Blog moved

Blog moved

Blog moved to my own domain and server.

http://kaeru.my/journal

If you are subscribed to my feeds, don't forget to update. The blog feeds portlet on the right has also been updated with the right links.

RSS Feed: http://kaeru.my/journal/kaerus-journal/RSS

Future updates to articles and howtos will also move to my new site.

amd64 freebsd desktop (jail)

Finished setting up working desktop environment on the new home server. I'm accessing the gnome virtual server (jail) as a thin client using XDMCP. The X and sound server (pulseaudio) runs on my notebook. +5 for Unix network transparency.

• Files

For documents and settings, it's a good test of cleaning out stuff. By replicating my desktop on another machine/environment, I'm making sure that the important things such as files and configurations are backed up and in sync to a central repository. I use a combination of subversion, rsync or mounted directories. As networks become better, I'm probably going to simply mount the currently rsynced directories to a central file server too.

• Sound

Just run pulseaudio with native tcp enabled on the server (the machine with audio), and then in the client desktop copy ~/.pulse-cookie over and set the PULSE-COOKIE environment variable to point to it.

• Video

Everything works great, even Compiz over the network.

• Scanning

Has always worked through network via sane

• Burning

Using rscsi

• USB for now, I just export the file system, by sticking it into the server and mounting the directory into the jail. Will lookin into FUSE later.

No more automatic citizenship for babies, if you have a foreign spouse

Go figure.

A Malaysian/Japanese couple has been told that their child born in Malaysia, have to apply for their child's citizenship a process that will take at least 6 months.

So is there any more ways that Malaysia government possibly invent to try make it hard for their own citizens to live in Malaysia?

For those of you not aware of how difficult this makes things.

1. Your child has no citizenship, when born.
2. If you apply for citizenship of country of spouse for chlid, then child is not Malaysian and will require a visa to be with their Malaysian parent in Malaysia.
3. (2) will apply if citizenship is not granted after 6 months period.
   

It seems that whether I like it or not, that I have to somehow get involved in politics to change things, so that Malaysian citizens are at least aware that when they vote for BN that they are also helping contribute to the brain drain.

Otherwise Malaysian citizens with their votes for BN are sending a clear signal to people like us.

"You people with foreigns spouses, get out! We don't want you and your family to live in Malaysia, or be Malaysians"

smartmontools

Tools for monitoring your hard disk health status

smartmontools is a utility and a daemon that can check, log and also email you the status of your hard drives. It is available as sysutils/smartmontools in ports.

With hard disks at least 80GBs in size these days it's worth it to have advance warning of when your drives are going to fail.

It's a good thing though that drives are increasing in size rapidly, we now have 1TB drives on sale. Everything is digital, and unless you want a room full of DVD-Rs, hard disks make good sense in terms of physical space to storage size ratio.

Exhausting Weekend

Exhausting when you don't spend some time on the weekend to catch up on rest. For parents with young kids finding this time may be quite difficult.  It also affects your concentration and productivity when you are tired.

Anyways, we should have a 500GB disk dedicated to ubuntu and freebsd mirrors within a day or two. Announcement of the urls will be available via the usual channels.

Help fixed the two computers for the family. One of them the CPU fan was so clogged up with dust, that it stopped running. Repairing it was simply a matter of taking things apart and applying a strong vacuum cleaner to it.

While two of the family computers now run Ubuntu, unfortunately one of them still runs Windows XP. Beyond MS Office, Microsoft also has an entrenched position in Malaysia's "Smart Schools", which means kids use MS Office and also other programs such as as MS Publisher. While the latter can be dealt with using OpenOffice, you can't actually just load MS Publish formats. It's not so much the functionality (my family has no problems using OpenOffice or Gnome desktop), but file formats which are preventing Linux usage. I need to dig a bit more into the use case of MS Publisher to check what they need it for.

For all other needs, they are happier with Ubuntu as it provides all they need in an easier environment.

• Watching movies/dramas with subtitles (gxine)
  
• Burning DVDs and CD-Rs
• Safe/virus free use of Internet using a Web Browser
• Importing photos from cameras
• Listening to music
  
• Share printer

Another interesting observation is how hot older PCs run (Athlons and P4s). It may actually be worth it to upgrade motherboard to take advantage of new low powered chips that run more efficiently and quieter.