The week wasn't bad. Friday was pretty quiet, given that we were down a man (scheduled time off).
I got "volunteered" for a project at work, but when I found out what it was I was OK with that. More working on the stuff I've been doing at home anyway (which is why vupline137 volunteered me for it).
The gang was going to watch Brave Combo at NRH's last "Spring Music" concert, but the rest of the gang decided it was too hot and humid. By the time I got home from work I didn't really want to go anyway. Just wasn't in the mood for some reason, even though I'd been looking forward to it all week.
We all hung out at Amythest's instead.
After that, went back to my place and mucked around with Wine, got it correctly installed and managed to install Day of Defeat and Guild Wars and get them working. Even managed to copy all the uploads and content off the Windows partition so I didn't have to RE-download 15k+ update files for Guildwars. I no longer have any reason to boot into Windows. If I ever go back to World of Warcraft, I may need to, since techie_ says he didn't have much luck getting that to work in Wine. We'll see.
Heading down to Austin to visit the 'rents for Mother's Day, just as soon as Kestrel gets home from work. I have to run some quick errands first though. Pick up more food and litter for the short, furry folk, put air in the tires, etc.

Current Mood: awake

OK, so my few-and-far-between posts have been getting even fewer and farther.
Mostly that's due to me deciding to post to the blog that I host, rather than livejournal, and let it's plugins update livejournal. Then I have very little to say, especially where my brother (who reads my other blog) will see it.
I find mostly the things I want to talk about are, well, not so much "personal" in the "this is private stuff, you better be a close friend to see it" way, but in the "only my friends would be interested anyway" and "Why am I defending my choice to post about this stuff to my family?"
So I give up. I'm just going to post "personal" stuff here and only worry about geek stuff on my other blog. Not that there's been much of that posted.
I haven't been reading much either. I miss you guys.
But no, I'm not going to to go back and read the last 2.5 years of stuff everyone has posted. :)

So what brought me back this time? I got a comment on one of my recent entries. So I go to look at the comment. It's a complement on my userpic. The same one I'm using on this entry. Ooook.... and it's no one I've heard of. Clicky, clicky, read userinfo... it's an account that's all of 2 hours old, already has 3 posts, all 3 with lots of very spammish looking links. Run a whois on the 3 domains listed, find they're all through the same registrar, with the same "PrivacyProtect.org" registration. Plonk! We have a spammer account. Whee.
Then I start reading vulpine137's entries, chuckle over a few incidents mentioned from work, decide to start posting on LJ again.

Around dinner, Kestrel points out we have a coupon for a free pizza. I try to redeem it online and keep getting told it's not a valid coupon code. Then I look closely enough to see it expired 3 days ago. Suck.
We ended up going out to IHOP instead.

Now I have a cat trying to remind me it's time for bed, so, night all.

Current Mood: good

About to update the blog to WP 2.5. It should be smooth but if things break, who knows how long I’ll be offline.
Not that I’ve been posting much lately…

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Just a personal note so I can find how to install Debian on a DomU again

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Last night I’m on my DoD clan’s Ventrillo server just before a scrimmage and yakking with teammates waiting for the game to begin.
I apologized for getting home and logging on only minutes before the game is due to start as I had to work late and only just got home.
One of them asks what I do for a living, I explain that I work for CI Host, one of the larger Internet server hosting companies and he asks if that means I know about networking. I explain that I’m more of a Unix guy than a Network guy, but that does come with having to know a little about networking. He mentions that since the clan switched servers, he and his wife (who also plays) have noticed quite an increase in his ping time. He did a trace to the server and saw the route go from Houston (where they live) out to California, bounce around a while, then back to Dallas (where the server is located).
I tell him to send me a copy of his traceroute and I’ll take a look.
I logged onto the clam forum site and see he sent me a private message.
Did he cut and paste the traceroute into the message?
Nope. He made a screenshot of the DOS window and attached the .bmp file.

Dunno what to say about a guy who knows how to do a traceroute, but not a cut’n'paste.

Not making the assumption that my gentle readers know what the hell I’m talking about…
Day of Defeat, a WWII simulation in the First Person Shooter genre.
A VoIP application popular amongst gamers, that creates something akin to a conference call.
A game that is more than a standard public “for fun” free for all but not as formal a league “match” that counts towards a team/clan’s standing in a game season.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

This is the first I’ve heard of this, but this is the first trailer release of a new movie being produced entirely on Open Source software, under a Creative Commons license.

Big Buck Bunny - Official Trailer on Vimeo

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Weird. Posts made with kblogger never show up in my blog. They’re “published”, they get a post ID, I can see them in the database and all fields are the same as posts that do show up (well, with the exception of things I expect to be different. Date. Title. GID, etc.) I even see my to “test” posts made it to twitter, but they don’t show up in the blog. Not even in the management interface where I should see ALL posts, published, draft or otherwise.

OK, WP is working. I can post just fine from the web interface.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

I just received a message via MSN from “Colby” containing only the words “PARTY PARTY PARTY” and a URL.
They immediately closed the conversation window and when I tried to ask who the hell they were, was told that that user had signed off.
Out of curiosity, I visited the URL (since it didn’t contain any session / cgi ID stuff to uniquely identify the visitor)
The first thing it asks for is my MSN login and password.
No, not a prayer you’re getting me to put that in on your form.
Under that it gives the standard “by logging into this site you agree to the terms and conditions”. Pretty standard stuff, only it’s not in fine print and they print the terms and conditions themselves immediately below that, also not in fine print.
And the terms?
“By filling out this form, you authorize TST Management, Inc to spread the word
about this 100% real and upcomming Messenger Community Site.
You will receive your share of the credit in helping us spread the word. This is a harmless
Community site which is offering users a platform to meet each other for free.”

Yeah. I’ll sign up for your bullshit spamming service. Uh-huh.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

OK, I think I have a clue to what is changing my theme on me.

After posting my last entry, due to the the problems with Drivel only allowing me to select a single category, and not having any way to enter “tags”, I loaded the blog in my browser to edit the post.
Having looked at my blog earlier today for something, I knew as of an hour ago it was showing the correct theme. After posting via drivel (via xmlrpc), the theme was reset to the default.

I’m posting this through Drivel. Let’s see if it resets again…

Well, so much for that theory. Post the entry, reload the main page, theme not reset. I’ll have to keep looking.
I don’t suppose Sadish will see this and offer some insight. Not that I think it’s in any way caused by his theme. I’m sure it’s a problem with /dev/null, but with all his experience with themes, maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll have some clue.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Does Youtube simply not grasp RSS?

Viewing any RSS enabled web site in Firefox or Konquerer, I get a little button in my browser that allows me to add that RSS feed directly to my RSS agregator. In Firefox, this defaults to it’s own “Livemarks” system, in Konquerer the default is the Kontact/Akregator application, but both have a mechanism to define another reader.

Click on this little button when viewing any page on Youtube and you get… a broken RSS feed.
In Firefox it takes you to, not the RSS feed, but a page EXPLAINING HOW TO GET THE RSS FEED. If I need an explanation I would look for a link ON the page that says “about our RSS feeds” or something similar. If I click the “subscribe” button, which is generated by the “link rel=’alternate’ type=’application/rss+xml’”, I expect I’ll get an RSS feed, not human-readable page ABOUT rss feeds.

On top of this, they don’t offer a feed of something simple like, say, all of my “subscribed” channels. No, I can get a feed of MY vides (videos I’ve uploaded. Useless to me since I don’t upload videos. I’m a consumer, not a producor.), all new videos (The last thing I want is an RSS feed of every new video posted to Youtube), etc.
Even viewing the page for one of my subscriptions, there’s no link to subscribe to the RSS feed. Sure, the “about” page tells me what URL syntax to put in my RSS reader to GET that page, but why don’t they just put the simple header IN the html page so I can use the tools just about every browser provides to subscribe to the RSS?

Apparently for Youtube, Really Simple Syndication means “you do the work”.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

I thought the problem with the theme randomly resetting to the wordpress default was solved with the installation of “I Love Music” 1.1, but I logged in today and it was again using the default theme.
I really wish it I could figure out what is causing this.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Any recomendations for a good blogging client for *nix?
Now that I’m getting back into blogging, and reading other’s blogs, I’m looking for a better blog poster app then the web form in my blog.
The best I’ve found of those available in Adept is BloGTK!, however it has a few issues such as not properly downloading my category list.

Correction: the best one I found was Drivel, which does download the categories, but does not provide a toolbar for bold/italics/underscore, linking, etc. BloGTK! provides these, but doesn’t get the categories, so I have to post, then edit in the web interface.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

It’s been a while since I played with KDE. Every few years I decide to give it a try and find that it offers nothing that Gnome doesn’t do better. However after seeing someone’s recent KDE setup and thinking it looked pretty good, I thought I’d give it another chance, see what’s new with it.

I must say so far I like it, but there are a few things that are just annoying the crap out of me.

1. Despite having a fairly extensive color configuration panel, all it’s apps seem to feel free to ignore the color settings. But only the ones that ensure you can actually read anything. For example: select a fairly dark color scheme (say, “Dark Blue”, “Blue Slate” or any of the CDE schemes but Solaris). You will get white text on a dark background. But open Kate, the default text editor for KDE and you get… black text on a dark background. Because Kate IGNORES KDE’s settings for TEXT color and has it’s own configuration panel for text color. But it does NOT let you adjust the background color. Same with Kontact, the KDE PIM. Only it’s even better there: it likes to use alternating background colors when displaying lists of things (folders on an IMAP server, messages in a mail folder). The text color is the same for each item in the list (grey) but the background color alternates like greenbar paper between dark and darker, such that every other item in the list is completely unreadable.
I fired up Kopete, the KDE IM client and moments later received a message from one of my contacts. Light grey text on a light grey background. I had to mess with it’s internal color and display settings to see what my contact had just said to me.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

On the heels of my raving about Gentoo, I find that while from and administrative perspective I like it, from a user perspective? Not so much.

I have two workstations at work. One is a Celeron 1.7ish, 1.5GB of RAM, running Windows XP. The internal web sites we use tend toward lots of javascript, plus another application that sucks up resources. Thus Firefox, when viewing our ticket system, our order database system and our server locator / user database system was running very sluggish.

I managed to acquire a second desktop, a P4 1.8Ghz, 1GB RAM system, on which I intended to install Linux. When I got that far, I installed Gentoo, running Xfce4, as a learning exercise. Everything went beautifully. Once I got Firefox and Thunderbird installed, I moved all my work that that system, using the Windows box only for the non-web based application that only has a Windows client. And since the speakers are hooked up to that system, I left Pidgin there as well.
The performance of Firefox on the Linux box is barely a marginal improvement.

My personal laptop, however, a Centrino 1.6 with 512MB of RAM running Ubuntu 7.10 and Gnome, running all the same web sites is at least 3x more responsive.
I even made sure I had exactly the same addons installed on the two Linux systems. By all lights, the Gentoo box should be smoking the laptop.

It’s got a faster (model) processor.
It has a faster (clock rate) processor.
It has 2x the RAM.
It’sToques, Imagens, Jogos, vídeos E é compativel com http://www.toques1.com/baixar-toques-mp3-para-celular-ofertas-especiais.html de graça no iPhone.Beruhmte casino tropez. got an “optimized” OS installed.
It’s running the light-weight Xfce4 window manager, compared to Gnome’s (and all the other bells and whistles I’ve installed) bloat.
The only thing I can figure is there’s something about the default compile settings Gentoo uses when building Firefox.

I must remember to reboot the Gentoo box and check if Hyperthreading is turned off in the BIOS. I’m running an SMP kernel but only seeing one CPU. I also need to check if a P4 1.8 has HT support…

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

I’m quickly becoming a fan of Gentoo.
I don’t think it will be replacing Ubuntu on my laptop, but I’m finding that for a “source based” system, it’s very easy to use. It doesn’t install anything you don’t absolutely need until you specifically ask for it, but when you do, it’s pretty painless. You just have to put up with it taking a little longer than other distros to get installed, since it has to download the source, then compile it.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

While I get back into the swing of blogging from a fairly long hiatus, I thought I’d start with something useful I discovered a while back, but that has recently shown just how really cool and useful it is.
With ssh connection mastering, you can open multiple sessions to a single host. Once you have satisfied all the authentication / authorization requirements of the host to log in the first time, as long as you have a master connection open, logging in additional times not only doesn’t require going through authentication again, it’s much, much faster.

For example, where I work, we SSH to a single server, we’ll call it jupiter, a “bastion host” if you will, from whence we can make ssh connections to any of our client’s servers. All our client’s servers have our public key in the root authroized_keys file, and all technicians on jupiter can ssh using the private key associated with that public key. To log into jupiter the technician must enter his RSA SecureID pin and rolling key.

If you’ve never used SecureID, it is a “two factor” authentication system. Two factor authentication basically means to log in, you must present both something you know (thus it can’t be taken away from you by force, though you can be coerced into revealing it) as well as something on your person. In this case the “something you know” is your PIN, which doesn’t change. The “something on your person” is the 6 digit number displayed on the SecureID token. This is more secure than a simple password or PIN in that you must have both that and a physical device that displays a constantly changing number. Either one by itself is insufficient authentication to log in.

So getting back to jupiter, to ssh to this server we use SecureID authentication. This means we must ssh to the server, wait while ssh negotiates keys and does any DNS foo the server wants to do, type our PIN, then dig out our token and enter the displayed number, then wait while jupiter checks with our SecureID server to verify the numbers entered.

Using the ssh connection mastering technique I’ve linked to, you only have to do this once. As long as that original connection is open, you can open another terminal window, or even a virtual terminal, and ssh to the server and be in, instantly. No delays for ssh key exchanges, DNS lookups SecureID. You don’t have to enter your PIN and token again. You’re just in. This is very useful if you have to log into multiple client servers at once.
Just don’t tell the security admin.

For some reason the trackback link isn’t showing up in the blog. The link referred to above is
http://www.newartisans.com/blog_files/ssh.connection.mastering.php

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

Just upgraded Wordrpress from 2.2 to 2.3.2 in preparation for beginning blogging again.

Originally published at /dev/zero. You can comment here or there.

I'm trying to pull some info from wowarmory.com into a Google spreadsheet. However it seems that wowarmory won't send XML if it thinks the HTTP User-agent is not xml compatible, and will send HTML instead. Not useful for my purposes, as apparently the agent string Google sends is not recognized as xml compatible by wowarmory.
So I'm browsing wowarmory to look for some hints and see "Known Issues". Clicky-clicky:

"An error was encountered while processing your request

[The topic you're looking for is not found]"

I guess "Known Issues" is an unknown issue...

Current Mood: amused

So just as I suddenly find myself with more time on my hands, a bunch of Ufie friends start getting into World of Warcraft again.
So we've all started newbie characters on the same server. I'm up to 15 now with my Blood Elf mage and have been having fun showing techie_ (who is new to WoW, though not MMORPGs) the ropes.

Current Mood: bored

I haven't been posting much, because there really hasn't been much to post about.
Today has been the first thing to happen to me of any real note in months.
Just in time for Christmas... unemployment.

Current Mood: numb