March 2006 Archives

Posted for my reference, I needed to clear the caching nameserver in OSX Tiger today. Google answered my call and I found the ever so simple:

lookupd -flushcache

Obviously I haven't hit a chapter on this in my OSX Tiger for Unix geeks yet (need to finish that book soon).
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Last nights dinner seems to have been a hit, so I thought I'd post the info on the Lemon-Thyme Chicken that I made....
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US Secret Service Best Practices for Electronics Seizure
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Over on the Desert Edge site I did a quick wrapup of our event . I can't believe I forgot to mention it here. Things went really well, we had a slightly smaller team turnout than we had hoped for, but still a decent amount. There was plenty of playtime, and the walk-on team did pretty well actually.

The best part for us was the review of the field by other players, as well as the SPPL's head ref. Everybody loved our setup, and the way we managed the play. Quite a few showed interest in practicing with us at future dates, which will be nice.

Remember, if you're interested in trying out paintball, just let me know, we'll hook you up.
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As all the local geeks are aware, Pete Ashdown is running against the incumbent Orrin Hatch for US Senate. It's not like every local group hasn't been chatting about this for a while. While really wanting to vote for him, I can't be positive yet, as I still have questions for him. But that's one of the great things it seems about Pete, not only is he willing to talk to geeks like us, he's going out of his way to do it. He's been scheduling with every Linux group in Utah, and making time to answer real questions (yes, many extra bonus points there, and he already had a lot).

One thing we'd really like though, is the chance to actually get a similar discussion with Senator Hatch. We geeks represent a group that has a lot of questions about decisions he's been promoting, and it just seems fair to give him a chance to own up to why he's been saying what he has. But how to we get him to talk to us, and even better, with Pete Ashdown at the same time. If anybody has any contacts, the local LUG leaders would like to arrange a multi-group meeting, which could bring in the numbers that could interest them. Pete is more than willing to talk with us, is Orrin?

Personally, I would have really enjoyed it if Steve Urquhart had stayed in the race, although I can see how he would have had trouble kicking Orrin out of the Primary. But Pete has a lot going in his favor in my opinion, and it would take some strong opinions on major issues to be able to push my vote back towards Orrin.

I've been an Erasure for many years now, and have a rather extensive catalog of their music. They recently came out with a new album, an acoustic rendition of several of their tracks.

I've really liked several of their older acoustic tracks, both live, as well as other tracks, such as the orchestral version of Wave Goodbye on the 'Two Ring Circus' album, so I had high hopes for this album.

Liquid Nitrogen can be so much fun, in so many ways. But here is a 'practical' usage for it. The top picture of the KitchenAid with the fog coming out is priceless.

So Dell really did buy Alienware . Interesting, wonder how this will influence the XPS line that Dell sells, maybe the same stuff?

The part that excites me the most, is that Alienware uses AMD chips, up to now, Dell hasn't. Since my work is a Dell shop, we've been out of luck with these chips, but maybe now that will change. One can hope.

I definitely see this as an opportunity to sell some of their peripheral hardware (mp3 players, handhelds) under a sexier name, and maybe increase their non-systems sales. Should help them out a lot.
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So, Desert Edge is sponsoring a paintball tournament this weekend. As most the local geeks know, I'm always inviting them out to come try. Well, this is the best weekend to do it. We have a lot of people coming, and will have our whole team as acting refs. We'll have both SPPL style tourney games, SPPL team elim rounds, as well as a general walk on elimination games for individuals and new people.

Come see what the game is all about, both on the casual and tourney level. If you know me, ask soon and I'll loan some equipment so you can try playing. Those with kids, bring them so they can watch (my kid loves to watch people playing).
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So, more downtime for the site today, longest stretch in a long time. This time the problem was thankfully isolated to just my personal site though, and not any of the others on this box.

I can say, I was actually bitten by wonderful uptime. My apache2 / mod_perl2 daemon has been running so long, and I had done several large CPAN based updates, including a major Catalyst upgrade that completely changed the DBIC/DBix interface. So, when things restarted I had a new framework in place, but code using the old one (at least the api changes were documented). Yes, my stupid fault for not paying more attention to my bleeding edge dev stuff, and live, but man that was a pain. Had to start learning the new stuff real fast. But now it's converted, and working. will check into patching this up to other users.

Oh, and it's nice that there are Catalyst packages accepted into the debian system. Wish they included everything I needed, but it's nice to have 85% of these newer packages apt-gettable compared to maybe 15% a few months ago.
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So I forgot to bring my current books home for the weekend, which means I'm getting behind in reviews. I was also rather upset at not having my reading material at home.

Marsee must have seen the future though, when lo and behold, a copy of the new Intermediate Perl was there waiting for me. Got a good start on that, but now I'm reading three books at once... d'oh.

Hopefully will have some fun reviews soon.
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Well, my company went out and bought a new one . In my position I can't exactly comment a whole lot about them or direction (please forward all inquiries to ... ) but it is nice to see us moving forward and growing our accounts. Looks like we have some fun work ahead of us as they will directly integrate into our operations. Seems to be FreeBSD/Perl :) At least that makes things easy.
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Forgot to post this a while back. Darn Dan Hanks gave me this module to look at. He and I regularly exchange cool stuff, but this one really has me thinking. SQL::Preproc is a source filter that creates new SQL language elements in Perl.

I'm really impressed by the look of the code with SQL as a native element. I know this is something you'd be able to do pretty easier in certain languages, and especially in Perl6, but in Perl5 it kind of scares me. When it comes to source filters, I had "a bad experience" with one once. Using a source filter does place some annoying constraints on the code as listed in the Supported syntax code, which one can live with easily, but can be handled nicer in something like Perl6.

From my rather casual review so far, they do seem to have decent constructs for the various forms of fetching data via the DBI , which was a concern for me, as I use several different methods often in order to do various performance tuning operations, or to just fit in certain paradigms.

I haven't had a task to play with this in a real situation yet, but it does pique the old curiosity, as I think bringing the concept of db access internal could be very nice in certain instances.
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Local Geeks Aggregate Thanks to the old Gunderson clan for setting that up. Of course they thought I was special enough to add to the list :)

Nice little writeup about a new bill by Senator Bill Frist, Online Freedom of Speech Act . While this should be obvious in our county, many people and groups have been attempting to get legislation that limits what you can say online. Bad idea! The internet, even beyond this now popular 'blog thing' is a great leveler in terms of letting people voice whatever harebrained opinions they have. Let it stay that way.
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Last night this box had a little bit of downtime with certain services. Chris had upgraded the router, and for some reason one of the policies didn't take correctly, and began to deny UDP traffic to the nameservers. This proceeded in killing SMTP connections and a few other things that required lookups. He had quite a fun experience in fixing it last night, guess he had to drive in after the router began totally blocking everything when he tried fixing it. Not a fun experience.
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A very cool looking NASA picture of the day

If you don't normally get the astronomy picture of the day, go here
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What is with the folks that think they can drive up the right turn lane to a red light, then jump the green to get through the light first, and get in front of traffic? That has happened a few times to me recently. So it get's worse, when those people aren't faster, and they give you all sorts of nasty stares, rude gestures and more because you aren't making way for them.
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So I was listening to Chunga and Mr. this morning, and they were doing the 'Stupid News' segment. The first thing they talked about was that there was a new radio station for prostitutes in Brasil, called Radio Zona (rádio zona). Chunga seemed to think a better name was "Ho Radio". Good joke for Americans, but the original name is actually quite funny.

See, 'uma zona' in brasil is a slang term for a brothel or Red Light District. So the name really does fit.

Now, this of course is a tip for American LDS missionaries, who use the term Zone to refer to a geographical area in which several groups of missionaries work (usually comprised of a couple districts, which in turn are made up of a couple companionships of missionaries).

So when your new elder mentions that they will be going to a 'Zone Meeting' with their 'Companion' (the term for the other missionary you are assigned to work with), you get some interesting looks, and all sorts of confirmation to strange rumors about you.

What's worse, the members of the church all realize what you really mean, so don't bother to alert you to this, it is just slang after all.

Even worse, is a lot of the investigators are fine with this, until you start talking about the 4th discussion (which involves the law of Chastity).
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As reported in a few places, the LAMP software stack was found to have less bugs than commercial offerings . It's nice having some more support for the tools I love.

One of my favorite notes there, though, is the fact that even though the score for LAMP was lower than other tools, our average was raised by having PHP included in the stack.

"There is one caveat: PHP, the popular programming language, is the only component in the LAMP stack that has a higher bug density than the baseline, Coverity said."

I think we've been saying that for a long time now.
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So what do you do after sitting down to install your nice shiny new game (Battle For Middle Earth II) and your drive won't read the disk?

• Cry?
• Scream?
• Rip it out and throw it?

Don't forget, it's 9pm, and all computer shops are closed.

Well, I wound up hitting Wal-Mart for a their cheapest Lite-On DVD drive. Not the greatest price, but not horrible. Just a waste, since I didn't want to spend the extra right now for a burner or anything.

But, at least now I can sit and watch my game install.
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Well, a couple of us decided that we were going to compete in the SPPL league this year, so we formed Desert Edge . We're starting to round up some sponsorships, so we needed a site. I decided that I'd give iWeb a try. I'll follow up with what I've learned so far, from actually using the software, and what I like/dislike.

Anyways, the site has a long ways to go, obviously, but it's a start.
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