blog.arithm

I’m still trying to get my head around what the hell is going on, but best I can tell is that Colonel Klink, social climber that he is, has somehow lifted himself from an obscure commandant of Stalag-13 to the very highest levels of the  American military industrial complex.

And he appears to be a mere thirty-two words away from unilateral control over the American banking system.

Where’s Hogan when you need him?

Seriously though, I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days trying to get a better handle on what’s really happening.  As someone who, until just about a week ago, knew virtually nothing of American or international finance, I’m the first to admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about.  That said, here’s my take on it all; oddly enough much of which can best be summarized via this tiff between Naomi Klein and Andrew Sullivan:

I think they both might just be right.  Certainly an administration that relies on shock doctrine to achieve it’s goals could leverage a generation of Americans raised on the concept of credit as money — after all, “Life takes Visa” doesn’t it? — to engineer a self-imposed financial disaster.

C’mon, let’s put on our tinfoil hats and ask a few “what if” questions.

• What if the current administration colluded with the likes of Goldman Sachs to setup mortgage packages that were difficult to trace and, more importantly, doomed to fail.
• What if these mortgages were promoted as part of an ownership society, a get-rich concept sold to an American public that grew up on credit and believing in the words of Gordon Gekko: that somehow greed “will save that malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”
• In other words, what if the current administration set out with the intent of producing a — this — disastrous event as a means of furthering an agenda?

Of course, some would call this financial terrorism:

And if it’s true, they’re damn right.  But terrorism to achieve what end?  What’s the agenda? More profit for Bush cronies as the dollar collapses?

I wonder if the Bank of Klink will offer a good Dollar to Amero exchange rate..

Hypothetically speaking of course, let’s assume you forget to renew a domain name. And suddenly that domain’s email is not working. And then you notice the site is down. The next step is, logically speaking, to panic, followed by an attempt to figure out what the hell is going on. Which usually means restarting Apache. Which results in:

apache2: apr_sockaddr_info_get() failed for yourhost

Which is, wow, an exotic new error. If you see this it means that, even though Apache says its restarting, really its probably not. And now all your other sites are down. And, so, more panic. More panic for you.

Now that you’ve probably realized that the default domain name has expired, you will want to get Apache back up on a different, actually non-expired domain. Like this:

$ hostname actual-non-expired-domain-name.com

Now restart.

Alternatively if your hostname is set to something like “www”, probably you can change the default site in vhosts so that Apache can connect the hostname to the tld.

This is all hypothetical of course.

Our HP PSC 950 (admittedly ancient) has been slowly breaking down for the last two or so years. Whenever you try to copy, scan, or fax, the printer will randomly go into a Warming Up mode from which it cannot seem to return.  Zombie mode.

Our when-in-doubt-reboot solution had been to cycle the power numerous times until the printer finally deigned to work. It’s hit or miss that the thing will work on any given reboot. Lately the hit ratio has become frustratingly low.

I was about to throw the printer out the window when I figured I might as well Google “psc 950 problems”. Sure enough, other people are complaining about the very same thing. And sure enough there is a simple solution from a gentleman going by the name tomahawk on fixyourownprinter.com.

The fix? Tear open the printer and wipe dust off the mirror.

I was shocked that this worked. And I have a sneaking suspicion that it will work for other HP printers with similar problems.

Details reproduced here for posterity:

1. Turn off the power, unplug
2. Remove the control panel on the right side by prying off the control box cover with a small flat screw driver, then do the same with the control box underneath (if required).
3. Take off the copy cover, followed by the two small screws at the back/top of the glass cover/scanner unit. These screws are tricky to remove and in the end you might break the plastic in desperation in prying up the cover! Don’t worry, your unit is useless anyway and a couple of missing screws is worth the sacrifice of fixing the copy function. Disconnect the connector multicable, noting how it came out.
4. Pry off the black cover on the copy/scan unit to expose the bulb housing. Don’t touch the bulb, but open the cover of the black plastic housing to the right side of the bulb. This can be a bit tricky too, but will come with a bit of encouragement.
5. With a soft, clean cloth give the mirror a wipe to remove any dirt/dust.
6. LEAVE THE BLACK COVER OFF
7. Reassemble the unit, making sure that the multicable is properly seated.
8. Plug in, turn on and the copy function should work.

Thank you tomahawk. Maybe now I can eek another two years out of this thing.

I’d seen this happen occasionally over the last couple of months, but it seemed to get really bad on Friday.

Fri Mar 21 21:31:45 2008 -> SelfCheck: Database modification detected. Forcing reload.
Reading databases from /var/lib/clamav
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 1)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 2)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory (try 3)
ERROR: reload db failed: Unable to lock database directory
Terminating because of a fatal error.
Socket file removed.
Pid file removed.
--- Stopped at Fri Mar 21 21:38:16 2008


Not entirely sure what the problem is, but it seems like clamav is choking on recent updates from freshclam.

And apparently I’m not the only one. Took advice from this thread and updated clamav to the version in debian-volatile. The official ClamAV documentation also recommends using the volatile repositories.

I’m new to Debian and almost took this to mean that I should use etch. Good to know that Debian maintains a volatile repository. To pull packages from volatile, just add:

deb http://volatile.debian.net/debian-volatile etch/volatile main contrib non-free
(though preferably use a mirror)

to /etc/apt/sources.list. Running a simple apt-get update clamav or aptitude update clamav will find and install the appropriate volatile updates. Nice.

Build mod_security against the wrong set of headers, and Apache 2 will mysteriously begin to segfault in a persistent manner. Check which version you’re running with dpkg --get-selections | grep apache2.

Seems my shiny new Debian distro running the prefork version of Apache had the threaded (worker) headers installed against it. Duh. apt-get install apache2-prefork-dev reinstalled the correct prefork headers and Apache is happy again.

Mathiew Dessus has a great article about installing mod_securty on Debian for those interested.

Ugh. As usual, more weird problems while trying to upgrade PHP on a Windows box. Are we having fun yet?

If you find that the MySQL extension won’t load, then probably a previous PHP installer has placed a version of libmysql.dll somewhere else in your path. Look in c:\WINDOWS\system32\

The problem is almost certainly the reason for the following obscure comment

Although copying libmysql.dll to the Windows system directory also works (because the system directory is by default in the system’s PATH), it’s not recommended.

in the PHP MySQL documentation.

Make sure your home PHP directory is in your path, and that its finding libmysql.dll there and only there.

If you are using Zend’s installer to upgrade PHP on Windows, the installer will probably break your file type mappings. Double check to make sure that .php points to the correct ISAPI dll in IIS.

(IIS -> Home Directory -> Configuration… -> Mappings)

Where “perfect” is defined as “cheap and works”.

KVM switches are like the high-tech equivalent of a garden hose splitter; and I never thought I would have to put so much energy into finding one. The IOGear GCS632U I picked up at my local Best Buy lasted a whole three days before one of the USB adapters stopped working. Reviews on Amazon reveal that his is a somewhat common problem.

So, after some obsessive googling, coupled with intense scrutiny of just about every Amazon KVM switch review… I’ve gone out on a $50 limb with the tiny StarTech SV211KUSB Micro USB KVM Switch. And a week later I can still double Scroll Lock over to my Mac Mini. Whew!

Now if only I could get the Mac Mini to recognize my weird-ass wooden Japanese keyboard and let me double Scroll Lock back to Vista. Good thing the switch has a physical toggle.

If you’re seeing this error from mod_perl, then probably your CPAN repository has changed. Try restarting Apache so that mod_perl can find everything again.

If you’ve upgraded Apache, you may need to rebuild mod_perl, depending on your deployment.

Anyway, don’t do what I did and waste half-a-day trying to debug the Perl when a simple boot to Apache’s head will show you what’s really going on.

Well, for whatever reason AOR crashed when I tried to run the licensed version. Fortunately the kind souls at DataNumen let me upload my archive to their FTP server and did the repair for me.

When I asked why AOR wasn’t working here, I got the standard “must be your machine” answer:

Sorry but we don’t know the reason, as we cannot repeat the problem on our computers at all. We have used Advanced Outlook Repair to repair your file without any problems!

I guess the problem may be caused by incompabilities, but our computer installed with Vista and 2007 can also run correctly. So the problem may be related to other software or system confirgurations.

So with some good support here the results are what I was after.. though buyer beware.