Older blog entries for berend (starting at number 394)

Kevin Drum on healthcare insurance, so true:


Let’s be honest. What we all want is unlimited access to medical care; unlimited access to any procedure we want no matter how pricey; unlimited choice of physicians; instant availability of doctors every time we get an ear ache; and we’d like all this for free. That’s what we want. And we’re annoyed when we don’t get it.

At Xplain Hosting we have been hosting Drupal since 2008. First on Ubuntu 8.04, systems built from scratch. To upgrade to another version, you build another system from scratch.

Have now switched to Ansible, so hopefully never have to do that again. And we now have good documentation what a working system looks like.

Upgraded from FreeBSD 8.x-STABLE to FreeBSD 9.2-PRELEASE. Disaster. Went back to FreeBSD 9.1. Still disaster. Every few hours the kernel panics, and the server reboots. Have completed major changes, went from i368 to amd64. Same bug. Somewhere PF has become unreliable in FreeBSD 9.

Not good. Have used FreeBSD since version, never had these problems.

Not sure what to do now. Probably simply my pf rules, which won't be easy, to see if the problem disappears that way.

Have gone to the 20th anniversary of the Manukau Symphony Orchestra (MSO). We've heard them since they played in the Papatoetoe Town Hall.

They had commissioned a piece of Gareth Farr, interesting, but won't work well via CD/Spotify I'm afraid. Usually a problem with modern music. Next piece was Mozart's Violin Concerto No.3 in G, K.216. I'm not a Mozart fan usually, unless played in period instruments, but Loata Mahe gave a great solo, really individual performance.

The big piece was Mahler. The first Mahler for the orchestra, and a really great performance from Uwe Grodd and the orchestra. Uwe was able to draw the music out of the orchestra, especially the beginning of the first movement was very well done. I liked the third movement, first half of fourth movement also went exceptional. Great night.

I'm happy to see that the Te Paipera Tapu, the Bible in Maori from 1868 website has now launched. Still a bit of work to do, but a web presence at last!

14 May 2013 (updated 15 May 2013 at 01:11 UTC) »

Typing gem on windows:

PS D:\Users\berend.deboer> gem
The term 'gem' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spellin
g of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At line:1 char:4
+ gem + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (gem:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException


Same on Ubuntu:

# gem
The program 'gem' can be found in the following packages:
* rubygems1.8
* rubygems1.9.1
Try: apt-get install <selected package>


Really, Windows just feels like an abandoned house, does anyone do any kind of development on this OS? Maybe all using Visual Studio, never leaving it?

15 Jan 2013 (updated 15 Jan 2013 at 02:37 UTC) »

Lot of pain to get Skype working properly after I switched from an increasingly complex ipfw firewall to a pf based one. Skype consistently gave me "UDP status: local: BAD". I believe that happens when Skype tries to use peers for udp traffic, instead of talking to the caller directly.

The solution was to use static ports for nat. My default rule in pf.conf was this:

nat on egress from any to any -> (egress) round-robin sticky-address

It is now:

nat on egress from 192.168.1.10 port 12345 to any -> (egress) static-port
nat on egress from any to any -> (egress) round-robin sticky-address


Skype now has UDP status local good, finally sigh.

One of Logitech's best wireless products was their Logitech ClearChat. From an audio quality perspective that it. It's manufacturing quality was disastrous, and the internet is filled with people complaining about issues with their microphone (turning silent, not turning on, turning off when you move year head).

Just very annoying to use when the microphone breaks down.

Got a different product today the Logitech H600 (there don't seem to be many manufacturers of wireless headsets). Didn't work straight out the box with Ubuntu. I.e. it turned up immediately, but there was no sound. This appeared to be a communication problem with the wireless receiver and the headset.

bhankins found a solution that works for me too. Download the pairing utility and that fixes the problems. Unfortunately the pairing utility only works on Windows (or perhaps wine, didn't try that).

Hopefully my microphone problems are now solved. But sound quality is definitely much lower than the ClearChat, but won't matter for Skype/phone calls I'm guessing.

Bad day yesterday. Lot's of fighting with Ubuntu Precise. Upgraded from Oneiric, but X would freeze regularly. Could still ping/ssh in.

I think it was an issue with the application switcher. I wasn't using the Unity one. There were other issues too. As the system was so unstable, I decided not to take any changes with conflicts, so simply wiped my ~/.config and started over (but copied back settings from apps I wanted to keep). Pretty stable now. The only issue is that I'm using the Unity switcher and I don't like the "Show desktop" option, which you can't remove. Unless you recompile the source I suppose.

The ten day sale: assault rifles now at a 50% discount, get them while stock lasts!

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