puppetlabs dist for arm

W: Failed to fetch http://apt.puppetlabs.com/dists/precise/Release  Unable to find expected entry 'main/binary-armhf/Packages' in Release file (Wrong sources.list entry or malformed file)

Bummer! I guess I can't use the puppet dist from puppet labs directly :-< May be worth the time to compile/install manually but for now - meh :->

Raspberry Pi 512m model ram

So this is interesting, by default ( at least with AdaFruit's occidentalis 0.2, http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-raspberry-pi-educational-linux-distro/occidentalis-v0-dot-2 ) I was only seeing the first 256m of the ram.

Looking at the documentation http://elinux.org/RPi_config.txt it looks like a simple modification to /boot/config.txt addressed the issue:

gpu_mem_512=8

pi@raspberrypi ~ $ free -m

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           486         56        429          0          9         28
-/+ buffers/cache:         18        467
Swap:           99          0         99

It looks like the kernel actually took 16 meg instead of 8 like I wanted but I'll take it :-> I'm logging in only via ssh so I don't see a reason to waste memory on video output.

I can haz pi!

Well, got my raspberry pi this afternoon. Thankfully, I ordered it before the hurricane hit!

So far, I've almost managed to fry it - off by a pin or two oops!

Oct 30 14:44:31 foo kernel[0]: USB Notification:  The device "XHCI Root Hub USB 2.0 Simulation" @ 0x14000000 has caused an overcurrent condition.  The hub it is attached to has been disabled

Thankfully, apple put in a safeguard to prevent mishaps like that from frying your stuff - at least I hope. I need to check the pi board, now if I can just get the tx/rx of the console cable going :->

Thought on technical documentation

Had an interesting IM exchange with a co-worker:

me: Where is the documentation describing how to get the uid of a server?
co-worker:
co-worker: I emailed it to you
me: Just a thought but email does not count as documentation. Does this exist anywhere in a doc or maybe as a puppet fact?

My co-worker has yet to respond and its been about 15 minutes.

This does raise a very interesting issue. Documentation is very important and it should be in a common location. To me, email just is not documentation - its a heads-up but not documentation.

Am I crazy that I don't like email? In fact, I actually hate it. Its a "necessary evil" but that does not mean someone can send me something and expect that I have added it to my ubermind and will hoard that data away somewhere for eternity including instant recall.

Especially when the way to find out is so freaking simple it should be made in to a puppet fact and culled in to puppet's inventory service ( http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/inventory_service.html and/or http://docs.puppetlabs.com/puppetdb/1/spec_q_facts.html )

ipmitool -H ipmi_host -U ipmi_user -P ipmi_pass fru | grep 'Board Serial' | awk '{print $4}'
ABC123FGYM

( obviously, those are changed values - use your imagination :-> )

Political donations and effectiveness

So,

I had an interesting thought a few minutes ago regarding an email. This email was requesting a donation towards a given candidate to essentially help throw more advertising up.

So, my question is - just how much benefit do these ads get? I'm sure there is a way to calculate a return on investment somehow right?

Besides that, I think at this point in the elections damn-near everyone knows who they are going to vote for. So really, these donations and ads are for the people who don't yet know who they want to vote for on a given spot. The cost/benefit just seems ... kinda crazy.

Our politicians are spending a large fortune to get/stay in office - OUR money that is. ( our meaning any donations, not public funds of course - that would be illegal :-> )

Something I've griped about for some time while I'm at it. We need term limits on ( all of ) our federal and state positions. No more career politicians - people should jump in to politics for a while and then get on with the rest of their life.

Slow TimeMachine backups on osx lion

So, approx 2 months ago I upgraded my laptop to lion. My backups became noticeably slower - they were slow has hell before but in 10.7 they were just unbelievable. Think system lagging to the point of unusable - that slow or worse.

I did find a good solution: Disable spotlight services.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Considering I never use spotlight to find anything, its just wasted cpu cycles anyway.

My backups now take a small fraction of the time they used to take - few minutes at a time unless I pulled down something big ( think os patches or something )

My laptop ( 2008 macbook pro ) is now usable though I think I'm going to need to replace the fans and am considering replacing the hard drive since its about 5 years old already. Hmmm, ssd? http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-830-MZ-7PC512N-Internal-Laptop/dp/B005T3GPXO/ref=wl_it_dp_o_npd?ie=UTF8&coliid=I2K5BO82B7593V&colid=1HSSX1GJ9ZT27 or maybe one of the intel drives but I'm thinking of just saving the $400 or so.

64-bit goodness?

so I've been doing load testing with emprix eload/oracle application testing suite. among the many issues I've had with it: running out of heap on the. controller and agent process

starting in version 9, they switched from a fairly light install ) about 400 meg ) to a rather hefty 1.5gb download. they used to run jboss 4 ( which was old at the time anyway but! ) and was 100% windows based. also was only 32-bit

starting in 9.2 they posted some support for 64-bit. I've regularly had oom issues on both the controller and the agent. because its 32-bit I'm restricted to 2gb heap which is a shame. their support tech tells me "well, you clearly need more heap - upgrade the hosts to 64-bit windows and that should fix your problem

I ran the upgrade, 64-bit 2008R2. guess what, installed 9.3 ( latest as of today ) and it's ..... 32-bit. great ;) opened a ticket 24 hours ago and guess what - no response yet ;) I'm so shocked!