flashinthepan

Yesterday my family and I went to the Dickson Dam Reservoir for Keilan’s second birthday party. We’d purchased an old boat from my brother last year, but it needed a little engine work. We finally had it fixed and were excited to try it out. The only thing that sat heavy like a lump in my stomach was the thought of the dreaded boat launch and backing up the trailer with a whole bunch of people waiting on me and watching.

I have very little experience backing up with a trailer and I knew I should have practised more. We got to the lake and I was happy to see that there was almost no one there. I thought to myself, “This might not be so bad.” With no one waiting on me, I can take my time. We got the boat prepped to launch, and by that time there were a couple vehicles in line to launch their boats. We got in line and by the time it was my turn, there must have been ten vehicles behind me. The lump in my stomach became a lead brick.

I started to panic a little bit inside. I tried to back up the trailer too quickly and it did not go well. After my third attempt, someone in line behind me came up and asked if I needed some help. I said, “That would be great,” and he patiently came alongside me and walked me through backing the trailer down the launch.

I decided right then that I was not going to pull that boat out of the water until after every last trailer was gone from the parking lot. That way I’d have lots of time and no pressure.

We had a great day at the beach with a couple other families. My plan of waiting until everyone else left was coming along nicely until the thunderstorm started to build in the West. The thought of five kids on the beach or sitting in their seats in the van during a thunderstorm while I waited on all the other boats to leave wasn’t a good one. I waited as long as I could, but the wind and the waves came up quickly and we finally had to get the car in line to pull the boat out of the water.

Backing the empty trailer down was even worse. I tried to go slower this time, but I couldn’t see the trailer out the back window. Again, I knew I should have practised in an empty parking lot before we went out. After a number of failed attempts, another person from the line behind us came and helped me get the trailer down the ramp.

I’ve learned my lesson. Never again until I practice, practice, practice!

I’ve been working with X-Cart shopping cart software for just over 6 years now and I still have to say that it’s my favorite cart package. Although it took a little time to learn the ins and outs of it at first, with the full source code available, the customization options are pretty much endless, limited only by your skill with php or your budget to have mods built for you by a developer.

Over the years, I’ve tried many add-ons to the base cart software to try and improve conversion rates including more than one trust logo. A trust logo is supposed to make the customer more at ease letting them know that you’ve taken steps to ensure that their credit card information is secure. That being said, you’d think that one trust logo is as good as another. I can now say definitively that this is not the case.

All trust logos are not created equal. I came across Trust Guard in the X-Cart user forums a number of months ago. They made a claim to increase your conversion rate or get double your money back. This was quite a bold offer and they had a 60 day free trial, so I thought I’d take them up on it and try them out. I was not disappointed.

Our site’s conversion rate increased by 20% within a very short time of implementing the Trust Guard seal within X-Cart. As an added bonus, their PCI scanning service is very thorough and provides a report in quite a nice format.

All in all, the addition of the Trust Guard seal to our X-Cart store was money well invested. Trust Guard and X-Cart really is a sweet combination!

Though Gentoo Linux is my main operating system, there are still a handful of Windows apps that I need to run in my day-to-day business operations. I’ve been using VMware Workstation to take care of these for quite some time. Over the years VMware has really matured and I’ve generally been quite happy with it. I’ve been able to do almost anything I needed to in Windows on VMware as opposed to Windows on a physical workstation.

With VMware Workstation version 7 coming out not long ago, I was excited to see improved 3D graphics support. I installed the updated version on my desktop system running Nvidia graphics and things loaded up without a hitch. When it came to my laptop running an Intel GMA 4500MHD graphics adapter however, things weren’t quite so seamless. I fired up my Windows 7 virtual machine in VMware Workstation for the first time and got a disappointing message: 3D Acceleration will be disabled along with something to the effect of having a video card that didn’t fully support OpenGL.

Since one, I don’t like error messages and two, I don’t like the idea of decreased functionality in my workstations, I started out on my quest to fix this. The first stop was the VMware logs (found in the folder that contains your virtual machine). On looking through the log files, I noticed some various OpenGL extensions that were flagged as missing. One in particular stood out as it was flagged as required: mks| GLUtil_InstallExtensionLists: Missing required extension GL_EXT_texture_compression_s3tc. A little research showed that this particular extension, S3TC, is not included in Mesa as in some locales it may infringe on software patents. Most of the time, it is not required as most newer games, etc. use precompressed textures with hardware decompression. VMware however checks for this one as it is apparently a prerequisite for DirectX.

To get around this, I installed driconf which allows you to set visual and performance quality settings on OpenGL drivers. On the “Image Quality” tab in driconf, I clicked to “enable S3TC texture compression even if software support is not available.” The long and the short of it is that this will allow support for the S3TC extension to be reported to VMware even if the external third party library is not installed on your system. VMware sees this and then allows 3D acceleration to be enabled.

There is source code for the third party S3TC library available and a Gentoo ebuild for it should be hitting my overlay shortly. It will be found under dev-libs/libtxc_dxtn.

The Stormfront overlay can be added through layman and can also be found here: http://code.google.com/p/stormfront/

I’ve been coming to a slow realization over the past year or so that I’m starting to get older. Yes, I know that birthdays are supposed to slap us in the face with this fact every year, but I haven’t really felt it that much. Maybe the effects are being amplified by the stress in my job of late and the fact that I get blessed little exercise (partly due to the stress in my job of late). One thing I know, I can’t treat my body the way I did when I was 25 and get away without paying for it.

This is all too obvious to me today as I barely seem to be able to stay awake at my desk. Thursday night, I stayed up until 1 AM working on a Flash banner ad for work. I said to myself, 5 hours sleep, I can function on that tomorrow. Unfortunately, 1 hour later, Keilan woke up colicky and at 4:17 AM I started to lose it. Good thing Christy woke up and she graciously spelled me off.

The next day was better than I expected, but after work I had to drive to Creston to pick up two of my other kids. Talk about a late night. I got into Creston around midnight and was out for 10 hours as soon as my head hit the pillow. Six hours after that I was back on the highway headed for Calgary. Sunday was fairly restful, but not enough I guess.

A good point from the Sermon on Sunday and one I saw again in the Bible story I read my kids last night brought it to realization for me: our bodies were originally designed to last forever, but we broke them when we allowed sin into the world. Wow, is that ever true. I no longer feel invincible like I used to. I’m NOT 25 anymore…

Linux gamers will now have another way to purchase games produced by Linux Game Publishing. Launched today was the new downloadable games service available through Linux Game Publishing resellers. So far there are 3 titles available in downloadable form with a promise of more to come shortly. Sacred: Gold Edition, X3: Reunion, and Jets’n'Guns can be purchased for download, or rented on a 1 week or a 1 month rental.

On looking at Linux Game Publishing’s reseller Web sites this morning, only Tux Games seems to have the new system implemented so far, with a note on the front page of the Stormfront Ventures Web site that the new service will be implemented soon.

There seems to be a growing trend in the retail video games marketplace toward digital distribution rather than packaged goods. It’s nice to see producers of Linux games moving in the right direction.

HylaFAX 4.4.4-r2 hit the Gentoo Linux Portage tree recently. Unfortunately, as with previous versions, it still won’t build with Paludis. I just wanted to drop a quick note to mention that I have synched the version in my overlay to the latest version in Portage. The version in the Stormfront Overlay contains a needed fix in order to be built with Paludis. The Stormfront Overlay can be found here:

Stormfront Overlay

Last weekend we were invited out to the Sundre, Alberta area by some friends to find a Christmas tree. This is something that we’ve been doing for the past few years and it’s become somewhat of a tradition in our family which we look forward to with great anticipation each year.

There’s just something about taking the kids and driving away from the hustle and bustle of the city to spend the day with friends and their children. Life and work in Calgary just gets too hectic and it’s easy to forget the important things in life. Sometimes we just need to stop and take a break and spend time with the ones around us that we care about.

Last year when we went, it was very cold, so only my eldest son and I along with most of the other adults went hunting for the ideal “Charlie Brown Christmas tree.” The rest of the kids stayed inside, supervised of course, and they still had a very good time.

This year, the weather was much nicer so all the kids came along to find the trees. The kids got pulled on tobogans and they had a blast.

I think the highlight of the whole afternoon came after finding the Christmas trees. We went back to the house, shared a meal together and watched 14 small children instantly become friends. Granted, they weren’t all strangers to each other, but it’s amazing to watch how kids can walk up to one another, introduce themselves and just play. Somewhere along the line we seem to lose that as adults with all of our responsibilities and hang-ups.

The bottom line in all of this is that life is just too busy. Take the time to slow down and spend some quality time with the people you care about in your life. It doesn’t have to be going out and cutting down your own Christmas tree (although if you have kids, I’d highly recommend it). Spend some time with your loved ones doing things that you all enjoy. You won’t regret that you did.

Part 1 – Hardware Recognition and Configuration

I picked up a new Rogers Rocket Mobile Internet Stick recently to use with my laptop so that I can stay connected while I am on the road. My Blackberry is great, but for some tasks, it just doesn’t cut it. For those who don’t know, the Rocket Mobile Internet Stick is a Novatel Ovation MC950D Mobile Broadband USB Modem which lets you connect to the Internet through the Rogers Wireless 3G network. It’s capable of download speeds up to 7.2 Mbps.

The Ovation MC950D modem is interesting in that for Windows it uses Zero-CD technology. When you first plug the modem into your PC’s USB port under Windows, it mounts on-board flash memory as a virtual CD-ROM drive and installs the driver and connection software.

Being a long time Gentoo Linux user, I was ready for the challenge of getting my new modem up and running under my favorite Linux distro.

Getting Started

Unfortunately, the SIM card that comes with the Ovation MC950D cannot be activated on the Rogers Wireless Network under Linux. I had a real aversion to using Windows in order to get my modem working on Linux, so I popped the SIM card into my Blackberry and booted it up so it could be found on the Network for the first time. Any cell phone should work for this purpose, or you could go the Windows route, insert the SIM card into the Mobile Internet Stick and plug it into a Windows PC for this first activation.

Kernel Configuration

Getting the activation out of the way, I plugged in the stick and watched my log files to find out what would happen. From my log files, it was obviously not going to just work out of the box. I was missing a few kernel options.

Here are some of the things you need to make sure you have configured in your kernel. I am running Gentoo-Sources 2.6.25-r8.

IP and PPP Support: (Some general support which is required for IP and PPP)

Networking --->
 Networking options --->
  <*> Unix domain sockets
  [*] TCP/IP networking

Device Drivers --->
 [*] Network device support --->
  <*> PPP (point-to-point protocol) support
  <*> PPP support for async serial ports
  <*> PPP support for sync tty ports
  <*> PPP Deflate compression
  <*> PPP BSD-Compress compression

Support for the Ovation MC950D Modem:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  <*> USB Serial Converter support --->
   [*] USB Generic Serial Driver
   <*> USB driver for GSM and CDMA modems

Support for the virtual CD-ROM drive on the modem:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  <*> USB Mass Storage support

File systems --->
 CD-ROM/DVD Filesystems --->
  <*> UDF file system support

Other tips:

Another kernel option I had configured that interfered with the detection of the Ovation MC950D modem was:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] Block Devices --->
  <*> Low Performance USB Block driver

This option conflicted with USB Mass Storage. If you have this option configured, enable the following to avoid the conflict:

Device Drivers --->
 [*] USB support --->
  [*] The shared table of common (or usual) storage devices

Once I recompiled my kernel and rebooted, my Ovation MC950D was recognized under Gentoo. The USB Mass Storage driver was loaded and since I run KDE, the virtual CD-ROM drive portion of the modem was mounted.

When the virtual CD-ROM drive is mounted, lsusb shows the Ovation MC950D connected with ID 1410:5010. If you unmount the drive (disconnect the Mass Storage driver via eject), the ID will change to 1410:4400 and udev will create the /dev/ttyUSB device(s).

Automating the Mode Switch

Since the virtual CD-ROM drive is not really of any use under Gentoo Linux, I started looking for a way to have the MC950D connected as a modem when it was plugged in. I came across a handy package for just such a thing called USB_ModeSwitch.

As chances would have it, version 0.9.4 of USB_ModeSwitch is in the Gentoo Portage tree. I did an emerge sys-apps/usb_modeswitch and had it installed in short order. The next task was getting it configured and working.

Unfortunately, there were a couple of errors with the ebuild at the time that I installed that I had to work through:

1. The “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file gets installed in the /etc/udev directory. You will have to move it to /etc/udev/rules.d
2. The first line in the “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file starts with “SUBSYSTEMS”. This needs to be changed to “SUBSYSTEM”. It will not work if the extra S is not removed.

For the Ovation MC950D modem, the contents of the “91-usb_modeswitch.rules” file should be modified to match this (all on one line):

SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1410",
 ATTRS{idProduct}=="5010",
 RUN+="/usr/sbin/usb_modeswitch"

In order to get USB_ModeSwitch to automatically switch the mode on the Ovation MC950D modem, the appropriate section of /etc/usb_modeswitch.conf needs to be uncommented.

Look for the section that starts off with “Novatel Wireless Ovation MC950D HSUPA.” Uncomment the configuration options in that section by removing the semi-colons from in front of the options. Add semi-colons in front of the configuration options in any other sections to comment out options for other hardware.

After setting up the configuration for USB_ModeSwitch, the /dev/ttyUSB device(s) were created automatically when I plugged in my Novatel MC950D USB modem.

Next Steps

Now that my Novatel MC950D Mobile Broadband USB Modem is detected and configured on Gentoo Linux, the next step is to configure the connection software and get online. Watch for this in Part 2, coming soon…

The HylaFAX fax server is an open source, enterprise-class system for sending and receiving facsimiles. It’s one I have been using and setting up for clients on Linux boxes with great success for a number of years.

My Linux distribution of choice is Gentoo Linux. I really like to be able to customize things and set them up the way I like them: Gentoo is after-all, all about choice. One choice I always make when setting up a new Gentoo box is to use the Paludis package manager for software management.

Paludis is great. It does have a tendency to expose broken or carelessly written ebuilds however. One such program I haven’t been able to install with Paludis is HylaFAX (thus the reason for this article).

If you try to install HylaFAX using Paludis from the Gentoo Portage tree, you will end up with an error like this toward the end of the build:

!!! Cannot write ‘/var/tmp/paludis/net-misc-hylafax-4.4.4/image/var/spool/fax/FIFO’ to ‘/var/spool/fax’ because it is not a recognised file type

When the package builds, it makes a FIFO which Paludis doesn’t support. My previous solution to this problem, which wasn’t a very good one, was to use Portage to install this one problem ebuild. With the 4.4.4 version of HylaFAX hitting the tree, I finally got fed up with this method. I did a lot of searching and finally came across a patch which I have now incorporated into the ebuild. The HylaFAX 4.4.4 ebuild patched for installation with Paludis can be found on my overlay here:

Stormfront Overlay

Instructions for adding the overlay can be found here:

Adding the Stormfront Overlay using Layman

There was really very little information out there on this issue. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone else who is experiencing this problem.

A few weeks ago my wife and I noticed that our 3 month old son had an inguinal hernia. We knew we’d have to have something done about it eventually, but since it didn’t seem to be causing any problems, we were in no particular hurry to subject him to surgery. We took our son to see his GP, and she wasn’t concerned about it at all. She did refer us to a pediatrician for an unrelated issue that turned out to be nothing.

When we saw the pediatrician, she said something would have to be done about the hernia and started the procedure of referring us to a surgeon at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. The hospital would phone us when they were ready for us to bring in our son for a consult.

On Thursday afternoon however, things became a little more urgent and my wife ended up taking him to the emergency room at the Alberta Children’s Hospital here in Calgary. Now, I’m not a big fan of the medical system. I think as a society we tend to intervene a little too much in the body’s God given ability to heal itself. That being said however, it definitely has its place and I’m quite thankful that it’s there for those times that it’s really needed.

My wife stayed at the hospital with our son from the time he was admitted on Thursday afternoon, until he was discharged late Saturday morning. The doctors and nurses at the Alberta Children’s Hospital were very supportive and you could tell that they really care about the children and the families under their care.

Dr. Mary Brindle and her team who performed our son’s surgery were very good. They made sure that we understood what was going to happen and the associated risks involved. When the surgery was complete, Dr. Brindle came to talk to us to let us know that it went very well and that there were no complications.

Our son is back to his normal, happy self and we are quite glad. I would like to offer a great big kudos to all the doctors and nurses at the Alberta Children’s Hospital. Thank you so much for being there and for the caring work that you do.