zwoc@zabre:~$ enrogue
Linux enrogue 2.6.8-2-686 #1 Tue Aug 16 13:22:48 UTC 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
n.
1. An unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person; a scoundrel or rascal.
2. One who is playfully mischievous; a scamp.
3. A wandering beggar; a vagrant.
4. A vicious and solitary animal, especially an elephant that has separated itself from its herd.
5. An organism, especially a plant, that shows an undesirable variation from a standard.

adj.

1. Vicious and solitary. Used of an animal, especially an elephant.
2. Large, destructive, and anomalous or unpredictable: a rogue wave; a rogue tornado.
3. Operating outside normal or desirable How could a single rogue trader bring down an otherwise profitable and well-regarded (Saul Hansell).

v. rogued, rogu-ing, rogues
v. tr.

1. To defraud.
2. To remove (diseased or abnormal specimens) from a group of plants of the same variety.

v. intr.

To remove diseased or abnormal plants.

[Origin unknown.]

(dictionary.com)

Last login: Sun Jun 3 02:04:38 2007 from zabre
zwoc@enrogue:~$ sudo halt
Password:

Broadcast message from root (pts/0) (Sun Jun 3 02:05:04 2007):

The system is going down for system halt NOW!
zwoc@enrogue:~$ who
zwoc pts/0 2007-06-03 02:04 (zabre)
zwoc@enrogue:~$ Connection to enrogue closed by remote host.
Connection to enrogue closed.
zwoc@zabre:~$

And thus my reign (heh) as sys admin ends after over 4 years of keeping enrogue running at my home. I’m hoping a lot of people benefited from it all, and it was all good fun. The reason I chose to stop is not because it got boring (although hardware needed replacing) but moreso because I won’t be able to maintain things once I move to another country.

Explosives: “the concept behind explosives revolves around the volume change which occurs when a component in solid or liquid form changes into gas form. Explosives of decent quality in solid form will change into gas form in a very short amount of time. In mines ammoniumnitrate mixed with diesel oil is used”*

*) Not using proper chemistry terms, no.

For example in mines they use ammoniumnitrate (NH4NO3). 25 kgs of NH4NO3 results in something like 70 m³ of “gas” (N2, O2, H2O), though this is a presumption based on the temperature of the resulting gasses reaching ~450 C. During a more powerful detonation the released gasses can reach several thousand degrees, at which point they generate a shock wave spreading faster than the speed of sound.

(This all is more or less copied and poorly translated from my chemistry book — I just thought it was kind of amusing that they went into such amount of detail over explosives. And noMrBushImNotOutToGetYou.)

Sysadmining has its downsides. But I’m back, and I’m bigger than a breadbox.

Two even.

Using IP-based telephony isn’t exactly new to me. I used my ISP-provided IP telephony for over a year before I moved to my new apartment.

And with my new apartment I switched ISP, and by switching ISP I couldn’t use that ISP’s phone service any longer. I first meant to use my new ISP’s phone, but they suddenly threw a $100 expense at me, expecting me to swallow which I didn’t. Instead I canceled my order to use their phone service, and bet all my cards on Skype.

Because see, I have an internal sound card on my computer’s motherboard, which Skype hates with a passion. Hiss snort. And then I have my old SB Live card from my old computer. To get Skype working, I had to use my old SB Live card, so I disabled the internal one. The fact I have two sound cards in my machine becomes important later on.
So, I got SkypeIn firstly. People need to be able to call me. I got a number in Sweden, in Stockholm. Yay and all that.

So then I got 100 SEK (Swedish crowns, ~$15 or something) worth of SkypeOut. So I can call regular phones using my Skype (and it’s actually really cheap).

That was a few weeks ago. All worked well, except for one little issue. Whenever someone calls me — or I decide to call someone — I have to tweak cables. Namely, I had to put my headset “in” into the logitech Z4 control’s “headphones”, and then move the control over to the computer, because the headset’s “mic” out was “tied” to the “in” cable, and then put the “mic” into the computer’s “mic in” port. And then I could finally “pick up the phone.” Shucks.

Then I realized what many others have already realized. Use one sound card for Skype and one for “everything else.” That effectively puts your Skype input/output in its own separate location. Which means I can sit and listen to music, and when someone calls, I just put the headset on, click “answer”, and start talking. The two sound cards worked together without any configuration aside from setting Skype to specifically use the SB Live card instead of the internal one. I can play music and talk on Skype without a single problem.

In celebration, I bought another SkypeIn number, this time a USA-based one (510 area code). If you wanna give me a call, lemme know and I’ll give you my number.

So, my CPU fan died on me today. Luckily I knew something was up as my computer sounded a little like a horny rhino and I’d been wondering why for quite awhile. So, I shut things down, consulted my knowledgeable buddy Brian about what could be the cause, and then went out and got a new one.

After I put the new fan in, I decided that it was about time I got a CPU temperature monitor applet set up in Gnome. I’ve always been concerned with the temperature inside my case, but I’ve never really gotten to the point where I’ve actually looked into it. I knew the sensors were there, because the BIOS has a hardware monitor page which displays all kinds of stuff. (And that is also where I noted that the CPU was reaching to and beyond 100 °F, which I considered a little high — and Bri agreed. And if Bri agrees, Truth hath been revealed.)

So I poked about a bit, and found lm-sensors. It was scary at first, and I thought I had to grok config files, but then I discovered the sensors-detect tool, which is kind of like a command-line guide that probes for various sensors and modifies the configuration file for you.

Joy and such. So I rebooted (due to modules being inserted and all that jazz) and then it all worked perfectly. The sensors-applet from apt showed my CPU temperature perfectly. It’s currently sitting at 29 °C which is miles better than the nearly 50 °C it was at before.