Older blog entries for mattbradshaw (starting at number 13)

holy sweet wads of something... this life is insane. why is it that i always bite off more than i can chew. i'm near ulcer stage now looking at my todo lists. sorry to complain, but man this sucks.

i got don chafer's (of waterdeep) cd "you were at the time for love". talk about a good music. i didn't know it could be done that well. :) true artistry of the soul.

speaking of music, would one have to be absolutely crazy to enter the music distribution market? i mean, these big, evil, etc recording companies surely will do something bad to anyone who threatens them (legitimally or not). not that it matters what i want to do in my free time because i have NO free time anymore. i have come to the realization that iowa state is not only a money sucking machine but a time sucking machine as well. classes start in a week and i'm so unprepared i'm about to crack and smoke it. and working for iowa state is no better either. i'm finally begining to tire of getting paid magnitudes less than what i'm worth to the college of engineering. the flexibility and fun that once attracted to me to the "perfect campus job" are begining to dull. cheap expletives (not the people i directly work for but the unversity in gerneal). back to not-complaining...

for the first time in a long time, politics are becoming remotely interesting to me. i am finding myself constantly watching the coverage. i think that the widespread support of nader among the computing crowds is a bit scary. a nice guy, yeah, but some of his ideas are more off than my golf game.

more complaining... (stop reading now if you can't bear this terrible diary entry <grin>) just noticed that someone started a freenet-client-in-mozilla project (wfw). i had that idea about 3 months ago and was just moments away from starting in on it. just kinda pissed that someone beat me to the punch. but they've just got the idea, and NO CODE! that kinda irritates me a bit.

oh well, i'm not sure i am completely *in* to freenet anyway, at least as far as the very intense focus on complete anonymity goes. i agree that anonymity is needed, and even supercedes all other rights. but i just don't think that i care all that much about that aspect of freent, as needed as it may be. however, i am fascinated by the dynamic nature of data storage incorporated in freenet. you get tremendous gains in performance and reliability. it would be nice to have a generic comodity protocol for doing this. and probably without freenet's anon features just to avoid controversy and gain widespread acceptance. i am just now begining to scour the net in search of "better" solutions than freenet provides in this area. i think that sgi just recently released a file system that sorta-kinda does this. and i also think that a network file system like coda or intermezzo would do this too. but i'm talking out of my ignorance now. anyone willing to provide clues? thanks.

lots to talk about tonight... none of it important of couse.

personal stuff : looks to be a very late night tonight and a very early morning tomorrow. i've finally revived my home pc and now my nervous habits have subsided (slightly at least). <grin> at *real* work (not *not-so-real* work which is my own consulting co that i can devote hardly any time to nowdays) we have to move over all our web stuff over to a new box. sometime between now and tomorrow at 6 i've got to figure out why ms frontpage2k server extensions are being crabby. when it rains it pours.

my co-worker passed away this weekend while i was out of town. it was expected to happen but not this soon i had thought. cancer is cruel and wickedly efficient. i want to do the right thing for my other co workers and her family but i just don't know what it is exactly that i'm supposed to do. i'm dreading work tomorrow, it's going to be very somber. and rightfully so.

in other, slightly happier news, i think i've convinced my wonderful s.o. to like linux. now that i've gotten some desktop-ish apps on my box all is well. btw, today (sunday the 23rd as i don't know if it's tomorrow yet...) was her birthday. i really enjoy getting older as it feels like we have more credibility being married. getting married at 20 was pretty weird for me, thinking that family and all were kinda like 'wait a few years'... our marriage is going wonderfully though! i've sure got a good spouse that i am very excited to spend the next 50-60 years of my life with.

tech stuff : at isu we're trying to come up with a (good) way of merging our modified rpm spec files with newer versions. would 'cvs join|merge|whatever' work for this??? please let me know. i need to escape rpm hell.

man, i'm writing a lot tonight. must be wound up. wonder if raph will ever put ssl on advogato so i don't need to login with my password over the wire. not a huge deal i guess. i wonder if i should obsfucate my email addr now that people *know* about avogato. darn that salon.com! probably wouldn't matter all too much as every fregin spammer in the world has my email. good thing it's going to soon (like this month) change.

the truth : god is good

seeing that i can't get in to the office (grrrr...) i'll write a diary from the lab. yeah.

this is just too funny (or very sad and i'm just trying to hide the sickness of it all...). yesterday i spent my day upgrading our web server, making it generally a pretty rocking box -- added *tons* of stuff. we wanted to finally be able to have ssl logins for all of our frontpage (l)users (<grin>) in the college. up until now we were stuck with Basic http auth (cleartext over the wire for everybody - bah!). in the process of upgrading i found a very interesting nugget.

ms frontpage98 sucks very badly! fp2000 is only *slighly* better...

yes, i'm aware that everyone knows this, and has known this, and will always know this - but it's worse than you thought... i promise. :) in trying to convince fp98 to connect to our apache webserver loaded w/ mod_ssl and mod_frontpage there was absolutely no way. it turns out that fp98 had it's list of CA's built in to the binary w/ no method of updating them and no update to the program (as far as i can find). seeing that all of the CA certs compiled in to fp have now expired (as all certs do - man this is stupid...) this makes fp98 completely *worthless* when connecting to a secure server. these guys at mickeysoft really know what they're doing, let me tell you. their new initiative with .NET is going to be simply amazing... :)

built-in obsolescence is either stupid or evil - my guess is stupid.

out of the blue, my (normal job) employer decided to have me start on getting some web server farm stuff ready for the college. on linux. wahoo. i have finally escaped irix/solaris/linux integration hell. at least i hope.

but i'm pretty much a virgin when it comes to clustering technology. it should be loads of fun learning though. what kind of stuff is out there??? i quickly found the "linux virtual server project" and piranha... anything else out there to occupy my reading time for this week?

wouldn't financial independence be nice?

confession time: being full of stupidity and pride (very normal - attempting to decrease this common state over time) i previously credited myself as journeyer. what a joke! that has now been remedied and i have ranked myself "honestly" as an apprentice. i have high hopes, of course, of finishing some really cool free software for the community but as of yet it's very unpolished and what i have done is small contribs to small projects. but that's ok. :) from now on i'm wanting the community cert me. no excuses for the wrong certs. my apologies to the world...

in other news wesley felter directed me to the answer i've been seeking regarding filesystem-backupsystem integration. that answer would be Network Appliance. he also stated that Plan 9 has a backup system built in to its file server. i'll keep an update here as soon as i check it out. thanks much wmf! i *really* appreciate your vast knowledge of what's going on (your ranking yourself as apprentice was the truth-stick for my mis-certification of myself).

off to 4th of july parades and what not. later.

viewcvs is very cool. kudos to gstein!

graydon mentioned ciphersabre a while back and i must say, very very very cool stuff. i already feel like a jedi. or something. must watch the star wars trilogy (and maybe the episode one thingy) yet again...

wesley felter joined avogato! man oh man he gets news fast on his site. pretty good stuff over there at hack the planet .

happy trails...

what do people use for a web server indexing and searching system??? any concensus on what is good out there? it looks as if the situation is akin to ftp servers for linux in that everyone and there grandmother has coded up one. and unfortunetly it looks to me as if none really perform as well as i'd like. this is esp. true when i'm trying to get it to run on uncommon (== un-linux) unix boxen.

so i'm about 10 minutes away from ripping into the sources for htdig and figuring out a database problem when running under irix. this upsets me so fregin much as it's an EASY problem. one that should be already solved for me.

guess i'm pretty pissy today.

just got back from an extremely fun weekend of sailing. it's pretty fregin awesome to have a wife that challenges me to do fun stuff like that... cuz i can be a pretty big wuss sometimes. :) during the 4th or so race of the regatta we demasted though (almost took off my head!). that caused us to miss two races and thus took us out of the running. oh well.

had a lot of driving time to get to the lake and campground, so that gave me lots of time to read up on freenet. i mean really read up on it. i think i got it down. it's pretty elegantly designed imo. i am hoping to incorporate some of my ideas in the project here pretty soon (like document type <aka mime> discovery, etc).

sweet swirly shortcakes! it's late and i'm big time behind here at work. later, diary.

later

had some more thoughts regarding the integration of a filesystem and a backup system. i now think that this would be quite a Good Thing tm. this integration would provide a solution to the problem of missing file versions lost between backups. just put the backup logic in the close() system call. no overhead at all; don't know what i was smoking earlier.

has this already been done??? surely it has.. just have to search for it. because the dichotomy need not exist.

in other thoughts today... how about changing (actually "unifying" is the word i'm looking for) config file formats under unix as to ease the learning/frustration curve for newcomers. i know unix old hands would throw fits but the absurdtity of learning reduntant and equivelant-in-desciption config file formats is well known. let's make unix even better - esp. for the newcomers. hope i'm not hated for that statement. :)

need yet another break... seems like writing diaries is my "escape".

i just got a new sun box. pretty fast so matt is a happy sysadmin once again. now only if helixcode's installer would fregin work, i'd get all productive and stuff. it looks to me as if i'm going to have do it manually. fiddlesticks.

now that i'm on the topic of helixcode... is it me or do they (intentionally?) make it difficult to do an initial install. i don't want to pay $$$ for a cd when i've got the connection. and i also don't want to have to click on every needed rpm. yes, i know i can just use wget... but still.

just got back from a wedding in mi this weekend. man oh man, did my "best man speech" suck to no end. oh well. :) i was very amused by a certain bridesmaid who shall remain nameless who is so very completely anal. we trashed (nicely though, i swear!) the new couples car and then this bridesmaid went absolutely ballistic. she tried to quickly clean it up but she left her garbage sack right next to the car so once we found out about it... it went in again. oh the look on her face... :)

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