OK, so while all my co-workers took a half-day to check their systems for each of the openssh and dns exploits earlier this year, I foolishly let it slide, thinking I had more important things to do. So while I didn't procrastinate so long as to get hacked/phished/etc. I did wait until tonight. So after a few hours research (and a couple educational jems, I've finally regenerated all my system's host keys and have deleted all my .ssh keys and regenerated them on systems where I have console access, relying on ssh agent forwarding everywhere else (thanks Josh). As for DNS, I've redirected my router to opendns which is looking to be an excellent service (thanks John). So I should be all buttoned up again...

It's a very novel concept I know, but the guys at wicd have managed to write a wifi network manager that does things like remember your WPA key (unlike some other more common NetworkManagers). I still need to see if it can do really complicated things like save a config for a hidden network (ooooooh!) and handle enterprise authentication (LEAP), but for now I am very happy to have replaced NetworkManager with something that appears to just work. Check it out: http://wicd.sourceforge.net/. Now, how 'bout it Ubuntu, can we ditch NM already - isn't two broken release cycles enough?

I've been enjoying streaming music to my Playstation 3 with the most excellent MediaTomb uPNP DNLA Media Server for a while. Tonight I managed to get MediaTomb to present the MythTV recordings in a format the PS3 could actually understand. I used the Cidero UPnP A/V Controller to debug the XML presented to the UPnP client by the server. Turns out the PS3 prefers video/mpeg over video/mp2p for MPEG2 video files - picky picky. Simply adding the following:

<map from="mpg" to="video/mpeg"/>

to the MediaTomb config.xml and removing/adding the recordings folder got my PS3 streaming video from MediaTomb. Excellent!

We finally got the landscaping bug, meaning we couldn't stand to look at our weed garden in the front any longer (rest assured, the one in the back is still thriving). It's been a back-breaking week. First I removed the plants we wanted to keep (Conan style). After learning all I could about proper grading and drainage (with some help from the folks on This Old House forums) I decided to get some help rather than tackle it myself. As it turns out that was a REALLY good idea as we had to move about 3 yards of material to the back (about 20 wheel-barrow loads) and uncovered a buried koi pond. "A koi pond" doesn't quite do this abomination justice. It was 5 feet in diameter and about 3 feet deep, and made from reinforced concrete lined with a second harder cement-like material and lined with a brush-on rubber membrane (and it was still holding water when we finally reached it's bottom). After a very affordable $50/4-hour breaker rental we had that beast broken up and removed in about 3 hours (the walls ranged from 3 to 8 inches thick, while the base was a full 12" thick). The removed pile of concrete is... quite large They added a bunch of water and then filled in the hole - which turned to soup (we nearly lost one of the guys in it). A week later and it's still not completely firm. They finally tilled up the yard, gave me a slight slope away from the house (with the exception of a couple mounds around existing trees) and tilled in some compost and gravel for drainage.

With the grading complete, I installed the conduit for the future water feature. Turns out that even after grading and amending, a 25 foot long 14 inch deep trench is still "a lot of work" (tm). But, I got it dug, the conduit run, and the rough-in inspected. With that out of the way, we ordered some sod and added the limestone dust and starter fertilizer. The sod showed up Saturday morning at 7:30 AM - and I got promptly to work. With the help of my two WONDERFUL neighbors, we had the entire lawn down in about 4 hours. We're now onto the water-the-heck-out-of-it stage. We're thrilled with the results and are looking forward to a few less weeds to pull. Many thanks to all the great advice from This Old House and Ask This Old House, my generous neighbors, and a very patient wife (and a not so patient toddler - he really wants to play on it NOW).

[Photo Album]

Our beloved Dogs (Sadie and Cleo) seem to have started shedding more and more - that or we have just become less and less tolerant of dog hair and dirt as of late. I did some reading and decided to try out the much acclaimed Furminator. Now I had been brushing the dogs a couple days a week with a rubber-brush-mit-kind-of-thing so I was also truly AMAZED at how much dead undercoat this great little device extricated from the dogs (and indirectly from my vacuum cleaner). The reviews are true it seems. The head consists of several very fine teeth, that individual would undoubtedly puncture and/or cut the skin; all of them together however form a comb that isn't any less comfortable than other dog brushes I've used (and I tried it on my arm to be sure I wasn't hurting the dogs).

Corey Barnes has been hard at work for the last couple weeks painting the exterior of the house. He saved the rear deck area for last, and it was pretty complex with all the columns and the railings. This gave me time to build the final 16 foot tall column wrap, which really helps complete the space. Once painted, I was able to cut and install my cap rails, which really help break up all the white, and ties the railing in with the deck. I had to include a picture of the front porch as it is still one of my favorites spots of the house, it has a lot of the key design elements all in one place: the cedar ceiling, the wrapped column, the window trim and the window muntins, the lights, the door with dentil rail, the raised deck... etc. Enjoy the pics.

I picked up a 1 TB Western Digital My Book World from Fry's today - that's a 1 Terabyte Gigabit Network Attached Storage box - for $220. I've seen a few consumer technical appliances that run Linux under the covers, and haven't been terribly impressed with many of them. So far however, this box is slick. While WD doesn't support Linux officially (bad WD!) it is pretty trivial to get the box into a techie-friendly state.

With only an hour or so of tinkering, I was able to enable ssh, disable the java server, add my own users, and mount my partitions via sshfs. The info on doing this is already covered by "Paul" at his How to setup My Book World Edition II page so I won't duplicate that here. Should also probably link to Martin Hinner's My Book Howto directly as he appears to have done the hard work. I'll spend the next few days figuring out how to best make use of this device; most likely looking into something like rdiff-backup.

Something they don't mention are the specs of this little beauty, for those of you who might care, read on...

Today at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the official release of Red Hat Enterprise MRG V1 (Messaging Realtime Grid) [1]. A couple snippets of note:

"The Realtime component of Red Hat Enterprise MRG comprises numerous kernel enhancements that provide deterministic performance for time-critical and latency-sensitive applications."

"IBM has worked together closely with Red Hat on the development of the real time Linux kernel and has optimized both WebSphere Real Time and BladeCenter servers on Red Hat Enterprise MRG. We are delighted that IBM and Raytheon have been recognized by Red Hat for this innovation which has led to the largest deployment of real time technology in the next generation of US Navy Destroyers." --Jeff Smith, vice president, Open Source and Linux Middleware at IBM

As enterprise distributions continue to roll out their respective real-time offerings, the benefits (and drawbacks) of real-time are becoming available to the masses. The expectations for these distros are often a mixture of general purpose computing performance and real-time determinism and low-latency. Unfortunately, meeting one of these often comes at the expense of the other. Deterministic behavior requires more overhead in the OS, including some lock serialization and additional context switching, which naturally degrades throughput. Two real-time Linux developers, Steven Rostedt of Red Hat and Gregory Haskins of Novell have been actively working on two distinct approaches to minimizing the effects of determinism on throughput.

Steven's rwlock-multi patches [1] (2.6.24.X-rt8) attempt to reduce the bottleneck of the conversion of the rwlock to an rtmutex in the PREEMPT_RT [2] tree. In order to provide Priority Inheritance [3] support, the rwlock was converted to an rtmutex, limiting it to one owner. This bottleneck hit some subsystems harder than others, networking was particularly affected. The rwlock-multi patch relieves the serialization by allowing a fixed number (configurable) of readers to hold the lock at any one time, bounding the wait time to a higher priority writer. As would be expected, if a high priority writer is blocked on an rwlock, it will boost the priority of all the readers, and prevent any new lower priority readers from getting the lock (as soon as the existing readers release the lock, the writer gets it). This approach certainly increases the latency a high priority writer may see when acquiring a contended lock, but the increase is bounded, and therefor still deterministic. The benefit is seen by all subsystems that leveraged the rwlock for additional throughput, bringing the rt kernel closer in performance to the mainline kernel, while maintaining the necessary deterministic behavior.

The front yard landscape project continues on helped along by great friends who willing gave up an entire SUNNY Portland Saturday to work in our front yard last weekend. We were finally ready for plants so I took a trip to a recommended nursery, Farmington Gardens, and had a wonderful time picking out plants. We ended up with over 30 plants that need to planted and as quickly as possible. When the Mauery's offered their help we gladly to them up on the offer. We got to work at 10 am and other then a lunch break pretty much worked through until 5 that evening, but we got all the plants in. The kids were great and played together or watched tv most of the day so we could work. It was amazing how much we got done. Even more amazing was the transformation to the house, plants just add so much.

Darren's mom came out to visit 2 weeks ago and I have been very remiss in getting the pictures posted. Devon had a great time with Grandma Hope putting puzzles together, working in the yard, going on walks, riding his bike, and playing at the park. I think everyone had a great time and Devon was very sad to see her go. We just don't get to see family often enough. Oh well we enjoy the time we do get together. See a few more pictures in Devon's 3rd Year Album

Parks So this summer I tried to do a weekly park trip with women in our yard. There are a few pictures of one park which turned out to be lots of fun. Water, sand, and spinning toys -- Devon was in heaven. Also included are pictures of Devon and his Friends Nicole & Nathan playing at the big tree house play structure at the outlet mall. They had a grand time and Lauren got to shop in peace. Devon loves being able to get out and move around, climbing, jumping, running, spinning, rolling, tossing,... the list goes on so I am glad that Portland has so many great parks -- now if his mom wasn't so lazy and would take him more often.

So Devon gave us our first really REALLY big scare Saturday. Darren had been out working in the yard with Devon (getting our water feature in) and I was in the house getting dinner ready because we were barbecuing with our friends the Mauery's. Lauren came in with her kids and said the boys were still out side "working" so we started chatting. About 5 minutes later Darren walked in and the first words out of my mouth were "Where's the boy?" (a common question in our house as if he's quiet he is definitely up to no good.) Darren's face clouded and he said "He's not with you? Oh no." And thus started the search for our missing 2 year old. I headed up the street to ask our neighbor (who had just been down helping Darren out in the yard) if Devon had come past. Nope, last time he saw him he was in the front yard with Darren. Darren started calling out his name, checked the front yard, the backyard, the side yards and then all the rooms in the house. I started checking his favorite spots in our neighbors yards the whole time calling for him, Lauren re-checked the house, told Nicole & Nathan to stay put, and she and Vernon headed further up the road calling out and looking in bushes and yards. After what seemed like an eternity (but was probably only 4 or 5 minutes) Darren and I met up in the front yard again. Darren told me he had sent Devon into the house to "get momma and tell her the water feature is ready" and that Devon had headed straight into the garage. As he said that I realized that the ladder to the attic had been down when I left the house to start searching, I started to ask Darren if he had checked the attic just as we both heard the clomping of little feet in the attic. Darren ran to get him just as he threw one of Darren's model airplanes down the stairs (The Stuntman 23 - don't panic Grandpa Vic) -- we were ever so HAPPY to see him again so he didn't even get in trouble. He apparently had quite a bit of fun up in the attic playing with old baby toys and dad's model airplanes because Darren said he made quite a mess. It's also not the first time he's climbed up the ladder (nor will it be the last I'm sure) so we'll have to be more vigilant about keeping it put away when Devon is about. He gave us quite the scare although I must say I'm glad we live on a cul-de-sac with good neighbors who keep an eye out for each other. If we lived on a busier street I would have been even more frightened. I am also thankful for good friends who started helping us look right away. Mostly I'm just grateful my crazy little boy is safe and sound. He drives me nuts some days but I don't know what I would do without him. Love you Devon.

Okay this is just a funny quote from Devon that I had to posted--he says the funniest things lately!
A little back story the boy's vocabulary has been growing by leaps and bounds and sometimes it seems that he is learn 10 new words each day--if you say it and he heard it it he will probably repeat it back to you. So he came into the kitchen asking for Raspberry juice (except it was more like "Rasppy jue" then the conversation went as follows:

Me: How about apple juice?
D: No want rasppy jue!!
Me: The Raspberry juice is all gone. All we have is apple juice.
D: Oh, appie jue is fine. Thanks Mommy.
Me,(Laughing at his use of "fine"): Where did you get your vocabulary from boy? (I don't know why I ask him such big questions)
D: Under the deck.

Under the deck. came out very serious and matter of factly and I just busted up laughing.

Well I finally won and our Alder at the front of the house was taken down on June 26th. Darren loved it but it had a split trunk that was leaning toward our neighbors house and it didn't look all that healthy to me. When the arborist was taking it down he did notice areas that would have cause us problems later on -- one being a large branch over our house that he felt was sure to have fallen off. Also as we looked at the 18 inch rounds we noticed they were all cracked right at the center -- like the tree was slowly spliting right down the center of the trunk. Needless to say I am glad to see it gone--as is our neighbor since it dropped a good portion of it's leaves and seed pods on his roof. Our landscaping plan does spec. another tree for that same general area--a Japanese Stewartia--but it shouldn't get quite as big (and it will flower).

Yeah we finally have paint on our house! It looks SO different and we love it. Our painter, Corey Barnes, has been working on it for a week now and he still has a few more days to finish up but it looks great. The front is mostly done (except gutters) and he should be spraying the back deck railing in the next day or so. We are so excited. And Corey is as meticulous as Darren so we are extremely happy with the level of work done. It looks amazing. Check out the pictures Exterior Paint and let us know what you think. Oh and here is a comparison (I just couldn't resist) the 1st one is of the house right after we put our offering in on it the second is from July 3rd.