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I seem to have some kind of a blog now, too. I'll post stuff, or something.

For the technically inclined, I've included a brief description of my hardware. I also listed some of the software projects I worked on in the past. At some point I'd like to include more current projects and scripts I've written to automate tasks and do cool things.

02-10-04 - Nothing interesting happening. I sold a bunch of stuff on Ebay and locally. I sold the 'oldworld' Mac. Someone wanted one of its SCSI drives and was willing to pay $40 more than it was worth, so I gladly parted with the drive, then lately sold the Mac itself. I kept all but one of the SCSI drives. I migrated a few of my boxes to SCSI. I'm working on a few Linux articles. I'm going to convert everything to DocBook XML format soon.

12-31-03 - 1a57 P057!

12-21-03 - Oops. There went another year.

Last week I played a lot of ultimate frisbee and some paint ball. I picked up an 'oldworld' Mac, although I haven't had time to do anything with it yet. Apparently I need OS8 installed to even boot Linux, so it's looking like it'll be pretty useless after all. I setup lrrd today and then crafted a little uptime tracker in Perl for all my boxes. The transport is via SMTP, so it's lightweight. It turns out my laptop has a dead DIMM socket, so I'm really thinking about selling it and buying a new one. It's reasonably fast with only 128MB of RAM. With my uptime counter complete, I can finally turn all my boxes off and reallocate my UPSes. The largest should be feeding my file server and backup server, but it's on the wrong side of the room... it's heavy.

12-03-03 - I converted the software RAID to a 128K stripe. It's faster now, or so it seems. My laptop's 128MB SODIMM died tonight. I ordered a replacement. I passed up the opportunity to buy a larger module. I don't really need it for twice the price of a 128MB module. Windows 2000 Professional is running with 32MB of RAM now. Amusingly, it seems to work, although I can see it's swapping itself to death. Hopefuly the hard disk won't fail next due to overuse. I'm looking into reformatting my articles by converting them to DocBook XML. Wow, 32MB of RAM and Windows 2000 is a painful combination...

11-12-03 - I spent the weekend moving the file server to the next dual Pentium Pro box. It's running Linux software RAID. So far it's working quite splendid.

11-04-03 - Sweet; I just picked up a dual Pentium Pro box. It's probably going to become the new file server. I seem to have run out of space on my UPSes for all this equipment. I need to phase in my 8 port switch too. Now the task of rearranging each machine to its new duties begins. Meanwhile at the office we're attempting to correctly configure and work with a Sun Ultra 10 running Solaris 8 correctly.

10-22-03 - New job still rocks. That's probably a good sign. Playing with Mapserver and PostGIS at the office. GIS is rather cool. Hoping to get a new box and configure it with Linux software RAID 5 soon. I just picked up two 120GB Western Digital SE IDE drives.

10-14-03 - A new version of HostAP was just released, v0.1.0-- I updated my tutorial appropriately. I updated my VNC over SSH tutorial with information about tunneling and using RSA keys with passphrases for tunneling arbitrary TCP ports. I started my new job on Monday. So far it rocks.

10-11-03 - I finally finished a new article covering the latest version of HostAP, v0.0.4.

10-02-03 - In other news, I finally have a real job. I'll be working for the Shimberg Center for Affordable Housing. The physical location is at UF, which is somewhat amusing, since I left school to get off campus. Who would've thought? I start on the 13th. I'll be doing lots of Perl programming with mod_perl, automated unit testing, and some system administration for the Solaris production Web server and the Linux test box.

10-01-03 - Feels like winter. Even though it's Florida, you can still detect a seasonal change. It just feels different.

I finally nailed Civ 3 and took home a space race victory. Playing on a large continent made things far easier. I kept pace with the computers growth via judicious usage of the wip until I had switched to a democracy. I skipped monarchy completely. I stayed ahead in culture with more than twice the next most successful AI players and ahead in science by a several advance edge.

09-24-03 - My desire for Civ 3 is waning. At the harder difficulty settings the computer is allowed to cheat liberally. It can colonize cities at least twice as fast as I can. Through the Middle Ages colonization is critical to success. Although a diplomatic or cultural victory is possible without a massive nation, my personal favourite is winning the space race. Without enough cities at the harder levels you cannot reach the Information Age in time to complete the race. Moreover, you likely will not have secured all the necessary strategic resources to forge ahead. Max cities is key. It seems playing on maps with more islands is harder, since you need to obtain Alphabet, Writing, then Map Making before you can colonize off the home island. The computer can acheive this level of knowledge more rapidly, leaving you with no land to colonize.

09-22-03 - How sad. OpenOffice still doesn't support intelligently splitting large table cells across multiple pages. This issue has been outstanding for more than two years and it still has not been resolved. I think I'm going back to WordPerfect. This is silly. It's a shame Kword doesn't support tables properly yet.

09-16-03 - I wrote an article exploring the implications of using apt-get for dist-upgrades and another on configuring Dante, a nice SOCKS compatible proxy server. I played a lot of Rise of Nations last week, but I'm bored already. This week I'm playing Civilization 3. I'm about two years late, but whatever.

09-03-03 - Ah, fun day. Good things.

In other news, I managed to own myself when installing my Escalade 5800. I accidently blew away not one, but all of my partitions when adding a journal for ext3 support. I was still using ext2 on the backup server. It wasn't ext3, but completely luser error. I spent Saturday reinstalling from a Debian Net installation CD, moving PCI cards around, disabling things in the BIOS, and compiling new kernels. I finally managed to get my 5800, which only fits in a single PCI slot due to space constraints (silly place for a CPU socket on a baby AT board) and my PCI network card to play nice. Now I'm seriously considering picking up a Escalade 6800, moving that into the file server, then moving the 6200 into the backup server. Then, I can add another drive and setup RAID 0 on the backup server. Eventually I'll probably move to RAID 5 (software, since the 6xxx series does awful RAID 5) on the file server.

08-29-03 - It's nice when stuff works. I fixed my busted Maildir folders to resolve a strange Courier IMAP issue I was having. I also had to track down why my new Westell setup seemed to be killing SSH connections. Now, I need to install my new 3Ware Escalade 5800 in my backup server so I can use UDMA33 instead of PIO mode. (Anything's better than PIO.)

08-22-03 - I finally kicked my Westell Wirespeed into IP Passthru mode. It's nice having my interfaces all back to 1500 instead of 1412. Silly Bellsouth, PPPoE is for lamers. I installed some Kingwin KF-23 mobile drive bays (aluminum with three fans) in my file server. Now I have hot swappable disks. Moreover, the lights are pretty to watch. Next up is a real heatsink for my workstation. It actually overheated the other afternoon and hung restarting. Not so pretty.

08-19-03 - A few words can't convey a few months of experiences. Some highlights include a random girl living at my house for four days, my laptop going out of warranty with Dell, a RAID 1 configuration on my file server, and a new box acting as a backup server; my old machine has returned with a new purpose. Welcome back, friend.

06-27-03 - I just made the mistake of buying a TRENDnet TK-200 2 port KVM switch. The included 4ft cables are pathetically short. Worse, the device itself has such an awful form factor, with cables attaching to it from all four sides, that it's essentially useless to attempt to place it anywhere with less than 2ft^2 of clearance.

06-25-03 - It's kind of strange. It's only been six months, but it seems like an eternity. Happenings only a few months ago seem like they occurred decades ago.

06-21-03 - If you're using an onboard audio chipset that uses the i810 Linux kernel driver, 2.4.21 might've owned you. I patched to the latest ac tree, -ac1, for 2.4.21 and audio is working again. "Intel 810 + AC97 Audio, version 0.24, 12:16:10 Jun 21 2003"

06-10-03 - I acquired a nice case and subsequent to that, ripped the Dell box I have apart and placed the mainboard into the new, sane case. Well I have to hand it to Dell and compliment them for the ease with which I was able to disassemble their case, I can't say I enjoyed having to beat it silly to put things into it when I actually used it in production.

I updated my resume, again. That happens a lot. I wonder why?

I'm deploying Nagios at the office; Perhaps I'll write an article on that? I haven't seen any yet that cover using nrpe, the remote plugin execution plugin, which supports SSL/TLS.

05-11-03 - I need to post another resume update. I ordered one of those nifty DC/AC converters for a vehicle's cigerette lighter. I hope it works. I also finally ordered a full duplex 100Mbps card for the laptop; This half duplex card is making me ill. Off to Orlando for Mother's Day. A SpamAssassin tweaking tutorial is in the works.

04-21-03 - I have posted an updated resume. It's about time.

04-19-03 - I have completed an article on mounting full disk images under Linux. Interesting stuff. My two port KVM switch from Belkin has arrived. I was worried the builtin cabling might have poor quality cables, but the VGA signal is still good. My USB mouse works fine via a PS/2 adapter. I have a PS/2 adapter on my five pin keyboard as well. Old stuff. My laptop has but a single PS/2 adapter, so I still have a USB mouse plugged into it. I need to look into getting a docking station for it. The KVM is switchless and uses a keyboard sequence to switch consoles. So far it hasn't proven to be problematic, though it's kind of cheap.

04-13-03 - My 20GB disk arrived last week. Today, I took to installing it in the laptop. First, I made some drive images to play with and I'll be completing a tutorial shortly on mounting entire disk images under Linux shortly. It's quite an amusing site to place in a completely fresh disk, add the first primary partition back with the same cylinder locations as on the older disk, then dd the Windows 2000 partition image onto the new disk and watch Windows 2000 load happily. No reinstallation necessary. If only that trick would work when moving to a box with new hardware. Fun stuff. (No Windows (tm) were broken or injured during this experiment.)

04-06-03 - I really hate the time change. Without warning, suddenly an hour is gone. Then I realize there isn't something wrong with me, there's something wrong with the world and that's why all my machine clocks are an hour ahead of my sane manual clocks. Blah.

03-31-03 - Lingering emptiness. I have this feeling with me. It seems ever present. I want to be somewhere else. Another time, another place. In the past. Sounds. Sounds from Trance 2002 and Clubber's Guide to 2002 are vividly bringing back memories, feelings; ghosts from the past. My best friend left town. Never before had I had a best friend. Just empty now the world is. Maybe it's not a place I seek, but a feeling that's long since gone. Friendship, understanding, trust? Whatever. It's gone. And tonight is the eve before an eternity of nothing. That is all. Meanwhile, I cannot crack the volume any louder. This beast cannot be silenced. I am the beast. Unescapable. The clock rolls over. Tomorrow is upon me; no...

03-28-03 - Friday. The upgrade to my global procmail file was successful on Wednesday night. SpamAssassin was upgraded too. I'm looking into enabling Razor v2 and using Bayesian filtering.

I just brought a larger hard disk for my laptop. I seem to have outgrown 4.8GB. The 20GB disk should be sufficient for ages.

03-23-03 - The switch to Bellsouth ADSL is complete. I received my Westell Linespeed modem on Thursday. After beating on it for an hour I finally found a setting to turn it into a bridge. It wants to route by default, but as I kept explaining to it, I already have a router. It was determined to ignore me.

I have been promoted. I am now a Network Assistant at Gleim Publications. Essentially, I am a junior Linux systems administrator, despite the difference in title. My first tasks have been migrating Jabber account names to a uniform system based on employee initials (The configuration files are server side, in a flavour of XML, though I simply used regular expression matching to acheive my goal) and to combat spam with SpamAssassin and procmail. I have completed a script to properly route mail believed to be spam to a special spam user for further investigation. The next task is to deal with MIME encoded base64 and quoted-printable text/plain attachments which SpamAssassin cannot see into by default, but humans via most mail readers can. A procmail tutorial is in the works.

03-11-03 - I have completed upgrading my systems. I now have a 120GB IDE storage disk. Space is good. I finally updated my resume, again. I made some changes to a few of my articles; mostly corrections. I'd like to write an installation tutorial for Debian Woody, but I have not had time. Cox raised the price of Internet access again, so I am in the process of switching to Bellsouth ADSL, since they now both cost the same and suffering with Cox's horrible upstream no longer saves me anything. An updated hardware page is in the works. Oh, and I am canceling my cable television completely.

02-16-03 - Sad, barren, and alone. Now cold, my former box sits exposed and empty. Little remains, save some dangling life cords, an exposed stick of mind, some adapters of speech. Gone now are the days of leaping through challenging problems and flickering things before my eyes. Friend, rest. Forgotten you are not, and always remembered you will be. Farewell.

02-15-03 - Spam graphing coding continues. I've switch modules a few times. I'm using Date::Calc and Mail::Folder now, which are both faster. Spammers don't always include valid Date: headers, so it looks like some mails will need to be dropped outside of a sane provided range.

My 1.2GHz Duron board arrived today. Or rather, I picked it up at FedEx. Sadly, the local computer store wanted to charge far more for cases than I was willing to pay, so I have an older Antec case on order from the same place I bought my board from. And the wait continues.

In the meantime, I ripped apart every other box I have. I upgraded the firewall to a 1.2GB disk. It's kernel is flaky now, though, and it seems to hang doing ext3 stuff. I have to investigate this further as the box is useless, mostly, when it 'hangs'. (Anything box currently speaking to it gets to keep talking, so NAT is uneffected, oddly enough.)

I slapped the parts from my old FIC 503+ board into a Dell Dimension XPS T600. It mostly works. I have to investigate why the ISA SB AWE64 isn't working. I might switch back to my original SB 16 PnP, which has served me quite well throughout the years.

Later, I'll move all the services I don't want on the firewall onto the new, faster server, the Dimension XPS box. Dell has an odd way with cases and I had to hack around on it to get my 3.5" internal IDE disk in. The floppy was hopeless, but the Dell box persisted. I finally gave in and bent some prongs in the case so it would fit into the lowest 5.25" bay which had a more or less convenient metal extent that allowed a 3.5" device to be screwed to it. The box is happy. I'm happy. It looks kind of slick, too. I upgraded to BIOS rev A11 while I was at it.

Back to compiling new kernels... (Yeah, I spent all day playing with this stuff.)

02-09-03 - I have been playing with Perl, Chart::Line, and my spam mbox file. I'll leave it to your imagination to decide what kinds of fun I've been having.

01-02-03 - Well, it's a new year. May the new year bring with it happiness to all.

I have added a new article. I never knew Linux on a laptop could be so much fun. I'd like to finish the TrekWeb updates early this year.

12-11-02 - I have a GPG key now. My public key is 4BD9A338 and is available on pgp.mit.edu.

12-06-02 - As I found out rather painfully, do not upgrade to kernel 2.4.20. It has a known bug of sorts that causes your machine to lag out during disk intensive activities. I have reverted back to 2.4.18 and things are once again running happily. The problem is mentioned several times in this thread on kerneltrap.

11-11-02 - I am now employed at Gleim Publications in Gainesville. An updated resume should follow.

10-25-02 - Music. I've been listening to a lot of Sylver these days, Skin and Forgiven being some of my favourites. If you're looking for lyrics, you might stop by #debian-kde where everyone keeps pestering me to stop scrolling the lyrics to the channel.

10-21-02 - Put up a copy of my resume in PDF format. I am currently seeking employment in the Gainesville area. Feel free to drop me a line if you need work done and think I fit the bill.