This photo is about a week old now, I'd post this earlier but forgot.

Very yummy photo of Lala on Flickr.

Make sure you click the video, it's even better!

So Yi sends me and a few friends this wikipedia article about the Great Circle that her co-workers had to work with to build an application to do that calculation and how it gave her a headache to look at.

I looked at it and started at it a bit and figured that deriving it would be impossible with my current state of math awareness (not like I could do it in the past heheh) but implementing it (given the formula above) now would be trivial.... so I did and sent her and my friends the link to a webpage.

It originally accepted 5 values, lat/longs values for two locations and the radius of the sphere defaulting to 6372.795 which is the radius of the Earth.... and it worked!! Yay proof of concept....

The next day her and my friends started goofing around with my calculator by calculating the distances from their homes to various other places such as work... grandparents homes etc.... but it was a bit of a pain because they needed to obtain the lat/long values from another source and then input them into my calculator...

Then someone mentioned something about using google to find the lat longs and then it struck me:

DUH!!!

I could just use Google Maps API to geocode the address and use the resulting lat / longs to do the calculation! Having used google maps api before, this would be fairly easy to do....

This resulted in the following webpage:

Grant's Great Circle Calculator Near Release

The in the spirit of annoying internet buzzwords, I decided to bring my little calculator into the world of web 2.0 by ajaxifying it and throwing some pastel colors as well as removing the final "e" in mapper.... this results in the final product:

Grant's Great Circle Mappr

Why did I do this? Well no reason really, I suppose I could throw an ad on it.

Anyway, what is cooler is how it was done is and it's explained here by the person who did it in the original doom9 thread.

A very interesting read.

I don't post here for months at a time and I come up with this.

... oh and this.

But it's been a few years and my installation needs some updating, i'm running ivtv 0.4.1 drivers and the latest is ivtv 0.10.1, i have 2 drives in ext3 filesystem, I want them LVM'ed together and running xfs... little things that I wish I had done when I first built it are bugging me.... so time for an overhaul.

So this week, I spent my evenings doing a ton of kernel optimizing and recompilations, repartitioned my drives with gparted... lvm'ed the majority of the space into one big XFS filesystem... updated ivtv to 0.10.1 (which required the kernel updates)... brought the pre-sarge "unstable" debian box completely up to date, which meant upgrading nearly every single package on the machine including going from xfree86 to xorg... this broke a tonne of things but I was able to fix them all one at time....Basically a ton of updates and they all have made my pvr way more snappier.

Secondly, finally installed Mythfrontend for OS X on Yi's iMac... and boy holy cow is that cool does ever work great, even watching Live TV works wonderfully over 802.11g.

Then I thought about my hosting account at 1and1 that gives me 250GB of storage... DUH? Off site storage that I'm already paying for! Since I already mirror everything I have stored at 1and1 locally here which I update every night with rsync.... why I don't I do the same thing in the other direction... it's so obvious! Why did I think of this earlier!

I just need to put all my data that I want to be backed up in a folder (where it pretty much already is) and rsync it in the other direction over to my 1and1 account, essentially a simple 5 sec rsync command. The problem is that I have sensitive information that i don't want to be sitting wide open on untrusted machine somewhere.

So I did a bit of research and discovered duplicity, this a very cool idea... basically takes your data, and encrypts it on the fly and uploads it to an outside ftp, or scp (via ssh) machine. After the first run, it will do incremental updates only. Perfect!

However, as I played with this, I realized 45GB for an initial full backup will take a few weeks with my cruddy cable modem upload speeds, and if it dies (which it did once) then there was no resume. This is clearly a problem.... you cannot rely on a home cable connection to give you that kind of reliability, at least in this neck of the woods.... so back to researching other alternatives.

Next i discover something very cool, sshfs and encfs. sshfs mounts a remote filesystem locally over ssh, encfs provides an encrypted filesystem.... A simple apt-get install enfs and apt-get install sshfs got me both in a few seconds. They are 2 separate utilities, HOWEVER if you first setup a sshfs mount, and then create an encfs directory over the sshfs mount, you end up with what essentially is an filesystem on a remote machine that stores the data encrypted... perfect exactly what I need... of course, you can then run rsync to move your data over to!

Because this creates an encrypted copy of your data stored on a remote machine that can be updated with rsync, it has no problems with resumes and is smart enough to only transfer changed files after the initial transfer is done!

I ran into a problem while trying to create the encfs over the sshfs, I suspect it's a permission problem prevents me from writing to the encfs mount and I didn't want to spend time debugging, so I ended up instead just building a local encfs filesystem where I moved all the data I wanted to be backed up into. Now I schedule rsync to copy the encrypted directory over to the remote machine, and this gives me same identical net result.

It's not quite as elegant as my original plan, but it works the same way... in fact i'm actually able to use my original method to mount and read the remote directory using encfs over sshfs, just can't write to it.....
-Update: "This was easily fixed by updating to a new version of the fuse library, apparently it was a known issue... i tearing my hair out for nothing"...

Anyway, and so I finally have some peace of mind that my data is a little more safer.

So what better time than use my Christmas break to convert my old 3 drive LVM setup into a RAID box.

First thing I had to decide on was hardware or software RAID... and after lots of reading online and putting much thought into it, I decided to go software RAID. The primary reason for this decision was that if a hardware RAID controller dies in a few years, I there could be potential for me be totally screwed if I cannot find a similar or exact RAID controller.

Now the next thing I had to do was decide on the size of the drives. Of course I want to make this as big as possible and it seems like Seagate 320GB Barracuda are priced quite right for me. At about $110 each, I could buy 3 for a RAID5 setup and spend about $375 for a 640GB RAID5 system... (I spent about that much for my original 120MB hardrive in 92 or so).

So next step, I backed up my 120GB or so worth of data on my current file server onto my PC workstation. This took about 10 hours over 100Mbps ethernet. Also did an "apt-get install mdadm" to get the latest RAID utility on my machine.

Next, I yanked out my 3 old drives, and replaced them with the shiny new 320GB drives. It so tempting to RAID0 them together to get close to a TB of usable space but that would make it no better than my old setup in terms of redundancy.

After some dust blowing and closing the case, it was time to boot up my box again.... ran fdisk, partitioned each of the drives with filesystem type "fd" to mark them as raid, you could leave them as the default type "83" as well but I think there's potential for someone to format a drive individually and blow up your RAID if you did that. This was unlikely to happen as it's my own machine but let's do it right.

Now time to build the drive:

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --chunk=128 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 /dev/hdb1 /dev/hdc1 /dev/hdd1

and then:

mdadm --detail --scan /dev/md0

and save the contents to /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf so that next time mdadm will see the drives upon bootup. The array immediately started to build in the background.... this i found out eventually will take 2 days... but the cool thing is that you can start using it immediately.

So, now it's time to format my new 640GB /dev/md0

It seems that you have to becareful how you choose to format your RAID partitions, at least when using ext3... didn't look into other filesystems.

mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -R stride=32 /dev/md0

the stride parameter needs to be your raid chunk size/block size.. which in my case I chose a chunk size of 128/4=32 - Apparently if you don't you run into some horrible performance issues. /Shrug.

This took less than hour to complete and of course then I started to copying my old files back over, which took another 15 hours, probably because the raid was still building and everything was kind of slow while this was happening.

Anyway, the end result when I run:

mdadm --detail /dev/md

/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Mon Dec 25 12:46:24 2006
Raid Level : raid5
Array Size : 624928256 (595.98 GiB 639.93 GB)
Device Size : 312464128 (297.99 GiB 319.96 GB)
Raid Devices : 3
Total Devices : 3
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent

Update Time : Thu Dec 27 21:48:35 2006
State : clean
Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 3
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0

Layout : left-symmetric
Chunk Size : 128K

UUID : 925b55ab:9a16cff7:7eeacd7b:931f8f9f
Events : 0.64744

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 3 65 0 active sync /dev/hdb1
1 22 1 1 active sync /dev/hdc1
2 22 65 2 active sync /dev/hdd1

Now I have 640GB of space that I can play with and hopefully not worry if something goes wrong with a drive.

We've been running a cvs version from around 0.18 (cira oct 2004) and haven't bother to update since everything was working so nicely.

But this announcement caught my eye as it now has a built-in dvd player and as well built-in burn to dvd archiving. Previously playing dvd's would require launching xine, and burning to dvd required a strange series of scripts.... not a big deal once we got it setup then, but now it's all built in and included altogether with a nice consistent interface....among other new features, fixes and optimizations.

So yesterday I was preparing for the worst and to not have TV for a few days but it was simply extract the tarball and ./configure ; make ; make install. Repeat with the mythplugins file... restarting mythbackend - watched on the console as it updated the database schema and then continue normally afterwards.... restarted mythfrontend and it just worked. No hitches, no problems... smoothest mythtv upgrade ever, the way it should work.

As stated before, mythtv simply RAWKS. I don't know how you can watch tv without it.

This will be going into my ipod.

It is a 850mAh replacement battery that will be replacing the original 630 mAh one.

My old 3rd generation Ipod battery won't run for more than an hour or so now... even if you charge it all day.... so off to the Apple Store I went yesterday and bought a Sonnettech replacement battery... came with a cd with an instructional video and a plastic tool to open the ipod.

Trying to open it up is the hardest part, they explain it fairly well, but it's still something you have to kinda feel for yourself... after doing it once, actually not too difficult.

Cover lifted, revealing the hard drive with the blue plastic gooey bumper thingy.

The blue stuff probably saved my data few times.

Yeah yeah yeah so it's only 15GB, but it's plenty for me.

With the hard drive out now, the new battery is ready to go in.

In goes the new one. Looks like a perfect fit to me.

Lastly, replaced the hard drive... this part was a little tricky as the ribbon cable connector basically just sits on top of ipod board and is very easy to misalign.

After the drive was put in, I closed it up and ... WHEW! It booted up again.

Now it's charging away!

This was just sent to me. Looks like another shameless attempt to exploit hot women in skimpy clothing with some teasing scenes of near nudity...

....OMG I can't believe they waited so long to make this, nor can I believe that I can't watch to watch it... drool... =P

Trailer can be seen at http://www.doa.film.de/ or download it here.

What others have to say about CIA / 3web / Cybersurf

So I have a friend that was on 3web and said the internet service was fine, since it's really just Shaw, so I decided to try it since I was on Shaw anyway, and since I didn't have a land line, I may as well switch to them since it's the same price.

Here's a timeline of events:

May 28, 2006 - submitted my order for the service online, i was a Shaw internet only subscriber at the time. Since I own a cable modem only, i just need the voice terminal for the phone service.

June 6, 2006 - Recieved an email telling me my application was recieved.

June 29, 2006 - Got an email telling me my service is now active - this is just over 1 month from my original sign up date. I have not recieved a voice terminal at this point yet. I call they tell me they are back ordered, I should receive in a week.

Approximately July 6, July 13, July 20... basically I call every 7 days asking about my voice terminal, each time they tell me it's coming next week. I was getting pretty mad at this point, as they are charging me full price ($39) for internet and phone, when I could be paying them $29 for internet only, it's only $10 difference but still.. I should be recieving the service I'm currently paying for.

Technically, they advertise on their website http://www.cia.com that it's free internet if I order a phone line for $39 a month, I technically shouldn't need to pay anything since I still don't have a phone line.

July 26, 2006 - FINALLY recieved my voice terminal, however no UPS was included as per the instructions they send out.. I sent them an email notifying them and they tell me it will be shipped at a future date, no eta.

So all in all, it took 2 months to get my service setup, and I already had cable internet service previously with Shaw. The phone service seems decent, there seems to be a "blip" of noise at the beginning of calls but it's so quick it's not really a bother, most probably won't even notice it.

My main problem now is that it doesn't work! My phone terminal keeps crashing, my guess is because it can't deal with the amount of traffic I use. This takes down my whole internet connection, it's been happening about 2 to 3 times a day since I setup the voice terminal.

My guess is if I can get the voice terminal working behind the router, it may prevent this problem from occuring, but I am so far unable to do so as reported by others... I've tried dmz, portforwarding and even changing the mac address on my internet facing port to the same as my VT.

I started to do some googling to see if I could find a way to fix this problem and found that other have requested a 2nd ip address for the voice terminal to fix this. I call and talked to a tech and they confirm the same thing, so they put in request for a 2nd ip address now and hopefully that will work for me.

[Aug 5th Update]

It's now Aug 5th, I still do not have a working phone. I requested an 2nd ip address for phone terminal, it's been 8 days, still no response... I called earlier and I was told it would be at least another 3 days minimum because it's a long weekend. The person said they will call me. It's now been Well over 2 months since the beginning, and I still have no working phone service... at least not when I'm using the computers.

This may as well be called highspeed dialup, as I can't use the phone and the computers at the same time (at least with any reliabllity). Customer service with this company is extremely poor, you sure get what you pay for.

[Aug 9th Update]

I was told I would receive a call back, nothing today. No response to 2 emails I've sent them over a week ago now. Getting sick and tired of this, submitting a complaint to their local BBB.

[Aug 11 Update]

I called them again asking about my IP address, the tech i spoke with told me it was up and to try it out. I hung up and tested it. They did not provision my cable modem for 2 ip addresses. I tried multiple devices not just my router and ATA, but other devices, laptop and desktops.... I was not able to get more than 1 ip simulatenously. I used tcpdump to watch the traffic on the segment, and concluded I was only given 1 address. Either they don't know what they are doing or he flat out lied to me.

[Aug 14]
I called them back a day later after my weekend of of testing, and again after a 35 min way, I finally got a hold of someone who went through a bunch of useless tests which involved rebooting laptops, a router and ATA all in various orders and various configurations with my hub. Although some of his tests were valid and I did them on the phone with him while he did his tests from his side, I knew it was pointless. In the end he said he would request another IP address from Shaw

[Aug 16]

I missed a call on my cell phone but recieved a voicemail from cia, a rep told me that I now have been given a 3rd IP address. Strangely enough I recieved my UPS today... all this shortly after my BBB complaint. I seems you need to call the BBB in order to get things done with this company.

I tested my equipment, sure enough I can request 2 ip addresses from their dhcp servers now. Not a 3rd one like they said I've been assigned.

So this appears to be the end of my setup procedures with this company. I only put up with this because I don't have a need for a land line, I've never had one, only our cell phones. If i had a need for a landline or for reliable service, I would NOT recommend this company. If you don't really care how long it takes to get setup and want a cheap phone/internet combo package, then cia i supppose is for you.

This is an amazing video.

You just have to watch it, and if you are wondering wtf, then read a bit about the story behind it..

I get all warm and fuzzy inside when I watch this video.