stay in the shallow end

If you make your home directory world writable, procmail will start delivering your mail to /dev/null.

I hope nobody tried to send me an important email yesterday from noon to midnight.

I picked up Tetris DS and Metroid Prime: Hunters on Tuesday. While I haven’t had a chance to really dig deep into them, I’m pretty excited about the prospects. Tetris is Tetris, except now it’s online, which is cool. Metroid takes place between the two Gamecube games, and they’ve done an excellent job of porting it to the handheld platform.

I’ve already posted about how awesome Mario Kart DS is, which I think is the first in a series of killer apps for the DS. In a couple of months we’ll have New Super Mario Bros., a 2D side scrolling platformer for the DS, as well as Nintendo’s new Train your Brain franchise. And if that’s not enough, yesterday they go and announce Zelda DS, which looks unbelievably awesome.

I’m more than willing to admit that I’m a Nintendo Fanboy, but I think that they’ve really got the right idea this go round. I think there are a lot of gamers out there like me, who love video games, but don’t have the time or desire to learn how to use a dozen button controller for each game. The DS is great for picking up and playing for 15 minutes, and the Revolution controller, looks like it’s going to carry over that simplicity. Until we get more information about the Revolution, though, I think I’m safe saying that the DS will be my weapon of choice for a good time to come.

Well, for the DSL problem, and now the TiVo. The strong winds of late moved the dish out of alignment, and we realigned that last night. As the TiVo was collecting guide data, I was messing with our recordings, and then it locked up and rebooted. From there, it never recovered.

I popped it open and put the drive in a PC, and it pretty much said the drive was hosed. I called DirecTV up, and they said that because it’s out of warranty, they couldn’t just repair it, but since they wanted to keep me as a customer, they’d do a free replacement if I signed a two year contract. In addition to the two year contract, I would be switching to a lease, so while I own my TiVo now, I would not own the new one, and in fact, I’d have to pay a leasing fee. Forget that.

So I went online and downloaded a new drive image, and I’ll go pick up a new hard drive tonight and perform the transplant. Hopefully all will go well.

In the meantime, we missed the Sopranos, Big Love, 24, and Prison Break. Luckily HBO replays their shows a kazillion times, and for 24 and Prison Break, there’s always Bittorrent.

So I upgraded my Sprint DSL service to the 5.0 Mbps service about a month ago. At 3.0 Mbps, the service was rock solid, I never had downtime. Unfortunately, at 5.0 Mbps, that is no longer the case. My connection suffers from a condition called “Sync, No Surf.” Basically, my line is too noisy for that speed, and the DSL modem loses it’s connection, but doesn’t realize it, so it doesn’t try to reconnect, i.e. it still has “Sync”, but you can’t “Surf”.

Needless to say, this sucks. The fact that I host my own email in my basement makes it all the more annoying. I’ve called Sprint, and they sent somebody out who did something, that made it to where it only happens every few days rather than every few hours, but the line still isn’t up to snuff. I considered downgrading, but quite frankly, I really like the speed. Basically, I needed a little gnome to push the power button on the DSL modem whenever the connection was lost.

So two steps to the problem, first something to monitor whether the connection is dropped, and then something to restart the modem when it happens:

So the first player is Ruby. FreeBSD has a nifty little utility in ports called Daedalus. Daedalus simply sits in the background checking to see if things are as you want them, and if not, it runs a command. Although I haven’t had to hack it, it’s written in Ruby if I ever want to. Here’s what the relavant part of my configuration file looks like:

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<name>dsl</name>
<checkinterval>5</checkinterval>
<checkcommand>ping -c 4 news.com</checkcommand>
<regex>/icmp_seq/</regex>
<failcommand>/root/restart_dsl_modem.rb</failcommand>
<commandtimeout>90</commandtimeout>

Pretty self explanatory. I’m not sure why I picked news.com, it’s just what I always ping to test a connection. But what’s that restart_dsl_modem.rb script…

I’m sure all of you are familiar with X10. They ran the most obnoxious pop-up/pop-under advertising campaign of all time selling their spy cameras and what not. Anyway, many years ago, they were giving out these free (plus shipping) home automation kits they called Firecracker. A little dongle that plugs into a serial port and little modules that you plug into the wall and then plug appliances into. You can still buy one here, but unfortunately they are not free anymore.

So I’ve had this box full of random X10 stuff that I’d been carting around for my last three moves, and I kept telling myself I should just throw it away, since I hadn’t used it. When I was trying to solve this DSL modem problem, I dug through the basement looking for it and was pissed cause I thought I had tossed it. I took one more look though, and it turned up, so all’s well.

Anyway, I plugged the dongle into the serial port of the FreeBSD box, and installed the x10-cm17a gem which provides an easy peasy Ruby interface to control the Firecracker module. So without further adieu, I present to you restart_dsl_modem.rb:

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require ‘x10/cm17a‘

X10.controller = X10::Cm17a::Controller.new("/dev/ttyd0")

dsl_modem = X10.device(‘a1‘)

dsl_modem.off
sleep 10
dsl_modem.on
sleep 60

Again, pretty self explanatory. I tested it out by pulling the phone cord on the DSL modem and then plugging it back in after the restart, and it worked like a champ. Here’s the Daedalus logs:

I, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.647592 #79938]  INFO -- :
    State changed from "found" on monitor dsl - the new state
    is "not found"
W, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.648690 #79938]  WARN -- :
    Regular expression /icmp_seq/ did not match the output of
    "ping -c 4 news.com" for monitor "dsl"
W, [2006-03-13T21:07:24.649623 #79938]  WARN -- :
    Running "/root/restart_dsl_modem.rb" (failcommand) for
    monitor "dsl"
I, [2006-03-13T21:08:44.315012 #79938]  INFO -- :
    State changed from "not found" on monitor dsl - the new
    state is "found"

Now to hook up ActionMailer to get notification emails, and I’ll be all set.

So geek. So awesome.

I recently upgraded my DSL connection to the 5.0 Mbps service from the 3.0 Mbps service with Sprint. While it is tremendously faster, the upgrade has introduced some instability. My connection slows to a halt every 8 hours or so. The solution to this is to come downstairs and restart the modem. I’ve started doing it proactively whenever I’m about to leave the house.

It’s kind of like I’m on Lost, except I wasn’t in a plane crash, I’m not on an unmapped island, I get plenty of food, and I’m not repeatedly thrust into life threatening situations. So really, it’s just that there’s a button. If I don’t push it every few hours, my internet connection goes down, and life as I know it comes to an end.

Santa Jobs brought me exactly what I wanted!

I just placed my order for this beauty:

I can’t contain my joy! Anybody want to buy an iMac and a Thinkpad?

After reading Michael’s post at Jagermeta regarding overhearing a conversation about Mario Kart at a bar, I had a brilliant idea: Now that Mario Kart DS is out, I could actually play Mario Kart in a bar!

A few words about MKDS. Nintendo basically released a “best of” Mario Kart for it’s dual screened handheld, the DS. It’s everything you’ve loved about all the past Karts, minus the stuff that sucked (*cough* Double Dash *cough*). In addition to all this goodness, you get free play over the internets via the Nintendo WiFi Connection. Needless to say this is the greatest thing ever, and my friends and I have geeked out playing Mario Kart while being conferenced via Skype for many hours now.

Anyway, Monday was my last final, and I’d decided that Tuesday night I was going to park myself on a couch at South Street and just drink and chill. After reading Michael’s post, it became obvious what chilling would entail. I grabbed my DS and headed out to South Street all by my lonesome. I got comfy on a couch, drank beer, ate nachos, and Karted out.

Since it was Tuesday night, a crowd started to develop, and some anthropologists asked if they could sit in the couch area with me. Since it was just me, I didn’t really have a problem with it. They had friends coming, and soon it was me on the couch playing Nintendo surrounded by 15 anthropologists who’d just finished grading papers.

I was there for three hours, and I can honestly say that I haven’t had so much fun alone in a bar in my life. It’s definitely becoming a regular event.

A few weeks ago I made the wife swear to me that she would do everything in her power to make sure that under no circumstances that I bought an Xbox 360. I now realize that that my insisting on that was a landmark moment in self awareness.

I can feel the hysteria setting in. I’m drawn to IGN and GameSpot repeatedly throughout the day. I lust over screenshots of Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark Zero. I know if I got one, I’d play it like crazy for a few weeks and then it would only be powered up every now and then. Besides, I need to save my money for the revolution.

Despite that, I still spend a good portion of my waking hours trying to figure out a loophole in my agreement that would let me off the hook… I’ve got enough gift certificates to Sears to get one. That wouldn’t be buying it, right? How about if I win one in a contest? Does theft count?

My FreeBSD box that hosts my mail, web, and other stuff had exceeded three hundred days of uptime (time without a reboot for the non-geeks). Last night the power went out longer than my UPS could keep it alive, and I’m back to zero. I took the opportunity to upgrade it to 5.4, but I’m still sad about it.

It was really refreshing to read this article where movie industry executives are finally admitting that ticket sales being down has less to do with piracy and more to do with the fact that movies these days are considerably suckier than usual.

I used to go to the movies much more frequently than I do now. Part of it happened with the move to Charlottesville, and the fact that the movie theaters here are so craptacular. I get depressed every time I go to one. It just sucks to sit through a movie on a small screen (for a movie theater), poor sound quality, and having my feet cemented to the floor by spilled soda and candy.

I thought about it more recently, and I realized a lot of my decreased movie watching has to do with the quality of television these days. IMHO, we’re in a golden age of television. Shows beyond soap operas are finally moving to more serial plot lines rather than episodic ones. Six Feet Under and 24 both play out like season long movies… if you just watch one of their episodes, you won’t get anything out of it.

It was easy for movies to compete when their budgets dwarfed television, and they got all the top actors, while television actors remained fairly anonymous. That’s all changed now, with actors like Kiefer Sutherland moving to television and doing the best work of their careers by far.

And at best (or worst), a movie can be 200 minutes long. One season of television gives nearly 1100 minutes to work with. It’s much more difficult for a movie writer to be able to develop characters to the extent that we now see in television shows.

The big question is why it took so long to happen. I’m guessing that it took awhile for a network to give a show a movie sized budget and demand corresponding production values. I think we can thank HBO with The Sopranos for that.

I guess I’ll close this post with a list of my favorite shows from the last few years:

• 24
• Arrested Development
• Battlestar Galactica
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I am still catching up on)
• Curb Your Enthusiasm
• Da Ali G Show
• Deadwood
• Lost
• Six Feet Under
• The Sopranos
• Veronica Mars
• The Wire

So half my list is HBO. If there were a way to subscribe only to HBO, I’d save so much money…