Category: Geekery

  • Website Geekery Update

    Just a few tidbits, really.

    • Even though I’ve been capable of syndication for months now, it never occurred to me to put the link up. Whoops. Off to the right you can now see the regular RSS 0.91 feed link as well as the Radio/Amphetadesk/etc clickable “add me” XML link. Syndicate away, kiddies.
    • Amphetadesk rocks. I can get a summary view of half my daily journal/blog/thingie reads with no effort at all. If you haven’t tried it, and you read more than a half-dozen syndication-friendly websites a day, you owe it to yourself to give it a try.
    • Disgusted with the design-rot prevalent in my ancillary pages, I finally did the smart thing and went to a header/footer/content includes structure. Now the main journal, the bio, the geegaws, the downloads and the two surveys all share all design elements. Changes made to the header and footer reflect across the site. Or, they will once I get bored enough to make the change to all of the TMTT and NaNoWriMo pages…
  • The BlogShare Reset Cometh

    I stealthily added the BlogShares button over there on the left side a while ago, when I discovered that for some reason my site had “cracked $1000” and was thus available for share trading.

    Today I learned that there’s a reset coming as BlogShares prepares to go live on May 1st. Accounts and cash balances are to be preserved, held shares are not. So I liquidated.

    I think I did pretty well. I bought shares in J-Mo at 44c/ea. and sold ’em at $2.35/ea., while The People’s Republic Of Seabrook cost me 98c/ea. but sold for a very nice $18.62 per share. And then there was the cashing out of my own pitiful little website’s shares, all of which leaves me with a net worth of $3,593.95 to carry into the reset. Not too shabby, eh?

    Now I just need to figure out how to crank up the worth of this site. Ideas?
    BlogShares

  • Random Post-Weekend Entry Du-jour Thingie

    First, the weekend. I didn’t do anything. No, really. On Saturday I started and finished a scenario in Heroes of Might and Magic IV. Unless you count making a top high score as an accomplishment, I accomplished nothing Saturday.

    Sunday wasn’t much better. In the morning I started a brand new Assassin in Diablo II. By nightfall she was a level 21 in Act III and had points stored up in anticipation of hitting level 24 so she could start dumping points into her two main traps. Yes, I’m trying out a Trapper build. I’m astonished at how effective traps can be, especially compared to the cumbersome and somewhat buggy Martial Arts skills. (“What do you mean, I right-clicked on the monster and nothing happened… again? Argh! Stupid charge-release skills!”)

    And then it was Monday, and while two days of hardcore gaming hadn’t entirely cured the anxieties of eleven straight days of work, it had numbed me to the point where I didn’t resist heading to the office. This is probably a good thing. I didn’t accomplish anything at work today, either, except resolve two stupid email-related problems.

    You see, Lancelot has been replaced by Mass. (Yes, the box I had so much trouble with recently is now almost fully operational.) Today I intended to install Courier IMAP. I followed the instructions, installed the software, ran the start-up command as instructed… and could not log in from any machine at all. Argh!

    Almost five hours of starting, restarting, reinstalling, poking, prodding and cussing finally led me to try the other startup script provided. Voila! Gee, it was so effing easy…

    But wait, there’s more! After telling all of the other servers to start sending their little alerts and what-not to Mass, I realized that Mass was incapable of receiving email. “Huh?” It had worked before, and at first I was convinced that the firewall was screwing things up. No, of course not. See, had I thought at first to look at Qmail’s logs to see if it was detecting connection attempts, I’d have known that I’d broken one of the configuration files shortly after bringing email online. For the want of an ‘=’, the server was lost…

    And that, folks, is how a guy like me blows an perfectly good eight-hour workday straight to hell. Sad, wot?

    To highlight my utter sadness quotient, I was prodded into taking a 500-question purity test. (Look at Lil’s current NOTD; I’m too lazy to copy and paste linkage tonight.) My dear friends all scored in what we shall call the “lower half” of the percentile range. Not me, though.

    I’m 69% pure.

    On the one hand, “sixty-nine, dude!” On the other, how can my friends stand to be around someone so relatively square? It must be the power of contrast. That, or my stunning charm and personality.

    No, that wasn’t meant as a joke, so you can stop laughing now. Thanks.

    And now for more gaming fun. Alex and I spent a very enjoyable hour or two this evening playing Team Holomatch in Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force. He and I put on our Johnny Bravo models and went around killing Gauron, Janeway, Seven of Nine and The Tick. Repeatedly. Much laughter ensued. Think of it as a father/son bonding experience. “Woo! You totally smacked that little fairy, didn’t you! Ah, that’s my boy. Hah! Did you see that shot? Damn, I’m good.”

    Anyway, tomorrow evening I’m to spend the evening with Lilith, Geoffrey and whoever else happens to be at their place. I’m looking forward to it, oh yes indeed. Talk about incentive for peeling myself out of bed in the morning!

    And that’s just about enough out of me for tonight. It’s amazing that I approached this entry expecting to only produce three or four paragraphs. This proves once again that I’m entirely too enamored of my own cleverness and the sound of my voice. Then again, if you weren’t just a bit impressed by it, you wouldn’t be reading this. If you don’t mind, I’ll go to bed smug now…

  • All kinds of rods I’ve heard of, but not this.

    I just received an email urging me to, and I quote:

    Grow a biger rod

    What, pray tell, is a “biger rod?”

    (Ah just lurves illiterate spammuhz, don’t y’all?)

  • New domain, Mass gets mass appeal.

    When the radio stations first moved into our current facility, I made liberal use of the kgon.com domain to name machines that lived on the “public” side of the network. Now that we’re moving to a Sprint T1 on that side, I’m taking the opportunity to rename the internet-accessible servers. What few machines are making the transition from the old network to the new are also getting a new domain: entercomradio.com.

    Okay, so I didn’t have much choice. In order to migrate the old names we’d need to spend $45 a shot. Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather make a clean sweep of things anyway, when you get right down to it.

    Anyway. Washuu is now TheLab, Mihoshi is now GXP, and Lancelot has been replaced by Mass. Also, Duckpond and Nestegg will instead be known as Souja and Shunga. (Hey, nobody’s going to be typing in those URLs but me, so who cares what they’re called?)

    Why yes, I am still working that Tenchi Muyo naming scheme. If you don’t like it, go build your own damned network. So there. Nyah.

    IN OTHER NEWS, Mass has a working Apache/PHP/MySQL rig, a cron system, and the beginnings of a traffic graphing system. The proxies seem to be working, email relaying remains to be tested, and I still haven’t started on that pesky firewall. (I should probably get on that, since I can’t migrate Ryoko, Zero, and the other machines off of the public side of the network until I have port-forwarding working.)

    I’m only going to spend a couple more hours on that graphing nonsense tomorrow. Cacti is giving me trouble with SNMP, and that’s the part I really need. If I can’t suss out the problem in short order I’ll scrap that project and move on to the firewall. I can always put the traffic graphing system onto GXP if push comes to shove.

    IN CLOSING, I’m aware that this has become a bit of a geekblog. Sorry ’bout that. Hey, it’s this or suffer more long stretches with almost no content. Work has completely absorbed my life lately, minus the occasional anime convention or visit with my cool friends. If all goes well, I’ll be back to my usual random nonsense by month’s end.

    What do you mean, that wouldn’t be much of a change? Feh. Some people’s kids.

  • Printing? We don’t need your printing. We already have printing!

    After spending a few hours trying to convince LPRng that HP LaserJet 5N printers aren’t the spawn of Satan and that Netware print queues are a Good Thing, several things came to light:

    1) Intel print servers support LPD-style printing, thereby obviating the need for the Netware queue when printing from any Linux-like environment.

    2) HP LaserJet 5N printers are, in fact, the spawn of Satan. At least if you’re going to use print filters through an LPD to get PostScript material into PCL format, they are. I have no idea how it worked before, except possibly a pact between RedHat and the aforementioned Satan.

    3) HP JetDirect print servers like, say, those inside of our trio of HP 8×00 printers support LPD-style printing even better than the Intel print servers do. Not only that, but the 8×00 series printers do PostScript natively.

    4) I no longer need to run an LPD interface between the Enco network and Netware, since Beast (the gateway box between Enco-land and the office network) can now print directly to the nearby HP 8000.

    Frighteningly enough, the old scheme looked a bit like this:

    Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> Lancelot’s LPD (because try as I might, I couldn’t get Beast to talk to the Netware queue itself) –> Netware print queue –> Intel print server (because the 5N’s print server sucks elephant ass) –> HP 5N printer.

    New scheme:

    Enco workstation –> Beast’s LPD –> HP 8000 printer.

    I’m a frelling genius. At least, until the next time I’m a frelling idiot…

    (Oh, by the way. This is entry #500. Commence fanfare.)