phrog blog

Well some of you may have noticed the addition of the snow report and weather to my sidebar. Since phrog.org is the first thing I see in my web browser every morning while I drink my coffee I figured I may as well get the weather I needed to decide if it was a ski day or not.

The snow report comes from steamboat.com which offers up an XML feed of the report, however it has been broken for years because it has no “style” associated with it, making it useless for anyone with a normal RSS reader to subscribe. more »

“Geek Night” happens when somewhat non-geek friends of mine want to bust some ass on code and get down to business and make shit happen on the internet. I provide the nerdness, they get me wasted, and somehow things end up okay. Last night we managed to make this happen. Please check out the latest additions to the phrog blogroll lauralamun.com and daveallendrums.com.

I did not write this. it got dugg and the site hosting it went down for the count. I had to share.

I only met my brother’s ex-girlfriend’s family once — the year they invited our family over to share Thanksgiving dinner. Since we were basically a group of strangers looking to make a good first impression, the table conversation was nothing more than friendly idle chitchat.

When I asked our hostess for more mashed potatoes, she took the opportunity to ask me about myself while dishing out my second helping — “So Shaun, what do you do for a living?”

Hesitantly, I responded: “I work in computer support.”

The transition to silence was immediate. All eyes suddenly turned to me, raised eyebrows all around. If you hadn’t heard my response, judging from everyone’s reaction you might think I said something outrageous like I was a male stripper or a gynecologist — but I knew the awkward silence would soon be broken by an overwhelming outpouring of computer questions.

“Oh wow, a computer guy!” — “So you know how to remove spyware and viruses and stuff, right?” — “Our family computer is really slow, I think it has a virus.” — “Do you have a business card, or can I get your number?”

more »

The tech commission is ready to spend some money. They have lots of it burning holes in pockets, Wait an idea! Let’s buy some really expensive software that will need constant spending to keep updated. Then we can spend all that tax money and everyone will feel great!

This could really happen.
Read this article from the pilot

So I have an Openwrt install and wanted to use ez-ipupdate to update my DynDNS account however it would only send the IP of the wlan0 and since I’m behind a router already the IP on wlan0 is for my LAN. So I made a quick hack to get the internet IP I wanted to DynDNS. Here it is. more »

Well last night my right hand nerd, Scotty and I upgraded the dkhosting.net server to use software RAID1 from a SCSI drive. This is what we did.

Manually Install new hard drives: This was simple. It’s a dell with some green rails that make it easy.We set them both as masters and threw them on different IDE channels so we have /dev/hda & /dev/hdc and then we got busy.
more »

Well another day here and all the things I wanted to do aren’t getting done.. Debugging a bunch of stuff instead. I was up late with our friend Dave over at ComputerCures.Biz setting him up with a slick OpenWRT router setup and when we finished at 2:00am he gifted me a brand new Western Digital 400 Gig USB hard drive. Of course this hard drive is quite slow to deal with when you only have USB1 handy, however I do have USB2 on my server in the closet we all know as “hugh” that runs gentoo and honestly has never been updated since put into use.. Well it’s not going well something is choking on it and dmesg is just spitting out repeated errors.

usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/64, error -110
usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/8, error -110
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/8, error -110
usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/8, error -110
usb 1-5: device descriptor read/8, error -110

If I Remove the USB2 driver with “rmmod ehci_hcd” the ohci_hcd module works just fine but its USB1 slow. So I’m updating the kernel in hopes that this is some bug in the ehci module that will be fixed up good in the newer kernel.

I’m into the world of “emerge” and this could take a while to get the stuff I need updated. I kinda wish “hugh” was like the rest of my computers here, running Debian so I could just install a pre-built kernel quickly to test my theory.
more »