June 2005 Archives

This is just flithy (no pun intended). See: Peeping Tom Pulled From Outhouse Tank - Yahoo! News

ALBANY, N.H. - A 45-year-old man was arrested after a teenage girl found him staring at her from below an outhouse seat, police said. Police said they pulled Gary Moody, from Gardiner, Maine, from the waste tank under a log cabin outhouse on Monday.

While trying to get my Asterisk server to receive inbound calls from my sip provider I keep getting these error messages on the Asterisk console:

Jun 25 04:09:47 NOTICE[27464]: chan_sip.c:7288 handle_request: Failed to authenticate user "3103568026" ;tag=as1921c1ac

I've published my solution to this problem here: Handle request: Failed to authenticate user

Home sales continue to soar, more and more people are getting concerned with "questionable" loans. Existing Home Sales 2nd Highest in History - Yahoo! News

Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, while discounting the possibility of a national housing bubble, has talked of "froth" in local markets that have seen a sizable run-up in prices over the past year. He has also expressed concerns that home buyers are using types of mortgages that allow them to purchase more expensive homes with less of a downpayment, leaving them vulnerable if prices do fall sharply. David Lereah, chief economist of the Realtors group, said he too was concerned about the reliance on interest-only mortgages and other types of mortgages that are offered with low down payments. Both types of loans would leave borrowers vulnerable if home prices started to slide in areas where price increases have been the greatest.

See: Wired News: Live, Jobs Tells Stanford Grads

Steve Jobs told Stanford University graduates Sunday that dropping out of college was one of the best decisions he ever made because it forced him to be innovative -- even when it came to finding enough money for dinner.

Interesting advice from one of the richest people on the planet.

At the Apple developer conference Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be switching from the PowerPC processor to Intel. This has no doubt left a few people to scratch their heads and wonder what is really going on. Bob Cringely has an interesting theory... that Intel is purchasing Apple. See: I, Cringely - Going for Broke

Question 4: Why announce this chip swap a year before it will even begin for customers? This is the biggest question of all, suggesting Steve Jobs has completely forgotten about Adam Osborne. For those who don't remember him, Osborne was the charismatic founder of Osborne Computer, makers of the world's first luggable computer, the Osborne 1. The company failed in spectacular fashion when Adam pre-announced his next model, the Osborne Executive, several months before it would actually ship. People who would have bought Osborne 1s decided to wait for the Executive, which cost only $200 more and was twice the computer. Osborne sales crashed and the company folded. So why would Steve Jobs -- who knew Adam Osborne and even shared a hot tub with him (Steve's longtime girlfriend back in the day worked as an engineer for Osborne) -- pre-announce this chip change that undercuts not only his present product line but most of the machines he'll be introducing in the next 12 to 18 months? Is the guy really going to stand up at some future MacWorld and tout a new Mac as being the world's most advanced obsolete computer?

I discovered that I needed to upgrade my perl installation on my FreeBSD boxes from 5.6.2 to 5.8.2 for an application that I was interested in running. However there are two issues with this:

1. Perl 5.6 is in ports as lang/perl and Perl 5.8 is lang/perl5.8, so a portupgrade on perl would not upgrade to the 5.8 version of perl.
2. I've installed a ton of perl modules from the ports tree as well. I need to make sure that after upgrading to Perl 5.8 that these modules will still work.

The solution...

# portupgrade -o lang/perl58 perl && use.perl port && portupgrade -f `pkg_info -Rq perl\*`

This instructs portupgrade to upgrade lang/perl to lang/perl5.8, after that is completed the system will be updated to the new installation of perl with the use.perl port, and finally any port that requires perl will be upgraded and reinstalled.

As I was browsing through Apple's iTunes site the other day, it dawned on me that Apple and Ticketmaster should do a deal together. Think about it... Apple already knows what music you like, what artists you have purchased music from and where you are located. Why not get an alert when your band is going to be in town? What about a purchase ticket button next to the purchase song button? What I think would be really interesting is the next generation services and integration that they could then start offering. Purchased music by artist A, well other people purchased artist B and B is going to be in town soon. Or artist A is currently on tour with all these other bands, you should purchase their music. Hmmm.... I think there is potential here.