Here's a screensaver pack that displays puffy white clouds on a dark background for your Nook. Just extract the directory and place in your screensaver folder on your Nook.

In an amazing shift, in my eyes, from being total buffoons, it appears that both Congress and the House are showing their support for NASA, thumbing their noses at Obama's attempt to cut the program.

Please, everyone collectively applaud now. Sometimes they have a few moments of lucid thought in Washington.

Here's my second (and larger) pack of images for use with the Barnes & Noble Nook. Each image is 16 shades of grayscale, so it should render quickly on the Nook.

After seeing the screen, I thought that more high contrast line drawing type images could make a much better screensaver than my photographs, so here's a collection of 20.

Note: Updated to remove black borders

NOTE: Please visit www.nook-look.com for these and more.

Recently I've been thinking that it was time I added temperature monitoring to my datacenter.

All of our equipment is on battery backup - with most using dual power supplies connected to two different battery backups in case one fails. I also have generator power that kicks in within 6 seconds of a power failure. My primary battery backups are constantly monitored and will both email and page me in the event of an outage.

Yesterday we had high winds that caused several extended power events - we never totally lost power but it was enough toggling back and forth that the generator automatically kicked in to protect things. During the flopping back and forth though, I got my page from my battery backup. I happened to notice that it has an internal temperature sensor and reported 19.3 C - or 66 degrees F, which is right about the temperature I keep the datacenter cooling system set to.

So, no need to add another sensor - I can easily set my Linux server to monitor that information using:

apcaccess status

and notify me if it reaches too high.

I have to admit - after years of having servers in the normal office environment, and now running for the past 4 years in a proper datacenter I'm amazed at the difference it makes in server stability and hardware reliability.

I finally found the photo manager for me to use in Linux. I'd tried all the major apps, but none of them worked properly with the Olympus .orf raw format. Even the leader, FSpot, wouldn't display the images. It relies on an embedded JPG thumbnail inside the raw image, but my Oly camera doesn't put that image there.

I had originally started working on writing my own in Python, but I haven't really had the time to dedicate to it. I had heard about an application called GQview, but it turned out that it wouldn't display my raw images either.

Then I heard about Geeqie Viewer which is a branch off of the GQview program. GQview hasn't been actively developed in some time, so in the true open source tradition someone took the original source and revamped it while adding new features.

If you're like me and want to access a library of photos on multiple computers possibly from thumbdrives, DVD or external hard drives, going with a program that keeps it's own internal database just won't work. Geeqie allows you to just use folders for organizing your photos, while giving you the ability to still add keywords and comments.

I just did a normal upgrade of suggested security patches that included a kernel update. I typically run dual monitors using "Twinview" that allows me to drag windows from one monitor to another.

After the upgrade, the drivers refuse to recognize the second monitor. I've swapped cables and both monitors work, but even after swapping it defaults back to the right hand screen. The NVidia control panel swears that I only have one screen attached.

I've tried restoring my xorg.conf file from backup, blowing it away entirely and recreating it with the NVidia tool and manually editing it by hand all to no avail. Something seems to have broken twinview in the new updates.

Very frustrating...

Update...

Turns out the monitor cable was at fault - the cable fine after swapping to the other port, but it wouldn't detect that the monitor was there when things were started up. Weird that it didn't occur until a reboot.

I've just upgraded my computer to a new quad-core AMD64 system and did a fresh install of Ubuntu Karmic 64 bit. My old tutorial on getting Tweetdeck working still mostly applies.

My old dual-core AMD64 that was about 3 years old worked just fine with Adobe AIR, but with a newer AMD 64 CPU, Adobe AIR will segmentation fault when you try to run the application installer. This means you can install AIR just fine, but you can't install any programs that actually USE it.

I've tested versions of AIR including 1.5, 1.5.1 and the latest 1.5.2 and all three segfault running the installer.

HOWEVER - the Beta 2 of AIR works just fine with it.

Now, if you previously had TweetDeck working, you might need to uninstall anything AIR, including AIR, then delete the ~/.appdata directory. Afterwards, do a fresh install of Air followed by Tweetdeck. I had originally copied my home directory from my old computer and then tried to reinstall Tweetdeck and Tweetdeck initially complained that it wouldn't run on my computer.

I had a user who's Outlook had apparently deleted the Trash folder from the IMAP server improperly. Outlook functioned okay, but any other email client would barf. The mail client would report a "filesystem error" when you tried to access the Trash folder, and wouldn't delete anything. The server would constantly log:

IOERROR: opening /var/spool/cyrus/mail/j/user/john/Trash/cyrus.header: No such file or directory

I'd noticed the log entries a long time ago, but given that his Outlook was still working fine I didn't stress over it. Now that he's switched to Thunderbird, it became a problem.

The fix was simply to run the following on the mail server:

sudo su - 
su - cyrus
/usr/sbin/cyrreconstruct -rf user.john

If you don't use the dot separator, it would look like:

/usr/sbin/cyrreconstruct -rf user/john

It's a quick and easy fix. cyrreconstruct (or simply reconstruct on some systems) will rebuild the user's entire mail database, and can fix many different types of corruption problems.

Our receptionist PC motherboard was dying, so I threw together a new $400 PC from a barebones MSI box, an enterprise-grade HD, a Celeron 64 bit CPU and 4 GB of RAM. Simple and easy.

Restoring the PC to operational status was very easy because of the PXE boot setup, our Puppet installation, and the use of Duplicity for backups.

I simply booted the new hardware (note the lack of DVD, CD or floppy drive) from the network, picked to install Ubuntu 64 bit and gave it the same hostname as her old PC. Then I walked away. Literally only 10 minutes from unpacking until the PC was installing it's OS unattended.

I came back about 20 minutes later to a newly installed OS with all updates and patches already applied. Then I just ran a single duplicity command line to restore the home directory from the backups and voila!

Yeah, Linux network administration is awesome.

Today I was fed a series of updates for Karmic. At first things went wacko, but only because I'd installed a test version of the NVidia drivers on my system while trying to fix the problems myself. After I reinstalled the standard driver and logged back in things seem much better. My Compiz crashes appear gone.

More importantly, the flash click interactive bug is fixed - when Karmic first hit the streets, on 64 bit with Flash and advanced desktop effects you couldn't interact with most flash animations and videos with the mouse (without having to pull some tricks.) Thankfully that issue is gone.

Also, it appears they've fixed the flash performance issues - hulu.com works great in full screen now without having to increase my CPU speed to max manually.

Very nicely done, Canonical. Very nicely done indeed.