Say hello to my little friend!
Hi, I'm a Java programmer and Linux admin living on the fashionable East Side in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. We call our city "a great place on a Great Lake"; our beautiful art museum is one reason why. I can be reached by email as shadowm at lyonlabs dot org.
On the right is an old picture of me with some of the Linux servers I'm responsible for at work; below it is what the rack looked like after virtualization! For the morbidly curious, there's also a picture of the boot screen on my test machine at home. Both that machine and the one this web server runs on were bought from the nice folks over at System76, and I recently replaced my main workstation with their top-of-the-line liquid-cooled "Leopard Extreme", which I'm very pleased with. I highly recommend System76!
Want to run GlassFish on Ubuntu? I have a HOWTO for you.
I'm a long-time Commodore 64 user, and still use and program these now-historic computers. Click the link for software, pictures of my machines and of shows where Commodore users gather, and of course, lots and lots of technical information.
Wonder where the Cenbe quotation in my email signature comes from ("After the vintage season came the aftermath — and Cenbe")? It's from one of my favorite science fiction stories, Vintage Season (1946). I read it as a child, and searched for years before finding it again. I'd like to write a sequel someday: what is Cenbe's own history? where (and when) else has he been? how did his work develop after capturing the event they came to witness? was he haunted forever by Oliver's face?
You can see my astrological birth chart if you like (don't tell me Pluto isn't a planet).
Here's a link to pictures of my travels to Yogyakarta in central Java (Indonesia). And here's some video from my 2005 trip, when a guy I met there invited me to a village outside Bantul to watch the local gamelan practicing. On my last trip to the city of my dreams (2011), I stayed at 1001 Malam (1001 Nights) hotel. There's a pictures page if you're interested... and don't miss this short video I shot of kopi joss being prepared at Angkringan Lek Man (watch all the way to the end)!
I'm an avid Dungeons and Dragons player, and recently put together some game narratives and pictures from our old campaign online. The fates of worlds were decided on a regular basis! Recently, I've been playing again with several different groups... but I'm developing a strange fascination with Empire of the Petal Throne.
I've started a page for pictures and recordings of Sheboygan Bands of the 80s. Remember going to see The Boss, Alliance, Trinity, or EMF at the Downtowner? Soon they'll all be there... well, sooner or later.
When I was in high school, I went to a training camp for classical musicians called Symphony School of America.
...all watched over by machines of loving grace. Speaking of which, here's a video of my Genibo robot dog.
I'm an active member of the NetBeans community, and have been part of the NetCAT (Community Acceptance Testing) program for the 3.6, 4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 6.0, 6.5, 6.7, 6.8, 6.9, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 releases. I am also a past member of the NetBeans Dream Team.
NetBeans 7.3 was released on 2013-02-21, and features the debut of Project Easel, which is a set of tools for HTML5 development (slides and audio of JavaOne presentation available here). Release notes are available on the web site, where you can also find screencasts about the new version. There is also a more detailed list of the new features on the New and Noteworthy page.
I've been dabbling in classic Macintosh computers lately, which is something I've always wanted to learn about; there's something so simple and elegant about the GUI of these machines. I've got two of them so far (running System 7.1), and have a fair grasp of how the operating system is used. Both LocalTalk and AppleTalk are working (with the participation of a Linux box acting as a server), and my most recent accomplishment is getting TCP/IP working using MacTCP (click the link for details).
If you're ever in Silicon Valley, be sure to visit the Computer History Museum. They've got displays that will knock your socks off, from centuries-old slide rules to the underground behemoths that watched the skies during the Cold War. They've even got a piece of ENIAC! One of their latest acquisitions is a reconstruction of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine (here are pictures of the setup checklist, the machine in operation, and the operator with a debugger).
I've been a Linux user since 1995, starting with Slackware. I switched to SUSE in 1998 after seeing it at the Linux Expo in Raleigh, and stuck with it for ten years. In mid-2008, I switched to Ubuntu, and continue to use it as my primary operating system... for now.
Ubuntu 12.10 ("Quantal Quetzal") was released on 2012-10-18, and continues to use the controversial Unity desktop. I reject Unity, the GNOME Shell, and all their evil works, and have switched to Kubuntu (Ubuntu's KDE variant), which is breathtakingly beautiful. I'm considering switching distros as well, though, because I'm uncomfortable with the direction Ubuntu has been taking.
Here are some Ubuntu tips 'n' tricks:
Can't connect to a hidden wireless network? Try forcing it to be seen first with this command:
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan essid <hidden_essid>
If you are using the Nvidia proprietary video driver and would like to disable the splash screen that briefly (and annoyingly) shows the Nvidia logo full-screen, you may have run across the advice to add a "NoLogo" option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. The problem with that is that this file is often no longer needed and doesn't exist. To create it, use the command nvidia-xconfig, then edit the Device section like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSectionI have fond memories of my early days with Linux, and still remember my first Slackware install, when I was prompted to choose a console font (that is, the consoles reachable via ctrl-alt-F1 &c., not the terminals). The installer presented quite a few fonts to choose from, and I looked at them all! But I really liked one that looked like handwriting, and used it for years. When I switched to SUSE, I learned how to set it up there as well (and even remember filing a bug that got fixed when it stopped working at one point). But when I switched to Ubuntu, it became a lost art to me. Recently, though, someone ran across a mailing list post I made about it from several years ago and asked if I ever got it working. When I said no, he figured it out himself and gave me the answer. So here it is:
When you restart the machine, you should see the font when you switch to a console. If you have set up GRUB so that boot-up messages are displayed, you'll see the font change while the messages are printing. Thanks, Tehmasp!
No sound when you run Kino? Try invoking it as padsp kino so he can use /dev/dsp as the audio device.
What's this? Can't mount a floppy disk... because "few, if any, developers still have a floppy"? What has happened to Linux' support for every device known to man including toaster ovens?? You can read all the gory details here. Fortunately, there's a command-line workaround:
udisks --mount /dev/fd0
If GRUB is giving you the message "Error 28: Selected item cannot fit into memory" when you try to load memtest on a newer machine, it's not his fault. For an excellent description of the problem, see this message attached to Debian bug report 319837. The solution is to write memtest directly to a floppy (i.e. not to a filesystem on the floppy) and boot from there. If you're too modern to have a floppy drive, you're on your own! Here's the simple command that will do it:
cat /boot/memtest.bin > /dev/fd0
