Older blog entries for mattbradshaw (starting at number 27)

doh! late for work... but working on work from home. does that count? as long as i'm late though, i might as make it count. :) so let's write a diary entry.

wrists still hurt. but i'm taking some action and trying to fix it. jwz has some really good information on wrist pain that has been really helpful to me. xwrits is getting a little annoying though. :)

i've enjoyed playing lots of tetrinet over my little vacation. my (wonderful) wife also quite enjoys the game. go and try it if you haven't already.

another goodie that i can share w/ you is joel spolsky's treasure of a book, "UI Design for Programmers". It's so very wonderful -- simple yet so powerful. and fun too. joel always has good things to say over at his editthispage.com place.

speaking of a userland guy, i just have to say that all of these userland people are pretty spiffy. really good weblogs. go dave winer! go wes felter!

btw, does anybody else here want a wiki-style editing option here at advogato... i think that'd be, um, yummy. let me know what you think. i still want to keep advogato's simplicity in its code though too. but typing html on a webapp is like 'so y2k'. :) let's move on

my wrists hurt :(

christmas is done, it was fun, corri got presents a-ton, my cold puts snot in my lung

got an optical mouse at my father-in-laws house the wheel wouldn't work till i gave xfree some hurt

should go to job but my sick body sobs so i'll sleep and i'll code and down painkillers a load

what a lame rhyme maybe better next time

tonight i had my first live radio performance. i played all this percussion stuff with some friends who started a new (good) band. i have to admit, i do miss the band days. its really fun and if you do things right you can even make a buck or two. i guess i didn't do things right. ;)

i had reason to celebrate tonight as i finished a test in which much cram-it-into-my-head studying took place. just a few more and then more breathing time.

later

yesterday, i attempted to install linux on an old inherited toshiba laptop... and no luck as of yet. and i thought i'd be doing my emacs thing in the bathroom by evening. :( here's the sad story. i got all 'inspired' and planned out how to actually accomplish this hack of an installation. this being a 'hack' as the laptop doesn't have a cdrom, a working pc card thingie, network interface, ... you get the idea. so i figured i would broaden my horizons a bit and try doing a network installation using plip. but i never got that far, as i discovered (*after* purchasing a new cable, and investing time in learning plip of course) that the toshiba just ain't gonna boot linux from its floppy. curses. i think i tried about every bootdisk in existence... if anybody has any linux experience with the toshiba satellite t1950ct laptop please let me know. and yes i've checked the linux laptop pages. :) all of them. the only reason i'm holding onto hope that my hardware isn't bad is that i *can* boot m$-dos from the floppy. go figure. so does this mean that the kernel isn't jiving with the hardware? or the loader (syslinux/lilo), or is linux more keen to hardware problems and aborts... no error msgs, nothing. just thought i'd share the frustration.

time it's time to go home and play handyman. got some new, fancy kitchen furniture to put together. and after that's all done i have some major catching up to do in my studies. it will be a late night as usual.

... i am the fashion police.

(doh! i check my links to amihotornot.com and blammo, nudity. it wasn't this way just a few days ago... so just wanted to warn you - links may be 'bad'. sorry.)

slowly becoming an "expert" on the SET standard. how completely boring i've become...

i've finally found the time to set up my own wiki server for my university employer. it works superbly (sp?) for documentation as documents live dynamically, and creating/modifying is so simple. this will give me more time to play around with zope as well. much rejoicing.

it's time to finally buckle down and clean out my inbox. i think there's something like 8K messages. i hate it when i do this (which is way too often).

life will settle down, life will settle down, life will settle down...

sorry that it has been so very long since i've last written. i'll try to keep more regular in the future. :)

what's happened lately... lets see here.

as of late, i have been experiencing the tyranny of the urgent in full force with so many little stupid things to do. school especially. i'm *not* going to miss pointless classwork when i'm shortly gone. nor numerous tests covering material that i could care less about (can you say "macroeconomics"). pretty darned frustrating as i've been unable to concentrate on growing my business. it's going to be a challenge to meet some of my self imposed deadlines. but such is life i guess.

my wife and i have recently been trying to consistently go out with this other couple and do fun stuff together. this last weekend it was the guy's (david and myself) turn to dictate what-to-do. so we had lots and lots of fun with lasertag (w/ good radiohead music as the shooting soundtrack btw), go-carting (i'm unbeatable mwhahahaha), minigolfing (very beatable here), and the like. and we topped off the evening with some killer food. i don't know how to pronounce what i had but it was tremendously tasty. i'm really looking forward to doing this again soon.

i've come to the conclusion that wikis are really cool! use them. read them. saturate yourself in them. etc. i'm advocating the use of a zope product doing wikis here at (isu) work to do internal documentation. the traditional documentation cycle is tedious and i see wikis as a fun (!), new way of doing documentation here. i'm planning on setting this up before the end of the week. i want to augment our wiki a bit though - user authentication, tighter versioning, the capability to deny anonymous writes, etc. hopefully something already exists along these lines but if not i don't see why i couldn't do this all quick-like.

in other news i've learned that standards bodies are funky. very funky indeed.

while in des moines at my father in law's, i set up (and am still in the process of setting up <grrr>) a little linux based firewall protecting his internal network from the big and nasty internet coming out of his cable modem. we're using old (486ish) hardware with an isa bus so i'm a bit concerned about performance hits. i didn't get any metrics on the kind of speed he's getting out of his cable modem but i suspect it's not fast enough to be hindered by a slow firewall. if he says its slow i'll take a look at getting him some better hardware for the firewall. but anyway, this little project was completely painFULL. went thru 2 cdrom drives and both were damaged. so no easy distro install for me... :( was curious about the linux router project so i finally gave it a whirl. cool, linux w/ needed tools all on a floppy or two. no install needed. all smiles. doh. it runs 2.0.x kernel with ipfw. i want my ipchains!!! don't want to learn an obsolete tool if i don't have to. ok... found materhorn (modified lrp) with 2.2 (ipchains... ahh). its working after a lot of tweaking to get the kernel to like his older hardware. but now i find out that his @home provider changes to use dhcp (@home had static ips before???). curses! have to fit that (dhcp support) on a fregin tiny floppy too. arggghhh... to be continued.

in sysadmin work, i've been trying to figure out how to put some of the high availability stuff i learned a while back to use in other services such as our print servers, etc. sometimes i feel that its all academic for us as we'll hardly ever need it. at least its decently fun to do.

been working on getting some good (good == somebody besides me making them) logos. i finally think i've come across the winner. and that's good as the website needs to go live SOON (before nov 1).

speaking of websites, at (isu) work we just hired a pretty cool web person. seems like a very nice and knowledgable lady. we really needed to refill that position. this should take some stress off of our backs.

btw, thanks lilo for the information on file delta stuff that you threw up in your recent diary entry. very good stuff that i wouldn't have come across easily otherwise. thanks again.

been reading david kahn's the codebreakers. its a fun read. also in the history side of things, i just now noticed that i got the history channel on cable. this very good veg-on-the-couch-when-i'm-too-tired-to-think material. better than, say, oprah. ;)

i'm sure there's been a lot more that went on but i forgot it all.

happy birthday to me!

harrisj has answered the factoring proofability question i had. thank you so very much! it's very nice to be part of a community that helps eachother out so beautifully.

btw, i fregin can't spell. i give up at trying - going to use that time for fun stuff like playing the guitar or something. please don't laugh too hard when you read my stuff <that means YOU christina>. :)

wow, i'm blue... probably (ok, definitely) not deserving of it yet though. but its so nice to see it because i want so badly to be a heavy contributor to this community of free software. but as of right now i haven't even revealed what i've been working on... which is dumb on my part btw. i think that i just didn't want to say anything until i had something to point to with pride. and i don't want to raise expectations in case i fail in my project. might as well stop now at being dumb: i'm working on getting an standard (i hope) and open implementation of interopable micropayments. the design is pretty much done, just lots of coding and technical writing left ahead. i guess if anyone else wants to lend a helping hand, shoot me off an email and we'll get it working rsn. but i want to reiterate... i'm not a journeyer by raphs definition. thank you eskimoses for your faith in future possibilities through some discussion we've had, but you should/can lower my certs until i get some more stuff on the table. but then again, this whole cert stuff is crazy (and meaningless really). so why am i beating it over the head. don't want to end up like ncm... just kidding. i'll stop now. :)

eskimoses has it right when praising the mentoring process. it's truly remarkable in its successes. keep on mentoring, its changing the world! that sounded like one of those motivating commercials or something.

and something to close off the entry on a sad note <drum roll>... i can't fregin read anymore. i think i'm going crazy. i have like 17 books open and i read about a sentence in all of them.... and its so jumbled in my mind. i think the web has destroyed my ability to read like i used to be able to. i'm always jumping from thing a to thing b and can't read straight text anymore. anyone else experience this or am i a freak of nature in this regard???

man i've been slow today.

i figure its about time to check out others to certify. and not just recertify the 'known' free software hackers here, want to catch some of the new stars. speaking of certs... thanks for everybody who cert'd me! i view certs as a very nice compliment to individuals that have contributed to free software which is important to us here. there's lots of people here who really deserve lots of thanks... time to certify.

man, nobody has tackled my (probably grade school) question regarding provability of public key cryptosystems based on the prime factors problem. poop. i might actually have to crack open some books or something and dig. i'll probably remember and appreciate it better that way though. but if you have an answer, please send it my way still! :)

eskimoses has finally convinced me to (really) check out wikis. i'm sure that there will be lots of fun stuff to discuss in the next few days. i just don't know if i buy into the viability of allowing anybody to do anything. sure, anarchism has its features but people aren't all that trustworthy are they? i would prefer to set up protections for content. but maybe (actually most likely) i don't know what i'm talking about. :)

i have to set up an answering machine on my linux box sometime this week. and i'm dreading it after reading some commentary on the state of mgetty/vgetty coming from jwz. i think he discussed some of the shortcomings in his caller id perl script he wrote (it *should* still be on his website). what i'm looking to do is something extremely simple (== no mailboxes or that kinda junk). greeting -> record message -> encode to mp3 or oggvorbis (for space consideration) -> *maybe* email it me as an attachment or at least a notification. that's it. it would be nice if their was a turnkey app for this. because i foresee a valuable week of work gone. but it'll probably be a learning experience, a little bit fun, and it'll make christina happy. i'll let you in on the progress later. expect more on this weekend after a camping trip. btw, jwz's caller id prog is pretty darned cool, it's integrated with his bbdb (his address book basically) and filters the ringing (on his computer) and volume accordingly. that's a pretty *cool* hack. hope to get it work on my box. kinda reluctant to do the bbdb though.

i need to get new hardware :( well actually s/need/want ... actually s/want/REALLY-WANT-BAD... time to look into the bank account.

gotta take my daughter to her first day of gymnastics (sp?). hope she enjoys it as much as i think she might.

later.