June 2006 Archives

It's that time of year again folks. Time to shed my geeky shell and go back to nature. Yes I'll be doing what few geeks can comprehend, going back country Montana for a week. Yes, Power stops miles from where I'll be and cell phones stopped a long ways away. Oh it will feel so good to get back into the woods.

For any geek, if you haven't gone without any form of net connection, power, etc for an extended period, you really need to try taking a week off. It's quite the refreshing experience.

Oh, and it's kinda cool, I can see my granny deannie's truck outside her house

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Looking for a better job? Want great pay and benefits, as well as get paid to work on GPL software? My Company is hiring again, and this time the position is to work with me (as if that wasn't benefit enough). The job is specifically Perl development on the Freeside GPL billing system, which is a great niche to get experience in. I'll include the full job description in the extended content of this post:
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Since I'll be gone for a week, I'd better mention this month's PLUG Topic . For July, PLUG co-founder Thayne Harbaugh will be presenting on the Realm Systems iDentity devices.

"A mobile, personal server: 400 MHz powerpc, 128 MiB memory, 1 GiB
storage, biometric finger-print reader, USB powered and pocket size.
Take your applications with you and have a secure, mobile end-point for
accessing VPNs. Don't ever trust someone else's computer again."

link

When: Wednesday July 12 7:30 pm
Where: United Online Facilities

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For some reason, If I had asked my wife for this toy for fathers day/birthday, I think she would have thought I was joking!

Thanks to James for the link.
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Just had another one of those moments where I really wasn't thinking, then had to wonder why my code wasn't working again. I had a very simple case where I needed a regex to match a character that was neither a word character or a space character. My fingers quickly typed:

[\W\S]

And I then wondered why it didn't work. For those not understanding that part, I basically was creating a character class that consisted of \W (non word chars) and \S (non space chars). What is different from that and what does work?

after all, in basic style, putting the caps char in a class \w vs. \W is just a negation, just like the ^ does inside a char class.

What happens is in how the regex engine defines a character class. What it's really doing inside is creating a bitmap for that token. When creating it, the \W is expanded into those bits not in the word set. ^\w however puts in the word chars, and says, not them. With just one of these that would be fine, but when I added the second set, it busted, why?

When creating the bitmap with all the non word, and non space chars it blocked out some of the chars I really cared about. The way the cases are interpolated, the set's were broken.

Thankfully I caught the problem quickly, but I could see how somebody could get rather confused about that.
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While I often invite locals to try out paintball with a nice small group of friends, I must also step forward at times like these to try and get people to see what larger groups of paintballers can do. Yes, this weekend, my friends at Scenario Junkies are hosting their fifth annual Valkyrie Offensive scenario game.

There should be around 100+ people in attendance, likely more. That includes Members of Team Desert Edge, as well as the Special Ops teams. Not only will these people be helping out both sides during the event, but Special Ops is bringing both of their tanks. Yes, the second one is now completed, and both teams will have chances to work with the tanks!

If you have any interest in trying out paintball, let me know and we can make sure you have everything you need to try it out.
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So as a final follow-up to the interlug-bbq, I'll post my macaroni salad recipe that I brought.

Start with 1lb elbow macaroni, cooked slightly past al dente (the cooling process firms it up). Rinse to begin cooling, and stop the cooking, then place in the fridge.

Separately prepare:

• 1c Mayo
• 1/2 Green Bell Pepper
• 1/2 Red Bell Pepper
• 1 Anaheim Chili
• 3T Dijon Mustard
• 1/2C Diced Red Onion
• 1/2C Cilantro
• 1/4C Lemon Juice
• 1/4C Chopped Green Onion
• 3 Hardboiled eggs

Mix together. Remove pasta from fridge, and pat dry. Add mixture to pasta, add black pepper to taste.

Joe mentioned preferring a previous version of this slightly better. In that one I had a bit of Chipotle also, spicing things up for the crowd (which was known to enjoy spices more than the average potluck). Just mixing in some Jalepeño, or a small Habañero would work well here.
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As part of the interlug-bbq, I decided to have a little desert for my family. I didn't bring everything I normally would, but I did grab two peaches and some ice cream on my way out the door. After dinner I cut them up, and threw them on the grill:

This raised a few eyebrows, to my surprise. People seemed to think it strange, why would you grill fruit? In short order several of them were able to taste the result, nicely grilled peaches with a little bit of very melted vanilla ice cream. I think there are some converts to the religion of grilling fruit.

With that, I share one of my favorite grilled fruit deserts:

Begin with peach halves (I prefer firmer peaches), and let them soak in a little cream while you cook your main courses. Also get some apple slices, dust with cinnamon and sugar.

Grill both of these together, both until your preferred texture (I like mine al dente, most people prefer soft).

Place peach half face up in a bowl, and drop a good scoop of vanilla ice cream on top, layer outside with apple slices, then top with some thin sliced strawberries (use an egg slicer, of course), and some sweetened condensed milk.

Possible alternatives:
Any other berries on top (raspberry, blueberry).
Crushed pineapple on top.
Switch our Pears for the apple or the peach.
Chocolate syrup instead of, or in addition to SCM.

This is one of many great deserts you can throw on the grill after you main course, and really impress the Significant Other in your life. It also is just a great use of those leftover coals you always have :)

If you are afraid to get started, just do the apple slices. Very easy, tasty, and are a great topper to several salads, deserts, or just on their own.
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Reading other people's reviews it seems like the inter-lug BBQ went over well.I myself has a lot of fun, and so did my son. Too bad my daughter decided to get sick the second she got into the parking lot. So my wife and daughter missed all the fun.

I would like to complain about whoever created the grills at the Scera park, not having adjustable grills at all! I had to have 3 full chimney's of coal to get some heat up to the grill level. The one adjustable grill had rust holes in the bottom giving very little area to put coals.

Despite that, the potluck worked well, and I don't think anybody could feel like they didn't have quite the selection of food to eat. Games, Music, and Networking followed, I think we all had quite a bit of fun.

I'll mention my part of the food in following posts.

For those who haven't seen this yet, somebody took some serious time editing a large number of bush speeches to get the words needed to go along with the U2 song "Sunday Bloody Sunday". For openclue and other readers, the video is embedded so I don't spam video out to everybody, click on the story to see the video.

I recently saw an article titled 10 things every Perl hacker should know , thought I'd pass it along. On the most part I'm in agreement with the basic ideas they show here. The only time I don't totally agree is in the naming conventions. I don't use .pl extensions solely for library files, and am not against using them on many, non system-install scripts. I do agree that if this is the kind of tool I will put in some public place on my system, I'll not use the extension.

Last week I noticed an actual real comment in my blog, that alone got my attention, and then I read it. It mentioned an upcoming Utah bloggers convention . Previously I hadn't heard about it at all, and then a few other geeks began to mention it on openclue . I decided I might as well try and check it out.

I'll have to admit, I wasn't expecting too much. Having not heard about it until the last minute, I wasn't expecting much more than an informal meetup. What turned out was actually a nice event. Food, t-shirts, and a panel discussion greeted a surprisingly large number of attendees representing very distinct blog realms. The signage and logo's really gave a professional edge to the event that I wasn't expecting.

This first blogger event (as they plan on using this to do more) was a short event, hosting just a single panel discussion. While the discussion was useful, I think having it be the entirety of the event was a slight disservice to the attendees. I think if they instead had focused on the social networks present, and promoted themselves as a service for linking these groups, it would have had a much more practical application for the night. Many of the bloggers present would benefit most from the associations possible at a meeting of this nature. Instead the panel's focus seemed to be blogs in business. This in itself is a great topic, that many present wanted, but many were more interested in either just meeting the bloggers they read, or connecting in their networks. I for example found several new geeks that hadn't heard of the openclue planet Utah, but are now looking at it.

All in all, a fun event, and a good way to get attention to start a series of conferences, but next time it would be beneficial to focus a bit on the promotion, as well as having keynotes and breakouts across a slightly larger time.

For the last couple years I've owned the Geekpolitics com and org domains. The whole time, I've had the great intentions of actually putting up a blog, or even more a point/counterpoint discussion page for geek oriented politics. Of course, my time availability has prevented me from ever actually doing anything about it. So, anybody else willing to chip in on something like this? I can host, and such, but need people willing to work on the site, and of course future publishers.

Just a reminder, Plug has two meetings this month.

At our regularly scheduled meeting, on the 14th, we will be hosting Pete Ashdown Democratic Party candidate for US Senate. Pete has made the rounds through the various LUG's in Utah, and this will be one of his last presentations to our groups. This is a great chance to meet Pete in a smaller setting, and make sure your questions get asked.

Wednesday, June 14th 7:30pm
United Online Conference Room

Also, on the 17th we have the interlug BBQ All the information is on the wiki, go ahead and add your name to anything you want to bring, and let us know you are coming. Bring the family and friends, this will be a fun social event.
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So Joseph and I have been prepping, and decided to have a little fun with Harleypig today. I prepped him by making a few comments about his age today, and he commented on how technology was getting past him. My response was to the effect of, well, I guess one day we'll come in here and you'll be using a TRS-80 so you can feel comfortable again.

He didn't quite catch it, of course.

We're waiting now, he'll be back in about an hour, and will walk in and see this computer, and this blog post on his screen. So go ahead and add some fun comments so he can read them on this super-special new machine.

So, as he left for his lunchtime exercise, we had some fun:

Anybody else ever seen KDE running on a trash-80? Even has the modem and disk drive. You can even see the red light on the modem, how nice.

Seen while watching Revolution on the History Channel today, as it went into it's first commercial break:

"The Revolution, brought to you by John Hancock "

So today was a day just screaming for the grill, and with my wife out of town with the family, it allows me to play a little more with what I cook. I decided to have some fun with the grill today, not only because of the great weather, but hey I like the grill. Follow along for a couple of fun recipe's that tied together for a great meal.

My entree was one of the best sandwiches I've ever had. Be warned, if you are faint of heart when it comes to spice, you'll need to be careful. It wasn't all that hot, but it would scare the crap out of some people I know. I started with some skirt steak (any thin cut steak that can handle a quick cook would work, the more tender the better). I took this and covered it in a rub that I made from some black peppercorns, coriander, mustard seeds, garlic cloves, and kosher salt. I ran that through my coffee grinder¹ under I had a nice coarse powder, and rubbed that on the meat, then let it sit while I got my charcoal going.

While cooking the meat, I also roasted two anaheim, and one jalepeño pepper. I timed it so both were done around the same time, then brought them in. I let the meat rest while I pulled the skin off the peppers, and cleaned out the seeds. I then put the peppers, along with a small amount of green onion, and a good amount of red onion, a tablespoon or so of honey, and a couple tablespoons of water, in a blender. Once mixed, a sliced my meat small, and brought the mixings, along with diced red and green bell pepper back outside.

I proceeded to take a couple of hard rolls², cut them open and toasted them on the grills. Once GBD³ I put a piece of Pepper Jack cheese on to melt, then loaded with meat, bell peppers, more diced red onion, and then put on some of my green sauce.

I was very impressed with myself, the bite of the black pepper on the meat was consistently met with the juicy firmness of the bell peppers, and the smooth creaminess of the green sauce. It was a resounding success. Heck, it even looked pretty. The greens and reds contrasted very nicely with the dark meat and light bread.

Of course, no good meal can go without desert, so while I was preparing the aforementioned meal, I also started my desert prep. I took a large granny smith apple (I like the firmness) sliced off the very top, then used a spoon to gut out the inside⁴. I then put a single pillsbury style cinnamon roll dough⁵ piece inside, with some extra cinnamon. I covered out the top with brown sugar, and wrapped inside of foil. These then went directly in the coals and started cooking while I made the rest of the meal.

After eating, I removed, unwrapped⁶ and put into bowls, topped with some good vanilla ice cream, and you have some amazingly good desert.

After recovering from my food induced coma I still had enough coals to re-season my dutch oven that I was careless enough to let get wet, and had some rust spots on it.

¹ Before anybody calls my bishop, yes, I have a grinder just for this purpose, and so should you. Freshly ground rubs are a key to good grilling. Oh, and can you imagine if anybody tried making coffee from my grinder?

² mini french bread rolls, pão de sal pelos brasileiros

³ Golden, Brown, and Delicious

⁴ Man, I could have really used a good multitasker like a melon baller or the almighty grapefruit spoon here. A regular spoon worked ok, but it could have been better

⁵ Just the normal kind you get in the tube at your local store, and flavor will do

⁶ Careful, if done right, your brown sugar will have created this extremely tasty sauce, that will melt right into your hands if you spill
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Today marks the official release of one of my companies' new brands/products, PrivatePhone . For anybody interested, it's a free local phone number that goes straight to a voicemail. The kind of thing you'd often setup just with an asterisk box. You can then call-in to access, or better, check via the web. The basic service is free, so it's worth grabbing just for a number you can toss at signup forms that always want your phone number :)

Of course the product is a lead in for other services (purchase a larger mailbox, but outgoing VOIP time from the number, etc). But as for me, I like just having a free number I can give to those stupid forms, just like my tosser emails :)
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w00t! I'm now the #3 referrer to Open Clue according to maintainer Gabe . I'm only lagging behind somebody named Google, and a hack named Bloglines. For me, since getting added to the planet, my traffic has doubled. Of course, none of you dorks ever click my ads :-p (as if I expect you to, we all know better than that).

I do need to start posting more messages that make you click from openclue to get all the content though, since it's only my 2nd highest referrer.

The one piece of information that scares me though, is that out of the browsers visiting my site, IE moved to #1 after getting added to the planet. What's with that?