Basement video tour, progress update

Here's a video of the basement in it's current state.

Verizon Droid Smartphone on Pre-paid plan

I recently inherited a gently used Verizon Droid phone and intended to use it to replace my wife's dumb phone on Verizon prepaid.

I diligently went to the Verizon site and plugged in the ESN for the new-to-me phone to port the phone number from the old to the new.

I was surprised to see a "Service Level" selection that did not include my pre-paid plan. So I tried the process again a few times and had the same result. I then googled it and discovered that Verizon does not allow smartphones on their pre-paid plans.

Oh the humanity. Really, Verizon. The phone has Wifi, and that how I intended to get the data on it. I don't need your megabuck per month insane talk + text + data plan, since the phone will generally be used only in emergencies.

But nooooo, you have to bulk-exclude smartphones on plans that don't have data. Learn a lesson from your competitor, T-Mobile, where one can buy a prepaid plan including data if one so desires.

So I searched a little more and discovered a second-tier wireless company that uses the Verizon network and offers both inexpensive unlimited as well as prepaid plans. The company is Page Plus Cellular and it's carried by equally second-tier cell phone shops such as Truly Unlimited Wireless, located on Culver and Parcells (across from the old Arlene's Costumes).

For a $10 activation fee, I got a phone number and for another $10, I got 100 minutes of service from Page Plus. So $0.10/minute for their most expensive prepaid plan. No data though.

I'm prototyping the service now, so I'll reserve critical analysis until my first $10 is spent.

Basement has turned a corner

After a little over a two weeks of putzing with around by patching problem area in the floor, moving electrical boxes and correcting some ugly wiring we finally pulled the trigger on the next phase of the basement remodel; reconstruction.

I decided to take the day off since I think I needed to be involved with a lot of decisions for this special day.

The first step was to have Mike the plumber come and correct some problems in the old laundry room. He had a bunch of low hanging water lines, and the bachelor Rick allowed prior plumbers to run supplies to the kitchen right in front of the window. See we went from this to that.




Additionally, I asked Steve the carpenter to come over and start insulating and framing the exterior walls. Lowes had delivered all the insulation, lumber and drywall the prior day.

We picked the west-facing wall, in honor of my Buffalo heritage and went from this to that:




Next steps are to continue insulating and framing the exterior walls, then work on the interior walls.

Things I'm thinking about

1. Where will the telephone/cable/internet center be?
2. How will I frame the walls in the laundry room, given the electric panel and plumbing?
3. When should I call the ceiling guy to come over?

Basement video tour!

I decided to do a video tour of the basement now that most of the walls are down. You can see isolated piles of stuff, but it's mostly cleaned out and nearly ready for the new walls!



Did you spot my secret beer storage?

Cleaning out the chimney

Last night I decided to clean out the chimney base, where the ashes from fires collect. I've been in the house for 16 years now, so I figured it was probably time.

So I opened the door in the basement and started shoveling the ash into a large heavy duty garbage bag. Scoop after scoop of ash until I surprisingly filled the whole bag. I thought, wow, that's a lot of ash.

I grabbed another. And filled it.

And another. Filled it.

And another. While shoveling, I found a barely burned piece of paper. I read it, and it was a letter from Gerald Ford, dated 1976, requesting money for the republican party.

I thought, wait... This hasn't been cleaned out since before 1976?

So I filled that bag and thought "I'm only doing one more bag". So after filling 5 bags with ashes from fires from probably the last 50-75 years, I called it a night.

It's amazing how any job I tackle in this house turns out to be a much bigger job than I had planned on. I thought I owned my house, but in reality, this house totally pwned me!

Homemade Tomatillo Salsa

I visited a farm market stand last weekend and behold, a basket of tomatillos! After sampling the tomatillo salsa at Salinas, and making pints and pints of my own regular tomato salsa, I've been dying to try my hand at this alternative.

So I found a recipe that looked reasonable at http://simplyrecipes.com/recipes/tomatillo_salsa_verde/ and got to work



Tomatillos, in case you're not familiar with them. They have a husk and the skin is a little sticky under the husk requiring washing them in warm water.




All ready to go into the broiler to blacken the skin.



Mary Grace at the helm of the food processor, combining the onion, jalapenos, cilantro and tomatillos



The first batch, looking good



Awwwwwwww, yeahhhhhhhhh! Outstandingly delicious. It'll be my new best friend during the Bills game tomorrow.

I made each of the kids bite into a chip with a little salsa on it with the offer that they could spit it out if they didn't like it. They both spit it out. :(

No sound from applications such as Amarok or KSCD using Kubuntu

After long hours of searching for a solution to my lack of sound in KDE's premier music player "Amarok", I discovered the solution to my problem in the KDE forums.

I have two sound outputs, Internal Audio Stereo and Digital RV570. I had somehow configured KDE to send Amarok output to the RV570, which I had no speakers connected to.

I used the tool "pavucontrol" that has a GUI to configure what applications send output to what outputs. The kicker is that the sound-generating application has to be running and generating audio in order to configure its output.

So, launch Amarok and play some music. Next, launch pavucontrol. You should see the Amarok application in the Playback tab. Configure the output by clicking on the button showing the current output.

New ductwork: I didn't do it, but I do like it!

As part of our basement project, we needed to redo some of the ductwork in the basement. The old ducts and trunk hung down quite low and would have made the future dropped ceiling even lower.

So, behold a new trunk tucked up as high as it will go, and new oval duct work to replace the old 6" rounds.

Looks like I'm on a freakin' jet!

Removal of another wall

The latest wall to come down separated the old laundry room area from the old paint room and general basement area. It was composed of tongue in groove 1 inch planks on one side and plaster and lathe on the other.

It came down pretty easily with the help of an electric reciprocating saw (compared to my cordless) and a new wood cutting blade.

Again, Anne and I are both pleased with how much removal of this wall opened up the space. Anne is starting to think about decorating (she's a confirmed pre-decorator).

We have the HVAC guy coming early this week to redo the ductwork to move it higher up and also to correct the limited cold return air situation.

Basement Remodel progress

Ductwork coming down to make room for reinforcing the floor joists


Me: Wait, isn't supposed to be really COLD this weekend?! Crap!



Taking advantage of the opportunity to rewire some 1st floor outlets that had 110 year old electric work

My new basement

Bathroom finally complete and outdoor projects winding down as fall approaches, I decided start out the basement remodel project.

So far I've

Taken down a workbench
Removed a storage room and ceiling in that room (plaster and lathe)
Remove a wall that created a long narrow closet
Removed the west-facing exterior wall (2x4 + plywood)
Removed a bunch of carpeting from the west half of the basement
Repaired a bunch of foundation problems with concrete patch.

Here's the current state of affairs


The is the remaining stuff that is in this part of the basement all packed in. The excitement is behind that dropcloth...


This is the back west side of the basement, where the storage room was.


This is facing fully north, where there used to be a wall separating this part of the basement from the furnace area.


This is the north west foundation wall. Lots of crumbling paint/dryloc and a few problems that required some concrete patching.

Sound woes, solved by a USB sound card.

I built a computer several years ago, and until recently it was chugging along just fine. It was a little slow, and a little short on RAM, but it suited my needs just fine.

After taking a Windows 7 update, I noticed that my sound was no longer working correctly. Rather than emitting a normal sound, it would just emit static until the end of the sound when it sounded vaguely like it should.

Assuming a sound driver problem, I scoured the internet for a driver for the onboard CM-1801 chip for Windows 7 and came up empty handed. Apparently, the company that makes these audio chips are know for providing very little support. This chip was from the Windows XP and Vista era, but it was never officially supported on Windows 7.

I next queried some of my friends to see if anyone had an old sound card for which I could find Windows 7 drivers. I got a few cards in response, one of them didn't work, and the other had no Windows 7 support (Creative Labs Sound Blaster 5.1)

Then someone told me to just get a USB sound card. A what? I never heard of such a thing. A quick search on NewEgg.com led me to the solution. USB dongles that look much like a memory stick, but that have 1/8" jacks on the opposite end to connect headphones and microphones!

$13 and a week later, it showed up. I plugged it in, Windows 7 installed the driver, and my glorious sound was back! Now, if you are a Dolby Pro 5.1 or higher power audio user, you may be out of luck, but simple stereo is all I need from my computer.

Configuring DNS in Ubuntu

My company recently added a primary and secondary DNS server, but I was unable to resolve any of the server names to IP addresses after configuring the name servers.

The file /etc/resolv.conf contains the following

nameserver 192.168.1.164 
nameserver 192.168.1.48

Which seemed perfectly reasonable, yet running a nslookup resulted in:

** server can't find mycomputer: NXDOMAIN

I instead tried a reverse lookup using nslookup, specifying the IP of the server I wished to connect to, which returned my first clue

servername.domainname.com

It appears that the domainname was required in my lookup. So I searched for servername.domainname.com and got the IP address as I would have expected.

This led me to the man page for resolv.conf, which identified the domain configuration option, and the following contents for resolv.conf

domain rocsoft.com
nameserver 192.9.200.164 
nameserver 192.9.200.48

Now running nslookup servername returns the IP for the computer.

I love KDE's new addition: Activities

As a developer I find myself desiring a way to segment the many applications I end up running which clutter both my task bar and my screen. I've tried using virtual desktops, where you have N screens on which you can place applications, with only one showing at any point in time. I've always found the management of the application on the screens and the switching to screens less than seamless.

Perhaps it's because I'm a gmail fan that I like what the developers of KDE have implemented in Activities. Activities are tags on a window, like Googles tags on an email message. You define your activities and associate your applications with a tag. When you switch to a new activity, only the applications with that tag are shown. Smartly, only the applications appropriate for the current activity are shown in the task bar also, further reducing clutter. Additionally, only desktop widgets for the proper activity are displayed

For example, I have a Development activity that includes Eclipse, DB-Visualizer, Chrome, and a terminal window. I also have a Overhead activity that includes LibreOffice, Kontact and Chrome. When I activite my Development activity, I only see Eclipse, DB-Vis and Chrome. When I activate my Overhead activity, I only see Kontact, Office and Chrome.

I found it best to use with the addition of a panel that lists my activities. So I just click on Development to see my development toolset. Email notification? Click on the Overhead activity and development windows disappear and I see my email. After processing the email, I just click back to Development and pick up where I left off.

Here's how it looks, and know in your heart that I'm running Eclipse, DB Vis, Kontact, Kopete, Chrome, Firefox, KRDC, Amarok and Terminal. This is my "clean" activity.



So my activities are "Escalation" (things related to dealing with customer problems, "Development" (things related to developing new features or fixing bugs), "Overhead" (things like email, time tracking) and "Desktop" (a clean area for clearing my mind).

KDE also provides some template activities like Photos, Newspaper, Search and Launch.

The bat of 2011 - part 2

I periodically opened the door a crack to get a glimpse of our visitor having his way with our bedroom. Zoom, zip, swoop, then finally a landing. He landed first on the curtains near the open window, looked around a bit, then climbed down to the floor.

Bats are actually kinda cute when they're crawling. He was turning his head left and right, looking for the Exit sign, but not finding one. So he started flying again.

He landed a second time beneath the curtains on the floor and crawled along the baseboard. I was ready to jump in with my shoe box to catch him, when I saw him jump/fall into the heat/ac register on the floor. The openings are quite literally an inch square and he just plopped right in like they were sized just for him.

I rushed into the room and put a big piece of cardboard over the register, then ran down to the basement to close the vent off. Now he was trapped in the ductwork. I tossed around in my head what my next move would be, but ultimately decided to return to sleep since I had to wake up at 5:30am to teach a Spinning class.

So having had naughty Mr. Bat trapped, I carried on with my day. I came home tonight and rigged up an intricate system of levers and pulleys to trap Mr. Bat. Actually I made a little tightly contained chute leading from the vent to the window.

At about 9:30, Mr. Bat showed his ingenuity by escaping and terrorizing Anne and the kids. This time I trapped him in William's room. I peeked in and there was no activity. Poor dude was probably tired. Anyway, I found him on the back of a curtain. I carefully lowered the upper pane of the window and coaxed him out!

I hope that's the end of the saga, as the Bat Man (batproofer) is coming over tomorrow to figure out how they're getting in and seal it up for us.

Keep your fingers crossed that he can fix it and that the bat that I let out was the same bat that got in last night. (the other possibility being a second bat)

The bat of 2011 - part 1

I pray that it's the only one this summer.

As I lay in bed, resting soundly, I was awakened by a small bump. Anne frequently opens the window but not the blind, so I just assumed it was the blind blowing in the wind and bumping against the window frame. Then I heard the flutter of a wing and knew the terrible truth that would prevent me from getting a good nights sleep. A bat had broken through our perimeter defenses.

I opened my eyes and my worst fears were realized. A bat doing laps around the bedroom ceiling. I leaned over and tapped Anne. Startled, she yelled "WHAT?!" There's a bat in here. "WOOOOOO", and the sheets were pulled over her head. She apparently believes the myth about bats getting caught in womens hair.

So we both laid there waiting for each other to make a move. Finally I said "lets proceed in a calm and orderly fashion to the door", and we made our move. Thankfully, we were able to close the bedroom door behind us with the bat trapped in the room.

I peeked in, opening the door a crack to verify that the little jerk was still doing laps looking for an exit strategy. This went on for about 5 minutes.

Read on! Part 2

cd command with two arguments to do directory substitution

At some place I've worked in the past I had the ability to issue a CD command with two parameters. Extensive googling for this resulted in nothing, so I wrote this bash function to do it.

Using 'cd' in this mode will replace the first occurrence of the first parameter with the second parameter. The simplest use case is changing from classes to src directory when in a deep directory structure:

$ pwd
/home/rcs/project/src/com/xyz/custom/some/really/deep/path
$ cd src classes
$ pwd
/home/rcs/project/classes/com/xyz/custom/some/really/deep/path

function cd {
        if [ -z $2 ]
        then
                builtin cd $1
        else
                builtin cd `echo $PWD | sed s/$1/$2/`
        fi
}

It's not bullet proof, but it's decreased the achyness in my typing fingers!

EDIT - I found a few bugs with the function; namely I could not change dir to a directory that contained spaces. Once I made a change to correct this problem, I could no longer issue 'cd' to return to my home directory.

Here are my change to correct these problems:

function cd {
    if [ -z "$2" ]
    then
        if [ -z "$1" ]
        then
            builtin cd
        else
            builtin cd "$*"
        fi
    else
        builtin cd `echo $PWD | sed s/$1/$2/`
    fi
}

KDE Kontact using 100% CPU

I observed a problem with Kontact maximising one of my four cores periodically. After extensive Googling, it seemed that I alone was having this problem, and so began my analysis.

Since it wasn't happening continuously, I figured it was a periodic event and the most likely periodic event was a POP3 mail check. I disabled "interval mail checking", but that didn't resolve the issue. It would still periodically consume 100% of one of the CPU cores.

On a whim, I decided to use the telnet command to connect to my POP server. After authenticating and issuing the list command, I observed a LONG LONG pause. I waited nearly 5 minutes before I got the response back, 19k messages and hundreds of megabytes!

At every interval mail check (set at 5 minutes), I was asking the POP server to count the number of messages and number of bytes in those messages. To resolve it, I added an automatic archival of messages older than 6 months on my mail server, dramatically lowering my inbox size, resulting in a minimal delay when checking for new mail, and no noticeable CPU usage!

As to why Kontact was using 100% CPU while simply waiting for a response from the POP3 server, that is still unresolved.