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Some things make me feel like this.
Specifically, when people say things that don’t make sense, and when they keep insisting that they be done “in case it works”. Here’s a cheerful example:
him: can we try tracerouting their office IP: 172.26.123.45?, and see if that takes the same route they have given
me: that’s inside their private network(172.26) which is not routeable over the internet, so tracerouting it would not make sense. Also, his desktop is on a completely different network from the server.
him: Can you answer my question in the email you replied to?!
me: I just did, and explained why doing it would not make sense
him: Why can’t you just do what i asked?
me: because it wouldn’t work, is illogical, and doesn’t even make sense.
him: but why didn’t you at least try? Fine. if you can’t do it, I’ll ask someone who can.
me: *head explodes*
This is basically what I gleaned from my time trying to work remotely from Vrindavan. I think the Indian mobile Internet services at the time are just starting to take off, so the phone guys mostly know how to set it up, but a lot of western visitors are still in the dark. A lot of the information here is either shamelessly cribbed from xda-developers or is my own work. I had a hard time getting pppd on OS X to play nicely with Idea and ended up having to write my own dial script for pppd.options. I’ll add this shortly.
Airtel (Delhi)
APN: airtelmms.com
Username/Password blank
Send sms with body:
MMS ACTV
to
222
Idea (U.P.)
APN: internet
Username: internet
Password: internet
Vodafone U.P. (formerly Hutch)
SMS with Body:
ACT VMC699
to
56789
You can also activate Vodafone Live by sending
ACT VL
to 52586
…though why you’d want to, i can’t imagine
APN: portalnmms
IP Address: 10.10.1.100
So there I was, driving along to work this morning. This is something I usually do and thus cannot be considered unusual. My bike started fine as I got onto it at home, rode beautifully all the way down the M1, and handled the humdrum commute down the A1 into Holloway Road.
So you can imagine my surprise when as I attempted to accelerate away from the lights, the engine decided it didn’t want to do anything other than idle. Applying the slightest touch of throttle would completely stall the engine. The tappets sounded quite loud and clattery, but they normally do on an Enfield, so meh.
I couldn’t find the problem anywhere, the fuel was fine, electrics were fine, everything seemed to work. Thinking that it might be a ‘loose tappets’ problem, I whipped off the tappet cover to check them. Immediately I noticed that the exhaust clearance was way off – there was about half an inch of vertical movement! I then took off the exhaust rocker cover and saw this:
 ...showing the worrying state of the rocker I find it absolutely extraordinary that an engine can continue to run when the rocker is held down by one medium-tight nut, two loose ones, and one completely absent one! The pushrod was lifting the *whole assembly* every time the cam pushed it up, and the slight amount of remaining lever action opened the exhaust valve just enough to allow an ‘idling’ amount of exhaust to escape. Thankfully by this point I’d managed to solicit the services of a very fine wandering mechanic with an affinity for bullets. Some of you may recognise him. He even wore his “Royal Enfield” t-shirt, but I didn’t quite get it in frame in this picture.
 Hire This Man
The ReadyNAS 1100 is one of Netgear’s small business ‘NAS’ solutions. Cheap NAS devices became popular a few years ago when people started realising you didn’t need a Windows NT or 2003 server plus CALs just to serve files. They’re usually a Linux or *BSD machine with a couple of extra Ethernet interfaces. This is made interesting because a failed automatic firmware update completely took down our office NAS device. Pulling out the drives, I discovered the following interesting information:
- The ReadyNAS 1100 uses a Sparc processor
- The drives in the unit I played have three partitions
- Root volume is mirrored across *all* drives
- The ‘Data’ volume was RAID5+hotspare in this case
- Netgear don’t really do Linux very well
The three partitions on the drives kind of make sense. The first one is the root partition, and has all the expected binaries. The second I’ve not yet identified, and the third one is the ‘Data’ partition (2TB in my case). If you attempt to mount these drives in a normal linux machine, they’ll be correctly identified as part of a RAID set, though with a few glitches
md: invalid superblock checksum on sdb2
This is caused by the ReadyNAS using a Sparc processor and Linux 2.2, and thus needs a special case switch to mdadm.
Running the following command allowed me to at least mount the root array, leading me to believe the drives themselves are not too damaged. The mdadm command has autodetected the array devices on install, so does not need the devices specified (’partitions’ option in /etc/mdadm.conf)
# mdadm -A -U sparc2.2 /dev/md0
The user data partitions, however, were RAID5, and needed slightly more work. I managed to recreate these by creating the linux MD raid set with one drive missing, so that the whole thing wouldn’t get overwritten. After that, I found that there was an LVM volume inside the RAID5 container. After extracting the LVM config file from the beginning of the volume like so:
# dd if=/dev/md2 bs=512 count=255 skip=1 of=md-config
I managed to activate this using the Debian LVM tools:
# vgcfgrestore -f VolGroup01 VolGroup01
After which, vgscan would show the volume, and the following command could be used to bring it online:
# vgchange VolGroup01 -a y
After this, it was a simple case of running fsck -y on the device (in this case, /dev/c/c). Mounting the filesystem, however, was something different due to the fact that the ReadyNAS has a SPARC processor, it uses 16k blocks in it’s ext2/3 filesystem. This cannot be mounted on an x86 architecture Linux, so you have to use the usermode ext2/3 filesystem driver, ext2FUSE. This command should help:
# ext2fuse /dev/c/c /mnt/foo
Of course, this assumes you’ve got everything else in the chain working nicely…
 Valves looking slightly worse for wear So my trusty Bullet decided to eat a piston for dinner. Coming up the M1 after work, I was hammering along at the breathtaking speed of 65mph, when all of a sudden an horrific bang followed by lots of crunching and a complete loss of power alerted me to the fact that the engine had just destroyed itself. I had to push the bike home to Watford, which was fun. I was nearly on the exit slip road so it wasn’t too bad. What follows is some photos of the insides of the engine after dismantling it. Abhay and I eventually had to replace the piston and valves, with the useful result that I now know how to grind valves (using paste, etc) and am not afraid of taking the head off an engine! Thankfully the cylinder did not need a re-bore. Although it took a long time, most of that was getting hold of the parts and applying much blowtorch and rubber mallet to get the cylinder out. Abhay is a resourceful type, and is exactly the sort of mechanic you need to get these kind of repairs done.
 Remains of the piston  Bore (Unscathed, thankfully!)  The piston again, showing how the crown has completely separated
Sitting in the office today, I received the following message from a colleague:
hi Seth, are you actioning on <server>?
never mind, I am actioning on it now
Ignoring the fact that this guy is not a native English speaker, and therefore may get things like ‘on’ in the wrong place, this is a disgusting example of corporate-speak.
Corporate-speak needs to be wiped from the face of the Earth, before it consumes us all with it’s litany of arse-covering Weasel Words.
That is all.
Who on earth gets it into their head that some like this was a good idea to build? Whatever you plug it into, pain will result!
I was just shown something by a friend of mine (FrostyCoolSlug). Google Spreadsheets has the ability to incorporate live data from teh intarwebs in the coolest of ways:
=GoogleLookup(”Query”, “value”)
This allows you to do such things as:
=GoogleLookup(”London”, “population”)
=GoogleLookup(”India”, “GDP”)
…and also:
=GoogleLookup(”Water”, “boiling point”)
I certainly wish I’d had the ability to use tools like this for homework. This confirms my belief that education should be in terms of learning how to acquire knowledge, not the worthless cramming of facts. Facts and knowledge of processes is called experience…
For those ‘kulis in the UK that want an @gurukuli.co.uk email address, let me know, and as long as I’ve got slots left (I get 50 free ones, and I’ve used 4), and you’re not a knob, you can have one. Also, I haz a 125cc motorbike, yay! (Honda CG125 1983)
First off, I recognise that the DSA has a difficult job, what with having to decide who gets to throw around 2-ton plus lumps of metal full of explosives along a motorway at near-relativistic speeds. I am annoyed, however, at the attitude of our illustrious goverment in regard to motorcycles. Firstly, they let pretty much any 16 year old pillock with enough grey matter to follow instructions for a few hours ride a 50cc moped. These things can go fast enough to inflict pretty serious damage on the rider and anyone they crash into. They’re supposed to be restricted to 30mph, but who really thinks that’s actually going to happen? Mine could certainly do 45mph if pushed hard enough.
Second, Why on earth make it difficult for older, more responsible drivers to get onto a big bike? ‘Big’ in this regard means over 125cc, or more than 33bhp. It’s impossible to take your test on a bike you own unless it’s a 125, and you feel like wasting two years pootling around with what sounds like peas rattling in a can underneath you. Driving schools charge hefty fees to get training or tested on their bikes, though I’ll admit they do make it slighly easier to book tests, as they can book them up ahead of time.
These are the kind of fees you’re looking at to get on the road, assuming you already know how to ride a motorbike:
£120 for the ‘CBT’, what a load of old bollocks; “turn this to go, squeeze this to stop, turn left, turn right, that’ll be a lot of money please”
£80 for the bike test (Govt: “Let’s make the test Euro-compatible, O WAIT IT ARE ILLEGALZ DRIVING LIKE TAHT ON OUR ROADS LOL WTF?//!? Ok, let’s just make it more expensive then and delay the new style test…
£80 for ‘Tuition and Bike Hire’ Expensive, but whatever…
£250+ for ‘Compulsory Lessons’ that the driving school will make you take in order to hire their bike
I mean, come on, seriously guys! This is obvious price gouging on the part of the DSA and bike training schools…
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