ok, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve mainly been waiting on migrating off wordpress to Hugo, but that hasn’t happened and I need to collect my thoughts. If you know me, you know I can be… Picky. I over-obsess about decisions (I have a spreadsheet with 17 apple varieties after finding out that Red Delicious were in fact the least delicious) to the point of absurdity. One of the things I’m most picky about are headphones.

I’ve been working with Linux for 20 years, and dd has always been that dangerous tool that makes me nervous to use. While trying to burn a series of SD cards through a USB adapter, I decided to performance test various Block Size (BS) settings, and figured I’d share the results. The following transfer rates were the result of copying the RancherOS from my local SSD to a microcenter XC 64GB SD card using a USB adapter.

Two issues: Builds and …Everything Else Builds have been a sore point for our for our team for some time. Common complaints involve: Reliance on a proprietary tool (HP RDP), which is windows based and owned by another team Reliance on DNS entries for the build process, which may take days to go through Lack of Tribal knowledge of the build process (only 2 team members are fully educated in it) Lack of visibility and documentation of the process and details Lack of centralized account management ownership Slow to resolve issues with build (no default jdk install, ulimit) Newly built servers are not up to date (patched) Aged distributions (SLES 9, SLES 10) require hardware-specific drivers on newer hardware.

This article is from sometime in 2008. I was kicking around the algorithms for combat. While it didn’t go anywhere, it’s interesting to see where my mind was. Battle mechanics are always fun… but how to calculate battle and/or damage… Base characters stats Fighter Snapper Snake Worg Fighter (lvel 2) Fighter (level 20) Lvl 1 1 11 19 2 20 atk 12 5 15 28 16 28 def 10 12 5 18 10 18 str 12 12 5 18 16 28 eva 9 5 15 28 9 16 maj 4 2 2 4 4 7 res 6 10 10 18 6 10 con 10 8 5 18 11 18 hp 50 40 25 90 55 90 total 63 54 57 63 Levelling lvl 1: main stats(str,atk) +2, +5 points 27

As I prepare to switch to Hugo, I’ve decided to go back through my drafts and publish unfinished works that have some value. This article was last edited Jan 22nd, 2013. The Moose is a special prize within the programming and IT communities. It is claimed, not awarded. The way it works is that you will catch yourself doing something stupid (by your standards), and you will then “claim The Moose.

I set up my first Proxmox implementation on my rebuilt gaming PC. The goal was to run proxmox on bare metal, then run a windows VM with hardware passthrough so I could play Elite Dangerous in windows with only a 1-3% performance loss. This would also give me a platform to work on automation tools and containerization. So how did I go about doing it? Well, I started by reading this article: https://techblog.

Found this here, which fortunately fixed my issue with 3 lines: sudo mv /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts_old sudo cp /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts_old/* /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/ sudo ln -s /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla /opt/Citrix/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts

I bought Xenoblade Chronicles 2 as a fluke- I’d heard the first one was good, and there was an article prior to it coming out suggesting that it was the game to play after Breath of the Wild. Well, I’ve put a week or so into it so far and here are the takeaways. The battle system is an over-complicated mess where you don’t actually battle, you just wait for permission to press buttons.

Because I don’t know when to stop, I’m going to start working on upgrades for my printer. 1. Filament Guide Apparently one of the common problems is that slack in the filament can cause tangles- the best way to work around this is a filament guide. The first filament guide I printed was loose- too loose to use by itself. The second style just didn’t print properly, even trying to print it 2 different ways.

After finally getting my 3d printer, I thought I should start keeping track of what I’m doing. Printer: Monoprice Maker Select Plus Standard Filament: MP Select PLA Plus+ Premium 3D Filament (white) After Unboxing it and getting everything aligned, I printed 1.gcode and 2.gcode from the SD card that came with it using the yellow PLA filament that came with it. The first was a small elephant, the second was a swan.

I’ve finally gotten the go-ahead to get a 3d printer. It’s something I’ve wanted for a long time, but I’m just now at the point where I can get into it. As I wait for my tax return, I’ve started learning how to use Freecad. So far I’ve finished the following tutorials: https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Basic_Part_Design_Tutorial https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Aeroplane https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Manual:Modeling_for_product_design https://www.freecadweb.org/wiki/Sketcher_tutorial (2017-03-26) It’s taken a bit of time, but I’m slowly getting there. With any luck I’ll be fabricating parts with relative ease, then can move on to sculpting with blender.

I’m currently investigating the best ansible module to manage redis for my server. The good news is that ansible galaxy has plenty of options; the bad news is that most of them are terrible. This is my first attempt to find the best of the bunch. For the sake of simplicity, I’m limiting my search to roles that support Enterprise_Linux (e.g. Redhat, Centos, etc). In addition, I’m going to be examining the github repos rather than the galaxy entries.

I’ve been tasked with setting up puppet enterprise. For numerous reasons it’s shaping up to be the project from hell (some the fault of puppet, but many that aren’t), but I’d like to share this little tidbit for posterity. The main issue I’ve run into is that our puppet server is in a highly restricted vlan with no internet access. Since puppet pulls its modules from puppetforge, this becomes problematic. The solution we came up with is to explicitly state the git repo to use for each module in the Puppetfile.

Once more into the breach? Sure. Lets see what else we can remove, and destroy some dependencies as well. Our changelist includes: removing “-d perl-Devel-StackTrace -d perl-Class-Data-Inheritable -d perl-Convert-ASN1 -d perl-Exception-Class -d perl-Compress-Raw-Zlib -d perl-Try-Tiny -d perl-Crypt-SSLeay -d perl-XML-NamespaceSupport -d perl-Archive-Zip “ adding -x “**Digest/MD5**” -x “**Crypt/OpenSSL/RSA**” -x “**/Module/**” -x “**/Test/**” -x “**/ExtUtils/**” \ updating iteration to 3 Adding perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-RSA perl-Digest-MD5 as a tentative rpm dependencies removing symlinks via vmunlinker script And here’s what I’m going to run.

So a bit of followup since my last post; I’ve begun reinstalling icinga and my other plugins and have already ran into some resistance- perl-net-SNMP is required by morgnagplug, and has a dependency on perl-Socket6, which conflicts with the vmware-cli rpm. The Plan I’m going to do the following: snapshot my current “production-run” version of the server jump back to my “package-created” snapshot add modules listed below to the exclude list rebuild the RPM save newest RPM locally revert to the raw snapshot upload the newest version of the RPM install it test vmware-cmd If I get an error, install corresponding RPM, then repeat until it runs properly.

Last we left off with a functioning vmware-cli and no way to replicate this in ansible. Lets fix that. We’ll be using FPM to create an RPM containing all of the files that were created by the installer (including cpan modules). But first, we need to figure out which files need to be packaged. VMWare aaallmost kinda makes this easy for us- each file it installs is tracked in /etc/vmware-vcli/locations (excluding cpan files).

ok, this has reached the point of absurdity that I need to document it. The Goal Install vmware-cli on CentOS 7 for check_vmware_esx.pl to use. The Requirements installation needs to be reproducible with ansible. the latest version of the cli, VMware-vSphere-CLI-6.0.0-2503617.x86_64.tar.gz The Complications CentOS 7 uses a new version of Perl that is binary incompatible. VMware doesn’t pay attention. CPAN seemed like a great idea 22 years ago. Unfortunately it didn’t keep up with the times.

It’s not that I fear change, it’s that I’m weary of it. This is a good example. I was recently notified that a new version of my operating system (Kubuntu) was release. After upgrading, here is the list of things that needed to be fixed, in the order that I found them: grub timeout needs to be reset to 1 second log in and see all of my settings, widgets, backgrounds, etc are gone.

Review nessus report, see Samba needs patching. Patch Samba. While retesting, I notice ESX has a patch that needs implementing. Find out they released 6.0 today. Rather than upgrading to 5.5.1 then 6.0, I look into upgrading directly to 6.0 While looking to implement that I research updatemanager, which I can’t use since I don’t have a windows server to install it on. So I look at doing it manually, and find out that I need to upgrade vcenter first, since vcenter can’t manage esx hosts that are a higher version.

every 1 in 10 times I hook up my Wacom Intuos to Kubuntu, xorg crashes with this lovely message. It’s very irksome. Linux linwider 3.16.0-28-generic #38-Ubuntu SMP Fri Dec 12 17:37:40 UTC 2014 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux Kubuntu 14.10 xsetwacom –list devices Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus id: 9 type: STYLUS Wacom Intuos PT S Finger touch id: 10 type: TOUCH Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser id: 16 type: ERASER

Someone take this idea and run with it; just make sure it’s free to use. I don’t have the time for it and it’s too great not to write down. The idea? A simple graph paper map maker. Nothing with fancy graphics like campaign cartographer or FantasticMapper, Just a simple graph paper mapper. The interface consists of two major parts- the map window and the collapsible sidebar. Main Window The main window looks like an unblemished minesweeper screen with a giant crosshair segmenting it into 4 parts.

*Random Crazy Person Thought of the Day: Ultra-specialized Geomorphs and Naming Conventions* Standard Geomorph A geomorph has 4 sides, and connects to all for sides via two entryways or “ports.” It looks a little bit like an octothorpe/hash with the center filled in (#). Base2 Geomorph Sets While Standard Geomorph tiles are cool, theres no way to close the system. To do this, you need to introduce the concept of a side being open (has two connecting ports) or closed (has no connecting ports).

I’m writing this as a general guide both for future reference, and to get feedback from others. Often when using an image manipulation program such as GIMP or Photoshop, you’ll need to create large swaths of consistent texture. The easiest way to do this is with a pattern fill tool, however most programs only include a small set of patterns. The good news is that you can make your own with relatively little grief.

Upgrade is not supported. Please use a production-ready database. If you’ve ever seen this message after a yum update, you know how infuriating it can be. I was sure I was already using mysql rather than the default h2 database, but everything indicated that was the problem. It turns out the error was caused when they replaced /opt/sonar/conf/sonar.properties with a default configuration. If you vimdiff it against /opt/sonar/conf/sonar.properties.rpmsave you should see the issue.

So there we were… Cragmaw Cave. We’d just killed a bunch of goblins and had located their leader, known only as “the big one.” The ranger peeks into the small cavern to appraise the situation, then returns to us. “There’s a Bugbear, a worg, and… a goblin in a jester outfit.” “Whut whut?” I ask. I take my craft seriously. There’s no way the goblin is a properly trained jester.

El Monterey, I have the perfect marketing pitch for you: Scene: Dining room table, happy music plays in the background. Mother, father and two children walk in door carrying fast food bags Father opens container to find a smashed, nasty, dried out cheeseburger. Music stops. Mother opens her fish sandwich to find it swimming in tartar sauce. Everyone appears grossed out and disappointed when suddenly there is a loud thump

I’m not sure why the idea hit me, but my brain has focused on it and it won’t let me move on until I write it down. Curse of the Goat When afflicted, a goat appears from nowhere and proceeds to follow you around, constantly bleating. The goat is immortal, never sleeps, and cannot be lost. It will keep you awake, give away your position, and generally be annoying. If pushed off a cliff or otherwise separated, it will reappear within minutes, often headbutting the afflicted from behind.

Google+ Comments Widget Lets see if this cuts down on the random spam.

The Problem Data was going in to my logging server and getting mangled somewhere along the line. To complicate matters, only the windows hosts were affected, and even then it was sporadic. The truncated data was in the middle of the string, which left me to believe logstash was trying (and failing) to parse it. To fully grasp my setup, perhaps a diagram is in order: NXLog -> Rsyslog -> Logstash -> Redis -> Logstash -> Elasticsearch -> Kibana When manifested, this was spit out of rsyslog into a temp logfile:

If you ever come across this message: Jun 27 10:52:52 detc6ut002 rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="5.8.10" x-pid="30899" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start Jun 27 10:52:52 detc6ut002 rsyslogd-3003: error -3003 compare value property - ignoring selector [try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/3003 ] Jun 27 10:52:52 detc6ut002 rsyslogd: the last error occured in /etc/rsyslog.conf, line 65:":programname, regex, 'ASA-[65432]-' ~" Jun 27 10:52:52 detc6ut002 rsyslogd: warning: selector line without actions will be discarded Jun 27 10:52:52 detc6ut002 rsyslogd-2124: CONFIG ERROR: could not interpret master config file '/etc/rsyslog.

Presuming I get my Alston guitar properly set up and playable, I’d like to try building another kit. Before I do that however, I need to figure out what I’ll need. A painting booth. Lacking a proper garage, some type of enclosed booth to hang the guitar in would be ideal- This video demonstrates how to build a temporary paint booth for ~$50. That in addition to a stand of some sort that I can hang the guitar from should be sufficient.

For Father’s day, the family picked up a guitar kit for me. Having attempted to make one from scratch (and failing miserably), this seemed right up my alley. The Unboxing The wiring diagram that was included was nice, however it wasn’t very useful since the pickups and switches were pre-wired and fastened to the pickguard already. This made overall assembly much less error prone. The mahogany body was in pretty good shape (as was the maple neck), but I wasn’t really fond of the coloration, so I decided to do a solid paint color on it.

So after the failure of Paranoid Android, I’m switching back to the Cyanogenmod 10.2.1 rom for my galaxy nexus. I figured I’d document the steps since they were so irksome in the hopes that someone can help me streamline this. Create a backup of most of my apps and their configurations with Titanium Backup. Download the proper google apps and cm rom for my phone choose to install rom, apps and backup via clockwork mod’s ROM Manager reboot and wait for magic to happen.

Note for next time- If I ever need to invert the alpha and black on 40+ layer images, this script-fu will do the trick in gimp. (define (get-all-real-layers image) (define (get-children group) (let loop ((children (vector->list (cadr (gimp-item-get-children group)))) (sub-layers '()) ) (if (null? children) (reverse sub-layers) (loop (cdr children) (if (zero? (car (gimp-item-is-group (car children)))) (cons (car children) sub-layers) (append sub-layers (get-children (car children))) ))))) (let loop ((top-layers (vector->list (cadr (gimp-image-get-layers image)))) (all-layers '()) ) (if (null?

I think a lot about previous characters I’ve created. One of the older chracters that I recall is Hock, a foul anti-hero who under other circumstances, would be a villain. While the description “Carnivorous castrated albino minotaur with hygiene issues and a wrestling fetish,” is a fairly accurate depiction of him, I feel the need to flesh him out and explain his tragedy. Hock should be dead. Not because of the countless people he has murdered over the years; nor for fighting as a gladiator for many years for sport; nor even for murdering his owner, a rich and powerful merchant with many friends.

When I began work on Megacosm Generator, I decided to look into Application platforms for hosting. My requirements were relatively low: Free Runs Python While I had started with Google App Engine, I found that it could not use non-python python modules (i.e. python modules written in C++), such as the Noise module that I was using to define landmasses. After examining several options, I decided to give Openshift a try.

Jackie has been asking for a while to convert her nook color (bnrv200) to android, so I finally decided to take it on (since I was on vacation). Rather than muddle through piecing together details from 100 sources- I took the “easy” route and used nook2android. Since I wanted to do this now rather than in a few days, I bought the installer rather than a pre-installed card. Should be simple, right?

I can never remember the name of modeline for some reason- I always call it a slug. Here is the proper syntax for it as found here: /* vim: set sw=2: */ Now the next time I google for “Vim slug” this page will come up and I can feel dumb all over again.

It is usually a pain in the butt to figure out how to find the DN of a user and I can never remember how I did it; Fortunately I stumbled across this link which gives the following advice: You may be asked to define a DN so that a service can bind to it to authenticate a query. Each user in Active Directory has a distinguished name. However, you cannot find it through the ADUC tool.

Long Version Backstory time! I’m currently in the process of implementing a new Configuration Management system. Since this will only cover a small subsection of servers, I opted to go with Puppet Enterprise (PE). As part of the installation, it asks you for your email address to use as a username- I used my work address. After getting it installed and configured, I thought it would be a good idea to auth off of Active Directory; I forgot to disable the internal account when doing this, meaning there were two jmorgan@foo.

First, capture a threaddump from your process (jvisualvm, kill -3 or jstack should do the trick). At the same time, get a list of the LWP threads from PS for your process ps -eLo pid,lwp,nlwp,ruser,pcpu,stime,etime,args -p {PID} >lwpthread.txt Once you have it, sort by CPU utilization and tail the list to get the worst four offenders: cat lwpthread.txt |sort -n -k 5,5 |tail -n 4 |awk '{print $2}' |xargs Now take the resulting list and throw it in a loop and convert them to hex (note, it must be lowercase!

Ever notice that your new EAP implementation appears to be leaking threads? Thread dump pointing to AJP? Does your thread usage resemble the graphs on the top, continuously climbing? Fortunately, the solution is simple- JBoss and mod_cluster are too brain damaged to account for Apache HTTPD timing out threads and closing them down, so it leaves them having open forever rather than have a sane (or even insane) default timeout. To work around this, add the following to your system-properties in your host.

The problem isn’t with your server, it’s with your cookie manager. Make sure you’re using the default Cookie Policy with the HC4CookieHandler implementation. Leave a comment if this helped you out. it took an hour of searching to figure it out…

Having your RHN/Rackspace ID available as a fact is very useful. Here’s an “easy” way to get it (just don’t ask me how long it took me to wrestle it out of REXML). # rackspaceid.rb Facter.add("rackspaceid") do setcode do require "rexml/document" xml = File.read('/etc/sysconfig/rhn/systemid') root= REXML::Document.new(xml) rsid=1 root.elements['params/param/value/struct'].each do |member| if member != "\n" and member.elements['name'].text == 'profile_name' rsid = member.elements['value/string'].text end end rsid # puts rsid end end

Here’s a writeup for a new campaign I’m putting together: Long ago, a power elven mage Hatane Baequispear lost a one-sided war with the regional mage’s guild. When he was eventually captured and executed for his supposed crimes, he left his tower behind. Frustrated that the tower was empty, the guild had it torn down. They did not realize that the tower was simply a door to his true sanctum.

So, you want to monitor your workers via SNMP in EAP 6 like you could with JBoss 4.x or Tomcat? Here’s the secret. This is the configuration for domain mode, but standalone is probably pretty close. Configuring JVM SNMP In domain.xml, you need to add the following system-properties(make sure to create an snmp.acl file someplace with super-restrictive permissions, otherwise the jvm will get really pissy): <system-properties> ... <property name="java.util.logging.manager" value="org.jboss.logmanager.LogManager"/> <property name="jboss.

Suppose you’re a good admin and you run JBoss as it’s own user rather than as root or yourself, but your devs need to use VisualVM- How do you give them access without providing ssh access to jboss or setting up jstat? Today I figured out I could do this: First, install the required packages to forward X11 traffic: yum install xorg-x11-xauth libXtst Once that’s in place, make sure that you have the following in your server’s sshd_config:

Final notes from day 3: Using an External Node Classifier(ENC) is considered best practice over site.pp There is a “puppet visual index” that has useful examples You can use ~> and -> to chain dependencies to help make things more readable. If I can figure out how to integrate it, I could use LDAP inventory tags to indicate puppet classes Hiera can be used to extract out data from configs Once data is abstracted out, I can put them on github and puppetforge the config_version parameter can be used to control the format of the puppet version (using date command, for example) There is a style guide available for puppet- it’s what puppet-lint uses.

Notes from Day 2: subscribe is the other side of notify the same way require is for before. In puppet.conf, under [agent] set graph=true for previously mentioned dot file creation. I need to take a look at concat, file_line and augeas. Use puppet parser validate init.pp to quick validate syntax. audit=>’content’ will track changes, even if puppet doesn’t care what it is. Setting default values in a class can drastically reduce manifest size.

I am currently in a training class for Puppet, which is a configuration management tool that I use at work. Yesterday was the first day, and here were the things I’ve learned so far: Puppet can actually create a dependency graph to visualize class relationships. By enabling “graph” in one of the configs, it will produce a .dot file for each host showing their dependency tree. Facter can almost single-handedly replace my linux_inventory.

So, you want to tie your jboss EAP 6 management interface into LDAP? Here’s how. This is for EAP 6 in Domain mode tying to an OpenLDAP server, but it should work for Standalone mode as well (I guess, I have no idea for sure). Open up your jboss-eap/domain/configuration/host.xml and Add a new security realm: ``` In the same <management> block as <security-realms>, add ``` and in your management-interfaces, change the realm from ManagementRealm to LDAPRealm: ``` and restart EAP.

While trying to configure mod_cluster for a new setup, I ran into a gotcha that got me good- first time I’ve ever seen apache httpd have an out of memory error in my 13 years of using it. The default behavior of mod cluster is to dynamically set up the basic context roots it receives from JBoss -i.e. foo.war has a context of /foo and mod_cluster will forward it without much explicit configuration on the httpd side.

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about a magical disturbance. This could be a number of things, from portals to fog to odd smells. During your travels, you stumble across a magical disturbance. You [see/feel/taste/sense/smell/hear] something [strange/unique/powerful]. Ahead of you there is a [colorless/invisible/colorful/red] [portal/cloud/shadow] [floating overhead/ hovering over the ground]. The disturbance fills you with feelings of [uneasiness/joy/revulsion], and yet you find yourself [attracted/repelled] by it.

So now that I’m back at an employer that does consulting work, I am re-contemplating getting some certifications simply so I look more valuable on paper. I figure, what the hell, might as well look at an RHCE or RHCSA, so I googled around and found Redhat’s evaluation exam- Here’s the results from the 80 question evaluation: Topic Evaluation Software Management Some Understanding Network Management Unfamiliar Managing SELinux Limited Knowledge NTP Server Configuration Deep Understanding Centralized and Secure Storage Limited Knowledge Web Server Additional Configuration Limited Knowledge Basic SMTP Configuration Deep Understanding Caching-Only DNS Server Deep Understanding File Sharing with NFS Deep Understanding Securing Network Services Deep Understanding Troubleshooting Boot Process Deep Understanding Tuning and Maintaining the Kernel Deep Understanding Enhance User Security Deep Understanding BASH Scripting and Tools Limited Knowledge Network Configuration and Troubleshooting Limited Knowledge Administering Users and Groups Limited Knowledge Manage System Resources Substantial Knowledge Installing and Managing Software Deep Understanding Administer Remote Systems Deep Understanding Deploy and Secure File Sharing Services Deep Understanding Managing SELinux Limited Knowledge Managing Simple Partitions and Filesystems Limited Knowledge Logical Volume Management Deep Understanding Essential Command-Line Operations Deep Understanding Managing Simple Partitions and Filesystems Limited Knowledge Managing Flexible Storage with Logical Volumes Some Understanding Controlling access to Files Substantial Knowledge Installing and Managing Software Limited Knowledge I wish they provided more feedback on what questions I failed- I know that I botched a chunk of the yum, lvm and SELinux questions, but I don’t know which scripting and networking questions I failed.

Lets look at another type of location generation: the Traveler. There are lots of travelers on the road these days. Perhaps its a traveling merchant, or a dignitary, or a messenger. Perhaps it’s a god or dragon in human form. Maybe a gypsy or a caravan; traveling circus or conmen. Perhaps it’s a mercenary who’s lost returning from a botched job. Maybe its a tax collector with a load of cash.

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about cows. Lots of them. A full herd of animals. Technically it doesn’t need to be cows, or even a herd, just a large mass of animals that doesn’t constitute a military unit, which we’ll deal with later. So a herd of cows or buffalo, or it could just as easily be a flock or a pack, gaggle or parliament. Where is the herd?

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about an object. A simple object is something that you could pick up and take with you. Perhaps as small as a glowing grain of sand on a dark deserted Highway, or as large as broken cart. So, what kind of objects are you likely to find? perhaps something mundane or magical, common or creepy. A toy, instrument, book, tool? What about a cheese wheel or loaf of moldy bread?

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about a building. Unlike ruins, buildings are usually inhabited or at least inhabitable. What you find will somewhat be determined by the type of building. What kind of buildings can we have? pretty much anything that you could find in a small town or city is eligible. A simple farmhouse, a brothel, a tavern an Inn. Perhaps a trading post, fortress, windmill, waterwheel or castle.

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about a trail. There are many types of trails you can stumble upon- a trail of destruction, a trail of blood, of slime; perhaps a bandit left a trail of coins or breadcrumbs. Are there foot prints, hoofprints, sled tracks, moose tracks? Is it an animal, a humanoid, a machine or a monster? is the weather affecting it? how old is it? Is it dangerous?

So what else can our locationGenerator describe? How about some odd vegetation. How can vegetation be odd? Perhaps its a dead zone? Scorched from a dragon? locusts have ruined it? A drought? Perhaps it’s unusually sized? Does it look healthy or sickly? Is there a creature that has contaminated it, made it better, or is dependent on it? are there corpses nearby? Is it grasslands? a clutch of trees? an orchard or field?

Lets look at the third type of location generation: the Sculpture. What type of sculpture is it, a statue? relief carving? stone, wood, metal? lifelike or abstract? is the artist unknown, minor or famous? how big is it? how do the locals feel about it? what is the lore related to it? Does it have any type of power? During your travels, you stumble across a [small/medium/large] [stone/granite/wood/oak] [carving//engraving/statue] of a [creature/human/elf/orc/man].

Continuing on with my location generation, lets look at another type: the Battleground. What do we know about battlegrounds? are they fresh? ancient? how are they recognized? is there lore? are they well known? During your travels, you stumble across the site of a[n ancient/ recent] battle. The field is [several/dozens of/hundreds of] yards in length and littered with bones and rusted weapons. Nearby you find the signs of a mass grave.

So my CityGenerator is cool and all, but cities aren’t the only interesting thing to stumble across in the world. So what else is there? What else would an adventurer run into that isn’t an “encounter”? I’m looking for things that people can run across that lead to encounters and further flesh out the world. So far I have them broken into the following types: ruins battleground sculpture vegetation trail building object herd traveler magical disaster military holy sign landform So lets start with the Ruins.

So, a major update. I reached out to both amitp and rhill to better understand their codebases and was able to get a rough map implementation in. After hours upon hours of grueling work, I now have not one, but three maps for use with my city generator- a continent map, a region map, and a city map. Still a lot of work left, but it’s looking pretty good.

As I continue to translate Amit’s actionscript to javascript, it is becoming increasingly obvious that I’m missing a crucial part of this codebase- the actual voronoi diagram. Since this is a level of math that is beyond my ability, I’m going to cheat and find another implementation. Raymond Hill has a demo and a nice MIT-licensed library that may be exactly what I need. After I examine the API, perhaps I can figure out how much the map.

So I have two ways to go about implementing this- read through Amit’s actionscript and try to implement it in java, or read though his article and randomly mishmash internet code together to get a working prototype. While it’s tempting to just swipe other people’s code, that won’t help me understand how it works. So, I guess the first part is to start with a simple HTML5 page with a canvas.

I’ve been working on my CityGenerator off and on for years; it’s finally reached a point where I’m content with it’s output and I want to move to the next level. I’d like to start generating an entire continent, then populating it with my CityGenerator. So, step 1- figure out how to generate an awesome map. I’ve tried a couple of things, including my last couple of posts on using gimp, but that won’t work for the city generator- I need something that can scale reasonably well.

Ok, so lets come back to the landmasses Click on the land layer and color select the land Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 1056316098 detail 15 turbulent x,y= 4.0,4.0 Select colors->levels and click auto, then OK If you want nice, boring land, you can color this with the technique below and be done. Otherwise we should spice it up a bit. With your landmasses selected Create a new layer Click on the land layer and color select the land Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 2925538520 (note that this is different) detail 15 turbulent x,y= 6.

This is a work in progress on how to create a nice, quick worldmap. Create a new image in gimp, 1200×800 Delete the background layer because it’ll just get in the way. Create a new layer group Create a new Transparent layer in the group called “noise” Use Filter->render->cloud->solid noise with the following settings: random seed 1056316098 detail 15 turbulent x,y= 4.0,4.0 You should end up with something like this:

So, on CentOS 6.x, I get the following warning when trying to use check_twill: [jmorgan@in1c6ut002:~]$ /usr/lib64/nagios/plugins/check_twill /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/twill/other_packages/_mechanize_dist/_auth.py:14: DeprecationWarning: the sha module is deprecated; use the hashlib module instead import re, base64, urlparse, posixpath, hashlib, sha, sys, copy Sorry, check_twill requires 1 option check_twill 1.2 (twill version 0.9) This plugin executes a twill script and returns results for Nagios. It is designed to be a simple method to funtionally test websites. (see http://twill.

I’m testing out D&D Next with the latest playtest and decided to build out a new character. I wanted to expanded my character list a bit, so I decided to come up with a new one. It’s a bit generic so far, but I hope to flesh it out. Varone Matto is a broken man. A soldier of a fallen kingdom, he has lost his king, his family and all sense of self worth.

Here’s the workaround I cam up with Configure JUnit reports to read status.xml and output something like this: echo '<testsuite><testcase classname="yourJob" name="yourError"><failure> a description of the error </failure></testcase></testsuite>'>status.xml Simple as that!

Ok, so here are some quick steps to make a simple map. Create a small image, 20px by 20px Drop solid black onto background layer Create layer called “path” With white 1px pen, drag a windy area Upscale to 500px, turn off interpolation select white area by color on Path layer select distort – thresh 127, spread 8, granularity 2, smooth 2, smooth horizontal and vertical both checked create new layer called floor add layer mask (black) fill in selected area with white on layermask hide path layer switch to layer mask of floor, select white select->grow selected area by 20px dropfill floor layer with white- this should reveal the layermask filter -> noise -> rgb noise w/ rgb .

For grins, I went through Tom Limoncelli’s sysadmin questionaire to see how “a team I have worked with previously” fares: A. Public facing practices: *1. Are user requests tracked via a ticket system? No, a high estimate would be 1/3rd of their requests are tracked. *2. Are “the 3 empowering policies” defined and published? No. 3. Does the team record monthly metrics? No. Outages are tracked by management, but that’s it.

Setting up a new NTP client? Can’t tell if it’s syncing properly? Use ntpq -c lpeers to figure out if things are syncing properly.

Dear Adobe, please stop helping me. jmorgan@mifhjmorgan-l2 ~ $ sudo -u morgajel acroread /home/morgajel/omnomnom.pdf [sudo] password for jmorgan: Adobe Reader does not need to be run as a privileged user. Please remove 'sudo' from the beginning of the command.

When word of Willis opening reached your realm, you were intrigued. There were reasons for leaving home, and the news of Willis was perfectly timed. Destiny, opportunity- call it what you will, but the ship to take you to Willis couldn’t arrive soon enough. Disembarking, you and a dozen others are led from the docks into the back of a covered wagon, which is sealed behind you. You have no idea where you’re headed, but the clop-clop of horseshoes on cobblestones continues for several minutes.

Nineteen years have passed since the end of the Mage war. King Vern’s grip over Willis has tightened like a vice. Few know what actually happened; after the failed war with the dwarves, the wizards from the surrounding realms met in the floating mage city of Korinara. They were never heard from again. Some say the archmage Astinathis tore Korinara from this plane of reality, leaving nothing behind but a black void.

Long title, but accurate. This was on a Dell Optiplex 760- dmesg showed only one core being found, cat /proc/cpu only showed one core, etc. sudo vim /etc/default/grub on GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT, change acpi=off to acpi=noirq save file run sudo update-grub reboot Now your cores should be found. Leave a comment if this was able to help you.

Since I’m home sick and trying to figure out how to do something productive with my time, I figured I might as well share something useful. The following are a few hotkeys I have set up in vim that I use when working on perl: map <F2> : call PerlCritic()<CR> map <F3> : call PerlCheck()<CR> map <F4> :!perltidy -i=4 -ci=4 -syn -w --add-semicolons --indent-spaced-block-comments --closing-side-comments --cuddled-else --maximum-consecutive-blank-lines=2 -l=120 -wbb=" + - * / x \\!

My droid has reached the end of it’s life, so I’ve gotten a replacement- the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. Pros Peppy– My droid was showing it’s age. It lagging pretty badly, regardless of what was installed or how it was configured. The Nexus can run several things without issue. ICS -The nexus is the first phone running the newest version of Android, “Ice Cream Sandwich”. A lot of cool new features that I’ve just barely touched.

I recently emailed my representatives letting them know that I think SOPA is a horrible piece of legislation and asked them where they stood on the issue. This is the response I received from Debbie Stabenow: On Fri, Jan 6, 2012 at 3:22 PM, Senator Debbie Stabenow wrote: January 6, 2012 Dear J., Thank you for contacting me about your concerns with legislation designed to fight Internet piracy. I appreciate hearing from you.

After trying to contact Ubisoft to provide them with feedback on Rocksmith (and receiving little more than an automated response,) I figured I might as well put my feedback here for all the good it’ll do. So here’s a list of things that I think they could improve. Why do I have to press 3 buttons to get into the game? Press A, Press Start, Press A… come on, I got 10 minutes to get my fix, and it takes 2 minutes to load up and get to a song.

With the purchase of any two ear infections and remember, pinkeye is still buy one get one. They’re checking now to see if they have any strep in stock… nope, out of stock. Oh well, i’ll have to make due with what I have.

For the last 9 years, I’ve been hosting this site and its predecessors out of my home. This is partially due to me being a control freak, and partially due to me being lazy. It was expensive, but the cost of a static ip comparable to paying for shared hosting someplace else. With this last move, the most economical way to accomplish this was to set up a Business account with WOW!

Suppose you have a list of 1000 IP addresses that you wanted to scan and inventory. If each IP address took 10 seconds to properly inventory, scanning serially would take 166 minutes… That’s a long time for a server wth 16 gig of memory, gig ethernet and 8 processors. So rather than that, I’ve decided to parallellize my scan into 32 threads and feed in the IPs as threads free up.

This is how the game is played… Here’s what I have installed. Task Killer – Kill background tasks when you’re feeling sluggish Wifi Analyzer – Find nearby wifi nodes and their source Lookout Mobile Security – Remote GPS locater and lock Titanium Backup – Awesome backup and recovery app Meridian Media Player – nice Widget player that only places a given directory My Verizon – Examine your verizon account WordPress – WordPress client for multiple sites Barcode Scanner – Scan barcodes, usually works pretty crappy.

yet again changing hosts. LE is getting too big for it’s britches.

Not too great, to be honest. Some things grew great only to not produce, while others were surprisingly abundant. Starting from left to right, these are notes for myself for next year. Parsley: Survived the winter only to be transplanted to a planter and die. Next year will keep it in the ground. Chives: Gangbusters. more than I’ll ever eat. Will keep them around. Cillantro: Seeded out too quickly, but produced well.

Jackie wanted me to reconfigure her scanner (since she hasn’t used it since I reloaded her system a while back) and I remembered what a pain it was to configure. A quick google search turned up the article I wrote three years ago, so I thought I’d do follow-up article to see what’s changed. Get the Drivers Since my last installation, things have changed. a bit. Many different distros are now supported, so we don’t have to shoehorn the RPMs onto the system with Alien.

Now lets see what breaks…

Some day I hope you’ll join us in the future, where websites don’t fail miserably for having the wrong user-agent string. Here’s the problem- I go to check my home value at cyberhomes only to receive the following message on every single page: Your browser is not supported. We do not support your browser yet… If you are on a Windows machine please use: * Internet Explorer 6 and up

Over the past few years I’ve been doing a lot of work with JBoss and tomcat. One issue we’ve always had is bringing some level of sanity to ports that are in use. My current situation is somewhat abnormal; we have 12 applications, each with two instances, each with 7 ports- that’s a total of 168 ports that we need to keep track of. Now, multiply that by tomcat, apache and nagios’ configurations.

The Following is an ugly little perl script I’ve whipped up for generating contact entries for Nagios; each file is read via a cfg_dir command in the nagios.cfg. This script is set to run nightly, capturing any new users and updating users and groups automagically. Let me know if you find it useful. <pre lang="perl"> #!/usr/bin/perl # read your ldap repo and generation nagios config files for contacts # and contact_groups use strict; use Net::LDAP; use Data::Dumper; # Set all your custom configs here: my $ldaphostname='ldap.

This sorta puts it in perspective… One of my few remaining coworkers at EPI made the following comment: (11:33:42 AM) Jeff: so many gone (11:34:10 AM) Jeff: jesse matt carrie lisa stacey kurt roger jim naveen brandon lee bink tristan jason jen sean drew radha VJ jackie andy noelle whip reedy jeremy keith ryan pankaj nirupa asad santhi rick limer meads mick (11:34:42 AM) Jesse: you should post that as a facebook status update.

SUBJECT: [#24413540] Suspension Notice CPU Limits Reached (1st Warning) Hello, Due to the amount of CPU and/or memory resources used by your account, we were forced into suspending the account. Please understand that we only suspend an account as a last resort and want to help you track down the cause as quickly as possible. Shared servers (MegaPhase, Prophase, and ANHosting accounts) are only allotted 10% of the server’s resources (CPU and Memory) at any given time.

Here’s how I stumbled across this (names changed to protect the guilty): Suppose you have 4 tomcat instances, A1, A2, B1 and B2. A1 and A2 run application Apple/. B1 and B2 run application Breakfast. Someone decided “Hey, we can save deployment time if we symlink A1 and A2 to the same directory.” Obvious questions aside (why bother setting up two if they’re going to be hosting the same content on the same box?

So the problem I’m having is with limiting LDAP users access to WebDAV directories; specifically, how do I keep devs from committing to the release branch. The setup is each of the large Projects (Project1, Project2) has a trunk and release branch; however some pesky devs try to ninja changes into the release branch, circumventing the entire process. That’s bad. The access should go like this (note this is a subset of the mess I’m dealing with):

I watch a lot of TV… well, I should qualify that; I do a lot of stuff with the TV on. I pay attention to the shows, but I’ll be doing other things. Since about halfway through November I started losing track of shows- mainly because of the stupid seasonal holiday crap. Here’s the stuff that I’ve watched at one time and lost track of: Dollhouse (Finished) Defying Gravity (Finished) Fringe (Caught up as of Feb 12th) Tosh.

So I’ve mentioned before that I picked up a motorola droid recently for my new job and have been playing with it relentlessly. One of the many things I like to do with a moment of downtime is browse the android marketplace- lots of interesting things in there (I browse just the free section currently). Anyways, in the marketplace is an app that looks like a star trek tricorder. When I first saw it, I downloaded it thinking it would be a neat little image display that I could taunt my friend The General with (he’s a big trek fan) when I see him later this year.

My resume says “does not wish to relocate.” 1) You’re calling me about a position in Iowa. I live in Michigan. It says Michigan on my resume. Right next to “does not wish to relocate.” You think I’m gonna bite? Even if (on the off chance) the job paid a small fortune… really? Iowa? IT’S WINTER! Michigan is cold, but at least there’s stuff to look at here. …Now, if it was in Tahiti you might get my attention.

(03:42:42 PM) Jackie: do you know what your son did!? (03:46:06 PM) Jesse Morgan: ? (03:52:19 PM) Jackie: we made it to KFC, he was good. He fell asleep in the car and woke up slightly when we got here. He went back to bed oh so well. That was my first mistake (03:53:09 PM) Jackie: he says he has to go to the bathroom. Much to my dismay, he already had and had spent a few minutes painting his wall and window

For the new job, I had to go out and get my own cellphone. Since my last workphone had been Sprint (and that’s what Jackie has), I figured I’d stay with them. My last three phones had also been blackberries, and while they’d been fairly reliable, I couldn’t turn down the chance to get a new, shiny android phone. I did a bit of research and found out there were only two android phones that sprint carried- the Hero and the Moment.

The second half of Ziggy’s autobiography has finally reached the finished rough draft stage. I was just starting the 3rd draft of The Rise when November (NaNoWriMo) struck, and I dropped everything to begin The Fall. Now that the rough draft of The Fall is complete, I can go back to revising the The Rise. It’s been a wild journey tracking this story; my initial vision had been a single book, but it quickly grew into something larger than that.

So I recently accepted a new job as many people have heard. While I gave 2 weeks notice, due to my access my manager was kind enough to walk me out that day (thanks mick). This means I’ll get paid for the next 2 weeks per my notice without actually having to work. I just want to be clear that this is *AWESOME*, not rude or lame. New job will be as a Linux/Tomcat administrator.

“The petrified dragon hit the ground like a freight train, sending ripples across the field and shards of stone in all directions.” It’s a simple enough saying, yet Ziggy can’t say it. Why? Because in his world, there are no freight trains. Now, while Ziggy’s brain has been shattered into a million pieces, and he often sees glimpses of other worlds, there are problems with him using the phrase. I’ve thought long and hard about the best course of action whenever I’m writing and this phrase comes to mind.

One of the characters in my book is a wizard who is only allowed to stay in Willis because he knows no “battle” spells- i.e. fireballs, fire shield, etc. Now as many DnD players know, sometimes the best offensive spell is a simple utility spell- Grease, Floating Disk, Shatter, Spider Climb, Sepia Snake Sigil, illusions, flying, haste, teleport, etc. So, I have a 17th level mage who can only have utility spells, and he needs help a silver dragon defeat a much larger red dragon.

earlier this week I crossed the 50k line on Ziggy’s second book. As I ramp down on this and switch back to editing the first book, I’ve been thinking about the different categories of editing. There are several different groupings- Technical, Stylistic, etc… I’m sure there’s an official english language checklist somewhere, but until I find it, I’m gonna try and write them up. Why? Because when it comes time for other people to edit my books, it would be nice if they kept these changes in mind and maybe color coded them so I’d be able to tell what is what.

So a coworker just shared a fun story with me- His bank, we’ll call it Pursue Bank, had a nice little glitch in their payment system. when he tried to change how he paid his mortgage. Said bank then charged him not one, not two, but three mortgage payments against his checking account. Then charged him overdraft fees. It’s nice to see someone else suffer from the bad code issues that I see on a weekly basis.

Migration Ok, so as the past two posts have hinted, Jackie and I have migrated most of our sites to a new host, Midphase. I compared 50+ packages to find a baseline for what we needed and rough cost. The initial round checked out Disk Space, Monthly Traffic, Uptime SLA, Setup Fee, Price / month, SSH access, OS, MySQL databases, Dedicated IP addresses. From there we narrowed it down to a dozen or so packages by eliminating overly expensive packages, bizarre limitations, required domain transfers, etc.

So the new move went well; LE is next up I suppose.

moving from unicron to our new host; using this site as a test. will be up sporadically. Update: this is on the new host; testing updates

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website easier for people to find via search engines. There are two ways to go about this- designing your site in a way that maximizes the right traffic to your site, and trying to trick google into sending ANY traffic to your site. There are some scum sucking bottom feeders out there who do this- Not only does it destroy the usefulness of search engines (like spam does to email), but it will often get you blacklisted and banned from sites like google for bad behavior.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m procrastinating. I’m stuck. I’m not even writing the book yet, I’m just coming up with the plot line. Perhaps sleeping on it will help. I can’t even write this without stopping every 5 words. Hopefully November will go smoother.

Just for the record, I WAS finished with the first draft. Honest. I wrote the rough draft for NaNoWriMo last year, chopped off two sections, rewrote the entire thing and was going to call it good. I just had a small list of things I needed to rework- polish how I discuss ziggy’s adopted mother, mention the king’s son, make Ziggy’s cousin and aunt more antagonistic, etc. There are 21 changes that I wanted to make for this book before I distributed the draft.

I’m currently on Ch 6 of 7 in the first draft of The AutoBiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise. Anyone feel like volunteering? Check out the Poll on the side and let me know. You can email morgajel at my gmail address for details if you’re interested. My goal is to have this wrapped up for November so I can start the second book. When December rolls around, I’ll go back to implementing the suggestions people gave me on the first book.

Time for a different battle- Ian’s online. Rather than be one of those moron parents who think it’s everyone elses job to protect my kid online, I’m gonna whitelist the sites he can visit, hence I gotta start working on a list of what sites are acceptable. Here’s what I got so far… http://pbskids.org/ http://www.infostuff.com/kids/a.htm http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=2601&amp;e=gamesByAge&amp;mcat=game_toddler&site=us http://schools-wikipedia.org/ http://www.funbrain.com/ Any other suggestions?

So our host for the past few years is shutting down the service we’re using, so our sites are looking for a new home. I’ll be moving the lower traffic sites back to my server for now, and looking for offsite hosting for literaryescapism. Let me know if you find anything broken on the site. Thanks vp for the past few years of service.

So my mind operates on analogies/similes/metaphors, and I often find it difficult to explain concepts to people without a proper analogy. Today I came across a great one that I’d like to share. While I’m using developers as an example, it also applies to DBAs and most of IT- it’s just more pronounced in the dev world since there’s usually so many of them. Development is war. It’s a never-ending series of fast-paced, multi-fronted episodes that take place in multiple theaters.

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now. So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him? First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account. Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child.

New saying: “Never attribute to ignorance what can be attributed to bad grammar.” …which is a corollary of “never attribute to malice what can be attributed to ignorance/stupidity.”

I caught some interesting behavior on one of our servers today- I’m using subversion to manage a jboss instance (there’ll be a writeup on this later, I’m sure) and caught the following behavior. Here’s the simplified setup. Two servers, X and Y. both of which are checked out of the subversion repository as a whole and fired up. They are clustered with each other. Each server is hosting a ROOT.war file (binary) that contains the site’s code base.

Preface: Kids, PAY ATTENTION IN MATH CLASSES. YOU NEED IT. So I’ve been spending a lot of time at work doing loadtests, and one question that keeps coming back is “what metric do we want to use to gauge progress?” We’ve been going with a simple throughput (pages/second), but that doesn’t take into account errors, average times, or samplecounts. You can have 30 pages/second and have the following conditions: average page takes 10 seconds to load (300 threads over a 10 second period) 50% error rate (pages that spit out a 500 error can return REALLY fast) 30 threads, 1 second page load That number doesn’t tell the whole story.

So last week in an attempt to update… something (*shrug*, don’t remember what), I upgraded to intrepid, which bumped me up to kde4. It was a lot smoother this time around, but there were a few bugs left… mainly the fglrx driver didn’t like me. so I decided to go full bore and try jaunty again. it’d been 2 months since initial release, so it should be a bit more stable.

So I’ve been keeping busy with the outside of the house the past few days. Cleaning the Shed A few weeks ago I cleaned out the shed, but I still have a lot of crap in there. This past weekend I got around to hanging a shovel/rake tool organizer thing, plus a couple of J hooks so the floor is mostly clean. All that’s left is getting the stupid toilet and sink outta there.

I watch Lost. From what I can tell, one of the appeals of the first season was the disconnect between characters. Their lack of communication drove the plot and drove the viewers crazy in the process. I’ve come to a point in my book where I know what the catalyst is, and I know what the result is, I just don’t know how it gets from point A to point B.

As I discussed earlier about AT&T Still Sucking, it turns out I’ve found a company that’s even worse- West Asset Management. Now, just to be clear, I gave these guys a fair shake- If a Vulture sees you lying on the ground crawling, it’s expected that they’ll circle. It’s their nature, I won’t fault them for it. What I WILL fault them for is continually calling me, trying to get me to settle even after I file the dispute charges.

I pride myself on being a geek, but every once in a while I do something that can’t be described any way other than “Nerdish”. Today I think I crossed that line again. 1) A while back I hooked up my old PC speakers (kinda nice) to my server in the basement, then streamed music through it. Well, this was fine and dandy for me, but jackie wanted “her” music.

Ok, so time for some updates: About 2 weeks ago I got my CPAP mask, and boy is it uncomfortable. I feel like it does help, but I wake up in the middle of the night with a small panic attack that this thing is on my face and end up taking it off. The idea is it’ll keep me breathing properly all night which means better sleep -> more energy -> easier to lose weight, etc.

I don’t wanna spend much time on this post because I’m in the groove for editing my book and still have to write two reviews for Literary Escapism. Gutter Clog Stupid birds built a nest in my downspout underneath the screen and wire grate that’s supposed to keep them out. managed to get it open, cleaned and happy before it rained friday night. Basement Clog When jackie runs the washer, the basement drain backs up.

As some of you know, I enjoy using Kubuntu on my desktop- I have been for the past two years. I’ve been using KDE since it was at 2.1, which was a lifetime ago (note- I remember how awesome 2.2 was in comparison). This past week the newest version of [K]ubuntu (9.04- Jaunty Jackalope) was released. Normally I wait a month or two before I try a new release of Kubuntu, but the previous release was so disappointing I decided to skip it.

and more importantly, So after… how many years? I finally have a real grill again. It gets up to 400 in under 2 minutes and cooks reaaally good. Scorecard: [X] Steak [X] Brats [X] Burgers [X] Bacon [X] Corn on the Cob [ ] BBQ Chicken Plus whatever else I can think of. muahahah

ok, so here’s the scoop. I was planning on switching unicron over to CentOS from Ubuntu, but during the prep process, I must have bumped a sata cable on my raid array- the result was me rebooting, rebuilding the drive and shaking it off as a fluke. A day later, that drive and another failed, which is bad news on a 4 disk raid5 array- usually it means everything is lost.

With the freakout of my raid array and the rebuilding of my server, it’s about that time of year where I re-rip all of my audio CDs. Since I don’t think mp3c was ever updated since the last rip (and subsequent mangling of a few titles), I’ll be investigating some of these new rippers: burn – Command line Data-CD, Audio-CD, ISO-CD, Copy-CD writing tool crip – terminal-based ripper/encoder/tagger tool cwcdr – Chez Wam CD Ripper

well, I guess sdd got jealous of sdc and decided to blow out as well- either that or my sata controller died. other way, BAD.

So, I’m home sick again. Fourth time this year I’ve been sick. Cold, flu, cold, Bronchitis. Awesome. Will I get to rest today? No, of course not. My server (Unicron) has been up and running for 2 years now- I got the parts right after Ian was born. I set up a nice software raid array at the time that’s served me well. I’d never set up a raid array like this before, so I wasn’t really sure how to monitor it.

So I’m testing a nifty new wordpress plugin… check this out: I wonder if it’ll work? update: no, no it will not.

Sick again for the second time in a month- no puking, I just feel like crap and have a sore throat. Jackie, Ian and I were all sick- and today was Ian’s birthday :/

I had this exchange with my son the other day: <me> Ian, go give that to your mother. <ian> no. <me> ...WHAT? <ian> yes. * ian walks towards jackie

Lets start off by saying Loyalty is Dead. Companies will do whatever they need to to be profitable, meaning they are willing to screw over employees and customers to please shareholders. Sorry, it’s a fact- it’s the way the system is currently rigged. Blame congress. What really burns me though is the blatant disrespect that some executive teams will have for their employees. Take the following example that happened to a friend of mine.

00:52 the greatest compliment I ever got was when groucho marx said “eh, clever boy- keep away from my balloons.”

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot on exactly when you should abandon ship; specifically, what event should be the turning point. So many questions to ask- is the ship sinking? is it sinking on it’s own, or is someone shooting cannonballs at you? Lets presume for a moment that the ship isn’t being shot at by anyone- instead, we’ll say that our route has been cut off by a field of icebergs, and the captain has decided “full speed ahead!

But could you please keep professional correspondence to complete strangers free of “SMS Shorthand”. I rly h8 wen u du tht.

Did you know, Ziggy… has no hair except for his eyelashes. It’s genetic. was raised by a tribe of hairy, barbaric gnomes. fights with two clubs. once helped a flying snakelady crush a landshark with a golden tree. once outsmarted a sphynx. has balls of steel crushed two stone golems without swinging once. lived in a Kender village for a year and left with more than he came with. has worn a sheep disguise on more than one occasion.

The Abridged Autobiography of Ziggy Swift has crossed the 88k word threshold as NaNoWriMo ends. I’m not sure if/when it’ll be published- I’m about 1/2 way done with the book and I’m burned out pretty badly. I’ll continue to work on it for the next few months, but I’m not sure when it’ll be finished. I’ll keep you updated as it continues.

In The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift, Ziggy gets the opportunity to fly a Gnomish Zeppelin. In order to get my head into one of the scenes, I’m trying to envision what controls would be at his disposal. Here’s the list so far… any additions? move forward move backwards move up move down turn left turn right landing gears elevator music selector running lights landing lights take off lights head lights tail lights blimp lights- ones that are on top of the blimp windshield wipers camel lights – in case you’re transporting a camel water pump emergency cargo dump ejection seat rejection seat (like an ejection seat except it throws you straight into the ground with no parachute) emergency break anchor up/down fire suppression system gas suppression system Kobold suppression system theft deterrent – press the button and it launches a rock in your face Anti-turtle system Bottle opener Zombie detection window heat shields Thermometer Altimeter Speedometer Wind speed Wind direction Moon phase tracker hand warmers shields- two bucklers that can be “raised” on the front of the ship

Rationale: Regular Haircut (me): $15 Regular Haircut (Ian): $10 Tip: $4 ———- Total:$29 Remington Shortcut Electric Razor- $29 ———- Total:$29 It’s paid for itself, and it will save me $30 every 3 months from here on out. I never really liked my hair anyways.

This one comes from Ziggy’s interview with Cobbwocket brothers for a job as a Swarzrok, which was a gnomish word that he didn’t understand. “So you want me to fly this thing?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around how essentially a boat tied to a large balloon would work. “Yes- we’ve had… problems,” Lumbert said, answering before his brother could. “It’s difficult to convince potential clients that our method of travel is safe and secure.

This is day 4.

Do Not Have Kids If: You value sleep You value your marriage You value not living paycheck to paycheck You value your sanity Cause right now Ian is fucking all of those up. Jackie walks out of the room, or even acts like it, and he starts screaming bloody murder. We tried letting him cry it out, but no, an hour later he was still going. Right now I’m thinking tomorrow- wait, today- I’m just going to go to work and not come back.

So I crossed the 50k word finish line 9 days into NaNoWriMo. How did I do it so quickly? Have a great, well developed main character in mind Spend October writing an outline- a gigantic, 12 section outline with 10 bullets under each point that covers 6k words and has a glossary containing all characters and locations mentioned in the book and a 10 word description of each Take the first week of November off of work Have an understanding spouse who gets that you are compelled to do this.

This one comes from later on in the story. Andy was dumbfounded that I was stupid enough to pour bricklayers mud into a trough and then take a bath in it. I wheezed the word ‘soap’ and he laughed. He chipped most of the stone away and was able to stand me up straight while he got some of the stone off my back. After a while he had to stop because his chisel was dull.

Kibbel clamped his hands over his eyes and trembled. In the distance the wagon creaked and groaned as the off-kilter hoofbeats of the single horse plodded forward at full speed. Slowly, the creaking and groaning grew louder. “OH GOD IT’S COMING RIGHT FOR US! RUUUUUUNNNNN!!!” I screamed and pushed Kibbel. He screamed as well and ran north as fast as his legs could carry him. I ran behind him a bit and gave my best impression of a dragon roar, causing him to scream and run faster.

So I’m 31k words in and nearing the end of the first week. I’ve done 2.5 of the 12 sections of my book. Jackie is taking off for the weekend so I expect to get another 10-15k words over the next few days. It’s funny laying out ziggy’s story… so much to tell, so many loose ends to leave.

7k words in and I realize I’m not writing this book, Ziggy is telling it. The words roll and flow in my head, pouring out like warm olive oil into a pan. This better be good.

first day, 4300 words in. did a lot of work on the house today so not as many as I wanted. tired. sleep now. 4 hours sleep last night. need more.

So I’m really lazy when it comes to creating cities for DnD, and this book is no exception. a few years back I wrote a samll utility to generate a city from a given xml file full of choices. After attempting to use it to generate some towns, I found it really wasn’t finished and the code was unreadable (it was perl after all, and city generation is complex). So, I’ve rewritten it in Ruby, and while it’s not done yet, here’s a good example of what it’ll produce- see if you can figure out what the madlib words are…

So I’ve been furiously preparing for this year’s nano, and thought I’d share this map. This is from the first part of ziggy’s journey.

So it’s been several years now since I first created Ziggy, and as I’ve mentioned before, I’ll be writing this year’s NaNoWriMo about him. The storyline will mainly take place before any of the games he was in took place, however some of the events will be retconned into place. I’m looking for bits of storyline and events from the DnD sessions, from IRC, and from the neverwinter nights module. (note at some point I need to decompile the module and strip out some of the backstory.

So I made the mistake of going to guitar center and trying out a epiphone G-400 on a fluke- I was just looking for a book and stumbled across the lefty. I’d never played one before and messed with it for a few minutes before leaving empty-handed. It got stuck in my head- it felt way different than my pathmaker or strat. A few weeks went by and kept thinking about it.

So I’d like to create a simple memory game in Flex, however my brain is stuck in music/writing mode rather than code mode, so I’m going to ask some people I know who are learning flex if they’d like to help. It will start off with 2 modes and a couple options- relatively simple, but in the future might move on to more modes (once I read their code, I may be able to tweak and append on myself).

Now that the Guitar books are done (enough to sell at least), I can concentrate on gearing up for NaNoWriMo. I’ve added the little image on the right that links to my wordcount. NaNo doesn’t start until November, so I have a month to get all my ideas down. This year I’ll be writing The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift, a first person narrative of the life story of Ziggy, as told by Ziggy.

So I’ve sorta been quiet about it on here, but I’m finally done- I’ve written a book! …well, design might be a better word. It was created for guitarists to uses as a journal for keeping tab for songs. I’ve included a link to my storefront on the top so it’ll be easy to find You can also buy a copy here: The storefront will also be used for other books I produce, such as my NaNoWriMo creations.

I go through these obsessive cycles where I’l focus on one thing and ride it out for a few months, forgetting about everything else. Since I started talking to Mr. Bojangles about guitar lessons, I’ve been playing nonstop. My calluses are up to 80% already (after being at 2% for over a year) and I’ve been looking for all sorts of teaching resources. I’ve found some great tools that will help me improve and allow me to help others get better.

Pam to me show details 1:15 PM (48 minutes ago) Reply: We’re on it, Jesse! —–Original Message—– From: Comments [mailto:cments@californiatortilla.com] Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008 12:59 PM To: Comments Subject: Customer Comments Name: Jesse Morgan Store/Location: Troy, MI I require urgent assistance. I lived in the Arlington, VA area for 18 months and ate a BCCB almost every day for lunch. In 2006 I moved back to Michigan. I miss the BCCB.

I sent the following message to California Tortilla via their website. I hope they fulfill my request. I somehow doubt it, however. I require urgent assistance. I lived in the Arlington, VA area for 18 months and ate a BCCB almost every day for lunch. In 2006 I moved back to Michigan. I miss the BCCB. Please open a location in Troy, MI so I may once again enjoy a delicious BCCB.

So while browsing fark, I came across this: Feeling the urge to become so angry that you go cross-eyed? Enjoy the most insane website in the history of the internet And OH MAN, did it deliver. Wow. Einstein was a fraud, heliocentric model of the solar system is wrong, we live in the united states of Cabotia, Rockefeller is running a conspiracy with Encyclopedia Britannica to remove all negative catholic articles, the WTC attacks were NUCLEAR attacks, the us constitution is condemned by catholic law, Tesla blew up russia or some crazy shit, and the guy who runs the site knows everything about who killed kennedy… argh I just had an aneurysm from trying to gauge the level of dumbfuckery on that site.

So guess who I just got an email from? Rick Davis, McCain Campaign Manager [ecampaign@gop.com] Dear Supporter, The reviews are in from Saturday’s Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, moderated by Pastor Rick Warren. The critics agree – John McCain’s straight talk emerged as the big winner of the night. blah blah blah You know what’s amusing about this? I did an experiment a few years back- used a bunk email address to try and “get an ipod absolutely free.

So I read this awesome article about faster than light information transfer between two photons and thought it was an excellent example of scientific method at work. Here’s the short version of what I mean. Scientists did something and something SPOOKY happened. They observed something spooky and say “How the hell did that happen?” and take notes. They review their notes and say “This makes no damn sense, unless…” and come up with an idea of how it happened.

(10:33:03 AM) jmorgan: if you have any FAQ-type questions for deployment guidelines, let me know. (10:33:13 AM) Developer Y: kk (10:33:17 AM) Developer Y: not atm (10:33:23 AM) Developer Y: ya know (10:33:27 AM) Developer Y: every time i see atm (10:33:32 AM) Developer Y: i think “ass to mouth” (10:33:34 AM) Developer Y: then i realize (10:33:37 AM) Developer Y: its “at the moment”

Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 3008 384 SN Margin (dB) 13.50 21.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 36.00 20.00 CRC Errors 14638 117 maybe? possibly?

Sat Aug 2 11:45:39 EDT 2008 Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 960 480 SN Margin (dB) 4.70 6.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 50.00 31.50 CRC Errors 47385 282 Sat Aug 2 12:32:18 EDT 2008 Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 480 416 SN Margin (dB) 8.50 7.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 50.50 31.50 CRC Errors 79196 557 Sat Aug 2 14:39:16 EDT 2008 Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1152 576 SN Margin (dB) 11.

Why yes, my internet connection is still fubar’d, thank you for asking. Here’s your epic fail for the day- my internet connection: Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1184 768 SN Margin (dB) 4.70 6.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 34.50 20.50 CRC Errors 2516 413 This image is my download speed since I started monitoring. Note that this is just what the modem is reporting, it does not mean that the connection was usable- most of that time PPoE couldn’t authenticate.

sent at 12:01pm: Hi guys, I’ll try to sum this up real quick to get you up to speed: Name on Account: Jesse Morgan Issue: Damanged Line/ Connection problems land line: ***-***-**** Contact Number: ***-***-**** Address: ************ I’m having line issues- I’ve called both cyberonic and AT&T (before I dropped their service for yours) several times over the last few weeks trying to piece together what is going on. For the record I’ve tried several different DSL modems and routers and have successfully removed them from the equation.

This is a followup with another developer about DeveloperX… (02:23:21 PM) me: hrm… (02:23:25 PM) DeveloperY: 🙂 (02:24:18 PM) DeveloperY: man can i go beat whoever developerx is (02:24:30 PM) DeveloperY: omfg (02:24:47 PM) DeveloperY: seriously they should get crucified (02:25:03 PM) DeveloperY: who the heck can be that retarded (02:25:10 PM) DeveloperY: to not know wtf release is (02:25:37 PM) DeveloperY: grrrrrrrrrr i’m gonna get out some 4x4s and iron nails ’cause somebody needs to get crucified for being an idiot

So AT&T managed to screw me yet one more time. The “loop link” is damaged, so the best Cyberonic can provide is 3meg/768 rather than the 6meg/768 that I should be getting. If I’m lucky, the problem with be with the illegally run line through my neighbor’s yard. If I’m unlucky, it’s a damaged like 1/4 mile away and completely unfixable. I plan on calling the proper people about the illegal line and having them re-run it.

*ahem*

Trying a new tool… lets see how this works…

Because it’s not nearly as gaudy as myspace and doesn’t have horrible music playing in the background. I figure if I’m gonna get roped into one or the other, it might as well be the one that annoys me the least.

So Unicron has now taken over the last of the webservices- smtp and imap. There’s still some tinkering to do, but I felt confident enough about it to move Unicron onto the UPS and p-nut off. Over the next week I’ll be making sure everything is backed up, but I think it’s now permanent. Hurray!

I migrated the websites from p-nut to unicron- this was one of the big projects in this migration. if you get a chance, check the following sites out and look for bad links/images. * morgajel.com * www.morgajel.com * morgajel.net * www.morgajel.net * ianhawthorn.com * www.ianhawthorn.com * myjaxon.com * www.myjaxon.com * blog.myjaxon.com

This will be a short review; buy it. What do you need to know about it? It’s a Zelda game, so the standard running around and stabbing things applies. You collect new items, piece together an artifact, and kill the bad guy. I haven’t gotten all the way though the game, but I have put in enough time to realize it’s pretty big. The controls make good use of the wii remote and nunchuck.

This was one of the articles I never posted for whatever reason… So I’m switching over to Kubuntu on my main workstation. The following is a list of things I had to tweak to get kubuntu working as I wanted as well as a rage meter displaying how annoying it was to configure. Project Rage level Time Wasted ldap auth frothing mouth 1.5 hours nfs mounts minor annoyance 5 minutes nvidia driver n/a 1 minute wacom n/a 1 minute Unfortunately I don’t remember what else I changed on it, so overall this is much less than there should be.

This article was originally written for draccus.net, then moved to morgajel.com. I’ve updated it a bit here to make it a bit more modern before posting it to my employers bbs. Apt-get is a great package management utility created for the Debian Linux distribution. It can be found on children distributions like Ubuntu, Linspire, and mepis. For those who are not familiar with it, let me give you a quick run down.

So Ian was born at 5:02am on monday (Fed 26, 2007). 7lbs, 15oz, 20.5 inches long. He is already carrying on the fine Morgan tradition of being an asshole.

So for those who have not been initiated, the Wii is the new Nintendo console. The cool thing about this console that makes it stand out is the motion sensitive controller. It adds a whole new dimension to gaming. I stopped being a big console player after the failure of the Atari Jaguar around 1994- it was a big disappointment for me. The next console I got was a PS2 in 2001 or so- I even waited an extra year to make sure it wouldn’t be a failure.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So we got in a fender bender last week and had to put the car in the shop- Insurance got us a rental for a few days while it was in. Fortunately, the rental place was all out of cars in my range, so I had to drive a 2006 Dodge Charger. It Goes Fast. Sadly, it also gets 24mpg if you drive like a granny, so you can’t drive it fast or you’ll actually see the gas gauge drop.

I have a horrible habit of remembering bits and pieces of all sorts of random stuff- this includes faces. I may not remember your name or where I saw you but I’ll never forget a face. Last night on Heroes they did a preview for episode 10- they had a 1 second flash of a minor character’s face that I recognized: and I spent an hour last night trying to remember wtf he was from- unfortunately nbc didn’t have the promo clip up yet so I didn’t have the screenshot in hand.

mmmm… one thing about being jobless and poor is I’m finding ways to save money. When jackie and I were in DC making lots of money and had no freetime, we ate out quite a bit. Now we’re looking for ways to cut costs and we’re looking for foods that we can make a batch of and eat over the course of the week- we can make a batch of stew and eat it for 3 or 4 days.

So jackie and I have been planning on going camping for a few months now with Jordan, Brad, Beth and Erin.. Since it was already paid for, we went ahead and went. We had 2 spots at orchard beach state park in Manistee, MI- very nice place. The trip went something like this: Friday: 10:40 am, went shopping together, bought an assload of food. 3 pm, got to manistee and checked in, put up our tents, and lounged

missed friday night and saturday due to being out of town, but I’m still walking. With the exception of those two days, it’s been every night for 2 weeks. we’ve settled on the big loop around the complex, the 3.15 mile one. I’ve been pretty lucky and found people to go every night- there’s about 6 or 7 of the guys that go with me, alternating on and off. I get home covered in sweat pretty much every night.

I haven’t mentioned the fatso walks yet, so I thought I’d bring them up. I found that if I can get my BMI down to a reasonable number, I can save $50 a month on my life insurance. All I have to do is attempt to lose 40-50 lbs. I’ve decided to start walking around the block every night to see how long I can keep doing it without missing a night, camping trips and other trips aside.

Had another weird dream. There was more to the dream, but the last 30 seconds of it overshadowed the rest. some parts were spilled along a highway and jackie and I were cleaning them up (was a large project, 20 other people doing this too) and I decide to grab onto the back of the car while jackie drives to the next part. But she doesn’t slow down. She keeps going faster and faster, thinking it’s funny, and I start yelling at her to slow down.

Jackie is pregnant. Looks like I’m gonna be a father.

Biopsy came back; irritated mole, not face cancer. that’s good to know.

ok, having another guitarday- looks like thursday is the day of choice from now on. 6:30pm till whenever. Let me know if you’re interested and bring an instrument. Thursday, July 13th, 6:30PM There, now you know.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

I’ve had this freckle on my right cheek for as long as I can remember. I’ve never really been fond of it, and I guess the freckle took it personally. Last week it started to itch, then swell, then get real sore… then started changing color. At first I thought it was just an ingrown hair or something relatively normal. I told jackie to set up an appointment with the doctor so I could have it looked at.

So here’s the problem: We’re setting up a new mailserver for our customers at work and I’d like for them to use SSL on their imap connections- the problem is we don’t want to get an SSL cert for each of the domains (there are around 30 and it’s constantly changing). After talking to the ssl people, they said that getting a cert for the ip would be the best solution.

Saw this on fark, worth repeating- Leperflesh provided both of these: Law of Fire. Any fire is the man’s fire. If there is a fire present, it is yours to manage. If there is more then one man present, priority of ownership of the fire is as follows: -if one of the men made the fire, it is his. -failing that, if one of the men lives there, it is his.

I have some weird dreams, but last nights was probably the worst in a long while. If anyone has a family history of stillbirthed 6-armed babies, I have a message for you.

So I was without an internet connection for 4.5 hours today- called jasnet, they called me back telling me the Wyoming area was having problems and they’d let me know when they fixed it. 6:30-11pm. What a pain in the ass. Oh well, it’s back up now.

So I heard a neil young song on the radio the other day, the “new” one… it’s a anti-war protest song. Now, I’m not really fond of the current administration or the war, and I guess it’s sorta expected that a guy that played at woodstock would be against it, but I have a problem with this song. He basically used the exact same tempo and beat from “rockin in the free world”.

So here’s the situation- We’re trying to consolidate our 5 mailservers into 1 master server with as much transparency to the users as possible. We have around 130 domains with a total of about 640 users. Some domains have one user, some have 50. The first step of the migration was to determine the new setup. Since all of the servers have completely different setups, we can be flexible. We settled on Courier-imap, postfix, amavid, clamav, spamassassin, squirrelmail and maildir.

so I got a lot of friends to play guitar in the GR area… I’m thinking I should invite them over for a “lets learn to play better” excercise. The best way to learn to play better is to play with other people- you learn new techniques, get practice, etc. So, anyone up for such an idea? wonko? ogg? yojimbo? silver? beth? rodarmer? when would be a good time? can we make this a weekly thing?

So I’m back in Michigan and holy hell does it feel good. a quick rundown is in order: got to MI alright like the new job movers broke a minimum of stuff, but had no common sense (packed a brush and a mirror together and put weight on top of the mirror, yet wadded up my spring jacket, wrapped it in padding, and taped the packing shut around it,) recieved our good within a reasonable amount of time (packed it on thursday, was unpacking sunday).

Anyone know where I can find an update for Lynx? I got this message while trying to test my printer to see if it was still connected via wire or if wireless had decided to work. Nothing suprising really, just amusing.

I’ve spent entirely too long trying to figure out what skill I wanted to focus on this year- what to “get another skill point in” as it were. I really wanted to try electronics, but I think I’m going to put that off just a little bit longer. Instead I’m going to focus on learning to play the keyboard. Well, not actually how to play, but learn enough to teach myself Chord Theory.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

As I mentioned previously, I picked up a midi controller. I’ve recently gotten midi on my sound card to work. now I want to get this beast of a keyboard working before I chuck it out the window. Here’s my current setup: Running Gentoo Running 2.6.15-r1 kernel from gentoo-sources using alsa drivers that came with the kernel all other alsa packages are 1.0.10 using http://alsa.opensrc.org/USBMidiDevices as a guide using version 1.

I caught a security notice about wordpress and decided to take the plunge and upgrade to 2.0.1. After the crap with midi I put up with this weekend, I wasn’t too fond of messing with anything. I bit the bullet and went through with it tho, and the result was painless. I’m using webapp-config and virtual hosts, so there was a bit of an extra step: emerge –ask –oneshot –verbose “>=www-apps/wordpress-2.

Well, right before I ran out the door for work this morning, I managed to capture the ever-elusive “win”. not just any win, but “Teh Win.” morgajel@draccus ~ $ aconnect -o client 64: 'Audigy MPU-401 (UART)' [type=kernel] 0 'Audigy MPU-401 (UART)' 32 'Audigy MPU-401 #2' client 65: 'Emu10k1 WaveTable' [type=kernel] 0 'Emu10k1 Port 0 ' 1 'Emu10k1 Port 1 ' 2 'Emu10k1 Port 2 ' 3 'Emu10k1 Port 3 ' While there are 6 devices listed, the important one is “Emu10k1 Port 0”, otherwise known as 65:0

No, not the popular social new site, the dns utility. Dig stands for Domain Information Groper (get it, DIG?), which fills the same niche as nslookup. As a matter of fact, dig is the successor to nslookup. Unlike nslookup however, the primary use of dig is non-interactive mode (which makes it ideal for scripting). Dig can also read batch files for more advanced executions, although I’ve not used this functionality myself.

This is my first real video game review, so I’m not sure where to go with it. You play a kid named Fayt with a sword who is being chased. There are a couple of plot twists, but for the most part the story is disjointed. Gameplay is spread between a couple of different worlds, and as you progress to the next world, they squeeze some plot in. They could have done more with the klausians, and they could have done a LOT more with the guys chasing them in the beginning.

a question I had in IRC today… anyone want to take a shot? 08:21 ok, explain this to me. 08:21 I wrote an iptables script that was pretty strict. 08:22 it only allows tcp and udp on 53 for dns, and tcp for ssh. and related,established for all 08:22 the defauly policy is to drop 08:22 when I try to halt this redhat box, it locked up while trying to shut down Named

so it sounds like the two new hires are discovering the joy of working for my old company. poor bastards. SPX apparently decided to have the christmas party early in december, so I didn’t get a chance to warn them… here’s what they had to look forward to… dinner at the smithsonian a live band Oh, but that wasn’t all they got- they also got the following: no actual food. sitting at the kiddie table staring at a tray full of sandwiches that the band got to eat a table from the back room when they realized there weren’t enough seats.

After being tracked down by a guy I went to HS with, I’ve decided, hell, I’m not hiding from anyone. I might as well attach a picture to the name. I think of it this way- if someone was to do a casual search, they won’t find a recent picture of me via GIS, but if they really wanted to, they could find me. So, here it is.

a coworker from my last job just told me the following (names changed to protect the moronic): <br></br>13:06 [ shaldannon] sooo<br></br>13:07 [ shaldannon] Bill got assigned to relocate a link to a form from one page to another<br></br>13:07 [ shaldannon] the "SPX Invention Disclosure Form"<br></br>13:08 [ shaldannon] JK asked Bill to alphabetize it under 'I' for 'Invention ...' rather than under 'S'<br></br>13:08 [ shaldannon] thing is....it'<br></br>13:08 [ shaldannon] it's the only link on the page<br></br>13:08 [ shaldannon] how do you realphabetize a single item?

oh, Lotus Notes, how I hate thee. you make me happy that the place I’m working at is replacing you with exchange. wait, I’m happy to use a microsoft product? why yes, lotus notes is really that bad- It’s a festering piece of crap. Here’a s brief breakdown of why I hate lotus notes: General Written in java, but not cross platform Closed source (Hello, IBM? I thought you liked open source!

So I had my first head-butting with Redhat Enterprise today. I thought I’d give it the run through, try to do things the RH way while building my command center. Since Dell gives away Advanced Server disc packs like candy, there were a few laying around. Went through the trouble of installing RHEL AS v3 only to find out that it not only doesn’t come with yum, but to register properly with their up2date network, it’ll cost $1500.

real quick mention of http://del.icio.us/ – it’s a social bookmarking system- see a page you like? don’t like managing your bookmarks? check delicious out. you can see your friends bookmarks as well- so if someone has a page that you find useful bookmarked, you can check to see if they have any related bookmarks. I like it for the fact that I move from computer to computer a lot and my bookmarks needs to be portable.

So I start my new job today, and I wanted to share an epiphany with you all that I had over the weekend. I never have to see kudla again! (don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense- it will to very few people)

So jackie finally got around to putting her recipe book into tellico, a collection manager. Now she can export it to HTML and share it with everyone so she doesn’t have to keep ripping a cookbook.zip file to CD and handing it to people. Update The tellico db is gone, replaced with opensourcecook.com

This article was originally written on July 19th, 2010, but never published. Documentation is another topic where there appears to be disagreement in the sysadmin world. When to document, what to document, who do document for, and where to store that documentation always seem to be subjects of contention. Everyone likes documentation, but no one has the time to document, and the rules for documentation often feel arbitrary. I’d like to open this up for discussion and figure out some baselines.

This concept is something I’ve carried around with me for my last 3 jobs, and since I’m writing it up for my current employer, I figured I should document it here as well. I’ve mainly worked in Linux/Windows environments, so you may sense a bit of bias away from older systems. It’s not intentional, just a result of my experience. Thanks to Mick for introducing me to this schema. The purpose of this documentation is to provide a clean-cut and straight-forward convention for naming servers.

We recently ran across a problem in production that we could not replicate in lower environments. Since this is not only a high use application, but an exceptionally “chatty” app, searching the logs was an excersise in futility (*one* of yesterday’s production logs was 6,975,291 lines long, with multiple logfiles per app, multiple apps and multiple servers). So how do you find a needle in the haystack? Get a smaller haystack.

My employer is currently looking for a sysadmin. If you’re interested, contact me for details. SR SYSTEMS ENGINEER ROLE IN FARMINGTON HILLS, MI Summary: We are looking for someone who will administer web hosting Linux systems infrastructure, including server hardware, operating system, enabling software, and application software/data for Internet-facing application systems. Direct other departments’ work on dependent systems such as network, firewall, load balancer, and external storage systems. Provide consultative expertise for our businesses to provide technical guidance, standards, knowledge and understanding of business and technology processes, and integration of technologies to deliver Internet-facing learning products and services.

New job, new laptop. Many utilities here are windows only, so it requires a bit of… effort… to get myself up and running efficiently. The solution to the windows problem is VirtualBox. I had set this up on my last laptop with little effort, but this time around required a bit more effort. Hopefully the instructions below will help others get up and running quickly. Disclaimer– your laptop may catch on fire and explode (or worse) if you attempt this… or something.

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.

So, I’m home sick again. Fourth time this year I’ve been sick. Cold, flu, cold, Bronchitis. Awesome. Will I get to rest today? No, of course not. My server (Unicron) has been up and running for 2 years now- I got the parts right after Ian was born. I set up a nice software raid array at the time that’s served me well. I’d never set up a raid array like this before, so I wasn’t really sure how to monitor it.

So I’m testing a nifty new wordpress plugin… check this out: I wonder if it’ll work? update: no, no it will not.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

anyone know of any good jabber clients for the blackberry? I’ve tried a couple with little luck, and most of them cost more than I can afford for this test. Features required Must run on BlackBerry 8703e v4.1.0x Connection server can be configured differently than jid address (i.e. you@morgajel.net for jid, jabber.morgajel.net for connection server.) This rules out Mobber as far as I can tell Requires SSL/TLS Non-strict cert checking Let me know if you have any suggestions.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

Had an amusing conversation with a developer at work that had the feeling of an abbot and costello bit. I’m leaving his name out of this to protect him, but he’s read this site before and will know instantly that it’s him. The conversation revolves around our new continuous integration system, and how the terminology has changed. BTW, QA=Quality Assurance, UAT= User Acceptance Testing (staging) (10:50:50 AM) morgajel: ok, so after talking to mick, it looks like my suspicions were correct

Can’t locate object method “seek” via package “File::Temp” at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/MIME/Parser.pm line 816. The underlying problem is perl was updated and overwrote the “correct” version of File::Temp that you probably installed when setting up RT and forgot about. To fix this issue <br></br>cpan install File::Temp<br></br>/etc/init.d/httpd restart<br></br> MAKE SURE TO RESTART APACHE! I didn’t, and it cost me probably 2 hours of screwing around with it. I’m posting this because http://www.nabble.com/RT-3.6.5-and-Sendmail-error-and-looks-like-perl-error-td15989015.html Didn’t really mention what the final working solution was.

For those of you who can’t get those three to work together, make sure you specify both TLS_CACERT tls_cacertfile- I didn’t and it caused me grief.

I recently wrote a nice little script in ruby for ldapifying new ubuntu servers- all the server needs is a ssh key set up for root, the rest is cake… jmorg@util3:~/base_configs# ./ldapify -h Usage: ldapify --install hostname [$options] ldapify --check hostname ldapify --uninstall hostname --install hostname hostname to ldapify(foo.pub.local) --uninstall hostname removes ldapification from hostname -a, --access_group access_group access_group that has access to hostname --no_group_dn No access_group limitations- use with caution.

Whoops. This happened after work on Tuesday. Jackie was at home. I was on a small service drive that T’d into a 4.5 lane road that was fairly busy. looked left, saw a car with it’s right turn signal on in the right lane. looked right, say a red light. looked left, saw the car with the blinker slowing down as if to turn down the road I was on. looked right, saw the red light turn green, meaning I had about 10 seconds to react.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

Ok, trying out Kubuntu on my new work laptop and I’m liking it quite a bit- the only problems I’ve had so far are with Hibernate (which I think is self- inflicted) and wireless stuff. I’ve figured out the wireless stuff and wanted to mention it for the people out there having the same troubles as I did. First up, a little info on my setup: Model: IBM T42 (note, not the T42p, which is awesome, the crappier model)

So after 3 months of unemployment, I was offered a job over in Troy, so I’ll be moving about 3 hours away from Grand Rapids. The position is for a linux sys admin. Unlike the last place, this one seems like a winner from the get go- much more lively and has a (for lack of a better term) DC vitality, compared to companies in Grand Rapids which sort of feel like they’re recycling coffee grounds and requesting employees bring in their own toilet paper.

So I just got hit with a new low… Looks like I’m inelegible for unemployment. Apparently I haven’t been in michigan long enough to warrant helping me out. when I look back on my life, this will be the moment when I said “this is as bad as it got.” I’m hoping it doesn’t get much worse at least. The depression that I’m sitting in right how is the soul crushing type where you lose the will to do anything.

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

so the devs are having a hell of a time with the new dev server- it’s constantly locking up on certain threads for 30-45 seconds. apache mainly, but occasionally grep and other things. It appears to be completely random. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find the problem, and I think I got it nailed down thanks to a post on the gentoo forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-189180-highlight-writethru.html) that said to change some settings in the raid card’s firmware… I tested this on the prod machine since it’s not in use yet(they’re both dell 2850’s with the lsi megaraid cards) and benchmarked before and after with bonnie++… here are the results(- is original, + is new):

So we just got these shiny new Netgear GSM7224 layer two 24 port managed switches, and I went about setting up MRTG. mrtg and snmp are one of my weak areas- I’m not too good at networking stuff to begin with, and mrtg has always seemed just out of my reach. Well, between rewiring half of the serverroom and threatening mrtg with a stick, I got it all working! now I can finally monitor network traffic and figure out which one of these network cards is a chatty cathy.

I have a habit of moving stuff to my website’s root directory and sending temp links to people. I’ve recently went about cleaning it out (which I do about once a year) and found some interesting bits… Here’s a job posting I wrote for a position we were hiring for at a previous employer: We're currently looking for a Mid-Upper level Perl Web Application Developer. If FrontPage or Dreamweaver is on your resume, please do not reply.

So I learned something new today. Apparently our UPS is rated to 3K, and we just added 3 new machines to it, putting it at 4 out of 5 bars for load. These three new machines are running gentoo on dual-xeon processors. I made the mistake of attempting to recompile subversion on all three machines at the same time. Suddenly, all the servers stopped responding. When we went into the serverroom, all the machines in the dell rack were off- the UPS had tripped.

ran into a problem with mod_rewrite and IE- a real one this time. IE was choking on files that were being downloaded via mod_rewrite. same script worked without rewrite, died with it. Did some research and with a lot of help from noodl of #apache figured out it was because mod_rewrite adds a “Vary: Host” line to the header, which apparently IE chokes on. loaded the header module in apache and added “Header unset Vary” after my rewrite and all is good- cvs, pdf, zip all download properly.

So apparently my problem yesterday with aw_foo.jmorgan.example.com didn’t work because _ is not a valid dns character. Every-freakin-other browser allows it to work except IE. Figures- the one time microsoft didn’t embrace and extend and did the minimum amount of work, it bit me in the ass.

ok, here’s my latest bout of IE stupidity. The new system I’m setting up will have several developers working on several projects. We’d like to be able to use subversion to manage the projects without dealing with pathname stupidity, hence all new projects should have / as their base since they will later become full fledge sites. So, how do we do that? I had the simple idea of mapping http://foo.

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

Holy crap, welcome to 1980. The FreeBSD install is going to take a little bit longer than I thought. I booted off the Install CD and the first thing I noticed was the lack of color. Not shiny pretty GUI color, but angry fruit salad color. As pages of white text on black blackground whizzed past my screen, nothing stuck out as important; I noticed no dividers between sections. This is a very small, trivial thing, but it is nice.

Well, the new job is gonna have a bucket full of FreeBSD servers. It’s been a while since I tinkered with FBSD, so it’ll be a challenge. To prepare for that challenge, I’ve decided to convert Draccus (my workstation) to BSD. The following is a list of hurdles I’ll need to surpass before I start in April: get draccus up and running get KDE up and running get Gimp working get my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet working get my Logitech Quickcam working get my m-audio keyboard working get rosegarden recording again burn a cd-rw burn a dvd+rw I’m presuming I’ll have no problems with my Nvidia 6600 GT, Audigy 4 soundcard, or other common hardware.

For the few people who haven’t heard yet, Jackie and I will be returning to Grand Rapids. I was offered a position at a local GR company as a Network Administrator. The company seems really nice from what I saw last friday. I can’t describe how much I really hate the DC area. It’s just too crowded for me. Among the many benefits of this move, Jackie and I will:

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

Yeah you, the jackasses who decided that the middle of a crowded elevator lobby was a good place to stop and chat. While I understand it’s of dire importantance you tell each other about what your coworkers said to annoy your other coworkers, could you please NOT STAND IN FRONT OF THE ELEVATOR CALL BUTTONS while doing it? I know there’s not much space there, with it being lunch rush and 50 other people crammed into this small space, but we all have to make sacrifices.

So i’m getting slapped around a bit by karma right now. I recently moved our DNS services to two new servers. everything appeared to be fine… I got cocky. Now it turns out they’re not behaving like proper slaves for certain domains. fore xample, we run foo.com, bar.com and bar.net as the primary DNS. We ALSO act as slaves for baz.org… except we’re not anymore. For some reason, we’re not getting updates from the primary DNS for baz.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So I woke up at 2:30am with severe back pain- the stabbing kind that makes it so you can’t breathe unless you sit/stand up. When THEY WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hired me, they brought me down from Michigan and paid to have our stuff moved. Long story short, their movers of choice were incompetent, and it ended up taking a month to get my bed. Since we were dead broke, I couldn’t afford a spare, and the cats kept popping the air mattress.

So in order to keep this job, I have to be cleared for a position of public trust. This means I have to document Every Place I’ve lived in the last 7 years Every Place I’ve workd in the last 7 years A Contact for each one of the above 3 people who know me well. So if I start asking weird questions, and you get calls from the Feds, don’t freak out- I’m not going to jail- it’s just clearance.

Yesterday I turned in my resignation. October 21st will be my last day. I was offered a job at another place, a big Gov’t contractor in the US as the Lead Linux Systems Administrator. The pay is better and the work sounds more fun. Just wanted to share that with you. Perhaps later down the road I’ll release my reasons for actually leaving- you know, the dirty secrets that disgusted me to the point of find another job.

So, Today we did the the rest of the training, which was just a big Q&A. Whether or not this is the right choice of software, I’ve given up caring- I’m not in a position to make the decision, and the decision will be made for political, not technical reasons which I will have no effect on. So I’ve quit agonizing about it. You could say, I suppose, [meme] I don’t care.

Alright, yesterday was a long day. training started at 8:30am, went till 5:30pm. What did I learn? That’s a damn good question. I learned how to use a web interface for extremely complicated tracking program . My biggest complaint is this training cannot be abstracted to be useful on other projects; it’s basically a 2 day training course on an obscure application. What I liked: clean interface, worked in both Firefox and IE.

So I’m being “sent” to training today and tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes. The training is for some business modelling software, or something. I’m still not sure what it does or how we’re going to use it. Meh, I’ll find out sometime today.

Alright, so it’s been a month and a half since Pete left SPX. What have I been up to? GLAD YOU ASKED. Update- upon some sage advice from the boat guy and a phool, I’d like to express how cool all the stuff I’m doing is.

This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

So while migrating some content to a Linode instance, I attempted to fire up screen ran face first into a brick wall. For context, this was on an up-to-date CentOS 5.5 instance running screen-4.0.3-3.el5. Steps to reproduce: logged in as my normal user typed in “screen” and hit enter console went blank for 5 seconds previous content returned, along with “[screen is terminating]” and my normal command prompt. Screen didn’t work for any regular users, however it did work for root.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

New job, new laptop. Many utilities here are windows only, so it requires a bit of… effort… to get myself up and running efficiently. The solution to the windows problem is VirtualBox. I had set this up on my last laptop with little effort, but this time around required a bit more effort. Hopefully the instructions below will help others get up and running quickly. Disclaimer– your laptop may catch on fire and explode (or worse) if you attempt this… or something.

die you wretched pc speaker beep that is so loud when I use the find bar in firefox or tab complete in the cli and nothing is found! rmmod pcspkr echo blacklist pcspkr >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist aaah, glorious silence.

Can’t locate object method “seek” via package “File::Temp” at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/MIME/Parser.pm line 816. The underlying problem is perl was updated and overwrote the “correct” version of File::Temp that you probably installed when setting up RT and forgot about. To fix this issue <br></br>cpan install File::Temp<br></br>/etc/init.d/httpd restart<br></br> MAKE SURE TO RESTART APACHE! I didn’t, and it cost me probably 2 hours of screwing around with it. I’m posting this because http://www.nabble.com/RT-3.6.5-and-Sendmail-error-and-looks-like-perl-error-td15989015.html Didn’t really mention what the final working solution was.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

For those of you who can’t get those three to work together, make sure you specify both TLS_CACERT tls_cacertfile- I didn’t and it caused me grief.

Ok, I’ve done it twice now, I think I’ve figured it out. Get the source files from Epson’s linux website; I don’t recall the url but these are the files you need (or newer, no idea what the future holds): iscan-2.3.0-1.c2.i386.rpm iscan-plugin-gt-f700-2.0.0-0.c2.i386.rpm Use alien to convert them to debs (normally bad, but acceptable this time around). Install both newly created deb packages with dpkg: dpkg -i iscan_2.3.0-2_i386.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.0.0-1_i386.deb Install sane, sane-utils:

So I got the new hardware parts, so I figured I might as well document the process. I’ve decided on the name Unicron because it’s the biggest PC I’ve ever owned. I’ve been waiting over a year to really rebuild my servers- since I ran out of ide connectors in Pablo, I knew something had to change. The new case is MASSIVE- it’s sitting next to jackie’s machine and is a good 6″ longer and 3″ higher.

Diff is a handy little command used to compare two text files- useful if trying to determine what’s changed in different versions of files, used by subversion to show what files have been changed, and can even create patch files for updating sourcecode. So what are some of the more useful flags? * -i lets us ignore any capitalization changes * -b lets us ignore any spacing changes * -B ignore blank lines

Route is one of these hate-inspiring, jaw droppingly obtuse programs that you always get the syntax wrong on. The purpose is simple enough- show and/or change the routing table. The most common uses are: route – shows the current entries route add – adds a new entry route del – removes an entry route flush– removes all entries Checking out your Routes The simplest use of route is to simply run route at the command line:

Ok, trying out Kubuntu on my new work laptop and I’m liking it quite a bit- the only problems I’ve had so far are with Hibernate (which I think is self- inflicted) and wireless stuff. I’ve figured out the wireless stuff and wanted to mention it for the people out there having the same troubles as I did. First up, a little info on my setup: Model: IBM T42 (note, not the T42p, which is awesome, the crappier model)

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

so the devs are having a hell of a time with the new dev server- it’s constantly locking up on certain threads for 30-45 seconds. apache mainly, but occasionally grep and other things. It appears to be completely random. I’ve been pulling my hair out trying to find the problem, and I think I got it nailed down thanks to a post on the gentoo forums (http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-189180-highlight-writethru.html) that said to change some settings in the raid card’s firmware… I tested this on the prod machine since it’s not in use yet(they’re both dell 2850’s with the lsi megaraid cards) and benchmarked before and after with bonnie++… here are the results(- is original, + is new):

I have a habit of moving stuff to my website’s root directory and sending temp links to people. I’ve recently went about cleaning it out (which I do about once a year) and found some interesting bits… Here’s a job posting I wrote for a position we were hiring for at a previous employer: We're currently looking for a Mid-Upper level Perl Web Application Developer. If FrontPage or Dreamweaver is on your resume, please do not reply.

So I learned something new today. Apparently our UPS is rated to 3K, and we just added 3 new machines to it, putting it at 4 out of 5 bars for load. These three new machines are running gentoo on dual-xeon processors. I made the mistake of attempting to recompile subversion on all three machines at the same time. Suddenly, all the servers stopped responding. When we went into the serverroom, all the machines in the dell rack were off- the UPS had tripped.

If you need to paste into vim from somewhere else, and your code has tabs or spaces in it, you’ll notice that vim may add extra tabs. see, vim doesn’t see it as a paste event, it sees it as “you typing really fast”- and one thing vim does will is auto-indent. The problem is when you paste, you don’t want auto-indentation because your code is already indented. to temporarily turn off auto-indenting, try this from insert mode:

ran into a problem with mod_rewrite and IE- a real one this time. IE was choking on files that were being downloaded via mod_rewrite. same script worked without rewrite, died with it. Did some research and with a lot of help from noodl of #apache figured out it was because mod_rewrite adds a “Vary: Host” line to the header, which apparently IE chokes on. loaded the header module in apache and added “Header unset Vary” after my rewrite and all is good- cvs, pdf, zip all download properly.

ok, here’s my latest bout of IE stupidity. The new system I’m setting up will have several developers working on several projects. We’d like to be able to use subversion to manage the projects without dealing with pathname stupidity, hence all new projects should have / as their base since they will later become full fledge sites. So, how do we do that? I had the simple idea of mapping http://foo.

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories.

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

My friend k_f sent me a link containing the resignation of the debian stable maintainer. I can completely see where he’s coming from- the Debian crowd seems to have collected all of the antisocial jerks over the years. I sent him the following letter of support: Hi there, I caught your post to the debian team’s mailing list from a friend (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00008.html ). As a former debian user, I wanted to let you know I fully support you.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

I finally got around to modifying the sa-stats script k_f gave me- it now works on my setup of postfix+gentoo+spamd. I unzipped, cat’ed and parsed my logs for the last 7 days and came up with the following stats: Total messages: Ham: Spam: % Spam: -------------------------------------------------- 572 196 376 65.73% Average spam score : 20.04/6.00 Average ham score : -9.04/6.00 Username: Total: Ham: Spam: % Spam: ------------------------------------------------------------ 572 196 376 65.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux user. Let me cover permissions first, then we’ll move on to chmod. Simple Permissions (I’m only touching on “simple” permissions because they’re difficult enough to grasp without throwing in super user and stickey bits, or attributes like immutable.

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

Well, sorta- they’re not new to linux, but they installed Debian on their home machines as part of a 2 month experiment. Yojimbo is looking for a better job, and I’ve been trying to help him develop some skills that will make it easier. I’ve taught him a little perl in the past and he’s used linux at the college (EOS lab at GVSU), so it wasn’t too big of a jump.

So i’m getting slapped around a bit by karma right now. I recently moved our DNS services to two new servers. everything appeared to be fine… I got cocky. Now it turns out they’re not behaving like proper slaves for certain domains. fore xample, we run foo.com, bar.com and bar.net as the primary DNS. We ALSO act as slaves for baz.org… except we’re not anymore. For some reason, we’re not getting updates from the primary DNS for baz.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

so I created a list of things I needed to do, and started incrementally going through it, finishing little projects and problems that I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve got a whole lot done in the past week: got squirrelmail working properly fixed the DMA on both workstations Fixed Jaxon’s cdrom Set up Kmail Fixed the DNS issues Swapped HDs around get spanish dictionary working for jackie in OOo Set up LDAP Some of these have been floating in my head for years (ldap) while others have been broken for just as long (DMA, squirrelmail).

So I’m running out of space. on everything. my workstation has a 40 gig split in half with 1/2 linux and half a long dead windows partition (I got this drive in 2001 or thereabouts.) the windows partition has been repurposed, but it’s still a pain in the ass. since the windows partition appears first on the drive, there was no way to wipe it and merge it with the other parition (easily).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent. I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger.

I’ve been using Gentoo for over 2 years now. Before that it was Debian. Before that it was Redhat. Spattered inbetween I’ve used slackware, mandrake, suse, knoppix, ubuntu, xandros and sorceror. I’ve noticed when I pick up a new distribution, there’s always little bits and tips that people forget to tell you about. I’m gonna try to make a list for gentoo. emerge Emerge is the main package management tool for gentoo- as such, there are several useful tips that may make your life easier.

This started with a comment from my friend Shedao about putting a life ban on slashdot. I’ve been reading slashdot since 2000 or so. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I listened to geeks in space and cheered when katz went away. So why am I deciding to leave slashdot? Because of Beatle Beatle, the submission spammer. You see, slashdot has a lot of power in the google pagerank system because of it’s size, links and traffic.

You know what I’d like to see? Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” . Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

So in order to keep this job, I have to be cleared for a position of public trust. This means I have to document Every Place I’ve lived in the last 7 years Every Place I’ve workd in the last 7 years A Contact for each one of the above 3 people who know me well. So if I start asking weird questions, and you get calls from the Feds, don’t freak out- I’m not going to jail- it’s just clearance.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

So, Today we did the the rest of the training, which was just a big Q&A. Whether or not this is the right choice of software, I’ve given up caring- I’m not in a position to make the decision, and the decision will be made for political, not technical reasons which I will have no effect on. So I’ve quit agonizing about it. You could say, I suppose, [meme] I don’t care.

Alright, yesterday was a long day. training started at 8:30am, went till 5:30pm. What did I learn? That’s a damn good question. I learned how to use a web interface for extremely complicated tracking program . My biggest complaint is this training cannot be abstracted to be useful on other projects; it’s basically a 2 day training course on an obscure application. What I liked: clean interface, worked in both Firefox and IE.

I saw yet again another article about open source in other countries. Why do I care? because China, Japan and Korea (IIRC) are developing their own official distribution of linux. Germany is implementing a linux conversion of a whole bunch of machines. I see one of these every few months for another country. Even the state of Mass has recently passed legislation stating that all future documents need to be done in the Open Document format (a format MS refuses to support, despite the fact that they helped design the format).

This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

New job, new laptop. Many utilities here are windows only, so it requires a bit of… effort… to get myself up and running efficiently. The solution to the windows problem is VirtualBox. I had set this up on my last laptop with little effort, but this time around required a bit more effort. Hopefully the instructions below will help others get up and running quickly. Disclaimer– your laptop may catch on fire and explode (or worse) if you attempt this… or something.

Less is more. That’s the common joke about less- It provides the same functionality as the older utility, more; but oh, how much more than more! Less allows you to easily scan backwards as well as forwards- something more is not too good at (though it is possible). Less also allows you to navigate with arrow keys, page up and page down, home and end. Less provides a quick way to view files as well- Many editors (like vim) need to read an entire file first, and often create a temporary copy (for editing) of the file.

anyone know of any good jabber clients for the blackberry? I’ve tried a couple with little luck, and most of them cost more than I can afford for this test. Features required Must run on BlackBerry 8703e v4.1.0x Connection server can be configured differently than jid address (i.e. you@morgajel.net for jid, jabber.morgajel.net for connection server.) This rules out Mobber as far as I can tell Requires SSL/TLS Non-strict cert checking Let me know if you have any suggestions.

One feature of vim I don’t use enough is the ability to split the screen and view multiple files at once. I use this feature all the time when I use vimdiff, but not really any other time. I thought I’d take a moment to lay out some uses of it (thank Linux.com for the reference): From Command Mode: :sp splits the screen horizontally :vsp splits the screen vertically Ctrl-w Ctrl-w moves between viewports Ctrl-w [right arrow] moves active viewport 1 to the right Ctrl-w [left arrow] moves active viewport 1 to the left Ctrl-w 3[left arrow] moves active viewport 3 to the left Ctrl-w q will close the active window.

Can’t locate object method “seek” via package “File::Temp” at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/MIME/Parser.pm line 816. The underlying problem is perl was updated and overwrote the “correct” version of File::Temp that you probably installed when setting up RT and forgot about. To fix this issue <br></br>cpan install File::Temp<br></br>/etc/init.d/httpd restart<br></br> MAKE SURE TO RESTART APACHE! I didn’t, and it cost me probably 2 hours of screwing around with it. I’m posting this because http://www.nabble.com/RT-3.6.5-and-Sendmail-error-and-looks-like-perl-error-td15989015.html Didn’t really mention what the final working solution was.

I was planning on simply republishing my previous svn article, but realized that it sucked compared to what I know now. Prerequisites I’ll presume you have the following things. – a Linux machine – subversion already installed Terminology to Know There are a few terms that get mangled if you’re coming from other types of source control. This is just to clear things up. – Repository: the central storage place on the subversion server where your data is kept.

For those of you who can’t get those three to work together, make sure you specify both TLS_CACERT tls_cacertfile- I didn’t and it caused me grief.

Search and replace is a great feature in most text editors, but what happens when you want to do more? Vim has a solution- recording macros. Suppose you have the following output from some ancient program that needs to be tweaked: <br></br>X1222 22323 2A22 3303 0000 3334esss test 123<br></br>X2222 22353 2A22 3303 0001 3334esss tacd 456<br></br>X3222 22383 2A22 3303 0010 3334esss fals 789<br></br>X4222 22393 2A22 3303 0011 3334esss true 012<br></br>

Ok, I’ve done it twice now, I think I’ve figured it out. Get the source files from Epson’s linux website; I don’t recall the url but these are the files you need (or newer, no idea what the future holds): iscan-2.3.0-1.c2.i386.rpm iscan-plugin-gt-f700-2.0.0-0.c2.i386.rpm Use alien to convert them to debs (normally bad, but acceptable this time around). Install both newly created deb packages with dpkg: dpkg -i iscan_2.3.0-2_i386.deb iscan-plugin-gt-f700_2.0.0-1_i386.deb Install sane, sane-utils:

So I’ve been working on a new project called Ruma(more on it later), and I’m beginning to get frustrated with the LDAP support. So far I’ve found * ruby/ldap, ruby-ldap, ldap-ruby by ian macdonald, last release 8/2006 * net-ldap, Net::LDAP by Francis Cianfrocca, last release 8/2006 * ruby-activeldap, ActiveLDAP-ruby by Will Drewry, last release 5/2007 ldap-ruby appears to be the frontrunner, but hasn’t been updated in a year- the forums appear to think it’s been abandoned.

So I’ve been working on a side app that connects to remote servers. While writing validation code for inputs, I came across an interesting dilemma. I’d like to validate an address input to be valid- be it a hostname, domainname, or ip address. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. According to the domain name RFC, section 3.5 domain names must start with a letter, end with a letter or number, and can have letters, numbers or hyphens in between.

Since I began working on the Luma project, I’ve been playing a lot with Python, a language that I’ve been around for years but never bothered to learn. Since Luma is written in Python and I’m not on the team, I figured it was time to jump in feet first. Coming from a perl/php/ruby/java background, it wasn’t a big leap to make. However, the more I read and write, the less I like it.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

I’ve been using and promoting open source for about 7 years now- it started back in 2000 when I began writing php and playing with apache. In 2003 I made the full switch to Linux. Since then I’ve produced several small little projects and put them under the GPL in hopes that it would help someone else. I’ve also written many articles and how-tos for my site to help spread what I’ve learned.

Slashdot is full of random crap, cliches and trolls- but buried deep within this pile of refuse is some useful and interesting info waiting to get out. The following is my checklist to find the relevant posts: 1) only read stories that actually look interesting. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s completely overlooked. As heart-warming as it is to read about them recovering Scotty’s ashes, it’ll be a waste of half an hour reading the same old rehashed star trek jokes.

So I’m looking to play with some monitoring software to figure out why, every once in a while, I get laggy spots when connecting to my server from work. The latest toy I’m playing with is Cacti. Here’s what I’m planning on monitoring (partially because it’s useful, partially because it’s fun): link (Linksys router running dd-wrt) * bandwidth on external IP * bandwidth on each port * wireless bandwidth used

Diff is a handy little command used to compare two text files- useful if trying to determine what’s changed in different versions of files, used by subversion to show what files have been changed, and can even create patch files for updating sourcecode. So what are some of the more useful flags? * -i lets us ignore any capitalization changes * -b lets us ignore any spacing changes * -B ignore blank lines

This is a list of all the things that make it feel old. I started this while working at a place that ran a lot of FreeBSD machines. I never got around to finishing it because we started implementing linux boxes, but I think the complaints are still valid. The real shame is that I only wrote down 6 out of about 100 different things. Mostly it’s trivial stuff, but trivial stuff should be the easiest to fix- the FreeBSD people had a real fear of painting barns (take that as you will).

Route is one of these hate-inspiring, jaw droppingly obtuse programs that you always get the syntax wrong on. The purpose is simple enough- show and/or change the routing table. The most common uses are: route – shows the current entries route add – adds a new entry route del – removes an entry route flush– removes all entries Checking out your Routes The simplest use of route is to simply run route at the command line:

Ok, trying out Kubuntu on my new work laptop and I’m liking it quite a bit- the only problems I’ve had so far are with Hibernate (which I think is self- inflicted) and wireless stuff. I’ve figured out the wireless stuff and wanted to mention it for the people out there having the same troubles as I did. First up, a little info on my setup: Model: IBM T42 (note, not the T42p, which is awesome, the crappier model)

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

So I’ve been working with QtRuby a lot the last few days. I’ve also been playing with unit testing thanks to drutro’s quick runthrough of it. The project I’m working on is a top-down view videogame, which at it’s base level requires loading up some images. The problem is using Qt::Pixmap requires that a QApplication exists. Now this in and of itself is annoying, but not a showstopper. What becomes a showstopper is building a test suite when each test file has it’s own QApplication- you see, you can only have one QApplication at a time.

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

So we just got these shiny new Netgear GSM7224 layer two 24 port managed switches, and I went about setting up MRTG. mrtg and snmp are one of my weak areas- I’m not too good at networking stuff to begin with, and mrtg has always seemed just out of my reach. Well, between rewiring half of the serverroom and threatening mrtg with a stick, I got it all working! now I can finally monitor network traffic and figure out which one of these network cards is a chatty cathy.

Well, I’ve got this turd polished well enough to release Ziggy 1.0. There’s still a lot left to do, and a lot more to add, but this is a good place for people to start looking at it. Feel free to download it and take him apart- I’ve included the very truncated Dribbly.xml profile (dribbly is surly, be forewarned) and kept ziggy’s real config under wraps. enjoy!

ran into a problem with mod_rewrite and IE- a real one this time. IE was choking on files that were being downloaded via mod_rewrite. same script worked without rewrite, died with it. Did some research and with a lot of help from noodl of #apache figured out it was because mod_rewrite adds a “Vary: Host” line to the header, which apparently IE chokes on. loaded the header module in apache and added “Header unset Vary” after my rewrite and all is good- cvs, pdf, zip all download properly.

ok, here’s my latest bout of IE stupidity. The new system I’m setting up will have several developers working on several projects. We’d like to be able to use subversion to manage the projects without dealing with pathname stupidity, hence all new projects should have / as their base since they will later become full fledge sites. So, how do we do that? I had the simple idea of mapping http://foo.

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

Holy crap, welcome to 1980. The FreeBSD install is going to take a little bit longer than I thought. I booted off the Install CD and the first thing I noticed was the lack of color. Not shiny pretty GUI color, but angry fruit salad color. As pages of white text on black blackground whizzed past my screen, nothing stuck out as important; I noticed no dividers between sections. This is a very small, trivial thing, but it is nice.

Well, the new job is gonna have a bucket full of FreeBSD servers. It’s been a while since I tinkered with FBSD, so it’ll be a challenge. To prepare for that challenge, I’ve decided to convert Draccus (my workstation) to BSD. The following is a list of hurdles I’ll need to surpass before I start in April: get draccus up and running get KDE up and running get Gimp working get my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet working get my Logitech Quickcam working get my m-audio keyboard working get rosegarden recording again burn a cd-rw burn a dvd+rw I’m presuming I’ll have no problems with my Nvidia 6600 GT, Audigy 4 soundcard, or other common hardware.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

My friend k_f sent me a link containing the resignation of the debian stable maintainer. I can completely see where he’s coming from- the Debian crowd seems to have collected all of the antisocial jerks over the years. I sent him the following letter of support: Hi there, I caught your post to the debian team’s mailing list from a friend (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00008.html ). As a former debian user, I wanted to let you know I fully support you.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

I finally got around to modifying the sa-stats script k_f gave me- it now works on my setup of postfix+gentoo+spamd. I unzipped, cat’ed and parsed my logs for the last 7 days and came up with the following stats: Total messages: Ham: Spam: % Spam: -------------------------------------------------- 572 196 376 65.73% Average spam score : 20.04/6.00 Average ham score : -9.04/6.00 Username: Total: Ham: Spam: % Spam: ------------------------------------------------------------ 572 196 376 65.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux user. Let me cover permissions first, then we’ll move on to chmod. Simple Permissions (I’m only touching on “simple” permissions because they’re difficult enough to grasp without throwing in super user and stickey bits, or attributes like immutable.

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with. First up is cut. Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the real names and user names from the /etc/passwd file where you actually have a real name.

So i’m getting slapped around a bit by karma right now. I recently moved our DNS services to two new servers. everything appeared to be fine… I got cocky. Now it turns out they’re not behaving like proper slaves for certain domains. fore xample, we run foo.com, bar.com and bar.net as the primary DNS. We ALSO act as slaves for baz.org… except we’re not anymore. For some reason, we’re not getting updates from the primary DNS for baz.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

so I created a list of things I needed to do, and started incrementally going through it, finishing little projects and problems that I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve got a whole lot done in the past week: got squirrelmail working properly fixed the DMA on both workstations Fixed Jaxon’s cdrom Set up Kmail Fixed the DNS issues Swapped HDs around get spanish dictionary working for jackie in OOo Set up LDAP Some of these have been floating in my head for years (ldap) while others have been broken for just as long (DMA, squirrelmail).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

I’ve been using Gentoo for over 2 years now. Before that it was Debian. Before that it was Redhat. Spattered inbetween I’ve used slackware, mandrake, suse, knoppix, ubuntu, xandros and sorceror. I’ve noticed when I pick up a new distribution, there’s always little bits and tips that people forget to tell you about. I’m gonna try to make a list for gentoo. emerge Emerge is the main package management tool for gentoo- as such, there are several useful tips that may make your life easier.

This started with a comment from my friend Shedao about putting a life ban on slashdot. I’ve been reading slashdot since 2000 or so. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I listened to geeks in space and cheered when katz went away. So why am I deciding to leave slashdot? Because of Beatle Beatle, the submission spammer. You see, slashdot has a lot of power in the google pagerank system because of it’s size, links and traffic.

so, you might have noticed my site has been acting oddly the last few weeks- I’ve found a bug with mod_rewrite in my current setup. I’m not sure what or how or why it changed, I just know that sometime between Nov. 10th and 16th, mod_rewrite stopped allowing implicit redirects that wordpress uses. I’ve since modified the .htaccess file to use explicit redirects, but it’s ugly as hell. until I figure out wtf is going on, that’ll have to work for now.

One of my side projects this past year was developing a “Radio Show” program to track and display info about songs currently playing on my stream. I’ve taken the last few months off, but now I’m back on track. http://morgajel.com/radio/index.php Unfortunately the stream is not available to the public (You can thank the RIAA for that bit of bullshit). If you have any comments, feel free to add them to my bugtracker: http://morgajel.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

So, Today we did the the rest of the training, which was just a big Q&A. Whether or not this is the right choice of software, I’ve given up caring- I’m not in a position to make the decision, and the decision will be made for political, not technical reasons which I will have no effect on. So I’ve quit agonizing about it. You could say, I suppose, [meme] I don’t care.

So I’m being “sent” to training today and tomorrow. We’ll see how it goes. The training is for some business modelling software, or something. I’m still not sure what it does or how we’re going to use it. Meh, I’ll find out sometime today.

I saw yet again another article about open source in other countries. Why do I care? because China, Japan and Korea (IIRC) are developing their own official distribution of linux. Germany is implementing a linux conversion of a whole bunch of machines. I see one of these every few months for another country. Even the state of Mass has recently passed legislation stating that all future documents need to be done in the Open Document format (a format MS refuses to support, despite the fact that they helped design the format).

This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

So Ian is staying with Jackie’s mom this weekend. Jackie left to drop him off about 10am friday morning with the intent of being back in Troy to pick me up around 6pm. Around 3pm one of the guys I work with walked into the room and began a conversation like this: [matt] Anyone want tickets to see Kids in the Hall? [me] How much? [matt] Free. [me] ooh, I’ll take them!

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

Summary: Horrible- do not buy. Jackie was planning on being out of town this weekend, so I asked her to rent a random Wii game for me while she was gone. She came back with Legend of the Dragon- looking at the cover it appeared to be some sort of RPG, and she knew I liked those so she picked it up. Once I fired it up, I found the fatal flaw of this plan.

Slashdot is full of random crap, cliches and trolls- but buried deep within this pile of refuse is some useful and interesting info waiting to get out. The following is my checklist to find the relevant posts: 1) only read stories that actually look interesting. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s completely overlooked. As heart-warming as it is to read about them recovering Scotty’s ashes, it’ll be a waste of half an hour reading the same old rehashed star trek jokes.

I was really looking forward to this game- I vaguely remembered playing Metal Slug at a Pizza Hut many years ago, and was looking forward to seeing all the games wrapped up into one package (it even had a new sequel, Metal Slug 6, included). The game is a side scroller shoot-em-up where you get different guns and shoot the bad guys before they shoot you. When I got it home and started playing it, I found a slight problem- it’s a perfect replica of the arcade game- you die quick and have to put in another quarter- only instead of quarters, you press start.

ok, I’m gonna start doing reviews for the games I rent for the Wii- the ratings will go something like this: First Tier Buy: Great game, you should absolutely buy it Second Tier Buy: Decent- not the best, but still fun. Third Tier Buy: If you’ve run out of things to try, give it a shot. Don’t Bother: I won’t even recommend renting it.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

So I just got back from my first concert without jackie in a long long time- went with my friend phil to the orbit room to see Coheed and Cambria. The events are as followed: * went and got dinner * went to the orbit room, realized phil was the “old guy” there (actually 3 or 4 people ended up beating him for that title) We got a table in the back because, since we were 10-15 years older than 9/10ths of the crowd and needed the support.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

Holy crap, welcome to 1980. The FreeBSD install is going to take a little bit longer than I thought. I booted off the Install CD and the first thing I noticed was the lack of color. Not shiny pretty GUI color, but angry fruit salad color. As pages of white text on black blackground whizzed past my screen, nothing stuck out as important; I noticed no dividers between sections. This is a very small, trivial thing, but it is nice.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

So yesterday a coworker came up to me and asked if I wanted to go to FOSE- I have a vague idea it was a government tech convention, but that’s about it. Since I have a Gov’t ID badge, I was able to get in for free. So Cris(the boss), David and Terrance went into DC in search of the washington DC convention center. It should be noted that this is not the MCI Center, Metro Center, or the Verizon Center- it’s a completely generic convention center with a completely generic name.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

I ride a shuttle bus to work every day- the type with a driver and passenger seats, then 2 rows of 2 seats stretching the length of the bus, with a door on on side of the first row of seats. Every day, I watch people scramble to be the first ones off the bus- they’re smart enough to stay seated until it’s their row’s turn, but then they start jockying to get out before the people across from them.

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with. First up is cut. Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the real names and user names from the /etc/passwd file where you actually have a real name.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

real quick mention of http://del.icio.us/ – it’s a social bookmarking system- see a page you like? don’t like managing your bookmarks? check delicious out. you can see your friends bookmarks as well- so if someone has a page that you find useful bookmarked, you can check to see if they have any related bookmarks. I like it for the fact that I move from computer to computer a lot and my bookmarks needs to be portable.

So Jackie and I went and saw Serenity yesterday. It was… a very good movie. A lot of fellow geeks either love or absolutely hate the TV show Firefly and are transferring these feelings towards Serenity. I have one thing to say to all of you hatemongers. Please. Give it a chance. Watch it with an open mind before you start bashing it. I know most of you haven’t seen it.

The series started with Rendezvous with Rama, going on to Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. Since I’m feeling lazy, I’m not gonna write a pretentious review about how the style of the first book was different/better/worse than the following books. The series as a whole was pretty decent, lot of things made you think about how humanity as a whole will probably be cleansed when they meet another intelligent species because they’re too stupid to just be civil.

So I caught an episode of “My Name is Earl” the other day, starring Jason Lee, of Mallrats and Dogma fame. He plays a grungy scum of the earth type that has an epiphany that every time he does something bad to someone, something bad happens to him. He decides to make a list of the things he’s done bad, and right the wrongs. I saw the second episode of the series, where his friends convinced him to apologize to a friend of his who went to prison for a crime earl comitted.

This is another article that sat in the drafts folder for far too long- Last edited Feb 21st, 2006. I fear writing about tar, and that is why I’m determined to finish it in this sitting, so it won’t fester and scare me off of this series. Why am I scared of writing about tar? Well, this is their flags list verbatim from the man page: [ --atime-preserve ] [ -b, --blocking-factor N ] [ -B, --read-full-records ] [ --backup BACKUP-TYPE ] [ --block-com- press ] [ -C, --directory DIR ] [ --check-links ] [ --checkpoint ] [ -f, --file [HOSTNAME:]F ] [ -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F ] [ --force-local ] [ --format FORMAT ] [ -g, --listed-incremental F ] [ -G, --incremental ] [ --group GROUP ] [ -h, --dereference ] [ --help ] [ -i, --ignore-zeros ] [ --ignore-case ] [ --ignore-failed-read ] [ --index-file FILE ] [ -j, --bzip2 ] [ -k, --keep-old-files ] [ -K, --starting-file F ] [ --keep-newer-files ] [ -l, --one-file-system ] [ -L, --tape-length N ] [ -m, --touch, --modification-time ] [ -M, --multi-volume ] [ --mode PER- MISSIONS ] [ -N, --after-date DATE, --newer DATE ] [ --newer-mtime DATE ] [ --no-anchored ] [ --no-ignore-case ] [ --no-recursion ] [ --no-same-permissions ] [ --no-wildcards ] [ --no-wildcards-match-slash ] [ --null ] [ --numeric-owner ] [ -o, --old-archive, --portability, --no-same-owner ] [ -O, --to-stdout ] [ --occurrence NUM ] [ --overwrite ] [ --overwrite-dir ] [ --owner USER ] [ -p, --same-permissions, --preserve-permissions ] [ -P, --abso- lute-names ] [ --pax-option KEYWORD-LIST ] [ --posix ] [ --preserve ] [ -R, --block-number ] [ --record-size SIZE ] [ --recursion ] [ --recursive-unlink ] [ --remove-files ] [ --rmt-command CMD ] [ --rsh-command CMD ] [ -s, --same- order, --preserve-order ] [ -S, --sparse ] [ --same-owner ] [ --show-defaults ] [ --show-omitted-dirs ] [ --strip-com- ponents NUMBER, --strip-path NUMBER (1) ] [ --suffix SUFFIX ] [ -T, --files-from F ] [ --totals ] [ -U, --unlink- first ] [ --use-compress-program PROG ] [ --utc ] [ -v, --verbose ] [ -V, --label NAME ] [ --version ] [ --volno-file F ] [ -w, --interactive, --confirmation ] [ -W, --verify ] [ --wildcards ] [ --wildcards-match-slash ] [ --exclude PATTERN ] [ -X, --exclude-from FILE ] [ -Z, --compress, --uncompress ] [ -z, --gzip, --gunzip, --ungzip ] [ -[0-7][lmh] ] So it’s a bit overwhelming.

This article was originally written back on Feb 21st, 2006. While never completed, I thought it was worth sharing. Cat is a very simple utility- so simple I debated added it to this list. There are however three really useful flags. I’ll try to write as much as I can about it so you don’t feel ripped off by this article. hrm… did that last sentence sound like filler? I swear it wasn’t meant to- that’s completely on accident.

So while migrating some content to a Linode instance, I attempted to fire up screen ran face first into a brick wall. For context, this was on an up-to-date CentOS 5.5 instance running screen-4.0.3-3.el5. Steps to reproduce: logged in as my normal user typed in “screen” and hit enter console went blank for 5 seconds previous content returned, along with “[screen is terminating]” and my normal command prompt. Screen didn’t work for any regular users, however it did work for root.

Less is more. That’s the common joke about less- It provides the same functionality as the older utility, more; but oh, how much more than more! Less allows you to easily scan backwards as well as forwards- something more is not too good at (though it is possible). Less also allows you to navigate with arrow keys, page up and page down, home and end. Less provides a quick way to view files as well- Many editors (like vim) need to read an entire file first, and often create a temporary copy (for editing) of the file.

I was planning on simply republishing my previous svn article, but realized that it sucked compared to what I know now. Prerequisites I’ll presume you have the following things. – a Linux machine – subversion already installed Terminology to Know There are a few terms that get mangled if you’re coming from other types of source control. This is just to clear things up. – Repository: the central storage place on the subversion server where your data is kept.

Search and replace is a great feature in most text editors, but what happens when you want to do more? Vim has a solution- recording macros. Suppose you have the following output from some ancient program that needs to be tweaked: <br></br>X1222 22323 2A22 3303 0000 3334esss test 123<br></br>X2222 22353 2A22 3303 0001 3334esss tacd 456<br></br>X3222 22383 2A22 3303 0010 3334esss fals 789<br></br>X4222 22393 2A22 3303 0011 3334esss true 012<br></br>

I’ve been using and promoting open source for about 7 years now- it started back in 2000 when I began writing php and playing with apache. In 2003 I made the full switch to Linux. Since then I’ve produced several small little projects and put them under the GPL in hopes that it would help someone else. I’ve also written many articles and how-tos for my site to help spread what I’ve learned.

Diff is a handy little command used to compare two text files- useful if trying to determine what’s changed in different versions of files, used by subversion to show what files have been changed, and can even create patch files for updating sourcecode. So what are some of the more useful flags? * -i lets us ignore any capitalization changes * -b lets us ignore any spacing changes * -B ignore blank lines

Route is one of these hate-inspiring, jaw droppingly obtuse programs that you always get the syntax wrong on. The purpose is simple enough- show and/or change the routing table. The most common uses are: route – shows the current entries route add – adds a new entry route del – removes an entry route flush– removes all entries Checking out your Routes The simplest use of route is to simply run route at the command line:

I recently wrote a nice little script in ruby for ldapifying new ubuntu servers- all the server needs is a ssh key set up for root, the rest is cake… jmorg@util3:~/base_configs# ./ldapify -h Usage: ldapify --install hostname [$options] ldapify --check hostname ldapify --uninstall hostname --install hostname hostname to ldapify(foo.pub.local) --uninstall hostname removes ldapification from hostname -a, --access_group access_group access_group that has access to hostname --no_group_dn No access_group limitations- use with caution.

I have two requirements for a program being on this list: the first one is it has to be a utility- something scriptable or usable on the command line. The second is it also needs to have multiple arcane flags that I can write about, or just be so unknown that it’ll bring it to the attention of people that have never heard of it. Tee falls into the “never heard of it” group.

If you need to paste into vim from somewhere else, and your code has tabs or spaces in it, you’ll notice that vim may add extra tabs. see, vim doesn’t see it as a paste event, it sees it as “you typing really fast”- and one thing vim does will is auto-indent. The problem is when you paste, you don’t want auto-indentation because your code is already indented. to temporarily turn off auto-indenting, try this from insert mode:

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories.

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

Whereis is an older utility- it’s functionality shows us of a time when a program not only had a man page, but also stored the source on the machine in question. That’s becoming more rare as programs like firefox come into play- firefox, for example, has no man page and doesn’t install the source (due to size issues). Whereis locates the binary, man page and source of a given command on the current machine.

Since I covered chmod last week, I figured I should touch upon chown this week. chown is infinitely less complex than chmod because you don’t have to worry about actual permissions. chown is mainly used by root, but I suppose it could be used by others as well, although it will happen much less often. chown can change the owner and group of a file or files. Standard usage goes something like this

Chmod is a utility used for changing permissions. It is fairly well known, and doesn’t have a lot of obscure flags, which makes it an odd choice for this series. I’m including it because it seems like the most logical way to touch on linux file permissions, which can be the bane of new linux user. Let me cover permissions first, then we’ll move on to chmod. Simple Permissions (I’m only touching on “simple” permissions because they’re difficult enough to grasp without throwing in super user and stickey bits, or attributes like immutable.

With the exception of maybe cd (which is boring), ls is probably the command you’ll use the most if you do a fair amount of work at the command line. ls lists files. It’s simple enough concept, but there’s a lot of information about those files that you can list as well. ls by itself will list the contents of all regular files and directories in the current directory. you can provide with with a target such as ls /foo or with multiple targets like ls /mnt /opt or ls foo.

Screen is probably one of the top 10 most useful programs in the unix world- why? Because of what it does. Screen lets you create a session on a machine and then disconnect, while the session stays open. Suppose you wanted to start a large compile on your home server before you left work, but needed to shut down your laptop and bring it home. You could ssh into the machine and simply start the compiling, but the compilation would stop when you broke the ssh connection by shutting off the laptop.

No, not the popular social new site, the dns utility. Dig stands for Domain Information Groper (get it, DIG?), which fills the same niche as nslookup. As a matter of fact, dig is the successor to nslookup. Unlike nslookup however, the primary use of dig is non-interactive mode (which makes it ideal for scripting). Dig can also read batch files for more advanced executions, although I’ve not used this functionality myself.

Wget is useful for a lot of things- downloading images from a directory listing, mirroring a website, recursively fetching one subdirectory of a website, etc. The main focus as you can tell is downloading from the web(http, https, ftp) in a non-interactive manner. There are a lot of flags to change the behavior, and you can get all sorts of wild behavior by mixing and matching those flags. The most straightforward use is this:

This is the first of a series of entries I’d like to do. Each week I’m gonna discuss a simple linux utility that you may or may not be familiar with. First up is cut. Cut can be used to shape data that is piped to it. for example, lets suppose you wanted a list of the real names and user names from the /etc/passwd file where you actually have a real name.

So long story short, I’ve decided to attempt building a guitar by hand- mainly because I’m an idiot. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or well formed or even sound good, I just want to make my own. So… I went to Lowes, bought some wood, bought some tools, and got to work. Supplies: 1″x3″x4′ Poplar board. 1″x4″x2′ Poplar board. 1″x6″x2′ Poplar board. 1″x12″x2′ Poplar board. Tools: Coping saw 1/2″ chisel Hammer Miter box Surform shaver Note that the design I’m working on is lopsided-the bottom half is larger than the top half.

After trying to contact Ubisoft to provide them with feedback on Rocksmith (and receiving little more than an automated response,) I figured I might as well put my feedback here for all the good it’ll do. So here’s a list of things that I think they could improve. Why do I have to press 3 buttons to get into the game? Press A, Press Start, Press A… come on, I got 10 minutes to get my fix, and it takes 2 minutes to load up and get to a song.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

So I’ve started teaching guitar again- This time the cash will go directly towards the G-400. As you can see on the sidebar, I’m now a hair closer. My new student is a coworker who is very excited to learn, so that makes things easy on several fronts (schedules, payment, attendance, etc). At this rate, I should have the guitar by next fall- sooner if I pick up another student (which is a possibility).

So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: <br></br>e|-------------------------------------------<br></br>B|--------x----------------------------------<br></br>G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5--------------<br></br>D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------<br></br>A|---5/7--x----------------------------------<br></br>E|-------------------------------------------<br></br> The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.

I’m the first to admit I’ve been slacking on my scales practice, mainly sticking to pentatonic (because I’m lazy). So while reading through my Scales and Modes book and I stumbled across something obvious, yet I’d never recognized. Each scale has a mode for each note in the scale- Major scale having 7, pentatonic scale having 5, etc. That I was remotely aware of, but didn’t think much of it.

So I’ve started on another book- this one however isn’t a novel, it’s a notebook for guitar students. The first two pages contain a layout of notes on the fretboard, commonly played chords (open, barred and power), pentatonic modes, and relationship of the guitar and tablature to standard musical notation. The rest of the book will follow a simple format, allowing notes, sketches and some notation on the left page and the right containing 6 tab staffs similar to this:

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

ok, having another guitarday- looks like thursday is the day of choice from now on. 6:30pm till whenever. Let me know if you’re interested and bring an instrument. Thursday, July 13th, 6:30PM There, now you know.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent. I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger.

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with others. What is Jenkins? So, what exactly is Jenkins? It’s a popular fork of the open source continuous integration tool, Hudson. While it is normally used for building and deploying software, it can easily be used for more interesting purposes.

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.

Preface While system administrators often have many different goals, here are two that seem fairly universal: Automate the redundant tasks Hand off the simple tasks I’ve recently found that the build utility Jenkins can be a major boon for an Operations team, and wanted to share my findings with others. What is Jenkins? So, what exactly is Jenkins? It’s a popular fork of the open source continuous integration tool, Hudson. While it is normally used for building and deploying software, it can easily be used for more interesting purposes.

So for whatever reason, I was googling around today and stumbled across this and saw that, damnit, someone stole my monkey. Not only that, but they’re linking directly to my server, and have been since 2006. I google more, and find someone using my security monkey to demonstrate an XSS attack. Now, the reason I created this image was for my security monkey shirt. I ask that everyone show their solidarity by spreading the work of the security monkey shirt to people most likely to buy one.

As a system administrator, monitoring is a key job responsibility, yet arguments seem to arise on how to implement it (usually with people who won’t be paged at 3am). Before writing this, I looked around for an article on the goals and philosophy of system monitoring, but found very little that really applied to this topic. Hopefully this will help set some expectations for admins, managers and stakeholders on what you should monitor, and why it should be monitored.

So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: <br></br>e|-------------------------------------------<br></br>B|--------x----------------------------------<br></br>G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5--------------<br></br>D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------<br></br>A|---5/7--x----------------------------------<br></br>E|-------------------------------------------<br></br> The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.

I’m the first to admit I’ve been slacking on my scales practice, mainly sticking to pentatonic (because I’m lazy). So while reading through my Scales and Modes book and I stumbled across something obvious, yet I’d never recognized. Each scale has a mode for each note in the scale- Major scale having 7, pentatonic scale having 5, etc. That I was remotely aware of, but didn’t think much of it.

Why yes, my internet connection is still fubar’d, thank you for asking. Here’s your epic fail for the day- my internet connection: Downstream Upstream Max Allowed Speed (kbps) 1184 768 SN Margin (dB) 4.70 6.00 Line Attenuation (dB) 34.50 20.50 CRC Errors 2516 413 This image is my download speed since I started monitoring. Note that this is just what the modem is reporting, it does not mean that the connection was usable- most of that time PPoE couldn’t authenticate.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display: It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book: Rough Draft: First complete version of the story. First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked. Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged.

I was planning on simply republishing my previous svn article, but realized that it sucked compared to what I know now. Prerequisites I’ll presume you have the following things. – a Linux machine – subversion already installed Terminology to Know There are a few terms that get mangled if you’re coming from other types of source control. This is just to clear things up. – Repository: the central storage place on the subversion server where your data is kept.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.

So I’ve been working on a new project called Ruma(more on it later), and I’m beginning to get frustrated with the LDAP support. So far I’ve found * ruby/ldap, ruby-ldap, ldap-ruby by ian macdonald, last release 8/2006 * net-ldap, Net::LDAP by Francis Cianfrocca, last release 8/2006 * ruby-activeldap, ActiveLDAP-ruby by Will Drewry, last release 5/2007 ldap-ruby appears to be the frontrunner, but hasn’t been updated in a year- the forums appear to think it’s been abandoned.

So Jackie’s been sitting at home with Ian for 4 months now and is incredibly bored. All she every does is read. I suggested a hobby, but she doesn’t really have any (except scrapbooking, which is expensive)- So what I want to do is get some ideas from all the people who read my site. Here are the base rules: cheap- no more than $25 start up cost and that must last 3 weeks.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

I’ve been using and promoting open source for about 7 years now- it started back in 2000 when I began writing php and playing with apache. In 2003 I made the full switch to Linux. Since then I’ve produced several small little projects and put them under the GPL in hopes that it would help someone else. I’ve also written many articles and how-tos for my site to help spread what I’ve learned.

Slashdot is full of random crap, cliches and trolls- but buried deep within this pile of refuse is some useful and interesting info waiting to get out. The following is my checklist to find the relevant posts: 1) only read stories that actually look interesting. It seems like a simple thing, but it’s completely overlooked. As heart-warming as it is to read about them recovering Scotty’s ashes, it’ll be a waste of half an hour reading the same old rehashed star trek jokes.

So I’m going to attempt a new routine- waking up at 6:30 and hitting the gym for 25 minutes every morning. It’s a 5 minute walk over to the gym, so I can get that done, hit the shower, and have plenty of time to get ready in the morning. The goal is to do this every morning, and after a month or so maybe scale back on weekends. I started on a saturday so I can get in the swing of it before the work week starts.

So I’m looking to play with some monitoring software to figure out why, every once in a while, I get laggy spots when connecting to my server from work. The latest toy I’m playing with is Cacti. Here’s what I’m planning on monitoring (partially because it’s useful, partially because it’s fun): link (Linksys router running dd-wrt) * bandwidth on external IP * bandwidth on each port * wireless bandwidth used

So I got the new hardware parts, so I figured I might as well document the process. I’ve decided on the name Unicron because it’s the biggest PC I’ve ever owned. I’ve been waiting over a year to really rebuild my servers- since I ran out of ide connectors in Pablo, I knew something had to change. The new case is MASSIVE- it’s sitting next to jackie’s machine and is a good 6″ longer and 3″ higher.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

So I took up playing DnD again about 4 months or so ago and our “weekly” meetings lasted for all of 3 weeks before turning into monthly meetings- we’ve finally got things back on track with 2 games in a row, and here’s a little breakdown of what happened at this last one- the guys are trying to find this statue piece- they slaughtered a den of Lizardfolk looking for t and found out that they had just sold it for a can of “Holy Green Beans”.

I have a wacom drawing pad, and one thing that’s always bothered me was the whole way linux handled usb items- depending on the order they were plugged in, they would be given different names- sometimes my keyboard would be “/dev/input/event1”, sometimes my wacom or mouse. Udev was made to get around these issues, but I’ve been to distracted to give it much thought. lately I’ve been getting the following error messages with my ruby projects:

So we just got these shiny new Netgear GSM7224 layer two 24 port managed switches, and I went about setting up MRTG. mrtg and snmp are one of my weak areas- I’m not too good at networking stuff to begin with, and mrtg has always seemed just out of my reach. Well, between rewiring half of the serverroom and threatening mrtg with a stick, I got it all working! now I can finally monitor network traffic and figure out which one of these network cards is a chatty cathy.

Well, I’ve got this turd polished well enough to release Ziggy 1.0. There’s still a lot left to do, and a lot more to add, but this is a good place for people to start looking at it. Feel free to download it and take him apart- I’ve included the very truncated Dribbly.xml profile (dribbly is surly, be forewarned) and kept ziggy’s real config under wraps. enjoy!

ok, having another guitarday- looks like thursday is the day of choice from now on. 6:30pm till whenever. Let me know if you’re interested and bring an instrument. Thursday, July 13th, 6:30PM There, now you know.

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

Well, the new job is gonna have a bucket full of FreeBSD servers. It’s been a while since I tinkered with FBSD, so it’ll be a challenge. To prepare for that challenge, I’ve decided to convert Draccus (my workstation) to BSD. The following is a list of hurdles I’ll need to surpass before I start in April: get draccus up and running get KDE up and running get Gimp working get my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet working get my Logitech Quickcam working get my m-audio keyboard working get rosegarden recording again burn a cd-rw burn a dvd+rw I’m presuming I’ll have no problems with my Nvidia 6600 GT, Audigy 4 soundcard, or other common hardware.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Fark has a great link for a DnD character personality test. Here’s what I came up with for me. Neutral Good Half-Elf Ranger Alignment: Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered ‘normal’. Race: Half-Elves are a cross between a human and an elf.

Well, it’s Feb. 26th and it’s still nice out. it’s only 34, but it’s bright and sunshiney. It was 60 last week, and it’s been decent most of the winter. My brain is starting to activate and come out of winter hibernation, so that means it’s time to start planting. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t get a real garden, so we have a bunch of pots and windowboxes and such.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

After trying to contact Ubisoft to provide them with feedback on Rocksmith (and receiving little more than an automated response,) I figured I might as well put my feedback here for all the good it’ll do. So here’s a list of things that I think they could improve. Why do I have to press 3 buttons to get into the game? Press A, Press Start, Press A… come on, I got 10 minutes to get my fix, and it takes 2 minutes to load up and get to a song.

Finally Finally Finally! Third revision of Ziggy’s first book is done. Now I’m looking for beta readers to read it and give me feedback on strong and weak parts of the story. Synopsis This is an autobiography of a man trying to find his place in the world. That world is the Kingdom of Willis, where Wizards are regulated, elves are under siege, Gnomes and Dwarves have locked themselves away, and an undying tyrant is feared by all.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

Ingredients kid hose sprinkler yard wife who doesn’t want to get wet step 1 take the kid outside to play in the sprinkler step 2 immediately get wet with the water that’s still in the hose and warmed from the sun step 3 get the kid soaked step 4 take the sprinkler off of hose step 5 show kid how to drink out of hose, hand him hose. Make sure to hold onto a length for crimping

So I think I need to actually keep track of the Wii games I like so I don’t lose track of them. Here’s what I recall being worth buying, what I am anticipating, and what were good purchases. Mario Kart Wii (bought) Excite Truck (bought) Mario Galaxy Mario Strikers Charged Warioware: Smooth Moves PuzzleQuest Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Metroid Prime: Corruption Spore (?) More to come as I think of them.

So Ian is staying with Jackie’s mom this weekend. Jackie left to drop him off about 10am friday morning with the intent of being back in Troy to pick me up around 6pm. Around 3pm one of the guys I work with walked into the room and began a conversation like this: [matt] Anyone want tickets to see Kids in the Hall? [me] How much? [matt] Free. [me] ooh, I’ll take them!

Had an amusing conversation with a developer at work that had the feeling of an abbot and costello bit. I’m leaving his name out of this to protect him, but he’s read this site before and will know instantly that it’s him. The conversation revolves around our new continuous integration system, and how the terminology has changed. BTW, QA=Quality Assurance, UAT= User Acceptance Testing (staging) (10:50:50 AM) morgajel: ok, so after talking to mick, it looks like my suspicions were correct

I’m claiming the win on this one… remember that the tinyURL that this bot messages is in fact a link to tubgirl. 15:14 -!- Pats-Sox [~no@fw.mdchomes.com] has joined #asp 15:18 we dont want any chowda heads in here 15:25 "chowda head"...I don't know why that just caused a really really bad "yo momma" joke to pop in my head 15:28 I just googled "chowda head" for the heck of it. This site is pretty funny.

Here’s a story from Christmas that I almost forgot to share. Every year we get together- my parents, brothers, aunt and uncle, cousins and grandparents. We go through dinner, do the present thing, then the grandparents leave. That’s when things usually degenerate below the average level of stupidity. The incident started when my brother Jamie (24) and cousin Walker (29) were talking about getting high from nutmeg. I don’t think Jamie believed it, so Walker offered to eat a tablespoon of nutmeg for $10.

It doesn’t get better than Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies. Since this is actually the second link I’ve seen about bacon that I wanted to share, I’m gonna start a new Bacon category.

So Jackie’s been sitting at home with Ian for 4 months now and is incredibly bored. All she every does is read. I suggested a hobby, but she doesn’t really have any (except scrapbooking, which is expensive)- So what I want to do is get some ideas from all the people who read my site. Here are the base rules: cheap- no more than $25 start up cost and that must last 3 weeks.

This letter was written in 2002-2003 to an interim head of the CS department about a class I had just taken. To protect the guilty parties, I’ve removed their name and replaced it with a Tomato. it’s somehow fitting. ——————— After talking to Chris S., I found out that you were interested in what “really” happened in Professor Tomato’s compiler class. I feel that I should share my story with you.

I recently wrote a nice little script in ruby for ldapifying new ubuntu servers- all the server needs is a ssh key set up for root, the rest is cake… jmorg@util3:~/base_configs# ./ldapify -h Usage: ldapify --install hostname [$options] ldapify --check hostname ldapify --uninstall hostname --install hostname hostname to ldapify(foo.pub.local) --uninstall hostname removes ldapification from hostname -a, --access_group access_group access_group that has access to hostname --no_group_dn No access_group limitations- use with caution.

So after 3 months of unemployment, I was offered a job over in Troy, so I’ll be moving about 3 hours away from Grand Rapids. The position is for a linux sys admin. Unlike the last place, this one seems like a winner from the get go- much more lively and has a (for lack of a better term) DC vitality, compared to companies in Grand Rapids which sort of feel like they’re recycling coffee grounds and requesting employees bring in their own toilet paper.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

After trying to contact Ubisoft to provide them with feedback on Rocksmith (and receiving little more than an automated response,) I figured I might as well put my feedback here for all the good it’ll do. So here’s a list of things that I think they could improve. Why do I have to press 3 buttons to get into the game? Press A, Press Start, Press A… come on, I got 10 minutes to get my fix, and it takes 2 minutes to load up and get to a song.

So this year I managed to snag the Humble Bundle package;Â If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a pack of Indie Games bundled together. There are five good reasons why you should consider getting it: Name your own price ($5000 or $0.01 – your call) You choose who the money goes to (charities and/or developers) If you pay more than the average donation, you get Humble Bundle #1 from last year.

So I think I need to actually keep track of the Wii games I like so I don’t lose track of them. Here’s what I recall being worth buying, what I am anticipating, and what were good purchases. Mario Kart Wii (bought) Excite Truck (bought) Mario Galaxy Mario Strikers Charged Warioware: Smooth Moves PuzzleQuest Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess Metroid Prime: Corruption Spore (?) More to come as I think of them.

So those of you who know me, I’ve never really been a fan of Microsoft- so much so that I refused to buy an XBox on general principal. I’ve not really been a fan of Sony, either, but I still own and loved a PS2. So why the change on this new generation of consoles? Well, Sony has pissed me off quite a bit recently. The following is a list of reasons why I won’t be buying a PS3:

Summary: Horrible- do not buy. Jackie was planning on being out of town this weekend, so I asked her to rent a random Wii game for me while she was gone. She came back with Legend of the Dragon- looking at the cover it appeared to be some sort of RPG, and she knew I liked those so she picked it up. Once I fired it up, I found the fatal flaw of this plan.

I was really looking forward to this game- I vaguely remembered playing Metal Slug at a Pizza Hut many years ago, and was looking forward to seeing all the games wrapped up into one package (it even had a new sequel, Metal Slug 6, included). The game is a side scroller shoot-em-up where you get different guns and shoot the bad guys before they shoot you. When I got it home and started playing it, I found a slight problem- it’s a perfect replica of the arcade game- you die quick and have to put in another quarter- only instead of quarters, you press start.

ok, I’m gonna start doing reviews for the games I rent for the Wii- the ratings will go something like this: First Tier Buy: Great game, you should absolutely buy it Second Tier Buy: Decent- not the best, but still fun. Third Tier Buy: If you’ve run out of things to try, give it a shot. Don’t Bother: I won’t even recommend renting it.

So I was in a Gamestop yesterday buying an extra nunchuck for the Wii (I plan on getting Wii Play which comes with a remote), and I overheard this conversation: [GSEmployee] Ma’am, you do realize that Call of Duty 3 is Rated T? [Lady] I don’t know, is that appropriate for a 13 year old boy? Is it violent? as a side note here, this lady was completely clueless that call of duty was a WAR gam, about WAR, where you SHOOT people.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

Finally Finally Finally! Third revision of Ziggy’s first book is done. Now I’m looking for beta readers to read it and give me feedback on strong and weak parts of the story. Synopsis This is an autobiography of a man trying to find his place in the world. That world is the Kingdom of Willis, where Wizards are regulated, elves are under siege, Gnomes and Dwarves have locked themselves away, and an undying tyrant is feared by all.

It’s no secret Ziggy’s book is based off a DnD campaign that I ran many years ago, but due to the miracle of Intellectual Property law, I’ll probably have to obfuscate that in the book. The problem is identifying the legal lines in this situation;Â it’s unclear what I am and am not allowed to use. Let’s take the lowly Rust Monster in my book, Rusty. Wizards of the Coast does not appear to own a trademark on the term Rust Monster, however Gary Gygax did invent the creature for the first edition of DnD.

I appeared to have stalled out on SPoE before I could finish it, so I’m flipping back to the reason for SPoE- Ziggy’s book. After taking a full year off of writing, I’m ready to revise the first of the two books. Last year I stalled out on the 3rd draft and was unable to get restarted; now I think enough time has passed to give me a fresh perspective.

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now. So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him? First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account. Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

I recently crossed the 100k barrier and came to a realization- this book is way too long. I think I’m gonna chop it after section 7 (90k words, 360 or so pages) and split it into two books- The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise The Autobiography of Ziggy Swift: The Fall This means that the first book is technically complete and ready for a revision. I’d like to finish the rough draft of both books before I proceed with a second draft of the first.

muahahahahaha.

So I’ve started on another book- this one however isn’t a novel, it’s a notebook for guitar students. The first two pages contain a layout of notes on the fretboard, commonly played chords (open, barred and power), pentatonic modes, and relationship of the guitar and tablature to standard musical notation. The rest of the book will follow a simple format, allowing notes, sketches and some notation on the left page and the right containing 6 tab staffs similar to this:

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display: It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book: Rough Draft: First complete version of the story. First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked. Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories.

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams. The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good. The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

You know what I’d like to see? Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” . Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

The series started with Rendezvous with Rama, going on to Rama II, The Garden of Rama and Rama Revealed. Since I’m feeling lazy, I’m not gonna write a pretentious review about how the style of the first book was different/better/worse than the following books. The series as a whole was pretty decent, lot of things made you think about how humanity as a whole will probably be cleansed when they meet another intelligent species because they’re too stupid to just be civil.

Finally Finally Finally! Third revision of Ziggy’s first book is done. Now I’m looking for beta readers to read it and give me feedback on strong and weak parts of the story. Synopsis This is an autobiography of a man trying to find his place in the world. That world is the Kingdom of Willis, where Wizards are regulated, elves are under siege, Gnomes and Dwarves have locked themselves away, and an undying tyrant is feared by all.

It’s no secret Ziggy’s book is based off a DnD campaign that I ran many years ago, but due to the miracle of Intellectual Property law, I’ll probably have to obfuscate that in the book. The problem is identifying the legal lines in this situation;Â it’s unclear what I am and am not allowed to use. Let’s take the lowly Rust Monster in my book, Rusty. Wizards of the Coast does not appear to own a trademark on the term Rust Monster, however Gary Gygax did invent the creature for the first edition of DnD.

If you ever see me talking to myself, I’m just working through ideas for my book, honest… Here’s a good example of what I’m chomping on right now. So I’ve been thinking, why does Ziggy’s Aunt Makuran hate Ziggy so much? Why does his cousin resent him? First off, Ziggy is adopted, so take that into account. Originally I thought it was because she was upset that Keltrem was made chief instead of her(since she’s female), and resented him for it because she is the eldest child.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

Well, I’ve got this turd polished well enough to release Ziggy 1.0. There’s still a lot left to do, and a lot more to add, but this is a good place for people to start looking at it. Feel free to download it and take him apart- I’ve included the very truncated Dribbly.xml profile (dribbly is surly, be forewarned) and kept ziggy’s real config under wraps. enjoy!

Happy birthday to me, I live in a tree, happy birthday dear me- happy birthday to me. -Ziggy

11:13 -!- lori [45dddd1f@A3455140.59D83169.126F8B2.IP] has joined #irc 11:13 jesse are you there? 11:14 he might be 11:14 want me to go get him? 11:14 sure why not 11:15 * ziggy runs off with a pickled herring under his arm 11:15 yo 11:16 what is jackie's work number? 11:17 *shrug* 11:17 I don't know. 11:17 well what good are you? 11:20 we're all wondering that 11:21 well, other than sperm donor- he seems to have gotten that down.

ok I need help- I need some ur mom jokes. I’d come up with my own but I’m heading over to ur mom’s right now. Just leave them in the comments. -Ziggy.

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

I saw a Goat today. His name was Charlie. Charlie was a nice goat. He wore pants. He said to say hi. -Ziggy

It’s no secret Ziggy’s book is based off a DnD campaign that I ran many years ago, but due to the miracle of Intellectual Property law, I’ll probably have to obfuscate that in the book. The problem is identifying the legal lines in this situation;Â it’s unclear what I am and am not allowed to use. Let’s take the lowly Rust Monster in my book, Rusty. Wizards of the Coast does not appear to own a trademark on the term Rust Monster, however Gary Gygax did invent the creature for the first edition of DnD.

IRC can be an excellent source of information, especially on the right networks, but every once in a while you have a conversation that is so disappointing you have to share it. <br></br>22:15 < morgajel> I'm using mockito to mock up a Dao, but I've run into an issue: What is the proper way to mock up chained getters, i.e. sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().createCriteria(Account.class).list()? a mock with a mock with a mock is considered bad form, so I'm not really sure how I *should* handle this.

So I got a call from a company called West Asset Management the other day- they’re a collection company. AT&T apparently sent us to collections. WHY, you ask? Because we had the audacity to cancel their service. Let me take you back to the beginning: – Had AT&T Phone + DSL at apartment – Moved to House – AT&T botched the DSL install, then canceled my contract and told me I had to sign a new one if I wanted DSL or pay 50% more for the monthly program.

This is excellent, yet disappointing at the same time- both the Pope and now The Church of England have come forward and said “mah bad, Darwin was right, sorry about oppressing science… again…” The depressing part is while all of the old-world christian religions are coming to terms with evolution, those in the US are still desperately fighting reality. I’m wondering what it’s gonna take for people to accept it. It’s like there’s just enough unverified data and blatant mistruths out there to convince people who’ll deny the enormous mountain of data that disagrees.

ok, this has been gnawing at me for the last few weeks. As I get older I become a lot less patient with people who waste my time on stupid things. I try not to get involved with religious or political debates mainly because they always seem to lead to hurt feelings and me putting someone on a life-long banlist. However. I’m getting *really* pissed at the anti-science bullshit that’s going on.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So jackie and I put in an offer on a house march 19th. The sellers agreed on… lets say the 25th of march. So we should have a house, right? Not so fast. Our offer was less than what was owed on the mortgage, so they had to get THEIR bank to approve the short sale. One delay after another. Every 1-7 days they give us another excuse. I’m getting really pissed at this point and needed to vent.

die you wretched pc speaker beep that is so loud when I use the find bar in firefox or tab complete in the cli and nothing is found! rmmod pcspkr echo blacklist pcspkr >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist aaah, glorious silence.

So my father in law has been going on for years about how great Ameritech/ SBC/ AT&T’s new broadband service is gonna be once it was activated. I personally like the idea of having fiber to the curb, so I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. A few months back they sent a rep out to let us know they were offering ‘U-verse’ in our area. I wasn’t home at the time, so Jackie got information and said I’d get back to them.

so I removed about 8 user accounts from this blog because I didn’t recognize the email address or the username. Apologies if any of those were valid. Stupid spammers.

I do my best to avoid politics on this site because it’ll always piss someone off. I don’t like the bible-thumping direction the republican party has taken over the past decade or two, and I can’t stand the democrats demands that we give up personal freedoms to save the children. I’m gonna talk about politics today because I’ve noticed something happening that’s so surreal I had to say something. I’ll use the names Candidate A, B, etc to represent the players in this little scenario.

So those of you who know me, I’ve never really been a fan of Microsoft- so much so that I refused to buy an XBox on general principal. I’ve not really been a fan of Sony, either, but I still own and loved a PS2. So why the change on this new generation of consoles? Well, Sony has pissed me off quite a bit recently. The following is a list of reasons why I won’t be buying a PS3:

So I’ve been working on a side app that connects to remote servers. While writing validation code for inputs, I came across an interesting dilemma. I’d like to validate an address input to be valid- be it a hostname, domainname, or ip address. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. According to the domain name RFC, section 3.5 domain names must start with a letter, end with a letter or number, and can have letters, numbers or hyphens in between.

Summary: Horrible- do not buy. Jackie was planning on being out of town this weekend, so I asked her to rent a random Wii game for me while she was gone. She came back with Legend of the Dragon- looking at the cover it appeared to be some sort of RPG, and she knew I liked those so she picked it up. Once I fired it up, I found the fatal flaw of this plan.

This letter was written in 2002-2003 to an interim head of the CS department about a class I had just taken. To protect the guilty parties, I’ve removed their name and replaced it with a Tomato. it’s somehow fitting. ——————— After talking to Chris S., I found out that you were interested in what “really” happened in Professor Tomato’s compiler class. I feel that I should share my story with you.

This is a list of all the things that make it feel old. I started this while working at a place that ran a lot of FreeBSD machines. I never got around to finishing it because we started implementing linux boxes, but I think the complaints are still valid. The real shame is that I only wrote down 6 out of about 100 different things. Mostly it’s trivial stuff, but trivial stuff should be the easiest to fix- the FreeBSD people had a real fear of painting barns (take that as you will).

Yes, I said Leverage- I sound like a big fancy CIO, don’t I?:) I have been a Michigan resident for 26 of my 27 years. I left Michigan for 18 months to take some contract work in DC- My wife and I weren’t happy with the area and moved back first chance we could. Unfortunately for us, the company that hired me started to flounder and laid me off after 5 months.

So I was in a Gamestop yesterday buying an extra nunchuck for the Wii (I plan on getting Wii Play which comes with a remote), and I overheard this conversation: [GSEmployee] Ma’am, you do realize that Call of Duty 3 is Rated T? [Lady] I don’t know, is that appropriate for a 13 year old boy? Is it violent? as a side note here, this lady was completely clueless that call of duty was a WAR gam, about WAR, where you SHOOT people.

Whoops. This happened after work on Tuesday. Jackie was at home. I was on a small service drive that T’d into a 4.5 lane road that was fairly busy. looked left, saw a car with it’s right turn signal on in the right lane. looked right, say a red light. looked left, saw the car with the blinker slowing down as if to turn down the road I was on. looked right, saw the red light turn green, meaning I had about 10 seconds to react.

Did you? Go try, even if you’re not registered.

So I just got hit with a new low… Looks like I’m inelegible for unemployment. Apparently I haven’t been in michigan long enough to warrant helping me out. when I look back on my life, this will be the moment when I said “this is as bad as it got.” I’m hoping it doesn’t get much worse at least. The depression that I’m sitting in right how is the soul crushing type where you lose the will to do anything.

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

So on our way home from getting the first ultrasound, jackie and I had the unpleasant experience ot driving down 44th street in rushour traffic. What made this different than any other day? Abortion Protestors with giant fucking dead baby posters. Thse are the same people who protested the passion of the christ for being too bloody. The same asswipes that forced Indiana Jones to get the first ever PG 13 because of melting people.

ok, here’s my latest bout of IE stupidity. The new system I’m setting up will have several developers working on several projects. We’d like to be able to use subversion to manage the projects without dealing with pathname stupidity, hence all new projects should have / as their base since they will later become full fledge sites. So, how do we do that? I had the simple idea of mapping http://foo.

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

I generally don’t like to talk about money on here because it’s depressing, but this bothered me so much I had to say something. It’s going to cost us about $5k to get the movers to move our stuff from one apartment to another. The drive is too far for jackie and I to do in multiple trips, we lack the manpower we had during moves in college, we have more stuff, and the cost of movers would be negated if we had an accident during the 12 hour drive.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice this, but my spelling and grammar has been getting worse. I don’t think I’m the only one suffering from this problem. I’m pretty sure I can attribute it to the internet in general, and this blog/irc in particular. Why do I blame them? Because I’ve gotten used to typing as fast as I can and hitting enter without proofreading. With the blog, I do proofread a bit, but not nearly as much as I should- with IRC, I rarely even think if I *should* say it before hitting enter.

Sed is a powerful utility for going regexes on the fly. Regular Expressions (regex) are beyond the scope of this artcle, but I’ll try to write one later. As I go, I’ll explain the regexes I use, but you really should learn about them because they’re handy as hell in many different utilities. First up, we’ll use a simple example of a regular expression. Suppose for some reason, you want a list of the Input Device names used by Xorg, and plan on piping it into another script later on.

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

For the few people who haven’t heard yet, Jackie and I will be returning to Grand Rapids. I was offered a position at a local GR company as a Network Administrator. The company seems really nice from what I saw last friday. I can’t describe how much I really hate the DC area. It’s just too crowded for me. Among the many benefits of this move, Jackie and I will:

My friend k_f sent me a link containing the resignation of the debian stable maintainer. I can completely see where he’s coming from- the Debian crowd seems to have collected all of the antisocial jerks over the years. I sent him the following letter of support: Hi there, I caught your post to the debian team’s mailing list from a friend (http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2006/03/msg00008.html ). As a former debian user, I wanted to let you know I fully support you.

I finally got around to modifying the sa-stats script k_f gave me- it now works on my setup of postfix+gentoo+spamd. I unzipped, cat’ed and parsed my logs for the last 7 days and came up with the following stats: Total messages: Ham: Spam: % Spam: -------------------------------------------------- 572 196 376 65.73% Average spam score : 20.04/6.00 Average ham score : -9.04/6.00 Username: Total: Ham: Spam: % Spam: ------------------------------------------------------------ 572 196 376 65.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Got an interesting call today. ———— guy on phone: Hi, I’m with thje intrusion detection team- we had a wolverine alert that your machine set off, I was wondering if you could enable your machine so I could remote in and check it out and make sure you’re not infected. me: Which machine was it? guy on phone: *reads off a machine number* me: Ah. ok, you won’t be able to- that’s my laptop, and it’s not running windows, it’s running linux.

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.

I’d just like to state, for the record, that I will never, EVER, E_V_E_R buy anything from the spam that I get in my inbox. So spammers, if you’re paying attention, you can remove every single account @morgajel.com because they all come to me and I’m not buying anything. So leave me alone and quit sucking my bandwidth.

I remember, back in the day when Quality was more important than looking pretty… well, not really- marketing droids and slack-jawed fools always choose shiny and useless over plain and useful. take, for example, the links WRT54G router. When I first got it, the firmware was buggy and ugly, but I could use it in lynx, a text browser. no pretty colors or images, just straight text. Using lynx meant I could edit my router config remotely to add/remove ports as I needed them.

Had a discussion with my wife last week about how much we share on our websites. It sounds like there is some concern that we talk “personal” issues on our websites- like my temper tantrum when pablo died, and how jackie’s family act like children when you get them in a room together. So here is my statement on it. If I discuss it here, I have nothing to hide. I am not perfect, nor do I pretend to be.

Yeah you, the jackasses who decided that the middle of a crowded elevator lobby was a good place to stop and chat. While I understand it’s of dire importantance you tell each other about what your coworkers said to annoy your other coworkers, could you please NOT STAND IN FRONT OF THE ELEVATOR CALL BUTTONS while doing it? I know there’s not much space there, with it being lunch rush and 50 other people crammed into this small space, but we all have to make sacrifices.

I did something today that made me feel very crappy. Nothing really big, I just sorta stepped in front of people to get to the escalator- just sorta pushed my way forward. Why does this bother me? Here’s why. When I first moved to DC, I noticed how rude people are- pushing shoving, cutting in line, not waiting their turn, generally being impatient, and treating those around them like crap in order to move on to their oh-so-important jobs of backstabbing, manuvering, and powerpoint presentations,.

So i’m getting slapped around a bit by karma right now. I recently moved our DNS services to two new servers. everything appeared to be fine… I got cocky. Now it turns out they’re not behaving like proper slaves for certain domains. fore xample, we run foo.com, bar.com and bar.net as the primary DNS. We ALSO act as slaves for baz.org… except we’re not anymore. For some reason, we’re not getting updates from the primary DNS for baz.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

so I created a list of things I needed to do, and started incrementally going through it, finishing little projects and problems that I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve got a whole lot done in the past week: got squirrelmail working properly fixed the DMA on both workstations Fixed Jaxon’s cdrom Set up Kmail Fixed the DNS issues Swapped HDs around get spanish dictionary working for jackie in OOo Set up LDAP Some of these have been floating in my head for years (ldap) while others have been broken for just as long (DMA, squirrelmail).

I finally let go of draccus.net. it was a sad day. I’ve not used it in over a year, and it’s just sat unused. I’ve replaced it with morgajel.net for the most part. I figured it was time to move on. So what’s the history of draccus.net? well, it was the first domain I ever bought. it was my first real website. It was there when I was hosting on my CSIS account, it was there when I set up my first list server at Brookmeadow, and it was there when I proposed to jackie.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

I’ve been using Gentoo for over 2 years now. Before that it was Debian. Before that it was Redhat. Spattered inbetween I’ve used slackware, mandrake, suse, knoppix, ubuntu, xandros and sorceror. I’ve noticed when I pick up a new distribution, there’s always little bits and tips that people forget to tell you about. I’m gonna try to make a list for gentoo. emerge Emerge is the main package management tool for gentoo- as such, there are several useful tips that may make your life easier.

so the cat woke me up at 2:50am hoarkin’ and I’ve been up since. I’ve been having sleep problems since I was about 14. probably longer than that, but that’s roughly when I got my own room and could stay up half the night. it’s weird, like my clock is set for a 30 hour day with two 4 hour naps rather than 24 with 8 hours of sleep. I have about 2 hours before I normally get up.

This started with a comment from my friend Shedao about putting a life ban on slashdot. I’ve been reading slashdot since 2000 or so. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I listened to geeks in space and cheered when katz went away. So why am I deciding to leave slashdot? Because of Beatle Beatle, the submission spammer. You see, slashdot has a lot of power in the google pagerank system because of it’s size, links and traffic.

As some of you may or may not know, I’ve been having back problems ever since I moved to Virginia. The Movers “misplaced” our stuff, and I ended up sleeping on the floor or an half-inflated air mattress for a month. I’ve had back problems ever since. Right before thanksgiving, two excellent events happened: I had a doctor’s appointment We bought a new bed I went to the doctor to complain about my backpain, and see if I could get a consultation or something.

so, you might have noticed my site has been acting oddly the last few weeks- I’ve found a bug with mod_rewrite in my current setup. I’m not sure what or how or why it changed, I just know that sometime between Nov. 10th and 16th, mod_rewrite stopped allowing implicit redirects that wordpress uses. I’ve since modified the .htaccess file to use explicit redirects, but it’s ugly as hell. until I figure out wtf is going on, that’ll have to work for now.

nothing inspires rage more than spending 30 minutes on a wordpress article only to have firefox crash when you press the left arrow key. I’ll write my lotus notes rant later.

So I woke up at 2:30am with severe back pain- the stabbing kind that makes it so you can’t breathe unless you sit/stand up. When THEY WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED hired me, they brought me down from Michigan and paid to have our stuff moved. Long story short, their movers of choice were incompetent, and it ended up taking a month to get my bed. Since we were dead broke, I couldn’t afford a spare, and the cats kept popping the air mattress.

You know what I’d like to see? Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” . Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

So I caught an episode of “My Name is Earl” the other day, starring Jason Lee, of Mallrats and Dogma fame. He plays a grungy scum of the earth type that has an epiphany that every time he does something bad to someone, something bad happens to him. He decides to make a list of the things he’s done bad, and right the wrongs. I saw the second episode of the series, where his friends convinced him to apologize to a friend of his who went to prison for a crime earl comitted.

I saw yet again another article about open source in other countries. Why do I care? because China, Japan and Korea (IIRC) are developing their own official distribution of linux. Germany is implementing a linux conversion of a whole bunch of machines. I see one of these every few months for another country. Even the state of Mass has recently passed legislation stating that all future documents need to be done in the Open Document format (a format MS refuses to support, despite the fact that they helped design the format).

You’d think that documentation on creating a search engine for a Spring 3 MVC website would be plentiful- search boxes are on most sites these days, and it should be trivial to implement some type of search functionality in Spring MVC. Unfortunately, there is very little direct documentation on the subject, so I thought I’d write up what I did so others can benefit (and hopefully I hit enough keyword combos to have it be found).

So as I mentioned earlier, loadtesting with 70 threads failed because the default MTA on Ubuntu (exim) is limited by default to 20 concurrent connections (smtp_accept_max). Since I was using under 20% of the cpu and the bottleneck was an unconfigured mailserver, I really wanted to see where my app bottomed out, meaning I needed to fix the mail issue and keep moving. I should also mention that I switched to localhost to avoid getting myself in trouble by sending out 10,000 registration emails (when I checked the exim queue, there were 28.

One concern I have with SPoE is that, should it get popular, it must handle traffic to a reasonable degree. Since I deal with misbehaving Java apps at work all the time, I decided to test mine and see how it behaved under load. I’m running tomcat via eclipse, trending memory usage with VisualVM, and running the test with JMeter. I decided to start small- simply registering a new account. With only 5 pages, the test flew by and gave me a false sense of security.

I’ve been slowly chugging away at SPoE in my free time here and there and have added a few bits that I’d like to share. Welcome Page – now displays recently modified Snippets and Reviews (although reviews are unimplemented). Snippets – Now have a publish flag to hide snippets from the public. If a snippet is unpublished, no one can review it. Snippet lists can be paginated now. Accounts – users can register, activate, edit, their accounts and change and reset their passwords.

I’ve been relatively quiet on SPoE because I’ve been focused. Users can now register, log in, log out, and view existing snippets. I’ve added a jquery navigation menu which looks slick in firefox but ugly in IE 7. I’ve also added wymEditor for adding snippets, despite the fact that it doesn’t save; I’m not sure if it’s the final choice, but it’ll work for now. The card system was a complete catastrophe;Â I was too focused on learning the framework and building out parts as I figured it out.

After my last round of mock-up tools fizzled out, I moved on to other things. Today I had a coworker inform me that Eclipse has a mock-up plugin. After giving it a spin, I have to say it’s the best of all the apps I’ve tried to use. I am amused that the solution to my problem has been sitting right under my nose this entire time. Sadly, it’s a non-free plugin, but I’m not sure what that means yet.

So SpringFuse was a dud. In the end it was just wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m trying to learn java and spring along the way and the library conflicts were getting out of hand. I dumped it and more or less zeroed out my checkout. On the bright side, trying to debug springfuse taught me quite a bit about maven, java dependencies, using eclipse for debugging, and spring classes.

So far, getting infrastructure in place has been much easier than actually doing any coding. As it stands now, I have added the following helpers: Cobertura and Emma: Code coverage. Findbugs: finding obvious bugs in my code PMD: Find other problems in the code. So far that’s all I have- bells and whistles to distract me from doing actual work. Ideally they’ll help keep me honest about code quality, but this early in the game they don’t offer much value.

One thing I knew going into creating SPoE was that there were two types of users, Reviewers and Authors. Authors are essentially Reviewers with an expanded view. Since I’ll be using Spring and MVC, it made sense to make Reviewer a model class and Author a child class. Then I could simply add the functionality to Author as needed. I’m starting to rethink that; Spring Security has the concept of Roles, which I’d originally planned on reserving for regular users and admins, but now I’m thinking that it might be a superficial distinction.

This is intended to be a set of user stories/use cases for the author beta-reader site I intend to build (the initial article can be found here). The purpose of this project is to create a site where Authors can go to have their content beta-read. Site is meant as an author-to-author tool for critiqing snippets. User Stories User Account theme As a user I want to be able to log into the site [done] I want to be able to create an account [done] I want to be able to change passwords [done] I want to configure profile information [done] I want to be able to recover passwords via email [done] General User stories

You’d think that documentation on creating a search engine for a Spring 3 MVC website would be plentiful- search boxes are on most sites these days, and it should be trivial to implement some type of search functionality in Spring MVC. Unfortunately, there is very little direct documentation on the subject, so I thought I’d write up what I did so others can benefit (and hopefully I hit enough keyword combos to have it be found).

So as I mentioned earlier, loadtesting with 70 threads failed because the default MTA on Ubuntu (exim) is limited by default to 20 concurrent connections (smtp_accept_max). Since I was using under 20% of the cpu and the bottleneck was an unconfigured mailserver, I really wanted to see where my app bottomed out, meaning I needed to fix the mail issue and keep moving. I should also mention that I switched to localhost to avoid getting myself in trouble by sending out 10,000 registration emails (when I checked the exim queue, there were 28.

One concern I have with SPoE is that, should it get popular, it must handle traffic to a reasonable degree. Since I deal with misbehaving Java apps at work all the time, I decided to test mine and see how it behaved under load. I’m running tomcat via eclipse, trending memory usage with VisualVM, and running the test with JMeter. I decided to start small- simply registering a new account. With only 5 pages, the test flew by and gave me a false sense of security.

I’ve been slowly chugging away at SPoE in my free time here and there and have added a few bits that I’d like to share. Welcome Page – now displays recently modified Snippets and Reviews (although reviews are unimplemented). Snippets – Now have a publish flag to hide snippets from the public. If a snippet is unpublished, no one can review it. Snippet lists can be paginated now. Accounts – users can register, activate, edit, their accounts and change and reset their passwords.

I’ve been relatively quiet on SPoE because I’ve been focused. Users can now register, log in, log out, and view existing snippets. I’ve added a jquery navigation menu which looks slick in firefox but ugly in IE 7. I’ve also added wymEditor for adding snippets, despite the fact that it doesn’t save; I’m not sure if it’s the final choice, but it’ll work for now. The card system was a complete catastrophe;Â I was too focused on learning the framework and building out parts as I figured it out.

After my last round of mock-up tools fizzled out, I moved on to other things. Today I had a coworker inform me that Eclipse has a mock-up plugin. After giving it a spin, I have to say it’s the best of all the apps I’ve tried to use. I am amused that the solution to my problem has been sitting right under my nose this entire time. Sadly, it’s a non-free plugin, but I’m not sure what that means yet.

So SpringFuse was a dud. In the end it was just wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m trying to learn java and spring along the way and the library conflicts were getting out of hand. I dumped it and more or less zeroed out my checkout. On the bright side, trying to debug springfuse taught me quite a bit about maven, java dependencies, using eclipse for debugging, and spring classes.

So far, getting infrastructure in place has been much easier than actually doing any coding. As it stands now, I have added the following helpers: Cobertura and Emma: Code coverage. Findbugs: finding obvious bugs in my code PMD: Find other problems in the code. So far that’s all I have- bells and whistles to distract me from doing actual work. Ideally they’ll help keep me honest about code quality, but this early in the game they don’t offer much value.

One thing I knew going into creating SPoE was that there were two types of users, Reviewers and Authors. Authors are essentially Reviewers with an expanded view. Since I’ll be using Spring and MVC, it made sense to make Reviewer a model class and Author a child class. Then I could simply add the functionality to Author as needed. I’m starting to rethink that; Spring Security has the concept of Roles, which I’d originally planned on reserving for regular users and admins, but now I’m thinking that it might be a superficial distinction.

So I have a few user stories; time to start putting the infrastructure together. So What have I decided on so far? Language: Java Framework: Spring* Repository: Subversion IDE: Eclipse Continuous Integration/ Deployer: Hudson Build Automation: Maven2 I’m in the process of getting all my pieces together and in place. I’ve set up a subversion repository and eclipse. I have a very basic .war file setup committed and a maven script to build the war file.

This is intended to be a set of user stories/use cases for the author beta-reader site I intend to build (the initial article can be found here). The purpose of this project is to create a site where Authors can go to have their content beta-read. Site is meant as an author-to-author tool for critiqing snippets. User Stories User Account theme As a user I want to be able to log into the site [done] I want to be able to create an account [done] I want to be able to change passwords [done] I want to configure profile information [done] I want to be able to recover passwords via email [done] General User stories

I’ve written three books- not my cheesy guitar tab book, but three actual manuscripts. The problem I have is editing; I can’t seem to make it good enough to show to others. This is fairly common with authors (I’m told), so I’m not really surprised by it. One coping mechanism is to have a beta reader review parts of your work and give you feedback. Jackie has been harping on me pretty hard to find a beta reader to review some of my work, which will hopefully give me the confidence to press on and get past the nine-month-long editor’s block.

IRC can be an excellent source of information, especially on the right networks, but every once in a while you have a conversation that is so disappointing you have to share it. <br></br>22:15 < morgajel> I'm using mockito to mock up a Dao, but I've run into an issue: What is the proper way to mock up chained getters, i.e. sessionFactory.getCurrentSession().createCriteria(Account.class).list()? a mock with a mock with a mock is considered bad form, so I'm not really sure how I *should* handle this.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

Had an amusing conversation with a developer at work that had the feeling of an abbot and costello bit. I’m leaving his name out of this to protect him, but he’s read this site before and will know instantly that it’s him. The conversation revolves around our new continuous integration system, and how the terminology has changed. BTW, QA=Quality Assurance, UAT= User Acceptance Testing (staging) (10:50:50 AM) morgajel: ok, so after talking to mick, it looks like my suspicions were correct

I’m claiming the win on this one… remember that the tinyURL that this bot messages is in fact a link to tubgirl. 15:14 -!- Pats-Sox [~no@fw.mdchomes.com] has joined #asp 15:18 we dont want any chowda heads in here 15:25 "chowda head"...I don't know why that just caused a really really bad "yo momma" joke to pop in my head 15:28 I just googled "chowda head" for the heck of it. This site is pretty funny.

This happened a month or 3 back and I forgot to post it. we enjoy harassing each other, and I felt the need to share this with the rest of the world… in #asp: 08:26 < CoolGui> dude 08:26 < CoolGui> I’ve had a fever since saturday 08:26 < CoolGui> Now I have these stomach cramps that won’t go away 08:27 < CoolGui> And all the doctor did was tell me it was probably a virus and call him if I didn’t feel better in a couple of days.

Well, I’ve got this turd polished well enough to release Ziggy 1.0. There’s still a lot left to do, and a lot more to add, but this is a good place for people to start looking at it. Feel free to download it and take him apart- I’ve included the very truncated Dribbly.xml profile (dribbly is surly, be forewarned) and kept ziggy’s real config under wraps. enjoy!

11:13 -!- lori [45dddd1f@A3455140.59D83169.126F8B2.IP] has joined #irc 11:13 jesse are you there? 11:14 he might be 11:14 want me to go get him? 11:14 sure why not 11:15 * ziggy runs off with a pickled herring under his arm 11:15 yo 11:16 what is jackie's work number? 11:17 *shrug* 11:17 I don't know. 11:17 well what good are you? 11:20 we're all wondering that 11:21 well, other than sperm donor- he seems to have gotten that down.

ran into a problem with mod_rewrite and IE- a real one this time. IE was choking on files that were being downloaded via mod_rewrite. same script worked without rewrite, died with it. Did some research and with a lot of help from noodl of #apache figured out it was because mod_rewrite adds a “Vary: Host” line to the header, which apparently IE chokes on. loaded the header module in apache and added “Header unset Vary” after my rewrite and all is good- cvs, pdf, zip all download properly.

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice this, but my spelling and grammar has been getting worse. I don’t think I’m the only one suffering from this problem. I’m pretty sure I can attribute it to the internet in general, and this blog/irc in particular. Why do I blame them? Because I’ve gotten used to typing as fast as I can and hitting enter without proofreading. With the blog, I do proofread a bit, but not nearly as much as I should- with IRC, I rarely even think if I *should* say it before hitting enter.

For those that are not familiar with Ziggy, he is a character based on a DnD character from a few years back and has taken on a life of his own. He’s made an appearance in my Willis module for Neverwinter Nights (based off the same campaign), a book that I’m writing, several sketches as to what he looks like, and an IRC bot written in perl. The IRC bot is what has really shaped his personality, and he’s become pretty much another member of the group.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

Well, sorta- they’re not new to linux, but they installed Debian on their home machines as part of a 2 month experiment. Yojimbo is looking for a better job, and I’ve been trying to help him develop some skills that will make it easier. I’ve taught him a little perl in the past and he’s used linux at the college (EOS lab at GVSU), so it wasn’t too big of a jump.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

well, almost. A few years back I had just finished working on a multi-threaded matrix multiplication project for a class, and jumping between that and bash scripting, which I was fairly new to at the time. I asked the following question in the #asp channel when I bounced back to writing ASP: (morganj): 0 is false and 1 is true, correct? (alec_eso): 1, morganj (morganj): bastard. This quote made it’s way to bash.

I wrote this script a while back, thought I’d share with the gentlemen in #asp. It works great if you’re on a *nix box. It shows who has tried to !search, as well as how many times they tried it. #!/bin/bash LOGFILE=”/home/morgajel/.xchat2/xchatlogs/UnderNet-#asp.log” #the keyword grep “!search” $LOGFILE | \ # remove the baiters and regulars- they know the score. grep -iv ‘k_f\|subnet\|morg\|pytte\|Crusher\|lanshark\|carlsb\|dev.nu\|LlamaHerder’ | \ grep -iv ‘James_But\|vp.bofh\|mylo\|shedao\|ram\|phool\|bebez\|rochess\|maestro’ | \ #make sure we don’t accidentally get the topic

Sometimes I really enjoy IRC a bit too much. you see, I spend a lot of time in the #asp channel, which at one point was a good place to talk about Active Server Pages. ASP is now pretty much dead, and the channel is a plain old (and rather vicious) chat channel. The problem is, on another network, #asp stands for alt.sex.passwords, so people come in all the time looking for porn passwords.

So I have a few user stories; time to start putting the infrastructure together. So What have I decided on so far? Language: Java Framework: Spring* Repository: Subversion IDE: Eclipse Continuous Integration/ Deployer: Hudson Build Automation: Maven2 I’m in the process of getting all my pieces together and in place. I’ve set up a subversion repository and eclipse. I have a very basic .war file setup committed and a maven script to build the war file.

So jackie wants to take her recipes and build an open cookbook sorta thing. I’m not sure how all of this is gonna play out, but I’ve set up the dev environment for it. I’ll try to make notes about it when I can.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

I was planning on simply republishing my previous svn article, but realized that it sucked compared to what I know now. Prerequisites I’ll presume you have the following things. – a Linux machine – subversion already installed Terminology to Know There are a few terms that get mangled if you’re coming from other types of source control. This is just to clear things up. – Repository: the central storage place on the subversion server where your data is kept.

So I’ve been working on a new project called Ruma(more on it later), and I’m beginning to get frustrated with the LDAP support. So far I’ve found * ruby/ldap, ruby-ldap, ldap-ruby by ian macdonald, last release 8/2006 * net-ldap, Net::LDAP by Francis Cianfrocca, last release 8/2006 * ruby-activeldap, ActiveLDAP-ruby by Will Drewry, last release 5/2007 ldap-ruby appears to be the frontrunner, but hasn’t been updated in a year- the forums appear to think it’s been abandoned.

So I’ve been working on a side app that connects to remote servers. While writing validation code for inputs, I came across an interesting dilemma. I’d like to validate an address input to be valid- be it a hostname, domainname, or ip address. Unfortunately it’s not as simple as it sounds. According to the domain name RFC, section 3.5 domain names must start with a letter, end with a letter or number, and can have letters, numbers or hyphens in between.

Since I began working on the Luma project, I’ve been playing a lot with Python, a language that I’ve been around for years but never bothered to learn. Since Luma is written in Python and I’m not on the team, I figured it was time to jump in feet first. Coming from a perl/php/ruby/java background, it wasn’t a big leap to make. However, the more I read and write, the less I like it.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

I’ve been using and promoting open source for about 7 years now- it started back in 2000 when I began writing php and playing with apache. In 2003 I made the full switch to Linux. Since then I’ve produced several small little projects and put them under the GPL in hopes that it would help someone else. I’ve also written many articles and how-tos for my site to help spread what I’ve learned.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

Ingredients kid hose sprinkler yard wife who doesn’t want to get wet step 1 take the kid outside to play in the sprinkler step 2 immediately get wet with the water that’s still in the hose and warmed from the sun step 3 get the kid soaked step 4 take the sprinkler off of hose step 5 show kid how to drink out of hose, hand him hose. Make sure to hold onto a length for crimping

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So Ian is staying with Jackie’s mom this weekend. Jackie left to drop him off about 10am friday morning with the intent of being back in Troy to pick me up around 6pm. Around 3pm one of the guys I work with walked into the room and began a conversation like this: [matt] Anyone want tickets to see Kids in the Hall? [me] How much? [matt] Free. [me] ooh, I’ll take them!

So jackie wants to take her recipes and build an open cookbook sorta thing. I’m not sure how all of this is gonna play out, but I’ve set up the dev environment for it. I’ll try to make notes about it when I can.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

So Jackie’s been sitting at home with Ian for 4 months now and is incredibly bored. All she every does is read. I suggested a hobby, but she doesn’t really have any (except scrapbooking, which is expensive)- So what I want to do is get some ideas from all the people who read my site. Here are the base rules: cheap- no more than $25 start up cost and that must last 3 weeks.

So some time in the middle of the night, I’m awoken by this strange, high pitch squeaking sound- almost a whistle. I could hear movement in the other room, so I figured it was the cats playing with a toy.In Truth, the cats have ADD and usually stop after about 10 seconds or so, but this kept going… 20.. 30 seconds. I finally got up and walked into the other room to see chaos playing with a live mouse.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

Jackie and I finally agreed on a name a week or three ago- “Ian Hawthorn Morgan”. We also bought the domain IanHawthorn.com for him- figured it was something he could take over when he’s old enough- it’s also gonna serve as a news center for family and friends. Jackie’s already set up a wordpress theme and started posting emails we’ve received and other such details. I’ve revised my categories on this site and added one for ian when I mention him.

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

Jackie is pregnant. Looks like I’m gonna be a father.

For the few people who haven’t heard yet, Jackie and I will be returning to Grand Rapids. I was offered a position at a local GR company as a Network Administrator. The company seems really nice from what I saw last friday. I can’t describe how much I really hate the DC area. It’s just too crowded for me. Among the many benefits of this move, Jackie and I will:

Well, it’s Feb. 26th and it’s still nice out. it’s only 34, but it’s bright and sunshiney. It was 60 last week, and it’s been decent most of the winter. My brain is starting to activate and come out of winter hibernation, so that means it’s time to start planting. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t get a real garden, so we have a bunch of pots and windowboxes and such.

Had a discussion with my wife last week about how much we share on our websites. It sounds like there is some concern that we talk “personal” issues on our websites- like my temper tantrum when pablo died, and how jackie’s family act like children when you get them in a room together. So here is my statement on it. If I discuss it here, I have nothing to hide. I am not perfect, nor do I pretend to be.

I don’t even know where to begin. This morning has sucked and it’s no ones fault but my own. It started with the DMA crap- the one machine where it would really help is the fileserver. I needed to simply change the chipset driver, recompile the kernel, and reboot. This should be simple for even a semi-competent linux users. However, I am a moron. Each mistake I make, I’m gonna put a little * next to it.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So I’ve been pretty quiet since I hit 100k words- what’s been going on? Round of layoffs at work Friend diagnosed with cancer Another round of layoffs at work. Jackie became a pampered chef consultant Finances have been wiped out from christmas and getting her PC stuff off the ground. 10% paycut at work Guitar lessons are now done because no one can afford them. Have been reading Manuscript Makeover for ways to improve my book Decided to do an initial cleanup of the first draft of my script, then rewrite the outline before starting draft #2 started yet another opensource project- this time it’s a collection of Nagios Plugins.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So my father in law has been going on for years about how great Ameritech/ SBC/ AT&T’s new broadband service is gonna be once it was activated. I personally like the idea of having fiber to the curb, so I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. A few months back they sent a rep out to let us know they were offering ‘U-verse’ in our area. I wasn’t home at the time, so Jackie got information and said I’d get back to them.

I do my best to avoid politics on this site because it’ll always piss someone off. I don’t like the bible-thumping direction the republican party has taken over the past decade or two, and I can’t stand the democrats demands that we give up personal freedoms to save the children. I’m gonna talk about politics today because I’ve noticed something happening that’s so surreal I had to say something. I’ll use the names Candidate A, B, etc to represent the players in this little scenario.

I’m claiming the win on this one… remember that the tinyURL that this bot messages is in fact a link to tubgirl. 15:14 -!- Pats-Sox [~no@fw.mdchomes.com] has joined #asp 15:18 we dont want any chowda heads in here 15:25 "chowda head"...I don't know why that just caused a really really bad "yo momma" joke to pop in my head 15:28 I just googled "chowda head" for the heck of it. This site is pretty funny.

Whoops. This happened after work on Tuesday. Jackie was at home. I was on a small service drive that T’d into a 4.5 lane road that was fairly busy. looked left, saw a car with it’s right turn signal on in the right lane. looked right, say a red light. looked left, saw the car with the blinker slowing down as if to turn down the road I was on. looked right, saw the red light turn green, meaning I had about 10 seconds to react.

Did you? Go try, even if you’re not registered.

So I just got hit with a new low… Looks like I’m inelegible for unemployment. Apparently I haven’t been in michigan long enough to warrant helping me out. when I look back on my life, this will be the moment when I said “this is as bad as it got.” I’m hoping it doesn’t get much worse at least. The depression that I’m sitting in right how is the soul crushing type where you lose the will to do anything.

I recently signed up for a form with a bunk email address for something or other… for my name, I put in something amusing rather than my real name because, hell with them, I don’t want them sending me stuff. I even checked the little box so they wouldnt… sure enough, they spammed me. how can I tell? well, the bogus account I used gave it away, but they addressed each message by the first name I gave them…

Today I find myself a little of both. I was called into the confrence room today and told that the company I was contracted to requested that today be my last day. Yes, I am officially unemployed. Fortunately I was laid off, not fired- turns out business wasn’t as good as they were hoping and they can’t afford someone to try and fix their broken infrastructure. Since they fired a developer a few weeks ago, and the lead developer put in his 1 week notice today, I can’t say it’s suprising- if they’re getting rid of me after losing two other people, they must be hemmoraging money pretty badly.

So on our way home from getting the first ultrasound, jackie and I had the unpleasant experience ot driving down 44th street in rushour traffic. What made this different than any other day? Abortion Protestors with giant fucking dead baby posters. Thse are the same people who protested the passion of the christ for being too bloody. The same asswipes that forced Indiana Jones to get the first ever PG 13 because of melting people.

So apparently my problem yesterday with aw_foo.jmorgan.example.com didn’t work because _ is not a valid dns character. Every-freakin-other browser allows it to work except IE. Figures- the one time microsoft didn’t embrace and extend and did the minimum amount of work, it bit me in the ass.

I’d just like to state, for the record, that I will never, EVER, E_V_E_R buy anything from the spam that I get in my inbox. So spammers, if you’re paying attention, you can remove every single account @morgajel.com because they all come to me and I’m not buying anything. So leave me alone and quit sucking my bandwidth.

Yeah you, the jackasses who decided that the middle of a crowded elevator lobby was a good place to stop and chat. While I understand it’s of dire importantance you tell each other about what your coworkers said to annoy your other coworkers, could you please NOT STAND IN FRONT OF THE ELEVATOR CALL BUTTONS while doing it? I know there’s not much space there, with it being lunch rush and 50 other people crammed into this small space, but we all have to make sacrifices.

So some of you may know that I’ve been working on a second book- this one is music-based. Anyways, I have a few friends who are new to guitar and my book is more or less aimed at them, however some of them don’t know how to read tab- hence this post. So here’s the rundown: <br></br>e|-------------------------------------------<br></br>B|--------x----------------------------------<br></br>G|--------x-------5---5-7b9r7-5--------------<br></br>D|--------x--5h7---7--------------7~~~~------<br></br>A|---5/7--x----------------------------------<br></br>E|-------------------------------------------<br></br> The above is a sample of some tablature. Each of the 6 lines represents a string on the guitar, each number represents a fret on that string.

I’m the first to admit I’ve been slacking on my scales practice, mainly sticking to pentatonic (because I’m lazy). So while reading through my Scales and Modes book and I stumbled across something obvious, yet I’d never recognized. Each scale has a mode for each note in the scale- Major scale having 7, pentatonic scale having 5, etc. That I was remotely aware of, but didn’t think much of it.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

So I just got back from my first concert without jackie in a long long time- went with my friend phil to the orbit room to see Coheed and Cambria. The events are as followed: * went and got dinner * went to the orbit room, realized phil was the “old guy” there (actually 3 or 4 people ended up beating him for that title) We got a table in the back because, since we were 10-15 years older than 9/10ths of the crowd and needed the support.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

This is excellent, yet disappointing at the same time- both the Pope and now The Church of England have come forward and said “mah bad, Darwin was right, sorry about oppressing science… again…” The depressing part is while all of the old-world christian religions are coming to terms with evolution, those in the US are still desperately fighting reality. I’m wondering what it’s gonna take for people to accept it. It’s like there’s just enough unverified data and blatant mistruths out there to convince people who’ll deny the enormous mountain of data that disagrees.

ok, this has been gnawing at me for the last few weeks. As I get older I become a lot less patient with people who waste my time on stupid things. I try not to get involved with religious or political debates mainly because they always seem to lead to hurt feelings and me putting someone on a life-long banlist. However. I’m getting *really* pissed at the anti-science bullshit that’s going on.

Ingredients kid hose sprinkler yard wife who doesn’t want to get wet step 1 take the kid outside to play in the sprinkler step 2 immediately get wet with the water that’s still in the hose and warmed from the sun step 3 get the kid soaked step 4 take the sprinkler off of hose step 5 show kid how to drink out of hose, hand him hose. Make sure to hold onto a length for crimping

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So jackie and I put in an offer on a house march 19th. The sellers agreed on… lets say the 25th of march. So we should have a house, right? Not so fast. Our offer was less than what was owed on the mortgage, so they had to get THEIR bank to approve the short sale. One delay after another. Every 1-7 days they give us another excuse. I’m getting really pissed at this point and needed to vent.

I see this one come up quite often, so I thought I’d share it. The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbits are caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words?

When I moved into Secchia Hall back in the fall of 2001, my mom took me to Sams to buy my first real piece of furniture- a Desk chair. The dorm room was unfurnished, so I ended up getting a futon and a desk as well. The desk was cheaply made and only survived one move. The futon was horribly uncomfortable, and given to Jackie’s dad shortly thereafter. The only thing that followed me was the chair.

Here’s a story from Christmas that I almost forgot to share. Every year we get together- my parents, brothers, aunt and uncle, cousins and grandparents. We go through dinner, do the present thing, then the grandparents leave. That’s when things usually degenerate below the average level of stupidity. The incident started when my brother Jamie (24) and cousin Walker (29) were talking about getting high from nutmeg. I don’t think Jamie believed it, so Walker offered to eat a tablespoon of nutmeg for $10.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display: It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book: Rough Draft: First complete version of the story. First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked. Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.

We just took her to the Humane Society. I am a sad monkey 🙁 Bye bye Chaos, I’m sorry it had to go down like this. 2004-2007

There’s nothing worse than seeing a pet go away; be it death or being forced to give it away. This weekend Jackie and I agreed that we’re going to take Chaos to the shelter this week. For those unfamiliar with Chaos, here’s the story. Jackie and I had been married for less than a year, and living together with her cat Toby who was 9 years old at the time. Toby had always been around other cats, but when Jackie brought Toby up from her father’s house, Toby became lonely, and would cry in the middle of the night, often waking me up and pissing me off.

So Jackie’s been sitting at home with Ian for 4 months now and is incredibly bored. All she every does is read. I suggested a hobby, but she doesn’t really have any (except scrapbooking, which is expensive)- So what I want to do is get some ideas from all the people who read my site. Here are the base rules: cheap- no more than $25 start up cost and that must last 3 weeks.

So some time in the middle of the night, I’m awoken by this strange, high pitch squeaking sound- almost a whistle. I could hear movement in the other room, so I figured it was the cats playing with a toy.In Truth, the cats have ADD and usually stop after about 10 seconds or so, but this kept going… 20.. 30 seconds. I finally got up and walked into the other room to see chaos playing with a live mouse.

So I’m going to attempt a new routine- waking up at 6:30 and hitting the gym for 25 minutes every morning. It’s a 5 minute walk over to the gym, so I can get that done, hit the shower, and have plenty of time to get ready in the morning. The goal is to do this every morning, and after a month or so maybe scale back on weekends. I started on a saturday so I can get in the swing of it before the work week starts.

FINALLY, after 4 years, I’ve got a grill again. The last time I had a grill, it was charcoal and at Brook Meadow. This time we’re going with basically a potbelly gas grill- small enough to be portable, big enough to grill 2 steaks. Somewhere around here I have my old bbq grill utensils. Gotta find those then I’ll be having steak and pork for dinner.

Yes, I said Leverage- I sound like a big fancy CIO, don’t I?:) I have been a Michigan resident for 26 of my 27 years. I left Michigan for 18 months to take some contract work in DC- My wife and I weren’t happy with the area and moved back first chance we could. Unfortunately for us, the company that hired me started to flounder and laid me off after 5 months.

So Ian was born at 5:02am on monday (Fed 26, 2007). 7lbs, 15oz, 20.5 inches long. He is already carrying on the fine Morgan tradition of being an asshole.

Whoops. This happened after work on Tuesday. Jackie was at home. I was on a small service drive that T’d into a 4.5 lane road that was fairly busy. looked left, saw a car with it’s right turn signal on in the right lane. looked right, say a red light. looked left, saw the car with the blinker slowing down as if to turn down the road I was on. looked right, saw the red light turn green, meaning I had about 10 seconds to react.

Jackie and I finally agreed on a name a week or three ago- “Ian Hawthorn Morgan”. We also bought the domain IanHawthorn.com for him- figured it was something he could take over when he’s old enough- it’s also gonna serve as a news center for family and friends. Jackie’s already set up a wordpress theme and started posting emails we’ve received and other such details. I’ve revised my categories on this site and added one for ian when I mention him.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

One feature of vim I don’t use enough is the ability to split the screen and view multiple files at once. I use this feature all the time when I use vimdiff, but not really any other time. I thought I’d take a moment to lay out some uses of it (thank Linux.com for the reference): From Command Mode: :sp splits the screen horizontally :vsp splits the screen vertically Ctrl-w Ctrl-w moves between viewports Ctrl-w [right arrow] moves active viewport 1 to the right Ctrl-w [left arrow] moves active viewport 1 to the left Ctrl-w 3[left arrow] moves active viewport 3 to the left Ctrl-w q will close the active window.

Search and replace is a great feature in most text editors, but what happens when you want to do more? Vim has a solution- recording macros. Suppose you have the following output from some ancient program that needs to be tweaked: <br></br>X1222 22323 2A22 3303 0000 3334esss test 123<br></br>X2222 22353 2A22 3303 0001 3334esss tacd 456<br></br>X3222 22383 2A22 3303 0010 3334esss fals 789<br></br>X4222 22393 2A22 3303 0011 3334esss true 012<br></br>

So vim 7 has native spell checking- which is great if you remember to turn it on. Enabling it in your .vimrc is fine if all you view is written text files, but annoying when it’s running while working on code. That’s why I created this little snippet of sunshine: add this to ~/.vimrc: au BufNewFile,BufRead *.txt call ConfigureTxtFile() func! ConfigureTxtFile() setlocal spell spelllang=en_us set wrapmargin=80 set textwidth=80 endfunction I also use it to set my text width and wrap margins.

If you need to paste into vim from somewhere else, and your code has tabs or spaces in it, you’ll notice that vim may add extra tabs. see, vim doesn’t see it as a paste event, it sees it as “you typing really fast”- and one thing vim does will is auto-indent. The problem is when you paste, you don’t want auto-indentation because your code is already indented. to temporarily turn off auto-indenting, try this from insert mode:

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

Ingredients kid hose sprinkler yard wife who doesn’t want to get wet step 1 take the kid outside to play in the sprinkler step 2 immediately get wet with the water that’s still in the hose and warmed from the sun step 3 get the kid soaked step 4 take the sprinkler off of hose step 5 show kid how to drink out of hose, hand him hose. Make sure to hold onto a length for crimping

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

So Ian was born at 5:02am on monday (Fed 26, 2007). 7lbs, 15oz, 20.5 inches long. He is already carrying on the fine Morgan tradition of being an asshole.

So I was in a Gamestop yesterday buying an extra nunchuck for the Wii (I plan on getting Wii Play which comes with a remote), and I overheard this conversation: [GSEmployee] Ma’am, you do realize that Call of Duty 3 is Rated T? [Lady] I don’t know, is that appropriate for a 13 year old boy? Is it violent? as a side note here, this lady was completely clueless that call of duty was a WAR gam, about WAR, where you SHOOT people.

Doing another annual recap this year like I did last year. 2006 was a pretty rough year- move from DC Metro back to Grand Rapids, got a crappy job, found out jackie was pregnant, got laid off from crappy job, spent 3 months unemployed, and at the end of November was offered an awesome new job in Troy, MI (the other side of the state). Other than Ian, and the new job, the best good news is we finally have a decent couch- two of them, actually.

Jackie and I finally agreed on a name a week or three ago- “Ian Hawthorn Morgan”. We also bought the domain IanHawthorn.com for him- figured it was something he could take over when he’s old enough- it’s also gonna serve as a news center for family and friends. Jackie’s already set up a wordpress theme and started posting emails we’ve received and other such details. I’ve revised my categories on this site and added one for ian when I mention him.

My internet connection. SO here’s the scoop 5 days until cutover: I call AT&T, tell them I’m moving and need to transfer my Static IP DSL service on the 30th(Monday). Tech says no problem it’s all set. I am pleasantly surprised at how little of a hassle it was and that it was way smoother than any other interaction I’ve had with them. Saturday, 2 days until cutover: We’re planning on doing the actual moving Sunday morning and plan to spend Saturday packing and planning.

So, we’re in the new house as of yesterday- AT&T just finished the dsl line, and everything is up and running- well, except for the 200 boxes that need unpacking. If the site goes down, let me know- AT&T didn’t bother telling me that my static ip was gonna change- I suppose it makes sense, but my gut instinct is they gave me a dynamic IP instead and it’ll change in the next week or two.

So we’re finally closing on the house. We close on the 27th, and take possession on Sunday the 29th. We have a lot of work ahead of us. The Todo list goes something like this after moving everything and getting settled: [X] Change locks [X] Build child door over stairwell [_] Replace broken glass panes in both bedrooms [_] Clean out bird nests in vents in roof, add screens outside Next up is things we should do over the next 2 months:

So jackie and I put in an offer on a house march 19th. The sellers agreed on… lets say the 25th of march. So we should have a house, right? Not so fast. Our offer was less than what was owed on the mortgage, so they had to get THEIR bank to approve the short sale. One delay after another. Every 1-7 days they give us another excuse. I’m getting really pissed at this point and needed to vent.

So my father in law has been going on for years about how great Ameritech/ SBC/ AT&T’s new broadband service is gonna be once it was activated. I personally like the idea of having fiber to the curb, so I’ve been looking forward to it for a while. A few months back they sent a rep out to let us know they were offering ‘U-verse’ in our area. I wasn’t home at the time, so Jackie got information and said I’d get back to them.

So jackie and I were thinking, “when we do get a house, what will we need?” so we’re gonna make a list. 55 gallon outdoor garbage can shovel snow shovel rake lawnmower Drill office chair

So I’ve been quiet the last few weeks- mainly because I’ve been keeping busy. As a lot of you know, I have many little side projects that I never seem to get done. So here’s a quick update: – Ruma has been put into stasis since the other devs don’t have the free time and neither do I. if anyone wants to take up development of it, I’ll be happy to give them access.

So I was wandering through del.icio.us and stumbled across hundredpushups.com, a site that supposedly helps you get in shape by getting you to do 100 pushups in a row. It lasts 6 weeks and I figured what the hell, I’ll give it a try. My initial test was 8- I could have done more, but my lower abs weren’t used to holding the 20lbs of flab and started feeling like I was gonna have a hernia.

So I had the following dream last night right before I woke up. It’s still pretty vivid in my head. Jackie’s friend PJ lives in the area and is sort of an SCA nut. For some reason, in the dream, she owned a small hole-in-the-wall cafe, and ran a wiccan group out of there (she’s not wiccan in reality). One day she was throwing a party and her wiccan friends were there.

Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those. Family The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now.

Had another weird dream. There was more to the dream, but the last 30 seconds of it overshadowed the rest. some parts were spilled along a highway and jackie and I were cleaning them up (was a large project, 20 other people doing this too) and I decide to grab onto the back of the car while jackie drives to the next part. But she doesn’t slow down. She keeps going faster and faster, thinking it’s funny, and I start yelling at her to slow down.

I have some weird dreams, but last nights was probably the worst in a long while. If anyone has a family history of stillbirthed 6-armed babies, I have a message for you.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

So jackie wants to take her recipes and build an open cookbook sorta thing. I’m not sure how all of this is gonna play out, but I’ve set up the dev environment for it. I’ll try to make notes about it when I can.

So jackie wants to take her recipes and build an open cookbook sorta thing. I’m not sure how all of this is gonna play out, but I’ve set up the dev environment for it. I’ll try to make notes about it when I can.

It doesn’t get better than Chocolate Chip Bacon Cookies. Since this is actually the second link I’ve seen about bacon that I wanted to share, I’m gonna start a new Bacon category.

So I just realized that I’ve become uber busy as of late. My current side projects look like this: – Warhammer Army builder for ChrisP written in Ruby (on Rails) – reviving radio.morgajel.com and rebuilding my stream (RoR, again) – SecretWord module and Logging for Ziggy (Perl + Po::Co::IRC) – ImportLDIF plugin for Luma This isn’t including the miniature painting, work, or Ian. The weird part is it feels nice to be busy- but only when it’s busy on my terms 🙂

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

a couple of weeks ago the lotto hit $200 million, and I bought my annual lotto ticket. The lotto has a strange effect on people. It gives hope where there is none. Even I sat at a redlight imagining all of the wonderful things I could do with that amount of money. Of course erasing family debt, replacing vehicles, real honeymoon with jackie, etc was at the top of the list, but what would *I* do after that was said and done?

So I’m looking to play with some monitoring software to figure out why, every once in a while, I get laggy spots when connecting to my server from work. The latest toy I’m playing with is Cacti. Here’s what I’m planning on monitoring (partially because it’s useful, partially because it’s fun): link (Linksys router running dd-wrt) * bandwidth on external IP * bandwidth on each port * wireless bandwidth used

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice this, but my spelling and grammar has been getting worse. I don’t think I’m the only one suffering from this problem. I’m pretty sure I can attribute it to the internet in general, and this blog/irc in particular. Why do I blame them? Because I’ve gotten used to typing as fast as I can and hitting enter without proofreading. With the blog, I do proofread a bit, but not nearly as much as I should- with IRC, I rarely even think if I *should* say it before hitting enter.

Had a discussion with my wife last week about how much we share on our websites. It sounds like there is some concern that we talk “personal” issues on our websites- like my temper tantrum when pablo died, and how jackie’s family act like children when you get them in a room together. So here is my statement on it. If I discuss it here, I have nothing to hide. I am not perfect, nor do I pretend to be.

so I created a list of things I needed to do, and started incrementally going through it, finishing little projects and problems that I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve got a whole lot done in the past week: got squirrelmail working properly fixed the DMA on both workstations Fixed Jaxon’s cdrom Set up Kmail Fixed the DNS issues Swapped HDs around get spanish dictionary working for jackie in OOo Set up LDAP Some of these have been floating in my head for years (ldap) while others have been broken for just as long (DMA, squirrelmail).

I finally let go of draccus.net. it was a sad day. I’ve not used it in over a year, and it’s just sat unused. I’ve replaced it with morgajel.net for the most part. I figured it was time to move on. So what’s the history of draccus.net? well, it was the first domain I ever bought. it was my first real website. It was there when I was hosting on my CSIS account, it was there when I set up my first list server at Brookmeadow, and it was there when I proposed to jackie.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

so, you might have noticed my site has been acting oddly the last few weeks- I’ve found a bug with mod_rewrite in my current setup. I’m not sure what or how or why it changed, I just know that sometime between Nov. 10th and 16th, mod_rewrite stopped allowing implicit redirects that wordpress uses. I’ve since modified the .htaccess file to use explicit redirects, but it’s ugly as hell. until I figure out wtf is going on, that’ll have to work for now.

nothing inspires rage more than spending 30 minutes on a wordpress article only to have firefox crash when you press the left arrow key. I’ll write my lotus notes rant later.

One of my side projects this past year was developing a “Radio Show” program to track and display info about songs currently playing on my stream. I’ve taken the last few months off, but now I’m back on track. http://morgajel.com/radio/index.php Unfortunately the stream is not available to the public (You can thank the RIAA for that bit of bullshit). If you have any comments, feel free to add them to my bugtracker: http://morgajel.

Have I really gotten this busy? I have been neglecting draccus.net for years now, and morgajel.com is falling to the same fate. I picked up morgajel.net to complete the set, and figured, “hell, I might as well set up a wordpress.” Let me know what you think, Hopefully this will keep #asp off my ass about implementing RSS. Now I just gotta customize it. -Morgajel

This is a list of all the things that make it feel old. I started this while working at a place that ran a lot of FreeBSD machines. I never got around to finishing it because we started implementing linux boxes, but I think the complaints are still valid. The real shame is that I only wrote down 6 out of about 100 different things. Mostly it’s trivial stuff, but trivial stuff should be the easiest to fix- the FreeBSD people had a real fear of painting barns (take that as you will).

So we just got these shiny new Netgear GSM7224 layer two 24 port managed switches, and I went about setting up MRTG. mrtg and snmp are one of my weak areas- I’m not too good at networking stuff to begin with, and mrtg has always seemed just out of my reach. Well, between rewiring half of the serverroom and threatening mrtg with a stick, I got it all working! now I can finally monitor network traffic and figure out which one of these network cards is a chatty cathy.

Another well used mode is Visual Mode, which turns your cursor into a hilighter. open a textfile with several lines of text ad move the cursor to the middle switch from command mode to visual mode: v You’ll notice as you move the cursor around, you highlight different sections from the point you started to the point you left. you can press [esc] to return to command mode. hilight a few lines of text from command mode:

Deleting in vim can be done several ways- in insert mode, the delete key and backspace key perform as you’d expect them to, but what if you want more? delete the character to the left of the cursor: [esc]d[left arrow] delete the character to the right of the cursor: [esc]d[right arrow] deleting the current line from insert mode: [esc]dd deleting the current line and the one below from insert mode:

Vim is a great tool, but using is can be a pita in the beginning- hence, we go through the basics. There are several command modes, but we’ll only discuss a few at first: Command Mode and Insert Mode. Command mode is used to perform actions like saving, searching, etc. Insert mode is used to insert and delete text. You’ll be switching between them a lot. Open a file from the cli:

Something that is really aggrivating the hell out of me is FreeBSD’s package management system. I’ve heard people go on and on about how it’s the best out there, but frankly I’m unimpressed. The main reason for this is there is no way to determine ALL of the dependencies that are going to be installed when I install a package. Lets do a comparison of a freeciv install on my workstations vs the freebsd server:

I don’t know if BSD can smell the gnu in my blood or what, but it is seriously putting up a fight. As I mentioned in the previous post’s followups, I got kde working finally- however every time I pop open Konqueror and hit slashdot, the entire machine locks solid. Not just konqueror, not just X; the whole machine. Now, I know slashdot has a troll meme about BSD dying, but this is ridiculous.

So, I’m compiling a list of what’s missing from my BSD install from the get go. tab-complete – stupid default shell is csh, which means no tab complete. Come on guys, jump on up to 1999. alt key – This is probably a keymap issue, but the alt and delete keys do not work. Alt acts like it does nothing, and delete behaves like a tilde. This means no alt tab.

Holy crap, welcome to 1980. The FreeBSD install is going to take a little bit longer than I thought. I booted off the Install CD and the first thing I noticed was the lack of color. Not shiny pretty GUI color, but angry fruit salad color. As pages of white text on black blackground whizzed past my screen, nothing stuck out as important; I noticed no dividers between sections. This is a very small, trivial thing, but it is nice.

Well, the new job is gonna have a bucket full of FreeBSD servers. It’s been a while since I tinkered with FBSD, so it’ll be a challenge. To prepare for that challenge, I’ve decided to convert Draccus (my workstation) to BSD. The following is a list of hurdles I’ll need to surpass before I start in April: get draccus up and running get KDE up and running get Gimp working get my Wacom Graphire 3 tablet working get my Logitech Quickcam working get my m-audio keyboard working get rosegarden recording again burn a cd-rw burn a dvd+rw I’m presuming I’ll have no problems with my Nvidia 6600 GT, Audigy 4 soundcard, or other common hardware.

I have a horrible habit of remembering bits and pieces of all sorts of random stuff- this includes faces. I may not remember your name or where I saw you but I’ll never forget a face. Last night on Heroes they did a preview for episode 10- they had a 1 second flash of a minor character’s face that I recognized: and I spent an hour last night trying to remember wtf he was from- unfortunately nbc didn’t have the promo clip up yet so I didn’t have the screenshot in hand.

So since I’ve been laid off, I’ve been watching a lot of TV in the background while keeping busy… seasons 2 and 3 of Deadwood, 4 and 5 of the Dead Zone, all of Invader Zim, Bones, Heroes, Grey’s Anatomy, Angel, Battlestar Galactica, My Name is Earl, Lost, etc. That’s a Lot of TV. Of the shows that I’m going to keep track of this season, Lost, My Name is Earl, BSG, Bones, Grey’s Anatomy, and maybe 24 are on the list.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

So I caught an episode of “My Name is Earl” the other day, starring Jason Lee, of Mallrats and Dogma fame. He plays a grungy scum of the earth type that has an epiphany that every time he does something bad to someone, something bad happens to him. He decides to make a list of the things he’s done bad, and right the wrongs. I saw the second episode of the series, where his friends convinced him to apologize to a friend of his who went to prison for a crime earl comitted.

Midi- oh, how do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways… I’ve never liked midi, it’s fabricated, boring, hollow existence bothers me whenever I hear it, yet I am currently at it’s mercy. Linux may be ahead of other operating systems in many respects, but for some reason, midi support seems to have been completely passed over. One of my side projects right now is writing a CD. a useful tool for writing a CD is a Piano.

I’ve apparently become either very brave, or very stupid in my old age. Last night at 10pm I reset my router and flashed it’s firmware with an open source alternative. A few years back, some Linksys tech realized the usefulness of some open source components and implemented them in the firmware of their routers- they just forgot to follow the license agreement of the software they used and didn’t tell anyone or release the source code and the changes they made.

So Today is the last day that I get to play with Jackie’s M5. I’m gonna miss it 🙁 on the bright sid,e I did find out something cool- the battery almost died on the way to work- that’s because it hasn’t been charged since monday. The long ass battery life this thing has is very nice. I thought when I connected it to a USB cable it would trickle charge, but it turns out, as I just found out a few moments ago, you have to slide the power charge on, then the “charge button” I mentioned on day one glows bright red- it’s a light, not a button!

I remember, back in the day when Quality was more important than looking pretty… well, not really- marketing droids and slack-jawed fools always choose shiny and useless over plain and useful. take, for example, the links WRT54G router. When I first got it, the firmware was buggy and ugly, but I could use it in lynx, a text browser. no pretty colors or images, just straight text. Using lynx meant I could edit my router config remotely to add/remove ports as I needed them.

So I’ve been using the M5 for the last few days and have been pretty impressed. I missed a few days due to a long holiday weekend, but the last few days I’ve been on it. I still haven’t read the manual- I need to check the CD tonight. It’s still broken on their site… Actually, I could just check google’s cache of the iAudio M5 mamual. I think I’ll do that now.

Since my music collection is 100% legitimate and ripped in Ogg Vorbis, finding a portable audio place that can play my music is a bit tough. There are 3 major players and a bunch of minor ones- the Neuros, the Rio Karma and the iAudio series are the leaders however. The Rio Karma is very difficult to find these days since it went out of production. I purchased a Neuros about a year ago and it was such utter crap I returned it (which broke my heart since I was looking forward to it).

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent. I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger.

Well, it’s Feb. 26th and it’s still nice out. it’s only 34, but it’s bright and sunshiney. It was 60 last week, and it’s been decent most of the winter. My brain is starting to activate and come out of winter hibernation, so that means it’s time to start planting. Since I live in an apartment, I don’t get a real garden, so we have a bunch of pots and windowboxes and such.

One of my side projects this past year was developing a “Radio Show” program to track and display info about songs currently playing on my stream. I’ve taken the last few months off, but now I’m back on track. http://morgajel.com/radio/index.php Unfortunately the stream is not available to the public (You can thank the RIAA for that bit of bullshit). If you have any comments, feel free to add them to my bugtracker: http://morgajel.

So Jackie and I went and saw Serenity yesterday. It was… a very good movie. A lot of fellow geeks either love or absolutely hate the TV show Firefly and are transferring these feelings towards Serenity. I have one thing to say to all of you hatemongers. Please. Give it a chance. Watch it with an open mind before you start bashing it. I know most of you haven’t seen it.