Last week I worked from home while plumbers replumbed the entire house with PEX, actually PEX-Al-PEX. They also replaced our aging water heater.

So now we have water pressure, no rust in the water, hot water in a few minutes, the attic doesn’t sound like a hailstorm when the water heater refills and we shouldn’t have to worry about 4am leaks.

We saw a great show last night, Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm opening.

Folk-Geek-Pop, I’m not sure how to explain it, but it’s great. Coulton has a real knack for songwriting. Creepy Doll and Re Your Brains have been stuck in my head all day. It’s fascinating how he started posting songs to his website for free and developed a following.

I’ve never heard Paul and Storm before but did a great job, wonderful harmonies.

Two major updates, one by choice and one by necessity.

Laptop

Although I was able to revive my laptop from the previous hiccup, this time true-death came upon it when the extern brick stopped charging the battery. I found a new one for $75 but decided I didn’t want to put any more money into a seven year old laptop.

I played around with the idea of getting a MacBook, and came close, but I’m cheap and decided I really didn’t need to spend $1500, so instead I did some digging to find a good Linux compatible model and settled on a Lenovo 3000 N100 which buy.com had one sale; $704 with shipping. It arrived on Tuesday after ordering it on a Thursday, before the shipping e-mail was sent.

I backed up the Vista installation kit and put Ubuntu Feisty on it. I was impressed, the only tweak it needs was a manual build of alsa which was clearly documented on the Unbuntu wiki site. So far I’m really happy with it, it even sleeps, hibernates, and shows my battery life!

Server

Given my string of good luck with the laptop I decided it was time for a long overdue upgrade of my server. I was still running a much hacked four year old instance of Debian Woody that had been through two servers and many hard drive upgrades.

I bought three 320GB PATA drives from Fry’s ($70 a piece!) and a 320GB external Seagate drive to backup my current server onto. Unfortunately, I only had three IDE compatible power cables in my Dell SC420 box and rather than wait I decided to stick with two 320GB drives in a RAID1 array rather than the RAID5 configuration I had originally intended.

I found an article on upgrading a RAID1 array to RAID5, so if and when I run out of space I may give that a try. I installed Debian etch and so far everything is running great. USB is even working on my server which it never did with the 2.4 Linux kernel. I have a few more settings to tweak and I’ll be done.

I’ve been drooling over the Sony eInk devices since the original Librie was released in Japan. Finally last year the PRS500 was released in America but was retailing for $350, way above my toy budget.

Then a month ago I noticed a deal where if you registered for a Sony Chase Visa you can purchase the reader for $50 plus $50 credit and their eBook store. Score!

I’ve been playing with some free software to convert html files to the native Sony format and have read one full book.

The form-factor is great, small and light yet the display is large enough to read. The eInk display is very crisp, but has a bit of bleed over from the previous screen. The refresh time is slow, but usable. I imagine future generations of this technology will improve on that. Since the display only requires power during transitions, the battery life is on the order of weeks. Also there are plenty of conversion tools so I can grab free books from Project Gutenberg and read them on the device with a bit of tweaking. Reading was pretty pleasant once I got used to the controls, after a few chapters I was ignoring the reader and focusing on the story.

There are a few downsides; it’s a bit underpowered, it only supports SD cards up to 2GB and doesn’t allow you to tag or categorize books on the SD card. Also the desktop software to manage the device and buy eBooks works but is awful. Yet another set of widgets that look nothing like native windows’ controls. A touch screen and wireless access would really enhance the device.

It was definitely worth $50 and I’ll be using it in between real books or while out and about. I still don’t know if I’d spend $350 for it, not unless I had big pile of cash I was just waiting to spend.

My laptop is somewhere around seven years old. I can browse the web and compile simple programs but not much more without straining it to its limits. But right now I’m too cheap to buy a new one.

As such, I was disappointed to see the Fedora Core 7 upgrade script die with a fault. Not too surprising really, most upgrades don’t come out too well, Linux or Windows. I had backed up all my data files so I rebooted into a full install. I only have 192MB of RAM so the graphical install wouldn’t load, so I tried the text install, which died a horrible painful python exception just after partitioning and formatting my hard drive.

Lovely.

So, on to Ubuntu. Which wouldn’t boot from a CD. Great. Burn to a DVD and it boots but the graphical installer won’t load. So, download the alternative image, burn to DVD and now I’m up an running again. Although, I with their wireless network config manager had an entry for channel.

So far I like Ubuntu, which is not surprising since I’ve used Debian for years. Apt-get is definitely much faster than yum.

I think next time I’m buying a Mac.

Sunday morning I awoke at 4am to the sound of rain. Unfortunately it was coming from out living room. A pipe in the second story attic started leaking directly over an interior wall. The water ran down between the wall, through the floor and pooled on the sheetrock ceiling of the living room before coming through.

One of the more surreal moments of my life was punching a hole in the ceiling with a screwdriver and watching the water run out.

I turned the water off and went back to bed. Later I started pulling down wet drywall and punching holes in the walls upstairs. We’re getting an estimate on pipe work and new water heater, which we’re due for.

It could have been much worse, the water fell on the rug above the hardwood floor which had a rubber pad beneath. Friends have been telling me horror stories all week about incidents, so I feel better.

Life can be interesting.

I’m almost forty years old and I’m thinking, “I shouldn’t start a new book tonight, Harry Potter comes out this weekend.”

Today’s the 100th anniversary Robert Heinlein’s birth. Sadly, he passed too soon at the early age of 80. He was a huge influence on my during my teenage years and is probably one reason I’m an engineer today.

I developed the ability to not fear failure from his work and to take joy from human foibles.

“Am I handicapped? Yes, but my handicaps do not interfere with my work — or my joy in life. Over forty years ago the Navy handed me a piece of paper that pronounced me totally and permanentally disabled. I never believed it. That piece of paper wore out; I did not.”

Brian, Mary and Cam finally make the holy pilgrimage to St. Arnold’s.

There was a bit of a hiccup but the site appears to be working again.

I finally found a Linux distribution that almost works on my Jornada 720.

Firefox 1.5 and my wireless card work, but I have had a few lockups. If I can it a bit more stable I’ll have the perfect “I wanna check mail but not boot my laptop or go upstairs” device.

For years I’ve used ssh port forwarding to access my home server. It works, but has it’s issues. I hated having to setup another forward for each service I wanted to use. Turns out, there was a better way. I kick off ssh to start a proxy server to my home box:

ssh -qT -f -ND 7070 user@homedomain
-q quiet, -T no pseudo tty allocated, -f go into the background after we enter the password, -N no remote command required and -D set SOCKS port.

and then configure the applications to use localhost and port 7070 for a proxy.

To make this really usable, I installed foxyproxy into Firefox and now only requests to homedomain are routed through the proxy server. All others are handled normally by the local network.

Neat.

Photos…

A quick jaunt around New England…Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware.

Phew.

Princeton was nice, New York was busy. A great region but I don’t know if I could handle the winters or the population density in the city.

Cool – typing on my Treo board the train from Penn Station to Princeton. Just saw Avenue Q – great show.

Oooh, Bodies in the Solar System Larger than 200 Miles in Diameter.

What’s amazing is that when I was kid pouring over astronomy books we didn’t have photos of most of these objects let alone ones of this detail.