Getting your SyncML phone working with Ubuntu just got a lot harder in their newest release, but fortunately it is still possible with a bit of work. In the latest release, they moved from libsoup 2.2 to 2.4 and didn't leave the old version in the repositories, so to get it working, you need to download the .deb packages for karmic and install them side by side.

• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsoup2.2-8
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/libsyncml0
• http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/opensync-plugin-syncml

When installing libsyncml0, i had to install libwbxml2-0 which can be gotten from aptitude. Also there are a couple of other programs you should also get.

So, to get your phone working (in my case a Nokia Symbian 3rd edition phone) you need to do the following things.

aptitude install libwbxml2-0 multisync-tools multisync0.90 opensync-plugin-evolution

and then install the deb packages from the previous links in ... Read More

I have had to update my resume lately and a while ago I wrote it using LaTeX which is a typesetting program. Typesetting programs are different then word processors as they allow you to focus more on the content rather then laying everything out on the page. A few cases where LaTeX trounces Microsoft word is when you are writing anything that uses a predefined layout that must be adhered to such as a paper written in MLA format or a book. While it excels in some areas it fails miserably in others, for most use cases anyway. So you are going to have your work cut out for you if you are trying to make posters, fliers, banners, and any other type of thing where you really want to focus on layout while writing.

While I don't write many MLA papers anymore, LaTeX is still the de facto standard ... Read More

Tax season is approaching in the United States and like most people I am concerned about where my money will go. A few days ago the state of the union address was taking place and of course the hot topics these days are job creation and ways that united states can retain its position as the world superpower. While there has be a increase of unemployment recently, I am still very strongly against welfare hand out systems and I believe that if people cant find jobs on their own because there is a shortage, jobs need to be created that will benefit the people that are paying for them, IE the tax payers. As they say, there is always work to be done.

About 55 Years ago, Eisenhower dumped $25 Billion into creating interstate highways and this kind of investment has been paying off ever since. It created American jobs ... Read More

Yesterday I was fooling around with python and trying to serve some XML to a Cisco 7960 I have. I spent a lot of time getting my web server set up to serve a dynamic XML page which I could pop my phone book information into and when I finally got it done it wouldn't work. Searching online I found out that the latest firmwares from Cisco, 9.*, has a couple of bugs in it dealing with XML. Unfortunately I don't remember where I found this information but I can give out the sparks notes on what I saw.

When I was served the page from a web server, if it responded HTTP/1.0 OK, no good, the phone would only accept if it was HTTP/1.1 . I was getting some cryptic 404/BTXML errors but I could see that the files were fine by loading it on to the production ... Read More

When you first turn on your computer the BIOS kicks in and searches for instructions on your master boot record or MBR. From there it is able to locate the boot loader which in turn figures out which kernel to run and then loads it into memory and that is the point you start actually running your flavor of UNIX. At this stage your computer is just running a kernel and has no interactivity or running services.

You are most likely used to using your computer to do something, and to do that, you need to run processes. While at this point you could have your computer launch a shell, you would still have a lot of setting up to do such as mounting hard drives, bringing up your network adapters, starting services, launching a GUI or what ever else you want to do. This is tedious and beyond ... Read More

I have been playing around with http://wolframalpha.com lately and it has a lot of power behind it. I mostly use it for doing math stuff when I don't have a calculator in front of me and it can even do some stuff I cant do on my ti-89 like Laplace transforms. When it returns a result it often time gives a comparison of other things that have the same unit. As an example, I asked it about 15 gigs and it immediately figured out what I was talking about and told me how big that was in relation to a blueray disk,60%, as well as how long it would download at different speeds. All this information got me thinking about what kind of questions it can answer and what it cant. The questions it cant answer fall into 3 main categories and while I could never list all the things ... Read More

My filesyserver at home is a opensolaris box using raidz under zfs and right now it is having some problems. Recently I had to replace a drive that did not fail but it was making some clicking noises. After repplacing it the first resilver left me with an error about a snapshot that i didn't need being damaged. okay i can live with that, so i just need to delete the snapshot and bring the pools redundancy back up. well, it reslivered everything, but it didn't seem like the pool was running completely. i cleared the error and it started to resilver again. same thing happened again but now i am getting a warning for something else <0x5c>:<0x64d62> and now the resilver is going past 100% and copying more then the amount of data i have. some posts online suggest disabling snapshots because they are keeping it from completing. didnt ... Read More

Just sent to PROD a copy of my personal site. PROD is a 20$ vps currently hosting two websites and it is running open source software which is important. thanks to jamescarnley[http://jamescarnley.com] for doing some beta testing.

My department has several linux computers and auditing the logs is very tiresome if they are all localized to each computer. While the vanilla syslog offers remote logging features it uses udp and thus many things can affect the chance of log messages reaching their destination. the message dropping problem is not as widespread in syslog-ng since it uses tcp to transmit log packets.

Compiling syslog-ng is required as the only syslog-ng binaries are licensed and require a contract to purchase. under rhel/centos the eventlog compilation goes as planed, but things start going wrong when auto configuring syslog-ng itself. it will complain. configure: error: Cannot find eventlog version >= 0.2: is pkg-config in path? this is a easy problem that can be fixed with running configure in the following way:

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure –sysconfdir=/etc

this causes the syslog-ng.conf file to go to /etc/syslog-ng.conf and adhere to the layout choices of rhel/centos. ... Read More

linux server: leif

solaris client: sisu

export the shares on leif to sisu and then exportfs -r

add an entry in /etc/hosts.allow on leif

on sisu modify the file /etc/auto_master and add the line

/- auto_direct

in /etc/auto_direct add lines like

/home -rw leif:/home

reboot and celebrate

if that is working its now time to set up nis to get remote logins

first set up the domainname in /etc/defaultdomain and use the domainname tool to set it

Create a directory named /var/yp/binding/domain

3. If you want the NIS client to broadcast for a NIS server (note: there must be a NIS server on your subnet), start NIS with /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart. If you want to manually specify one or more NIS server(s) to use, run ypinit -c and then /usr/lib/netsvc/yp/ypstart. Note that each manually specified NIS server must have an entry in ... Read More