InsideTWiT’s Neighborhood

2 acts down and the soprano is still alive. It's final dress so la boheme opens tomarrow

It's hard to believe that, ten years ago, we were making preparations for the Y2K cut-over. As an IT professional, this was something we had to plan for, prepare for, and test.

We spent lots of money on remediation. I know that more than a few companies chose to replace the systems outright. At the time, my office specialized in implementing such systems. After Y2K, everyone had a shiny new system--it took a while before things picked up again.

As this article notes, the use of off-shore people started with Y2K. Once companies realized the benefit, they realized they could continue to send work overseas.

At the end of the day, was disaster averted, or was it a waste? Overall, I think that the remediation effort served its key aim of preventing lots of annoying little problems from causing not a global collapse, but months and years of lost productivity after the fact, sorting it out piecemeal.

Y2K came at an odd time in the world of computing. It was at the heels of the first internet wave, when such technology became a key part of day-to-day life. Over the course of the nineties, what was something that tended to be part of big business was being pushed to smaller and smaller organizations. Y2K, I think, was the capstone event for this shift, leading to a few years until the next phase.

Apocalypse Then: a two-part series on the lessons of Y2K. (1) - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

http://www.slate.com/id/2235357/entry/0/

Almost 10 years later, it's remarkable how little we think about Y2K.

I just installed Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) server edition on the music server and managed to get Squeezebox Server, as it's now known, installed. I found this excellent guide:

http://havetheknowhow.com/Install-the-software/Install-Squeezebox-server.html

I tried stable main (7.4.0) but it didn't work due to some database conflict but testing main (7.4.2) worked. It looks good, although I've got no tunes in it yet as I have no idea how to create the disk space and make it visible from my Windows 7 computer. I know it will involve samba, which I have installed. On ClarkConnect, I could get a visual display of the server from the web browser with the included GUI or with Webmin, but Webmin is not available by default on Ubuntu and seemingly it can mess up one's config files?

I've posted on ubuntuforums.org for some answers and hopefully will hear soon. It would be so nice to get this fixed up before leaving on Sunday and get the bits of computer cleared up off the floor and desk finally after three months. I miss my music server!

Originally published at Jeremy Heslop. You can comment here or there.

Requirements: 1and1 shared plan that has ssh support

- Download pdftk deb file for debian etch (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/pdftk/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/pdftk/pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the pdftk deb file:

ar xv pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Download libgcj deb file for debian etc (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/libgcj7-0/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gcj-4.1/libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the libgcj deb file:

ar xv libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Create a script to link libgcj for pdftk (use nano or vi):

#!/bin/bash

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" usr/bin/pdftk $*

- Chmod the pdftk script so it can run:

chmod 755 pdftk

Now you can run pdftk from your main directory and process files from php or cronjobs.

Originally published at Jeremy Heslop. You can comment here or there.

Requirements: 1and1 shared plan that has ssh support

- Download pdftk deb file for debian etch (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/pdftk/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/pdftk/pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the pdftk deb file:

ar xv pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Download libgcj deb file for debian etc (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/libgcj7-0/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gcj-4.1/libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the libgcj deb file:

ar xv libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Create a script to link libgcj for pdftk (use nano or vi):

#!/bin/bash

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" usr/bin/pdftk $*

- Chmod the pdftk script so it can run:

chmod 755 pdftk

Now you can run pdftk from your main directory and process files from php or cronjobs.

Originally published at Jeremy Heslop. You can comment here or there.

Requirements: 1and1 shared plan that has ssh support

- Download pdftk deb file for debian etch (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/pdftk/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/pdftk/pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the pdftk deb file:

ar xv pdftk_1.40-2_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Download libgcj deb file for debian etc (http://packages.debian.org/etch/i386/libgcj7-0/download):

wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/gcj-4.1/libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the libgcj deb file:

ar xv libgcj7-0_4.1.1-20_i386.deb

- Extract the data.tar.gz file:

tar xvzf data.tar.gz

- Create a script to link libgcj for pdftk (use nano or vi):

#!/bin/bash

LD_LIBRARY_PATH="usr/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" usr/bin/pdftk $*

- Chmod the pdftk script so it can run:

chmod 755 pdftk

Now you can run pdftk from your main directory and process files from php or cronjobs.

I received most of my tools yesterday.  Got them hung and rearranged my board a bit.  I was just waiting on my truing stand to be the final piece for now.  I did get the stand but there is one problem.  the wonderful Park Tool company sent me an incomplete box.  Two of the three control knobs are missing from the box.  I have called Bike Tools Etc to tell them and they were very helpful and apologetic, especially considering that it is not even their fault.  They simply sent me  the sealed box that they had on their shelf from Park.  There was no way for them to know it was missing parts.

So while I wait for Park to call me back and send me the control knobs I set up the stand anyway.  Here is the (almost) finished Toolboard and work stand.

DSCN2151

WOW I just spent the last 5 minutes trying to get that picture to post, great job VOX, my days here might be numbered with your crappy service.

Then here is a quick pic of the hub, rim and spokes that are waiting to be made into a wheel if Park Tools decided they ever want to send me all the parts of what I ordered instead of just some of them.

DSCN2150

This is an old rim and hub that I've had since the 80's.

Geeks bow down to STÖRMTRÜPER! Created by @chuckbb . So metal! http://ow.ly/AlKY

Topolsky comment

Yesterday on Engadget, a relatively minor post about typos in an Android 2.0 error message turned into much internet drama when Josh Topolsky (editor in-chief of Engadget) got very offended after people in the comments section began criticizing Engadget for making fun of someone else's spelling errors, when Engadget editors themselves are well known for misspellings and/or missing words in many of their posts.

Some comments were deleted, including a comment of mine which simply agreed with another poster that Engadget makes errors of this sort all the time, and the karma system on both of Topolsky's comments on the subject was removed.  I guess Josh thought his comments were ranked low enough and didn't need any more down votes. 

The real surprise is that Topolsky's comments indicate that he banned at least two users for their comments on the issue.  I don't know if he just had a bad night yesterday, or if he's always this thin-skinned, but if Topolsky is going to be doing Jimmy Fallon's show and giving NPR interviews regularly, he's going to need to develop a thicker skin that he showed yesterday.  If he can't take accurate criticism regarding the work that his editors put out, how is he going to handle being a minor tech-celebrity?

Incidentally, you don't have to look too far from this article to find a typo in an Engadget post, just look at this story posted just a few minutes after the one in question, where the word of is missing in the last sentence:

Engadget typo