Christmas gift

It will be 42" LCD TV.
Samsung or LG ?

Winter is here

Lots of snow.
And rather cold -13C.

What we need to be public

Probably 3 things:
doctors
teachers
lawyers

Used to be in USSR ...

What will happen to Harper's government ?

Will it survive the vote on budget?
Interesting.
Definitely, we don't want coalition government.

Google works ok

In a few days - about a week, Google picked up new keywords and new ads are all about new things.
So we know well enough now how it works.

New keywords - asbestos and insurance and mortgage

Why car insurance is so expensive in Ontario? Why so cheap in Quebec ?
Where to get mortgage?
If you are a victim of asbestos - what to do ?
Very interesting.

New gadget

Cheap reader - 75$
But it says - crappy display and no wireless connection.

Games

It is time to retire GameBoy - I have one made in 1997.
New toy is Nintendo DS.
Just needs R4DS card.

MQ series from IBM is such a drag

Requires too much Java/Eclipse crap.

Used to be a good cheap wireless router

This router was a very good device cheap, fast, easy to use, rich features.
Not anymore...

Hylafax on Linux

Ok, dreadful hylafax error "waiting for modem to come ready" fixed by adding this:
s0:2345:respawn:/usr/sbin/faxgetty ttyS0
to /etc/inittab
Do not forget to say telinit Q
Hylafax claims you don't need faxgetty running - in fact, you need it.

Ok, so serial port problem is common for Xen kernels

Solution:
add bolded config parameters to grub.conf
kernel /xen.gz-2.6.18-8.el5 console=vga xencons=ttyS16 console=ttyS16
module /vmlinuz-2.6.18-8.el5xen ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 rhgb quiet xencons=tty

Dell 1650 and CentOS-5 and serial port

Now, phreaking thing doesn't understand it has serial port.
Says this:
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 4 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: 8250_pnp: Unknown symbol serial8250_unregister_port
Jan 24 09:40:16 dell1650 kernel: 8250_pnp: Unknown symbol serial8250_register_port

So what we are going to do about it ?

Dell 1650 and CentOS-5 and PERC3/Di

After upgrading a few packages, boot started to be painfully slow - SCSI probing all devices
and giving the error:
AAC:AAC received an unrecognized command [601].
aacraid: Host adapter abort request (0,1,0,0)
aacraid: Host adapter abort request (0,1,0,0)
aacraid: Host adapter reset request. SCSI hang ?
... - and so on, probing all devices and finally booting

The solution is to upgrade PERC firmware to 2.8.1.7692 - http://ftp.us.dell.com/scsi-raid/PE1650_RAID_FRMW_LX_R168387.BIN

Worked well - boots ok now.

Linksys SPA-3102 - power to the masses

This amazing little box can do so much on VoIP - so it takes quite a time to learn how to configure it.
But can do wonders.

GE SxS GSS20 refrigerator is not cold ...

After the move, freaking thing is not cold in freezer.
Symptoms:
1) freezer section is not cold enough
2) food in fresh food compartment got frozen
Observation:
air damper between freezer and fresh food section stays open.
So I used sticky tape to close the hole - now freezer is cold, for sure, but no cold air goes to fresh food.
Question: what makes air damper stay open ?

Where almost everything is made

Taiwanese companies made 98 percent of the world's motherboards, 30 percent of desktop computers, 82 percent of laptops, and 72 percent of LCD monitors last year, according to Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry.

Source - Bloomberg.

Zebra Printers tech support activation sucks

First, they send you this:
If you wish to create a Technical Support request in the future, you will need to 'activate' your profile by clicking on the link below.

When you click on a link and activate, they tell you this:
We have recently completed changes to Zebra.com to improve the profile validation process.
No profile activation is required

Suckers !!!

HP NetRAID-4M

RAID controller going crazy way to often.
Reports power failures, breakes mirrors, had to be rescan.
Only good thing is that hpncli utility allows rebuild everything online, without taking server down.
Can't wait to decomission this SCO beast.
The sooner the better.

Dell is crazy

I ordered computer from Dell last month - had to wait 3 weeks, deal with 4 people via e-mail:
Vishnu, Kranthi , Gautam , Maheshwari .
Ordered 5 more again - and now they ask who am I - and order was placed via their own system, with user name and password ...
Name of the new person is Sheela.

Resume: Dell makes good computers, local tech support in North America is good enough, sales support is outsourced to India and staffed with idiots.

WRTP54G - good for VoIP only

So, solution was to put back venerable WRT-54G into service, connect WRTP-54G as one of the ports, redirect some ports and life is back to normal.
Next step - get Linksys PAP2 off Ebay cheaply to try.

More on WRTP54G , Emule, and dropping connection

Problem seems to be that Emule causes phreaking box to die.
This is syslog: kernel: ip_conntrack: table full, dropping packet
Now what ?
Stop Emule ? Add good wired router in front of WRTP54 and use it for VoIP only ?
Fix WRTP54G ?

WRTP54G is piece of crap in IP side

WRTP54G needs to be rebooted (powered off-on) after a few hours.
What a piece of crap.
Voice works well, anyway, so solution will place this POS behind real thing - WRT54G and disable wireless and routing.

Centos USB drive not working at USB 2.0

For odd some reason (used to work) phreaking stick is not recognized if I plug it in USB-2 port. Works ok in USB-1 ports.
Very annoying.

Best free e-mail service for low spam level is HOTMAIL !!!

I have Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail accounts - and so far Hotmail has the least amount of spam.
It is easy to explain - Microsoft sells real products and doesn't need to rely on spam for extra revenue.
Yahoo and Google are advertising-based so they promote spam heavily - stupid advertises paying them in the hope that somebody will see that message (but both Yahoo and Google honestly put it into spam folder)