Wednesday, 21 December 2005, 0159

I've gotten grades submitted for 3 of the four classes I taught last semester. I'd like to thank all of my students for making my return to teaching a wonderful experience.

Also, I'd like to mention that if you're in the Twin City Metro Area, there are still plenty of openings in my classes--particularly Linux Admin 3. That class (I know, I hate the name, too...) will cover much more shell scripting, kernel patching and compilation, and Voice over IP using asterisk (provided I can get the VOIP hardware to work =) ). That class is offered on our Eden Prairie campus on Tuesday afternoons. Enroll at HennepinTech today!

My PHP class on Thursday also has openings, and we'll cover more than a bit of MySQL, as well.

And if you're new to this whole Linux thing, I'd like to recommend Linux Admin 1 and Linux Admin 2. They are, respectively, Workstation and Server/Network administration. The first class essentially covers user accounts, boot/shutdown, and all that jazz. The second covers apache, sendmail, samba, NFS, more security, and a just a touch of encryption/crypto. Both classes are an absolute hoot (if I do say so myself), and are being taught this spring with Mandriva 2006. You can look at my ugly, ugly class notes at linux.angelar.com, and see if anything there looks interesting to you.

Wednesday, 14 December 2005 1512

Me thinks SANS is jumping to conclusions

slashdot is running a link to a Report on supposed chinese military efforts to hack US gov't systems.

Personally, I don't buy it. What they cite as their reason for suspecting the Chinese military is weak, at best. "no keystroke errors", "breached a system in less than 30 minutes, and left no fingerprints". Anyone who is remotely professional could do that, and it smells to me of an automated process--better than most, perhaps, but this is still very possibly the work of just a few crackers. Yes, the attacks originate in China, but so does a lot of Spam. I don't believe the Chinese government is sending me spam, I think they just have lots of non-secured machines. Non-secured machines can be hijacked to send spam, and they can be hijacked to launch attacks on US Government and (not that long ago) British Government machines.

Unless of course, this is part of a bigger media push to show the Chinese as the great big bad guys.

Brad Spangler has some of the same suspicions that I do.

Sunday, 11 December 2005, 0038

Something like 40% of my bandwidth is going to idiots at various phpBBs who are directly linking to a picture I have of a goldwing wheelieing. Yeah, that's spelled wrong, and I don't really care.

That's just annoying. So how did I deal with it? I replaced the image with a new, photoshopped image. I thought long and hard about what that image should be, then noted that most of the hits were coming from Germany, where it is a crime to display Nazi emblems and propaganda. Voila. My new image is nothing more than a good old-fashioned swastika. That should tell them that linking to it is a bad idea.

Jerks.

Friday, 9 December 2005, 1539

Jose and Beth Nazario were kind enough to gift us with a Canon digital camera, when Thor was born. I thought it appropriate that I take a little movie of Thor today, and put it up.

This movie shows Thorwald diligently disassembling and sorting out LEGO bricks, and Shows more of the same, and Thorwald waves goodbye at the end. Please note, these movies are 50MB and 44MB respectively. They're big, they're high quality, and my upload speed is only 512Kbps. So, figure it's going to take a couple of minutes to download them, even if you have really high-speed internet. If you are on a dialup, don't even bother. Also, both movies are avi's, and I didn't have any luck getting the framerate or sound to display correctly under Linux with mplayer. Try windows media player. Sorry!

Wednesday, 7 Dec 2005, 1831

60 years and 12 hours ago, Japanese fighters were prepping to wallop the socks off the US Fleet in Pearl Harbor. The took off knowing that their embassy had declared war in time, so that it would not be considered a sneak attack. Too bad their diplomatic corps botched deliver of the declaration of war.

Sometime after December 19, this machine will be down for a while. I'm going to have to reinstall the OS, and put some new hardware in. Should be fun all around. No more than 4-6 hours of outage, tops.

Sunday, 4 Dec 2005, 1503

Ever wondered how LEGO bricks are made?. I don't anymore. This is a very, very cool animated tour.

Sunday, 4 Dec 2005, 1450

I uploaded a bunch of pictures I've taken with my palm to this directory here. A couple of fun pictures there, some of which have already been posted to tmbo.

We went to a party at Mike Schwarz's house last night, which was an absolute blast. Mike was snapping away with his 8 Mp camera, and hopefully he'll send some of those images our way. It's always good to catch up with my former co-author, and co-worker from my recent 1-year sojourn in industry. I was glad to hear the that the PalmOS project for which I pushed is going quite well. Turns out it _is_ easier to start from scratch and build something for Palm, than it is to make some crappy PocketPC software package work.

Also, I found out how much LEGO bricks weigh, and that people are writing software to build LEGO structures without human intervention, such as bridges! Some very, very cool stuff.

The end of the semester approaches, and as usual, I'm behind on school work. I've also got something like a thousand digital pictures to process and slap up in various places on this machine. Aaaaaaaargh. Hopefully I can get some of those done over Xmas break. Happy Festivus, everyone!

Thursday, 01 December 2005, 0132

URPMI has been treating me well for some time, but I noticed it was borked up on my server. so, I thought, I'll just manually download the new RPMs, and install those. Well, after much messing about, I got the RPMs to install...only to find that...well, they wanted a different version of glibc. So rpm is broken now. Heh.

This is funny actually. I'll try backrevving to MDK2005, but I'm not sure if that's even possible at this point. I may just have to boot from the DVD and do an upgrade.

Saturday, 26 November 2005, 0044

I've decided that hanging on to all these lego boxes and instructions is counterproductive. Particularly since they aren't nearly as fun as the actual bricks. So, Buy LEGO boxes and instructions from me. Or contact me in meatspace.

Tuesday, 22 October 2005, 1654

THF is the bomb for gluing LEGO bricks together. It's also the active ingredient in PVC solvent.

Can anyone tell me how the heck I'm supposed to download the videos OFF of my palm zire 72s?

Monday, 21 November 2005, 2307

Man. Busy, busy. Gunnar's umbilical hernia is healing, apparently. I'm thinking in a few months it'll be gone entirely. Angela and I cleaned the house a bunch, played with the kids, and I got a bunch of school work done. I found out that my Palm Zire 72 will take video, and I'll get that video uploaded shortly. It's funny. Trust me.

Gunnar is beginning to say "agoo", and "whaaa" in a non-crying sense, which is nice. Thor is verbal as ever, and wants to be read to for a few hours a day. Seriously. Today, we read excerpts from a variety of Sandra Boynton books, several dozen pages from "The Way Things Work", and all about Charles Ponzi. I think I'll have to break out Guns, Germs and Steel again. Thor seems to dig the dry academic stuff. And he likes building with LEGO bricks.

Speaking of LEGO bricks, I have a favor to ask. If you get prescriptions filled at a Target Pharmacy, and you have some of those cool red pill bottles, can you get in contact with me? They work REALLY well for storing the smaller, fiddlier LEGO technic bits. Those are the pieces that Thor or Gunnar can choke on, and they're also the pieces that are easy to lose, so a pill bottle is perfect. Thor can't open it without my help, and they're transparent so a person can see what is inside.

I'm also playing with a small bottle of Tetra-Hydra-Furan (THF) that a student gave me. Cool stuff, supposed to be a great adhesive for ABS plastic. It's also the active ingredient in PVC solvent. Needless to say, you don't want to sniff this stuff. I'm doing some test gluings of old beat up LEGO bricks that are cracked or don't stick to each other anymore. If that works, I'm going to try gluing some cracks in the VFR's bodywork with it. I'm sure it'll prang up the paint, but not any worse than a plastic welder does. Motorcycle bodywork, you see, is generally made of ABS plastic.

Oh, and I found out how to actually get my WiFi card to work with Mandrake, easily. /usr/sbin/drakconnect will allow you to easily specify any WEP or WPA keys, and pick out what SSID you want to use. It even works with the ndiswrappper kludge I have to use for my Linksys card. What I can't figure out, however, is how to get my Dell Latitude C810 to run in something other than 1600x1200 resolution. I mean, that's neat, but I get a headache squinting at the laptop screen. I'll figure it out eventually.

Sunday, 13 November 2005, 1558

Rybak won, which makes me glad, because Sergeant John Delmonico doesn't like Rybak. Delmonico, if you remember, is a spammer, and supposedly a cop. Anyway, I'm glad to see that the MPF's politicking helped consolidate Rybak's victory.

On other fronts:
Which Colossal Death Robot Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

Monday, 7 November 2005, 2127

The Minneapolis Police Federation has now resorted to spamming in an effort to promote political candidates. I thought it was bad enough that these guys got themselves exempted from the do-not-call registry, but that wasn't good enough for them. Email Sergeant John Delmonico of the Minneapolis Police Federation and tell him what you think of their spamming practices.

You see, the MPD Federation rubber-stamped an anti-rybak message from an organization called highriskrybak.com, which is run by Michael Shannon of MANDATE: Message, Media & PR. Either the MPD federation is using their member dues to pay this PR firm to trash rybak, or some anti-rybak group (think, conservatives) have paid the bill and the MPD is fronting the message.

The trailer on the message says: This email is an independent expenditure and was not and has not been authorized by any candidate nor has it been prepared with the consent of, in cooperation or concert with, or at the request or suggestion any candidate. Prepared and paid for by the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis Contingency Fund, Lyall Delaney, treasurer, 1811 University Ave. NE; Minneapolis, MN 55418.

So yeah, it was the MPD's idea. The company which is fraudulently claiming that I opted in is Lyris Technologies. They can be contacted at lrod@lyris.com. Website hosting is provided to the MPD federation by acomhosting.com out of Massachusetts (Way to keep money in-state, MPD federation!), and the email contact at acomhosting is service@acomhosting.com.

I suppose the bright side of things is that the MPD federation doesn't host their website overseas--but that probably just never occured to them.

Vote for Rybak--at least he hasn't spammed me.

Wednesday, 2 Nov 2005, 2028

Yep, I've finally updated this page to use CSS. Much prettier now, isn't it? Too bad IE handles CSS so poorly.

Also, Thor is now playing with LEGO bricks, even the little ones. He's surprisingly good at building things, and also at ordering people around. Mom & Pop brought up about fifteen pounds of my old LEGOs, and Angela & I have started sorting out the broken and worn-out pieces. We're going to have to supplement with new bricks, I think. Darn.

I'd forgotten how addictive those little things are. I think I need to pick up a less addictive hobby, like smoking, or doing crack cocaine. Probably be cheaper.

Friday, 28 October 2005, 1400

Sulu (George Takei) is gay. Actually, he's been gay for a long time, but he's announcing it now. I tip my hat to starfleet command for having a gay captain of a starship. Hopefully, we won't have to wait until the 23rd century for gays to get equal rights in the military (and everywhere else).

Porkins (Red Six, from star wars) died today.

And, I found a great new Hunter S. Thompson quote, via themaxx.com:

"And the whole Bush family, from Texas, should be boiled in poison oil."
-Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, 11.13.00, from ESPN.com

Wednesday, 26 Oct 2005, 2048

So much to blog! Life is good. I'm getting my head around teaching again, beginning to grok javascript well enough to teach it (which is good, since I'm > 8 weeks into the semester). Thorwald is doing fabulously, and Gunnar is growing like a weed. Gunnar was baptized last weekend, and almost the entire family managed to make it to the ceremony.

I'm playing around with water-cooling a PC. Expect a page on this in the next few months, complete with pictures.

Furnace and A/C were replaced last week, so the entire family will be living on Ramen and Macaroni and Cheese for a while.

And on the interesting link front, I found a very interesting writeup on the MS way of programming. It's a very good commentary on why I generally dislike 4GLs, as well. Most scripting languages (Perl & Python are notable exceptions) so constrain the art of programming as to remove all joy from it. I've always hated code-generators, since they generate code which is impossible to modify manually. It's why this page (and all webpages on angelar.com) are written with vim, and not with the poo-flinging monkey of HTML editors. Oh, how I hope that starts a google-bombing incident.

Language is interesting because it is so maleable. I believe that this is the key feature in the dominance of English, worldwide. We can understand people with accents, we can understand strange phrasing, we can understand Yoda. Order verbs and nouns of, alter we can. Still--people will understand the meaning. Programming is interesting because there are so many ways to solve any given problem. I like what I read about engineering today: "good engineering is solving for a few quid the same problem which a major corporation paid 3 million UKP to solve." That's an ugly, ugly paraphrase, but it's still true.

Visual editors and such limit your freedom the same way living in a double-wide trailer house limits your choice of furniture placement. Yes, a double-wide is a quick, inexpensive way to get a dwelling. It does not, however, have the flexibility, the maleability, or the durability of an actual constructed house. When damaged, pre-fabricated homes are simply bulldozed, while constructed homes can be repaired. Yes, constructed homes are more expensive, and harder to build than their pre-fabbed counterparts, but the end result is simply _more_ than the alternative. Code is the same way, and it is why I favor Linux over Windows. With Linux, I can arrange things the way I want, and I don't have to do things a particular way. If I become disatisfied with Mandriva (my current distro of choice), I can trivially switch to Debian, Gentoo, RedHat, or even the festering boil which is SuSE. I have a choice in how I do things. This is not, however, the MS or Apple way. Both companies are predicated upon removing choice from the hands of the consumer. "Think Different" shouldn't be the motto for Apple, it should be "Think like Us, instead". If you want to think different, Linux or one of the BSDs is for you.

Monday, 26 September 2005, 2058

The defining characteristics of our administration. Oh, wait, did I say administration? I meant to say "a fascist regime."

Thursday, 22 September 2005, 2005

Last night, we had major thunderstorms up at the school--major enough to knock out power just before 7 PM. Brooklyn Park was hit hard. We spent better than an hour huddling in the fallout shelter with our students before we were finally released. Power is still out today, so I had no class.

Unfortunately, I didn't check my email until I headed in, so I got an optional 40 mile ride in on the bike. Once back, I was socializing with Angela and my parents, when my dad said: "hey, there's a fight going on in your yard."

I was out the door in a shot. Half a second of surveying the situation showed me what was going on: five black guys--three yelling "leave him alone, man!", one running away, and the fifth throwing punches at the one trying to run. I jumped in between them, and bellowed something diplomatic, like "Hey, SHITHEAD, Get the FUCK out of my yard!" That had no effect, so I just lied: "Cops are on the way, so get the fuck out of here, man!" Fifteen tense seconds went by, before the aggressor finally bailed. Talking to the other guys didn't give me many clues. The victim was uninjured, and swore that the perp had just charged up to him and started throwing punches. (My dad had seen this all happen, and verified his story). Apparently the perp and victim had been playing basketball last night, but that didn't give the victim any clues as to why the attack had happened. Finally, everyone went on their way.

But that doesn't change the big news: Tenth wedding anniversary today. In 1995, Angela said "I do", and there were plenty of surprised people. I imagine some money was lost today on various wagers. It still doesn't seem like it's been that long.

Thursday, 15 September 2005, 0831

I've been up for almost two hours now...which doesn't seem like much, until you realize that I don't need to, since I never have to be to work before noon (as a trade off, I'm there until 10 pm).

So I'm making use of my time. Catching up on themaxx.com, replying to emails, and playing with my new Palm. See, my Zire 31 bellied up recently. So, Angela bought me a Zire 72s. Nice little machine, and it comes with a built in camera. Here's a shot of Gunnar Olav sleeping last night, and here's proof that hennepintech.edu loves me. Not even photoshopped! Yep, I have a reserved parking space. Gotta love it!

Wednesday, 14 September 2005, 1355

Looks like the primary hard drive in mail.angelar.com is going south fast. smartd is reporting 29 unreadable sectors. I've ordered myself a 200GB 7200 RPM drive from newegg ($90, shipped), and will be putting it in place soon. So, this machine will be throwing away it's 103+ day uptime very shortly. Ah, nothing like rebuilding a server to make a weekend fun, fun fun.

Tuesday, 13 September 2005, 2326

We're all safe and sound at home. Gunnar is growing well. Thorwald loves having a brother. Things are good.

Except for E-vites. God, I hate evites. Just send me the ^^&!@#& invitation, already. Don't make me go to some stupid website so I can SEE what all the fuss is about. Here's the deal people: Evite makes big long stupid links. I do a lot of my email work from a terminal. That's by choice. Do I go and look at your evites? No. I don't. They're a nuisance. Instead of showing me the real info, they show me a long string of characters. So, I have to copy and paste them into a browser session. Or, if I'm working from a low-bandwidth connection, I have to remind myself to look at your evite later.

You know what? Most parties aren't worth the trouble. Just send me the invite, will you? Is it THAT hard to type out four or five lines of text, and put it in an email? Do you really think that typing it in on a webpage saves effort? If I'm going to come to your party, I'm going to do it regardless of who else is going. If I care about you so little that I have to know who else is going, before I commit...do you really want someone like me at your party?

In closing, I hope evite folds quickly, and people can get back to sending normal messages in email. Next week's rant: HTML Email, and how it is destroying the moral fiber of this country.

Saturday, 27 August 2005, 1656

Gunnar is finally starting to gain some weight. He had dropped 11 ounces, but is now beginning to gain again. He was up to 5 pounds, 1 ounce this morning, but he's been eating like a champ since. pictures of gunnar and some of thorwald, too are finally up. We're headed back to the hospital shortly. Angela has been discharged, but the hospital has been kind enough to find us a room so that Angela can hang out free of charge.

Good thing, too, since Assurant (Formerly known as Fortis) is seeing just how little they can cover. As insurance companies go, Assurant is pretty darned evil. They're definitely profit-driven, at the expense of everything else. Yeah. I'd like to say bad things about them, and wish bad things on their board of directors, but you know, they're just behaving like any good MBA: they value profit above everything else. Remember, to get your MBA, all you have to do is trade in your immortal soul. This statement does not apply to those few MBAs I know who have retained their souls (hi Erin! hi Mark!).

Anyway, things are going well at the hospital, and Gunnar should be able to come home early next week. They've run a full battery of tests and he's come up negative on everything.

Sunday, 21 August 2005, 1003

At 0407 hours, Angela gave birth, via C-section to Gunnar Olav Anderson. Gunnar was 5 pounds 10.7 ounces, and 18 inches long. He scored 7 and 9 on his apgars. He's doing great. While he's on oxygen now, the nurses expect to ween him off it over the next twelve hours or so. After all, he's only 6 hours old now!

Thursday, 11 August 2005, 0910

The blog is always slow for one reason or another, but I've got a very good reason this time. Over the past month, I've resigned my position with $company, finished up my time there, and been working on refurbishing Thor's room. Most importantly, however, I've been hired back to my old job at the technical college. Hennepin Technical College.

So, these last few weeks have been some of the happiest of my life. I'm going back to a job I love, to work I sincerely enjoy, and to be around people who genuinely like me. Teaching rocks.

Also, I get to put my page on the various problems with the filePro RAD system back up, since I now have (joy of joys!) a union to ensure that I have the right to free speech in my free time. While I can't say that my previous employer specifically ordered me to take down my filePro page, I can say that they said it was "insanely unprofessional." Huh. An information technology professional writing up a professional opinion of a technology product, and using his own time and his own resources in the process. To me, I'd have to say that sounds professional. If a mechanic says he considers a given type of braking system inferior to another, wouldn't you think that's reasonable?

Not, apparently, in everyone's world.

Oh, and Mandriva 2005LE absolutely loves that Foxconn hardware. I ripped out the HD from the old machine, and put it in the new, powered it up, and everything worked perfectly. The ONLY manual configuration I had to do was to fire up Mandriva's Xwindows configuration tool, to set the resolution back to 1024x768. The day of Linux on the desktop is actually here.