* My morning commute took an extra fifteen minutes this morning because of traffic. I figured it was most likely an accident some ways ahead on highway 44. Turns out the ‘incident’ happened on the westbound lanes (I, and everyone else was heading east). There was absolutely no reason for the eastbound lanes to slow down whatsoever. Except for the fact that everybody just had to crane their heads around (tapping their brakes in the process), for the chance to witness another human beings’ misfortune. Very sad. Especially since I couldn’t see anything by the time I got there!
General — entered at 15:51PM
Comments…
15 minutes? 40 minutes? I would like to invite all of you to try a one week daily commute between the San Gabriel Valley and Irvine Most likely this would mean taking the 5 down to OC, more importantly, taking the “Orange Crush!” down to OC Need not I mention you first need to take the 10 (and maybe 710) to get over to the 5 from SGV! When it’s busy, that can be a half hour right there! But you know, still glad I moved from St. Louis out here instead of going back home to NY. I have gotten used to the traffic out here but I was never able to get used to the NY/NJ obsessions of putting tollbooths on every few miles of highway. What did someone once say about diving in NY/NJ? “I can’t pull out of my own driveway without someone asking me for .35 cents.”Posted Mon Nov 10 21:10:58 CST 2003
From: P. Brahler http://paulbrahler.bravehost.com
Pah, 15 minutes! Once back in the olden days before the new stretch of Hwy 21 was open, I had a bad experience with rubbernecking. There was an accident on northbound (everyone is going southbound in afternoon rush hour) old Hwy 21, about half a mile away from the end of new 21. For anyone who doesn’t know, New 21 is a 4-lane highway and Old 21 is a 2-lane highway. So anyway, traffic was backed up for 2-3 miles on New 21, because of this accident on Old 21. I think it took me an extra 40 mins to get home that day. Come to find out it was a fender bender, by the time I got there there was actually nothing to see but everyone was rubbernecking at the two cars. As soon as you got past that traffic flew. I guess that’s Jefferson county for you. This is why I don’t post about traffic much in my blog. I’d be typing forever about all the annoying rush hour incidents.Posted Mon Nov 10 20:19:37 CST 2003
From: Amber http://ambysjournal.invigorated.org
* After a long hiatus, I have returned, prompted by ‘Surviving Windows’ by Charles Sebold and Chouser’s ‘Tools to make Windows Livable’. Both are in a similar situation as myself. Unix admins (of one flavor or another –more likely several flavors) who find themselves confronted with the necessity of a Microsoft Windows based computer for daily business use. They have listed the tools that they each employ on their desktops in order to get their jobs done. So, like the good little web-monkey that I am, I will follow suit.
o CygWin
o Tera-Term
o Multiple browsers - Netscape, IE, Opera
o QCD Player
Not exactly a long list, but allow me to explain. Besides testing website designs in multiple browsers, using Lotus Notes for corporate messaging and playing music (QCD Player), all of my day to day work is done from within the protective familiarity of the CygWin environment. I am fortunate enough to have a dedicated SunBlade workstation at my disposal so I perform my work from there. However, I am not particularly fond of an over-crowded work environment. Having both my windows workstation (a laptop with a docking station) and a Sunblade workstation on my desk is a bit overwhelming. I much prefer the austerity of a clean desk surface. My telephone, a writing pad, my cup of water and my laptop (sans monitor- I just plug the machine into the docking station to utilize an external keyboard and mouse) are the only things on my desk. This does force me into certain workarounds in order to do my job, hence the list above.
The CygWin environment gives me local access to a multitude of unix tools- a bash interface, ssh connectivity, keychain management, vi and others. CygWin also allows me to start an X-server on my laptop, ssh into my Sunblade and execute a window manager on the Sunblade, having it display on my laptop’s X-server and giving me access to a full compliment of unix tools- perl, emacs, grep, awk, fnord, etc… So, sitting at my desk, looking at my laptop, I have full access to both the windows environment (native to the laptop with Windows2000) and to the Gnome interface from the Sunblade. Quite acceptable.
The only real exception to the list is Tera-term. It is a windows program whose sole function for me (it is capable of telnet and ssh as well) is to provide a reliable serial interface to the various pieces of hardware I may have to configure. Sure, I could use hyperterm for this, but I much prefer the logging, configurability and stability that comes from using Tera-term.
* I get to spend the weekend in Chicago. Not to visit with relatives or for a well earned (at least in my mind) vacation. I get to spend the next two days performing a mock disaster recovery. There is a group of about eight of us headed up there to restore all of our systems on backup hardware and then bring up the corporate network on the new hardware, test everything and then swing it all back. Sure looks to be a fun weekend….
* Have you ever been digging around through your old music collection, and grabbed a handful of songs that you haven’t listened to in years? Maybe you recorded a bunch of them to tape or nowadays to cd so that you could listen to them while travelling? Then once you’re actually listening to the songs, you get so wrapped up in a particular set of lyrics that you find yourself smiling, gazing out the window and perhaps even singing out loud? FYI… This is frowned upon on public transportation. (Not that this happened to me, It almost happened, but I caught myself right before I began singing)
General — entered at 09:28AM
Comments…
Hey! Where did you go? It is almost November? Did you get stuck in Chicago or something? I have tried four different websites in the time you have been gone! Posted Sat Oct 25 04:16:00 CDT 2003
From: Paul Brahler http://paulbrahler.bravehost.com
You get to do all the neat and fun stuff. I have never been paid to crash anything.Posted Wed Aug 27 06:33:48 CDT 2003
From: christopher mayfield www.ap0.org
* We have a veritable plethora of updates this morning! Let’s start with some of the comments from the previous entry. First, I have enlarged the comment box a little bit to accommodate Christopher and Paul. (although if you need more space to vent, may I suggest placing a link in the comments to your own webspace where you are free to post as much or as little as you wish) I have momentarily fixed the rss feed so that it once again validates. I really need to re-work the process that creates the feed, since I keep having to go back and fix the feed manually from time to time.
This past weekend, Logan and I went on our annual canoe trip. Although this is an annual trip, we missed last year. This year we went to Gasconade Hills to camp and canoe the Gasconade river. I think that this was our best trip so far. The river was quite low at points and we had to carry the canoe at various spots. We were pleased to be able to see several blue herons along the way. The wingspan on these birds was enormous, easily spanning nine+ feet. The night before, we marveled at the fantastic star viewing that was possible with the sparce light pollution. The Milky Way itself was evident as were a few shooting stars and ::ahem:: billions and billions of stars. Rather overwhelming, actually. We are now totally psyched for Astronomy lessons this year in school.
How about a Body for Life update? It has been a while and there are only a couple of weeks left until the challenge itself is over. I have not given up, and I continue to train, although two weeks ago I had a major setback in the form of a sprained lower back. That put me out of commission (at least for training) for the better part of ten to twelve days. I am resolved to finishing the challenge, and most likely continuing on with the program (albeit modified to suit my needs a bit more) for a long time to come.
General — entered at 10:24AM
Comments…
Hmmm. Is that photo in the upper right hand corner a snap shot of you after you opened up your site and saw all the �comments� about your new layout? You know, if there would have been no comments at all then that could of meant two things: either 1) everyone was happy with the new layout or 2) no one was looking at your site. As for the suggestion of posting links to ones own site if there is not enough room to post on your site � is that directed towards me? You know you have posted one too many comments on someone site when your own total amount of text is equal to or greater then the actual text in the site itself. Posted Wed Aug 20 23:40:02 CDT 2003
From: Paul Brahler http://www.geocities.com/paul.brahler@sbcglobal.net/links.html
add a comment
* Yes, once again I have re-worked the layout of the site. After all it has been what? at least four or five months since the last re-design. Did you think I was just going to let you get all comfortable-like looking at the same old layout??? Hah! not me, buddy. Gotta shake things up every once in a while, you know! That being said, whatcha’ think? (be nice, boys and girls!) Constructive criticism is always welcome!
Code — entered at 12:48PM
Comments…
Your RSS feed has gone a little goofy, though. http://feeds.archive.org/validator/check?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.xionic.net%2F%7Ejkp%2Findex.xmlPosted Sat Aug 16 11:08:04 CDT 2003
From: Charles Sebold http://www.livingtorah.org/journal/
Oh, sorry. That was suposed to be ‘ramblings’Posted Fri Aug 15 20:02:21 CDT 2003
From: Paul Brahler
I have to second the complaint about your comment input box not being wide enough. Then again, I have yet to find a comment input box that is wide enough for all of my remblings..Posted Thu Aug 14 00:26:56 CDT 2003
From: Paul Brahler http://briefcase.yahoo.com/paul.brahler@sbcglobal.net
The thing that bothers me most about your new design is the white #, It drives me crazy because my background default is set to a gray color. So it stands out. and you comment input box isn’t wide enough. Otherwise great design.Posted Wed Aug 13 08:15:24 CDT 2003
From: Christopher Mayfield www.ap0.org
I do like this new layout. It is much easier on the eyes if I can say that.Posted Tue Aug 12 23:14:03 CDT 2003
From: Paul Brahler http://briefcase.yahoo.com/paul.brahler@sbcglobal.net
Sorry, not yet. I haven’t implemented any sorting routines, although it is a possibility for the future.Posted Tue Aug 12 20:30:54 CDT 2003
From: Jeff
so can you sort/search by catagories?Posted Tue Aug 12 17:19:22 CDT 2003
From: Christopher Mayfield www.ap0.org
* In my last entry, I mentioned that I was configuring a wireless access point (actually the piece of equipment is a wireless “router”, but I’ve configured it as an access point) to be able to roam about the house with my laptop still connected (albeit wirelessly) to the network. What’s the first thing anybody does when they get their wireless connection working? Right! I ran around the house with my laptop in hand, checking my signal strength. (okay, I didn’t exactly run, more like I walked quite cautiously with the laptop) I was a bit surprised to see how well the signal propagated throughout the house. Not a single dead spot! The signal was excellent even out on the back porch. Now, I have not positioned the access point to optimally broadcast a full lobe in all directions, in fact it is in the basement against a concrete wall, situated about five feet below ground level. At this point I figured it might be a good time to see just how far the signal propagated at a level that allowed network connectivity. I quickly configured the laptop and wireless card to monitor the entire range of spectrum covered by the 802.11b range (with the help of some excellent -and widely available open source tools). I set the laptop on the passenger seat of the van and drove around the neighborhood. At this point I was truly shocked to see that my signal was available from as far as five houses away. The other thing that I found quite suprising was the number of other access points I was able to locate merely by driving a few blocks.
Several of these other access points were still set to their default configurations, and thereby allowing just about anyone to utilize their internet connection. So, as an FYI, here are a couple of recommendations that every wireless access point user needs to remember:
o Change the SSID, but don’t change it to personal information like say, your address or your last name.
o Enable WEP to encrypt your connection, but don’t rely on it to protect you, because it won’t. If you buy your sweetie a gift over the web, and you use your credit card, that number can very easily be grabbed, and the level of encryption utilized by most wireless routers is quite easy to defeat.
o Disable DHCP. This is the mechanism that allows the router to indiscriminately hand out connections to just about anyone who wants one. Including encrypted connections. Choose a non-standard sub-net and assign a static IP to your laptop or desktop. Sure, DHCP makes connecting easier, but not just easier for you, easier for anyone driving by.
o Last, but not least, enable MAC address filtering. This tells the router to only accept connections from a specific network card (each card has a unique, identifying address that is seperate from the assigned IP). The drawback is that if your network card goes bad, and it needs to be replaced, you need to have an alternate method of connecting to the router to change the list of acceptable MAC addresses.
Like everything else, even a MAC address can be faked, so take this all with a grain of salt… These steps will NOT, I repeat WILL NOT guarantee that your network won’t be compromised, but these steps will make it more difficult for your assets to be abused. Comments? Corrections? Please add them below!
Entered at 16:54PM
Time for a few updates before the weekend is over…
Lets start off with the laptop… Of course I couldn’t just leave well enough alone, I had to make some ::ahem:: adjustments. The system comes stock with WindowsXP Home, so the first thing I did was re-partition the 40GB drive and re-installed XP on a little 8GB slice. I split the rest into three chunks, 15GB for Debian Linux, 15GB for FreeBSD 5.0 and the rest for swap space. (overkill on the swap, I’m sure…) I found a nifty little procedure on how to get the ghosted WinXP rescue disks to allow me to repartition the drive and reinstall the image on the newly resized slice. You can read the originals here. After that, the linux and bsd installs were pretty much no-brainers. I installed linux first, then FreeBSD, and ended up going back into the Debian install to reconfigure LILO to recognize all three O/S’es.
Ahhh… A triple-boot system!!! Life is good!! (Now if I could only get OS/X to run on it….)
I picked up a Linksys Wireless router and pcmcia card to start messing around with 802.11b. It took about thirty minutes to get things set up w/ encryption and such. (not that I trust it, mind you) I will say that I am quite surprised at how well the signal propagates from the back corner of my basement. I haven’t done any drive-by’s of the house yet to map the footprint, but I intend to do just that later this week.
So the unveiling of the new website was originally scheduled for this weekend. I have decided to push it back a few more days (perhaps another week) to tie together a few loose details…
Entered at 22:25PM
That penguin is showing up everywhere!!!
* Noticed over the weekend that my pages do not render very nicely at all with the Safari web browser. I have been slowly removing all of my old crufty bits from the site-code and trying to make it both CSS compliant as well as XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. My stylesheet does in fact validate, but there are a couple of warnings that need to be cleaned up. As far as the XHTML validation, well, let’s just say that although I’ve removed a great deal, I still have a very long way to go.
Entered at 12:52PM
* I have finally made a purchase of a new laptop, specifically a Toshiba 1905-S301 ( P4 2.0Ghz, 256mb, 40GB, DVD/CD-RW) It’s not a model listed on the linux for laptops site, but I hope to remedy that. With what you might ask? Well, with Debian, of course! I am pretty much a total convert thanks to apt-get! I still use the BSDs in server situations, (firewalls, etc) but I am beginning to favor Debian for my main workstation more and more (I’m composing this email on an Ultrasparc I running Debian Woody with a stock 2.4.18 kernel (I keep breaking strange things when I recompile the 2.4.18 or 19 sources…)
Entered at 20:30PM
Comments
I have been shopping for a new laptop for a few weeks, stopping in at the Apple store about once a week. I was absolutely thrilled with Jobs’ keynote and the announcement of the 12″ powerbook. What an awesome little machine! Unfortunately, even with the amazing prices, I find my capital budget for hardware to be somewhat less than what is necessary to properly fund an Apple purchase at this point. I did play with the iBooks as well, and although they were well within my budget, the lack of power presented by the G3 was quite noticeable. I judged this merely by the time it took to load and/or switch between apps. (one of which was Safari) So, while I had Safari running, I pulled up my site and was less than thrilled with its rendering. I know my code isn’t the cleanest, especially with me re-writing things all the time, but sheesh, even IE renders the site pretty well. Posted Mon Feb 3 20:30:35 CST 2003
From: Jeff
How do you know that they don’t render well with Safari? Did you get a Power Mac?Posted Mon Feb 3 19:39:17 CST 2003
From: Charlie Sebold http://www.livingtorah.org/journal/
STS-107 has broken up over Texas, just after re-entry for a scheduled landing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Details are available at NASA and CNN
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
November 5, 2003 11:33 pm | 
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