K3bert

How to get your ass kicked at monopoly

2009-11-08T13:25:00.001-06:00

How to get your ass kicked at monopoly
Originally uploaded by K3bert

I'm the one with all the mortgaged property. I had to mortgage
everything to pay $1,275 in rent on one of Charlottes properties with
a hotel. It was game over after that.

Hi, I'm Russ

2009-10-18T19:38:00.001-05:00

Russ_at_play
Originally uploaded by K3bert

We had to board the dogs this weekend and they got a great picture of Russ. He doesn't seem to mind being boarded.

At predators game

2009-10-10T20:26:00.001-05:00

At predators game
Originally uploaded by K3bert

4 minutes left in 2nd period and still no score. Have awesome seats,
wish you were here.

Did you know...

2009-07-29T20:41:00.003-05:00

Did you know that when you purchase a music video from the iTunes store, you can burn it to a CD and listen to it on a CD player. That is, you can make music CDs from the music videos purchased on iTunes. My wife and I were browsing some of our favorite artists and noticed they had some music videos. We purchased one and as an experiment, I created a music CD with it and went and played the song in our car. I find that cool. If you didn't already know you could do that, now you do. If you did know, I wish I would have spoken to you sooner.

Vonage Sucks - I was not happy with the quality of the service

2009-07-24T08:09:00.002-05:00

Ok, to be fair, I did not have good luck with their service. Often, calls made to us never found their way to our phone. In other instances, we would dial a number and end up speaking to someone we didn't know, I.e. we were connected to a phone number other than the one we dialed. Finally, we would here other conversations on our calls, which I have to presume they could here us.

I never called their technical support because I was experimenting with Internet phone calling. For me, after trying Comcast and Vonage, I think the industry needs to mature some and it's not for me.

When I called to disconnect, the agent put me on hold to look up any final charges and the unpaid balance of our contract. That is pay for any of the future months that I hadn't been billed yet. Luckily for me, because I bought the Vonage box at a retail store a d paid full price, I was not subject to a contract. Had I got the service through one of their promotions, I would have been in a contract and paid the remaining months. All I had to pay was the $39.99 disconnect fee. I didn't care for this much either and i went and looked at the terms and conditions and in plain site It stated the $39.99 disconnect if I choose to disconnect the service. This falls into the category of buyer be aware.

I was offered to connect to the top tier service group and give me a couple of months free, but I had already made up my mind and wanted out.

Now that I've gone back to a hard line with AT&T, I am paying double the cost for the same service, including unlimited nation wide calls. But, I haven't missed a call yet, phone calls are going where they are suppose to, no static on the line, and finally no third parries joining our conversations.

Buyer be aware, like cell phone companies, if you are getting their service and receiving one of their boxes for free, they are signing you up for the contract and you could pay a hefty price if you choose to disconnect one day. As the saying goes, you don't get anything for free (or something like that).

So long Gracie...you will be missed

2009-07-03T22:02:00.004-05:00

Our beloved girl, Gracie, has gone home this past Tuesday. Her heart grew too big and finally gave way while she went outside to lay in the sun one last time.

I wish I could pet her one last time. I wish I could take her on one last walk. Had I known that Tuesday was her last day, I would have done both of these things. I'm going to miss her.

Some of you may remember Ben, our first greyhound who succumbed to bone cancer new years day in 2006. I posted about "Ben's Rose" on my blog at that time which sprung up in our rose garden the day after he died. The rose came from the unlikeliest of a shrub, a misfit, a runt...but, it bloomed the most beautiful rose, it was unmistakable that the rose was Ben letting us know that he was free of pain.

Gracie, not to be out done, sent us a sign of her courageous spirit and her eye-catching beauty...it's almost unbelievable. After she passed, on the way to the vet to prepare for her final arrangements, as I drove down the highway, I saw a huge bird. Vultures are not uncommon in Tennessee and at first, it appeared that I had seen one flying by the highway. But, for some reason I couldn't take my eyes off it. As I looked for a half second longer, I realized that I was not looking at a vulture, rather I was looking at a Bald Eagle!

The white head and tail feathers were unmistakeable. She sent an eagle to me to remind me of her beauty, strength, courage, and triumphant spirit that stole our heart and that which made us love her so much.

Gracie, we will miss you. Say hello to Ben for us.

She was born on 01/11/1998 and went to her forever ever home
on 06/30/2009.

And because the life of a greyhound should never end on a sad note, here is a movie that best personifies her. Don't let her tickle your funny bone...she's guilty I tell you.

Our Family

2009-05-26T23:08:00.001-05:00

1120081526-00
Originally uploaded by K3bert

I was just surfing the Internet, and was looking back at our photo's. My wife caught this greyt action photo of Ester playing with Russ. You can see Gracie in the background, she's too mature for such tomfoolery.

Close call lightning strike

2009-05-15T20:27:00.001-05:00

Close call lightning strike
Originally uploaded by K3bert

Today at work, a quick moving thunderstorm rolled through. A lightning strike occurrd just outside my office window. The tree didn't fair to well and luckily for me, I wasn't sitting at my desk. Notice all the bark was blown off the tree.

syslog consuming 100% cpu - SOLVED!

2009-05-06T21:04:00.003-05:00

Finally figured out. Can't explain how it happened, but I know what happened.

A couple of months ago, I dropped my MacBook and the hard drive froze. I was able to replace it with no issue. I went to install Leopard, but the DVD couldn't be read. So, I reinstalled Tiger and opened a support case...bottom line, when I dropped the laptop, the DVD can't read double density DVDs anymore.

Why is this significant? It's not, but part of the story.

When I took my laptop in because I couldn't get Leopard installed, the store installed via an external drive. The result from this upgrade was that the /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily was renamed /etc/periodic/daily/500.daily.applesaved and the original file was replaced with a new version.

When the periodic daily job was run, both files ran. The problem is that the 500.daily.applesaved file is for some reason not compatible. The line in the backed up file that was causing the problem was:

syslog -p -k Time lt -7d -o -k Time lt -3d -k Level ge 4 -o -k Time lt -1d -k Level ge 6

Don't know why it caused the problem, but it did. The full content of the file that was backed up follows. Once I removed the .applesaved file, it worked like a champ.

#!/bin/sh -
#
# @(#)daily 8.2 (Berkeley) 1/25/94
#
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
host=`hostname -s`
bak=/var/backups

echo "step 1"
echo "Removing scratch and junk files:"

if [ -d /var/rwho ] ; then
cd /var/rwho && {
find . ! -name . -mtime +7 -exec rm -f -- {} \; ; }
fi

# Clean up junk files.
#find / $ ! -fstype local -o -fstype rdonly $ -a -prune -o \
# $ -name '[#,]*' -o -name '.#*' -o -name a.out -o -name '*.core' \
# -o -name '*.CKP' -o -name '.emacs_[0-9]*' $ \
# -a -atime +3 -exec rm -f -- {} \;

# Clean up NFS turds. May be useful on NFS servers.
#if [ "${host}" != "localhost" ]; then
# find / -name .nfs\* -mtime +7 -exec rm -f -- {} \; -o -fstype nfs -prune
#fi

if [ -d /tmp ]; then
cd /tmp && {
find . -fstype local -type f -atime +3 -ctime +3 -exec rm -f -- {} \;
find -d . -fstype local ! -name . -type d -mtime +1 -exec rmdir -- {} \; \
>/dev/null 2>&1; }
fi

if [ -d /var/spool/fax ]; then
echo "step 2"
echo "Removing scratch fax files"
cd /var/spool/fax && \
find . -type f -name '[0-9]*.[0-9][0-9][0-9]' -mtime +7 -delete >/dev/null 2>&1;
fi

# remove system messages older than 21 days
msgs -c

if [ -f /var/account/acct ] ; then
if [ -x /usr/bin/gzip ]; then gzext=".gz"; else gzext=""; fi
echo "step 3"
echo "Gathering accounting statistics:"
cd /var/account
if [ -f "acct.2${gzext}" ] ; then mv -f "acct.2${gzext}" "acct.3${gzext}" ; fi
if [ -f "acct.1${gzext}" ] ; then mv -f "acct.1${gzext}" "acct.2${gzext}" ; fi
if [ -f "acct.0${gzext}" ] ; then mv -f "acct.0${gzext}" "acct.1${gzext}" ; fi
cp -pf acct acct.0
if [ -x /usr/bin/gzip ]; then gzip -9 acct.0; fi
sa -s > /dev/null
fi

#if [ -d /var/db/netinfo ]; then
# echo ""
# echo "Backing up NetInfo data"
# cd /var/db/netinfo
# for domain in *.nidb; do
# domain=$(basename $domain .nidb)
# server=`nicl -t localhost/$domain -statistics | grep tag | awk '{print $3}'`
# if [ $server = master ] ; then nidump -r / -t localhost/$domain > $bak/$domain.nidump; fi
# done
#fi

echo "step 4"
echo "Checking subsystem status:"

echo ""
echo "disks:"
df -k -l
echo ""
dump W

if [ -d /var/spool/mqueue ]; then
echo "step 5"
echo "mail:"
mailq
fi

echo "step 6"
echo "network:"
netstat -i

echo "step 7"
if [ -d /var/rwho ] ; then
ruptime
fi

echo "step 8"
printf %s "Rotating log files:"
cd /var/log
for i in system.log; do
if [ -f "${i}" ]; then
printf %s " ${i}"
if [ -x /usr/bin/gzip ]; then gzext=".gz"; else gzext=""; fi
if [ -f "${i}.6${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.6${gzext}" "${i}.7${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.5${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.5${gzext}" "${i}.6${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.4${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.4${gzext}" "${i}.5${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.3${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.3${gzext}" "${i}.4${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.2${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.2${gzext}" "${i}.3${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.1${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.1${gzext}" "${i}.2${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}.0${gzext}" ]; then mv -f "${i}.0${gzext}" "${i}.1${gzext}"; fi
if [ -f "${i}" ]; then
touch "${i}.$$" && chmod 640 "${i}.$$" && chown root:admin "${i}.$$"
mv -f "${i}" "${i}.0" && mv "${i}.$$" "${i}" && if [ -x /usr/bin/gzip ]; then
gzip -9 "${i}.0"; fi
fi
fi
done
if [ -f /var/run/syslog.pid ]; then kill -HUP $(cat /var/run/syslog.pid | head -1); fi
echo "done rotating"

# Prune the main syslog output file (/var/log/asl.log)
# Delete all messages after 7 days (-k Time lt -7d)
# Delete Warning (Level 4) and above after 3 days (-k Time lt -3d -k Level ge 4)
# Delete Info (Level 6) and above after 1 day (-k Time lt -1d -k Level ge 6)
echo "step 9"

syslog -p -k Time lt -7d -o -k Time lt -3d -k Level ge 4 -o -k Time lt -1d -k Level ge 6

echo "step 10"
if [ -f /etc/daily.local ]; then
echo "step 11"
echo "Running daily.local:"
sh /etc/daily.local
fi

if [ -f /etc/security ]; then
echo "step 12"
echo "Running security:"
sh /etc/security 2>&1 | sendmail root
fi

Another f$%ing sleepless night...I'm at my wits end

2009-04-17T03:05:00.003-05:00

I do not know what to do and it's start to ware me out. If it weren't for the ADD medicine on, I don't think I would get anything accomplished. But, that's enough about me.

The good news is we found our next home. We have been complete discontent with our current home. It's the same size in square footage as the home in Houston, but it's 2 story. Our older greyhound, Gracie, the one pictured on the right doesn't do stairs. The home is also situated with a bonus room above the garage which never gets used. Therefore, our primary family room is downstairs which has the kitchen (smaller than most galley kitchens) the family room, dinning room and 1/2 bath. Therefore, we re confined to a single room apartment living with 3 dogs.

You can only imaging how much work it takes to keep this place clean. There are days we don't do a good job.

The good news is, that the dogs have about a 1 acre fenced in lot to run around. The floor plan is single story and open. And most importantly, it's in the country.

I'm going to have to buy a riding lawnmower and some overalls! We'll get a does of the "real life". Don't have the pictures yet, but you can see the satellite images from google with the home was first being built. Also, it has a septic tank...I heard they work good if you don't try to do 15 loads of laundry, run 2 showers at the same time, and do 15 loads of dishes.

Here's to a bubble free yard with our new home.

Cancellation fees for doc appointments

2009-03-31T16:56:00.002-05:00

So, typically if you don't cancel a doc appoinment within 24 ours of the appointment, you are charged a fee.

Let's say you have an appoinent scheduled to last 45 minutes. Don't you think it's reasonable that if after waiting for 45 minutes in the doc office and you still have not visited the doc, shouldn't thy be cosisered a cancellation and you should be paid a fee?

ok...just kidding...no idea what's up with the syslog process

2009-03-30T01:33:00.002-05:00

Just an update, I have no idea what's causing the syslog process to hog all the cpu. It appears to be related to the periodic daily task, but not sure which one..

syslog consuming 100% cpu part deux

2009-03-27T01:18:00.003-05:00

So, from the previous post, I thought I may have been on to something with 100GB daily.out file. As it turns out, I wasn't. But, I kept digging today. And I found something interesting in system.log file

Mar 26 03:30:41 Legolas [0x0-0x219219].com.apple.dock[4729]: 2009-03-26 03:30:41.448 DashboardClient[5247:10b] (com.iSlayer.iStatpro4.widget) file:///Users/kevin/Library/Widgets/iStat%20pro.wdgt/scripts/core.js: TypeError: Result of expression 'this.isSectionEnabled' [undefined] is not a function. (line: 528)

Could it be this simple, the iStat widget was throwing an exception which caused the churn in the syslog process? It looked like this exception was being thrown every 3 minutes, non stop. Every three minutes doesn't seem like enough activity to cause the problem...but, I uninstalled it and going on 12+ hours without cpu saturation

It started with syslog consuming all my cpu

2009-03-26T00:13:00.004-05:00

A rather strange phenomenon has been occurring on my Mac over the last several weeks. Don't know what started nor do I know if it's over, but I want to tell you the tale of the 110GB daily.out file and the syslog process that kept (maybe keeps) consuming all my CPU.

At least once a day, the syslog process starts consuming 100% of the CPU on my Mac Book and does not stop without force quitting. Searching through Google, I learned that many others have the same problem, but no consistent explanation. So, I resigned to force quitting the process whenever it would misbehave...until tonight.

I start up Openoffice.org to create a spreadsheet to for a household budget when I receive a nice message saying that my root disk is almost full. Opening the disk utility showed that I only had 600MB of free space left. I did the natural thing, I emptied my trash bin. That only gave me back 10MB, so I'm at 610MB.

I did some googling on how to run the disk utility or look at other 3rd party utilities that could help determine any unwanted, and large files were lurking on my drive. I went back into the disk utility again when all of a sudden it was reporting 0 bytes of space left!

Yikes!

I went and looked in the /var/log directory, as this is where many (if not all) log files are written. I did your friendly "ls -help" command and to my astonishment, the daily.out file was 110GB in size!

Stunned silence.

After the shock wore off, the awe kicked in and I went to see what in the heck was going on. As it turned out, on 2 days, Jan 24 and Feb 6, I started receiving an inordinate number of "kernel[0] " messages in the log. No other description provided. Google didn't help much either other than providing that the only similar errors actually related to disk i/o errors and the kernel.

Now I tried googling "how do i control the size of the daily.out log file mac os x" which lead me to maxosxhints.com. Here, I found a script that will rotate out the daily (and weekly and monthly) log files once they become larger than 50kb. Chalking up the kernel errors to some anomaly that has since gone away (at least I hope so), I went ahead and set up the script listed in the comments section of the post on the page and then executed, thus purging the 110GB daily.out file.

I now have 120GB freespace according to disk utility. The math doesn't seem quite right, but at least I took care of the drive space issue.

Now, if the cpu hogging syslog process has/had anything to do with the large file (or vice versa), I don't know. Only time will tell and I don't have an answer for any of you out there that google "syslog consuming 100% cpu" and end up on this page, but this was a journey that I had to share.

Gumby would be proud

2009-03-25T02:40:00.001-05:00

Gumby would be proud
Originally uploaded by K3bert

I guess I shouldn't make fun of her, after all she has a broken leg. It must be hard to find the right "roaching" position.

FOXNews.com: Google Earth Leads Man to 'Buried Treasure'

2009-02-12T08:23:00.001-06:00

Maybe google earth can be used to fund where jimmy Hoffa is buried.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,491007,00.html

-------
kebert
www.k3bert.net

Panoramic of Lights 2

2009-01-29T03:42:00.001-06:00

Panoramic of Lights 2
Originally uploaded by K3bert

Over the holiday, I tried using the panoramic feature of my digital camera to capture the view outside our balcony window. I turned out ok, but I think I messed up the focus a bit causing blurriness.

How old is old enough?

2008-12-13T01:35:00.001-06:00

A coworker was telling me about a woman who was in a sexual harassment training at her work. After the training ended, she raised her hand and asked at what age does sexual harassment become a compliment?

Change your password in Fedora

2008-10-30T00:12:00.002-05:00

To change your user account password within Fedora Linux, open a terminal window and enter "passwd" and follow the steps.

[Me@fedora ~]$ passwd
Changing password for user Me.
Changing password for Me
(current) UNIX password:
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[Me@fedora ~]$

Adding users to sudoers file

2008-10-30T00:08:00.002-05:00

Run a terminal session with your "root" account and execute the following:

echo 'loginname ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers

Where 'loginname' is your user account.
Use 'ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL' if you don't want to be prompted a password.
If you are prompted for a password with 'sudo' it is the user password, not root.

Praise to Time Capsule

2008-10-26T22:10:00.003-05:00

Last week, I dropped my MacBook in our living room. The net result? A failed hard drive. After a quick trip to Best Buy, I picked up a new drive and later that night had it plugged in.

I suspect why you would find that so amazing...well, it's not. The amazing part is my Super Drive worked with the original Tiger install disks but not Leopard. What the? Dropped in a The Matrix, and it worked. Now I'm really perplexed. I've heard so many good things about Apple support, so I give them a call. After a few troubleshooting steps, still could not resolve the issue and they created an appointment for me at my local Apple store, for the same day none-the-less!

I promptly arrive for my 5:45pm appointment and after some additional troubleshooting, the customer service rep declared something was wrong with my Super Drive. He gave me 2 options for getting it fixed, and needless to say both were the 1/4 the original price of the laptop. A third option he offered was to not fix it and pick up an external drive (this is what I'll do, seeing how that will only set me back about $125). The tech then offered to install Leopard for me from an external drive, which I did.

Thirty minutes later, I walked out with Leopard installed. But, what's so cool, while it was installing, we were chatting and came up with the hypothesis that the issue with my Super Drive was that it could no longer read dual layer DVDs. After all, I was able to install Tiger (single layer DVD) and not Leopard (dual layer DVD). Either way, I was very satisfied.

Now for the cool part. Thanks to my Time Capsule and Time Machine, I only lost 3 days of work, which I really didn't loose as I hadn't done any work in the three days.

So, kudos to Time Capsule + Time Machine, there is another satisfied Apple customer in me.

Un-install MySQL from Mac OS X Leopard

2008-10-18T23:52:00.002-05:00

This weekend, mucking around with Ruby on Rails and MySQL, I wanted to uninstall previous versions of MySQL that I had installed on my Mac. Quick Google search, and viola:

sudo rm /usr/local/mysql
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM
sudo rm -rf /Library/PreferencePanes/My*
edit /etc/hostconfig and remove the line MYSQLCOM=-YES-
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/mysql*
sudo rm -rf /Library/Receipts/MySQL*

And you think your system handles a high transactional volume?

2008-10-10T23:29:00.003-05:00

My buddies at work always start chuckling when we look at some performance stats on our middle tier system. We proudly proclaim how we are pushing 5 transactions / second with a quarter second response time on average. This is all somewhat tongue-in-cheek, as we are very aware that this is child's play.

So, when I was reading the Amazon Web Services Blog about how they peaked out 70,000 transactions / second, I could help but laugh harder. Damn, I wish I had the opportunity to work on that type of system.

"Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second."

.

Goes to show just how small of a fish I really am in this big ocean.

Meet the newest member of our family

2008-10-03T23:02:00.001-05:00

Meet the newest member of our family
Originally uploaded by K3bert

Now that's a diamond worthy of my wife

2008-09-23T00:32:00.001-05:00

~500 karats isn't too shaby for an uncut diamond. I'll take two.

http://iphone.foxnews.com/slideshow/0/425824-Giant-Diamond-Unearthed-in-Africa-May-Set-Record.html

-------
kebert
www.k3bert.net