Author: Jón Frímann

I want to remind people that I am turning off my email post-list due to cost. The cost of having the email post-list has been going up, since the more member it has the price goes up for me. Sadly, my income of this web site has not been increasing enough to support this expense. So I have have just cut it off my cost list. If people know of cheaper alternative to my current email list, please let me know so I can set it up.

I was told to get a job

I got a donation earlier this month. I was checking my invoice for it in the bank, on the comment I did see the message that I should enjoy the donation and I should also get a job. While I am thankful for the donation, I do not like the message a lot, since it implies that I am not doing any work. Nothing is future from the truth, the reason is simple. Writing is a job, granted that I am not working for big international company and I do not get any regular income from this. It is however a job and has always remained as such, many people due handle writing as just a hobby. That is fine with me, I do however handle writing as a job, even if it pays me little at the moment. That can change, I hope.

Now, I do not waste my time doing nothing when nothing is happening in Iceland. I am currently preparing to write a number of short stories, three large books (more then 300 pages) and more short stories that I hope to publish on Tor.com (if they accept me to start with). I hope that all this work, is in the end going to increase my income so that I can properly pay my bills without a issue. For the moment, I am mostly just surviving on my social welfare from Iceland, that is not easy due to my income – debt ratio. That ratio is improving and thanks to the donation I got earlier this month (the one who told me to get a job) I was able to pay down my glasses for good. There is some debt left to pay for me, but things are getting more manageable now from few months ago. I still have problems, but what is important is the fact things are getting better for me money wise. Donation however help me keep things working and I am continuing cutting down cost where I can afford it, since I need to and I just cannot afford to have everything for this blog while my income is at such low levels as it is now.

I just hope that my e-book publishing is going to fix this in the future, but I won’t believe it until I see it. So until then, I am making the best of what I have at the moment.

I need some technical help, for the reason that I am not a programmer and I never have. I guess that I never am going to be one, since I lack the talent of doing numerical math (I possibly have dyscalculia).

I problem is this, I run a internal counter on my local server. This counter helps me by telling me the total number of earthquakes during the day, week, month and a year in Iceland, it is really useful when large earthquake swarm takes place.

I used Gentoo Linux on my server, but I have now moved over to FreeBSD for technical and practical reasons. The move to FreeBSD did work as I expected, with the exception of this counter, it does not work in FreeBSD, I do not get any reading to mrtg (the counter software). The script I have been testing work when run from command line, but when I run the cron job on them. Nothing more happens and no data is handed over to mrtg.

Here are the scripts,

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

#earthquake count shell V0.0.6

URL=”http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/eqlist.html”
TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
#TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y/%m/%d`
#TODAYSDATE=`date +%Y-%m-%d`

COUNT=`lynx -dump ${URL} | grep ${TODAYSDATE} | grep -vi updated | wc -l`
#COUNT=`wget -O ${URL} | grep ${TODAYSDATE} | grep -vi updated | wc -l`
echo ${COUNT}
echo ${COUNT}
#echo ${COUNT}
#echo “uptime”
#echo “hostname”

exit 0

This script does not give me any error, but no data is handed over to mrtg as it did in Gentoo Linux. I do not know why that it and I have been unable to resolve this issue.

The second script I was testing is this one here, more details and discussions can be found here on FreeBSD forum.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

#earthquake count shell V0.0.7

URL=”http://hraun.vedur.is/ja/englishweb/eqlist.html”
TODAY=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
HOURS=`date +%H`
MINUTES=`date +%M`
OUT=”$TODAY.txt”

NOW=`echo “($HOURS * 60) + $MINUTES” | bc`
EARTHNUM=`wget –quiet -O – $URL | grep $TODAY | grep -vci updated`

if [ $OUT ]; then
touch $OUT
fi

echo “$NOW $EARTHNUM” >> $OUT

exit 0

When run in mrtg, I get this error here. The script runs without a issue when run it from command line.

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Could not get any data from external command ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’
Maybe the external command did not even start. (Illegal seek)

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Problem with External get ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’:
Expected a Number for ‘in’ but nothing’

2013-05-20 22:46:09: WARNING: Problem with External get ‘/usr/local/etc/mrtg/eq.imo.sh’:
Expected a Number for ‘out’ but nothing’

2013-05-20 22:46:09: ERROR: Target[localhost_eq][_IN_] ‘ $target->[0]{$mode} ‘ did not eval into defined data
2013-05-20 22:46:09: ERROR: Target[localhost_eq][_OUT_] ‘ $target->[0]{$mode} ‘ did not eval into defined data

I am bit lost what is the issue here, since the script works from command line. If anyone out there has any idea what this might be. A help is most welcomed in this matter, since I am no programmer at all and I have little understanding on how to deal with this problem.