April 2004 Archives

I meant to post this a while back. Christina and I were visiting my Mom out in the Valley. This moth flew in and was hanging out. It looked like something straight out of Silence of the Lambs.

April 24, 2004 In regards to: Beverly Hills Police Department Case #04-2575 To Whom it May Concern: On Saturday, April 24, 2004 at approximately 8:15pm my Fianc�e and I were rear ended by relatively new model silver Volkswagen Cabrio. The driver, a young Caucasian female proceeded to flee the scene of the accident at the corner of Wilshire and Maple after learning that my Fianc�e had sustained physical injuries. The Volkswagen that hit us incurred substantial damage to the front of the car; they will require extensive repairs, and most likely will need to be towed into a service facility. There should be no doubt that the vehicle had rear ended an SUV with a higher positioned bumper. ITEMS OF NOTE:

1. The accident occurred at the corner of Wilshire and Maple in Beverly Hills.
2. The vehicle that hit us and fled the scene appeared to be a relatively new model silver Volkswagen Cabrio.
3. The driver was a Caucasian female approximately five foot four inches (5�4�) tall, in her late teens early twenties.
4. The vehicle was leaking fluid, and given the quantity on the ground would probably not be able to drive far from the accident.

I am seeking help in locating and identifying the driver/owner of this silver Volkswagen Cabrio, your assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated and rewarded accordingly. Sincerely, Max Clark max@clarksys.com

After carrying my new laptop around for a day, working on it downstairs on the couch, and then of course bringing it upstairs to charge... I can't believe I was hauling that old box arround. Man I tell you, I picked it up to move it off of my desk and I was stunned by the weight. Something else that I discovered tonight on the couch... the X40 doesn't get hot. The Dell would get so hot it would burn your legs (and nobody want's to end up like this guy), and was very difficult to use for long periods of time as a result. If you can't tell, I've been very impressed by this little box. Now all I need to do is find a laptop bag that fits it properly.

Every now and then I find something that really makes me geek out. Newsgator is one of those applications.

NewsGator is a “news aggregator” that runs in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you to subscribe to various syndicated news feeds (such as weblogs, news sites, etc.) and have news from these sites be delivered right into your Outlook folders. There are thousands of sites which syndicate their content in RSS format, and many more being added every day. You can even read NNTP newsgroups with NewsGator.

I have been searching for a good RSS news agregator for quite some time now. I have been using FeedDemon for a while now, and it is a great application, and I will probably continue to use it. But considering that I spend most of my day in Outlook to begin with, having an integrated tool with Oulook that gives me RSS feeds is absolutely perfect for me. Time will tell how much I like it, but so far, I’m impressed.

I learn something new every day. I've been using computers for over a decade, and not a day goes by that I don't learn something new about something I knew a lot about. Vixie cron's @reboot (Jeremy Zawodny's blog)

While looking at the manual page for the crontab file format, I discovered a chunk that I'd never seen before: Instead of the first five fields, one of eight special strings may appear:

    string         meaning
    ------         -------
    @reboot        Run once, at startup.
    @yearly        Run once a year, "0 0 1 1 *".
    @annually      (same as @yearly)
    @monthly       Run once a month, "0 0 1 * *".
    @weekly        Run once a week, "0 0 * * 0".
    @daily         Run once a day, "0 0 * * *".
    @midnight      (same as @daily)
    @hourly        Run once an hour, "0 * * * *".

Hmm. @reboot. Isn't that handy. There's an easy way to give users the ability to run something at boot time without root access.

See: Stern belongs on radio just as much as Rush

"I find it strange that so many Americans describe themselves as patriotic when their values are anti-democratic and totalitarian. We are all familiar with Voltaire's great cry: ''I may disagree with what you say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.'' Ideas like his helped form the emerging American republic. Today, the Federal Communications Commission operates under an alternative slogan: ''Since a minority that is very important to this administration disagrees with what you say, shut up.''"

“640K ought to be enough for anybody.” Bill Gates

Most people involved with technology knows this famous quote from Bill Gates. With TeraByte disk arrays selling for under $10,000 dollars it’s always amazes me how fast technology evolves. I can vividly remember installing my first 1.02GB hard drive. It was enormous, I couldn’t imagine ever filling it up.

Now as I sit here transfering files onto my new laptop (12GB in my documents folder geez) I realized that I have over 2GB in mail archive. It is time to clean house.

My new laptop was delivered today. It is a little smaller, and definately a lot lighter than I expected. The only odd thing is the laptop bag. I mistakenly ordered a laptop bag that I thought would fit correctly, when I opened up that box it is huge, huge I tell you. Something about having a bag that is heavier than the laptop, not to mention 7" longer that just doesn't go over well. I've been scouring the Internet looking for a better bag, and so far the 12" powerbook laptop case (a.k.a. The Profile) by Brenthaven looks to be my best bet. Initial impressions:

• It's light, really, really light.
• The screen resolution is amazing. It's a night and day difference next to my old Dell 4150.
• The system feels snappy. I was originally concerned with the 1.2GHz processor speed and what the system would be like to use, I have zero complaints.
• Some of the keyboard placement will take some getting used to. I use the CTRL key alot, and IBM has an opposite layout with the FN and CTRL keys.
• The nipple pointer will take some getting used to.

Now I just have to go through and install all of my software, and migrate my profiles over and I should be good to go. Apple definately has a leg up with that, but what can you say. I'm still an IBM guy.

1. Include a copy of your resume. Before you click the send button, make sure that you attached your resume first.
2. Use spell check. Not only should you use spell check, you should also read your message and resume aloud to yourself, and someone you know should read it to make sure you didn't miss anything. Misspelling a word on the first line of your cover letter doesn't go over well.
3. When applying to a Technical job don't list every protocol on the planet in your list of experience. Proudly displaying DES, 3DES, AES, Blowfish might impress a non technical screener, but when it reaches a technical person for review the assumption will be that you don't know what you are doing so you are padding your resume.
4. If you are responding to a job post in a different city that is not in driving distance from where you live, make sure you note this and explain why you are looking for an out of town job. Otherwise if you are applying for a job in Los Angeles and you live in Nebraska your resume is going to be put in a pile you don't want to be in.
5. If the job posting includes specific salary/compensation and you require double, don't respond. It obviously isn't the right place for you.

So I'm browsing through iTunes (see: iTunes Rocks) when it suddenly dawns on me. The perfect partnership idea, business development epiphany, money maker galore.... iTunes and Ticketmaster should be integrated with each other. Think about it, you are browsing through iTunes, searching for your favorite artists when you see that they are playing soon in your city. Or vice-versa, you are searching for concert tickets for your favorite artists and you get a list of all of their albums/songs for you to buy. Let's see how long it takes before someone picks up on this little brainstorm of mine.

Christina's car was broken in to tonight while she was at the gym. The only thing the perp took was her purse of course. We've been scrambling to cancel all of the bank/credit cards that she was carrying, but of course identity theft will be a big concern for the two of us. Tomorrow we are going to the bank to change the actual account numbers on our checking and savings accounts so that someone can't try to transfer money around. Outside of the violation, the huge inconvenience of changing all of the cards, the worries of identity theft, it's the personal items we all carry on a daily basis that come as the biggest loss. In Christina's case it was her new purse that I gave her for Christmas (easy to replace thankfully), her sunglasses and glasses both with prescription lenses, and the biggest loss... the sample of her wedding dress that she has been carrying around since September. I think it will take a couple of days for the full effect of this to sink in. We are just trying to react as quickly as possible to prevent more damage.

See: http://www.kidofspeed.com/

"My name is Elena... [snip] I travel a lot and one of my favorite destinations leads North from Kiev, towards so called Chernobyl "dead zone", which is 130kms from my home. Why my favorite? Because one can take long rides there on empty roads. The people there all left and nature is blooming. There are beautiful woods and lakes."

This is both a fascinating and somber look at the effects of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown.

gratuity A favor or gift, usually in the form of money, given in return for service.

The other day Christina and I were out to lunch at a cute little cafe. When the check came I was floored to see that they had added a 20% gratuity to the bill. I can understand when you are hosting a party for dozens of people to require a tip as part of the service fee, but a $35.00 dollar meal for two people, give me a break.

A tip is supposed to be a bonus for exceptional service, not an expected absolute for doing your job. If your job that you are being paid to do is to serve me a meal, why should I pay you extra for that? Especially if you sucked. When did it just become a given that you have to tip?

What is up with the Music Industry? (See: Wired News: Speaking of Music Piracy ....)

For months, digital-music services have been touting albums for $9.99 to entice more people to buy online. But Apple's iTunes Music Store has been charging $16.99 for Fly or Die, while Napster sells the 12-song collection for $13.99. Both prices are higher than the $13.49 that Amazon.com charges for the CD itself. The same pricing shifts are showing up on albums by a growing slate of artists, from Shakira to Bob Dylan.

The music industry/RIAA have been complaining for years now about piracy. People illegally downloading music because they don't want to pay a gouged price for a CD everyone knows costs less than a dollar to make. So now we have popular online music stores that offer decent prices and are gaining traction in the market and what's the first thing that the record companies want to do? Jack up prices! I mean please, get a clue people!

So I finally broke down a bought a new laptop. A nice shinny new, lightweight, long batterylife laptop... an IBM ThinkPad X40. This was not an easy process for me. The temptation to buy an Apple was huge and I really like OS X. The reality for me is that I need a Windows computer that I can carry with me easily from site to site. My current Dell 4150 has been a great computer and will serve Christina well. It is simply to heavy (over 6 pounds with two batteries), and the battery life is just to short for what I need. A lot of people ask how I will handle using a computer with a 12.1" screen; a) I've had one in the past, it really isn't bad at all, b) I have a docking station at my house with a 19" LCD, keyboard and mouse. So having something as light as possible with as much battery life as possible is the most important thing and makes this laptop absolutely perfect. For those interested, read on for the specs (Check out the ThinkPad X40 Technical Doc from IBM):

As I was driving into work this morning I was listening to Dr. Condoleezza Rice's testimony to the Independent Commision's investigation into the pre September 11th terrorist attacks. What really struck me is how isolated I feel in California from events that are occuring in the country. I don't know if it's because the distance really drives the seperation, or if it's a lack of news interest in the day to day of our government, or if it's really just because American's just don't care. I think it's mostly that the population just doesn't care. It's imbarrassing to say but it's the truth. My barber who immigrated from Bosina after the conflict knows more about what is going on with this country than most people that I know. It's just sad.

HOWTO Remove Lilo/Grub from your computer when you have been dual booting Windows XP and Linux and decided to remove linux and totally screwed up the hard drive so the system wouldn't boot. Yep that's what I did, I had linux partitions on my laptop, needed to reclaim the space for Windows, so I opened up Partition Magic and deleted the old partitions and extended the Windows partition. Only there was a minor problem... Prior to Windows XP there was a dos command fdisk to manipulate the partitions on the drive. Fdisk had an undocumented feature fdisk /mbr that would wipe the old master boot record from the drive and install a new one that would boot the Windows C:\ drive. Okay so Windows XP doesn't have fdisk, so you can always boot from an old dos floppy and run fdisk. Sorry no floppy drive with this laptop, didn't come with it, didn't spend the extra $100 bucks for it. So this leaves me with the point of this entry. There is a great web site Bart's CD-Rom Boot Disk where you can download the software necessary to burn a boot disk. There are plenty of images that do different things. Once I burned a boot disk I booted the system from the cdrom and ran my trusty fdisk /mbr.

Postgresql supports a data type "inet". Inet allows you to insert ip addresses into the table, and then later run operations against the host/network ranges. A while back I accidentally created a schema using the inet data type, today I was able to search for transactions based on a subnet mask (yes it's very cool).

select to_char(date, 'YYYY-MM-DD') as date, round(sum(size)/2/1073741824,3) as size, account, appuid, clientip from proftpd where method = 'RETR' and to_char(date, 'YYYY-MM') = '2004-03' and clientip << inet '10.1.0.160/28' group by to_char(date, 'YYYY-MM-DD'), account, appuid, clientip;

That "clientip << inet '10.1.0.160/28'" section is key. It says where clientip is in the 10.1.0.160/28 subnet or has a 10.1.0.160-10.1.0.175 ip address.