Geeky Baldisms

I was at Barnes and Noble last night, looking for a good science fiction book. I'm sort of stuck in the past, SF-wise, I like the works of the masters: Pohl, Clarke, Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Lem, Asimov, etc.

I was distressed to find no books at all by Anderson or Lem. The selections of the others were quite limited.

On the other hand, there was a plethora of the later Dune books by Herbert (and/or son). There were also a ton of books by new authors with whom I'm not familiar.

I realize that time goes on, and new faces take the place of the old, but I'm disappointed that two writers of the stature of Anderson and Lem would be completely left off the shelves at a book store.

It doesn't seem like good business. The science fiction section should be well-stocked by the books of the authors who put it on the map in the first place.

I've foolishly relied on "security through obscurity" for my various AWStats reports. I have also had lots of referrals to my sites from sites which have nary a link on them pointing my way.

Duh.

I was being used by these scumsuckers to provide bogus links THEIR way, thanks to my unsecured aws folders, in which dwelt my traffic reports. Presumably, these "links" would enhance their status with the search engines.

It was fixed with putting password protection in place via .htaccess.

If you have wide-open web tracking reports, and are seeing crap sites as major referrers, you're being used.

Implement password protection ASAP.

I wrote a column a while back about Computerworld's Shark Tank. Since then, many of the folks that got mentioned in the article have moved on. Many more have blown in. And it continues to be a fun place to read funny (allegedly) true tech stories, then afterwards to join in on the bantering that goes on in the comments.

Anyhow, here's a couple of pics of 02BIrish and myself, wearing our hard-earned Tank shirts.

Have you got one? Shoot a pic of you wearing it and I'll be happy to post it here. Let me know if you want to be famous or incognito. Click on the pics for enlarged versions (if you dare!)

02BIrish, world's greatest lymericist

Ye Olde Bald Guy, in his usual state of stuporous oblivion

This is Dimhelmet, he doesn't post many comments, but he wins shirts!

Gadfly: pest: a persistently annoying person.

We're all annoying, we can't help it. Imperfect humans will always sometimes rub each other the wrong way.

And let's face it, sometimes we CHOOSE to be annoying. It can even be fun.

With that in mind, I must try to show more patience to annoying gadflies (whoops, that's redundant, isn't it?) who hang around blogs of certain technologies and bash the technologies in question.

I guess I don't understand the mentality of the blog gadfly.

Example: I think the New York Yankees are Satan incarnate. The team has wealth beyond imagination, and an impotent management structure over major league baseball refuses to consider a salary cap. Ergo, small-market teams raise talent in their farm systems and watch helplessly as they eventually sell their souls to Hank Steinbrenner and begin wearing pinstripes.

That being said, what I don't do is hang around Yankee discussion boards and annoy their fans.

Continue reading "Gadflies" »

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I am very impressed with Ubuntu 10.04. Except for the fact that I was greeted with blank screen from the install CD, and had to get around that by booting with the nomodest option. See details here.

Anyhow, somehow, my desktop got ugly. Instead of my razor-sharp 1680x1050, I was topped out at 1360x768. That might be fine on my old 19" widescreen, but not on my gorgeous Samsung 24".

The problem proved to be amazingly perplexing. Several times in the course of editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf, I fubarred things badly enough that X wouldn't even start.

Finally, a solution was found. I found an xorg.conf online that restored every resolution. Click to continue, and I'll share it with you.

Continue reading "Fixing Goofed Nvidia in Ubuntu" »

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Well, crap. The official Ubuntu 10.04 release didn't play nice with the Nvidia onboard video on my 2006 vintage HP a1483w. Booting led to a screen that was black. my monitor didn't detect a signal, and went dormant. What made me crazy was that I had run into similar issues before, and was able to boot into runlevel three (no GUI) and work on the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to at least get ugly video back, so that I could have the GUI running to experiment on.

In the Redhat world, hitting escape when the grub menu pops up allows you to edit the command line. Adding a '3' to the end of the string that calls the Linux kernel overrides /etc/inittab and sends you straight to runlevel 3.

Well, I was quite perturbed to discover that the boot string editing trick no worky with Ubuntu. Adding a 3 to the boot string had no effect at all. Ctrl+alt+f1 didn't work, either, no alternative login screen.

What's even weirder is that there is NO /etc/inittab file to dictate system runlevel.

In short, I simply could not boot into anything but a broken GUI, i.e. a black screen.

Time to fall back on an old friend.

Enter CentOS 5.

Continue reading "Shifting Linux Gears" »

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I installed the late beta of Ubuntu 4.10 this week. Here are my thoughts on the process and the product.

First of all, if you are not already keeping your home directory on a separate partition, I strongly recommend that you do. Once the install is done, everything looks pretty much like you had it before, including app preferences, look and feel, saved Firefox passwords, etc. It's nice not to have to reconfigure everything from scratch.

Second, upgrading was not an option, since I went from Mint back to Ubuntu. But the whole process took about two hours, and I really think a clean install is the way to go.

Third, strangely, I got no video on the install CD. I ended up downloading the text-based version and installed from there. And you know what? I actually prefer the text-based method.

Fourth, you MUST install Ubuntu Tweak if you haven't already. It instantly edits all sorts of obscure config files for you, making it simple to have a system that does exactly what you want it to do.

Continue reading "First thoughts on Ubuntu 10.4" »

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Are you like me? Taxed to death? Yet, pay taxes we do, because it's the law.

Ya know, if we all had billions of dollars to spend on lawyers and lobbyists, maybe we wouldn't be in that boat: Click here for more.

Hey, Washington residents! The next time your local taxes are raised because of deficits, why not give Steve Ballmer a holler and thank him personally? :-)

I have just returned from a week of asp.net training, at the behest (and the kind compliments of) my employer.

First impression: I've given dot net programmers WAY too much credit. With Visual Studio, asp.net is quite simple to pick up. At least it was simple for a PHP developer. It's quite simple, IMHO, lots of dragging and dropping.

Second impression: I was helped by a year of creating Access apps in the late 90's. The experience of using Visual Studio 2008 is, to me, quite similar to using Access 97. I'm certain that the next version will sport the same bastardized Vista-type interface that some idiots at Redmond have decided that MS customers want.

Third impression: One of the biggest things that my (excellent) instructor, Brandon Ahmad, stressed, was that there was a lot of power in using caching to speed up your web apps. I found this ironic, because if the ungodly load of MS overhead wasn't present at server level, there would be no need to speed things up. Without a doubt, if you're looking to get the most out of your hardware, stick with Linux and the rest of the LAMP suite.

The official Microsoft training session was written by outsourced contractors, and I would rate it a 5 out of 10. Lots of errors, typos, and poor writing. But Brandon did a remarkable job of cutting through the poor workmanship of the course and gave me the knowledge I need to jump in and begin building effective, slick .net apps.

Unfortunately, I WILL have to create a 2008 Server VM to run them on.

Back to the crappy Vista interface...

The calculatedness of Tiger Woods is amazing.

He knows just how many tournaments to play in in order to maximize his effectiveness for the majors.

He also know what tournaments require his presence, for contractual reasons or for maximum public relations.

He wouldn't DREAM of missing Nicklaus's Memorial, or Palmer's Bay Hill Classic. That would cost him the support of the game's biggest names (next to his own, of course).

And he knows how to make a return to professional golf from a scandalized absence.

He debuts in the Masters.

The Masters is the world's most uptight, rigid, protocol-ruled tournament. Gary McCord continues to be banned from broadcasting it because of that bikini wax remark about the greens. That was back in 1995! Fifteen years and counting for making a remark that the Powers-That-Be deemed inappropriate.

The fans know they are under watch, too. Booing, jeering, and basically doing anything but politely applauding can result in losing tickets that took many, many years to obtain.

Ergo, Mr. Woods chooses the hallowed halls of Augusta to make his return. No chance of anything but polite appreciation there. No signs, no banners, no "Tiger slept with me" t-shirts. Just the adoring praise of the announcers, the fans, er, PATRONS, sorry, Hootie, and the chance to spend a quiet week getting back into golf.

Once it's over, look for an extended break. The next tournament will be equally chosen in a calculated manner.

DISCLAIMER: I've been a Tiger fan since he destroyed the amateur golf world. The folks at The Masters have earned the right to be buttheads about their tournament. It truly is the greatest in professional golf. The four minutes of commercials per hour is wonderful. However, I'm not a fan of spin doctoring. And Tiger Woods is about to demonstrate the most coolly calculated painless return to public life that you've ever seen.

I've always been stuck in the past, musically speaking. In high school, while everyone else was listening to Styx, Foreigner, and Supertramp, I was into the Stones, the Beatles, and just about anyone else who charted during the 60's.

Even now, it took until the 21st century before I began getting into the hits of the 80's.

However, I've recently discovered two artists who are more contemporary.

The first is Drive-By Truckers.

Admittedly, what caused me to give them a listen was their homage to Lynyrd Skynyrd: Southern Rock Opera.

I've always been partial to Southern fried R&R. The Allmans, Skynyrd, Dr. John, I could go on and on. Some kind of down-hominess comes through from a southern band or performer that just can't be duplicated. So when I stumbled upon a review of SRO from Rolling Stone, and saw its four-star rating and its double-CD-full of praise for Lynyrd Skynyrd, especially the relationship between Ronnie Van Zandt and Neil Young, well, I had to give it a listen.

It's a powerful album. It has a hard edge to it that I would like to think that Ronnie and the gang would likewise possess had not that 1977 plane crash killed the original Skynyrd.

It took me a while to take a chance on another Truckers offering: Brighter than Creation's Dark. This album is equally listenable, with some sweet mellow tunes thrown into the hard-driving mix. This includes the gorgeous vocals of Shonna Tucker, a bass player who has joined up since 2001's SRO. She is also a songwriter. The group is lucky to have picked up her talent.

I now own all of the Trucker's albums, including a bootleg called Acoustic and Otherwise. I haven't obtained their latest, The Big To Do, but intend to do so soon. If you like southern fried rock, give the Truckers a try. That goes for you old goats my age, especially.

The second pleasant musical discovery I recently made was Lucinda Williams.

Continue reading "Recent Pleasant Musical Discoveries" »

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In 2008, I made a modest amount of money working for my employer. Well above the average mean income for my area, as befits my IT skills, but still quite modest when compared with other white-collar jobs.

I make some money on the side via my websites, and it's reported to the IRS.

In addition, my wife makes some money in her endeavors, again, reported.

I'm in the process of paying off a $4,000 tax debt.

That's why I get hacked off when I read about the state of Washington, and its collectively planting its figurative lips all over Microsoft's collective Ballmer, excuse me, posterior.

Read the depressing details here, if you dare.

Basically, M$ is getting unconditional amnesty from the financially strapped state of Washington for past tax evasion. We're talking OVER A BILLION DOLLARS.

Corporate crooks have long existed in American business. Meet the most prominent one today.

Are those who bypass the RIAA-affiliated record companies cold-hearted thieves? Well, obviously, the RIAA would like you to think so. And they're willing to sue as many grandmothers or eight-year-old little girls as it takes to convince you of that.

I'm setting a precedent for this piece: The RIAA needs to go away. If you don't agree, you might as well stop and find something else to read.

With that said, I really don't think that everyone who downloads music in whatever fashion that bypasses the record companies refuses to consider the idea of giving credit where credit is due. I believe that if artists made it easy for fans to donate to them, the money would roll in, probably more than would ever be received from their record companies.

This is a business arrangement I'm talking about here, not a charity movement. The Rolling Stones are rich beyond imagination, that doesn't mean that fans of, say, 5x12 wouldn't be willing to toss a few bucks or Euros their way because of the enjoyment that the venerable work continues to provide.

The problem is that there is no way to do that, short of mailing a check made out to Mick Jagger to what you hope is his home address. Their record company would never allow it. And the RIAA, of which their record company is an affiliate, would never, ever, EVER allow it.

Fans, it's time to change the business model.

Continue reading "Compensating Musicians and Record Companies: a New Business Model" »

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Well, at presstime, another woman has accused Michael Irvin of rape.

Irvin has the following incidents on his record:

• March 1996: cocaine possession at a hotel party celebrating his 30th birthday. Irvin showing up to court in a full-length mink coat. He pled no contest to the charges and was sentenced to community service, ordered to pay a $10,000 fine, and put on 4-years probation. My favorite part of the whole disgusting mess: Irvin asking an arresting cop "Do you know who I am?"


• 1998: Irvin allegedly inflicted a two-inch cut in the neck of Dallas guard Everett McIver. McIver did not press charges, and rumors swirled that Irvin brokered a six-figure settlement with McIver to drop the matter. Accounts of this incident after the alleged settlement became difficult to find or research in the local Dallas press.
  


• 2000: Irvin was arrested on drug possession charges.In this case, Irvin was in a Dallas apartment with an unrelated woman. Police entered the apartment forcibly and found drugs. Irvin and the female were placed under arrest, though charges against Irvin were later dropped.

Continue reading "Michael Irvin and the Art of Slime" »

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I just started a new website, I Hate the Home Team!, a forum for folks to gripe about having relocated somewhere far away from their beloved favorite teams, and who are now forced to deal with local media and fans of teams which they likely don't care about.

Anyhoo, I decided to give SMF (Simple Machines Forum) a try. The open-source product is absolutely amazing! I recommend anyone out there starting/running a forum to give them a try.

Not only does it install painlessly (with shell access, anyway, my preferred way of doing business), but the platform is absolutely loaded with add-on modules written by the community.

There are hundreds of themes to choose from. I settled on the Black Phoenix look, simply because I didn't have hours to peruse every example. I was looking for a lean, mean, clean look, and Black Phoenix worked perfectly.

It's in the modules themselves where SMF shines like a beacon.

Continue reading "GREAT Forum Software!" »

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When I was eighteen years old, Rolling Stone magazine and myself began a relationship that continues today. Though I gave up the extreme left-wing articles several years ago, I continue to hit their website to get the only truly unbiased opinions of what music is good or otherwise.

Now Rolling Stone album reviews aren't perfect. I remember they trashed ABBA pretty hard during the late 70's, and I've come to appreciate the tight harmonies and flawless engineering of their stuff in my more mellow years. And so has, for that matter, Rolling Stone, being kinder to them in retrospective reviews than they were at the time.

But the fact is that when RS gives out an infrequent five-star review, it's because the artist has earned it, producing a great work that transcends musical genre. Thus, a rock and roll fan can listen to Bill Monroe's Bean Blossom and know that he was hearing the best bluegrass music that is out there. And that's how my own musical appreciation eventually spread out to include music other than that produced by loudly amplified electric guitar.

However, five stars is the highest honor that can be bequeathed upon an album by the Powers that Be over at RS. So, the question arises: what can you do when a master has accumulated a lifetime of musical accomplishments that all rate five stars? How do you discern the greatest of the great?

Continue reading "The Problem With Being a Long-Lived Musical Genius" »

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I love Ubuntu. It's been my choice for a desktop Linux for three years.

But I just veered down a side road. it's still Ubuntu under the hood, but the distro is actually Linux Mint.

Mint is basically Ubuntu with all proprietary codecs thrown in. It also comes with its own menu manager. It's released a month or so after Ubuntu.

I recently upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10, and something went screwy. I was getting X crashes, anywhere from one a week to several a day. I've successfully upgraded in the past, but this was a bad one. So I was going to have to rebuild.

I decided to give Mint a shot. I'd heard good things about it. I wasn't disappointed.

Continue reading "Linux With a Minty Flavor" »

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This is a tale of two golfers who decided to suspend their play.

The first one found out that his wife of thirteen years had been diagnosed with breast cancer. The golfer immediately decided that golf was a secondary pastime, pushed far to the rear by the more immediate concern for his lady's health. So the first one made an announcement that he would be taking a break from the Tour, to be by his wife's side as she began aggressive treatment to wipe out the dreaded disease.

His fellow golfers joined in on the cause. His good friend John Daly wore a pink pair of pants during a tournament. ALL golfers at the following week's tournament wore pink, in support of the golfer, his wife, and his family.

Two months after his announcement of a hiatus, the world rejoiced when the golfer revealed that his wife's cancer had been contained. He would be rejoining the Tour. In September, two months later, the first golfer, four strokes back on Sunday morning, would go on to defeat the second golfer at the Tour Championship. The first golfer would epitomize the well-loved and and admired family man and good sport, and would earn the admiration of untold millions.

That brings us to the second golfer to take time off from the Tour.

Continue reading "Two Golfers Take Time Off" »

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At my workplace, I've managed to integrate Linux and Active Directory so that I can use AD groups to control access to intranet sites. That was quite a breakthrough, allowing me to move my MySQL/PHP-driven apps onto Linux, where they feel most at home.

I'm going to be learning asp and asp.net web development, so I built a Server 2008 machine this week where all of my new development will be living.

I've managed 2000 and 2003 Server installs, so I know how things work. But let me say this: If you think Vista was an abortion, it's NOTHING compared to the piece of crap that is Windows 2008 Server.

Basically, an admin is treated like an idiot. Things like managing services now involve at least two more mouse-clicks. I'm behind a strong firewall, I don't need Windows Firewall. But guess what? You CAN'T turn on Terminal Services unless Windows Firewall is running!

Here's what it amounts to: our OS is so inherently unsecure that we are going to forbid you to make a connection to it unless our firewall is on. What rubbish.

Continue reading "Oh My Dear Lord, What's Happened to Windows Server?" »

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Wow, what an amazing distribution I just stumbled on to. It's called Titan Lev, and is distributed by http://www.affordy.com/. It's not free, but you get a bunch of test drives from the iso. And if you decide it's for you, it's a measly 25 bucks. It's also Ubuntu-based.

Basically, these folks have duplicated the Windows environment for those wanting to try something else, but who have gotten used to the MS way of running your computer.

I'll have more to say after I actually run the desktop, but it looks extremely impressive. They're based in Israel (so a nice "up yours" to Al Qaeda fans by using it), and I hope that they've covered their tracks legally. After all, they actually include Internet Explorer in the distro.

Anyhoo, check it out.

I run a Windows XP virtual machine (VMWare) that was living on a three-year-old Dell 2950 server with dual Xeons, six gigs of RAM, and Windows Server 2003.

I say WAS.

That machine was a dog. It was as slow as a GX1 with a 350 MHz processor that I once had. It was driving me nuts to see its processor pegged at 100% for a full minute every time I switched websites in Dreamweaver. It has a gig of fully-VMWare-dedicated RAM, BTW.

The server, FWIW, runs ONLY VMWare. No other applications at all, except for McAfee in the background and periodically scanning.

And VMWare is running a total of TWO machines. Mine, and a utility machine running scheduled Access queries to keep databases of various flavors updated through the magic of linked tables.

So I suggested reformatting it and installing CentOS5, along with the Linux flavor of VMWare.

Good idea, said the powers that be, but we'll need to temporarily move those machines over to a new home. No prob, said I, I have a two-year old Dell GX620 with dual core Intel power and three gigs of RAM just sittin' around. I'll stick CentOS on there and make sure it and VMWare get along.

Continue reading "Running Windows Server? I Admire Your Patience!" »

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I love Ubuntu. However, I'm not nuts about the six month rewrites.

So, I decided to try a couple of less-often-rewritten distros on a Dell GX 755.

A month later, I'm back to Ubuntu. Here's why:

Continue reading "Ubuntu. It Just Works." »

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VMWare introduced me to the concept of running machines virtually, instead of physically.

"Interesting concept" I thought in 2005, when I first learned about it. "But I'm not sure how it would benefit me."

Well, let's just say that my life has changed a lot since then, and so have my views of virtualization. I run a Linux desktop, with Windows in the virtual world for those times when I MUST use it. Example: my employer's VPN will run in Windows only. My obscure Epson all-in-one is unsupported by sane.

Thus, I became an ardent VMWare fan. However, with the release of Ubuntu 9.04, I lost the ability to hook up USB devices.

I posted this fix for 8.10, but no amount of coaxing could persuade it to work with Jaunty.

Enter Sun's VirtualBox.

Continue reading "Thanks, VMWare, But It's Time to Move On" »

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Update: HSBC claims that I didn't request my credit balance to be mailed to me on 6/24/2009, the day I closed this account. In other words, they claim that I closed my account and, in essence, told them to keep the money. It will now take up to 21 days. During this time, they deducted 19 dollars from my balance for what they claim is accrued interest. The saga goes on, and if you are doing business with these people, I strongly suggest you consider dropping them and giving someone your trade who knows how to treat customers.

I've been too busy posting lots of fossil pics over at my new site, What Is This Fossil?, to spend much time updating this blog.

So, it's time for a nice gripe-fest.

Why have so many companies forgotten what customer service is? Why do they tie their employees' hands so that they can't help their customers even if they want to?

Specifically, I'm talking about HSBC bank, their credit card program in particular.

We lost about 1500 bucks in monthly income last year, and it made things financially dicey. I did a refi on my house to stop the bleeding, and we're back on track now, I'm happy to say.

But there was a time in January when I made an online payment to HSBC, and unfortunately, the direct payment from my bank account bounced. They had to run it through a second time.

Jump ahead six months. The refi is closed, a cashier's check is mailed to HSBC. I log into their site and track its progress. Finally, credit is given. However, my card is unable to be used.

So, I call the 800 number and finally get a rep online. It's some dude from way overseas who obviously has no decision-making power, so I ask for his boss.

She gets on and explains that they have a"policy" of waiting five business days after posting payment in the case of someone who has had a payment returned.

I respect that, I said, but reminded her that payment was made in the form of a cashier's check.

Darn it to heck, she wished there was something she could do, but it's policy. She can't change it.

"Look" I said. One of two things is going to happen here. Either you're going to lift this hold, so that I can begin using this card for my corporation, or else this account will be canceled on the spot.

One minute later, HSBC and I had parted ways.

Bad move. I'll be making lots of purchases for my little corporation in my newborn favorable financial situation, and paying the card off monthly. Now, that privileged arrangement belongs to Capital One.

Oh well. At least HSBC can take comfort in the fact that their policies are apparently un-overrideable.

I gathered these rocks from the roadside on a quiet country lane. It was at the site of a cutout about 10' deep.

The rocks are brown in color, and very porous. They get very soft when saturated in water.

First, the one that got away. I found an exquisitely detailed trilobite rear end that literally crumbled when I split the rock open. Sadly (and stupidly), I didn't photograph it on the spot. It crumbled into nothingness when I attempted to trim the rock down a bit.

Live and learn, as they say.

Here are some pics of some fossils that I did manage to successfully extract:

A small brachiopod, but exquisitely detailed. The soft rock preserves extremely fine details, as you will learn by continuing.

Continue reading "Fossils from Soft Rock, Benton County, Arkansas, 6/2009" »

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This post will concentrate on finds that I discovered that cost me a pretty penny.

I mean, I'm in northwest Arkansas, I'm on a country road, a car passes every twenty minutes. No need to lock your door, right?

Apparently so. Some disgusting slimeball stole my iPod and my GPS. I gave the cops a description of your car, scum. Rest easy.

Anyhow, on a more positive note, I found some killer stuff. Here we go:

This is exactly the SECOND crinoid calyx I've ever found. The first one still lies in the wash in the woods on my Pea Ridge, Arkansas farm home I enjoyed when I was fourteen. It's in a slab that was too massive for a kid to mess with. It's just as well. I'm sure I would have misplaced it by now, as I did with a bunch of massive oysters I found in Austin, Texas construction sites as a kid.

Continue reading "Fossils from a Recent Escapade" »

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