Gekitsuu's Geekery

Nothing like a week off to give you a fresh perspective on your life . It's nice to have some time to get away from the grind of the office and be able to take a look at where you are and where you want to be. I'm fortunate to have a very understanding spouse and some good friends who don't mind having deep conversations. I've also been surprised by some of the people at work who are too understanding to be considered 'just' co-workers. Despite a really bad allergy spell I've managed to get some pretty cool stuff done on my mini-vacation. I've put together a photo-book at lulu.com and I've ordered a test print to see how it looks. If I like the result I'm going to offer photo books of 50 or so fractals for sale through lulu.com. I've also writen a python script that allows me to process fractals in a client-server method so that I can now bring up machines at my house and have them process fractals off the server. This is necessary because I figured out that to rerender the remaining fractals in my collection would be nearly a year (ick). With the 3 machines I've added to the "farm" of servers I should be done in a few months. My wife has gone to visit her grandfather who is in the hospital and I am here alone with our itty bitty dog named "Zoey". This is a double-edged sword in that I have a lot more responsibility than I usually do because my wife takes care of walking Zoey but I also get to spend more time with her than I usually do. Hopefully we'll both survive. I'm about halfway through the Ubuntu Book and it's been a really good read so far. I've only skimmed over the install chapters because for the most part I'm pretty comfortable with installing ubuntu. I've tried out every version since Warty and I've always been pleased with their installer and I prefer it to anaconda. I just read a blog entry about their new init system called Upstart that has me pretty impressed. I have yet to go through the documentation of the system to see how it operates but the fact that they're not afraid to change something that has been in use since the dawn of time shows great ambition in the group and encourages me to help them out. I'm researching ways I can contribute to their effort.

I'm trying to keep myself creative by doing the things that I enjoy such as coding, fractals (more on this below), and writing. I've been listening to the "I Should Be Writing" podcast by Mur Lafferty and she has Lulu.com as a sponsor. I looked into what it takes to publish there and I'm toying around with the idea of publishing my flash fiction through this site. That also got me thinking about how I haven't done anything with my cafepress store and so tonight I plan on getting both of these ideas off the ground. The thing that has kept me from putting items up for sale on cafepress is that I felt the need to re-render my fractals at a larger resolution. Tonight I'm going to clean up my Perl script that modifies the fractals and select a batch of initial fractals that I'd like to sell in the store. I'll probably pick 12-15 so that I can make them into a calendar. The other thought I had is that I'll re-render ALL of my fractals and publish them as an art book on Lulu.com.

I have redone my site using RapidWeaver which is an awesome tool for doing websites. I have only just scratched the surface of what it can do and I can already see the genius behind it. Right now I'm using a very boring default theme but I already have plans to create my own and hopefully in the next couple months I'll get that done. I heard about this program from The Screen Casts Online. It's a show done by Don Mcallister that is a tremendous source of good information about applications for the Mac. I have been doing my best this past week to go through all of the old episodes and even on the shows about applications I thought I was fairly familiar with I am learning great tips and tricks to make life easier. He really should be getting a commission for his shows from the companies because I bought Little Snitch after watching his show. But I'm also considering RapidWeaver (For obvious reasons), NetNewsWire, .Mac, and Snapz Pro X. If you are a mac user or are considering a move to Mac I cannot recommend this show highly enough.

I submitted a piece of flash fiction to Escape Pod and while I'll be very surprised if they read it but my feelings won't be hurt if they don't. I have a few more ideas for flash fiction and I may start submitting them to publications and see if there's any interest. Part of the fun to me is to hear what people think good and bad so it's hard to say what venue is right for me. If Escape Pod decides not to carry the story I submitted I will certainly post it here.

I was listening to Mur Lafferty's podcast called "I Should be Writing" and I
started thinking off on a tangent about how important is it that someone know
the names of the peices of ther craft. Take for instance a car mechanic. In
order to work with other mechanics they have to agree on terminology they need
to understand about the systems they are working on. But if the apocalypse
came and all the char mechanics died I would still be able to figure out how a
car works without knowing the names of it's parts. In my mind that means that
knowing the terms is really only important to the people in a field who
communicate with each other and with other fields.

I upgraded my server; everything is running ok so far. I've also reinitiated the ticket with Speakeasy.net to try and get their service. I have not been getting to the gym
as often as I was but I'm working on that. I went to dinner last night with my wife and
her co-workers to "Sunflower" which is the same veggie place we ate, on her birthday.
Life is busy, so I'm being very brief. Goats.

I have had one busy Sunday night (which is the first day of my weekend). Last night I had to go into the office briefly to fix a problem with the backup server, I did 2 full loads of dishes, 1 full load of laundry, read 7 chapters in the Learning Python Second Edition from Oreilly Press, and worked on my current computer situation with my new file server. Because I skipped the gym last night I plan on leaving shortly to do what will be the first full body weight lifting session I've done since I was a teenager. I fully expect to fail to do everything I want to do at the gym tonight just because I'll run out of steam. I have been reading the Python book and salivating at some of the things Python lets you do. I really am starting to think that the main reason Perl people hold so tightly to the idea that Perl should be used for everything is because of CPAN. The fact that Perl can do nearly everything doesn't make it the best tool for the job. I can't wait to start doing some benchmarks on large file processing and see which is faster. Because of the way that Python works I was thinking I may use it to my my fractal generator instead of Perl. Python seems to handle math better which would make it better suited. I haven't decided what reading material I'm going to take with me to the gym but I find myself wishing I had the hard copy of the Python book so I could bring that. The RHCE book is very dry and something I need to concentrate on more than I can when I'm peddling like a madman on the bike. One of my co-workers let me try out his iSight camera on my iBook and I don't know if it was the lighting as I suspect but the video looked much clearer recording on his PowerBook than it did on my iBook. There was an article on NewsForge about RSS vs ATOM for news feeds and I haven't read the article yet but I wanted to record my view on it before I did. After working on a program to parse RSS feeds and put them into emails (a similar idea to RSS2email by Aaron Swartz) and I started to realize that RSS and its many versions make for some really ugly hacks to parse them correctly. ATOM seems to have a better initial design so it hasn't had to grow and mutate like RSS did. I feel so strongly that ATOM has done things right that I've considered pulling the RSS feed off my website and just allowing ATOM. I haven't done that and may never because i believe in supporting as many different interfaces to my weblog as possible but it is a debate that should be happening.

I have had one of those days where you just want to rip of your shirt and yell like Hulk Hogan used to do before he turned
103. I have taken the day off work to resolve some of the many issues that came up today and so far everything is going
better than I had hoped, so there's that.

Yesterday I went into my office at home and I was getting something out of the great "closet-o-computer-misc" and I haapened to look at
the monitor connected to my file server. As much as I would come to hate this moment in my day later on I saw a message about "hdd interrupt lost" and said some colorful phrase then continued to get ready to go out to dinner with my wife (We had setup a "date night" thing). I
pushed the concern out of my mind and continued on with the night. Then when I got to work I connected to my server at home and began an
fsck on the drive in question (which coincidentally is the one I store all my data). fsck is the program *nix machines use to check hard
drives and partitions to make sure everything is OK; it is the windows equivelant of scandisk. Now when you invoke fsck you can tell it to
do lots of things and I elected to ask it to give me verbose output and automatically fix anyhting it came across. I hit enter waited about
30 minutes and began to cry. fsck did nothing, I mean nothing I hit enter and nothing. With verbose turned on that's the equivelant of
feeding a dollar bill into a vending machine and the machine disappearing. I have backups, of course but I HATE ever having to use them. So
after I told my wife this morning about everything that happened we went to check and make sure the backup of our financial data was current.
This would have gone without incident if the date had not been wrong on the server so instead of us thinking we had the latest money file we
thought we had the file from March. It all worked out in the end. I rebooted the machine and was able to run one last backup before he hard
drive started the click of death. I had seen a deal on www.digg.com for some cheap EIDE hard drives so I
beat-feet on over to tigerdirect (I'm not linking them because I hate them) and purchased a 160GB hard drive that is about 40 dollars after
a mail-in rebate.

For a long time now I've thought about getting a tattoo of the cheshire cat on my arm because of a nickname I had.
I've decided that once I get down to the weight I want to be I'm going to reward myself with a nice tattoo but I don't
think I'm going to get the cat. Now the question is what will it be. I'm going to have to hunt around to find the
right image and I imagine it will be something small say the size of a half dollar, maybe a little bigger. I did
consider getting one of my fractals but I think even the most experienced tattoo artist would cry when he saw how
detailed the images are.

Yesterday my beautiful wife turned 27. I know she was a little down about this but I personally was very happy.
We're starting to get near middle aged and I welcome the prospect of the two of us growing old together. She never
stops surprising me with her strength and courage. We took her out to her favorite vegetarian dive called "Sunflower" in Vienna. I had the General Tso's Surprise which is usually great and didn't disappoint last night. She shared the
same dish and Popeye's Favorite with my Mother. If you looked at the history between my wife and my family it really
has been a beautiful story. We were kids with problems who found each other and fell in love. My parents were afraid
we were too young and they were probably right but it didn't change the fact that we were meant to be together for
the rest of our lives. It just meant we got started too early. Now they love her as much as I do they really do
consider her as a daughter. She has also warmed to them and cares for both my parents very deeply. Family is a great
thing and when it grows it's even better. I think my wife loved all her gifts but she seemed to really enjoy the
necklace my aunt gave her from Denmark.

I'm working on an OpenBSD box for a project at work and so far it isn't giving
me any trouble. Typically when something is more secure it is also more
stringent about doing things a certain way (control = security). This isn't a
total surprise but it is an indication of a group who believes security doesn't
have to exclude ease of use. I'm intersted to see if when I reboot the box it
comes up correctly, and I believe it will. Once I have the box patched
I can begin working on the meat of the project which will be to make a box that
blazes through web stats and requires less maintanence than our current system.
Once I have that functionality I'll include the mail and ftp stats collections.
I'm hoping to have it near ready in a week but since every piece of this is new
to me we'll have to take things as them come.

I work for a company who focuses on security for our customers. We pay attention to all aspects of security for the services we provide our clients. That means analyzing everything that happens in ways most people would consider overly cautious. Once you practice thinking a certain way long enough it, permeates the rest of your life because of the instincts you form. Tonight while driving home from the grocery story I saw a situation down the road. Without knowing all the details I had enough information that made me pause while the 2 to 3 cars on the road continued. About a quarter of a mile up the road there were 5 police cars surrounding one car. I opted to hold back and let the situation play out before I passed. The officers were all out of their cars with guns drawn. The car full of people had all the windows down, with many arms reaching for the sky. I wondered why the people would continue to pass with a situation that the officers obviously did not feel they had control of yet. It occurred to me that many people go through their days without understanding the risks they are taking. Things as simple as traffic around here become complicated because people think things like "I'm not going to let him in, and if he hits me the law will be on my side." That hardly matters if you're dead or you receive a life changing injury. Thankfully this situation was resolved peacefully, but I've never understood why people would put themselves into a situation that could endanger them, when there are alternatives. I don't mean you should be paralyzed with fear but at the very least people should think about the situations they find themselves in. Once the police had all the people from the car under control I proceeded past and I maybe lost 10 minutes in the process. I knew the situation was at least partially controlled when the police had them out of the car and holstered their weapons. I do love the night.

I've been thinking for some time now about making my own blogging tool because, lets face it, if you don't make your own most of the time
you're just making do. I wanted to document a bit, for myself, what the plan is so far, that way I'll have something to look back to later
to see what I planned and what I ended up with. The basic rule of it will be that all the files published to the website are static content
which means there most likely won't be a form for comments. I'm still debating this issue internally and may decide later to make a comment
cgi. I want to have the articles stored in xml files that will be diced up RSS items for easy generation of feeds. I'm big on
RSS at this point and this would be a good way to develop better skills. Also I wanted to design the output files to work easily with
CSS so if I decide down the road to release the project as an open source app; other people will be able to customize it easily.
Another contributing factor to me doing this is so I can design the system in such a way that my wife will be interested in using it. I think
she'd have a real fun time with a blog but she doesn't like using the nanoblogger software that I use.

I've been having a rough couple days because of a situation at work but it looks like things will
work out ok (and I sure hope they do). I didn't post earlier because I was really tired when I got
home so I decided to just crash and post tonight if I could. So far it's been a quiet night and
that's all I can ask for. I went out for chineese food with my parents and wife and we all had a
good time. The visit was too short but they always are. Lots of good things going on, a few not so good things going on. Tonight I plan on studying CSS and maybe starting on my Perl blogging software.
I have a lot of great ideas for it and I don't know how much time it will take to finish but it
will be well worth it. I'm thinking I'll start it as a sourceforge project and open source it, but only after I'm ready to make an initial beta release.

One of the things I am using my blog for is a reason for me to code. The more ideas I can come up with the more experience I will get writing Perl. I've recently removed all my fractals from deviantART for many reasons but I've written my own gallery program so that I can display them here. I've also been trying to participate more in www.perlmonks.org I've submitted some code there. If you're into Perl that's one of the best resources I've found for discussions about Perl and Perl code. I have been exercising the past few weeks in an effort go get myself into better shape and so far the only setback is that I seem to keep developing foot problems. So far nothing serious enough that I can't continue so I plan to keep pushing; I'm assuming it's just my body grumbling that I'm being more active. I plan on getting a gym membership to help me during the week. My wife and I had when we lived in Fairfax and both loved the place. The gym I'm referring to is Lifetime Fitness I can tell you from personal experience that they are a bit more expensive than the others but they are the best gym I've ever been in. The bonus for me is that they are open 24/7 and since I work nights that means I can take my lunch break and go work out. I heard from my boss today that it's not likely II'll get to go to the Oreilly Open Source Convention which is disappointing but not entirely unexpected. I was hoping to attend the Perl track and it would have been a lot of fun but I just can't justify paying for it out of pocket. I've started to come to the realization that I don't need classes or books I just need to practice and find problems to solve to improve my skills to where I want to be as a developer. I am going to make a concerted effort to make this a daily blog but time doesn't all ways allow for such things so I'll leave it at that, a desire to be consistent.