GoDaddy Sucks!

Yes, it’s sheer force of habit that I stuck w/GoDaddy after moving away from Network Solutions (another sucky registrar, stay away from them).

As time goes on, I’ve discovered that GoDaddy reliability (ha!) has gone way down, customer service sucks (what customer service?).  For the second time in less than two weeks, my VPS at GoDaddy mysteriously died (unreachable web sites, can’t ssh in, etc.) and it has been running fine for a year now.  GoDaddy support would only said that they found some issues and has “fixed” it without telling me what it was.

Requesting power cycle of the VPS take 90+ minutes!!!! holy jeeze!  actually it is 93 minutes now and I still can’t ssh in, web sites on VPS is still down.

I am moving everything, domains, VPS, sites, to another registrar.  I am tired of this crap.

 

Android tablets

I’ve been wanting (drooling) over Android tablets for awhile now.  Almost bought one several time over Christmas holiday, but managed to stop myself in time.  Knowing that new (dual core Tegra and Android 3.0) things was coming help convinced me to wait for things to settle down before diving in.

In the meantime, I’ve been educating myself as much as possible about Android, phones and tablets.  I did exchanged my two plus years old RIM Blackberry for a Droid 2 Global.  That helped me get familiar with Android, its Markets, apps, rooting, etc 🙂  It took some getting used to with the way Android apps and phone work.  I’ve been so used to my Berry (it’s perfect for email, text) that I almost swap my Droid phone back for the Berry!!!!  I’ll have to say that RIM has done a great job with making their phones work seamlessly in the mobile email environment.  It was painless to get mail from my various accounts – Gmail, Yahoo, IMAPS hosted on my personal server at home, etc.  Also love the way I can customize how I get notified (alerts) when different type of email come in.  Oh my god!  The way I can customize it is just so awesome and easy to setup and use!

Anyway, sorry, back to Android tablets.  I almost bought the Velocity Cruz (T103, T105, T301 and Cruz Reader) several times, and glad I did not.  Stay away from the Cruz and any other tablets that are not based on ARM chips.  The Cruz tablets are based on MIPS architecture and you will have a hard time finding community support.  There are some hacking on the Cruz, but most of the Android hacking community is focused on ARMs and a minority on x86.

This is because Android was first released for the ARM architecture, with the development and emulation done on x86 (build and toolchains were done on Ubuntu x86 Linux at Google).  So there are lots of supports and knowledge out there for those two architecture.

Sooooo…. there was a sale for the Viewsonic G Tablet, and it was at the right time (weak moment) and I bought one.  Heh.  Anyway, so far I am happy with it, only had it for 4 days.  Got an AOSP 2.3.4 build running on it.  I’ve pulled down CM source repo and am going to build my own.

More to post soon.

 

How To use canon C5045/5051 printer on OSX 10.6.7

 

I’ve been using a Mac book pro for last few years, work required it, otherwise I prefer my Linux laptop.

Anyway, updating OSX to 10.6.7 broke my ability to print to office Canon C5045 printer. Googling shows lots of people running into similar issues.

I’ve d/l Canon’s latest US version (v2.24) of the UFR II driver and installed it, but was still getting error about raster mode.

“Cannot continue printing because an error occurred. To continue printing, select {Raster Mode} in {Quality}-{Quality Settings}-{Graphics Mode}.: 15920”

Canon driver here:

http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/support/office/color_imagerunner_advance/imagerunner_advance_c5045/imagerunner_advance_c5045#DriversAndSoftware

Anyway, to fix the raster error, you need to go to your printer setting options page and change the mode.  Go here:

http://127.0.0.1:631/printers/_10_3_1_25

Replace _10_3_1_25 with the IP address of your Canon printer (10.3.1.25 is the IP of MY printer).

Click on Maintenance drop down and go to Set Default Options

Click on General and scroll down till you see Graphics Mode:

Select Raster Mode

Scroll down to the very bottom and click on Set Default Option

You will need to enter your login and password to confirm the change.

That should do it.

Addendum (7/6/2011):  We got a Fiery board added to the C5045 and it broke my printing ability again (@#$!!), turns out I need new driver.  The driver is : CanonPPD_v3.05.zip (google for it, it’s also on Canon support web site).

 

Envoy router from Enphase

How to monitor your Envoy router with MRTG

So I am into green, whole family is. This past summer, I decided to install solar panels. Got a 4.4KW system installed with Enphase microinverters.

Traditional solar panel system generate DC in the panels, and all of them goes to a battery bank, then a DC-AC converter for the house. It’s big, bulky and wasteful (converting DC-AC, etc). The Enphase microverters uses a DC-AC converter per panel. So no batteries needed, and losing one panel (whether shade, damage, whatever) is not going to stop power production.

Anyway, long story short, along with the microinverter come an Envoy, which is essentially a small embedded computer that talk with each inverter, query their status (power generation, heat, etc.), collects them and send them to a central place (Enphase’s server).

You have the option of subscribing to Enphase Enlighten program which allow you to login to a personalize website and view your power generation history with nice graphs, etc. The first few months are free after installation so you can play with it and see how it work.

I didn’t want to pay for something I can do myself. The microinverters talk with the Envoy over the power lines, so use their own protocol. But since I have access to the Envoy controller, I can query it for the data it collect from the inverters. There is a web interface on the unit that I can login to and see the data. But there is no programmatic way to get that data, e.g no snmp or API that I can use to ask the Envoy.

Hmmm, ok, I’ll screen scrape the web interface. So I wrote a little perl script to do just that, and that script output MRTG data for graphing locally.

12/14

Sorry, didn’t finish this yet.  I’ll post my little perl script and the config I used for MRTG when I have chance.

3/9/2011

I posted my MRTG config and perl script in the comment to this post.  Too lazy to put it here….

 

VMWare error: Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permission to access file.

Recently I was making changes to one of my vmware vm and made a typo, heh, like that never happens.  Anyway, long story short, I had to recover from backup and when I tried to start up the VM, I was getting the following error:

Check for missing files failed: Insufficient permission to access file.

This is on one of my laptops, this one happen to be running Vista and VMWare Workstation 6.  Googling find that other people run into similar problems.  There were various suggestion about ACL, and disabling UAC, etc.

I’ve went through all the various checks, to no use.  Even after I login as Administrator…. hmmm…. WTF!

It turned out to be very simple issue (for me).  When I restored from backup (I dumped all backup to a NAS w/lots of storage), using rsync, I had not realize that the backup had readonly permission (UNIX 0444).  The culprit was myvmname.vmx, myvnmname.vmdk, etc.  After I removed the Readonly flag, all was happy.