Viraj's Weblog

I will soon be moving and leaving my current employer. I'm currently looking for someone to replace my position, and the job description is available at the above link. Please contact the address listed if interested.

With how easy it is to install things on Debian, I decided to check out Mediawiki, the wiki used for the large encyclopedia site Wikipedia.

It required PHP 4.1.2 or higher, and MySQL 3.2 or higher. The Debian package notes for libapache2-mod-php4 stated that the package only works with Apache's prefork MPM. I had earlier installed Apache 2 with its threading MPM (apache2-mpm-worker) to play with mod_python. PHP is not thread-safe, so requires the MPM preforking model (apache2-mpm-prefork). I selected that package, expecting some problems 'converting' to the different Apache MPM, but it ran flawlessly. Then selected the libapache2-mod-php4 package, which brought in all the needed requirements. Man, I remember when I had to use Apache Toolbox to get everything working properly. Debian packages are a huge timesaver.

Anyhow, there was no Mediawiki Debian package, so grabbed the tar and went through the install. These days, PHP projects are coming with their own PHP web-based installation. That's nice for installing on webhosting providers that don't give you shell access. Within a few minutes I had Mediawiki running on my system.

It's a very nice wiki, storing most data in the database. I liked how simple it was, and it had a very usable markup toolbar when editing pages. This would help alot for new users. I know that it is scalable from the massive Wikipedia site.

My major gripe with it is how it stores attachments. It seems the only attachments Mediawiki expects are images. This can be changed by allowing different extensions, but why the concentration on images only? More importantly, there is one namespace for all filenames. So you cannot have 2 wiki pages with the files meeting.doc on both of them. The 2nd upload would overwrite the first one. This makes uploading attachments rather unusable in my opinion. Contrasting with Twiki, which stores the attachments in a separate namespace for each wiki page.

Because of the above, I feel Twiki is still the best wiki out there.

There's a good interview with John Sayles in Zmag about independent films:

If you're not an independent filmmaker, generally it means that it's a negotiation all the way down the line. We'll give you the money if you cast somebody we want. If it's not somebody you like, too bad. You can either make the movie or not make the movie, accept this person or don't. We'll give you the money if we can review the final cut and then make some changes and put it in front of an audience and get their numbers of how many liked it, how many really liked it, how many didn't like it, would they recommend it. Then we may recommend some changes that we will expect you to do.

There are people I would consider independent filmmakers who work within the Hollywood system usually because their movies have been successful enough. The Coen Brothers make the movies that they want to make. It's not necessarily how you get financed, but it has something to do with who generates the story and how that story comes out the other end. I've often said, getting a movie through the studio system is like getting a bill through Congress. What comes out the other end may not resemble much what went in and a lot of stuff may be attached to it that waters down or actually does the opposite of what you originally wanted that bill to do.

And futher warns:

The problem that I see with most independent films made by young people is that they have only gone to see films, then they went to film school, and then started making movies. They have not done much out in the world. They haven't had another job, they haven't lived more than one place in their lives, they don't know what goes on in the world. So I would say go out and do something else. Learn a little about the world. And then think about it a little bit before you try to tell stories about it.

I honestly feel that Martin Scorsese is the greatest director of all time. I love directors that push the limits on the cinematic experience, everything from the music, to the camera movement and angles, to the characters, to the plot. It all has to come together for a great movie, and Scorsese rarely fails to achieve that. I loved all of Scorsese's films, except for Gangs of New York. For some reason I found that film unconvincing. Yes it had lots of gore, but it didn't feel like New York to me, and it seemed it was missing something.

The Aviator is missing nothing. This is perhaps the greatest movie I've seen in a long time. At 3 hours in length, I wasn't sure what to expect. I'm not a big fan of long movies, and usually after 1.5 hours I start yawning. But this film kept me interested the whole time. Many in the audience clapped at the end, and rightly so. It was just an amazing cinematic experience. I have so much more respect for Leonardo DiCaprio now, and he pulls off every scene flawlessly. Scorsese films are character studies. This film shows the dark side of Hughes as well as the bright side, balanced perfectly to keep the interest of both entertainment seekers, and others looking for a thought-provoking movie. The acting and plot was superb. Scorsese sets up beautiful shots of the many airplanes Hughes creates, such as a camera slowly descending behind a plane as classical music hits the soundtrack. The time period was absolutely convincing, even with Gwen Stefani. There are even some hilarious scenes, such as when Hughes requests his meteorologist to prove to the MPAA that his film contains no more cleavage than other films.

The film ends with Hughes/DiCaprio repeating in a mirror, "The way of the future." I have heard that Hughes pretty much went insane at the end of his life. By the end, you know it will happen. But you also know what a great person he was. It takes people like this to pave the way of the future.

Checkout this review by Roger Ebert.

Recently I've been noticing slowdowns when browsing on my Bellsouth DSL connection. I let it slide for awhile thinking they may be overloaded from time to time. Now it just got so bad, it was taking literally a minute to resolve sites like slashdot.org and timing out on many sites.

I started using dig to look into this further. The DNS servers Bellsouth normally gives me are:

205.152.144.23
205.152.132.23

The following command attempts to contact a DNS server 205.152.144.23 to resolve the address (a) record of www.slashdot.org:

dig @205.152.144.23 www.slashdot.org a

Running this repeatedly was taking a few seconds to return results, and many times would just timeout. DNS replies should generally be less than 1 second, especially after the DNS server caches the lookup. Bellsouth appears to be doing something funky, almost like they are not caching anything. I didn't notice any packet loss from me to their DNS server, so it doesn't appear to be network related.

It turns out I am not alone in my problems. Bellsouth's ridiculous problem reporting form asks me what number I am dialing. WTF? And look at their 'Date of trouble' drop down. It turns out I can only report problems that happend in 2003. I managed to find another form and I sent in my report.

For now, I just ended up using a DNS server at a previous company I worked for. As soon as I made that change, browsing became MUCH faster, and no more DNS timeouts. Ideally I would run my own DNS server, but I have no system here to do so .

Well this Christmas morning I went for my usual jog, which I try to do every other day. Now I've come across unleashed dogs in my neighborhood, and even complained to my homeowner's association about one which I could not find the owner anywhere. That dog was not very big, and even when it was barking at me, I felt I could probably take it down with a swift kick. I haven't run into that dog since my complaint, but it is amazing how many others do this same shit.

I'm jogging and I see a big black marmaduke-type of dog coming down the sidewalk ahead of me. About 50ft behind it is the owner wearing a Santa hat with a baby stroller, and 50ft behind him is another white grayhound-type of dog. Of course neither are leashed, except for the fucking baby. The big black dog starts speeding up towards me.

Now, I used to have 2 big german shepherds, and I have a pretty good idea of what dogs are capable of. No matter how sweet and cuddly you think your dog is, it is essentially a wild animal with its wild nature suppressed (i.e. tamed). If something were to turn that switch on, no amount of "heel"'s and "down boy"'s will turn it off. They say that dog's can sense fear, and they can, no matter how much you try to hide it. Well I stayed calm and kept jogging cautiously.

The dog slows down beside me, and starts growling, then runs around me from behind back to my front and starts barking. At this point I've stopped jogging and had my hands up ready to block any bites this thing attempts. This dog was BIG, up to my waist. I knew if it attacked me I wouldn't have much chance, but I was ready to take this fucker's eyes out.

Luckily, it didn't go any further. The owner comes running up yelling for his dog to stop. If I would have kept running, it would have definitely attacked. Especially with a baby, dogs are extremely protective. The owner apologized profusely, and I was too stunned to say much back. Dog's do not like it when people argue with their owners as well. The people here are not exactly "love thy neighbor" types. I refer to them as closet rednecks. It didn't take much for the dog to make the dark skin is evil conjecture.

What a great way to start out Christmas day! Merry Christmas!

I caught this movie on Encore. I thought it was very much a family-oriented film, but it was rather strange in the Willy-Wonka way. For some reason, IMDB seems to recommend the Godfather Trilogy if you like this movie .

The movie involves a boy who is sent to a detention camp to dig holes and avoid CG lizards that kill instantly. It had a great cast: Sigourney Weaver, Tim Blake Nelson, Jon Voight, and Patricia Arquette. I thought it was a pretty fun movie, with a great soundtrack and occasional hilarious dialog like this one where the warden is addressing the inmates:

I got a story to tell. Once upon a time there was a magical place where it never rained. The End.

Ok, it was funnier when Jon Voight said it...

As mentioned, I recently installed Debian Testing, aka sarge, on a home PC. It had defaulted to the GNOME desktop, and I had noticed that the volume applet was not working properly. I attributed this to Debian not detecting my soundcard at install, and didn't bother with it as I don't have much need for sound.

I decided this morning to see how difficult it was to get sound working. Doing an lsmod showed an emu10k1 module loaded. It actually did detect my soundcard! But why was the GNOME volume applet not working? It was always going back to zero volume level, and trying to start the mixer resulted in some device not found error. Well is sound actually working?

cat /bin/ls > /dev/audio

Ahh, yes I actually heard the sweet sound of /bin/ls. xmms even works, but rhythmbox, which is the default player for certain files, had a similar complaint about my device not being found.

Now I wanted to find out where my emu10k1 module was configured to load. On Red Hat systems, I would see this in /etc/modules.conf, but I didn't find it in the file on Debian. I searched all of /etc:

grep -ril emu10 /etc

and still came up with nothing. Wtf? Is Debian storing system configuration elsewhere? I decided to forget about that and look into the real problem: GNOME audio apps not working.

After some Googling, I saw some mention on this page that I needed to create a /dev/sound/mixer the same as /dev/mixer. Well that didn't do shit. Maybe it's trying to open something else. I brought out good old strace on the volume app:

strace -o /tmp/blah gnome-volume-control

I looked for any /dev opens or stats, hoping to see it trying to find a missing mixer device. I saw it trying to open /dev/snd/control* and /dev/aload* devices. I remember seeing something about ALSA and these devices. Well I am not using ALSA, and don't really see a need to install it. I just want the volume control working damnit.

About an hour more of searching I finally came across a bug report from someone who went through my pain, almost exactly to the tee. From that bug I saw mention of gstreamer-properties. I have no idea what this is used for, but after running it showed it was configured for ALSA sound output and input. There was no other selection.

The bug mentioned the gstreamer0.8-oss package needing to be installed. Started up Synaptic, installed the package, and gstreamer-properties now has an OSS selection. OSS is the standard Linux sound driver. After selecting that and restarting GNOME, my volume, mixer, and rhythmbox worked fine. strace on the volume app show it correctly opening /dev/mixer and other devices. It turns out the main problem was a result of a bug in the new Debian installer. What a pain!

Lesson learned, Debian still has a ways to go for a usable desktop. I still don't know where my sound module is being loaded from...

Update: Digging around for sound in /etc led me to a /etc/discover.conf. It turns out discover is like kudzu on Red Hat, and does hardware detection. So now I know how my emu10k1 module is being loaded.

I've been pretty much a die hard Red Hat Linux guy, so much that I even have an RHCE, which unfortunately will expire soon. Red Hat has always been a solid distribution on the corporate environment. Nowadays, because of Red Hat's cost, I usually use Whitebox Linux.

I experimented with Debian in the past and loved its package management. I recently installed Debian Testing on my home system. I still do not feel Debian is good for new users. Configuring X is something I had to do manually, and only could have because of past experience. Also, my sound does not work, and I haven't even begun to look into that.

I think Debian is great for servers. I've been learning Python and the book I'm reading has a chapter on mod_python. Well I figure'd I would try out Apache and mod_python on my Debian box. I could not believe how simple this was to install. Synaptic is a great GUI package management tool that is simple and works. So I looked for mod_python, and had a good selection of versions to use. Some work with Apache v1, v2, Python 2.2, 2.3, etc. I just selected the one I wanted, and then since I didn't have Apache, it was selected as a dependency and installed/downloaded flawlessly. What was very cool is when I looked at the /etc/apache2 directory for how the server is configured I saw a very elegant directory structure with the sysadmin in mind. You will have to check it out for yourself to appreciate it. The Debian packages are of very high quality. In all, it took me about 10 minutes.

Doing the above on a Red Hat system ends up with dependency hell, with RPMs not playing well with each other. I am constantly impressed with how well Debian packages the software, and I think I have found a new distribution for servers I setup. For workstations however, there is some ways to go for proper auto-detection of hardware.

Lately I've been learning Python. Granted, it was sparked by a Google interview, but I'm really glad I've spent the time.

I've been doing Perl for about 6 years, and considered it my favorite language. Things are changing now, and Python is creeping into my psyche. I'm not a programmer, but as a sysadmin I like to code a few tools from time to time. I believe that code should be beautiful, and programming is an artform. Programming is normally compared to structural engineering. Sometimes you see a building and think, "That's a very beautiful building." Code should be no different. A great program is both functional and beautiful.

Most of the Python code I look at is just a pleasure to read. It's compact and there is less syntactical stuff that makes code ugly. I recently looked at the Perl code for amavisd-new. I have nothing against the amavisd-new developers, but I believe their code to be horribly ugly. However, it may be very functional, and from the number of users, appears that way. This is not to say all Perl code is ugly. I think that when we write programs, they should be written like a good book that stimulates the reader.

My first experiment at writing a Python program was an SMTP proxy which took me 2 days to write. Most of it is re-using objects already defined in Python that just work. I was impressed with how easy it was and how it pretty much worked the first time I ran it. Python requires alot of research before you start coding, but it's time well spent. Perl, on the other hand, is write code first, ask questions later.

I do have peeves with Python though. Probably the major one I have is regular expressions, only because I'm used to Perl. It's not so bad though. For example, the following searches the string fullpath for extensions of .tcl, .itcl, .tk, and .itk:

if re.compile(r"\.(i?tcl|i?tk)$", re.IGNORECASE).search(fullpath):

One thing very cool is list comprehensions. Let's say I have a list of strings in selections and I want to create a list called printable that is a escaped properly for HTML:

printable = [cgi.escape(x) for x in selections]

There's still alot I need to learn in Python, but I'm enjoying it. If you're looking for a new language to learn, invest the time in Python. You won't be disappointed.

Warning, the above link contains explicit language.

Back when I was a Netflix member, I rented some wierd stuff. I watched movies I would never get to see anywhere else. I remember renting Clerks not knowing what the hell it was other than it got some good reviews.

This is one great movie. I'm now watching it again on IFC. This was the movie that catapulted Kevin Smith and Jay and Silent Bob. The movie is mostly dialog, and its hilarious. There are some genuine characters in the film, some reminding me of past friends.
I didn't notice it before, but the soundtrack is also very good. I couldn't find it on Itunes though . IFC said the soundtrack rights costed more than the entire movie!

I remember the DVD had an alternate ending where the Dante, the main clerk, gets shot. That was interesting.

Favorite quote: Hey, try not to suck any dicks on the way to the parking lot...Hey...Hey you! Get back here. 

Just finished reading Spam Kings. It delves into the secret lives of spammers and anti-spammers. There is no technical information in the book. It instead follows the lives of a few famous spammers and their opponents. Most of these spammers were earning over $1k a day, and some, such as the Time Travel Spammer had motives not exactly monetary. It offers good explanation of why people get into spamming.

The book sums up the current sad state of affairs quite nicely:

The Internet didn't invent plain, brown-wrapper deliveries. But spam provides Internet users with new levels of anonymous access to the dodgiest of items. By double-clicking a hyperlink in a spam message, consumers can order cable descramblers, "free" government grants, and fake diplomas. Thanks to junk mail, any consumer with an Internet connection and a credit card now has access to raunchy, and in some cases illegal, porn without the inconvenience of having to drive to the nearest adult bookstore. From the privacy of their homes or offices, spam recipients can get nonprescription access to controlled drugs via the web sites of fly-by-night apothecaries on servers in South America.

If email were around during the Prohibition, you can bet that spammers would have been selling moonshine.

... spam reveals something profound about the American consumer psyche. ... some people are stupid.

I'm a stickler for movies that no one sees. I go out of my way to find such movies, and usually I head down to Sunrise Cinemas because they play the indie flicks that cause people to come out of the theatre saying "What the fuck?". Recently AMC Aventura 24 has also been dedicating a theatre or 2 to independent films as well.

Warning, spoilers ahead...

Recently I saw The Machinist starring Christian Bale. I've liked him since American Psycho, and in this movie he literally looks like he came out of a Nazi camp. That's some dedication. Some may also remember him as a little boy in Empire of the Sun. Another reason I wanted to see this movie is that the director Brad Anderson made another psychological thriller I liked called Session 9.

The Machinist is very dark and eery. It has a hint of Fight Club psychology, but ultimately turns out to be a film about guilt and redemption. The whole movie is a downward spiral into a psychological hell. I love such movies, but nothing can top Requiem for a Dream in that category. The reason why the Bale character cannot sleep is because he has a guilty conscience for things done in the past. In a way, he resembles a walking corpse. In the end, even though he is in a jail cell, he is free and can finally sleep. Some may be annoyed by the religious undertones, but I found it intriguing. There is one scene where he is in a slow scary carnival ride that forks into 2 paths: Road to Salvation, or Highway to Hell. That's essentially what this movie is about.

I like the movie very much and recommend it.

Wee, this is my first post! I'm using a nice blogging package called b2evolution. My hosting provider Infinology does not provide shell access, but this system was completely installable via the web and their control panel.

One thing I must say is I am impressed with Infinology. For the price, they have a really nice system, and their control panel is actually quite usable. They use something called Hsphere. Long ago I worked for an ISP and evaluated a similar control-panel like tool called Ensim. Boy did that suck. That was a long time ago though, and things might have changed.