To clarify last night’s post, the laptop had no problem suspending….resuming on the other hand was odd. If you google for “fedora 10 resume” you see plenty of people have been having similar problems. Upon resuming, all I would get is garbled video for a few seconds before the system would lock up.

This was bothering me enough on the drive home that I contemplated dropping down to Fedora 9 for now. Luckily I ran across Fedora’s Common F10 bugs and added nomodeset to my kernel parameters in /etc/grub.conf. I did not have high hopes for that to work, but it does….and then some. The boot process is not as pretty but I’m suspending and resuming, I could not care less about what the boot process looks like. So now I successfully suspend, but the fun comes with the resume. When I open the laptop the system just about resumes, then suddenly suspends again. This would continue the sad panda moment, but resuming again works. So I just have to resume twice, I can live with that.

Sunday called for a format of the work laptop to accommodate Fedora 10. I am quite pleased that gnome-rdp is now included, but I miss suspending.

*sad panda face*

I was listening to my iPod at work today when Sevendust’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” came on which started a good run of Wikipedia crawling….which resulted in Sad Kermit. While I am a Muppet fan, I thoroughly enjoy this parody. Check it out when you get a chance, you can see the video here.

Side question, what covers of “Hurt” do you like? I heard Johnny Cash’s version before all versions of the song and still love it, but many bands have covered it (Wikipedia has a good list here). So far I’ve only heard the versions by NIN, Johnny Cash, Sevendust and now Sad Kermit, but need to hear more. I wonder if Cake will ever cover it…

I’m sitting around at a conference, and just to share with you some of the pain I feel I figured I would post this:

PING google.com (72.14.207.99) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=2190 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=1470 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=1467 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=1195 ms
64 bytes from eh-in-f99.google.com (72.14.207.99): icmp_seq=5 ttl=241 time=985 ms

— google.com ping statistics —
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 3999ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 985.984/1462.167/2190.931/407.187 ms, pipe 3

Seeing as how today is PI day I found this particulary good, but requires you to drop the last ‘e.’

I prefer pie

I’m stuck in an all day conference call of a sick person telling us what we already know, so I might as well get around to posting about the trip I just got back from. All around it was a great trip. I enjoyed Tempe but the workshop itself was more management than technical so that was a bummer but I made some good contacts and had plenty of side conversations. Some points though:

• Flights: I don’t mind flying, but being stuck three people in when you want to go to the bathroom and you have incredible heartburn for 5+ hours is not fun. However while flying out we were chasing the sun as it was setting which was amazing. I had the window on the south facing side so I got to see some incredible gradients and such. And if anyone ever has to pick up baggage in the Phoenix airport, I feel for you.
• Mr. Pibb: There’s a Coca-Cola bottling facility in Tempe so most of the place offer Coke products, including Mr. Pibb!! Something I’m not used to seeing since I’m in the northeast, but it’s amazing.
• Weather: The first day out, the weather was phenomenal, it was like a perfect Spring day. Thursday and Friday however there was some rain or just the feeling of pending rain but not too bad. However, we were sitting outside at a Happy Hour talking about CAS Thursday night, and got hailed on thrice.
• The Big Bang: Thursday night I went out looking for a bar. Being only three blocks away from ASU this was not a difficult task, but which bar to go to first. We walked into a basement bar called “The Big Bang” which advertises itself as a dueling piano bar. Holy Cow! If you are a fan of live music and find yourself in Tempe go to The Big Bang. We had an amazing time. The “I’m only going out for 1 drink” night turned into a night in which we had t o leave at 2:00 because Tempe closes down at 2:00.

So it was a good trip. I was completely exhausted Saturday night when I got back to Albany, but with my love of live music I went straight to Mahoney’s to see Replica. Just a couple more days of not working on projects then I fly down to Orlando for another conference.

That’s right A/C. I walked into my hotel room tonight, and the priorities were 1.) turn on A/C 2.) Scan for wireless networks. I guess more to follow but I’ve been traveling for 12-13 hours so I’m going to go relax.

I had this weird problem at work back in December that I thought I’d share. I had noticed that when I started new gnome-terminals, my prompts read:

I have no name!@urbs-19979

Now that’s weird, but I ignored it since the machine was working and I was in a series of meetings. However, when I started trying to ssh into other systems I was getting told

You don’t exist, go away!

At this point I verbally told my laptop “You don’t tell me no” which caused some weird looks but people moved on just fine. Since the problem was now getting in my way I had to look into it. After a while I had realized that by adding a username to my ssh commands (through -l user or user@host) I could use ssh again. This caused me to think something was wrong with /etc/passwd, and I was right. My user couldn’t read /etc/passwd, fixed the permissions and all was well. I forget what I did to muck up /etc/passwd, but I’m sure if I had been using vipw like you’re supposed to I wouldn’t have had this problem…..but then again I would have missed out on the great gems that programmers leave in their programs.

I’ve got a list of tools I think are cool or useful, so I’m going to start sharing my thoughts of them here….isn’t that the point? So today’s tool is iftop. It can be used to display bandwidth usage on an interface. If you can’t figure out what it does based on the name, their description of the tool lays it out well:

iftop does for network usage what top(1) does for CPU usage. It listens to network traffic on a named interface and displays a table of current bandwidth usage by pairs of hosts. Handy for answering the question “why is our ADSL link so slow?”.

Small and simple tool, what’s not to like. Real good for those times that you know something is eating traffic but don’t know what. Check out screenshots of iftop at http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/iftop/.

Have you ever have one of those weeks where at the beginning you thought everything was going to be reasonable and time would just pass quickly, but then you run into a wall and everything falls apart? Why can’t this week just end? To make it worse, I was on the way home I was thinking about how it is supposed to snow late this afternoon and how that might mean not going to Poughkeepsie Friday, but now I don’t see how that helps at all.

On a brighter note, here’s a great reference for any How I Met Your Mother fan.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother