Slashzero

First things first, in the last five or six years I haven’t really been reading many books. Most of my reading has been related to work or blogs. I had downloaded the Stanza app for my iPhone, but only found a few free books that interested me. Out of curiosity I grabbed the kindle app when it became available. I would never have bought the real kindle, and the kindle app is really meant as a companion app to the real thing, but I figured what the heck. As an application it is inferior to stanza, in fact I beleive amazon has since bought stanza. However, the kindle app has one good thing going for it in my opinion, it is east to go to amazon, find a book, send a sample to the iPhone and start reading. At the end of the sample there is a link to complete the purchase.
I have read about 10 books in a month and thouroghly enjoy reading on the phone.
I look forward to better and more features, and I applaud amazon for continuing to come up with more ways to get my money.

Well, ok I am not 100% sure it has anything to do with FIOS specifically, but the timing sure is right.  Ever since I converted my old Verizon phone service to FIOS, my uncle in Italy cannot call me.  I think the call is routed all the way here to the US, but he hears the Verizon Lady telling him the number he has dialed is not in service.  To top things off he still gets charged for the call.  To Verizon’s credit they did raise this issue to their second level swithing support people who assured me that everytihng was fine on their end and this must be an issue with the Italian telco.  If that is the case why are they getting the Verizon lady?  This is a deal breaker for me, if I can’t get this to work I might have to take up Comcast’s offer to pay for my cancellation fee and go back to them with my tail between my legs.

If you are like me then after you installed ESXi you went and created a ton of  virtual hosts, then realized that you were short on disk space.  In doing research on using NFS as a datastore, I read how by default images on NFS were thin provisioned.  In a bit of a jealous moment, I wondered why I didn’t have that option.  I learned that by using the RCLI appliance it is possible to convert.  “Vmkfstools -i” is your friend.  First you must shutdown your VM, in this case called “test-vm”.  Then from the RCLI run the vmkfstools command as follows:


vmkfstools -i /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/test-vm/test-vm.vmdk /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/test-vm/testvm-thin.vmdk -d 'thin' -a lsilogic


The command prompt on the RCLI appliance will not return until the copy/conversion is done, but you can see the progress graphically in the tasks windows on your VI client. Once the copy is done, go into the settings of your VM, delete the hard disk, and add a new hard disk pointing to the “thin” vmdk you created. Boot your vm, if it all works then you can use the datastore browser to delete the thick vmdk and you are done.

Another week, another iPhone problem. Suddenly I cannot launch the aim app. I get this error: “the application AIM cannot be opened”. So far restarting
the phone has not helped.

Finally.  Just for some background I got a letter asking me to preorder Verizon Fios services last July.  I was told then then in about 6 weeks an installer would be coming out.  Well, its is now 13 months later and its finally going to happen.  The town I live in, Malden, Massachusetts granted Verizon a franchise licenses in April.  I beleive one of the requirements was that Verizon offer services to everyone and not cherry-pick neighborhoods as had happened in other cities and towns around here.  My install date is in a few weeks.

Now, a few words of warning, the first time I went to order online I selected all my packages, hit enter, got assigned an install date, then started getting “Sorry, we cannot complete this transaction” errors.  I tried again the next day and I was able to place the order.  Then I started reading forums and blogs about Fios, and realized that the price quoted during the online ordering was way to high.  Apparently there are bundle prices available, so I called up Verizon and for $130ish I will get

Unlimited local/long distance - Call Waiting - Voicemail

20/5 Internet

Every Channel except the premium movie channels

1 Cable Card

1 HD/DVR (no charge on this for a year)

That is about what I pay now for just cableTV and internet, so I get phone server pretty much for free.  I think I am going to call Comcast and give them a chance to give me a better deal, I love capitalism.

I don’t immagine that Screen needs a big introduction.  For those that don’t know, screen is a window-manager.  One might ask I use XTerm or Konsole or Terminal in gnome, what do I use this for???  Well one of the big features of screen is that you can detach you session from you current console, go to a different computer, and reconnect to the same screen session.   You can start a command process at work, drive home, and reconnect to the still running window.

To start a new screen session just type “screen”. You will see a welcome screen, just start typing away as if you are in a regular terminal session. Need a new window? “CTRL-A c” will create one. “CTRL-A p” goes to your previous screen, “CTRL-A n” goes to your next screen.  When you get to the last screen it just goest back to the first one.

So now you are ready to detach, “CTRL-d” detaches.  When you want to reconnect, I usually do a “screen -dr”, the d will detach the screen session if I had forgotten to before exiting then connect.

One feature I use a lot, especially when working with network gear, is the screenloging.  I connect to my router, type “CTRL-A H” to create a logfile, anything on the screen after that will get logged to the screenlog file.  Then if I do a “show run” my router config is saved incase I mess things up.

One final usage of screen that I empoy is as a serial interface, I connect my routers via serial to my linux laptop, then fire up screen like this “screen 9600 /dev/ttyS0″ and voila.  Buy a bunch of usb serial dongles and build your own Serial Console server this way.  Turn on screenlogging and you can capture router error messages ghetto style.

Suddenly, I noticed that I was missing tons of calls.  I just assumed it was due to poor reception at work, but the other day I had my phone in my hand while receiving a call, and noticed it wasn’t vibrating any more.  I tried resetting the phone, removing apps, restoring.  Eventually I just gave it a good hard old fashioned whack and the phone started vibrating when I called it again.   In looking at the apple support fourm, I guess some other people are having the same issue.  I’ll probably take it in to the Apple Store to see what they say, but this is not a good sign for an 8 month old $400 phone.

UPDATE:  Now that I think about it I don’t believe it is vibrating as strong as it used to.

UPDATE2:  I made a post to the Apple support forums saying that I fixed the issue by giving the phone a whack, but they deleted the post claiming it was bad advice.  I can see their point.

At least this is how I did it…
Download the patch file here, then scp it over to your RCLI host. You have an RCLI instance somewhere right? If not there is an appliance you can download also from VMWare. Once the file is on the RCLI instance, you can use the vihostupdate command as follows:


vihostupdate --server ip_address_of_your_ESXi_host -i -b ESXe350-200807812-O-BG.zip

And enter your admin user and password at the prompt. You won’t notice to much going on from your VI Client screen. After the vihostupdate command is done, you will notice a little “reboot needed” message in your VI Client. I set the time and date back to the correct date, re-enabled NTP then shutdown my VM’s, and rebooted the ESXi host. It was back up withing 3 minutes, all in all a pretty simple process.

“This product has expired, Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.”

Way to go, I had to set the clock back to last week on my ESXi console. There goes my VMWare consolidation proposal at work.

I wouldn’t want to be the poor developer that forgot to take out the “if date = august 12 2008 then fail” line of code.

Having lived in the Greater Boston area most of my life, I’ve been a Boston Red Sox fan for as long as I can remember.  I was much too young to remember the successful teams of the early 70’s, the Red Sox of my youth were a mediocre team that never made a World Series.  Just the thought of the Sox winning it all was laugable.

In 1984 my family moved to Italy.  There we lived in a pretty rural area, and unlike today where cell phones and the internet provide constant access to everything, things were a bit different.  In our little village of about 3-4 families (depending on the season), my Aunt and Uncle were the only ones who had a phone.   As you can immagine, along with many other cultural differences,  no more baseball.  For a few months another Aunt of ours in Boston would send me the Sunday Boston Globe, but as the weeks went by I suddenly began to think less and less about the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics.  The Pats were a joke then so no big loss.

In the summer of 1987, American relatives from New York came to visit one of our neighbors, one was a boy about my age.  Along with a chance to speak English and catch up on things in general, eventually we started talking about baseball.  As clearly as I can remember what I had for breakfast 5 minutes ago, I remember asking “Hey how have the Red Sox been doing?”

He suddenly looked at me with a huge grin and a look of stupor at the same time.   “How can this idiot have not yet known?” must have been his first thought.   So he began to tell the story.

The Red Sox had been in the World Series!  And against his favorite Mets!  He tells me that the Sox are about to win Game 6, then proceeds to mime playing first base and re-enacts the famous gaffe seen and talked about by every baseball fan for probably a year until that point.  I was speechless.  I decided not to ask about the Bruins.