lori's car
Lori got a new car, so her old one is officially for sale.
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/Other/for_sale/celica/
Let me know if you or someone you know is interested.
by popular request
On this blog, popular request is one person. So by popular request, I will talk about Kaelyn.
More pictures of her birthday party;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/kaelyn_first_bday/
My Dad and Jac's are the new ones. That's the end of her birthday pictures.
holy tutorial batman! synergy and encryption
Who remembers the bad TV show Batman? Robin loved to say "holy <something> batman!". Who could forget the bad animated pop-ups that said "BAM!" "SMACK!" "POW!". Man that show was great.
In honor of Eddie's comment about my holy tutorial I figured I'd give you all another one. I find myself setting up convoluted/complicated things on my computers sometimes and then never documenting them anywhere. Since a blog is supposed to be about not only sharing thoughts and ideas but also putting things back in to the Internet I figured I'd do my documenting here.
So next we look at synergy and encryption.
Synergy (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/) is an app that works in Windows, Mac OS, and Unix to let you share your mouse and keyboard. I use it every once in a while at home, but I use it every day at work. I have in front of me; three computers, four screens, and only a single keyboard and mouse.
The only down side to synergy is that there is no built in encryption. I don't feel safe typing in passwords without encryption, it's just a bad idea.
Due to the PC based firewall that runs on our corporate IT standard XP machines I can't run the synergy server in Windows, so all of my encryption is from the two Windows machines to the FreeBSD machine (same one I'm backing up to from the previous post). In the past I've used PuTTY and manually opened it each time my PC booted. This gets old after a couple years, and it also leaves a window open in my taskbar I wasn't interested in staring at all the time.
First, install synergy clients on the Windows machines and the server on the Unix machine. The Windows clients are pretty self explanatory, the only catch is you want to tell it the server is localhost since the connection will be encrypted locally via an SSH tunnel. Also, make note of the Screen Name under Advanced, and make sure you have it set to AutoStart when you login.
On the server, make sure it's set to start at boot (a million different Unix variants here, you'll have to figure it out yourself). Then create a config. Here is what mine looks like;
section: screens
FreeBSD:
Windows1:
Windows2:
end
section: links
Windows1:
right = Windows2
Windows2:
left = Windows1
right = FreeBSD
FreeBSD:
left = Windows2
end
Now make it start.
Next, install myentunnel from http://nemesis2.qx.net/software-myentunnel.php
I used the base install so I could just control it starting from my startup menu.
Now install puttygen from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html
If you've already generated an OpenSSH Key in Cygwin as part of my previous post you'll want to just import that one by going to the Conversions Menu selecting Import key, and opening your id_rsa from the home dir of cygwin/.ssh. If you don't have one already, you can just click Generate. If you had to generate one, copy the contents of the public key and put them in the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the Unix host. Make sure it's chmod'ed to 600 so sshd can consider it secure and use it.
Now, save the private key, say ok to having to passphrase, and save it in your myentunnel dir as "keyfile.ppk".
Close puttygen, and open myentunnel.
Under the Settings tab that comes up enter the name of your SSH
Server, Username. I selected Connect on Startup, Reconnect on Failure,
Use Private Key, and Verbose Logging.
Under the Tunnels tab, enter 24800:localhost:24800
24800 is the port synergy uses and this just makes it tunnel locally as 24800 and then on the remote host, forward the data to localhost 24800.
Now, click Connect, wait for the lock in the system tray to go green, and then click Hide.
Lastly, create a shortcut to the executable in you startup folder and you're done!
With the SSH tunneling in place you can see synergy gets pretty powerful. I can actually share a mouse and keyboard in my house when the laptop on my desk is VPN'ed in to work by SSH tunneling back in to the house. It's a *bit* slow, but it definitely works.
There are other alternatives here, including using stunnel, or even more cygwin work, but myentunnel seems to work great so far for me.
backing up windows to unix with rsync
My IT staff at work doesn't provide a standard way to back up my computer. There are a ton of very cheap online backup systems that work extremely well in Windows, but I would violate my work policy on information. So instead I just did it myself locally. I actually have three work computers, and one of them is a very basic stock install of FreeBSD. This works great, so I can rsync both the Windows XP laptop and desktop to the FreeBSD machine and use that as my backup storage. Here is how I did it.
First, install cygwin from http://www.cygwin.com/. While installing this be sure to select Net/rsync, Net/openssh, and Editors/vim.
Just a random cygwin sanity note (besides installing vim) when you have the command window open; if you right click on the menu bar, hit defaults, and click quick edit mode it makes dealing with copy/paste a bit more reasonable.
Now, the first thing is to create an ssh key so you can copy files without entering a password. To do this, use the command ssh-keygen. The defaults are fine, and be sure to just hit enter at the passphrase prompt. Now, you'll need to take the contents of ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub and get them in to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the server where the backup will occur. Be sure authorized_keys is only readable by your user id or sshd won't use it. chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys is all you need for that.
Be sure to check that ssh is working with the key auth (no password/passphrase required) before moving on.
Now we're ready to set up the backup.
First create a shell script to run in cygwin to do the actual backup. Here is the one I wrote;
#!/usr/bin/bash
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/bin
/usr/bin/rsync -a --delete --numeric-ids "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings/<local username>/" <remote username>@<remote host>:<backup directory> 2>&1 | egrep -v 'Device or resource busy|Outlook/.*\.(ost|pst).*(Permission denied|failed verification)|some files could not be transferred' | while read out
do
echo `date +%F-%H:%M:%S` $out
done > /cygdrive/c/Documents\ and\ Settings/<local username>/backup.log
You'll note I'm only backing up the contents of my own Documents and Settings folder. You may want to do more.. I'm also ignoring a few errors I expect to get semi-often so I can see actual failures. The script then date/time stamps the output and puts a log in my Documents and Settings folder.
Now make the script executable (chmod 755) and run it to make sure it works. It may take a few minutes since this is a full backup.
Next you need to install StartX from http://www.naughter.com/startx.html
This will make it so when we run the task no DOS windows pop up and it will be completely invisible.
Last but not least the task needs to be scheduled. To do this, go to Scheduled Tasks in Control Panel. In there, double click on Add Scheduled Task. You'll want to browse to StartX when it asks what program to run. Tell it you want to run it daily. Personally I told it to start at midnight every day, starting today. After you fill in your auth info check that you want to open advanced properties and hit finish. In the window that comes up add the arguments for what we are running. First add /B to make the window not appear, then add "C:\cygwin\bin\bash -c <location of backup script>"". Be sure to also hit that you only want it to run if you're logged in. This will help ensure that you don't have to change your password in the scheduled task everytime you change your password for the machine.
Next hit the Schedule tab and the Advanced button. Click Repeat task and now you can make it run multiple times throughout the day. This is a very non-intuitive spot in Windows, you're basically running a daily task that repeats. I'm not sure why you couldn't just run it in minutes or hours in the first place. Anyways, I told it to repeat every 2 hours and run for a duration of 23 hours and 59 minutes.
In the Settings tab I also told it to kill off the task if it runs for 2 hours since I'm on a LAN and a few GBytes don't take but a few minutes.
And now.. you're done.
There are few alternate ways to do this. I could have not used the StartX/scheduled tasks but used cygrunsrv and had it execute crond in unix, but I didn't want to install extra services non-native to windows. You could also have the shell script actually email you the log results when there are some, but my IT stuff does a good job of blocking outbound SMTP and I don't care that much about bouncing around it. Just remember to install some of the mail packages in cygwin if you're doing that.
I'm also going to setup an rsync to copy the data of both machines to each other so I can see docs on either machine, but it'll be more of the same, except adding the --exclude command to my backup script to make sure I don't backup the copy of the backup in my backup.
Say that ten times fast.
kaelyn's birthday
Just think, Kaelyn's birthday is coming up in less than two months. I guess that means it's time to update the pictures from last year!
Denise's pictures from K's bday;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/kaelyn_first_bday/denise/
Chris' pictures;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/kaelyn_first_bday/chris/
More to come, but I'm tired right now.
shock and gas
I input what Lori and I spent on gas per month into Excel, computed a 12 month floating average to smooth it out, and finally graphed it. (numbers removed intentionally)
Ouch! I only started tracking in June last year, so the first few months aren't very smooth. After that you can see the natural progression of rising gas costs. It'll be interesting to see what that graph looks like next June! (someone remind me..)
Of course, then there is the shock, kinda. Eddie beat me to the blogging punch on George Carlin dying over the weekend. I agree with him that it's sad, but shocking? Hrm, he was looking pretty bad the last few years, I can't say I'm shocked at all.
R.I.P. George Carlin, you made me laugh more times than I can count!
(from What Planet Am I On?)
W O O H O O !
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=19791167&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=68561&rfi=6
If this city is ever going to see an increase home values, retail stores, and functioning infrastructure this was a requirement. Look at that, the government actually works sometimes! It doesn't even matter when it's built, just that it is on the books as a future project. Vote yes!
awesome prank
This is great.
Guy sent it to me on LinkedIn.
doping and cycling
I like bikes. I don't ride mine enough, so I live vicariously through reading about other people riding theirs and watching TV. In honor of this problem and the fact my health is a valid excuse right now Lori recorded a recent episode of "Intervention" on A&E. Well, A&E HD actually!
It's a show about drug addicts that family and/or friends stage an intervention for to get them off drugs. It's a pretty surreal show, but this time it was about Chad Gerlach. I'd never heard of this guy, but through that magical google thing I found out he rode in some pretty impressive circles. Julian Dean, Scott Moninger, Jonathan Vaughters, Bobby Julich, and Lance Armstrong. Then his temper got him kicked off U.S. Postal Service (the team Lance won 6 of 7 tours on) and a bunch of other well known teams (Navigators, Sierra Nevada, etc..).
So naturally he started smoking crack and living on the streets of Sacramento. He could have easily ended up riding in the Tour de France, and instead he was homeless. Awesome.
Anyways, it was a pretty interesting watch and you can read more about him here;
Elsewhere in cycling, the latest golden boy (Tom Boonen) tested positive for cocaine out of competition. It isn't specifically against the rules but the Tour de France has already announced he won't be invited. Cycling tests more than any other sport on Earth, and is known as a sport full of dopers. I wouldn't be shocked if the majority of athletes in every major sport on that same Earth were using some illegal substance. Woo!
sick of our wedding yet?
This completes every picture I have or have been sent.
If someone has more, or higher quality pictures please let me know!
Chris';
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/wedding/chris/
Marcella's;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/wedding/marcella/
Lori's Uncle Randy and Aunt Andy;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/wedding/randy_and_andy/
My Dad;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/wedding/dad.html
If you haven't been following along, the index is just one level of hierarchy above all of these;
http://www.disturbed.org/gallery/v/mikes_pictures/events/wedding/
Let me know what you think!