Teleidoscope

Sat, May 30, 2009

Broiler and Wok Burner

Posted at 8:24 pm MDT to Technology

Yesterday I used the wok burner of my fancy stove for the first time in wok mode. I need to find a 12 or 14 inch round-bottom wok without a heavy handle to really use it properly.

I used my rice cooker, which has fuzzy-logic that can handle the altitude without burning the rice. It's way bigger than I need for just me, but it was cheap at Costco and it is very useful. One thing I will miss from sealevel (like Mobile) is being able to get rice and pasta to cook in reasonable amounts of time. The rice cooker knows when the rice is done and automatically switches to warmer mode.

Today I worked at the farmers' market for the first time this year (last week, Memorial Day weekend, the Boulder Creek Fest tookover the market space and parking). The weather was beautiful (unusually, for weekends this spring) and I stocked up on lots of goodies.

Apple cider. Dried apples. Rhubarb. Fresh mushrooms. Swiss chard. Green garlic. My favorite goat cheese for grating over pasta now that I can't have parmesan (Whole Foods doesn't carry it for some reason, though they carry other cheeses from the same dairy). And chicken: both bone-in breasts and the giblets and livers for making dirty rice, now that I know how to do that.

I had Sister's Pantry checken dumplings for breakfast, and vegan papusas for lunch.

I made a chard frittata for supper, with some goat cheddar on top. I think when I put it under the broiler to set the top of the eggs and melt the cheese, it was the first time I have used the broiler in the new gas stove. It is very powerful compared to the broiler in the old electric stove, and I love the way it heats up instantly. It actually has a lower setting, too, which I will have to try using some time.

Chard frittata:

1. bunch chard, rinsed, and leaves stripped from the stems. Salad spin the leaves to drain them. Chop the stems into 3/4 inch pieces, and begin sauteeing the stem pieces in a cast iron skillet, adding a small pinch of salt. Roll 3 or 4 leaves together at a times, loosely, and cut the rolls at one inch intervals. Add the sliced leaves to the stems, sprinkling with a little more salt, and toss to coat with oil, then cover. Stir occasionally until fully wilted.

Remove the chard to a storage bowl and wipe out the skillet. Add more oil and begin heating it.

Whisk eggs with water and add to the heated pan. When the eggs are about half cooked, add a thin layer of the chard and sprinkle with salt and fine-ground black pepper.

Turn on the broiler. Grate cheese on top of the eggs and chard. Place the skillet under the broiler until the cheese is melted and the tops of the eggs are set.

Slide the frittata onto a plate and serve immediately.

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Fri, May 29, 2009

Charity of the Month(s) April/May 2009

Posted at 1:45 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

The Habitat for Humanity folks called because they were having a matching-fund drive, so I made a donation. (I've apparently been donating to them for 10 years.) This is prime building season so the money does more good now than waiting until later inthe year.

I also made a donation to Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres, since there was a recent earthquake and we are coming up on hurricane season. Their donation page doesn't work with the Konqueror browser -- they use one of those CAPTCHA things, which Konqueror blocks (It's picky about Flash apps) -- but I was able to make the donation by switching to Firefox.

This puts me just about exactly on track for my goal of making charitable donations equal to 10% of my net pay for the year. I'm really trying to get out of the bad habit of doing most of my giving in the 4th quarter when Christmas shopping is also happening.

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Fri, May 08, 2009

Non Menopause

Posted at 5:12 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

This week my body informed me in no uncertain terms that I am not finished with menopause. This is very disappointing. After more than a year without needing to deal with cramps and such, I had thought I was done. The total gap was 19 months.

The cramps are really annoying: I don't know whether it is just that I am out of practice dealing with them.

Better this week than next: driving 22 hours with cramps would not be fun.

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Wed, May 06, 2009

Wesleyan University Shooting

Posted at 4:52 pm MDT to Current Events

Whoa.

There was a shoooting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut this afternoon: a junior woman was murdered. It technically took place just off the campus, but the building is the one that serves as the university book store. I spent a lot of time in that bookstore, once upon a time, though in my day it did not include the cafe where the shooting took place.

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Mon, May 04, 2009

Routes

Posted at 8:16 pm MDT to Travel

Today I got a call from the Eldorado Springs Company asking whther I wanted them to resume deliveries of bottled water to my home this week. I said "No, not until the next scheduled delivery on May 20".

While I was thinking about it schedules, I called the trash company and arranged for trash pickups to re-start the week after next.

I've been looking at routes for the trip home.

The default route offered by my TomTom GPS uses interstates as much as possible. The route (going back the way I came) goes through Lafayette and Shreveport Louisiana to Dallas, then heads north on I-35 until it hits I-70 in the middle of Kansas. It has a predicted driving time of 23 hours 50+ minutes.

Rand-McNally offers a route going through Jackson Mississippi to Shreveport, then to Dallas, etc. and taking 23 hours 20 minutes.

Google maps and Mapquest prefer a route through Jackson Mississippi, Little Rock, Arkansas connecting to I-35 in northern Oklahoma that supposedly takes 22 hours 7 minutes.

The AAA triptik calculator offers a route through Memphis and north up the Mississippi to pick up I-70 at St.Louis, then it's all I-70 west to Denver. That route is supposed to take 22 hours 27 minutes. But I'm not sure I want to drive I-70 all the way across Missouri and Kansas.

Fiddling with the online maps, it looks like Mobile to Memphis, to Oklahoma City (by way of Little Rock) then I-35 to I-70 in mid-Kansas won't cost much time (10 minutes out of a 22+ our trip isn't much) and I think driving through Arkansas should be prettier than driving across the plains.

Now I need to fiddle with the GPS and get it to give me something approaching that route. (I think I need to use the app that lives in the computer to calculate the route and download it into the TomTom.)

If I was travelling without Dinah Kitty, I'd think about spending part of a day in Memphis. Oh, well. Maybe some other time.

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Sun, May 03, 2009

Software Plumber

Posted at 2:36 pm MDT to Miscellaneous

In preparation for an interview this past week, I have finally thought of an analogy that can explain our business model to someone outside the business. There is another business that a lot of people have experience with that works a lot like ours.

I am like a master plumber for software, and ReleaseTEAM is a plumbing company.

People who have problems in our area of expertise, or want to remodel or put in an addition, hire us to do the work, and I get sent out to various project sites to do the actual work.

Sometimes we get hired directly by the customer who wants the work done, but more often there is a prime contractor and sometimes additional layers of subcontractors between us and the client.

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Intuos3 on Ubuntu 9.04

Posted at 2:19 pm MDT to Technology

I needed the following changes to get the rotation, buttons and eraser working properly for my Wacom Intuos3 graphic tablet. I did a lot of rummaging in the Ubuntu forums vefore I found something that would work for me.

In the old method of configuration using xorg.conf, the Wacom tools have names like "pad", "stylus", "eraser" and "cursor", and that is what the wacom control utilities expect to see.

First set up a translation to take place during boot:

sudo vi /etc/init.d/wacomtohal

Cut and paste this into wacomtohal:

## find any wacom devices
for udi in `hal-find-by-property --key input.x11_driver --string wacom`
do
type=`hal-get-property --udi $udi --key input.x11_options.Type`
## rewrite the names that the Xserver will use
hal-set-property --udi $udi --key info.product --string $type
done

sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/wacomtohal

sudo update-rc.d wacomtohal defaults 27

Set ~/.xinitrc to:

#!/bin/sh
xsetwacom set pad Rotate HALF
xsetwacom set pad StripLDn "core key up"
xsetwacom set pad StripLUp "core key down"
xsetwacom set pad Button4 "core key SHIFT"
xsetwacom set pad Button3 "core key ALT"
xsetwacom set pad Button2 "core key CTRL"
xsetwacom set pad Button1 "core key space"

and make it executable.

Reboot to activate wacomtohal, and make sure ~/.xinitrc is run before firing up krita or gimp. (It needs to be re-run if the tablet has been unplugged and replugged since the last boot or log on.)

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Kubuntu Upgrade to 9.04

Posted at 8:26 am MDT to Technology

I upgraded Kubuntu to 9.04 yesterday, and it went very smoothly, except that it left me with an unbootable menu.lst file for the GRUB boot manager. Fortunately, I had once edited the old menu.lst with an editor that generated a menu.lst~ backup file. Forcing GRUB to use the older version of the file got me in to a point where I could edit the broken file.

I don't think this is a problem with the current update. I'm pretty sure something got broken in one the previous updates and I've been sort of limping along with boot problems after every major update.

I like a verbose boot process, so I edit my menu.lst to remove the 'quiet' settings, and then I have to keep manually hacking the scripts forever after. I'm pretty sure these problems have been around for a while, but because I kept tweaking versions of a bootable menu.lst they weren't fully apparent. This time I let the update tool give me what it thought was a clean copy of the menu.lst.

The update tools for Ubuntu do not have as good a mechanism for reconciling differences in config files as the RedHat/Fedora tools do. The Fedora tools always put a file with their proposed changes on the drive and keep a copy of your customized file there, too, regardless of which version of the config file you told it to use during the update, so it is possible to go back and audit the config changes later. The Ubuntu tools clean up very aggressively and there is no way I have figured out to tell it to leave a copy of the config alternative that was not selected around for reference purposes. If I hadn't had that menu.lst~ I would have had even worse problems, because it turns out that my LiveDisk for rescues is back in Colorado, not packed where I thought it was.

In the current case, the broken menu.lst contains a boot stanza like:

title           Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=32d73b5c-3672-47b7-b704-105947811a7f ro splash resume=/dev/sda2
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
quiet

and the working one looks like:

title           Ubuntu 9.04, kernel 2.6.28-11-generic
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=/dev/sda1 ro splash resume=/dev/sda2
initrd          /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic

The boot error was from initramfs, complaining that a device with UUID=32d73b5c-3672-47b7-b704-105947811a7f did not exist.

The update (I also like my updates verbose) had complained about the resume device:

update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic
cryptsetup: WARNING: found more than one resume device candidate:
                     /dev/sda2
                     UUID=b025b5c2-02cc-481b-b663-06eccb3b0235

Interesting that cryptsetup was smart enough to know that it was hosed, but update-initramfs apparently was not. I have never had any luck using hard drive UUIDs on this laptop, so I suspect the configuration has been hosed forever. Time to fix it.

I found a thread in the Ubuntu forums that explained how to fix the resume device problem, so I attacked that first.

Running 'sudo blkid -c /dev/null' (no quotes) in a command window gave me the current actual UUIDs:

/dev/sda1: UUID="daee274f-d8bf-447c-914a-e3db8ce84f62" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" LABEL="/"
/dev/sda2: TYPE="swap" UUID="29e7c127-6729-4009-a201-03fa84b54ad9"
/dev/sda3: UUID="01c67fb7-9818-4a6e-b71c-4597f3ec54ad" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3" LABEL="/home"

The -c /dev/NULL forces it to look at reality instead of using a cached value. Note that the output values don't resemble the ones in the broken menu.lst nor in the error message (final digits are wrong in all cases).

Update /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to contain the UUID of the real swap partition.

Check /etc/fstab and update UUID values as needed. I had cleaned out all UUIDs on this laptop long ago, so this was not really necessary. If I get the UUIDs working properly, I should put the UUIDs (which are unique) back in /etc/fstab instead of the names and labels, which cannot be trusted to remain constant across system changes. LABELs like / and /home might be duplicated on an external drive, and the current architecture of the hard drive device drivers does not guarantee that the same physical drive will always be sda (I ran into problems with that when I was having those drive failures on the my server last fall -- the sda values for specific drives changed when I rebooted after a drive failure).

Ran 'sudo update-initramfs -u' and edited menu.lst to put the UUID back into the boot line (carefully saving a copy of the working menu.lst first).

Rebooted. It worked with the UUID in the boot stanza. So I ran 'sudo update-initramfs -u -k all' to make sure all of the kernels in my choice list have current UUID info in them.

Then I tried suspend/resume to disk. It didn't quite work, but I think that was due to interference from vmware on the way down and up. I'll experiment more with this sometime in the future.

For now, I need to figure out what they have done to the configuration of the Intuos. It's supposed to be more flexible now, but the commands I use to rotate the pad don't seem to be working.

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