Older blog entries for csm (starting at number 25)

** free dmitry **

havin' big fun now... some folks have written in about our anti-Coble stuff at MoonGroup.com... i hope that sometime soon he regrets having ever sponsored that damn bill... i sent some info out to the NC Libertarian Party this morning... hopefully we'll be able to garner more support for our next "geektivist" event at the federal courthouse...

mexican project

picked up my tickets today... the presentation preparation proceeds as planned... it's a lot of work but hopefully it will be worth it.

toodles!

dan: chill master barlow... so far as I can see nobody here is trying to tell you what you may or may not include in your diary... why be concerned about what other people are putting in theirs?

tired... just plain tired... gotta sleep....

toodles!

Code Red Contest

Home Office Firewall
[root@gateway junkbuster]# grep -c default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log
65

MoonGroup.com Primary Web Server
root@varmint:/root -> grep -c default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log
72

MoonGroup.com Secondary Web Server
root@server:/root -> grep -c default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log
51

LPI Web Server
[root@new /root]# grep -c default.ida /var/log/httpd/access_log
73

What an fscking waste of time...

This just in from the EFF:

We have just learned that the bail hearing for Dmitry Sklyarov will be held on Monday, August 6th at 11am at the San Jose Federal Building, in front of either Magistrate Judge Trumbull or Infante.

EFF is organizing both protests in front of the courthouse and a "dress-up day," which means that if you are planning on sitting in on the hearing, you should dress up (no t-shirts!) and show proper respect for the court.

More information will follow. We are short-staffed this week, so volunteers are welcome!

Katie Lucas
Executive Assistant
Electronic Frontier Foundation
415-436-9333 x104
www.eff.org

Hopefully they will let the poor guy out of jail... flight risk my arse... they can simply hold his passport and he won't be going anywhere... not that I think he should be held for anything at all... IMHO he's committed no crime and should be simply let go... One can only hope.

busy, busy, busy... i despise incompetent real estate and rental agents (and no i will not hang any meat on the bones of that complaint...) miserable damn day...

i'm looking forward to august though... oh yeah... it's august already... :-) i'm going to mexico city on the 19th... and then Linuxworld on the 27th... should get to visit with dyork again... fun, fun, fun...

i thought that the "secret project" was dead but now it looks like it's alive again... ~sigh... the worm doth turn...

dmitry is still in jail :-(

dsifry: thanx for the kind words. hope to run in to you sometime soon... maybe in San Fran the end of august...

jmallett: passport stuff can be found here:

PassPort services at the US Department of State

no time for more now... lot of stuff going on.

kandalf: yes you can block port 6000 from the internet and still allow it locally. I do it... a lot of people do. I don't know what you're using for your firewall but go read the source for plonk and you'll see how it's done... easy stuff! :-)
quick note

nymia: GreatBridge does postgresql solutions and support. Red Hat's database is also postgresql and they do intend to provide solutions and support.

money

landed a small amount of work which will suffice to get the bills paid this month... hopefully that trend will continue...

geek

i saw this article on byte.com and decided to give festival another try... a couple of years ago i could not get it to work but this time... well... this time i got my mind blown! :-) it sounds cool reading this manifesto:

I will promote the use of Free Software and Open Source technology where possible and plausible and where it's not I will help others discern how it may be used to interoperate with proprietary solutions. I will preserve and promote accepted standards in software and its underlying protocols. I will work to combat the universal destruction of community and creativity occuring because of the "embrace, extend, and litigate" mindset.

the dirty bird continues to kick butt... the latest cartoon highlights a very sad state of affairs...

XFce: development is really going nuts... i've moved cvs to a private host now... the troubles with sourceforge continue and frankly we don't want all of our eggs in a single basket... we've broken things up into two separate modules now... we have a stable and a devel... in just a few more days we should be off of sourceforge for everything except distribution... alan has joined the project now and that's cool... one of the things upcoming will be a gtk based terminal (without gnome-libs)... we've also got new docs written in docbook format and they are really nice... when we do the next release those new docs will be on board... the author is Jasper Huijsmans and he's done an excellent job... speaking of docbook... i found out a week ago or so that the new version of abiword will save docs in an xml based docbook format... that saved me some time on a conversion i'm doing because i lost the sgml source...

Linux Professional Institute: level 2 continues to progress... the objectives are completed and item collection is well underway... good... anyone wanting to contribute should see Kara's latest announcement for instructions

meta

i have seen people discussing their ages here... i turned 44 on 3 July.

comms

dyork: awesome news... big time congratulations... e-smith being acquired by mitel networks is a very good thing... it seems that more and more people are "getting it" as time passes

deven: please hush now... you've long since made your point... if it's broken they will fix it... if it's not broken continuing to complain about it will do little more than annoy

lilo: if the FL job comes through for you i will be happy... i certainly know how tough things are right now... let me know how it's going...

...bye...

30 Jun 2001 (updated 30 Jun 2001 at 03:25 UTC) »

i haven't felt much like posting lately... too many things going wrong... just about nothing going right... bah!

goingware: touching entry my man! also... i know what you mean about everything you said. the article you mentioned is frustrating me today as I have a business plan which does not require an exit strategy at all because it will be profitable to run without the need of an IPO or a buyout. so here I am... opportunity in hand and because so many lusers got money for nothing... well... you know what i mean... no need to belabor the point. i will keep trying though...

in my latest pursuit of toys and eye candy i found xpenguins. they make me laugh when i don't feel like laughing and... well... they r0ck! :-)

LPI is doing great with development of Level 2. it's starting to look like we'll be ready to start testing months sooner than we anticipated! i spent several hours today cleaning up the main web page for LPI. it was a mess of tables (without enough comments to keep it all straight) but it isn't any more... :-)

XFce: doing some hacking and slashing again. the #2 kernel dude (ac) joined the dev group. turns out he's an xfce fan! we're working on a gtk terminal... should be fun! :-)

dirty bird, #12 (the power of "X") is out! awesome! :-)

that's enough

jfleck: sometimes people die in very undramatic ways.

i got a call today from the mother of a friend, Scott. he was our first psychometrician at the Linux Professional Institute and one of the five founding members of the board. last summer he started acting strangely out of character and then he simply dissappeared. ultimately we had to replace him at LPI and we did, with great reluctance after he'd been gone for about six months. in point of fact i honestly thought he had died last year because his dissapearance was so far out of character (and i told him so) but then he resurfaced about 90 days ago when he started to phone me again, out of the blue.

after we founded LPI Scott and I and another friend (Tom Peters from the Netherlands) were a collaborative triumvirate developing the first level of LPI's certification tests and we were always on the phone or email discussing the work. the work became our social life! in fact, Scott and I knew each other over the net and on the phone for more than a year before we ever met in person (at LBE in Lost Wages!). while the three of us were pounding out the technical side of the tests dyork and Evan Leibovitch were running around with their hair on fire promoting the project. so we were all insanely busy!

needless to say i was very glad to hear from Scott. it turns out (according to today's call from his mother) that he had been battling a serious downturn with diabetes and it had affected his mind (yet he did not admit this to me, ever!). just two weeks ago he and i talked for an hour or so on the phone. he sounded lucid and said he was looking for work but having a hard time with it and that he hadn't been feeling very well. while we were talking something happened to his phone and we got disconnected, i called him back in spite of the fact that i was busy as hell (i'm glad that i did) and he said he was grateful i had called back because he was feeling down and was reluctant to take up any more of my time. i told him i didn't mind.

when she called today his mother told me that Scott passed away two weeks ago, alone, in a motel in Arkansas. i think he was 29. after i made the announcement on the LPI mailing lists this afternoon my friend Tom Peters called me from the Netherlands. we didn't talk long because transatlantic calls aren't cheap but we remembered Scott for moment or two, together. i will miss Scott. he was my friend.

Scott would have loved advogato had he still been on the net during the last year or two. he wrote some awesome python code for LPI so he would have fit in really well here. with that in mind i was thinking about the contributions he made to LPI (considerable!) and I searched through the archives to find some of the things Scott said when we were first trying to get LPI up and running. i found this and thought i'd end this note by quoting him:

"On a philosophical note, I would hope that the certification process reflects the spirit of the free/open-source software movement as much as possible. I would like to see certification develop to be as "free" and open as possible. By this I mean that all guidelines and policies should be developed in public and made available to all. While the exam and/or hands-on evaluation will have to have specific standards, the means of training and preparing should not be specified by the project. So there should not be a requirement to attend training classes or to buy a specific training course. Let multiple commercial and free preparation methods be developed."

--Scott Murray

i doesn't seem strange at all that what Scott was hoping for in November of 1998 (notice the message number from the archive) is a reality in June of 2001. Scott, you made it real!

peace.

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