Low Bit

The previous owners of our home here in Nashville are session musicians. Specifically, contributing to Reba McEntire's music. Tis the season, cause FedEx pulled a stealth delivery and left a box from Lobels' of New York on our front porch today.

The box was clearly labeled as perishable and was addressed to our home's previous owners. We looked up their new number and left a message re: said gift box. Due to the nature of the contents, I decided to open it up and get the meat in the freezer until such a time as we could arrange for a proper delivery. What do we have here? Two boneless strip steaks, two porterhouse steaks and two filet mignons courtesy of Narvel and Reba. All said around $250 worth of aged steaks which sure beats a holiday ham I think.

What we secretly hope is that we never make the connection and Reba sends us steaks every year. Oh, did I not mentioned this happened last year but we were able to catch the FedEx guy and have them returned? I give them until January 1 to call back, if not I fire up the grill. Happy Holidays right back at you Narvel and Reba!

Update:

We met one of the previous owners last night around 10 PM. She was coming home from playing a show and stopped by. It was actually really nice to met her, incredibly nice woman and we chatted for a while about the neighborhood and such. Turns out they did get their steaks last year after FedEx got them to Reba's office. This is a yearly gift for playing and touring with Reba, quite cool. I mean, if you like steaks, which I do. Apparently one of the other band members had his steaks delivered to his next door neighbor. Before he could go and get them, the neighbor had eaten them. Not really in the spirit of the holidays! I assume that the address confusion will get worked out, but we won't know until next year.

This year for Thanksgiving I tried a new method of turkey preparation, grilled! I used a simple dry rub that consisted of salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper and sugar. It was grilled over indirect heat for about an hour and forty five minutes. I am not saying it was barbecued since I was using propane and that can be a touchy subject.

Before:

After:

I am happy to report it was a rather tasty bird.

I run a Mac Mini as my home server, currently with OS X 10.4. Tonight I dug around and got GlassFish up and running using OS X's answer to SMF on Solaris, launchd. I am by no means an expert on launchd but I will happily document what worked for me. First off I installed GlassFish v2 to "/usr/local/glassfish" as per the documented instructions.

Once I verified that it all worked, I sought out how to integrate it into launchd. I certainly don't want it running as root, so I took a look at the available users and groups using the NetInfo Manager application. I found an "appserver" user and associated "appserverusr" group. Seemed a good place to start. I changed the ownership recursively for my install directory to this user and group combination. Once done, I created my launchd plist file and saved it to "/Library/LaunchDaemons/glassfish.plist".

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
	
<plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>com.sun.glassfish</string>

        <key>Disabled</key>
        <false/>

        <key>UserName</key>
        <string>appserver</string>
	
        <key>GroupName</key>
        <string>appserverusr</string>

        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
            <array>
                <string>/usr/local/glassfish/bin/asadmin</string>
                <string>start-domain</string>
                <string>domain1</string>
            </array>
		
        <key>RunAtLoad</key>
        <true/>
    </dict>
</plist>

Similar to SMF you have to load/import the service description. On OS X you use "launchctl load ./glassfish.plist" for this purpose. If all goes well you will have a running instance of GlassFish. If not, you will see rather vague error messaging in the system.log file.

Some drawbacks. It seems that launchd relies on sending a SIGTERM to the process when you attempt to stop it using "launchctl stop com.sun.glassfish". This doesn't work for GlassFish. I prefer the ability of SMF to define a appropriate shutdown command. Not a huge deal as I can easily stop GlassFish using asadmin or the admin console when needed. Once the process is stopped you can use "launchctl start com.sun.glassfish" to bring it back up. There is no notion of a restarter if the process dies. I think there is a new KeepAlive element in OS X 10.5 but I haven't be able to experiment with that version yet. Sounds promising though.

All in all this works pretty well. GlassFish will launch on boot using the recommended subsystem. If anyone has any tips on achieving a tighter integration with launchd let me know.

I recently picked up a Linksys WRT350N to replace my old WRT54G. After getting the new router up and running, my wife noticed a problem with her Powerbook. It would no longer pick up a strong wireless signal in the sun room. I had hoped the new unit would provide increased range throughout the house but this doesn't seem to be the case.

I decided to put the old WRT54G back into service and set it up in the sun room as a WDS participant. I flashed both of the units with DD-WRT v24 RC2 and more or less followed this guide. So far it is working great. My wife's Powerbook went from essentially no signal to four bars. The other benefit is that I can now get my Squeezebox back on the network. Since mine is an older model, it doesn't support WPA which I am now using for wireless security. The WRT54G is parked right next to the Squeezebox so I am able to connect it wired and get music back in the sun room.

Once Rama posted some favorable results after a recent AirPort upgrade, I decided to drop the cash for a WRT350N of my own. I have been running the home network on a WRT54G v2.2 flashed with a beta of DD-WRT v24. The idea was to migrate to the new hardware using the same software.

After some sleuthing on the interwebs, I discovered that I needed version 1.0 of the WRT350N which is still Broadcom based and supported by DD-WRT. Various folks have reported receiving version 2.0 units which would, for now, keep me tethered to the stock firmware. Either I got lucky or the version 2.0 units just aren't that prevalent out in the wild because when the friendly UPS truck came, it was indeed bearing a version 1.0 for me.

The initial flashing was rather easy once I booted up Windows on my Mac. Using Firefox or Safari I would get the rather humorous error message, "Upgrade are failed." This makes me think those Linksys engineers are big fans of Zero Wing. A bit more research revealed that I needed to use IE for the initial flash from the stock Linksys firmware. Granted, it was stated that the OS X version of IE would work but who still uses that?

The new router is now happily running DD-WRT v24 RC1 and most of my settings have been migrated. I haven't cut over to it yet because that means I have to get under the house. Yep, one of the main reasons for getting this router was the gigabit switch fueled by my grand scheme of running three CAT-5e cables into the sun room. The WRT350N was the last bit I needed and now I have no excuse not to get down into the basement and then into two different crawl spaces to run cable. Well, I guess I can still use spiders as an excuse.