Andrew's blog

It seems to have been ages since we last uploaded any photos. Oops. To make up for that here is a double whammy:

• 16 - 18 Months
  
• 19 - 21 Months (I'll continue to add photos to this one)
  

Also, a huge congratulations to Susanne's sister Debbie and her husband Jeff for the birth of their first child Ellie on Saturday morning.

S and I are looking at switching ADSL providers to a provider when also provides a phone service over VoIP, and I thought, "Hey, since I'm going to switch our phone over to VoIP, and our 'net connection will have to be online all the time for the phone to work, it'll have a fixed IP as part of the plan, right?". So I finally found the right person to ask at the new ISP and was told "No". It turns out I need to pay an extra $10 a month for a fixed IP.

Is it just me or is the whole attitude towards fixed IP addresses on ADSL lines crazy? First a little bit of history.

Back in the early days of dial-up Internet usage all users were allocated a fixed IP address. You just got one, I still have my letter from Actrix Networks from 1996 which had my connection information, including my allocated IP address. Then when the number of users grew large enough that ISPs didn't have enough IP addresses available to allocate to more users, users were switched to dynamic IP addresses (so you received a different IP every time you connected). This worked okay since most people were only online for short periods of time, and allowed for the customer base of ISPs to grow, without further exhausting the IPv4 address pool.

So, the reason that the industry switched to dynamic IP addresses was to make the best use of a limited resource.

But now, having a fixed IP address is seen as another revenue stream by the ISPs. Which is crazy. I'm going be online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'm going to be using an IP address from that dynamic pool the entire time. That IP address will never be available for anyone else to use.

I can get around this by using a dynamic DNS service (which is what I'm already doing). But this seems crazy when my plan new will require me to be online 24 hours a day. If I'm not online we won't have a working phone.

The up-shot? I won't be paying the extra $10/month, I'll continue to use my dynamic DNS service and I'll continue to consume a dynamic IP address never allowing it to be used by anyone else.

Update: It was suggested to me that this could be due to the APNIC IPv4 Guidelines, but APNIC classify DSL as a permanent connection, therefore static allocations are fine, in fact it appears that they expect organisations to use static IP addresses for DSL connections.

Wow, another 3 months, time for some more photos! Brooke has really started walking now, she has two speeds, standing still and 100km/hr. She is definitely keeping us busy!

I've also discovered that I'd forgotten to upload her birthday pictures. I've uploaded them (and a few others) to her 9 - 12 Month album. Oops.

In other news, we're now living in Belmont, and enjoying it, even though the lawn is really a swimming pool.

Well, as of debian-maintainers version 1.39 (uploaded on 2008-07-08) I'm now a Debian Maintainer.

w00t!

Francois will upload a new version of MythTV Status soonish which amongst other things adds the magic fu required to allow me to upload it directly. Oh, and I've changed MythTV Status to be GPLv3.

More w00t!

Back in the days when the Unix world was more trusting, we had a command called finger. This command was used to find out information about a user. The output would look something like this:

Login: andrew         			Name: Andrew Ruthven

Directory: /home/andrew             	Shell: /bin/bash

On since Wed Jun 25 09:18 (NZST) on pts/0 from chimaera.etc.gen.nz

   1 second idle

Plan:

This is my .plan!  Surprise, surpise, surpise!

And if you ran finger against a host it would return a list of the users logged in. But the finger daemon that was queried had a few issues. Early versions had gaping security holes, and as more bad guys started appearing it became a useful way to find out what accounts existed on a host. This was useful to know who to target.

Because of these reasons the use of finger has declined, quite drastically.

One thing of interest though is the "Plan" section, this displays whatever is in the .plan file in the users home directory. This used to be used to indicate what someone was up to, or their plan.

Last year some of the folks at Catalyst started creating themselves Wiki pages called .plan or ToDo in their own namespace. In a moment of insanity I decided to create a finger daemon that would return those wiki pages. I also hooked it up to our internal staff directory. So it would return something like:

Name : Andrew Ruthven                         Extn: 7231

Email: andrew.ruthven@catalyst.net.nz         DDI : +64 4 xxx yyyyy

Nick : puck                                   Cell: +64 27 xxx yyyyy



Plan:

                              Andrew Ruthven/.plan



                                   Priorities



Do more work.

This was easy to do with our original wiki software - MoinMoin - because it had an output mode for plain text. But we've changed to MediaWiki, and Mediawiki doesn't have support for spitting out pages in plain text.

Yesterday I decided enough was enough and wrote a filter to support this. It grabs the Printable version of the page and strips out the toolboxes and headers and footers, then passes it to the text based web browser links before printing out the plain text version.

Perfect.

If you are interested in this filter, you can grab it from its git repo or you can just grab the script from here.

We've had some exciting developments with Brooke, she's been crawling and "cruising" for a few months now (she can even crawl up and down stairs!). She finally has teeth! 4 weeks ago a tooth appeared and 6 days later another one popped out next to it. And it looks as though another two are about to come through on the top. Brooke has settled into daycare 5 days a week now that Susanne is back at work, and both of them seem to be loving it!

Brooke's 1st birthday is just over 2 weeks away, wow! Where has the time gone? Here are some 9 - 11 Month photos. I'll upload Brooke's 12 month photos into that album shortly after her birthday so I can include some birthday pictures.

Wow, we've been busy! Has it really been that long since we last uploaded any photos? As a bonus here are photos of Brooke between 5 and 8 months.

The current exciting news is that Brooke has started crawling, not very fast yet, but she is getting faster!

Andrew's Mum has also uploaded some more photos.

It seems that the iLiad might be really nice eBook reader. It supports PDF, allows you to annotate documents using a touchscreen and lots of other fancy things.

Nice.

Now if only it cost less than AUD$1,000...

I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.6.1.

Notable new features:

• Details on disk space are reported, and individual storage groups[0];
• If there isn't enough program guide data, a warning is shown;
• The --email-only-on-conflict option has been extended to mean "Only on alert" which now includes both the previous points (this means, you'll only be emailled if there is something which needs your attention);
• For each recording (scheduled, current and conflict) show the channel name it is related to;
• We do a little bit of rinsing on the XML data now to remove some invalid unicode characters that occasionally appear;
• Suppress some warnings if the user doesn't have access to MySQL and handle some other error conditions in a nicer manner.

If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some email addresses).

As usual, you can check the project page.

[0] To get the details on the individual storage groups you need to apply a couple of patches to MythTV. Please see the FAQ in the tarball or for Debian type boxes, /usr/share/doc/mythtv-status/FAQ .

Update: I've disabled comments for now as I'm tired of all the spam.

It is time for another open source release of the Domain Name Registry System (DNRS) - the software which runs the .nz domain name space.

Head over to DNRS on SourceForge to check it out.

I'm pleased to announce a new version of my little script - 0.5 0.5.1.

Notable new features (from the shiny new ChangeLog):

• Add support for printing colour in the encoder status display.
• Show any schedule conflicts, or if the MythTV Perl API isn't usable, a warning is displayed.
• Display the amount of time until the next recording.
• Add --version & --help options.
• Allow suppressing blocks of output.
• The report can be sent via email with the subject set correctly. With an option to only send out email if schedule conflicts are detected.

If you install the .deb, then the MOTD is updated automatically and the email will be sent daily if there are conflicts (and you've set some email addresses).

As usual, you can check the project page.

Update: I've released 0.5.1 which should make the colour look good on non-black backgrounds as well.

The other day I was recompiling some kernels during the day on our MythTV backend, which at the time happened to be recording my wifes favourite program (Grey's Anatomy, we discovered it part way through the season, so the repeats are good). It turns out the compilation caused some issues with the recording (which reduced the WAF).

So to increase the WAF, I'm making sure this doesn't happen again. I've written a script that spits out the MythTV status which is then displayed in the MOTD. It is available over here.

I've found this is a pretty effective way of letting me know of any upcoming recordings and what is going to be happening on the system in the next little while. It is a whole lot easier than using the status page on MythWeb.

Sample output:

MythTV status for localhost
===========================
Status: Mon Oct 15 2007, 8:41 AM

Encoders:
cerberus (9) - Idle
cerberus (12) - Idle

Scheduled Recordings:
2007-10-15 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-15 18:00:00 - 3 News
2007-10-15 20:30:00 - Mythbusters
2007-10-15 22:00:00 - Flight Of The Conchords
2007-10-16 13:30:00 - Grey's Anatomy
2007-10-16 18:00:00 - 3 News

I run Debian, so there is a .deb. For those not running Debian there is a tarball (but the MOTD updating glue is Debian specific at the moment). For those interested in hacking there is a git repository.

Hopefully I'm not the only one that finds this useful.

A fantastic song from the RIPE 55 Meeting.

I'll try the embedded thing as well...

We have another instalment of photos of Brooke.

I've decided to move to a monthly posting of photos instead of every 4 weeks as I had been doing.

And yeah, a bit late this time... However, Brooke rolled for the first time a couple of weeks ago. That was pretty exciting!

Update: Err, weeks, not months.

It is great to see that the OLPC folks have been listening to the clamouring on the net about wanting to buy a OLPC.

The concept they've come up with is pretty cool. Give 1 Get 1 is basically, pay OLPC US$399 (it doesn't say US, but I'm guessing here) and they'll ship a laptop off to a kid somewhere in a developing country, and they'll also ship a laptop to your kid (it is for your kid right?).

It is still a bit steep for me, but still a pretty cool idea.