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).