TechnoStuffAndJunk

Kozmo of the Cosmos New Website!

2011-04-28T12:10:00.000-07:00

The best comic in the world has a new awesome website! Visit www.kozmoofthecosmos.com. He's got a lot of details, history about the site, and you can buy a tee-shirt and coffee mug!

Kozmo is now being featured regularly on setiQuest.org. Yay SETI! Yay Kozmo!

2011-04-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

Beware of the Amazon Free Tier Offer

Last month I applied for the Amazon Free Tier offer. Basically you get a free server in the Amazon cloud for one full year. This is to try it out and they hope you'll like it so much you'll stay with it after you pay. Sounds like a good deal, right? Not for me.

After having the server for over a month I got an email this morning saying I've been charge $140! I immediately sent an email to the support email and got this response:

I'm sorry for misunderstanding in regards to your usage and the Free Tier offer. I've researched your account and confirmed that the charges incurred on your account are correct. Although your account is eligible for the AWS Free Usage Tier, your usage charges were based on activity that was outside the specifications of the offer. You have created a Large SUSE Linux Instance (m1.large) and only a Micro Linux Instance (t1.micro) qualifies for the offer. Therefor your Large SUSE Linux Instance is subject to standard pay as you go rates of $.44 per hour.

When I signed up for the free offer I had no idea about this difference. I feel like I've been misled. What if I was a student in India or Romania? I'd quite possibly be out a large sum of money, as if $140 is not a large sum of money to me!

Too bad, I was hoping this would be a good place to host my Ruby-on-Rails server to learn Ruby-on-Rails programming. I'll have to find another service. I wish there was a service I could pay $30 or less a month and know exactly what I am getting charged. If you know of any let me know.

Update 2 Days Later

I got an email from Amazon saying they will refund my money. Pretty nice of them, so no hard feelings! I canceled my account anyway. I think I'll try Rackspace, they have a computer in the cloud for $12/month, with Ruby-on-Rails. That seems like a good deal, and I'll be charged a simple rate.

ssh auto login not working

2011-04-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

I encountered a problem setting up an account for auto login via ssh. I set up my keys properly, all the permissions on everything was correct. Still, when I ssh'd to the account it always asked for my password.

To debug the problem I restarted the ssh daemon on the server computer with the -ddd option, which put it into maximum debug mode. This showed me that the ssh server daemon was looking for the authorized keys in /.ssh/authorized_keys. This is incorrect, there is not /.ssh direcotry. It should e looking in ~/.sshd.

So, I edited /etc/ssh/sshd_config and corrected the line:
AuthorizedKeysFile /.ssh/authorized_keys
to be
AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_key

That corrected the problem. Now I can auto login with ssh.

This is obviously a sshd installation bug.

Hope this helps someone! If so, leave a message!

SETI and "Kosmo of the Cosmos"

2011-03-27T17:37:00.000-07:00

I am a member of the setiQuest project. If you don't know of this project, go to setiQuest.org and sign up! You can put your brilliance to work and help with the search for signals from extraterrestrials!

I really like that they just added "Kosmo of the Cosmos" as their mascot. It's about time! This cartoon fits right in with the SETI vision: "One day all people will call themselves Earthlings..."

My only complaint is that it is hard to find on the home page. You have to go to setiquest.org and click on the "Open Source Algorithms and Software" tab to view it. Come on SETI! Put in on the main page for all to see. I hope you update it regularly.

I've been reading Kozmo for several years now at GoComics. You should too.

Educating Myself

2011-03-19T18:54:00.000-07:00

The previous article shows the top programming job trends. Some of these trends I need to hop onto. I need to educate myself!

I am going to start by teaching myself Ruby-on-Rails. I've purchased an excellent book called "Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial" to help me learn Ruby-on-Rails. I'll outline in future articles what I am learning while I am learning it.

I am on page 30 so far. It is very easy to read.

To prepare myself for this leaning I've gotten a free Amazon Web Service server account. It is a 64-bit Linux server, totally mine, free for 1 year. It comes with Ruby and Rails already installed. And I have root access! If you want to learn and don't have a super-duper server I would suggest visiting aws.amazon.com and getting one. But don't get one of these free servers till you are ready! The "free" part ends in one year. But actually, after 1 year the cost is really minimal, you are charged by usage, not by a monthly fee. So if you are still using it only for development after a year, the monthly out-of-pocket should be minimal.

So now I am off on a learning quest! I'll be posting more soon.

Top Programming Job Trends

2011-03-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

HTML5, Android, iPhone, Mobile App, jquery Job Trends

Html5 jobs - Android jobs - iPhone jobs - Mobile App jobs - Jquery jobs

I am looking to the future! According to Indeed.com, HTML5 is the hottest trend. I think I am going to start a full on self education in HTML5, Android and JQuery.
Does anyone have any advice? What kind of salary or hourly rate could I get if I was an expert in these areas?

SSH and DNS problem solved

2011-03-03T15:27:00.000-08:00

Today I came across a weird one (aren't they all?).

On a computer running OpenSUSE 11.3 Linux OS.

I could "ping github.com"

But! "ssh github.com" would not work! "ssh: Could not resolve hostname" was the error. Why would ping work and not ssh?

Through some fiddling around I determined that ssh only queries the first entry in the DNS file /etc/resolv.conf!!! The first entry in my /etc/resolv.conf was a local DNS for internal purposes.

I solved the problem by moving the first entry to the end of the list in /etc/resolv.conf. Now ssh can find the address of github.com.

Java Geometry

2011-02-14T02:29:00.000-08:00

I found this great simple Java class for performing basic geometry. http://geosoft.no/software/geometry/Geometry.java.html

My home automation work

2010-12-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

Over the last 13 years (yes, 13 years!) I've been doing work on and off for a Japanese company. We've been developing home automation controllers for the Japanese market. With the latest incarnation of the product line you can keep tabs on all your home energy usage, as well as control and monitor many devices from a browser or your cell phone.

See Ecofront for a look at the product. Pretty cool!

Java - Append text to a file

2010-12-27T13:36:00.001-08:00

This is pretty simple, but I always forget and have to look it up.

To append to a file from a java program:

try {
BufferedWriter out = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter("filename", true));
out.write("aString");
out.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
}

Found this on: http://www.exampledepot.com/egs/java.io/AppendToFile.html

X Server running but can not find display

2010-12-18T18:29:00.000-08:00

I was trying to run an X windows program on a Linux computer remotely. The program did not actually display anything over X, but required to attach to the X Server to do some processing. Anyway I was getting the error:

Can't open display: 0.0

I was logged in remotely. If I logged in remotely forwarding the X port, the error did not happen. The server was running an X Server. So why this error? What was the correct DISPLAY to define to make this program work without having to forward the X port to my local computer?

The answer is that even though the Linux computer was running an X Server, it did not actually have a display card, so there was no actual display to assign the DISPLAY variable to. The fix was to create a virtual frame buffer, faking the X Server into thinking there is a frame buffer, thus a DISPLAY variable can be properly set.

To create the frame buffer:

/usr/bin/Xvfb :1 -screen 0 1024x768x16 &

Set the DISPLAY variable in the environment to 0.1

setenv DISPLAY 0.1

That fixed it. Now X windows thinks there is a frame buffer and can run X Window programs even though they are not displayed anywhere.

FYI: I had to install the Xvfb program in the server, it was not previously installed.

PXE-E61 and PXE-M0F disk errors

2010-12-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

Today I encountered a computer that was showing the following errors when it was trying to boot:

PXE-E61 Media Test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F Exiting Intel Boot Agent

I remember last year I got this same error message on my laptop.

These error mean that the computer can not access the local boot disk and it has looked on the network for a boot drive. Both tries failed.

In the case of my laptop, reseating the hard drive worked. In the case of the server I encountered today, no OS was installed yet on the local disks.

What is RAID?

2010-12-16T10:46:00.000-08:00

Today I had to set up a computer that had 12 1GB disks as a RAID 10. I have to admit I did not know what RAID 10 was, until I read this: http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/storlink/H200/en/UG/PDF/H200.pdf