vaguerant

2005-09-03T11:19:00.000-07:00

New blog . I'm busy but starting to post again.

2005-07-25T11:27:00.000-07:00

Wireless Access
Looks like I have a new neighbor in the house behind me. Must have a wireless enabled PC because I noticed a new MAC id in the client list about the same time I observed the pale steady glow of a monitor coming out of the house windows. Cool, I have no problems letting someone browse and check email on my AP, if they stay cool, I'll stay cool. I checked the router logs. Looks like Grand Central but whats up with the gazillion SRC addrs that are_coming_in_? I figure Bittorent, and you know what, IMO, on my network, on my dime, that's lame. I blacklisted the MAC which should send this person the message that they are not welcome any longer. Getting to know the neighbors, 21st century style.

2005-07-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

Will anyone pay attention to this company?
The US government is unable to stop Microsoft mainly because Microsoft pays a lot of money to keep it that way (don't believe me, do some reading, links follow). The government is so kinked they look at MS as the strongest export we have, so we better not "rock the boat" and keep that Gates Machine happy. Following that line of thinking the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office) seems to have allowed Microsoft to file for patent on emoiticon processing. You know, you type characters to mimic facial expression like this;
=-)
and it is interpreted by the IM (instant messaging) client (or maybe a word processor) to be a tiny "smiliey" in the chat (or document). The emoticon processing by an IM client isn't the real issue here, it's just another piece of the patent puzzle Microsoft and other big industry players are building.
Here's a link to the zdnet coverage. I could care less about "smilies" it's the point. The US (and the World eventually?) being a place where even the trivial is owned by corporate machination is an ugly concept. Technology like this blog for example, if found to be "infringing" on some trivial patent, could very well be litigated out of existence for simply using common methods of communication.
The US government seems to offer little protection of it's citizens from the non-friendly behavior being exhibited by Microsoft (and other corporate behemeoths). In fact the government is quite accommodating, indeed diliberately granting patents as if there is no one with a technical background looking at the filings. Since the 1970's there has been discussion on how to overhaul the USPTO but not much headway made. Ideas come and go and the patents keep being filed.
Ideally the US Patent system will be subjected to political control and this madness stopped. Humankind as a whole stands to lose more than just emoticons if corporations are unchecked in the ability to aquire rights to ubiquitous technology that is in essence "public-domain."

Links;
Wired News, Technology section. Ideas for patent overhaul.
Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure is European based but it never hurts to look.

lxer.com article that I read about a month ago. Microsoft has deep pockets and damn good connections.
lxer.com, more along the same lines, fascinating.

2005-07-23T14:05:00.000-07:00

Our Rights, where have we placed our Rights?
With announcements like the one from the GAO (Government Accountability Office) concerning the TSA (Transportaion Security Administration), shouldn't we reconsider the Patriot Act? Before it goes to the Senate as sent by the gang of fixers in the House?
The GAO discovered (link to article) that the TSA and it's contractors went way out of bounds with concern to information about airlines customers. The TSA compiled data about people using methods it was not suppose to use thus breaking the law in regard to our privacy. That one agency will bend the rules with regard to privacy speaks volumes toward what the rest of the combined "law-enforcement" agencies might, or already happen to be engaged in.
The House had passed on the rubber stamping of the Patriot Act and has handed it off to the Senate, who I would hope have some money behind not re-enacting most or all of it. Seems though these days the dollars are behind the thumb screw types and their solutions for "securing the masses."

2005-07-22T12:25:00.000-07:00

Vista?
Vista. The "media alert" came today from all angles.
Microsoft has a new OS in beta. Wow golly. Named Vista because? I don't know or care, it's annoying and I detest the company on general principle. Now the small portion of the smaller portion of people who _did_ migrate to XP can have something else to bitch and complain about. Don't get me wrong, Windows works and all (Win 98 seemed the best to me, for games... What else is there to do on an MS box?) but the licence is horrific and something akin to a bargain with the devil is made when "I Agree" is clicked.
Now with a new "flagship" rolling out MS, can try and cattle chute the herd along with tactics like "lock-out!" and "end-of-life." A lot of people on this planet are still using EOL stuff though, driving those at MS crazy. All of you need to plunk down the cash and upgrade, all the time, every release if possible... I do, I upgrade every week sometimes. But then again an aptitude dist-upgrade is so much less expensive than a Microsoft upgrade =-)
In fact just this morning I did some upgrading around the home...

Saturday Upgrade day.
My desktop was pretty out of date. It's a Sid box (Debian GNU/Linux http://debian.org ) and because of the video card has a nvidia-kernel-module. Every time a kernel upgrade is done the nvidia module needs to be re-built (Windows people just ran away at this point... Really it is worth it). Debian has made this very easy to do really. I aptitude installed 2.6.11 headers and image, rebooted into the 2.6.11 kernel and before video would work (console only login) used the Debian Module-Assistant to build a 2.6.11 nvidia-kernel-module. Rebooted again (just to be sure... and my uptime was already hosed by the kernel reboot =-) and there was the ugly old Nvidia boot screen. Thank you Debian People. When I again have more to give you will get.

So in essence I have eschewed a bad licence, buggy, works o.k., supports DRM, closed (who knows whats written into it) source crapware for great licence(es), works o.k., supports _me_ as an end user, open-source (everyone knows whats written into it) Free as in Libre operating system with all sorts of Free (both Libre and Beer) software to go along with it.

If you aren't that technical, you maybe say "I can't configure that!" or "Thats way too technical for me." and you're most likely correct. You also can't configure a Windows (really there are ways of doing it) box to survive long on the Internet so you are either paying someone for their technical knowledge or you own a "zombie" that's pumping spam as you read this. Some people react to my attitude toward this with some consternation but let me say this, computers are not televisions (even if they were you can fix you tv either) and they need maintenence. If you aren't going to learn to do it your box either dies, is crippled or you shell out the money for the work. Simple. Free Software hasn't made me daft. It's just that instead of you all spending money first on proprietary software first and then technical help down the road, why not spend nothing on the software (donate if you like) and hire the technical help you need from the get go. Just an idea.

2005-07-21T11:11:00.000-07:00

RFID Revisited.
Although wary of anything "good" about RFID, this
link to a Register
(Register home) article illustrating a deployment that makes the technology shine. If RFID could be used for things like this alone great, but we need legislation in place protecting us from it going any further. I mean if I was in charge and this technology comes along that lets me broadcast citizen ID info to a portable reader... The potential for abuse is staggering.
Hospitals yes, Real ID no. Security expert Bruce Schneier over at his weblog
Schneier on Security paints a fairly grim reality, a reality ignored by the current set of politicians inhabiting DC.

2005-07-20T08:55:00.000-07:00

Thanks Dell
As if computers don't come with enough crap pre-loaded on them... All the icons for AOL, Earthlink etc... Lurking about to "help" the end user. Crapware, adware not quite malware but just lame, creepy ways to push services. What most average users don't realize is you alrady have all the software you need to connect to the Internet. Even a stock Windows box is ready to go. Build a dialer, or enable the network interface and thare you have it. None of that crap is needed to get online, it's confusing, bloats the box and really shouldn't come with something you just shelled out good money for.
Now Dell is bordering on spyware with new computers.
Link to a Security Focus article. It's not full blown malware says a Dell rep, it's a search aid. You can turn it off in the options menu (why doesn't it come turned off?) and it just reports your surfing habits when visiting affiliated sites. What they fail to do (aside from apologize) is mention it's bundled with Internet Explorer which has way to many things tied to it already. It's a web browser, you read remote files with it. Or at least thats how it should be but the people at Microsoft figured why not turn it into a Swiss Army knife of sorts and now it has the ability to whack the computer it runs on. Oh yeah, read the EULA, Microsoft (and in this case Dell) takes no responsibility for anything at all.
Dude, you got a Dell.

2005-07-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

The Mayor of London speaks up.
Hey, a Western politico who isn't denying the West's role in the Middle East. Here's the
link (tiny url) to the full Reuters story. I don't think I have ever read or heard a Western Politician acknowledge how we are to blame for the mess we find ourselves in. Usually the standard has become "terrorists" hate freedom or they hate Christiandom (which they might, that feud is _really_ old) but Londons Mayor is being forthcoming about the West's meddling in the affairs of others, quote (from Reuters article);

" "You've just had 80 years of Western intervention into predominantly Arab lands because of a Western need for oil. We've propped up unsavory governments, we've overthrown ones that we didn't consider sympathetic," Livingstone said.

"I think the particular problem we have at the moment is that in the 1980s ... the Americans recruited and trained Osama bin Laden, taught him how to kill, to make bombs, and set him off to kill the Russians to drive them out of Afghanistan.

"They didn't give any thought to the fact that once he'd done that, he might turn on his creators," he told BBC radio. "

Atta boy! I wish to hell we had more people like that in office here in the US... For the last 80 years.

2005-07-20T08:14:00.000-07:00

Here comes the Judge.
The New York Times (free fairly painless registration) has more on Bush nominee number one this morning. Like I found out yesterday, it's hard to pin a guy down when there is hardly any written output from the man. Times link, or http://tinyurl.com/75466
Needless to say he is what Bush would want in a judge, I think Bush has likened him to both Scalia and Thomas, barely changed, kind of reptilian and kinked to the right... .
Again, next please.

2005-07-20T08:06:00.000-07:00

Cool! Google Moon
Ah Google. I love Google Maps, use the search engine proper a gazillion times a day and was bummed about Google Earth being an .exe but another fun thing grabbed my attention this morning, Google Moon.

2005-07-19T19:02:00.000-07:00

Bush, choice one
El Presidente has rolled out number one in the quest to fill Sandra D. O'Connors seat on the Supreme Court bench.
John Roberts. I read up on him briefly and have to say he's kinked. Dissented regarding the secrecy of Vice President Cheney's energy task force (as in he would have kept it secret) and dissented on Rancho Viejo, LLC v. Norton, a constitutional test of the Endangered Species Act (as in he thinks legislation doesn't matter). Pass on this one please, next in line...
Link to the two cases I mentioned.

2005-07-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

Slow news day.
So here's a link to a Register article on where Adolph Hitler is hanging out. I liked the larch grove photo myself.

2005-07-18T10:58:00.000-07:00

Backpedal by Bush.
I think Karl Rove might be in hot water but maybe not guilty of a crime because Mr. Bush is now saying things like he'll dismiss anyone found to have committed a crime.
Reuters link Yeah, I was hopeful but I have had the feeling that Rove was going to be untouchable. These are ugly times.

2005-07-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

Trusted Computing
So I'm reading at eweek.com about the "recent" Apple decision to go with Intel chipsets. I emphasized recent because there has been a fork of OSX for x86 for quite some time now and I think Jobs and Co. have been looking ahead to make the switch. I didn't fully buy the reasoning that IBM couldn't deliver the goods. Look at the new XBox, the hardware underneath that things hood is pretty wild, not like Big Blue is a slouch with the hardware. Larry Loeb (back to eweek.com =-) makes an interesting point in his article over at eweek, link in that Trusted Computing was a prime motivator in the jump. Makes sense and coupled with the fact that OSX runs incredibly fast on the Intel hardware ( appleinsider.com link) Apple people should be happy... Until they find out that not only have they lost the uniqueness of a platform ( come on Mac users, that was a big reason for some of that "macpride" =-) but they are being shoehorned into Microsofts vision of a "happy" digital future. Let me get something straight, Trusted Computing isn't about protecting the user. It's about protecting the owners of content. I don't care how anyone tries to explain it away, it's about control over how we use the hardware we purchace. Sure its being hyped as a way to better authenticate access and to keep malware off your Windows machines (among other things) but aren't there better ways to go about those problems? Shouldn't Microsoft look to a real rewrite of their operating system that would foil spyware or virus infestation? Here comes Longhorn but it's shedding some of the cool features it was supposed to have and it wasn't even close to being a "from scratch" build like Windows needs. Instead Microsoft pushes Trusted Computing and I'm sure they have found lots of support from the likes of the RIAA and MPAA. Tell me how those two bodies are concerned in the least about 802.11 auth and malware?
The people over at the Free Software Foundation link have a take on this situation, their chief council Eben Moglen has written a great paper on it, "Untrustworthy Computing" link is a keen insight to what is being brought to bear against our global society. A quote from the paper,

"This aspect of the free software movement's program isn't revolutionary, it's conservative. For the last generation we have had personal computers--computers designed to serve people. Now we are threatened with entering a brave new world, where impersonal computers serve everyone except the people who use them. And in the newspeak of the fascistic radicals trying to control the future of the human mind, that's ``trust.'' If their plans are achieved, technology will begin to strangle human freedom. If we wait too long to begin, our protests will be unavailing. We have to start now. Send email to the manufacturer from whom you bought your last computer, pledging never to buy another from them if they make untrustworthy computers. Speak up loud, lest we all lose our voices. As a great American conservative politician, Barry Goldwater, said, ``eternal vigilance is the price of freedom.''"

Really, to use a saying of the late Hunter S. Thompson, the greedheads are circling the wagons. Trying to cattle chute you and I into a neat collective digital reality that they control. Don't buy into it. It won't help us at all, on the contrary it will work against us. Lastly here a link to an endgadget.com article that shows how it's really begining. That butterfly isn't so pretty after all.

2005-07-16T12:49:00.000-07:00

Scientology, legions of the lame.
I had no idea Tom Cruise was such a drone. I never have cared much for his acting skills, IMO he has little if any range as an actor but hey, it's an eye candy thing right? I was just reading an article at Salon.com about Scientology and its war on psychiatry. link to article (fairly painless advert for day pass). These people are really kinked. Here's a quote from the article,

"It may be easy to dismiss Tom Cruise's recent outbursts against psychiatry as the ravings of an egomaniacal celebrity. Comedians have certainly had a field day with Cruise, a fervent disciple of the Church of Scientology, ever since he scolded Brooke Shields for taking prescribed medication to treat her postpartum depression and lectured Matt Lauer, host of the "Today" show, that psychiatry was a "pseudoscience" and antidepressant drugs were worthless because there is "no such thing as a chemical imbalance." "No?" wisecracked Lewis Black on "The Daily Show," watching a video clip of Cruise berating Lauer, "Then what do you call what's happening to you right now?" "

No shit, Tom you need need a nice cup of stfu and a helping of professional help to go with it. A Slate aricle, link casts some illumination on the man who started the whole religion. L. Ron Hubbard. That the guy died with high levels of a psychiatric drug in his system should be of interest to his followers but I'm sure some bulletproof reasoning has been concocted to deal with that fact by now. John Travolta, Beck ( guess I won't be buying anymore of his music), Kirsty Alley... The star power is scary just because, as the Salon article quotes someone as saying, it's hard to lobby against actors.
Quietly they are changing laws and making inroads into government, Cruise and his whacked outbursts might have been the noise that people needed to wake up and see whats going on.

2005-07-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Mickey Mouse = Big Brother?
Disney World (any Disney theme park for that matter) is a weird place. The semiotics involved are deep rooted, reality blending so well with fantasy and all. Well the good folks in charge of operation at Disney World just broke the fantasy. Not quite fingerprinting (so they say) but (quote from article)
"Disney officials said the finger scans do not take an actual fingerprint. The scan recognizes certain points and outlines visitor's fingers, officials said."
The article is from local6.com which goes on to say people are pretty creeped out about it. No shit. How does this do anything but help Disney in this case, gather infromation about people who are walking through their gates? Note the article goes on to mention Universal Orlando and Sea World are going to roll it out.
Weird.

2005-07-15T19:01:00.000-07:00

Friday means Apache2 day
Haven't messed with Apache2 much, liked 1.3 just fine but the world is a changin...
So logged on to a colo box and started learning. I got http working just fine but https was another story. Why you may ask? Well, because it's _simple_. Really simple in fact. Happy making times, thank you Apache Foundation and the Debian Apache2 maintainers.On another note the box is a mail server as well (Apache being for client Postfix admin) and Postfix-TLS, MySQL, Spamassassin, ClamAV worked just fine. Again some thanks are in order,
Ars has a great howto for Apache (2 and 1.3) Also ilovet link has some good advice on SSL config. For the mail server (my first with a MySQL backend) I relied on the postfixwiki link to smooth the process along. I love my job =-)

Rove report
That slimy bastard might just get busted down a notch or two. Fox News ( do people believe what these assclowns push as the truth anymore? ) is trying hard to spin this one but the rats are bailing now. The New York Times (free but still lame registration) sheds a little more light on the matter.
He's a punk, a ligitimized con-man selling a shitty product. These guys are thugs and not too far removed from child molesters IMO. The people who are so quick to throw the label trator around are just that. Selling us all down the river for their own gain. That people can believe the crap shoved down their collective throats by this gang ( or any politico for that matter ) reminds me of an H.L.Menken quote, "The great American herd of sheep." Mind you he wrote that over 80 years ago so not much has changed. Bottom line is I hope Rove is sent packing like the human cull he is.

2005-07-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

Firing Rove?
Finally more media attention is coming to bear on the Valrie Plame "outing."
Karl Rove, the Bush teams right hand on strategy looks to be the leak in this debacle which not only
jeopardized Ms. Plame but really, security at the CIA. Maybe Mr. Rove was just trying to blow smoke and cover up the truth about Iraq, namely there weren't any weapons of mass destruction and the invasion was proped up with bogus info or maybe he's just a vindictive cull who likes to gossip. Bottom line is he has a history of leaking info, he was fingered to be a leaker during the Victory '92 Bush Sr. Presidentail bid and subsequently fired. Now lets see if Mr. Bush will live up to his (and other top staffers) words and fire the pig. MoveOn got this topic in my head this morning and I'm glad to be a member. If you feel strongly about where the US is going and want to do something about it, join. What is it to fire off e-mails and make phone calls to your elected ones? I like it because I do feel like I am doing something not just reacting all the time, but I digress =-)
Rove needs to go.

2005-07-12T10:04:00.000-07:00

Growing meat.
Ars Technica has an article that is similar to what I was thinking while posting about cloning animals for consumption. Just have a vat - o - beef around and keep the barbecue going, I grew 6 pounds of tri-tip last night...
Weird stuff.

2005-07-12T08:16:00.000-07:00

Musings on Hurricanes.
You know there are people still living in "FEMA Parks" ( trailer parks for people displaced by hurricanes in Florida ) from Hurricane Ivan ( 10 months ago ) only to have more pile in from the current one, NOAA (National Hurricane Center) has more info.
I was listening to NPR's
Morning Edition (needs realplayer) this morning and heard the aforementioned story. Haven't listened to NPR in quite some time and figured I'd stream it. Having to install the RealPlayer to get the streams was not a jump up and down moment for me ( I'd rater use XMMS and the HelixPlayer is missing the proper plugin ) but Real's installer worked great and I haven't had any issues with it technically, besides I tainted my kernel with the Nvidia drivers so it's not like my box is a Free Software shrine.
Back to news, Slashdot brought this New York Times story (lame but free registration) to my attention this morning and wow! Death for coding.
Mercury News reports (painful registration) an interesting statistic about Iowa. That's a good thing to know about a high stakes caucus ground. Like the article states, Hillary is not ignoring it.
And because I love Make heres a link thats timely (ouch =-)

Cheers!

2005-07-12T00:45:00.000-07:00

RFID, you gotta love it!
Or not, unless you are a cop or cop like individual. The Register provides us with a little creepy factor. RFID is coming to us soon, the question is how fast can we foil it ;-)
Invasion of privacy (as if we have any anyway) will go to new depths and it will be cataloged!

2005-07-12T00:37:00.000-07:00

I'll have the cloned please.
As in cloned cows giving milk or you and I eating cloned beef. The FDA thinks its all right and without any prodding from consumers they just might allow the stuff into our food chain.
Wired News has the full story. I personally don't know how I feel about it. So much of what we eat is kinked already with chemicals and hormones. Will it be less expensive? That of course will drive it.

2005-07-06T09:45:00.000-07:00

2005-07-06T08:09:00.000-07:00

Attack of the map hacks.
There are quite a few smart people hacking both Yahoo maps and Google maps. I was reading at Make about a recent Yahoo news over Yahoo maps modification here . Both Google and Yahoo are encouraging people to mix and match with an eye toward new technology. Wired covered it and it's where I initally read about all the craziness. I myself have been using Google Maps and really like it. I overlayed the sat images on my old neighborhood in Hawaii and was surprised at the detail.
I was disapointed by the Google Earth roll out, .exe only. Looks like it would be cool and if the imagery is as good or better than Maps it will be a powerful tool. I would have loved something like that as a child!

2005-07-06T07:38:00.000-07:00

Like to read the paper?
I was reading at Tegan Goddards, politicalwire.com about digitized newspapers. Pressdisplay _is_ pretty cool. Big plus, it works while being viewed with open source tools.

Rove
It seems to me like the media is just looking the other way on this (people too in general) but Karl Rove might be getting into some hot water over the whole Valerie Plume outing. Heres msnbc / Newsweeks take on it. It's much more watered down than what I was reading at the huffingtonpost. Still thogh maybe Rove will become as untouchable as Ed Meese was. I (we) can only hope.

2005-07-06T07:18:00.000-07:00

Europe says No!
The Register is writing about the EU voting no on software patents. Yes! Now if the US patent office could stop handing out stupid patents and copyright was overhauled we be on the right track. Well it's early still and I was up late. I need more caffine before I post more =-)

2005-07-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

OpenOffice clip art
Fantastic is all I could mumble after grabbing the .deb files for the packages. There is an incredible amount of clip art available stock without charge. Nice stuff as evidenced by the picture of Tux I have posted. This is where I found info on it. I did all my installing using apt but I read where there are Windows .zip files for download.

Grub screen tweaking.
Tired of your old stock blue GRUB boot loader screen? Go here for some images to customize your boot loader page. Not that I reboot a whole lot... It's just to impress the chicks =-)

2005-07-04T01:57:00.000-07:00

Tools
Two tools I use daily at the moment are Firefox extensions, Sage and fireFTP.
Sage IMO kicks ass. Save the feed, update the feed, read the feed. Quick and simple aggregation with a nice interface in my favorite browser. FireFTP is just handy. I know I'm a lazy sod who doesn't want to click another icon (conserving energy I am) to either fire up the terminal emulator (or switch desktops or strike alt-tab etc...) or open another GUI app to move files. Just select Tools > fireFTP and theres another tab waiting for input! Clean looking too. GFTP is nice and all, and I really don't mind GET and PUT too much, it's just nice to look at the site in one tab and push to the site in another. Lazy hellbilly swine, thank you =-)

2005-07-04T01:35:00.000-07:00

It's the 4th of July.
Should I care?
WTF does "freedom" mean nowadays anyway? My POV is about free software (as in speech, not just beer) and what it's doing for people. Thats way different than the kind of "freedom" being exported by my government. I know I live in the land of swine and I'm doing what I can to change it (I respond to almost every MoveOn email I get, I email my local reps) but damn it if things aren't drifting toward creepy and Orwellian right now.
I don't give a hoot which side of the asile their on either, all politicos are kinked toward the money. I was just reading a bit about our strongest exporter of "trapware" Micro$oft and just how ingrained they are with the government I live under. It's really scary. No wonder the anti-trust suit brought against them seems so tame, they have bought everyone off. I'm not too shocked but damn... It's a lot worse than I dreamed of...
LXer article makes for really interesting reading.

2005-06-28T02:08:00.000-07:00

So much so fast (-=
Finished our first desktop migration yesterday. Wrapped it up by closing out the last trouble tickets and finishing with the documentation. Windows to Linux (Ubuntu) with the excaption of one machine which was upgraded to Server 2003 (Windows flagship, whatever that means). Just dealing with the licencing to set up Terminal Server was so alien feeling. All in all the one server needed 3 sets of CAL's (client licences) for different access. Coming from the world of Open Source and Free Software it had me chuckling at the paranoia inherent in all the licencing. On a serious note though, M$ would like _everything_ to be licenced and under lock and key.

And then there is the Grokster case, decided by the Supremes yesterday. Info here Seems to me to be a fixed gig. How much does it take to buy the legal system I wonder?

On a happy note I began screwing around with Open Solaris and got it to load on a Ultra Sparc. With a 333MHz (64 bit) processor and 384MB of memory it's not the most modern box but hey, it was just lying around. Works great. Sun's Java Desktop kicks ass with it's Gnome interface! The naming is kicking my ass though, names of files!
I had it fubared in 10 miniutes trying to reset the hostname (DHCP client expects _everything_ from a server by default, including a hostname). By defaulting to "unknown" for a hostname the box made me start tweaking and what do you know... I f*!*ed it up =-) After some more screwing around though it was all well and good. Gives me a chance to learn about Solaris, thats what I was wanting. There is even a Solaris-Sparc build of Firefox available and it works very well (much faster start times than it's big brother Mozilla), even the about:config settings (pipelining and auth are critical for me) worked without a hitch and I scp'd my bookmarks over and imported with no issues. As soon as I have some shell prompt skills with it I'll be better off but for now it's all learning!

Our shop (code name Swamp Castle) is open for bidness and I plan on at least one day a week there. OpenSourcery has a home! Worked on my first international job last night - this morning, a mail server in Canada. A little weird setting up a firewall remotely without locking yourself out =-). I was stoked my Spamassassin config worked right out of the gate! Only one config error on the Postfix side, easy fix, and it was up and running. Knock wood all jobs are as golden as this (dreamer!).

With that I'm gone. Need to fill the sleep tank. Cheers!

2005-06-07T14:59:00.000-07:00

firefox / deerpark alpha part 2
It is alpha =-)
Sage and Habari Xenu (rss aggregators) are broken. Some themes as well I suspect. The news aggregators are a must so I bolted back to ff 1.0.4.
I'm going to keep trying it out though and using the update feature (which I suspect of breaking the extensions). All of my about:config customizations are good to go though. Seemless Kerberos auth, speedy page loads, enormous caching etc... All there. As good as it is in alpha firefox 1.1 will certainly be a "best of breed."

Meanwhile I was reading the NYTimes news feed (with Sage) and came across an article about Hillary Clinton sounding off about Republicans (tinyurl). Interesting, interesting... A woman in the White House could be a good thing. This woman learned politics on the job with one of the finest (or foulest) political machines on the planet. She maybe a junior senator from New York but she packs considerable punch in _any_ conversation. Smooth, she's been greasing wheels for awhile now in the form of stumping for damn near any Dem running for office. Shes built considerable loyalty and just might pull it off, the Democratic nomination that is. In the General who knows. Theres a lot of conservative power and fraud nowadays. The shit that goes on in this day and age makes the mob look like a bunch of side lot scratch gamers. She'll have a tough one in a General election but who knows. The Democrats have to try something different.

2005-06-07T13:10:00.000-07:00

deerpark-alpha
Thought I would give it a whirl. I backed up my firefox directory and installed right on top of the old one. (all done in my /home/user partition). Nice improvements to the prefrences window. All my bookmarks came through just fine and my iconless nav buttons are lined up (an annoyance in 1.0.4).
No major bummer here is all I have to say. Those Mozilla people are pretty cool. Also brings to mind though there is a pretty funky exploit in firefox (and deerpark-alpha) that Secunia. has written up. Works on my Linux box and I suppose it does under Windows as well. Curious to see how fast the patch comes out. Some come out in as little as 48 hours but I think it's been that long already.
One window at the bank folks has an entirely new meaning :-)

2005-05-28T09:39:00.000-07:00

Tuesday morning I reach over (upon waking) and fire up the laptop...
Grub loading 1.5... Error 18
WTF, over? Somehow my drive geometry changed? Or GRUB see's it that way. I booted a Knoppix disk (Thank you Klaus Knopper) and run gpart againt the drive. It can't guess anything about my rieserfs partition other than it's fubared.
I'm pretty sure my drives bad ( weird noises trying to mount the bad partition, I was getting weird seg-faults with aptitude prior as well) but managed to get Windows to boot and can limp along till I get a new drive (employer says they will pick one up for me!).

Tattoo side of things is getting better. I pulled my head out and found what I needed to find. Owning any job you do is important. I wasn't owning shit. It was a matter of stepping up and getting it on. Back on track and hopefully tattooing by the summer solstice.

What a bitchin life, =-)

2005-05-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

Migration woes or is it woah's!

Such a bummer when things don't work right. All you can do is be as professional as possible. Smile as your scheme fails with some quirky hitch... Came up with a way to get window mail data Linux frendly and on host #3 (of 5) we come up empty. what are you going to do but try and have a workaround in hand? At least the software is Free :)

On the tattoo side of things _who_knows_! is all I can say. At this point it's like having to choose which hand I get to keep or something. I've been a transient really since Feb. when I moved up here (having places to stay but not my own) and it's been a wild ride... I'll see tomorrow what's going on with my apprenticeship. I need the tech work! Can't anyone see the revolution we are trying to start? So many people with so little concern over their digital lives ;)

2005-05-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

Sick today. Woke up bad. Went to work but disclosed that I was sick. The office staff asked me to leave :) I fully understand. Touching the keyboard right after I've picked my nose is a good way to get other people sick, it's a good thing they sent me home.
So I'm sick and get a call from the artist I'm apprenticing under. It's pretty much a wake up you fucking moron call but put to me in nice tones. Damn it. I lost something somewhere in all the hustle. I figure I need to call up something to get things shaking again but I'm sick right now.

The alt-tab applet in Gnome is cute. Fast window switching with only 128MB of memory and five apps open. Evo, Firefox, Gaim, Xmms and a gnome-terminal session. That this laptop even runs all this goodness is a testament to the fine memory management provided by the kernel. It is slow but it's stable and starts every time. I just upgraded the fox to 1.0.4 (from 1.0.1), about time I figured, backed up my bookmarks after seeing Will lose his earlier and had an effortless install. Firefox kept all of my about:config tweaks as well as the bookmarks (toolbar and HabariXenu feeds + 3 dozen other randoms). extensions and themes. Here's to free software and the people at the Mozilla Foundation!

2005-05-15T23:13:00.000-07:00

So last time I posted I was working counter at the tattoo shop. I did it again today. Some people (a familiy rather) came in today and wanted commerative pieces done to celebrate a lost son/brother/friend. Just fucking sad. It was a sad moment to meet good people. They went away with a good experence I believe, no happier but moving ahead with it.

I've been using Gnome lately instead of KDE (or Ion2 or IceWM) and I'm enjoying it. Debian. My laptop has a 1600x1200 resolution and Gnome looks great, font's are smooth etc... I rate it just as good as KDE. Both are nice and have more goodies than you can shake a stick at. I am currently fond of the applet that gives me a simple percentage reading of the signal my wireless card has. cpufreq applet is cool as well.

Continued work on my backpiece yesterday. Eyesockets were shaded in as well as the nose socket and a major outline around the mouth.Needles that I built! Used on me. When more of it is done I'll post some pictures, it's a worthy one.

2005-05-11T11:53:00.000-07:00

Today is the day of the week I work counter at the tattoo shop I am apprenticing at. Not the calm desk job (not that I really have one of those anyway), it's a gig that takes some getting used to.
The feeling around here is that the music should be as painful as the tattoo and I think we do a good job of doing that. Loud. I managed to get the stuff (cable modem, router etc..) and were streaming music now. More later I have to set up my laptop...

2005-05-10T11:21:00.000-07:00

Portland
I moved up here from Southern Oregon in Febuary. It's been a good move for me even though it meant giving up business I worked my ass off to aquire down South. Oppurtunity knocks so I jumped. I landed a job with an Open Source start-up called of all things OpenSourcery. Its a great crew of people to work with and things look to be picking up. The other reason for moving is I'm learning how to tattoo. My right brain had to be brought back to life somehow... Web design and graphics are cool but there is nothing like manipulating a medium physically. I do a lot of needle making and drawing/stenciling right now but the time draws near... An unforgiving medium to be sure, tattoo but one with the most interesting canvas.
So, it's been a do over in quite a few respects but what a wild ride.

2004-10-14T09:04:00.000-07:00

Seems really cool yet really creepy at the same time dept. brings us The Google Desktop! .

2004-10-13T18:42:00.000-07:00

Open Office turns 4 years old today. I use it under Linux and Windows. Java Runtime 1.4.2 JRE needs to be loaded for it but it's a free alternative to MSOffice.
I think I'll try this out tonight. Never a bad thing to have around, a firewall is.

2004-10-13T16:33:00.000-07:00

boingboing is much hyped and IMO deserves it. Doctorow is a pioneer of sorts. I see he posts for EFF as well. I'm also getting into lising to ITConversations at least once or twice a week. It seems a good way to keep up on new ideas and old ones as well.

Ahhh, how we saturate ourselves with media. I think it has to do with feeling like we somehow control our environments.

2004-10-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

I did get a gmail.google.com account. Not through blogspot (blogger) but through a friend over at tribe.net . Neat concept and right now I have been trying out the forwarding (free for now!). The networks we build online are interesting.

2004-10-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

I'm really happy with my desktop right now. I used the Debian Beta4 Installer a few months back to load Sarge onto my box. I use unstable sources and am woking mainly under KDE 3.3
Really nice. Fairly old hardware. Like Pentium 3 old. Anyway I'm happy and almost able to not use Windows. There is one service that absolutely requires IE 5.5 or better that I have to use... GIMP 2.0 is impressive. I have some learning to do before not ever using Photoshop again as well. So 2 reasons to keep MS around.
I am weaning and aim to be free of MS in another year (ouch!).
Maybe by the time I'm 80 more games will port over.

2004-04-27T16:43:00.000-07:00

Following a thread today I ran across an article about textbook censorship. The labeling of Mr. Chiras book as un-American and anti-Christian by the Texas Board of Edu. is a sad day for Texas. The Board I take it has no intrest in sustainable environmental science and from what I read into it, neither would Jesus. This book is a staple at noted colleges and has been for years. But what the fuck, if Mr. David Bradly (Galveston-area
Board member) goes on record with the hometown paper as saying the current free speech suit is "silly and frivolous" it must be. Mr Bradly must subscribe to the biblical notion that man has to be in dominion over nature. Jesus wants us to make a hollowed out shell of the planet we live on. It's why God created it in the first place. To top it off, watching the bottom line and not the constitution, publishers are kowtowing to Texas Board of Edu. by adding such little gems as "Does it really matter if the world gets warmer?" In last minute rewrites.
So much for objectivity in Texas schools and adherance to the First Amendment. I'll wager Mr.Bush is damn proud though.
Amen to that.

2004-04-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

Well enough of hunting for Gmail info. I'd better write something. Between Diebold and our screwed up leaders
trying to strip us of what ever they can, is revolution on the horizon?

How comforatable are we? I'm certainly not of the fiber of the anti-war protesters of the 60's. I suppose I am
one of the masses that are trying to get by with blinders on. But I am starting to think about doing something,
even if it's just voting or joining a protest march. We are I believe at the brink.

2004-04-25T16:37:00.000-07:00

I'll write more later, I'm really motivated to try out the Gmail beta. I am a whore.