For somebody who grew up with major inferiority complex I do talk a lot whenever we have somebody new in the team. I usually have a few pointers and expectations but I am consistent in conveying what my goals as a leader is. This has always been my challenge to my new members:
MAKE ME OBSOLETE. ONCE THAT IS DONE THEN I HAVE DONE MY WORK PROPERLY.
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Yesterday, February 14th, my wife and I ate dinner at home which subsisted of grilled rib-eye steaks, a bowl of marble potatoes in honey mustard dressing, and we actually finished a bottle of White Zinfadel. This morning we had a fairly standard fried breakfast: sunny side up eggs, sauteed corned beef, home-made bacon slices and fried rice with bacon bits. Was it a good Valentine’s day celebration? NOPE.
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No time to read through contexts? Jump to the TL;DR; section.
For security reasons my internet access in the office is restricted and most if not all of the sites that allow saving of data is blocked by the office proxy server. This becomes a pain if I come across some articles and sites that would be good to read later or heaven forbid something that I need. The usual route that would allow me to schedule reading the article is to save the links in my company email drafts folder, or email it to myself so I can remember to move them to my bookmarking or reminder site when I get home. This setup has been fine but being the perennial procastinator (or busy if you want to put a positive spin on it) I sometimes forget to do it immediately. The other alternative is horrible: type the url on my android device as I encounter the sites and articles. That option is as pleasing as going to the doctor for a rectal probe. I forgot to mention that my Android device doesn’t have continuous Internet by the way, which would have made my life easier and this post an academic exercise. 🙂
I have an alternative solution which works if you have a QR reader on your device. The main gist is to transfer the information to the device using a QR code. The steps follow:
Instead of having no internet connection I have a very slow internet. How slow?
— cs62.adn.edgecastcdn.net ping statistics —
53 packets transmitted, 29 received, 45% packet loss, time 52000ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 4908.713/18702.236/32208.306/7853.188 ms, pipe 33
Yes, that is 5-32 seconds latency! If the site is not familiar to you that is what is being resolved by “pldt.speedtest.net”. That abysmal speed is leagues better than having no internet connection, right? It is as savory as like having a view of the beach from the safety of your prison cell.
The SOA server I am currently working with had a nasty quirk on its services that I havent figured out yet on how to fix: it fails on requests with an XML comment. We use SOAPUI to trigger requests and the quirk requires most of us to strip the comments that is automatically generated by the tool. This quirk however gives me a good segue on this IT tipjar: how to leverage pattern matching to batch remove comments. This should serve as an introduction in other pattern matching applications when dealing with text/ascii content.
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Yesterday pixie, my RPi serving as the torrent/dlna box, stopped responding. Rebooting it doesnt help as it eventually reverts to only having the red LED on which I have started to interpret as the system is not yet booted.
I pulled pixie out of its nook and hooked it to my monitor before rebooting it. It showed that the boot process is encountering errors when reading from the SD card. The process stopped while asking for the root password to start the file check maintenance, or Ctrl-D to continue the boot process. I plugged a keyboard and here lies the conundrum: this is a debian system and I have been administering it as the pi user. I have been relying on the sudo mechanism and never replaced the root password so I cant provide it. That realization blows.
No other recourse now but to pull out the SD card and have the partition checked on my desktop. A “sudo fsck /dev/sdb2 -y” command (because sdb2 is the partition assigned to it by udev) and ten minutes of automated fixing later pixie is back online serving its DLNA goodness.
Now I made sure I have changed the root password so this can be fixed without booting the desktop. Come to think of it, I am doing it also on my Ubuntu desktop. 😉
ciao!
The pragmatic in me kicked in and I realized again that problems are what defines our existence. Only the dead are free of them.
With that said I wish your problems will be sur mount able, your challenges manageable, trespasses against you forgivable, and your heartaches forgettable.
Year 2013, bring your best and worst. We already have gone through the millennium bug and the mayan calendar end. We are as ready as we are going to be for the next round. 🙂
ciao!
Hectic schedule but I finally finished having my own TorrentBox/DLNA/UPnP server out of the Raspberry Pis. One concern that got answered is if the system is usable as a media streaming server as there has been reports of slow throughput since the Pi’s ethernet (network) and USB system share the same memory space. Early on the file I/O throughput on the SD card I am using as the BIOS and operating system is a little bit slow, and as a techie friend (named Gideon[1]) pointed out its the class of the card itself that is the bottleneck.
The instructions are all over the net so Ill just reference the articles I used and add the other stuff I did to make it work on Pixie (the name of this Pi).
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