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).