv6 .nz name servers and whois server are now up and running. The announcement from .nz Registry Services sent to NZNOG:

---

NZRS is today pleased to announce that the .nz name servers are now operating
with IPv6 connectivity in what can be regarded as the first phase of the .nz
IPv6 rollout. The name servers are named ns8.dns.net.nz and ns9.dns.net.nz, and
are located in Wellington and Albany repsectively.

Both are connected to the NZ IPv6 Internet Exchange and there is a .nz Whois
server accessible at whois.ipv6.srs.net.nz.

NZRS thanks Open Contributors Corporation for Advanced Internet Development
(OCCAID) and US telco Sprint for providing the IPv6 tunnels, and thanks Citylink
for help in connecting to the NZ IPv6 Internet Exchange.

.nz Registry Services is responsible for the operation of the register of domain
names and the Domain Name System (DNS) in the .nz domain name space.


For further information contact:

support< at >nzrs.net.nz

---

There might be a few more tweaks to the setup, but otherwise, it is looking good.

If anyone is using IPv6 in New Zealand but are not peering with the v6ix then please contact Andrew Ruthven at Catalyst (puck in catalyst.net.nz) to talk about tunnels or other peering arrangements.