Ad spotted at Wawa Store #912. Click for full-size.
“Unmatched Pleasure”
That’s what the sign promised.
Y’know, friends, as far as I’m concerned there’s simply NO pleasure in the whole wide world that matches the pleasure of gum disease. Unless, of course, you can find some way to cram tooth loss into the mix.
Well, your search is over! Here’s the product that’s done it.
I bought all that I could fit in my truck. NOT.
I think I’m going to package a hammer with a nail. The marketing sheet will promise that if you use the product properly – that is, by pushing the nail through your hand with the aid of the hammer – it’ll deliver the unmatched pleasure of a hole in your hand.
I recently set out to upgrade a virtual host server from VMware Server to Oracle’s VirtualBox. The upgrade was a huge success. This is one of several articles where I talk about various aspects of that upgrade, hopefully helping others along the way. You might want to go back and read the introductory article Virtualization Revisited.
Installing Ubuntu Server 10.10 is very fast and straightforward – maybe 10 minutes tops. There’s no shortage of coverage of the install procedure so I won’t bother with it again.
But in case you’re not familiar, I’ll mention that the Ubuntu installer will offer to configure the server with a selection of packages right off the bat. Like many others, I prefer to do those configurations myself in order to tailor the instance exactly to my needs. I make an exception with Open SSH so I that can reach the server from the comfort of my desk by the time it’s booted itself for the first time.
So let’s assume you’ve just finished the IPL, popped the install media, booted for the first time and logged in. The very first thing to do is catch up on any pending updates.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
For the sake of completeness, if anything is shown as kept back you should probably do a distribution upgrade followed by a reboot. If not, skip ahead.
$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo shutdown -r now
Next I install Lugaru’s epsilon editor, a very capable emacs-like editor that I run on all my boxes. Believe me: there’s great value in having one editor that behaves in exactly the same way no matter what keyboard’s under your fingers! I’ve been a Lugaru customer since the 80s and I’m pleased to recommend their rock-solid product. Go test fly their unrestricted trial-ware. Anyway, the epsilon installation needs to build a few things and installing this bit first allows that (as well as other routine software builds that might be needed in the future) to simply happen.
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential
To The Business At Hand: Installing VirtualBox
Download the key and register the repository for VirtualBox. The key has changed recently, so what you see here might be different from other articles.
Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list to add the following lines, which simply adds the appropriate repository.
# VirtualBox 3.2.10 VirtualBox for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat
deb http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian maverick non-free
Make your system aware of the newly added repository.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Now you’re ready for the actual VirtualBox install.
$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-3.2
Finally, add any users that will need to run VirtualBox to the vboxusers group.
Don’t forget the -a flag in the command! This is especially important if you’re manipulating your administrator account. (The flag indicates that the group should be added to the the account, rather than replacing any/all existing groups.)
$ sudo usermod -a -G vboxusers <username>
And that’s all there is to it!
[ed. Appended later…]
There have been a couple of comments in email about networking setup. “You must not be making your VMs visible to your LAN. There’s nothing mentioned about bridge adapters…”
In fact I am using bridged adapters in my VMs! Last time I looked at VirtualBox it was quite the pain to set up that way. When I came to that part I just gave it a WTF and tried to simply bridge eth0. It works just fine!
I’ve been virtualizing machines the home network for many years. The benefits are simply huge (but relax – I’ll not go into them in detail here). Suffice it to say that it beats the snot out of stack of old PCs with their attendant noise and energy consumption.
The server I built on a shoestring one August afternoon many years ago has (ahem) served us well. A mile-high overview of the hardware includes an NVIDEA motherboard from BFG, several GB of commodity RAM, a SATA RAID card from Silicon Image driving a handful of 3.5-inch SATA drives, and an IDE boot drive. The mini-tower case – told you I cheaped out – is somewhat dense inside so there are extra fans to keep the heat in check. The host OS has been Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4.
Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a 32-bit OS on 64-bit hardware. A nice chunk of RAM is ‘lost’ to insufficient address space right off the bat. I figured to upgrade the OS one day but never quite got around to it. The virtualization software is VMware Server, which I’ve been using since the beginning. Their current version is 2.0.0 Build 116503 (wow, 2008, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth). The guest OSs are a mix of Linux and Windows servers handling core dedicated roles as well as a changing mix of experimental/test/research stuff: DOS, Windows 3.1, Chrome OS, OS/2 Warp (OMG what a hack that was!), a couple of OTS appliances, more. What can I say? I’ve got an interest in history. Besides, the look on my kid’s face when he sees an ancient OS actually running (as opposed to just static screen shots on some Web page) is worth it.
Anyway, there are lots of problems with this setup. VMware Server, their free product, is getting long in the tooth. The Web-based interface doesn’t work with the Chrome browser; it’s one of the few things that continues to force me to use IE. Sometimes the service side of the interface goes MIA altogether. The 32-bit Win2K is finally hopelessly out of date, absolutely no more updates. The list goes on and on.
So every now and again I look around for alternatives. The last serious contender was VMware’s ESXi. The idea of a supported bare-metal virtualization platform sure sounded appealing! I spent a day or two experimenting but ended up dismissing it. Getting it to run on the (albeit weak) hardware proved do-able but not without difficulties. In the end it just seemed too fragile for the long-term. I chalked it up to more trouble than it was worth, restored the old setup and got on with life.
The October 2010 issue of Communications of the ACM carried an interesting article, Difference Engine: Harnessing Memory Redundancy in Virtual Machines. Excellent article! A side effect of reading it led me to think again about the clunky mess humming away in the basement. And it was at roughly that time when another interesting article came through the news flow, How do I add a second drive to a Windows XP virtual machine running in VirtualBox? [link is dead]
Hmmm, VirtualBox. I had looked at VirtualBox a long time ago. I grabbed a current release and installed it on my desktop. Wow, it’s apparently matured a great deal since I last paid attention! I found it intuitive and fast to not only create and use new guests but also to simply import and run my existing VMs. (Well, okay, so there were a few gotchas, but no showstoppers.) Yes, this could be a contender for the basement server!
I pulled out an old laptop for some preliminary testing. I loaded it up with Ubuntu Server 10.10, installed VirtualBox and parked it in the basement. The goal? Well, VirtualBox is very easy to control through its GUI but I’d need to learn to run it entirely via command line and build my confidence for a smooth migration. I just  knew I’d run into problems along the way – nothing’s ever as easy as it looks at first glance – and I wanted to be able to anticipate and solve most of them in advance.
As usual, the ‘net came through as a truly incredible learning resource and I made copious use of it along the way. But every situation is different. By documenting my work in a series of articles, well, maybe it’ll help some wayward soul have an easier time of it.
Pam‘s not much of a gamer but she plays The Sims. Has for years. Started with the first one, now they’re up to The Sims3. Quite a piece of software that is!
If you’ve played (or watched it played) you know that it’s a chatty game. That is, those simulated entities never shut up. Some of the sounds are universal. Babies crying, sounds of disgust (“Ugh!”) and so on. But conversationally they seem to have a language all their own.
I was wondering about that. First, does what they say have any consistency? By that I mean, say, when one of ’em is hungry and mentions it, do they always say “oot grickle mem sitto zerk!” (or whatever that incomprehensible jabber is)? I don’t play, but I asked Pam and she said she thinks they might – but admitted she never paid attention.
By extension, if they do ‘speak’ with consistency then has anyone out there worked out the grammar? Is there anyone on the planet that can speak Sim?
Why not? There are people that can speak (and understand) Klingon. The ‘net delivers example after example of people that clearly have an abundance of free time. So why not?
Yes, it’s true, that’s $21.99 on my receipt for a quart of maple syrup from my supermarket the other day. I nearly dropped the jug when the handheld scanner displayed the price. My next thought was that it was a mistake. But no, the display tag agreed. The smaller jugs had a wildly higher unit price so into the cart it went.
I don’t get it. The trend is supposed to be toward zero. Toward cost reduction, toward savings, resource conservation, and so on and so forth.
I’m a big fan of rebates. Yeah, I’m one of those folks that actually sends ’em in and keeps track of whether or not they pay off. (They always do pay off, by the way.) By the end of the year they make for a pretty good return for the few minutes it takes to satisfy the requirements.
Yesterday’s mail brought the latest one. But instead of the usual check there was a thick envelope containing a Visa debit card.
Netgear rebate debit card
The card was adhered to a cover letter, printed single-sided on heavy stock. The envelope also contained a Know Before You Go! insert explaining a few situations where you might expect difficulties using the card, like restaurants (where they typically pre-authorize an amount that includes gratuities) and gas stations (where the card simply won’t authorize at the pump). Finally, a tri-fold Cardholder Agreement: “IMPORTANT – PLEASE READ CAREFULLY” it implored, followed by dense, tiny print that covering both sides of the unfolded page.
Instead of the eyestrain I turned to the log. It all started when the 8+-year-old network switch in Damian‘s room finally failed. (I wasn’t unhappy; the failed switch was the last piece of stuff less than gigabit speed on the wired LAN. I wondered how many frames that old Linksys beast had switched in its lifetime…) Anyway, the Netgear replacement was on sale for about $36, then there was this $10 rebate. The rebate process consisted of a quick visit to a Web page to complete a form and print the qualification sheet (maybe 2 minutes), copy/paste the address and print the envelope, fold the qualification sheet, razorblade the bar code from the box, stuff and stamp the envelope (another 2 minutes or so to ). Then the logging and tracking on my part (another minute, tops).
The value of the whole thing? Ten bucks. All that stuff had to have cost Netgear more than that to process, produce, mail and track. Not to mention the involvement Parago, Inc., who runs Netgear’s ProSafe Rebate Center, and Visa International.
The old checks were easy to handle; just shove it into a convenient ATM and be done with it. Now there’s this card to bulge my wallet, another value to keep track of and – oh yeah – that trifold of fine print. (Where can I use it? Where can’t I? It says ‘debit’ but they said use it like credit. Hmmm.) And I’d better remember to use it before it expires. Wait a minute, expires? It’s good through October of 2011, it’s embossed right there on the plastic, but in that Fine Print…
Account Maintenance Fee: Subject to applicable law, a fee will be applied to all accounts each month, after the six month anniversary date. The charge will be recurring each month until the balance of the account is $0.00.
So, considering that the Account Maintenance Fee is $3.00, if the card sits on my desk unused then on May 2, 2011 it’ll be worth $7. On June 2, $4. August 1, $1. And finally, on July 2, $0. Hey! For three months and 29 days – from the date the fees drain it dry until the thing expires – the card will have no value at all!
So I don’t get it. Can someone explain who makes out on these things? I mean, I understand coupons. Print a lot, the redemption rate’s pretty low (Groupon fiascos excepted – small companies have been nearly put out of business!) But these? I’m sure Visa gets paid, but beyond that it baffles the mind.
I’d argue that the iconic Zappa mustache logo is far more famous and certainly has been around a lot longer.
Tour-De-Frank Concert Tee
Now that’s a famous mustache! What’s more, it’s been copyrighted by the Zappa Family Trust. Hey, Paul, better be careful. Y’know, Gail Zappa‘s got quite the reputation for defending all things Zappa. Wasn’t that long ago Gail sued a… Zappa fan club, of all things… over their use of the mustache in promoting their annual “Zappanale” festival. (Okay, ZFT lost that one largely, as far as I can tell, on technicalities.) Your pockets are deeper, I’m bettin’, and you’re right here in the good ‘ol USofA rather than Germany.
I don’t know what to make of this oldie-but-goodie – Toyota.
Won’t these corporate assholes ever just play nice with each other? Every time they get their collective shorts in a knot there’s only one loser – the consumer. Now, trust me on this one, there’s no love lost between me and Cablevision. They’re the local cable monopoly franchise and, for me, the only viable Internet service provider. I’d drop ’em in a heartbeat if I could, but there are no alternatives. Essentially, they’ve got a gun to my head.
But I digress. In this morning’s email was this missive from Cablevision.
A MESSAGE FROM CABLEVISION
We regret to inform you that News Corp, in an act of corporate greed, has pulled Fox 5 and My9 from your Cablevision channel lineup. This is an unfortunate attempt to extort unreasonable and unfair fee increases from Cablevision and our customers.
News Corp is demanding more for Fox 5 than we pay for every other broadcast channel. In fact, they want more for Fox 5 than we pay CBS, NBC, ABC and Univision combined and are asking for more than $150 million a year. That’s an $80 million increase for the exact same programming! In these tough economic times, an increase of these vast proportions is irresponsible and unfair.
We have made numerous fair and reasonable proposals to News Corp and they have refused every one. And now, News Corp has pulled the plug on Fox 5 AND My9. This was News Corp’s decision, not ours. We want to keep these channels on the air while we negotiate a fair agreement.
As a result of News Corp’s refusal to negotiate, Cablevision is willing to accept binding arbitration to resolve this matter fairly. We are confident that an independent third party will agree that what we are offering to pay News Corp is fair. We call on News Corp to accept binding arbitration, and return Fox 5 and My9 to the air until an agreement is reached.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused by News Corp’s actions, and we ask for your help. Call 1-877-NO-TV-TAX (1-877-668-8829) or visit www.cablevision.com/fox and tell News Corp to put Fox 5 and My9 back on the air, and to keep you out of the negotiations.
Thank you for your patience, your patronage and your support.
(The link in their message eventually expired. I removed it, but note that when it appeared in Cablevision’s email it actually pointed to an internal tracking link before being forwarded – deceptive at best.)
[sigh] Who’s the bigger liar? If you take Cablevision’s statements at face value then News Corp looks like the dick. I’m sure that if I sought out News Corp’s take – I didn’t bother – I’d find that Cablevision looked like the dick.
It’s the customer that takes it on the chin. Pam‘s grumbling that some of the television shows she likes are affected. I told her to watch ’em over the ‘net. Me? I don’t watch television, no time for that, so I’d dump the subscription and not miss it in the least. (Sure, I’d lose the multi-product discount I get for the Internet service portion of the bill but the benefit is so small it doesn’t matter.)
Well, here’s to hoping those profit-mongering bastards resolve their differences.
In this day where consumer-class terabyte drives approach the fifty buck price point, this Corvus ad from April 1981 seemed worthy of sharing.
Five million bytes at the newly-lowered price of $3750. That’s thirty seven hundred and fifty dollars, not a typo.
Ad from Corvus Systems circa 1981: a 5 MB hard disk for the newly reduced price of $3750.00. (click to enlarge)
Just last week I was in an email discussion with a friend and he lamented the “good old days.” I’m not so sure that the old days were all that good. Did you have four large burning a hole in your pocket for storage back in 1981? I sure didn’t.
Over the past few months I’ve been selling stuff on craigslist. (Sometimes the name’s capitalized, sometimes not, and I’ve even read interviews where they’ve said not capitalized is more correct so I’ll try to be equally inconsistent.)
I’m a bit of a pack-rat and space is becoming tight. If I chip away at it I figure I will have lightened my load considerably in, oh, say two or three years. We’ll see.
Anyway, while my sales have by-and-large completed quite nicely, the amount of spam and scam has been an eye-opening experience. How about this email, for example?
Hi
Thanks for the response.I am willing to pay your asking price.I will pay by money order as its the only way i can pay you at the moment.I will make arrangement for the pick-up after payment have been received by you. I don’t mind adding an extra twenty dollars so you can keep it in my favor.Reply with your full name,cell phone number,and address where payment should be sent.Please take the posting off craigslist today and consider it sold to me. Expecting to hear from you soon.
Regards
How ’bout that? Would you respond to this? An extra twenty bucks. Sounds tempting, doesn’t it?
I came close to asking the writer if I could offer my Social Security number as well as the other stuff he asked for, just for giggles. But nah, into the junk it went.
I’m certain that you’ve been following the rescue of the trapped Chilean miners. The media attention has been unprecedented. And rightly so – it’s nothing short of incredible how everyone has pulled together to save the miners. (And I’m proud of the contributions the good ‘ol USA has made to the effort. I’ll set aside for a moment the fact that much of the world regards us as the very definition of evil.) A decade ago all 33 would have likely perished.
As I watched the coverage last night a couple of questions came to mind.
One story mentioned that these men toil underground – dangerous work – for a bit more than $400 a week. I believe in Chile that’s a respectable sum. I wonder whether they earned overtime pay for the time they were trapped. And I wonder whether their families have been collecting their salaries throughout these 68 days in order to do such things as put food on the table, pay bills, and so on.
Mine is – er, was. It began as an intermittent – now there’s a word that no wrench likes to hear – problem. Then, one day, Pam almost got stranded.
I’ve got a pretty good relationship with the dealership. They handle most of the maintenance work on this truck mostly because I don’t have a shop manual. (They’re important, y’know, and I have one – or a set – for all of the other vehicles, but that’s a story for another day.) The dealership treats me pretty good. They allow me into the service area to chat directly with the techs and even cut me nice price breaks often enough to matter.
Shifter hack – before and after.
There’s a procedure in the user manual for overriding the interlock on the shifter. (I wouldn’t have thought so, but Pam suggested looking there. For once I listened. Smart girl.) So override I did and went to let the pros have a look. Two birds, one stone, it was time for the 75K service interval anyway.
A couple of hours later they told me the shifter assembly needed to be replaced. Actually, it was just one part of the assembly, but I had to buy the whole thing: $370 for the assembly, $130 for the labor to install it, plus tax and what have you. They’d have to order it so in the meantime the tech managed to get this one working. My options were to order the part and schedule the swap, or leave it be and see how long the fix would last. When it failed (when, not if, I noticed the choice of words) I could call the order in and they’d take if from there.
I chose to let it go for now and take my chances. That was the end of June and now it’s the beginning of August. I was in Asbury Park one night last weekend when it failed. I applied the override and got on my way.
Today I implemented my own fix, which I suspect will last longer than theirs. Before I continue I need to tell you that I’m not recommending that you perform this hack on your own vehicle. It disables a part of the safety interlock that prevents you from accidentally shifting out of Park. I personally don’t have a problem with that because I’m an Old Guy that grew up without those damned interlocks, back when you could freely shift the transmission however you pleased at any time.
Let me describe the interlock system. There’s a button on the shift handle which, through a series of internal levers, must physically move a lock that trips whenever the lever is placed in Park. That kind of interlock has been around forever. Some column shifters, for example, required you lift the handle toward you before they’d move out of Park. Implementations vary but they all accomplish the same thing. But there’s an additional interlock here, one that prevents the button from moving unless the ignition is on and your foot is on the brake. Naturally, this is an electrical interlock. There’s a solenoid in the shifter assembly that, when electrically actuated, moves a smaller physical interlock within the button, allowing it to move. This second interlock is tied into the ignition circuit and the brake lamp circuit. Yes, what you’re thinking is true; if your brake lights fail in certain ways or if the fuse for that circuit blows, you’re stuck in Park. When the system is working properly you listen can carefully and hear the solenoid actuating as you press and release the brake. The override mechanism mentioned earlier is a tiny lever that, when pressed, simply does what the solenoid does – allows the button on the shifter to move. In fact, when the system is working properly you can see the override lever move when the solenoid actuates. Whenever the lever is not in Park, the lever remains in the override position.
In my case, I knew from testing that the ignition, brake, and brake lamp circuits were operating properly. The intermittent was that sometimes the solenoid would actuate and sometimes it wouldn’t. Solenoids are simple electromechanical devices. I’m guessing that there could be an intermittent open circuit, maybe caused by something as simple as a solder joint gone cold from vibration or age. Or the mechanical part of it is sticky or binding, where the correct electrical signal is present but it can’t physically move, sometimes. Either way, the shifter assembly needs to be removed for disassembly and troubleshooting. There’s where that shop manual, the one I don’t have, would be handy.
My fix is simpler. I took a few small zip ties, daisy-chained them together to an appropriate length, and positioned them such that the interlock override lever is in a permanently-overridden position. The small daisy-chain of zip ties doesn’t interfere with anything and has enough slack that it can be removed without tools, if necessary for some reason. The zip ties are bright yellow so they’re obvious to anyone looking in there.
The effect is that the shifter now behaves as they used to in the 60s. You can’t shift out of Park without deliberation, but you can do so without the ignition on and stepping on the brake.
So, half a grand in parts and labor, before tax? Or a couple of zip ties? The difference will put lots of gas in the bikes. See you on the road.
Update, November 24, 2012: I’ve noticed that this is a popular post. Between the comments and the email, well, this is apparently a common failures. And here I just read in Fortune magazine about how hard Ford works to make sure their parts are reliable. But I digress. I simply wanted to add that my fix is working just fine to this day. Haven’t touched it. No problems.
