Stuckey, Gene's Blog

How To Turn compiz off

2009-11-04T19:17:00.002-06:00

I had turned on the Desktop Effects (compiz) in Fedora 12 Beta while testing a newer kernel. It worked great.
When I rebooted back to the current kernel and logged in, the display was messed up because this kernel did not support compiz.

So I needed to use gconftool-2 on the command line to disable it.

Just documenting here so I can find it again.

Set the windowmanager back to metacity:

gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity

Verify that the setting took:

gconftool-2 --get /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager

DTV Delay Act

2009-02-07T11:38:00.005-06:00

I really don't think the DTV Delay Act is going to make much difference. The people that haven't made the switch yet are probably just going to procrastinate until June now. I think the only thing that will really work is when their analog signal goes away. They've already had years to prepare.

Cringely had a good post on this back in January.

I do like that the White House posts the bills and lets us comment before the President signs them. Very cool and open.

Continuing Saga - Seagate Barracude Drive Firmware Support Fiasco

2009-02-06T14:35:00.002-06:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my drives reports a firmware version of SX15. So I had submitted a case 01/31/2009 to Seagate support in order to find out if I should update that drive. I finally got a response on 02/03/2009:

According to our records, this drive was shipped with SD15 firmware - it could be that the drive controller is interfering with reporting the drive's firmware correctly to the drive detect utility.

You can verify the firmware on the drive my looking at the drive label - it should read "SD15". If so, then you can update the firmware if appropriate.

I checked, and the label does indeed say SD15. I have a really hard time believing the drive controller is interfering with reading the firmware version of this drive, but not the other. It's more believable that someone mistyped the firmware version when they loaded it. Who knows...

I am impressed that they only took basically one business day to respond to this case.

Still no response to the case I submitted on 01/22/2009 about the SMART failures I'm seeing since upgrading the firmware on 1 on my drives.

5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 003 003 036 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 2004

I wonder if I should just create a new case.

I won't be upgrading the firmware on my second drive until I get some resolution on that SMART failure.

Seagate Barracude Drive Firmware Support Fiasco

2009-01-31T21:55:00.005-06:00

I really need to write a long post about this fiasco. Also mentioned here and here.

I have two drives (both the 1TB model ST31000340AS) that seem like they could be affected by this. I did as Seagate said in their original Knowledge Base article, I emailed my model numbers, serial numbers, and firmware versions to discsupport@seagate.com. I did this on Jan 17. I did not receive an automated reply back. So after a few hours, I also created an account and submitted a case using their online support. I got this email reply:

Your inquire Case #00163372 has been escalated to a Customer Support Agent. You should expect a response from us within 24 hours.

First, nice English. Your inquire Case, what?

Second, I did not receive any response within 24 hours. In fact, I never received a response for this case. It was automatically closed on Jan 26. This is unacceptable customer support. You cannot close a support case without ever contacting the customer. A thread about the closed cases has been started on their forums and the moderator has said it was a glitch and they are working on fixing it. Sure. We'll see about that.

My original email did receive an automated response on Jan 23 (6 days after submitted) pointing me to the Knowledge Base article that I had referenced in my original email. It had been updated to point to the now released firmware updates.

The problem with this is that one of my drives has firmware version SX15, which is not listed as one of the affected versions. But it is awfully close to the SD15 version that is affected. Others in the forums have been told by Seagate support that the X is just a typo and the version is really SD15.

So I've submitted another case to support today to see if they will tell me whether I need to update this drive or not.

All I can say is Seagate customer support = FAIL!

I don't fault Seagate for having the issue in the first place. Everything has bugs. But you need to handle the support in a more professional way if you want to keep your customers.

Stay tuned for another post on the actual saga of updating the other disk...

Vote!

2008-11-04T10:52:00.001-06:00

Don't forget to vote today.
Find your polling place.

Voted Today

2008-10-26T16:35:00.002-05:00

We voted today. Early voting is great. It was relatively quick, although there was a line of about 10 people in front of us when we got there. I imagine election day will be worse.

It seems that a lot of people are taking advantage of early voting. According to the stats for our county, it looks like around 10% of registered voters had voted as of last Thursday.

Register to Vote

2008-10-02T15:47:00.002-05:00

In order to help increase voter registration, Google created a voter info map

Here's the video:

So make sure you're registered to vote.

McCain

2008-09-13T13:56:00.003-05:00

Wow, Havoc Pennington does a much better job expressing how I feel about John McCain than I could have.

I used to have respect for McCain, but then he ran for President this time and seems to have lost some of his integrity.

Firefox 3

2008-03-13T09:32:00.002-05:00

I've been trying out the Firefox 3 betas for a few releases,. Now that Firefox 3 Beta 4 has been released, I've decided to switch to using it full time.

The one downside is that one of my most used extensions, the del.icio.us bookmarks extension is not supported in Firefox 3. It makes sense, because they completely redid the bookmarks in Firefox 3. I really like this extension, though, because it allows me to see the same bookmarks on each computer I use (work, home).

Other than that, Firefox 3 is great. It seems a lot faster, definitely uses less memory. It looks like the Mozilla team has another winner.

Fun Time Sink

2008-03-13T09:04:00.002-05:00

My friend Jim pointed me to this new site hulu. Very cool. It has free streaming TV shows and movies - you don't even have to login.
But of course I wasted way too much time watching old episodes of Arrested Development. I forgot how stupidly funny that show was.

Happy New Year

2008-01-01T09:50:00.000-06:00

Happy New Year!

Looking forward to a great 2008.

Fedora 8 Released

2007-11-09T09:36:00.000-06:00

Fedora 8 was released yesterday. Read the release notes for what's new. I'd already been running the test (Rawhide) version on my laptop for a while. I like it. Most things just work. I plan on upgrading the rest of the machines in the house.

Congrats to the Fedora team for another great release.

Verizon Wireless Voicemail Extended Absence Greeting

2007-06-20T09:49:00.000-05:00

I want to record a different voicemail greeting for when I'm on vacation. It's called Extended Absence Greeting by Verizon Wireless.
For some reason, this is hard to find how to do when searching on the web.

Access your voicemail (*86, password)

Select 4 (personal options)
Select 3 (greetings)
Select 2 (to record an extended absence greeting)

Starting to keep notes

2007-06-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

I'm going to start adding short blog entries with notes of things I've found. They're mostly just simple tips for myself so I can find them again. But if someone else finds them useful, that's nice too.

del.icio.us and favicons

2007-06-20T09:25:00.000-05:00

I use the del.icio.us Firefox addon for my bookmarks. Every once in a while, the favicon for a particular bookmark will be incorrect. It usually happens when the web site is down and it saves the Firefox error favicon.

I found that to remove it, the icon field needs to be deleted from the appropriate section in the delicious.rdf (found in the Firefox profile directory).

Google Maps Satellite View

2006-08-15T21:06:00.000-05:00

I was just looking back through some of my previous posts and noticed this one. So I looked again at the Google Maps Satellite view of our house. The images are updated because our house is there, but our neighbor's house that was built last fall isn't.

Searching by our address is only off by about half of our neighbor's lot. (We're one house north of where the arrow is pointing.)

Blogger Beta

2006-08-15T20:59:00.000-05:00

Blogger has a new version in beta.

I tried to switch, but they're only allowing a limited number of users try it. I guess I just don't blog enough...

Google-Mart

2005-11-20T18:52:00.000-06:00

Really interesting piece by Cringley about Google. Neat theory about why they're buying up all that dark fiber.

I've probably drunk the Google koolaid already. I use gmail now for my mail. What a cool user interface.

Donate

2005-09-03T13:44:00.000-05:00

Yahoo News Broken Links Fixed

2005-04-30T10:30:00.000-05:00

Just for the record, Yahoo News fixed their broken links. I had linked to jwz's rant earlier. That's pretty amazing customer service.

javascript instead of real links

2005-04-28T18:58:00.000-05:00

I don't use Yahoo! News photos, but jwz has a good rant about them using javascript to popup a new window instead of a regular link. It's bad enough when sites open a new window (I can open one on my own if I want to, thank you very much), but when they use javascript, it breaks the middle-click to open a new tab functionality.

Firefox: Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000

2005-04-26T19:57:00.000-05:00

Firefox: Blazing a Trail to 50,000,000

Google Maps adds Satellite Images

2005-04-16T14:04:00.000-05:00

Google shows why they bought Keyhole last year. They've added satellite images to their maps. The images must be a few years old, because our house still shows up as an empty field

OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta

2005-03-04T07:08:00.000-06:00

OpenOffice.org has released 2.0 Beta. I've been using the developer releases for a while now and it's really nice. Here are some of the new features.

Check it out. You won't be sorry.

Playing with CSS

2005-02-20T11:16:00.000-06:00

I've been messing around with CSS on our home page. It's pretty amazing what you can do.
I think it looks fairly nice now. Of course I've only tested it in Firefox, but it is standards compliant.

Let me know what you think of it..

I think I might next try converting it to XHTML.

25 million in 99 days: Do you all ever sleep? - Spread Firefox

2005-02-19T19:59:00.000-06:00

25 million in 99 days: Do you all ever sleep? - Spread Firefox

Bookmarklets are useful

2005-02-19T19:58:00.000-06:00

I created a bookmarklet to cleanup the reply message when using Microsoft's Outlook Web Access. It makes the email reply look less Outlook-like and more like a regular email reply from a RFC following email client.
Bookmarklets are fairly easy to create. They're just javascript.

How many messages are in your Inbox?

2005-02-12T17:04:00.000-06:00

Jason Clarke has a good post about being a piler or a filer.
I'm definitely a filer. I try to only leave e-mails in my Inbox that still need my attention. Sometimes I get a little behind, but then it feels so much better when I do finally get it trimmed down.

So, are you a piler or a filer?

Google does Maps

2005-02-09T07:18:00.000-06:00

I really like the new Google Maps. Their maps seem more readable than Yahoo and Mapquest. I also like how you can move around by just dragging the mouse.

Water Softener

2005-01-03T14:00:00.000-06:00

I installed a water softener the other day. It wasn't too difficult. I had to do a lot of soldering of copper pipe to connect from the main supply to where I wanted to put the softener. The only part that was somewhat tough was soldering the pipes into the main supply. Since there was still a little water that kept draining from the rest of the house, part of the joint didn't want to solder very well. Finally got it and no leaks so far (3 days later).
We can definitely tell a difference on our skin. And when I fill the dogs' water bowls, the water isn't cloudy anymore. North Aurora seems to have pretty hard water. Hopefully the softener will help our appliances and clothes last longer.

DRM is scary

2005-01-03T00:15:00.000-06:00

Some interesting comments on DRM.

Tsunami Relief

2004-12-29T17:26:00.000-06:00

Donate to American Red Cross via Amazon

Other Tsunami Relief information.

Mozilla Firefox ad in New York Times

2004-12-16T07:10:00.000-06:00

The Mozilla Foundation has placed a two page ad in the New York Times for the Firefox browser. My name is in the add, since I contributed to their campaign. See if you can find it in the ad.

Firefox 1.0

2004-11-10T19:21:00.000-06:00

Firefox 1.0 was released yesterday. If you haven't already, you should definitely switch.

Apparently, they had over 1 million downloads on day 1!

FireFox in the NY Times

2004-10-22T19:38:00.000-05:00

Help get a fullpage FireFox add into the NY Times

Fantasy Football

2004-10-17T14:33:00.000-05:00

I'm watching my one fantasy football team get its ass kicked this weekend. I was undefeated until last weekend. Yahoo has feature on it's StatTracker that shows you the optimal score you could have gotten if you made better choices on which players played and which ones sit on the bench. Last week, I could have won. This week, right now I would have more than doubled my score. It kind of rubs your nose in it... Oh well, such is life.
At least I'm still winning today in my other league.

Hurricanes

2004-09-25T21:21:00.000-05:00

I know it's been debunked, but this still cracks me up.

Firefox, The browser you can trust

2004-09-25T20:56:00.000-05:00

I know, you probably already realize how much I dislike Microsoft. I only really hate the crappy products they make. They're an incredibly smart marketing machine. Anyways, Internet Explorer is so full of security flaws. You really need to consider switching to something safer. I suggest
Not only is it more secure, but I think it's actually faster. Plus it actually conforms to the web standards instead of making up it's own. Plus, it seems like they're only going to provide security updates for those who have Windows XP.

Of course, the best course of action would be to get rid of Windows all together and install Linux.

New Laptop - Dell Inspiron 5150

2004-09-25T20:20:00.000-05:00

I got my new laptop. I went through the Windoze update reboot, update reboot... process. Ugh. I can't believe how much Windows XP sucks. It's so slow.

I resized the Windows XP partition using QtParted from the SystemRescueCD to mark room for Linux. It worked flawlessly. Then I installed Fedora Core 2. Again flawless. Using nsdiswrapper, I got the wireless card working. It was complicated by the fact that I am using WPA-PSK security on our wireless router, but with wpa_supplicant (latest from CVS) it worked no problem. While not as easy as getting it working on Windows, it does work and there is an incredible amount of information out there on the web. Google is your friend.

I really thing the performance is better under Linux. Everything just seems faster. Someone at work said I need more RAM for Windows XP to work. I guess. But why does Fedora Core 2 seem so nice, then? I did order another 256MB (to bring the total to 512MB) from crucial.

blog slacker, working from home

2004-09-22T13:45:00.000-05:00

Boy, I suck at this blogging thing... too infrequent updates.

I'm working from home today because I need to sign for our new laptop that's being delivered. It's a Dell Inspiron 5150. I got the wireless router yesterday and got it setup on the network. I should have gotten a wireless access point instead of a router, but they're a lot more expensive (supply and demand, I guess). It comes with Windoze, but I'm going to install Fedora Core. Not sure if I'll use FC2 or FC3T2

My boss was giving me a hard time about working from home. "as long as you can work OK with the rest of the team". What? You're kidding, right? The only person on the "team" that works with me at all when I'm physically at work is Steve and we work fine via e-mail. Besides, I've already gotten more done today than a normal day, because of fewer interruptions by people not on my "team". Fortunately, most people in my group don't seem to like using e-mail, preferring instead to "stop by" my cube. Also, my PC at home with Linux is so much faster than the crap I've got at work. Hopefully my new work machine will arrive soon, but I understand GIS is busy with the Microsoft Exchange/Outlook rollout fiasco.

I'm on a action team at work trying to come up with ways to help employee engagement. While our team is supposed to be looking at career development, someone suggested that just some work-life benefits would help. Such as allowing people to work from home x days a week, flexible work schedules, etc. I agree. I would definitely feel better about my career if I wasn't made to feel guilty every time I needed to work from home. We're a telecom company, we should be able to communicate remotely.

Oh well...back to work.

Fedora Core 2

2004-09-11T16:09:00.000-05:00

Finally updated my second machine to Fedora Core 2 last weekend. It went almost flawlessly. I just had a problem with the mouse (only a two-button on) where I couldn't get it to emulate three buttons. Turns out there were two mice defined in the xorg.conf. Once I removed the second one, everything worked great.

More Family stuff

2004-09-01T20:41:00.000-05:00

My brother Dan and his wife Amy are moving to a new place this weekend. I really need to give them a call., I've been a terrible older brother communication-wise lately.

My other brother Matt, who's in the Army, is going to or just did move into a new apartment. He starts Special Forces training this fall.

Parents Visit

2004-09-01T20:38:00.000-05:00

My parents visited this past weekend. It was great to see them and I'm glad they got to see the new house. It was a relaxing weekend for the most part, we just hung around the house. My mom and Amy went shopping on Saturday and we took them out for dinner to celebrate their anniversary.
I wish I wouldn't have been so distracted with work.

Texas Holdem

2004-08-22T20:07:00.000-05:00

A few friends and I played Texas Holdem last night. I actually came in second in the third game, so I got my money back for that game. It was a lot of fun.

Testing 1, 2, 3...

2004-08-15T16:05:00.000-05:00

Is this thing on?