Sushi night!! 

Still Alive! (contrary to rumor)

Although the almost criminal level of neglect my blog has been subjected to lately might suggest otherwise, I am actually still alive and thriving like a weed. For the last six weeks I've been spending my energy and time on physics, o-chem, and various other academic and sometimes less academic interests. Finally break week is here, but don't let the "break" part fool you. It is really just an opportunity to finish homework for those disciplined enough to do it. So far I haven't been one of those. I've spent the week trying to get caught up on some projects at work during the day and cooking wonderful meals with some friends at night. Monday we had salmon with Dijon sauce and noodles, on Tuesday we made some awesome chicken curry with rice, and on Wednesday we had sushi and miso soup. The curry cooking session was interrupted by a trip to pick up Reuter's kitten which is now staying as a guest and harassing the other cats to no end. (Yes, I'm kitten sitten.)
The "break" week has provided me with enough time to run across some incredible articles however:

1. Nerve cells from a rat have been cultured in a dish, and through interactions with tiny electrodes implanted in the dish, have learned to fly a computer simulated airplane. Basically the nerve cells formed a small network, and became intelligent. Amazing. With a few million more, maybe they could do my o-chem for me?

2. Apparently testosterone/estrogen levels in the womb are closely linked to the length of the index and ring fingers in humans. Using this knowledge, Dr. Mark Brosnan at the University of Bath has determined that men involved with hard-sciences tend to have higher estrogen levels than average, and women involved in social sciences have higher testosterone levels than normal. So, whip out your rulers folks, and participate in the study. Depending on how I measure, I get between 6.6% and 5.1% difference, my brother is around 1.5% difference, no wonder he's always been better at spacial reasoning then me! According to the researcher:
"As the levels of testosterone decrease in males, performance upon visual-spatial measures increase whereas comparable cyclical declines in female testosterone result in decreased performance upon visual spatial measures (Moffat and Hampson, 1996; see also Sanders et al., 2002). Thus those with the greatest visualization skills will be females with the lower male-typical digit ratio (0.98) and males with the higher female-typical digit ratio (1.0)." So, males with low testosterone, and females with high testosterone should be especially proficient at math-like subjects.
Anyway, record your scores below....

3. This article does a nice job of debunking the "Windows is more secure than Linux" myth.

4. If you are horribly allergic to cats, but have always wanted one, genetic engineering might just save the day (hope you brought your checkbook though...).

5. And finally, a major new discovery in Indonesia shows that there were once 3' tall human-like creatures running around making tools, starting fires, and hunting pygmy elephants. Apparently there are lots of legends about these creatures to this day, so maybe they aren't quite extinct? And people tell me not to worry about Yeti....

Homework? Cripes! Lets make some crepes

Yesterday Tshering came over and taught me the fine art of crepe making. They are actually quite easy; eggs + flour + milk + sugar, stir them until they are well mixed, and go heavy on the milk. Then pour a very thin layer on a hot oiled pan. Turn them after a bit so they don't burn. They sort of act like a tortilla shell when finished, you can wrap meat in them, and probably all sorts of other things. We had jelly on ours. Here Tshering demonstrates proper crepe flipping technique.

Gmail File System (for windows this time)

An enterprising fellow by the name of Bjarke Viksoe has written an application which allows one to use their gmail account as an internet harddrive! There are some limitations, like 10 meg max file size, but, it is pretty cool none the less! Here is a page that talks about it.

Nice

"I'm nice by nature, he's nice by nuture"
-Tshering S.

Close encounters with the third kind

Well, life has been an interesting endeavor in balancing huge quantities of work (both school and of the employment variety), limited sleep, and a little social interaction these last few weeks. It is fun and challenging, but good lord, O-Chem is going to kill me.
Yesterday my frantic schedule was broken by an unwelcome intruder. I was home for a quick bite of lunch before physics, and just before I left, I noticed that water was welling up from the drains in the downstairs bathroom. These were not the waters of heaven however, they had a look and smell about them which is best left to your imagination. Needless to say, I skipped physics. After placing a call to the Caldwell water dept (thanks to Beth for clear thought in a moment of crises), and a few hours of bailing furiously (more thanks to Beth for hauling buckets), my basement was mostly saved from flooding. A battery backup got a little damp (but seems to be working), and a small section of carpet also got soaked. I gave everything involved a good dose of clorox water however, so I think all of the bacteria have probably lost membrane potential by now. My parents (bless their hearts) came out the same night with a carpet cleaner, and things are pretty much back to normal. The neighbors got hit much worse. They just moved in a few months ago, and have been working to finish their basement since then. Apparently they had just gotten sheetrock, carpet, etc finished. Their basement must be a few inches deeper because they had about 5 or 6 inches of water sitting in it all day. The disaster cleanup people were there pumping water out until late in the night.
According to the water-guy, the blockage was caused by massive grease dumping somewhere in my neighborhood. Apparently the pipe had been cleaned just 6 months earlier, and usually only needs cleaned once every two years. The school across the street is a major suspect of course. So, the moral of the story is DON'T DUMP GREASE DOWN THE DRAIN!

New Firefox!

Well, almost.. Firefox 1.0 Preview Release is out! It is still not the fully polished version 1.0 that will be along shortly, but, it is getting awfully close. Apparently the install should go pretty smoothly, although one has to disable any extensions from older versions before installing it, as they will cause trouble. I have been running the nightly builds for a while, and I can safely say that the new version has a lot of cool features and seems to start up quicker and run better. Never the less, with a preview release one should expect some odd behavior on occasion.

Budah has very nice markings, and big yellow eyes. 

I have never really posted about the two semi-wild animals that live in my house, so here they are, all 25 pounds of em. The black one with green eyes is Gata, she is older and the more intelligent of the two. You can see the "oh, why is he so dumb look" she dirrects at the spotted one who is named Budah (but goes by Dork for short). His name is Budah because he likes to have his belly rubbed, so I figured it was a good way to get some luck out of the bargain. He follows me around the house like a puppy and is more teddy-bear than cat. 

Getting Closer....

Linux servers I got two!
One's called Black
And one's called Blue! 

Scared Spitless

Project Censored has released their top 25 list. If these don't scare you spitless (and keep you from voting for Bush) there is something wrong with you. So where was this "home of the free" place again?

Mutton Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich

I was slicing a tomato the other day for a sandwich, and was reminded that “true love is the greatest thing in the world, except a nice MLT --- mutton, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, when the mutton is nice and lean, and the tomato is ripe.” As I pondered the truthfulness of this sentiment, I was suddenly struck with a horrible doubt about the basic stability of the plot in The Princess Bride. You see, up until the point where Westley says that true love is what he has in this world that is worth living for, I'm not sure that Inigo could have known or even had an inkling about his connection to Buttercup. Yet, when Fezzik and Inigo hear the scream while looking for The Man in Black, Inigo instantly concludes that it must have come from him.

Inigo: “Do you hear that Fezzik? That is the sound of ultimate suffering. My heart made that sound when the six-fingered man killed my father. The Man in Black makes it now.”

Fezzik: “How do you know?”

Inigo: “His true love is marrying another tomorrow, so who else has cause for Ultimate Suffering?”

Previous to this, Inigo was a drunkard (and probably can't remember much) while Fezzik was unemployed in Greenland. How either of them could know of the relationship between Buttercup and Westley is beyond me. It is possible that in a moment of clarity Inigo reasoned that Westley would only have chased them if he loved Buttercup, but it seems to me that kidnap and ransom would be a more obvious motive for a pirate. Of course, Inigo somehow also knows that Vizzini is dead, so maybe he has a gift for clairvoyance. I always imagined that this discrepancy could be easily explained by Fezzik coming upon Vizzini's dead body after sleeping well and dreaming of large women, but knowledge of Westley and Buttercup's true love would be a bit more difficult to come upon.

Perhaps some Princess Bridge scholar can straighten this out for me? Until then, I'll look for some mutton and lettuce so that I can settle my first question once and for all.

Bush's Acceptance Speech

I had an insight while watching Mr. Bush's acceptance speech the other night. I believe I have made an egregious error in the way I judged him previously. I have always held him up to the same sort of standard I would hold any president. A standard which is heavily weighted towards rational thought, facts, logistics, and rooted in reason. Bush is not this sort of leader at all. He is a religious leader, plain and simple. He is providing all of the mythology and religious fervor that have become so absent in our cynical materialistic society. In the eyes of his followers, he is like a prophet of old, or perhaps even Christ himself, sent among us here in these last days to lead his righteous peoples, against the wicked. He has come to cleanse the world of evil with a flaming sword, and to give us victory and a new world of peace and righteousness; one where he rules with the iron fist of a dictator of God.

The scary thing is that his followers seem to really think this way. In his speech he told everyone that he would increase spending for education, make sure that everyone had medical insurance, and continue the aggressive fight against terrorists. Meanwhile he has also promised to cut deficit spending in half. Everyone cheered, but as far as I can see, the numbers just don't add up. The only way to believe this nonsense is to see Bush as a miracle worker, and we are not talking conjurer's tricks with a few loaves of bread, and a couple fish here. We are talking major economic wizardry on a scale that makes Enron look like a child playing with pebbles. The reality is that all of these promises are empty. He talks big, but just like the tax cut he gave the top 1% of the nation (I believe he calls these people his base), his policies do not help the people who need it most, the bottom 99%. Unfortunately, and probably through no fault of their own, the ignorant hear and believe his words, feel a rush of religious fervor at the wholesome, heart felt sincerity he puts in his voice and follow him like the children of Hamelin. Despite the facts that terrorism was at a 21 year high in 2003, the economy is limping along like a lame horse, health insurance is a rare luxury, the blood of the nation's youth is being poured out in the desert, and God is punishing Florida for letting him steal their votes, it looks like Bush might be our next president. The wolves guarding the sheep I guess. How convenient for them.

So, what did the acceptance speech teach me? Well, a better understanding of how Bush plays the game for one, and a healthy fear of his potential power for another. I will continue to judge him by the numbers, but now I know that his words are what really counts to those who will vote for him.

Wooho!

Well, apparently my good luck is holding, or my bad luck hasn't gotten here yet, because despite pulling them out of a fried motherboard, it looks like my cpu/memory/cards are all a-okay! They are running along happily in their new home and seem to be zippy fast, and pretty stable (although I'll only know this after I leave the system running benchmark things all night).

The ASUS A7V600 motherboard I replaced the dead one with seems to be pretty snazzy. It has a bunch of nice features including BIOS recovery from CD in event of a power failure while flashing, and a nice temperature gauge with logging features. Despite this, it pales in comparison to the huge dual Opteron board we just got in at work (I'll try to post a photo eventually) that thing is AMAZING. It even screams at you if you forget to plug in one of it's hot-swappable power supplies.

Meanwhile, I've been pleasure-reading as fast as I can for the last few weeks, knowing that the storm which is school is coming, and that I might not be able to read for fun again for at least 4 or 5 years. I have been reading a number of books by Ursula K. Le Guin, very possibly the author who has influenced my life most strongly. I read her book, The Dispossessed, when I was very young. Either it fit with who I was already meant to be, or molded me into who I am. I don't know, but when I read it again this spring, it felt deeply rooted in my psyche. About mid-summer I read The Left Hand of Darkness, and over the last few weeks I have finished all but the most recent book of the EarthSea series. Unfortunately I don't have this final book which is horrible because in just 8 days I'll be taking O-chem, physics, TA'ing the bio-informatics part of a molecular bio class, hopefully working in Dr. Ayers's lab a bit, and trying to get 20+ hours of work per week. It has been my experience that school always looks harder going in that it does coming out. Hopefully this observation holds up (and my books get here in time!). At least I won't be bored....

This and That

In the "slip of a forked tongue" department, Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's security program manager admits to Wired that he uses Firefox. If you haven't switched yet, you should have your head examined.
And for all those conspiracy theorists out there (you know who you are). This guy has put together some pretty compelling evidence that NASA (or someone) is editing the photos from Mars! Amongst other things, they appear to be hiding active volcanoes, water, and life! I have to wonder if this isn't just some MAD Tennis gone horribly horribly wrong.

Gmail file system

This is a damn cool little hack... and of course it only works with Linux. A Squash Playing Buddist (his words, not mine) named Richard Jones has combined the power of Linux with the speed and storage space of Gmail to create the Gmail File System! This means that anywhere one has Linux and an internet connection, one can have a 1gig drive to store things on!
Some fool just sent a Gmail invite to my Gmail account, thinking I was someone named Steven apparently? I think I have a good idea of what to use it for now!
I also have 6 invites if anyone wants one.

The middle capacitor is normal, those on each side bulge. Notice how the light reflects differently from the bad ones because the angle is different due to bulge. 

The capacitor on the left (with the red arrow) is leaking. The capacitor on the right is bulging. Neither is good. 

The whole motherboard, each small red arrow is a blown or bulging capacitor. 

Singing the Blown Out Motherboard Blues

My computer has been a bit unsteady lately. Sometimes it refuses to turn on. Other times it will just reboot itself. Finally last night around midnight I decided to get to the bottom of the situation. I poked and prodded around for a while, unplugging one item or another, resetting the CMOS, etc. After a few hours of no luck, I decided that I better pull it out of the case entirely and make sure that I wasn't having some sort of problems with it grounding out. As I studied the motherboard I realized that many of the capacitors did not look right. On closer inspection I saw that some actually had ruptured and leaked their fluid! It was then that I remembered the big scandal that was going on a few years ago over capacitors. Apparently some fellow in Japan stole the formula to the electrolyte they use in capacitors, and took it to a company in Taiwan. He got the formula wrong however, and all of these cheap capacitors made using it are prone to blowing up. Becaues of this a good deal of the motherboards manufactured between 1999 and 2001 have these faulty capacitors. By this time it was about 4:30 A.M. so I went to bed.

Anyway, after reading dozens of reviews, I've decided to get an ASUS A7V600 for my next motherboard. Sure the KT600 chipset isn't quite so snazzy fast as the dual channel nForce2 Ultra 400, but the reviews say that this board is stable, and stable is what I want. Plus, with built in SATA RAID and Gigabit LAN, it is plenty cool. It also has NO ON BOARD FAN one of my major criterian in choosing a motherboard.

Check out the pics above to see the blown capacitors.

Cool medical things and Loathsome Lurkers

There were a couple of cool articles on MSN today, the first is about a man in Germany who had a new jaw grown and implanted successfully. It isn't known whether the bone-marrow stem cells injected into the titanium jaw-shaped form differentiated into the new bone, or if the cells were recruited from the tissue in his back where the form was implanted while it grew, but whatever the case it is fairly impressive that he has a jaw after nine years of not having one. I have to wonder if this isn't the first step towards someone getting their bones replaced with titanium reinforced ones, and then maybe some big claws built into the hands, super healing powers, a strange hair due, and a visit to the court house to change his name to Wolverine.
Apparently Bush is also nervous about this possibility, as he and his continue to block stem cell research in the US. Or maybe he is just really nice, and wants to give other countries the chance to become the next major centers for innovation in the medical arena? Of course, with Bush's new policies on foreign students, medicine might not be the only field he is offering up to other countries on a silver platter.
In contrast, the Bill Gates of medical & bio technology is emerging In California, and guess what, it is Bill Gates! Bill and a number of others are working to get a bond passed which would raise 3 billion to fund stem cell research in California (dodging Bush's fanatical ban of the research altogether, and causing much consternation in conservatives there and elsewhere). The list of supporters is long and recognizable. Many have medical conditions, or have children with them. Meanwhile, conservatives opposed to medical advance are bombing stem cell labs, apparently considering it their God given mission to kill those who try to regenerate organs and cure diabetes. I would like to express how incredibly messed up these people are, but I don't know if I could do it without a lot of expletives, and this IS a family blog after all.
Finally, on the home front, mere days after I opened a few ports on my firewall so that my little Linux server could go out and explore the vast wild land which is the Internet, some chumps have already decided to attack it. One in particular was persistent, trying to guess root's password about 200 times. Grabbing his IP from the logs, I looked him up on ARIN and much to my surprise it was the State of Utah Government! Initially I figured that it must have been that rat bastard Orin Hatch (may his sudo-religious soul forever burn in Hell Fire), but he just isn't techno savvy enough to do such a thing, and has no reason to know that I think some of his policies are the most loathsome ever oozed forth from a putrescent, cancerous sack of tissue such as he is. Instead I believe that the attacking system must have been broken into by some sort of Internet worm which was just blindly scanning the net looking for someone to try and spread itself to. Once it found me, it settled in to do it's dirty work. Probably the whole job was perpetrated by some no-account script kiddie who knows enough to download a rootkit and not much more. Mostly this is what one sees on the net. The true Dark Jedi Masters are generally smart enough to be focused on more sinister goals. My little servers and meager bandwidth would be of no interest to them (and a good thing too I might add, defending myself against a REAL attack could be trouble).

The weather has taken a turn for the cool lately. A little bite of autumn is in the air, it is colder outside than in, and bike ridding has been a much less sweaty affair. Isaac and I went out for a little fun in the Owyhee foothills near the Reynolds Creek drainage. Going up was hard painful work that required low gears and lots of “spinning.” Coming down was a lot of fun however, 40.1mph of it at one point! (well, a bit scary too, asphalt and gravel look kinda scary at this speed). This is Isaac's new pimp-mobil. It carries bicycles, AND gets the chicas! Amaziiing..... 

Conservatives lack conscience? And other stories

The New York Times has an interesting article about how the part of the brain responsible for controlling emotions and empathy (the amygdala) responds more strongly to images of violence in liberals than in conservatives. So maybe this is why the current administration doesn't seem to feel very bad about untold thousands of wounded, 11-40+ thousand civilian casualties, and 1000+ military personnel casualties in Iraq. Hopefully the Wizard of Oz will give Bush a heart soon... or wait, I mean a brain, oh what the hell give him both!
Oh, and if you don't want to fill in all the registration business for the article, check out BUG ME NOT for Firefox!
Also, this article reaffirmed my longtime distrust of hooking a camera up to my computer. Apparently there is a worm going around that allows a remote viewer to see whatever your digital video camera sees, whether you think it is active or not! More detail on the worm can be found here.

SCO gets the smack down

In true 1-2 knock out punch style, IBM delivered another major blow to SCO, filing a motion saying that SCO illegally copied and distributed 783,000 lines of code from IBM. The situation is that IBM contributed a bunch of code to the Linux project under the GPL. When SCO decided to claim ownership of Linux and charge licensing fees to anyone using it, they violated the GPL, and by their own actions made it so that they couldn't distribute Linux legally any more, and especially not IBM's part of it. Despite this, SCO kept distributing Linux, and put themselves into a very sticky situation. I have always figured that the powers that be withing SCO would try to litigate themselves into prosperity, and then sell the company before their house of cards came tumbling down. It looks like IBM is spraying that house of cards with lighter fluid, and plans to burn it to the ground before anyone can buy. Three cheers for IBM I say. Suddenly Linux has legal muscle. Bite this penguin, and it will bite back.

A little luck

So apparently God and all her minions were smiling upon me today. Not smiling as much as free, but about $73 worth, which is at least a few grins. Where there had been no used copy of the physics text yesterday, now one had appeared as if by magic, and at a significantly more reasonable cost. Sure there are a few bent corners, some scuffs here and there, a little highlighter, but I figure all of that just lets me know what to pay attention to. Plus, $73 is roughly 15 lunches at China Star. It is all about having priorities! Anyway, gracias a dios, and if a used copy of the o-chem text would just show up on the stack at about half price, I'll consider being a true believer (nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more).

Book store funding terrorists?

Okay, so good cripes, I went to check out what books for a measly two classes would cost me, and yeah, over $300! One small soft cover 150 page lab manual is $52 new. It was probably close in weight to a chunk of gold of the same value. A hard-cover o-chem book is over $150, and physics demands this goofy pack of books which run $164. Now I know knowledge is supposed to be of great value and all that, but this is ludicrous. As far as I can tell, the only rational explanation for these outrageous prices is that the money is funneled into some terrorist funding network. These people are wide-spread too. I checked online at a few different used places, and nothing was much cheaper! Oh well, I guess it's like "a wiser feller than myself once said, 'sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.'"
(p.s. name that movie, and drink a White Russian--dare I say caucasian?--when you do)

Caution Horses

is the name of a Cowboy Junkies album that I kinda like when I'm in the right kind of mood, and the sign they should have posted on Stock Trail road tonight. After a few days of slacking (okay so maybe it has been a little over a week) I went for a jog tonight. I had forgotten the mass of trucks, trailers and horses that I'd seen mustering on my way home from work. I think that my estimation of 500 head was pretty accurate but I didn't realize this until I was right in the thick of the herd. Yes, the Caldwell Night Rodeo is upon us. Luckily a certain chica took me horse riding a few weeks back, so my innate distrust of equines is at an all time low at the moment. Nevertheless, I spent most of the run walking around horses and steaming piles of horse dung (not so easy in the dark, let me tell ya). The horse-folk seem to have a few levels of decency on the carnival goers I was wading through earlier this summer however, and I got no harassment despite going amongst them in running shorts and blue polyester jersey, so that was nice. I also learned that truly serious horse owners dump that whole pickup business in favor of a semi-tractor. Some of their horse trailers rivaled semi-trailers however, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

A rainy day

Today is a drizzly rainy day, which is nice because it means that the heat has finally broken, but also means that I have to subsist on a Nature Valley bar and a banana for lunch because I don't want to ride home in the rain. Nevertheless, I love rainy days. They remind me of being a little kid in Seattle. I especially like how concrete smells when it first starts to rain, and how the little birds come out and sing in a happy quiet way. The rain does have some downsides however. For instance, there are about 500 horses at the Caldwell fair grounds today, all wet, and a bit smelly because of it. Also my lawn will most certainly grow even faster (where is a huge truck full of gravel when I need one).
Today is also a good day because GROKLAW published a review of the motion IBM filed last week to dismiss SCO's contract claims. Basically SCO has been trying to make a quick buck off of the Linux community by claiming ownership of Linux source code, claiming that IBM gave Unix source code to the Linux people, and suing people to try and make them license their copy of Linux with SCO. All of it is total garbage of course, and as the details have been fleshed out, it is looking like SCO has been bluffing the whole time. This latest filing by IBM basically drops the axe on SCO's spindly neck. HOORAH! The GROKLAW site is overwhelmed with happy readers right now, but a synopsis of the IBM filing may be available there if you are patient. The Register also has an article about it.

Trials, Tribulations and Testing

Well, I have been messing around with the old computers lately. I put a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor in my main system, and I am getting Linux running on another box for use at the college. Hardware changes always introduce unknowns into the system however, and this new processor seems like it might have a few quirks to work out. So far the system has done a few odd little reboots and freezes. Strangely these only occur when I am not here. Stress testing with Doom3 (which gets 3fps better now) shows the chip as running totally stable. I am running the memory and bus at a higher speed (333 and 166) so maybe they don't like this speed, or maybe the processor (which is OEM) is a bit flaky but only on rare occasions? It is hard to say. Initially I thought I had some major troubles until I realized that I'd turned the voltage down on the old 2200+ to keep it cooler. The new processor apparently won't run at anything below default however, and might even need a little extra juice for full stability. It seems to be running between 110F and 120F which isn't bad, but a little warmer than I'd like. Maybe more juice and a bit better heatsink will be necessary.
Of course, the hardware in the Linux box to be is also doing its dead level best to give me trouble. It is an Athlon XP 1600 with an older model motherboard. I think one of the 256mb sticks of ram I had in it was bad because it was doing some crazy stuff until I pulled that (which means the hard-drive isn't bad as I first thought) so I am down to 256mb on that beast. Hopefully that will be enough for running all of the things I hope to run. I might have to get a cheap KM400 chipset motherboard, case, and ram for the xp2200 processor that is now sitting in a bag just so that I have a decent set of hardware for Linux. We'll see.
Meanwhile, I met with Chad Dr. Ayers today (Where was the rest of the research group? Will we ever know?) to discuss the location of our new lab, and get an idea of what Ayers has in mind. I am somewhere between thrilled and excited about all of this, but with O-chem, Physics, lots of lab and computer setup hours, work, and maybe TA'ing staring me in the face like a 5-barrel shotgun, there is a little dread thrown in there. O well, I'll sleep when I'm dead I guess. Ayers did hook me up with the Instructor's Guide for Discovering Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics. Apparently this is the *teachers edition* of a book that the Molecular Bio class will be using this fall. This is the class that I might be TA'ing so having the teacher's edition will be HUGE! Anyway, looks like the Linux install finished successfully, so I best get to evaluating open-source document and project management systems. Yee-haw ;)

Hacking in our modern age

Wow, I read a few spooky articles about a tool called the Metasploit Project which was recently demoed at a Black Hat Security conference. This tool makes it a whole lot easier for someone to exploit remote security holes on a number of different types of platforms at the click of a mouse. A tool like this is very useful to system administrators who want to test the security of their own networks, but also makes it much easier for people to hack into remote systems without knowing very much about the complexities of hacking at all. It doesn't expose new vulnerabilities, but does make known ones much easier to exploit. The adventurous should try it on their own systems.
As a side note, computer hacker types are generally grouped into two or sometimes three categories. Black hat hackers are a bit more devious, and probably do things they shouldn't. If they find vulnerabilities in systems they generally keep them quiet and only tell others in the black-hat community. White hat hackers are generally professionals who engage in hacking sort of activities as part of their job (sometimes I fall into this category). Upon finding vulnerabilities they alert the software manufacturer first, and the security community after a certain period of time. Then there are the gray hats, who are somewhere between the two. They announce vulnerabilities to the general public (black-hats, white-hats, and manufacturers) and probably do questionable things from time to time.

Back!

I made it back from the BRIN/INBRE conference. It was quite exciting. Lots of smart influential people working hard at setting Idaho up to be a major player in the emerging Bio-technology industry. I listened to a lot of talks, met a lot of the key people doing research in Idaho, and started getting an idea of where I might fit in this exciting new field. Biology and computers, together at last. It is almost as good as "beer that has candy floating in it".
In other exciting news, one of my best friends of all time, LaDonne is here today, and coming to visit! I haven't seen her since her wedding at least a year ago so it will be great to catch up on everything that has happened to us.

Mandrake 10.1 beta released! And an update on the varmint situation

I woke this morning to wonderful news. Mandrake, my favorite Linux distribution in the whole wide world a million, has released their 10.1 beta with all sorts of groovy new features. Check out their press release for more information (and yeah, BitTorrent is pulling it down at around 70K/s as I type). If I have time, I will install it on one of my test systems when the download finishes. It looks like it is 1.9gigs however, so that could take a little while.
Meanwhile, Old Man Geeze has had some success in his war with the various varmints which are overrunning the little one acre farm. I went out to visit yesterday, and he had a skunk caught in a trap he set in the chicken run, and a dead marmot or rock chuck or something which he picked off at 20 yards with his trusty bolt action rifle. A trapped skunk is a tricky situation to have on one's hands, and this skunk was certainly a prime example. The last one he caught trying to eat chickens stunk up the woodshed for three years! It seemed that the only humane solution was to put him (the varmint, not Geeze) out of his misery however, so Geeze did his best to send the beast on to the next world with a minimum of stink. Having dispatched two varmints in one day, Geeze was whistling a happy tune like the brave little tailor until Mom noticed dirt and sticks flying out of another hole under the woodshed. The battle rages on.

Promiscuous Penguins, etc.

A good friend of mine who sometimes is called Miss Fyn, sometimes Fynnilicious, and occasionally Francesca de Argentina sent me an interesting tidbit. Apparently Dr. Hunter, a professor at Cambridge University (she is no relation to me as far as I know – and que lastima too, I want to visit Antarctica!) did some observation of penguins and has recorded numerous cases of penguin prostitution! Yes, sex for pebbles. Apparently some of the males seem to realize what is going on, while others think they are courting legitimately only to end up short a few stones and singing the blues. What an odd world we live in.
Also I went for a little bike ride with Isaac and Kristen tonight. We were only out for an hour, but rode 15 miles over some fairly hilly terrain so it was a nice workout. On one particularly steep downhill spot I hit 31+mph, a new personal record (and kinda scary on a bicycle). The uphill spots went a bit more slowly. Bicycling is certainly easier on the old joints than jogging however, and one goes SO much faster.
A new release of Firefox (0.9.3) has come out to fix a few bugs. If it seems like a nuisance keeping up with the updates, don't give up hope. Apparently there is an auto-update feature in the works, maybe for version 1.0. Plus, it is better to have an update to install, than to surf unprotected.
And finally, I am headed off to a conference at ISU this Sunday which has me all excited. Apparently there will be some heavy hitters there however, so I might be a bit out of my depth (at least in the bio and chem stuff). I am looking forward to trying to hob-nob with serious scientists, and especially to making a long list of all the cool computer stuff a certain college near me needs to acquire. I will take my laptop and try to look professional. On the down side, this means I won't be here for the next two inventories, I will have my cell, but I am really hoping that late night calls won't be necessary.

55.1 miles of wifi!

Wow, I thought that I was a hard-core tin-can-antenna kid, but these guys managed to shoot a 802.11b signal 55.1 miles without external amplification. That is a long way! Of course, they had some 9+ foot satellite dishes, so that probably played a big part in their success.
In other news, this server is awesome. Six hot-swappable scsi drive bays with hardware RAID 5, dual Opteron processors, a slim sexy 2U case, and up to 16gigs of ram. Look at it shine in all of its 64bit splendor. We might get one for our central server here at work, but three of them would look so nice running as a Linux cluster in my basement.... Anyone have an extra $10k?
Today is another inventory day, the last one went fairly smoothly (all things considered). A number of small things have been fixed, a few features have been added, and some things have been streamlined, so here's hoping that all goes well. Needless to say, it could be a late night.

The Genius Within, a review

Well, I was going to go for a little run tonight to try out the new running shoes I got (and boy do they feel nice and springy compared to my old ones) but between lightning, wind gusts, a few drops of rain, and a certain spooky game which I played for a few hours earlier, I decided after about a block that not running would be the better idea. Instead I finished the book The Genius Within by Frank T. Vertosick Jr. It was a decently good book, with a few interesting ideas, but like most of the books I've read which fall into the "written by scientist for the general public" category, this one lacked something in literary quality. I think this is a side effect of writing and reading tons of primary literature. This sort of author seems to rely on very few devices, chief among them is making some claim which is mildly strange, and then going on for pages about how unbelievable we are sure to find it. I sometimes want to scream "SHOW DON'T TELL!!" at them. They also seem to rely on repetition far too much. Read Part 1 of this book, and see if you can keep from cheering when “Poor Tom” (which apparently is his legal name) finally kicks the damn bucket. Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes.
The core thesis of this book is that most, if not all living systems, can be understood more accurately as intelligent networks. Many of the peer to peer file sharing networks like KaZaA are variations on this sort of network theory, and it is really sort of cutting edge stuff. Unfortunately I have only read a few papers on it, so I am no expert by any means. The idea is that one can get intelligent results out of many unintelligent entities by connecting them to one another, and then allowing them to modify their connections, create new connections, and destroy old connections based upon the amount of traffic which flows across these connections, and inputs from the outside world. Vertosick's idea is that we can explain the apparent intelligence of bacteria rapidly evolving to deal with new antibiotics, immune systems memorizing huge lists of antigens, and other highly “intelligent” behavior by applying network principles. He says that this intelligence is an “emergent property” of these large groups of communal entities. For the most part, I find it difficult to disagree with his conclusions because they provide an enlightening way to look at the complexity in biological systems.
In my opinion, his most interesting point is that there are many different manifestations of intelligence and that competition dictates that all surviving organisms must be about equally intelligent in one way or another, or they would have ceased to exist. This is by no means a revolutionary statement. What he is doing here is redefining intelligence to be what a biologist would traditionally call fitness. In the same vein one could argue that all organisms are roughly equal in their fitness level or they would have rapidly ceased to exist already. We can see this clearly in species which are no longer intelligent/fit enough to co-exist with humans and are rapidly going extinct. When it comes to evolutionary theory, it has always been my experience that people don't realize that the fitness of a species is heavily dependent on the environment in which it exists. Putting things in terms of intelligence may make this concept easier to grasp.
This book covers a wide range of topics from the smart, but slow intelligence of the evolutionary process, the genetic learning and problem solving bacterial colonies display, and the speedy intelligence of the vertebrate brain. Vertosick's goal is to explain all of this to someone with little background in biology or computer science, and he doesn't do too terribly at it. He does brush over some of the more complex topics, and spends much to long on some simple ones in my opinion, but this is probably to be expected in a book with an uncertain audience, and such a wide scope. Over all, I would say that this book would be better off if boiled down into three or four 30 page papers, but it isn't too bad.

Premature Ejectulation

So I got called into the advertising department today where one of our two MACs was refusing to boot because it had a bad zip disk in the zip drive. It would start to load up its GUI thing, and then just freeze there. The advertising guy was about ready to throw it out the window, so I intervened and started messing with it. After trying the normal peaceful solutions I had to resort to violence and riped the front cover off. There, just were it was supposed to be was the eject button! I have long pondered why in God's holy name the Mac people hide the eject buttons, and I think I've finally figured it out. See I think Steve Jobs has a problem with premature ejectulation, so they covered up all of the buttons in order to make him drag the little disk icon to the little garbage can. PC users on the other hand are expected to have more self control and wait until the light goes off before ejecting. In linux, things get even more complicated because you have to umount first... or at least you did before the new kernels and automount tools became available.
(Note all obscene comments will be deleted. This IS a family blog after all. And this means you MIKE!)

This daemon hell beast wants your soul.... you have a big gun. Can you really ask for more than this in a game? 

Big day for Bug Bounty Hunters

I was quite happy to read that the Mozilla Foundation (of Firefox fame) is putting a $500 bounty on serious bugs in their software. Unlike a lot of software companies (Microsoft for instance) who try to keep security problems hidden from the general public, Mozilla is taking a much more progressive stance by making their development and bug resolution processes transparent. By doing this they ensure that all of their users are aware of security problems should they arise, and that fixes are promptly created. In contrast, many of Microsoft's security problems are kept quiet and only known about by Microsoft and malicious hackers for disturbingly long periods of time. Here is an interesting article about these two approaches. Amazingly it was published by ZDnet, a group which is usually pretty pro Microsoft, but in this article they very much support a transparent, full disclosure approach.
In other news, Doom3 comes out tomorrow. It is already floating around in certain channels. We can expect to see a serious decrease in productivity from IT people for the next few weeks. This game is HIGHLY anticipated (and pretty much guaranteed to scare you witless).

This is a high-speed shot (hence the blur) of the horse cantering. Cantering is tons of fun but a bit scary because it feels like the horse is suddenly going quite a lot faster. It is much less painful than trotting however, and getting from the trotting stage to the cantering one can be a big relief. 

In this picture you can see how the horses two diagonal legs are doing the same thing. Apparently this means that the horse is trotting. Trotting is the least comfortable option in my opinion. 

Okay, going from slowest to fastest, here are some action shots. In this one, the horse is walking (the most comfortable speed, but kinda slow). If you go to this page you can see the differences in each gait type. It is quite interesting to me that horses have these different gaits, very much like a car has different gears, if only the shifting up part was a bit easier, and the shifting down part didn't happen automatically.... 

Trail, probably intent on food somwhere off to the left. and I (apparently gripping the saddle horn for dear life). 

Yeehaw!.. well more or less ;)

Today was quite an exciting day. It started off fairly ho-hum with some lawn mowing and car washing, but quickly ramped up when I donned a pair of wranglers (YES.. REALLY.. and in 100 degree weather none the less) and went for a little bit of a horse ride! I am not what you would call an “experienced rider” by any means, having only ridden three or four times in my life, so it was a bit of an adventure (and Kendra got a few good laughs on a number of occasions). None the less, it was quite a lot of fun, especially the whole cantering thing which is as fast as I've ever gone on a horse before.
The horse I rode is named Trail. His primary joys in life seem to consist of eating weeds (he needs a bumper sticker which says I BRAKE FOR PLANTS) and leisure. Partly because of this, and probably partly because of my lack of experience, he got a bit uppity about the whole riding business on occasion and did some little jump things which I guess are called "crow-hops". These were a little scary, but quite exciting, and other than this he was very nice, if a bit lacking in the enthusiasm department. It quickly became obvious to me that I need to learn how to sit a horse properly however. Certain bones in my less than amply-padded-butt seem to have taken their fair share of beating, strange muscles in my legs are sore, and on a couple of occasions (usually during that trotting part) I seriously wondered how real cowboys manage to further the species.... A couple of times I did sort of get into the rhythm and things went much more smoothly, so I suspect that practice is probably a key factor here. Anyway, Kendra was nice enough to get photographic evidence of this adventure (see above), so here is a really big THANKS to her for that, and for an exciting afternoon! :)

Linux...hicks and dogs

Although they are more or less the spawn of Satan, as the Bowling for Columbine documentary points out, Lockeed Martin is apparently gearing up to be the Linux using spawn of Satan. I guess even they can't pass up free software.
In other news, last night was wonderful for a little jog, with a big full moon, and temperatures in the mid 70's! Unfortunately the Caldwell Natives were out in force. One car full of them even managed to pool their intelligence enough to come up with "run forest run" which they hurled out of their window at me. About 3/4 a mile later I got harassed by a pack of un-chained, un-fenced dogs, so I went home. I still haven't decided which group was more intelligent, but I'm leaning towards the dogs.
p.s.
If anyone can explain why Idaho hicks dislike joggers and bicyclists so much that would be great.

Midnight Machinations

10:01 P.M. - Well, I'm back at work again. The time has come for the final live test of the inventory beast.
10:24 P.M. - Problems. There is no DISK there, it is always the LOWEST and most downright repugnant of technology that gets us in the end. So, I'm going on a Mission From Gawd (ala Blues Brothers) to get the data from a contact in Boise.....
1:21 A.M. - The mission was a success, after approximately 60 high speed minutes on the interstate, and a few tense moments copying the file to a laptop for backup, I am now waiting while my python script crunches the data. The first three items went through perfectly, and so far everything looks to be going wonderfully. (touch wood)
2:38 A.M. - Some minor bugs in the code cause some delays, and lots of careful checking at each step caused some more, but it looks like everything went pretty smoothly.
3:20 A.M. - Upon reaching the old homestead, I found that my roomate was still up, and not feeling well in the stomach. Her supply of pepto had been exhausted however, so, being the nice guy that I apparently am, I was off on yet another Mission From Gawd, this time to Walmart. Having made it back safely, I think I will try and find out how deep the bottom of sleep is.
12:58 P.M. (the next day) - I got a call this morning at 8 A.M. saying that things were ready for the next major step in processing, so with 4.5 hours of sleep and some coffee con leche in me I headed back for another 3 hours of going through code and data with a fine toothed comb. As it turns out there were a few small bugs, and one major one caused by a set of circumstances I hadn't predicted which necessitated a little last minute programming. Such is life. On the upside, all of the data looks very good now and has made it to its final resting place, and so the first live test has been labeled a success. Needless to say, I'm going home a bit early for a nice long nap in an hour or so! Then it is lawn mowing time and after that I am busting out the old air-compressor and doing some major computer cleaning (so besides other clean systems, there will be a nice shinny pile of parts waiting to be assembled into a Linux machine by the end of the night).

Yippy!!

Well, after almost two months (6-7-2004 until today) of pretty solid development, ending in a mad two week rush of carrot stick eating and programming. The huge new inventory maintenance and processing system which I more or less masterminded and programmed with the other two guys here at work has passed initial tests, and is ready for prime time tonight! Parts of it are written in 5 different languages (c++, python, delphi, java, and php). It ties together data entry via pc and wireless scanner gun in a mysql database running on a Linux server with web reports served by Apache and php, data processing, and finally import into an IBM AS400 mainframe. There are a few areas for improvement of course, and some parts will need to be reworked as we get feedback from users, but HOT DAWG it is good to finally get to a stopping point.

Until then, this will have to do however (don't pay any attention to the banana, it was all I could find at the time). 

Blues Brothers

6:01pm - Okay, so I just saw the first 11 minutes of Blues Brothers... and WOW. I have very little doubt that this movie rocks.
8:24pm - Nearly 2.5 hours of my life later, and has my estimate of Blues Brothers changed? Not drastically. I was a bit nervous when Pricess Leia started shooting at them with a rocket launcher, but they took it in stride, so I figured, why shouldn't I? This movie is certainly packed with big names, good music, and plenty of old-school car chase action. It is like Grand Theft Auto - Vice City, when you have 5 stars and things are getting REALLY serious except it is in Chicago. Staying cool and being able to sleep through a night long car chase with 40 cops on one's tail seems to be the ticket however.
I NEED to find "Boots, black. Belt, black. One black suit jacket. One pair of black suit pants. One hat, black. One pair of sunglasses. Twenty three dollars and seven cents."

Yes, the Carnies are back. I've taken to wearing all dark colors when running. You see, in Caldwell, if they see you they try to hit you, so it is better NOT to be seen by traffic. 

Oh Lord!

Tonight was a good night for running, with the big moon and clear skies, BUT! carnies have invaded Cladwell once again! Yes, the chicken geeking, feats of strength and other such dark corners of the human experience will once again unfold mere meters from the sanctity of my own home. I will try to get pictures when I ride into work tommorow. In the meantime I suggest that everyone pick up a copy of Katherine Dunn's wonderful book Geek Love in order to get some idea of what to expect.

Fixings for fajitas. 

More Cooking

Fajitas are one of my more favorite foods, and now is the best time to make them. I start with a packet of fajita seasoning, mix it with some oil and a little water, and then put a sliced up steak in this mixture to soak. Meanwhile I slice up tomatoes, a jalapeño, a big onion and lots of peppers (green, yellow or red). I start the onion and jalapeño frying first so that their taste will be less strong, and then add the peppers. Once these have cooked for a bit I add the meat and tomatoes. It is best to add the meat later so that it doesn't get overcooked. Finally I put the mushrooms on, and when they look done it is ready to eat!

10 points for Norway!

I looked in the mailbox the other day, and much to my surprise, there was a REAL letter in there (usually bills are the most exciting thing which come in the mail). Even better, the letter had stamps which said Mexico, and a postmark which said Cuernavaca! Inside I found a birthday card, a "Sinceramente Hallmark" birthday card. Now to head off any confusion, my birthday WAS in fact a number of months ago, and apparently that is when this card was mailed. The postal service between here and Mexico is not terribly prompt however and it seems that my card had been sitting in the Cuernavaca post station until they finally shipped it out on the 7th of July. Despite all that, I was grinning like the Cheshire cat when I opened the card. It came from a cool girl I met in Mexico named Nina. She is a chef from Norway and taught me a wonderful recipe for salmon. I like cooking a lot, but even better is learning new tricks from someone who knows how to cook well, so cooking with Nina was quite a treat.
Here is the salmon recipe:
It is best to start with the sauce because it takes a long time to simmer. It is very simple to make, just put some cream (of about whipping cream thickness) into a smallish sauce-pan. Stir in dijon mustard (I use the normal kind, but the honey type might be good too?) until the mixture turns a little yellow. Heat it until it is boiling a little bit, and keep adding mustard if it isn't as strong as you'd like it. Adding some sugar is also not a bad idea. When the sauce has boiled down to the point that it is sort of thick, especially if allowed to cool in a spoon, it is done. Put some dried dill in it at the very end, and maybe half a cube of fish bullion if you can find it. (Experimentation and tasting frequently is key here).
Once the sauce is going, slice up an onion or two, and maybe some garlic etc. Put these in a big pot full of water, and add a few fish bullion cubes (maybe impossible to get in Idaho, so I use vegetable ones instead). Bring this to a boil, and meanwhile cut your fillet of salmon into nice serving sized steaks (wash it well, but leave the scales on). Once the water is boiling turn the heat off (yes I'm sure), and dump the steaks in. They will cook quite quickly in the hot water, so check them every few minutes. Once they split very easily with a fork they are done. Don't overcook them or they will flake apart and you will have fish soup.
Serve the fish and the sauce with a nice salad and some noodles. For those extra-special occasions a bottle of wine goes well with this combination. Of course, we had it with copious amount of chips and home-made-guacamole in Mexico ;) Viva el aguacate, ajo y cebolla!

Theme!

OOOOH!! I found a cool new theme for Firefox called NOIA. It is all snazzy and shinny, you can get your own here.

Running...

I guess I better start packing a can of mace, and a cell phone on my evening runs. Tonight a big black shinny SUV and a smaller white car where clandestinly parked window to window in the darkest, most remote section of my usual route. Maybe it was just a happy couple meeting for a late night chat, but I certainly ran quietly, and with heart all a flutter as I passed them in the dark. I really wish Caldwell would invest in some decently lighted biking and jogging paths. Oh well, I guess it's better to die of gang violence than heart disease.... Right?
Interestingly I had a run in with the other end of the spectrum on my way back from New Meadows last Saturday. I was following a big shinny blue pickup down out of the mountains, listening to Led Zeppelin, and not paying attention to my speed when the pickup and I passed a police officer going the other way. In my rearview mirror I saw him brake and come about. Looking down saw that I was going about 65. After pulling me over, the officer explained to me that the speed limit stayed at 55 until I got to the other side of Cambridge, and then changed 65. Nuts I thought, my first speeding ticket after 7 or so years of getting away with all manner of moderate speeding! He then went on to explain that he was going to turn the drug dog loose on my car, and that it would "throw itself against the car if it found something" but not to worry because that just meant he could then search the car. To further increase the pressure, he told me that if I admitted to carrying anything before he turned the dog loose he promised to give me the mildest citation possible. To admit, and keep the dog off, apparently I had to stick my arm out the window and wave while he was filling out paperwork. I kept my arms firmly in the vehicle, and when he came back he asked if I'd thought about his question. I told him I did not have anything like THAT in my car, and he sent me on my way. No dog, no ticket, hardly even a warning. I think he was wishing he would have gone after the blue pickup.
In more cheerful news, according to this set of benchmarks my computer will play DOOM3!!! This game is so freaking cool and scary that I hardly dare visit it's web site at night with my speakers on. I'm not sure whether I'm looking forward to playing it, or dreading the nightmares more. Oh well, "Bring it On", "Hurt Me Plenty", "I'm Death Incarnate" here I come (God but I've missed the good old fashioned Doom carnage. Ever since I figured out that I could exit windows 3.1 and play Doom 1 shareware in DOS mode on my parents' 486sx 25mhz with 4 megs of ram, it has held a special place in my heart. Yes, those were the days.)

Going toe to toe with evil spammers

Work was exciting today. One of my servers has been acting up lately, running really slowly, having trouble keeping up with it's work load, etc. Initially I was afraid that it had gotten hacked and was doing bad things, but as I examined it, I realized that it was just getting flooded by a constant deluge of spam! The poor old server was so busy bouncing all of this spam back that it didn't have much time for processing other things. Each piece of email that comes in has to pass through a huge list of filters which try to deny any email that looks suspicious. There are thousands of entries to parse through for each email, so when a spammer dumps a huge load of spam on the server it has to do a lot of processing. Luckily we had a spare system sitting around in case of emergency, so now we've upgraded from 450mhz of spam blocking power to 1.9ghz. Hopefully that will be enough for now, but I imagine that I'll have to look into more potent anti-spam measures in the future. Apparently black-lists are all the rage.

Another picture from this weekend. This one was from MaCall. Note that Reuter is already fingering the chips with a strange look in his eye.... 

At about 6am I woke to find Reuter gloating over his winnings. 

Old Man Geeze moves to heavier weaponry. 

Alive if not entirely unscathed

Well, amazingly enough I made it back from Reuter's birthday party more or less unscathed. I say amazing because Reuter did manage to dole out two bloody noses in the 18 or 20 hours that I was there. There is one lesson I learned well quite some time ago and that is that Reuter is a dangerous animal and not to be approached lightly. Plus, I knew from the thick pine forests that I was in Yetti country and Reuter is especially wild when he senses his own kind nearby. For these reasons I kept an eye on him at all times.

On the home front:
Apparently the damned varmint rock-chuck animals have been paying attention to this whole duct tape and sheets of plastic home-land security business because the chemical approach proved unsuccessful. Instead of dying, they moved under the woodshed. Old Man Geeze is not likely to let a few varmints get the upper hand so easily however, and has upped the ante by cleverly placing a fox trap in the entrance of their hole. The next move is theirs.

And as a follow up to the SGI post:
Apparently SGI pretty much agrees with me, as their next big project is going to be one Linux kernel stretched over 1024 processors and 3TB of RAM. This thing is mammoth, has enough memory to put my whole life in, and has to eat power like a small town, but damn. WHAT A MACHINE!

Cool things to read..

Unfortunately there is no time for real posting or reading, but I am eyeing these articles with great interest (and testing this new "compose" thing with a bit of trepidation...):

• First, the Hitchhikers Guide to Biomorphic Software talks about taking suggestions for biological systems for software design (super cool stuff in my opinion).
• Next, an article about tweaking everyones favorite web browser (Firefox in case you forgot).
• And finally, an atricle about the groovy new software development platform called Mono which is being developed as a compatible alternative to Microsoft's .NET platform. As far as I can tell, Mono will play a MAJOR role in widespread Linux adoption on the desktop in the future. I have already tried out the Rapid Application Development platform SharpDevelop
  which is a GPL'ed IDE for .NET, and Mono. It was pretty snazzy.

I'm headed off to observe the Wild Reuter in his natural environment, so if I never post again, look for my mutilated corpse in New Meadows....

A brush with SGI

So the other day I went with Arzhang to visit the SGI box which lives out it's lonely existance at BSU. As far as I can tell, it pretty much qualifies as "BIG IRON" in the server market. It has four processors for God's sake, is purple, and has SGI written on the front. This should qualify just about any hardware as "BIG IRON". Arzhang has a picture on this page. Apparently most of these big SGI servers have 64bit MIPS processors, which is really cool because at one point I knew the basics of writing assembly language code for MIPS! (Hooray for Dr. J). They run a flavor of Unix known as IRIX. IRIX was originally released in 1987 and has apparently evolved since then.
I have had a few chances at dealing with other big corporate type Unix based systems in the past but nothing so big as an SGI box, so I was expecting quite a lot. I have to say that when it comes to usability, I was not very impressed however. For example, the software install and packaging system is straight out of a Douglas Adams book. There is no syntax highlighting when listing files or editing with vi, and to add insult to injury, there is no tab completion! Hardware being the same, I would take a Linux command prompt over an Irix one any day. The Irix desktop is is also a few years behind the curve, KDE and Gnome make it look pretty clunky. The difference between the two is really quite striking. Maybe the old Unix geezers (and don't get me wrong, I have boat-loads of respect for them) would tell me to stop my whining because they used to have to write 40 lines of code just to copy one file, but good lord, why haven't they AT LEAST written tab-completion into Irix? It didn't seem to work under tcsh or bash! To put it more poetically, Linux is like a young growing thing whose muscles bunch and ripple beneath ones hand, Irix is like a withered tree in the dead of winter, lifeless. Maybe it is just that Irix is so old, but my hunch is that the difference lies in Irix's closed-source nature. The people who use Linux can also change and improve Linux. This insures that it is continually evolving to be better, faster and more streamlined. On the other hand, Irix is reliant on a few programers who are probably paid too maintaining and create hardware drivers and other such system-level things, but don't get much time to spend making the interface snazzy. Don't get me wrong here, I'm sure the big systems from SGI can process data like mad, and they seem to still have a bit of a niche, but as a lot of the big-name corporate software producers are finding, it is hard to keep up with OpenSource. The expense of one of these SGI boxes is also incredible. I would be quite suprised if an SGI box could outperform an equally priced cluster of Linux systems.

Back ALIVE!!!???!!

After close to two days of waiting for 1and1.com to fix a horrible RAID harddrive corruption, my little blog is back! HOOORAY! I was suprised at how much I missed the little guy. Now I just have to try and remember all of the things I wanted to make blog entries about.... mmm

More Linux

Today marks another stride towards Linux World Domination as the New Zealand stock exchange moves their database to Linux servers! Apparently Oracle has produced a database server which runs on top of a stripped down Linux kernel which performs only the basic functions that a database server needs. Because Linux is open source, Oracle was able to remove all of the extra stuff which one wouldn't want on a database server, and do any tweaking they found necessary. This process leaves them with a lean mean machine which apparently is very efficient, cheap (they run it on standard Intel compatible hardware like servers from Dell) and of course very stable (because it IS stil Linux).
My favorite quote:
"We went for Linux, not just because we hated Microsoft, but because the cost was compelling,"

And... another day, another FOUR Internet Explorer security exploits. If you are still using IE by this point you might want to have your head examined.

Productive?

Decided to give in to peer pressure and test this Hello thing. It seems that everyone is doing it. I have to say, it does seem pretty handy, especially with the whole resizing and blogger integration thing. Apparently my user name is Sarcaza?
Today was quite the day. Large strides were made towards de-varmitification of both my yard, and that of Old Man Geeze. I wait on pins and needles for the sounds of the foul roving packs of wild dogs to hit the electric fence and leave my lawn un-fertilized. Har-har-har. Geeze on the other hand has opted for chemical warfare, and the old Alice in Wonderland song “We'll smoke the monster out!” comes to mind. Also I rendered my first molecule in Linux today!!
(All hail the o-great and powerfull Linux, destroyer of Windows and humbler of Microsoft, liberator of science departments, the one who will bring balance to the force. Praise be unto thee, and mayest thou forever remain free.)

The cats get a second climbing post. Now they have no excuses for scratching the furniture. (and I can torment them by putting treats way up there....) 

Old Man Geeze had some big rodents eating his sunflowers, but what can stand up to something with a name like REVENGE RODENT SMOKE BOMB and a list of ingredients which reads as follows: Sulfur 40%, Potassium Nitrate 40%, Charcoal 9%. I have to admit, it did smell like rotten eggs, even from a good distance. 

Honda Civics rock. Yes that is 368 miles on one tank... and going. 

It is time to secure the perimeter. (Note, it specifically says "horses and smaller animals" in the users manual. Dogs ARE smaller animals. And won't be venturing into my yard to do their thrice a week defecation detail I'd wager).
 

My little Japanese Maple has new growth!!  

Good days for bored students everywhere

I ran across a couple of cool sites on Slashdot today. Basically Carnegie Mellon and MIT are putting a bunch of courses and whatnot on the web! It looks like the MIT people have more in the way of coursework and lecture notes with no real opportunity to earn credits (but some interesting looking stuff to say the least), while the Carnegie people are actually going to offer classes for credit, except that you get the credit through whatever school you might be attending. The coolest thing about the whole deal is that Carnegie Mellon has a chemistry course with a VIRTUAL LAB! Being a good student and all, I first did their dilute 1M Glucose solution to .025M problem. I then decided to *test the system* by making something blow up (as far as I can tell, probability of explosion is the litmus test for all chem classes). Unfortunately, it seems that they only allow things to get to 99.85*C and don't account for evaporation (believe me, I TRIED!). This, the lack of highly reactive chemicals, and no tight-fitting rubber stoppers combined forces to thwart my plans. Perhaps if I were a better chemist....
Meanwhile, my laptop is now running Mandrake 10, and after only a very little wizardry, Autodock and Autodock tools. I think Bobscript and Raster3d are also working, but need to figure out how to test them. I am told that these programs represent some of the finest in bio-chem research.

YIKES!! (and WOOHO for Mandrake!)

A bug was found in the Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox browsers which could let a malicious web page run code on your system! (This makes one for Firefox, and like 20 for Internet Explorer, so I'm not switching back any time soon...). Unlike Internet Explorer, a fix for this problem is already out. Read about the same-day-fix here. Either you can download the new version, 0.9.2 or install this extension (just click and it should auto-install). It is important to keep in mind that Firefox is still a Technology Preview, and not considered a finished product by the Mozilla people. For this reason it is important to update it occasionally. (For the most part, it seems pretty damn polished to me though!).

In much cooler news, Mandrake Linux is making a big SPLASH in France where they are helping to replace a whole lot of Windows NT systems with Linux ones!

Birthday Wishes

Well, despite the fact that her blog bears an uncanny resemblance to mine, here's wishing Cassie a HIPPITY HOPPITY HAPPITY BIRTHDAY! (And, since that Punk Billoney ALSO has a page that looks like mine, I guess I'll get to work figuring out how this whole style, css, page structure business works so I can be snazzy and unique... or so that my page can be at least....).

Consumer rights..

Well, it looks like the boys in Hollywood are at it again. Apparently a law will go into effect July 1, 2005 which will make it illegal to sell HDTV equipment which doesn't support a "Broadcast Flag". This basically means that most of the recording/portability functionality of HDTV will be killed in all equipment made after July 1, 2005. Of course, the EFF is pretty nervous about this, and urging people to buy HDTV tuner cards for their home-brew PVR linux systems, and help out with the programming too. Maybe it is time to look into a card.. but at $200 they are a bit pricey. Of course, when everything is broadcast in hdtv a few years from now I'd probably be happy I did. Then again, does anything worth watching ever really show up on TV?

Out on the Weekend

Alpine Lake :

See the random photos for more. In total it was about 10 miles worth of hiking.