"Because you will be approached by people with questions and stupid jokes."
I took the DeLorean when I went to the bank this morning. I pulled into the parking lot and found a space. As I got out of the car a guy around my age came running over before I could shut the door.

He said, "I can't believe it, this amazing. I've always wanted to see one of these. Man, I was just watching the movie last night. Can I take a picture?"

I said, "sure" and let him know that it still needed some work so it doesn't look as good as it could. He said, "It doesn't matter; it's a DeLorean."

Later in the afternoon I went to get some more gas. I pulled into the station, shut off the car, got out and opened the hood to get to the gas cap. Neither of the attendants on duty had seen one before and both came over to see the car. They had some questions about the body construction and the engine.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Sunset Classic 5M
I got to meet Bill Rodgers tonight after the Sunset Classic 5M in Bloomfield. He was signing autographs after the race and actually spedning time talking to people. He spent a good 5 to 10 minutes with everyone, answering questions, giving advice, and just talking about running in general. He signed my race bib and we talked about the course and his diet. He really did put mayo on pizza. Hellman's. Had to be Hellman's. As he put it, "When you're burning 5000 calories a day, you're hungry." It was a pretty good race, I kept pace with the second place female finisher for almost the whole race, with number 3 not far behind. In the last 200 meters or so they both took off and I finshed a few seconds behind them. After the race I thanked the girl I had been running with for making me push myself a little harder than I planned, and congratulated her on her placing. I also made some new friends from work. I met most of the company's running team after the race and we talked about running and stuff. Most of them are in other divisions of the company so I had never seen them before tonight.

[/running] [permanent link]

QOTD:
"I figured I'm getting too old to run, I might as well get married."

--
Acquaintance on missing a race to meet with caterers for his upcoming wedding.

[/running] [permanent link]

The new phone book is here!
I am now officially 5% rockstar. At least I am according to the New York Times. I am now the proud owner of DeLorean #6291 manufactured in November of 1981.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

NIN|JA
On June 6th, I attended the Nine Inch Nails/Jane's Addiction concert in Holmdel, NJ held at the Arts Center. I think I enjoyed it.

I ordered a pair of tickets through nin.com during the presale. I managed to get through shortly after they went on sale and ended up with two tickets for Section 104, Row S. This time I went with my friend from college who now lives in Virginia. He drove up for the day and had to head back down to VA the next morning.

As per the terms of the nin.com presale, we had to pick up the tickets at the venue, just as we did for the show at the Meadowlands last Summer. We arrived shortly before the gates opened, but were allowed in immediately after picking up the tickets.

I stopped and purchased an overpriced souvenir t-shirt at one of the merchandise stands. This time I was smarter and got a small. It fits much better than the XL I picked up in August.

At 7:30 the opening act, Street Sweeper Social Club, took the stage. They were pretty good. Let me clarify that. The guys with instruments were good. Tom Morello was close to awesome and the other musicians were good. I wished the vocalist would have just shut up.

At 8:15 Nine Inch Nails took the stage as Pinion played. As soon as it ended, they immediately went into Wish, quickly followed by Last. After Discipline, the band tore into March of the Pigs. The crowd exploded.

The 19 song set, was about an hour and a half. It was an amazing show. The stage show was incredibly stripped down compared to the previous show, utilizing only lights and fog machines. It was also far more aggressive.

At 10:00 Jane's Addiction took the stage. Unfortunately, because my friend had to leave for VA the next morning we only stayed for the first half of their hour long set. Dave Navarro was rather amazing. Eric Avery was great. Stephen Perkins was really good. Perry Farrel was certainly a good showman, but I found his voice a bit grating at times. If I have the chance, I would like to see them again.

NIN Setlist:

• Pinion
• Wish
• Last
• Discipline
• March Of The Pigs
• Reptile
• Meet Your Master
• Gave Up
• La Mer
• Non-Entity
• The Way Out Is Through
• Mr. Self Destruct
• 1,000,000
• Echoplex
• Survivalism
• The Good Soldier
• The Hand That Feeds
• Head Like A Hole
• Hurt

Jane's Addiction Setlist:

• Three Days
• Whores
• Ain't No Right
• Pigs In Zen
• Then She Did...
• Up The Beach
• Mountain Song
• Been Caught Stealing
• Obvious
• Ocean Size
• Ted, Just Admit it...
• Summertime Rolls
• Stop!
• Jane Says

[/musings] [permanent link]

National Running Day part 4
I did another 10K this evening after work. That brings my National Running Day total to 13.6 miles over 3 runs. I hope everyone was able to run today. You still have some time if you haven't yet. Happy National Running Day!

[/running] [permanent link]

National Running Day part 3
Did a little over 4 miles on my lunch break at a slightly faster pace than the run this morning. Looking forward to this evening.

[/running] [permanent link]

National Running Day part 2
That was fun! I got my first run completed, just over 5K. Now it's time to get ready and get off to work.

[/running] [permanent link]

National Running Day part 1
Here I am ready for my first run of the day and there's a thunderstorm about to roll through. The RADAR shows it moving pretty fast. If it hasn't passed by in the next 15 to 20 minutes, I'm getting on the treadmill.

[/running] [permanent link]

National Running Day
Wednesday June 3, 2009 is the inaugural National Running Day. I encourage everyone to get out and run. Whether your a seasoned athlete or a couch potato, lace up your sneakers and get out there this Wednesday.

For the runners out there, make sure you run on Wednesday and try to drag some people along with you. For those of of you who aren't runners, Wednesday is a perfect day to start.

The National Running Day website has more information about the day, and tips for people who are new to running.

[/running] [permanent link]

Just a Question
Given the following code fragment, I was asked to implement foo such that the program would output "America." How would you do it?

        int main()
        {
          char *p = "Hello";

          foo(         );
          printf("%s",p);

          return 0;
        }

My solution involved allocating new memory from the heap to store the new string, and changing p to point to that buffer. They didn't like that answer. They preferred the method of putting the new string in the data segment as well.

I personally would always avoid that, whenever possible. "Hello" is stored in a read-only area of memory as is "America" in their preferred solution. Any attempt to alter those strings will trigger a segfault. This is an accident waiting to happen.

[/code] [permanent link]

How long does it take to build a linux kernel?
It has been a number of years since I built a linux kernel. Slackware 9.1 was the last GNU/Linux distro I used before switching back to BSD. Tonight I put together a machine from some old parts (1.2GHz celeron with 256KB cache, 256MB RAM, 20GB hard drive) and installed Slackware 12. I customized a kernel configuration and attempted to build it. I don't remember the 2.4 kernel taking as long to build as this 2.6 kernel. It took nearly two hours. Granted, this machine is fairly old, but 2 hours? After I complete the tasks for which I needed this setup, I'm going to install an older Slackware with the 2.4 kernel and build that. I may also install FreeBSD and NetBSD and build their kernels. I'd like to get an idea how long it takes to compile other kernels on this rig.

[/unix] [permanent link]

It's gotta be the shoes
Yesterday I picked up the pair of shoes in which I will run the New York City Marathon.

[/running] [permanent link]

1264352606
1:37:50. New half marathon PR.

--
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

[/mobile] [permanent link]

Avatar
Here's my review of the movie.

There's something about the giraffes if you believe we're apples and oranges. I was disappointed by the ketchup, but the mustard was surprisingly good.

[/musings] [permanent link]

1263048598
Qualifier #1 done.

--
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

[/mobile] [permanent link]

I Hate People
http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-dog-beaten-in-elevator,0,193301.story

I saw that on the news last night and it made me sick. There is no reason for this. This is just senseless abuse.

It'd be nice to see him in prison getting kicked around his cell by another inmate, but that likely won't happen. Under the current laws, he can only be charged with a misdemeanor.

Haven't there been studies indicating a correlation between abusing animals and becoming a serial killer?

[/musings] [permanent link]

I Hate People
http://www.wpix.com/news/wpix-dog-beaten-in-elevator,0,193301.story

I saw that on the news last night and it made me sick. There is no reason for this. This is just senseless abuse.

It'd be nice to see him in prison getting kicked around his cell by another inmate, but that likely won't happen. Under the current laws, he can only be charged with a misdemeanor.

Haven't there been studies indicating a correlation between abusing animals and becoming a serial killer?

[/musings] [permanent link]

It was a good day...
So today I woke up and watched an episode of Star Trek while I did some weight training and core work. Then I met my friend and her 5-month old baby for breakfast. That baby is so cute, and so happy too.

After that I met another friend for a run in the Tourne where we met a fox on the Red Trail. When I got home from the run, I turned my lawn into an avant garde art installation and then took a shower.

I took Ailsing out for a drive and on the way home she rolled over to 15,000 miles. I've had the DeLorean for about five years now, so I'm still averaging 1,000 miles per year. Not bad.

A large part of a tree fell and missed my house by about 18 inches. So then I went and ran another Six miles during a National Weather Service tornado watch.

Now I'm finishing up the day with a good movie and a glass of Monk's Blood.

Today, I didn't even have to use my AK. It was a good day.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Blosxom 2.2.0
Apparently Blosxom development has been picked up again. There was a new release on 2024-02-03. Nice!

[/unix] [permanent link]

I wasn't born this way; I made myself.
I heard that Lady Gaga song on the radio the other day, you know the one that sounds like the Madonna song, and it got me thinking. On the surface it seems to contain a very positive message about accepting yourself because you were "Born This Way." You were born like this, you were made this way, there's nothing you can do about it so be happy with it.

I disagree. Sure, when we're born we're stuck with the genetic material passed on to us by our lineage. But we're more than that, what we are, what we become, is so much more than how we were born. And this made me think about the Incubus song, "Make Yourself." I find the message of that song to be much more positive. While the song has an overt "them vs. you" context, the general theme is one of taking responsibility for yourself and what you become.

Was I born the way I am today? Judging from the direction my life took in the first twenty-six years, and comparing it to the last three years, the answer is no. I was born heavy, weighing in over nine pounds. I grew into a heavy kid. I was always sad and lonely as a kid. I had few friends. I rarely went outside. I never played sports. I watched a lot of TV. I ate a lot. I got heavier. I got sadder. I got lonelier. But I was born this way, right? I should have just accepted it, right?

While I was born heavy, I didn't have to stay that way. It was my own choices that made me into the depressed, obese misanthrope I was. Despite my claims that I was born that way, genetically predisposed to those conditions, I really made myself that way.

And then I decided to change that. I took responsibility for my life. I started exercising. I ran. I ate healthier. I lost weight. I had better relationships with my friends. I started making new friends. I became happier.

Just as I had made myself into what I was, I made myself into what I am today. The key to this change was taking personal responsibility for myself. No longer did I use the excuse of being born that way. I knew I was like that because of my decisions and my actions. I knew through my decisions and my actions I could change. And I did. I made myself.

"If you really want to live, why not try and make yourself?"

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

1263048598
Qualifier #1 done.

--
==================================================================
This mobile text message is brought to you by AT&T

[/mobile] [permanent link]

NJ Governor Endorsement
I officially endorse anyone who is not Jon Corzine.

[/politics] [permanent link]

Last night I ran...
15 miles because I felt like it, again.

[/running] [permanent link]

I just ran...
15 miles because I felt like it.

[/running] [permanent link]

Excellent music. Go check out Android Lust now.

[/musings] [permanent link]

C#, XNA, and 8 Queens
I spent some time this weekend learning some C# and getting working a bit with the XNA framework. I implemented a solution for the 8 Queens problem in C++, then ported that class to C#. After getting that working in Windows, I started moving it to the Xbox.

It works there with little issue, but, as expected, writing to system.console doesn't produce useful output. My next step is to get some sort of graphical representation of the chessboard displayed with the solution set.

[/code] [permanent link]

XNA
As of this morning, I am now a member of the XNA Creators Club.

[/code] [permanent link]

Staten Island Half Marathon
Sunday was the Staten Island Half Marathon. I've been dealing with overuse injuries as of late, my IT-band has been acting up and I strained my right hamstring.

I wasn't sure if I'd be running or not, and the temperature was predicted to be in the low- to mid-50's, so I wore my coldgear; I didn't want to end up with hypothermia again if I was standing around for 2 hours in shorts.

It turned out that one of my teammates, Liz, wasn't sure if she'd be able to finish. We decided to run together. And we did. We finished with the exact same time of 2:34:00. I kept her from stopping and she kept me from going to fast and re-injuring myself.

It took me an hour longer to finish the race than it normally would, but I think it went quite well. My hamstring actually felt better after the run. My IT-band was a little sore the next day, but it was better by Tuesday.

Running at the slower pace, I was able to actually look around and enjoy the scenery. The shores Staten Island were not as bad as I was expecting. Over all, it was a good recovery run. A 13.1 mile recovery run.

[/running] [permanent link]

Bing!
It has come to my attention that searching bing for pictures of closed doors yields pictures of my DeLorean.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Self Documenting Code
Despite what you think about your code, it is not self documenting. When writing code add comments, describe what a function does, explain why you're using that convoluted pointer arithmetic and bit shifting. I'm sure it makes sense now, but someday you'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing. Or worse, I'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing.

Sometimes it is important to have some sort of separate documentation for the code; maybe some UML or ER diagrams, maybe some English text. Use what ever it takes to explain what you were doing. Do not paste snippets of your code into the text and call it documentation.That is not documentation, that is code.

[/code] [permanent link]

AFI: Starland Ballroom, October 10, 2009
Show was great last night. Here's the setlist from the show:

• Torch Song
• Leaving Song Pt. II
• Veronica Sawyer Smokes
• Ever and a Day
• Kill Caustic (With Lou Koller of Sick of It All)
• End Transmission
• Love is a Many Splendored Thing
• Beautiful Thieves
• Dancing Through Sunday
• Leaving Song
• On the Arrow
• Death of Seasons
• Medicate
• Love Like Winter
• Just Like Heaven
• Miss Murder
• Silver and Cold

I'll write more later, now it's time to get ready for the Staten Island Half Marathon.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It exists
As part of the DeLorean's restoration, I've been considering a backlit dash. I had considered sticking with the stock dash with the white light bulb in front of the gauges, but I thought a red backlit display would be better for night vision.

Then came the issue of whether or not something like that exists. Turns out it does. Speed Hut carries a line of customizable gauges for the DMC-12 as part of the EL-Glo line.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Gmail and mutt
I like mutt. Of all the mail clients I've used over the years, it sucks the least. It works well with my mail server.

Despite having my own domain and mail server, I still use gmail for certain things; things I don't mind being retained for 3 years after I delete them, or more specifically, things I want retained for 3 years after I delete them.

I don't like the gmail web interface. I find checking my gmail to be annoying because of this. I remembered gmail offering POP and IMAP. I figured I could use that to get my gmail. Shouldn't be too hard right?

A quick search of Mr. Yahoo and Mr. Google gave me two good starting points: Lifehacker.com and MattCutts.com.

I read the sites and the getmail man page and figured out what I needed to do. First I enabled IMAP for my gmail account. Next, I created the .getmail directory in my home directory then created a getmailrc file there. I want all gmail mail to be delivered to a specific mbox file without going through my normal mail delivery channels. The contents of the getmailrc file are quite simple:

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = username@gmail.com
password = usernamespasswordgoeshere
mailboxes = ("inbox",)

[destination]
type = Mboxrd
path = /usr/home/mforde/Mail/GMAIL

The retriever section defines how getmail will retrieve the mail. In this case it uses IMAP over SSL to connect to imap.gmail.com. The mailboxes setting can be used to specify only certain gmail labels to retrieve, but I want anything in the inbox.

The destination section tells getmail what to do with the mail once it has grabbed it from gmail. This configuration dumps it into an mbox file I've named GMAIL.

I chose IMAP over POP because of the slightly-less-than-documented "feature" of gmail only allowing 99 messages at a time over POP.

So to get the initial batch of 7000+ emails, I ran

> getmail -vvv -l 

to get verbose output and to leave messages on the gmail server. When that was done I pointed mutt at the GMAIL mbox and like magic, there was my gmail, organized nicely in my terminal.

Now, I want to check to get the latest mail fairly often, and I don't want to download messages already copied over. To accomplish this, I added a crontab to run every 10 minutes and invoke

getmail -l -n -q

This tells getmail to leave copies on the server, only get new messages it hasn't already retrieved, and be quiet about it.

This has worked out well for me. If you're interested in setting up something like this, I highly recommend reading the article at matcutts.com. That article also links to several sample getmailrc files.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Happy Anniversary
The Twilight Zone premiered 50 years ago tonight. Slashdot has a bit about it.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Marathon Tune-UP
This past Sunday was the Marathon Tune-Up, an 18 mile run through Central Park. My goal was to run it maintaining roughly a 7:30/mile pace. I had set a range of 135 to 140 minutes for myself. I would have been satisfied with any finish time in that five minute span.

At the 10 mile mark, I was averaging 7:27/mile. During that 11th mile, I decided to use a Gu energy gel. I was still feeling pretty good at that pace and I was hoping to time the gel right so as to not "hit the wall" at mile 14 or 15.

Instead, the gel started giving me stomach cramps. At mile 12 I was still well under an 8 minute pace and at the half-marathon mark, I was a minute off my best official half. I was clearly slowing down as the stomach pain increased.

I struggled through miles 14 and 15, alternating running and walking every quarter mile. By mile 16, I could not run. The pain was almost unbearable. I ended up walking the last two miles, in the rain, with all my blood concentrated in my core, dealing with the Gu in my stomach. By time I crossed the finish line, I was a half over my 135 minute goal and had almost no feeling in my hands or feet.

I went to the medical tent and told the volunteer that I had severe stomach cramps and I was so cold that I couldn't feel my hands. He responded, "We don't got no blankets or nuthin' so we can't do nuthin' for ya." So I walked away.

I went to the tables where volunteers were handing out gatorade and pretzels. I stood there, shaking, until another runner came up to me and asked if I was okay. Before I knew it, another runner was keeping me from falling over while the first runner was coming back with two NYRR volunteers. One of them wrapped me in a plastic bag to keep the rain off while the other went for help. I explained what happened at the medical tent.

Two more people from medial came back and put me on a gurney and took me back to the tent. I told them what had happened at the tent and explained what I was feeling. At the tent I removed my soaked shirts and was wrapped in a mylar sheet and two blankets. I pointed out the guy who told me they couldn't do anything for me.

I managed to get in touch with my fellow Giraffe who ran back to our car to get my dry clothes. After about a half hour or so, I was feeling much better and feeling had returned to my extremities. I got in my dry clothes and my teammate and I walked back to the car.

So taking a Gu ended up with me being treated for hypothermia. I had had mild stomach irritation when using Gu in training, but never this bad. I'm glad I found out now instead of next month in Philadelphia.

during my 22 mile training run at the Tourne, I used prepared bottles of GuBrew and Gu2O. These liquids never caused the irritation that the gel did, so I should be okay using them during the race.

I've purchased a bottle that gets strapped to your hand for the purpose of carrying the GuBrew with me. I filled it with water and ran with it on the treadmill last night. It seems a little awkward, but it shouldn't be too bad. I'll use it to carry the GuBrew with me during the Staten Island Half Marathon on the 11th and see how that works out.

[/running] [permanent link]

Best Buy Charges Customers for Exchanges
This weekend I witnessed a friend try to exchange an item at Best Buy. He had mistakenly purchased the full-screen version and wanted to exchange it for the wide-screen version. While he did not have his receipt, it still had the Best Buy sticker on the shrink wrap as well as the $19.99 price tag.

The signs on the shelf indicated that the wide-screen version was also $19.99 and as of January 22, both versions are $19.99 on the Best Buy website.

My friend waited online patiently for about 15 minutes to make his exchange. He handed the Blue Shirt both the full-screen version he had purchased and the wide-screen copy he picked up before going to the customer service line. The Blue Shirt asked if he had paid cash or credit and when my friend said credit, the Blue Shirt asked for his card.

The Blue Shirt swiped the card and pushed a bunch of buttons then told my friend he'd have to pay $5.35 ($5 plus 7% sales tax) due to a "difference in price."

When we questioned this "difference in price" we were told, "Wide-screen always costs more than full-screen."

I am boycotting Best Buy and I urge others to do the same. This company has a long history of using underhanded tactics to increase profitability at the expense of its employees and its customers.

[/musings] [permanent link]

He's Not Wrong...
Over at Net Meister there's a nice peice entitled Things They Don't Teach You in School". A lot of what Jan has to say is spot-on observation and good advice.

It's definitely worth a read.

[/code] [permanent link]

Looking back...
As I look back at code I wrote a decade ago as an undergrad, I often find lots of little things that can be done better. For instance, in one file I found that reversing the order in which two functions were called would have eliminated a half dozen conditionals from one of the functions and would have resulted in the same expected behavior, but with fewer lines of code and a lower cyclomatic complexity.

[/code] [permanent link]

Thoughts on National Computer Science Education Week
This week is apparently National Computer Science Education Week. Code.org is organizing the "hour of code" to promote teaching of Computer Science and Programming in schools. They're also organizing petitions to make CS courses count as credits in Mathematics or Science for High School graduation requirements.

In High School, my CS courses were by far my favorites, Programming in Pascal, AP Comp Sci in Pascal, Programming in C++, and AP Comp Sci in C++ ( the language for the exam switched my junior year). I learned a lot about structured code, elegant, efficient code. I learned enough about Data Structures and Algorithms that I didn't have to study for my college CS classes until Computational Structures (Discrete Math II with Scheme, essentially) in my third semester. I had an amazing Computer Science teacher who also taught me Calculus and the proper order of precedence in life: God, Family, Math. I wouldn't be where I am today without that educational opportunity I had in High School. I want others to have that opportunity too.

However, this is where I differ with the opinion of the Code.org folks. I do not believe that CS classes should count toward the Math or Science requirements. In this state, CS counts toward the "practical or performing art" requirements, I'm assuming under the "practical" label. I think this is a better place for it at the High School level.

Computer Science is not a hard Science. It's not Physics. It's not Biology. It's not Chemistry. There's a saying that if the subject has science in its name, it's not really a science. That is true with Computer Science. It's not studying the how and why of atoms, of molecules, of living systems, of anything really. It's not science.

Computer Science is really applied mathematics. I am very fortunate that the college program I went through was very strong in mathematics: Calc I and II, Linear (Matrix) Algebra, Discrete Math, Discrete Math II in the guise of Computational Structures, Probability and Statistics, Theory of Computation, Algorithmic Analysis... the list goes on. All of these mathematical foundations were then applied to a machine, to make the machine carry out a task in an efficient manner. It's those mathematical foundations that are the true core of Computer Science.

While mathematics is the core of Computer Science and Computer Science is essentially applied mathematics, I do not believe it should count toward the Math requirements. The CS classes would likely detract from other mathematics courses such as Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. These courses are far too important to an education to be replaced by a Computer Science course. Many, maybe even most, High School Computer Science courses focus more on "programming" than the fundamental mathematical theories. They will pick the language du jour and teach you the syntax and semantics. They'll teach about basic data structures like arrays, and linked lists. The AP exam currently focuses not on implementing lists, trees, stacks, queues, and sorting and searching algorithms, but on arrays and lists using Java library calls. This is not math. This is learning Java syntax.

[/code] [permanent link]

unHide
After a friend's computer became infected with some malware that hides files in your home directory and tries to extort money from you in order to "recover" your data, I was inspired to write this little program.

All it does is search for hidden, non-system files and unhides them. It defaults to the user's home directory (My Documents), but other directories can be chosen.

If anyone wants to try it out, please do. If you do try it, let me know what parts I can do better. I primarily work on embedded systems and Unix daemons professionally; the user only knows my software exists when it isn't working. As such, I have very little experience with GUIs or human-computer interactions. Any feedback would be much appreciated.

The Windows executable can be found at: http://www.skinnymf.com/~mforde/unHide/. Source code is available upon request.

[/code] [permanent link]

Just a Question
Given the following code fragment, I was asked to implement foo such that the program would output "America." How would you do it?

        int main()
        {
          char *p = "Hello";

          foo(         );
          printf("%s",p);

          return 0;
        }

My solution involved allocating new memory from the heap to store the new string, and changing p to point to that buffer. They didn't like that answer. They preferred the method of putting the new string in the data segment as well.

I personally would always avoid that, whenever possible. "Hello" is stored in a read-only area of memory as is "America" in their preferred solution. Any attempt to alter those strings will trigger a segfault. This is an accident waiting to happen.

[/code] [permanent link]

It's not magic, it's C.
I love reading comments like

/* These defined magically in the linker script. */

I found that in the GNU Standard C Library implementation when GCC told me the the variables to which the comment referred were undefined. I guess that linker script isn't magic after all...

[/code] [permanent link]

C#, XNA, and 8 Queens
I spent some time this weekend learning some C# and getting working a bit with the XNA framework. I implemented a solution for the 8 Queens problem in C++, then ported that class to C#. After getting that working in Windows, I started moving it to the Xbox.

It works there with little issue, but, as expected, writing to system.console doesn't produce useful output. My next step is to get some sort of graphical representation of the chessboard displayed with the solution set.

[/code] [permanent link]

XNA
As of this morning, I am now a member of the XNA Creators Club.

[/code] [permanent link]

Self Documenting Code
Despite what you think about your code, it is not self documenting. When writing code add comments, describe what a function does, explain why you're using that convoluted pointer arithmetic and bit shifting. I'm sure it makes sense now, but someday you'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing. Or worse, I'll have to go back and look at it and figure out what the hell you were doing.

Sometimes it is important to have some sort of separate documentation for the code; maybe some UML or ER diagrams, maybe some English text. Use what ever it takes to explain what you were doing. Do not paste snippets of your code into the text and call it documentation.That is not documentation, that is code.

[/code] [permanent link]

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

Blosxom 2.2.0
Apparently Blosxom development has been picked up again. There was a new release on 2024-02-03. Nice!

[/unix] [permanent link]

1702672835
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[/mobile] [permanent link]

I'm looking California and feeling Minnesota

[/musings] [permanent link]

Fireside Chat


Tonight I signed up for the Fireside beta. They asked for all my social media accounts to prove I'm a human. The problem is, I don't have a twitter account, a facebook account, instagram, etc. Years ago I took the advice of numerous psychology studies and my own therapist's advice and got off the social media platforms. It was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health.

So hopefully this blog, though infrequently updated (and slightly broken since the last major perl update), will serve as proof to the people at Fireside that I am human and not a bot.

It was the Astonishing Legends Podcast that led me to Fireside. It would be nice to use it for one of their interactive live chats sometime.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Bill Gates is Satan's Minion
Bill Gates was Satan's minion, is Satan's minion, and always will be Satan's minion.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Tenth Runniversary
Today is my tenth runniversary. It's been a decade since I first stepped on that treadmill. Like my first day running, I ran on the treadmill while listening to br\oken. I've had some set backs in my recovery. Not properly rehabilitating the atrophy in the left leg has caused some problems with the muscles around my hip. Listening to my trainer only made it worse. But now I'm taking care of it properly. Like that first day ten years ago, I have a goal I am working toward. This time it is the Dublin Marathon in October. This will be marathon number 13. I don't expect to PR. I think 10 minute miles are a much more reasonable goal at this point, but frankly I'll be happy just to cross that finish line. It's been a long, hard road out of Hell, but God has been by my side and put some amazing people in my life to help me along the way. I have to thank the Giraffes for today. I have to thank the Giraffes for much of my life this last decade. I was heading for an early grave, and they changed that. Giraffes, I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I look forward to running the LTC and many other races with you in the next decade.

[/running] [permanent link]

Take back your privacy
Recent surveys have found that 76% of [the most visited] websites in the world cotain trackers from google and 24% contain trackers from facebook. This has been reported by CNBC, PC World, The Verge, Fortune, and Breitbart.

Almost anywhere you go on the internet, they are following you, building a profile on you, and selling that information, your information, to the highest bidder. Even if you don't have a user account for google or facebook "services," they've built a profile of you using this surreptitiously collected data.

It turns out there are some steps one can take to prevent these companies from following you wherever you go. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot. First, don't use Chrome. Second, install ad-blocker plugins for your browser. Third, use your firewall.

It turns out Google and Facebook are large enough that they have their own Autonomous Systems (AS) composed of numerous subnets. Google owns AS 15169, while Facebook owns AS 32934. Using a little bit of shell, it's relatively easy to look up all the subnets owned by these companies.

whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS15169' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'

That's a lot of subnets. Because I have different operating systems on different computers and still want to block traffic to and from all those IP addresses, I've written some simple scripts to add rules to various firewalls. I have scripts for IPFW on FreeBSD, IPTables on Linux, and the Windows Firewall that should work from XP SP3 through Windows 10. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it worked in those.

All of these scripts can be found in this directory. The IPFW and IPTables scripts are self-contained. For the Windows command shell batch files, the *ips.txt files are also needed.

I have to say, the internet looks very different with these firewall rules in place. There are noticeably fewer advertisements and pages load faster. Embedded YouTube videos and Instagram photos don't appear. Sometimes the frame disappears, sometimes you get a "failed to connect" page appearing in a frame in the middle of a page. (Yes, these rules block YouTube and Instagram; they are owned by google and facebook and reside in the subnets owned by those companies.) On a relatively rare occasion, I come across a site using some sort of javascript or css or something hosted by a machine in one of those ASs and that will be blocked. Sometimes the site handles that gracefully, sometimes it stops being functional. A small price to take back your life.

Update: Twitter has trackers on a decent amount of sites out there too, so I've added scripts to block Twitter's AS 13414 as well. Those scripts are in the same directories as the others.

[/musings] [permanent link]

St Michael, defend us in battle
Crisis Magazine has a great piece about St Michael and the ongoing spiritual warfare in the world.

[/musings] [permanent link]

New PGP Key!
So apparently Evil32 happened. Approximately 24,000 PGP keys were generated that had collisions with the 32-bit short IDs of existing keys. Then someone decided to use those conflicting keys to generate revocation certificates and upload them to the keyservers. Joy.

Though my old keys still work, they were affected by this mass revocation of collsions. I have created a new key which can be found at http://skinnymf.com/~mforde/mforde.asc.

On a related note, if anyone is interested in Key Signing Party, shoot me an email. I haven't been to one of those since college.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Time Travel?
A few months ago I happened to snap a photo of the DeLorean on Main Street in Boonton near the Darress Theatre. It's probably one of my favorite photographs of the car and certainly one of the best I've ever taken.
The theatre was built in 1919 and has remained largely unchanged since then. A lot of Boonton still has a very old "look and feel" to it, and this section of Main Street served as a perfect backdrop for the DeLorean.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

How to Drive a Classic Rolls-Royce, or a DeLorean, Any Time You Want
Bloomberg has posted an article entitled How to Drive a Classic Rolls-Royce, or a DeLorean, Any Time You Want. It's really quite simple, actually. You take your keys, go out the the garage, and you drive the DeLorean any time you want.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

This ends tonight...

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

Sometimes...
Sometimes it's dificult to find a reason to continue.

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

Ninth Runniversary
Yesterday was my ninth runniversary. Like my first day running, I ran on the treadmill while listening to Broken. Unlike the first time, I only listened to it once, and covered 4.48 miles during the duration of the EP, thanking God every step of the way.

I'm confident in knowing that the bone in my ankle has healed completely now; however, I'm still rebuilding the muscle in that ankle and the rest of that leg. There was significant atrophy during the early phases of recovery. Slowly as it may be, I am making progress, and I am thankful for that.

[/running] [permanent link]

Merry Christmas
While the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time, I know and understand how hard they can be for some people. If you're having a rough time over the next week or so and need someone to talk to, feel free to message me. If you're reading this blog, you likely know my email address or phone number.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Aisling at 35
She's still looking good at 35....

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Happy Birthday Aisling!!!!
My DeLorean, #5333, was built in October of 1981. This month, the car will be 35 years old and she looks and handles like the day she came off the assembly line.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Don't Call it a Comeback
On June fourth, I was running in the Tourne on a trail I first ran twenty years ago, a trail I've run hundreds if not thousands of times before. On that morning, my foot came down on a wet rock at just the wrong angle, slipped just enough and I rolled my ankle. Not only did I roll the joint, I came down on it with enough force to break it; a fact I would learn when I final saw a doctor about it on June ninth.

No surgery was required, but I was unable to run for three months. I was finally cleared to run. The plan was to start with short distances, about a quarter mile, on a rubberized track then build up from there, moving on to treadmills and eventually roads and trails. I was instructed to spend six months rebuilding my 60 mile per week base.

On the morning of September 11 (a day I will never forget and a morning that will always make me feel a bit uneasy), I took to the track for the first time. I started by walking a mile. As I finished the fourth lap, I said a prayer, asking God to give me the run I needed and the wisdom to know when to stop. I queued up my playlist: AC\DC's "Back in Black" and LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." I took my first stride.

I've been progressing well in the last two weeks; pushing it on some days, resting when necessary. Though the short, slow distances have been frustrating, it feel good to be running again. Every stride I take I'm reminded of everything I love about the sport.

It's good to be back.

[/running] [permanent link]

Fun Conversations
The DeLorean often leads to conversations one wouldn't normally expect. Case in point: today I had to call my auto insurance provider for an issue with my daily driver. After taking some info to pull up my account the conversation went something like this:

Agent: Which car is this?
Me: The Pontiac.
Agent: Am I reading this right?
Me: Reading what?
Agent: I'm sorry, do you have a DeLorean?
Me: Yes.
Agent: I never thought I'd see someone with a policy on a DeLorean.
Me: Well, you've insured both of mine...
Agent: You've had two DeLoreans?
Me: Yes.

At that point there were a few more questions and then we got back to the issue which my phone call had been about originally.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

An Observation
There is something satisfying about driving in a DeLorean while listening to The Clash's Live: From Here to Eternity.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

What Year is This?!
So this was my Saturday night....

[/musings] [permanent link]

He's Not Wrong...
Over at Net Meister there's a nice peice entitled Things They Don't Teach You in School". A lot of what Jan has to say is spot-on observation and good advice.

It's definitely worth a read.

[/code] [permanent link]

Trouble opening aterm in FreeBSD?
Here's a soltuion! https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/44941/

[/unix] [permanent link]

X11 Mouse Cursor Themes
Starting after installimg the binary nvidia drivers on both my laptop (Quadro K1100M) and my workstation (GeForce GT 630) Blackbox was defaulting to a mouse cursor that was suboptimal, a black, notched triangle.

The settings in the Xresources for the mouse cursor theme are honored by XDM at the graphical log in, but when Blackbox or Fluxbox start, the cursor would change to the black notched triangle. TWM honors the settings in Xresources, but TWM is just a little too minimalist, even for me.

But there's a simple fix!

Create a file in your home directory (if it doesn't already exist) .icons/default/index.theme. In this file, add the following lines:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits = polarblue

where polarblue is the name of the X11 mouse cursor theme you wish to use. FreeBSD installs many of the X11 cursor sets into /usr/local/lib/X11/icons/, your Unix flavor may be different. In theory, you can also install new themes of your choosing into ~/.icons/ and use those without the need for any elevated privileges.

Additionally, there's the option of creating a .Xdefaults file in the home directory and adding the line

Xcursor.theme: polarblue

Again, where polarblue is the name of theme you want to use.

[/unix] [permanent link]

FreeBSD Unix on Dell Precision M4800
I installed FreeBSD 10.3 on the laptop I recently acquired and almost eveything worked out of the box. The gigabit ethernet and wi-fi coards worked fine and by setting the BIOS to discrete graphics only, the nVidia Quadro was recognized.

I installed the binary driver from nVidia, because they support FreeBSD because they're awesome like that. The nvidia-xconfig(1) program was useful to streamline the process of getting X.org to use the Quadro.

There were a few things that did need some tewaking though. First there's the sound card. Because the quadro supports HDMI (in addition to VGA and DisplayPort), it includes an HDA-compliant sound card. This card is recognized before the primary HDA-compliant sound card in the machine, the one that's actually connected to the speakers.

I did some research and there were some suggestions about using sysctl(8) to control soundcard GPIO pins to connect the nVidia sound device to the speackers but what ultimately worked was using sysctl(8) to change the default primary sound device to the dedicated card. There were a few ways to make this happen but the one I found that actually worked was to place sysctl(8) command lines in /etc/rc.local.

First I found the device I wanted as the default:

mforde@gaz:~> cat /dev/sndstat 
Installed devices:
pcm0:  (play) default
pcm1:  (play)
pcm2:  (play) 
pcm3:  (play)

Device pcm2 was the one I wanted so I added the following lines to /etc/rc.local

sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=2
sysctl hw.snd.default_auto=2

Now when boot completes pcm2 is set to my default and sound "just works" and sndstat shows pcm2 as the default.

I found ACPI support has some weirdness as ACPI support often does. What I found was that Suspend works from console, but resume doesn't... HOWEVER After I start X ACPI suspend and resume work just fine. Normally I prefer to boot into a console and only start X if I really need it, but because I want suspend and resume to work "by default" I've enabled X to start at boot by allowing the xdm console in /etc/ttys.

But this had one last issue. See, when manually starting X, I added the -dpi 143 option to get graphics and text to be appropriately sized for my screen. XDM needed to know about this.

This probably wasn't the best place to do it, but I edited /usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/XServers and modified the call to X(7) to add the -dpi 143 option. Now when Xdm loads at start up, the DPI is set correctly.

The function keys for adjusting the screen brightness don't work; however, xbacklight(1) works just fine. Similarly the volume keys don't work but I can adjust the volume quite easily with aumix(1).

I've submitted my dmesg output to NYCBUG's dmesgd repository.

I suppose I've posted this for two reasons. The first is so I have a record of how I eventually got these little things working in case I have to do it again. The second is in case anyone has similar issues with their hardware; if they happen to stumble upon this, it might give them some hints.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Who... What are you?
I was running earlier tonight and around mile 7 I was going up a steep, winding, dark hill. Near the top a couple was walking their dog. They saw the flashing lights on my shoes and wrists and, when I got close to them, the woman said, "We were trying to figure out what you were."

"I'm a runner."

[/running] [permanent link]

An Awesome Christmas Present
I waited until to today to verify that it wasn't just a random occurrence. I checked again this morning and it was the same as yesterday.

I gave myself one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received. It took me about nine months to accomplish it, but I gave myself a new body, and more positive perspective on life.

As of yesterday, I have lost 101 pounds (45.8Kg for those of you who prefer the metric system) and over nine inches (22.86 cm) from my waistline.

A friend of mine told me tonight that, her doctor had told her recently that people can live much better lives, with fewer ailments, if they just made simple life changes. She said that having watched me over the last year transform my body, my mind, and my life, she found me to be a good model for positive changes people can make in their lives. As much as hitting the century mark meant to me, her words meant even more.

I've been thinking about this for a while and I think I'm going to become a motivational speaker. I want to help people change their lives for the better.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Season's Greetings
To my Democrat friends:

Please accept (with no obligation, implied or implicit) best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday,practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. We also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2009, with due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great (This is not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country, nor that America is the only country in the Western Hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishes. By accepting these greetings, you are accepting these terms. This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for himself, herself, or others. This greeting is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher. This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first, and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.


To my Republican friends:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

[/musings] [permanent link]

A Strange Encounter
Yesterday morning at work I was walking back to my cubical from the cafeteria with a bottle of water in my hand and a woman from another department stopped me in the corridor.

She said (roughly), "I've seen you over the last few months and you've lost a lot of weight and I just wanted to tell you you look great."

To which I replied (roughly), "Thank you," and I smiled.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's snowing!
Okay, it's not snowing right now, but it was earlier. I took some vacation time and cut out of work early today. I spent an hour and a half driving 11 miles home. By time I got home the snow was already 3 to 4 inches deep and still coming down.

So what did I do? I put on my normal cold weather running gear, put on sweat pants and a sweat shirt over that, and took off running.

After the first mile, I was a lot warmer than I thought I'd be. There was a big difference between running today at 28F and running last week at 20F. I took off the sweat shirt and continued running. Along the way I got a lot of strange looks from people shoveling their driveways, but I suppose that is to be expected.

I ran about 6K and while it wasn't my best run, it was good fun.

[/running] [permanent link]

Coding Soundtrack
Two albums that are great for background music while coding:

• The Matrix Soundtrack
• Spawn: The Album

The industrial/metal/techno mix on these two just fades into the background. The music is repetitive enough to not require direct attention, but not so repetitive that it draws attention to itself.

If anyone has any other good suggestions for background music while coding, I'd love to hear them.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Merry Christmas
While the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time, I know and understand how hard they can be for some people. If you're having a rough time over the next week or so and need someone to talk to, feel free to message me. If you're reading this blog, you likely know my email address or phone number.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Aisling at 35
She's still looking good at 35....

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Happy Birthday Aisling!!!!
My DeLorean, #5333, was built in October of 1981. This month, the car will be 35 years old and she looks and handles like the day she came off the assembly line.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

Don't Call it a Comeback
On June fourth, I was running in the Tourne on a trail I first ran twenty years ago, a trail I've run hundreds if not thousands of times before. On that morning, my foot came down on a wet rock at just the wrong angle, slipped just enough and I rolled my ankle. Not only did I roll the joint, I came down on it with enough force to break it; a fact I would learn when I final saw a doctor about it on June ninth.

No surgery was required, but I was unable to run for three months. I was finally cleared to run. The plan was to start with short distances, about a quarter mile, on a rubberized track then build up from there, moving on to treadmills and eventually roads and trails. I was instructed to spend six months rebuilding my 60 mile per week base.

On the morning of September 11 (a day I will never forget and a morning that will always make me feel a bit uneasy), I took to the track for the first time. I started by walking a mile. As I finished the fourth lap, I said a prayer, asking God to give me the run I needed and the wisdom to know when to stop. I queued up my playlist: AC\DC's "Back in Black" and LL Cool J's "Mama Said Knock You Out." I took my first stride.

I've been progressing well in the last two weeks; pushing it on some days, resting when necessary. Though the short, slow distances have been frustrating, it feel good to be running again. Every stride I take I'm reminded of everything I love about the sport.

It's good to be back.

[/running] [permanent link]

Fun Conversations
The DeLorean often leads to conversations one wouldn't normally expect. Case in point: today I had to call my auto insurance provider for an issue with my daily driver. After taking some info to pull up my account the conversation went something like this:

Agent: Which car is this?
Me: The Pontiac.
Agent: Am I reading this right?
Me: Reading what?
Agent: I'm sorry, do you have a DeLorean?
Me: Yes.
Agent: I never thought I'd see someone with a policy on a DeLorean.
Me: Well, you've insured both of mine...
Agent: You've had two DeLoreans?
Me: Yes.

At that point there were a few more questions and then we got back to the issue which my phone call had been about originally.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

An Observation
There is something satisfying about driving in a DeLorean while listening to The Clash's Live: From Here to Eternity.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

What Year is This?!
So this was my Saturday night....

[/musings] [permanent link]

He's Not Wrong...
Over at Net Meister there's a nice peice entitled Things They Don't Teach You in School". A lot of what Jan has to say is spot-on observation and good advice.

It's definitely worth a read.

[/code] [permanent link]

Trouble opening aterm in FreeBSD?
Here's a soltuion! https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/44941/

[/unix] [permanent link]

X11 Mouse Cursor Themes
Starting after installimg the binary nvidia drivers on both my laptop (Quadro K1100M) and my workstation (GeForce GT 630) Blackbox was defaulting to a mouse cursor that was suboptimal, a black, notched triangle.

The settings in the Xresources for the mouse cursor theme are honored by XDM at the graphical log in, but when Blackbox or Fluxbox start, the cursor would change to the black notched triangle. TWM honors the settings in Xresources, but TWM is just a little too minimalist, even for me.

But there's a simple fix!

Create a file in your home directory (if it doesn't already exist) .icons/default/index.theme. In this file, add the following lines:

[Icon Theme]
Inherits = polarblue

where polarblue is the name of the X11 mouse cursor theme you wish to use. FreeBSD installs many of the X11 cursor sets into /usr/local/lib/X11/icons/, your Unix flavor may be different. In theory, you can also install new themes of your choosing into ~/.icons/ and use those without the need for any elevated privileges.

Additionally, there's the option of creating a .Xdefaults file in the home directory and adding the line

Xcursor.theme: polarblue

Again, where polarblue is the name of theme you want to use.

[/unix] [permanent link]

FreeBSD Unix on Dell Precision M4800
I installed FreeBSD 10.3 on the laptop I recently acquired and almost eveything worked out of the box. The gigabit ethernet and wi-fi coards worked fine and by setting the BIOS to discrete graphics only, the nVidia Quadro was recognized.

I installed the binary driver from nVidia, because they support FreeBSD because they're awesome like that. The nvidia-xconfig(1) program was useful to streamline the process of getting X.org to use the Quadro.

There were a few things that did need some tewaking though. First there's the sound card. Because the quadro supports HDMI (in addition to VGA and DisplayPort), it includes an HDA-compliant sound card. This card is recognized before the primary HDA-compliant sound card in the machine, the one that's actually connected to the speakers.

I did some research and there were some suggestions about using sysctl(8) to control soundcard GPIO pins to connect the nVidia sound device to the speackers but what ultimately worked was using sysctl(8) to change the default primary sound device to the dedicated card. There were a few ways to make this happen but the one I found that actually worked was to place sysctl(8) command lines in /etc/rc.local.

First I found the device I wanted as the default:

mforde@gaz:~> cat /dev/sndstat 
Installed devices:
pcm0:  (play) default
pcm1:  (play)
pcm2:  (play) 
pcm3:  (play)

Device pcm2 was the one I wanted so I added the following lines to /etc/rc.local

sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=2
sysctl hw.snd.default_auto=2

Now when boot completes pcm2 is set to my default and sound "just works" and sndstat shows pcm2 as the default.

I found ACPI support has some weirdness as ACPI support often does. What I found was that Suspend works from console, but resume doesn't... HOWEVER After I start X ACPI suspend and resume work just fine. Normally I prefer to boot into a console and only start X if I really need it, but because I want suspend and resume to work "by default" I've enabled X to start at boot by allowing the xdm console in /etc/ttys.

But this had one last issue. See, when manually starting X, I added the -dpi 143 option to get graphics and text to be appropriately sized for my screen. XDM needed to know about this.

This probably wasn't the best place to do it, but I edited /usr/local/lib/X11/xdm/XServers and modified the call to X(7) to add the -dpi 143 option. Now when Xdm loads at start up, the DPI is set correctly.

The function keys for adjusting the screen brightness don't work; however, xbacklight(1) works just fine. Similarly the volume keys don't work but I can adjust the volume quite easily with aumix(1).

I've submitted my dmesg output to NYCBUG's dmesgd repository.

I suppose I've posted this for two reasons. The first is so I have a record of how I eventually got these little things working in case I have to do it again. The second is in case anyone has similar issues with their hardware; if they happen to stumble upon this, it might give them some hints.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Megapath sucks
Speakeasy was by far the best ISP I ever dealt with. Freindly, and above all, knowledgeable. Since they have been purchased by Megapath then merged into Global Capacity, their tech support has been, frankly a bunch of idiots. Furthermore, their website routinely has "Service failed" errors that prevent you from logging in, changing passwords, and viewing account information.

Today, after being unable to log in to the website due to "service failed" the tech support rep on the phoned didn't understand what a subnet mask or gateway address were. Eventually I just got her to read me "all three IP addresses" on the screen in front of her.

But at this point my only other option is Verizon. So I'm sticking with Megapath.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Found this sitting in a tarball of my old home directory...

                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                              
              ..,,..  ..ttLLLLtt..  ..;;ii;;,,..;;ttGGLL;;....iiiiiiiiiiii..    ..iijjttttii..                                
      iiLLLLGGKKKKDDLLGG########GGLLDDWWWWWWKKKKKK######WWDDEEWW##WWWW##WWDDjjffDD##########LL..          ..;;..              
  ..ffWW########WWKK####KKjjttEE####WWGGGGEEGGDDDDGGjjttGGKKWWWWLLGGLLGG##########DDjjttttGG##GGffttiiiiffDDKKDDGGGGGGii      
  ff####GGffffttii;;ttLLiijjtt;;LLtt;;,,,,;;;;;;iittLLtt;;,,iiiiiitt;;;;ffGGGGLLtt;;iiii;;;;DDWW####WWWW####KKDDKKKKWWWWtt    
..EE##LL;;ttttLLttLLLLttff##WWGGjjffGGDDGGKKKKKKWW####WWDDGGDDDDWW##EEEEffttffLLffGGWWWWGG;;;;ttffjjffDDDDff;;;;;;iittKKWWii  
;;KKKKiittKK######WWWW######################################KKKKWW##WW##################WWKKDDffttjjjjiiiiiiLLEEGGDDiittWWLL  
..KK##ttGG######WWDDDDEEKKDDKKWWDDKKEEKKWWEEKKEEWW##WWKKWWEELLLLDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKK##########WW####KKWWKK########KKiiDDEEii
  DD##ffGG######EELLLLLLLLLLGGDDLLDDGGDDDDLLLLEE####WWGGGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK######WW####KKKKKKWWWWKKKKWW####ttLLWWLL
  GG##LLLL##KKKKDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGWW####WWLLDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGKKWW######EEEEDDLLLLLLDDEEEELLEE####ffLLWWGG
  LL##GGjj##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK####WWLLEEDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGEEKK##WW##EELLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDLLKK##WWiiGGKKjj
  jj##GGiiWWWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK####KKLLKKEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK##GG##EEDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK##GG;;KKDD;;
  ii##EE;;DDWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK####KKLLDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEE##ffWWKKEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKWWiijj##ff  
  ;;WWWWiiGGKKLLLLLLLLGGLLDDEEDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK####KKDDGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDWWttEEWWDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEKKiiKKWW;;  
  ;;WW##ttGGWWGGLLLLLLEEDDEE##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK######WWEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDGGGGDDKKWWiiLLWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKKKttWWLL    
  iiWWKKiiKK##DDLLLLLLEEEEWW##WWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLKKWW######EELLLLLLLLLLDDEEEEWWWWKKKKWW####ii;;KKDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDWWKKffWWtt    
  ii##WWttWW##EELLLLLLDDEE######EELLLLLLLLLLLLKKDDEE####KKLLLLLLLLLLEE##################ii..KKEELLLLLLLLLLLLGGDD##DDffWWii    
  ;;WW##ttLL##KKLLLLLLLLEE##KK##KKLLLLLLLLLLDD##LLLLEEWWKKLLLLLLLLLLKK####WWKKffLLKKWWGG;;..EEKKLLLLLLLLLLLLDDEE##LLLLWWii    
  ..EE##LLiiWWKKLLLLLLGGKK##LLKKKKGGLLLLLLDDWW##ff;;iiKKKKLLLLLLLLLLKK##WWLLffttiijjLLiiffttGG##DDLLLLLLLLDDEEKK##ffLLKKii    
    LL##KKiiKKWWGGLLLLLLKK##ttGGWWDDLLLLLLEE####tt;;,,EEKKDDLLLLLLLLEE##########WWWWWWttGGGGttWWWWDDLLLLLLGGGGKK##ffGGKK;;    
    iiWW##ttGGWWDDLLLLGGWWKK;;GGWWDDLLLLLLEE##KKiiGG;;KKKKDDLLLLLLLLGGEEWW##KKEEDDDDKKttKK##ttGG##DDLLLLLLLLGGWW##jjEEEE..    
      GG##GGttWWDDLLLLGGWWKKiiWWWWDDLLLLLLEE##GGttKKiiGG##EELLLLLLLLLLLLGGDDGGLLLLEEKKjjWW##ffLLWWGGLLLLLLLLGGWWWWjjKKGG      
      tt##EEttWWDDLLLLDDWW##WW####DDLLLLLLKK##ffLL##DDttWWWWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKKKjj####jjGGKKLLGGLLLLLLDD##KKttWWLL      
      ii##KKttKKDDLLLLGGWW####WW##EELLLLLLEE##jjGG####ttDDWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDGGWWEEtt####ttKKWWLLLLLLLLLLDD##GGffWWtt      
      iiWWKKttWWEELLLLLLEEKKKKEEEEDDLLLLLLEE##ttEE####jjKKWWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDDDWWDDtt##WWttWW##DDLLLLLLLLEE##LLLLWWii      
      iiWWKKff##EELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEWWttKK##KKttWW##EELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDD##GGtt##WWttWW##EELLLLLLLLEE##ttGGEE..      
      iiWWWWff##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGKKWWttWW##KK;;EE##EELLLLLLLLLLGGGGGGGGEE##GGtt##WWttKK##EELLLLLLLLEEWWttEELL        
      ;;WWKKff##KKGGGGLLDDLLLLLLGGLLLLLLDDWWKKtt####WWiiLL##EELLLLLLDDKKWWWWKKWW####ffff##WWttEEWWDDLLLLLLLLEEKKiiEELL        
      ;;WWKKjjWWKKLLLLDDWWEEDDEEKKDDLLLLDDWWKKjj######jjLL##EELLLLLLEE##############jjLL####ttGG##DDLLLLLLLLKKKKiiKKff        
      ;;WWWWttKKEELLLLEE####WW####KKGGLLDDWWDDjj######ffGG##EELLLLLLEE##LLLLLLWWWWKKiiGG####LLjj##DDLLLLLLLLKKEEttWWff        
      ;;KKWWiiEEDDLLLLWW############DDLLGGWWDDjj######GGff##KKLLLLLLEE##ttiiiitttt,,;;KK####DDtt##EELLLLLLLLKKDDttWWtt        
      ;;KKWWiiDDDDLLLLWWWWffff######EELLDD##GGff######KKttWW##DDLLLLEE##ffGGKKjj;;iiDD######KKjj##KKLLLLLLLLKKGGffWWii        
      ,,KK##iiDDEELLLLWWGG  iiffffWWDDLLEE##GGff########ttGG##EELLLLEE##ttLL####WWWW########KKtt##KKLLLLLLGGWWLLLLKK;;        
      ..KK##ttLLKKLLLLKKGG......ttKKGGLLEE##LLLL########GGtt##KKLLLLEEKK;;LL########WWKKWW##KKttWWWWDDLLLLDD##ffLLGG..        
      ..KK##jjLLWWGGLLKKKK;;ttttff##DDLLDDWWttGG########KKttWWKKGGLLDDKKiiEE##ffttttii..ttWWWWttKK##EELLDDKK##ttGGGG          
      ;;KK##ffLLWWGGLLKKEE;;LLGGtt##KKLLGGKKjjKK########WWttKKWWDDLLDDKKttKKEE..          GG##ffff##WWDDWW##EEiiEELL          
      ..DD##GGttWWDDLLEEGG..LLWWttKKKKGGEEKKjjWW##########ttGG##KKDDDDWWttEEDD..          tt##KKiiWW##WW####GGtt##ff          
        ff##KKiiWWDDGGEEGGiiWW##ttDDKKDDWWKKjj############ffLL####WWKK##ttDDEE..          ;;KK##ttLL######WWttLL##ii          
        ;;WWWWttKKWWKKKKGGjj####ttGGWWEEWWGGtt############LLLL##########ttKKDD              GG##EEiiDD####LL;;KKEE..          
        ..EE##ffLL##WW##GGtt####jjLL######LLtt############LLttWWGGKK##LLttWWLL              iiWW##ffff####ttGG##ff            
          LL##EEttGGLL##GGtt####LLttWWKK##ffLL##EEttttKK##DD;;ff;;ttEE;;GG##tt                ff##DDiiKKLLiiWWKK;;            
          tt####ttii;;KKffff####KKiiii;;GG;;LL##ii    iiWW##LL::  ;;tttt##DD..                ;;KKWWiiffiiGG##ff              
          ..KK##GGttiiii;;GG######DDLLii;;;;KKEE..      ff####DDLLii;;GGWW;;                  ..DD##LL..tt##KK;;              
            jj######GG..jj############GGiiDD##ff        ..LL######WWKK##GG                      ff##WWDDWW##tt                
            ..LL####WWGGWWWWffiittGGWW##WW##DD::          ..ffKKWWWWWWKKtt                      ,,DD######ff..                
              ..ttEEWWWWDDii        ttEEKKGG;;                ..;;;;ii;;                          ;;ttffii..                  
                  ..ii;;..            ..;;..                                                                                  
                                                                                                                              

[/musings] [permanent link]

Remapping Keys in Vim
While I love the keyboard on my relatively new Dell M4800, I'm not particularly fond of the placement of the Page Up and Page Down keys to the left and right of the Up arrow, and above the Left and Right arrow keys. I find myself accidently hitting those keys too frequently while editing code and jumping all over the file.

So I remapped them. It was quite simple, because Vim is awesome. I added the following lines to my .vimrc file:

map <PageUp> <Up>
map <PageDown> <Down>

This turns Page Up into a second Up arrow, and Page Down into a second Down arrow. For now, I'll leave it like that. I may remap them to the Left and Right arrows in the future. Or not.

[/unix] [permanent link]

New Vernon Coach and Motor Works is Awesome
For as long as I've been a DeLorean owner, I've been taking the car to New Vernon Coach and Motor Works. They have always been professional and courteous, and they have always done top-notch work. I highly recommend them.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

How to Make VMWare suck less Tip #273
Find the .vmx file for your VM and add a line

bios.bootDelay = "15000"

That gives you 15 seconds before the virtual machine launches the boot loader, giving you plenty of time to do things like change the boot order so you start from a recovery CD.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Prince
I'll never forget the day I started liking Prince's music. I was with my friend in his car headed somewhere. We were listening to K-Rock and they had a "listener playlist" where for about an hour, all the music had been selected by a listener and this listener was on the phone, talking with the DJ about his selections and introducing songs.

The guy announced that the next song was from Prince. The DJ questioned this selection and he said, "No, this dude can shred. Just listen."

And we laughed.

And we listened.

And Prince shredded.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's been a while...
It's been a while since I've had a substantial update here. I've been busy living life leaving little time to be writing about it; at least writing about it here.

Work has been quite busy for a while now. Lots of projects, lots of deadlines, lots of extra hours. But there hasn't been any "mandatory seven day work weeks" like I had at that one job, and there isn't that expectation of "you can work from home so you are always expected to be working" I had at the last job. Plus, the work is a lot more interesting than anything I've done in years.

Bernstein was right: money doesn't motivate me, interesting problems and the ability to tinker do.

Yesterday the DeLorean rolled over to 16,000 miles. That's still about 1,000 miles a year I'm putting on it. I'd like to keep the mileage low, but she's just so much fun to drive. I've been asked by people at work to bring Aisling next week for Bring Your Child to Work Day. Apparently a lot of my co-workers have told their kids about the car and they want to see it.

I ran my 29th half-marathon this past weekend. I'd like to get up to 32 this year. I'm also signed up for my 13th marathon this Autumn. I'm considering running number 14 a few weeks later.

In addition to all of that taking up my time, I've also been volunteering with the Youth Ministry at a church in my diocese. That's been quite an amazing adventure. It's had a profound impact on my life and has certainly helped at least a few teens. It's been an honor to do the Lord's work. Maybe someday I'll publish some of the talks I've given. The In His Image talk seems to have resonated with a lot of people, certainly more so than some of the other talks.

I guess that sums things up for now.

[/musings] [permanent link]

1461117251
"Each of us is willed. Each of us is loved. Each of us is necessary." - Pope Benedict XVI

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

On Content "Management" Systems
Wordpress is the new Typo3.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

[/musings] [permanent link]

1454815466
Beautiful https://www.instagram.com/p/BBeDsOSrXEk/

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

1453995544
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P3hY1eagq88

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

Thoughts on National Computer Science Education Week
This week is apparently National Computer Science Education Week. Code.org is organizing the "hour of code" to promote teaching of Computer Science and Programming in schools. They're also organizing petitions to make CS courses count as credits in Mathematics or Science for High School graduation requirements.

In High School, my CS courses were by far my favorites, Programming in Pascal, AP Comp Sci in Pascal, Programming in C++, and AP Comp Sci in C++ ( the language for the exam switched my junior year). I learned a lot about structured code, elegant, efficient code. I learned enough about Data Structures and Algorithms that I didn't have to study for my college CS classes until Computational Structures (Discrete Math II with Scheme, essentially) in my third semester. I had an amazing Computer Science teacher who also taught me Calculus and the proper order of precedence in life: God, Family, Math. I wouldn't be where I am today without that educational opportunity I had in High School. I want others to have that opportunity too.

However, this is where I differ with the opinion of the Code.org folks. I do not believe that CS classes should count toward the Math or Science requirements. In this state, CS counts toward the "practical or performing art" requirements, I'm assuming under the "practical" label. I think this is a better place for it at the High School level.

Computer Science is not a hard Science. It's not Physics. It's not Biology. It's not Chemistry. There's a saying that if the subject has science in its name, it's not really a science. That is true with Computer Science. It's not studying the how and why of atoms, of molecules, of living systems, of anything really. It's not science.

Computer Science is really applied mathematics. I am very fortunate that the college program I went through was very strong in mathematics: Calc I and II, Linear (Matrix) Algebra, Discrete Math, Discrete Math II in the guise of Computational Structures, Probability and Statistics, Theory of Computation, Algorithmic Analysis... the list goes on. All of these mathematical foundations were then applied to a machine, to make the machine carry out a task in an efficient manner. It's those mathematical foundations that are the true core of Computer Science.

While mathematics is the core of Computer Science and Computer Science is essentially applied mathematics, I do not believe it should count toward the Math requirements. The CS classes would likely detract from other mathematics courses such as Geometry, Trigonometry, and Calculus. These courses are far too important to an education to be replaced by a Computer Science course. Many, maybe even most, High School Computer Science courses focus more on "programming" than the fundamental mathematical theories. They will pick the language du jour and teach you the syntax and semantics. They'll teach about basic data structures like arrays, and linked lists. The AP exam currently focuses not on implementing lists, trees, stacks, queues, and sorting and searching algorithms, but on arrays and lists using Java library calls. This is not math. This is learning Java syntax.

[/code] [permanent link]

Normalcy
I realized that if and when I have children, they will grow up thinking it's normal to have a DeLorean.

[/dmc] [permanent link]

... On man pages, a mini-rant
I really despise the linux man pages. They're useless at best and wrong at worst.

From the man page for setsockopt: "The include file <sys/socket.h> contains definitions for socket level options, described below."

1) The options are not "described below."
2) No, that file actually doesn't contain those definitions.

On the other hand... The FreeBSD man page for setsockopt does actually describe the options and under FreeBSD the <sys/socket.h> file does indeed contain the definitions.

[/unix] [permanent link]

[mini-rant]
I hate bash. I hate it. I hate how it bastardized bourne by adding half-assed implementations of features from ksh and tcsh.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Problems with loader.conf

First the background. The story of how I got into this mess:

I'm trying to get ACPI working on my laptop under FreeBSD. Specifically, I'm trying to get Resume to work properly. Suspend works, and resume seems to partially work. The fans spin up, the keyboard's backlight comes back on, but no screen. And without video, it's a little hard to figure out what's going on.

ACPI works great on my server. It's running the same FreeBSD 9.1 x86-64 build that the laptop is, but the biggest difference is that it's an intel motherboard. The laptop is an Alienware, for our purposes, I might as well just call it a Dell.

I started comparing the ASL output from both machines and noticed some things. First, the Alienware's ACPI implementation looks for the OS to be various forms of Windows or "Linux." The intel ACPI implementation also looks for these Windows variants and "Linux" but it has an additional OS string. It has an entry for "FreeBSD."

I figured the easiest next step was to use iasl co compile the intel ASL source and load that DSDT onto the laptop.

I calculated the odds it would work vs the odds I was doing something incredibly stupid... and I went ahead and did it anyway...

I compiled the asl and I set /boot/loader.conf to override the DSDT with the intel one I had just compiled and I rebooted. At first everything was good. The machine went down, I got the boot loader, and the FreeBSD kernel started to load. Seconds into the kernel load, it rebooted itself. After the second time, I powered off and tried a cold boot. Same problem just as I had feared.

Now i was in a situation where I couldn't successfully boot because of an error in loader.conf I needed to find a way to edit it.

And here's the solution:

The FreeBSD bootloader, like many others, works in stages. At a certain point, it can be interrupted at which point it provides a set of simple yet powerful commands to control various aspects of the loading process. If you still have that default menu at load, I beleive the option to chose is 6. I disable that menu so during a brief countdown I hit escape before the boot loader turns control over to the kernel.

Once in the boot loader prompt, I entered the following commands:

unload
load kernel
boot

Pretty simple right? The unload command does what it says, it unloads the kernel and any modules loader.conf had pulled into memory. The load kernel command grabs the kernel and loads it into memory... but only the kernel thus ignoring the broken DSDT in loader.conf. And of course boot tells the boot loader to continue booting the system.

Once booted, I removed the bad DSDT from loader.conf.

[/unix] [permanent link]

[/musings] [permanent link]

1381017534
Good night, demonslayers.

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

1381006292
--_CEEC49CB-DE1D-4A1E-9DFE-114E3B54D3CB_
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252"

Test blog

Sent from my Windows Phone=

--_CEEC49CB-DE1D-4A1E-9DFE-114E3B54D3CB_
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Content-Type: text/html; charset="Windows-1252"


pe>

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

1381005175
Corning is a quaint little town. Looking forward to exploring.

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

1380987012
test
test

[/mobile] [permanent link]

chafing...
WARNING: possible TMI

I thought I had healed from the chafing left after Saturday's River to Sea Relay... Until I ran in the rain yesterday. To quote a friend, "It feels like someone took a cheese grater to my crotch."

[/running] [permanent link]

Why do I run?
So, why do I run? Here's one reason:

[/running] [permanent link]

Windows 8.1 in Virtual Box
I was attempting to run the Windows 8.1 Preview in a VM using Sun's Oracle's Virtual Box on a Windows 7 host. I ran into a minor problem.

The OS wouldn't boot. I received an error stating:

Your computer needs to restart. Please hold down the power button. Error Code: 0x000000C4 Parameters: [redacted]

Looking for the error code online led me to this article describing the issue and a fix. The key to fixing this was running the command:

"c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" setextradata "" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1

The CMPXCHG16B is an instruction in 64-bit X86 processors that allows for atomic operations on octal words.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Excluding directories while using pax(1)
My primary disk is failing. There are large segments that are generating low level IO errors during read or write operations. Most of the files written to the bad area were under /usr/ports/ where the FreeBSD Ports collection is installed. A few files were under the web server's root.

Figuring I'd take care of things prior to the disk actually failing to the point of it being irrecoverable, I purchased a new disk early. I installed it, partitioned it, and formatted it.

To copy the data over, ignoring the areas that were causing the IO errors, I used mv to "move" the files from the web root under /usr/ports and used the following command as root:

pax -rwvpe -s':/usr/ports/.*::gp' -X / /mnt/newdisk/

The -X prevents pax from traversing into mount points that have a different device ID than the one on which it was started. This prevents an infinitely recursive loop from happening when the new disk's mount point would have been hit. It also prevents data on the non-failing disks from being copied as well.
the -s option allows for sed search and replace scripts to be run. In this example, the : is used as the delimiter and any path matching /usr/ports/* is replaced by a null string. With this replacement all directories under /usr/ports are excluded from the copy.

[/unix] [permanent link]

Senator Elbert Guillory
Elbert Guillory, a state senator in Louisiana, has switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. This website has a short commentary on the matter, as well as an embedded video of Senator Guillory explaining his decision.

[/politics] [permanent link]

I LOL'ed

PATIENT: "The problem is that obesity runs in my family."
DOCTOR: "No, the problem is that no one runs in your family."

[/running] [permanent link]

World Autism Day

[/musings] [permanent link]

Awesome News
As of today I am qualified for the 2010 New York City Marathon.

[/running] [permanent link]

1396881317
Gear Tip: Dry Out Soggy Sneakers | Runner's World http://www.runnersworld.com/running-shoes/gear-tip-dry-out-soggy-sneakers?cm_mmc=F

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[/mobile] [permanent link]

I'm looking California and feeling Minnesota

[/musings] [permanent link]

Fireside Chat


Tonight I signed up for the Fireside beta. They asked for all my social media accounts to prove I'm a human. The problem is, I don't have a twitter account, a facebook account, instagram, etc. Years ago I took the advice of numerous psychology studies and my own therapist's advice and got off the social media platforms. It was one of the best things I've ever done for my mental health.

So hopefully this blog, though infrequently updated (and slightly broken since the last major perl update), will serve as proof to the people at Fireside that I am human and not a bot.

It was the Astonishing Legends Podcast that led me to Fireside. It would be nice to use it for one of their interactive live chats sometime.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Bill Gates is Satan's Minion
Bill Gates was Satan's minion, is Satan's minion, and always will be Satan's minion.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Take back your privacy
Recent surveys have found that 76% of [the most visited] websites in the world cotain trackers from google and 24% contain trackers from facebook. This has been reported by CNBC, PC World, The Verge, Fortune, and Breitbart.

Almost anywhere you go on the internet, they are following you, building a profile on you, and selling that information, your information, to the highest bidder. Even if you don't have a user account for google or facebook "services," they've built a profile of you using this surreptitiously collected data.

It turns out there are some steps one can take to prevent these companies from following you wherever you go. It's not perfect, but it helps a lot. First, don't use Chrome. Second, install ad-blocker plugins for your browser. Third, use your firewall.

It turns out Google and Facebook are large enough that they have their own Autonomous Systems (AS) composed of numerous subnets. Google owns AS 15169, while Facebook owns AS 32934. Using a little bit of shell, it's relatively easy to look up all the subnets owned by these companies.

whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'
whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS15169' | grep "^route:" | awk '{print $2;}'

That's a lot of subnets. Because I have different operating systems on different computers and still want to block traffic to and from all those IP addresses, I've written some simple scripts to add rules to various firewalls. I have scripts for IPFW on FreeBSD, IPTables on Linux, and the Windows Firewall that should work from XP SP3 through Windows 10. I've only tested it on Windows 7 and Windows 10, and it worked in those.

All of these scripts can be found in this directory. The IPFW and IPTables scripts are self-contained. For the Windows command shell batch files, the *ips.txt files are also needed.

I have to say, the internet looks very different with these firewall rules in place. There are noticeably fewer advertisements and pages load faster. Embedded YouTube videos and Instagram photos don't appear. Sometimes the frame disappears, sometimes you get a "failed to connect" page appearing in a frame in the middle of a page. (Yes, these rules block YouTube and Instagram; they are owned by google and facebook and reside in the subnets owned by those companies.) On a relatively rare occasion, I come across a site using some sort of javascript or css or something hosted by a machine in one of those ASs and that will be blocked. Sometimes the site handles that gracefully, sometimes it stops being functional. A small price to take back your life.

Update: Twitter has trackers on a decent amount of sites out there too, so I've added scripts to block Twitter's AS 13414 as well. Those scripts are in the same directories as the others.

[/musings] [permanent link]

St Michael, defend us in battle
Crisis Magazine has a great piece about St Michael and the ongoing spiritual warfare in the world.

[/musings] [permanent link]

New PGP Key!
So apparently Evil32 happened. Approximately 24,000 PGP keys were generated that had collisions with the 32-bit short IDs of existing keys. Then someone decided to use those conflicting keys to generate revocation certificates and upload them to the keyservers. Joy.

Though my old keys still work, they were affected by this mass revocation of collsions. I have created a new key which can be found at http://skinnymf.com/~mforde/mforde.asc.

On a related note, if anyone is interested in Key Signing Party, shoot me an email. I haven't been to one of those since college.

[/musings] [permanent link]

This ends tonight...

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

Sometimes...
Sometimes it's dificult to find a reason to continue.

[/musings/self] [permanent link]

Merry Christmas
While the holidays are supposed to be a joyous time, I know and understand how hard they can be for some people. If you're having a rough time over the next week or so and need someone to talk to, feel free to message me. If you're reading this blog, you likely know my email address or phone number.

[/musings] [permanent link]

What Year is This?!
So this was my Saturday night....

[/musings] [permanent link]

Megapath sucks
Speakeasy was by far the best ISP I ever dealt with. Freindly, and above all, knowledgeable. Since they have been purchased by Megapath then merged into Global Capacity, their tech support has been, frankly a bunch of idiots. Furthermore, their website routinely has "Service failed" errors that prevent you from logging in, changing passwords, and viewing account information.

Today, after being unable to log in to the website due to "service failed" the tech support rep on the phoned didn't understand what a subnet mask or gateway address were. Eventually I just got her to read me "all three IP addresses" on the screen in front of her.

But at this point my only other option is Verizon. So I'm sticking with Megapath.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Found this sitting in a tarball of my old home directory...

                                                                                                                              
                                                                                                                              
              ..,,..  ..ttLLLLtt..  ..;;ii;;,,..;;ttGGLL;;....iiiiiiiiiiii..    ..iijjttttii..                                
      iiLLLLGGKKKKDDLLGG########GGLLDDWWWWWWKKKKKK######WWDDEEWW##WWWW##WWDDjjffDD##########LL..          ..;;..              
  ..ffWW########WWKK####KKjjttEE####WWGGGGEEGGDDDDGGjjttGGKKWWWWLLGGLLGG##########DDjjttttGG##GGffttiiiiffDDKKDDGGGGGGii      
  ff####GGffffttii;;ttLLiijjtt;;LLtt;;,,,,;;;;;;iittLLtt;;,,iiiiiitt;;;;ffGGGGLLtt;;iiii;;;;DDWW####WWWW####KKDDKKKKWWWWtt    
..EE##LL;;ttttLLttLLLLttff##WWGGjjffGGDDGGKKKKKKWW####WWDDGGDDDDWW##EEEEffttffLLffGGWWWWGG;;;;ttffjjffDDDDff;;;;;;iittKKWWii  
;;KKKKiittKK######WWWW######################################KKKKWW##WW##################WWKKDDffttjjjjiiiiiiLLEEGGDDiittWWLL  
..KK##ttGG######WWDDDDEEKKDDKKWWDDKKEEKKWWEEKKEEWW##WWKKWWEELLLLDDDDDDEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKK##########WW####KKWWKK########KKiiDDEEii
  DD##ffGG######EELLLLLLLLLLGGDDLLDDGGDDDDLLLLEE####WWGGGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK######WW####KKKKKKWWWWKKKKWW####ttLLWWLL
  GG##LLLL##KKKKDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGWW####WWLLDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGKKWW######EEEEDDLLLLLLDDEEEELLEE####ffLLWWGG
  LL##GGjj##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK####WWLLEEDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGEEKK##WW##EELLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDLLKK##WWiiGGKKjj
  jj##GGiiWWWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDKK####KKLLKKEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK##GG##EEDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK##GG;;KKDD;;
  ii##EE;;DDWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK####KKLLDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEE##ffWWKKEEEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKWWiijj##ff  
  ;;WWWWiiGGKKLLLLLLLLGGLLDDEEDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK####KKDDGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDWWttEEWWDDDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEKKiiKKWW;;  
  ;;WW##ttGGWWGGLLLLLLEEDDEE##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKK######WWEELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDGGGGDDKKWWiiLLWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKKKttWWLL    
  iiWWKKiiKK##DDLLLLLLEEEEWW##WWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLKKWW######EELLLLLLLLLLDDEEEEWWWWKKKKWW####ii;;KKDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDWWKKffWWtt    
  ii##WWttWW##EELLLLLLDDEE######EELLLLLLLLLLLLKKDDEE####KKLLLLLLLLLLEE##################ii..KKEELLLLLLLLLLLLGGDD##DDffWWii    
  ;;WW##ttLL##KKLLLLLLLLEE##KK##KKLLLLLLLLLLDD##LLLLEEWWKKLLLLLLLLLLKK####WWKKffLLKKWWGG;;..EEKKLLLLLLLLLLLLDDEE##LLLLWWii    
  ..EE##LLiiWWKKLLLLLLGGKK##LLKKKKGGLLLLLLDDWW##ff;;iiKKKKLLLLLLLLLLKK##WWLLffttiijjLLiiffttGG##DDLLLLLLLLDDEEKK##ffLLKKii    
    LL##KKiiKKWWGGLLLLLLKK##ttGGWWDDLLLLLLEE####tt;;,,EEKKDDLLLLLLLLEE##########WWWWWWttGGGGttWWWWDDLLLLLLGGGGKK##ffGGKK;;    
    iiWW##ttGGWWDDLLLLGGWWKK;;GGWWDDLLLLLLEE##KKiiGG;;KKKKDDLLLLLLLLGGEEWW##KKEEDDDDKKttKK##ttGG##DDLLLLLLLLGGWW##jjEEEE..    
      GG##GGttWWDDLLLLGGWWKKiiWWWWDDLLLLLLEE##GGttKKiiGG##EELLLLLLLLLLLLGGDDGGLLLLEEKKjjWW##ffLLWWGGLLLLLLLLGGWWWWjjKKGG      
      tt##EEttWWDDLLLLDDWW##WW####DDLLLLLLKK##ffLL##DDttWWWWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLKKKKjj####jjGGKKLLGGLLLLLLDD##KKttWWLL      
      ii##KKttKKDDLLLLGGWW####WW##EELLLLLLEE##jjGG####ttDDWWGGLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDGGWWEEtt####ttKKWWLLLLLLLLLLDD##GGffWWtt      
      iiWWKKttWWEELLLLLLEEKKKKEEEEDDLLLLLLEE##ttEE####jjKKWWDDLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDDDDDDWWDDtt##WWttWW##DDLLLLLLLLEE##LLLLWWii      
      iiWWKKff##EELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLEEWWttKK##KKttWW##EELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLDD##GGtt##WWttWW##EELLLLLLLLEE##ttGGEE..      
      iiWWWWff##KKLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLGGKKWWttWW##KK;;EE##EELLLLLLLLLLGGGGGGGGEE##GGtt##WWttKK##EELLLLLLLLEEWWttEELL        
      ;;WWKKff##KKGGGGLLDDLLLLLLGGLLLLLLDDWWKKtt####WWiiLL##EELLLLLLDDKKWWWWKKWW####ffff##WWttEEWWDDLLLLLLLLEEKKiiEELL        
      ;;WWKKjjWWKKLLLLDDWWEEDDEEKKDDLLLLDDWWKKjj######jjLL##EELLLLLLEE##############jjLL####ttGG##DDLLLLLLLLKKKKiiKKff        
      ;;WWWWttKKEELLLLEE####WW####KKGGLLDDWWDDjj######ffGG##EELLLLLLEE##LLLLLLWWWWKKiiGG####LLjj##DDLLLLLLLLKKEEttWWff        
      ;;KKWWiiEEDDLLLLWW############DDLLGGWWDDjj######GGff##KKLLLLLLEE##ttiiiitttt,,;;KK####DDtt##EELLLLLLLLKKDDttWWtt        
      ;;KKWWiiDDDDLLLLWWWWffff######EELLDD##GGff######KKttWW##DDLLLLEE##ffGGKKjj;;iiDD######KKjj##KKLLLLLLLLKKGGffWWii        
      ,,KK##iiDDEELLLLWWGG  iiffffWWDDLLEE##GGff########ttGG##EELLLLEE##ttLL####WWWW########KKtt##KKLLLLLLGGWWLLLLKK;;        
      ..KK##ttLLKKLLLLKKGG......ttKKGGLLEE##LLLL########GGtt##KKLLLLEEKK;;LL########WWKKWW##KKttWWWWDDLLLLDD##ffLLGG..        
      ..KK##jjLLWWGGLLKKKK;;ttttff##DDLLDDWWttGG########KKttWWKKGGLLDDKKiiEE##ffttttii..ttWWWWttKK##EELLDDKK##ttGGGG          
      ;;KK##ffLLWWGGLLKKEE;;LLGGtt##KKLLGGKKjjKK########WWttKKWWDDLLDDKKttKKEE..          GG##ffff##WWDDWW##EEiiEELL          
      ..DD##GGttWWDDLLEEGG..LLWWttKKKKGGEEKKjjWW##########ttGG##KKDDDDWWttEEDD..          tt##KKiiWW##WW####GGtt##ff          
        ff##KKiiWWDDGGEEGGiiWW##ttDDKKDDWWKKjj############ffLL####WWKK##ttDDEE..          ;;KK##ttLL######WWttLL##ii          
        ;;WWWWttKKWWKKKKGGjj####ttGGWWEEWWGGtt############LLLL##########ttKKDD              GG##EEiiDD####LL;;KKEE..          
        ..EE##ffLL##WW##GGtt####jjLL######LLtt############LLttWWGGKK##LLttWWLL              iiWW##ffff####ttGG##ff            
          LL##EEttGGLL##GGtt####LLttWWKK##ffLL##EEttttKK##DD;;ff;;ttEE;;GG##tt                ff##DDiiKKLLiiWWKK;;            
          tt####ttii;;KKffff####KKiiii;;GG;;LL##ii    iiWW##LL::  ;;tttt##DD..                ;;KKWWiiffiiGG##ff              
          ..KK##GGttiiii;;GG######DDLLii;;;;KKEE..      ff####DDLLii;;GGWW;;                  ..DD##LL..tt##KK;;              
            jj######GG..jj############GGiiDD##ff        ..LL######WWKK##GG                      ff##WWDDWW##tt                
            ..LL####WWGGWWWWffiittGGWW##WW##DD::          ..ffKKWWWWWWKKtt                      ,,DD######ff..                
              ..ttEEWWWWDDii        ttEEKKGG;;                ..;;;;ii;;                          ;;ttffii..                  
                  ..ii;;..            ..;;..                                                                                  
                                                                                                                              

[/musings] [permanent link]

Prince
I'll never forget the day I started liking Prince's music. I was with my friend in his car headed somewhere. We were listening to K-Rock and they had a "listener playlist" where for about an hour, all the music had been selected by a listener and this listener was on the phone, talking with the DJ about his selections and introducing songs.

The guy announced that the next song was from Prince. The DJ questioned this selection and he said, "No, this dude can shred. Just listen."

And we laughed.

And we listened.

And Prince shredded.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's been a while...
It's been a while since I've had a substantial update here. I've been busy living life leaving little time to be writing about it; at least writing about it here.

Work has been quite busy for a while now. Lots of projects, lots of deadlines, lots of extra hours. But there hasn't been any "mandatory seven day work weeks" like I had at that one job, and there isn't that expectation of "you can work from home so you are always expected to be working" I had at the last job. Plus, the work is a lot more interesting than anything I've done in years.

Bernstein was right: money doesn't motivate me, interesting problems and the ability to tinker do.

Yesterday the DeLorean rolled over to 16,000 miles. That's still about 1,000 miles a year I'm putting on it. I'd like to keep the mileage low, but she's just so much fun to drive. I've been asked by people at work to bring Aisling next week for Bring Your Child to Work Day. Apparently a lot of my co-workers have told their kids about the car and they want to see it.

I ran my 29th half-marathon this past weekend. I'd like to get up to 32 this year. I'm also signed up for my 13th marathon this Autumn. I'm considering running number 14 a few weeks later.

In addition to all of that taking up my time, I've also been volunteering with the Youth Ministry at a church in my diocese. That's been quite an amazing adventure. It's had a profound impact on my life and has certainly helped at least a few teens. It's been an honor to do the Lord's work. Maybe someday I'll publish some of the talks I've given. The In His Image talk seems to have resonated with a lot of people, certainly more so than some of the other talks.

I guess that sums things up for now.

[/musings] [permanent link]

On Content "Management" Systems
Wordpress is the new Typo3.

Discuss amongst yourselves.

[/musings] [permanent link]

It was a good day...
So today I woke up and watched an episode of Star Trek while I did some weight training and core work. Then I met my friend and her 5-month old baby for breakfast. That baby is so cute, and so happy too.

After that I met another friend for a run in the Tourne where we met a fox on the Red Trail. When I got home from the run, I turned my lawn into an avant garde art installation and then took a shower.

I took Ailsing out for a drive and on the way home she rolled over to 15,000 miles. I've had the DeLorean for about five years now, so I'm still averaging 1,000 miles per year. Not bad.

A large part of a tree fell and missed my house by about 18 inches. So then I went and ran another Six miles during a National Weather Service tornado watch.

Now I'm finishing up the day with a good movie and a glass of Monk's Blood.

Today, I didn't even have to use my AK. It was a good day.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Cast Yourself

"Cast yourself upon Him and be not afraid; He will not draw away and let you fall. Cast yourself without fear, He will receive you and heal you."

-- Saint Augustine, Confessions: Book 8, Chapter 11

[/musings] [permanent link]

It's not stupid, it's advanced
I opened the Windows 10 settings app, not to be confused with the control panel, and I selected "Windows Update." Next, I chose the "Advanced Options" and was greeted with this mess. I hope the next build fixes this problem, as well as the myriad of other issues plaguing the current Windows 10 preview release.

[/musings] [permanent link]

Initial Thoughts on Windows 10 -- UPDATED!
I'm done with Microsoft for any platform that is not a telephone. Windows 10 attempts to "fix" the abomination that was windows 8 on the desktop, but just makes things worse.

The "search" "app" that replaces the previous existing search feature really only sends a query to bing. I'm looking for a file somewhere in a subdirectory on my hard drive. I didn't want to search the web for 20141020*.txt. The UI looks like crap. Slapping a titlebar on top of the "modern" "apps" does not make them usable on the desktop. The start menu has returned, but it has never been this useless. And the ability to revert to the "classic" start menu, the behavior introduced in windows 95, and refined in win98 and Windows 2000, has been removed. I shouldn't be surprised by that given that Windows 7 also lacked the "classic" start menu. At least Windows 7 allowed a "Windows Classic" theme for the rest of the UI.

Ever since Service Pack 3 for Windows XP, MS has been slowly and surely trying to make things "easier." However, what they deem "easier" often means removing features and behaviors I relied on to get work done. Windows 10 continues this tradition.

I never really had a problem with Microsoft, I never avoided their software for ideological reasons. I believe in using the right tool for the job. Windows 10 is the wrong tool for any job.

UPDATE!!!

Using the Windows Update mechanism, MS pushed out a new build of Windows 10. This upgraded the installation from build 9841 to build 9860. After a lengthy download, installation, and a very long reboot, I was able to log in again, Only to be greeted by this:



And this lovely error when I tried to open the new "Notification Center":



Now isn't that special?

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The Truth is Out There
Tonight, I had the great fortune of joining a person who means the world to me at a book signing by Gillian Anderson and her co-author Jeff Rovin. Jeff has ghost-written/co-written several novels for and with Tom Clancy, and Gillian is AGENT DANA SCULLY!!!

Gillian indicated that she modeled the main character as someone she would play in a cinematic version of the story, and Jeff mentions that, while not required reading, the novel is a spiritual sequel to Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

I'm going to put The Crytptonomicon on the back burner and put Poe's work and this new novel, A Vision of Fire at the front of my priority queue.

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Windows 8.1 in Virtual Box
I was attempting to run the Windows 8.1 Preview in a VM using Sun's Oracle's Virtual Box on a Windows 7 host. I ran into a minor problem.

The OS wouldn't boot. I received an error stating:

Your computer needs to restart. Please hold down the power button. Error Code: 0x000000C4 Parameters: [redacted]

Looking for the error code online led me to this article describing the issue and a fix. The key to fixing this was running the command:

"c:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox\VBoxManage.exe" setextradata "" VBoxInternal/CPUM/CMPXCHG16B 1

The CMPXCHG16B is an instruction in 64-bit X86 processors that allows for atomic operations on octal words.

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World Autism Day

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Happy Birthday

I'm starting to get used to celebrating my birthday at TBM concerts. This year it was about a week prior to my birthday at a show on December 1 held at New York's Gramercy Theatre.

Along with the tickets, I had also purchased the "VIP package." This package included an autographed poster signed by all members of the band, a "VIP" laminate on a lanyard, and... the opportunity to meet the band prior to the show!

You may be thinking, "But they stick around after shows and mingle with their fans anyway," and "You've already met them a few times!" Both are true. And even with this "VIP" package meet-and-greet, they still make time for all their fans after the show. What this provided was a somewhat quieter meeting in a more intimate setting.

In fact the meeting was in a small lounge beneath the concert hall. Dim mood lighting, mirrors, and couches set the atmosphere. I spoke with Rainbow, Michael, and Nate first. Rainbow informed me his name was Michael also and made a joke about the "power of the three Mikes lighting the room." After a bit, they started moving me to Chibi who was sitting on a couch after injuring her knee during a show two nights prior. She tried to walk to me, but I told her not to. She said, "I'll meet you half way then."

I gave her a get well card, knowing she had had surgery on her vocal chords about 8 weeks prior and recently injured her knee. Someone decided we needed a photo of that and she gave me the card back so I could give it back to her. I believe it was Owen who said, "Act natural and hold it for 30 seconds!"

I asked Rainbow about writing "Unfamiliar" because both he and OE were given credit in the liner notes. He said it was mostly OE; OE started it and Rainbow had finished it. I said I wanted to thank them because it was a song that had taken on some greater meaning to me and I relayed a brief version of the story of the moment I recognized that. It turns out "Unfamiliar" is one of Chibi's favorite songs too.

Every one of the bands that night were amazing. All, remarkably, were performing as duos. Creature Feature was a real fun band to see. Their music is heavily influenced by old horror movies which gives them a dark yet fun sound.

Aesthetic Perfection put on a good performance. Their drummer is amazing and fun to watch. They heavily synth-based and while there was a dark tone to most of their songs, they still had fun and lightened things up with a Fine Young Cannibals cover.

William Control was the only other act I had heard before the show (Thanks Last.fm!). He was great live and I'd love to see him again. He reminded me a little of Dommin in that Dean Martin meets Glen Danzig sort of way.

The Birthday Massacre was great. They played a good mix including songs from every album. For most of the set Chibi was sitting on a speaker placed near center at the front of the stage, wearing a knee brace. She stood up and moved around occasionally, but not much. At one point Rainbow sat down on another speaker and stuck out one leg in a similar fashion to how Chibi was seated and laughed a little. It was easy to tell by their interaction here that Chibi and Rainbow are close.

If you care (or even if you don't), their set list follows:

• Night Shift
• Down
• Control
• Always
• Red Stars
• Video kid
• Lover's End
• Forever
• Pins and Needles
• Happy Birthday
• Alibis
• Calling
• In the Dark
• Sleep Walking
• Midnight
-- Encore --
• Leaving Tonight
• The Long Way Home
• Blue

The band did not leave the stage prior to the encore as they normally would. Chibi said, "This is the part of the show where we say thank you and leave and you clap and we come back out and play some more. But I'm not going to walk down those stairs anymore than I have to, so do you want to hear three more songs?"

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Signs of the Apocalypse
A friend told me this was from Glee. I found it amusing; thought I'd share.

It's a fact that the book of Revelations predicted Twitter. It's one of the seven signs of the apocalypse; Along with porn, unexplainable weather anomalies, martian rovers, Barney Frank, the middle east and MSNBC. It's like Kirk Cameron said, "It's never too late, until it's too late."

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Christmas Eve
On Christmas Eve, I headed out around 7:00PM to take a look at the Christmas lights and decorations around town. There was a snow storm predicted for around 9:00PM, so I decided to take the DeLorean out for one last drive before the Wonderful Winter Weather(TM).

The snow started much earlier than expected. The snow was light and slow, and despite the car not handling well in slick conditions, I kept going for a while.

As I was driving I had the realization that I was having an experience no one else in the world has ever had. I was driving a DeLorean through my town on Christmas Eve, admiring Christmas lights and listening to Christmas music as snow fell.

I looked over at the empty passenger seat and wished there had been someone, anyone there to share this with. So for now, until circumstances like this arise again, I will continue to be the only person to have experienced this.

When I got home, I took this photograph.

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