Roffes blogg

Til Roger. Dette kan oversees av alle andre enn svoger roger :). Med mindre dere er spesielt interessert i ubuntu sine programvare-arkiv, da:

1. Gå på Applikasjoner-menyen, velg systemverktøy og gå ut i Terminal. Vet ikke hva Terminal heter i den norske utgaven, men ikonet er en skjerm.
2. Skriv følgende:
cd /etc/apt (nb! i linux må du ha mellomrom mellom cd og katalognavnet)
sudo mv sources.list sources.list.gammel
(skriv inn passordet ditt)
sudo wget http://rolfas.net/sources.list
(skriv inn passordet)
sudo apt-get update
(skriv passord igjen og vent til den har jobbet seg ferdig)
Lukk terminalen ved å skrive exit
3. Du har nÃ¥ fÃ¥tt flere applikasjoner inn i “Synaptic package manager” og du skal finne openoffice.org2 der.

NÃ¥r det gjelder web editor, sÃ¥ er det ikke mange wysiwyg-editorer, men du har en innebygget i openoffice som er ganske bra. Ã…pne html-filene dine i “openoffice.org writer”, eller lag nye html filer ved velge fil->ny->html-dokument i openoffice.org.

Got an excellent anniversary-present from my wife. A 1 GB Jens of sweden music player. Since the mp3 format has become non-free, I strive to not use mp3, so I wished for a player that could play ogg vorbis files and got it. The lovely little gadget looks like this:

It is just as cool as it looks. I have a cord that lets me hang it around my neck. It is about the size of a lighter. This player came stripped for everything (to keep the price as low as possible), so i had to buy some headphones too, and decided on a set of Sennheiser PX 200. Excellent headphones with nearly no loss of sound. That way I can listen to loud music without bothering the other commuters.

I love having a job again and and thereby being able to afford some nice stuff.

Fikk en flott bryllupsdags-gave av kona. En 1 GB Jens of sweden musikk-spiller. Siden mp3-formatet ikke lenger er fritt så tilstreber jeg å ikke bruke mp3, så jeg ønsket meg en spiller som kunne spille ogg vorbis-formatet og fikk det også. Se bildet over for hvordan den ser ut. Den er omtrent like stor som en vanlig lommelighter. Spilleren kom helt strippet for alt for å holde prisen så lav som mulig, så jeg måtte kjøpe noen hodetelefoner også og bestemte meg for Sennheiser PX 200. Fabelaktige hodetelefoner praktisk talt uten tap av lyd. Så da kan jeg høre på musikk høyt uten å plage andre pendlere.

Jeg elsker å ha en jobb igjen sånn at jeg har råd til litt kule ting.

Backup
I finally have backup up and running on the new server. I haven’t had the storage space needed to backup the server, but now I have bought a separate 120 gig harddisk to keep my users data safe. I have been nervous about not having backups and it has almost kept me from sleeping at night. I especially got nervous the other day when I accidentally broke my blog database. Nearly 400 blog entries was totally gone. Luckily I found a script on the web that fixed and recovered the database. But if I hadn’t found that script it would be a big personal catastrophy. I would have lost a huge bit of my heart and soul. That was the day I ordered what I needed to get backups of my system again.

So now I back up all data to the separate disk every day and burn the changes out on dvd once a week. Now I feel safe. I realized that a lot of important things is located on the server. All documents I have ever written, a lot of photos, all my web sites and pages, blog and all the same for my wife. In addition to this we host mail folders for > 20 other persons. So backup is nice to have.
Job
Got mail from the job I was interviewed for. The will make their desicion on monday. Guess it will be a high strung weekend.

Cold
Something is trying to keep me from starting to work out again. I had planned to go to the gym today, but when I woke up my throat was so sore I could hardly speak, I felt feverish and my nose was totally blocked. So going to the gym was out of the question today too. I hope this cold will go away soon. I really want to start working out again.

Sikkerhetskopi
Endelig har jeg sikkerhetskopiering i gang på den nye serveren. Jeg har ikke hatt lagringskapasitet til å sikkerhetskopiere, men nå har jeg kjøpt en separat 120 Giga harddisk for å holde mine brukeres data sikre. Jeg har vært kjempenervøs fordi jeg ikke har hatt backup og det har nesten tatt fra meg nattesøvnen. Jeg ble spesielt nervøs her om dagen da jeg ved et uhell ødela databasen som bloggen min ligger i. Nesten 400 blogg-innlegg var borte. Heldigvis fant jeg et script på web som fikset basen igjen. Hadde jeg ikke funnet de scriptet så hadde det vært en gedigen personlig katastrofe. Jeg ville ha mistet en stor del av mitt hjerte og sjel. Den dagen bestilte jeg det jeg trengte for å ta backup.

Jobb
Fikk mail fra jobben jeg ble intervjuet for. De vil ta en avgjørelse på mandag. Tenker dette blir en rimelig spent helg.
Forkjølelse
Noe prøver å hindre meg i å begynne å trene igjen. Jeg hadde planlagt å dra på senteret i dag, men da jeg våknet i dag tidlig så var halsen så sår at jeg ikke klarte å snakke, jeg kjente meg febersyk og nesa var totalt igjenblokka. Så det var ikke aktuelt å trene i dag heller. Jeg håper forkjølelsen forsvinner fort. Jeg har så ufattelig lyst til å begynne å trene igjen.

Bought the norwegian edition of the PC World magazine (no 6/2005) today. They had a linux test there and Ubuntu won the test by far. The other “contestants” were Fedora, Linspire, Mandriva (mandrake) and suse. Quite nice, actually. I really, really hope the ubuntu team will succeed and continue to develop this fantastic linux distribution. In my opinion Ubuntu is just what the linux movement needs to become a “household” operating system. Easy installation, easy maintenance and a big and solid support network is what people want.

Actually, I have joined the Ubuntu team now. I am not contributing very much yet, but I have signed up to translate some applications to norwegian. In addition I do my best to answer questions on the support forums and the irc channels. It’s not much, but I do my best to give something back to Canonical and the people spending big parts of their lives developing this operating system.

PS! Canonical is the company that backs and sponsors the Ubuntu linux distribution.

Jeg kjøpte PC World Norge i dag (nr. 6/2005) . De hadde en test av diverse linux-varianter og Ubuntu vant med en “bÃ¥tlengde”. Konkurrentene var Fedora, Linspire, Mandriva/Mandrake og SuSE. Ganske flott, egentlig. Jeg hÃ¥per virkelig at Ubuntu-teamet vil lykkes og vil fortsette Ã¥ utvikle denne fantastiske linux-varianten. I min mening er Ubuntu akkurat hva linux-bevegelsen trenger for Ã¥ bli et akseptert operativsystem. Enkel installasjon, enkelt vedlikehold og et stort og solid support-nettver er akkurat det folk trenger.

PS! Canonical er firmaet som står bak og sponser Ubuntu linux.

Dressed up my blog in Norwegian colors today. Happy birthday, Norway!

Jeg har pyntet bloggen min i anledning dagen i dag. Gratulerer med dagen, norge.

I always like to have the latest stable versions of the software I use. 3 days ago Wordpress released 1.5.1 and I always dread upgrading web/php/mysql-applications, but have learned that with Wordpress it’s extremely simple. Just remove everything but the config file and the customized files, put the new files in place and run the upgrade script in the browser. It was all done in less than 3 minutes. I love wordpress and recommend it as a perfect blogging system to anyone who asks. The back end interface, where you write posts and configure the blog, is also very easy and user friendly.

My foot is hurting very much today. I am almost unable to walk at all without a sharp, stabbing pain. Wonder why it has gotten worse now. It is almost as bad as it was the second I twisted it. And the whole foot is turning more and more red and blue every day. I guess I will go to the doctor tomorrow.

I am so extremely fed up of being hurt now. I feel I have been “handicapped” for ages. First it was my hand. That is almost well now. Actually I decided it was time to start ignoring the dull pain in the hand just the day I hurt my foot and back. Quite ironic, aint it? I had planned to go to the gym the friday I hurt myself, but I guess I wasn’t supposed to do that. I really, really, really, really, really miss working out now. Going to the gym gave me an energy kick I haven’t felt in years. The endorphines also made me a happier and more comfortable person to live with.

I guess I will stop whining about it and just enjoy the spring, even though it’s hard to enjoy a season when all I can do is sit in a chair with my foot high and pop pain killers.

Jeg liker å alltid ha den siste, stabile versjonen av programvaren jeg bruker. For 3 dager siden ble wordpress 1.5.1 sluppet. Jeg gruer meg alltid til å oppgradere web/php/mysql-applikasjoner, men må vel bare innse at Wordpress er unntaket. Wordpress er ekstremt enkelt å oppgradere. Man fjerner bare alle filer fra web-området med unntak av konfig-fila og de filene man har endret selv, legger på plass de nye filene og peker browseren på upgrade-scriptet. Alt var gjort unna på under 3 minutter :). Jeg elsker wordpress og anbefaler den som det perfekte blogge-systemet til alle som spør. Baksiden av wordpress, der man skriver innlegg og konfigurerer bloggen, er også veldig enkel og brukervennlig.

Men nå får jeg vel slutte å syte og prøve å nyte den deilige våren, selv om det er ganske vansklig å nyte en årstid når alt jeg klarer å gjøre er å sitte i en stol med foten høyt og stappe innpå smertestillende.

Entered a shoutbox in my sidebar. Pretty incredibly cool. If you feel like shouting or saying something spontaneous to me without entering a comment, just type your name and shout me something.
Lagt inn shoutbox i sidemenyen min. Ganske så kult. Hvis du føler for å rope eller fortelle meg noe spontant uten å måtte gå inn på kommentarene så bare skriv inn navnet ditt og rop det ut!.

The geek part
I was unable to sleep last night and decided to read some logs on my server. Yes, I AM a geek, deal with it :). I found out that for the last week or so someone has tried to hack into my server the way I log in when I not at home, via ssh for those who knows about these things. I think theres a kind of worm raging the internet and has found my server. But they will never be able to get in. I have set up ssh way to secure for that. You cannot log in with only a password. To be able to log in you have to have a keypair consisting of a public key on the server and a private key on the client. To use the private key, you must have the keyfile locally on the client computer AND the >20 character long password/passphrase to unlock the key. Unless there’s an unknown bug in the ssh server I think it is virtually impossible to break in to my server that way. But only idiots are completely sure of anything, so who knows. One have to have a little trace of healthy paranoia to have servers connected to internet.

The Chef part
The Chef part is actually a bit of a geek-part also. I have found a fantastic recipe program for linux. It lets me keep a pantry register and connects this to my recipes. If I want Taco for dinner one day, I can add the Taco recipe to the shopping list in the program and the program gives me a shopping list containing the things I don’t already have in my pantry. This is a great little program that will make the everyday of my teflone brain a bit easier. I won’t forget half of everything I was supposed to buy in the store. So now it remains to see if I have the discipline to keep my recipe- and pantry-database updated.

Bla bla
I am having a hard time sleeping these days. I feel very restless and I am thinking a lot of the fact that I do not have a job to go to from july. It worries me. I know it’s stupid to worry about something I cannot do anything more with than I already do, but that is just the way my mind works. Or do not work. I think that was the source to the sleepless night last night. I layed awake until 230am and was as awake as a kid on a chocolate high before getting presents on christmas eve. Finally I got up and spent a couple of hours by the computer. I think I fell asleep (in my bed at about 530am.

At 645 my wifes alarm clock rang so that she could get up and get Maiken off to school. But she had one of her bad headaches and I had to get up to send Maiken to school. I had decided to go to bed when Maiken had left at 800, but before I could even get into the bedroom, Charlotte woke up and demanded breakfast. I fed her and at about 0930 I tried to go to bed again. But right then an attack from the people in the geek part started and I tried to find out more about who they were. I managed to find out who their Internet Provider was and sent an email to the abuse-department there. Wonder if I get a response from them.

After the mail was sent, the clock had turned 1045 and I decided to try to get some sleep while Charlotte slept. And that was Charlotte’s cue. She woke up and demanded attention again. But now I was so exhausted I had to kick Wifey out of bed to tend to Charlotte while I slept. And FINALLY. I got another 2 hours of sleep and actually felt a bit rested afterwards. I reallye hope I will get a whole nights sleep tonight. I hate the way my body, head, mood and everything feels when I am sleep deprevated.

Den nerdete delen
Jeg fikk ikke sove i natt og bestemte meg for å lese noen logger på serveren. Ja, jeg ER en nerd, hva så? Jeg fant ut at i løpet av den siste uka eller så så har noen prøvd å hacke seg inn på min server den veien jeg går inn når jeg ikke er på hjemmenettet mitt. Dette kalles ssh, for de som kjenner til det. Jeg tror det er en orm som snor seg rundt på nettet som har funnet min server og prøver å komme seg inn. Det får de ikke til. Jeg har nemlig satt opp ssh altfor sikkert for at dét skal fungere. Du kan ikke logge inn med bare et passord. For å komme inn må du ha et sett med nøker som består av en offentlig nøkkel som alle kan lese og en privat nøkkel som bare er for meg. Den offentlige nøkkelen må ligge på serveren og jeg må låse opp den private og vise den opplåste nøkkelen til serveren for å få logget inn. Den private nøkkelen krever et passord på minst 20 bokstaver/tegn for å bli brukt. Jeg tror det er bortimot umulig å bryte seg inn på ssh-serveren min med mindre det er en bug der som ingen kjenner til. Men det er jo bare idioter som er skråsikre, så jeg føler meg ikke HELT trygg. Litt sunn paranoia må man ha hvis man skal koble servere til internett.

Etter at den mailen var sendt hadde klokka blitt kvart på elleve og jeg skulle prøve å sove litt igjen. Men da våknet Charlotte iegjen. Men nå var jeg så utslitt, så jeg sparket kona ut av senga for å ta seg av Charlotte sånn at jeg kunne få meg litt søvn. ENDELIG. Jeg sov 2 timer og følte meg faktisk noenlunde uthvilt da jeg våknet. Jeg håper jeg får sove godt i natt. Jeg hater hvordan kroppe, hodet, humøret og alt føles når jeg lider av søvnmangerl.

After the computer crash I had last week i have been struggling to get everything working the way I want it, but this morning I finally got the last thing, bluetooth, nailed. I will backup /etc (the config directory) and store it somewhere safe from force majeure, fires, theft and all. It has been quite frustrating to get things up and running fully again. I have been able to use the computer, but things like power saving, bluetooth, wireless (the source of my initial problem) has demanded som ekstra attention.

Linux is a great operating system to use. If you choose the right distribution, the initial install is also great and actually easyer than the ancient install routine of Windows XP.

The trouble start when you need to install the small things. I guess this is troublesome on XP too, but windows usually come pre-installed with all needed configs and drivers. I guess it’s like that if you buy a preinstalled linux-computer also. Actually everything works right out of the box with the ubuntu distribution, but to get it working optimally it’s quite a lot of tweaking. I like to get the most out of my computer as possible. The small things I am talking about are as follows:

• Optimal graphic card config. The initial setup shows the screen correctly for normal use, but if I want to run heavy graphic things such as games, I have to tweak the config to get OpenGL to work. This I have done a lot of times and it was ready the first day of installing.
• Power saving. My laptop computer has the flop processor Pentium 4 and a tendency to get so hot that you can fry an egg on it. The highest temperature I have seen on it is 99 degrees celsius. That time it just shutdown all by it self. But with the right setup and tuning the temp is to live with and hasn’t passed 60 degrees in a week now.
• Putting the computer to sleep. There are two different approaches to this: suspend, which is when the power is on to keep the memory contents and hibernate, which is when the computer writes the content of memory to disk and turns off completely. This has been impossible for me to get working on linux, but now with the fabulous Ubuntu distribution it almos works right out of the box. After som debugging I found out that I had to tell the computer to unload the drivers for a few things before going to sleep and reload them when waking up. As soon as this was in place it works beautifully.
• Bluetooth. This is mostly just for fun, but may come in handy one day. My mobile phone is bluetooth capable and so is my laptop. Today I got this up and working perfectly. I can now take pictures with my phone, send it to the computer via bluetooth and webify it. Great to get everyday action shots on the web nice and easy. Just too bad the phone camera is not very good. Another very cool thing is that I can use the phone as a gprs modem via bluetooth. I can get online everywhere in the world via bluetooth. Since I do very little in the web browser I only transfer text stuff and it doesn’t get too expensive since I only pay with what I download on gprs. Download of 1 MB costs 20 NOK ($3) and I can do a lot of terminal work and get/send a lot of mail on 1 MB. With bluetooth working I can also use my laptop to send sms messages instead of the small keys on the phone

All of this I probably could have gotten to work in one evening, but with a small baby, a 10 year old step daughter, a already-fed-up-of-my-computer-time-and-I-don’t-blame-her-for-it wife, a dog, a parrot and I could go on forever, I cannot spend more time by the computer than I already do.
I am trying to post at least one geeky post in the blog each week and this will have to be it. Was it geeky enough?
Etter at maskinen min kræsjet forrige uke har jeg slitt litt med å få alt til å virke slik jeg vil igjen. Men i dag tidlig fikk jeg endelig fikset det siste, nemlig bluetooth. Jeg skal få tatt backup av /etc (katalogen med konfigurasjoner) og lagre den et sted sikkert for naturkatastrofer, brann, tyver og alt som kan sørge for at jeg mister den igjen. Det har vært ganske frustrerende å få alt i gang igjen. Jeg har jo kunnet bruke maskinen som vanlig, men men ting som strømsparing, bluetooth, trådløst nett (kilden til kræsjen) har krevd litt ekstra innsats for å få i gang på riktig måte.

Jeg prøver å poste en nerdete ting i bloggen hver uke og dette får være det for denne uka. Var det nerdete nok?

I have been struggling a lot with the built in network card in my computer. The linux driver, orinoco, has been buggy for the Intersil Prism 2.5 chipset and it seems they haven’t been able to fix it. So I tried installing ndiswrapper to use it with the windows XP drivers for the card, but that broke my system completely. A library file got destroyed and rendered me unable to boot the system.

So the Intersil Prism 2.5 card DOES NOT WORK WELL WITH NDISWRAPPER. You are hereby warned. It might break your system completely.

So I had to download the Ubuntu cd image to reinstall my computer. Luckily I had installed some synchronization software and synced my data to the server so my data was safe, but all my configurations got lost. So since monday morning I haven’t done anything but trying to get my laptop up and running again. I think I will back up the configurations also from now on. I do this on my server, but not on my laptop. *sigh*

But ubuntu is such a dream to install, so it wasn’t really a biggie and it’s actually good to get a fresh system up and running after all the experimenting I have done with this ubuntu thing. But now I have learned. I will back up the configs in addition to the data.

Jeg har slitt veldig med det innebygde nettverkskortet i pc-en min. Linuxdriveren til kortet, orinoco, har masse feil med Intersil Prism 2.5 brikkesettet og det ser ut til at de ikke har klart å fikse det heller. Så jeg prøvde å installere ndiswrapper for å bruke xp-driveren for kortet, men det havarerte pc-en min helt og holdent. En bibliotek-fil ble ødelagt og jeg var helt ute av stand til å starte opp systemet.

Men Ubuntu er en drøm å installere, så det var ikke spesielt vanskelig og det er faktisk deilig å ha et ferskt system oppe etter all eksperimentering jeg har gjort med denne ubuntu-tingen. Men nå har jeg lært. Jeg skal ta backup av konfigurasjoner også. Ikke bare data.