Monthly Archives: August 2011

North Island Roadtrip

In a random fit of madness I decided to take a couple days leave this month – meaning I have a four day weekend, from Thur 25th to Sun 28th.

I’ve decided to spend this by taking a road-trip from Wellington up to Auckland, along with GF Lisa and possibly another friend.

Planned schedule is as follows:

Thur 25th: Drive from Wellington to Auckland via SH1, will arrive in Auckland by around 18:00 and do twitter drinks that evening at Mac’s Northern Steamship 122 Quay St, from around 19:00. (see twtvite to RSVP/more info).

Fri 26th: Spend day in Auckland, visiting friends, planning some day trips.

Sat 27th: Half day in Auckland, drive down to Rotorua, spend night at hotel.

Sun 28th: Visit geothermals, before heading back to Wellington around midday, via SH1 again.

If you are in Auckland and want to meet up, come along to Twitter drinks, or let me know what suits and Lisa and I can make time where possible :-)

Also – if you’re inbetween Auckland and Wellington, not too far out, and want to meet up, please let me know and we can plan detours to come say hi! :-D

Oh and as an added bonus, we’re expecting a Tasmanian open source geek @chrisjrn to be tagging along for the Auckland portion of the trip.

Waste Overload

2 Replies

Getting pretty tired of the amount of waste that gets generated, even by somewhat recycling conscious individuals like myself, kind of depressing considering how much we send to landfill as a society.

Being in IT doesn’t help, a lot of stuff provided ends up being waste or is generally non-recyclable.

Amount of packaging – stuff often has way too much packaging, bubblewrap and worst of all – polystyrene.
Cables wrapped in plastic bags! IT companies worldwide, looking at you…. WTF companies, it’s a frigging *cable*, it doesn’t require a special bag.
Poor recycling in Wellington – the number of times that recycling has been incorrectly rejected or completed missed is beyond infuriating, and with apartment life it’s not possible to do organic recycling ourselves.
e-waste is almost impossible to get rid of in Wellington, without resorting to dumping or paying high fees to get it recycled – if it can be recycled.
Conferences – this is actually what got me started on this post, whilst tidying my room – every time I leave a conference, I end up with a bag, booklets, lanyards, trinkets and other junk that I actually just don’t really need, and a number of bits if unable to be given away, will end up being landfill (this point ties into my goal for less stuff somewhat)
Media – we can’t recycle CDROMs, floppy disks, yet I receive hundreds of these disks that I don’t need every year.

Unsure what (if any) improvements I can make, at this stage my procedures are pretty much limited to:

Storing and reusing packaging – typically boxes, which are easy to store.
Recycle anything that Wellington city council will take.
Sell or give away older electronics, recycling by reuse – but this isn’t always feasible, people tend not to want certain items, like obsolete cellphones or CRT displays.
Try to avoid foods that have non-recyclable packaging – this tends to be less of a problem for me, most stuff I reuse, even takeaway containers.

Additional thoughts?

Optimizing Life

5 Replies

Lately I’ve been feeling pretty annoyed at some of the things going on in my life, so trying to make some improvements, looking at what I dislike about my lifestyle currently.

Credit Cards – A necessarily evil – I do a lot of travel and they are vital for that – but at the same time, terrible habit of putting all my purchases onto them and not really realizing how much is being spent until I get the bill… Moving to using EFTPOS more to better track regular spending.
Services I don’t need – this is an easy one to get into, been looking at what I pay for – maybe I don’t need 5 SIP trunks and/or 20 domains – it’s easy to say that something is only $15 a month or so and doesn’t really matter, but over a year it adds up….
Paper Mail – physical bills and letters are extremely annoying, working to move everyone who sends me paper materials to electronic forms and culling as many mailing lists as possible.
Email – I get way too much email and the fact is, about 50% of it I don’t care about… I’m being pretty brutal lately and unsubscribing from lots of different lists and groups.
Computers – As part of my goal of reducing the complexity of my computers, by the end of the month, I will have decommissioned one of my two collocation servers and my flat server infrastructure is down to a single tower and router/switch, as well as having completed a number of VM reductions and improvements.
Stuff – Been going pretty well at my goal of reducing the amount of stuff I have, down to a final few servers to sell off, and a few boxes of bits to sort through/out.
Car – Having recently obtained my full license and not needing one much for work now, tempted to consider selling off my car – after all it’s expensive to run and TBH, I prefer to walk to most places. Thinking something I might visit later this year, at least at my current flat parking isn’t that expensive.
I fucking hate TVs – We have a 32″ TV in the lounge – whilst it’s not connected to public broadcasting, it’s far too easy to just blob infront of it and waste time away watching stuff. I’d much rather sell the TV to discourage myself from wasting so much time and instead spend it on the computer doing more geeky things. And I have more than enough LCDs to watch things on anyway. :-)
Business – There’s a number of things I do that cost a lot, make little money and add to stressful life – which makes little sense, so I’m culling some things and focusing on those I enjoy and which do help me in my savings goals.
Games – I need to play a few more games, do more fun hacking, in general, taking some de-stressing time away from computers, but in a way that’s more interactive than just passive entertainment.
Open Source – There’s a lot of content I’m working on, I need to force myself to make the time to get it out into the public.

So a number of areas to work on improving – want to obtain a better life style, stop wasting so much money and generally feel like I’m doing something a bit more productive with my life.

I think part of it is that very scared of falling into a “work, come home, watch stuff, sleep, repeat” habit and starting to feel like it’s more of a possibility.

I want to feel motivated, complete geeky projects and do amazing things – one of the most depressive things I’ve seen has been people I know who do nothing but watch TV all evening after work, never doing anything exciting, challanging or geeky.

(of course, each to their own, but to me, there’s nothing worse than that life style, I need more challenge, to make something valuable and worthwhile).

Hopefully by posting this, I’ll have a rough list of aims that you can all accuse me of failing if I start to stray to motivate me further. ;-)

Rugby World Cup Dates

KVM/libvirt change CDROM

2 Replies

I was setting up some Windows virtual machines this evening on my Linux KVM/libvirt server, in order to experiment with how Windows handles IPv6 networks.

Installing windows was easy enough – standard virt-install commands, however post-reboot, Windows XP wants to access the CDROM again.

However the reboot causes the CDROM ISO to be unattached from the virtual CDROM drive – so it’s necessary to re-add it to continue installation

However the logical syntax based on virsh help, doesn’t work:

virsh # attach-disk devel-winxp1 /tmp/winxp.iso hdc
error: Failed to attach disk
error: this function is not supported by the connection driver: disk bus 'ide' cannot be hotplugged.

The correct syntax is:

virsh # attach-disk devel-winxp1 /tmp/winxp.iso hdc --type cdrom --mode readonly 
Disk attached successfully

Basically you need to tell libvirt that you’re attaching a *cdrom* and not an actual disk – I’m not sure why it doesn’t just figure that out, based on the fact the user is trying to obviously attach an ISO to a virtual optical drive device – maybe nobody has gotten around to implementing a nice autodetect method yet…

Thinkpad Wireless Headaches

4 Replies

Last year I obtained a new Lenovo x201i laptop to replace my aging Libretto – it’s been going pretty well, with one glaring exception – thanks to the “Thinkpad Wireless” 802.11n wifi card.

Lenovo sell their laptops with several wifi options – I didn’t do my research into the differences at the time and went for the default – turns out that “Thinkpad Wireless” is actually an Realtek RTL8192SE card.

This card has wonderful features like:

Unreliable and out-of-upstream Linux drivers – I find that currently I can only use version linux_2.6.0018.1025.2010, any other version introduces even more extreme unreliability.
Inability to stay reliability connected at 40Mhz band when available, instead jumping between 20Mhz and 40Mhz frequently.
When connected to an Apple Airport wireless access point, it will like to randomly drop the connection and re-connect every hour or so.
When connected to an Engenius wireless access point, it will work fine for 90% of traffic – but inexplicably, drops packets to just a select number of websites.
When connected to a Mikrotik R52 access point, it will work fine sometimes, but at other times suffers latency on all traffic types of around 5,000milliseconds (that’s 5 seconds for a packet return trip!)

I use my laptop a lot – pretty much 12 hours+ a day, at work, at home and on the go and have had nothing but problems with this wireless card on access points wherever I go, so I know it’s not AP, or even interference, specific.

So I made the decision to replace the card with something decent, ordering myself an Intel 633ANHMW mini-pcie card – low profile to fit into the laptop easily, and with support for 802.11n in both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz ranges .

I had *hoped* to get this card to not only resolve my reliability issues, but also to provide more performance and to allow me to move my wifi network to 5Ghz to get around frequency clashes at the flat.

Except that I can’t – Lenovo have locked the BIOS on these laptops, so that only official Lenovo cards are permitted to be used.

I couldn’t even *boot* the laptop without removing the card – even disabling the card in the BIOS will still throw up the same “Error 1802 : unauthorized network card is plugged in – Power off and remove the miniPCI network card” error. :-(

Turns out that this is a long known issue with IBM’s (and now Lenovo’s) laptop series – many different workarounds have been developed for it:

Linux-based C application to change a bit in the BIOS to disable the check – sadly, doesn’t work on the X201i.
Taping over pin 20 and installing into the WWAN slot – unfortunately I’m using the slot already for the WWAN card, so no good to me.
Patching the BIOS with a hex editor to disable the whitelist.

That last one should work even for me – there’s annacdotial evidence floating around online suggesting it’s possible…

But it’s too risky – this is a work laptop, I can’t afford to be without it, and bricking the BIOS by making a mistake will leave me with a very expensive repair bill.

I ended up ranting about the issue on Twitter and @Lenovo_ANZ send me a message asking for more information about the problem – this has lead to an email conversation with them, but I’m not too optimistic about a large company being able to change their policies based on customer feedback.

All I know is, I’d be very, very, weary about buying anything made by Lenovo ever again – if I’m going to get locked down unchangable hardware, I might as well consider other vendors making shinier equipment, or go for someone like Dell who don’t seem to lock the wifi cards.

Pretty unhappy with it right now…. only options left seem either to buy a vastly over priced Lenovo branded Intel card, or go with an Expresscard device, such as an Ubiquiti SR71-X.

Will update this page with where I get to with Lenovo, if I don’t demolish my laptop in frustration first.