Sunday, February 11, 2007
xinerama, SSH & Emergencies
So I think I'm somewhat over feeling insane. Not totally over, just not as bad as it was a couple weeks ago. A large part of that is due to AJ. It's nice when people appreciate you. AJ phoned me up one day and was asking the difference between PCI and AGP cards. I'm not a hardware guy, and off the top of my head do not know. So it was left at that and he had to go. Later that afternoon I got a call from him that he was close by, and wanted to stop in. He came bearing gifts. Two 19" flat panels, and an AGP dual head card! SWEET!. He was surprised I was not running dual monitors. "I heard somewhere having two monitors makes programmers more productive". So it was a totally awesome thing to do, but when I think about it it's like "hmmmmm ... how can I get more work out of Andy?". lol. I know that was not the intent. He told me they just ordered 40 of them for the offices or something up there like that.
I installed the monitors, and cleaned off my desk in the process. Installed the AGP card, and hooked things up accordingly. It took relatively simple X11 configuring. I apt-get installed the drivers (I love kubuntu). And then started to fiddle. I do only have one DVI, and then one VGA. You can totally notice the difference in quality when side by side, but I am in no way complaining. Since the VGA is always registered as screen #1 in X, and I wanted the DVI on the left, I had to reverse the screen orientation (left to right / right to left) as one would think to make it work the way I wanted. All in all an hours to get going, and I am very much happy. So much more space. I noticed a couple of little quirks in KDE (like alt+tab no longer showing a window list, but whatever).
I have also reinforced my love of SSH. It is so useful for so many more things than just secure logins. The key generation, and usefulness for secure scripting is a huge benefit. Recently I reworked the majority of my backup procedures for clients to use rsync over ssh. For the mostpart it was never really needed, as it was synced internally, or to the attached USB drive. And the rsyncd was setup as securely as it can be (passwords, limited host connections). I was never concerned with the rsyncs I had in place. But this way with rsync -e ssh, I can entirely eliminate the rsync server from running, authentication is handled, and the transfer is encrypted, so it's all around a better choice. Slightly slower, but better. And with some new servers, require remote offsite backups, it makes for a nice way to sync up the data.
So I've still been having troubles (massive) with my internet and phone. I did manage to call and order flowers for my mother on her birthday (She really really liked). Today however, I lost service. The internet came back in 10 mins, yet the phone remained out of service. I finally had to call tech support at 8:30 at night, they found some problems, and did shit. I happened then to finally get my voice mail and found a message from a friend saying she needed me to call, and it was an emergency ... she actually said "emergency". So now I feel like a jack ass, and when I called her back (a mere 10 hours later), she was not home. So now I am somewhat worried, and feeling bad. Hopefully tomorrow I can find out what is going on. ¶ 4:22:00 AM
I installed the monitors, and cleaned off my desk in the process. Installed the AGP card, and hooked things up accordingly. It took relatively simple X11 configuring. I apt-get installed the drivers (I love kubuntu). And then started to fiddle. I do only have one DVI, and then one VGA. You can totally notice the difference in quality when side by side, but I am in no way complaining. Since the VGA is always registered as screen #1 in X, and I wanted the DVI on the left, I had to reverse the screen orientation (left to right / right to left) as one would think to make it work the way I wanted. All in all an hours to get going, and I am very much happy. So much more space. I noticed a couple of little quirks in KDE (like alt+tab no longer showing a window list, but whatever).
I have also reinforced my love of SSH. It is so useful for so many more things than just secure logins. The key generation, and usefulness for secure scripting is a huge benefit. Recently I reworked the majority of my backup procedures for clients to use rsync over ssh. For the mostpart it was never really needed, as it was synced internally, or to the attached USB drive. And the rsyncd was setup as securely as it can be (passwords, limited host connections). I was never concerned with the rsyncs I had in place. But this way with rsync -e ssh, I can entirely eliminate the rsync server from running, authentication is handled, and the transfer is encrypted, so it's all around a better choice. Slightly slower, but better. And with some new servers, require remote offsite backups, it makes for a nice way to sync up the data.
So I've still been having troubles (massive) with my internet and phone. I did manage to call and order flowers for my mother on her birthday (She really really liked). Today however, I lost service. The internet came back in 10 mins, yet the phone remained out of service. I finally had to call tech support at 8:30 at night, they found some problems, and did shit. I happened then to finally get my voice mail and found a message from a friend saying she needed me to call, and it was an emergency ... she actually said "emergency". So now I feel like a jack ass, and when I called her back (a mere 10 hours later), she was not home. So now I am somewhat worried, and feeling bad. Hopefully tomorrow I can find out what is going on. ¶ 4:22:00 AM
