2010-03-08T17:57:51-08:00

316 So... I've been mulling this over, reading reviews, and playing with software, trying to figure out what phone I need to move to, because the Treo isn't cutting it. (And hasn't ever, really, though it's a great phone.) It turns out that only the iPhone plays well with generic CalDAV sources. That's insane to me, but there it is. There's no CalDAV support on Android or WebOS at all at this point. Even more surprising is that all of them: iPhone, Android, and Palm, suck at handling contacts except through either a corporate EAS server, or Google. So I guess I'm resigned to give Google my contacts. I thought I was going to get lucky with the Zindus addon for Thunderbird, as it syncs both Zimbra and Google contacts. But I just tried dragging-and-dropping my Zimbra contacts over to Google. While it worked, technically, the fields got somewhat jumbled. This leads me to contemplate keeping "cell phone" contacts in Google, and everything else in Zimbra, but I know that's just going to be more hassle than I want. I guess the answer is to write some sort of script to transform back and forth? Yuck. Why aren't we living in the future yet? The good news is that I successfully tested Thunderbird 2.0 (because the client hasn't been compiled for 3.0) syncing contacts to my Zimbra server through Funambol, so I've proven that the Funambol-to-Zimbra part works. However, the bad news is that I can't seem to get the Palm client to work. I get an error message that leads me to think that some tweaking might make it work, but I'm over it. I'm going to get some other phone, and I'm tired of wasting time on the Treo. So, given that contacts are going to be a hassle, no matter what platform I use, the question has become: do I want to hassle with iTunes on Linux and get great Zimbra calendar integration, or use an open platform and use the web browser to access my calendar (on the admittedly-rare times I need to get to it when I'm not in front of a proper computer, or my netbook)? Well, to answer this question, I played with a friend's iPhone today, and then went to the Verizon store, and played with a Pre Plus, and a Droid. The iPhone is cool. I have to admit it. But I don't think I can stand to hassle with the iTunes thing on Linux. From what I've read, there's just no way to make this work well. I'd be using a virtual machine, and, really, what's the point. The Pre was hopeless. It's too small for my hands. Typing on it was just terrible. Also, something was wrong with the unit I was looking at. It kept getting stuck, for, like, minutes at a time. Yeah, ok, someone's messed with it, but I don't want a phone that this can EVER happen to. The Droid was alright. The software (read: browser) was almost as good as the iPhone's. But I didn't like it's keyboard either. I haven't liked the iPhone's keyboard till now, but I liked it the best of the stuff I was working with today. So, I'm just going to wait for the Nexus One to show up at Verizon. And I have to get a dock. Or two. I can't wait. Clearly, from this weblog, I agonize over these decisions. (You should have seen me pick a task manager a year ago! But even during that, I was starting the process of figuring out how I would move into the future with a real smartphone.) I'm not under any misconceptions, I don't think anyone else reads this stuff. But it helps me work through it. And I'm ready to get on with it.

2010-03-08T17:57:51-08:00

2010-03-07T04:12:00-08:00

315 <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/26/our-own-greek-tragedy//print/">This</a> is how world wars happen. History has already taught us this. Twice. As my 7th grade history teacher said, wars are always about money. We know it will happen, the question is just when. If our goverment passes "health care," it will rapidly speed up the process.

2010-03-07T04:12:36-08:00

2010-03-06T17:04:38-08:00

314 The sort of integration and usability offered by just using Google as a backend for contacts and calendars on any of the new smartphones is pretty compelling these days, but I just can't get over letting them index when and where I am, or with whom I'm communicating. And so I maintain my own email server, calendars, and contact lists. The other things I've historically kept in my phone (memos, tasks, and passwords), I've setup webapps to replace. I'm feeling the itch to have everything available on my phone again, so I got a data plan again, and I've spent most of the last 24 hours looking for a way to make my Palm Treo "smart" phone play well with my Zimbra collaboration server. First, I wasted several hours trying to update the firmware. Turns out that you simply cannot do it, with USB, under Windows 7, and I don't have a Bluetooth chip. Then, even though closed-source version of VirtualBox under Linux has USB support, the Palm goes on and off the bus in such a way that it's never "there" for VirtualBox to handle and pass through to my XP VM when the sync tool needs it. Then it took me many tries to get it to work right on the family's communal XP box. What a hassle! I'm glad I had the option there, but I'm realizing just how out of date my choice of platform is now. And by this, I mean all of: Linux, Windows XP, and Palm. I've spent the rest of the time trying to find a way to sync contacts and calendars with Zimbra and Thunderbird/Lightning. The "Zindus" plugin is working well for contacts there, but it doesn't do anything for the Palm, and you really need your contacts integrated in the phone's phonebook. (Calendars can work alright as a webapp, as long as you have a good browser.) There was a tempting lead with Funambol, but the Zimbra plugin I found for it doesn't seem to work, and debugging a java web application is not something I want to do. I'd rather just throw in the towel and let Google have all my data. The Palm client I found is about 3.5 years old, and doesn't work either. You know, just to pour salt on that wound. I hear rave reviews about the Droid on Verizon, but the Nexus One is supposedly even better, and it's due at the end of the month. So I think I'm going to get one as soon as they come out. Now, obviously, that platform is going to expect its data to live on Google's servers even more than the others, but I'm hoping that the openess of the platform will give rise to a solution in the near future. (I mean, isn't Google being accessed through CalDAV? Can't I just switch the provider?) I can take Verizon up on their satisfaction guarantee if it doesn't work any better, but I imagine that the web browser available in Android is about 1000% better than the one on my aging Treo, and that will probably be enough for me. I'd actually be tempted to try a Pre, but after FIFTEEN YEARS of hassling with syncing Palm devices (on both Windows and Linux), I'm just ready for something else. Even though I know that the Pre's have a whole, new OS, I've just become worn out with them as a company. To be fair, I did look at one the other day, but it just seems too small.

2010-03-07T09:20:09-08:00

2010-03-03T04:02:12-08:00

313 Preachers like to say that it's "worse" now than it has ever been, but the Bible says, "as in the days of Noah, so shall it be at the coming of the Son of Man," (or something close to that). I see stories like <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,587737,00.html">this</a>, note that Jesus has not returned, and wonder, just how bad was it back then? Yikes!

2010-03-03T04:02:12-08:00

2010-03-01T04:05:44-08:00

312 So Al Gore as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opinion/28gore.html">back at it again</a>. He spends three online pages asking us to ignore all the recent scandals around "climate science" because the "science" is already settled, and one or two "honest" mistakes don't mean anything in the larger scheme of things. Well, first of all, most Americans won't know what he's talking about, since the news stories of these scandals has gotten no play in the American press, especially in the NY Times. But if we overlook this obvious non-sequitor, there are much bigger problems afoot. Here, Al is claiming that the "consensus" is that the last 10 years have been the warmest ever, yet the world's formerly leading "expert" on "climate change" -- and the man at the center of the scandal -- has come out and stated that there has been <a href="http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/02/16/climategater-jones-stunning-global-warming-revelations-ignored">no warming for the last fifteen years</a>. Now, guys, I'm not a "scientist." I'm just an "engineer." But when people -- supposed experts with lots and lots of credibility (just ask them) -- can't agree on even this simple statement, how are we supposed to believe either side?! If the "science" is "settled," then we should, at the very, very least, have agreement on what has actually, physically happened. The debate should concentrate on how mankind is contributing to this, what we can do to stop it, and how we go about doing that. But we're not even to that place. Instead, Mr. Gore makes one, single statement in his article that prepends "man-made" to "global warming" as though this, too, was without controversy and to be taken as gospel. Well, sir, it may be. By the New York Times readers, it may be. But for the rest of us, you're going to have to do a little more work to tie the two together. Your credibility is already shot, and the credibility of everyone involved in "climate science" is now suspect. It's already been shown that the world's "leading" lab for this was corrupt, and it's caused the resignation of both it's leader, and the UN's top climate expert. It would seem that the onus is on you, Al, to prove something at this point, and not try to use the old Jedi mind trick of waving your hand and trying to cause us to believe something out of thin air. Out of the 3 pages of article, Al dismisses the scandal and asks us to accept that global warming is real, and that we're causing it, in the first page. The next 2 pages are a description of how catastrophic it will be if we don't (basically) immediately all go back to being farmers. Oh, and "jobs." Excuse me, sir. If "green technologies" were profitable, there would be a stampede around the globe to make them, and the jobs would happen on their own. We wouldn't need a national system of taxes to force us in the directions your puppet masters want us to go. This stuff is a religion, by every definition of the word. As an ardent Christian, I'm not opposed to people believing whatever they want to believe. But just like you don't want me to force my crazy, "dark ages" beliefs on you?... Yeah, well, don't force your belief that we have to go back to the bronze age on me, either, pal.

2010-03-01T04:05:44-08:00

2010-02-26T04:12:25-08:00

311 Another point on Zimbra: It would be perfect to use Evolution as a front end except for two issues with Contacts. You can create a CalDAV address book, but there's a <a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=610572">bug</a> in Evo where having a "@" in your username causes it to barf. On the other hand, there's a slight bug in the Zimbra setup that marks the "virtual vcard" entries with the older mime type that Evo won't understand, but the first problem needs fixed before the second. There's still the issue of how to use a cell phone with the FOSS version, but I'm letting that ruminate. The only thing I really care about is sync'ing the contacts so that the phone's dialer can use them. The email will work with whatever you throw at it, and the calendar will work just fine as a web page (providing you have an internet plan, which I still don't).

2010-02-26T04:12:25-08:00

2010-02-15T17:41:36-08:00

310 So I'm about 24 hours into using Zimbra, and it's been a real eye-opener. Usually, with these sorts of things, I find roadblock after roadblock that leads me distinctly into a particular way of using the software. Not so with Zimbra. Every client I use (Evolution, Thunderbird, Sunbird, browser, and even their Zimbra Desktop) all work (basically) great. (Even though Evo duplicates the Junk and Trash folders, there's a bit of the ability to use server-stored contacts.) It's still going to take awhile to really discover all the new ways to use the tool, I'm actually hopeful that I'll eventually be able to do everything I wanted to do with it. It's stunning that they give this away for free. Even when you buy their full-featured version, which includes Outlook, iSync, Palm, and Blackberry integration, it's still a fairly reasonable $875/yr to get started. Sure, some people balk at that figure, but that's a fraction of what I pay just for electricity at my house over the course of a year. Good thing I don't care about Outlook integration any more. Their Desktop app is going to be just fine for the fam, thank you very much.

2010-02-15T17:41:36-08:00

2010-02-15T04:12:27-08:00

309 Well, it's done. All of my computers that were running Gentoo have been converted to running Ubuntu. The last to fall was the email server. I'm cautiously optimistic that this has gone well, but only time will tell as I try to take advantage of the reasons I installed <a href="http://www.zimbra.com/">Zimbra</a>. Sure, it looks really sexy, but we'll see how it works out in time. I tried playing with it in a virtual machine, but it became pretty clear that, like anything else, I wasn't going to really get to grips with it unless I "lived in it." All I could do in testing was make sure there were no major stoppers.

2010-02-15T04:12:27-08:00

2010-02-06T10:27:06-08:00

308 Against my better judgement, I decided to reprioritize some personal computer hackery. You know, so I could put off the things I really need to do in favor of yet another couple of projects that I just shouldn't be fooling with. So I tried to plan things out so that it would be an easy and quick changeover. Well, two small issues just cost me about 6 extra hours worth of nonsense. I guess I can get on with life now.

2010-02-06T10:30:25-08:00

2010-01-30T20:16:31-08:00

307 Wow. Thanks for a few less brain cells, Microsoft. Due to <a href="http://www.russellconsultants.com/information/how-to-mainmenu-15/21-networking/43-dhcp-and-windows-vista.html">this</a>, I finally figured out that Windows 7 hates a more recent versions of the ISC DHCP server that have a "server-identifier" line. Sheesh. What an aggravating waste of time.

2010-01-30T20:16:31-08:00

2010-01-30T18:12:04-08:00

306 I'm still not 100% convinced of leaving Gentoo for Ubuntu. However, a project at work led me to see that one of the bigger things making me nervous about Ubuntu is actually, basically a non-issue. How do you get later versions of packages installed when there's no backport? Create your own with "prevu". So I sat down to do some coding tonight, and got a wild hair -- which is always how it works with me -- to reinstall my NAT box / firewall with Ubuntu. It took about an hour to get it on and patched up. (I need a local repo setup, and then I can just install over the network.) I took a nice little backup before I blew Gentoo away, and figured it would be a simple matter of transplanting config files. Well, in Gentoo land, my bind database files were symlinked, and I didn't get them with tar. Sigh. Just what I wanted to do: rebuild them from scratch. And I had automatic updates from DHCP configured. This caused a problem on Ubuntu. Figures. I don't know why yet, and it's bypassed for now. It took a couple extra hours, but it seems to be back doing what it needs to do. Anyway, I'm counting on inertia to keep me running Ubuntu now. It would literally take 3 days to get Gentoo put back on this old piece of junk, and that's even considering a totally-minimalistic install with no X or anything. I can't be disconnected from the internet for that long. Not even my wife could be. Five machines down, two to go. I figure changing the file server will be about the same amount of hassle this turned out to be, as long as I don't screw up its backup as well. I'm going to skip trying to transplant my horrid mess of an email server, and skip straight to trying to run Zimbra. I've installed it on a VM, and it seemed really straightforward. The problem is that it's also a development web server, and I don't think having anything else on that box is going to play nice with Zimbra. The plan will be to wait until 10.4 proves its mettle, after having been out for a couple months, and then upgrade, let it do automatic security updates, and then forget it exists for 5 years. What will I do with the time?

2010-01-30T18:12:04-08:00

2010-01-27T10:34:31-08:00

305 Still hesitant to commit to a full-fledged Ubuntu switch. <a href="http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/01/27/0118244/Ubuntu-Moves-To-Yahoo-For-Default-Firefox-Search">This</a> is a perfect example of why. It's not about changing the default search provider. I couldn't care less about that. It's about making arbitrary decisions at the distro level. I don't even care that it's about funding their pockets at the same time as they help Microsoft. What I liked about Gentoo is that they did only enough to the sources such that they could put packages in the distribution. They essentially left the upstream sources alone. I'm finding that I'm such a big fan of the principle here that I'm considering going back to Gentoo, even though I see how much time and effort running Ubuntu is saving me. I'm still split about spending a more of my time, but having a distro exactly the way I want...

2010-01-27T10:34:31-08:00

2010-01-24T04:19:34-08:00

304 People on the left side of the political spectrum are decrying the recent Supreme Court <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/125333/Public-Agrees-Court-Campaign-Money-Free-Speech.aspx">decision</a> on campaign spending. Despite what Rush Limbaugh says, I'm a little mixed on it. On the one hand, I see what liberals are saying. The dirty little secret  fact that people aren't talking about here is that there's a direct, linear relationship with campaign spending and votes received. I saw a study on this years ago; I sure wish I had saved it. So I can see what's coming as well as the next guy. So I understand the implications here. However, I also know that politicians are already owned by who gives them their campaign money. That's why "we" are so deadset to do healthcare. The AFL-CIO and the SEIU want it, and they put Obama in office. So I think the only thing wrong with the decision is that it will change who gets to tell the politicians what to do. Considering that it's the liberals who are upset about it, it seems to me that it must be "big business" who will dictate the next round of lawmaking. I don't know if that's good or bad, in the long run, but it will be different...

2010-01-24T04:19:34-08:00

2010-01-18T11:37:00-08:00

303 Hmm... The equivalent of the Microsoft corporate desktop "ecosystem" now <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/partners/icsw">released</a> as a native Linux application? I don't know where it's at in Revelation, but I'm pretty sure that this must be one of the signs of the End Times. If there were a free-but-limited-number-of-accounts version of the Lotus backend, some person with more time than sense (e.g., me) might try this out. Maybe we could see a tiny bit more real competition from this? I doubt it. I wouldn't think anyone would make a switch because of it. On the other hand, if I were working in an established Notes shop, I would definitely be doing some testing with end users on using Ubuntu, OpenOffice, and this new Notes client. Unfortunately, I can only find one grainy screenshot of the interface, in Portuguese. Otherwise, I'd link it.

2010-01-18T11:37:00-08:00

2010-01-15T05:20:12-08:00

302 I'm bored with Ubuntu. Things work as expected 99% of the time, and I don't have to fiddle and fudge with everything I put into place. Well... at least a whole lot less. It took a couple of swipes at getting the right drivers installed last night to print to an HP inkjet shared from a Windows XP computer, but working out the drivers was about 10% of the battle of getting the thing working. The rest was understanding that I still had the firewall activated on the XP box, and using the correct URI in CUPS to get there. Anyway, while I'm quite convinced that I will know almost nothing about Linux compared to what I know now if I use Ubuntu for a few years, I'm still trending away from Gentoo. Although I'm bored with Ubuntu as Linux, what's really hurting Gentoo's case in my mind right now is that I couldn't find any help on the last couple of problems I had with it. It used to be, about 2 or 3 years ago, that any question I had about Linux would be answered through using Google, and winding up on Gentoo's forums. Now, that's no longer the case. Most of the time, the answers are now found on Ubuntu's forums, or, more likely, sticking an extra "ubuntu" into query will land you on someone else's blog, where they've written up how to do what you want to do with Ubuntu specifically. While that doesn't help with Gentoo, it does tend to make the case for actually using Ubuntu, and not spending hours, days, and weeks tracking down problems with little problems that have nothing to do with actually getting things done. UPDATE: Again, I've looked at the Google trends for Linux, spefically zooming into just "gentoo". The search volume for "gentoo" peaked in the second quarter of 2005, and then starts a downward trend ever since. There are no numbers on these graphs, but whatever the volume was then, it's less than a quarter of what it was now. What was so interesting to me, though, in looking at this, is that there's a little, helpful <a href="http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1015496/gentoo-linux-founder-joins-microsoft">link</a> attached to that peak back in 2005, and that's the news story about how Daniel Robbins sold out and went to Microsoft, which, as I recall, lasted a short time. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Robbins">Wikipedia</a> says less than a year.)

2010-01-15T05:30:24-08:00

2010-01-10T17:22:36-08:00

301 Still mulling this thing over in the back of my mind. I posted a less-thorough version of this to Facebook, and thought I'd put it here as well. It looks like, soon, Ubuntu will be Linux. <img title="Unix Trends" src="../images/viz.png" alt="Unix Trends" width="580" height="260" /> From <a href="http://trends.google.com/trends?q=fedora|redhat|centos%2Csuse|opensuse%2Cgentoo%2Cubuntu|debian%2Cfreebsd|openbsd|netbsd&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=2">Google Trends</a>.

2010-01-10T17:22:36-08:00

2010-01-08T07:17:28-08:00

300 Got a great deal on Ebay for a rare computer part. USPS lost it. They said they delivered it, but I never got it. I doubt I can find as good of a deal again. You'd think the person that got it would see my name and address on it, and just come give it to me. That's what I would do, but I guess that's not how it works any more. Every time I think I'm too cynical, the world informs me that I'm still a complete amateur.

2010-01-08T07:17:28-08:00

2010-01-04T18:34:08-08:00

299 Aaaaand another one falls. I have two MythTV computers in the house. I switched the one to Mythbuntu to try out, but I recompiled everything on the Gentoo box with the binpkg option, so that I could put it back on the Ubuntu box at a moment's notice. The only problem was that no USB devices (including mice and keyboads) would work on it. USB support was baked into the kernel. (I used genkernel, after all.) I had "usb" in my make.conf. Yet, I had no /dev/usb directory. I took a couple of weak stabs at fixing the problem, including making sure that the BIOS was right, but nothing got it working. So I blew it away and put Mythbuntu on it too. I was up and running in 20 minutes. While I've seen about 5 problems on Ubuntu over the past 2 days that would never have been an issue with Gentoo, and while Ubuntu still doesn't feel quite right, I have to admit it's saving me a lot of time, most of the problems are easy to work around, and I've seen some spit and polish (e.g., printing) that Gentoo would never have in a million years, because that's just not their thing. So, the short of it is that I'm still not convinced, but, out of 8 of my 9 computers running Linux, 4 are running Ubuntu, and 3 are running Gentoo (and one runs CentOS). I'm getting pretty serious about moving my mail server to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS so that I can run Zimbra on it. Moving the file server / domain server would be fairly straightforward. And I guess there's still a chance I could run DD-WRT for my firewall, and skip a standard distro entirely there.

2010-01-05T02:52:19-08:00

2010-01-04T05:28:41-08:00

298 Ah, Linux, you are a vile temptress, aren't you? I've been trying to save time by running Ubuntu over Gentoo, but I wasted several hours sorting through the issues of getting MAME to run on my home machine. I have had issues with getting AdvanceMAME compiled on Gentoo, plus it takes a couple of hours, but this sort of thing just wouldn't have been a problem. The Pulse audio system is the new kid on the block, and I just took it out of Gentoo with a "-pulseaudio" in make.conf, and that was the end of it. <a href="http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1370466">http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1370466</a> Also, I see that Flash under 64-bit Karmic is bugged. Something to do with Compiz? Who cares. I doubt I would have had this problem under Gentoo, either. Gentoo, by it's very nature, keeps all these binary interface issues resolved through the magic of revdep-rebuild. The answer was just to download and install the latest 64-bit Flash plugin from Adobe, by hand, just like we used to, what?, 10 years ago, now. Just reminds me of this: <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2514730680283477734">http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2514730680283477734#</a> The bottom line is that the jury is still out on moving completely to Ubuntu...

2010-01-04T05:28:41-08:00

2010-01-01T13:57:05-08:00

297 OK, I concede. I ran the benchmark suite's CPU-testing module, and got essentially no difference between running Gentoo and Ubuntu. I had always reserved some performance gain in my mind because of a comment someone made a long time ago, that at least compiling the kernel and glibc for a particular processor would improve things, but that was it. Sure, everything on a Gentoo system is supposedly tuned for your processor, but that meant that I was at least getting the gains that even detractors of Gentoo were admitting, right? Turns out that they were right all along. I note for the record that I've not heard much about Gentoo's supposed performance advantage from their materials (e.g., web site, et. al.). Maybe this is why. What I've realized here is that, if the performance advantage were measurable, someone would have documented it by now, much like what I've tried to do. I guess one of the two reasons I'd been sticking with Gentoo just got shot down in flames, my personal "gut feeling" be dipped. (To my defence, I always claimed that having dual processors in my early machines gave me a 20-30% performance improvement over a single-processor machine, and that's what many people finally came out and said.) The only other thing on this front that bears talking about is that Intel has a seperate -- i.e., non-GNU -- compiler chain that supposedly makes MUCH faster code than gcc. Maybe if it were used in Gentoo to compile the kernel and glibc, then real gains could be measured? I don't know.

2010-01-01T13:57:05-08:00

2009-12-31T17:12:25-08:00

296 Here we go again. My OCD is still kicking my tail. Today, I realized that, on my new Gentoo builds on my main computers, if I leave a CD in the drive when I boot, I can't unmount the disc as a user. Also, I can't get rid of the annoying console beep with GDM. I spent an hour trying to fix these two things, which, to my mind, was waaaay too much time. So now I'm back to thinking about moving to Ubuntu. I did on my work machine, and I'm going to leave it for at least a week. No more of this trying-it-for-2-days crap. I'm going to live in it for awhile, so that I can truly appreciate the differences. I'm spending time before going out tonight loading up the Phoronix benchmarking suite. I'm going to do a performance shootout on my home machine, and see how much faster Gentoo is than Ubuntu. My gut feeling is anywhere from 5 - 20%, just from day-to-day use, but I'm going to figure out once and for all if this is just wishful thinking. I consider myself "above" that sort of bias, but, well, don't we all. If Gentoo isn't measurably faster, it's going to really put a damper on my feelings about continuing to use it, despite its hassles.

2009-12-31T17:33:57-08:00

2009-12-24T07:31:03-08:00

295 I put Gentoo back on my home and work computers. I'll move the MythTV box back eventually. To me, it comes down to a tradeoff of my time in sorting out version conflicts and babysitting the build process on Gentoo versus having all of this sorted for me with Ubuntu, but with their decisions on how to compile the software baked in. What I've realized is that, for "my" stuff, I like spending my time doing that stuff. It's almost as enjoyable to me as playing a video game. I get exactly what I want, and it keeps me close to what's happening under the covers. That way, whether I use Ubuntu at work or CentOS at church, I'm comfortable with what's going on. Another thing I've realized is that I don't think there's a significant time savings for me in configuring software on Ubuntu versus Gentoo. On Gentoo, I have to build it from scratch, but the upstream source maintainers usually have a good idea of what people do with their software, and have sensible defaults. Further, their documentation usually leads you to instructions on common things you want to do. With Ubuntu, I find that I need something different, and I have to sort through what Canonical has done to the default, upstream configuration. And, usually, I rely on finding someone who has figured out how to do what I want to do, and has posted the Ubuntu-specific instructions on their web site. Me: 0. My OCD: 3.427e13.

2009-12-24T07:31:03-08:00

2009-12-24T05:02:16-08:00

294 Yesterday, one of my coworkers brought in some pop for the community fridge. One of the selections was some original, made-with-real-sugar (instead of corn syrup) Mountain Dew. Now, I had heard about Coke being made with real sugar again, so I thought I'd try it out, just to see if I could tell the difference. Well, what I hadn't planned on was that it was Mountain Dew, as opposed to something else. See, when I was a kid, I used to tag along with my dad while he visited with hunting buddies when we went back to Elkhart for holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. As anyone who has spent any significant time in the north part of the state can tell you, things are subtly different up there. To me, it's more natural and down-to-earth. You know, roofs are sloped to shed snow, and flannel isn't a hipster statement. And, being as I spent about 6 weeks a year up there when I was a kid, it became ingrained in who I am. Anyway, one particular "character," Floyd -- who names their kids "Floyd" today? -- who was a good friend of my grandfather, kept an old, pull-handle-type refrigerator on his front porch, and kept it stocked full of everyone's favorite beer. But there were always a few Mountain Dews in it, just for me. (Or so he told me...) Anyway, I just wanted to say that at the very first sip of this "retro" soda, I was instantly transported to that front porch, at the age of 8 or 9 again. Of course, I hadn't expected this. Smell is the most potent, memory-evoking sense, and I don't know as taste has ever affected me like this. The effect was particularly strong. It was wonderful to feel those memories again, like I was a kid without a care, hanging around with comfortable friends and family. I understand that my coworker probably just brought in some pop that she had lying around or something, but she gave me about the best Christmas present I could have asked for.

2009-12-24T05:02:16-08:00

2009-12-19T14:45:50-08:00

293 I don't want to fool with writing the details, but, while Ubuntu is nice and all, my gut feeling is that moving back to Gentoo is inevitable. I'm trying to hold off on pulling the trigger, but I'm getting twitchy...

2009-12-19T14:45:50-08:00

2009-12-18T02:43:32-08:00

291 Awhile back, I said something about how being basically neurotically OCD had it's benefits at times. Now is not one of those times. Based on an offhand comment my boss made, I decided it was time to try "living in" Ubuntu. So I switched at work. When I came home, my wife told me she was trying to watch a DVD on our Gentoo-based MythTV PVR machine. I took a look, and it would just pop right out of trying to play the DVD. While fooling with it, I saw that the 3 days I spent upgrading all the software on the machine had left the Mythweb setup broken, so I figured, what the hey!, I'll just try Mythbuntu! After I started that running, I decided, hey!, why not try Ubuntu on my desktop too! So I did, and promptly got screwed. Despite how the "alternate" install CD got me through setting up on a software RAID at work just fine, it turns out that it's completely busted for installing to a fakeraid setup. Know how I found out? At the END OF THE INSTALL, after I had already WIPED EVERYTHING OUT, when it went to load grub. So I proceeded to spend 3 hours trying to figure out how to boot what I already had loaded. There were lots of helpful guides on the internet, and none of them worked. Being tortured by it, I stayed up late trying to figure it out. However, I called it quits about midnight. I tossed and turned, and finally got to sleep, only to wake up at 4:30 and start thinking about it again. So I took another look, and found the key. Everyone's helpful advice said to run `update-grub', but what it didn't do was give me an initrd line for the present kernel. I only found this because I thought I would try running the backup kernel, which did have the line. (I had a hard time reading the menu.lst file in the recovery console because it only supports some strange "bterm" console. Nano wouldn't run, and vi was munging up the lines something fierce.) Anyway, I finally have it sorted. It's a known bug, and supposedly will be fixed in 10.4 next spring. Let's hope. To their credit, you can look back on the instructions for installing Ubuntu on fakeraid, and see how easy it's become since they first started supporting it, but that's just it: you're stuck relying on Canonical to support it. With Gentoo, they give you all the tools to do whatever you want. Getting all stopped up during the installation was precisely the situation I was wanting to avoid by sticking with Gentoo. However, I've spent a LOT of time over the past 4 years dealing with maintaining Gentoo. Ergo, I'm going to try living in Ubuntu for awhile, and see if their "artificial" limitations are less work to get around than integrating everything from scratch.

2009-12-18T02:43:32-08:00

2009-12-10T03:37:19-08:00

290 I had forgotten about <a href="http://jwz.livejournal.com/1137141.html">this</a>. Thankfully JWZ didn't. My definition of evil runs along the lines of "someone who has no problem being a hypocrite," which I think singularly characterizes the left side of our political structure in America. While I've purposely lived my life in such a way that it wouldn't devastate me if everything were known about it, there are still things I would prefer that people not know. So although a part of me agrees with Google's CEO Eric Schmidt's <a href="http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people">comment</a>: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place," I understand that there are very few people who are NOT going to have a problem with it, and rightly so. And it shouldn't surprise me that one of the people who actually advised Obama as he started his administration <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/">blacklisted all CNET reporters</a> from talking to Google when they published what they could Google about him. Two followups, because I write so disjointedly, and try to cram too much into single statements. Mr. Schmidt is formerly of Apple fame, and I suspect they have just as liberal of a culture as Google, but are just better at hiding it. Also, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt">according to Wikipedia</a>, it would appear that Mr. Schmidt was instrumental in calling for the federal "stimulus" plan, which is on track to bankrupt our nation, while providing no tangible benefit <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/71353-mark-penn-got-6-million-from-stimulus">except to the ruling class</a>.

2009-12-19T08:35:28-08:00

2009-12-10T03:07:57-08:00

289 One more update on the Windows 7 video driver situation: not long after I posted the last post, my system started getting a bunch of video corruption while watching a show on Hulu, and shortly BSOD'd.

2009-12-10T03:07:57-08:00

2009-12-06T09:24:23-08:00

288 Ok, so an update is in order. I started using Windows during the 3.1 days. Back then, you could switch out a video driver much like you do in Linux: drop to a prompt, do some fiddling, and start the GUI back up. When NT came out, everyone heralded it as the end-all-be-all of operating systems, and I thought that was true, too. Microsoft had bet the bank on a microkernel architecture. Linux (as famously debated between Linus and Tannenbaum) was based on a monolithic kernel. Yet, while it should have been possible to load a new video driver in NT without rebooting, of course, you still did. When 2000 came out, Microsoft moved the video driver into the kernel, dismaying lots of people, including me. It implied that it would be impossible not to reboot when loading a video driver, and it definitely meant that it was much more likely that a bad video driver could BSOD the machine. And, indeed, it did. I'm not going to take the time to look this up, but I once saw a report from Microsoft themselves, that showed that around 75% of all BSOD's were due to nVidia drivers. (They make chipsets too, but I imagine this is almost all video-related.) Now, I said all that to say this: despite my previous post complaining that the nVidia video driver for Win7 is 134 MB, it installed and started working without a reboot. So, now, Windows has something Linux doesn't: changing video drivers on the fly. Maybe this will be possible when the new kext stuff comes down the pipe? I don't know, but kudos to Microsoft on this one.

2009-12-06T09:24:23-08:00

2009-12-06T07:56:12-08:00

287 When hard drives became popular, they came in 10, 20, and 40 MB sizes. You could have loaded DOS 6.22, Windows 3.11, and all your applications in 5 or 6. And we got real, day-to-day productivity work done with that setup. I'm currently downloading an nVidia video driver for Windows 7, and it weighs in at 134 MB. One hundred, thirty-four megabyes. For a driver. I know that video is where it's at on the PC; that's why I have one for gaming. But, come on. That seems a little steep.

2009-12-06T07:56:12-08:00

2009-12-05T08:56:17-08:00

286 This article is very sad: <a href="http://cbs13.com/local/limewire.child.porn.2.1346842.html">http://cbs13.com/local/limewire.child.porn.2.1346842.html</a> Here's the most-scary part: "The FBI could not comment on this specific case, but said if child pornography is ever downloaded accidentally, the user needs to call authorities immediately. They may confiscate your computer, but it's better than the alternative." What this means to me is that -- in so many words -- the tapping of the domestic communication lines is so thorough that EVERYTHING you do online or over the air is logged. And, when the authorities can't find anything else to do -- you know, like track down a terrorist cell or an otherwise racially-motivated domestic group -- they'll `grep' their logs, and look to hang someone for being a pedophile. Who's going to argue for this guy's cause? Here's a chance for the ACLU and the EFF to join forces in the name of justice. I doubt either will step up. After all, which one would chance to lose a case like this, and be seen as supporting someone found to actually be a pedophile?

2009-12-05T08:56:17-08:00

2009-12-02T11:20:54-08:00

285 So, today, I decided that I would start counting WW points again. I rediscovered that my bowl of mini-wheats and skim milk is costing me 9 points. OK, but I'm only supposed to have 27 for the day, and there went exactly a third. You get 35 points on the week to do whatever you like, but I find that 27 points is so little food, that I just break up the bonus points, and try to keep each day under 32. So I go out for lunch, and talk my eating companion into going to Arby's, thinking I'll do better there than, say, a BBQ joint, Chinese buffet, or a cheap Mexican place that serves more food on a plate than your head. I decide to have the roast chicken club combo, thinking, hey, chicken, right? Bzzt! The sandwich and small curly fries? Yeah, 24 points. So I'm already at 6 points over on the day. So I go check the worst thing I can imagine: going to Chili's, which I love. Their Smokehouse Bacon Burger is the bomb, and I usually have it with a side of onion strings. Wanna take a guess at how many points this turns out to be? I checked: SEVENTY! That's nearly 3 times what WW says I should eat, and still more than double if I count my bonus points! I knew it was bad, but man! Come on! No wonder I'm fat! Maybe I'll really start tomorrow?

2009-12-02T11:20:54-08:00

2009-11-29T19:28:39-08:00

284 I'm rewriting an old PHP application in Rails, and learning a lot in this 3rd exercise with it. I'm taking the time to really learn the philosophy of the language this time, and get the idiom right. I just want to say, for the record, that this trick with "fields_for" renders HTML code that I worked out "by hand." <a href="http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/7495">http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/7495</a> I've got another small application to write after this one, and then the monster...

2009-11-29T19:28:39-08:00

2009-11-27T07:10:06-08:00

283 I hate what Christmas has become. This morning -- Black Friday -- the parking lot in front of the shopping mall that houses our local Target was FULL. There must have been, literally, 8 to 10 times the normal of number of cars there. You know why it's called "Black Friday?" Because it's the first day that stores start making a profit during the year. That's right: most retail chains generate all of their profit between Thanksgiving and Christmas. There's something very, very deeply wrong with this. Christmas has gotten completely out of hand. The total focus on buying things has absolutely ruined the holiday for me. I would almost rather the atheists of this country force us Christians to stop publically celebrating the holiday than for this to continue. Of course, if the atheists actually did do away with the Christian concept of Christmas, you can guarantee that the big retail chains of this country would find a way to supplant it with a holiday that remains -- like Valentines Day -- all about giving something to someone, preferably costing more than you can comfortably afford. See, the credit companies will like that. Consider it a "Christmas present" from one spousal company to another.

2009-11-27T07:10:06-08:00

2009-11-25T06:07:30-08:00

282 If you're not paying attention to this, you really, really should be. Eric Raymond is one of the smarter guys on the planet, and he's gone through the data dump that some hacker smuggled out of one of the world's foremost climate "research" facilities. He's found that they are just fudging the numbers to match their pre-conceived notions. If this holds up, there's NOTHING true about global warming, man-made or otherwise! <a href="http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d21-ClimateGate-emails-provide-unwanted-scrutiny-of-climate-scientists">http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25061-Climate-Change-Examiner~y2009m11d21-ClimateGate-emails-provide-unwanted-scrutiny-of-climate-scientists</a> <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447</a> The only way that this will change anything is if the "mainstream media" reports on it. My first reaction is that the administration must be putting enormous pressure on the American news outlets to keep this quiet -- at least until the conference on global warming in Copenhagen next month -- but I think that's short sighted. The liberals have taken over the news, and this is their religion. They'll respond to it the same way anyone does any criticism of their worldview.

2009-11-25T06:12:16-08:00

2009-11-24T05:29:55-08:00

281 My workplace is only 6.5 miles from my house, but it takes me 20 to 25 minutes, because I have to either go through town, or around it. I've decided that the best route is to go through it. So, every morning, I take IN31, or National Road, as it's known within city limits. As it winds through town, there are various portions of the road that expand to 5 lanes, and then collapse back to 3, and, for 30 years, everyone's known that it's needed to be expanded ALL THE WAY through town. In the past year, they've finally started working on doing this. There are presently construction sites at many points along the road to prepare for the big push when it's time. Now, one particular section of the road widens to 5 lanes, right in front of a big used car dealership. This part goes through the busiest intersection in town, and then collapses to 3 lanes again, right before you get to the busiest McDonalds in Indiana. The road is 5 lanes wide for about 2 or 3 blocks. All the time I've grown up, people have respected that it was pointless to use that lane unless you were going to turn at one of the 3 intersections it runs through. However, since the construction has started, it's become vogue to jump into that lane to get ahead of other cars. Just about every morning, when I come to the first stop light there, 4 or 5 cars will peel off into the second lane, and then try to run up and jam themselves back into line within a third of a mile. It's very, very frustrating. One morning, a black Grand Am pulled up next to me at the light, and tried to race me. I got on it. He got on it harder. And then we both floored it. I hit the brakes at coming up to the next light. He almost t-boned someone turning left in front of us. And, yes, thanks for asking: I had to repent over that. I want to put up a big sign, right in front of the car dealership, that says something to the effect of: "If you're using this lane to jump ahead of 3 or 4 cars on your way out of town, you're a jerk." Would that be a Christian thing to do? I didn't think so. I guess, by the essence of Matt 5:28, I've already offended, since I've thought about it. Bummer.

2009-11-24T05:29:55-08:00

2009-11-21T10:40:34-08:00

280 <img title="2D Virtual Girl" src="../../images/9844-620x-loveplus.jpg" alt="2D Virtual Girl" /> <a href="http://gamingbolt.com/2009/11/20/man-to-wed-a-2d-virtual-girl-in-real-life/">http://gamingbolt.com/2009/11/20/man-to-wed-a-2d-virtual-girl-in-real-life/</a> To all the haters out there who want to stop something like this from happening: How can you deny the basic civil rights of 2D virtual people? What are you? 2D-ophobes? True love knows no bounds, and you have no rights to force your human-based sexuality on him, her, or it. This person's genes have obviously evolved well past hetero- or homosexuality to digisexuality, and their desires should be protected by law just like anyone else's.

2009-11-21T10:46:43-08:00

2009-11-20T11:12:27-08:00

279 I just realized that she did it to me again, and I hadn't realized this one either. I told her I was going to put the previous posting on Facebook, and she complained vehemently. She didn't mind me posting it to my blog, here, though. Guess that means she doesn't think anyone reads this.

2009-11-20T11:12:27-08:00

2009-11-19T19:34:53-08:00

278 Tonight, my wife zinged me twice, without even meaning to. I told her I was taking a break from a really, _really_ long project to work on something else, and she said that it was nice that I could do something that would actually "work." Later, I commented on how I didn't know if I could get this other project up to the standard I would find acceptable, and she asked me if I had seen her book on perfectionism. Sure... she doesn't "mean" to say these things...

2009-11-19T19:34:53-08:00

2009-11-09T05:50:33-08:00

277 I don't usually do politics here, but this is getting too important, and the mainstream media isn't holding the administration accountable for it. <a href="http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/lawmakers-detail-obamas-pitch/">http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/lawmakers-detail-obamas-pitch/</a> Heinrich (D-NM), said (about the health care bill) “This is an opportunity to do something as big as Social Security,” he added. “And me, personally, I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.” Social Security? Oh, you mean that program that going to be broke by next year? Yeah, let's do something "as big" as that. <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/199167" target="_blank">http://www.newsweek.com/id/199167</a> According to other sources, and because of "this economy," Medicare is already broke, but I guess that's not evening-news material. I been struggling to understand, and this must be why AARP is on-board with the health care plan that Congress is working on. Something is going to be better than nothing. I have an idea for investment...

2009-11-09T05:50:33-08:00

2009-10-30T07:08:32-07:00

276 I tell you what: the new Ubuntu looks so sexy, it's making me consider using it on my desktop instead of Gentoo. I have this obsessive need to run the same distro on my desktop as my servers, though, and I still can't see running a Debian-based distro on my servers. Gah! It's driving my OCD crazy! I managed to overcome this for my netbooks, but I can't get over it on my desktops.

2009-10-30T07:08:32-07:00

2009-10-28T05:10:35-07:00

275 Ok, ok. To be fair, I gave the game a rest, and then another try, and I finally got the hang of it. Borderlands is fun. Not as fun as I'd hoped, but it is fun. That being said, I'm going to double down on my digitization project, and not play either Borderlands or Fallout 3 until I get to the robotics stage.

2009-10-28T05:10:35-07:00

2009-10-27T17:44:49-07:00

274 Just picked up the new game, Borderlands. I'm a huge fan of the post-apocalypse RPG, and FPS's. The Fallout series -- all of them -- especially the latest -- are my favorite games of all time. So I've been psyched about this game since it was announced. I pre-ordered it from Gamestop and picked it up today, which is the first day it's been available on PC. So here's my review: I'm NOT enjoying it. I'm really, really disappointed with having spent the $54 on this thing. It's kicking my butt six ways to Sunday! I mean, not even close. I'm shooting the non-adult "skags" at POINT BLANK RANGE with a shotgun 4 or 5 times, and they're taking it in stride, and turning around and killing me! If I stay far away and shoot with a pistol, then I can "boggle" them, and keep them from spitting at me, but at terrible expense of ammo. Something is waaaay off here. Bleh. I've fought with this for about an hour now, and I'm just not getting what I could be doing wrong. Maybe I picked the wrong character for the first level? I certainly would have thought that that would be impossible, if the designers had done their job correctly. Look, this is simple, the one -- the ONE -- thing I can't stand about video games is making it feel like a Mario game, where you have to just keep dying till you get lucky enough (or learn the level blindfolded) to get past something. I hate hate HATE to keep playing the same part of a game over and over and over again. That's why I didn't play Mario, and I resent it when game designers make a game that feels like it. I play PC games primarily for the mouse and keyboard, and for the (usual) ability to save my progress any where, any time. AAAANNNDDD, I was apparently supposed to get some sort of code to enter into the game to unlock special guns for pre-ordering from GameStop. The kid who sold me the game said it was in the box. NOT. But, like I just read on Steam's forums, what's the point of 8 special guns in a game that advertises that there are "47 GAZILLION" guns? I knew it wouldn't work, but it's the principal...

2009-10-27T18:30:16-07:00

2009-10-19T04:13:18-07:00

273 You know that feeling when the Spirit of God blows through where you're sitting? When you get "the goosebumps?" For a brief time, all my aches and pains melt away. My head doesn't pound, my back isn't sore, and I forget about my stomach. The phrase "the earnest of our inheritance" always comes to mind, and I find myself longing for my eternal home. If a church doesn't serve to put us in touch with the Almighty in a palpable way, what's the point of its existance? Don't bother calling it a church, at least, not in the Christian sense.

2009-10-19T04:13:18-07:00

2009-10-10T09:15:18-07:00

272 Again, so far, so good on the netbook. I can't believe that memory that tests just fine under memtest can cause problems like I saw, but it's been several days of heavy use now, and no crashes. I'm almost ready to start breathing again.

2009-10-10T09:15:18-07:00

2009-10-06T22:41:30-07:00

271 I can't keep anyone happy in my life any more. No matter what I choose to do with my time, I'm cheating someone. It could be my wife, my kids, my friends, my pastor, my employer, or even myself, or God. I have so much to do, I keep a list. A really long list. I look at it from time to time, and remind myself how cool it would be to get to work on things that matter. Things that would have a lasting impact. But I can't. All I can do is work on the single thing that is most upsetting someone else, do the bare minimum to make them satisfied, and then move on to the next person, who has, by this time, become upset. I exaggerate, of course, but it doesn't feel by much. Someone or some thing is always getting slighted at this point in my life. If I never had another thing break, nor another idea pop into my head, nor anything else be asked of me by someone else, I honestly could work on the things on my list for the next 5 years. I'm 40 this year. According to some books, I'm supposed to have 5-, 10-, and 20-year goals. So what? Who cares what I want to do in this life? It's all proscribed. I have no choices in the matter any more. It doesn't matter how much I want to work on a special project to benefit myself, someone else, or society at large. When your 2-year-old son flushes a pencil down the toilet -- and there's not even enough money to even think about looking up a number for a plumber -- you have to stop everything and get that taken care of yourself. I'm so stuck, at this point, I'm becoming blase' about the whole deal. I beyond getting upset about it. At least consciously. I'm having trouble sleeping, and my college ulcer is back with a vengence, so I guess I'm "internalizing" it. I don't have any answers, except to just keep hacking away at it. After all, that which does not kill us... just delays the inevitable.

2009-10-06T22:41:30-07:00

2009-10-04T20:01:57-07:00

270 Ok. If it's going to fail, this ought to do it. I changed the memory in my netbook back to the original chip, and let it run for several days. Every once in awhile, I'd open it up, peck around on it, and then put it back to sleep. After a couple days of running alright, I decided to provoke it by putting UNR 9.04 back on. (To its credit Ubuntu 8.10 was better.) So, today, I wound up using it quite a bit, and I didn't have any problems. (Well, except that there seems to be a bug in Ubuntu's desktop-switcher applet, but that's another story.) No crashes in either Firefox or OpenOffice. I'm posting this here because it seems that every time I think I've got it licked, this is what causes it to break. Just for the record, I'm pretty sure that's 12, 12! operating system installs on this thing so far. Ah ah ah ah ahhhh....

2009-10-04T20:01:57-07:00

2009-09-29T16:49:34-07:00

269 Gah! Jinxed again! My laptop got all crashy on me this evening. Last stop: put the original memory back in, even though the expansion memory tests fine. If this doesn't stop it, I'm finally going to call Asus, and I'm prepared to jump through whatever hoops it takes to get a replacement.

2009-09-29T16:49:34-07:00

2009-09-29T10:54:52-07:00

268 The continual saga of getting some sort of Linux to work on my Eee PC 1000... I was trying desperately to stay on UNR 9.04, but I attempted to use OpenOffice the other day, and it was COMPLETELY unusable. I mean, I couldn't type a SINGLE LINE before it would crash, restart, and then prompt me to recover the (blank) document I was trying to write. Over and over and over. Every time. I finally gave up and put Ubuntu 8.10 on it. So far, both OpenOffice and Firefox have not hiccupped. Which is a huge relief. However, just now, I took at look at the Eee PC 900 I have at work, on which I installed UNR 9.04, and -- of course -- it seems to run OpenOffice just fine. So I guess I have arrived at the conclusion that my hardware is fine, and something is deeply, deeply flawed with running Ubuntu 9.04 on an Eee PC 1000.  I don't have much hope that the next version will be better, but I don't suppose that I'll be able to resist trying it when it comes out. Sigh. I'm a glutton for punishment.

2009-09-29T10:54:52-07:00

2009-09-27T17:16:56-07:00

267 I'm so close I can taste it on my big project. I can get the signals, but only at half speed. I think there's a bug in the National Instruments driver. I had only been able to run the card at 20KHz (when it's rated at 1.25MHz), but the latest software drivers fixed that, so I can't help but wonder if there's another bug deeper in that didn't get caught. I'm going to have to cast my fate to the message boards, and hope that someone can tell me what I'm doing wrong, how to work around it, or get hold of the right person to fix it. It's a long shot. These things always are. If this fails, I'm going to have to try comedi. Right now, though, I'm too tired to do anything. I've been weening myself off caffeine for several weeks now, and I think I've finally hit "bottom."

2009-09-27T17:16:56-07:00

2009-09-25T18:44:38-07:00

266 How sad, lonely, depressed and worthless do you have to feel to simply stand in place for 10 minutes in an online game and do things that prevent your team from playing the game? And 10 minutes was all the longer I waited. He probably kept it up until he got kicked, but I see kick votes succeed so rarely, I don't even bother any more. But, I mean, really?! This is the sum total of your life?! That your definition of fun is ruining an otherwise perfectly enjoyable match for 63 other people? My mind just boggles.

2009-09-25T18:44:38-07:00

2009-09-18T20:55:38-07:00

265 Why is it that every Facebook post I read sounds about like this: "I just had the best time ever doing things that were way more fun than what YOU did, and I did it with lots of people who are WAY cooler than you. Aren't you jealous now? I thought so. That was the whole point of writing it down, you silly person! Feel free to comment on how fun and cool it must have been to have been there with me." If I could get the Facebook Beautifier Greasemonkey script working, at least I'd have that going for me. But I can't. I give up.

2009-09-19T08:40:02-07:00

2009-09-15T07:58:36-07:00

264 The march toward putting all of my data "in the cloud" continues. Putting my to-do list into a "web app" (of sorts) with MonkeyGTD has been a huge success for me so far, but there are 4 applications that I've centered my personal information around on my Palm-based device: to-do's, memos, contacts, and calendar. To-do's are done. Memos are also done. I setup a wiki for putting any sort of "knowlege base"-type of information into. I don't use it much, but, when I need it, I can get to it from anywhere. Still to come are contacts and calendar, and I'm moving toward setting up a virtual server with Zimbra. This is a little bit more tricky. Really, given my hardware layout, I need to pull in another machine to be the host, but it's noisy and I don't want it in my office. But none of my other servers have enough memory to run a virtual machine, so I guess I'm stuck. The one other thing I kept on my Treo, which was flying under the radar, was a password manager. I don't keep EVERYthing in it, which causes me to reuse a few passwords over and over. Apparently, there's an awesome iPhone / webapp application out there for this sort of thing, but I don't have an iPhone, and don't plan on getting one, so I just need a web-based thing to be done with it. This is why I'm writing. The first hit I found on Google was a personal blog with a long discussion that led me to look at <a href="http://www.clipperz.com/">Clipperz</a>. And, lo, it is awesome. I understand both sides of the debate about where to host this sort of data: on your personal servers or on someone else's, and I still want it on mine. Their "community" version allows me to do just that. It has every feature I could imagine for keeping passwords. I'm blown away, so I'm giving them a shout out here. Not that anyone reads this, but maybe Google will pick it up. Also, my hosting provider just discovered a problem with my service, and fixed it by changing me over from mod_rails (which I had requested, since I use it at home) to mongrel_rails. I'm noticing that it's faster. LOTS faster. I'm going to have to check out using this on my testing instance at home. Of course, the other side of the argument is that it will be more difficult to setup and manage. (Let's face it, phusion is pretty simple!)

2009-09-15T08:35:21-07:00

2009-09-07T18:45:18-07:00

261 Small update. I forgot about there being some sort of persistence mechanism in the Gnome - Evolution - Pilot stack. Rather than remember which daemons I needed to restart, I just rebooted, and, after a couple of false starts, seem to be syncing again. However, this doesn't change the fact that I'm going to "upgrade" this situation as soon as feasible.

2009-09-07T18:45:18-07:00

2009-09-07T18:19:59-07:00

260 So, today I wasted all my time in still yet more experimentation to find some way of having my calendar available on the network, yet sync'ed with my Treo. Even more FAIL than usual. I tried the newest version of Zimbra. And, lo and behold, it worked perfectly with Evolution! However... that little drop-down box in the Evolution synchronization applet -- the one that supposedly lets you choose which source to sync which apps with? -- yeah, it doesn't do anything. I tried all sorts of settings. I even tried OpenSync and all the settings it had. There's apparently nothing in the world that will sync some sort of networked calendar to a Palm under Linux. I was going to just give up and use Google for everything, but there's apparently also no way to get a sync between the almighty Google and a Palm either. I've just lost 3 days of my personal time, and come to the halting conclusion that this idea of "sync'ing" a Palm is over. I've had some sort of Palm for THIRTEEN YEARS now, but it's officially DEAD TECHNOLOGY. I'm just sorry I missed the memo a couple years back. It's time to figure out if a Palm Pre will work the way I want it to. Verizon's supposed to start carrying them by the end of the year. It may be time to suck it up and get a data plan. To add insult to injury, now that I've decided to just go back to the way I've been doing it for the past several years, I'm getting duplicates in both the calendar and the contacts databases. I've been screwing around with the situation for an hour, and I can't figure out how to make it stop duplicating on a sync. Looks like I'm just going to use the phone, keep it backed up, and forget about syncing it with Evolution entirely. It makes me sick, and I just want to throw up at this point. God, please forgive me for this disastrous waste of my time.

2009-09-08T03:48:05-07:00

2009-09-06T18:37:42-07:00

259 In and around church today, I've tried Zimbra. It has the same sort of "unknown error" trying to add calendar events from Evolution. But in the process of trying all these different softwares, I upgraded Evolution to the latest version in the Gentoo tree. So the questions is: Do I "downgrade" (back to the "stable" version) to see if this fixes it? On the other hand, I also see that Zimbra released a new version 4 days ago, whereas I had downloaded my test copy a month ago, thinking it would come to this. So maybe the question is: Do I bother with installing the new version to test with? The geek in me says that they've probably fixed the problem. The lazy person in me -- who also just doesn't want to run the monster that is Zimbra -- thinks that I need to just go try fooling with davical some more. However, Zimbra may yet prove very useful in lowering the barrier to organizing my family's schedules as my children get older, and start to run around on their own power.

2009-09-06T18:37:42-07:00

2009-09-05T18:43:06-07:00

258 I have literally spent all day -- 14 hours -- working on setting up some sort of accessible and sync-able calendar on my home network. I failed. Utterly and miserably. I studied 8 different software packages in depth, and installed and tried to use 4 of them. Not one can be accessed remotely, yet still somehow work with Evolution. Yes, I know Evolution's a bit of a strange bird, but if it Evolution can access it, then it should sync with my Treo, at least in theory. The closest I got was <a href="http://rscds.sourceforge.net/index.php">davical</a>. It's the only one that seems to work fine with Evolution, but entries entered from Evolution don't show up in Sunbird! I suppose I run Evolution in all the places I care about at the moment, but if I'm going to do this, I want my information accessible from any place and any client. I'd prefer to have a web client, but <a href="http://www.bedework.org/bedework/">bedework</a> has some sort of strange error with Evolution. (It can't create non-whole-day appointments.) Just using a simple Apache setup and placing a .ics file in a DAV container works great with Sunbird, but Evolution's "webcal" handler can only read that information, not edit it. The one I'm avoiding is Zimbra. I know it will probably do most of what I want it to do, but previous experience with both OpenGroupware and Scalix at my church leads me to believe that it will almost work great, yet will take over the machine I put it on, and be hard to maintain. I've been doing all of this in an effort to open up my information a little bit, because of how well putting my to-do list on a web server has worked out. (So far, still so good.) I was hoping that getting my calendar out there would be just as beneficial. I know, I know. "Just use Google." Everything connects to Google these days, even Evolution. And I would, but -- at least as of right now -- I can't stand the thought of Google indexing all of my personal contacts and schedule. There's no reason for them to have everything I'm doing and everyone I'm doing it with in their database. It bothers me, even though I may have about the least to hide of anyone I know. Besides, I like the challenge of doing the infrastructure work myself, even when it doesn't work out. Well, sorta. I see that newly-created entries from within Evolution do show up in Sunbird. Maybe there's a way to fix the big import yet...

2009-09-05T18:43:06-07:00

2009-09-02T12:18:11-07:00

257 Gotta give mad props to <a href="http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/#MonkeyGTD">MonkeyGTD</a>. I've spent many, MANY hours of my personal time lately, searching for a new tool to Get Things Done. (Hours I could have spent, you know, actually getting things done.) I've been using <a href="http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/">ShadowPlan</a> on my Linux desktop and my Palm Pilot to try to emulate GTD for a long time. (And then I sync the Palm up with Evolution. I've had some SERIOUS problems with syncing over the years, as things have gotten broken and then fixed in the stack, but it's currently working like a champ.) While -- conceptually -- this is a perfect fit for me, I've finally realized that this is just not working. The process looks like this: I use the desktop application to review, juggle things around, sync the Palm Pilot, link next actions into the To-Do database, then sync back with the desktop, then I can see what I need to do in Evo. The problem is that, on Linux, to get the Palm's version of the database updated, I have to open the raw PDB directly from a backup directory, edit it, then pause my sync tool, manually re-sync the database back to the Palm, and then carry on. (On Windows, this would be much easier, because there's a plugin that works with the Palm sync tool that does a two-way sync with the ShadowPlan database.) The bottom line is that, despite how philosophically the idea fit with how I want to work, the "friction" here was causing me to just not use the system. So I've tried about a half dozen different software packages to try to actually do GTD. <a href="http://getontracks.org/">Tracks</a> looks really nice, but it doesn't handle a large amount of projects, and I have A LOT of projects. I really liked the idea of having all my stuff out on the web so that I could hit it from any place, but I finally saw that one of the contributors pointed out how it was only designed to handle the next actions part of the process, and not really be a good place to juggle the projects and the prioritization. That finally let me allow myself to get over it. Plus, it was sluggish, being served by my ancient PC "server." I also tried <a href="http://www.trgtd.com.au/">ThinkingRock</a>, which is pretty good. It's a desktop app, but it's Java, so it'll run on anything. The problem here is that I already got sold on having web access to my list. If I'm not going to sync whatever it is I finally use with my phone, then I at least want to get at it from a browser. (Who knows? Maybe I'll finally get a good web phone and a data plan, and I'll be able to get to it anyway.) While I can use sshfs to get to the database from any computer I'm on, that's just another friction point that I'm doubtful I'll overcome in practice. Desperately, I looked at several forms of TiddlyWiki, and finally found one that is really powerful: MonkeyGTD. Now, I've only gotten a start with it, but it seems like the right way for me to go. It even prints out well. Admittedly, getting it installed on my web server with the upload plugin was an enormous hassle, but that's because I didn't understand how TiddlyWiki plugins worked at first, and because I skimmed over things I should have read very carefully. I've converted my work projects over to the system, and I'm happy enough with it to start moving everything else over. We'll see how long this lasts...

2009-09-02T12:18:11-07:00

2009-08-15T04:53:49-07:00

256 I think it's funny the way people congregate themselves into groups of like-minded behavior without any sort of external pressures. Two examples follow. As a family, we went to a Coney Island-type park in Cincinnati. Small, cheap, and the kids ate it up. Now, they have an outdoor stage, and an event was taking place that night. They weren't letting people park in the amusement park's parking lot, so we had to wade through extra foot traffic from people parked all over the wider area who were walking down and across the road. We didn't know what was going on when we rolled through the first time; we were just passing by the place to get something to eat. What was so striking about the group was how similarly they were all dressed. It was bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts for the men, and fake grass skirts over bathing suits or short shorts for the women, as far as the eye could see. Lots of crazy hats. Fake coconut bras were being worn by both men and women. Everyone was tailgating and drinking. Lots of alcohol. After eating, we got to the gate for the park, and asked what was going on: Jimmy Buffet concert. Ahhhh. Everything fell into place. Apparently, Jimmy has an almost deadhead-like following. But, again, what struck me about the situation was how homogenous everything looked. The dress code was strictly enforced. Again, except for the smallest one, we went to something called Symphony on the Prarie, where the Indianapolis Symphony plays at an amphitheatre at Conner Prarie. We were too far away, but they had small speakers for amplification, and the weather was great. I felt bad for having brought kids. (Sorry, guys, if you ever read this.) But this was because most people didn't bring kids. The average age of the SotP goer was probably 50. It seemed like about a third of the people there were drinking wine. (Or, perhaps, holding wine is a more accurate description.) But, it wasn't the fact that more people than I figured were drinking at an event like this, it was that they were all drinking wine. What I mean is that, if it's significant somehow to have a drink to be able to sit through the set of Mozart they were playing (YAWN!), then why wouldn't beer have worked as well? Again, the demographic was so homogenous that it felt as though security would have escorted someone out of the park had they cracked open a PBR. So what causes this? Is it peer pressure left over from our teenage years, or is it a natural function of people of like mind finding themselves at the same venue to enjoy the same sort of entertainment? Just wondering out loud.

2009-08-15T13:41:34-07:00

2009-08-07T07:22:06-07:00

255 And, yeah, I jinxed the netbook. I've seen it spontaneously crash the session back to the login screen twice now. The best part is that it no longer responds to the keyboard, and I have to reboot. The latest time just happened -- while it was closed and doing nothing -- and I only knew it because I heard the login screen reappear because of the sound effect it plays. I can't help but think it's got some bad piece of hardware in it, but I don't have the slightest clue what it might be, and I can only imagine that it would be a legendary hassle trying to get it replaced under warranty if I can't prove anything. Maybe the clue is the keyboard or mouse driver itself.

2009-08-07T07:22:06-07:00

2009-08-07T07:18:27-07:00

254 Something finally cliked into place in my thinking: Every day is like playing a real-time strategy game. It seems to me that your resources are time, your God-given talents, and whatever allies you can get to join your cause. Likewise, your "enemies" are your health, mother nature, and the conflicting goals of other people. With those things in mind, you have to decide what objective to try to acheive, big or small. Maybe that's taking over the world. Maybe it's simple survival. Maybe that's getting high or drunk. Maybe that's learning a new skill. Maybe that's just listening to someone else's problems. Even if you just want to sit in front of TV all day in your own filth, that's still a choice, complete with benefits and consquences to your time and health. It's like that old saying: "Everyone's gotta believe in something. I believe I'll have another beer." Or, like an old roommate wanted so badly for me to understand, the old Rush line in the song, Freewill, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Thinking a little further, it may be odd to lump "your health" as an enemy, but it seems to me that the best it can do is get out of the way. Even if your goal is to run a marathon, and you're already in shape, your "health" has to be attacked like an enemy so as to get it in line to support the mission. I guess the question I have, at this present moment in life, is whether forcing my choices to be conscious will improve them?

2009-08-07T07:18:27-07:00

2009-07-31T03:35:30-07:00

253 I hope I don't jinx it here, but ever since the latest reinstall of Ubuntu on my netbook, I haven't seen it be "crashy." I'm cautiously optimistic that they've fixed whatver was wrong with it.

2009-07-31T03:35:30-07:00

2009-07-21T04:18:26-07:00

252 I want the experience on my netbook to be free of hassle. For the most part, using Gentoo on my main two desktops is great. I had a lockup the other day, but I blame that on using shutting down a VPN while having active remote mounts, and I'm too impatient to wait for them to timeout on their own. It was memorable because I hardly ever have problems. So, I decided to give up on Linux for a time. It pains me greatly to admit this. I was sure that, by buying a netbook that came pre-loaded with Linux, I would get something that worked great. I was going to try to give Linux a few months to work out whatever's going on, and keep my eye on the Moblin-enhanced version of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which should come out in the next version. I loaded the Windows 7 RC back on the netbook. I thought I would try to put Gentoo prefix on it, for all of the networking tools I need. This turned out to be an even bigger fiasco than Linux. I got Windows on, after one failed install attempt, then a BSOD, and started trying to get Gentoo prefix on it. After installing and uninstalling the Posix layer (because the Prefix install script did that for me), I found that the installer just wasn't going to work. In the morning, I found that the machine had gone to sleep. That's expected, right? Well, it blue screened on wake up. And reboot. And safe mode. Even a system restore didn't fix it. So I checked, found that there had been a new BIOS released, put that on, installed Ubuntu, applied all the patches, and installed the software I wanted. I put the machine to sleep, woke it up, and the browser never crashed, all the way until this morning. I guess I'm now holding my breath... This has become... something more weird than surreal. I don't even have any words for it any more.

2009-07-21T04:18:26-07:00

2009-07-18T04:23:18-07:00

251 I've confirmed that there's something wrong with running any sort of Linux on my netbook. I was hoping it was just a problem with Ubuntu, but it's not. Gentoo's doing it too. When it wakes up from sleep mode, it's... goofy. Browsers crash. (I'd say that "applications" crash, in general, but I only run about two programs on the thing, a browser and a terminal, and I guess gnome-terminal is cool with whatever's happening.) At least on Gentoo, I'm getting a bug-buddy bug report sometimes. The one from a browser crash indicated something about a library that makes me think it could be something to do with X going to sleep, so I guess that's where I look next. It's fine if I just turn it on and off. That's no way for a netbook to behave, but that approach is (just barely) keeping me from just putting the Win7 RC back on it. The problem here is that the one other thing that's bothering me on the setup is that there's a step in the boot process (for udev) that takes about 2 minutes to timeout, which makes needing to reboot all the time an even bigger pain than it normally would be.

2009-07-18T04:23:18-07:00

2009-07-15T04:23:29-07:00

250 Stick a fork in her, the USA is officially done. The representative democracy is gone, replaced with proxy socialism by lobbyist. The inmates are running the asylum now. One thing, and only one thing, fixes this immediately: congressional term limits. While I'm at it, you can fix health care in one easy step. I don't hear anyone calling for government to "fix" auto or home insurance. So, force employers to STOP PROVIDING HEALTH INSURANCE, give us the money they pay for premiums on our behalf, and let people buy health insurance the same way they buy any other insurance.

2009-07-15T04:42:10-07:00

2009-07-14T19:25:02-07:00

249 While working out some issues due to running <a href="gentoo_eee.html">Gentoo on my netbook</a>, and waiting on various pieces of software to compile, I refreshed the software on two of my other computers, updated this site, researched stuff for a new R&D project, and read <a href="fmylife.com">fmylife.com</a>. By the time I had read a few pages of anecdotes, I was getting more and more troubled by the fact that 99% of them seem to be about people doing horrible things to each other. So I started feeling more and more appreciative of my wife, who is awesome, and who I implicitly trust not to stab me in the back. So I got up from my office desk, went into the living room, knelt beside the couch next to her, as she was lying down, flipping channels, and told her that I appreciated the fact that she was a great wife to me. Though she said thanks, she kept flipping, and looked mostly annoyed. I told her I should post the incident to the site.

2009-07-14T19:25:02-07:00

2009-07-07T16:55:47-07:00

248 I've been beta testing <a href="http://www.battlefieldheroes.com/">Battlefield Heroes</a> for months. I was having a pretty good time with it, but a couple weeks ago, they re-leveled all the classes, and it stopped being any fun for me. Up until that point, I was getting annoyed at how unavoidable getting killed by snipers was. Now, they have a policy that there should be no one-shot-one-kills in the game, but it seemed like half the time you got sniped, you couldn't get to cover fast enough to avoid the second shot and death. Now that they changed the classes, you WON'T get to cover in time. After you get to middling level (say, 12 - 15), you're going to be playing on servers that have snipers who have several points in "piercing shot," and who have bought the "quick" sniper rifle, and you're going to die in two shots as quick as you can say "bang bang." I went to the forums to complain about the issue, and the thread got to be several pages long, but I never saw a response to any of the gameplay changes from the devs. If they would have just published their compiled stats, it may have made some sense. But without that, I can't understand it. It seemed that half the people playing Nationals already WERE commandos. They didn't need any more incentive for that. In the process of actually IMPROVING the sniper, they made the soldier's "grenade spam" almost useless. Yes, I played a soldier almost exclusively, but that didn't bother me as much as the sniper issue. The forums were LIT UP about the GS issue. Another annoyance with the game is that you MUST work as a group to really succeed, and it happens JUST as rarely as in other Battlefield games. :-( Curiously, tanks take, like 3 or 4 GOOD shots to kill someone (more like 5 or 6), but can be blown up with just 2 TNT packs. Heck they even take about 4 shots to kill another tank! Person-to-person, you can be killed in about a second, so tanks wind up being... strange. Planes are almost useless. I hate BF2's planes, because someone who's really good with them can rule the whole server, and there's nothing you can do about it. Don't worry about that in BFH! They're just a big, fat target for small arms fire, which can bring them down in seconds. Notably, you can't choose where you spawn. I realize that this is intentional, and I understand this mechanic to keep the action hot at "the line." But when you're working on an award, sometimes you need to spawn at certain points. Maybe that's home base, to get a tank; maybe that's near the center, to capture a flag. The way the game runs (SLOW!), you could spend HALF the time in the level running back to home base to get a vehicle. Finally, cheaters. Because of the speed and size of the levels in this game, cheaters are even more annoying in BFH than other online games. You just can't get away from them. Maybe PunkBuster is fixing this, but I doubt it. It doesn't keep cheaters out of any other game I play with it! And I see post after post about problems with it. (I know it's been hassling me since I gave up on BFH and tried to play BF2. I keep getting kicked out with some sort of "file corruption" problem. Thanks, guys!) In any game I play, when I get on a server that has an obvious hacker, I just go somewhere else. There are usually plenty of options. Well, in BFH, you can't choose your server, and I've gotten dumped back into the same server after leaving. That's doubly annoying. I've gone back to 2142.

2009-07-07T16:55:47-07:00

2009-07-07T05:21:02-07:00

247 Yesterday, I finally noticed that I wasn't getting the nice font rendering on Gentoo like I was under Ubuntu. Apparently, this is an "intellectual property" issue with -- who else? -- Microsoft. Like many things in Linux-land, this led me on a big goose chase. The bottom line is that "Cleartype"-like font rendering is available on Gentoo, right now, with stable packages from the tree. It just doesn't get activated unless you do it manually. Strangely, I had never noticed that the Gnome font config panel wasn't really doing anything for me. I had to go to /etc/fonts/conf.d and symbolically link the hinting type I wanted from ../conf.avail. Just linking all the 10-*.conf files was garbage. I just needed the 10-sub-pixel-rgb.conf. The change takes effect in just a couple seconds. What I notice this morning is that, once this is done, it's done. I tried to remove the link and take a "before" screenshot, but removing it doesn't do anything any more. However, the font configuration tool now works as expected. So I guess I got that going for me. Thank you, software patents, for making everyone's computing experience that much more complicated. Before: <a href="../../images/fonts_before.png"><img title="Fonts, Before" src="../../images/fonts_before_small.png" alt="Fonts, Before" width="124" height="99" /></a> and after: <a href="../../images/fonts_after.png"><img title="Fonts, After" src="../../images/fonts_after_small.png" alt="Fonts, After" width="124" height="99" /></a> After looking at the results here, I wonder how many people notice these things. I don't think it's very many. But, to me, it's a huge and welcome improvement. This was on my CRT at home. It's even more dramatic on the LCD's at work.

2009-07-07T20:06:55-07:00

2009-07-05T13:20:18-07:00

246 The other day, I told my six-year-old son, "You're the man!" And he replied, "You're the man!" So I said, "No, you're the man!" And then he said, in the Sponge-Bob Squarepants voice-over voice, "'Three. Days. La-ter,' You're the man!" Totally caught me off guard. It was very funny. Kids are challenging some times. OK, a lot of the time. But it's so rewarding seeing their personalities develop. Some things you can tell right away, and they grow into them. But other things, like their sense of humor, are hard to predict before they can speak. It's the sort of thing that makes the work worth it.

2009-07-05T13:20:18-07:00

2009-07-04T12:48:47-07:00

245 I've reactivated my Twitter account. I'm put a link on my pages so that people can tweet responses to my content. Excelsior!

2009-07-04T12:48:47-07:00

2009-06-28T15:29:32-07:00

244 I give. I had grand ideas about posting up all I've discovered about putting Gentoo on my Eee 1000, but I have to yield. After several hours of trying, I can't get user-level access to the Bluetooth stack, and the wireless just won't play nice with NetworkManager. I don't know what to try next, and I won't live without either. I hate hate hate this. I really wanted this to work. I don't like splitting my attention, but I don't have any intention of putting Ubuntu on any of my other computers, and I need this thing to work. To get the wireless card driver even running at all, I had to go to the very latest gentoo-sources kernel, and specifically enable the "playground" drivers. Then I had to download the driver from RealTek so that I could grab the firmware. I'd be fine with all of this, but during all the reboots to sort to make sure I had done things correctly, I've seen the machine get hung so badly that I had to unplug the power and pull the battery. Twice. Well, that's worse than getting dumped back to the login screen on Ubuntu, so back I go. I'm tempted to put Win7 back on. It was great. It's just that I'd spend days downloading and configuring the various programs I take for granted on Linux.

2009-06-28T15:29:32-07:00

2009-06-28T06:17:21-07:00

243 Yesterday, as I worked on my main computer, I watched my Ubuntu-powered Eee 1000 restart the login session, on its own, while I wasn't doing anything. Twice. I don't know what's up with that distro. They finally, seemingly, fixed the problem where every single web browser I could run on it would lockup or die every 5 minutes, but then they've introduced a new problem where you just get spontaneously logged out. So I finally decided to rip it off and put Gentoo on it. I had been working on a VM for awhile, so I had a stage 4 install basically ready to go. Now, I've avoided this exercise because I know that -- despite its flaws -- Ubuntu was doing an enormous amount of configuration work for me. Well, I'm starting to see just how much. I was running Gentoo on my work laptop a couple years ago, and it wasn't bad, as long as I didn't care about getting the thing to sleep. I convinced myself that I could live with just starting the thing up and shutting it down, and everything else worked fine. Now I'm trying to bring up Gentoo on this thing, and I find the Linux world is in a state of flux. All the configuration I'm used to has been supplanted. Normal group memberships have changed. There's a move afoot to the new policykit/consolekit structure, and I'm having to pull in all sorts of packages from the unstable side of the portage tree. I've FINALLY gotten NetworkManager going, but bluetooth is up in the air. (And, in true Gentoo fashion, getting it going is going to require pulling in lots of unstable libraries, which will force me to recompile a lot more packages that depend on them.) The audio is MIA. And I don't want to even THINK about power management yet. Hey, at least the Xorg guys have their act together. I didn't even NEED an xorg.conf file. I've already spent too many hours on this. It's getting really close to just scrapping it, going back to Ubuntu, and hoping and waiting for them to fix their problems.

2009-06-28T06:17:21-07:00

2009-06-21T07:42:21-07:00

242 Twitter has officially joined Facebook in my open and cordial invitation to bite me. I can't stand needing to delete a twitter-spam follower or two every time I make a post. I briefly experimented with the idea of creating another account to follow my main account so that I could make my main account private, yet still excerpt it here, but that would require passing credentials as part of the viewing process, and that's probably going to be a security hassle. I also looked at creating a Rails-based Twitter app to do the same thing, but Twitter apparently lost my app registration half-way through the process, and I just can't be bothered. I wondered how else I might use Twitter in a way that let me post publically, but only allow friends to comment. I can't find it, though I'm sure I'm not trying hard enough. Meh. What's the point of it when this is the site I want to spend my energy on? Posting from a cell phone? I could code that here, but I don't even have a data plan! Tweeting with my friends? No one I know of my generation uses it. I guess we're just too old. And frankly, I never got the whole 140-character-limit-as-an-advantage idea. I think leads to useless posts. What would this post have looked like on Twitter? "Twitter sucks. KTHXBAI!" That's not the underlying point. I think it's great that other people think it's great, but it's just not for me, and there are extenuating circumstances why that happens to be the case, but I couldn't have even posted those on Twitter. I think that last run-on sentence alone would have been too long!

2009-06-21T07:42:21-07:00

2009-06-21T05:54:04-07:00

241 When I was little -- I'm thinking about 6 -- my beloved grandfather (who was an E9 in the Marines) painted his old footlocker orange, with black hardware, and gave it to me to store the toys I had at my grandparents' house. Many years later -- I'm thinking after I bought my first house -- my grandmother reminded me of the trunk, and asked if I wanted it. Of course! And I used it to store all my old treasures. I'm not a really sentimental guy, but I had, most importantly, all of my old Legos, an old RC car, lots of magic sets, a couple yo-yo's, hackey sacks, Silly Putty eggs, Slime buckets, a Rubik's cube, along with other toys like it, etc. The point of this post is that I also had a Big Trak stored in there. This thing had survived my dad kicking it across the floor when I was a kid, though he had killed the dumpster I had that plugged into it, but it had still worked as of the last time I tried to make it go, so I've kept it, now, for something close to 30 years. Several years ago, I got the wild hair that I would open up the trunk, and let my kids play with what was inside. I didn't see it coming. I thought I could impart my love and care for my "things" to my children. I was wrong. Lots of stuff is now missing, and I know I'll never find it again. I started losing control of "my" Legos to my son, who immediately fell in love with them. Now, that's what I wanted to happen, but I didn't understand how his desire to play with them would interact with my deep-seated need to prevent him from breaking or losing them. I started to lay down some rules about them, but then my aunt and uncle found a PILE of Legos in a garage sale, and we've made those "his." I've since re-packed "mine," except that I let him have all the minifigs and accessories, since "his" didn't have any. Most of those I'll probably never get back too. Sigh. So, yesterday, we had our big, neighborhood-wide garage sale. We did pretty well. What didn't sell, and we could fit in the van, we took to Goodwill. What didn't fit, we put at the curb. An hour later, the desk, mini-trampoline, and box springs were gone. We got a lot of "stuff" cleaned out, which is great. It was a project that allowed me to link together lots of reorganization in the house, garage, and my office. In the process of doing all of this yesterday, I noticed that the Big Track was out of my trunk and sitting on some shelves. I made a mental note, because I knew that I would be reorganizing my "stuff" soon. Well, this morning, I dragged my trunk in from the garage, cleaned it off, and started putting some things in there. I went to get my Big Trak, and I found that one of the wheels had been broken clean off. I'm... disappointed, and thinking I'm going to go rounding up all of my old "stuff" that I can, including any Lego minifigs I can find. UPDATE: While in the process of throwing away the Big Trak, I decided to give some epoxy a try. We'll see how that goes...

2009-06-21T06:04:46-07:00

2009-05-27T04:22:03-07:00

240 To say that Linux requires a lot of tweaking to get running, and that Windows doesn't, is a ridiculous double standard that somehow keeps getting recycled. When I first installed Linux, back in '94 or 5, I don't recall exactly, I asked myself the same question everyone does the first time they install Linux: OK, now what do I DO with this? The answer is: LIVE IN IT, and do everything you normally do. That requires installing some extra programs, and setting up your desktop as you like, just like any other computer. To be fair, this included LOTS of heavy tweaking to get hardware running. (So the other day, I downloaded the Windows 7 RC, and installed it in a VirtualBox VM, and then thought: Ok, now what do I DO with this? The answer was: Nothing. All I wanted to do was have a look at the user interface.) However, at this point, it takes a lot more fooling around with Windows to get it ready for use than it does Linux. Of course, I may be being unfair. I'm talking about XP. I only know of one person who uses Vista. But Vista, for me, has caused me more hassle with BSOD's than any other version of Windows, so I just stay away from it. From what I read and hear from other people, I'm not alone. Back to the point. I just refurbished about a dozen computers at work with XP. All P4-based Dell machines that were getting too slow to use thanks to Symantec "anti-virus" crap. It takes about all day to do a few on the bench, including sorting the hardware, like maxing out the RAM or making a RAID set for the disks. As for the software, I need to load the OS (including answering questions twice in the middle of the install), grab the network driver on a different machine and carry it over on a USB stick, finish loading the other drivers from Dell's site, update Windows Update, update Windows Genuine Advantage, update Windows to SP3, update to the latest Windows patches (including IE8 and its patches), load Firefox and OpenOffice and whatever else they will need (including Office). We're actually just skipping the anti-virus now, because the "cure" is worse than the "disease." For Ubuntu, this compares to: pop the disk in, answer about 5 questions, come back in an hour, and start using the computer. Seriously, for the past several years, it's actually much easier to get a Linux install going than a Windows install. Heck, even doing a plain Gentoo install only takes about 15 minutes to get going (and then you wait for a day). To be fair, the Windows 7 RC seems to be this easy. Maybe I should really try it out in anger. Microsoft may finally be paying attention to the competition.

2009-05-27T04:22:03-07:00

2009-05-25T20:26:41-07:00

239 I added an RSS feed for my blog, and now I feel all growed up and stuff. It was pathetically easy to add with Rails, but, then, I don't fully understand how it's passing things off behind the scenes. I was stuck for a little while, until I realized that NetBeans, as an editor, didn't understand the newer way of doing things with a view called something like "feed.rss.builder". It kept forcing me to stick an ".erb" on the end. And then there was the issue of the format, which seems to be getting magically interpreted. I like Rails; don't get me wrong. But it's computer wizardry at its finest, and I've never been keen on things that are so clever, especially when the specification is continually changing, and really poorly documented. Still, it seems popular enough that you can usually Google until you find a solution.

2009-05-25T20:26:41-07:00

2009-05-25T10:56:11-07:00

238 We're cleaning out the garage to prepare for the big, neighborhood-wide garage sale on Father's Day weekend. It's amazing how many people come through for these things. This year we're looking to move some bigger items. We'll see how this goes. As part of the cleanup, I'm going through my collection of computer hardware. I had 3 PIII's and a PII stored up. I thought I would put the latest Ubuntu on them, and try to sell them as part of the garage sale. You know, for purely web browsing and emailing machines. I was thinking I could advertise them as "Facebook computers." However, after getting Ubuntu on them, I was disappointed, to say the least. I'm always hearing about how Linux runs faster on old hardware than Windows. Certainly, it would have been pure madness to put XP on those machines, but Ubuntu didn't fare very well either. It literally took between 2 and 3 seconds to minimize a Firefox browser window. Maybe that's acceptable for some people, but I couldn't -- in good conscience -- sell them like that, and I wasn't going to load a version of Windows on there either. That would have been outright illegal, but, moreover, part of the inspiration of the project was to get Linux into the hands of people who had never heard of it before. If I couldn't do that, I wasn't really interested. I found that one was dead anyway, so I parted it out along with the PII, and set the other two PIII's back in the corner, in case one of my PII/III-class "servers" decides to take a dump. I'm going to put a couple of tape drives on Ebay, I guess. Other than that, I'm installing Gentoo on adelphi, in the hopes of making it a Myth frontend box for the bedroom. Maybe we'll move the exercise bike in there. We got given a larger TV, which went into the living room, rolled the old one to the play room, and now I have my trusty, if rusty, 13" model that I bought for college. Mitsubishi. Still has a great picture. Turned out adelphi already had a video card with TV out on it, so I think I'm set. I thought about posting this to Twitter, but I'm just not sure I like the format. I usually just have more to say than 140 characters can express. The jury's still out on that. I think I'm going to make a minor change on this site so that jumping in and making a new update here is really easy. And Facebook? Facebook is just for people who can't program. ;-)

2009-05-25T10:56:11-07:00

2009-05-09T11:37:28-07:00

237 Whatever you do, don't buy a Worx GT weed whacker. Unless you have but one blade of grass to trim, it's useless. That is all.

2009-05-09T11:37:28-07:00

2009-03-16T17:25:13-07:00

236 I had a problem with my blog/comment layout that made those pages unrenderable in IE. Firefox silently ignored the problem. That was... interesting. I also updated the maintenance of the pages so that if I removed a page, it would also remove all the comments associated with it. I'm not used to doing that in the "business logic." I'm used to having the database take care of that through referential integrity. I filtered all the page markup to clean it up, but I still haven't done much actual content editing. That'll come in time. There are some obvious places that need updating, and I've just realized that I've stepped on at least one "medium" edit with this latest round of fixes.

2009-03-16T17:28:33-07:00

2009-03-15T09:04:06-07:00

234 This site's been basically offline for over two years now, and I'm getting tired of it. I want to write about things, and I just don't. I occasionally make a note, but I stuff it away in a folder in my files. I need to get these thoughts "out there." I originally took everything down because I thought I was being a little too transparent, and I stand by that decision. However, in the process of rewriting the site, I got caught up in reprogramming it as well. So I spent several weeks of time recoding to use the Smarty template system over top of my PHP-based site. It was okay. I was never a huge fan, but I had a buddy who persuaded me to use it for another site we programmed together, and I could see the advantages. However, I got down to the end of the effort, and found that there was just no way to marry the Smarty system with the sort of security I was trying to employ. I just put all of my management pages in a subdirectory, and put a .htaccess file in that directory that locked it down with htdigest authentication. I could never get that to work with leaving my common headers and footers in other subdirectories of the main site... or something. I let it sit, now, for about a year and a quarter, and I've forgotten the details. So now I've learned some Rails because of a project I'm doing at my still relatively new job. (Next month will make 1 year.) Now Rails has been interesting. It's at once very powerful and flexible, but it's also incredibly annoying to learn. One of the problems was that I didn't know Ruby going in, and I'm not all that great with object-oriented concepts. (Hey, at least I understand that.) The big problem here is that, as it has gained popularity, Rails has already undergone 3 major revisions, and some things have changed drastically between them. So reading books and especially looking up things on the internet has led me down some roads that have dead-ended. Or at least taken a sharp U-turn. So I got a wild hair to re-reprogram my site in Rails. It's been wonderful. My project at work is horribly complex. This is very straightforward. It's taught me a lot about Rails I hadn't learned at work, just because this is a much more traditional sort of web application. The best part is that the promise of Rails is holding true: I'm about 90% done with the effort, and I probably have about 12 hours into it. I admit I'm not the world's greatest programmer; I'm simply comparing this to the -- as I said above -- weeks of off-and-on effort I put into the Smarty transformation. I still need to edit all of my content, but -- providing I can work out the obvious authentication issue -- I should at least be able to get my site uploaded to the public again, and be able to blog again.

2009-03-15T05:38:22-07:00

2008-10-26T18:58:07-07:00

229 Maybe getting back into this? It's been almost a year. Well, OK, 11 months...

2009-03-15T08:46:19-07:00

2008-01-01T14:56:16-08:00

233 Test! First post in probably years. I'm just getting the site working again on my home development server. I think I'm going to convert the site to use Smarty, and then reorganize the content.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2006-01-27T03:57:19-08:00

232 I made some unspecified changes on the site because of something that I can't talk about, and it really puts a fine point on what I'm doing here. See, I've been censoring myself in this space for years. I've wanted to talk about what's going on between my ears because of what's going on with my job. It's been frustrating at times, but it's taught me absolutely loads about life, and myself. The end results have been good – meaning that I've extracted what good I can from it – but it wouldn't be right to air out my company's dirty laundry in this venue. Now, I've redacted part of my site and I can't explain why, and the whole episode makes me wonder if keeping this up is worth the hassle. It started out primarily as a way for me to explore my newfound life in God, and to help me resort all the "big" topics in life in relation to that new reality. Now, much of my thinking on these topics has been tempered by time and an associated aggregation of prudence. I'm thinking about off-lining this whole thing while I go back over every page with a fine-toothed comb. I still think the main thing is the main thing; I just think I can say things in a much wiser way these days.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-12-30T19:28:28-08:00

231 Ok, so my previous two, rather lengthy postings have described some pretty silly shenanigans I've had to pull with my computers to get BF2 and Xorg running correctly on my box. With the old mobo in my server, I see that it's pulling down the voltage on the +5V lead, as I've noted before. Well, it turns out that it's also having heat problems. When I'm running the one (1) processor I have in the board, it's pushing 60°C. I got woken up this morning by my wife who noticed the BIOS alarm going off on it. So I upped the BIOS complaint threshold to 66°C, which is just 4 degrees shy of it's maximum. The one nice thing about the board is that it has great support for lm_sensors, and I can neatly monitor what's going on while running Gentoo. I also traded my main machine's side panel with the built-in fan, and this is now keeping the temp around 57°C. Not cool, but not frying. All this hassle has set pretty heavy on my mind. I wasn't planning on all this over my break; I've got things I'm not doing because of it. And what to do from here – knowing that this mobo is faulty – has really made my mind race. Now, I had had a migraine at 5:30 this morning. One I immediately took 2 pills for. That kind. I waited for them to take effect, then went back to sleep till almost 10. When I got up, I felt great, but I wanted to sleep more. What got me out of bed was the realization of what to do about this motherboard. I did a bunch of research, and ordered a new, single processor <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813127179">Abit</a> board for $75 shipped. The thing that was really holding me back was my quad PATA RAID card. It's a 64-bit PCI card. But then I remembered (and verified) that it will run in a 32-bit slot. I worried a little about the performance hit, so I tested it. A quick `hdparm -Tt /dev/sda' showed an average of 39 MB/sec on buffered reads while running in the 64-bit slot, whereas the score while running in the 32-bit slot averaged 35. That's only about 10 or 12% of difference. At this point, I'll gladly trade that off for saving $125 on a computer that I have already spent thousands on, and just want to forget ever existed. The card will just hang over the slot. I was sure to look at the picture and make sure that at least one slot had nothing in the way of that. So... we'll see towards the end of next week. Here's hoping that my power supply holds up, and doesn't fry, taking all 4 hard drives with it...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-12-29T11:22:23-08:00

230 Followup to the previous post: I forgot to talk about the most maddening thing about the mobo swap: Windows. Big surprise there, huh? See, I got things swapped around, and immediately tried out running BF2. No problems at over an hour of play time, except when I exited the program. That's where it BSOD'ed on me. So I did some more work, and tried again. Then I got a blue screen while in the program. Both times, though, it said the problem was an infinite loop in the Nvidia driver. Now, I realize that this is probably Microsoft double-speak for "our driver model sucks" or something, but it did remind me that my Nvidia driver was a little outdated. So I naturally decided to update it. That's when the trouble started. I downloaded the latest and greatest, but right in the middle of installing, I got a nice black screen with a blinking cursor. I couldn't do anything to get back to Windows, and it didn't seem that any of my keystrokes were generating disk activity. So I started up in safe mode, uninstalled the driver, and tried again. Same thing. So I uninstalled the driver, ran a registry cleaner, and tried again. Same thing. So I figure that Windows is basically broken because of all the screwing around I gave it trying to cripple it in various ways to get BF2 to run stably on it, and decide it needs a reinstall. Well, like I said before, I fried my nice SB Live card, and had been using the built-in AC97 chipset on my old mobo. So I bought a $30 SB Live 24-bit card at Wally World. Lo and behold, Windows doesn't have a driver for it. What?! I thought this was my Live card, just a lot cheaper these days. Of course not! It's some sort of stripped down piece of junk based on a completely different chipset. Why does this really bother me? We'll get there. So I load up the drivers for the sound card, the network card, the AGP port, the IDE chipset, and, finally, the Nvidia card. SAME. !@()$*#$%. THING. So it's not Windows at all. Rather that Nvidia has released a piece of crap installer for their drivers. I don't know what's going on here, but apparently whatever the problem is, it's been plaguing the last several releases. I see writeups about the problem in various places on the net, but no one has any real answers. In the process of screwing with the driver, I decide to use the Windows "feature" of "rolling back" to the "last known good" configuration. Boy, that was a good idea. Then NONE of the drivers would work. Or load. Or uninstall. Or reinstall. So I repaired. That took as long as installing. BUT! It fixed the problems with the sound card and network card... but it still gave me the same error the next time I tried installing the video driver! It just wouldn't do it! So I re-installed for the second time. (Or third if you count the "repair.") This time, though, I installed the last Nvidia driver I knew that worked for me, on Linux, at least: 77.76. But this gave me blue screens on exiting games as well. So I finally went back to MSI's web site, and downloaded their last official release: 76.45. It's a little old, but it has overclocking sliders built into the control panel, and... IT WORKS! (Will wonders ever cease?) So I wasted, like, 4 hours with the Windows "ecology" in trying to get it all up and running. I had some drama getting video running on the new mobo under Linux, but that was because /usr/src/linux was pointing at a source tree I wasn't using (trying to eliminate that X problem). I had all of that sorted in about 20 minutes. The only remaining problem I have is with sound under Linux. I now realize the value of spending $100 on a sound card. They have hardware mixers. Neither the on-board AC97's, nor the Sound Blaster Live! 24-bit's have them, and it's up to me to do some funny asoundrc stuff to setup software mixers. On the other hand, I don't really want to listen to my MP3's while watching TV, so I'm in no hurry to abuse myself with that.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-12-13T05:21:48-08:00

228 I was in Los Angeles last week for some training for work. I'm in Fort Lauderdale this week for part two, and I've had about enough of this stupid travel. I forgot my cell phone charger, so I decided I'd go to a Verizon store to pick one up. I looked up a store about 6 miles away on Google maps. No problem, I thought. About 2 miles on the way, I spotted a Quizno's, which I really like, so I stopped in for supper. Then I got lost on the way to the store. So I stopped by an Enterprise rental place I passed (I have an Enterprise rental this week), and got better directions. Then I got lost again. So I called the store for more directions. Twice. I finally found the store. They didn't have what they said they had (I wasn't specific enough), and I bought a car charger. Took me, like, an hour or something. With Enterprise map in hand, I started driving the measly 6 miles back to the hotel, and what did I pass, ON THE CORNER OF THE STRIP MALL WITH THE QUIZNO'S?! That's right. Another Verizon store. I HATE TRAVELING.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-12-12T18:27:54-08:00

227 My instructions for setting up <a href="suse_8.2.html">SuSE 8.2</a> are a testament to how much I liked SuSE, and how much I had invested in it. It ran my home network for a few years, and, as of this writing, it still runs my church's network (though probably not for much longer). However, now I run Gentoo. As I've talked about in my blog, I've tried many, many other distros, and I tried several

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-11-23T09:14:10-08:00

226 Ok. It's all over now but for the shouting, and I've downgraded my Gentoo workstation from Gnome 2.12 to 2.10. And, sure enough... wait a second! Everything went pretty smooth, all things considered! I had to go around in circles a couple times, doing `emerge -pvuDN' and then doing `revdep-rebuild -p', but it's all back up and running. And, sure enough... wait another second! I've just tested, and I can sync my Treo, and I can automatically mount and unmount my memory stick, SD card, and a CD-ROM. Wow. I'm impressed. Don't try this with your Debian. (I have, and it's not pretty.) Hmph.That'll do pig. That'll do.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-11-22T15:11:08-08:00

225 So I'm sitting here, logging into my machine, getting ready to sync my Treo 600 with Gentoo Linux, and thinking what a complete hassle it's been for me of late. Sure enough, with this morning's latest "improvements" in the portage tree, I'm now segfaulting some part of the udev-hal-ivman-gamin-gnome_volume_manager-pmount-pyrex stack, and can't sync at all. I think I read in the forums this morning that I can fix this by taking out pre-emptive multitasking in the kernel, but I don't want to do that. On top of this, there's no good way to sync up ShadowPlan (which is a project planner, obviously, but this is in spite of there being a native Linux desktop client to go with it) or Plucker docs. For the former, I have to do a backup, then edit the Shadp-* files in place in the backup, then selectively restore the database to the Pilot. For the latter, I have to use my USB SD card reader, and put the Plucker docs on it from the file-system level. Adding to the Linux-y hassle here is the fact that there's something else borked in the "automagic mounting" stack of software, in that the SD card won't automatically appear on my desktop anymore. It mounts, it just doesn't show up. However, while I'm looking at that problem, I notice that my USB memory stick isn't even MOUNTING any more!!! GAAAAAH! Granted, I'm running all this Gnome 2.12 "goodness" (he says very sarcastically) out of the unstable (~x86) tree, so I deserve to get some of this. However, SuSE shipped their last commercial release with all of this in their production distro. Was it as bad as all of this? I doubt it. It's sooooo tantalizingly tempting. If they can finally get all of this together, Linux will have just as good a Plug-n-Play capability as Windows. Maybe even better. And I see that they're talking about including the one, critical, FOUR-YEAR-OLD bug fix that I need in the next major release of Evolution next spring. So I've been trying to hold out with this beta stuff until they become officially released in the "stable" portage tree, but I don't think I'm going to make it. I just checked, and, no, I don't see any new packages in portage of the stuff that's giving me a hassle. I think it's time to prune my package.keywords file back to the handful of things I really must have, and wait. It was an experiment. A failed one. But it's one that I can easily recover from. I hope...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-11-13T02:32:59-08:00

224 I ought to create tags for my posts, like some of the blog software that's out there. I would title this one an "I love the internet" post. Take the <a href="http://www.travelbygps.com/guides/everest/everest.gpx">GPS map</a> of the path used to scale Mount Everest (from <a href="http://www.travelbygps.com/guides/everest/everest.html">this page</a>), and plug it into <a href="http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/googlegpx/">this hack</a> of the Google Maps API. Well, I thought it was cool.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-10-11T03:44:41-07:00

223 One of these days, I've got to go through this whole site, date each page, and update the content to current.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-09-29T05:56:10-07:00

222 I don't know what I was thinking. I wiped my workstation and installed Ubuntu. I guess I was bored. After a few days, I thought it would be cool to try out what is supposed to be a Debian-based distro's most robust feature: flawless upgrades. So I tried to upgrade to next, preview version. Adimittedly, it's beta, but everyone in the Debian world is always talking about how great it is to run Sarge and all these other beta versions. Anyway, you can tell where this is going: it failed miserably, and left me with a system that wouldn't even run X. So I blew it away, and reinstalled Gentoo from scratch. Yes, it takes a long time, but, on my machine, it wound up being about 24 hours to get it back into really fleshed-out and usable shape. Now, I have it running better than ever. I hadn't even gotten around to trying some things before, like using VMware and the Ximian connector for Evolution. The former works just great; the latter doesn't seem to handle meeting invitation updates. Gnome-pilot and the associated plugins is FUBAR'ed in the literal sense of the word. It's horribly busted, and will eat your data. Thank goodness for JPilot. I don't care a whit about the supposed performance improvements available in Gentoo. Much smarter people than I say that's all foolishness. But what I do value about Gentoo is the complete control over the system. For instance, the current version in the portage tree for VMware is 5, but my license is only valid for 4.8.2. But portage allows me to emerge that specific version. I know this sort of capability isn't unique in the Linux world. Apt is supposed to do this as well, but it clearly doesn't handle upgrades as well as portage. And I like how portage rolls parts of the system forward on an on-going basis, instead of replacing 90% of the system every 6 months. All in all, I'm quite pleased to be back with Gentoo.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-09-01T03:34:49-07:00

221 This hurricane disaster can be nothing more than a diversion cooked up by Howard Dean and the NY Times to divert attention from the Air America scandal. Hmm... Or maybe it was a scheme perpetrated by Karl Rove to divert attention from Cindy Sheehan... You just never know about these things...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-08-03T11:43:52-07:00

220 As I posted previously (but don't want to link), the <a href='http://bf2s.com'>Battlefield 2 Stats</a> site is just a great example of what the web should be. It's simple, elegant, does one thing, and does it really well, and it's easy to use. In addition to tracking my stats, I find it interesting to look at the leaderboard. What I note is that the top-ranked people have put a little over 300 hours into the game. (For reference, at the time of this writing, I have about 24.) Now, the game has only been available for 42 days. If you use this figure, which provides the most conservative estimates, you can calculate that the current leader, <a href='http://bf2s.com/player/43501925/'> eXp.ElekTriC</a>, has been averaging 7 hours and about 45 minutes, per day, for this amount of time. Basically, this is a job, with a lot of overtime to boot. That's not the worst part. Take the current time "leader," <a href='http://bf2s.com/player/44420550/'>****666RA****</a>. With nearly 464 hours in so far, he has to have averaged at least 11 hours a day for the past 40 or so days. Obviously, these people don't have jobs. I suspect they're students, and probably not college-level. Am I trying to put them down? No! It's their perogative. I don't think it's very healthy, but that's just my opinion. If I didn't have it -- or a job -- I guess I'd be in the same boat. The point I want to make is that the makers of the game have set the bar so high that, even with that amount of investment in the game, no one has even yet put in the time it takes to get the least-interesting substantial "merit badge" in the game. Those start at 500 hours. The <a href='http://www.totalbf2.com/strategy/medals/'>highest reward</a> in the game reportedly requires 6,000 hours of playing. That's twenty times the effort that the leader has already put into the game. If he keeps going, eXp.ElekTriC will make the second-highest rank in the game in 80 more days, or a total of about 250,000 points. The highest rank in the game will reportedly be given to the best-performing second-highest rank for one-month at a time... and a minimum score of 2,500,000. Think about that. Even at eXp.ElekTriC's astonishing rate (which I don't think can be kept up forever), after 120 days of about 8 hours per day, he'll be 1/10th the way to making what, in the game, is the equivalent to E9. All of this implies 2 things. One is that the game designers think that people are going to be playing their game a lot longer than I think they will be. The second is that, at this point in the discussion, I'm having a hard time believing that these sorts of "players" are individuals at all. I'm starting to think that they are accounts that are being shared amongst players. If that's true, that's interesting. If not, I think I should find my own group of 20 people to put time into my own account. Another upshot of this is that Dice have already announced an expansion pack. If the points don't apply to both games -- if you can't carry your stats from one to the other -- I think they're screwed.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-08-01T03:59:36-07:00

219 And now for something completely different. I've been playing a lot of Battlefield 2 lately. It has its moments, both good and bad. It still has a lot of issues that the developers will reportedly fix in the next patch. We'll see. The interesting thing about it is the global stats tracking. The company -- as their software quality would lead you to conclude -- didn't think anything about external interfaces to the tracking system. So someone else did it on their own. The result is <a href='http://bf2s.com/'>Battlefield 2 Stats</a> and lo, it is awesome.<img src="http://bf2s.com/player/45736224/sig.png" alt="" /><img src="http://bf2s.com/player/45736224/awards.jpg" alt="" />

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-07-16T17:45:54-07:00

218 In the course of doing my job, I often need to go to Detroit. It's really nice on this end. We have a company shuttle which makes the trip twice a day through the week (except for Tuesdays now), once in the morning and once in the evening. It's a 10-passenger King Air twin prop. (Actually, the company has two, plus a jet they're trying to sell.) It has leather seats and all that, but it's a little short on leg room. The best part is that the airport -- which is right across the street from my new office -- is only 3 miles from my house. So I can drive over and be in the air in about 15 minutes. It used to be much nicer on the other end. I usually needed to go to the new home office of the merged company, which is in Troy. Now, if you don't know, Troy is one of the nicest areas anywhere. The mall, just 2 miles up the road from the home office has a Saks, a Cartier, etc. All the biggest names. It's that kind of "neighborhood." They even opened a really great Homewood Suites right off the parking lot, with complementary breakfast and supper, free high-speed internet access, and an unbelievable discount for ArvinMeritor employees. Unfortunately, I now usually need to go to the new tech center downtown. And by this, I mean downtown, as in, I've been told that you can see truckers enjoying the labors of the area "workforce" parked right along the other side of the street. Anyway, you get the idea. It's that kind of neighborhood. On top of this, the drive from the Homewood is about 30 minutes, if traffic moves. If not... well, it's probably an hour. To go 20 miles. And you'll hit 80-90 mph in spots to keep up. Sheesh. I'm glad I live in Columbus. <img src="images/out_the_plane_window.jpg">

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-07-16T16:22:24-07:00

217 I got a Treo 600 a few months ago. I haven't talked about it because I've been saving all of that for later. Well, now is that later, and I'll be making several posts in rapid succession. I just wanted to preface with this, because I'm taking the pictures with it. However, it's not got a very good camera.Anyway: I've spent the last week building a fence.<a href="images/fence.jpg"><img src="images/fence_small.jpg"></a>I got someone to help me install the posts last Saturday, my dad helped me three days this week to build it, Sue did a lot of cleanup work, and I hauled off about a yard of material to the landfill today. I still need to finish cutting the posts, and you can see where I "tested" one in the picture.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-07-11T17:54:40-07:00

216 Not really an update, but I just posted this on another <a href="http://www.hpmuseum.org/">site</a>. I love the internet. My dad and I were just talking about this stuff today (which I also mention below.) <blockquote> My first HP was actually my dad's. He was an engineer, and one of his coworkers got a deal on buying several HP calculators at once. He told me that it cost $300. (We were just talking about this today.) I'm not positive, but, from looking at the pictures on this site, I'm pretty sure that it was an HP-45. I also don't remember the exact year, but I remember learning how to use it late in gradeschool, which would have made it about '77 or '78. In high school, I remember a kid in my pre-calculus class was allowed to use his 15C to take a test. He had programmed the rule of sines into it. The teacher's thinking, he explained to us, was that the kid had to have written the program himself, and if he could do that, he could do the math. That, and, if he were actually wrong, he'd screw up his test. That satisfied everyone. Now, I had had a Commodore home computer (first a Vic-20, then a C64) since 4th grade, but the power of his calculator really fascinated me. Two years later, when I got to college and started in engineering, (like my dad, at Purdue), I managed to convince my parents that I needed a 15C. I think it cost $100. (I was just doing some calculations with it today, now almost 18 years later.) Not long after, the 28C's became popular, and everyone forgot about the 15C. My roommate, an electrical engineer, had one, and I just couldn't get into using it. So I happily continued using the 15C straight on through. I remember a time, as a senior, studying in the Undergrad library, a kid came up to me out of nowhere. He asked me if I had the assignment for Physics 152 (which was -- and probably still is -- the "weed-out" course for freshman engineering students). I was trying to disengage my mind from what I was reading and formulate a response when he looked down and noticed my 15C. He said, "Oh, you're not a freshman, are you?" and walked away. I just laughed.</blockquote>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-05-11T18:08:30-07:00

215 Updating at Applebee's from my Treo 600. Looks like it's going to work right.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-04-09T14:55:23-07:00

214 So, ok, like just a month after writing here that I was going to give up on Linux, I've tried -- and found that I liked -- Gentoo, the most "hands-on" distro in the world (except maybe a pure LFS setup). Even though I've finally seen how cool it is, I still want to run the same thing on my desktop as on my server, and there's no way I'm running Gentoo on my servers. Unless... unless I build everything for i686, and prepackage everything I want on my desktop for moving to my servers. Oops. I still have one 586 box. Maybe a cross-compiler? I have the disk space, but probably not the patience. Anyway. I still can't get over it. SuSE 9.3 is coming out, and it looks to be cool. The problem is that even with a DVD chock-full of goodness, there are a LOT of programs out there that don't come with it, and building extra things like a non-crippled Xine are very difficult. On Gentoo, that's a snap, if you want to wait for 4 hours. At least it's a one-liner and no hassle, right? I guess that's why everyone's fired up about Ubuntu. It's Debian -- which I hate -- except that it's Debian without everything I hate, namely being 3 to 5 years out of date. Backing up a second, I've been having a lot of problems with my motherboard, and I thought that I had narrowed it down to my video card. I borrowed a video card to test with, and everything seemed jake, so I ordered a spiffy new card. Then, like 1 hour after I placed the order, my machine wouldn't reboot correctly once again. Sigh. I've been wanting that card for a long time, so I guess I'll keep it, but I sent my mobo back for repair just before the video card arrived, as there was only 1 month left on the warranty support. So now I have a card and no computer. I've been out of it for like 2.5 weeks, but I see that on Friday, they've noted that it's ready to ship back to me. That's a relief. Now we'll just see if that was the problem... Anyway, I've been running on my work laptop, which is SCHWEET, don't get me wrong, but it's still no dual Athlon 2800 for playing games. The reason I've made this aside is that I've put up a VMware virutal machine with Ubuntu on it to try it out. I've had about 4 app crashes on it in the few minutes I've run it. Now I know why Gnome 2.10 is still masked in Gentoo. I don't think it's ready for primetime. But SuSE is shipping it in the next week or two as well, so we'll see. So the question is, do I stay on SuSE because I really, really like what Novell is doing with them, or go to Ubuntu because it seems to be the best of all worlds?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-03-16T13:05:34-08:00

213 Well, I did do an `emerge --sync' not long after the last update, and there were already several packages that needed updating. Significantly, one was xorg-x11. That's fine, it was due to a security patch, but still, that's one of the bigger packages in the system, and it takes, like, a half hour or so to compile on my system. I think I've finally got all my hardware configured in the kernel. I even got "hal" going so that USB keys just "show up" in /media, which is nice. On top of this, I've emerged things like advancemame and advancemenu, and mythtv. Things that, besides xine and bmp, have always given me a hassle to get compiled on SuSE. I have yet to see if MythTV really works (I've got to create the database for it). It always segfaulted within 10 minutes on SuSE. If it's up and good to go, it will be a solid win for keeping Gentoo on my desktop, unless SuSE 9.3 will include all of these various packages I'm talking about, which I highly doubt. I'm running the <a href="screenshots/gentoo_bluecurve.png">Bluecurve theme under Gnome 2.8</a>, and loving it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-03-14T03:04:20-08:00

212 Okay. So, like, just, like, 2 hours after I wrote that last update, I was downloading Gentoo iso images through BitTorrent. When I got home that afternoon, I started installing it. Now, this is, I think, the fourth time I've tried Gentoo. This is the second time I've gotten a system fully up and running. This is the first time that I have hope of actually liking it. The reason I switched has proven to be valid. I can sync my Treo without any problems, and without hacking any scripts. The fonts are beautiful, which is important to me. It's snappy, but I wouldn't say that there's a big difference in terms of the speed compared to SuSE 9.2. Speaking of which, <a href="http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/preview/">SuSE 9.3</a> is taking pre-orders, and it looks to be as cutting-edge as Gentoo in terms of package selection. We'll see if that's a good thing or bad down the road, I guess. I'm certain that I'll try it, but this time, I'm going to buy it from some place that makes cheap copies of the CD's. I've bought 4 boxed sets of SuSE over the years. That's more than I've spent on Windows, and that's enough. I've got about a month or month and a half before I try it, so I'll be giving Gentoo a workout. I like the thought of having a system with the stuff I want. For instance, I've never been able to compile the beep media player or xine under SuSE. For the former, I've just done without. The latter I've downloaded from <a href="http://packman.links2linux.org/">PackMan</a>, which always annoyed me. Both went into Gentoo without any problems. In fact, I've only had 2 really minor issues with ebuilds, and I found workarounds for both within minutes on the Gentoo forums. This is really amazing to me. There are an amazing number of places where this process can go wrong, yet here I am typing this in from Gentoo. The only remaining things I have to do are to 1) get the timezone working right, 2) get the bttv driver compiled (I keep missing something in my kernel config), and 3) get Samba configured so that I can get to my files from my laptop. At this point, an `emerge -uvDN world' shows that I have nothing to do. I almost fear doing an `emerge rsync'. I think I'll leave well enough alone for now. ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-03-11T04:36:10-08:00

211 Goodbye, cruel world, I'm leavin' you today. --Pink Floyd.I give up. I've had enough of "Linux on the desktop." I'm getting to old for all of the nonsense. The lastest bit? I bought a Treo 600. It didn't hotsync. A little Googling showed that support for the device has been in the kernel for well over a year. I spent THREE HOURS fiddling with it, including compiling the latest beta version of pilot-link. I finally sent out a letter to the SuSE mailing list, and someone responded very quickly... with the fix! Now, if that were the end of the story, I might be satisfied. But it's not. It's just. not. Just after getting the Treo to communicate with pilot-link, I booted into Windows to combine 3 PST files of contact info into the new device. Then I decided to work from home for the next two days, and, having been in Windows, I decided to stay in Windows. I got everything working just great. This morning, though, I decided to go back into the office, and so I wanted to boot into Linux, get a hotsync, and get on with my life. First, I did a raw backup, then I went for the sync with JPilot. Oops. Didn't work. In fact, it started acting exactly like before. What happened? I don't know. One minute it worked, the next minute, it didn't. I expect that a reboot might have fixed it, but if that's the case, I'm no worse off using Windows. And that's really where I'm at this morning. What's the point? I've been here before. But then, there was a financial point to the issue. Now, with my free Microsoft software from the college I'm attending (more on that whole business a little later), I don't have the financial excuse to fall back on. I'm just tired of it. After all of these years using Linux, I'm just finally sick of it. And the stupid thing is that I know this won't last long. There's already rumors on the SuSE list that 9.3 is in pre-order. But I've spent a lot of money on SuSE over the past couple of years, and I think I'll try to wait until the downloadable version shows up on the mirrors. And, as I've been over before, I don't see any other distro as fitting me. This problem is a problem with udev, and mainstream distros are still coming up to speed with that. I think Fedora and Gentoo would handle this device without a problem, but both have been flaky for me. Fedora's undergoing huge political upheaval. Perhaps Gentoo's recent "stable" branching, ala Debian, will actually work around their problems, but I'm just not keen on 3-day `update world' 's when I want to change something. Sigh. Maybe I just need a couple of months to cool off. The next version of SuSE is supposed to have some pretty cool stuff that the Ximian guys have been working on. I know I won't be able to resist.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-02-27T02:46:57-08:00

210 As an aside, I have a lot to write about these days, but, as we can all well see, I have months of little or no postings. I can't really even go into why I'm not posting or creating new content. I just thought I'd post a note here for myself, for future reference. "Writers write," which is to say that I feel the internal pressure like a lot of others to commit my thoughts and feelings to "paper." Maybe I can come back to these things later, but I suspect that by the time that time comes, I won't feel the inclination any more. Maybe that's for the best.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2005-02-27T02:38:54-08:00

209 There are some good reasons that I'm not updating as frequently as I'd like. One is that I'm in school, working on a pre-req for starting an MBA program. I'm beginning to really wonder if an MBA is for me. However, I'm starting to write my 3 essays required for the application, and I think I'll let my mind wander as much in them as I have in these pages before I edit them for submission. Maybe I'll get a little clarity. It's not that an MBA wouldn't be good. It would. But I really do have a goal in pursuing one, and I have to wonder if it will really help me attain it. Maybe I should discuss this with someone at the school; I dunno.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-12-26T21:43:03-08:00

208 So, yeah, as a follow-on to my last post, and as a test of my ability to upload new pages to my web site, there's the <a href="computers.html">Computers</a> page. Again. I need to get some new pictures up.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-12-26T19:40:30-08:00

207 After a solid week's worth of work, I'm back in the groove. Or, at least as much as I normally am with all this computer nonsense. My power supply failed on my main machine about a month ago. The second time in 3 months. This time around, it took out my SCSI controller as well. Rather than spend the $300 it would have taken to replace it, I finally gave up on SCSI. I bought a 3ware SATA RAID controller and a couple Maxtor 10K RPM drives. This allowed me to get all of my data on my main machine, and do away with the very loud file server I had. It's a little less convenient, but now that I notice just how much quieter it is in my office (and the adjoining living room), I'll find a way to cope. While I was at it, I replaced my other two boxes -- the firewall and the development web server -- with one newer box. So I'm down to 3 computers (and a laptop) from 5. (And 2 laptops. I gave the other to charity, but I don't know how charitable I was being. It was only a P100.) Anyway, as I'm writing this, I'm getting a final backup of my new arrangement, and I think I can finally start getting to some of the other work I need to do this week. Oh yeah, and I only missed 4 points out of 650 in my accounting class. I don't know if I'm going to work that hard at statistics, though. I'm not sure it's worth it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-12-25T20:07:57-08:00

206 Another test?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-12-25T20:07:19-08:00

205 Test

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-11-21T04:17:24-08:00

204 I beat Half-Life 2 yesterday morning. Don't get me wrong, the game is great. As a mechanical thing, it's wonderful, but I was really hoping that there would be some resolution with G-Man. There wasn't. Everything's as vague as it was before. Everyone is going ga-ga on the reviews, but I think that once people start beating the game and saying, like me, "Is that it?," opinions will be a little more tempered. I think Valve screwed the pooch on this one. There were never any surprises in this one, like the first time you see a soldier and he turns on you, or the whole G-Man thing. *That's* the sort of thing that made HL1 so great. HL2 has a great engine. (Well, except for the one big problem that they're talking about, which has affected me since HL1. I have some doubts that they're going to be able to fix it; I think it's a result of a fundamental design decision, not a bug.) But it's not enough to have a great engine these days. It's all about the story. If we have to wait another 5 years for some part 3 and more furtherance of the fundamental plot, I think Valve will have spent its goodwill. What would be unbelievably cool would be for Valve to release a HL3 in just a couple of months, saying, "Ha! We were working all this time because we were working on TWO games at once!" As it stands now, the whole thing feels like the X-Files with all of its hanging plot threads. On the other hand, the whole "Steam" thing feels like a success to me. I downloaded the game the day it was released. It took about 18 hours, even though, at the start, I was pulling 1.5 Kbps at times. (You heard that right. I didn't think my cable would go over about 400, but it does. I suppose it might have something to do with Comcast buying out Insight.) It took several tries to get an account created, but I didn't have any of the game "unlocking" delays people were reporting. I hate the whole "activation" thing, which is why I stayed away from anything more than Microsoft's 2000 products until they became free for going to school at IU. (I just couldn't resist. What am I? A robot or something?!) But Valve's done it right. As long as their servers never go down. The real benefit to this Steam scheme is that they can now "lock down" the client to prevent cheating in Counter Strike: Source. Yeah, yeah, I know. Theoretically, you can't truly lock down the client. I don't know exactly how it works, but if they really are decrypting something before every time you go online, it sounds pretty bulletproof to me. I guess time will tell.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-11-14T07:08:48-08:00

203 If you liked Medal of Honor, do NOT -- I repeat, DO NOT -- bother buying Pacific Assault. I bought the DVD version with some gift card money. On the one hand, I'm glad it was someone else's money. On the other hand, now I can't spend that money on Half-Life 2. MoHPA is almost totally different than MoHAA. I guess it's trying to be more "life-like." Well, you can have it. I hate it. Which is painful to say for a $60, high-profile, anticipated sequel to a hihgly-rated triple-A title. Don't waste your money. It sucks. At this point, I doubt I'll finish it, and I'm only a few levels into it. What sucks about it most? It's like you're moving and firing in molases. It takes like 10 seconds to reload. Even with "zoom" on a rifle, if you don't land a head shot, it'll take, like 5 shots to kill someone. Spare me. And there's the whole, you-bite-the-dust-press-b-for-bandage-press-h-for calling-help-doctor-patches-you-up thing. Again, spare me. I guess it's nothing in particular. There are just a whole lot of bad ideas in this thing. I expected a MoH like the first. This is more of a thinking shooter, like Rainbow-6 or something. Which I also hated. It's false advertising. And this is coming on the recent reports and lawsuit about how EA mistreats their workforce. Doesn't exactly help my buying habits for the future, guys.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-09-18T03:38:39-07:00

202 It's part of a longer story, but I decided to try to get an MBA. The local extension of Indiana University here in Columbus offers the full program, and the degree will say "IU" on it when completed. There are a lot of cool things about this development. One is that, being a mechanical engineer, I have to take a couple of prerequisites: accounting and statistics. I've always been mystified by accounting, so it's interesting to me to have an excuse to study it. More than just a how-to about keeping books, the class is all about how to interpret financial statements, and this intrigues me. Another cool thing is that the tuition and book is being paid for by the company for which I work. At just a little over $800, this is a nice little "bonus." The real dollars start next fall, though, after the prereq's are met... The little gem of the deal is that IU has a blanket license agreement with Microsoft. This makes Windows, Office, and Visual Studio free to students. That's right: free. Admittedly, it costs $10 for the Windows XP CD, but that's just to cover the media. Other media kits cost a little more because they have more CD's, but, if you have the bandwidth, you can download them for free! Office and VS don't even have registration keys! I don't understand how Microsoft thinks that these copies won't proliferate on the internet, but whatever. My whole point with this is to get completely legit. Despite the fact that I swore I wouldn't spend any more money with Microsoft (though I guess I have through the tuition), and despite the other fact that their policy of activation is antithetical to my senses, I've decided to "use" them for my own purposes. Someone recently impugned my refusal to copy Office for them, guessing correctly that I had illegal copies of video games, and, hey, pal, what's the difference? Although he surmised I was into this big time, I did have to own up to the fact that I had 3 pirated games out of something like 50 or 60. I decided right then and there that no one is going to beat me over the head with this again. I've never been especially egregious about such things, but now I'm completely legit (at work, too). And not just with software, but also with music. I'm compliant with copyright law, and no one is going to trap me with hypocrisy on this issue again. So, no, I won't copy that CD for you, and, no, I won't install my software on your computer, Reggie. As an aside, a friend and coworker is now seriously contemplating taking a class just to get the free software, and the academic discount on Apple hardware.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-07-04T08:41:06-07:00

201 Major update to the computers page. So much so, that I didn't bother to bold or italicize anything, since it would have cluttered things up too much. It's up to date now, but it goes out of date so fast that I'm thinking about taking it down. While I'm on the subject, I will say that I love my new Tungsten C. The thumbboard is so much nicer than using Graffiti, but the wireless networking is turning out to be the real clincher, now that I have wi-fi at work, home, and church.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-06-12T07:01:55-07:00

200 I've been reading over my logs, and it's really fascinating. Search engines are doing an impressive job these days. I imagine that I can remove my meta tags from the front page now, as all of my content is being indexed quite nicely. I see things that people are interested in, and want to write more about them. I wish people that find my site based on something tangential -- if they don't find what they need elsewhere -- would write me about it. For instance, there was a person looking for info on running Debian on an IBM A20p laptop. I have Debian on a laptop, and I have an A20p. But I don't run Debian on the A20p. However, I might have been able to help that person, and added a bit of content to my site as well.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-06-12T06:58:42-07:00

199 So, ok, it's been SIX MONTHS since I made an update?! What's up with that?! I updated the <a href='archive.html'>Archive</a> page so that the timestamps have "permalinks." Not that anyone would care. I mean, after all, my site traffic is down and declining since taking the video files offline, and since the introduction of newer versions of SuSE. That's fine; that's the way it goes. But all the big kids with their blogs sort of made me want that feature, so I coded it up in a few minutes. I may not use this stuff much, but the enjoyment for me comes in the coding. I don't have much to say on a daily basis.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-04-04T09:06:48-07:00

198 I don't recall how much I've said about it here (I need to redo the <a href='archive.html'>Archive</a> page), but we've put in, basically, a whole new sound system at my church. When I moved out the old rack that used to house the amps, we found this!<a href='images/mouse.png' border='0'><img src='images/mouse_small.png' alt='Mouse'></a>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-03-27T20:48:10-08:00

197 Made a small update to the <a href='suse_8.2.html'>SuSE tips page</a>.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-02-16T07:23:10-08:00

196 Life is speeding by. I got angry about something this morning, and thought I could write a rant about it here, but I've since forgotten what it was. It all seems so pointless any more, and that's something I really should write about, because it's deep and meaningful. That's right, a deep and meaningful piece on why writing about anything is pointless. Hrm. Maybe I should expand that into a treatise. The problem is, of course, time. There are so many good things to do these days. So many actually, physically meaningful things, that I have to realize that the lack of writings on this site aren't due to any sort of apathy on my part. This has always been a place to scratch my itches, not make an impact on society. With my foray into offering files for download, and with my popular page on configuring SuSE 8.2, I had sort of come to forget that. Anyway, it's all tied up in that essay I want to write. Again, the problem is time. I'm going to wind up wanted to sift through all my old pages, checking their markups, updating them, and dating them, if they're date-relative. (My views on Clinton are both date-relative, but they could easily be expanded for today, because I see the impact of those events all over the political landscape.) The bottom line is that we've been settling into a new house, I bought a car whose transmission went out 2 days later (dealer split the cost), and then my baby son got RSV, and spent 3 days in the hospital. I was sick before him, and now I'm sick again. And we're in a time crunch on two major projects at church. So, spouting off on this page -- once a privilege of my life -- is necessarily trailing off. I'm not taking the site down. In fact, I've gone through a lot of trouble keeping it up over the past several months, though I've kept it looking the same and haven't added much new content. I guess I've just come to realize that I don't want to do a whole lot more with the site, and that's ok too.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-01-13T07:38:41-08:00

195 I think I've got a system in place now whereby I can make changes and updates to my site on my home server, then upload the changed pages to my new host. Which, by the way, is <a href="http://www.smarterlinux.com">SmarterLinux</a>, and they're working out pretty well so far.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2004-01-09T05:52:26-08:00

194 Things are beginning to settle in now. There's still a long list of things to do, of course, but I spent a lot of "quality time" yesterday reorganizing my schedule, and I think I've got a handle on it now. I've had to make a bunch of changes to this site to put it up on this new host, and I've pulled those changes back to my development machine at home, but it's going to take some creativity to setup the scripts to elegantly work on both my home setup and this host's setup. Sigh.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-12-23T18:29:42-08:00

193 So, ok. We've moved. I'll try to post a pic later, but I'm too tired. The house is so... BIG. We went from 1024 square feet to 2650. A lot of things are running through my mind right now, but I'm just too tired. We did it all in a day. Final, final walkthrough, closing, movers, appliances, utilities, phone, cable and internet. The only things lacking pertains to the appliances. We don't have our frige or microwave yet, though we have a loaner frige and our old microwave. The new stuff will come in another week and a half. The other thing is that the plumber should be here tomorrow to plumb the water softener. I just couldn't get them scheduled today, because I didn't know when the appliance folks were coming. (I could have called, but there was so much...) The 9 foot ceilings on the lower level, combined with the new furnace, makes for a much quieter house than our old one, and the fan noise from all these computers is bleeding through the dogleg hallway from my office into the "great" room. (What's so "great" about it? The master bedroom is bigger, but then, it's just plain huge.) Anyway, I'm thinking I'm going to have to do something about it, but what, I have no idea. I mean, I could just shut them off, but that's not really an option, now is it?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-12-16T06:33:58-08:00

192 Hoo hah! Yes, everything seems to be working! I'll move the DNS information over today, and we'll be off and running!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-12-16T06:29:44-08:00

191 This is a test of the new web host!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-11-27T05:03:26-08:00

190 Oh wow. Lots of things have been going on, and I've been too preoccupied to post. For the record, we close on our current house next Monday. Then we close on our new house on the 23rd of December. It hadn't even occurred to me all the things that have to happen to move. I still can't understand why women will have another child so soon after having one, but I guess time dulls the memory. With all that's involved in moving, I can see why the average moving interval is 7 years. That's a lot more pain for time to dull. I'm still trying to decide what appliances to buy. My budget says "junk," my taste says "Cadillac." Unfortunately, my instincts say "Mercedes" so that I won't have to do this again in about 10 years. I've been so busy with projects for my church -- both computer and sound -- that I've pushed back my appliance selection task, and it must be done this weekend in order to have everything show up on time. There's no second chance here. If I don't get all the utilities hooked up and all the appliances delivered and installed on the 23rd, I'll have to wait at least two days to try again. The 23rd starts my holiday time off, so everything works on paper, but we all know about those plans of mice and men. Crossing my fingers... I also have to get this website moved to a paid host. I hate to do it, but I have no choice. And I'd like to keep it up and running without a hitch, so this needs to happen before the move. On top of the stinkitude that is the fact that I'll be using a cable modem, and subject to their Luddite AUP, is the fact that several of my friends in town are having problems with the service now. Of course, the cable company is saying that it's not their problem. No. Of course not.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-11-06T22:19:00-08:00

189 The downloads are going away. See that page for details. You have 6 weeks. For some reason, Galeon -- my browser of choice -- isn't reading the style sheet for most of the pages. I don't understand, but it looks like a bug. I may have to try to file a report.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-11-03T12:19:19-08:00

188 I forgot to mention that a very cool person sent me a collection of videos on a CD through the mail to return the favor for leeching my files. (Don't get me wrong. I don't use the term perjoritively. That's exactly why they're there in the format they are.) Again, very cool. In fact, it has inspired me. I've just offered to send an Oracle noob an introductory book on the subject I have laying around, you know, to get him started. I think I'll do it for nothing, just to pay back some of the karma for getting that CD. Unless he lives in "Egypt," knowwhatimean? And it looks like I need to trim back the number of comments kept on the front page. Sheesh! I've been crankin' out the big balls. (Now that's obtuse. It's from some K'Nex ad from years ago.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-11-03T02:16:08-08:00

187 Well, life proceeds. I'm still using Gnome as my desktop, and I'm liking it more all the time. I recall just how much more I like the look of Gnome over KDE, even though it's not as uniform. Linus Torvalds made some comments recently that spoke volumes: the KDE guys wanted to get it working, the Gnome guys wanted to get it right. I was really hoping that SuSE 9.0 would have Gnome 2.4 in it, but alas, it's still 2.2. Maybe next time. I'm thinking that Gnome is really going to "be there" at the next release. But then, I think that about every release of every open-source project. Do not trust the shover robot. He is defective. Pushing in the answer. Gah! I have a million little odds and ends to do. There came a time a while back where I had to give up doing everything I wanted to do, which meant giving up on doing everything for everyone else who asked. Now I'm faced with the prospect of not doing everything I want, even for myself, which is a very difficult prospect for my obsessive-compulsive personality to accept. I sit here thinking about what I wanted to do before the weekend started, and see that I have accomplished none of it, and I just don't know when I will. And it's significant stuff. I guess I just need to get it all down in my Palm Pilot, sort it out, and work the list. I think I've got too much hanging in my mind, and I don't know where to begin. I'll tell you one thing, though: I'm going to have to start using the "2's" and "4's," because the Outlook-and-Evolution-restricted 1, 3, and 5's of managing tasks are not discrete enough. Sigh. Ever notice how life gets in the way of living? That ought to be in my sig somehow.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-28T16:53:10-08:00

186 Must be time for a new screenshot. My computer is alive again, thanks to a new BIOS chip, and now running SuSE 9.0, thanks to the $10 (after rebate) DVD drive I picked up last month on the advice of a friend. Good times. I'm back to using Gnome (2.2) from KDE (3.1.2), and while I have some complaints (XMMS acts a little "goofy," but then, it was goofing up in KDE too), overall, I like being back in it again.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-26T07:22:18-08:00

185 Well, if you were trying to get a file from the downloads page, I'll just say that I painted my office, which also just happens to be my co-lo server room. I'm still not sure I've got everything hooked back up correctly, but I guess time will tell. My main machine is still down with a failed BIOS upgrade. That's the first time in about 11 years of working with computers full time that that has happened. MSI, the company that makes my mobo, was quick to send out another chip at no charge, leading me to think that they have some problems in this area. However, it will have taken them over a week to get it to me. So, points off for the dismount. The old junk laptop I got from Uncle Arv is proving to be exactly that: junk. I wish I could justify a few hundred dollars to buy a descent one where at least everything's guaranteed to work at the outset. Sheesh. I have a wish list about a mile long, and I'm going to be moving into a house that's worth over twice as much as the one I'm in now? What was I thinking?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-23T15:16:20-07:00

184 Well, I have a closure date on my new house: December 23rd. Merry Christmas? Yikes. I can't imagine the amount of money I'm going into debt for this. I wanted to get my knees "scoped," but I'm doubting I can afford it now. For the money it's going to set me back, I could get my eyes lasered. Then again, I'd like to be able to play basketball again. Then again, I'd like to be able to not have to wear my old welding safety prescription indestructible nerd glasses when I play. Whatever. I'd like to not hurt going up and down my stairs. I guess it's just something else I'll go in debt for, and leave for my kids.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-18T09:00:49-07:00

183 Well, I'm obviously going to have to amend my comment about Rush Limbaugh now. However, I fried my motherboard with a BIOS upgrade. (Upon review, I had done everything according to their instructions, so I think they owe me a new chip gratis, but I think we all know how that will go.) In the downtime, I tried to enable DMA on my web/email server. Uh, unless you know for certain this will work: don't. That was an 80-day uptime shot to pieces for nothing. Grrr. One of these days I'm going to make a page that gives me an instantaneous look at uptimes and, say, the top-10 processes running on all of my machines. Feh. I likely have an entire week without my main system. Guess now's a good time. Good thing I just got this old crummy laptop working. What stinks most of all is that I should be getting the new SuSE 9.0 this week. Sigh.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-10T08:02:18-07:00

182 I recently re-signed up for the Debian users mailing list. Since then, I have been absolutely bombarded with what are apparently "Swen" virus emails. Someone else on the list complained about this, and it seems that Swen grabs email addresses from Usenet posts. Since debian-user is crossposted to Usenet (which I didn't know), I stuck. Those machines already have my email address now; unsubscribing won't help. It's bad enough that spam is spam, and we'd all get a lot of it regardless, but it's becoming unmanageable thanks to the inaction of Microsoft. They could have prevented this situation if they'd have just patched Outlook years ago to prevent this sort of thing like people begged them to. But no. Thanks, Microsoft. Every time I think about making my life a little easier and starting to use your products again, I just think of any one of the multitude of your corporate sins, and I go learn more about using open source software. Ultimately, this sort of attitude is going to reach critical mass. It can't get too much worse until email will literally become useless. It's getting so bad that ISP's are going to have to start doing things that will block legitimate email in an effort to block the spam. I've already been at the end of it twice in the past month. As I've come to understand the reasons, I see the pain that they have to endure. The computing power and bandwidth that is being wasted due to spam and Microsoft-culpable viruses is starting to make running a mail server of any size of consequence financially untenable. Now, honestly, I don't know if this will ever happen. It's like the law of diminishing natural resources. To wit: We will never run out of gas. The price increases when it becomes scarce enough will make alternate forms of energy attractive enough that the last of the gas doesn't even get used. The same goes for email. When the costs, administrative and economical, finally reach that critical point, and it just becomes too much hassle for the average person to deal with, or the average ISP to deal with without making their customers mad, things will change. We'll either overhaul the email protocol or use something else. I figure it will be something else. That's usually how it goes. I'm ready.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-06T16:51:56-07:00

181 Just blogging this from an old laptop I got as a castoff. I put Debian stable (aka Woody) on it, and it seems to be running fine, though several things about it seem about ready to cash in their chips. Speaking of playing with technology, I also loaded up <a href="http://www.mythtv.org/">MythTV</a> on an old computer laying around at work. It was... an experience. I'll have to play some more with that later, when I finally get either cable or DSS in the new house.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-10-06T09:38:56-07:00

180 Why is anyone bringing up the sexual-harrassment allegations against Arnold in the California recall? Why bother? It cracks me up to no end that the very sorts of people who would do this, to him, now, are the very same people who would have supported a certain sitting president who not only made advances on women, but actually had sex, with a subordinate, in the office. The Oval Office. You know, the place where Ronald Reagan wouldn't even take off his suit coat out of respect for what it represented. The liberals have made sexual conduct a non-issue in politics. They now have to live with the consequences. If it wasn't enough to remove "their" man from power, it's not enough to remove the other party's man from the running. I knew this sort of thing would happen then, and I'm loving it now. I hate that the bar's been lowered so far; don't get me wrong. But I do dearly love that the people who did it are now having their actions bite them in the rear. Gary Condit must be seething right now.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-09-10T11:33:40-07:00

179 Finally, they broke ground! The footers and blocks are in, and they should be pouring the slab this week. Then comes the fun part.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-08-16T11:41:01-07:00

178 <img src="images/snap3.png"> Because I wanted to, alright? Sheesh. Get over it already.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-07-27T06:01:44-07:00

177 Still haven't signed final papers on the house. Should be this week, but I expect a round of "red lines." Sigh. This is the first time I've had a chance to just sit down do something for myself for awhile, and what did I do with it? Updated my web site. Man! What a geek!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-07-11T03:17:20-07:00

176 Yee haw! We were without power for 36 hours after a nasty storm took out power for half the city. We went to our county fair, partially for our daughter, who loves it, but also for just having something to do for the second evening with no power. I mean, when I get out the harmonicas, I'm bored, man, bored. Anyway, we came home to find lights on. We shut up the house in two shakes, cranked the AC and the dehumidifier, and I brought davidkrider.com back online. It's good to have power. We're waiting for cost estimates for the architectural changes we requested in our new house. I'm hoping to have them early next week. If so, we should be able to make some last-minute changes, and sign off the plans toward the end of the week. Then we settle back for a 5 month process of oversight to make sure that everything gets done as we've requested. At least, I keep hearing from people that go through this that you have to watch the builders to make sure they do what you want. However, I kept the deviations frightfully minimal, so this shouldn't be a problem, knock wood. The new baby's doing well, i.e. sleeping better. That helps everyone. I have a lot of business travel over the next month and a half. I have to get trained on some software that I'm supposed to support. I'm sure the technology is there, but the project itself is a sort of political jungle that I suppose is part and parcel to any large IT project in any large company today. It's more "PDM" stuff, which I thought I was all done with. It's a long story, and I already have a grimace while I type this. I should really make paragraphs out of this stream-of-consciousness diary of sorts. Or something.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-06-27T02:53:23-07:00

175 After about 4 months, we finally made a decision on a house. We're going to have a new one built not too far away from where we live now. It won't have a basement; the whole neighborhood is deemed to be too close to the water table to allow for basements, so I'm having a third-car bay added to the garage (for storage) with a den (for me!) behind it. We have to pick out all the interior stuff now, which is a long, tedious process, but we've got a friend with a good eye for this sort of thing who's willing to help us with it. Plus, we'll have to secure all new appliances since the ones we bought new for our current house are all aging poorly. (They just don't make appliances like they used to, do they? My mom and dad still have their original washer and dryer.) Then there's window treatments, which are going to add up quickly. Then there's the matter of having, like, two more rooms for which we have no furniture. After all, the new house will be almost 3 times the square footage of our current one, which really isn't saying much, though. It's going to take 5 months for this thing to get built. Why do I get the impression that it's going to continue to eat my time and my stomach lining the whole time?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-06-24T17:25:49-07:00

174 The baby... isn't sleeping... at night... I took the day off yesterday to just relax. I updated a few pages, but nothing really major. I had a minor problem with the <a href="files.html">files</a> page due to the switch of operating systems, but I found it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-06-06T07:44:27-07:00

173 Aaron James Krider, born 6/5/03 at 5:44 pm. He was 7lbs, 12 oz. and 22 inches long. Everyone's great! He's even taking to the breast. All this only reinforces my desire to sue the doctor who had Emily induced two weeks early. I guess the ability to "latch on" is one of the latest things to develop, and the current hindsight guesswork is that Emily didn't have time to develop that ability, or her mouth didn't have time to develop to be big enough for it to work. All from a mis-read ultrasound. Grrr... Anyway! A. J. is neat.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-06-02T20:10:59-07:00

172 It's about that time. I don't think I've mentioned it here before, but my wife is due with our second child any time now. I'll take a few days off work when this happens. I'm hoping to be background noise when it does. She's lined up everyone in the family to help officially, and there will be a steady stream of friends as well. Maybe I'll get some time to start working on a web site for the church. Riiiiight....

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-05-28T01:44:07-07:00

171 Very rough new page on installing and configuring <a href="installing_suse_8.2.html">SuSE 8.2</a>. Mostly for my reference, but written so as to (I hope) help others. I wasn't ready to foist it upon the world, but conditions on the mailing list predicated it. Also, a kind reader showed me that some of my thoughts on a particular religion are out of date. Upon rereading them, I'm scared to read further. Most of the religion section dates from the start of this project, some 6 years ago. I wrote most of those pages on feverish late-night writing binges. They're at best out of date, and, at worst, knee-jerk and coneceited. It's all in need of a rewrite and the task is daunting.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-05-06T02:51:07-07:00

170 I've got new case badges on order. Since the fleeing from Red Hat's camp, I've settled on <a href="http://www.suse.com">SuSE</a> as my distro of choice, and I need to update my logos to reflect this. I grabbed a KDE desktop background from <a href="http://www.kde-look.org">kde-look.org</a> and I Gimp'ed it up a little. Here's the result, though it's getting a bit "jaggy" because it's being force-fitted into a roughly case-badge-sized area. The real image is actually 600 dpi and 1 inch square, so you could gank this here and get custom badges made yourself.<div style="text-align: center"><img src="images/suse_case_badge.jpg" width="100" height="100"></div>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-05-04T04:43:18-07:00

169 As I guessed, everything's groovy. I've got some housekeeping stuff to put into place. After that, I'll be taking this SuSE 8.2 act "on the road." (I'm going to upgrade the church's server to it.) All I can say is... WHEW! This finally brings to a close about a month of searching for a new distro-of-choice because of Red Hat's recent destruction of their (perfect) offering. <Sniff, sniff.>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-05-04T03:57:49-07:00

168 It's... ALIVE!!! It would seem that I have everything working here, technically. I still need to put the CVS repository back to work. It may be working now, for all I know, but I haven't checked it out. It's been quite an ordeal, actually, getting up to speed with SuSE 8.2. They have their own set of administration tools that can seriously get in your way. You can either shut them off, or play nice with them. I opted for the latter, for now, anyway. Well, I need to update my <a href="colophon.html">Colophon</a> page.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-04-25T01:10:00-07:00

167 I screwed up. If you were the person who uploaded the video about the football fan and his dog, please do it again. I knew I already had it, so I blew it away. However, when I confirmed that I indeed did have it, I realized that yours was much higher quality. If you're reading this, please upload it again. Thanks!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-04-18T12:53:41-07:00

166 <a href="http://www.debian.org">Debian Linux</a>: because vi is all I should need to administrate my system. Just kidding. I'm trying it out on my file and print server again. Again! And again I had a horrible time getting samba and cups configured so that my Win98 setup could print through it. It's only partially for my wife; I want to be able to do these kinds of things with Linux, regardless of distro. Anyway, I've committed to really learning it this time, and I'm trying to setup a local mirror of the parts of the tree I want so that it becomes much easier to install on my other two servers (and even easier to update). There are no "wizards" here. It's all bare-metal config-file work. It's... refreshing, after all this Red Hat and SuSE I've been looking at. Reminds me of my fledgling Slackware days. I had been resisting moving to Debian because they lag so far behind the rest of the Linux world. Then I realized that my web server is still Red Hat 7.2, and that's just fine with me. As long as I'm getting security updates, what do I care? It does everything I want. So, ok, Debian lags by a year, year and a half. Red Hat 7.2 is two years old, and I don't want to change it yet. So, fine. Debian becomes my server OS. I still don't know about it on the desktop. SuSE 8.2 is working out fine, but I just like the thought of running everything at the same level. Maybe <a href="http://www.ximian.com">Ximian</a> Desktop 2.0 will support Woody. That would be a clincher for me right there (as long as 2.0 is as solid as 1.4 was). Otherwise, I'll probably run Sid, which is Debian's "unstable" distro. Oh yeah. Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-03-30T03:33:54-08:00

165 Ok. Here's the deal. Red Hat 9 releases on Monday morning at 9 am. I'm going to be installing it on all 4 computers at home, 3 computers at work, and the church server. Then I have to figure out how to host the FrontPage extensions on it, and get it going at the church. Then comes a shared calendaring web app, and... I'm going to be busy with computers for awhile. On a related note, I'm finding Red Hat's new licensing and product structure a little hard to take. So while Red Hat still meets my needs the best of any distribution available right now, when it comes time to upgrade one year from now, I'm going to be evaluating the alternatives again. I almost went with Debian on my servers and Gentoo on my workstations. We'll see what happens in another year...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-03-24T05:22:08-08:00

164 You know, I didn't post about it yet, but I wanted something in my "blog" about an encounter I had with an old friend I grew up with. She told me... a LOT of things, all of which blew my mind. Apparently the father of my best friend from grade school and junior high shot himself in the roof of his mouth a few weeks ago... and lived. He was a long-time Arvin employee, recently retired. He came into one of the offices to do it. I heard nothing about it. My friend told me that there was a paragraph or two in the local paper about it -- on page 8 -- but with no names. Also according to my friend, he was distraught that his son, my old best friend, was and continues to be homosexual. This is all second-hand info from someone who described herself as having MPD, schizophrenia, and about a dozen other mental health problems, but, yeah, I should have seen that coming. He allegedly came out of the closet when he was 16. We had already drifted apart a few years before that. If it's true, it would explain many things, and, weirdly-enough, puts some of the irrational things he did that caused me to stop hanging around with him into perspective. I guess he was just wrestling with his feelings versus what he knew his dad would think. Unfortunately, my <a href="homosexuality.html">views</a> on the subject are apparently similar to his father's, but everyone's free to live their own life, and deal with the consequences. Back when we were young, I thought that my old friend's defining characteristic was that he was the most creative person I had ever known. Now, 20 years and college, career, marriage, and kid later, I still think that's true. He had a real gift for it. I'm not sure what he's doing with his life now. I was too stunned by all the news to ask. If he had been doing the kinds of things I imagined, I expect I would have heard about it, though. I always expected him to write plays or design ad campaigns or such. I find it unfortunate that he's probably wasted his gift because of dealing with the fallout of his sexual orientation. If he'd have moved to San Francisco and been part of a community that just lives with that lifestyle as a matter of course, perhaps he would have found a more productive way of using his gift. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am. I don't really want to use names here. Even those that are familiar with my history from high school might not know who I'm talking about, and that's fine. But, old-best-friend, if you've found this site on the net (and you still read it after knowing my thoughts on various issues at hand): I still think of you often, and I'm crushed by the news. I wish you the best, and hope that you can come to find some sort of peace within your family.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-03-24T04:51:13-08:00

163 I have some updates to do on the "computers" page, but I'm waiting... waiting... for RedHat 8.1 to finally release. Then I'm going to reinstall all of my computers. I think the "tips" page is going to be a big part of this site going forward. It's going to be tough to keep up, and I'm already going to have to start breaking the individual stories out into their own pages. In unrelated news, I still don't know what to do about a new house: to build or to buy, that is the question.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-03-06T04:15:14-08:00

162 I am in the process of moving. We've put down some money on having a new house built, but we still may buy a pre-built one. I'm working on fixing up my house a little to get it to sell. Anyway, the point of saying all of that is to say that I don't know if DSL will be available where I'm moving to, and I don't know if we'll have to move to an apartment for a little while for the transition. This site will likely go down for awhile, though I may get creative about that...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-02-26T18:38:14-08:00

161 It's coming... I started to make the files page fully database-backed so I could do ratings and different sortings and such. However, I might be getting another consulting gig, and I am definitely moving into a new house. Lots and lots to do...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-02-26T09:52:24-08:00

160 Response to my <a href="files.html">files</a> page has just surpassed my expectations. I'm getting a lot of good submissions. I suspect it won't be too long until I'll need to do some sort of ratings system... And get more bandwidth.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-02-24T06:34:21-08:00

159 I put up a new page: <a href="tips.html">Tips</a>. It's the place I hope to put all the complicated things that I figure out for others to benefit from. For too long, I've suffered through poorly worded answers to emails and newsgroup postings on such things, reading between the lines to get anything out of them. Here's my chance at rectifying the situation.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-02-04T18:33:29-08:00

158 At the bottom of this page, I finally succumbed to putting up some "powered by" logos. Think of it as the beginning of a "colophon" page...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-02-02T16:25:08-08:00

157 Someone uploaded a new "wazzup" video to my <a href="files.html">files</a> page, and -- I just gotta say -- this is what I'm all about there. Awesome! To whoever it was: Thanks!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-01-27T01:32:11-08:00

156 New screenshot up on the mis-named <a href="future.html">future</a> page.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2003-01-26T03:47:46-08:00

155 Well, it's certainly been awhile since I posted anything. I have some ideas for new content, but what I wanted to say was that I was going to (I hope) be posting all the cool Superbowl commercials to my <a href="files.html">files</a> page. I have a friend with a Tivo. (Several actually.) And he's agreed to get me the mpeg2 streams. I'm going to take them and "transcode" them to mpeg4 under Linux. Should be interesting.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-12-18T02:46:47-08:00

154 One of these days, I'm going to revamp all the content on this site. It's just that at over 80 pages, that's going to be a big job. The big Project is in limbo. We can't get licensed on the most important bit. I'm guessing that we're being put off? I mean, I know that the company with which we are dealing is busy, but come on! They've had the signed contract for something like 5 months now! I'm starting to look for some contracting work, as I don't think we'll ever get to accomplish what we set out to do. Pretty depressing when you think about all the work and money that's gone into it so far. In hindsight, I guess we should have gotten the signed contract up front. It's just that in the months leading up to getting our half of the contract signed, there was nothing done or said that made me think that there would be any delay in the process. I think I'll try calling their only real competitor...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-11-15T04:38:59-08:00

153 I'm getting closer and closer to implementing a ratings system for my <a href="files.html">file collection</a>. It's nice to see people grabbing stuff from there, but I can also see the page getting seriously abused. If you're reading this, all I ask is that you don't link anything directly. Download it and use it on your site or store it in your collection. If you link, link to the page, not the files. Thank you.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-10-17T02:44:54-07:00

152 Q: How does the ACLU count to 10? A: 1 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Very interesting page that was referenced from a <a href="http://slashdot.org">Slashdot</a> discussion. <a href="http://archive.aclu.org/library/aaguns.html">ACLU on the Second Amendment</a> It just so happens that I *DO* believe that the second amendment was written to preserve my right to own whatever weapon it would take to overthrow a tyrannical government. I think the day is coming when average Joes like me are going to have to rally themselves and demonstrate. The longer I look at issues like this, the more I think that it can't be left to the full-time zealots. Average people have to realize that other average people are interested enough in these sorts of issues to take time off from work and make their voice heard. And that's really the problem, isn't it? Average people owe something like $20,000 on credit cards alone. They can't afford the luxury of interrupting their cash flow for even a week. I tend to look at such convergences with an eye toward conspiracy. Karl Marx said, "Religion is the opiate of the masses," but Karl hadn't seen anything yet. Big screen TV's and 100 channels of garbage are today's opiate. Universally available and only $100 together, rent-to-own. I don't have a big-screen TV. I don't even have a DVD player. Not even in one of my 4 computers. I guess my opiate is of a different variety. As long as I don't do anything about what I consider the erosion of my rights by Congress, I am allowing these things to dope me into submission...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-10-10T18:05:16-07:00

151 I added a couple new screenshots in the <a href="future.html">"future"</a> page. The last one deserves a mention, since - bewilderingly - Mozilla doesn't pop up the alternate text with a mouse-over. That shot is one of my computer at home running a VMware session to use my company's VPN to get to a work computer running Windows 2000 because it had PC Anywhere which I used to remotely connect to a Windows NT box. (There was a problem at work I was trying to solve from home.) I then found out that it was a non-issue anyway. Regardless, I snapped the shot for posterity. Well, it's been a long time since I really worked on this site, and you know what that means: major update to the <a href="computers.html">computers</a> page...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-09-28T06:19:12-07:00

150 It looks like my file archive is a big hit. I'm starting to get people coming to the site because of searches that turn my page up. That's fine. I can see right now that I'm going to have to implement some sort of bandwidth throttling in the future. I've looked at some of those solutions, but I haven't tried any yet. Also, I still want to put a ratings system into place, but, hey, I think I hear my second job calling me...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-09-12T18:34:32-07:00

149 Updated my <a href="files.html">files archive</a> so that the entries are sorted alphabetically. I'm wanting to create the ability to rate the files for funniness, but that's going to take database work... Thanks to whomever uploaded my first user-contributed file!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-09-01T05:30:49-07:00

148 Okay, I really, really feel the need to rejuvinate some of the content around here. After searching for something like a year, I have found a couple regular bloggers that I like to read, and I've been thinking about what it is about them that I like. I'm going to try to do some things to emulate them. One of the first has to be to shrink the length of my writing. Which led me to <a href="hmm.html#efficacy">this</a>.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-08-27T05:19:32-07:00

147 Mark your calendars! I'm going to be hosting a big LAN party at my place of work. I'm going to get a digital camera and record the event here. We're probably going to have 16-18 people there. Now I've got to find the nerve to ask the person in charge of the facility if we can use the nice training room... Wish me luck!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-08-05T04:52:15-07:00

146 I got a new <a href="computers.html">computer</a> at work. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-07-13T15:53:33-07:00

145 I'm thinking that the design of this page is still holding it's own, but I have two ideas in the back of my head for a re-design (for some year that I have time). One is for a 50's-ish theme, where I'd gank all the graphics out of `Life' magazine and Normal Rockwell prints. The other is to do a cheap sci-fi sort of thing. I guess I've already started that with the `The Fantastic Voyage' theme, but it could easily be vastly expanded. Maybe an intersection of the two is in order... I've recently come across two new blog sites. They've been standing the test of time for the past few weeks in neither offending me nor boring me. I greatly desire to follow the <a href="http://www.fush.org">first</a> in terms of wit, and the <a href="http://www.lileks.com/bleats">second</a> in terms of style and theme. (I have to say for the record that I've been intrigued with the 50's my whole life, since well before finding that site, though.) Finally, some good people to read! It makes me want to take up a real blog of my own, instead of just a diary of what I'm doing to the site.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-06-04T02:40:03-07:00

144 You know, there's a lot of furor building over what the CIA and FBI might have known prior to 9 am on September 11th. However, both agencies have a long list of people that could do the same sorts of things, both foreign and domestic. You know what keeps them from up and busting them right here, right now? The Constitution and the rights it affords us. Oh wait, they're all busy up on "the Hill" making sure that doesn't get in our way again. It's going to make that movie with Tom Cruise about arresting people before they've committed the crime a lot more relevant... <blockquote> First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. - Pastor Martin Niem </blockquote>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-05-09T05:42:01-07:00

143 Well, continuing the theme from my last installment, I have to say that RedHat 7.3 has been released, and seems to be sucking a little less. My sound card (a SoundBlaster Live MP3 5.1) has always had this annoying glitch at the start of sounds with RedHat's updated kernels for 7.2. This has now been fixed, and I'm relieved. Sometimes the noise it would make would make me jump out of my chair, so I had to turn of the `desktop' sounds, which I usually enjoy. (I like to `hear Biff bark' as the kernel HOWTO used to say, though knowing what that really referred to took me years and years to truly understand.) I might try some new graphical treatments to the site in preparation for another web site I'm working on. We'll see. I need to get a good raster graphics creation tool for Linux. Gimp does a bit of Photoshop-like work, but you can't even draw things like boxes and circles with it. It may be that I'm still stuck with Photodraw (or Image Editor, which is still better). If anyone has a suggestion, please tell me about it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-04-21T15:17:26-07:00

142 Well, I did little else with the computer - except be frustrated with crashes and lockups - under both Windows and Linux (every OS sucks!) - than try to reformat my site and give up on it, only to back out all the changes I was in the midst of making. It's a long story, but I can summarize it. I wanted to make my site completely database driven, including having the page contents in the database as well as the links. However, I realized that search engines will not be able to search my pages if I do that. If I was clever, and made HTML fragments of the contents to stick into a generic template, I would still confuse search engines, because the link would point to a "page" without a proper HTML header, and it would lose all the formatting I had intended if someone came straight to the page. So, I'm back to my original way of doing things. It still makes it a big pain to make site-wide changes to the format, but it makes the content the most accessible, and that's still the important thing on the web. Isn't it? Anyone?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-04-15T02:23:09-07:00

141 I'm working on a slight redesign. I have lots of ideas for new content, but I just never have time to get to it all. It's building up, though, and I'll probably do something about it anyway. Like this morning. I woke up a 5 thinking about a program I'm working on at work. I almost worked on it instead, but I figure if I'm going to miss a couple hours of sleep, I'll work on my stuff, not Arvin's.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-04-02T04:24:39-08:00

140 Well I finally figured out how to process the server logs for my UT server, and found that a few people had indeed played on my server. What I didn't understand was that UT doesn't log the kills in the console log like Q3 does. (That's depressing, but it's another story.) Neither the Q3 nor the UT server is running right now, but I do have a Lithium Quake 2 server running right now. (That was always my favorite mod...) I hope someone joins so that I can play with them. Unfortunately, the Linux version of Q2 is a bit goofy under X (the mouse is not very sensitive) and it's slow under the console (hey, I've just got a P3-600), so I think I'll have to reboot into Windows to play. Or fix one of those two problems...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-28T18:41:25-08:00

139 I've reached what Dilbert describes as "nerdvana" here at Starfleet Command (TM*). Starfleet Command (TM) is what I call my office. I used to call it "Nerve Central," but I name all of my computers after Star Trek ships, and, well, something had to be done. I have 4 computers now, and I know that's all described on my dedicated page for that - which is linked to often that I'm just not going to do it <a href="computers.html">again</a> (Oops) - but I just wanted to say that - by the grace of God - everything's humming along nicely. Sure, I get my share of hack attempts, and it's very educational to try to understand what's happening there. I've had some pests so annoying that it makes me want to buy one of those "How to be a Skript Kiddie in 3 Easy Lessons" books at the mall. You know, the ones that have a precompiled Windows binary for launching WinNuke attacks and such. What I ought to do is buy the book I recently saw that talked about the theory of networking such that you could actually understand why a Nuke or a Smurf would work. It's just that I have so many things I want to do with computers, and there's not really a lot of creativity involved with trying to hack someone. I want to do something to inventive, not parasitic. Anyway, I still can't get my UT server going. As opposed to the simplicity of opening one port for a Quake-3-based game, you need to open about 10, and I'm not having much luck getting that all working at the same time. Making the situation more difficult is that I can't test my external firewall rules from here inside Starfleet Command (TM). Anyway. * Starfleet Command is a registered trademark of Paramount Studios Inc. Or something like that. I just find the Small Print (TM) amusing.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-22T09:13:00-08:00

138 False alarm on the sv_maxrate setting. It's working, but not showing correctly in the server status. That rate setting is only what the client is configured for. I had someone tell me that on IRC, but I didn't want to believe it till I tested that hypothesis by watching the network transmission rates with sar. Everything's a go, now! I am going to get a UT server configured as well. On top of that, I've read that an old Loki employee is working on a Linux port of Serious Sam. I'd love to see that...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-19T15:12:41-08:00

137 Someone, anyone, please tell me how to get Quake3 to respect the sv_maxRate setting!!! I'm going to go MAD!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-13T07:38:40-08:00

136 I have a new computer for serving up multiplayer games. You can read about it on the <a href="computers.html">computers</a> page. I also have a <a href="q3status.html">status</a> page for checking to see what's happening with it. Right now, it's just running a stock Quake 3 Arena deathmatch game. I intend to expand this to include a Q3 Threewave game (my personal favorite), UT deathmatch and CTF games, and probably a little bit of anything else that has a dedicated linux server port. Unfortunately, my DSL bandwidth will probably limit me to only have one game running at any one time, so it will have to rotate. I'm trying to get a handle on just how much traffic these sorts of things use, but - Wow! - working through the copious logs I'm taking is hard work. (Not to mention keeping track of hack attempts.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-10T16:17:52-08:00

135 It's alive! At home. Over DSL. I'm just merging some of the changes I was working on, and coming up to speed on taking care of this site without the aid (defiling?) of Microsoft products. It's a whole new way of doing things. I'm debating about putting up a development database. I don't have to if I'm careful about not adding database-type content until I'm ready for the world to see it. On the other hand, if I do use a development database to test all changes that I might make, then I have to export and import and track schema changes. I'm thinking that I need to write scripts for this on my "top secret" project, so I may as well do it here too, but I'm not quite ready for that yet.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-09T13:22:33-08:00

131 This is a demo for my dear old dad.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-03-08T14:35:34-08:00

134 Last post here. The DNS changes have been submitted. This site will soon be hosted at home...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-02-27T06:48:03-08:00

133 I really must learn how to play Starcraft properly if I am to keep up with the kids these days... Still no word on my DSL hookup, and Insight (the local cable provider) is saying that they are NOT providing any @Work-like features with their recently-transitioned service. So no backup in case DSL goes kaput. I really don't want to bring my stuff back inside only to have to push it back out in a couple months. The top-secret project continues. The only thing I'll give away is that it's a web application. I really need a good code name for it. I hope to sit down with my partner and hammer out the finer database details tonight.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-02-15T05:42:10-08:00

132 Just in case anyone is still watching this space, I have been deliberately avoiding updating here because I've ordered DSL again, and will be bringing my email and web hosting back into my own computers in my own house. Now that's co-location! I didn't want to have to fish out database entries from here and plant them over to the database at home, but it's just been too long since I've updated. I've spent the intervening time working on <a href="http://www.campusfire.net">campusfire.net</a> and making it useful. I'm not entirely happy with the design of the site, but it is definitely becoming quite the growth experience. I'm just about ready to start doing this as a consultant. I'm hoping for a small contract to come through, but I'm not going to count on it, just so my hopes aren't dashed, but it thrills me to think about doing this sort of thing on my time, in my environment, for real money. And I think God is moving me in that direction. I'm just so thankful for a good job with (at least it seems at this point, but you never know for sure) good security that I can continue to work until everything else takes off, if it does. There's something else cooking that's much bigger than everything else, but I'm not going to talk about it here yet. Rest assured I will once we launch it, but it promises to be big. World-wide big...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-01-31T07:59:53-08:00

130 Well, I had it out with my <a href="computers.html">computers</a> page using VIM. I'm determined to switch over and do all of my HTML editing without FrontPage, but the transition is coming slowly. This time around, I learned how to indent blocks of text, and rewrap paragraphs on command. I think, like using VIM compared to Notepad, there's a lot more capability in using VIM over a GUI HTML editor, there's just another learning curve. If anyone knows the perfect GUI and text-mode editor, let me know, but I don't think any of the GUI's will stop putting HTML in like , which annoys me. (Yeah. I know. I don't care that I should be doing ALL formatting with CSS.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-01-31T06:38:58-08:00

129 Well, I have just placed a new order for DSL. This time, it's from a company called <a href="http://www.mwisp.com">MWISP</a>. The problem is that it's going to take 4 to 5 weeks to get it installed. I'm trying to get the DSL modem I need from an Ebay auction, and, so far, it looks like I might get one for cheap. We'll see. The good news is that it appears that I really did get a half-price deal on the Cisco router I needed for the last DSL provider I had, and I can sell it on Ebay for a profit. Maybe I'll even cover the expense of the new one. How cool would that be? I am already preparing my "<a href="computers.html">servers</a>" (boy, they're really starting to show their age, and, yes, I really need to update that page) for hosting my own DNS, web site, and email again. I can't wait! Full control will be mine again! And that's the whole reason I didn't just get cable, which is finally available in my area. I guess if the DSL falls through again, I've got a backup plan...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2002-01-14T03:50:17-08:00

128 Well, a friend of mine and I have reached a level of completeness on the site I talked about before: <a href="http://www.campusfire.net">www.campusfire.net</a>. I like the way it came together in a matter of about 3 weeks. We still have some work to do, but all of the foundation is done. There are some things I don't understand about how it works. My buddy, Michael, did most of the backend programming. I guess I'll have another shot at it, as we are now teaming up on an even more ambitious project. I really want to dig in and learn the PHPLib stuff we're using for validation and tracking and such. It does a lot of things that we didn't use this first time around, but, just thinking about it now, we will this next time. Should prove interesting...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-12-19T04:33:25-08:00

127 I am waaaaayyyyy heavily involved in making another web community right now, and have no time to update the news or my content. I will be back, but it will be well after the new year...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-11-24T17:34:36-08:00

126 Yet another stinking test.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-11-19T17:47:15-08:00

125 Yet another demo test: <A HREF="http://www.bluesnews.com">www.bluesnews.com</A>.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-11-19T17:37:41-08:00

124 This is just a demo for a friend who was looking over my shoulder as we discussed web design and communities.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-10-31T05:24:52-08:00

123 I am David's lethargy. Maybe I'll start actually blogging; I don't know. I'm in a very weird mood this morning. There are so very few really good blogs out there.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-10-31T02:34:22-08:00

122 No news is actually bad news. I'm upgrading all 3 computers at home to RedHat 7.2 and it's not going nearly as smoothly as I would have expected. Every turn is causing me problems. They've touched (i.e. changed) everything, and I have to relearn a lot of things to get back to what I had with 7.0 or 7.1. Gee, thanks. As much as I want to, though, I'm just not going back to Windows right now. (And, in any case, I'll never run anything with an "XP" attached to it.) So, it's more head banging...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-10-16T04:31:37-07:00

121 Boy. I really must do some updating, even if it is just to clean up the code that puts up the comments, so that it doesn't revert to the oldest comments in the database when I haven't updated.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-09-26T05:54:48-07:00

120 Whew! I have read enormous amounts of material on the net over the past couple of weeks, and even jumped in and took part in several discussions. What kills me more than anything is the way that most people feel the need to force the square peg that is the underlying issue(s) into the round hole that is the attention span of the average American. It seems that most commentators think that if you can't say it or read it within 60 seconds, you'll alienate most of your listeners or readers. It's a by-product of our TV-dinner culture. And lest I be called hypocritical for posting this and running off, the reason that I'm not taking the time to expand these thoughts into yet another page on my site is that I'm going through something of a larval stage in my thinking. I'm learning how to see bigger pictures in my life and in the world. My thought process is maturing, and I'm unrepentantly feeding that evolution right now.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-09-13T12:39:34-07:00

119 I'm not worried a bit. It just depends on where you put your trust. If it's in government, then you're going to be worried. If it's in God, then you really have nothing to be worried about. It's really, really telling to see the reaction on the net just where we, as the priveledged elite in the world, fall down on the issue. There are so many people who are so confused by this whole thing. Well, those people have made themselves victims of the crime as well. Those sorts of people have given the criminals yet another victory. I've got plenty to say about this, but I'm just not going to. I'm just going to sit and watch for a little longer for all the dust to settle...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-08-30T03:55:27-07:00

118 I have been on a mission to find really interesting, funny, or innovative "blogs" for the past several weeks. What strikes me about the vast majority of these sites is the fact that they are simply a one-way conversation. It's almost like <A HREF="chatting.html">chatting</A> to me. Not a single conversation with one hundred participants, but one hundred conversations all occuring simultaneously but individually. I'm going to have to amend my page on chatting, but I'm also going to have to revamp many of my pages. See, I'm guilty of it too. I've seen the tone that makes a site interesting, and I usually don't have it either. So... time to sharpen my pencil.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-08-09T06:47:50-07:00

117 I need to modify the SQL stuff on the main page so that an appropriate amount of news stays there, and I should probably update the main page's comments. On the other hand, I am writing up some more content. I realize this isn't much in the way of information, but I just wanted something else to appear in the news.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-29T20:19:23-07:00

116 Whew! After WEEKS of hard work, I think I've hit a point where I can go back to actually writing! I have two stories to put to digital paper, and I'm going to write them up in such a way that I hope they'll get posted on <A HREF="http://www.fray.com">The Fray</A>, which I've found to be an interesting diversion. We'll see how that goes. I now have a workable content management system of sorts. I have moved all linkage information back out of the individual files and into tables in the database. In order to streamline the maintenance of such things, I have made pages to manage the news, pages, and links. This, of course, led to a big rewrite of the <A HREF="sitemap.php">sitemap page's</A> <A HREF="sitemapper.html">script</A>. I think I've learned enough now to start tackling a larger project...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-23T19:44:43-07:00

115 Total makeover. I must say I really like the look and feel of the site. I'm sure that more tweaks will be necessary, specifically in the are of navigation. But, all in all, it's coming together very nicely.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-23T07:14:12-07:00

114 This is the first, real, on-the-road test of using the update page. I hope my boss doesn't catch the timestamp here, but, then again, I think he avoids this site like the plague, along with my co-worker. Anyway, it's taken a lot of small tweaks to get everything working like it should. I am impressed by the complexity of all these web technologies. I understand now why web developers are making more money than anyone else in IT (except management). It's hard. It's harder than administration, but it's less stressful. (I'm sure that if I worked for a dot-com, I'd feel differently.) On the other hand, I'm enjoying it as much as I used to enjoy video games, but maybe that's because there don't seem to be any games available right now that I would enjoy.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-23T07:03:30-07:00

113 Hello?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-23T03:50:30-07:00

112 And this is the first test of the new comment submission page. Seems to be working...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-22T15:23:56-07:00

111 This is a new update to impress my beautiful wife. The updates (or comments or news or whatever you want to call this "stuff) is fully functional as of this writing, even though it won't go up to the hosted site until I figure out the permissions I need to set.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-14T15:50:00-07:00

108 It finally struck me that I've been cutting off my nose to spite my face. I can keep not using FrontPage extensions on my web space provider, but I put them back on my development server as it seemed to be the best way to keep my site in sync with the live copy, and it will help with the editing. I see that without the pages being in "FrontPage" format, making site-wide changes (like moving directories around) now complete almost instantaneously. If anyone is actually reading this and actually has questions about that, email me.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-14T09:29:00-07:00

109 Major overhaul of the second half of my page on the Book of <A HREF="mormonism.html">Mormon</A>. I felt it was just too harsh on the person of Joseph Smith when I really don't need to go there to describe why I'm so confused by that work. Added a new Linux screenshot on my <A HREF="future.html">Future</A> page. I'm noticing that my site loads faster now without the FrontPage extensions and without all of the FrontPage-included HTML. I have a really mediocre way of uploading just the files I have changed now, but I have got to find a good way to keep things in sync. The problem is that I don't want to pay for another program just to do that.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-14T05:37:00-07:00

110 I forgot to upload the last update. I write the news in a web page that gets included in both the new and the old home pages, and I forgot about uploading it along with other changes. I really need some sort of FTP sync tool. If my provider used sftp, I'd be all set, but alas.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-07-09T02:11:00-07:00

107 Well, even though I haven't been creating a lot of new content for the site, I have nonetheless been working extremely hard on it. You're now viewing my new "Microsoft-free" version of this site. Well... almost. I am still using FrontPage to edit my files, but I have removed the FrontPage extensions. For the longest time, I have wondered how "the other half" lived: the people who made beautiful web sites without any Microsoft products. Now I know. It's PHP. With PHP and Cascading Style Sheets, I have been able to duplicate all the look and feel of my old site without using any FrontPage-specific stuff. I still lack the ability to drag pages around in a hierarchical view, but for sites that get much bigger than mine, I can imagine that that feature becomes something of a hindrance anyway, though I miss it right now. I no longer have a convenient site map and search tool, but I'm sure there are some scripts out there that will do the job nicely; I just have to look. I gave up on a hit counter when I realized that my provider has complete stats any time I want to look at them, so I don't need to fool with that any more. Finally, I need to find an FTP client that runs on Linux that will synchronize the local version with the "live" version, and I will be set. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a graphical web page editor that is as good as FrontPage. There's Mozilla, but it mangles my HTML. There's VIM, but it doesn't have a graphical mode. And, let's face it. For tables, you really need a graphical editor. So, a couple more pieces, and I can finally get away from the ease-of-use curse that is FrontPage. Why all the trouble? This effort, combined with the one I talked about in my previous update will allow me to revamp the other site I work on the exceed the capabilities of using FrontPage. We are already hitting the wall there, and rather than go pay hundreds of dollars for Visual Interdev and more money for an SQL Server-based host, I am going the free software route. Even so, I am now learning Interdev for the project at work now. Grrr....

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-06-23T12:38:00-07:00

105 I am getting into some really cool stuff at work. I am working through a project that is teaching me how to do a real, database-enabled web app. I've been trying to get that going for a year now in my personal life, but I need to do a "Skunkworks" project at work, and I can use what I want: PostgreSQL, PHP, and Apache all running on RedHat GNU/Linux 7.1. I've been making my way through a tutorial I found on <A HREF="http://www.mysql.org">www.mysql.org</A> but adapting it for PostgreSQL, which I think is going to become the leader long term over MySQL. (In the same manner, I think GNOME is going to eventually win clear market share over KDE, though I wouldn't want either to go away.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-06-02T07:00:00-07:00

106 Ah... I am finally getting my home setup back in order since giving up on Linux for desktop use. I know I've said that before, but I mean it this time. I still have 2 computers at home and a computer at work with Linux on it, but it's going to take some serious developments for me to try it as my workstation again. I've revamped my <A HREF="computers.html">Computers</A> page. I am finally getting back to working on the Pentecostal Students' web site, but I don't know how much I can get working today either. My DSL is dead, so I have to deal with dialup speeds, but I mean to put together my firewall in expectation of cable access.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-05-18T08:55:00-07:00

104 You're reading this at a new hosting site, specifically <A HREF="http://www.websitesource.com">websitesource.com</A>. They have a wicked cool control panel for managing your own site, and they host on Linux servers, meaning I get SSH access! All that, plus unlimited email, 200 MB of space, and only $20 / month. How cool is that? The deal is that I am going to be losing my DSL connection someday. In order to not disrupt the flow of email, I transferred all the domain functions from my Linux server to this new place. I have heard word that we are due for cable access by the end of the month. After 2 years of that story, I'm not holding my breath. I'll do a real update later. I'm worn out with computers. This is just the icing on the cake. I've spent a week of vacation doing a ton of computer work for my church.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-04-09T03:42:00-07:00

103 Well, after 170 days of uptime, I downed the server to change several pieces of hardware. I swapped sound cards (to give the cheaper one to someone else), removed a network card I wasn't using (I have another box now that can act as a firewall if I want one), checked on a fan, and replaced the floppy drive (which my 2-year-old daughter ruined with coins, paper clips, and erasers). I almost put my Voodoo 2 card back in it, just to make it a contemporary collection of stuff, but I'm just not going to play any games on it. I notice that Mozilla doesn't render this page correctly. I never thought about cross-browser compatibility issues when I redesigned it. The problem is that when RedHat releases their next version, I'm going to switch over, and I'm going to need to make sure it works right with Netscape and Mozilla. It's not that I think Linux is ready to replace Windows, it's just that the incremental value gained with the XP series of products isn't worth the next round of upgrade charges, and their whole new licensing thing is out of whack. I don't even think I'll be using it at work, just for the principle of the thing. So, I'll probably be buying Lin4Win in order to play games and use FrontPage, and just learn to live in Linux otherwise. The trick is getting my wife to use it...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-03-11T07:11:00-08:00

102 I redid the background to make it easier to read the site, and I'm amazed at just how much it improved the overall look as well. I'm very happy with it. I also made a decent modification to this page by putting this boundary around the news. I put up a new page about <A HREF="abortion.html">Abortion</A>, and I've got several others in the pipeline. Also, the new <A HREF="screenshots/solaris_dual.jpg">screen shot</A> of my dual-headed Solaris box at work is really cool. I also moved a note from another part of my site to the <A HREF="tongues.html">Tongues</A> page. (I can't figure out what it was doing where it was.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-03-10T05:37:00-08:00

100 I decided to just go ahead and try out my new default page. It's been in mothballs for probably 6 months. I tweaked it up and made it work like I wanted to. Getting into more serious design work, I can see why some people have a problem using FrontPage. It can get in your way at times. (Yes, I'm trying to talk myself out of using it because of the stuff in the previous update, but so far I just can't convince myself.) I have several pages to put up, and I hope to get them done within the next week. I've made LOTS of updates to the <A HREF="computers.html">Computers</A> page, and I still need to make more. I want to change out several components on "voyager," but it's uptime is at 143 days, and there's no hard reason to do it. I want to see how long I can stretch it out.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-03-10T04:23:00-08:00

101 I think I'll leave the last entry up just to show how long it's been since I made an update, which is pathetic. In there I talked about needing to come up to speed on PHP and Postgres, but the truth of the matter is that I've spent all my free time trying out the new RedHat 7.1 beta at home and getting Solaris x86 (and the Linux beta) to work in dual-head mode on my Matrox G400 at work. Now that I've scratched those itches, I can get on with life. I don't know what compels me to put so much work into something like that and then ultimately decide that Windows is still better, but there it is. Microsoft already has plenty of my money. Last time I added it up, it was well over $1100. I won't be upgrading to the "XP" series of products by Microsoft, so I guess my point is that I'm trying to find an equivalent work-alike for home. (Work's not an issue; of course I'll ask for the upgrades there.) One of these days, I suppose, Linux will get there. In fact, it's really close right now. I think I could switch at home, except for the infernal FrontPage. There's just nothing even close on the Linux side. I probably ought to put up a page about all of this...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2001-01-07T06:53:00-08:00

99 I don't have much to say on my site, even though I made an update to the Computers page. I had to use my UltraSPARC 5 to be a secondary SSP for our E10000. (You can read about the E10K <A HREF="http://www.sun.com/servers/highend/10000/">here</A>. Ours has 11 boards so far. My job is becoming more fun, but also a lot more work these days.) However, I need to take this whole web thing to the next level very soon. I have been asked to do a web site for my church, and I plan on showing everyone what really can be done. Sure, I'll make it look nice, but there's going to be so much more. I'm going to have to finally learn a bit more about Apache, and really learn PHP and PostgreSQL, but then again, that can only help me with other things. For instance, after I do this, I can immediately apply that knowledge to bringing the PentecostalStudents.org web site over from a paid web host to also live on my web server.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-11-26T16:17:00-08:00

97 New "corpus collosum" just below.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-11-22T02:33:00-08:00

98 What has happened in Florida is the middle of the end. (The beginning was when we elected Clinton for the first time.) In my mind, this issue is now way beyond who eventually wins the presidency. I guess the law means nothing any more. I read the Florida statute that says that the election results need to be certified within a week. There wasn't any provision for discretion in it. Additionally, it seemed clear that it was written explicitly to prevent what's happening there. If the court found the first deadline arbitrary, what's so special about the one that they've legislated from the bench? They may as well count till they're all happy now. In my way of thinking, this is becoming almost as big a conspiracy as the assassination of JFK, and, to make matters worse, it's being done brazenly, in the open, with full media complicity. This is the result of the death of shame in this country. This is what happens when "wrong" is PC'ed out of existence. I might expound on these thoughts some more, but what's the point? "They caught the last train for the coast, the day the music died." My only consolation in all of this - and I hesitate to say this because by then I know I've lost all hope in the situation - is that my life is built on something that man didn't invent, nor can he destroy, that my ultimate destiny doesn't depend on what happens in this world, and that, in the end, my God will eventually balance the books.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-11-02T08:37:00-08:00

96 I'm having some trouble with my DSL line. In fact, if you can't hit it today, I wouldn't be surprised. The guys at the "network operations center" have been really great so far, so even the process of sorting out the problem has been fairly pleasant. And - surprise, surprise - they all seem to be technically competent. After Sprynet, I had given up hope of ever finding that to be the case. It looks like Ameritech needs to make a visit, though I don't see why. Of anything I've done or not done, I've certainly not messed with the phone wiring, and if it was good before... Anyway. I've made a significant updates 

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-10-23T05:22:00-07:00

92 Okay, the DNS changes have been submitted. I can't imagine it's going to be that easy. I'm trying to save the actual discontinuance of my hosting service until the changes really take, because I'll lose mail in the transition. Anyway, if you want to see the site and you can't get to it, it's already loaded and running at <A HREF="http://machine138.vectris.com">http://machine138.vectris.com</A>. Bookmark that address, and you'll have a bookmark to my new IP address, regardless of what happens with my domain name, and you can change it when it becomes official.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-10-23T05:22:00-07:00

95 I'm glad to be wrong. The DNS change was that easy. Now when you're hitting this site, you're hitting my Linux box at my house over my DSL line. I suppose now that I'll have to start paying keen attention to the security problems of Apache and Sendmail, but it - as always - is a good learning exercise. I was having serious problems with email, but they seem to be worked out. (Something I tried to set up at work started working all of a sudden, and when I set "Out of Office," all my mail was being copied to my personal account. Since I had something wrong with my Sendmail config, it was bouncing every message back to the sender. This cause a bounce fest between my Arvin account and my server. I must have generated about 50 messages before I just ssh'ed in from work and shut off the mail service.) Anyway, thus begins a whole new chapter in geekiness.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-10-16T06:08:00-07:00

93 I need to call Network Solutions and see what I can do about getting my domain name moved. I "bulged" the graphics above, but haven't done much else. I just can't believe how much I have on my plate right now. I'm just so behind, I can't see straight, and I got two more "favor" projects dumped on me tonight! Oh well... At least this DSL is kicking butt. I am thinking I won't need a local repository of patches and such. I can always just download what I need in the space of even a half hour for the really big things, then burn a disk. It's times like this that make me glad I bought a new computer.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-10-04T02:28:00-07:00

94 I am going to be changing ISP's, so I expect this site to be down for a little while while the change takes place. I'm not exactly sure how this will go, but I'm sure I'll muddle through. Three pieces of good news. <UL> <LI>The DSL is in. I am getting what I paid for. I was getting horrible ping times, but Vectris' "Network Operations Center" got it all worked out in record time. It kicks butt. I can get ~160 ms playing online. That's not as good as the ~100 I can get at work, but, then, I'm not paying for 2 T1's either. Also, I saw 41 KB/s while downloading a patch last night. Woohoo! DSL rocks.</LI><LI>My computer hasn't crashed in 36 hours or so. I'm still holding my breath, but my problems may have simply been the Voodoo 2 drivers. The card has been pulled, and it may just find its way back into work when I get my new dual PIII 800, on which I will install RedHat 7.0.</LI><LI>I found out that my role in my new position at work will be to (help) administrate what will be the largest Oracle ERP implementation in the world (according to the independent consultant we've hired for the project). At this point, we're only doing our largest division (which isn't Exhaust anymore, but it doesn't matter because I'm now Corporate), but that's still going to take 3 fully-racked Sun E10000 servers. Wow.</LI><LI>Okay, how about a 4th? I'll go ahead and tell you that my new service provider is going to be me! I need to change my domain name over to my fixed IP address. I've got some things to settle before this actually happens, like wiring the Linux box's UPS for automatic shutdown, setting up a backup routine for both machines on the Windows box, and getting the FrontPage extensions working on the Linux box (which appear to be broken on RedHat 7.0). Then there's getting my mail server going, and being the authoritive nameserver for davidkrider.com, and...</LI></UL>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-09-22T02:54:00-07:00

91 Whew! Just wanted to make a quick update. I finally have gotten all the bugs worked out of my new setup, which I'll go into detail on my <A HREF="computers.html">Computers</A> page someday once the DSL is in. Suffice to say that Creative Labs - despite all the electrons wasted to say otherwise - STILL has major problems with their drivers and SMP machines. Un. Be. Lievable. They wasted hours and hours of my time years ago with their stupid (and well-known) problems with the AWE cards and SMP NT boxes, and now they've wasted countless more hours (and two reinstalls) thanks to their stupid Live card. While I'm downloading the latest drivers for the thing (after the first couple crashes), I'm reading their FAQ, and its saying that they still have "issues" with SMP boxes, and that they're working on it. I should have cancelled the download right then, but noooooo. I called support. They thought they knew how to work around it. Whatever. Creative's going to eat this card. And the shipping. The problem is: what in the world else is there for a sound card these days? I'm having to use my 3 year-old Ensoniq PCI. You know Ensoniq? The company Creative bought? I guess I can still buy an Aureal card over at Office Max. They supposedly had good NT support. But now they've been run out of business by Creative, and I don't expect their Windows 2000 support to be there.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-09-02T08:40:00-07:00

90 Okay. I got my new computer running, but I decided to switch the 10-only 3Com NIC I had in it with the 10/100 Acer-generic NIC I had in the Linux box. Bad idea. I installed drivers from Via's website, and it seemed to do fine, then BOOM! On reboot, it suddenly found Windows drivers for it, that it hadn't found before, and wrecked all networking. So I reinstalled. Sheesh. Every time I've switched network cards in the Linux box, RedHat has detected the change, modified the loadable module information, and migrated the network configuration. Nice. The more experience I get with Windows and Unix, the more I like Unix, and the less I trust Windows. My next two challenges will be getting my Linux box to do automatic dial-out and firewalling (in preparation for the DSL service I can now get at my home) and get OpenGL acceleration running on the Matrox video card in my Linux box at work.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-08-27T06:09:00-07:00

89 Forgot to mention that I'm going to be getting a new computer at work because I'm also getting a new job. That makes 4 positions (and 5 offices) in six years. With a merely average merit raise next year, I should be at more than double my original starting salary, and that doesn't include bonus! Thank you, Lord! Thanks to the merger of Arvin and Meritor, the project I have worked on for the past two years - the one that was minutes away from going "live" - is now being broken up and sold off for parts. We're finding new uses for all the UNIX servers here in the US, and all of us (all whopping 3 of us) are getting new jobs. Ending what has been weeks of uncertainty, turmoil, and rumor (even though is still not technically "official"), I find myself being part of a group that will administrate all of the "enterprise" servers for ArvinMeritor. My focus will be UNIX, but NT, AS400, and S390 stuff will be included in the mix. I feel good about how it ended up, even if I didn't like the way it progressed. Sure, there have been a lot of behind-the-scenes maneuverings and all, but I got inquiries from 5 different groups as to my availability, so I can't complain. ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-08-26T12:07:00-07:00

88 Ending what has been about 20 hours worth of work, I now have a newly re-christened "Enterprise." See my Computers page for full details. The bottom line is that now I have a computer that's more than 50% faster than the computer I use at work. HOWEVER, the very week I place all my parts on order is the week that I find out that I get to get a NEW computer at work. My (main) home computer is now a dual PIII 600. My computer at work is going to be (I hope) a dual PIII 800. There's a few more parts I'm waiting on here at the house, like a Plextor SCSI CD-RW, but most of the work is now done. The old Enterprise, now christened "Voyager," is humming along with RedHat Linux 6.2, but not without some complications of its own, like needing all of its BIOS settings defaulted. Speaking of problems, fooling around with some bad memory someone tried to sell me cost me hours of frustration. ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-07-23T07:35:00-07:00

87 Would you believe that I'm back to using Linux all the time at work? (Ok, not ALL the time. I dual-boot Win98 SE for gaming.) On top of that, it's RedHat 6.2! Again! And it's working great. With the Helix GNOME (which wasn't available on Slackware yet), I really like it. I tried to install Debian, but it's Symbios Logic SCSI controller module was goofed up and wouldn't load, so I never got passed the initial install boot sequence. Like I said, the Helix thing kept me from Slack again, so that left RedHat. Now that I understand where to get RH-specific docs, it's not so bad.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-07-11T02:30:00-07:00

86 I updated the <A HREF="computers.html">Computers</A> page with a lot of upgrades. I have several ideas, but I just don't have a lot of interest in putting new content on the site. It's the way I work. I have to have inspiration for this, and, hey, it's my free-time, artistic project, so that's the way it ought to be, right? Anyway.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-06-11T06:29:00-07:00

85 I don't even have any updates to talk about. I've been spending all of my free time playing with Linux at work. I tried to go 24x7 with it -- live in it, as it were -- and while it works all right, I just can't justify it. I can make it do everything that I rely on Windows for (modem dialup (but I didn't try multilink), CD burning, media playing, even playing Unreal Tournament), but -- and I seem to keep coming back to this -- I still need FrontPage, and there's nothing comparable on Linux as yet. Star Office makes a nice backup to Office, but it's not got the VBA that I've come to rely on. Graphics are okay, but - of course - not as fast as Windows. KDE is sure nice. I almost like it better than the Windows GUI now. But all that experimentation cost me a lot of time. It took me two weeks to get my system running like I wanted with Slackware 7, then I blew it away and put on RedHat 6.2. I don't like RedHat. I repeat, I don't like RedHat. They just want to screw up everything about Linux with their own ideas. It's not necessarily better. It just seems different for the sake of being different. Then I tried unsuccessfully to get Solaris x86 8 running on my machine... twice. I blew it up with one command the second time, and have resigned to try it out again on a separate machine when it becomes available. The install program seems to have ... issues, at least on my machine. All this ought to go on a Linux page or something, but I'm too busy with it to do it, and that just underscores my point on my Chat page. Four and a half hours on Saturday, and I'm back with a fully-working 98/2000 system. I expect I'll throw some games back on it tomorrow as well. Ah... it feels good to have my system back in a settled state. I settled on Windows 2000 at home; I guess I'm resigned at work too. Nevertheless, I will keep experimenting and watching.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-04-29T04:52:00-07:00

84 Well, it's been a little while. I have been polishing up a lot of things. I had been working on a whole new front page, complete with borders that would stretch themselves to fit whatever size of screen it was viewed on, but that whole business was taking way too many hours of work, so I scrapped it. There are more changes than I can describe here. The two biggest two are the dissolution of the Games page, and the evolution of the "Whole Story," which is finally making some headway. I commented my <A HREF="beos5.html">BeOS 5 PE</A> screenshots page and updated my <A HREF="computers.html">Computers</A> page, which was getting pretty out of date.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-03-22T18:46:00-08:00

83 I actually finished updating much earlier, but forgot to update this part too. I have a new page in the <A HREF="questions.html">Questions</A>, and finished up that page about the <A HREF="matrix.html">Matrix</A>. I was thinking about making a Quake 3 clan, but I just found out that one of the key potential members will be moving away. :-( Maybe someday. I have Solaris 8 in hand, and a spare P90, but I don't think it'll be enough to run an Oracle database with. Maybe it will be a good computer for testing BeOS with. There should be another P133 come along in a few weeks, but that still doesn't sound like enough.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-03-11T16:29:00-08:00

82 Yee haw. I'm finally back. I spent two weeks in England and another week getting back "into" my life here at home. I may have to go to the Netherlands, but I'm hoping to avoid it. I don't like travel. I got a "real" (read: legal) copy of Windows 2000 Pro for home, and this is the testimony that my computer's up and running again. IIS had quit working on my upgraded installation. The upside to a day's worth of work getting going again is that my computer seems to be running a little quicker. I hate upgrades anyway; I always prefer clean installs. I really want to try out both Solaris 8 and BeOS 5, both due this quarter and both free, but I think I'll scavenge a computer at work for these things as I just don't want to waste time at home with it anymore. Win2K with Office 2K is the best desktop environment for my money, even when the competition is free, but I still like to keep up with what's going on with the rest of the scene. And now that my job has now officially moved under a divisional vice president with the long-Arvin-forgotten phrase "research and development" in his title, I may actually get some money to buy an extra computer with.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-02-07T19:30:00-08:00

81 What in the world am I still doing up?! One new page added to <A HREF="topics.html">Topics</A>, and another - a very interesting one, I think - on the way. The link is there, but I haven't written it yet...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-02-04T18:18:00-08:00

80 Two new pages added, one to the <A HREF="questions.html">Questions</A> and one to the <A HREF="answers.html">Answers</A>. Of course, now the archive extends to 3 pages. It's amazing to me that I have other parts of the site to work on, and yet I did those pages, and I did that based off one paragraph I had written to myself in the notepad I use for writing observations down from studying the bible. I gave up with the Q3A and Win2K thing. I've got my work computer dual booting 98 and 2K. I guess I'll have to wait until the new round of hardware and games, and maybe a service pack, before Win2K gaming takes off. Yeah, right. I'm going to have to wait until they merge the two product lines. Oh yeah, another new page: <A HREF="hmm.html">Hmm</A>. And I cleaned up a bunch of useless formatting HTML (like .) I don't know for sure, but I hope that it speeds looking at my pages just a smidge.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-01-24T17:31:00-08:00

79 I am realizing that almost the entire Technology section is going to need an overhaul, what with all the new stuff emerging. And I have to make a decision. Do I try to keep up and learn it all? Do I wait until the next leap in technology, so that it's more dramatic a change, and thereby more meaningful and less assumed? Or, finally, do I forget about it, and move on to something else. I'll tell you, right now, I'm thinking option 3. I'm getting sick of it all. Sure, upgrading to Windows 2000 was interesting, and I like it a lot better, but it cost me hours on both my two main computers, and Quake III crashes on it. I'm just left wondering what the point of it all is. It's sort of like Linux: what's the point? Whoever said "time is money" was so wrong. Time is much more valuable than money.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-01-22T08:26:00-08:00

78 I forgot to mention it before, but I have been running Windows 2000 for about two weeks. It came in Arvin's January shipment of our Microsoft agreement. I have server on at work and professional on here at home. I used the Arvin license to see if it would go on here and see if my old dual P200 could keep up. Unfortunately, it does just great, which means I still have no incentive to go buy a new computer. When the commercial version hits the streets, I'll cough up the bucks for an OEM copy. Speaking of not upgrading, I tried a SoundBlaster Live! and a couple GeForce 256-based video cards at work, and neither really did anything for me. I mean, yeah, the VisionTek GeForce - with SMP enabled -cranked 60 and 70 fps in Quake III on "highest" quality, but I can get that in "normal" quality with my Voodoo 2 without SMP. It's just not convincing enough to lay out $250 for yet. The SB Live! killed my NT 4.0 partition and forced me into the Win2K beta for a few days until the released version hit our shop. I don't think I'll ever buy a Creative product as long as I live. They just cannot figure out NT. Back on video, maybe nVidia's forthcoming NV15 chipset will be interesting enough to warrant an upgrade; I don't know. I think every major video game that I will want to play from now on will have support for hardware T&L. In any case, waiting longer to buy a new computer means the computer will be that much better. Here's to another year out of my box. I suppose it's a testament to the extra throughput (not speed) available in a dual-processor rig.<UL><LI>Bonus link: <A HREF="http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/health/011800hth-behavior-incompetents.html">Incompetence found to be a vicious circle</A>.</LI></UL>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

2000-01-18T17:09:00-08:00

77 A new year, a new format for these updates. I have added a couple miscellaneous pages. I was going to add another really heavy-duty one, but decided to can it half-way through. I'm making this update with a sort of blank stare. I have tons to do in every area of my life, and yet I'm bored. It's all big stuff. Projects that will take a lot of time. I just don't have it right now, and I'm getting backed up again. My project at work is not going well at the moment, but at least I get to go to England to start messing up the European side of things. And I get to take Sue with me.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-12-26T04:43:00-08:00

76 Well this time next week , we're all finally going to know just what "Y2K" is going to have been all about. Thank goodness it'll finally be here. I'm tired of all the waiting. I'll be peering through the mini-blinds, crouched behind my walls of sandbags, quietly rubbing my AR-15 as I await the looters... Just kidding. I don't foresee any real problems.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-12-19T19:36:00-08:00

75 Well, I have two weeks of vacation, and nothing solid planned. I don't know what I'm going to do. I imagine I'll catch up with some email, make some progress on this site, play some video games, hmm... maybe I need to stay away from the computer for awhile... Yeah ok, back to what I was doing. Seriously, I don't know what I'm going to be doing. And, oh yeah, I finally got rid of that annoying banner at the bottom of the page. I'd have done it sooner, except that I use a program that blocks ads from appearing on my browser, so it wasn't annoying me much, it's just the principle of having an ad here.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-12-06T01:01:00-08:00

74 I'm still fooling around with this thing. I am absolutely wired. I just discovered, after all this time, that the problems I was having with the search form on the <A HREF="sitemap.php">Site Map</A> could have been fixed ages ago. It's working now. New addition: <A HREF="culture.html">Culture</A>. Very much "under construction," but I hope it evokes some good memories for you too. Enough already, I need to get ready for work!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-12-05T22:53:00-08:00

73 Wow, it's been a long time. To update a couple points from the last log entries: we got the head of application development of our db application to give us a fix for the problem we were having, and we are now proceeding with the "easy way." All locations but Mexico now have their server. (We did Canada on Saturday. What a hassle. We spent 6 hours waiting at the airport to clear customs. I've got a lot to say, but it's too boring and long for here.) The trip to England has been put off till January; I'll be installing another db app starting this morning. If I thought I'd had problems up till now... well, I'm hoping for the best. Now onto current news: I can't sleep. So I started reading Joshua (I like Joshua) and came across chapter 21, which brought me back to working on "The Whole Story" again. Some day... Some day... This one's for a few guys that may or may not still be reading: Heard a rumor from my uncle who lives in Wisconsin that GENCON is moving to Indianapolis for 2000. Heh. Oh the irony. There are three things I wouldn't mind seeing because I'm so curious about them: a Star Trek convention, a gaming convention, and a major LAN party, and the same thing that makes me curious will keep me out of them all. That is, that even during the time in my life that I would have gone to a GENCON, I think I would have been turned back by the sheer, overwhelming nerdiness of the collective group. And I'm just thinking about that 100-person "convention" that Kevin and I went to in Elkhart. I simply can't imagine a 10,000-person event of that nature. Ah, William Shatner's words from Saturday Night Live ring so true yet today... "Get a job." "Move out of your parents' basements." "You! Have you ever kissed a girl?!"

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-10-29T15:03:00-07:00

72 For the first time at Arvin (for 5 years just the other day!), I am actually putting in serious overtime. It feels... well, good, in a way. I suppose there is some relief in that it's going to ease up a bit in a few weeks, and then I get to travel a bit, including going to England to help them set up the first servers for my project in Europe. I have a friend who's doing something like 70 hours a week with Y2K stuff. He's been doing that for months now, and he's been told to expect that kind of schedule to continue well into next year. I think I'd go crazy at that point. Anyway, I've spent the morning doing some recreational net reading about how bad UNIX is. It was written by people who know better. The problem is that it was written up to 10 years ago, before Windows was even a thought in Gates' -- oops, that's Jobs' -- head, back when UNIX was edging out VMS and other proprietary systems. Funny thing is that 10 years later, it's still the best thing out there for running a server (especially one that actually does more than *one thing at a time*.) Now NT is taking heat for all the bad things in it, even though it seems to be displacing UNIX in many ways. I wonder what the next 10 years will prove... Anyway. I should probably make a page about UNIX.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-10-09T17:18:00-07:00

71 I finally have some time to make a quick update! I can't believe how busy I have gotten, and it's all good stuff. It's not like I'm wasting time with video games any more (just a couple hours a week now. ;-0) I have put together an online, update-able database on the Pentecostal Students page. Unfortunately, that part of the site is for members only and requires a password, so I won't be showing it off from here. It was a lot of fun to put together and get working, but now I have to "rationalize" the data and get it "normalized." That's the boring part. Then I have to redesign the site and make it over with it's new name: STAND. (I'll leave it to enquiring minds to see what that means.) I've got all 10 of my UNIX servers in, but I'm being stymied getting my application going on them. Everything I do with that cotton-pickin' package requires a call to tech support. Other than that, my boss just made a command decision to implement the thing the hard way. It'll be a lot better for the end-user, but it makes my job twice as hard. Now I have to maintain fixed IP addresses on all 300+ machines continent-wide that will use the application and maintain a separate DNS server. I could've done without that. But, hey, it's UNIX, so it'll be easy to work with. I impressed my boss by reconfiguring all the tape drives on the machines at once with a single, scripted command. On NT, I would have to have touched each machine - and rebooted it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-09-11T07:37:00-07:00

70 Finally got some new content up. There are new articles in the <A HREF="questions.html">Questions</A> and <A HREF="topics.html">Topics</A> sections. I have also revamped the <A HREF="future.html">Future</A> and <A HREF="gaming.htm">Gaming</A> pages. I am still working on a cool new bible study, but I just seem to have other things oozing out of my head right now. I still haven't had time to do anything with anything. I'm so behind...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-08-29T07:33:00-07:00

69 Whew, what a month. I'm working harder at work than I ever have. I've even had to do some "real" overtime these past couple weeks, and it doesn't look to let up any time within the next month either. It's both exciting and frustrating. Our database application shows such promise, but every time we do something to the thing, something else breaks. It would seem that for a couple million dollars, software should work better than this. I have to get everything working on NT this week, and then I must get the UNIX stuff tested and rolling. As part of the ongoing effort at church, I got a couple free, used P90's. I hope to turn one into a server with Linux. In support of getting Samba going on it, I loaded Linux on my machine again, this time SuSE 6.2. I should have a screen shot, but I don't yet. It went on without a hitch; I'm impressed with the distribution. In just a few hours, I had it on, triple booting along with 95 and NT, and a new kernel with SMP, NTFS, and sound support. It runs really well in SMP. Much more responsive than NT doing SMP, but I guess we all knew that already. (Sheesh, Linux has more responsive multitasking with one processor than NT with two!) I don't know when I'll have time to get back to the new content I have to post, but I figure - in typical fashion - the crave to do it will strike at some inopportune time, and I'll throw it up in a fit of obsessive / compulsive drive.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-07-31T21:15:00-07:00

68 Not much to report, other than major changes at the bottom of the <A HREF="computers.html">computers</A> page, which should explain why other content hasn't been appearing of late. I have stuff to add, but I'm buried right now. Now I gotta go back to updating the Pentecostal Students' site...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-07-13T01:53:00-07:00

67 Ugh. Doin' the scheduling & sync'ing thing, and I just can't stand not having made an update for so long. I am continuing to work on the religion section. There's a new cluster of pages going in there that I don't have linked to the rest of the site yet. There's a lot of work there to do. I need to work on the PSF website; we may be changing to another provider, but I don't know if it will all work yet. I bought Riven with my gift card that I got for buying Office 2000 at Best Buy. What a waste of human effort. If you haven't played it, you haven't missed anything. The only interesting thing about it is that to play it, I had to install 95 back on my machine, and that now permits me to buy another Snappy or something to capture video from my camcorder. I'll write up something about it on my gaming page, which is beginning to need an overhaul as well. Believe it or not, I read something in the Sunday funny pages that struck me - in "Cathy" of all strips. The joke was that the internet had ushered in the "way, way, way too much information age" - especially thanks to sites, well, frankly, like mine. I wonder if that's not true. Though this effort is certainly not without it's communicative and educational and therapeutic values, I am thinking about "neutering" the entire site to remove the extraneous personal detail.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-27T05:20:00-07:00

66 Well, my two new pages in the <A HREF="questions.html">questions</A> section are up. I have to say that they are easily the two most controversial pages I have on my site. I am still interested in anything anyone has to say about my site, though. Even though my provider seems to have fixed the glitch, my search bot on the sitemap page still doesn't work. I also have to say that I am glad that I bought Office 2000. It's new features are really starting to show through and prove themselves.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-24T15:57:00-07:00

65 My page was down for a little while today. My new host had this to say, "We recently experienced a corruption on the metabase for IIS causing the technical support team to rebuild the server." I don't have any idea what they meant by "metabase," but it got fixed just a short while after I noticed. Sorry for the confusion. I am doing some very, very heavy lifting in the religion section of this site. After years of putting it off, I am trying to make a page about the Book of Mormon, and the more I read about it and the Mormon faith in general, the more awestruck I am about how much faith it takes to be a Mormon, if you take my meaning. Oh yeah: the Buz is also a bust. It requires 95. Brother.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-20T17:41:00-07:00

64 If it's been awhile since you've visited, check the archive for missed updates. I also put in a new page about <A HREF="krider.html">the move and its ramifications</A>. I finally bought Office 2000. The new drawing package, PhotoDraw, is much more cumbersome than Image Composer that shipped with FrontPage. Sheesh. I reinstalled the old one. I tried to make new images for this page, but I just couldn't come up with anything I liked more. Since the Snappy is a bust, I'm going to check out the Iomega Buz. They have a $100 version for video only that looks like a direct competitor. And they have a good history on NT (via the Zip drive.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-19T08:06:00-07:00

63 One more quickie: I finally posted some screenshots from Fallout 2 on my <A HREF="gaming.htm">gaming</A> page.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-19T07:07:00-07:00

62 Computer stuff update: June is turning out to be a nasty month for computing. The new BeOS is going to support the sound card I have now, which is good news, but after shelling out $380 (after rebate) for Office 2000 Premium, I don't know if I'm going to want to spend the money. The Matrox G400's have hit the streets, but the NT OpenGL ICD is still up in the air, so that's pending. And, finally, the Windows 2000 beta is a bust for end users. There's nothing compelling about this piece of software. I'm sure once it's released, I will feel the same compulsion to get it that I now feel for Office 2000, but until then, forget it. As a server platform, it will be very much improved, but if you want a lot of user enhancements, you're kind of left high and dry. NT 4.0, SP 5 with IE 5.0 is almost there already, except for that 98-like color fade along the window title bars. In fact, I even gave up on it at work, since it didn't seem worth the effort to recreate my entire system of software on top of it. In addition, I wound up hosing my machine because of it. I stupidly tried to use the NT 4.0 driver for the Zip drive in Win2K and it not only crashed the thing, it corrupted my hard drive such that I had to do a low-level format to get it working again. Which was alright, because my NT 4.0 partition had gone a year and a half, and that's a half a year too long without being reinstalled. Things are much speedier now without all the registry cruft that had building up.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-19T06:55:00-07:00

61 Okay, things seem to be moving along quite nicely with the move. Now that I have this site on a FrontPage-extensions-enabled server, I can do things like add my own counter (which doesn't do anything but count) and search forms and such. I have added both to the <A HREF="sitemap.php">sitemap</A> page, and I am thinking about putting in a feedback form just for the sake of it. The Snappy video capture thingy I bought does NOT work so far, despite 12 reboots trying every possible way of configuring it with two parallel ports and 5 toll calls to tech support. I finally sent an email to their support. We'll see if the come up with the goods. Somehow, I doubt it, but we'll see. Like I told them, it's exactly what I need, and I really want it to work. I would still like to get some kind of graphics from the movie The Fantastic Voyage (from which I take some of the inspiration from this site), and the Snappy would have fit that bill nicely too.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-06-17T19:06:00-07:00

60 Well, I finally got fed up enough to move. I might bring the forwarding page over to tell the tale, but I don't know. I got my replacement Pilot, and they sent me two. I sent the extra back. :-( I have been on vacation, and will post pix with our new camcorder and Snappy! Much more later...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-05-22T10:45:00-07:00

59 Another forever. I updated my <A HREF="testimony.html">testimony</A> and finally made a page about <A HREF="zen.html">Zen</A>. I broke my PalmPilot by dropping it on the ground; I'm awaiting a replacement. I am finalizing quotes for ordering about 1/3 of a million dollars of equipment, and we've been given a move date no later than 2.5 months. We dedicate Emily at church tomorrow. (There's also a new picture of her on her <A HREF="emily.html">page</A>.) I ran sound and digitally recorded our choir concert last week. We're still doing some patch work, but we'll get this mixed down and mastered at a friend's sound studio and make a CD soon. (Practices for that certainly curtailed some updates lately.) June's going to be a good month for computers. Along with BeOS 4.5, the Matrox G400 and the long awaited NT OpenGL ICD will arrive. Also coming are the TNT2 Ultras which may or may not be the card to get in a new computer. It should also usher in a copy of Office 2000 Premium and a new Intellimouse Pro, and a copy of the Windows 2000 beta (that I am not paying for.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-05-08T09:26:00-07:00

58 Wow, it's been forever. I have gone through and proofread just about every page on my site. I have little else to add. I need to be working on the <A HREF="http://www.pentecostalstudents.org">Pentecostal Students Fellowship</A> site. It may be moving to a new server with lots of new features. I was going to get SUSE 6.1, but I cancelled the order. I have Slackware 3.6 running at work. I'm pretty sure I'll upgrade to Office 2000 Premium (and Windows 2000 when it's gold.) I'm also pretty sure I want to try BeOS again after it gets to 4.5, supposedly in June. (Solaris x86 may still be worth another look too. I saw that it does indeed support my SCSI adapter.) Emily is doing well. I am moving offices again for the 4th time in a year, and things are finally getting started with my project. All in all, life is very, very good.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-03-15T17:22:00-08:00

56 Small Linux update. Bottom line: what's the big deal?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-03-13T08:29:00-08:00

55 Man o man o man o MAN! I've had my head so far far up this computer's butt... for DAYS! I installed a top-of-the-line Adaptec 2940U2W and an IBM 7200 RPM 4.5 GB SCSI LVD drive. (It makes NT MUCH faster; I am very pleased.) Someone tripped the 1000 mark on my counter! I think it might have been David Pugh (see the Linux page.) The entry in the counter reads: Mar 10 06:50:44 - tceennt.hig.se - Linux -Netscape 4. Woohoo! Updates include <A HREF="computers.html">my computers</A> page, the <A HREF="linux.htm">Linux</A> page, and the <A HREF="solaris.htm">Solaris</A> page, but there's not a lot of detail there yet. I wanted to put screen shots back up (and from NT), but I was just too taken with getting it going to fool with it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-02-17T17:58:00-08:00

54 I put up another picture of <A HREF="emily.html">Emily</A>. The <A HREF="archive.html">Archive</A> now needs TWO PAGES! As you can see, this site's address is changing thanks to Sprynet's acquisition by Mindspring. It's a bad deal. I used to be able to use a nifty wizard to make updates of only those pages which had changed. Now I have to manually transfer all the files that make up this website by FTP. Groan.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-02-16T17:40:00-08:00

53 It's been awhile, but I have a good excuse. See <A HREF="emily.html">Emily</A> for a full explanation.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-02-07T16:36:00-08:00

52 Been working on the PSF website. Been spending all my spare time since the first of the year on Fallout 2. Sue just had her first contraction. about an hour ago, but we don't think this is "it" yet. Holding our breath... Things are ... in flux waiting for it to happen. Our church is on the brink of an all-out revival that will pack our church to the brim, requiring us to expand. That's the best church problem to have. ;-) I suppose I'll be home a bunch - maybe a week - when the baby comes, and while Sue and Emily sleep, I'll try to work on my program.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1999-01-23T03:09:00-08:00

51 It's been a long time since I updated, but here it is. I've been OUT. I spent two weeks in Indy training on Oracle admin. (I've got 2 more weeks to do yet.) Then I spent this last week in San Francisco training on Product Data Management in general. I have working code for a command-line interface DOS program to do Star Fleet Battles internals allocation, but after talking to a Maters'-level computer science / Oracle DBA friend of mine, I have a slightly better algorithm to implement. Working with VC 1.0 is going to make the conversion to a Windows program more work than it needs to be, but it will be a good learning experience. That makes the Palm Pilot version a long way off. Also, it seems Paramount (the movie company) will likely put the kibosh on the whole thing anyway, so I may never make it public. I have a new game: Fallout 2. I've already got about 100 hours on the thing, and I figure I'm about halfway through it now. And I think it will have some definite replay value. I'm not figuring out all the puzzles, so I have some things to do fresh when I play again (and I've bungled some others), and there's basically 3 different styles of ways to get through it, fighting, talking, and sneaking, so it leads to three slightly different outcomes to every major quest, and it's your option how to go about it. Very cool. Plus, it plays well even on my old dual P200. (minimum P90.) It's nice to play a old-fashioned type game with plain-old software rendering for a change. I'll get Quake Arena, but it's not the same anymore.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-12-29T04:43:00-08:00

50 I have done no work to this site as I have been working furiously on <A HREF="http://www.pentecostalstudents.org">The Pentecostal Students' Fellowship</A> website. It makes me wish I could spend the money moving this site to a FrontPage web host. Maybe SpryNet, uh, I mean  Compuserve, um, no, I mean Mindspring will - someday - allow FrontPage extensions on their web server, though I've been told it's a custom package, and will not, therefore, ever do that. On another note, I got my Pilot pager card, and it's working great. It's not loud enough though. Still, I highly recommend one. I'll update the page later.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-12-20T05:19:00-08:00

49 I did a massive update to the <A HREF="gaming.htm">Gaming</A> page, partially inspired by my complete dissing of Unreal. I need to go do some programming...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-12-15T06:12:00-08:00

48 I have had to get rid of the highlighting buttons on all 3 pages and the animated GIF's at the bottom of this page. It just takes too long to load this page with all of that. I am also debating on whether to go back to the old Sprynet counter or keep the PageCount one. It takes too long, but I like it's traffic analysis capability. I updated the <A HREF="programming.html">Programming</A> page with the script that provided the highlighting effect.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-12-13T04:30:00-08:00

47 Wow, two weeks without hardly even thinking of an update. I have spent nearly all my free time this past week preparing for our Christmas cantata. Our first performance was last night; we do another today. It went well, and I look forward to an even better one today. It's a great musical, and it's been fun to boot. I loaded Microsoft VC++ 1.0 to get a context-highlighting editor with which to program my PalmPilot. I had not realized how much work it would be to write a program for the Pilot. There's an awful lot of stuff you can take for granted when programming Windows that just isn't there yet on the Pilot. I again put in for a <A HREF="palmpilot.htm">Pilot pager card</A>.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-29T15:32:00-08:00

46 The updates just keep comin'! Happy Thanksgiving all; hope yours was good. For the first time I can remember, I didn't go north (where my familiy is originally from) for it, which makes me sad, but it just didn't work out this year. We did have a nice couple of dinners here though. Anyway. I got a brain flash about something else I wanted to post: <A HREF="programming.html">Programming</A>. I hope that it does indeed, as I suggest there, get me motivated to do some more. I need the practice.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-26T20:10:00-08:00

45 Axed the active graphics that FrontPage can do. Something keeps them screwed up on Sprynet's server.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-23T17:23:00-08:00

44 One more update to finish my thoughts from the weekend. Added Active Graphics ala FrontPage (we'll see how they work on Sprynet...) and had to remove some screenshots due to space constraints. That's alright; they weren't adding much.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-22T07:08:00-08:00

43 Okay, maybe not weeks. I have updated enough for awhile. I'll be back soon! Check out the reorganization by visiting the <A HREF="sitemap.php">Sitemap</A>. Check out the <A HREF="technology.html">Technology</A> section. And watch the amazing buttons highlight on mouseover! (I need to learn how to do that with DHTML now.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-21T14:47:00-08:00

42 I've spent a long time reworking and scripting ALL the buttons on the site, and I'm quite pleased with the results. I just had the FrontPage editor die on me. I didn't lose anything but this update. I just fired it back up and kept going. Not bad after having run since about 8:30 this morning. NT can be stable if you treat it right. ;-) I have lots of content to update now, but I'll be working on that over the next couple weeks.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-21T07:47:00-08:00

41 In the midst of a major overhaul in reorganizing the two halves of this site...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-20T17:14:00-08:00

40 Well I can't say that I will continue the updating of this site as much as I have in the past, but I will always have a homepage. If not here, then I'll paste a link, but this site is working well. (Check <A HREF="http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dunkirk">this</A> out.) It'll always be a place to speak my mind and tweak (like the new hover graphics; hold your mouse over them and see!) When I have time to spend on something like this, I tend to want to play with another OS. I think I'm going to get a second hard drive again and install my developer's edition of Solaris 7 for Intel. It looks amazing. It's packed with everything 2.6 lacked (or so I read.) If I do, it'll be the Christmas break (which should be 3 weeks long including some vacation I've been saving) and I'll post screen shots of the coolest features back here. And BeOS is due for another look as well, seeing as it's at another major rev, and I have been collecting newsletters on how to program it. And a major revision of the Linux kernel is just hitting the streets. Hm... Maybe Microsoft isn't in such an uncontestable position after all...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-11-07T19:20:00-08:00

39 A lost week for updates. I don't know where the time went. Okay, okay. It was time spent Quaking. Oh well.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-10-24T09:54:00-07:00

38 Well, I can't sayt that I have anything new to say. There's a tremendous amount going on inside me these days. I don't know if it's prompted by the upcoming birth of my baby, but it's good to get back to it. I feel like I've gone for too long without signicant introspection. There's things to change in me, in my thinking, in my feeling. I know where to start, but of course, these things have been there since my childhood, and it will take a lot of... something... to change them. I just thank God for bringing me to this point, giving me the advice and instruction, and the grace to make it happen. It's nice to grow up a little more, if you take my meaning. Some people can be 50 years old and still be a child. I feel like I've been a late bloomer all along. I wish I could have conquered some of these weaknesses, say, 8 years ago, but now will certainly do. ;-) God I love this life! It's silly I know, but I feel like I'm having such a good one, that I'll miss it when the trumpet sounds. Hmph. Nah. I'm ready any time. Beam me outta here!

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-10-12T15:52:00-07:00

37 Bought a 95 Saturn SL2 5-speed. It's kinda fun to drive, but it's Sue's car. She's always wanted a smallish white sportier car, and I always wanted her to have one. I like making her happy. She's a great lady. And she's having a great pregnancy: thanks be to the Almighty God! Made a new section in the "Me" area: my <A HREF="op-ed.htm">Editorials</A>. (And made my rant on hacking in the last update a separate page.) Made reference to some of the <A HREF="dionysis.htm">inspiration</A> for the layout of this site. Moved my "buttons" to the bottom of the page. I haven't spent this much time on a theme to have it messed up right at the top! ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-10-04T08:02:00-07:00

36 Just a quick update. <See Editorials.> Hackers: you want to do something worthwhile? Go join the <A HREF="http://www.kde.org">KDE project</A> and make Linux an NT killer. It's starting to look like it's achieving critical mass..

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-09-30T17:54:00-07:00

35 Well I have now officially begun the <A HREF="http://www.pentecostalstudents.org">Pentecostal Students' Fellowship</A> website. It will be a meeting place for college-age students, to share ideas and events. I won't be doing the bulk of the content creation there, but I will be overseeing the technical details.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-09-20T06:33:00-07:00

34 Okay, computer's home. <A HREF="technology.html">Technology page</A> updated. (See also <A HREF="palmpilot.htm">Pilot page</A>.) Talked about <A HREF="clinton.html">Clinton</A>. Bought a new putter; a Carbite. Got my swingweight scale so I can finally finish my clubs. Bought a new TV. And a computer desk (and a new outlet, which looks like it will precipitate needing a new electrical box. Sheesh.) Still need to buy a car, but I don't see any I like online. (We're going to buy a used Saturn.) Got most of the trim covered on my house, so I need to do just a spot of painting before winter. Sue's about done with work, and the pregnancy is going smoothly. We're putting her in charge of improvements and finances shortly. Metaphase? Man I need to learn Oracle. That's a lot to learn, but I think it will pay for itself many times over. ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-09-16T08:49:00-07:00

33 WOW, am I behind! I have had my computer at work for about 3 weeks now, and I just got word this morning that it will be one more week. I find it difficult to update this page after I have already spent 8 hours here. Please bear with me. I have one topic I want to write on, and I want to clean up the things I obviously don't have enough interest in to finish. More later...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-08-28T17:36:33-07:00

32 <UL><LI>(I thought I'd try a new news format, as my updates are coming less frequently, but still contain the same amount of information.)</LI><LI>Okay, training's done until we hire a couple of C programmers. (Then I'll go take another couple weeks of training along with them.) I can settle down for awhile. I hope to come back and polish up some of the areas that need attention in the next two weeks. I took out the section on "The Whole Story" till I can complete my thoughts. (I hated having it out there in such a raw form.)</LI><LI>I still don't have my amazing new dual PII 400 at work, so I'm going to take this one in. I don't know if I have a free IRQ, so I think I'll have to remove one of my modems for awhile. This machine should still keep me competitive at Quake II on the internet; that'll be an interesting experiment. They hired a new guy to replace me, and he plays Quake as well. We'll have to see how he stacks up... Of course, one of the first things I did with my new dual PII 400 server was set up a dedicated Q2 server as an NT service, to switch on and off from my desktop. (Rock!) When the situation settles out, I'll update my hardware page.</LI><LI>I think I'm going to cancel my backordered Pilot Pager, because I hear they're going to come out with a TWO-WAY wireless Pilot by year's end, and Arvin would still be willing to buy it.</LI><LI>I have a domain name registered with the InterNIC for my new Pentecostal Students website, but I have yet to get my site uploaded and tried out. I must do that this week.</LI></UL>

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-08-14T20:00:00-07:00

31 Whew! What a week! I've got this week to catch up and finish moving into my new office, and then I'm off for another full week of training. The PDM kickoff meeting went extremely well yesterday, and everyone especially loved the website I cooked up for it, including the "Office of the President," by which I mean the two heads of the American and European branches of Arvin Exhaust. Woohoo! Going to be boring this week though, because I'm still waiting on my dual Pentium II 400's (192 MB RAM, Matrox G200, 4 GB UltraII SCSI, 19" monitors, etc. etc.) Boy are these suckers going to be able to compile code. And play Quake II. Again, Woohoo! Maybe I'll just take some vacation. And I still don't have my swingweight scale to properly finish my clubs. Shot a new record 89, though (a 42 and a 47.) And my PalmPilot pager card will be in at the end of the month. Woohoo. (All this excitement's wearing me out.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-08-07T20:00:00-07:00

29 (Boy, I like the theme I have created.) It's been a very busy week. I am going out of town for the next week for training for my new job. When I return, I should have a new office, a new computer, and a new server to setup. So it should be another crazy week. B> - EM>Then, I go out of town for another week of training. So I don't know how much time I'll have to work on the site till the end of the month... :-( On the other hand, I have a laptop set up with FrontPage 98. Still, I will be working on my new internal company website next week...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-29T20:00:00-07:00

28 Realized the news is taking over, so I limited it again. Forgot to mention it before, but I have a little page of quotes that I have invented or collected called <A HREF="proverbs_32.html">Proverbs 32</A>. Lots of cleaning over the last two days.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-28T20:00:00-07:00

27 I am having an insane week at work, and it's going to get better before it gets better. (No, that's not a typo. I've been bored for awhile now; the change is good.) Updated the <A HREF="questions.html">Questions</A> page. (Note that reference has changed.) Working on <A HREF="whole.html">The Whole Story</A> that will detail what I think is the real wonder of the Bible. Working on a website for my church. Will post a link when it has a home. (Speaking of which, I'm going to need a new home for this site soon. I'm running out of room.) Arvin is buying me an alphanumberic pager module and service for my PalmPilot! WooHoo! Will update with stuff on that in due time as well. Played with my new clubs: they're great! Still have to dress the ferrules. Had a page on Finite Element Analysis all ready to go, but couldn't bring myself to post it due to confidentiality considerations.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-22T20:00:01-07:00

26 I think I'm done with the graphics for now. I am looking for a FrontPage web host.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-22T20:00:00-07:00

25 Work continues on my visuals. I think they're great, but then, I'm biased. I never realized how much work FrontPage can save a person until I started making my own graphics. Once finished here, I will start putting on some more content. A lot of material is here, just not linked. Plus, I need to fill in some of those "Under Construction" areas.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-19T20:00:00-07:00

24 Well, a theme without active elements seems to do alright on Sprynet, but now I am running out of space. I will have to get a FrontPage web host. Applying a theme seems to mess up bulleted lists for some reason, at least how I was using them. I think I fixed all my references. If you see a paragraph running off the right side of the page, let me know.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-18T20:00:00-07:00

23 I created my own FrontPage Theme. Let me know what you think.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-17T20:00:01-07:00

22 Whew! Never even bothered to upload the last edits; I've been too busy. This new job is going to require that I learn C++ and Oracle, both big topics alone. Plus I have to get all the equipment in: 5 new PC workstations and a departmental server. (I think all might be dual PII 400's.) Plus take care of my old group by installing two new top-of-the-line HP workstations, a new shared laptop, and upgrading WinCenter when the new version comes out. On top of that, the church wants a network and a website. I've got a lot to do here as well, so bear with me! Clubs are almost done...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-17T20:00:00-07:00

21 Just barely beating the buzzer to get this on today. Everyone should notice the changes immediately. Several spot revamped. I will be updating lots more...

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-12T20:00:00-07:00

20 Put up <A HREF="gaming.htm">screenshots</A> taken with my Canopus Pure3D II LX. Got that new job. A good bump in pay, plus bonus, and I get to implement "the next big thing." More on that will tie in nicely with the FEA info I will put up here, probably in the next couple weeks. (Finally.) Susan and I are both feeling a little queasy lately; guess it's the baby. Ordered clubs. Should be here Wednesday. Should be playing with them Friday. Won't buy a new house yet, but will probably get a new car. Oh yeah, WinGlide stinks. What's the point?

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-07-04T20:00:00-07:00

19 Opened a <A HREF="questions.html">new division</A> of the Religion section to deal with things I don't "get" about other religions and why; maybe someone can give me a clue. Decided to make my own golf clubs. Seems fairly straightforward. <A HREF="http://www.dynacraftgolf.com">Dynacraft</A> clubs look all right. Waiting on a <A HREF="http://www.golfsmith.com">Golfsmith</A> catalog, but will probably order by the end of the week anyway.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-06-26T20:00:01-07:00

18 Well, so much for Themes on Sprynet. I reformatted the <A HREF="technology.html">tech section</A>. "My Computers" will have to be updated, as I will finally get to get rid of the SGI in buying two new HP workstations. Made a new addition to the <A HREF="answers.html">Questions page</A>. Revamped the <A HREF="gaming.htm">Gaming page</A> with Unreal info.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-06-26T20:00:00-07:00

17 Lots of little edits and fixes.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-06-25T20:00:00-07:00

16 Happy Birthday to me yesterday! My wife is pregnant. Not that I wanted to tell anyone yet, but she told everyone and asked me to do the same. I am now trying a FrontPage Theme in the technology section; have to see if it works on Sprynet. Will buy a new set of golf clubs if I can ever figure out what I want. Bought a living room full of furniture. Need to buy a new car. Maybe lease a Saturn. Can't rewire this 50 year old, prefab house of mine, so we'll probably move. Am putting in for ANOTHER new job at work, which would make my second promotion in 7 months. Again it looks like I'm just what the doctor ordered. We'll see. Bought a Canopus Pure3D II LX Voodoo2-based video card, Quake 2, The Reckoning, and Unreal. It ROXORS! Unbelievable. Unreal even. Good $270 purchase. Getting 45 FPS with Q2 on the PII at work, 22 at home on the dual P200. BUT, there's a new WinGlide out that will multithread the video, so I could see a big increase at home. We'll see.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-06-13T20:00:00-07:00

15 Surprising even myself with my commitment to this project, I am continuing to tweak things. Updated sections of the Technology section to remove dated content. Finished a new Questions page on <A HREF="atheism.html">Atheism</A>. BIG CHANGES ARE COMING. And I don't mean that I might be trying to make a custom FrontPage web theme... ;-)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-06-05T20:00:00-07:00

14 Put up an interesting <A HREF="debugging.html">conversation</A> with John Carmack, the main programmer of Quake II, and how I helped him debug it. Made a <A HREF="archive.html">page</A> for the old updates that I move off this list.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-22T20:00:01-07:00

13 Again; call it a holiday weekend. Miscellaneous edits. Finally got some graphics converted from presentations. I think I'm about out of stuff that I already had prepared in some form or another. All new stuff will be fresh for me as well. Saw that AltaVista lists this site first when searching on "David Krider," but WebCrawler apparently still hasn't indexed me.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-22T20:00:00-07:00

12 Decided to limit news to the last month's worth. Worked on the Questions sub-site. <A HREF="beos.html">BeOS</a> experiment is over at home. :-( Good stuff that. <A HREF="linux.htm">Linux</A>, after three tries, is working at work. :-| KDE is compiled and installed. :->

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-16T20:00:00-07:00

11 Added some pages to the New Technology section. Apparently, though someone from the seidata.com domain asked for my viewpoints on D&D, he doesn't seem to care for them. ;-) Just hired a summer "slave" to do the internal web page at work. I hope to be able to rework and include some (non-proprietary) info about FEA off of it.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-11T20:00:00-07:00

10 Added a new page about Dungeons & Dragons. Check the site map for location. Be very careful... I was harshly reminded: LINUX IS NOT READY FOR THE CASUAL USER. You must sell your soul to Linus to get it configured to taste. On the other hand, Linus himself <A HREF="linux.htm">advised</A> which distribution to get.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-09T20:00:00-07:00

9 Fixed a couple goofy links. You'd figure with FrontPage, I'd catch these kinds of things. Sorry.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-06T20:00:00-07:00

8 Got a FREE copy of BeOS from Be. (They must be very cool.) Alas, I find it unfamiliar. It has made me wistful to try Linux again. Will update about it sometime.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-03T20:00:00-07:00

7 Added a <A HREF="sitemap.php">site map</a>, which you can also reach by clicking on "other" areas of the graphic above. WooHoo! Miscellaneous edits.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-05-01T20:00:00-07:00

6 I submitted my URL to AltaVista and WebCrawler for indexing. I can't wait to see how that turns out. I guess this thing is finally "birthed." I got a new idea: putting in interesting email I have sent and received.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-04-29T20:00:00-07:00

5 Hmm.. I lied. I have been smitten with the web bug. Mostly just polishes though.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-04-27T20:00:00-07:00

4 I am now pretty much done. Things to do: complete the Questions page, expand the technology pages, and make a page for my church. This is my last update for a couple weeks.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-04-25T20:00:00-07:00

3 Got the Religion section mostly done; just need some pictures. I will now be concentrating on finishing the Computer Technology section.

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-04-23T20:00:00-07:00

2 My computer was crashing when I played Quake II. I tried repairing the problem in all the usual NT ways, but it got to a point that the Modems applet in the Control Panel wouldn't even open, so... I totally reinstalled my computer to fix the problem. Turns out it was the PnP drivers for my SB64AWE. (When I installed from scratch, NT never saw that I "plugged" it, and I had to load the driver by hand, which must have left the offending part out.)

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00

1998-04-17T20:00:00-07:00

1 I got FrontPage 98 at home, and have completely overhauled the site. My focus is now shifting to the Religion section

2009-03-12T18:03:11-07:00