March 22, 2006

First Impressions

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

March 21, 2006

Going FreeBSD

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

March 20, 2006

Going Home

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

March 14, 2006

Useful Utility: whereis

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

March 12, 2006

This Year’s Lesson

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.

March 10, 2006

FOSE Review

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

March 10, 2006

Debian Stable maintainer quit…

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

March 9, 2006

Useful Utility: chown

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

March 9, 2006

Spam and Ham

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

March 7, 2006

M-Audio Oxygen (O2) Midi Controller

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.