Brian Jamison

I recently upgraded vi to vim on one of my servers and was puzzled why changes weren’t being saved when I edited my crontab file using crontab -e. I would make changes to the file, save them, but still get this error:

crontab: no changes made to crontab

I found a lot of unhelpful advice from checking permissions on the files and directories, to using different editors, to checking cron.allow and cron.deny. None of those worked.

It turns out that .vimrc needs to have a one line configuration option set. You’ll find .vimrc in your home directory (/root for superuser). Just add this line:

set backupcopy=yes

and you’re on your way.

I’ve been a Netflix customer for over a decade, and for years I’ve been using an old Compaq laptop to watch high quality streaming video from Netflix. And despite being old, the laptop was more than fast enough for the highest bitrate streaming Netflix offered. Once it a while I’d have a buffering issue, but the playback was always smooth at 1024×768 resolution.

Until tonight, when Netflix required me to install Microsoft Silverlight in order to watch streaming video. With Microsoft Silverlight installed, the video is unwatchably choppy at 1024×768 resolution – I get maybe 12 frames per second. At 800×600 it’s still choppy. And the video quality is substantially worse. I’ve gone from near-DVD quality to what looks like a badly copied VHS tape. There’s no excuse for it – this is shoddy programming from Microsoft. The old player worked fine, and other high quality streaming video works great as well.

I’ve got no problem upgrading to new technology when something better or faster comes along. I bought an iPhone 3gs recently because of the improvements from the prior models. I can’t stomach wasting money because Microsoft can’t be bothered to write quality software. My choice now seems to be, give up instant viewing, or waste hundreds of dollars on another laptop. Looks like I’m giving up instant viewing. Way to go, Microsoft. Fantastic move, Netflix.

Oh, wait. YouTube just announced they’re going to offer pay per view. And their high quality video streams great using Flash Player! Looks like Google just won over a customer.

“I do not like this Sam-I-am.”

Spotted on the garden train tour

I recently had the pleasure of installing Monit on one of my personal servers. At OpenSourcery we use more complex tools like Nagios + Munin, but I needed a simpler utility for monitoring services, and Monit also allowed me to easily restart a service that may have died. Thumbs up all around.

And while I was able to install and configure Monit in just a few minutes, I didn’t have an easy way to test different loads on the system. Enter stress, which was equally painless to configure and set up, giving me a number of ways to controllably test load on the server in question.

Once again the power of open source proves itself. Total time invested, less than one hour. I didn’t have to pay for a thing, and everything just worked.

I think they meant “biodiesel”

I’ve been having intermittent issues with my comcast setup, mostly doing netflix instant viewing. I called in today and quickly became frustrated with the run around. After I politely asked to be connected to billing to cancel my account (and sitting on hold for 10m) my issue was magically escalated.

Here’s director Josh Tickell at the regal fox tower last night.