Late Night PC

As I've been getting started with Android I decided to take some notes. What follows is something I wrote down as I was working on getting a first sample to build and download from Eclipse using ADT. I followed the instructions from Google and tried the troubleshooting directions. My platform is OpenSuse 10.3 Linux. This note might be helpful if you're trying to develop for Android.

I took a little break today from the C++ and Lua stuff I've been doing to have a look at Google's new phone platform. I followed the installation instructions and had some demos up and running pretty quickly. I also grabbed the source and poked around to see whose shoulders they stand on.

There are a couple things I've done to tweak World of Warcraft on my Linux box. I run OpenSuse 10.3 now but most of this will be the same for other distros, especially if you use KDE. These are just specific to what worked for me but I guess that some other Linux WoW players might benefit from the same settings.

First off I lost the ability to do a quick self-cast. Self-cast is done by just holding alt while clicking the icon for a spell. So, as a mage, every half-hour I want to self-cast Arcane Intellect. That's no big deal since it's not in combat. Remove Lesser Curse is a bigger problem. The second fastest way to use that is with a shortcut key or click followed by F1 (which also targets your own character). I thought the problem was because of some multi-language keyboard customization I had done but as it turns out it was a setting in KDE for moving windows by holding the Alt-key. To turn this off just follow the steps here - I included pictures, click each to get a bigger image.

A few awesome KDE keyboard shortcuts, some I forgot, some I never knew and just said "wow, what a great idea".

Just in case anyone's wondering about the outcome from the parts I ordered the other day, I just installed my Ruby Orb fan on my Asus M2NPV-VM. It was a little scary, for one thing that heatsink & fan is really huge. I mean really. It's a 120mm fan, stock CPU fans are about 65mm if I remember right. The Ruby Orb is so big I don't think I could take the RAM out of the computer without removing the CPU heatsink. I will say it's very quiet for the amount of air that it moves. Still my computer overall seems about as loud as it was with just the one case fan. Of course now it's got two case fans running and with the old case fans I had the noise would've been unbearable. I've also got five hard drives in there now (just installed the 500GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive).

It seems like the shorter the code is the longer it takes to write. I'm trying to rename a group of similarly-name directories using Bash and for no good reason I decided I'd like to do it all on one line. There are a bunch of ways to do it, not all fit on a line and some are more efficient than others. There's apparently a package out there called mmv that I haven't looked for which does stuff like this. There's also sed. With sed I got something close:

I started out talking about SMART and drive temperatures the other day but got all geeked out about hardware and forgot where I was going. I meant to also talk about how I tried to just spin down my older Western Digital ATA hard drives to give them a chance to cool off.

I looked at the hdparm, I saw some comments on forums saying it could be used to set a time delay to spin-down a hard drive.

One thing I've noticed since upgrading my system to OpenSuse 10.3 is that my 3 older Western Digital 160GB drives (specifically 2 WDC WD1600JB-00D and a WDC WD1600JB-00F) run really hot. Like 120 degrees Celsius hot. I get this information from smartd or smartctl. It leaves scary log messages like Oct 24 19:43:18 copper smartd[4479]: Device: /dev/sda, SMART Usage Attribute: 194 Temperature_Celsius changed from 120 to 116 The drives do get hot to the touch but 120°C sounds really hot. It is possible that the sensors aren't accurate. It's also possible they've been reporting high temperatures ever since I installed them around five years ago. See, until I installed OpenSuse 10.3 I never saw the SMART data. I could also guess that the information just isn't accurate for my system. So to test these ideas out I ran smartctl to see what it had to say about all my drives. Three are the WD drives I mentioned and the fourth is a Seagate SATA drive.

When I upgraded from OpenSuse 10.2 to OpenSuse 10.3 I should have backed up my LDAP database as LDIF before I started. I didn't do that of course but I thought maybe I could just copy the database over and tweak the config file in /etc/openldap/slapd.conf. The OpenLDAP server, slapd, can be configured to use a few different backends for storage. The most common seems to be a Berkeley Database. On my installation the database resides in /var/lib/ldap. There are a bunch of files there, it looks like a couple log files, a DB_CONFIG file and several database files (they have the extension .bdb). I don't have exact step-by-step directions for how I fixed it but I'll go over the highlights of what worked for me.

Motivation

Now that I've got an LDAP server up and running I'm trying to get my personal web server set up so it has a blanket authentication for my personal applications, static content and development stuff. The web applications I'm talking about aren't meant to be exposed to the public at large, they're not what you find here on Late Night PC Service or any of my other sites. These are things like PHP Calendar, Task Freak, SugarCRM, a bunch of development versions of apps I'm working on and some static content that might be a single html file or an image. I currently have a server that's accessible through DynDNS and I use basic HTTP authentication on it. The server runs Apache HTTPD 2.2 and has whatever modules I want on it. My next server is roughly the same but I want to make things a little more secure and a little simpler (at the same time no less). So my idea was to move to LDAP as the Authentication Provider and Digest as the Authentication Type.

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