Cameron Stokes’s Blog

The tldr version is…RefurbUPS.com is awesome and saved me over $80 off buying original manufacturer batteries and over $200 off buying all new UPS units. Read on for the full story.

Several years back I purchased two uninterruptible power supply units (UPS) for my home file-server and firewall. The idea, of course, was to prevent these systems from experiencing temporary power interruptions and potentially causing file corruption in the case of my file-server or just being a nuisance for the firewall. Last year both units died within a month of each other. I couldn’t believe it… I was convinced they had a time trigger to fail after X number of years in a ruse to get customers to spend more money. Not wanting to fall for this, I started looking for alternatives.

A new, comparable UPS would cost approximately $150 (these were high-end models) and I certainly wasn’t excited about buying two.  Replacement batteries from the manufacturer would have cost approximately $80 each so I was still looking at roughly $160. I looked around at replacement battery sites and was largely unimpressed. Let’s just say the site design for several sites left me questioning their credibility. I finally found RefurbUPS.com and was sold when I found their instructional video for how to replace the batteries. It wasn’t a complicated procedure but that gave me the warm, fuzzy feeling I was looking for to buy from them. Total price from RefurbUPS.com including shipping was $90.29 for two sets of batteries.

After receiving the replacement batteries I installed them and was dismayed when the UPS started beeping and the Replace Battery LED lit after being turned on. I re-installed them a few times with the same results. I watched the instructional video again, realizing it was hard to mess up a two and a half step process, and was stumped. My one thought was maybe the UPS needed to charge a bit. I left the unit plugged in but turned off overnight and when I checked the next day all was well.  The UPS turned on fine, no beeps, and when I hooked it up to my file-server it said it had a full charge.

The UPS have been up and running with the new batteries for a few months now and are holding strong.

My girlfriend (Rhonda) and I recently celebrated an anniversary and she completely outdid herself this year. Knowing my obsession for beer, she gave me a personalized glassware set complete with pitcher, two pilsner glasses, and two Frankfurt beer mugs. Here’s a shot of one of the Frankfurt beer mugs:

My awesome glassware.

Rhonda purchased the set through The Glass Fox. She called them prior to ordering and asked about personalizing beyond the normal options on the site and they were able to accommodate exactly what she wanted.

I highly recommend them and expect to use them again in the future.

Every time I listen to Pandora I open the site in a new window and scroll and resize the window to fit the player just right and hide the noise (ads) on the page. I finally sat down and put together a bookmarklet to do this for me. It’s not perfect, but is good enough. Right-click the link below and click Bookmark This Link (in Firefox) and you can use the same script to load Pandora and only see what you really care about, the music.

Bookmark This Link.

Here’s the code (prettified):

javascript: function pandora() {
    window.open( 'http://pandora.com/#radio',
                 '_blank',
                 'width=725,height=340,' +
                 'scrollbars=1,location=0,menubar=0,titlebar=0,toolbar=0'
    );
}
pandora();

Enjoy.

Having been bit by the cloud bug, I recently looked into the cloud computing software Eucalyptus. Using the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud distribution I setup a controller and a couple nodes and then went to install Euca2ools on my Macbook. Following the instructions here, I soon ran into an issue. Here is the error I received:

stokesc-mbp:euca2ools-1.2 stokesc$ sudo make
...
Processing dependencies for euca2ools==1.0
Finished processing dependencies for euca2ools==1.0
install: root: Invalid argument
make: *** [install] Error 67
stokesc-mbp:euca2ools-1.2 stokesc$

A quick internet search didn’t reveal too much but I soon found my way into the MakeFile and noticed the group for the install command seemed off. Knowing Mac OS X’s ancestry is BSD and from my past experience with OpenBSD, I knew the root group did not exist in the BSD operating system and was in fact named wheel. I changed all references to the group root (the -g option), but left the owner references alone (the -o option) and Euca2ools was soon installed. Here is the snippet from my new MakeFile:

...
@install -g wheel -o root -m 755 -d $(PREFIX)/bin
@install -g wheel -o root -m 755 bin/* $(PREFIX)/bin/
@install -g wheel -o root -m 755 -d $(PREFIX)/man/man1
@if [ -d $(MANDIR) ]; then install -g wheel -o root -m 644 $(MANDIR)/* $(PREFIX)/man/man1; fi
@if [ -d $(BASH_COMPLETION) ]; then install -g wheel -o root -m 644 $(UTILDIR)/* $(BASH_COMPLETION); fi
...

I opened bug 558420 with the Eucalyptus project to address this. As of this post, this issue affects version 1.2 of the Euca2ools download and likely previous versions.

Almost eighteen months ago, I found the Google Street View guy near work and followed him for a bit trying to stay in view.  For several weeks following I checked the location online nearly every day and eventually gave up.  Thanks to a commenter on my original post I checked again and we are there.  They removed the frames of us hanging out the window talking to the driver, but there I am in the driver seat.
Click here to see us on the map.  My original post is here.