Viraj's Weblog

I came across the above article in Discover magazine about how anyone can be a producer/musician these days. It praised Garageband, a music orchestration program that comes with OS X.

Now I've always seen that little guitar on my Powerbook's dock, but I've never clicked it before. After reading the article, I thought I'd try it out.

I am amazed. The program makes it extremely simple to create music, and good quality music at that. It comes with drum loops, intruments, bass lines, guitar riffs, etc and the interface is unbelievable intuitive.

Now some background here, I used to work alot with electronic keyboards, mostly doing sampling and hiphop music. I spent years doing that, cutting up samples, creating drum beats, working with some would-be artists, going to studios, etc. It was fun, but I stopped when most of my friends went elsewhere and I started a real job. Nowadays the field is saturated with producers, and my god, the equipment these days... you need alot more money now to make good music.

I spent about an hour in Garageband and did what would take me 2 days to do on a sampling workstation/keyboard. The ease that you can manipulate waveforms, create loops, arrange and move them in your sequence (in real time!) is awesome. It almost makes me want to get back into music again.

This weekend I checked out Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. I've liked the films he's directed and they all are very intelligent.

This movie has Hilary Swank training to be a boxer, and she does awesome. Her Oscar nomination for this is well-deserved. Eastwood plays her trainer, and he does great as well.

Spoiler alert...

Oscar nods seem to always include a movie where someone dies on a deathbed. Well this boxer does die, and goes through a very sad sequence of events before she does so.

The boxer gets blindsided with an illegal punch that causes her to fall on a stool in the ring and break her neck, rendering her paralyzed from the neck down. Most movies at this point would show a person rehabilitating and triumphing over the disaster. In fact when I first saw it, I thought, no way, she is just getting started on her championship, this can't stop her. Wrong...

Eastwood movies have characters battling inner demons, and I thought the conversations between Eastwood and the priest were very interesting. The priest considers him a pagan, but in reality he is very spiritual. The movie eventually comes down to a euthanasia question. The priest says it is a sin to kill, but it's argued that it's a sin to keep the person living in such a state. She suffers so much that she attempts to bite off her tongue to bleed to death. It's a grueling scene.

The boxing scenes were top notch, and I was reminded of Scorsese's Raging Bull. It's a very sad movie, but if you can take it, go see it.

I'm currently testing Communigate Pro as a groupware solution. I've had great experience with it in the past. It's solid, stable, uses open standards, and painless to maintain. There is really nothing that comes close to its administration interface and it has a very nice filter plugin interface.

They have a MAPI plugin for Outlook which I had issues with in the past, but I'm hoping that it's much better now. What's very cool is it basically converts MAPI to IMAP, and stores things such as calendar items in standard ical format. They make a good effort to be cross-platform.

One issue that came up in the past were offline synchronization. I'm doing tests with a 2 gig PST file converted to MAPI, so we'll see how it goes.

Another was its web interface, which is extremely bare-bones. It works, but is just ugly. I did some searching and found this post about some nice skins. Personally I like the Rapsberry OSX theme the best.

I've setup a new blog for a buddy of mine Scott Illsley whom I used to work with. Check it out.

I've been evaluating Scalix at work as an Exchange replacement. The system is based on HP Openmail, which in my opinion is a piece of junk. Everything is stored in a proprietary format that is impossible to debug when there are problems.

One of the main selling points of Scalix is the web interface. This is supposed to rival Exchange's webmail, but seems a very clumsy interface to me. It's missing key features such as free/busy checking, not being able to create shared folders (needs to be done via Outlook), and no addressbook links when composing messages. It gave the impression of a hack job

I played with the Outlook plugin, and certain public folders I created in Outlook wouldn't show up in the web interface. Other than that it seemed to work ok.

After installation, I had to change my hostname. Well Scalix did not like this at all and failed to find the 'mailnode' when adding users afterwards. It was non-intuitive what I needed to do to fix it, and my only solution was to completely re-install it. After that, I was even able to hang the Scalix server when I tried using Thunderbird with IMAP. Just pathetic.

Then there is the "admin" interface, which after you have seen Communigate Pro's, is lacking in many respects. It's just a simple user manager.. no server configuration at all.

The web interface requires Java and Tomcat/Jakarta on the server, and as with all Java crap there is version hell. I went through a few hours trying to get the right combinations of versions of Java and Tomcat that would work with Scalix.

When using offline sync'ing to Outlook, you are limited to 2GB in Scalix. So you can continue doing your maintenance of keeping users under 2GB. Yippeee.

I just could never see myself maintaining this in a production environment. The system is too complex and closed. Why the hell did they choose Openmail instead of the countless quality free mail servers out there?

It's sad that there is no good Exchange killer out there. This problem seems never ending. I would love to use Thunderbird and Sunbird for shared calendaring, but it is missing any concept of meeting scheduling (availability, accepting/rejecting meetings, etc).

I really admire OS X Server. This is a bundle of free software that works (Postfix, OpenLDAP, Cyrus, Apache), but where is the Exchange killer? How do people at Apple schedule meetings?

I've been using Ubuntu Linux on my home desktop for a few weeks. I like it very much, mainly because it is less of a moving target than Debian Testing. The forum support is very good, and I even got help on an issue I had.

I hadn't booted Windows in awhile, and this evening I attempted to. Lo and behold the boot loader appeared to hang. I thought my XP partition was hosed. In Linux, I was able to mount and read the NTFS partitions just fine, but it just wouldn't boot. I did alot of searching, attempted XP's fixmbr, reloading grub, etc all with no luck. I finally started a Recovery Installation of XP.

During the recovery install I did more searching and eventually found this post on the Ubuntu forum, which in turn pointed to this article. The first reboot of recovery install was attempted, and XP wouldn't boot!

So I tried what was explained in the above pages. I booted a rescue disk and did:

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk --no-reread -H255 /dev/hda

After that, booting continued the 2nd stage of the recovery install. Long story short, my partition table was hosed. I could have just run the above command to fix it, but now I'm sitting through an XP install .

In case you want to do some Python scripting on MS Access databases, this link explains a bit how. It works very nicely, but you have to install the pywin32 package.

I had a chance to check this out after hearing good reviews about it. It's essentially a journey of a man going mad. When I first heard Sean Penn's character introduce himself as Sam, I thought oh no, can it be this Sam? Fortunately not. I honestly could not watch more than 5 minutes of I am Sam due to being supremely annoyed by Penn.

He was very convincing in this movie, which is ultimately a character study. It's reminiscent of Taxi Driver, and I love such movies. In the end, there is a botched attempt to hijack a plane. It shows Penn reaching his exploding point. He gets in line for the metal detector.. gets scared, leaves, has doubts, then comes back. This scene is actually quite scary, and I couldn't help thinking about September 11. When a person reaches this point, there is no turning back.

At work the IT Director suggested using small form factor PCs for servers. I found this rather intriguing. Think about a stack of cheap brick PCs like the ones sold by Idotpc and Simplified Innovation, instead of a rack full of expensive, large, loud, and hot servers.

Fairly decent brick PCs are running around $500. The storage for such small PCs could be offloaded to a Coraid box. Instead of concentrating on expensive servers, why not make them easily replaceable, such that they can even become almost disposable. Disposable servers... there is something very cool about that .

Maybe even something like a stack of Mac Minis. The only issue is we want to run Linux. We can, but certain support may be lacking. For example, we are using Sangoma T1 cards in Linux boxes. They require a PCI slot and x86. Most likely there is no ATA over Ethernet support on such architectures as well for Coraid.

Could this be the way of the future? Could such small, cheap, and disposable systems replace the monstrous racks of expensive servers?

My new job uses SMTP AUTH over SSL. For some reason Mail.app in OS X was getting authentication errors sending mail. I thought this was maybe a client problem and was busy with other things to look into it. Also I could get by without AUTH just fine. I then switched to Thunderbird and got the same problem. It was beginning to irritate me so I started looking into it further.

I wanted to understand what the client was sending. Normally I could use tcpdump or ethereal, but when the transaction is SSL encrypted it doesn't help much. I did some searching and found ssldump. When given the private SSL key, this can decrypt the packets for you.

I didn't have gcc on OS X, so I couldn't compile ssldump. But I did have tcpdump and ssldump can read pcap files. So I used tcpdump to capture data to a file:

sudo tcpdump -nlp -i en0 -w /tmp/blah.pcap port 25

Then I tried sending mail in Thunderbird. Next I took the blah.pcap file to a Debian box where I installed ssldump (easy as apt-get install ssldump). Then I did:

ssldump -r blah.pcap -k server.key -d

Voila, it got me the AUTH line my mail client was sending. I compared it with the one generated as explained here. Everything looked ok, but the server was rejecting it for some reason.

After further investigation, it turned out there was a misconfiguration on the mail server that was causing this. The steps above helped me rule out a client issue, and ssldump was very helpful.

Well today was my first day at the new company. Things went very smoothly, and everyone is extremely nice and easy to get along with. I work in a group of 6 IT people. I went through alot of orientation, and understanding the network. My first task is to setup Twiki to put alot of server documentation online. That'll most of all help me understand everything. The IT director is encouraging everyone in the group to learn Linux (some have Windows background), signing them up for training, etc. Pretty nice, and I helped one with her regular expression exam. I think she passed.

I was given a 15" Powerbook and also Virtual PC to run Windows on OS X. Virtual PC is pretty nice, but slow of course. It is similar in speed to VMware, and it's good for me to have as a sysadmin in order to diagnose Windows issues. So now I'm staring at 2 Powerbooks on my dining table. I just know one day I'm going to take the wrong one to work .

I started using the OS X Mail client, but didn't quite like it. I thought of maybe installing mutt, but then thought about having to setup fetchmail, making it not fetch when offline, or avoiding a cronjob re-awakening out of sleep. I decided to go with Thunderbird, and it is pretty nice on OS X. On the server end they run Exim, which is something I'll have to learn.

I got in office at about 8:30am and left about 5:30pm. I expect those to be normal hours, for IT at least. In the evening at home I did alot of research on hardware and other work-related stuff. I expect to be doing alot of that, at least in the beginning. Shit, I haven't even finished unpacking.

Today Adelphia came to my place to install a HDTV tuner and cable modem.

First the TV. I have used Voom for awhile, and even though it had tons of HD channels, I had problems with signal quality. Certain scenes that had lots of action going on resulted it pixelation frequently. Also if there were any clouds in the sky I'd get signal cuts. When I heard Adelphia now has HDTV, I figured I would try it. They were offering all premium channels + HDTV + cable modem for $75/month.

I had made things easy for the technician and prewired component and optical cables ready to be plugged into the tuner box. I also learned that it is a PVR as well, and I must say the pausing live TV feature is quite addictive. There are only a few HD channels (HBO, Starz, Showtime), and only the primary channels (no HBO2 etc), but in general I was impressed with the quality. The PVR even works in HD, and changing channels is MUCH faster than satellite. I watched Out of Time tonight to test it. Looked very good (and not a bad movie).

Next was the cable modem. Again I had everything ready, including Windows XP for the clueless tech. He had to do some configuration directly on the box so I had to disconnect my wireless router. After that, I put the router back in, and all worked flawlessly. It is extremely fast. I was playing with Ubuntu Linux and when it was downloading packages I got rates of 256-280 KB/sec! This blows away the DSL I had. One good test is going to a HTTPS page. These always load up dog slow on slow connections (even DSL), but was extremely fast on cable. Very cool!

The apartment is becoming more likable . This morning I reported some issues such as my dishwasher missing the utensil basket, and the front door lock being difficult to use. Within a few hours someone came out with the basket and fixed the lock. Not bad service. Oh and I found a pretty good Chinese and pizza place closeby, so I'm pretty much set .

Between moving and unpacking, I made an effort to go see the movie House of Flying Daggers. This is a beautiful movie. I loved it very much, from the choreography of the fight scenes, the music, and the story. The movie almost makes a 90 degree turn halfway through it. The fight scenes were simply amazing, and very artistic in the Hero sense. They had a scene similar to Crouching Tiger's tree fight, but this one was just much cooler and at least a little more believable (hehe, well not really). Definitely go checkout this movie. It's ultimately a romance, and a great one. It deserves the many awards it won. As usual, I think there were like 4 people in the theatre when I saw it.

I also saw the trailer for Kunk Fu Hustle. From the director of Shaolin Soccer, and it looks awesome.

Well I've successfully moved into my new apartment Saturday morning 1/15/05. That evening I went to a co-worker Dennis' bachelor party. It was pretty fun. First we went to Hard Rock Casino for dinner at a restaraunt there. That place is HUGE. Then of course the strip joint. We were out pretty late, and I didn't want to drive 1 hour home, so I crashed at his place.

So now it is Sunday evening about 11pm. I have no internet access from my apartment, so I went war driving. I'm now sitting in my car outside Panera Bread, getting a weak, but working wifi signal . It's kinda cold also (for Florida at least): about 55 degrees fahrenheit. Tomorrow is a holiday so I start my new job Tuesday. I should hopefully get my cable modem tomorrow.

The apartment is workable, but kinda small for the shit I have. I may look for another sometime later. It should do for now though, at least until I sell my townhouse.

Well I've packed almost everything except for my DSL hardware and laptop. I'm surrounded by boxes. I thought I lived light. It's amazing how much stuff you think you don't have. Things just start creeping up out of nowhere and you're like, "WTF did I buy this?" and "Do I really need this crap?"

What's kinda scary is I have not seen my new place yet . I've only seen it on paper. They didn't have the model available when I was looking, and I never got a chance to drive to Palm Beach Gardens to check it out. So I have movers coming tomorrow morning. I sure hope I like it .

I'm looking forward to it though. I actually like the fact the community has a gym. There is no gym here and I haven't worked out in awhile. I've been reluctant to jog these days due to unleashed mutts.

I decided to go with cable modem for Internet. Adelphia had a good deal: all movie channels with HDTV and high-speed Internet for $75/month. That's a pretty nice deal.

Hopefully my next blog will be from Palm Beach Gardens, probably from an open wireless network somewhere since I don't get cable modem until Monday.

Today was my last day at Z-Kat as a Systems Administrator. I'm moving on to a new job in Palm Beach Gardens. I believe we have found a good replacement for me at Z-Kat, and things should go smoothly.

I was taken out to lunch by a bunch of co-workers to Dave and Buster's. The CFO says to me afterwards, "So this is all a joke right? Ok ok, you got us. You're not leaving right?" Unfortunately no, but he was a cool guy. I played my last game of foosball (and won). I spent all day putting finishing touches on all of the sysadmin documentation I could come up with. I did a bit of cleanup, like killing stray Call of Duty servers . Luckily things are kinda slow right now at Z-Kat, so the new sysadmin should have some time to get up to speed.

I said my goodbye's to everyone. It was a fun time there. It was the first job where I worked mostly with software developers, and can say I learned some cool things. There is also something that I'm taking with me from Z-Kat, that I can never forget.

I've decided to ditch Debian Testing on my home desktop system. Im tired of downloading 200megs of updated packages every time I boot Linux. It was turning out to be very risky, because many times some package would break. I thought it was fun, because I would have the challenge to figure out how to fix it . Tonight I just got fed up. This particular instance resulted in my MySQL database not starting:

Jan 12 22:41:27 localhost mysqld[1607]: 050112 22:41:27 [ERROR] bdb: unable to initialize mutex: Function not implemented
Jan 12 22:41:27 localhost mysqld[1607]: 050112 22:41:27 [ERROR] bdb: process-private: unable to initialize environment lock: Function not implemented

Debian Testing is changing so much it's just not worth it for me. I think Stable is the only one to run, and that is better for servers, not desktops. I'm going to switch to Ubuntu Linux. I've heard good things about it, and it is based on Debian.

This morning I'm sitting at stoplights reading Linux Journal and came across an ad for Coraid, a company making 'Ethernet Disk Drives'. This uses ATA over Ethernet, and currently there are open source drivers for Linux (no Windows it seems). From what I understand, the drives will appear just like normal attached drives on Linux systems. You can then do software RAID, etc, on Linux if needed. Multiple systems can even see the same drives in read-only for backup purposes. There is no TCP/IP overhead, and it seems reasonable that this would work well with a gigabit switch. They even say it works good on 100mb.

It looks like a very cool storage solution, much cheaper than the big SANs. They are addressing users looking for storage without the need for big servers. They use standard IDE drives which can be purchased cheap. Backups would be a cinch with the hot swappable drives.

I've been interviewing candidates at my current job. I recently talked with a recruiter and couldn't believe the fees they charge. Here is a real example.

One candidate wanted a salary of 60k. Through the recruiter, we would pay them $52 per hour. Let's see what this comes out to. Assuming 40 hours a week, 52 weeks per year, this salary would actually be 108k! The recruiting company would make 48k off of this candidate.

That was their first option. The second one was 30% of salary for direct hire. That's 18k initially up front.

What a ripoff! Be careful if you work through a recruiter. Keep in mind how much they are stealing from your salary.

Well I've been slowly doing packing for my move on January 15. My previous mover, Luis Moving, did a pretty good job. They only work in Florida, and were not available for my move date.

I instead selected Nice Jewish Boy Moving . We'll see how they work out. Moving is a bitch. I need to get rid of the junk I have. A friend of mine actually used UPS as a mover. Now that's what I call travelling light.

Meanwhile I have to keep my current home rather clean because realtors come and go during the day. You lose some privacy when your home is on the market. A realtor actually came interested in buying the place for herself, which may be a good sign. I'm hoping to make about 20k on the sale of my place. Not that great, as selling my last home 2 years ago got me 50k. Homes are too overpriced in FL these days, and it is very difficult to determine what will be good investment and what will not.

My webhosting provider does not give shell access, but allows you to use a web interface for various administrative tasks. It has a file manager that is pretty nifty.

I was trying to install Twiki from their zipped distribution, and accidentally unzipped it in my website root. It ended up clobbering my index.html. That zip should really changed to be like their tar, where it creates a subdirectory first. Luckily I had a copy of the index.html somewhere, but my web page was broken for a day before I even noticed it .

Anyhow, I had no luck getting Twiki running because I needed more control of the Apache configuration file. It probably can be done, but I just didn't invest much time in it. Instead I installed Mediawiki. It was a pretty simple install and enough for me. I've kept the wiki private for now, and use it just for some personal notes.

I've been doing some research on Single Sign On (SSO) systems for a possible project at my new job. Such a system lets you login once, and be automatically authenticated for everything else without requiring further passwords. They are also interested in implementing two-factor authentication, such as SecureID.

The most popular system is Kerberos. This is a tried and tested SSO system, and a great introduction is given in this dialogue. Now this all works great with Unix (Linux, OS X), but problems arise when interoperating with Windows.

Now if I were implementing this, I'd want the Kerberos server(s) running on Linux. Windows 2000's Active Directory actually uses Kerberos, but they've added extra things to the protocol that are proprietary that the Unix servers cannot support. Basically, the Windows clients need to have the SID and some sort of certificate for the user logging in, and this is what Microsoft has added to a Kerberos ticket. There are 2 ways you can use Windows with a Unix Kerberos server:

1. Running a Windows Active Directory server and proxying the authentication to a Unix Kerberos server. This essentially involves the AD server trusting the Kerberos realm and accounts existing in the AD.
2. Binding Windows workstations directly to the Kerberos realm. This requires that Windows clients not be part of a domain and that user accounts are pre-created locally on each client system.

Neither of these solutions are very appealing to me, but if I were to choose, I would pick the first method. This is what major universities appear to be doing from what I've read. Samba unfortunately cannot be an Active Directory server yet.

I was kinda excited about Kerberos until I found out these limitations. I started looking at other alternatives, and found pGina. This is a replacement login DLL for Windows systems that has plugins to authentication via many methods, including SecureID. This actually might be the better method for centralized authentication.
However, there is talk of using an Exchange server, and I know that won't play well with this. And really this is not a SSO system like Kerberos, it's just centralized authentication.

Exchange will, however, work fine with Active Directory. And there are many people that have setup Linux systems to authenticate to AD. This would suck, but might be the only other option.

Today I went searching for an apartment. Let's see, where to begin...

The first place I went to was Flagler Pointe. I was very optimistic about seeing this place. Just driving there, along the intracoastal, was beautiful. When I got there, the security guard was much nicer than usual ones, letting me in to park in private covered parking. As I'm walking up to the lobby, I hear some very good piano playing, and when I tell the lobby attendant that I'm here to see Elena (a realtor), he says it's the "beautiful girl playing the piano." All of this got me very excited .

I ended up looking at 4 or 5 units, only one of which I really liked. The main one I was going to see, a 1 BR top floor "penthouse" was too small for me: 863 sq ft. It was overlooking the water, but also a parking lot. They wanted $1300 for it. The one I really liked had a view overlooking the courtyard/pool area AND the intracoastal. It had oak wood living room floor, carpeted bedrooms, upgraded kitchen and appliances. It was VERY beautiful, but too expensive: $1800. So Flagler Pointe was out for me .

I ended up finding a pretty good apartment close to my job. I got a 2 BR, 1300 sq ft for $1200. It's not the greatest place, but still fairly nice. It's called San Merano, and I got the Doral model.

So my selection is done, and hopefully I move in Jan 15. Meanwhile, I've put my townhouse on the market.

With my new job I need to find a place closer to Palm Beach Gardens. I've been looking at some rentals, and originally though of renting out my townhouse in Fort Lauderdale. It turns out there are many units for rent in my neighborhood, and I'd have a tough time competing with them. So now I'm looking to sell. I tried selling awhile back, but did not get any good offers. Time to try again.

Last weekend I did some apartment hunting and considered Legacy Place. That's pretty nice and about 5 minutes away from work.

This weekend I'm planning to look at Flagler Pointe. This is about 20 minutes away from work, but is on the intracoastal and looks very nice. Another one is Park Place, a bit west, and about 15 minutes away from work. Finally, there is the not-so-exciting Mira Flores Apartments, which is about 5 minutes away from work.

Ideally I'd like to move before I start work. But this is risky. If I don't sell my townhouse, I will be stuck with paying for 2 places. If I don't move, I'll be driving 1 hour every morning from Fort Lauderdale (with a leased car even). Neither of these are very good scenarios.

A friend of mine told me about an RSS agregator that emails you called rss2email. Pretty cool, and written in Python as well. The problem I have is I don't have a machine to run such as script on.

In the latest Linux Journal there was an article about Bloglines. This is a free web service that lets you subscribe to RSS feeds. It even has a public API to use in scripts. It's very cool, and I've started using it to keep track of blogs.

Well it seems Microsoft has released (or rather rebranded) a spyware removal tool. Haven't checked it out, but might be worth it.

What I found rather funny was the spyware education video linked above. My favorite quote:

On my "How dangerous is it?" scale, I give it a medium. Spyware is like having an intruder in your home.

Yeah, having an intruder in my home, I would consider that medium risk also. I also loved how she explains how much better it would be if spyware companies had license agreements we could read and accept. Then we'd never have spyware. Microsoft is magnificent at blaming users for bugs in their OS.

I've setup a new blog for Prashant Chopra, a co-worker of mine. He's moving to California to take a cool job there. You can reach his blog from the Prashant tab at the top.

Well I've been interviewing candidates to replace me at my current employer. It has been an interesting experience. We are looking for someone with good Linux skills, and I posted the job on the Florida Linux User's Group job mailing list. I got quite a few responses.

I have a pretty tough interview process, consisting of 85 or so technical questions consisting of things like coding small programs, troubleshooting, networking, binary arithmetic, and other topics. I purposefully scatter the questions around, so that the topic jumps around quite a bit, and maybe comes back to a topic already discussed. Some people get stunned by this, but it's my way of determining how this person deals with completely different problems one after another. Part of it involves also admitting defeat, in that they must now forget about the previous problem they got wrong, and think about a new problem. A few candidates would even have a eureka moment and realize an answer to a previous question. That sort of shows them actually multitasking. That's really what sysadmin involves.

I don't expect anyone to get all of the answers, and so far the highest score anyone has got is 81%. I was very impressed with this person. The lowest score so far is 33%.

I try my best not to humiliate anyone. But I don't make it easy for them either. If you claim to know something or have it on your resume, I'm going to ask you about it. The problem I have with candidates is the blatant lying on resumes. I had one person claim to know PERL but could not tell me what the split() function does. Then another claiming to know SQL, but could not give me an example of using a select statement. Then another claiming to know bash but could not tell me how to set an environment variable.

Please, please, please make sure you know more than just what the acronyms stand for on your resume. Personality and confidence are great, but if you cannot backup the knowledge you claim to have, you will be considered more a liar than anything else.

This weekend I had checked out The Incredibles again. Great movie, but this blog is not a review. After reading a friend's blog, I thought about how crappy movie theatres are becoming. The AMC Sheridan 12 is probably the worst fucking theatre I've ever been in. Every movie I've watched here has had one stupid problem after another.

First you have the near catatonic popcorn vendors who are about as speedy as Night of the Living Dead extras. No problem, I know they hate their job. I'll cut them some slack. But I sensed the aggravation of the rest of the people in the line, but no one spoke up.

Then I get in the theatre and during the trailers the film slowly spun down like an unplugged record player to a complete stop. A few minutes later it comes back, but there are all sorts of artifacts on the screen. No one seems to notice. Ok, now I think I may be setting a higher standard since I'm so used to HDTV. So I'll ignore them.. then I notice the focus is pretty bad. Now on a CG film, being out of focus stands out ALOT more than non-CG.

At this point, I'm expecting the whole experience to be crap. Luckily, I'm using an AMC gift card (i.e. I didn't have to pay for this shit). Next, throughout the movie the center channel was completely fucked up, coming on and off with loud static noises when it would do so. I'm looking around, and no one is doing shit. It's like people are coming from their black and white antenna-based TVs at home to this crap! WTF?

Finally I go out to complain, and to my relief someone has already complained about the sound. Their solution? Turn off the center channel. Yeah that sounds fucking great.

Seeing a movie like this makes me want to pirate it! Fix your fucking movie theatres please!

As much as I enjoy a fresh pill of Cialis every day to give me that pep in the morning, I had to remove the recent/top referers links because of referer spamming.

I've been testing a few things on Debian that require additional daemons to be started (ldap, apache, samba, exim). I left them on and my bootup was getting kinda slow. So began my quest to understand the Debian initscripts.

Generally they are the same as Red Hat, with /etc/rcN.d/ directories corresponding to the runlevels. Now what I wanted to do was disable the inetd service from starting. On Red Hat, I would do something like:

chkconfig --level 2345 inetd off

How to do it in Debian? After a bit of searching on Google, I came across some recommendations to do:

update-rc.d -f inetd remove

Which actually works, but you lose the original startup order. Let's say inetd used 33 (i.e. S33inetd), the 33 appears not to be stored anywhere. On Red Hat, this was stored in the rc script itself for chkconfig. The only way I could restore this information is re-installing the package, which is kinda lame. Worse, if ever the inetd package is updated, the initscripts would be recreated! This is just retarded and I was beginning to see that update-rc.d should not be used for administration.

I did some more research and it turns out the remove method of update-rc.d is not recommended for what I'm trying to do. In fact, the Debian Security HOWTO cautions against it as well. That text and some users recommend that the /etc/rcN.d/S??service script be removed. Ok I can do that, but how does that remember the startup order? I still have to resort to re-installing the package to get it in the original state.

Ugh, I hate when only half of my question is answered. Yes, Debian truly is an elitist distro.