Gekitsuu's Geekery

iTunes Frustration

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2007-01-25T09:03:38-05:00

I'm a big fan of iTunes and I need to say that up front because what I'm about to say will appear to be nit picky. Yesterday I bought a song and a video by Three Days Grace named "Animal I Have Become". I was rating them and sorting them in my play lists when I noticed that the video and the track listed the song in different genres. For someone like me who uses the ID3 tag information often this is a nusance. I now feel like I have to check each of the songs I download to make sure the id3 tag information is accurate but also consistant. ID3 tags are difficult to maintain because what is considered modern rock today will be, by definiton, classic rock in 20-30 years. What one person may consider Metal another person might consider Speed Metal or Death Metal. I had hoped that by buying songs from iTunes I could expect their conventions to be consistant which would make my life just a bit easier. The example I sited to them in the ticket I created is if it takes me 30 seconds to check each song after I download it and I download 100 songs in the next year then I will have wasted 50 minutes of my time. If you multiply 50 minutes by the number of users that iTunes currently has then what you have is a compelling reason for Apple to fix it on their end and save their customers the hassle. Here's a screenshot from my iTunes library.

The Userland Driver

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-12-17T08:24:10-05:00

I've been reading the book Operating System Concepts which is a college book for computer science majors. I have been really enjoying the insight this book is giving me into my career. When you think about how an operating system handles communication between the various parts of the computer, it isn't a far stretch to view the "user" as another part of the system that needs a driver to interface properly. What makes a good userland driver is a subject of many debates. It's unreasonable for the user to have to adapt to the computer. I think the solution is to retrain how the companies developing operating systems think about the interface. The mentality seems to be that we will use what ever they produce because we have no choice. I think that someone should do research and begin developing a system for relating to a computer. You know what size shoes you wear, you know what size your clothes are, why not have a computer interface number. Something that would translate on all systems. I could log in to a system at a new job and punch in my number and instantly my new account on the system would get set up with preferences like, "I only like working with files in lists, not with icons". Many people who are not considered computer savvy probably have issues with the way they are required to interface with the computer and would get much more use out of it, if the computer had to adapt to them. This is something that would require a massive amount of work due to the diversity of peoples needs. The task is one the open source community could tackle if they had the backing of science institutions to provide guidance.

Firefox 2.0 Just saved me 30 Minutes

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-10-27T04:32:28-04:00

While I was working on my computer yesterday and responding to a webmail a friend sent me, my computer locked up. It happens pretty often at work because our machines are getting a bit long in the tooth and we've started seeing hardware failures. I've been using the new Firefox for a little while now and when I've crashed it has been able to recover the websites I had been viewing with it's new session restore feature when it detects a crash. Yesterday, however, when it crashed while I was filling out the form for the webmail not only did it recover the webpage but all of the form data I had filled out as well. What a great new feature.

Book Reivew

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-09-08T15:38:33-04:00

I posted a book review of "The Official Ubuntu Book" on Amazon and I'm really excited about the project. I've subscribed to all the mailing lists I feel might be able to offer something to and for now I've been just lurking trying to see where the groups currently are and where they are trying to go. I have already started working on some ideas I have and want to see what they think when I get to a point where I can share them. The link to my review is here if you are interested.

Perspective

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-09-02T18:53:49-04:00

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.

For the first time in years

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-08-29T23:06:22-04:00

I'm no longer hosting my sites at my house. This is in preparation for an ISP switch that's coming soon and I won't be able to run my web/mail server at home anymore. It's a little uncomfortable but something I probably should have done a while ago. The switch has gone pretty smooth there were a couple burps but they only happened during the night so hopefully not many people noticed ;). I'm home this week on some much needed leave from my job and unfortunately I'm sick at the same time so I'm not sure how much of a break it's going to feel like. I've been watching lots of poker, working on lots of ideas I've had, and sleeping for more hours in the day than a person should sleep. I just received my copy of "The Official Ubuntu Book" and I hope to post a review shortly, who knows maybe I'll make it the first review I post on Amazon. Aside from the illness things are going well and I hope to start putting up one of my open source projects on Freshmeat in the next few days.

Update

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-08-18T12:44:06-04:00

I've uploaded over 100 re-rendered fractals and I'm pleased to say that switching my server to Ubuntu seems to have give me a slight bump in speed. The podcast seems to be doing well aside from the problems we had last night with recording. We're going to try again tonight and hope that my connection holds up. Every time I spend a morning working on my fractals ideas race through my head about setting up calendars for sale on Lulu and I just never seem to find the time to do it. On the weight loss front I seem to be dropping again which is huge for me. I've been trying to lose weight since early may and so far I've dropped 35+ pounds. I know it seems like a lot but I lost most of it early on and my weight loss has slowed considerably. I keep trying to play with my diet/exercise to see if I can get back to the numbers that I had at the beginning but slowly I'm resigning my self to the fact that the reality is, it's going to be slower from now on. It's really sad that I haven't posted a blog entry in 5 months.

Creativity

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-03-13T22:03:02-05:00

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.

Update

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-02-20T00:52:46-05:00

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.

Focus

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2006-01-04T04:19:42-05:00

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.

OSCON2005[2]

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-08-04T11:57:08-04:00

The exibit hall was big and I went through it a few times just to make sure i got to each both and talked to as many people as possible. I bought some Perl books and picked up some goodies although there wasn't enough bribery trinkets to go around for sure. I did have some good conversations with the SugarCRM people and Kris Moore the inventor of PCBSD. Like all good ideas Kris has very valid reasons and a good vision of what he wanted to accomplish with PCBSD. He wanted to make a BSD for the average windows user and he designed his packaging system in such a way that my mom could use BSD and I could still use ports to bring down anything I want or compile things from source without breaking his system. He's just one of the many fun people to meet here at OSCON.

OSCON2005[1]

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-08-03T01:07:02-04:00

It's a good thing I bought a second battery for my laptop; I barely had enough juice to last yesterday. I was very psyched about Damian Conway's tutorials; truth be told they are one of the major things that got my interest in the convention. This morning, while I was waiting for his talk to start, I created a Flickr account so that I can enter the HP Photo contest if I get any pictures I think are worth entering. I'm picking front row seats at each of the talks which is something I wouldn't normally do but I feel like I need to make sure I'm not hendered by being too far away to see the slides, or hear the speaker. There are some big thinkers here and listening to them got me thinking about possibly giving my own talk some day. I don't consider myself an expert on any of the things love enough yet but someday I'd like to speak before an audience.
Today I learned that I am very dumb. In order to become undumb I will require (much * infinity) more practice at my craft. While I could keep up ok with the Perl Best Practices tutorial. I was mostly lost during the object oriented tutorial. Not because I don't understand the concepts or what he was suggesting but because I've had little experience with object oriented Perl. That particular tutorial assumed that you had a bit more knowledge than I do. I will be fixing that at some point in time. There are many smart people here which is nice but somewhat intimidating. So far I've met and spoke with 5 of the presenters at the convention and all of them seem to have intuitive understanding of their topics. I am still battling jet-lag but having an easier time than yesterday, where once I got back to my room I could no longer fight to stay awake. After a long day I really enjoyed the speeches at the "Tuesday Night Extravaganza".
This "sun" thing up in the sky is very strange. It seems to produce a type of radiation that the "day-people" accept being irradiated with. It is very hurty on the eyes and makes sleepy ju-ju at me. When I find a way to turn off the sun I'll surely execute the proper procedure.

OSCON2005[0]

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-08-02T08:28:22-04:00

Well it was a good first day at OSCON I got up around 5 and managed to snap some photos of the sunrise. Tomorrow I'm going to try and get out earlier so I can take it from the bridge. Speaking of bridges I found the list to sign-up for the Portland bridges tour on Friday. They were offering pastries and coffee in the hall in front of the conference rooms so after I checked in I made my way to the munchies and grabbed a chocolate croissant. After hopping on the wifi and checking my mail, harassing my friends and family with phone calls, and much pacing; it was time for the talk to begin. The first tutorial I went to was on robust authentication. When I saw the talk I thought I might be able to get some useful information from it but didn't have high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised when not only did I get answers to several questions for my company but I also reviewed some of the topics of the RHCE exam. All in all the talk was entertaining and I'm glad I went. The second one was on Snort Database reporting. I had hoped this one would cover advanced snort analysis but it turned out to be more of how to correlate data from the tables in a snort database. Don't get me wrong that information is just as useful to me but it wasn't what I was expecting from the name. Portland is a pretty place and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. It's time for Perl.

Jounrey

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-31T04:49:42-04:00

Today I leave for Portland Oregon to attend OSCON and I'm pretty
excited. I know I haven't been blogging lately but I've been very busy at home and at work preparing for this trip. I
leave from BWI today around 2 and I'll be arriving in Portland at 8 local time. I managed to shift my sleep schedule very
well and I'll be alert for the convention which is critical. I don't just want to be awake for the convention I want to be
able to soak up everything I can. This morning I'm going to make sure I have everything packed so I can spend the remainder
of the morning with Melissa before I have to leave. Another good thing that's going on is I'm finally getting
SpeakEasy DSL and VOIP the week I come back. This is my second attempt at getting
service from them but it looks like this time it will actually go through. I may setup an asterix box once I have the VOIP
just so I can play around with it. I will definatly be blogging about what I did each day at the con so if you're interested
in nearly-live reporting of OSCON2005 stay tuned.

Stuff

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-23T05:08:50-04:00

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.

Busy Weekend

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-18T22:43:14-04:00

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.

Qemu Meet Whax

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-17T05:41:41-04:00

Ok so earlier I blogged about Whax which is very, very cool. I also wanted to mention I sent an email to Muts about his collection methods for the vulnerability databases and not only did he respond,but it was damn fast too. Last night I checked on qemu to see if they've fixed the bugs in the Mac version yet and they say they have. This is great news because now I can emulate a PC to run Whax inside my Mac :D. I did run into a crashing problem which I'm going to submit a bug report on when I tried to startx but even getting the console to run is a huge benfit.

A Me Day

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-16T02:15:43-04:00

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.

Feeling Uninspired

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-15T18:41:21-04:00

I'm still learning Python and there are many many things that I like and a couple that are painful. Like for instance
storing a function in a "dictionary" (I still think hash when I read that) as an element is strange. I can see it
being useful but it seems like an ability that isn't entirely necessary. I do like how the "Learning Python, 2nd
Edition" and nearly every other python tutorial I've read plays with the fact that the language was named for Monty
Python. I like Monty Pyton so that's OK with me. I don't really understand why they structured the language the way
they did and I'd be curious at some point to do some research or maybe write Guido and ask. My impression so far is
that Python is deceptively complex; because it was being designed in such a way as to keep code "clean" and easy to
read it does things in its own unique way. A very strange way like your cousin Norman who eats glue and is 25 but a
unique way none the less. One of the things I like is the "in" function you can do some very simple pattern matching
in strings with it and to do the same thing in Perl would involve more typing.

Tricky Snake

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-14T05:44:36-04:00

I've been teaching myself Python the past few days and while it is VERY different from Perl, I like some of the
differences. The way variables, arrays, and hashes are implemented is somewhat alien but I can see some of the
benefits and ideology already that make it appealing. I do like that I can program in a shell (which I'm sure Perl can
do too but I never tried before) and this would be a great language for "Firing Tracer Bullets". I can't wait to get a good understanding of the basics so I can take this language out for a test drive. I already have a project in mind to use as a feeler.

and the Holy Grail

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-13T05:26:32-04:00

I've decided to augment my Perl skills with some Python. After reading some convincing
arguments in the Perl vs Python debate I decided in order to have an informed opinion I would
have to learn Python. This isn't a bad idea due to the fact that many of the
Red Hat tools/scripts are written in Python and I'm beginning to see they had some very good
reasons for choosing that over Perl, Ruby, or anything else. For one Python was designed to
be "cleaner" and easier to read. This promotes good coding and security. That's not to say that Perl can't be written in a clean way that's easy to maintain but with a motto such as "There's more than one way to do it" they have some problems that will be exaggerate by bad coding. I'm very impressed with how Python handles somethings and I can see why it would appeal to people. I've also been reading the RHCE exam study guide I purchased a couple months ago and I hope to take the exam in sometime in August.

Things That Suck

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-11T00:01:49-04:00

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.

24 Hours

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-10T04:02:37-04:00

Working the night shift changes your perspective on a lot of things and one that really screwed me over good tonight
was a 24-hour McDonald's. Now I have to admit before I do any of my complaining that this is the first night I ever
tried to patron this particular McDonald's at 2:45am. When I pulled up I was a bit concerned because there were 3 cars
sitting in line in front of me and at this time of night that can only mean that the people inside are slow or are
oblivious to the fact that people are outside waiting. The people currently stopped in front of the ordering device
lay on their horn. The question as to which case this is, had been answered. Finally they place their order and then
car in front of me gets to go. They ask for a #1 clear as day and are told that the #1, #2, #3, #4, #6, #7, and #8
aren't available. Which leaves gold ole #5. I didn't want any of the combo meals so I was hopeful that I could still
the vanilla milk shake I'd been thinking of since I left the gym. So I pull up and it's my turn. "I'll have a medium
vanilla milk shake please." "I'm sorry sir we don't run the milk shake machine at this time of night". Hmmmm, I
decide to parry with something else easy. "How about a Ceaser Salad." "Ok sir, please drive to the 2nd window." When I reach the window she sees my credit card in hand and she says, "I'm sorry sir we just closed the charge machine." The
question is obvious and I just have to ask it (keep in mind I've always claimed to be an asshole). "You're not really
24 hours are you? I mean you aren't serving 7 out of 8 of your combos, the milk shake machine is apparently off and
just turned off the easiest method of payment for your services." Blank stare. "Well I don't have any cash thanks for wasting 20 minutes." See I think the problem here is that they advertise 24-hours to give the people who come during
the day a warm fuzzy, they don't expect anyone to actually come. If they truly did then they would be sure to explain
the special diminished services schedule so that I wouldn't even bother hoping for a vanilla shake at 3am. I was
annoyed and with all rights. I work nights for many reasons and I hate how places say 24 hours a day yet when you get
to the grocery story they have nearly every isle blocked with palettes of Wheaties so you can't even squeeze a cart
down them anymore. I understand shelves need to be restocked. Just try to be considerate of the people who DO try to
use your advertised service.

Ink

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-09T01:42:33-04:00

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.

The Birthday Girl

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-08T19:15:14-04:00

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.

Viva La Whax!

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-07T01:07:57-04:00

So I went to the whoppix website to check out what's doing with those guys and found out that they've changed the name. Whoppix has become Whax (I like Whax much better) which is based on Slax. I think is an interesting move. I'm currently downloading their beta 2 ISO and I can't wait to see what this badboy can do. This has become my default Live CD to tote around with me since it has many of the tools that I use on a day to day basis for work. Of course I keep my Mac in the same backpack so I don't usually need it.

Gym Routine

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-06T00:48:12-04:00

I'm going to try out my plan for taking a break from work each night and hitting the gym around 2AM or so. I think it should be pretty quiet by then and I'll be able to do some cardio as a way to break up my day. I'm hoping to practice Japanese while I'm doing it in preparation for the trip to Japan in October 2006. Ouisa has said she liked some of the fractals which is good because I was really worried I'd make a bunch and they wouldn't fit in to her project so after the smaller ones are done rendering tonight I'll set the ones she liked up to render at higher resolutions. Didn't get much coding done today before work but I did decide I'm going to fix my RSS project by s///'ing the characters that are giving me grief with the file names. I still haven't tackled the UTF-8 thing but I'll get it done sometime this week. Tonight what I hope to accomplish when I get back from the Gym is to finish writing the SSL doc so I can turn that in for tomorrow's meeting.

Fractals and UTF-8

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-05T04:10:03-04:00

Big things brewing lately which is why I haven't posted in a couple days. Obviously things were busy with the 4th of July but also I am working a 6 day week so I didn't have as much time to do my weekly things as I normally do. Did manage to make some progress on my RSS aggregator. But I've run into a major snag with a UTF-8 problem that I'm going to research the proper way to fix. Originally I was just going to ask for help on PerlMonks but I know the answer I'm going to get. I have also made the fractals for my friend for her project and I'm currently still rendering some of the ones that I liked. The AWStats thing is on hold until further notice else I might get screwdriver-tossy.

AWStats Project

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-07-01T23:37:39-04:00

I've been working on a web stats solution for my company using awstats to process the web logs of our customers.
Today I was working on the script which will setup configs/directories for new clients, servers, or websites and ran
in to a problem that I haven't decided how I'm going to tackle yet. My original plan was to take the stats from any
one box and dice the log files so that each line was examined to determine which website that line in the log file pertained to. Then have the script shunt that to another file (using something like SEC) for processing for that specific site, on that specific server. The problem I ran into had to do with how
to determine the website that was being hit. Since a typical line in a log file might look like this:

66.249.65.77 - - [28/Jun/2005:13:26:14 -0400] "GET /galleries/ HTTP/1.1" 404 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I have no way to determine which website the person was hitting only that they tried to "GET" /galleries/ so I'm
trying to decide if I want it to be setup so that each customer will have a different directory for each website to
dump stats. It's causing me a brain cramp so I thought I'd take a break and whine about it.

Fractals with Friends

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-30T08:40:47-04:00

A friend I met through DeviantART contacted me about helping her with a project she's working on.
She wanted me to make some fractals for an album she's doing and this is as good a reason as any to start posting the ones I've been
working on, which I'll probably do this weekend. She's linked on the right as Ouisa and is a great photographer, so please check out her
work. She made a good observation about my fractal gallary so I made the change she suggested. Now there are "Back" and "Next" links above
the thumbnails for better navigation, it was an easy thing to add and she was absolutly right about it being necessary. A brief post today
since up I'm way past my bed time.

OpenBSD

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-29T02:04:26-04:00

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.

Security

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-28T00:12:32-04:00

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.

Blogging Software

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-26T06:48:23-04:00

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.

Late Night

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-25T22:17:59-04:00

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.

A New Project

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-24T20:37:26-04:00

last night I purchased linuxisforlosers.com and .org. I was very surprised to find out that they had not been snatched up already, so I
jumped at them when I saw they weren't. For those who aren't familiar with the story Forbes published, which is located here, titled "Is Linux for Losers?" It was an
interview with the driving force behind OpenBSD who brought up some very valid points about design problems with Linux. Once I had the
domains I knew exactly what to do with them. I'm going to setup a site where people can discuss the general design
problems with the Linux kernel and hopefully help the developers by giving them an outsiders perspective. I haven't decided exactly
what the scope of the site will be but at least for starters it will cover the Linux kernel. I'm excited about this and hope to have up
something in the next couple weeks.

Travel

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-23T16:53:37-04:00

Well, I was wrong about the Oreilly Open Source Convention I have been approved. This is more than I had hoped for and I'm going to prove to my employer that it was not a poor decision. I'm going to bring as much info as I can back about the convention to share with the rest of the Ops team and I'll even do my best to find good opportunities for the company. I expect this convention will produce some really good projects for my group and certainly the bulk of our business is related to open source projects. I've never been to Portland before so that will be a new experience as well. I plan on taking pictures and posting notes about the convention. I've never been to FOSS even though I had the chance a couple times with NoVaLUG so I'm really excited about this.

A Short Rant on Siding

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-22T16:33:59-04:00

I want to cover two things in this entry, siding and my code. I didn't come as
far as I would have liked with the web front-end for the blogging software I
use. I've also been toying with the idea of making my own blogging software
based on Perl which is most likely what I'll end up doing even if I get the
CGI front end working. I do have to say that I'll be a better coder because of
it if I do. I'll have to play with XML, CSS, HTML and CGI modules to get it to
work exactly how I want but I think it would make for a pretty secure blogging
tool once I was done. The other thing I wanted to address is siding. I live in
suburbia for sure and it seems that any more all the houses are covered in
siding. Even my folks who live pretty close by have most of their house covered
in siding and I'm not really sure I like the look of most of it. It seems that
all the houses start to look the same just because everyone is getting safe,
sensible siding. My townhouse is covered in wood siding which I personally
think is better than the plastic or metal types but I'd really like to see more
brick on houses. I just noticed it when I was out for my morning walk and
thought it might not be one of the best signs of progress.

First Entry

gekitsuu@gmail.com — 2005-06-21T14:09:34-04:00

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.