Older blog entries for abg (starting at number 21)

Long time no diary: I had a baby (well, I didn't, you know what I mean...), started a LUG (well, I didn't - no, wait, I did...), cancelled my $60USD/month cable internet connection, picked up a $13USD month/30 hr./month dial-up for a few months, dropped the dial-up for the same cable connection this month at $26/mo, bought a camcorder, bought a laptop last weekend at a show and was pleasantly suprised to find out that it doubles as a pen computer, let the Gopher server development slow to a trickle (still want to finish it...), and wrote a bunch of crappy software that I haven't released yet.

There's other, more pointless stuff too (Won the Fantasy Football league here at work, for instance).

No time for more now. Will be soon. Promise.

abg@volkerding:/var/log$ grep -c default.ida access_log
899

w00t! Do I win something? :P

PyGS goes CVS in the next couple a days. My home gopher site, up and kicking for two weeks now. Still no IE support, I'm stumped but don't really care. 8^)

I had something really interesting to tell y'all but I forgot it. D'oh!

Mulix, your mail is bouncing.

I hate summertime.

Q*ick:

While everyone else was doing the honorable thing, I had my first day of work. Let's see how it went:

1. Arrive on time - check
2. Attend hours of orientation - check
3. Turn an AIX box worth more than my soul into an expensive paperweight by inadvertantly hosing /dev/null/ into a freakish file/device hybrid - check

I don't know what happened. We were cruising along at around 1715 when things ground to a halt. Quick inspection revealed that /dev/null/ was something with my name on it. Have no idea how that happened. Too late to call the admins - an entire night of work suspended because of my account. Bleah! Bad start!

AIX, I hate you.

H*cking:

Gopher server down all weekend due to kernel reboot - forgot to restart it and left for Central Minnesota. Doh! It's back up again. 0.4 rolls inexorably (-ibly?) closer.

G*pher: Version 0.3 has been up for a week without problems. IE doesn't seem to work and I'm having a hard time making myself care.

Di*t: Down 9.5 lbs so far! Hoorah for the hacker diet!

H*cking: Anyone from Northfield, MN know of or is interested in starting a LUG? Can't find any information on one and the Rochester LUG hasn't heard of one. With two colleges, I'm surprised one doesn't exists...

L*fe: Very, very good.

andrei: Don't focus too much on making every day 'unique' - for instance, if you're working on a big project, every day might seem quite like the others. Look for progress.

And if you really need some unique-ness, mentally draw a circle around your current home and head off in those directions heretofore unexplored. And really explore them - hit the alleys, look in the corners, talk to people. Give it an hour every night and I can guarantee that very few will be like each other.

ObGopher: Can someone with IE tell me whether or not you can see gopher://abg.sytes.net? I was at the library the other day and tried to test it with IE, but it wouldn't go. I dunno if it's my server or IE or what...

H*cking

My home gopher server is chugging along just wonderfully. I dished out a few hundred requests last night. Version 0.3 hits the streets today. I'm going to try and mirror the actual PyGS webpage/releases with the server, which means that I have to get the non-text file transfers going next.

Di*t

Hacker Diet - Day 7. I resisted the temptation to eat my shirt, but the mousepad wasn't so lucky. Mmmm... Low-cal mousepads... My last recruiting pitch picked up one person - if anyone else wants to join us, let me know. I'm in for the long haul, if you knowhaddimean.

L*fe

Did I mention that my wife is pregnant? First little hacker offspring due in January. These things come with Operating Manuals, right?

Who wants to play with Adam's new toy? Try this: PyGS - My python gopher server in action. Can't guarantee it for very long. (Feedback to adamATgurnoDOTcom - GPG key)

Hacker diet, day 5 - I want to eat my shirt.

Di*t

Hacker Diet, day 4. Friday was my first night out since starting and it showed up on the scale. Damn this lack of willpower!

Anyone want to diet as a team? Let me know... - adamATgurnoDOTcom.

H*cking

The gopher server is coming along. I have to implement .cap files next, but I've been lazy.

Here's a question for ya: Is the output of some of the more popular hash routines (SHA, MD-5) significantly different for similar pieces of text? For instance, would 1234567890 hash to something much different than 1234567890123? Would the outputs of similar text always look alike or different?

I just had an idea that I will implement if no one has already...

I wanted to connect to my VNC server, but I hate the simple password that I have - I've done the random generation thing for all my others, but I never seem to do it for this one.

Anyways, what I wanted was a password generator that accepted a simple passphrase as a seed along with the (UTC, I suppose) date and generated a new password off of that, different daily (or hourly, minutely, etc)

All you would have to remember is your passphrase (say... "joshua") and plug it into the program which yeilds "t&67M;;" for today. The same program generates the pwords for the host so that, for today, you can log in with that password. It would change at the roll over of the next day.

Any thoughts? My public key - You can send them to me or post them here. (Any service, not just VNC...)

I've written a first draft of something called Information Poisoning for Beginners. Everyone is invited to look at it and give all the feedback that they want.

I brought the 486 OpenBSD box back to life last night. I swapped out the PS with another junk machine that I got gratis from a customer, pulled out the slave with the hosed heads, dusted it all off and re-installed. Did you know: when slave went down with /usr attached to it, it still ran for a week and a half before I finally powered it down?

I'm just about ready to release PyGS - a Gopher(+) server written in Python. This is most definitely not ready for primetime.

And I got the lay off notice last week. Last day is Friday. Visit to the unemployment office is Monday. 8^)