numbersix

happy birthday dad :)

only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about

the first log entry using the new automated system. about time...

just figured out the box this website is on runs under PST. that's not right. will have to adjust the time stamp. ..... there that should do it.

rediscovered doom II . still as good as i always was :) looking forward to some deathmatching, oh yes.

a definition of infinity - the number of episodes made of little house on the prarie

'There are only 10 types of people in the world - those who understand binary, and those who don't'

if you're reading about a piece of software and there is no mention of what OS it runs under, it will always be windows. the arrogance.

'For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3.'

i didn't know you could do that - mv ${DIR1}/[qxs]${file} ${DIR2}/

Progress means simplifying, not complicating - Bruno Munari

'Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.'
- George Orwell, quoted in Angela Partington, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1992, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 501.

many, many thanks to 'Silby' for his help to fix a little problem with FreeBSD and a badly behaved firewall. if you ever have delay problems with 0 sized TCP windows coming from a GNAT firewall, make the following change to your tcp_timer.h file:

define TCPTV_PERSMIN ( hz/5)

instead of:

define TCPTV_PERSMIN ( 5*hz)

this will reduce the hardcoded delay FreeBSD will make before re-transmitting the packet.

interesting spam fighting article - http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html. I wonder if I could do this in Perl?

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for. - Fortune

'The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don't like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for.'
A. Tanenbaum, 'Introduction to Computer Networks'

useful shell scripting trick:

$ set -- `uname -a`

then variables $1 through $n are set to the fields of the back ticked command, in this case:

$ echo $1
SunOS
$ echo $2
booger
$ echo $3
5.7

etc. neat. saves having to parse out the fields, or use awk or something.

'The more I practice, the luckier I get.' - Jack Nicklaus

FreeBSD is for people who love UNIX, Linux is for people who hate Microsoft.

'Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' - Benjamin Franklin

this is a very funny story about a blimp. 'spect to my bro for the link.

"No technology exists until Microsoft invents it." - read on slashdot. depressingly true. a lot of people would be surprised to learn how little MS have actually invented/innovated themselves. Windows? - Xerox, VB - Alan Cooper, .Net - Java, etc.

"No technology exists until Microsoft invents it." - read on slashdot. depressingly true. a lot of people would be surprised to learn how little MS have actually invented/innovated themselves. Windows? - Xerox, VB - Alan Cooper, .Net - Java, etc.

"The enemy we're fighting is different from the one we'd wargamed against" - Lt Gen William Wallace, US ground commander in Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq isn't even over yet but the Sun newspaper has already relegated it to page 8 of todays paper in favour of various celebrity stories. And this the largest selling newspaper in the UK.

sig seen on /. :

"The shareholder is always right."

Particularly relevant for May day?

sig seen on /. :

"The shareholder is always right."

Particularly relevant for May day?

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - R. Buckminster Fuller

(ta Ben :)

When I'm working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. - R. Buckminster Fuller

(ta Ben :)

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." - Hermann Goering (or was that G.W. Bush)

Howard Stone is a genius. Thanks Nick.

"It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper." - Rod Sterling

Thought for the Day: Before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticise them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. - cheers Nick for that one

Occasionally you happen across a whole slice of society you never knew even existed. Listening to Julian and Sandy sketches from Round the Horne I kept hearing odd words: bona, vada, nanti etc. Apparently these are part of a 'secret' british gay slang language called Polari. Sounds a lot like the language used in Clockwork Orange. Some other interesting links, and even a Polari translation of the bible.

"The important task is for America to advance a conception of justice that is acceptable to the large majority of Muslims ... this is more important than dropping bombs on Afghanistan, freezing financial assets, or beefing up security at airports."

James Kurth, Professor of Political Science, Swarthmore College

Wired has an interesting article on Australia's recently completed electronic voting system. The system was designed to be open to anyone who wishes to see the internals, and the code has been published on the Internet. What a refreshing change from the news about the American e-voting manufacturers Diebold, who operate a completely closed system, who's chief executive is a major fundraiser for the Republican party, who have been accused of purposely leaving back doors in their system, and who are now being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for trying to silence debate on the subject.

Could you ask for a more perfect example of the power of the open source philosophy? And a more blatant example of why the US should think twice about pointing at themselves as the world's embassadors of democracy.

"We are agreed then on the good things we have in common. On the advantage of being able to test yourself, not depending on others in the test, reflecting yourself in your work. On the pleasure of seeing your creature grow, beam after beam, bolt after bolt, solid, necessary, symmetrical, suited to its purpose; and when it's finished you look at it and you think that perhaps it will live longer than you, and perhaps it will be of use to someone you don't know, who doesn't know you. Maybe, as an old man, you'll be able to come back and look at it, and it will seem beautiful, and it doesn't really matter so much that it will seem beautiful only to you, and you can say to yourself 'maybe another man wouldn't have brough it off'."

- a quote from Primo Levi's The Wrench, a beautiful book about man as a maker of things.

Thanks to Nick for this very cool site. I've got to try this.

I've written up a page on installing OpenBSD onto an AR-B9637 here.

machine learning techniques, Robotics Institute researchers Alexei Efros and Martial Hebert, along with graduate student Derek Hoiem, have taught computers how to spot the visual cues that differentiate between vertical surfaces and horizontal surfaces in photographs of outdoor scenes. They've even developed a program that allows the computer to automatically generate 3-D reconstructions of scenes based on a single image. [...] Identifying vertical and horizontal surf

Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters

A quick summary of how I fit all these together on a BSD system.

First install each from ports. Then configure fetchmail to fetch your mail from whereever it is, my .fetchmailrc file looks something like this:

# Fetchmailrc
#
poll mail.mailserver.com protocol pop3 no dns
user myusername
pass mypassword
mda "/usr/local/bin/maildrop -d %T"
no keep
fetchall

Notice the mda line which will invoke maildrop as the Mail Delivery Agent. Then write your maildrop filter. Mine is pretty simple, all it does is invoke Spam Assassin's client to scan the mail. I use pine to filter the messages into different folders so I don't have any more rules :

xfilter "/usr/local/bin/spamc"

And finally make sure Spam Assassin is running as a daemon, add this line to /etc/rc.conf:

spamd_enable="YES"

and then start the daemon:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/sa-spamd.sh start

Then all you have to do is run fetchmail to get your mail, and your mail client to read it. Oh, and add filters to your mail client to actually filter the spam. I'll leave that exercise to the reader.

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion. ~ Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in physics

Heard this recently quoted in a documentary by Richard Dawkins based on his new book The God Delusion. At first I thought his point of view a little too much, but I'm beginning to think someone needs to be saying these things now.

"The easiest way to explain something new is to start with something understood." - Just read this line as part of The Objective-C Programming Language on the Apple dev site. Nice concise way of saying it.

“I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” (Stephen F. Roberts)

In awe I watched the waxing moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an ambered chariot towards the ebon void of infinite space wherein the tethered belts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever festooned in their orbital majesty. And as I looked at all this I thought...I must put a roof on this lavatory. - Les Dawson

Theater is life, cinema is art, television is furniture. - Anon

"Everyone knows they're going to die, but nobody really believes it."

Britain is crap at being entrepreneurial because (a) it's a risk averse country, and (b) the stigma of failure is so high that if you fail you're considered to be a loser. Entrepreneurism is a word that has been stolen by people who don't understand it. The truth is that people who are entrepreneurial take risks, and risk is something that is un-British, and if you're successful with it they'll hate you for it.

Fallor ergo sum (I err, therefore I am) - St Augustine.