Neurotech - the weblog of Luke Reeves

Finally, after a huge nightmare, the DNS servers I’ve setup work great. Props go to Peter Pentchev, who basically gave me a ton of free tech support. So once again TinyDNS rocks.

Once again I chickened out and didn’t take any pictures of Manila. So here’s one I found on the “Internet”:

The flight was strange; there was a medical emergency and we did a really fast drop and landing, but then Will and I expected the attendents to tell everyone to stay put. But they didn’t. Which might mean that someone died on the plane. Of course, no one mentioned anything about it.

Once we got off the plane strangely enough there was another security check with X-rays and everything even though we were leaving the plane, not boarding. I guess nobody trusts the Manila airport security.

Other than that I’m very excited to get back to Japan on Friday.

So Manila is fine so far, the meeting went well and I’m getting ready to crash (we have to leave the hotel at 6AM to catch the flight). I haven’t taken any pictures yet.

I just wanted to say though, when I was on the plane coming here I caught the flick 50 First Dates. I had never really heard of it until I saw it then, and I gotta say: holy shit. This is probably one of the best movies I’ve seen, which boggles my mind. Usually Adam Sandler is partially funny, and his last attempt at a romantic comedy (Punch Drunk Love) didn’t do anything for me. But 50 First Dates was absolutely great. I was laughing my ass off for the first half and almost crying for the second half. That’s pretty rare for me since I basically have no emotions (Matt can testify to that).

Anyways, I watched it and I was “moved”, actually moved by it. So we get off the plane and I’m still in this mindset of thinking about this movie, when two of the guys I travelled with (who weren’t sitting me) start talking about watching the same movie and how it did the same stuff for them. So it’s not just me being nuts.

I’m going to Manila again tomorrow for a two-day stretch, same as last time. Meetings and what not, fun stuff. I’ll actually try to take some pictures this trip though.

So I’ve been wrestling with some funky DNS problem for a while now, and I just can’t figure out the issue. I’m using TinyDNS as the nameserver on two machines, and something keeps going wacky with the MX record for neuro-tech.net. When I check it out using the DNS tools (dig/host/whatever), it looks OK:

luke@flux:~$ host -t mx neuro-tech.net
neuro-tech.net mail is handled by 0 a.mx.neuro-tech.net.

Then when I lookup the MX name, it seems correct also:

luke@flux:~$ host -a a.mx.neuro-tech.net
Trying "a.mx.neuro-tech.net"
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 10133
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 2, ADDITIONAL: 2

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;a.mx.neuro-tech.net.           IN      ANY

;; ANSWER SECTION:
a.mx.neuro-tech.net.    85308   IN      A       212.13.198.74

;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
neuro-tech.net.         258108  IN      NS      ns2.oceanlake.com.
neuro-tech.net.         258108  IN      NS      ns1.oceanlake.com.

;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.oceanlake.com.      171708  IN      A       69.20.65.214
ns2.oceanlake.com.      171708  IN      A       69.20.65.215

Received 134 bytes from 127.0.0.1#53 in 3 ms

To me it all looks good. But for some reason, mail sent from Gmail bounce about half the time with the error message being “Unable to determine MX for neuro-tech.net”, and I periodically get bounced and unsubscribed from Debian mailing lists. I’ve even appealed to the TinyDNS mailing list for help; a few people helped out and I thought I had corrected the records, but it still has problems.

Ugh.

If anybody else wants GMail invitations, post here. It seems like Google is giving everyone five a day - if they’re ramping up this fast, I’d guess that the beta is almost finished.

My distribution of choice has been Debian for quite some time now (at least several years), and I’ve had only one complaint with the entire system - the installer.

I’ve switched over to using Debian at work whenever I can (previously I’d used things like RedHat due to support for Oracle). However, the installation process has been a nightmare due to a how massively outdated the boot image kernels are. Most of the systems at work are HP D325 desktops - which you can buy with Linux - so I figured Debian would be a snap. Unfortunately, neither the nForce2 chipset or 3Com590 NIC are supported on the old-ass Debian installers I’ve used. So to get the system on quickly I resorted to using an extra NIC - one detectable by the 2.2/”2.4bf” kernel - and then using apt-get to pull down enough of the system to roll my own modern kernel. That was horrible due to the lack of DMA transfers on the IDE system (meaning disk performance was utterly horrible).

No longer though. There’s a superb - and I mean superb - new installer for Debian that I’ve somehow missed all this time. It works flawlessly on these systems, and the actual procedure itself is nice and streamlined. The only thing missing from the base install was ACPI support (which I could add separately, but the only advantage that gives me is a soft power switch on these systems).

So that’s it. If you want to try Debian, I highly recommend trying this new installer.

Firefox 0.9 has been released. It has a new default theme, so don’t be all shocked or anything. Lots of updates and major bug fixes (as usual).

The other Luke got married this weekend - congratulations!

I finally obtained a copy of The Atrocity Archives, by Charles Stross… I had contemplated ordering it directly from his publisher but since I’m moving around so much I have no idea where I’d order it to. Luckily there’s a kickass Borders shop in Singapore where I’ve found a ton of good science fiction books (as well as the previously mentioned Japanese study guides).

Strange shit always happens there though. The first time I went, I was standing at the sf hardcover section and a woman approached me and asked to talk to me. Stop me if I’ve told this one before.

Anyways, this lady lays on me this enormous story about some guy she’s sorta of dating and actually having sex with, and shows me every SMS that was sent between her and him. All this is happening while I’m trying to look at books - she doesn’t care though, she just keeps talking. The first thing that I thought was, “Scam.” So I see Chris (dude I work with) walk by the aisle and I mouth “help me”. He comes over and stands like right between me and this woman. She just looks at him and says, “Excuse us, we’re talking” and pulls me towards her.

Even if it was a scam and she was just distracting me for something, I wasn’t worried since I had no money. So after 15 minutes of boring agony she asks me if she should trust this creepy bastard that she’s with - she needs a male opinion (am I qualified for that?). I just tell her no, and walk away. That was the end of it.

So today I’m browsing, in the sf hardcover section again, exact same spot. And some Asian dude comes up to me. He’s totally, um, well, cockeyed, so I wasn’t sure that he was talking to me when he said, “Can I ask you something?” I was like, uhhhh, sure… Already flashing back to the previous incident.

He then asks me if I live in Singapore. I’m like no, just staying here for work. He asks if it’s a good city. I reply that, yeah, I think it’s OK. Then he says, “I’m thinking of moving here from America - are there a lot of Americans?” I tell him that I’m not sure, and said something like, “I don’t know, I’m Canadian.” He then proceeds to just turn around and walk away.

That was the extent of my awesome day. I also picked up novels by Greg Bear and Frank Herbert, for what it’s worth.