Those of you who have lived with me probably know that my naming scheme for my computers has been anime characters. I can't remember all of the characters that I've been through, but currently my hefty Macbook is kusanagi, my lightweight MacbookAir is chiyo, my windows desktop was tomo, my beefier do-everything server is yomi, more recently my archive fileserver is megabaa, and there's also fumie, haruhi, akabane, and once upon a time our video-server kanchi. Yes I've gone through many computers. I always like to make the name reflect somehow the characters of the machine (if you don't understand the above, you need to watch more anime ;)

Anyway, while home for the holidays I was taking care of broken home computers, and was annoyed that the central house server had such a non-descript name gw. Because our houses are connected by VPN, MDNS and NetBIOS names often across the ocean, so "gw" is a confusing name (which network is it a gateway on??). So I decided to at least give meaning from names to the family computers I manage. I needed another naming scheme, and I don't have a whole lot of cultural overlap with my parents. One thing we do have in common is Battlestar Galactica. So, the former gw became athena, and the computer I was converting into a fileserver became baltar. The tricky bit is baltar is my ancient Athlon with 758MB of RAM (originally "misato") and no SATA interface (though equipped with SATA drives), so it was a bit of a challenge trying to get an OS configuration where ZFS was running stably. OpenSolaris does't support the SiI3114 SATA card natively (of course). I tried linux with zfs-fuse (zfs-fuse had an extremely stupid error while doing a scrub. something like "assertion integrity_check_ok failed." Of course it failed. That's why I was doing a scrub. *sigh* Also zfs-fuse still doesn't support snapdirs, so it's not ideal anyway). For a brief moment, I tried OpenSolaris from within VirtualBox and got to name the guest VM "six" which made me very happy. Unfortunately trying to run osol and linux inside of 758MB of ram without hardware virtualization is an exercise in pain, so I gave up and installed FreeBSD 8.0. Fortunately ZFS support has gotten much better in FreeBSD 8, and actually everything worked basically without a hitch or excessive tinkering. Good job FreeBSD!

Anyway, the point of this whole post was basically to say how happy I was that I got to make a virtual "six" inside of "baltar." Six doesn't exist anymore, but I think I'll add six as an entry to hosts.allow just in case she ever comes back ;)

I think I need to create a blog for myself where I can post those little scribblings about random computer stuff that I discover/write/find both as a memo to myself and in case anyone else is curious. Like for example today I figured out how to boot memtest86 over the network by holding down shift while booting a suspicious cluster machine you want to investigate (this may seem trivially obvious to the PXE gurus out there, but I had no idea that syslinux was so awesome). Lots of fun, but I think too technical for my livejournal, which still has its heart, a lot of my embarrassingly personal stuff.

But, I must share the good news of my discovery that Foxmarks can in fact use a personal webdav server/file as to synchronize rather than using the foxmarks server. Like many people, I was leery of upgrading to Firefox 3 soley because it would mean saying goodbye to Google Browser Sync which (at least tried) to keep my bookmarks in sync between all the different computers I use firefox from (current count: 7). Lately though, google browser sync was doing more harm than good (eg. even though I didn't even change any bookmarks, a whole folder of them would disapear), so I decided it was time to say goodbye to google browser sync. I started to put together a framework for handling syncing via mercurial (kinda like what i did with password gorilla, but that's another post waiting to happen for the "Krispy-Tech Journal"), but this was doomed to be an exercise in futility because Firefox 3 manages bookmarks in sqlite3, making merging via simple textfiles impossible, and even then only possible to pick up new changes by restarting firefox. I'd seen Foxmarks mentioned before in the "Goodbye Google Browser Sync" post, but shyed away because by looking at their features page it seems clearly obvious that they will have access to your bookmarks and are upfront about the fact that they will use them for data mining purposes. I don't like the idea of my bookmarks being datamined, and also I don't like the security implications. I thought briefly about trying to write the extension on my own, but ultimately gave up on that idea when I thought of how ultimately I would want to publish it, but then I'd have a continual stream of users complaining about something that I wrote simply as a hack until someone else writes it properly for me. I also looked into Mozilla Weave, which looks promising, but right now is pretty immaterial and "the only encryption is implemented method currently implemented is a stub while we work out the technical and legal issues about using real cryptography" so basically, Weave isn't going to happen yet.

But, today, in a moment of apathy, I decided to try out Foxmarks, and after downloading and setting up my account (and providing them with one copy of my bookmarks, grrr), I discovered that you can in fact use your own server instead of Foxmark.com! Doing it that way you don't even have to create an account with them! The key secret: hit cancel during the initial set up wizard thingy, then under the "advanced settings" tab, you can set it up to use an arbitrary webdav/ftp/"local file" as a synchronization point. I later found out this is in fact documented in a dark dusty corner of their wiki FAQ, but to me, that should be out front on the Features page! So, I share my joyous discovery with you here.

But whatever, I'm just pleased that I have a nice extension to sync bookmarks for me again! And now all my computers can go firefox 3! (and everything goes faster!) Also, Firefox 3 actually keeps a bookmark history/backups automatically, so I suspect that even if Foxmarks does something horrible, it shouldn't be hard to fix. But just in case, I also set up mercurial to take hourly snapshots of foxmark's webdav file, it's like having super triple crazy insurance, which is always a good thing.

Right now it's technically 梅雨 in Japan, which is supposedly "the rainy season," but it never really seems that different from any other time of year. Except now it's annoyingly too warm to wear a rain coat. But anyway, I want to know, what is the character for "Season of Spontaneous Computer Death?" 計算機自然死季節? There's gotta be a catchier phrase. Anyways, here's the death toll so far:

• a couple months ago my old toshiba laptop, which I got nearly 4 years ago upon arriving in japan, started making the "fan stutter of death" noise, rattling around for a while and then grinding to a halt. This usually causes the CPU to overheat in about 5 minutes, so not really a usable configuration. I've tried dismantling this laptop to get at the fan before, but toshiba's are apparently built by sadistic puzzle building gnomes with a penchant for the self-destructing containers (like the cryptex in the da vinci code). Try as I might I can never actually separate the final layer of plastic covering the top of the motherboard. I tried keeping the fan alive by blasting it with air duster spray from as many angles as I could, but that only bought it another month. About 3 weeks ago, it died for good.
• My cheap-assed lenovo box which served as router/web/mail/whatever server for my apartment experienced a bad case of spontaneous motherboard failure last week. Lenovo technical support was terrible. Well, actually I'd say it was hit or miss. the first lady I talked to was pretty good. she followed me along what I already tried, and how I was 99% sure it was the motherboard (the ram is not "lenovo ram" and thus, there was a $80 gamble that if BOTH dimms failed simultaneously it was in fact my fault, and they'd charge me for wasting their time), so she was ready to ship it off to repairs for me. I didn't like the idea of the $80 gamble, so I said I'd look around a bit more for the original ram first. The original ram, however, apparently ran away with another decidedly broken dimm that I had lying around, because I can't find either of them. Maybe they're trying to start their own little dysfunctional ram family. Anyways, I gave up on finding the ram, and called back to accept the $80 gamble. The lady I got this time was terrible. Lenovo loads some diagnostics software and a magic boot loader with recovery toys etc onto the hard disk, which takes up a pretty sizable chunk when you're already buying the cheapest configuration, so this of course I deleted. The moment support lady #2 heard that I had erased that partition, she said that she couldn't help me because I was running some sort of "linux" said with the same tone of voice usually reserved for talking about the kind of people who push elderly women in front of buses. I never actually mentioned the word "Linux" or even said that I installed a different operating system, simply that I erased their recovery partition. ANyway, much tedious explaining later, she gave up on me and forwarded me away from repairs and over to normal tech support. By this time I had downloaded their precious diagnostics software, burned it to cd, booted it, and started the diagnostics process only to find it rebooted about a third of the way through (all this one handed while talking to evil support lady on the phone mind you). The tech support guy didn't care one way or the other about the diagnostics because the fact that my hard drive didn't show up in bios but worked in another computer was enough for him to say "yup. dead motherboard." and forward me back to repairs.
  That said once I actually got the "ok" to the repair service, it was unbelievably fast. They sent a courier the next day to pick up the dead box (in the afternoon), and it came back the very next day (in the morning!) with a brand new motherboard! When the doorbell rang I was like "whaa? computer? for me? are you sure?" So ★★★★ for repairs, and minus fifty stars for 1/3 of the support staff treating me like a vandal.
• Today, I went home early to help sophie with her java and database homework, and I had this "apple security update" dialog lingering on my macbook. I was going back and forth helping sophie, so not really getting any work done, and for some reason vpn was failing ("no space left in buffer?" that's a weird error...), and firefox was mysteriously crashing on startup. So I ran the security update, which complained about 2 of them failing (one for quicktime and one system files (that's a bad sign)). It told me to restart anyway, said ok. Bad move. After restarting, just moving the mouse over my name in the little login window caused the screen to drop to text mode and give me a console logon (I didn't even know that such a mode existed in macs!). I have no idea how to get it to re-attempt those updates from a text console, so I figured at this point reinstalling the OS was probably my best hope of getting my mac back that night (which I reallly wanted to get back because my mac is the best environment for writing TeX in japanese, which I need to do for a presentation tomorrow... >_<). Again, bad move. The install failed part way through with an enigmatic "Installation failed. Please try again." But this installation attempt has apparently pushed my system beyond the point of no return. Upon starting the installer again, my hard disk no longer shows up. The disk utility program tells me that the partition still exists, but it's unmountable and apparently in a very bad limbo state. Verify says finds some with some errors with some file's size errors and says "This disk needs to be repaired", repair finds the same error and says "Repair failed." Thanks Apple!
  There's no clicks of death from the hard disk, so right now I'm betting on piece of crap file system (a few weeks ago I got a kernel panic from hfs_create_symlink that took down my system (check your logs apple, it's in there!), so that may have been the beginning of the end). Grrrr....

  Allright, enough whining. Already 1am and writing japanese tex in linux is going to be a major pain...

  PS: I've been reading "When You are Engulfed in Flames." Can you tell? =P