Coats Sez

Ok. So I made a video to upload to youtube.com for the first time and realizing I had to snip some from the beginning and end of the video I began looking for a way to do it, not ever having had to do it before and ignorant of and a newbie at video editing. I did the usual google.com search for linux video editors and found what the selection was for my Ubuntu distribution. To make a long story short I ended up downloading them all, one by one. Cinelerra, LiVES, OpenShot, Pitivi, Avidemux, Kdenlive, and Kino. Every one of these programs crashed before I could get thru editing my video and sound files. Kdenlive crashed right when I was within a fraction of a second of getting my video and audio synchronized, taking at least 30 minutes of work with it. The other video editors experienced similar crashes. I found I could not depend on any of them. I tried them all many times but kept experiencing the same results every time so I finally decided I was just wasting my time, which disappointed me, as I have used one Linux distribution or another for the past 10 years and I would like to use it for everything I do on a computer. It was not to be for the video editors, however, so I broke down and decided I was going to have to use my Windows Vista system on my secondary computer. I use my second computer hardly at all but I guess from now on it is going to be my video editing machine. I went to Office Depot and found and bought a copy of Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9. It seems to work ok for the short time I have used it and it didn’t crash on me(yet).  I move my work back and forth between the machines using a thumb drive. I knew those thumb drives would come in handy some day. The thumb drive I am using also contains my rescue system but it has plenty of room for other things.

I wish I could give a better report on Linux video editors but I’m just telling what happened. Looks like they are not quite ready for primetime yet. Keep up the work though, guys. I would really like to use Linux exclusively. I feel kinda tainted and dirty having to fire up that “other” system to do things.

My youtube.com channel is at: http://www.youtube.com/user/terry2141859

Terry Coats

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was in the Senate asking for unanimous consent in passing
her bill to aid homeless women veterans and veterans with children. Republican Senator
Mitch McConnell stood up and objected on behalf of Republican Senator Tom Coburn.
Apparently Coburn was in a committee hearing.

McConnell indicated he would like to object to the bill himself at another time. The objection raised put a
stop on the bill for the time being. Senator Murray promised to continue trying. The cost of the bill would be
only 50 million dollars over 5 years for grants to give homeless women vets and homeless vets with children
a little extra help in getting back on their feet. You can read the bill at http://murray.senate.gov/veterans/womenvethome.pdf. Apparently Republicans think this is too much money to spend on people who have
served their country. I’d like to point out that BP, according to news reports, has spent just about the same
amount of money in their public relations ad campaign to make themselves look good in spite of the
ongoing underwater oil gusher.

I tell you folks, the Republican Party should be called the Heartless Party. They’re never, ever, on the side
of the people who do the work for this country. If you work, either civilian or military, you don’t count for
anything and are considered worthless by the Republicans and their sympathizers. They like only people
with bags of money or people who are in a position to rule over other people. They are the party of the
puppetmasters and we “small people” are the puppets. Do you really want to vote for these people, ever
again?

Terry Coats

If your unemployment benefits are running out, guess what? You’re gonna have to start
visiting the soup line or the mission to get something to eat because every single Senate
Republican voted “no” on a vote to stop their filibuster of a bill extending unemployment
benefits, among other things. So, as you get hungrier and start your serious worrying
about how you are going to pay the rent, think about the Republicans’ estimation of your
worth and value. Keep thinking about it until election time and be sure to vote. Even homeless people can
vote in most or maybe all places, because you may be homeless by then, thanks to the Republicans and
their commitment to value only the rich and upper class. I am not able to understand how any American
citizen can consider Republicans to be a friend of average, ordinary, working(or non-working) people, or the
“small people” as BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg calls you and me. Yes, I know he is not an American
or a Republican but they all share the same philosophy that they are on a higher plane than we are. Who
cares if people are turning into hobos as long as the uppity class can continue their march to the bank
with their sacks of cash?

Good luck to you people as you navigate your way through life in our failing country.

Terry Coats

“A tragedy of the first proportion.” That’s what I heard Texas Republican Congressman Joe
Barton say this morning as I was watching CNN coverage of a congressional hearing
about the BP oil leak disaster. He wasn’t speaking about the oil leak. He was talking about the “tragedy” of the Obama administration getting BP to ante up 20 billion dollars.
He was apologizing for the administration’s “shakedown” of BP. I was shocked as I was
listening to this but I suppose I shouldn’t have been. It shows what Republicans really think about. They
really don’t care about people’s loss of jobs and income due to the spill. They don’t care about miles
of shoreline ruined. They don’t care about mounds of dead animals. The Republican Party cares only
about upper class people losing their billions. The Republican Party is the party that sees nothing
wrong with raping the land and the sea. They don’t care if every last fish is dead and every last tree is
cut down as long it keeps upper class fat-cats laughing all the way to the bank. Damn the future, get it all
now while it’s available to get!

You Republican Party members ought to be ashamed. It is your right-wing stupidity and arrogance that is
ruining the country, not left-wingers like me. To refer to BP’s money loss as a tragedy of the first proportion
while at the same time their mistakes may be ruining the Gulf Coast of the U.S. forever is among the
stupidest things I’ve ever heard a Republican say and shows that Republicans have no compassion for
working people. They care only about the rich. It’s always been that way, though. It’s just startling to
actually hear it straight from a Republican’s mouth. Congressman Barton, you are an idiot and I hope
what you said damages your party for a long time.

Terry Coats

It’s almost 2 a.m. here in Oregon as I write this and I just got done looking in on CNN’s
live feed of the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing is happening on the video.
They were undoing bolts earlier but now nothing is happening. I guess they are sleeping.
Sleeping while the oil continues to flow. This is not a time to be sleeping. It’s always
nighttime a mile deep in the ocean. The oil doesn’t care if you are tired. The responsible
people can rest when it’s all over.

This one is a fail for President Obama. He is acting cool and calm while the Gulf coast of the United States
is getting ready to be destroyed in the greatest ecological calamity in United States history. This is not a
time to be cool and collected. It is a time for leadership and action. If nothing else he can send some
people to hold guns to the heads of the responsible parties to make sure they are working 24/7 to fix the
problem. Foul my country’s beaches, will ya!?

Sorry, President Obama, but you are fiddling while Rome burns. You dropped the ball on this one. I heard
someone apologizing for your administration, saying there is nothing that can be done. Yes, there is.
You can solicit help from the brightest minds in the country. We have excellent engineering schools and
excellent scientists. You aren’t doing enough. Just like President Bush didn’t do enough after hurricane
Katrina, sitting around while old people died in their wheelchairs, you and your administration are sitting
around while the Gulf coast dies. More and more, Washington D.C. and representatives and senators are
showing themselves to be incompetent when it comes to the needs of the citizens. The administration
must fix this or the Republicans will come back to power next election which will compound the tragedy.

Goodbye, Gulf coast. I knew a day like this was coming. There will be more as long as we remain oil
addicted.

Terry Coats

I decided that I am too old to go by a nick so I will start using my real name to post.
I also changed the name of my blog to reflect that.

Terry Coats

I was writing a new story to add to my collection of stories and when I got done I thought
about how to add the hyperlink to the pages I wanted to link to the new page. Up till now I
had been doing this by hand, editing every html file with my text editor program and
copying and pasting the link one file at a time. I decided to look for a different way to do
this and I knew Linux had the tools to get the job done but despite my time on Linux I had
not learned how to do this yet. After doing a bit of googling I came up with the solution. The solution was to
use a combination of the “find” and “sed” commands. I looked at an example I found and through some trial
and error I finally got things right. I made a copy of my webpage folder to work on first. You don’t want to
experiment on your real files until you’re sure it’s going to work.

What I wanted to do is take the link to the new page I had written and insert it into existing menus on my
webpages and do it in one fell swoop. The idea I came up with was to take an existing menu item and
replace it with itself plus a new line with the new link to add to the menu. This may be a stupid idea and I
am sure there are better but it works for me. Here’s an example command line:

Find and replace strings and maybe add some too.
Important! Forward slashes in strings must be escaped with a backslash.
\n is a line feed. \n tacks on an additional string which goes on the line just below second string.
example:
find . -type f -exec sed -i ’s/<li><a href=”the_prisoner.html”>the prisoner<\/a><\/li>/<li><a href=”the_prisoner.html”>the prisoner<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=”the_leeches.html”>the leeches<\/a><\/li>/g’ {} \;

generic version:

I’m taking the original line and replacing it with itself plus a new line.

Probably stupid but it works. “second string” is identical to “first string” in this case.

find . -type f -exec sed -i ’s/first string/second string\nthird string/g’ {} \;

The page I found on the web which helped me with this is: http://www.brunolinux.com/02-The_Terminal/Find_and%20Replace_with_Sed.html

Terry Coats

I know the menu on the right side of this and my other blog pages at least as of the date I
am writing this is a messed-up menu. As viewed in Internet Explorer 8 and probably other
versions of IE as well. It looks fine in Firefox though, which is the browser I use with Ubuntu. I just want to say I am working on it and thinking about it, trying to figure out
what the problem is. Obviously Firefox and IE can’t agree on how to interpret html or css
or both. I don’t know how long it’s looked that way. I hardly ever fire up Vista and just did today and saw
what my pages look like in IE. Makes me look like a dummy. I’ll be working on trying to get it fixed but
might be a while. The Wordpress blog creates its pages with php code and I’m not used to working with
php. Here’s a screen capture if you can’t see what I am talking about: screen capture

Terry Coats

I installed openvpn on both of my computers to encrypt wireless traffic but found I was
having trouble getting a consistent gateway for the vpn on the client computer. I haven’t
figured it out yet. Doing it the “right” way, that is. I did manage to get my default gateway
every time though by putting the command:
route add default gw 10.8.0.1
as the last line in /etc/rc.local on the client computer. I’m sure there’s a better and more “correct” way to
do this but I haven’t got it figured out yet.

Terry Coats

I’ll comment on myself. I dug through openvpn documentation and their suggested way of
getting a gateway up and running on openvpn startup was to start a script from openvpn.conf
which basically used the “route” command to set up a route and that was basically what I was
doing in the first place so I guess it doesn’t really matter where you bring up the gateway from.
I copied openvpn’s way of doing it however and start a script from the client’s openvpn.conf file.

Terry Coats

I’ve been working on this for three weeks. Getting an ad-hoc wireless network working
between my two computers, that is. I didn’t intend for it to be such a long-running project.
I was a little bit naive at the start though about how hard it was going to be. Although I
love Linux and Ubuntu I was discouraged by how hard it was get a wireless connection
working. I almost gave up. It really wasn’t that important. I don’t have a need for it. I just
wanted to do it for a learning experience but I underestimated the number of hours I would spend on the
project. In this article I will tell about my experiences and how it all came out in the end.

I’ll cut to the chase and tell what I ended up with that works. On my main computer which is running
Kubuntu 9.10 I have a Belkin Wireless N usb card which has an lsusb identifier of 050d:8053. The only
way I could get this device to work for me was to compile the Ralink driver and edit its accompanying
RT2870STA.dat data file to suit what I wanted for my card. The driver compiles into “rt2870sta.” There
is a driver by this name which comes with Ubuntu but I could not get it to work so I moved it out of the
way into another folder. There is also included with Ubuntu a rt2800usb driver which looked like it was
going to work with this card but I never could get it to connect with that driver. I had to put rt2800usb
into blacklist.conf in /etc/modprobe.d or it would load on startup and whack my compiled rt2870sta. I
figured this out only after 3 weeks and many days and many hours of trial and error troubleshooting. I
probably missed something along the way that would have also worked but I had to go with what worked
for me after long hours of frustration.

My second computer is running a Dlink DWA-130 usb card on a Xubuntu 9.10 system. It took me a
long time to figure out how to make this one go. The final solution was to use ndiswrapper and the 32 bit
XP driver from the cd. I tried every solution I could think of including compiling a driver but that one wouldn’t
work either. After installing ndiswrapper and the XP driver, this combination finally caused an ad-hoc
connection to occur between the two systems. The card id is 2001:3301 in lsusb.

During the 3 weeks I worked on this I tried every possible combination of adapter and driver that I
could think of. I had 3 adapters to work with. I also have a Belkin Enhanced Wireless usb adapter that I
tried to make work but I could find no combination that would work for this device. And by work I mean
get a connection. There were several drivers for the 3 different devices that would work to set the
parameters apparently correctly but the two devices on my two separate computers would just sit there
and do nothing. Usually iwlist would work and I could see devices in the neighborhood but I could set
the ad-hoc parameters for both devices and nothing would happen. It was very frustrating. The combination
of Belkin Wireless N on the main computer and the Dlink DWA-130 on the second computer just turned
out to be a lucky combination.

I did all this work with the idea of someday moving my second computer into the living room and
leaving my main computer here in the bedroom. I spent enough money on this to have just gone ahead
and bought a wireless router in the first place but I suppose I am a glutton for punishment and I refused
to admit defeat.

After finally getting these devices to connect ad-hoc I had to figure out a way to get my second
computer to connect to the internet via my first computer. After doing some googling I came up with the
right iptables rules for enabling it to work. These are the rules I use:
iptables -A FORWARD -m conntrack –ctstate ESTABLISHED,RELATED -j ACCEPT
iptables -A POSTROUTING -t nat -j MASQUERADE
and:
echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
to enable ip forwarding. That’s it. I came across many other combinations of rules people were using to
do this but this simple 3-liner does it for me. I put these three lines in rc.local in folder /etc. It is the last
script to get executed when the computer starts up. I’m lazy. I probably could have done some startup
scripts for init but that’s too much trouble. After all, it’s MY computer and I can do it the way I want to.

The next thing I did was to get some sort of security in place. I was disappointed to discover that
wpa2 won’t work in ad-hoc mode and that wep is considered useless. I know because I tried for hours to
get this to work before realizing it just wasn’t possible. After lots of thought and googling I finally decided
to use openvpn. This is available thru Ubuntu’s installation system so i got it installed and followed
directions at http://openvpn.net static key mini howto to get things rolling. This turned out not to be too hard. Just follow directions putting the necessary configuration files on the server and client computer.
After I did this I started both computers back up and presto, encrypted communications over the wireless
between the two computers. This takes care of the problem of people reading my traffic but it still doesn’t
prevent unwanted connections outside the vpn. I’m still working on that. I think it is going to take some
iptables rules to block unwanted traffic. Anybody got any ideas to help me on that?

Oh, I forgot to add that I did all this manually. I do not use a network manager on either of my computers
but edit by hand the file “interfaces” in /etc/network. I never have been able to get any of the network
managers to work right for me. It’s faster to just go ahead and do it myself rather than rely on something
that only seems to work when it wants to.

Terry Coats