Ideas for Free

“chown“, “chgrp“, “ln“, and “chmod“, behave oddly on fat-32, vfat, and ntfs file systems.  The “Operation not permitted” message may mean “This type of filesystem does not support that operation”.

Here’s the example:  I want to create a file and own the file.  I can’t seem to do it.

Step 1:  Confusion!  I don’t own the files I create!

chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ whoami
chasm
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ date > today
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ ls -la today
-rwxrwx— 1 root plugdev 29 2009-12-22 15:15 today

The created file, /big/today, is owned by user root, and group plugdev.  I can create, modify, and delete the file but I can’t seem to own it.  I had not heard of the plugdev group and Google is not helpful.   The plugdev group manages which users are allowed to use hot pluggable media and FAT-32 media.  Use ‘grep plugdev /etc/group’  to see who is in the plugdev group.

Step 2:  Failures and Bad Error Messages.

Even as root, I cannot change the owner, root, or permissions.

chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ ls -la today
-rwxrwx— 1 root plugdev 29 2009-12-22 15:27 today
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ sudo chown chasm today
chown: changing ownership of `today’: Operation not permitted
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ sudo chgrp chasm today
chgrp: changing group of `today’: Operation not permitted
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ sudo chmod -x today
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ ls -la today
-rwxrwx— 1 root plugdev 29 2009-12-22 15:27 today
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ sudo ln -s today anotherday
ln: creating symbolic link `anotherday’: Operation not permitted

Note the problems with error messages:   “Operation not permitted” is not about user privileges, and chmod fails silently.  In this case, “Operation not permitted” means “The vffat filesystem does not support that operation”.

Step 3:  Enlightenment

The problem is that FAT-32 file systems do not have permissions, owners, and groups per se.   The entire file system is given one set of permissions at mount time, specified in the file /etc/fstab.  Let’s change it.

chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ grep “/big” /etc/fstab
# /big was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=C14C-CE25  /big            vfat    utf8,umask=007,gid=46 0       1
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ sudo vi -u NONE /etc/fstab
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ grep “/big” /etc/fstab
# /big was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=C14C-CE25  /big            vfat    utf8,umask=007,uid=1000,gid=1000 0       1

I made this change using vi -u NONE to preserve tabs.  Before the change all files in the /big file system were owned by the uid of 0 (root) in the gid of 46 (plugdev).  After the change, all files will now belong to uid and gid.  Here’s the quick test of remounting the filesystem with the new permissions.

chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/big$ cd ..
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/$ sudo umount /big
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/$ sudo mount /big
chasm@chasm-blue-laptop:/$ ls -l /big/today
-rwxrwx— 1 chasm chasm 29 2009-12-22 15:27 /big/today

The only way to change a permission is to change permissions for the entire file system in /etc/fstab.  Also, the file system supports neither symbolic links nor hard links.

For those few brave souls working on KDE 4, this is my list of bugs I noticed in the first couple hours.  Some may be viewed as belonging to other subsystems.  This is installing KDE 4.1, 32 bit, on a new T-6836 laptop.

• On live CD, font on “read me” came up as unreadable and clipped.
• The whole “add widgets” system is difficult; I keep wanting to add widgets to my task bar.
• Double clicking on a downloaded debian package brings up Ark but without the package loaded. Ark doesn’t appear to handle this file type.
• Hey! Where’s my alt-space quick launch (Katapult) or a replacement.
• Where’s my easy “look for more widgets to install” thingee?
• During install on partitioning disks, the progress bar hangs at 0% for about five or ten minutes.
• My traditional bar across the bottom disappeared and I don’t know where it went. Sometimes KDE seems to fail to bring up any interprocess communication.
• Once I moved the app launcher to the right hand, it made my menus funky, and I don’t know how to make it go back. I eventually blew away my .kde* directories
• Why do I have a .kde3 directory when running kde4?
• Tons and tons of warnings and errors in the dbus backtrack.
• Crashing Konquerer on GMail. Why KDE has its own browser is beyond my keen.
• Grub should initialize with better names. Not just “Generic Linux…” and “Windows Longhorn…”. Also, there are two Windows entries, one of which should be labelled recovery.
• Default width on “Add Widgets” box is way too narrow.
• In “Add Widgets”, “Pager”, “System Tray” and “Task Manager” have too generic icons.
• Can’t be sure or prove it, but “All Widgets” seems to not have all widgets the first time.
• Power management, by default, ran until out of battery and turned off.
• Appears not to save settings until successful shutdown of window manager.
• When I click on the “Leave” icon, choose restart, I get another level of menus to try to restart again.
• Network manager crashed at least once or twice. No clear way to make it start again.
• No ’small icons’ for a quick launch bar.

After a certain level of  bugginess, it makes no sense to report bugs unless one is also submitting patches.

I went out and bought a new laptop, having succesfully proven that driving over a laptop is not a good idea.

First, I watched SlickDeals for a reasonable, cheap system.  I’ve found that laptops have a short obsolescence period, and buying near the bottom end is best.  Second, I went to Best Buy and picked it up.  Best Buy has a less than stellar reputation, so I double-checked the factory seals.

And the system had a bad wireless.  DOA.   Some hours on Gateway’s chat trying to install drivers for a broken subsystem.   They gave me an RMA number; Best Buy has a less than stellar reputation.

The next morning, I went back to Best Buy.  Ten minutes for them to poke and prod and I had a new system on the way out.   Sometimes the reputation is undeserved.

Boot up Windows; download Firefox; download Kubuntu; burn CD;  install and go.

Life is better again.

In hopes of making a more productive utopia, I share this tip:

DO NOT RUN OVER YOUR LAPTOP WITH A MOTOR VEHICLE.

This has caused a noted decrease in my productivity.   A corollary for advanced production specialists follows:

DO NOT RUN OVER LAPTOP IN THE  MORNING WHEN THE BACK-UP DRIVE WILL BE DELIVERED THAT AFTERNOON.

I hope this bulletin prevents the same mistakes that I’ve been having this week.

Have you ever had a downgrade when you thought it was an upgrade?

Now, NetGear make on this an option. You may have seen that my previous review was less than glowing. Now it comes with brand-new backup features in an upgrade!

1. BitTorrent Software installed to download and serve torrents to/from your backup device.
2. A proprietary photo gallery to browse pictures on your backup device
3. A new add-on infrastructure widgets to manage your new BitTorrent and Photo Gallery.
4. Support for new photo standards used by some unnamed new cameras and cutting edge hardware like the XBox 360.

And New Bug Fixes:

1. Flash auto-copy is enabled by default, which transparently affects the way files are copied from some devices in order to better support the new photo gallery!
2. Some bugs with the fan may have been fixed. Or may not have.
3. Lots of small stuff.

And New Bugs:

1. Yes, 10 outstanding issues that affect user performance in this update! Plus lots of “easter eggs” bugs that haven’t been mentioned yet.
2. Now broken with with Opera, Safari, Vista, Web/DAV, wireless, Mac AFP, and installing new drives when the machine is off.
3. The upgrade is “pray-ware”. It cannot be reversed or uninstalled, so no backups for the backup server. Oddly, the upgrade does not state as to if it destroys the data on your drives. It shouldn’t, but don’t assume.

How are these people employed?

… at least more than Microsoft products. Still, silly bugs are everywhere:

So, that’s a 29 Gigabyte partition, with 65.9 Gigabytes used, leaving 23.0 Gigabytes free of the original 27.5 Gigabytes. New math.

WHAT:   Hacking with the OLPC, Python, and the Sugar Environment.

BRING:  Your OLPC (XO) if you have one, and a laptop if you have one.

WHY:  You want to play with an OLPC, or want to start developing for it.

WHEN:   Saturday,  December 22, 2007.   Starting at 10 a.m., going
until we stop.

CHILDREN:   The house is generally kid-safe, and we have a four year
old and a baby.
Usually, the more the merrier, but check in with us first
(charles.merriam@gmail.com).

WHERE:   My house.  It’s next to Westgate mall in Saratoga.  RSVP for
directions.

WHY Again:  It’s fun.

RSVP:  Please.  charles.merriam@gmail.com.

Email with any questions to charles.merriam@gmail.com, or call me at
408.368.6050

Hypothesis: Some domain registries cherry pick through names queried and register them.

Conclusion: Probably not.

Given that:

• domain registration services have unreadable terms of use,
• the site owner do just about anything with any data you provide,
• you (or any user) have put your creative energy into figuring out cool names,
• human nature is to wait before comitting to a name,
• it’s valuable to have the name you want or found creative

So, it seems like one way to make money to camp on any interesting names that people look up on your site.

The hypothesis is that sometime in the day after you look at a cool name, it gets registered.

To test this, I tried looking up a number of adjective-noun combinations on a number of lookup sites. For each service, I tried two different unregistered domain names, e.g., SnappyGrunge.com or SlickThunder.com. I waited a couple days, tried again with the same service, then waited a week and checked with nslookup.

I tried these domains: SnappyGrunge.com, SlickThunder.com, SnappyThunder.com, SlickSlime.com, SlickThunder.com, GrabPottery.com, GrabFudge.com, GrabThinker.com, SnappyFudge.com, SlickGrunge.com, GrabGrunge.com, TakeThunder.com, SnappySlime.com, TakeFudge.com, SlickPottery.com, GrabThunder.com, HappySlime.com, GrabThinker.com, HappyGrunge.com, SlickFudge.com, HappyThunder.com, TakeThinker.com, SnappyGrab.com, TakeGrunge.com, YellowSounds.com, YellowHarvest.com, BrickTeens.com, FloppySounds.com, BrickSounds.com, FloppyHarvest.com, EdgeCup.com

Two at each of these registry services: DNSStuff.com, ZoneEdit.com, DNSWatch.com, Bankes.Com, Register.com, GoDaddy.com, NetworkSolutions.com, Active-domain.com, Secure.OnlineAccess.net, 101Domain.com, DomainDirect.com

There were no results in which these domains were registered. There were a few irreproducible results: GoDaddy.com initially reported that the two domains (GrabGrunge.com and GrabThunder.com) were taken, but did not report this a week later. Google.com/a reported the same with SlickPottery.com. A few of the fly by night sites (bankes.com, Secure.OnlineAccess.net) were not responding for one phase of the tests. None of the domains was registered after a week.

It was an experiment. It told us this wasn’t a problem.

Yesterday was a busy day.  I love busy days.   Hopefully you will find an idea or two in this write-up.

In the morning, I dropped of Andrew at school, loaded up the car with school supplies, ran a couple errands, and headed off to my first stop.

First stop, Give Away School Supplies

I dropped off supplies at the Edison Brentwood, an East Palo Alto public school.   They had the TrueGift Donations sign-up sheet which had been posted in the teacher’s lounge and I was ready to go.  I spent about an hour dropping off over a hundred boxes of crayons, fifty pairs of scissors, a hundred notebooks, and some miscellaenous supplies.  I am now out of scissors, glue sticks, colored pencils, and wide ruled notebooks.  When helping so great a problem, is it better to spread around the supplies or target them to completely fix a couple of schools?

Second stop, Colingo at Sandbox Suites.

I trekked up to San Francisco to meet at the SandBox Suites drop in office.  This is a new pay-by-the-day office with an open design that just opened up a couple days ago.  I met with Benjamin Lowenstein and Arthur Richards, founders of the start-up Colingo.  We spent a few hours chatting through their design for language learning software targeted at children using the One Laptop Per Child’s XO computer.  We played with the XO and some python XO code, and then I walked them through the XO’s Hello World application.  They are doing good work and I hope to keep in touch with them.

Third stop, Dinner with My Brother.

Hugh and I had dinner and talked over TrueGift Donations.  Hugh just had a packing party where over a hundred boxes were packed in a few hours.  We discussed how my short-cutting the web site did or did not fit into the TrueGift mission.  We chatted about life.

Fourth stop, Ignite Talks at DNA Lounge.

The Ignite talks were hosted at the DNA Lounge.  Good talks on the censorship tangle by Violet Blue; several talks on the Internet being more hopelessly malwared than you can believe; cool burning-man robots; Chicken John for Mayor; etc.  Lamest talk was a five minute infomercial for a backpack company.  The format of having a new slide every fifteen seconds is horrible because waiting for slides keeps breaking up the flow of conversation.

Fun day.

My ideas roll out as a blog, and are more contemporary than topical. Here is a summary of topics to date:

Shameless Plug

• Looking for A Place to Excel
  • A shameless plug of me looking for excellent sales engineering, Python, or sensors employment.

Write-ups of Technical Videos and Events

• EngEdu Video Write-up: “Google Test Automation Lightning Talks
  • Many short, useful ideas on automated testing compressed.
• BayPiggies Write-up: 9/13 SnapLogic Talk
  • Development and tool chain of an open source data munging tool
• EngEdu Video Write-up: “A New Way to Look at Networking”
  • Great history of voice and TCP/IP networking with some future ideas
• EngEdu Video Write-up: “Unit Test Automation for Drupal, Google Summer of Code”
  • A short write-up of summer’s work on test automation
• EngEdu Video Write-up: “Advanced Python (or Understanding Python)”
  • Great talk on underlying structure of Python and its advancd features
• Event Write-up: First Tuesday Notes for Tuesday, August 1.
  • Technical ideas for improving face to face meetings
• EngEdu Video Write-up: “Practical Common Lisp”
  • Key advantages of the Lisp language

Free New Software Ideas

• Pondering Future Programming Environments
  • Appreciating the need for more capabilities in programming environments
• Linux hurts my brain.
  • Appreciating the scattered documentation and broken man pages of Linux
• Automatic Misspell Checker
  • A tool for adding misspellings so that people won’t take spelling too seriously.
  • Actually implemented independently by John Maeda
• Annoying Back To Work Buzzer
  • Software that notices you have been surfing too long and reminds you to work.
• Quick-reference and Keyboard Template Generator
  • A generic system for printing out keyboard short-cuts
• Spam Hassler, a FireFox Plug-in
  • Executing DDOS and resource wasting of those that send you spam.
• Another online spell-checker
  • Spell checker that helps you learn the correct spelling

Free New Product Ideas

• A Backpack for Connected Humans
  • A backpack with chargers and and an extension cord built-in
• Today’s worst idea: authenticate what you wear
  • Be sure what the person in the chat room is really wearing
• Rear mounted license plate cameras
  • Be able to report and authenticate people who tailgate
• Cool Shoes, and other gesture based clothing
  • Use gestures to control message displayed by POV clothing display
• Touch to turn on flash lights
  • Flashlights that stay on only when touched
• Extra-iodine Enhanced Salt
  • Make branded salt with additional iodine and other trace minerals
• Toys by the Handful
  • Make toys in strips for Halloween and other occasions
• Markers for Making Test Keys from Overheads
  • Markers that eat holes in transparencies to allow fast grading
• Book Journal
  • A pretty journal to keep track of what you have read

Free New Ideas about Society and Politics

• Journey of the Unconferences
  • About unconferences and some ideas to improve them.
• Bad Blood Bank
  • The Red Cross could sell your DNA information
• Secret Shoppers for HMOs
  • Manage health care costs and quality by getting second opinions
• Fixing the Patent System — Publish Provisional and Abandoned Patents
  • Keep inventions from obscurity by publishing everything in 17 years
• Comedy Industry of America (CIA) Poster
  • Satire poster about legal dangers of retelling jokes
• Medical Record to PDF law
  • Prevent medical records from being lost due to proprietary formats
• Court Reporters and Limited Copyrights
  • Provide limited copyrights to place court transcripts into public domain after a short period
• Government Mail Seals to Thwart Junk Mail
  • Provide distinctive, restricted seal on all government originated mail
• Strikes: Violent story idea
  • Plausible scenario or plot of extremely violent gangs due the three strikes laws
• Encouraging Small Towns to “Tourist Trap” SUVs
  • A slightly evil idea to have small towns target overweight SUVs visiting their roads
• Two quick, simple management ideas.
  • Secret Job Titles and Personal Slogans on Nameplates

TrueGift Donations and Education Ideas

• A TrueGift Experiment: Proactive Distribution
  • An experiment in having teachers sign up on a paper sheet quickly
• A song for all languages
  • A children’s song that teaches the difficult phonemes of all languages
• And So It Begins
  • The beginning of the 2007 school year at TrueGift Donations
• MMORPG with human languages
  • Use human languages for different races in on-line games to encourage learning

Other Blog Posts

• 12 Impossible Things Before Bed
  • The personal habits and time commitments I find interesting
• Miami Vice, Police Don’t Pay
  • Noticing a movie that portrays negative value police
• FavIcon added for this blog
  • The little picture in your address bar, and how you can add one, too.
• Hello world!
  • First post!