A nice little tool I came across – DeltaCopy – for when you have to work with Windows desktops and want to rsync (and don’t want to install Cygwin). I haven’t had time to play with it yet, but apparently the DeltaCopy client will connect to an rsync server.

Out of interest, there’s also a SourceForge package for installing a minimal ssh server on Windows, rather than the full Cygwin.

I’m using the Cisco VPN client, and it seems unreliable on Linux – it occasionally connects but often just gives up with “Remote peer is no longer responding”.

Apart from the obvious firewall/nat checks [1][2], a solution seems to be to edit the .pcf file, bump up the timeout and force keepalives:

PeerTimeout=180
ForceKeepAlive=1

I got a Huawei HSPA E1762 USB stick a few months ago for 3G network access, together with Exetel’s $5/month Zero Gig plan (uses the Optus network). Great for when I’m out and about and can’t find a wireless signal to jump onto, or I’m at some client who doesn’t allow laptops onto their network. I’ve been using it regularly and still haven’t gone over about 100M usage, so it’s worked out to be very cheap.

Using Network Manager on Ubuntu Jaunty it mostly “just works” – all I needed to do was set the APN to ‘exetel1′. I’ve also bought an antenna for it from The Antenna Shop – gives me better coverage in shadows in the CBD and out in the country. There’s also other bigger antennas available, as well as car antennas.

antenna

All-in-all a good buy – thanks Dean for the tip.

Addendum

As per Matt’s comment below, Huawei modems currently have problems on Ubuntu Karmic – Problem with Huawei E1762 Mobile Broadband in Karmic, Bug #413989, Bug # 446146.

A couple of good links [1][2] came up on the Axxs collective email list about monitoring disk activity under Linux using block_dump.

In a nutshell:

kern.debug setup in syslog.conf (it often is; if sync is used disk activity will obviously be greater)

echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/block_dump
wait n seconds
echo 0 >/proc/sys/vm/block_dump

Do various grep'ing on /var/log/debug for READ, WRITE, inode, block, etc

Thanks to Andrew Mc & Torrance.

I blogged previously about how the Australian locale in Ubuntu incorrectly uses Sunday rather than Monday as the first day of the week, and how to manually fix it. Unfortunately, whenever the locale gets updated (eg via one of Ubuntu’s regular package updates), the locale reverts and you have to manually fix it again.

So I’ve written a script that fixes the locale, and also hooked it into dpkg:

% cat fix_locale.sh
#!/bin/bash

LOCALE_FILE='/usr/share/i18n/locales/en_AU'
if [ -f $LOCALE_FILE ] ; then
 sudo sed -i 's/^first_weekday.*/first_weekday 2/' $LOCALE_FILE
 sudo locale-gen
 killall gnome-panel
fi

To run this automatically, add a stanza like this to /etc/apt/apt.conf:

APT {
 Update {
 Post-Invoke {"/home/sonia/bin/fix_locale.sh"; };
 };
};

The script could be smarter ie check the existing value of first_weekday and only change it if it’s different, but I’ll fix that when I’ve got more time.

A link off the RORO list about Why “require ‘rubygems’” Is Wrong.

In a nutshell, the environment variable RUBYOPT should include rubygems eg

export RUBYOPT="rubygems"

Here’s how to install Virtualbox 2.1.4 on Ubuntu Jaunty (people are saying 2.2.0 is buggy). And now that Oracle owns Sun, Virtualbox may go the way of the dodo…

No rocket science here – just saving myself time in future.

sudo aptitude install virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-source dkms

Applications -> Accessories -> VirtualBox OSE

I’ve started playing with Ruby 1.9 – the latest and greatest version of Ruby. On Ubuntu Jaunty, 1.8 is considered mainline and 1.9 experimental – here are the shell aliases if using 1.9:

alias ri='/usr/bin/ri1.9'
alias irb='/usr/bin/irb1.9'
alias rdoc='/usr/bin/rdoc1.9'
alias ruby='/usr/bin/ruby1.9'
alias gem='/usr/bin/gem1.9' # belts-and-braces - gem 1.8 & 1.9 are the same version - 1.3.1

Last night I attended the second cultural activity of the Cervantes Institute – a Flamenco Guitar Masterclass put on by a giant of the flamenco world Óscar Herrero, with the assistance of David Rasko and students from the Sydney Spanish Guitar Studio. There were a large number of attendees (about 50) as well as many guitars, and we all had a great time.

Óscar talked us through a brief history of flamenco and explained how a flamenco guitar differs from a classical guitar. He then demonstrated the playing techniques that give flamenco it’s distinctive sound – the alzpúa, rasgeados, and golpes, as well as showing us a flamenco metronome that allows guitarists, dancers and singers to practice by themselves (very different from a normal metronome – it has all the different beats like Sevillanos, Siguiriyas, etc). Then the best part – Oscar would give a little improvisation based on the technique and pure music would flow…

When I grew up we were all forced to learn a classical instrument at school – piano, violin, flute or (classical) guitar, along with several ‘real’ foreign languages (French and Latin for me). I learnt guitar, but it wasn’t fun – hours of practice and study each day, exams and formal auditions – enough to put you off music for life. But learning the guitar got me interested Spanish (all the footnotes were in Spanish), and hearing Óscar and the students play has got me thinking about playing the guitar again – Olé!

The Spanish Language Institute (Instituto Cervantes) has just opened in Sydney. The Institute has a similar role to that of  the French Alliance Francaise – to encourage the spread of Spanish language and culture throughout the world.

Last night was the first night of the advanced class – we started late as none of us had thought to order our textbooks and the poor teacher had to improvise, but there was also an opening of an exhibition of Peruvian photography so we had red wine and tapas on our break and then proceeded to have a great time in the second half of the class (all typically Spanish).

Now, onto the homework. At these more advanced levels we study the finer and more cultured aspects of the language, including of course slang and idioms… For example, my first homework question – what is this word x? One of them is worth a lot (“worth an x”), two of them means brave (“you’ve got to have 2 x’s to do that”),  if you have 3 of them you don’t give a damn (“it doesn’t matter 3 x’s”), and a lot of x’s means really difficult (“getting it cost me a 1000 pairs of x’s”). There are many other uses for the word x, and it is of course one of the most widely used words in the Spanish language – cojones.

As Frikipedia tells me, “cojones (balls) are a mechanism of masculinity created to relieve stress … they’re made of two oval forms covered with skin that is impermeable to alpha rays … it is believed that cojones emit a magnetic radiation that attracts the spherical objects used in sports …”

I wonder if Japanese or German classes are like this….?