This morning, Victoria and I headed up to Kelowna to pick up the boat. After finishing all the paperwork, getting plates for the trailer and buying some accessories, "Captain John" took us out for a brief spin in Okanagan Lake. It was a lot of fine and it really made me feel much more comfortable with the boat. Great service from Dockside Marine.

My only complaint would be that we weren't all that impressed with how clean the boat was when we picked it up. We were assured that it would be fully detailed. It was reasonably clean but there was a lot of dirt/dust/grit all over her and she really needed a good waxing.

We got the boat out of the water, locked everything down and headed for Penticton with our fingers crossed. Well, we made it just fine. The van worked perfectly.

Then I spent the afternoon washing, waxing and doing some general cleanup on her. She looks much shinier.

Here's some pics.... see if you can spot the bratty girl....

We were helped by Steve. He was great. We told him that we were new to boating and that we weren't exactly sure of what we wanted. He said that they had just gotten in a 2005 Bayliner 175 the day before and it hadn't even been cleaned up yet. The boat is 5 years old but had been sitting in storage for the last two years as the previous owner run into financial difficulties and couldn't afford the boat anymore.

Long story short....we bought ourselves a boat...

Download the latest build

Extract it.

Prerequisites:
# pacman -S python-geoip

You need pod2man in your PATH otherwise the configure script fails.

Add the following to your ~/.bashrc

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin/perlbin/core

Close your term session and reopen for change to work.

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt

Get the following error: configure: error: Kerberos library requires -lcrypto but --with-ssl not specified

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt --with-krb5=/usr/include

Get the following error:
checking for krb5.h... yes
checking whether the Kerberos library is Heimdal or MIT... no
configure: error: Kerberos not found

Looking a few lines above that and from a google search I see that the script is looking at /usr/inclue/krb5/krb5.h which doesn't work. Tried this:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt --with-krb5=/usr
...
checking for krb5.h... yes
checking whether the Kerberos library is Heimdal or MIT... HEIMDAL
checking whether HEIMDAL includes krb5_kt_resolve... no
checking whether HEIMDAL includes krb5_kt_resolve (linking with -lresolv)... no
configure: error: Usable HEIMDAL not found

This is frustrating and the solution is damn simple:

$ ./configure --prefix=/opt --with-ssl

Looks like there's some sort of license issue with openssl - http://www.ethereal.com/lists/ethereal-dev/200407/msg00402.html

$ make

Go grab a coffee...this takes a while.....

$ sudo make install
$ /opt/bin/wireshark

Now it won't work as a regular user doesn't have permissions to access the network card in promiscous mode. Here's the fix (search for 'wireshark' on the Arch Linux Wiki)

# groupadd wireshark
# gpasswd -a "your_username" wireshark
# chgrp wireshark /opt/bin/dumpcap
# chmod 754 /opt/bin/dumpcap
# setcap 'CAP_NET_RAW+eip CAP_NET_ADMIN+eip' /opt/bin/dumpcap

This is what I did to get my laptop to suspend when closing the lid. Found the instructions at http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_Thinkpad_X300#Suspend_.2F_Hibernate

# pacman -S uswsusp

Test suspending:
# /usr/sbin/s2ram -f

Then install acpid

# pacman -S acpid

Add it to /etc/rc.conf DAEMONS section before hal.

# nano /etc/acpi/handler.sh

Note: In above link it says to edit default.sh. That file doesn't exist. It's now handler.sh

Change the 'button/lid' section like this:

button/lid)
#echo "LID switched!">/dev/tty5
;;

to

button/lid)
/usr/sbin/s2ram -f
echo "LID switched!">/dev/tty5
;;

15 minutes later I've written and passed the exam with only 3 questions wrong out of 36.

What is wrong with this picture? How the hell is this kind of useless exam making boating safer? What a complete and total joke.

See you on the water.

Did the 4 hour exam in about 2:15.

90%!! WOOT!!!

The League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) had a booth at LinuxFest this year. I spoke for a while with one of their volunteers and was impressed with what he had to say. Basically it came down to the fact that Doctors, Lawyers, etc all have professional organizations to represent them with governments and other bodies. Why don't we have such a thing for all of us System Administrators/Network Admins/Security Admins and the myriad of other titles we get when working in IT?

I decided to join them. If you're any sort of System Administrator I'd recommend doing the same thing. It's only $50US a year.

Join today

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Repo

I took a look at it today and the site seems pretty legit and there are, at what first appears to be, some amazing deals like 13.3" Macbooks selling for $70, Nokia N900 unlocked phones for $7.00. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. How could this company be making any money? Now I figured it out.

First off here's how the auctions work:

The items are listed on the site for 48 hours and start at $0.00.
Each bid puts the price up by 1 cent.
When the auction gets down to 20 seconds left and somebody bids again, the countdown goes back to 20 seconds.

Here's how they're making their money:
Each bid costs 75 cents. That's the profit!

As an example, if a Macbook goes for (to make the math easier) $100 that is 10,000 bids at $0.75 each! That's $7500 for the company. Nice profit.

They do auction off bid packages with more bidding credits that seem to go for pretty cheap but again the company is already making money on the packages when they sell them.

It also looks like the same group of people always win the auctions so I think if you didn't get in on day one with this site you're pretty much screwed. I'd say stay away from this site.

Has anybody here had any luck with wavee.com?

UPDATE: Been thinking about it and actually it's not that bad. For example, I just watched a Nokia N900 go for about $5.00US. So that's basically $375 for bidding for the company plus $5 for the item and $7 for shipping. Now if there was 4 people who bid on the item and they each bid an equal amount of times the item only cost the winner $93.75 bidding +$12 for the item with shipping. Not a bad deal. Although it's gotta suck for those people who didn't win and spent $94 each just for the privilege of bidding. I'll keep my eye on it.