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