Category Archives: technology

technology of all kinds

yet another opml editor test post of boredom

2008.08.24 – 7:45 pm PDT

w00t

interesting.

it just puts a new post above the old post.

i wonder how it will be once i get a lot of posts.

it would be awesome if OPML editor supported multiple WordPress blogs. :)

By px | Also posted in test post | Comments (0)

first post with opml editor

2008.08.24 – 7:21 pm PDT

this is the first post on my blog.px.ns1.net using OPML editor. thanks dave! i’m using this howto.

adding a link to something is pretty easy.

if your link is already in the copy/cut/paste buffer, highlight some text then HTML-> add link. voila. or right click, -> add link.

if you already saved you’ll notice your post is categorized by the default category.

To change and add a different one right click the post title then select category.

you need to populate the categories first.

Tools -> WordPress -> Get Categories…

I haven’t figured out how to remove categories once added. :(

By px | Also posted in blogs, books, test post | Comments (0)

status

2008.08.03 – 12:37 pm PDT

It’s Sunday not a whole lot going on.  Pretty bored at the moment.  Gotta get to the gym by 3:30pm to get my full routine in.  I didn’t give myself enough time Friday night.  The dog likes me getting up earlier as of lately.  He gets to sun for a couple hours a day.  I’m kind of happy my VPS is back up.  I wasn’t looking forward to having to recreate everything somewhere else.

About an hour ago I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.6, and then fumbled around a few minutes looking for where to turn on Google Gears.  I think they could have put “Turbo” somewhere a little more obvious, maybe even give it an icon to stand out.  So far I guess the wp-admin seems a little quicker.  Not sure what to really test.  Looking at the Apache logs for my website, it definitely saves on server requests/bandwidth, which while isn’t necessary at this point, is still welcome.

I’ve been back to work about 2 weeks now.  Things are ok.  I’ve made a few correctable mistakes, created lots of documentation, tried to update really old software, and started using Microsoft Outlook with Exchange *shiver*.  It’s not that bad when kept in the cage of a virtual machine container.  Oi Vey, so another issue I’ve had to deal with that I’m not to thrilled about is software licensing.  I really just don’t care for it.  It makes things more complicated in that I can’t just install and configure the software I need, to make sure we own it, get the right software media which works for the install key and then input the correct number of client access licenses or processors.  Then of course I had to find and use a 3.5″ floppy disk to install 3rd party drivers to install M$ Server 2003 R2 on a Dell 1750 from almost 5 years ago.  It’s all new hardware to me :) but still seems to have the same M$ quirks I remember from back in the day.

Another new to me thing I’ve had to deal with is Quickbooks, WTF.  File locking, multiple users, slow as molases over the network.  I’ve had to correct the same issue at least 10 times now where I go over to the machine, attempt the task again, fail, then remote to the server, run the Quickbooks server app, find the company database _again_, re-attempt the task, fail, re find the company file, re-attempt the task, possibly succeed, then maybe tell it to stop “hosting” the multi-user access to files which are stored on the remote machine.  It’s messy, and scary to think that 15 years ago it was OK for programs to act that way.  In this day of age, software should just work, and if it doesn’t it should be open enough that someone with the spare time can take a look under the hood to advance things for all to enjoy.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, personal, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

sox soxio: Failed reading : unknown file type

2008.06.27 – 5:08 pm PDT

I got this error on my Ubuntu system. It stuck me as odd because the script I had made, ran just fine previously.

sox soxio: Failed reading `hello-thank-you-for-calling.wav': unknown file type `raw'

Upon searching, I found that for some reason sox lost all it’s available formats.

$ sox
...
SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS: pls m3u

The following installed all the available file formats.

$ sudo apt-get install libsox-fmt-all
...
$ sox
...
SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS: 8svx aif aifc aiff aiffc al alsa ao au auto avi avr caf cdda cdr cvs cvsd dat dvms fap ffmpeg flac fssd gsm hcom ima ircam la lpc lpc10 lu m3u m4a mat mat4 mat5 maud mp2 mp3 mp4 mpg nist nul null ogg oss ossdsp paf pls prc pvf raw s1 s2 s3 s4 sb sd2 sds sf sl smp snd sndfile sndt sou sph sw txw u1 u2 u3 u4 ub ul uw vms voc vorbis vox w64 wav wmv wve xa xi

Here is the command my script was running to convert a text2wav file into a GSM encoded file for my Asterisk setup.

sox --show-progress -V1 hello-thank-you-for-calling.wav -r 8000 -c 1 -t gsm hello-thank-you-for-calling.gsm resample -ql
By px | Also posted in Ubuntu | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Blogger import

2008.06.20 – 9:36 pm PDT

So today I’ve just been trying to work on importing my blogs from Blogger to here. What a task. It’s a pain to spell check, browse over, then categorize each and every single entry into work comp, pain journal, or other, and there is no shortage of entries. Then try to figure out tagging of each post, if it requires any. I’m not having much luck and have had to restart a few times. Good thing I made a nice clean backup before playing around. Which I will have to create a new one after this post, seeing as it will be lost if I have to restore again.

By px | Also posted in WordPress, blogs | Tagged | Comments (0)

We all love boobs, Google just proves it.

2008.06.15 – 5:10 pm PDT

OK, bored as I am, I’ve been noticing more and more traffic to my blog.  All because of 1 image and a simple search term, anime boobs.  If only I had a real idea to popularize and profit from this #1 listing.

By px | Also posted in internet, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Cox, “Yes we’re a wasteful business.”

2008.06.14 – 4:10 pm PDT

Dear COX, What a waste of resources.  I do not have a cable box from you assholes, therefore I cannot watch your VOD, ONDEMAND programming.  “YOU have the power with Cox Digital Cable. Watch what you want, when you want.”

Let’s clear the air here.  I have the power to watch what I want when I want because of my and .  I know you’re sad I’m not paying you $12/month for you’re set top box, get over it.  Please stop contacting me and further wasting resources on customers who are unable to utilize your service.  No I won’t switch.

dsci0407.jpg

By px | Also posted in hardware, media, thoughts | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Google Health, a good start.

2008.05.19 – 5:57 pm PDT

I read today first on LinuxMedNews that Google Health has launched.

Upon accepting the additional Google Health agreements for my Google Account, I was shown a list of eight partners where I could link up to for importing data. Nice for now, I want MORE.  I easily linked my Walgreens prescription info thereby adding that part of my medical history.  Which it still hasn’t done quite yet as of writing this.  I highly doubt State Fund Insurance Compensation () will ever become a partner, if they do I can only forsee good coming of it.  I am also populating some other fields too as I write.

I am very impressed with the quality of the interface for adding basic health information, like height, weight, blood type along with Conditions, Medications, Allergies, Test Results, and Immunizations.  It is quite clean and is a perfect example of what I’ve come to expect from Google.

Now for the fault.  There is no way for a person to their own documents, records and images to the system.  Not too sure how much use I will really get out of the Google Health platform until that roadblock has past.  But even then it’s a good start with what information it can collect.  I’d like to see something where a person could scan their document and then batch upload the images to Google for Optical Character Recognition or other processing.

TechCrunch has a more thorough image filled post if you’re interested.

Seeing that they want to host all of my data, it would be nice if I could some how link my Google Calendar which has all of my thousands of appointments and such, so that I can be easily reimbursed for mileage somehow.  Maybe with the Google AppEngine?  /me wishes he could sit down, then functionally design and build such a thing.

By px | Also posted in internet, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

a bored, bandwidth, power user

2008.04.16 – 10:34 pm PDT

At one point in my life I considered myself to be a bandwidth power user. Someone who uploads and downloads constantly, maxing out their available bandwidth 95% or more of the time.

Dave’s post early this afternoon got me thinking throughout the day about bandwidth usage. He apparently used around 450GB of data transfer in one billing cycle, pissing off Comcast his provider, so they shut off his cable broadband.

DSCI0306

Flickr gives you 100MB per month upload. I barely even scratch that. I’d really like to take more pictures, but of what, is the difficult question posed to me. I’d like to try and use as much free upload bandwidth I can for any service. For Dave to use even 100GB of traffic to/from Flickr, that would be amazing in my eyes.

2008.04.16 ^ Azureus Seeding Screenshot

I use Bittorrent. I seed probably around 140 different files, +/- 10 for stuff I’m downloading. They certainly aren’t high traffic torrents, but I manage to peak my upload bandwidth, a measly 65KB/s, several times an hour on average. I also try to keep my seed ratio 2:1 or more depending on the content.

In general, while downloading my bandwidth will peak at around 900KB/s from tier 1 sites, which is the soft cap set in place by Cox, my provider, for my internet package, the lowest speeds available from them for $31.95/month.  This is a hell of a lot better than the “high speed” offered in 2001, except today the upload speed hasn’t stayed inline with downloads.

Now my home router keeps tabs on my transfer, and unfortunately it hasn’t been up since the beginning of the month, so much for nice good numbers. But here is 11days of up time statistics.
IN/OUT 37138780/9595423 (3.68 GB/3.64 GB)

My virtual server is allocated 300GB transfer per month, and for the last 9 months I generated virtually no traffic, perhaps only 15GB tops any given month

The source videos of this post is about 66MB, and the images another 2MB.  Do you know how much you use in your tasks?  I wish I had an easy to use bandwidth calculator off hand.

I would try and calculate the maximum possible transfer for both up and down in a given billing period for different speed connections.  I wonder if this widget, bit, chart already exists?  Internet service is already considered by many to be a utility, lacking only regulation.  Customers should be able to know how much traffic they incurred, and like a leaky faucet they should be able to pay for the usage instead of being turned off.

By px | Also posted in blogs, internet, thoughts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

netgear ps121 usb print server notes

2008.04.10 – 3:31 pm PDT

I had one while I was living with my , and got used to not having to walk to the printer, plug in the laptop and wait.  Over the weekend I ordered a refurbished Netgear PS121 USB Mini Print Server for cheap and got it up and running in minutes not counting my fruitless searches to find the default log-in and password.

Hopefully this page will rank high for those searching for the default log-in, password, and settings of their new Netgear print server.  I am using CUPS on Linux.  Right now using Ubuntu, and Gentoo primarily.

By default it uses DHCP to request an available address from your network.

Also by default the user-name is “admin” and password, “password” both with no quotes.

LPR Queue name “P1”

IPP URL “http://ip:631/ipp/p1” (Connects; unable to print; reason below)

AppSocket/HPJetDirect “socket://ip:9100/p1” (Works; Read Update Below.)

Also to print a test page, hold down the reset button for 2 seconds.

To reset back to factory default settings, hold down the reset button for 10 seconds.

The web based configuration tool for the Netgear isn’t that involved, and certainly isn’t as “smart” as the banner proclaims it.  There isn’t even a way to control jobs via the web interface.   If you do not know how to configure your DHCP server to assign a static IP address reservation, the only important thing to configure security wise is the password.

After a quick nmap scan of the new device on my network, it revealed several open ports which you may want to firewall from outside networks as there is no password authentication required to telnet, or print to the device.

PORT     STATE SERVICE
23/tcp   open  telnet
80/tcp   open  http
139/tcp  open  netbios-ssn
515/tcp  open  printer
631/tcp  open  ipp
9100/tcp open  jetdirect

UPDATE:

I’ve had the printer server for about a month now, and I have to say that it pretty much sucks.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  I haven’t really been able to print anything reliably without multiple attempts or wasting paper from printing garbage.  I have only had luck with the AppSocket/HPJetDirect, LPR/LPD methods.  I have not been able to get IPP to work either.  This post from 2005 confirms it’s apparently by design.  Pretty lame.

By px | Also posted in hardware, notes | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Change Congress launched

2008.03.23 – 12:18 am PDT

The incredibly smart and well spoken Lawrence Lessig, of Free Culture and Creative Commons fame, has lanched Change Congress.

It’s purpose is to change congress for the better. By how do you ask?

Listen, and/or watch the initial Change Congress press release on blip.tv.  Lawrence Lessig explains in plain English the goals of this new organization.  Change Congress simply put is…

I believe candidates should:

Change Congress
Click the Change Congress badge to learn more about my district.  You can get your own badge here.

By px | Also posted in internet, thoughts | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

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