Okay me lame again. No posts since the 17th is bullshit. Fucking kangaroos.
Well things have been hectic. Since I got rotated into the graveyard shifts starting the 15th and there was the Christmas holidays and still the New Years holiday, my schedule has been really fucked up. I've been doing lots of short sleep cycles adding up to sometimes enough hours a day but there haven't been too many nights where I've just slept a full eight hours. Largely 3-5 hours a couple times a day. Or not.
As for more interesting news, for work I've started working with Postgresql. It cetainly is a feature-rich DBMS. It has a "CIDR" type for storing network addresses. (I'm impressed.) Its definately different from MySQL but already I'm seeing plenty of trade-offs just in the features (I haven't gotten to observing performance difference).
Its fun stuff anyhow. Must be time for me to go back to work. Heck, I may even post again *within* two weeks.
Tuesday, 30 December 2003
Tuesday, 16 December 2003
We're Under Attack!
Ah. Windows set a new record today:
Users not found in UNIX Database:
administrator : 126 Time(s)
That's right. My windows client (Michael) attacked the samba server a grand total of 126 times. Sure I used some of the network resources, but I guaranteed I didn't get prompted 126 times for a username and password.
"Thanks for breaking my cow lamp, guys."
In other news, I am full of hate. Michael's onboard nic didn't work from the Fedora install. Not too too surprising. So I put a NIC in. That failed. Some strange bus errors or tx errors. Strange. Both these devices work fine in windows.
So I tried to compile NIC drivers for the onboard NIC. That didn't go so well. I managed to compile network drivers until ifconfig seggied. I assume it was just the failed module I had compiled, but I was impressed.
Fuck, I'm tired. At the end of my first grave shift. I want to curl up and go sleepy-sleep now. Waa! Waa! Doesn't help that there was this total psycho calling in. Definately a head-case.
Users not found in UNIX Database:
administrator : 126 Time(s)
That's right. My windows client (Michael) attacked the samba server a grand total of 126 times. Sure I used some of the network resources, but I guaranteed I didn't get prompted 126 times for a username and password.
"Thanks for breaking my cow lamp, guys."
In other news, I am full of hate. Michael's onboard nic didn't work from the Fedora install. Not too too surprising. So I put a NIC in. That failed. Some strange bus errors or tx errors. Strange. Both these devices work fine in windows.
So I tried to compile NIC drivers for the onboard NIC. That didn't go so well. I managed to compile network drivers until ifconfig seggied. I assume it was just the failed module I had compiled, but I was impressed.
Fuck, I'm tired. At the end of my first grave shift. I want to curl up and go sleepy-sleep now. Waa! Waa! Doesn't help that there was this total psycho calling in. Definately a head-case.
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Its Getting Old
So today's a big day. I mark the end of a year of getting older. Completed. Done. Finished. For the next year, I plan to get older just about every second. In total, that should be about 31,536,000 seconds older. I think I can acheive this modest goal with a little help from my friends Al and Cohol.
And for those who are big fans of Governor Schwarzenegger you can ask "When are you going to get older?" to which I will naturally respond by shouting "NOW!" and throwing an axe at you.
Two more days till the lan party. I'm excited. Are you excited?
And for those who are big fans of Governor Schwarzenegger you can ask "When are you going to get older?" to which I will naturally respond by shouting "NOW!" and throwing an axe at you.
Two more days till the lan party. I'm excited. Are you excited?
Friday, 5 December 2003
New Gear, Yo
Its been a while since my last .plan update but things have been fairly quiet. I've finished my class for the semester, been horribly sick, and most importantly I got some new computer hardware.
I finally went ahead and bought the missing bits to build Michael. I got an Antec case, an ASUS A7V600 mobo, lots of RAM, an Athlon XP 2500+, and ended up getting a GeForce 4 5200.
I was a bit worried about hooking everything up myself but it went just fine. Took me some hours to get everything plugged in to the right places and such but it came right on just fine the first time I booted it.
Michale is super fast and super sexy. The one thing that's missing is the floppy drive. I thought I had plenty of extras at home but it turns out the only one I still have here is un-recovereable. Of all the things to not have lying around, who'da thunk I would have problems with the floppy drive? Not me apparently.
So that's that and I'll try to remember to post again sooner this time.
I finally went ahead and bought the missing bits to build Michael. I got an Antec case, an ASUS A7V600 mobo, lots of RAM, an Athlon XP 2500+, and ended up getting a GeForce 4 5200.
I was a bit worried about hooking everything up myself but it went just fine. Took me some hours to get everything plugged in to the right places and such but it came right on just fine the first time I booted it.
Michale is super fast and super sexy. The one thing that's missing is the floppy drive. I thought I had plenty of extras at home but it turns out the only one I still have here is un-recovereable. Of all the things to not have lying around, who'da thunk I would have problems with the floppy drive? Not me apparently.
So that's that and I'll try to remember to post again sooner this time.
Wednesday, 19 November 2003
A Good Fortune
From The Onion (www.theonion.com):
Sagittarius: (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21)
Everyone has potentially fatal flaws, but yours involve a love of soldiers' wives, an insatiable thirst for whiskey, and the seven weak points in your left ventricle.
Speaking of fortunes, its about that time of the year again. The Party Time. Starting off with my birthday for December 11th (date TBA), Yule (December 21st), and New Year's Eve (guess). I think I'm going to host another lan party this year but I gotta start making arrangments.
In the news a few things. Been doing some stuff with Nikita. I'm setting up a simple deal for dynamic hosts in a separate zone. Should be workable and I really need to see what framework is available with DDNS. I don't know if DDNS will work since these are computers on different networks... But we'll figure that one out.
Ah, hmmm, what else. Oh yeah, school. Wrapping up school. Next week is my practical exam for Network Administration. Booked time is three hours. Normal time is between 90 minutes and 120 minutes. My expected time is around a half hour.
Week after that is the written exam for both Software Engineering and Network Administration. Holy crap it will be nice to be done Software Engineering for a while. Definately waiting as long as possible before doing the next SE course.
I compiled irssi at home last night. That was fun. I'm already lost. Its neat and has lots of cool swag but its going to take a while.
We're hacking away at the changelog stuff on Nikita. Got Dante to whip together some RSS feeds which are good and bad. At the moment I don't have a client that can actually read the feeds. This is a problem. I need one that support SSL connections and self-signed certificates. Tricky. Also because its supposed to be a notification system where I don't have to go to the source, right? Well I'm not too likely to leave an RSS aggregator running at work even if I do find one.
So then we turned to the possibility of an RSS reading IRC bot. Well to heck with RSS, lets just have a bot that reads the db. Sounds like a good idea, don't it? All that is in analysis so we'll see where it goes from there.
Now that I've spammed my .plan, I really should go back to work.
Sagittarius: (Nov. 22 - Dec. 21)
Everyone has potentially fatal flaws, but yours involve a love of soldiers' wives, an insatiable thirst for whiskey, and the seven weak points in your left ventricle.
Speaking of fortunes, its about that time of the year again. The Party Time. Starting off with my birthday for December 11th (date TBA), Yule (December 21st), and New Year's Eve (guess). I think I'm going to host another lan party this year but I gotta start making arrangments.
In the news a few things. Been doing some stuff with Nikita. I'm setting up a simple deal for dynamic hosts in a separate zone. Should be workable and I really need to see what framework is available with DDNS. I don't know if DDNS will work since these are computers on different networks... But we'll figure that one out.
Ah, hmmm, what else. Oh yeah, school. Wrapping up school. Next week is my practical exam for Network Administration. Booked time is three hours. Normal time is between 90 minutes and 120 minutes. My expected time is around a half hour.
Week after that is the written exam for both Software Engineering and Network Administration. Holy crap it will be nice to be done Software Engineering for a while. Definately waiting as long as possible before doing the next SE course.
I compiled irssi at home last night. That was fun. I'm already lost. Its neat and has lots of cool swag but its going to take a while.
We're hacking away at the changelog stuff on Nikita. Got Dante to whip together some RSS feeds which are good and bad. At the moment I don't have a client that can actually read the feeds. This is a problem. I need one that support SSL connections and self-signed certificates. Tricky. Also because its supposed to be a notification system where I don't have to go to the source, right? Well I'm not too likely to leave an RSS aggregator running at work even if I do find one.
So then we turned to the possibility of an RSS reading IRC bot. Well to heck with RSS, lets just have a bot that reads the db. Sounds like a good idea, don't it? All that is in analysis so we'll see where it goes from there.
Now that I've spammed my .plan, I really should go back to work.
Wednesday, 12 November 2003
Check Out My Pipes
Today was the day. Nikita got unhooked from my residential Shaw account and hoisted out to New Westminster to camp on the nice little OC3 that's out there. Erm, well. Its all good now. Not only is she hardened but she also has physical access restricted. All is well.
Ah, well. Yeah. That's about all there is to it. I'm excited. Are you excited?
Ah, well. Yeah. That's about all there is to it. I'm excited. Are you excited?
Friday, 7 November 2003
Disconnect the Power from the Back of Your Cable Modem
So a wee spot of news. I'm a little toasted so it may not be coherent or spelled correctly so bear with me, please.
This morning I left the city of Vancouver to attend my job in the city of New Westminster. My shift started at eight o'clock in the morning.
At twenty minutes after eight, the Internet connection at my home goes down. Dulcea and Nikita are no longer online. Nobody can get into UnRoots Online. Since I am at work, all I can do is hope and check. I called home to leave a message for the Wendawg and then check throughout the day to see if Dulcea and Nikita pop online. They don't.
'Fuck' says I.
'I can't believe this fucking shit', I exclaim.
'Why the fuck does this happen when I'm just starting my fucking day at work and am eight or nine fucking hours away from being able to fucking troubleshoot fucking son of a bitch!' I vehemently propose to anyone and everyone who will listen.
Everyone was sympathetic and when back to work with only a nod.
Did I mention I've had a few drinks? So final the bell strikes four. I flip four the single deuce and run for the door then hold. Wait, I have other business to attend to.
I storm the NOC at my office. I demand: 'Adam, when can I bring Nikita here for COLO?'
He responds with 'oh, did Tom send you an email? It should be fine if you want to bring it in on Monday. Oh, hey Tome. Dominic here wants to COLO, is that fine?' he inquires of Tom who has wandered by in the direction of the machine room.
'Yeah, its fine by me. *I* don't have a problem with it', Tom responds.
Great, so I'm going to move Nikita to the office. After Tom and Adam discussed where my IP was going to come from, Tom flaunted his machine room. After some poking the hardware he confides to me: 'Its all fine by me so long as you're not going to get rooted', upon which we both recall with hidden mirth a specific dumb bastard at the office who did get his COLO rooted.
Having demonstrated his supreme prowess and well endowed equipment, Tom and I go to his office so I can get an account on Asimov.
'Do you have an existing account on here?', questions Tom.
'I dunno', I reply like an idiot.
'Lets see, what's the username you want here?', Tom persues.
'Ehh, just Dominic. D-o-m-i-n-i-c.' I request.
'Huh', he mutters as he searches the password files with vi like any sysop worth his salt. 'I don't see you in here. dshaw, what's your last name?' he says as he searches turning to me looking almost mystified that the office he works at has employed more new people in the last year then there have been total employees in the prior years.
'Lepiane. dshaw was Dan Shaw. He was one of the techs. He's left already', I inform him like a memo unread and even printed on letterhead newer then any he has bothered to read.
'Well okay, here. Put your password in' he directs, turning away from the computer to allow me access. He adds 'You'll have to put it in twice. Once for Samba and once for the system' as I go to put my password in.
After some quick typing, my passwords have been added to Asimov. He quickly adds me to the appropriate groups so I can have the standard access, again using vi. And now I take my leave. Imbued with not only permission to COLO Nikita, but also with both a Samba and system account on Asimov.
Despite this remarkable quest and the relics obtained, my travel back to the city of Vancouver is manic. I have come so far yet still it has been over eight hours since my ladies have been online. On the trip I alternate between resting, for I have slept lightly these last few days, brooding, and panicking.
I arrive home and after harassing the beast, Tallia, I turn to my fellow, the Wendawg. 'So what's up there?' I prompt ambiguosly.
'I dunno. The power was on and everything. It looks fine', he responds being as useful as paper against a cannon ball.
I explode 'well fuck that means those fuckers changed my IPs again.' Enraged I continue my solitary argument 'that doesn't make any sense. They couldn't *both* go offline. How could they do that?'
I strike out seeking foes where there are only wisps: 'Crap. The power wasn't out?'
It had not been so I brought my battle to the agreed fields: The Network. It was not a large battle ground, but I know it well. Perturbed that I may have even been cut down by the hand of the ISP, I persue the missing Internet connection.
First I load Chevette. My faithful workstation who has been perpetually indispensible. She will not connect with Dulcea and I realize how I have near-fataly crippled Chevette for omitting the simple task of ensuring she approached the appropriate side of Dulcea.
After a quick ritual to repair my failure, I bring Chevette up fully to the battle and so it begins.
Failing to connect immediately, I try the obvious which is to renew the IP on Dulcea. Realizing I had possibly erred in my priorities, I disconnected the display from Chevette and sought Nikita even before Dulcea could issue her cry.
I found Nikita also unable to connect. I checked again on Chevette and then discovered that Dulcea had not succeeded either.
And so beaten back, I turned to the basest of methods. I took Michael and pressed him ahead. I booted this sad Windows machine through the hub to the cable modem. Truly a desperate measure but sadly superior if I was going to in fact have to Call Tech Support.
I feared that call. I feared it with good reason. Who am I if I cannot do such a simple thing as connect to the Internet? What manner of pathetic creature calls himself Archangel, gloriously saves dozens of customers per day, and yet cannot get himself online? Truly a sad creature, I tell you, truly a sad one.
I swallow my pride as even Michael fails to obtain his goal while connected as directly as I can risk to the cable modem. I do that which every man, woman, and child has been told if their cable Internet connection has failed: I disconnect the power from the cable modem.
Sighing with a mixture of frustration, grief, anger, and impatience, I step from the Interface to let the cable modem rest.
I return to the Interface a short while later and reconnect the modem. It is too much for me. I cannot sit idle while the eyes of the modem mock me. But three blinks of 'message ... message ... message ... ' and I must retreat.
Again I harass the beast. Since Tallia is ferocious though miniscule, I easily defeat her thus restoring my sense of prowess. So restored I return again to the battle.
Michael, being a base Windows creature, does not engage the enemy quickly. He bides his time relying on perhaps only stubborness to win this fight. Yet despite his shortcomings, he has won. Attacking at the edges, the tide of the battle tilts back into my hand. I play it.
I set both Dulcea and Nikita on the enemy at once. I still tremor with fear as I know that the insurmoutable creature that is both ally and foe, the ISP, may yet mar me a wound I will not easily survive.
Having pressed my fighters to the attack, I step back and wait ... But this wait is not long. They return nigh immediately. I hold my breath for news of retreat or victory. Demanding 'ifconfig' of both systems, I find only victory in my hands today.
Elated, I immediately set about restoring The Balance. The gateways on Dulcea are reopened once again allowing the free clients of the Ice Palace to see the wonders of the Internet and I restore the servers on Nikita like royal jewels to a once usurped Queen.
Oh, it has been a mighty day. After such a day I can think of one thing and one thing alone:
'Fuck, its time for a drink.'
This morning I left the city of Vancouver to attend my job in the city of New Westminster. My shift started at eight o'clock in the morning.
At twenty minutes after eight, the Internet connection at my home goes down. Dulcea and Nikita are no longer online. Nobody can get into UnRoots Online. Since I am at work, all I can do is hope and check. I called home to leave a message for the Wendawg and then check throughout the day to see if Dulcea and Nikita pop online. They don't.
'Fuck' says I.
'I can't believe this fucking shit', I exclaim.
'Why the fuck does this happen when I'm just starting my fucking day at work and am eight or nine fucking hours away from being able to fucking troubleshoot fucking son of a bitch!' I vehemently propose to anyone and everyone who will listen.
Everyone was sympathetic and when back to work with only a nod.
Did I mention I've had a few drinks? So final the bell strikes four. I flip four the single deuce and run for the door then hold. Wait, I have other business to attend to.
I storm the NOC at my office. I demand: 'Adam, when can I bring Nikita here for COLO?'
He responds with 'oh, did Tom send you an email? It should be fine if you want to bring it in on Monday. Oh, hey Tome. Dominic here wants to COLO, is that fine?' he inquires of Tom who has wandered by in the direction of the machine room.
'Yeah, its fine by me. *I* don't have a problem with it', Tom responds.
Great, so I'm going to move Nikita to the office. After Tom and Adam discussed where my IP was going to come from, Tom flaunted his machine room. After some poking the hardware he confides to me: 'Its all fine by me so long as you're not going to get rooted', upon which we both recall with hidden mirth a specific dumb bastard at the office who did get his COLO rooted.
Having demonstrated his supreme prowess and well endowed equipment, Tom and I go to his office so I can get an account on Asimov.
'Do you have an existing account on here?', questions Tom.
'I dunno', I reply like an idiot.
'Lets see, what's the username you want here?', Tom persues.
'Ehh, just Dominic. D-o-m-i-n-i-c.' I request.
'Huh', he mutters as he searches the password files with vi like any sysop worth his salt. 'I don't see you in here. dshaw, what's your last name?' he says as he searches turning to me looking almost mystified that the office he works at has employed more new people in the last year then there have been total employees in the prior years.
'Lepiane. dshaw was Dan Shaw. He was one of the techs. He's left already', I inform him like a memo unread and even printed on letterhead newer then any he has bothered to read.
'Well okay, here. Put your password in' he directs, turning away from the computer to allow me access. He adds 'You'll have to put it in twice. Once for Samba and once for the system' as I go to put my password in.
After some quick typing, my passwords have been added to Asimov. He quickly adds me to the appropriate groups so I can have the standard access, again using vi. And now I take my leave. Imbued with not only permission to COLO Nikita, but also with both a Samba and system account on Asimov.
Despite this remarkable quest and the relics obtained, my travel back to the city of Vancouver is manic. I have come so far yet still it has been over eight hours since my ladies have been online. On the trip I alternate between resting, for I have slept lightly these last few days, brooding, and panicking.
I arrive home and after harassing the beast, Tallia, I turn to my fellow, the Wendawg. 'So what's up there?' I prompt ambiguosly.
'I dunno. The power was on and everything. It looks fine', he responds being as useful as paper against a cannon ball.
I explode 'well fuck that means those fuckers changed my IPs again.' Enraged I continue my solitary argument 'that doesn't make any sense. They couldn't *both* go offline. How could they do that?'
I strike out seeking foes where there are only wisps: 'Crap. The power wasn't out?'
It had not been so I brought my battle to the agreed fields: The Network. It was not a large battle ground, but I know it well. Perturbed that I may have even been cut down by the hand of the ISP, I persue the missing Internet connection.
First I load Chevette. My faithful workstation who has been perpetually indispensible. She will not connect with Dulcea and I realize how I have near-fataly crippled Chevette for omitting the simple task of ensuring she approached the appropriate side of Dulcea.
After a quick ritual to repair my failure, I bring Chevette up fully to the battle and so it begins.
Failing to connect immediately, I try the obvious which is to renew the IP on Dulcea. Realizing I had possibly erred in my priorities, I disconnected the display from Chevette and sought Nikita even before Dulcea could issue her cry.
I found Nikita also unable to connect. I checked again on Chevette and then discovered that Dulcea had not succeeded either.
And so beaten back, I turned to the basest of methods. I took Michael and pressed him ahead. I booted this sad Windows machine through the hub to the cable modem. Truly a desperate measure but sadly superior if I was going to in fact have to Call Tech Support.
I feared that call. I feared it with good reason. Who am I if I cannot do such a simple thing as connect to the Internet? What manner of pathetic creature calls himself Archangel, gloriously saves dozens of customers per day, and yet cannot get himself online? Truly a sad creature, I tell you, truly a sad one.
I swallow my pride as even Michael fails to obtain his goal while connected as directly as I can risk to the cable modem. I do that which every man, woman, and child has been told if their cable Internet connection has failed: I disconnect the power from the cable modem.
Sighing with a mixture of frustration, grief, anger, and impatience, I step from the Interface to let the cable modem rest.
I return to the Interface a short while later and reconnect the modem. It is too much for me. I cannot sit idle while the eyes of the modem mock me. But three blinks of 'message ... message ... message ... ' and I must retreat.
Again I harass the beast. Since Tallia is ferocious though miniscule, I easily defeat her thus restoring my sense of prowess. So restored I return again to the battle.
Michael, being a base Windows creature, does not engage the enemy quickly. He bides his time relying on perhaps only stubborness to win this fight. Yet despite his shortcomings, he has won. Attacking at the edges, the tide of the battle tilts back into my hand. I play it.
I set both Dulcea and Nikita on the enemy at once. I still tremor with fear as I know that the insurmoutable creature that is both ally and foe, the ISP, may yet mar me a wound I will not easily survive.
Having pressed my fighters to the attack, I step back and wait ... But this wait is not long. They return nigh immediately. I hold my breath for news of retreat or victory. Demanding 'ifconfig' of both systems, I find only victory in my hands today.
Elated, I immediately set about restoring The Balance. The gateways on Dulcea are reopened once again allowing the free clients of the Ice Palace to see the wonders of the Internet and I restore the servers on Nikita like royal jewels to a once usurped Queen.
Oh, it has been a mighty day. After such a day I can think of one thing and one thing alone:
'Fuck, its time for a drink.'
Saturday, 1 November 2003
Happy All Saints Day
Woo! So for news since my last post, holy crap I've let it lapse. Well, I've been well, I've been sick, I've been well, I've been sick. Its sucked. Just caught a cold from the office, really super lame. I hate being sick. I only missed a half day of work this time though. Miserable the rest.
Speaking of work, they promoted my bitch-ass to Tier 2 tech support. Great. Now I get to jockey for non-ts positions and its probably going to take a long time and I'm stuck, in the meantime, dealing with shit that nobody in Tier 1 wants to deal with. I even had to work on a ticket I deferred before getting promoted. Stupid shit.
Okay, enough boring crap. I didn't mean to rant on rl events so back to the more interesting stuff: Computers.
I'm still wanting to get at least one computer (Nikita) out onto the OC3 at my office. I have to get permission from the Network Operations Centre (NOC) to do that since its a locked room (oo, restricted physical access). NOC hasn't been in the last week...
Those swines! I demand better service! I'm trying to run a business here. Neep neep nop neep losing money neep nop dialup was neep nop nop ...
Ah anyhow. Being sick has really sucked. Dante did get the Apach SSL working again so the main nibble site is now properly ssl and restricted but as for putting up the changelog, I haven't gotten too far with it. Sleeping 10-14 hours a day really cramps my style, dawg. You know what ahm sayin?
Speaking of work, they promoted my bitch-ass to Tier 2 tech support. Great. Now I get to jockey for non-ts positions and its probably going to take a long time and I'm stuck, in the meantime, dealing with shit that nobody in Tier 1 wants to deal with. I even had to work on a ticket I deferred before getting promoted. Stupid shit.
Okay, enough boring crap. I didn't mean to rant on rl events so back to the more interesting stuff: Computers.
I'm still wanting to get at least one computer (Nikita) out onto the OC3 at my office. I have to get permission from the Network Operations Centre (NOC) to do that since its a locked room (oo, restricted physical access). NOC hasn't been in the last week...
Those swines! I demand better service! I'm trying to run a business here. Neep neep nop neep losing money neep nop dialup was neep nop nop ...
Ah anyhow. Being sick has really sucked. Dante did get the Apach SSL working again so the main nibble site is now properly ssl and restricted but as for putting up the changelog, I haven't gotten too far with it. Sleeping 10-14 hours a day really cramps my style, dawg. You know what ahm sayin?
Friday, 24 October 2003
I Made a LAN
This is it. I now have a LAN. The last thing I just finished setting up this week was NIS. My trusted network is now fully featured with centralized logins, filesharing via both NFS and Samba, email in and out, NATing, and all glued together with a 100Mbps FD switch.
It is The Nice.
In more news, Nikita has got everything she needs software-wise. Just needs stuff setup. But anyhow, she has weeb, mail, dns, and mysql all installed now. After installing all that, we even did an image of the system. Backups are cool. Especially if you use udpcast. Admitedly not the best way to image in this case for a variety of reason, but multi-casting over the lan is just ... just so much cooler.
Anyhow, that's the news. Dante and I are working on building a lightweight online changelog so we can do proper logging of changes to Nikita. Since there are two admins already, this is going to be fairly crucial. It'll be fun.
Movie Reviews:
Kill Bill
Its great. Its gory. See it and love it right now. Damn that movie was a slaughterhouse with super-fly style. Just so damn cool. I think I may try to see it again in the theatre fairly soon.
All other movies are warshed aside compared to Kill Bill but stayed tuned because though all of you are going to see Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation on November 8th with me, I know you'll still want to see my own special take on it.
It is The Nice.
In more news, Nikita has got everything she needs software-wise. Just needs stuff setup. But anyhow, she has weeb, mail, dns, and mysql all installed now. After installing all that, we even did an image of the system. Backups are cool. Especially if you use udpcast. Admitedly not the best way to image in this case for a variety of reason, but multi-casting over the lan is just ... just so much cooler.
Anyhow, that's the news. Dante and I are working on building a lightweight online changelog so we can do proper logging of changes to Nikita. Since there are two admins already, this is going to be fairly crucial. It'll be fun.
Movie Reviews:
Kill Bill
Its great. Its gory. See it and love it right now. Damn that movie was a slaughterhouse with super-fly style. Just so damn cool. I think I may try to see it again in the theatre fairly soon.
All other movies are warshed aside compared to Kill Bill but stayed tuned because though all of you are going to see Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation on November 8th with me, I know you'll still want to see my own special take on it.
Saturday, 18 October 2003
Domainated
With much alternating joy and excrutiating pain yesterday, Dante and I setup and hardend Nikita in preparation for the great outdoors. She's been battened down to offering five services to the outside (counted based on port scanning her) and only a few more available locally only.
She currently does: ssh (22), smtp (25, no relaying), dns (53, see below), web server (80, apache + php4 but nothing up yet), and spop3 (995, ssl connection w/ std pass auth).
That's all that gets through the firewall. Internally, she really only adds syslog and system stuff like that. Everything else has been removed, NFS and RPC too.
All this in prepartion for hosting the new domain: nibble.bz. Dante bought it once we were done and ready. It is up and active now. Nikita is the primary dns server for the domain with afraid.org doing the backup. Basically, we ownz dis domain, yo. We've got A records for all my machines and all his already, MX records for Nikita as primary, irc.nibble.bz pointing to roxy, and all the good things that domains are.
Mmmm the sweet taste of power. Now if only we had authority for the reverse lookups on our IPs...
She currently does: ssh (22), smtp (25, no relaying), dns (53, see below), web server (80, apache + php4 but nothing up yet), and spop3 (995, ssl connection w/ std pass auth).
That's all that gets through the firewall. Internally, she really only adds syslog and system stuff like that. Everything else has been removed, NFS and RPC too.
All this in prepartion for hosting the new domain: nibble.bz. Dante bought it once we were done and ready. It is up and active now. Nikita is the primary dns server for the domain with afraid.org doing the backup. Basically, we ownz dis domain, yo. We've got A records for all my machines and all his already, MX records for Nikita as primary, irc.nibble.bz pointing to roxy, and all the good things that domains are.
Mmmm the sweet taste of power. Now if only we had authority for the reverse lookups on our IPs...
Monday, 13 October 2003
Sick as a Dog
The last few days I've been sick with a cold. Sunday was the worst of it. I didn't even go out for thanksgiving dinner. I feel better today but when I woke up this morning, I just didn't have the energy to goo to work. My head was foggy with sickness goo and movement was tricky. I called in sick, yay. When I go in tomorrow, its going to be fucking hell. Ah well.
Friday we had some peeps over for Colin's going away party. Good fun and such so Bob, Czak, and I stayed in the computer room and Czak installed Debian on Nikita. So now Nikita is a Debian machine and could run the DNS and mail for our would be domain...
Except bad news on the Domain front. Sounds like policy at work has been changed. Apparenly all the Staff's free co-location (colo) have been kicked out of the pool to tighten up bandwidth usage. The flip side of this is that I haven't spokent to NOC since that happened and the only confirmed booted colo was one that did 40GB traffic a month. I don't know if they will be kicking out all staff machines since some, like mine, wouldn't even pump 1GB. We'll see. At least it sounds like Excessory is down with the domain idea.
Now, back to my mint tea and rest.
Friday we had some peeps over for Colin's going away party. Good fun and such so Bob, Czak, and I stayed in the computer room and Czak installed Debian on Nikita. So now Nikita is a Debian machine and could run the DNS and mail for our would be domain...
Except bad news on the Domain front. Sounds like policy at work has been changed. Apparenly all the Staff's free co-location (colo) have been kicked out of the pool to tighten up bandwidth usage. The flip side of this is that I haven't spokent to NOC since that happened and the only confirmed booted colo was one that did 40GB traffic a month. I don't know if they will be kicking out all staff machines since some, like mine, wouldn't even pump 1GB. We'll see. At least it sounds like Excessory is down with the domain idea.
Now, back to my mint tea and rest.
Wednesday, 8 October 2003
Where Are You? I'm at 192.168.1.2
For my Network Administration course this week, I had to "learn" DNS and also set it up. Historically I have been afraid of DNS... And with good reason. I really needed to be much more careful in my zone files.
Anyhow, the bulk of the message is that I now have dns working at home! Both forward and reverse lookups work for my wee home network. Its four machines (dulcea, pyrrhus, chevette, nikita) in the domain "icepalace.lan". Changed the domain option in my dhcpd.conf and now everyone on the lan can hit eachother without host files or stupid netbios.
Next step: a real network! Dante and I were kicking around the idea of splitting a domain that we could fuck around with. It'd be fun.
Anyhow, the bulk of the message is that I now have dns working at home! Both forward and reverse lookups work for my wee home network. Its four machines (dulcea, pyrrhus, chevette, nikita) in the domain "icepalace.lan". Changed the domain option in my dhcpd.conf and now everyone on the lan can hit eachother without host files or stupid netbios.
Next step: a real network! Dante and I were kicking around the idea of splitting a domain that we could fuck around with. It'd be fun.
Sunday, 5 October 2003
Movie Reviews
Having seen a few movies in theatre the last little while, here's my opinion.
Underworld
Underworld was a really great movie with some really big problems. That's really the only way of putting it. If you don't expect a perfect movie and do like any of Gothic/Punk, guns, or leather, then you'll really enjoy a large portion of the movie. There's a couple big problems which I won't spoil here save one:
It's supposed to be a love story. It is *very* poorly portrayed so I'll point this out to you: The protagonist Selene (Kate Beckinsale, beauty) is a vampire who is enamoured with the human Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman) despite the fact that the only hint of emotion is in the exchange of stoney gazes. However Kraven (Shane Brolly) is infatuated with Selene and all those two ever show is Selene ignoring Kraven and him cursing her for her disobedience.
Good job with the "feelings" on that one, team.
All in all the setting was perfect and the story was good (some think less of the story and some think more of it... I liked it). Hence I rate it at "See it in the theater but never again, maybe"
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
Basically this movie was more fun for the cast and crew then the audience. It was silly, campy, and disjointed. There was lots of shooting and the good guys were good, the bad guys were bad, and the sleezy guys were sleezy.
The movie jumps around between present time and flash backs with little or no cohesion. The few serious scenes were well played and the shooting scenes had a lot of shooting. Other then that it was sort of a gory comedy. Mexican Slasher meets Friends... or something.
So in my humble opinion, skip it till you can rent it and share the cost. Even then its a very strange conclusion to the El Mariachi trilogy. As different from Desperado as Desperado was from El Mariachi.
Matchstick Men
An interesting con movie. The twist is a real good one. I didn't see it (but I ain't the swiftest of people) but it was smoothly handled. The leading story of the movie is that the neurotic con artist Roy (Nicholas Cage) meets with his fourteen year old daughter by his estranged wife. Roy and his partner go after a big con (80 Gs USD) and Roy's daughter gets involved.
I will say no more since the movie tells the story very well on its own. I recommend catching this movie in theaters just so you don't have to wait, and then its a good one to rent with people. Even in mixed company, its quite polite as movies go.
Formula 51
Samuel L Jackson plays a contraband chemist who tries to get out by blowing up Meatloaf's drug syndicat. Meatloaf survives, we adjourne to Liverpool, England, and hilarity ensues.
A good fun action flick with a good car chase. Worth renting a few times as its a fair/good crowd pleaser. (Its out of theaters and if it weren't I'd give it "see it cheap" as well.)
That's just, like, my opinion and stuff, man...
Underworld
Underworld was a really great movie with some really big problems. That's really the only way of putting it. If you don't expect a perfect movie and do like any of Gothic/Punk, guns, or leather, then you'll really enjoy a large portion of the movie. There's a couple big problems which I won't spoil here save one:
It's supposed to be a love story. It is *very* poorly portrayed so I'll point this out to you: The protagonist Selene (Kate Beckinsale, beauty) is a vampire who is enamoured with the human Michael Corvin (Scott Speedman) despite the fact that the only hint of emotion is in the exchange of stoney gazes. However Kraven (Shane Brolly) is infatuated with Selene and all those two ever show is Selene ignoring Kraven and him cursing her for her disobedience.
Good job with the "feelings" on that one, team.
All in all the setting was perfect and the story was good (some think less of the story and some think more of it... I liked it). Hence I rate it at "See it in the theater but never again, maybe"
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
Basically this movie was more fun for the cast and crew then the audience. It was silly, campy, and disjointed. There was lots of shooting and the good guys were good, the bad guys were bad, and the sleezy guys were sleezy.
The movie jumps around between present time and flash backs with little or no cohesion. The few serious scenes were well played and the shooting scenes had a lot of shooting. Other then that it was sort of a gory comedy. Mexican Slasher meets Friends... or something.
So in my humble opinion, skip it till you can rent it and share the cost. Even then its a very strange conclusion to the El Mariachi trilogy. As different from Desperado as Desperado was from El Mariachi.
Matchstick Men
An interesting con movie. The twist is a real good one. I didn't see it (but I ain't the swiftest of people) but it was smoothly handled. The leading story of the movie is that the neurotic con artist Roy (Nicholas Cage) meets with his fourteen year old daughter by his estranged wife. Roy and his partner go after a big con (80 Gs USD) and Roy's daughter gets involved.
I will say no more since the movie tells the story very well on its own. I recommend catching this movie in theaters just so you don't have to wait, and then its a good one to rent with people. Even in mixed company, its quite polite as movies go.
Formula 51
Samuel L Jackson plays a contraband chemist who tries to get out by blowing up Meatloaf's drug syndicat. Meatloaf survives, we adjourne to Liverpool, England, and hilarity ensues.
A good fun action flick with a good car chase. Worth renting a few times as its a fair/good crowd pleaser. (Its out of theaters and if it weren't I'd give it "see it cheap" as well.)
That's just, like, my opinion and stuff, man...
Thursday, 2 October 2003
A Post
Well I'm making a post cause, well, I feel like it and haven't recently. Not much interesting in the last week or so. The new hardware (switch and driving wheel) is still saweet and super awesome.
Well, I went to Staples today. It was good. Makes me think about consumermas. Gives me some good ideas. You're all saving up to buy me some nice stuf, right? Anyhow, my Staples visit came be summed up by two statements:
"I wish I had bought a pen"
"School? Shit I hope that'd be the only use for this crap!"
See ya latah.
Well, I went to Staples today. It was good. Makes me think about consumermas. Gives me some good ideas. You're all saving up to buy me some nice stuf, right? Anyhow, my Staples visit came be summed up by two statements:
"I wish I had bought a pen"
"School? Shit I hope that'd be the only use for this crap!"
See ya latah.
Thursday, 25 September 2003
My What Big Hardware You Have
Weeee! Spending week! As of Wednesday, I have been the proud owner of a racing wheel for my ps2. It makes the racing games super-sexcellent. Driving the A class cars and Special/Super cars is smokin unlike with digital or even thumb-thing control. Turns go around, accelleration happens in grades, and its all so much butter.
I *also* picked up a 100 Mbps switch. Full duplex == hot shit. Fuck that thing is nice. Well, let me meander back to tuesday night where for the later half of my network admin class, ex, mdk, and i went to the pub. The problem was raised that my xmms freaking halts fairly frequently playing songs off the NFS mount. I complained about software and ex pointed out that in this case, maybe i really should blame the hardware.
So out with the 10-half hub and in with the 100-full switch. xmms has yet to halt. In fact, I have yet to see a collision light (thought that's expected). It is totaly saweet. I think I should have gotten the wireless access point though... Mmmm so delicious.
I go play with hardwares now.
I *also* picked up a 100 Mbps switch. Full duplex == hot shit. Fuck that thing is nice. Well, let me meander back to tuesday night where for the later half of my network admin class, ex, mdk, and i went to the pub. The problem was raised that my xmms freaking halts fairly frequently playing songs off the NFS mount. I complained about software and ex pointed out that in this case, maybe i really should blame the hardware.
So out with the 10-half hub and in with the 100-full switch. xmms has yet to halt. In fact, I have yet to see a collision light (thought that's expected). It is totaly saweet. I think I should have gotten the wireless access point though... Mmmm so delicious.
I go play with hardwares now.
Tuesday, 23 September 2003
iMac - The 'i' is for 'I'diot
This may seem a little strange to some, but I have some interesting Mac news today (and some leftover from yesterday). For the first item, as some know, I use an iMac at work. Its a nice little Mac that Bob put OS X on and is all great. So today I was playing around with iTunes on there to discover the coolest option box ever. It reads:
On CD Insert: Import Songs and Eject.
And that's really what it does. I inserted my new Coal Chamber CD and the iMac ripped it, encoded it to mp3, and ejected it. All quietly in the background. Totaly bitchin.
In more mac news, my sis has a dysfunctional iBook that she wants to use for school. However, its been fdisked so many times with erratic software sources that it doesn't do anything she needs it to (eg do full word processing and printing). So what we may do is arrange an exchange. I'll setup a computer of mine that she can take to Uni and take the iBook in exchange.
Then, that's right, hands-free ripping for me. Mac's are so cool.
On CD Insert: Import Songs and Eject.
And that's really what it does. I inserted my new Coal Chamber CD and the iMac ripped it, encoded it to mp3, and ejected it. All quietly in the background. Totaly bitchin.
In more mac news, my sis has a dysfunctional iBook that she wants to use for school. However, its been fdisked so many times with erratic software sources that it doesn't do anything she needs it to (eg do full word processing and printing). So what we may do is arrange an exchange. I'll setup a computer of mine that she can take to Uni and take the iBook in exchange.
Then, that's right, hands-free ripping for me. Mac's are so cool.
Thursday, 18 September 2003
Nikita is Home and Dulcea is Safer
So having done some more hard time, I've become a changed man. I've become more assertive, more knowledgable, more full of shit, and definately more bitter. So many people in my network admin course are going to drop or fail and its only because they know nothing and haven't the brains to learn simple things fast enough to catch up.
Anyhow, Nikita is home. I took another stab at installing NetBSD on her. Not so good. Better. She did pull down packages via ftp and I did learn a few things, but for some reason she refused to handle DNS. It didn't matter if Dulcea gave her the DNS server info via DHCP (Nikita ignored that flat-out) or if I manually entered the DNS server address. Nikita just gave us "No, Annie.". So I installed RH 7.2 Enigma for now and I'll stick another drive in and try building LFS or something, I spose.
As for stuff I actually learned (or rather learned not to avoid) from school includes apache's user authentication facilities. Rather then have my personal site admin be handled based on client IP address, I actually have it now set to require a login. Ooo ah. So this is my first actual remote post even though I'm doing it sitting at home :P I'm using Galeon from my workstation at work through ssh to submit this post. So everything is remote except my lazy ass.
That about sums up the amount of time I want to spend waiting for my typing to go from Vancouver to New Westminster and back so I'll see you all later.
Anyhow, Nikita is home. I took another stab at installing NetBSD on her. Not so good. Better. She did pull down packages via ftp and I did learn a few things, but for some reason she refused to handle DNS. It didn't matter if Dulcea gave her the DNS server info via DHCP (Nikita ignored that flat-out) or if I manually entered the DNS server address. Nikita just gave us "No, Annie.". So I installed RH 7.2 Enigma for now and I'll stick another drive in and try building LFS or something, I spose.
As for stuff I actually learned (or rather learned not to avoid) from school includes apache's user authentication facilities. Rather then have my personal site admin be handled based on client IP address, I actually have it now set to require a login. Ooo ah. So this is my first actual remote post even though I'm doing it sitting at home :P I'm using Galeon from my workstation at work through ssh to submit this post. So everything is remote except my lazy ass.
That about sums up the amount of time I want to spend waiting for my typing to go from Vancouver to New Westminster and back so I'll see you all later.
Saturday, 13 September 2003
Reupdate the Plan
So below is the actual body of my current plan. I haven't really said boo as to what I've got planned per se so I tried adding a .project file much to the chagrin of Dante's webfinger. So I'm moving that content here and he's fixing webfinger to handle simple .project files.
Active Projects
Get a bachelors' degree
Step 1 - Take some classes
Step 3 - Graduate
Install BSD on Nikita
The current plan I have for Nikita is to turn her into a tight little network server. I would like to set her up with a strong firewall that will handle the routing and NAT for the LAN here in the Interface and then adding the LAN-only services (being SAMBA and possibly FTP) leaving all the public stuff on Dulcea.
Currently I am trying to install BSD on Nikita. This isn't going so well largely due to the fact that I brought Nikita to work and I just don't have idle time there anymore. She's gotta come home before I can spend any time on that. So this week I will bring her back home to the Ice Palace on wednesday and thursday.
Add webmail to Dulcea
Tried installing NOCC and hacking it. No dice. Dante's actually putting a simple pop3-based webmail thing together. Thinking about just giving up and using mail2web.com
Active Projects
Get a bachelors' degree
Step 1 - Take some classes
Step 3 - Graduate
Install BSD on Nikita
The current plan I have for Nikita is to turn her into a tight little network server. I would like to set her up with a strong firewall that will handle the routing and NAT for the LAN here in the Interface and then adding the LAN-only services (being SAMBA and possibly FTP) leaving all the public stuff on Dulcea.
Currently I am trying to install BSD on Nikita. This isn't going so well largely due to the fact that I brought Nikita to work and I just don't have idle time there anymore. She's gotta come home before I can spend any time on that. So this week I will bring her back home to the Ice Palace on wednesday and thursday.
Add webmail to Dulcea
Tried installing NOCC and hacking it. No dice. Dante's actually putting a simple pop3-based webmail thing together. Thinking about just giving up and using mail2web.com
He's ... Running Out of Time
Haven't gotten anything done this week between the addition of school and going out a couple nights. If it weren't for the flaring-up of bitterness toward school, I'd say it's ben a fairly cood week.
One point I've decided on but haven't had a chance to act on is to bring Nikita back to the ice palace. At work these days there's too much to do. I didn't even boot her this week. So all told, I'm going to bring her home during the week and actually get on with installing BSD.
One point I've decided on but haven't had a chance to act on is to bring Nikita back to the ice palace. At work these days there's too much to do. I didn't even boot her this week. So all told, I'm going to bring her home during the week and actually get on with installing BSD.
Tuesday, 9 September 2003
School's Back
So school is back in session. Yay. Just finished the first class for both my courses. Sounds like... school. My software engineering teacher even has it as a buller on one of the firt lectures slides that he doesn't know why I have to take that course. *shrug* What are you going to do when you've been reemed but only have 60 credits to go if you stick to the program you're on?
Network Admin will be fun though. I have most of the knowledge but it will be fun working with this group and prof (even if it is largely laughing at the pain of others). I've sortof got hack experience with most of the topics so the more formalized instruction should be very good for helping me handle planning and security a lot better. Or at least no worse.
Anyhow, that's two nights a week up at 6am and home around 10pm with homework added on top so I'm going to sleep now. Ciao.
Network Admin will be fun though. I have most of the knowledge but it will be fun working with this group and prof (even if it is largely laughing at the pain of others). I've sortof got hack experience with most of the topics so the more formalized instruction should be very good for helping me handle planning and security a lot better. Or at least no worse.
Anyhow, that's two nights a week up at 6am and home around 10pm with homework added on top so I'm going to sleep now. Ciao.
Saturday, 6 September 2003
Why You Gotta Play Me Like That?
My post from the URO forums:
Can be read here
"So this week has been fucking fun. First off I discovered that on Dulcea (which I also login to for my workstation these days) the ctrl+alt+backspace combo which is supposed to just close my x session actually puts the computer into sleep mode. fucking lame. killed my cacheing nameserver, fine restarted that and comps on the lan can get online again (mostly just wendawg's)
that's fine. i usualy fuck up my computers and such on a regular basis. its what i do. i have been getting better, but i still do it every now and again
then, fucking power outage thursday. some fucking drunk hit a fucking pole or some stupid fucking shit. common, fuckwad! why you gotta bust my balls like that? you can go fuckyourself very fucking much, asshole.
so when comp gets booted, something with networking is fucking (the violent shutdown and all) and wendawg can't get an ip from dulcea. fuckass. i re-run the firewall and reload the nic and all is well. stupid fucking idiot. THE POLE WASN'T MOVING!
so fine. a fuckup by me and a power outage. i can hack it, no wait, Hand of God fucking smokes my ass. lightning strike right outside my fucking house. hits the damn transformer in the fucking back alley. jesus a christ! what the fuck is that? this is fucking vancouver, not Tahsis. i'm just sitting here checkin da emails when *FLASH* *BANG* everything goes off. common, why you gotta play me like that?
so we got the transformer replaced or whatever the shit was with its stupid shit and now again no lan. fuck ass! tried everything. restarting the network subsystem, re-running the firewall, restarting services individually, reloading the nic, doing everything again, pulling the nic out, booting and removing all traces of it, reinserting it and installing it from scratch, and doing everything again, still fuckall coming over the network.
fuck this shit. dropped second hub in and so chevette and pyhrrus can have a fucking open connection to the pornterweb.
dammit all, i'm tired. i'm going to fucking bed."
Can be read here
"So this week has been fucking fun. First off I discovered that on Dulcea (which I also login to for my workstation these days) the ctrl+alt+backspace combo which is supposed to just close my x session actually puts the computer into sleep mode. fucking lame. killed my cacheing nameserver, fine restarted that and comps on the lan can get online again (mostly just wendawg's)
that's fine. i usualy fuck up my computers and such on a regular basis. its what i do. i have been getting better, but i still do it every now and again
then, fucking power outage thursday. some fucking drunk hit a fucking pole or some stupid fucking shit. common, fuckwad! why you gotta bust my balls like that? you can go fuckyourself very fucking much, asshole.
so when comp gets booted, something with networking is fucking (the violent shutdown and all) and wendawg can't get an ip from dulcea. fuckass. i re-run the firewall and reload the nic and all is well. stupid fucking idiot. THE POLE WASN'T MOVING!
so fine. a fuckup by me and a power outage. i can hack it, no wait, Hand of God fucking smokes my ass. lightning strike right outside my fucking house. hits the damn transformer in the fucking back alley. jesus a christ! what the fuck is that? this is fucking vancouver, not Tahsis. i'm just sitting here checkin da emails when *FLASH* *BANG* everything goes off. common, why you gotta play me like that?
so we got the transformer replaced or whatever the shit was with its stupid shit and now again no lan. fuck ass! tried everything. restarting the network subsystem, re-running the firewall, restarting services individually, reloading the nic, doing everything again, pulling the nic out, booting and removing all traces of it, reinserting it and installing it from scratch, and doing everything again, still fuckall coming over the network.
fuck this shit. dropped second hub in and so chevette and pyhrrus can have a fucking open connection to the pornterweb.
dammit all, i'm tired. i'm going to fucking bed."
Monday, 1 September 2003
Hear Dvorak's Latest...
So its official. Tonight was the night I first tried Dvorak. Already I like it. Initial typing speed: 5 wpm. We'll clock progress as I go. Should be interesting. I'll try to use Dvorak primarily at home and we'll see how quick I pick up the pace.
Ugh. Tomorrow back to work.
Ugh. Tomorrow back to work.
Sunday, 31 August 2003
Here I Come, Back From the Dead, to Say
Holy Crap!
Last nights party went good too. Erm, rather Friday night's party, you know, the one a couple days ago.
I am awake and feeling well once more. Well rested, fed, and all that good rot. The house is clean (finally) and all that's left to do is return some pans and stuff to their respective owners.
Friday night was loads of fun. Czak has all the crazy pictures from it up online and there's some excellent ones.
http://uro.mine.nu/~czak/bob/
Lemme see if I can recall some details here... Ah yes! How could I forget? After a little gun-play on the first night, we made Friday night a 'gun themed' party. A bunch of peeps brought *more* plastic guns to add to the ones the dawg and I have for lots of 'click click click' fun. I ended up with some of the left-overs here and man, there are a lot of guns lying around. Its great.
Well that being announced, nothing *actually* plan like in my .plan right now considering I been drunk off my rocker for several days.
Most I've been doing is turning my lan into a audio feed for the stereo system. The simplest and probably most effective setup has been to just shell to chevette (so long as she has an xsession running to own /dev/dsp) and then do xmms here on dulcea through xforwarding.
Yep, and that's that. Future plans? Persist the SLA characters (I *love* data validation...) and start working on a multi-detection script for uro.
Last nights party went good too. Erm, rather Friday night's party, you know, the one a couple days ago.
I am awake and feeling well once more. Well rested, fed, and all that good rot. The house is clean (finally) and all that's left to do is return some pans and stuff to their respective owners.
Friday night was loads of fun. Czak has all the crazy pictures from it up online and there's some excellent ones.
http://uro.mine.nu/~czak/bob/
Lemme see if I can recall some details here... Ah yes! How could I forget? After a little gun-play on the first night, we made Friday night a 'gun themed' party. A bunch of peeps brought *more* plastic guns to add to the ones the dawg and I have for lots of 'click click click' fun. I ended up with some of the left-overs here and man, there are a lot of guns lying around. Its great.
Well that being announced, nothing *actually* plan like in my .plan right now considering I been drunk off my rocker for several days.
Most I've been doing is turning my lan into a audio feed for the stereo system. The simplest and probably most effective setup has been to just shell to chevette (so long as she has an xsession running to own /dev/dsp) and then do xmms here on dulcea through xforwarding.
Yep, and that's that. Future plans? Persist the SLA characters (I *love* data validation...) and start working on a multi-detection script for uro.
Friday, 29 August 2003
*rubs eyes* Where am I?
Where am I? Between party night 'a' and party night 'b'. That's where I am. Last night we had a gaggle show up for fun and excitement and it was good. I *was* thinking that some people would show Thursday and some *other* people would show Friday, but they sure fooled me. Almost everyone who was here last night is coming again tonight.
Why would these people do that to themselves you ask? Well its cause the Ice Palace is so damn cool.
Monday I went to see my family for my dad's birthday. Twas good an my mum had just gotten back from her cruise. She did a seven day Alaskan cruise and every day they gave all the guests a sortof on page newsletter thing. In the middle of the week, they showed them the consumables stock. Which included a total of 200,000 lbs of food. That's not counting cream, sugar, ice cream... Its just meat, veggies, and fruit. 7 days, 2,000 guests, 200,000 lbs of food. Yes, every had 100 lbs of food in a week on that boat. Don't worry, 38,000 lbs was beef alone. Works out to the better part of a kilo of beef per person per day. 2,000 people, 7 days, 38,000 lbs of beef. My mother ate neither 100 lbs of food nor a kilo of beef a day. Some people were fucking hitting that buffet like it was going out of style.
So I says to my sis on Monday 'golly, sis. should I get a playstation 2 or another computer?'. She says 'playstation 2s *are* cool...'. So Tuesday I went out and bought a new PS 2 :D Its sleek, its sexy, and it was cheep. The place I went to is this tiny little game shop on Granville where the owner dude is pissed off about consoles cause he got screwed in the price war. The conversasion goes a little something like this:
'So I want to get one of the PS 2's off you.'
'Sure, how many you want?'
'Heh. Just one, sorry.'
'Okay which do you want, you want to go online with this thing?'
'I sure do.'
'Okay cause this one has the network adapter packaged with it'
'Cool. How much?'
'That depends. How are you paying?'
'I was thinking debit...'
'Could you do cash?'
'I sure can.'
So then I wander around the store grabbing a second controller, two memory cards and two PS 2 games. So good, so good.
Then came wednesday. Wendawg and I went shopping... Oh so much booze. Its a beautiful sight. for the duration of the parties the booze has been moved to the shelf in the office at the foot of my bed. Never have I awoken to a more dazzling sight. Truly wonderful.
And then, the party. Twas good, twill be good. Good peeps, good eats, good drinks. Two and a bit pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas later, all is well.
Nevertheless, time to clean. See all you punks tonight at the Ice Palace.
Why would these people do that to themselves you ask? Well its cause the Ice Palace is so damn cool.
Monday I went to see my family for my dad's birthday. Twas good an my mum had just gotten back from her cruise. She did a seven day Alaskan cruise and every day they gave all the guests a sortof on page newsletter thing. In the middle of the week, they showed them the consumables stock. Which included a total of 200,000 lbs of food. That's not counting cream, sugar, ice cream... Its just meat, veggies, and fruit. 7 days, 2,000 guests, 200,000 lbs of food. Yes, every had 100 lbs of food in a week on that boat. Don't worry, 38,000 lbs was beef alone. Works out to the better part of a kilo of beef per person per day. 2,000 people, 7 days, 38,000 lbs of beef. My mother ate neither 100 lbs of food nor a kilo of beef a day. Some people were fucking hitting that buffet like it was going out of style.
So I says to my sis on Monday 'golly, sis. should I get a playstation 2 or another computer?'. She says 'playstation 2s *are* cool...'. So Tuesday I went out and bought a new PS 2 :D Its sleek, its sexy, and it was cheep. The place I went to is this tiny little game shop on Granville where the owner dude is pissed off about consoles cause he got screwed in the price war. The conversasion goes a little something like this:
'So I want to get one of the PS 2's off you.'
'Sure, how many you want?'
'Heh. Just one, sorry.'
'Okay which do you want, you want to go online with this thing?'
'I sure do.'
'Okay cause this one has the network adapter packaged with it'
'Cool. How much?'
'That depends. How are you paying?'
'I was thinking debit...'
'Could you do cash?'
'I sure can.'
So then I wander around the store grabbing a second controller, two memory cards and two PS 2 games. So good, so good.
Then came wednesday. Wendawg and I went shopping... Oh so much booze. Its a beautiful sight. for the duration of the parties the booze has been moved to the shelf in the office at the foot of my bed. Never have I awoken to a more dazzling sight. Truly wonderful.
And then, the party. Twas good, twill be good. Good peeps, good eats, good drinks. Two and a bit pitchers of Long Island Iced Teas later, all is well.
Nevertheless, time to clean. See all you punks tonight at the Ice Palace.
Thursday, 21 August 2003
Die, Die, Die, My Darling
This is it. Nikita is down, stripped of her nice HD and nice CD drive and down to the basics. Disconnected from the world and about to move.
Tomorrow she'll be going out to the office with me. There she's going in a nice isolated lan. Sort of a gated community for computers.
Or maybe more of a lab of computer experimentation where computers are relentlessly formatted, forced to network with other operating systems, and put through stress tests unimaginable on live computers.
Basically I'm going to install BSD on her until I get it right and test network setup stuff by bouncing stuff off a windows 98 and a windows nt box. The whole plan being to learn the wonderful world of BSD so I can setup Nikita as a gateway again and bring her back home. Once she's back home, then I'll be able to take Dulcea out to the office to host on our small little OC3 connection! Booyah!
Tomorrow she'll be going out to the office with me. There she's going in a nice isolated lan. Sort of a gated community for computers.
Or maybe more of a lab of computer experimentation where computers are relentlessly formatted, forced to network with other operating systems, and put through stress tests unimaginable on live computers.
Basically I'm going to install BSD on her until I get it right and test network setup stuff by bouncing stuff off a windows 98 and a windows nt box. The whole plan being to learn the wonderful world of BSD so I can setup Nikita as a gateway again and bring her back home. Once she's back home, then I'll be able to take Dulcea out to the office to host on our small little OC3 connection! Booyah!
Monday, 18 August 2003
Mozilla... On Fire!
Warning! The following post may not be appropriate for some readers as it contains coarse and violent language!
So Mozilla. Anyone who tells you that you can 'just copy your settings over' when going from one system to another somewhat different system obviously either has a fucking hole where their head should be or is bullshiting and making assumptions where they don't know shit.
Okay, not quite true. The three fucking bookmarks I have were fine. As for my fucking mail, hah! Yeah right. Sure so all the settings for the local folders were not updated to the somewhat different home directory (from /home/archangel to /home/user/archangel). Okay, fine, I can hack that shit.
What really busts my fucking balls is that I can't fucking create new mail accounts. Sweet Jesus, Mozilla! I outta gouge your eyes out for what little use they are. Dumb shit, just create a new fucking folder! Why you gotta play me like that? I own the folders and parent folders and everything you ought to need. Where are you trying to stick the mail and settings that you can't handle it? Try pulling 'em out of your ass for starters.
And quit pissing me off with your stupid shit!
And for exhibit B, YOU'RE A CRAPPY BROWSER! Just cause every other web browser is shit doesn't make you any better. Why do you handle css, tables, and javascript somewhat differently. Okay, okay, okay. Not fair because I think Mozilla is actually one of the best options are concerned but for the love of fuck! Where you get your name resolution from? Having updated the A record for uro.mine.nu, you still didn't get it. Fine, thinks I. Maybe its my cacheing nameserver.
host uro.mine.nu yields 24.84.202.131 (the new ip) SO WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THE 24.84.201.61 FROM? Again, must be a *huge* ass you have because you seem to have plenty of space in there for your thumb and everything else.
Grrr... Browsers piss me off. Cacheing. I know its great, but why can't you just flush when I tell you to?
Yeorg! That's a shitty jeeeeoooorb you did there, Mozilla.
*pant* *pant* *pant* *boots the dead horse* *pant* *pant*
*phew* I need a drink.
So Mozilla. Anyone who tells you that you can 'just copy your settings over' when going from one system to another somewhat different system obviously either has a fucking hole where their head should be or is bullshiting and making assumptions where they don't know shit.
Okay, not quite true. The three fucking bookmarks I have were fine. As for my fucking mail, hah! Yeah right. Sure so all the settings for the local folders were not updated to the somewhat different home directory (from /home/archangel to /home/user/archangel). Okay, fine, I can hack that shit.
What really busts my fucking balls is that I can't fucking create new mail accounts. Sweet Jesus, Mozilla! I outta gouge your eyes out for what little use they are. Dumb shit, just create a new fucking folder! Why you gotta play me like that? I own the folders and parent folders and everything you ought to need. Where are you trying to stick the mail and settings that you can't handle it? Try pulling 'em out of your ass for starters.
And quit pissing me off with your stupid shit!
And for exhibit B, YOU'RE A CRAPPY BROWSER! Just cause every other web browser is shit doesn't make you any better. Why do you handle css, tables, and javascript somewhat differently. Okay, okay, okay. Not fair because I think Mozilla is actually one of the best options are concerned but for the love of fuck! Where you get your name resolution from? Having updated the A record for uro.mine.nu, you still didn't get it. Fine, thinks I. Maybe its my cacheing nameserver.
host uro.mine.nu yields 24.84.202.131 (the new ip) SO WHERE ARE YOU GETTING THE 24.84.201.61 FROM? Again, must be a *huge* ass you have because you seem to have plenty of space in there for your thumb and everything else.
Grrr... Browsers piss me off. Cacheing. I know its great, but why can't you just flush when I tell you to?
Yeorg! That's a shitty jeeeeoooorb you did there, Mozilla.
*pant* *pant* *pant* *boots the dead horse* *pant* *pant*
*phew* I need a drink.
Sunday, 17 August 2003
Digital Move About Complete
So the move from Nikita to Dulcea is about complete. There's a couple things left over yet but most everything is up and working atm. Got the web and db servers up. Samba and the shared files. The users and permissions. So far looks promising.
Among the last few things to do are (in order from simple to painful):
Once these last minor things are moved, then I'll be able to take down Nikita. Ooo ahhh. She's going to move out to my office where I'll be trying to put BSD on (probably NetBSD for those who care). One of my co-workers is studying for Network+ so we're going to have a wee isolated lan where we can all test our shit and learn a few things. Should be good.
Among the last few things to do are (in order from simple to painful):
- Move the URO forums
- Fix urodev.mine.nu which is the only disfunctional virutal host
- Install and configure an ftp server
Once these last minor things are moved, then I'll be able to take down Nikita. Ooo ahhh. She's going to move out to my office where I'll be trying to put BSD on (probably NetBSD for those who care). One of my co-workers is studying for Network+ so we're going to have a wee isolated lan where we can all test our shit and learn a few things. Should be good.
Thursday, 14 August 2003
Yar! Thar be Data!
Ooo ah! This is my first post on Nikita. Very exciting considering everything that it is doing.
First of all, this is my first .plan entry, so that's cool.
Second, I did it through the web interface. That shows that Apache is up and running and PHP is working swell here too.
Third, since its archived in the db, mysql is up and running.
Bitchin. Now for all the other databases and users...
First of all, this is my first .plan entry, so that's cool.
Second, I did it through the web interface. That shows that Apache is up and running and PHP is working swell here too.
Third, since its archived in the db, mysql is up and running.
Bitchin. Now for all the other databases and users...
Friday, 8 August 2003
Give us Yer Bytes
ncftp is tight! I've been meandering around a certain chap's ftp server alternately messing my shit up and causing him to restrict access further, but what I've learned is that ncftp is sweet.
A set of commands in the ftp client allow you to queue several requests to be run as a batch at a later time. The background commands, bgget and bgput, create a wee file describing the transaction (server, local path, remote path, and simple config info) in a spool directory. In this manner, you can spool up as many files you want to be started at either a certain time or else upon explicit command.
To start 'em if you don't specify a time, you either run bgstart within a ftp session or else simply use the ncftpbatch program. Do so within the client or with the -d switch to the batch program spawns a daemon which will download all queued files one at a time from the default or speficied spool. In this manner, you can just log out and leave the transfers running.
There's also a pile more nice utilities that ncftp has for all this fun batch/spool stuff. Some of which are *very* nice for mirroring. Now I wonder about the ncftpd server...
A set of commands in the ftp client allow you to queue several requests to be run as a batch at a later time. The background commands, bgget and bgput, create a wee file describing the transaction (server, local path, remote path, and simple config info) in a spool directory. In this manner, you can spool up as many files you want to be started at either a certain time or else upon explicit command.
To start 'em if you don't specify a time, you either run bgstart within a ftp session or else simply use the ncftpbatch program. Do so within the client or with the -d switch to the batch program spawns a daemon which will download all queued files one at a time from the default or speficied spool. In this manner, you can just log out and leave the transfers running.
There's also a pile more nice utilities that ncftp has for all this fun batch/spool stuff. Some of which are *very* nice for mirroring. Now I wonder about the ncftpd server...
Saturday, 2 August 2003
MOoC and Fun
Not much news the last little while. The stereo is still tight, by the way. I'm still thinking about a new computer, but not getting one yet (and I'll put it off now that RAM prices seem to have picked up a bit).
However, I have been looking at iptables quite a bit the last little while. I did a bit of cleanup of my current firewall script on Nikita and am finally getting a good enough grasp on tables, chains, rules, and targets to feel I can build a solid and heavily accounted firewall. I've started it a bit, but I'm basically going to toss the script, patch in stuff from other files and go from there.
Other interesting bits... hmmm... There's talk of setting up some computers at the office off the main network so peeps like Wobbly-Headed Bob and I can test some network stuff. *shrug* I don't really have a loose working comp right now to donate to that but once I get the new one then I'll pitch in on that.
Classes, ah yes. I'm going to start part-time in the fall to work towards my B-Tech from BCIT. Shoot me now... Wait! I love school!
Well, I'm off to compile a tighter kernel, so wish me luck.
However, I have been looking at iptables quite a bit the last little while. I did a bit of cleanup of my current firewall script on Nikita and am finally getting a good enough grasp on tables, chains, rules, and targets to feel I can build a solid and heavily accounted firewall. I've started it a bit, but I'm basically going to toss the script, patch in stuff from other files and go from there.
Other interesting bits... hmmm... There's talk of setting up some computers at the office off the main network so peeps like Wobbly-Headed Bob and I can test some network stuff. *shrug* I don't really have a loose working comp right now to donate to that but once I get the new one then I'll pitch in on that.
Classes, ah yes. I'm going to start part-time in the fall to work towards my B-Tech from BCIT. Shoot me now... Wait! I love school!
Well, I'm off to compile a tighter kernel, so wish me luck.
Sunday, 20 July 2003
Gain and Browsers
Its done. I am now the proud owner of a Sony DE 975 receiver. She's a beauty. I wandered into the store aimed for the 695 but I noticed they had a few old models, 1 year dated, they were knocking the price off.
So I takes a peek at the back to find a whole mess of inputs. Video 1, 2, and 3 (3 is on the front), DVD/LD, TV/SAT, CD, Tape, MD/DAT, and Phono. That and four optical inputs for digital feeds. The video inputs can each come in on either normal lines or S-Video.
As for output it has standard, s-video, and composite output for the video. It has a 5.1 system for the speakers with a tight 100w per channel. It will also do a second-room output.
DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, 32b DSP, almost a dozen theatre modes, adjustable gain *and* bandwidth for base, mid-range, and treble on each set of speakers.
And as if that weren't nice enough for you, the volume also works. (Not a feature of the wendawg's receiver.)
I'm definately very happy (and a little flushed) with the new stereo.
Not so much with browsers. This may be an old rant, but for the love of God! Can't there be a little uniformity? The clickable menus for the SLA Industries project have worked fine from the start using Mozilla in Linux.
Apparently not the case with Opera (Windows or Linux), Netscape 7.1, MSIE 6.0 ... Like what the hell?
Looking at the source for the pages (the output of my php scripts) seemed to indicate that that most browsers were trying to intelligently quote urls in anything they thought might be an anchor.
Quoting + Javascript = Dead page.
So it took me several hours to get things straightened out so at least the same stuff was breaking on all browsers. We had a little fun with Mozilla in Windows since it was eating NS settings/cache/lunch/etc. Once we got that far, it was only a short hour of screaming and hollering (ask the wendawg about my debugging techniques sometime) to get it working.
So I feel fucking pleased. Three hours of hacking through php scripts and js output such that the site works exactly as it did before. Save of course that other people get to have the same funcitonality as I do. Yay.
Now if only I could figure how to get the video channels to work as desired through the Sony...
So I takes a peek at the back to find a whole mess of inputs. Video 1, 2, and 3 (3 is on the front), DVD/LD, TV/SAT, CD, Tape, MD/DAT, and Phono. That and four optical inputs for digital feeds. The video inputs can each come in on either normal lines or S-Video.
As for output it has standard, s-video, and composite output for the video. It has a 5.1 system for the speakers with a tight 100w per channel. It will also do a second-room output.
DTS, Dolby Digital, Dolby Pro Logic II, 32b DSP, almost a dozen theatre modes, adjustable gain *and* bandwidth for base, mid-range, and treble on each set of speakers.
And as if that weren't nice enough for you, the volume also works. (Not a feature of the wendawg's receiver.)
I'm definately very happy (and a little flushed) with the new stereo.
Not so much with browsers. This may be an old rant, but for the love of God! Can't there be a little uniformity? The clickable menus for the SLA Industries project have worked fine from the start using Mozilla in Linux.
Apparently not the case with Opera (Windows or Linux), Netscape 7.1, MSIE 6.0 ... Like what the hell?
Looking at the source for the pages (the output of my php scripts) seemed to indicate that that most browsers were trying to intelligently quote urls in anything they thought might be an anchor.
Quoting + Javascript = Dead page.
So it took me several hours to get things straightened out so at least the same stuff was breaking on all browsers. We had a little fun with Mozilla in Windows since it was eating NS settings/cache/lunch/etc. Once we got that far, it was only a short hour of screaming and hollering (ask the wendawg about my debugging techniques sometime) to get it working.
So I feel fucking pleased. Three hours of hacking through php scripts and js output such that the site works exactly as it did before. Save of course that other people get to have the same funcitonality as I do. Yay.
Now if only I could figure how to get the video channels to work as desired through the Sony...
Monday, 14 July 2003
Sleep is a Cruel Hag
Its been a bit since I've jotted down my plan, but I've just been keeping busy. So far I've been doing some day-dreaming about hardware.
First is computer gear since I'm mostly familiar with what to look for. Here's the sortof template I put together for Michael:
Base Bits
So this would be the base I'd put all Michael's components into rather then the crap celeron boards that MDK got stuck with. If (or should I say when?) I get a new board like that, then I'd do quite a bit of gear shuffling to get Nikita, Dulcea, and Michael all doing their respective jobs... We'll see.
The other little bundle of copper I've been chasing is a stereo receiver. Now this I've been putting off because I know too little. After a little research online, I'm sortof understanding what I should be looking for and this sony seems to fit right about where I want it:
Sony Tuner
Ah sweet melodies...
First is computer gear since I'm mostly familiar with what to look for. Here's the sortof template I put together for Michael:
Base Bits
So this would be the base I'd put all Michael's components into rather then the crap celeron boards that MDK got stuck with. If (or should I say when?) I get a new board like that, then I'd do quite a bit of gear shuffling to get Nikita, Dulcea, and Michael all doing their respective jobs... We'll see.
The other little bundle of copper I've been chasing is a stereo receiver. Now this I've been putting off because I know too little. After a little research online, I'm sortof understanding what I should be looking for and this sony seems to fit right about where I want it:
Sony Tuner
Ah sweet melodies...
Wednesday, 9 July 2003
Nothing a Little Duct Tape Can't Fix
So today was a fun day. Let's start at the top: New office for work today. Great. I get up, roll out of bed bang on time at 05:15 (yes, in the morning). Eventualy, after rebounding off just about every wall, I manage to line myself up and stunmble out the door at 06:10. I wander down to Broadway and think
"Okay. So now I can walk to the sky train station and catch the 106 (a bus I did not need at all at the old office), but I really would like to get there early so I don't miss it. I'll bus from here to the sky train station."
*ten minutes pass*
"Fuck! I could have walked to the sky train station faster!"
*bus finaly gets me to sky train*
"Crap. Not only did I miss the bus that will get me to work nice and early, but also the one that will get me there significantly late."
*I then proceed to hike up the hill, about 15 minutes all uphill, to the new office.*
"Great. Only stupid freaking 10 minutes late."
The new office is very nice though. Large, clean, and has windows. S'all good.
So work goes as usual (plus some drilling as there is still work being done). Then I get off shift and go home. Yay. I soon roll out again and this time to visit MDK in Richmond to try to buy some cheap crappy gear.
Getting off the bus en-route, I bump into another guy and drop my 4 month old Panasonic SL-SX420 MP3 CD player.
*smash on the cement, sideh-ways*
The guy looks at me mutters sorry and looks like he's worried about it. "No sweat, bro", says I "my warranty will cover it." I did get the no-questions-asked warranty on that piece of gear, so much to this fellow's relief, I don't give a damn.
However, on my second bus out to Richmond, I fiddle with the Panasonic SL-SX420 a bit. Lo and behold, it works! I snap the cover back in place and though it is now missing a cover spring, and latch, and has a new giant crack, it turns on and plays my cd! How dope is that?
For those of you who are wondering, the Panasonic SL-SX420 plays mp3 cds, comes with headset, and is available for under 100CDN at Future Shop (where I got mine), Zellers (where Bubs got his), London Drugs (where Randy Andy got his), and many other fine retailers of personal electronics.
And now last but not least, I make it to MDK's pad with lift in his Golf TDI. Yes. TDI. Turbo Deisle Injection. Its a deisel coupe.
There I take a look at his hardware. He has three old computers. He wants one so he can install Redhat 9 (I brought the CDs). Well, between one dead main board and one sketchy one, he's got one working computer. Nice. Asshole who sold that shit to him was a co-worker. How weak is that?
Out of the deal he gets one computer (a celeron 400 w/ 128MB ram) that works and one (celeron 600) that boots maybe half the time and certainly only if you buy it dinner. And ten bucks for a 10GB HD I buy off him.
I get an hd, 250W ps, and cmos battery instead of the mainboard (and optional CPU) that I wanted. At least it only cost me ten bucks.
So if today weren't 1337 enough, I say "food!" at the top of my lungs and mdk looks at me like I'm from Mars. I clarify that I am hungry and we should go get eats. We decide on Fog and Sudds because they have Moose Drool brown ale. I htought he was lying and was very wrong. They do have Moose Drool.
Those of you who don't know what this beer I'm talking about is shouldn't be surprised that it sounds crazy. Its brewed by a micro-brewery in Missoula Montana that is a tiny little operation. I have a T-shirt for it because my dad grew up in Missoula and has family in the area he visits. We're talking about a micro brewery that basically still glues labels on by hand.
Now if that isn't a plan update, I don't know what is...
"Okay. So now I can walk to the sky train station and catch the 106 (a bus I did not need at all at the old office), but I really would like to get there early so I don't miss it. I'll bus from here to the sky train station."
*ten minutes pass*
"Fuck! I could have walked to the sky train station faster!"
*bus finaly gets me to sky train*
"Crap. Not only did I miss the bus that will get me to work nice and early, but also the one that will get me there significantly late."
*I then proceed to hike up the hill, about 15 minutes all uphill, to the new office.*
"Great. Only stupid freaking 10 minutes late."
The new office is very nice though. Large, clean, and has windows. S'all good.
So work goes as usual (plus some drilling as there is still work being done). Then I get off shift and go home. Yay. I soon roll out again and this time to visit MDK in Richmond to try to buy some cheap crappy gear.
Getting off the bus en-route, I bump into another guy and drop my 4 month old Panasonic SL-SX420 MP3 CD player.
*smash on the cement, sideh-ways*
The guy looks at me mutters sorry and looks like he's worried about it. "No sweat, bro", says I "my warranty will cover it." I did get the no-questions-asked warranty on that piece of gear, so much to this fellow's relief, I don't give a damn.
However, on my second bus out to Richmond, I fiddle with the Panasonic SL-SX420 a bit. Lo and behold, it works! I snap the cover back in place and though it is now missing a cover spring, and latch, and has a new giant crack, it turns on and plays my cd! How dope is that?
For those of you who are wondering, the Panasonic SL-SX420 plays mp3 cds, comes with headset, and is available for under 100CDN at Future Shop (where I got mine), Zellers (where Bubs got his), London Drugs (where Randy Andy got his), and many other fine retailers of personal electronics.
And now last but not least, I make it to MDK's pad with lift in his Golf TDI. Yes. TDI. Turbo Deisle Injection. Its a deisel coupe.
There I take a look at his hardware. He has three old computers. He wants one so he can install Redhat 9 (I brought the CDs). Well, between one dead main board and one sketchy one, he's got one working computer. Nice. Asshole who sold that shit to him was a co-worker. How weak is that?
Out of the deal he gets one computer (a celeron 400 w/ 128MB ram) that works and one (celeron 600) that boots maybe half the time and certainly only if you buy it dinner. And ten bucks for a 10GB HD I buy off him.
I get an hd, 250W ps, and cmos battery instead of the mainboard (and optional CPU) that I wanted. At least it only cost me ten bucks.
So if today weren't 1337 enough, I say "food!" at the top of my lungs and mdk looks at me like I'm from Mars. I clarify that I am hungry and we should go get eats. We decide on Fog and Sudds because they have Moose Drool brown ale. I htought he was lying and was very wrong. They do have Moose Drool.
Those of you who don't know what this beer I'm talking about is shouldn't be surprised that it sounds crazy. Its brewed by a micro-brewery in Missoula Montana that is a tiny little operation. I have a T-shirt for it because my dad grew up in Missoula and has family in the area he visits. We're talking about a micro brewery that basically still glues labels on by hand.
Now if that isn't a plan update, I don't know what is...
Thursday, 3 July 2003
"I Cannot Comply"
Last night we went to view Terminator 3: Rise of the machines. Excellent Arnie flick with great one-liners and lots of action and stuff blowing up with the slightest provication.
I rate it: see it cheap and/or buy it on video.
I rate it: see it cheap and/or buy it on video.
Tuesday, 1 July 2003
Can You Say "More Power"?
Happy Canada Day, Eh?
I went to visit my parents for Canada Day today. That was all good. Especially when I inherited Michael, my Pa's old box. Michael suffers from dead mobo. Everything else in there is good. Fine NIC, nVidia TNT2, quiet power supply and such. Just need a mobo/cpu.
So now I just have to come to a good agreement on buy a comp from MDK. Could be tricky since he wants some coin and there's really only a couple things I want from the machine. *shrug* We'll figure something out.
Michael is the most likely to be the next full-time uro server. I would like to put him in the server room at work and since we're moving offices this month, there's a bit of slack time before I have to press that issue. Mmmm... OC3
Other news? Oh yeah, I finally got Nikita's firewall counting the web traffic that she generates... Its looking a little higher then expected but stay tuned for the traffic reports.
I went to visit my parents for Canada Day today. That was all good. Especially when I inherited Michael, my Pa's old box. Michael suffers from dead mobo. Everything else in there is good. Fine NIC, nVidia TNT2, quiet power supply and such. Just need a mobo/cpu.
So now I just have to come to a good agreement on buy a comp from MDK. Could be tricky since he wants some coin and there's really only a couple things I want from the machine. *shrug* We'll figure something out.
Michael is the most likely to be the next full-time uro server. I would like to put him in the server room at work and since we're moving offices this month, there's a bit of slack time before I have to press that issue. Mmmm... OC3
Other news? Oh yeah, I finally got Nikita's firewall counting the web traffic that she generates... Its looking a little higher then expected but stay tuned for the traffic reports.
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Doing the Foxtrot
In the news today: Archangel narrowly avoids heart attack while his server disappears.
So just after 8 am today, Nikita disappeared. I'm at work. My shift started at 7 and would end at 3 pm... I started panicking. I couldn't ping her much less bring up any of the web sites she hosts. Not good thinks I.
I call the Ice Palace and get Wendigo to reboot Nikita. Still nothing. Quiet as a mouse. After a little panicking and trying to post an emergency 'URO Down' page on Roxy (with no success until Dante setup a virtual host for me there), I was getting really worried.
Kept having panic attacks thinking "what if the fallout of the last firewall change was only ganking me now" or "if the root partition is full again, how many services are dirty beyond my meagre abilities to repair". By the time I got home I was pretty fucking nervous.
So I took a deep breath and turned on the crt for Nikita. Asks for login. Huh, she's working... So I check. Sure enough, different ip. Fuck. Shaw just moved her onto a different ip block. Lame. Seven full hours of work ago, I was having seizures that I'd just had Nikita keel over on me. Talk about relief.
So that was it. Just update all the dns entries. Posted info where appropriate (less a couple) and then made shitty noodle stir fry and went for pool with fish and drew.
If I have a shock of grey hair next time you see me, that's why.
So just after 8 am today, Nikita disappeared. I'm at work. My shift started at 7 and would end at 3 pm... I started panicking. I couldn't ping her much less bring up any of the web sites she hosts. Not good thinks I.
I call the Ice Palace and get Wendigo to reboot Nikita. Still nothing. Quiet as a mouse. After a little panicking and trying to post an emergency 'URO Down' page on Roxy (with no success until Dante setup a virtual host for me there), I was getting really worried.
Kept having panic attacks thinking "what if the fallout of the last firewall change was only ganking me now" or "if the root partition is full again, how many services are dirty beyond my meagre abilities to repair". By the time I got home I was pretty fucking nervous.
So I took a deep breath and turned on the crt for Nikita. Asks for login. Huh, she's working... So I check. Sure enough, different ip. Fuck. Shaw just moved her onto a different ip block. Lame. Seven full hours of work ago, I was having seizures that I'd just had Nikita keel over on me. Talk about relief.
So that was it. Just update all the dns entries. Posted info where appropriate (less a couple) and then made shitty noodle stir fry and went for pool with fish and drew.
If I have a shock of grey hair next time you see me, that's why.
Saturday, 21 June 2003
I Still Can't Hear You
That's right. Still no sound in Q3 under Linux. I think, however, my system is just plain pooched. Though I get sound under XMMS, I don't get sound for flash after having dropped the plugin into Mozilla. Bah! This game is bullshit! I guess I'll just live without sound in Q3 for now.
So in code news, one of the URO players is porting Hethor from the current table layout to a css layout. Czak says it looks good so far. I can't say since Shaw apparently won't resolve his domain for me. I'll double check again tonight, but lord knows what's going on over there.
Must be time for a little videe.
So in code news, one of the URO players is porting Hethor from the current table layout to a css layout. Czak says it looks good so far. I can't say since Shaw apparently won't resolve his domain for me. I'll double check again tonight, but lord knows what's going on over there.
Must be time for a little videe.
Saturday, 14 June 2003
I can't hear you...
So I've been scrapping with my sound to see if I can get Q3 working under Linux. So far, no good.
I've read what few docs are available from Id on the issue (eg disable esd and check perms on /dev/dsp) with no luck. After disabling esd, I was able to get XMMS to succesfully use OSS for output which seems to me that the sound itself is working fine.
So then, as Luke pointed out, my cracked Q3 may be teh sUc so I installed the Q3 demo right from Id. Still no dice. Q3 logs show 'sound system is muted' but damned if I know how to change that.
Bah! Bastards. Its probably just a switch I can pass when opening Q3 or something. Ergh! It'll be much gooder when I figure out what it is.
I've read what few docs are available from Id on the issue (eg disable esd and check perms on /dev/dsp) with no luck. After disabling esd, I was able to get XMMS to succesfully use OSS for output which seems to me that the sound itself is working fine.
So then, as Luke pointed out, my cracked Q3 may be teh sUc so I installed the Q3 demo right from Id. Still no dice. Q3 logs show 'sound system is muted' but damned if I know how to change that.
Bah! Bastards. Its probably just a switch I can pass when opening Q3 or something. Ergh! It'll be much gooder when I figure out what it is.
Wednesday, 4 June 2003
... and I'm LFS's Little Bitch
Well, that wasn't in the plan. Apparently LFS clears a bunch of the directories from /var. Well, /var is a separate partation which RH uses and since I left it in the fstab for LFS, it fucking ate my RH. RH wasn't dead, but definately focked. How lame is that?
Ah well, reinstalled RH and that went fine. Back up to about where I was before. I just need to re-create a couple more users and groups and I'll be fine but what a pain in the arse.
Well in relation to that, I've made a partition to match the existing lfs partition. As I write, I'm dd'ing my first backup of LFS. I'm going to try to post a changelog so I can recover LFS if (when) I kill it. I think I'll just use root's .plan file and once I get finger up and Dulcea live then you'll be able to finger-bang the changes I've made.
And that's the news. Later, zudes.
Ah well, reinstalled RH and that went fine. Back up to about where I was before. I just need to re-create a couple more users and groups and I'll be fine but what a pain in the arse.
Well in relation to that, I've made a partition to match the existing lfs partition. As I write, I'm dd'ing my first backup of LFS. I'm going to try to post a changelog so I can recover LFS if (when) I kill it. I think I'll just use root's .plan file and once I get finger up and Dulcea live then you'll be able to finger-bang the changes I've made.
And that's the news. Later, zudes.
Tuesday, 3 June 2003
GRUB is My Bitch!
Jeepers-creepers! Talk about mangled translation from directions and sample installation to implementation on Dulcea.
Dulcea has two disks with Windows on the first (NTFS fills the whole drive), has /boot on /dev/hdb1, and has / on /dev/hdb2.
Now firstoff, I tried to install GRUB from the stage1&2 files distributed with Redhat. I don't know for whom or what they work for, but they didn't work for me. On top of that I ran grub-install like:
grub-install --root-directory=/dev/hdb2 /dev/hdb
That seemed to reverse the way the drives are referenced in GRUB so hda on Dulcea is now hd1 and hdb is hd0. Dunno, but I did finaly get things sorted out and here's how it works now.
1. (Optional) Create a GRUB boot disk
# cat /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 > /dev/fd0
# reboot
1. (Alternate) Just run GRUB
# grub
2. Now install GRUB in the MBR of hdb. Note that our root is set to /boot a.k.a. /dev/hdb1 or hd0.0
> root (hd0,0)
> embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)
> install /grub/stage1 (hd0)
(hd0)1+17 p /grub/stage2
/grub/grub.conf
3. Reboot and enjoy!
> reboot
FOCK! That was lot of hacking before I got everything figured straight, but its done now and I reign supreme over my own software... I hope.
Next: Making Quake 3 work with sound! (Yeah, right...)
Dulcea has two disks with Windows on the first (NTFS fills the whole drive), has /boot on /dev/hdb1, and has / on /dev/hdb2.
Now firstoff, I tried to install GRUB from the stage1&2 files distributed with Redhat. I don't know for whom or what they work for, but they didn't work for me. On top of that I ran grub-install like:
grub-install --root-directory=/dev/hdb2 /dev/hdb
That seemed to reverse the way the drives are referenced in GRUB so hda on Dulcea is now hd1 and hdb is hd0. Dunno, but I did finaly get things sorted out and here's how it works now.
1. (Optional) Create a GRUB boot disk
# cat /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 > /dev/fd0
# reboot
1. (Alternate) Just run GRUB
# grub
2. Now install GRUB in the MBR of hdb. Note that our root is set to /boot a.k.a. /dev/hdb1 or hd0.0
> root (hd0,0)
> embed /grub/e2fs_stage1_5 (hd0)
> install /grub/stage1 (hd0)
(hd0)1+17 p /grub/stage2
/grub/grub.conf
3. Reboot and enjoy!
> reboot
FOCK! That was lot of hacking before I got everything figured straight, but its done now and I reign supreme over my own software... I hope.
Next: Making Quake 3 work with sound! (Yeah, right...)
Monday, 2 June 2003
Howdy Do
Well, its been a while since I've updated my plan so I gotsta put something in.
So for the last while, I've been trying to learn how to properly install a boot loader, GRUB, on the slave disk. For some reason it ain't going so smoothly. Dulcea's BIOS will boot IDE-1 so the MBR I am writing there does come up, it just won't let me, say load the kernel.
I finally went to the GRUB docs, I was going from a couple different HOWTO's, and it does look like I may have to complete the GRUB installation from a floppy as opposed to just running GRUB. Weak. Now I have to find a floppy that I can use.
One of the other reasons I want GRUB up is because I have recompiled my kernel and want to try that. With GRUB dead, I'm booting the kernel off my boot disk. Groot.
And Quake 3 is being a problem. I got it installed under Linux by the book but it runs without sound. I tried cranking the docs open on that and changed the file permissions on /dev/dsp and tried disabling esd but still no sound. I haven't found any useful help yet on it. Hmmm, maybe I'll try taking a dive in burial-grounds.
And the most recent funk wit mah rigs, dawgs, is that Nikita wasn't properly handling last-login times (eg for finger). Looks like it was just a file permission problem on the log files so I chown/chmodded Nikita's to match Rio's. I think I may have bunged those permissions when I moved /var/log to the share partition.
Ah, c'est la vie. I think I'm gonna aim for at least weekly updates of my .plan, I pseudo-promise-but-kinda-not :P
So for the last while, I've been trying to learn how to properly install a boot loader, GRUB, on the slave disk. For some reason it ain't going so smoothly. Dulcea's BIOS will boot IDE-1 so the MBR I am writing there does come up, it just won't let me, say load the kernel.
I finally went to the GRUB docs, I was going from a couple different HOWTO's, and it does look like I may have to complete the GRUB installation from a floppy as opposed to just running GRUB. Weak. Now I have to find a floppy that I can use.
One of the other reasons I want GRUB up is because I have recompiled my kernel and want to try that. With GRUB dead, I'm booting the kernel off my boot disk. Groot.
And Quake 3 is being a problem. I got it installed under Linux by the book but it runs without sound. I tried cranking the docs open on that and changed the file permissions on /dev/dsp and tried disabling esd but still no sound. I haven't found any useful help yet on it. Hmmm, maybe I'll try taking a dive in burial-grounds.
And the most recent funk wit mah rigs, dawgs, is that Nikita wasn't properly handling last-login times (eg for finger). Looks like it was just a file permission problem on the log files so I chown/chmodded Nikita's to match Rio's. I think I may have bunged those permissions when I moved /var/log to the share partition.
Ah, c'est la vie. I think I'm gonna aim for at least weekly updates of my .plan, I pseudo-promise-but-kinda-not :P
Sunday, 11 May 2003
And Now We Compile
So I finally got started w/ the Linux From Scratch project for Dulcea. Last night I got to the point where I can chroot into the stuff I have compiled so far (the compiler and file utilities, basically). Its going mostly smoothly but it is a fairly long process. My SBU is around 1m20s.
Anyhow, there were a few hiccups with my hardware setup and configuration... Firstly since I was doing most of this stuff remotely from work, I had to make sure I set GRUB to boot Linux by default. Well, I tweaked my networks cards and rebooted to make sure they perform as expected on boot and, guess what, Dulcea booted to windows.
Go me!
So on the topic of network cards, Dulcea has three. eth0 is the on-board NIC which you may remember as being scragged. eth1 and eth2 are both SMC PCI Full-Duplex 100Mbps cards (the 1211TX and 1244TX). Since I need to diffrentiate between the two I wrote the MAC IDs on the back of them. Pretty clever, da? It would have been if I hadn't mixed the two MAC IDs up...
Well after getting that sorted out I now have eth1 set as my external interface. Nikita is statically allocating it 192.168.0.2 and thus Dulcea deserves an entry in the hosts file. eth2 is the internal interface which Dulcea statically sets to 192.168.1.1. Oooo, aahhh. Different subnets.
With the network cards sorted out I cranked open my fstab on Dulcea because the NFS mounts are always mis-behaving. After looking at my entries and reading the mount and fstab properties carefully, I finaly have entries that load nfs mounts consistently and correctly on startup:
nikita:/home /home nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/share /mnt/share nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/ftp /mnt/ftp nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
With basic system config crap out of the way (and grub.conf edited to boot linux by default so I can reboot remotely) I started into compiling my 1337 warez for Linux From Scratch (lfs docs available from www.linuxfromscratch.org).
Talk about a lot of slogging. I followed the directions to the letter. It is going smoothly but I am only just through chapter 5 which is compiling the tools required to compile (and the first mess is compiled statically).
So today I hope to put all the commands in a script file so I can just fire and forget. And also so I have the script file for if/when I build another LFS system.
Anyhow, there were a few hiccups with my hardware setup and configuration... Firstly since I was doing most of this stuff remotely from work, I had to make sure I set GRUB to boot Linux by default. Well, I tweaked my networks cards and rebooted to make sure they perform as expected on boot and, guess what, Dulcea booted to windows.
Go me!
So on the topic of network cards, Dulcea has three. eth0 is the on-board NIC which you may remember as being scragged. eth1 and eth2 are both SMC PCI Full-Duplex 100Mbps cards (the 1211TX and 1244TX). Since I need to diffrentiate between the two I wrote the MAC IDs on the back of them. Pretty clever, da? It would have been if I hadn't mixed the two MAC IDs up...
Well after getting that sorted out I now have eth1 set as my external interface. Nikita is statically allocating it 192.168.0.2 and thus Dulcea deserves an entry in the hosts file. eth2 is the internal interface which Dulcea statically sets to 192.168.1.1. Oooo, aahhh. Different subnets.
With the network cards sorted out I cranked open my fstab on Dulcea because the NFS mounts are always mis-behaving. After looking at my entries and reading the mount and fstab properties carefully, I finaly have entries that load nfs mounts consistently and correctly on startup:
nikita:/home /home nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/share /mnt/share nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
nikita:/home/ftp /mnt/ftp nfs _netdev,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 0 3
With basic system config crap out of the way (and grub.conf edited to boot linux by default so I can reboot remotely) I started into compiling my 1337 warez for Linux From Scratch (lfs docs available from www.linuxfromscratch.org).
Talk about a lot of slogging. I followed the directions to the letter. It is going smoothly but I am only just through chapter 5 which is compiling the tools required to compile (and the first mess is compiled statically).
So today I hope to put all the commands in a script file so I can just fire and forget. And also so I have the script file for if/when I build another LFS system.
Tuesday, 6 May 2003
More Gear
Mmmm New hardware. Tastes just like chicken.
So I made another trip out to NCIX to get the last couple of things I need to trick-out Dulcea for becomming the disciple server. A new large HD and a PCI NIC (in addition to the one she already has).
Got us a nice Western Digital Caviar JB series drive. This one is 7200 rpm, ATA 100 (didn't see any 133s around), 9ms avg seek, and a 8 mb cache. Its wery nace.
Heh. I didn't realize that Dulcea was actually using her secondary drive for Linux. Its a crap drive and I thought Linux was just on a partition (or three) on the main disk. Come boot time, not GRUB for you. In short, I got to "upgrade" from Redhat 8.0 to Redhat 9. As with Chevette, the upgrade wasn't very exciting. At least RH 9 comes w/ the 2.4.20 kernel.
Anyhow, the NIC I picked up was twenty bones which I guess I kinda think is fine. Not as many free PCI NICs as there are ISA NICs. Its a fair and popular chip at least. SMC 1244TX. In fact, the other NIC in Dulcea is a predacessor to that one. Its a SMC 1211TX. Both NICs are 100Mbps and support full-duplex and, uh, me ethernet 'em up good. Don't know why anyone would buy the 60-80CDN 100Mbps NICs, but apparently NCIX sells plenty of 'em.
Whoops, gtg. Gonna be late for work.
So I made another trip out to NCIX to get the last couple of things I need to trick-out Dulcea for becomming the disciple server. A new large HD and a PCI NIC (in addition to the one she already has).
Got us a nice Western Digital Caviar JB series drive. This one is 7200 rpm, ATA 100 (didn't see any 133s around), 9ms avg seek, and a 8 mb cache. Its wery nace.
Heh. I didn't realize that Dulcea was actually using her secondary drive for Linux. Its a crap drive and I thought Linux was just on a partition (or three) on the main disk. Come boot time, not GRUB for you. In short, I got to "upgrade" from Redhat 8.0 to Redhat 9. As with Chevette, the upgrade wasn't very exciting. At least RH 9 comes w/ the 2.4.20 kernel.
Anyhow, the NIC I picked up was twenty bones which I guess I kinda think is fine. Not as many free PCI NICs as there are ISA NICs. Its a fair and popular chip at least. SMC 1244TX. In fact, the other NIC in Dulcea is a predacessor to that one. Its a SMC 1211TX. Both NICs are 100Mbps and support full-duplex and, uh, me ethernet 'em up good. Don't know why anyone would buy the 60-80CDN 100Mbps NICs, but apparently NCIX sells plenty of 'em.
Whoops, gtg. Gonna be late for work.
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Check Mah 1337 G34R!
"Checkitout, checkitout, checkitout!"
So since putting in a couple quarter-gig sticks of MM in Dulcea, all my games got a whole lot more interesting :P I tells yeh, going from an eigth-gig to a half-gig was the best investment of a hundred and fifty bones I've ever put into a system.
Now stuff like D2 and DoD don't hit the freaking hd for texture maps and sounds data anywhere near as much. It all sits memory-resident. I have been nothing but eccstatic about the improvement. I noticed it as soon as the RAM was tossed in the box.
Only thing I need now before I can seriously make moves on porting Dulcea to a server is put in a nice honkin HD or two. Say an 80GB disk or two? I like the sound of that... Oh, that and she'll need a second PCI NIC since the on-bo NIC ASAD. But that'll likely cost me not a dime.
And in Nikita's news, I gots da fat Samba config going on there. I borrowed Sante's copy of the Samba book from O'Reilly. Went through that file we had scabbed off wherever and actually looked up the options I needed to have/remove.
Mostly I was removing stuff. Whether it be defaults (a bunch of options were restating defaults) or poor overrides (like map system = yes).
Heck, I even structured my Samba config file and commented it so anyone nipping it can pepper to taste.
A couple major renovations were made in there. Firstly the usage of security = user rather then share. Secondly, the use of the [homes] section.
The first actually matches usernames/passwords. Apparently all share does is check that the submitted password matches any valid password... Brutal. The most important change there was that each share now has to explicitly set valid users (or groups in most cases) which wasn't a big change since my shares were either public or restricted to certain users.
The second was the use of the super-slick [homes] section. As both Dante and the O'Reilly folks pointed out, there are a few issues with assuming that every user can access their disk space... Like say Apache shouldn't be allowed to access its 'home' directory over smb. However, that was mostly solved in relation to point one anyhow. I had created a smbusers group which was all users who may want access to the Samba resources on the lan... Eg archangel (moi), wendigo, czak, and dante. Since user level security requires I explicitly list them (add them to the smbusers group), apache and all the rest don't get homes shares anyhow.
That the news, very late, but all good anyhow.
So since putting in a couple quarter-gig sticks of MM in Dulcea, all my games got a whole lot more interesting :P I tells yeh, going from an eigth-gig to a half-gig was the best investment of a hundred and fifty bones I've ever put into a system.
Now stuff like D2 and DoD don't hit the freaking hd for texture maps and sounds data anywhere near as much. It all sits memory-resident. I have been nothing but eccstatic about the improvement. I noticed it as soon as the RAM was tossed in the box.
Only thing I need now before I can seriously make moves on porting Dulcea to a server is put in a nice honkin HD or two. Say an 80GB disk or two? I like the sound of that... Oh, that and she'll need a second PCI NIC since the on-bo NIC ASAD. But that'll likely cost me not a dime.
And in Nikita's news, I gots da fat Samba config going on there. I borrowed Sante's copy of the Samba book from O'Reilly. Went through that file we had scabbed off wherever and actually looked up the options I needed to have/remove.
Mostly I was removing stuff. Whether it be defaults (a bunch of options were restating defaults) or poor overrides (like map system = yes).
Heck, I even structured my Samba config file and commented it so anyone nipping it can pepper to taste.
A couple major renovations were made in there. Firstly the usage of security = user rather then share. Secondly, the use of the [homes] section.
The first actually matches usernames/passwords. Apparently all share does is check that the submitted password matches any valid password... Brutal. The most important change there was that each share now has to explicitly set valid users (or groups in most cases) which wasn't a big change since my shares were either public or restricted to certain users.
The second was the use of the super-slick [homes] section. As both Dante and the O'Reilly folks pointed out, there are a few issues with assuming that every user can access their disk space... Like say Apache shouldn't be allowed to access its 'home' directory over smb. However, that was mostly solved in relation to point one anyhow. I had created a smbusers group which was all users who may want access to the Samba resources on the lan... Eg archangel (moi), wendigo, czak, and dante. Since user level security requires I explicitly list them (add them to the smbusers group), apache and all the rest don't get homes shares anyhow.
That the news, very late, but all good anyhow.
Monday, 7 April 2003
Busy Days, Y'All
So been kept fairly busy and looks to be busy for some nights yet. Yay!
Tomorrow I will be catching the Cowboy Beebop flek at the Tinsletown. Should be fun stuff. Anime cowboys in space. *Shrug*
Wednesday, out for drinks on someone else's tab.
Thorsday, coding w/ dante and Nibble Night (more drinks).
Friday is the usual (more drinks).
Saturday is Vampire day, oh, shite, I need to call the GM and see if we can hold it ealier or somethin cause Xiao will be in town.
Sunday is LAN party, yo. Still have done nothing to organize it.
And all the while, I have to write the changes for Hethor and play lots of Diablo II. Sounds like a wicked good week to me.
Now since nobody in their right mind gives to breezes about my personal life, here's the Nikita News:
Samba is FND. I was tinkering with DHCP on Sunday only to kill the Samba shares by switching to a tendot network for the lan. After realizing how much relied on ips for the lan being one-nine-twos, I switched back... Samba has not returned.
Well shoot says I. Time to restructure and rebuild my Samba setup. I definately need to fix all the persmissions and such on the local system. As for the network, Nikita does not even appear in Network Neighbourhood.
I am still hoping to get dns runnign for the lan however I'm scared. Half the resources I was reading on Sunday made it look really tricky.
Well, I'll see all y'all next time and have even fewer servers working on Nikita.
Tomorrow I will be catching the Cowboy Beebop flek at the Tinsletown. Should be fun stuff. Anime cowboys in space. *Shrug*
Wednesday, out for drinks on someone else's tab.
Thorsday, coding w/ dante and Nibble Night (more drinks).
Friday is the usual (more drinks).
Saturday is Vampire day, oh, shite, I need to call the GM and see if we can hold it ealier or somethin cause Xiao will be in town.
Sunday is LAN party, yo. Still have done nothing to organize it.
And all the while, I have to write the changes for Hethor and play lots of Diablo II. Sounds like a wicked good week to me.
Now since nobody in their right mind gives to breezes about my personal life, here's the Nikita News:
Samba is FND. I was tinkering with DHCP on Sunday only to kill the Samba shares by switching to a tendot network for the lan. After realizing how much relied on ips for the lan being one-nine-twos, I switched back... Samba has not returned.
Well shoot says I. Time to restructure and rebuild my Samba setup. I definately need to fix all the persmissions and such on the local system. As for the network, Nikita does not even appear in Network Neighbourhood.
I am still hoping to get dns runnign for the lan however I'm scared. Half the resources I was reading on Sunday made it look really tricky.
Well, I'll see all y'all next time and have even fewer servers working on Nikita.
Saturday, 29 March 2003
Makin Movies, Makin Songs...
... and Foightin round the World!
So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.
"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"
There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.
In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.
Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.
So at work this week, I hack into Gary's 1337 book collection. He has a book for Linux Network Administration, or some such. It looks like a good one. I've been reading it a bit at work and I am hoping I will be able to setup some more network servers on Nikita, starting with a primary nameserver and hopefully ending up with a successful NIS setup.
"Its a long hard road out of Hell!"
There's just *piles* of stuff I know too little about. Like the 'host' command for looking up the IPs of urls. Or yp-serv for sharing user information on a network. That oughtta keep me busy in the 'slow' times at work.
In consumer business, though I have not bought anything yet, I'm also thinking about my multimedia equipment. Chiefly that I should start building a home stereo and ignore wasting cash on a portable cd/mp3 player. Sounds like fun, no? I can just replace Paul's stereo by module, starting with the amp.
Mmm and Vampire. Most of the coterie ended up owing *lots* of boons left-and-right and in return I (and my coterie) have a couple big favours to call in from a couple big sources... Hmm, we'd best figure a good way to let this city know that we did revive Archon Fedrico Di Padawah and are the ones to choose to run this show.
Thursday, 27 March 2003
Argh Its Quiet!
Same-old same-old. Up to work, video games, and too little projin'. Actually, I did log some energy into the messaging design *grumble* *grumble*. That is something I really need to spend regular time at. Had a few drinks this eve so not tonight, but mayhaps tomorrow.
In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).
And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.
In Nikita news... I think I'm finally getting my expectations for a server down to a reasonable level. Chiefly: None. I'm going to stick a bigger hd in Dulcea and a mess of RAM. As for Nikita, I will swap a quieter power-supply in since her's is suffering a little of the vtol'itis. Upgrade her ram soonish. As for the storage issues, I dunno. Mayhaps I will swap my new huge drive in for the hdb and use the 20GB for Dulcea which is enough (now she has a 7GB which is weak).
And that's the news. Heck, soon I get paid and will realize some of my computer upgrades.
Saturday, 22 March 2003
Whoops, Lost a Week There
Seems that I lost a week in there somewhere. Guess I had better summarize briefly then since I have no hope of remember all the details...
Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.
After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:
"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."
Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.
So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)
Hmm. Work, games, food, repeat. Not very intersting week since I haven't done anything. Wait, LIES! I was taking a peek at Nikita's df -h during the week to find that the root partition was down to 35MB free. I started bitching and cursing and dove into rpm to start removing packages. Well, I kill rpm again thus I *really* need to start build my new server from LFS.
After hacking at rpm for a little while to no avail, one of my brilliant users pointed out that I should probably clear-out /var/log. I said to myself:
"hmm... good idead. lets du -sh... Oh shit! Its 200MB! I installed this system four weeks ago. That's 50MB a week..."
Nikita was going down by the end of the week so I moved everything in /var/log to my share partition and... symlinked /var/log to it, hehe. Symlinks rule.
So to summarize: Don't be an archangel and put your /var/log on a separate partition so that you don't fill up root and fuck-up your system. (Note the rhyme.)
Sunday, 16 March 2003
Sunday Night
In the news today: Updates have gone missing. We suspect that journalists are either getting really sloppy, or have picked up a crack habbit. We apologize for the lack of interesting service lately and will continue with our rehabilitation program.
And now for something completely different, a midget wearing a bikini:
This last week has been plenty full of Vampire stuff. Writing background material and building the online site. Heck, even added a light-weight private messaging system to it. Seems like the players are making fairly good use of it.
In sys admin news, I finally found a good setup for wu-ftp. Anonymous login sends you to the chrooted ftp directory where you can d/l files but not upload. Navigate to the pub folder and you can upload files and conversly not download them. Seems to be working nice a slick. And no guest or real logins, of course.
Picked up a little practice with .htaccess files today as well. Got them to supress or allow directory listings in the various areas of the site. Shipped the boss .htaccess link to Tammie as well. I'm sure she'll love it.
Ah, and did a little slogging on the ArchMessaging design. Doesn't look pretty, I tells yeh. The elegant solution I had mostly sketched out is *way* too inefficient. Every user would have a minimum of at least one group and every forum would have permissions for most of the groups which would have to be sorted through every time a user viewed, posted, edited... etc. Not nice. The way phpBB seems to have it setup is by breaking the forum system in a set of cases which maybe more cumbersome to handle in code but is much lighter in execution. Pfah!
order deny,allow
deny from all
That's what I say to users!
And now for something completely different, a midget wearing a bikini:
This last week has been plenty full of Vampire stuff. Writing background material and building the online site. Heck, even added a light-weight private messaging system to it. Seems like the players are making fairly good use of it.
In sys admin news, I finally found a good setup for wu-ftp. Anonymous login sends you to the chrooted ftp directory where you can d/l files but not upload. Navigate to the pub folder and you can upload files and conversly not download them. Seems to be working nice a slick. And no guest or real logins, of course.
Picked up a little practice with .htaccess files today as well. Got them to supress or allow directory listings in the various areas of the site. Shipped the boss .htaccess link to Tammie as well. I'm sure she'll love it.
Ah, and did a little slogging on the ArchMessaging design. Doesn't look pretty, I tells yeh. The elegant solution I had mostly sketched out is *way* too inefficient. Every user would have a minimum of at least one group and every forum would have permissions for most of the groups which would have to be sorted through every time a user viewed, posted, edited... etc. Not nice. The way phpBB seems to have it setup is by breaking the forum system in a set of cases which maybe more cumbersome to handle in code but is much lighter in execution. Pfah!
order deny,allow
deny from all
That's what I say to users!
Tuesday, 11 March 2003
Up and Runnin'
New Hethor round just started. Our tenth enumerated round. Must be something special. Bah, I dunno. Feeling tired but I'm just campin' to make sure the round (Infection) gets rolling properly. Should be fine since the code came up and the registration worked fine. Just a question as to how well the growth script works. Dis is goink to be a gud round, da? Gud and long. Eight weeks will make this our longest fixed round.
Mmm, still ploughing through piles of Vampire material. I've been spending my eves bickering over URO so I haven't got as much to show as I would like. Yergh. Being unemployed is a lot easier. Speaking of which, I'll get paid some time this week, mayhaps. Dat'd be swell since I'm flat freaking broke and would like to avoid cashing more of my term just to buy pizza. Dat'd be lame.
/me starts twiddling his thumbs
Eight minutes until the growth script runs. Doobie-doobie-doo...
There it goes. Not bad. The script went fine. Problem in the attacks though... Scored negative kills. Should be a quick patch.
Cheerio
Mmm, still ploughing through piles of Vampire material. I've been spending my eves bickering over URO so I haven't got as much to show as I would like. Yergh. Being unemployed is a lot easier. Speaking of which, I'll get paid some time this week, mayhaps. Dat'd be swell since I'm flat freaking broke and would like to avoid cashing more of my term just to buy pizza. Dat'd be lame.
/me starts twiddling his thumbs
Eight minutes until the growth script runs. Doobie-doobie-doo...
There it goes. Not bad. The script went fine. Problem in the attacks though... Scored negative kills. Should be a quick patch.
Cheerio
Monday, 10 March 2003
Bwah! Mad sniper!
Boy, did I eat shit in DoD today. Scragged 7:26 while useing the Gerand and then 13:28 as I finished the map with a Thompson. Yeesh. My skillz suck.
Good news today, posted a fresh code-batch of Hethor. Yay for me. Tomorrow I have to implement the changes for Infection.
Still slogging up piles of BG work for Vampire. Mmm-mmm good. Fun stuff, but there's *lots* of it. I should paste it all in a doc and see how many words I've done up so far. Plenty, I'm sure.
Anyhow, dats de brief, yo. Diggit?
Good news today, posted a fresh code-batch of Hethor. Yay for me. Tomorrow I have to implement the changes for Infection.
Still slogging up piles of BG work for Vampire. Mmm-mmm good. Fun stuff, but there's *lots* of it. I should paste it all in a doc and see how many words I've done up so far. Plenty, I'm sure.
Anyhow, dats de brief, yo. Diggit?
Sunday, 9 March 2003
/me has been a slacker
Well, maybe, maybe not. Work is going fine. Up in the morning, at work until the evening.
Thursday I went over to Meep's pad. They've *really* cleaned that place up since I was last there. Heck, a fellow could even see the floor, ain't that fancy. Even the new tenant there seems like a nice person rather the psychotic and prone to the occasional assaults against the other tenants. Sadly, my visit was cut short after some choice eats and a couple brews because I made my mad dash over to the post office to grab my passport... Finally.
Took bleedin' long enough. The application was mailed on December 28th, along with the required DL and birth-cert, and only arrived on March 6th. That was not the expected two to four weeks. You know what that was? It was BULLSHIT!
Friday, again work. They haven't filed for a restraining order yet so I may have carried off a pretty good cover. Friday though, Tammie and I swapped sailor jokes for dead baby jokes, heh. Still no word of a restraining order. This place should be just fine.
Friday night we all piled west to Czak's for grub and duck porn. All was good in the land of Taco salad. Tacos!
".. all day and through the night" we were up to making Vampire characters and backgrounds. I'm still doing that right now, actually. I just realized I hadn't updated my plan. At any rate, that's about all my hours account for since my last plan update on the fifth.
Screw you guys.
Thursday I went over to Meep's pad. They've *really* cleaned that place up since I was last there. Heck, a fellow could even see the floor, ain't that fancy. Even the new tenant there seems like a nice person rather the psychotic and prone to the occasional assaults against the other tenants. Sadly, my visit was cut short after some choice eats and a couple brews because I made my mad dash over to the post office to grab my passport... Finally.
Took bleedin' long enough. The application was mailed on December 28th, along with the required DL and birth-cert, and only arrived on March 6th. That was not the expected two to four weeks. You know what that was? It was BULLSHIT!
Friday, again work. They haven't filed for a restraining order yet so I may have carried off a pretty good cover. Friday though, Tammie and I swapped sailor jokes for dead baby jokes, heh. Still no word of a restraining order. This place should be just fine.
Friday night we all piled west to Czak's for grub and duck porn. All was good in the land of Taco salad. Tacos!
".. all day and through the night" we were up to making Vampire characters and backgrounds. I'm still doing that right now, actually. I just realized I hadn't updated my plan. At any rate, that's about all my hours account for since my last plan update on the fifth.
Screw you guys.
Wednesday, 5 March 2003
A bum no more
Ah, so tomorrow morning I start my brand new job as Tier 1 tech support for ParaSun. Should be fine considering my biggest concern is what to wear. No holy jeans and shirt first day. No shirt and tie neither. Bah, slacks and a shirt will be fine.
In other news, that last of the major work on the Vampire site is done. What a pile of crap code. Definately caught the "it's due in 48 hours" syndrome. The db is okay, but I'm not using objects aside from the menu and email classes I wrote elsewhere. Archangel is a very naughty fellow. The code stinks but should work considering the site useage is exactly five. Now if only I could get more of GD done... I guess Vampire gave me some good ideas on what not to do for GD.
Other news? Ah, nothing. Screw you guys, I have to catch some 'Z's.
In other news, that last of the major work on the Vampire site is done. What a pile of crap code. Definately caught the "it's due in 48 hours" syndrome. The db is okay, but I'm not using objects aside from the menu and email classes I wrote elsewhere. Archangel is a very naughty fellow. The code stinks but should work considering the site useage is exactly five. Now if only I could get more of GD done... I guess Vampire gave me some good ideas on what not to do for GD.
Other news? Ah, nothing. Screw you guys, I have to catch some 'Z's.
Monday, 3 March 2003
I like pipes
They are cool... Today's accomplishments are a simple few:
1. Got a bus pass,
2. Enhanced my news features (archives, ooo),
3. Added sexy pipes to the items in my links section,
4. Illed in tha hood, yo.
Yep, that's it. I start work on Thursday so I feel justified in slacking. Then again, by Monday I'll be wishing I hadn't wasted all my free time :P If anyone catches me bemoaning my time usage just remind me:
"Arch, four boxes of Vancouver Island in that weekend..."
A lightweight plan tonight. I'm going to go read. I'll just drop this in here: http://uro.mine.nu/~archangel/personal/
"Welcome to [the Ice Palace] where two's company and three's an audience." - Max Headroom (mod'ed by archangel)
1. Got a bus pass,
2. Enhanced my news features (archives, ooo),
3. Added sexy pipes to the items in my links section,
4. Illed in tha hood, yo.
Yep, that's it. I start work on Thursday so I feel justified in slacking. Then again, by Monday I'll be wishing I hadn't wasted all my free time :P If anyone catches me bemoaning my time usage just remind me:
"Arch, four boxes of Vancouver Island in that weekend..."
A lightweight plan tonight. I'm going to go read. I'll just drop this in here: http://uro.mine.nu/~archangel/personal/
"Welcome to [the Ice Palace] where two's company and three's an audience." - Max Headroom (mod'ed by archangel)
Sunday, 2 March 2003
Lookout! Games Ahead
And now, the review you've all been waiting for:
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Absolutely boss, yo. Ah dig dat flick. The CG was truly astounding. Spotting the *huge* Maya logo in the first scene was an amusing props to the 3D studio used for FF, and used well. If only animators weren't so stinking bent on particle effects... But aside from the gorgeous gfx, I even found most of the movie valuable for its setting and characters. CG aside, FF is still a good Sci Fi movie. They just got a little too melodramatic in the script in the last few scenes: "Don't leave me now!" "You saved my life, let me save yours." ... And so on. Heh, Alec Baldwin voiced Captain Gray. Overall rating: "see it in theaters and rent it a few times".
And now you'll be pleased to know that I won't be wasting your precious few literacy skills with my videe reviews for a while... Instead bullcrap about gaming!
In Kobal's werewolf, where I run a pack of evil characters, I had a boss downtime. Through a strange twist of events, my group of malevolent characters have managed to attract a group of cultist. Cool huh? Still deciding what to do with them. Maybe setup some traps and then flaunt the crew around town and try and gank some of the good-guys. Should be able to nab a few of those do-gooders.
As for Quirinus' Vampire game, I'm still thinking of what character I want to play. Definately leaning towards the meglomaniac kinda character. A Brujah likely. A Ventrue possibly. I guess I'll see what everyone else is sorta aiming for.
Must be time to unplug. C'yall on the morrow.
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Absolutely boss, yo. Ah dig dat flick. The CG was truly astounding. Spotting the *huge* Maya logo in the first scene was an amusing props to the 3D studio used for FF, and used well. If only animators weren't so stinking bent on particle effects... But aside from the gorgeous gfx, I even found most of the movie valuable for its setting and characters. CG aside, FF is still a good Sci Fi movie. They just got a little too melodramatic in the script in the last few scenes: "Don't leave me now!" "You saved my life, let me save yours." ... And so on. Heh, Alec Baldwin voiced Captain Gray. Overall rating: "see it in theaters and rent it a few times".
And now you'll be pleased to know that I won't be wasting your precious few literacy skills with my videe reviews for a while... Instead bullcrap about gaming!
In Kobal's werewolf, where I run a pack of evil characters, I had a boss downtime. Through a strange twist of events, my group of malevolent characters have managed to attract a group of cultist. Cool huh? Still deciding what to do with them. Maybe setup some traps and then flaunt the crew around town and try and gank some of the good-guys. Should be able to nab a few of those do-gooders.
As for Quirinus' Vampire game, I'm still thinking of what character I want to play. Definately leaning towards the meglomaniac kinda character. A Brujah likely. A Ventrue possibly. I guess I'll see what everyone else is sorta aiming for.
Must be time to unplug. C'yall on the morrow.
I'm On a Freakin' Roll Here
Dude! Today I recovered my old archive CD! I'm stoked about that. I have all my old school projects back, chiefly the 80c196KC Domination which is a micro controller simulator. I thought that was gone for good, but thar she be. More on that further down, but the other stuff on that disc was a pile of useful utilties I'd forgotten all about. Stuff like Eudora keygens, fv AudioCatalyst, and, erm, well a pile of other warez. Nevertheless, I had to surf through a lot of pr0n spam to get those apps and now I have them back thanks to IsoBuster.
Now that I have recovered my pride and joy, the chip sim, I brought this up with Dante. Needless to say, we've got a new project cookin. Since the simulator will read hex-files and our assembler (assm) in C produces hex files from assembly code, we're aiming to re-write both.
I'm pretty keen to practice my OOP and think we stand a sizeable profit from using C++ for both projects which will be a re-work from design forward. I may have to handle the bulk of the sim myself, but it all depends on what we plan.
Mmmm, Dos Equis is nice. And tomorrow is Nibble Night(tm). More brew again. Well, I'll harangue Dante into showing-up early so we can lay down some plans for coding our various projects before we head out.
Whee! It'll be fun. I'm still ecstatic to have recovered that CD :D At the bottom of my third brew now, so I'll see all y'all tomorrow.
Now that I have recovered my pride and joy, the chip sim, I brought this up with Dante. Needless to say, we've got a new project cookin. Since the simulator will read hex-files and our assembler (assm) in C produces hex files from assembly code, we're aiming to re-write both.
I'm pretty keen to practice my OOP and think we stand a sizeable profit from using C++ for both projects which will be a re-work from design forward. I may have to handle the bulk of the sim myself, but it all depends on what we plan.
Mmmm, Dos Equis is nice. And tomorrow is Nibble Night(tm). More brew again. Well, I'll harangue Dante into showing-up early so we can lay down some plans for coding our various projects before we head out.
Whee! It'll be fun. I'm still ecstatic to have recovered that CD :D At the bottom of my third brew now, so I'll see all y'all tomorrow.
Saturday, 1 March 2003
Just another day on the farm
Interesting news? Nah, ain't got much of that. Got a pile of videe from the local store. 5 of 'em for 6 bucks. Here's the rundown so far:
Max Headroom
Wicked Sci Fi. Excellent humor in a dark-future setting. Definately a part of everyone's mandatory sci fi education. Glad I caught it. I rate it as "rent it often or buy yourself a copy".
Canadian Bacon
John Candy and company in the classic flick about the next US invasion of Canada, eh? Rated as "see it first run and buy yourself a copy". Heh. Even I'm afraid of the Canadian Menace now.
Amos Perros (subtitled)
Three short stories tied together for a Tarantino style film of wicked character. Truly well played and written characters. Rated as "catch in theaters for cheap and rent it many times".
The Long Yard
For fans of Mean Machine, you will immediately spot its origins in The Long Yard. A game about prisons and american football. Good humor if you can understand what the mush-mouths are saying. I could bloody understand the British Mean Machine way betteh then this southan mush. Blimey. Rated as "rent it".
Final Fantasy
Showing tomorrow.
In other news, been usering it up again. Apparently I never actually sent Kobal the email telling him GD was ready for his data. My bad. He's filled out the first batch of data and so I whipped up a bit more work on that site. Mmmm, faking foreign keys is fun.
Ah, and in gaming news... Those bastards didn't play Deadlands. So here endeth the tales of noble Nick. May he rest uneasily fer eternity. Bah, so next game we're going to take a spin at is Vampire. Eeks. Well it may not work out so well on the basis of my work schedule for the next while until the students are out of class. We shall see. Apparently Quirinus wants *us* to put effort into the game. Heh. That's like saying that running the show by commitee is a *good* idea. Maybe we'll slide into getting two games running in alternate weeks. Give each storyteller a chance to catch some air.
Anyhoo. Boring rant, I'm sure. But its time to read some more of American Gods. I'm near the end now. Shadow is hanging from the World Tree for Odin's vigil.
Max Headroom
Wicked Sci Fi. Excellent humor in a dark-future setting. Definately a part of everyone's mandatory sci fi education. Glad I caught it. I rate it as "rent it often or buy yourself a copy".
Canadian Bacon
John Candy and company in the classic flick about the next US invasion of Canada, eh? Rated as "see it first run and buy yourself a copy". Heh. Even I'm afraid of the Canadian Menace now.
Amos Perros (subtitled)
Three short stories tied together for a Tarantino style film of wicked character. Truly well played and written characters. Rated as "catch in theaters for cheap and rent it many times".
The Long Yard
For fans of Mean Machine, you will immediately spot its origins in The Long Yard. A game about prisons and american football. Good humor if you can understand what the mush-mouths are saying. I could bloody understand the British Mean Machine way betteh then this southan mush. Blimey. Rated as "rent it".
Final Fantasy
Showing tomorrow.
In other news, been usering it up again. Apparently I never actually sent Kobal the email telling him GD was ready for his data. My bad. He's filled out the first batch of data and so I whipped up a bit more work on that site. Mmmm, faking foreign keys is fun.
Ah, and in gaming news... Those bastards didn't play Deadlands. So here endeth the tales of noble Nick. May he rest uneasily fer eternity. Bah, so next game we're going to take a spin at is Vampire. Eeks. Well it may not work out so well on the basis of my work schedule for the next while until the students are out of class. We shall see. Apparently Quirinus wants *us* to put effort into the game. Heh. That's like saying that running the show by commitee is a *good* idea. Maybe we'll slide into getting two games running in alternate weeks. Give each storyteller a chance to catch some air.
Anyhoo. Boring rant, I'm sure. But its time to read some more of American Gods. I'm near the end now. Shadow is hanging from the World Tree for Odin's vigil.
Thursday, 27 February 2003
Another Good 48 Hours
Damn, I'm good! Yesterday I got a job offer from Parasun (which I accepted today). I received the email right before Dante and I were heading out for the pub. Damn fine timing, dig? At the pub, the nibble illed the night away. They even had the first kind of brew I asked for. No coy games last night, heh. After that, I hit the hay a little early.
Today we had a slight panic as the stinkin frooftenaggen-snooftennagen root partition on nikita ran out of space... ouch! When mysql tried writing to the databases, couldn't write the output even though she could get the write-lock. Damn bitch ate half the game. In a panic, I went through figuring the fatest way to make space: rm -Rf /usr/share/doc . Suckit. I don't need no stinkin docs! That freed up a pile of space so I rolled back URO to the last successful backup (24 hours old). Heh. So the major disaster wasn't too-too bad. Just mostly sucky.
If that isn't enough joyous sys admin fun... I killed RPM today! Yay! I was trying to get wu-ftpd re-installed from scratch. No dice. RPM froze. I wrote it off at first as being sucky, but my rpm db was corrupted. Nothing would work with rpm. I eventually went surfing up the netpages to find that this was in fact a very common problem. I ended taking the advice of the zudes at Redhat and deleting /var/lib/rpm/db_* and running rpm --rebuilddb. This wasn't quite enough because the packages I had tried to install or remove were half-in and half out. I had to force the "erase" of the packages and then install them again. Fun. No really. I loved it.
Hmm, what else? Oh, Quirinus isn't too keen on running Deadlands, much to the disappointment of yours truely. Mostly it was because neither Czak nor Grayson were "hot" on the game and the Wendawg has been positively malevolent towards it. But the wendawg ceeded that he'd gotten most of his bitching out. So I bleedin hope. Sick of him making lame complaints when he should just buzz off and say he'll find something else to do on Saturday nights. .... Anyhow... I am hoping we'll give Deadlands at least one more try this weekend so my intrepid (and undead) hero, Nick, can sling his shootin' irons one last time fer good luck.
Now that my rant is long and your eyes are bleeding, I bid you "kiss-off"! And I'll see all y'all on the flipside.
Today we had a slight panic as the stinkin frooftenaggen-snooftennagen root partition on nikita ran out of space... ouch! When mysql tried writing to the databases, couldn't write the output even though she could get the write-lock. Damn bitch ate half the game. In a panic, I went through figuring the fatest way to make space: rm -Rf /usr/share/doc . Suckit. I don't need no stinkin docs! That freed up a pile of space so I rolled back URO to the last successful backup (24 hours old). Heh. So the major disaster wasn't too-too bad. Just mostly sucky.
If that isn't enough joyous sys admin fun... I killed RPM today! Yay! I was trying to get wu-ftpd re-installed from scratch. No dice. RPM froze. I wrote it off at first as being sucky, but my rpm db was corrupted. Nothing would work with rpm. I eventually went surfing up the netpages to find that this was in fact a very common problem. I ended taking the advice of the zudes at Redhat and deleting /var/lib/rpm/db_* and running rpm --rebuilddb. This wasn't quite enough because the packages I had tried to install or remove were half-in and half out. I had to force the "erase" of the packages and then install them again. Fun. No really. I loved it.
Hmm, what else? Oh, Quirinus isn't too keen on running Deadlands, much to the disappointment of yours truely. Mostly it was because neither Czak nor Grayson were "hot" on the game and the Wendawg has been positively malevolent towards it. But the wendawg ceeded that he'd gotten most of his bitching out. So I bleedin hope. Sick of him making lame complaints when he should just buzz off and say he'll find something else to do on Saturday nights. .... Anyhow... I am hoping we'll give Deadlands at least one more try this weekend so my intrepid (and undead) hero, Nick, can sling his shootin' irons one last time fer good luck.
Now that my rant is long and your eyes are bleeding, I bid you "kiss-off"! And I'll see all y'all on the flipside.
Monday, 24 February 2003
Tweakin, Yo!
Another day, another dime down the drain. Apparently my posts haven't been interesting enough for Dante so I reread my last couple of .plans... Definately dry as toast. So in compensation, I'll tell you about my exciting dream last night:
I dreamt that I was in the Interface (my computer room, for those not privy to tha lingo, yo) sitting at Dulcea (mah sweet rig, yo). I opened good old IE and went to check out the forums. After all, I hadn't checked them since going to bed. I read the forums and answered the two posts that were up. I don't recall what they were about since everything was blurry as though I did not have my glasses on. That done, I woke up.
No, really. That was my dream. Czak was crashed on my couch and would have mentioned something about me sleepwalking if it was that. This is why I hate sleep. Its so bloody lame. Nevertheless, I hope you millions of avid .plan readers found it at least amusing to read about.
Speaking of readers, I have really been usering things up today. At one point I posted in IRC "why does mIRC keep flashing when no posts are coming up?!?"... Well, gee, Archangel. Could it be because you weren't scrolling down to see the new messages? Yeah? I thought so. Yikes! Talk about twelve o'clock flasher...
In more positive news, I upgraded the DBO class for Palaemon (though only in my own private area as to not fudge up czak's code yet). Now it determines scalar members from the db instead of from the object which is prone to faults when members are set to 0. Eg it doesn't recognize a 0 as a scalar member and thus won't update it in the db, even if you do want to set a field to zero.
In related news, I've done some good work with The Interface which is my personal site. I'm becomming very pleased with the layout and structure. Now I have to tweak the content up a couple notches and gussy-up the look. Then the Interface will be a personal site I can really be proud of :D
And that's all mah news fer de day, yo. Kick it easy, dawgs 'n' stay offa mah turf. Yeh hear?
I dreamt that I was in the Interface (my computer room, for those not privy to tha lingo, yo) sitting at Dulcea (mah sweet rig, yo). I opened good old IE and went to check out the forums. After all, I hadn't checked them since going to bed. I read the forums and answered the two posts that were up. I don't recall what they were about since everything was blurry as though I did not have my glasses on. That done, I woke up.
No, really. That was my dream. Czak was crashed on my couch and would have mentioned something about me sleepwalking if it was that. This is why I hate sleep. Its so bloody lame. Nevertheless, I hope you millions of avid .plan readers found it at least amusing to read about.
Speaking of readers, I have really been usering things up today. At one point I posted in IRC "why does mIRC keep flashing when no posts are coming up?!?"... Well, gee, Archangel. Could it be because you weren't scrolling down to see the new messages? Yeah? I thought so. Yikes! Talk about twelve o'clock flasher...
In more positive news, I upgraded the DBO class for Palaemon (though only in my own private area as to not fudge up czak's code yet). Now it determines scalar members from the db instead of from the object which is prone to faults when members are set to 0. Eg it doesn't recognize a 0 as a scalar member and thus won't update it in the db, even if you do want to set a field to zero.
In related news, I've done some good work with The Interface which is my personal site. I'm becomming very pleased with the layout and structure. Now I have to tweak the content up a couple notches and gussy-up the look. Then the Interface will be a personal site I can really be proud of :D
And that's all mah news fer de day, yo. Kick it easy, dawgs 'n' stay offa mah turf. Yeh hear?
Sunday, 23 February 2003
Sunday is a slow day
Not much cookin' today. Slow day. Compiled the 2.4.20 kernel for Chevette. That was good.
Oh, "not much cookin'"... Except open-sourcing Hethor that is! Czak finally busted us into the GPL for that pile of crap code. Anyone who wants it can use it. We are no longer supporting that code save for greivous patches. And even then... It'd better be a big deal because we're aiming to get Palaemon up.
Now for those of you in the crowd who are going "please not GPL", don't worry. We don't use Hethor's code and thus Palaemon is not GPL. That's the one you have to worry about. Once we get a game in Palaemon up, we'll open that asap. Out classes are sexy. Hethor's hack piles of files are not.
Ciao. Me sleep now.
PS Meekers needs to pick a name for his stinkin' computer.
Oh, "not much cookin'"... Except open-sourcing Hethor that is! Czak finally busted us into the GPL for that pile of crap code. Anyone who wants it can use it. We are no longer supporting that code save for greivous patches. And even then... It'd better be a big deal because we're aiming to get Palaemon up.
Now for those of you in the crowd who are going "please not GPL", don't worry. We don't use Hethor's code and thus Palaemon is not GPL. That's the one you have to worry about. Once we get a game in Palaemon up, we'll open that asap. Out classes are sexy. Hethor's hack piles of files are not.
Ciao. Me sleep now.
PS Meekers needs to pick a name for his stinkin' computer.
Saturday, 22 February 2003
First Post
Woohoo! This be my first post on my personal site. I'm excited. I tricked it out to post to the news table in MySQL as well as to my .plan file. Two birds with one stone.
I've done some restructing of my personal site. Much of it thanks to the glory to .htaccess files. They are freaking cool. I can specify PHP options/settings for portions of my site using them. The way I set mine up is to change the include_path for my user area (everything under ~archangel) so I stick all my classes and stuff in a common area since I work on them accross projects. Its super-cool. That and I deny access to this "post news" file to everyone outside the lan :P Easy security, heh.
Ah, what else? Oh. Went to vote for the Olympics. And since half the peeps in Vancouver will shout with me and the rest against me I'm going with: "GO, OLYMPICS! WOOT!"
Posting .plan updates in forms is cool. Hehe.
I've done some restructing of my personal site. Much of it thanks to the glory to .htaccess files. They are freaking cool. I can specify PHP options/settings for portions of my site using them. The way I set mine up is to change the include_path for my user area (everything under ~archangel) so I stick all my classes and stuff in a common area since I work on them accross projects. Its super-cool. That and I deny access to this "post news" file to everyone outside the lan :P Easy security, heh.
Ah, what else? Oh. Went to vote for the Olympics. And since half the peeps in Vancouver will shout with me and the rest against me I'm going with: "GO, OLYMPICS! WOOT!"
Posting .plan updates in forms is cool. Hehe.
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