Slashdot Moderation

Slashdot Moderation, apparently is what i can do now. Maybe. It's kind of, ahem, weird that it's possible for someone like me to wield the power to stop or start a thread hither thither and yon.

Esoterica Bulk to Order

Esoterica Bulk Tobacco can be ordered at Knox Cigar. A half pound, as of this writing, was about 20$ without shipping. Spendy, but from what I've read of the reviews, it's worth every penny.

Esoterica Tobacciana - Stonehaven

An interesting blend is reviewed here. What does this have to do with tech or anything else? Nothing.

One sweet Photo Place

Image * After - currently 9985 free textures and images available. and it doesn't suck. Some of the pictures are downright neat.

How to get that perfect shave

A link from Weekend Edition - MSNBC.com that describes how to get a good shave. It seems to have worked kind of well, and I'm really excited to see what sort of manly creams and moisturizers I can go buy. Taylor's on Old Bond ST looks like it has some really neat items to use. Oh and badger hair brushes are expensive! Hua, they are spendy.

My computers

Actually more my work'scomputers. Also keep in mind that my work asked me to set this up for them to use the cycles and 'burn in' the system more.

It's weird looking for stars being stuck in a basement. Oh well.

4Dos

Ah the good old days of Fidonet. I remember spending a lot of time with the local sysops reading stuff and wanting to be that cool to have my own BBS and the network feeds that it entailed. I really think that was why I was so thrilled the first time I dialed into the Internet with a 14,400 baud modem. It was total information gluttony. Granted the 90/10 rule hadn't set in yet as much so there was a lot of *easy to find* information that I could read.

And there was 4dos on the BBS's.

4dos was a godsend. It let me do command historys and paint my prompt and all sorts of things that I do now in bash shell. It was the defacto shell I used on my old Gateway. It had everything, aliases being the nicest part of it. Man now a days I recommend people use cygwin, but 4dos will always have a place in my heart telling me not to settle for crappy shells.

Computer Loving

So got a new motherboard and some new memory. The computer was still not working. However the wife, bless her soul, mentioned that maybe I should try the old memory in the new mobo. Sure enough, it booted and stayed stable. Yay. Now I can surf again.

Oh and she got me a dvd+-r/w Sony DR710UL external. The successor to the one I have at work. And it's a sweet piece of hardware. The Nero stuff isn't that bad either, but then again I didn't really get a choice in burning software and the native stuff for Windows XP tried to think that the drive was a CD writer. The only weird thing now is that one of the cdrw drives in the machine (of which there are two) wouldn't detect or show in the items known category till I did an 'Add Software'. Very odd.

Blogging not liked by the Librarian

Slashdot | ALA President Not Fond of Bloggers

Frankly I'm not overly suprised. This is something that I've always expected to hear from the old guard. Sure there are times that blogs are complete crap, but then again when was the last time that something that you read, that was professionally made, was less than what you expected.

Fave quote:
It is obvious that the Blog People read what they want to read rather than what is in front of them and judge me to be wrong on the basis of what they think rather than what I actually wrote. Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts. It is entirely possible that their intellectual needs are met by an accumulation of random facts and paragraphs. In that case, their rejection of my view is quite understandable.

I am a Moron

So I reread the gabeart section. Seems he did mention Yoko Matsugane as a pinup. I, as a skimming moron, did not read that part and just read "name" and went "== illustrator".

Oh well....

The Computer that would just not work

Replaced the motherboard last night. Then spent three hours trying to figure out why it is still resetting. The memtest came back clean, and it's almost [now] all new parts. Hooked it into another computers peripherals and power and it still reboot horribly. It's off to the last desperate measure of installing XP onto another hard drive in the machine, installing WoW and trying to get it to reboot. If it does, then the only thing left that is the same from the old computer is the video card.

And it's not a cheap one. . .

Shoe Lacing

Where else are you going to find a site on how to lace up your shoes? This site has things like Straight (European) Lacing or Shoe Shop Lacing, which was purported to be used in the early british army for lacing boots. So far the various lacings that I have read about have both talked about easy of removal to get at injured feet. *Not* something I think of when I am lacing my shoes....

*Not* An Illustrator

So I was looking at gabeart_v2.0 and he mentioned Yoko Matsugane. She is *not* an illustrator. She is a model. Remember this, if I teach you anything, be wary of illustrators when they say things like modelling curves. . .

The Tale of The Glitchy Computer

For those of you who want to check to make sure that everything is working fine on your motherboard: Memtest86 - Memory Diagnostic Page is the page for you.

So far this is what has been tried to fix my computer:
New Power Supply
New Mouse
New Keyboard
Old Keyboard reinstated
Defragged the Hard Drive
Moved the most fragemented file from harddrive C to D, defragged C, moved file back to C
Reduced mouse polling speed [slower icky mouse and when it freaked it just hung the box]
New graphics driver [end result the login screen refreshes slower]
Replaced the DirectX9.0c installation with a fresh one
Turned off the sound card [no sound, no stability]
Reduced the Memory speed from 166 to 133 [slow memory still not stable]

One of the coworkers seems to think that it's a ram power module has gone south. Reason being that the memory on the motherboard at home kept posting errors on memtest. I brought it in, and voila, no memory errors whatsoever. How cool is that?

And the reason why I went through the steps of replacing vid/directx? Well the folks at blizzard on the forums suggested those steps. Oh and then other posters would cite that turning off their sound seemed to make it better. What was going on was that my mouse on occasion in game would just start jumping all over the screen like a chinchilla on speed. And it would click along the way. I'd lose icons, target friends, camera would go all over the place. Not fun. New motherboard is at the delivery place and here is to hoping that it is delivered today.

Focus Follows Mouse

Got this from one of the coworker/mac fan/all around good guy:

> Hey,
> I am not sure if you guys have seen this... there is a hidden option to
> enable the "focus follows mouse" feature in Apple's X11:
> Q: Is there an option for no-click-to-focus for X11 applications?
> A: Yes there is a hidden option. From an xterm or terminal execute :
> defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true
> I got this tip from the following page:
> http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2001/qa1232.html


Very nice. I can have my ffm back! I've so been missing it.

Yeah I'm the speshul munkey

I set up an email to send new entries to in blogger. Then I forget it. So I came back today to see what the fark it was. So what do I do. I blog instead. Yeah, the allure of a blog is pretty large.

Ruby ruby ruby

Yeah there are times that I've wondered about my sanity. I really enjoy Ruby. Now some folks would start to talk about how they think there isn't any money to made in it or how they are missing some critical library that makes it an unusable language. To the first group I say "A hacker does for love what others would not do for money" and the other group "If you have a scratch, itch it and then send us the backscratcher". This is a really neat and wacky language. Just look at Redhanded. _why is in a class all by himself, and unlike myself, actually takes time to blog each day. Maybe I should code up some gui widget in Fox which comes standard on windows installs of ruby that takes text and emails it to an address. Then I could have an autoblogger

And the neat thing about ruby is that you can write code like this:

(1..10).each {|item| puts "Ruby is neat"}

Realize though, that my leet coding skills in Ruby are like 1 month old and I'm no David Heinemeier Hansson.

I will say this, Ruby has been for me, a side effecty language. I write some code and in one line I can do three things to the current array and get back the changes I've made at the same time. It's a good thing, but some of my old professors would have a heart attack if they ever saw that code. Oh well, at least I realize this.

/rant

Parts of Deepfreeze

This is a part of the deepfreeze program. Note that I'm using diff -ru to generate the differences between the Nth snapshot and today's snapshot. The really nice thing is I account for two things both that the target is different than the current one and that the file is now unique [ie having been deleted since the Nth snapshot was taken]

open(FP,"diff -ru --brief $SOURCE $TARGET 2>/dev/null |");
open(FP2, "|(cd $TARGET ; tar jcf $DESTINATION$SCRUBBED_TARGET.$SUFFIX -T -)");

while (){
s/: /\//g;
#this is if the file that was in TARGET is different than SOURCE
if (/^Files .* and (.*) differ$/){
$tmp = $1;
$tmp =~ s/$TARGET/\./;
print FP2 $tmp,"\n";
}
#this is if the file no longer lives in SOURCE at all
if (/^Only in ($TARGET.*)\n/){
$tmp = $1;
$tmp =~ s/$TARGET/\./;
print FP2 $tmp,"\n";
}
}

Work Backups

So I wrote two backup strategies at work lately. Both seem to work rather fine, but I can see that unless I document them somehow they are going to overlap in my brain and that would be bad.

The first one is the the snapshot.rb/deepfreeze.pl/rsync strategy. In this one, we take and do a synchronization to a target disk. Then each day we rotate this snapshot and any other snapshots on disk to older directory names. So disk.2 would be moved to disk.3 and disk.4 to disk.5. Depending on how many snapshots are in the disk the last one is removed each time we rotate. This is where deepfreeze.pl comes in. He basically goes in and checks to see what is different from this snapshot and the latest snapshot and then archives those differences in a tarball [archive file] on yet another disk. This means you get all the files that have been changed since the final snapshot was taken. This is cool and lets a person go back to any day as long as you have snapshots and tarballs and get file *at that day*. [Mental note: Check deepfreeze and see how it's diffing]

The second strategy is to take a timestamp file and find all the files on a drive that are newer than that file. Then tar them all up. Simple, eh? The other neat thing is that you can change the timestamp so that it says "Back up everything since 1969" for example and get a full backup. It's really smooth and makes backing up stuff on an odd schedule really easy. Just touch the file once a week to be a week old and it'll do a weekly backup. Touch it once a month and get one, two, or even three month backups depending on the date you specify.

Yeah it's cool.

Tada!

From those wacky guys who made the Basecamp site comesTa-da. This is basically a part of the basecamp code that has been extracted out so that those of us that just want a to do list can get one really easily. And share parts of it with the world and parts of it just keep to ourselves.

How can that be bad? Answer: It can't. And from reading the author's blog it took, 500 lines of code. That's it. That's nothing. Nada, zip, zero, naught.

Some of my computer science projects took more lines of code and did a lot less work. That's just amazing.