September 11, 2014

Curse of the Goat

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.

July 7, 2014

muahahah

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

July 2, 2014

The Case of the Truncated Syslog Program Field

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:

June 27, 2014

rsyslogd-3003: error -3003 compare value property – ignoring selector

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.

June 23, 2014

And For My Next Trick…

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.

June 22, 2014

Thoughts on the Alston A830L Guitar Kit

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.

May 26, 2014

Reimaging my Phone

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.

March 31, 2014

Saul’s Gimpy Inversion

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?

March 27, 2014

Who is Hock?

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.

February 7, 2014

Thoughts on Openshift

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.