I’m building a new server and decided to toss on an old crystalfontz lcdpanel. Not really anything hard about this (apt-get install lcdproc, edit /etc/LCDd.conf, run lcdproc) but it looks kinda nice. Sorry, my basement is a little loud around the server rack.

Not so clean.

tried to update cpan
perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Bundle::CPAN’

catastrophic errors all over the place. I thought it was just the Scalar List Utils error from a while ago, but Perl is hoaked - feeds you back pages of

/usr/lib/perl/5.8/CORE/perl.h:420:24: error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory

until you run:

apt-get install libc6-dev


Or apparently you need to install the build-essential package.

Ok, so you still need to install Scalar List Utils (because the XS version isn’t included)
Then install Compress-Zlib, and to do that, manually install all the prereqs.

PITA.

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) - The former chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo war crimes tribunals testified on Monday that the tribunals were tainted by political influence and evidence obtained through prisoner abuse.

Air Force Col. Moe Davis, who quit the war court last year, said political appointees and higher-ranking officers pushed prosecutors to file charges before trial rules were even written.

A supposedly impartial legal adviser demanded they pursue cases where the defendant “had blood on his hands” because those would excite the public more than mundane cases against document forgers and al Qaeda facilitators, Davis said.

He said the pressure ramped up after “high-value” prisoners with alleged ties to the September 11 plot were moved to Guantanamo from secret CIA custody shortly before the 2006 U.S. congressional elections and amid the ongoing U.S. presidential campaigns.

“There was that consistent theme that if we didn’t get this thing rolling before the election it was going to implode,” Davis testified in the courtroom at the remote Guantanamo naval base in Cuba.

“Once you got the victim families energized and the cases rolling, whoever won the White House would have difficulty stopping the proceeding.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080428/ts_nm/guantanamo_hearings_dc_5

So here I was, standing in the church parking lot, having responded to church advertisements hawking an “Encounter Weekend” — three solid days of sleep-away Christian fellowship that would teach me the “joy” of “knowing the truth” and “being set free.” That had sounded harmless enough, but now that I was here and surrounded by all of these blanket-bearing people, I was nervous. When most Americans think of the Christian right, they think of scenes from television — great halls full of perfectly groomed people in pale suits and light-colored dresses, smiling and happy and full of the Holy Spirit, robotically singing hymns at the behest of some squeaky-clean pastor with a baritone voice and impossible hair. We don’t get to see the utterly batshit world they live in, when the cameras are turned off and their pastors are not afraid of saying the really dumb stuff, for fear of it turning up on CNN. In American evangelical Christianity, in other words, there’s a ready-for-prime-time stage act — toned down and lip-synced to match a set of PG lyrics that won’t scare the advertisers — and then there’s the real party backstage, where the spiritual hair really gets let down. I was about to go backstage, to personally take part in the indoctrination process for a major Southern evangelical church. Waiting to board the bus for the Encounter Weekend, I had visions of some charismatic ranch-land Jesus, stoned on beer and the Caligula director’s cut and too drunk late at night to chase after the minor children, hauling me into a barn for an in-the-hay shortcut to truth and freedom. Ridiculous, of course, but I really was afraid, mostly of my own ignorance and prejudices. I had never been to something like this before, and I didn’t know how to act. I badly wanted to be invisible.

Rolling Stone: Jesus Made Me Puke

Ubuntu 8.04 was officially released as production code on Friday. I’d already been running beta versions of it on two laptops (or the wife was, I should say) so I felt that I pretty much was ready to take my production laptop to it as soon as it hit general release code.

All the public distribution sites were swamped, of course, but it was pretty easy to snag it via Ubuntu’s official torrent.

I burnt the iso out to CD and did a full clean install from it. It nice how little there is to backup when you run all your work through a windows virtual machine and all your personal life data lives on web based applications.

On my Dell D620, it loaded fine, detected all hardware, and was ready to go in about 15 minutes. I ran Envy to get the newest video drivers (nice that it’s included in packages now), and then followed the instructions for making VMWare workstation support the newest 2.6 kernel.

Encrypted LVM didn’t seem to be an option on my build, so I didn’t do it even though I’d been planning on it.

Also, Firefox Beta 3 started refusing to remember my bookmarks. I probably caused that by resetting it back to defaults initially, but got tired of that fast and moved by to Firefox 2. Really, probably should included a default browser in a distro that hasn’t made it to a general release.. but that’s just like my opinion, man.

Also, default fonts always seem sucky - am I the only one who notices?

SANTA ANA, California (Reuters) - A computer hacker testified on Wednesday that a News Corp (NWSa.N) unit hired him to develop pirating software, but denied using it to penetrate the security system of a rival satellite television service.

Christopher Tarnovsky — who said his first payment was $20,000 in cash hidden in electronic devices mailed from Canada — testified in a corporate-spying lawsuit brought against News Corp’s NDS Group (NNDS.O) by DISH Network Corp (DISH.O).

Yahoo! News

I’ve been a big fan of the $9.99 special wireless routers for a while, but I’ve started having problems recently. I’m not sure if it’s because everybody in the neighborhood is buying fios and all the lame actiontek routers are being installed with the wifi enabled, but for whatever reason I’ve been having a hard time associating and staying associated with my ap for a while. In the last couple days it’s gotten really bad, to the point where I’d put in the wpa shared key and retry for twenty minutes before being able to get on.

I decided what I needed to do was get some reasonable router and put some nice stable package on it like dd-wrt.

Digging through the dd-wrt forums, it looked like the recommended highest performance router was the Asus 500g Premium. I found it at NewEgg for $79, not a bad deal at all.

Factory out of the box, it’s a pretty neat little router - it’ll take an external hard drive, act as a UPNP stream server, print server, run bittorrent apps, fileshare, streaming webcam, etc.

Instructions for installing the dd-wrt firmware are here. I accidentally followed the ones for a slightly different model and did a bunch of tftp prep files that were entirely unnecessary, but ultimately had it running in ten minutes.

It’s pretty amazing the stuff people are doing on these little routers - here’s a bunch of prepackaged apps ready to be installed. If you want, you could run just about anything on this little device.

And only fair to say that I was reminded and inspired by this project.