Steve Gets A Life

bugzilla on Panther

had some issues installing Bugzilla on Panther (OS X 10.3) in the hope that i can save some headaches, here are some tips:

• in order to get DBD::mysql installed (and some others modules?) check out this link describing a bug that didnt get fixed in the Panther release.
• install expat from source (straight up: ./configure; make; sudo make install; )
• if you try to install DBD::mysql and get something like t/mysql.t 68 3 4.41% 46-48 1 test skipped. Failed 1/18 test scripts, 94.44% okay. 3/767 subtests failed, 99.61% okay., you should be ok, acccording to this post. from CPAN, just type look DBD::mysql, then when you drop into the shell, run perl Makefile.PL; make; sudo make install. even though it doesnt pass some tests, it should be ok.
• if you can't get GD installed through fink, try this link for how to install GD onto OS X from source. note: i couldnt get his patch to work on libpng, so i did it by hand. i also had to change the line:
  LDFLAGS=-L. -L$(ZLIBLIB) -lpng -lz -current_version $(PNGVER)
  to
  LDFLAGS=-L. -L$(ZLIBLIB) -lpng -lz -dynamiclib -current_version $(PNGVER)... but i still can't get it to work. damn! oh well, its optional.

follow the links

just a stab at a new idea. i think ill try to track links from article to article, blog to blog, that i take in the span of one browsing session. here goes..

• the growing trend of groom blogs [salon.com]
  1. questioning why men are characterized as "pot-bellied lemmings, willing to follow our fiancées off a matrimonial cliff as long as she lets us hold the remote"
     • the new trend of narcissitic men who are blurring the gay/straight line. most notable point: the acceptance of semi-pornographic, slightly homoerotic Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs in Frat Boy culture. this last article strays a bit at the end, i suggest just reading the first page or so.
  2. some other blog. not that interesting. maybe kinda funny..
  3. another groom, but talks about other stuff (sometimes)
     • boeing is working on anti-gravity. kinda makes you wonder what made them make that announcement. a leak? a breakthrough? the need for press? (im thinking the last).
  4. one more this time the guy's got a picture of himeself. not standard on blogs, kinda interesting. but not really.
• OS X innovators announced.
• Panther vs Linux from slashdot
• quantum computing breakthrough in japan
• the problems with the american medical system

so thats it. started out kinda interesting, i think i got burnt out. i gotta say, browser tabs really make web surfing a lot easier (open every interesting link, then read them at leisure), but that leads to burnout it seems.

anyways, please no comments about why i started on a groom's blog trend, it was just an interesting article ;)
i blame the combination of kung-log and NetNewsWire

Payday

I got my first real paycheck today.

its pretty amazing what full-time pays compared to student jobs. i recently went over my finances, my savings plans, etc and realized im really not making that much money. but then i saw my check and thought about how long ive been working here (only 2 weeks)... man, thats more than i made in 2 months at my first job

i guess, in a sense, im rollin.

im an idiot

i hosed my G5 today. well kinda.

while trying to install way too many fink packages at once, i managed to install users like mysql, pgsql, etc, but at the same time wipe out users like stevem and root from NetInfo. basically i locked myself out of my computer. for some reason, i logged out and had no way back in.

but i got my stuff back:

• booted into single user mode (hold s when booting)
  
• now that you're root, all you have is a read-only filesystem, fix that:# mount -uw /
  
• # cd Users/stevem
  
• # tar zcvf stevem.tgz Desktop Documents Library [whatever else...]
  
• boot off the OSX installation CD (im using 10.3)
  
• dont over-install (i did the first time, it doesnt help), but use the change password utility to set the password of one of the useless accounts currently on your system (i used mysql)
  
• quit out of the installer and reboot off the hard disk. log in as mysql or whatever you chose in the last step
  
• copy stevem.tgz to a remote server. notice that you can't access the rest of the Users/stevem/ directory, so you couldn't have just copied them directly. well maybe if you had chown'd them or something. anyways...
  
• reinstall OSX
  

so, not the ideal solution, but it works and nothing important was lost.

lesson learned: don't go crazy with fink's dselect. I think the biggest problem was that i didnt have the X11 SDK installed (its on the 10.3 devtools CD that was downstairs i found out later), but i did have the X11-User installed, so i was "half installed" which confused fink. because of this, anything that required X11 failed. several attempts to install non-X11 stuff later i ended up hosing NetInfo. all the users that needed to be added to NetInfo for those packages were added, but all the old ones were deleted. hence the difficulty.

and now its time for bed.

eBay for divorcees

thanks for randall for this link

isreal article

as much as i hate talking about politics, i recommend reading this article. Written by phil greenspun, an MIT professor of Computer Science, its a pretty good look at some of the problems in the middle-east. apparently philg either does his homework or knows his history, as he cites several events and facts ive never heard of before.

most of all, he makes interesting connections between mid-east violence and othere seemingly non-related issues like Nazi Germany, Sprint telecom's executives, and Roman emperors. his work is always a good read and this is no exception. of course, it is laden with nice photographs (all taken by him, of course. he also happens to be a great photographer. what a jerk).

also, be sure to see his other political writings and those on many other topics. and be sure to visit (repeatedly) photo.net

trojan horses are real

well, assuming you use outlook or outlook express, here's why you shouldn't open emails from someone you don't know.
This guy got lucky, it makes you wonder if any other people convicted of pedophelia were innocent like this guy.

Fires

Check out this picture of the fires. pretty crazy.
also, check out sean's recent photograph sized just right to be your new desktop.
[note: this is my first post using kung-log.. not bad.]

ya baby

posting from the G5. not in my final office, but still on the G5.
right now im copying an image over, gonna reboot with apps installed, then its 10.3 time.

a good joke

taken from slashdot:

"What did the employed physicist say to the unemployed physicist?"
"Would you like fries with that?"

Blaming Zodo's

Watched Bowling for Columbine tonight.

Wow. Tobin wrote about the "culture of fear" mentioned in that movie before, but i didnt realize how well it was really presented. The whole comparison of the US and other countries, trying to determine what exactly caused the rediculous nature of gun violence in the US was really thought-provoking. I never knew the numbers before, which really do help. The ratio of guns to people in Canada and USA (similar) compared to the amount of gun violence is stunning.

The bit with Marilyn Manson was really good. as much as i dont really dig his image (or his music i guess, not horrible, but not my thing), every time i hear him speak about something serious, i respect him more and more. he's a smart guy and knows what he's doing. The cycle of fear and consumption is so well presented, from home security systems (vs unlocked canadian front doors), y2k preparedness, and especially guns.
The finale with Heston made the movie. Watching "Moses himself" stumble over his words when confronted directly was fantastic. The bit with the Columbine victims and KMart stopping bullet sales was awesome as well. Awesome as in "instilling awe." I was amazed that they actually made that change. I know the media presence was the only reason, but who cares, it still worked. I just hope it remained in effect. There's a KMart commercial on right now: "right here, right now."

There was so much in that movie, i hate that i can't remember all of it. Im gonna have to watch it again, maybe buy it. ya, probably.
shit, maybe ill even get a book or two of moore's.

week one

the first week of the rest of my life is done.

still no office. no desk. no G5. no 10.3.
but i did get to play with iSight today. for about a minute. and by play, i mean install and not actually vChat with anyone. oh well, got a neat pic out of it.

besides that, work is good. the people i work with directly are way cool. the attitude is super-relaxed. taking vacation/leave is no biggie. its looking good.

introduced myself to the 3rd year ARCH students today. it was a huge room, filled with kids saying "who is that?" to each other as i stood by the faculty head looking all important (odd, eh?). apparently there are 700 students in ARCH and maybe 100 in LArch. i sure hope they use the ticketing system, cause damn im not gonna remember all their names.

10.3 review

following a slashdot story, i read this story. pretty simple review of 10.3, but the reason i post this is the following quote:

Finally, surely there's value in using an operating system that, well, isn't Windows. Mac OS X isn't just free of viruses; it's also free from copy protection, "activation" (a Windows XP feature that transmits information about your PC back to Microsoft), and pop-up messages that nag you to sign up for some Microsoft database or clean up your icons. When you use Mac OS X, you feel like it's yours; when you use Windows, you feel as though you're using someone else's toys, and Mrs. Microsoft keeps peeking in on you.

dot bomb

Watched startup.com tonight. Its a documentary of a startup gone bad, but mostly its a movie about how egos with too much power (money) ruin companies and friendships.
Pretty amazing how these normal guys (much like myself and many people i know) turn into such jerks and take on such cold, corporate identities when they have a company under their belts. Corporate espionage, backstabbing, etc. Scary.
Glad im working for the university right now.

notable link

here you can find swimwear for your next Quaker meeting or southern Utah family outing:

http://www.wholesomewear.com/page-4.html
(link thanks to sean)

All X'd out

As in OSX. Yes, this is the second post in a row about the computers at my new job, im a nerd. So, ya.. worked on OSX server for the first time today. Not that big of a deal. Just a few tools to deal with UNIX config files. I guess its way easier to look at and if thats what it takes to get UNIX to the rest of the world, so be it. The XServes are pretty sweet. they put out a ton of heat in the back though.

Tomorrow hopefully ill be setting up my new office. Right now its full of junk. I think ill bring my camera to work tomorrow just to document some stuff like that. Hm. ya. Oh, something else kinda camera related: working in a non-engineering department is way nicer in terms of aesthetics. I walked past one Art Studio professor's office today that looked like the inside of an italian restaraunt, seriously. I mean, the walls were painted with that brown/yellow stuff, with some vines, i dunno, it was cool.

Where was I? oh, the new office. yea, ill have 10.3 to play with on the G5, tons of apps (gotta learn some of em for work), and a fat pipe. The only problem might be that my office might be way hot. no air flowage. that sucks :( .

Andria is talking to herself in the other room. funny girl.

first day at work

today was my first day of my first job. my coworkers are cool so far and im getting a G5 workstation. nice.

did a lot of paperwork today, mostly just got HR stuff taken care of, got some keys (nine so far, more to come), tried to remember 500 different names (ok maybe a dozen), and almost did something computer related. it seems there isnt much to do before you have an email address, access to any systems, or any kind of computer or office of your own yet. which brings me back to the G5. so nice. dont have it yet, but hopefully tomorrow.

in the meantime, im trying to get a handle on how they run the college. hopefully ill be able to have a hand in more broad-scale stuff, not just the student labs stuff. almost everything is running of macs. xserves and G4s serve files/web/etc. they dont have an authentication system set up for the students yet, apparently some red tape with registrars setting up an LDAP or whatever. lame. anyways, i hope that working with OSX will be fun. already have copies of 10.3 (doesnt come out for a week) and apparently its pretty sweet. dont ask me how, but apparently it adds a hour of life to laptop batteries. more efficient screen drivers? dunno.

anyways, time for bed. gonna have to get used to this 8am thing again.

on a lighter note...

why we should kill all the butterflies in the world.

and how to jack the Mass turnpike (several pages, be sure to read to the end)

The Patriot Act

Every time I hear about the patriot act, I can't believe it was ever passed. This time is no different. Taken from Schneier's cryptogram it raises a good point about how this law is being used for reasons it was not meant to be used for. A good case of poorly worded law, if you ask me. Here it is:

The Patriot Act and Mission Creep

One of the problems with laws is that the crimes that justify their passage are not always the crimes they are used against. In the United States, the RICO (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations) law was passed to help fight organized crime, but was used against anti-abortion protesters and relatively minor drug offenders. And the Patriot Act, passed to help fight terrorism, is being used against a variety of other crimes.

According to a TRAC report, definitions of "terrorism" have broadened considerably. The AP reports that the Justice Department admits that the Patriot Act has been used "to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden overseas by alleged bookies, con artists, and drug dealers." So someone with a pipe bomb in California is suddenly charged with "terrorism using a weapon of mass destruction," and a North Carolina man who had a methamphetamine lab is suddenly charged with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture of chemical weapons. The Justice Department has even been conducting seminars on how to use the new wiretapping provisions in the Patriot Act in non-terrorism cases.

It's a big deal. The guy with the meth lab could get 12 years to life in prison for a crime that, under the old laws, was only worth about six months. The Patriot Act was hurriedly passed less than two months after 9/11 with almost no debate. That was a mistake, but it echoed the national mood about terrorism. Having the law applied broadly against common criminals is something that we shouldn't do lightly. Security is a trade-off, and the trade-offs in the Patriot Act were extreme. Maybe treating drug dealers like terrorists is something Americans want. But we should debate it in public, and not let the Justice Department sneak it by us.

Report: "Criminal Enforcement Against Terrorists and Spies in the Year After the 9/11 Attacks":

so is it no big deal that they're giving meth dealers 12 to life instead of 6 months? from a certain standpoint, maybe not. what about someone who is wrongfully sentanced for such a crime? maybe under past laws they would have served a few years fighting the decision, what if their accused crime was covered by this act? they could be considered a potential terrorist and possibly executed. who knows.
The point is, laws that have been on the books for years are being overruled by this singular, hastily worded, frankly outdated, law of fear. If someone is caught making a bomb, they should be tried for making bombs, not for being a "potential terrorist."

I'm not even getting into the wiretaps on suspected terrorists without courts approval mess.

Public Internet Terminals

Call me paranoid, but this article reminded me that i shouldn't use public terminals. i used a Kinko's in New York just this last September. had it been 2 months prior, my keystrokes would have potentially been logged. A good quote from the article,

Richard M. Smith, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., said customers could also use certain techniques to foil keystroke loggers. When typing in sensitive information, for instance, he suggests cutting and pasting individual characters from elsewhere to form the password.
No keys depressed, no characters logged.

so even if you have to type in a password, you can copy/paste characters one at a time from some random webpage.
paranoid? maybe. safe? yes.

My Desk

Since I haven't used my digital camera in a while and I've been looking for an excuse to blog a bit, I decided to take a snapshot of the sate of me, this my last weekday without a job.
So here goes from top to bottom, right to left: (click on picture for big version)

• andria's schedule. that crazy girl is always doing something.
  
• todo list. lots of random web/programming projects. note the inclusion of Zelda and Metroid. very important.
  
• paper heart, card. the card text says "you're always on the right side of that fine line between cool and dorky." from andria, of course.
  
• monitor draped with paper ribbon-ey stuff. from my birthday recently.
  
• (on the desk now) cups of pens, change, a slinky, etc. nothing exciting here.
  
• charger, extra memory for camera (8x speed, yeehaw)
  
• edgeware receipt. for andy's gift. hope you're not reading this before saturday, andy.
  
• envelope under receipt - offer letter from Cal Poly. first real job ever, i guess. crazy.
  
• books, etc:
  • mac os x hacks. - for the new job
    
  • programming perl - for the stupid perl thing i ranted about this morning
    
  • quick fix italian grammar - going to italy next summer. still havent opened this really.
    
  • learn latin - for some reason im learning latin before italian
    
  • notebook - notes from latin book. actually doing the excersizes. strange, eh?
    
  • cryptonomicon- pretty good geek fiction, by Neal Stephenson.
• gorge games hat - i sometimes work for octagon marketing, one of their events is the gorge games. err. it was..
  
• pile o' discs, a bunch of software. Gentoo linux live cd on top. (note stupid USB hub above and to left that doesnt work with linux, bah)
  
• palm m505, nokia 8390, usb2 hub, external hard drive (200GB, w00t!)
  
• yepp 700H 128MB mp3 player. havent used it in a month or so. good little toy though.
  
• smith slider sunglasses. the shizno.
  
• polar s710 and USB interface. for training. which i haven't done in months :-/
  
• cool speakers
  

i guess thats it. so now you know what i look at all day. and now you can too.

perl sucks

more accurately, perl documentation sucks. the camel books (some by larry wall himself) kinda start easy and then pile everything on you, without mentioning whats actually important. for example, last night i was working on parsing my old .plan.bak text file to input it into this blog.
so, i need to look at more than just one line at a time in order to get the body out of each entry. should i use the /m or /s modifier for regular expressions? maybe. but what's the most important part? you have to undefine $/ (input record separator) so it wont just parse one line at a time. how do you find that? well its in the same section as the rest of regular expressions, but its tucked into the source of an example like this:

$/ = ""; #paragraph mode

i mean, is that documentation? i think not. the idea of undefining $/ isn't even presented. the whole /s and /m stuff is explained carefully, but its all for naught if you don't do the $/ thing.

that's what i hate about perl.

Using iTunes (finally)

after a significant download (well, not that big, just some serious lag), iTunes is installed and running on my XP machine. not bad. i like the interface, like the integrated burning, etc. Its basically windows media player done right.

one thing that would be nice is if it could recover album art ripped from WMP. i have all these albumArt.jpg files everywhere and now they're pretty useless.

i want an app that will go through my mp3s and clean up all the ID3s and sort them correctly. i suppose there are tools that do this, but they all suck in one little way or another. i guess its just a matter of taking the time to fix them up. then maybe this dynamic playlist thing will work better too.
all in all, im pleased with iTunes, do doubt.

oh, and notice the lack of "Listening to: ..." at the bottom of that post. oh well, it was fun while it lasted. maybe someone will write an iTunes plugin soon :)

iTunes for windows announced

so rad. watched the whole thing on IRC. cant wait to download it.
they're gonna give away songs with pepsi bottles. 1 in 3 wins. not bad if you ask me.

in related news, randall just pointed out the winamp plugin for w.bloggar (see bottom of this post).
well that should be useful for the next few hours before i switch to iTunes ;)

AT&T online (in)security

I just got off the phone with AT&T wireless. for some reason, i cant pay my bill online. i think its cause i signed up when they were just getting their "next generation" thing going. basically, my account has been hosed in the past and has never been right since.
aaaanyways. the point to this post (besides me liking this blog thing) is that when i told the customer service woman about my problem, she asked me for my userid and my password.
...
now think of back in 6th grade when AOL first came out and it was cool and you actually used it. do you remember the email / message you got weekly saying "AOL employees will never ask you for your password under any circumstance" ?
well, i do.

basically, asking a user to divulge his/her password is horrible computer security. i like to think i know a little about computer security, but who knows. anyways, the service agent was actually quite open about how this is the only way she has to look at my account when it comes to the website. apparently this is the same with some internal duties she does as well. when someone inside at&t calls her about something, often she has to ask for their password. this is just bad. i suppose i should quote bruce schneier or something, but nothing comes to mind.
anyways, i thought that was totally lame.

Finances

so ive never been that good at keeping track of my finances. i mean, ive never gotten in any trouble because of it, but ive never really felt the need to really get on top of it all. So now that ive got some sort of dependable income coming my way (note to self, call up poly, make sure you still have job) maybe i should get on it.

Enter Quicken.
Ive used quicken before, but only a little. Basically tried it out to see how it worked then ignored it. Now im actually saving my receipts (even the trip to Scolari's this morning for milk and cereal) and entering them into Quicken. Its kinda interesting i guess.
in order to enter some credit card stuff, i check my online account. it seems my amex credit limit was bumped up from $3,000 to $10,000. um. ok. so i stop working for 3 months, charge everything, make minimum payments (need that cash for rent) and you reward me with more credit? sure dude.

anyways, i hope to keep this up. im going to enter my paycheck amount, etc. and see if i can use it to get out of this credit card whole i dug myself into these last few months. maybe even if i tell it how much i want saved up, by when, it will tell me how often im allowed to go watch the cubs lose at woodstocks per month. or maybe not.

posted from w.bloggar program

so this is pretty cool. im posting this from a program on my desktop called w.bloggar it makes posting a bit easier in that i dont have to keep bookmarks on the admin site, etc. i can just open up the program and blam. done. it even lets you edit previous posts, etc.
it also supports other CMS systems like Blogger, xoops, even PostNuke.. hmm.. that gives me an idea.
anyways, its pretty neat. simple, but it works like a charm.

tuesday in SLO

i guess i should make a real entry. here goes.

today was pretty boring, until andria came home. basically i stayed at home and played zelda all day. i was planning on calling up Dave Keller (dude from high school/college that i randomly ran into at SLO barnes and noble) to go mountain bike riding, but i uh, i was getting really far in zelda, alright? i guess i dont really feel the urge to go riding these days. partly due to the lack of health insurance.

.. but i digress.

so when andria came home, we decided to walk down to woodstocks and watch the baseball game. im so glad she likes baseball, so rad. anyways, it was a good game. the cubs shoulda won, but this fan caught a ball that a player would have caught, letting the marlins start an 8-run streak. all in one inning. yes, an 8-run inning. the score went from 0-3 to 8-3 all cause of some jerk. or at least thats what the chicago papers are gonna say tomorrow.
anyways it was a blast. had good pizza with some DP and Newcastle, good environment, great company.

we walked dowtown to woodstocks, walked home. great temperature, short distance, perfect. ive never lived somewhere like this, where home and downtown are so close that its totally feasable to say "lets go watch the game at a pizza place" on a whim.

i love this town.

Blog explanation

basically im at a crossroads in my life right now. well, for the last 3 months ive been standing at the crossroads, but now im actually on them. i recently got my first "real job" (the sysadmin for the student labs in Cal Poly's landscape architecture and architecture departments). basically it feels like im starting "real life" now, so i thought id document it.

i must admit, i was a bit influenced after reading tobin's and alex's blogs. so there you go :)

My first actual blog

so .planning has lasted for hm, 5 years now on and off, but i think its time to make the switch to blogging. As silly as it sounds, i know this is a better format. While it might be hard without dfi (ignore this if you're confused) for now, i predict that will change. Maybe thanks to me, maybe tobin ;)

So anyways, i will attempt to update this from now on and hopefully will be able to import my old .plans into this with a lot of help from my friend perl.

so thats all i've got right now.