Advogato blog for sethcohn

24 Aug 2003

Sun, 24 Aug 2003 01:02:24 GMT

Long long time, no post. Much happened in the last 2 years since my last post. :) One of these days, I'll write more in my journal about it. Lessons learned, sometimes hard. Love found, marriage next year. Life is good.

Mostly just want to check in, since I haven't advogatoed in a long time.

14 Sep 2001

Fri, 14 Sep 2001 09:27:08 GMT

Been a while since I posted, though I read advogato regularly. Still working on why that is. My life is a mess in some ways, not bad in others... and maybe I'm just not the journaling type.

9-11 events:

Simply put, while the event is shocking, my opinion of the media and the masses are confirmed sadly. I am more saddened by the rampant patriotic bullshit and lack of awareness than anything else, even the deaths themselves.

I have relatives in NY, and yes, thankfully none of them were hurt. Yes, I was scared, and if one of them had been hurt, I'd be a mess right now. No argument there.

And yes, the pain and grief and terror and rage are driving people right now. Feeling all of that is good. Acting from that is not. There is a difference.

I had no hope for this country, even before this mess happened, and I see nothing to change my mind: The US is screwed up in so many many ways and it's unlikely to change.

ESR voices a valid if unpopular opinion, and he's personally attacked for it. Fuck all of you who did so.

Bush and others are willing and wanting to go to war, regardless of the realities or even the logic of such. Fuck that.

Flag waving patriots who think that "America" really means something good and true these days: Wake up, or you continue to earn the stupid American image. Fuck the flag and learn the truth about what the rest of the world thinks about ugly American involvements. We are not innocents.

CNN, and the rest of the media (with the exception of BBC for some odd reason): plastic propaganda machines, all of you.

Heroes? Yes, there are heroes. Flight 93's brave passengers who probably saved many lives, even while losing their own in the process. Firefighters and policemen who rushed into burning buildings to rescue people, buildings whose exits should have be fixed the first time a tragedy happened there and weren't. All of the people who are giving time and energy to pick up the pieces and breathe smoke and sweat for hours. Those are the heroes, and nobody will argue that, will they?

Anyone who picks up a gun or a bomb and goes to kill someone 'responsible'? Not a hero. Not in my book, and shouldn't be in anyone else's either. Feel free to disagree. Many do. But if you so value the 'freedoms' we have, you cannot argue that my voice isn't as valid as yours. Freedom to voice the unpopular view is one of the most important of freedoms.

Now, watch the powersthatbe shut down encryption, privacy, and myriad other freedoms, all in the name of 'peace' and 'justice'. I won't join conspriracy theorists who wonder if the US had a part in the attacks, but it wouldn't surprise me to one day learn that someone knew something was going to happen, decided there was no point in warning people because they couldn't stop it happening eventually, and decided that a huge horrible event was just what they needed to let them take charge the way they wanted to all along.

To end this, I'll quote Niven's law:

F x S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. These remarks apply to individuals, nations, and civilizations. Notice that the constant k is different for every civilization and different for every individual.

We have people in charge who don't care about F at all. F them.

30 Jul 2001

Mon, 30 Jul 2001 03:38:22 GMT

EUGLUG
Well, it is all the rage here to create projects for LUGs, so I've created a EUGLUG project for those of us who are in the Eugene/Springfield Oregon area. (At least ten here I know of)

Wiki
I'm hooked on playing with PHPWiki. Wiki is addicting.

15 Jul 2001

Sun, 15 Jul 2001 07:54:08 GMT

meta
Well, got some good responses so far to my article, and hopefully something good will come of it. The more I play with this stuff, the more I like it.

xvl
Still can't get xvl to work for me. Solved one problem by hardcoding the directory and now it's got a memory allocation problem or something.

wiki
Decided to try installing a wiki. Nothing was packaged for Debian (huh?) with the exception of zope-wiki which is far overkill, so I grabbed the PHPWiki snapshot tarball and after some mysql wrangling (wrong table names), it installed like a charm. rybolov's usually the mysql/php guy but I can handle it enough to at least figure stuff out and make it work. PHPwiki is very nice, much prettier by default than other wikis...

life
With more of my friends (naturedarren, Kyrgan) joining, I might just find the discipline to diary more often... we'll see.
Life has been so busy lately, it's nice to be taking it easier. Leaving a job and entering the marketplace isn't fun, but so far so good. Ask me again in a few months.

community
Our local Linux user group, EUGLUG has been wrestling with finding new places to meet having both outgrown the old and business changes where we meeting. After weighing all the options, I decided a hiatus for the summer makes the most sense. Meeting every week on Thursdays and once a month on Saturdays has taken its toll, and a break is a good thing, so we can coordinate something with the other Oregon LUGs as well as find new digs. It was pretty funny how many regulars reacted to the news with "Well, now what will I do with my Thursday nights?" Still haven't posted the news to the mailing list, I'll go do that.

tivo
Tivoed: too many to count - with my new 60 gig HD addition, the number of movies waiting to be watched is just perfect, I can pick and choose from about 7 or 8 at once...plus all of the good shows I season pass, both new shows and good stuff i missed the first time round.
At the moment: Pups - spoiled kids rob a bank. Thumbs down.

looking forward to
Jay and Silent Bob - Kevin Smith is a god.
Annual fireworks party at my place

11 Jul 2001

Wed, 11 Jul 2001 04:05:04 GMT

I've followed the certification 'problems' with interest, seeing as I'm rated as Master based solely on 1 Cert for it from kbob, and I'm working on lkcl's xmlvl the next generation of advogato. (Ever notice how Luke ends up being the TNG guy?)

gary wrote:

have a ``show incoming capacities'' link on everyone's personal page. I had a play with mod_virgule to see how easy this would be

Please let me know when you get this working, I'd like to see that... if you get it for virgule, it should work for xvl also

dmerrill mentioned increasing the number of seeds from four to ten or so. If you look at the seeds, however, you will find this: raph has certified loads of people (at least N, where N is a number larger than I can be bothered to count) and seems fairly active. alan has also certified at least N people, although I don't think he is active here.

http://daniel. haxx.se/advogato/stats.cgi says it's raph at 70, alan at 76

There are plenty of people here who are:
Respected in the open-source community, aka the Masters amongst us
Very active here
Known to be scrupulous certifiers
Perhaps two or three of them should be ``seeded''.

Per the above link, (all thanks to bagder) I nominate, based on community certs:

lilo DV mathieu

All are active and all are well certified enough that making them a seed is justified by the given trust metric currently.

30 Jun 2001

Sat, 30 Jun 2001 16:30:47 GMT

malcolm wrote:

So, they gave me a USB Compact Flash reader instead. Now the chances of this working under Linux are ...? That's right: zero!

Wrong. There is excellent USB flash reader support in Linux.

In fact, you can do things with it (fdisk flashcards with partitions and more, it's a full scsi-ish emulation) that you cannot do with Windows software. I used it to make a 3 partition flashdisk to install PocketLinux for a Casio Cassiopeia PDA (normally running WinCE). Per the instructions, I created a FAT16 and 2 ext2 partitions, and it worked great, bootstrapping from WinCE into Linux. I could NOT repartition the card under Windows.

SanDisk makes a reader I tried installing on a dozen machines, worked fine on some, blue screened on others, tech support was clueless (It's a really buggy driver). That same reader works like a champ with Linux using usb-storage.o

29 Jun 2001

Fri, 29 Jun 2001 14:17:59 GMT

Long time, no diary. I think I'm gonna try and change that. I feel like so much of my life lately has been postponed. So many projects desired, so little done.

Last day at work. I gave notice a month ago, and spent the last month working harder and longer than ever, trying to finish/documemt/adjust things to life without me in a professional manner. Gonna take a week off and then start my consulting/networking biz. More on that later. First job: go right back to the same company, this time working for an outside vendor to finish off a project. Gee, isn't life ironic... I can't escape from this company even by quitting. No wonder I felt dilbertesquely trapped here.

My brother flys in from NY today. Should be fun to see him, been a long time, 3 years. Going camping over the 4th. Will spend time hacking Tivo, swapping 'deal' stories, and amazing friends with stories of former exploits.

xvl: Still working on getting it working. even the CVS version wasn't working right for me... oh well, I'll have free time to mess with it soon enough. Trying to decide on a 'pure' advogatoish site, or something like PHPnuke combined with xvl...

28 Dec 2000

Thu, 28 Dec 2000 23:26:47 GMT

Ugh. I resolve to start this diary up again, and to pick up all sorts of projects that I've dropped the ball on. Too much stress, not enough fun, and next thing I know it's 6 months later and I'm just a mess.

15 Jun 2000

Thu, 15 Jun 2000 23:41:51 GMT

My god, it's been over a month since my last entry. Depression is not a fun thing. I'll try to get back in the habit. Talk is good for the soul.

I'm putting together a vendor contact list for Linux User Groups, quasi-officially for linux.com, so would all of you wonderful people who work for companies that can, do, or should support Linux User Groups with freebies and more, please contact me (seth@euglug.net) with some info, or even just a quick note saying who I could contact for more info. Mostly, I'm doing for my own LUG, because we are holding a large event at the Oregon Country Fair, and we need stuff, but also cause all of the existing lists are very dated. Volunteerism is good for the soul.

Applied to be a Debian maintainer. Free software is good for the soul.

Work: spent the last few days wresting with routers of all sorts. Routing is bad voodoo and bad for the complexion, and the soul. Exhausted and ready for a change. Anyone with some neat job openings?

7 May 2000

Sun, 7 May 2000 07:13:07 GMT

dria:
It's Spenser, with an s, like the poet (as he's said more than a few times). Robert Parker's created two other detectives since, I'm not greatly impressed with either so far, and when I found out the female one was written for Helen Hunt to play... bleh... If you like that style of writing, do check out Elvis Cole by Robert Crais. Very similar but just different enough to not feel 100% clonish (I like these better than Parker's own others.)

something new every day: I tend to write an entry then go back afterward and put urls in by doing a quick google search, and picking something. Often, I discover a new site that way. After looking over the Crais website, I learned that he's got ties to the sci-fi community, and written for many tv shows, probably stuff I've liked and never noticed was by him. Advogato diary writing can be self-educating.

Hamfest: I have a amateur radio tech class license I never use, but once in a while, I go to the ham radio shows to find goodies. Bought a tiny little Yaesu VX-1R that fits in the palm of my hand, runs for 14 hours on a lithium cell and can receive a huge spectrum of things besides just the ham frequencies. Of course, the major software to tweak the unit is commercial windows stuff, but I did find some linux code for it right away. Now I have to either buy or make a cable for it. Combined with the Espresso pc (review coming one of these days), I could have a completely mobile packet radio station, which these days is internet capable.... of course, I wanted to do this years ago, when nobody was doing it, now it's pretty common. Any old Palm 7 can do it.

Iluvyou-youloveme: The night before this hit, I was thinking of improving the mail scanner setup I had. Of course, I decided against it at the time. Next morning, drive to work, turn on radio and hear that 'a new virus' is out. Bang head against steering wheel over missing chance to look really psychic. Luckily, only person who got it that morning (8 times) was one of the very few who uses netscape for mail, not outlook (in some form). Turned off sendmail, installed procmail filter and turned sendmail back on. Caught every variant (and a few prettypark.exes) with just that one fix. Good thing to come out of it: boss is willing to look at other email packages. Eudora seems to be in the lead. Must be free, windows, easy as outlook, and full featured. Any others anyone can think of?

God:
I added some stuff to the Universe, and you removed it. I'll have to let people know: Jesus saves, but God deletes.

Linuxcare layoffs: Not that it's any of my bizness, but it'd be interesting if someone did a tally of where the people all end up. Here's hoping you all land feet up someplace else soon.

Physical labor: mowed lawn. (most of it)

i-opener: It's a version3 which means Netpliance removed the shadow passwd and disabled the root login windows that worked before. Someone will have to hack this puppy and gain root so we can reflash the bios. They will. Netpliance will learn that if they'd been nice, we'd be on their side, spending time doing cool stuff with them, but no... they had to goop and clip and piss people off, and now the effort is spent fighting what they did to stop us from doing things we'll do anyway. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, don't put epoxy all over them.

Television: I own a 60 inch Sony tv with a Tivo and DirecTV. TV on demand - only shows I want to watch, and I currently don't get the major networks. I mostly watch movies or scifi channel. The tv was a present to myself, it's too big sometimes (it's almost a full wall in my tiny place), but it's fun watching movies on it.