Mine the Harvest

Recently I have learned about a little Linux tool I wish I had become familiar with a very long time ago – the checkinstall program. I had an mistakenly assumed concept of what this tool did, believing that it checked or verified the installation, as in something one would run after using the usual ./configure && make && make install steps if you later wanted to verify everything was still where it ought to be.

Nope. And yet its so fun to make instant conclusions like that!

checkinstall is the bomb. Of course the slightest use of man checkinstall would have educated me, but it came to me through a colleague at work whom directed me to this wondrous gem.

With checkinstall you actually create your own .rpm or .deb packages which you can then install as an rpm directly.

There are several benefits to this:

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This weekend Syd and I completed our Diver Stress and Rescue training.

We are now certified Rescue Divers which along with our previous Advanced Open Water training, and with the number of dives we have completed also earns us the highest recreational rating of Master Divers. This marks the sixth diving course we have completed. While there are other recreational courses we can take, the next significant training would be in the professional / technical areas such as Cave diving, Dive Control Specialist, tech diving certifications, etc. which we are interested in looking into.

This was a great course that covered self rescue skills as well as rendering assistance to another diver or rescuing them. The primary focus was on accident prevention by early recognition of stress factors which if not addressed lead to panic and resulting accidents or dive injuries. It was pretty informative really. It also dispelled some myths you accumulate, such as when people are drowning on the surface – contrary to the typical TV show depiction – they are too panic ridden and are often unable to call for help and thus can just slip quietly below the surface.

The skills part was done at Hudson Grotto – our second dive there. We practiced the methods of towing a fatigued or unconscious diver, how to handle a person who is panicking on the surface or at depth, how to control a person without allowing them to put you in a dangerous situation, etc. A person in a complete panic state may try to climb up on you, pushing you under, grab on to you, etc. but there are some simple techniques that allow you to stay safe and in control – like just descending beneath them and observing them. They most certainly will not follow you down!

We also practiced recovering an unconscious diver from depth, getting them back to shore and out of the water and running through mock scenarios of handling bystanders, contacting EMS, etc. I can tell you, carrying a guy out of the water is not as easy as you think.

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Taking my Cisco classes has been great, and I’ve certainly been learning a lot more about networking, routers, routing protocols, TCP/IP, network design, WANs, VLANs and such. But a few weeks ago I came across this killer site for OpenWRT which allows you to install Linux onto Linksys and other routers which have enough memory and use supported chip sets. I love Linux and knew immediately knew I would have to do this.

My first attempt on my own Belkin bricked it -it didn’t have enough memory (knew it but couldn’t resist trying). Getting the correct original firmware back on it was a nightmare – THANKS BELKIN for putting about a dozen incorrect firmwares out there and utterly hiding the correct one for this version. Appreciate it.

But then a friend of mine had a Linksys WRT54G ver. 2.0 that he just replaced as it was giving him some trouble and he graciously donated it to science. Perfect!

Now that I had supported hardware, I simply had to play with this. It sat several weeks as I was busy with class, but then last weekend I finally got to try it out.

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I love making old technology live on some times – today’s bleeding edge is all fine, but give me a nice low-tech solution any day.

Last weekend I had a fun time playing with a server I am picking up from work. I found a Sun Cobalt XTR laying about, forgotten by the flow of time, and it seems to have followed me home. A co-worker and I played around with it at work first, fired it up and ensured it still had a pulse. I decided to toy with it to see if it could fulfill my long held desire of having a RAID file server – a central dumping ground where I can at last place all my completely invaluable files and accumulate even gigs more! My digital pack-rat mentality can finally realize its full innate potential. I can save everything forever – just like that Microsoft guy and his “My Life” project. Or at least have a stable place to back my other systems up to.

So – I brought the box home and it looks like this:

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Syd read an article recently stating that each hour of exercise had been shown to extend your life by an hour. This made her think: doesn’t that just cancel each other out?