Recycling in the capital

Well, we're not quite in the same league as Al Gore, but my wife and I do try to make some effort towards cutting down on our wasteful consumer-oriented impact on the environment.

We've got a decent system going to compost our organic waste and we try to recycle where possible.

Unfortunately this is a major uphill battle in the republic of sleepy hollow. We may be the city of choice but the services rendered for our rapidly escalating municipal rates are hardly addressing environmental issues.

Today the witness reported on a sewerage outflow into the Msunduzi river from one of the pump stations. That's right, the report claims raw sewerage is flowing straight into the river. Is there any outrage, are heads going to roll? Nope. There seems to be some concern and some gentle assurance that they'll address it but no-one seems overly perturbed.

If we don't pay our rates or taxes you can bet your life we'll be rapidly prosecuted and incarcerated but is there any consequence for allowing severe pollution of the environment we are paying the council to protect and manage? Naaah.

Sorry, I digressed. But back to the recycling issue.

It is a battle to recycle waste in this town. At one stage there was a paper pick-up where you could leave waste paper out on the verge on a certain day of the week but, sadly, this was discontinued. Apparently it wasn't supported enough by residents so it became unviable. That is really disappointing, but I can believe it. Apathy is rife.

Apart from that there is no collection service whatsoever for recycling. There are some "dump" points where you can take your glass and paper but these seem to be very poorly serviced. It is a mission to get all your recyclables to the spot and then when you arrive, half the time the bins are overflowing and obviously haven't been emptied for weeks.

Pathetic.

Perhaps it isn't commercially feasible to run these recycling points but one would think then, that the city would subsidise this. What a great way to reduce our landfill impact, reduce litter and create jobs? Obviously not a priority.

Above is a picture taken of the overflow of the glass recycling point at the Super Spar. Took time off during my lunch to take my glass there and had to return home with it because the point obviously hadn't been cleared for some time.

These bins have the name "reclaim" on them so presumably this is the organisation responsible for running the point. Get your act together guys, this is pathetic. And, Pietermaritzburg/Msunduzi council, you could also really get involved in a recycling drive. Give us *something* for our rates.

(P.S. The paper bin is mondi run but that was fine, no complaints there)

Enable remote destop between Fedora Core 7 PCs

Some more handy tips for Fedora home users:

Enabling remote desktops at home.

1. I did this step first and I don't think it worked so leave it out next time but, having done it, I can't not document it in case it is critical.

I went to the System->Administration->Login window command from the main menu;
Went to the "Remote" tab;
Chose style- same as local;

Essentially, this was to allow remote login. Not sure if this was replaced by the steps below or augmented by them.

2. As per the helpful document in http://homepage.ntlworld.com/daniel.rigal/xdmvnc.html

# Edit /etc/X11/xdm/xdm-config. Comment out the last line saying:

DisplayManager.requestPort: 0

by adding an "!" on the front.

# Edit /etc/X11/xdm/Xaccess. Uncomment the line:

#* #any host can get a login window

by removing the first "#".

# The next file to edit depends on which XDM version you are using. For GDM based systems (e.g. RedHat) edit: /etc/X11/gdm/gdm.conf. For KDM based systems (e.g. FC7) edit: /usr/share/config/kdm/kdmrc. If unsure, editing both will do no harm.

In either case, find the section:

[Xdmcp]
Enable=false

Change "false" to "true" or "1".

Underneath this (i.e. somewhere inside the [Xdmcp] section), make sure you have a line which says:

Port=177

If it is commented out then uncomment it. If it says Port=0 then change it to say Port=177. If it is missing entirely then add it.

# You now need to restart the XDM/KDM/GDM process to make it notice the changes. The easiest way to do this is: "init 3; init 5". Note that this will crash any X desktop you (or any other users) are running on the machine at the time. If you prefer not to do this, you can kill and restart the processes manually.

3. Firewalls

On both systems, I enabled the following ports:

177 (UDP)
6000-6005 (TCP)

Unpalatable self-centredness

Yawn.

My wife and I have just done our level best to sit through Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".

Not what I expected at all. We had some preconceived ideas, and those were simply that this would be moving, impressive stuff. Everyone had raved about it.

What did I know of Al Gore before watching the movie? Only that he was beaten by Bush to the presidency. Precious little else so I definitely wasn't prejudiced.

What is our impression? Well, we weren't able to finish it. We just got sick and tired of what appeared to be Al Gore being more obsessed with getting his own picture on the camera, revelling in his own showmanship and presenting pseudo-science in what he supposed was a moving manner.

Look, we're hardly rabid environmentalists, but we're certainly not evil capitalist exploiters-at-all-costs either and have our own major problems with the Bush administration's policies on the environment.

But this was just too much baloney. Human induced global warming may well be true but I will not be moved by some guy that wants to squeeze into his film a teary moment when he was beaten to the presidency. Earlier on he was telling us about life changing events after his son's accident which changed his perspective on things; and then suddenly he seems to be trying to dig at Bush as if he never got over the election thing. GET OVER IT, Al! You yourself are telling us your life has changed and there are more important things than petty political squabbles.

What's more, you'd think after watching this that Al Gore was the guy that had introduced the world to the concept of global warming. We found the whole film amazingly self-centred. Pictures of Al musing about how he could save the planet are liberally interspersed among the badly presented "facts".

He shows a clip of some glacier calving and the commentry implies that we are witnessing glaciers retreating! Glaciers have always and will always calve where they enter the sea whether they're retreating or advancing. This is gross misrepresentation. Look, I'm not trying to say that the world's glaciers aren't retreating... I believe they are... but that doesn't justify misleading people by implying that what was shown in that clip is evidence of it. What it means is that either
a) Al Gore doesn't know about glaciers calving OR
b) He is deliberately misleading the audience.

Either of the above possibilities is equally damning and scary. And if there's one "fact" like this in the movie you can hardly trust the rest of the hastily drawn conclusions.

I can't comment on whatever the final conclusion was because I bailed somewhere during Al's reminiscences of life on the farm in his younger days.

Poor job, Mr Gore. Next time forget the pictures of yourself and try to get the facts down accurately and objectively with a little less bitterness about your political misfortunes.

SABC TV Tax

Dear Sir

Today I made payment for my television licence to the SABC. I wish to remind you that I
do this under the strongest possible duress. I pay only in order to abide by the law
which I consider draconian and oppressive.

I do not make use of the SABC at all and yet I am forced to subsidise this organisation
just because I have a television set which I use for watching DVDs and DSTV (pay)
stations.

The fact that there is a law which forces me to pay for services I do not use or want I
consider extortionate in the least.

I also object to the term "TV LICENCE". This is a tax like any other and should be named
as such.

I realise that you alone are not responsible for this deplorable state of affairs but I
do suggest you consider the moral aspect of your position in an organisation that uses
such extortionate means to obtain its revenue.

kind regards

Recovering Data via USB Housing

Just had a bit of a mission recovering data from my old hard drive and in the true spirit of open source and community support, I thought I'd publish the details here. Hopefully it gets indexed by google and someone having similar difficulties will find some answers or help from my experiences.

Data Recovery: Old Linux Drive into USB housing
===============================================

So my old computer gives up the ghost and I get a brand spanking new one. What to do about the data sitting on the old hard drive?

What was that? Yes, of course I had backups. And they worked. But one thing.... the only thing not in the
backup were my photos from our skiing trip. Downloaded seconds before the blasted thing crashed.

AFAIK the hard drive (and photos) were fine. So I thought I'd just plug it into my new computer and get the data off.

Except....

New computer is all SATA and old is IDE. No IDE connector!

So I order one of those external bays - you know, you for backups AND I can get my data off. Right?

Wrong- not so easy.

I plug the sucker in and FC7 automounts it... but it only mounts the boot partition. I forgot the thing was partitioned.

Uh oh.

So I unmount (using umount) that one from the command line and attempt to mount the correct (data) partition.

How do I know what it is? Well, running fdsik -l gives:
>>>>
Disk /dev/sdb: 80.0 GB, 80025279488 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 9729 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00074b79

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 * 1 13 104391 83 Linux
/dev/sdb2 14 9729 78043770 8e Linux LVM
>>>>

Aha! Then, /dev/sdb2 is what I'm after.

So I try
#mount /dev/sdb2 /media/main

no dice. I think it asked for an fstype at the time and I couldn't supply one that worked.

Turned out the problem is that the second partition above is not just Linux (ie ext2) but Linux LVM. This means it is a logical volume story.

So, the journey begins:

First, we run pvs to check out the physical volumes.

first time I ran pvs, the USB drive didn't show, so:

Ran pvs on /dev/sdb2
and it showed the good stuff:
>>>>>>
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sdb2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 74.41G 32.00M
>>>>>
but, next time I ran pvs with no arguments:

>>>>>
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup00: Existing ynE4fb-efC3-Yqz2-gY9u-72rp-rEUf-N7iJgs (created here) takes precedence over 775r5u-IFr7-8Hlf-wMIS-ziFX-EBjW-YR3qVb
PV VG Fmt Attr PSize PFree
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 232.62G 32.00M
/dev/sdb2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 74.41G 32.00M
>>>>>>

uh-oh: problems, they have the same VG name. But the gobbledegook after "Existing" in the line above is the UUID so we can use that and vgrename to rename the offensive (2nd) one to something better so...

with much trepidation:

#vgrename 775r5u-IFr7-8Hlf-wMIS-ziFX-EBjW-YR3qVb VolGroup00_tmp
>>>>>>>
WARNING: Duplicate VG name VolGroup00: Existing ynE4fb-efC3-Yqz2-gY9u-72rp-rEUf-N7iJgs (created here) takes precedence over 775r5u-IFr7-8Hlf-wMIS-ziFX-EBjW-YR3qVb
Volume group "VolGroup00" successfully renamed to "VolGroup00_tmp"
>>>>>

OK, seemed succesful.

Now when we pvs, we get:
>>>>>>
/dev/sda2 VolGroup00 lvm2 a- 232.62G 32.00M
/dev/sdb2 VolGroup00_tmp lvm2 a- 74.41G 32.00M
>>>>>>

phew. So far so good. Now we need to mount the bugger:

We try

#mount /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/LogVol00 /media/main

but somehow keep mounting the existing (Volgroup00) LogVol00 to this point. Not sure why.

So I decide to rename the logical volume (LogVol00) under the volume group VolGroup00_tmp to avoid lv naming confusion:

#lvrename /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/LogVol00 /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/newlv
>>>>>
Renamed "LogVol00" to "newlv" in volume group "VolGroup00_tmp"
>>>>>
OK, seems succesful.

Try to mount and it can't find /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/newlv. But I've just created it? What's up?

now run lvdisplay and you get, among other things:
>>>>>>
LV Name /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/newlv
VG Name VolGroup00_tmp
LV UUID BE6gLt-cTZD-1JKL-ADy5-ksLX-2Obv-gSB1Pm
LV Write Access read/write
LV Status NOT available
LV Size 73.62 GB
Current LE 2356
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors 0
>>>>>>

NOT available??? apparently you have to run vgchange -a y /dev/VolGroup00_tmp
and.....

2 logical volume(s) in volume group "VolGroup00_tmp" now active


So....

and now we can mount the bugger

mount /dev/VolGroup00_tmp/newlv /media/main/

Success!!

Auto Valet in PMB

After 3 weeks Europe, we returned to find my wife's car a jungle of spores and fungus. Everywhere. The seats, the carpets, the seatbelts the steering wheel, the gearlever. And it stank.

It seems that some water had dripped into the passenger side footwell and I guess the moist, close environment over 3 weeks had allowed this stuff to go mad.

The car was practically undriveable unless you were prepared to get covered in the stuff and really smelly. So we set about some internet research to see how to fix it. Suggestions included:

1. Drying the car out by leaving doors and windows open and running the heater
2. Vacuuming
3. Sprinkling bicarbonate of soda on all surfaces and leaving for a day or two before vacuuming up

We tried all of these and then took it for a Valet. We dropped it at Universal Valet Service in Commercial road. After phoning around, they seemed reasonable (R375 for full valet) and said they would take the seats out which sounded quite thorough.

My wife dropped the car there at about 11 on Thurs morning and specified that what she wanted them to focus on was the fungus! Well, they called on Friday and said was it possible to leave it overnight and pick it up on Sat. We agreed and reiterated that we'd rather it was a thorough job than a quick job.

On Sat, after being told it was ready we went to collect. My wife was very disappointed to find that the inside really hadn't been thoroughly cleaned. The seatbelts and other areas still had the fungus. When she pointed it out to the guy in charge he agreed there was a problem and called one of the cleaners over to attend to it. This wasn't really good enough... there was no way she could do it then and there and we weren't going to stand around while she tried.

So we asked if we could leave it for them to sort it out. The chap agreed but also felt he had to tell us how short staffed he was and how difficult it was to get people in over the weekend etc etc. I feel for him but that really isn't our issue. Note to service organisations- customers are not interested in your problems: what they want is

1. An apology
2. A plan to make it right

You will be surprised how much a customer will put up with if you just apologise and try to make it right. Examples of making it right are - redoing the job, discounting the work or both.

Anyway, we left it and fetched it on Monday afternoon. It still wasn't pristine but they had made a bit more effort so we just cut our losses and took the car. There was no discount or anything further so while I don't really blame the guys, I probably will try somewhere else for a similar service next time.

In the end, what we got was a carwash, an engine clean and a polish. The interior valet was a bit disappointing. It didn't seem as though they'd been very thorough and we can get a similar interior clean from a R30 carwash at the local garage.

So this may be one of the cheaper valet services in Pietermaritzburg and they are friendly but be aware of what you are likely to get and don't have your expectations too high!

Will let you know when we try other services what they are like.

Incidentally, I think the car is still a bit stinky. Will try sprinkling bicarb again this weekend and leaving it to stand open before re-vacuuming. That is supposed to absorb a lot of the hone.

Kruger Mpumalanga International Airport - What to do while you wait for your flight

Well, since I arrived well in advance of my flight (Nelspruit to Durban at 11.40) I thought I'd find a nice placeto sit and relax, have a cup of coffee and maybe some cake or something, hopefully check up on my e-mailand perhaps work a little on my trading strategy.

I started with the upstairs Cafe called "Wings" restaurant or something like that. From the end of theRestaurant (essentially the smoking section / bar) there is a view of the Apron and the aircraft and Iwas able to easily get a table there as there were practically no other customers. The tables and chairsare sort of rustic wooden but fairly comfortable.

The restaurant lacks a bit of background music and ambience but then, I suppose, it is an airport cafe.There is nowhere to plug in a power cable so I didn't take out my notebook. I assumed there would be nointernet either.

A glance through the menu shows that they are pretty much focussed on meals rather than coffee-shop typefare. This didn't really suit me so I tried to find the smallest thing on the menu. It was a Cruisin'Croissant for R19. Looked OK, so I ordered a cup of filter coffee and that. No luck, they are out ofCroissants. I asked if they didn't have muffins or scones or something like that but this was alsogreeted with a shake of the head.

So I sat back, enjoyed my coffee (which wasn't bad) and watched police sniffer dogs check out the Jetstreamaircraft on the apron waiting to depart. They seemed to give it the all clear and it left.

I noticed the pilot spun the port engine up to full speed and ran it for a while before even startingstarboard. I wondered if they were anticipating some problem. I also wondered how an aircraft is able tostand still with one engine (and propeller) belting away at full tilt. I don't know much about these thingsbut I believe the pilot can vary the pitch of the propeller so perhaps when they do this they have thepropeller pitch in a neutral position, thereby generating very little thrust? Seems to make sense.

I finished the coffee and tired of listening to the cellphone conversation of my fellow patron so Ithought I'd try the coffee shop downstairs, Buondi Cafe. Paying was a bit of a mission as the waitress had to empty her personal handbag to find the correct change for me.

Buondi Cafe is not blessed with much of a view and has no windows but looked cosy enough. They boastan internet connection at (less than! R1/min). That is hardly cheap. I won't give all the prices butthe 90min deal is R50. Not great but comparable with the Jo'burg airport wireless deal, if I recallcorrectly. However, this deal is to sit at their special machine. I have yet to check if there is a wirless offering.One moment, while I do....

OK, only one detected - Interlink KMIA security enabled. Signal weak here so I guess it's not specific tothe Cafe. The lady at information didn't know much about it. So no luck there.
As for Cafe Buondi... before ordering *another* coffee I checked what muffins they had (as these werepublished on the menu). The answer- none. So I told the waitress not to worry and haven't had anything.Very disappointing. Surely that is basic fare for a coffee shop? In their defence they aren't griping atme for sitting in the chair and not ordering anything but I'm still not too impressed.

I guess there's a chance that if I go through to departures I will have more luck (possibly a notebook desk orsomething?) Will let you know shortly.

Nope, same story at departures. had to sit with machine on lap and no internet. Pretty poor, I'm afraid,so I suggest when visiting Kruger Mpumalanga airport, take a good book ;-)

Patricia the social democrat

Bread prices are up again. Apparently this is a worldwide phenonmenon, not driven just by the monopolistic price fixers (Albany et al backed by Tiger Brands).

And Patricia is righteously indignant, apparently. I refer to our very own Patricia de Lille, champion of the people and leader of the Independant Democrats.

According to Fin24, she is pushing for heavy penalties on the price fixers and government regulation on the bread price. Does that strike anyone as ironic? No mercy for the people currently fixing the price and a strong push for someone else to fix the price. Hmm. Tom Caldwell would have raised his eyebrows, I suspect.

Is price regulation good or evil in your eyes, Patricia? Or is it more a case of who the regulator is? While we may be justifiably uneasy about price control by those evil capitalists behind Tiger Brands, should we be any less uneasy if our government wields the power? Do those individuals have a track record that inspires confidence?

I would suggest Patricia consider changing the party name to the independent socialists. Regulation is not a tool favoured by democrats.