bob – Page 38 – Insignificant Bits

May 10, 2006

Paleolithic

Dear Slashdot, I briefly lifted my null route of your IP to read some blather about microkernels. It’s not even a debate among Linux kernel developers, so why you bringin’ up old shit? Oh yeah, so that people who have no clue can bitch about the Linux development process (“I want my latest network card to work but I don’t want any other work done! Oh and how about a stable ABI so NVidia can screw us more?”). *plonk*

In other news, Joshua “Joshy” Marinacci has abandoned his roller blades and taken up writing Java books about “Killer GUIs”. On his blog you can find him reminiscing about his days as a UA. My opinion: the users in the Mac labs, more often than not, *were* idiots. And they had baggy pants.

May 9, 2006

KAP

Power supply
Originally uploaded by bluesterror.

I’ve made some slight progress on my aerial photography project. I bought a used R/C airplane radio with servos and a receiver. The receiver and servos were meant for park flyers (i.e. super light planes) so I figure that will be a good match for the kite where it’s all about weight. But you gotta power those things somehow, so I built a simple battery supply using a Radio Shack AA battery holder and shorting one of the terminals. The batteries add a lot of weight, but I can probably throw a resistor in series with the PS and power the camera off of the batteries as well. The idea is to mount the servo on top of the camera near the shutter button, then just wiggle the stick to snap a picture. I’ve tested this in a limited fashion and it seems to work nicely. The camera, of course, is the “one-time-use” CVS camera which has been hacked to be many-time-use.

May 1, 2006

Shinedown Redux

I am a bit late in getting to the requisite blog entries. Partly that is because my Dell laptop is sucking now. After only having the thing for two years, the power connector has broken internally such that batteries can no longer be charged; this appears to have happened to many many other Dell laptop owners. Great work, guys. So I take back any good things I said about Dell, especailly after half the desktops at work showed up with bad RAM.

Anyway, the Shinedown/Trapt show at Ram’s Head was great. Trapt led off, lead singer Chris Brown causing the womenfolk to swoon at his sensitive yet profanity-laden lyrics, punctuated with his ever-unnecessarily-flexed biceps. Brent Smith of Shinedown won the most acrobatic award, doing a nice half gainer off of the balcony early in the set, along with a jump from the top of the ridiculously high drum riser that left the audience wondering if he sprained an ankle. Of course both bands pulled out all of the hits, Shinedown with SAVE ME and I DARE YOU, and Trapt with HEADSTRONG, STILL FRAME. Shinedown performed a cover of Skynyrd’s SIMPLE MAN with the help of the audience, then raged against the record industry and gave us advice on making it through our teenage years. In fact, teen angst seemed to be the big social message here and we got an earful from both bands about all of the people “putting us down” and how we could turn that into “positive energy” and whatever else the fuck. Back in my day, this would never have flown, but the mostly college-aged crowd didn’t seem to mind so much. Anyway the main thing is the music and both bands pulled it off, never eliciting my usual reaction to radio bands which is “wow they really suck live!” In fact Smith, though nearly hoarse at the end, was still hitting all of the high notes in the double encore. Both guitarists were energetic, and while there was nothing particularly exciting in the solos, they carried off everything effortlessly. Shinedown’s bass player had a nice solo groove in there at one point.

In all, definitely going to be a highlight of this concert season. Looking forward, we’ve got Al Di at the Birchmere coming up again, Chili Cookoff (maybe)… and uh that’s all I have so far.

April 23, 2006

procced mail

I’ve been meaning to do something about my spam situation, which rather sucks at the moment. Now that my email address appears occasionally on the linux kernel mailing list and elsewhere, I’ve not suprisingly got a signal-to-noise ratio of something like 200:1. I’ve had spam assassin in the loop for a while, but the Bayesian analysis always invokes the OOM killer on my memory poor firewall so it’s not running with full effectiveness. Thus I took a little time out to add a whitelist to the front end to make things go better: if you’re in the whitelist, it skips all the filters. Meanwhile SA will get the threshold cranked up to consider practically everything spam, and I’ll be more likely to insert one-off regexps that trash certain spams that I get over and over again.

To make the whitelist, I went to my existing mail folders (in mbox format, of course). This was easy enough:

#! /bin/sh

for i in `/bin/ls | grep -v junk`; do
formail -s formail -zx "From: " -zx "To: " < $i |
sed -e "s/^.*<(.*)>.*$/1/g" >> whitelist.uns
done
cat whitelist.uns | sort | uniq > whitelist
rm whitelist.uns

Then, it took a while to figure out how to make the proper procmail recipe to use it, but I eventually came up with this:

MAILDIR=Mail
FGREP=/bin/fgrep

:0:
* !^List-Id:.*
* ? formail -zx "From:" | ${FGREP} -F -v -i -w -f whitelist
{
:0fw
* <100000
| spamassassin 

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
junk

:0:
* ^Subject:.*Corel Draw.*
junk

:0:
* ^Subject: *[^ ]* new(s)?$
junk

:0D:
* ^Subject:.*(O|0)EM *
junk

:0D:
* ^Subject:.*[A-Z]+[a-z][a-z][a-z][A-Z]+
junk
}

:0Ecf
| formail -A"X-Whitelist-Passed: OK"

# kill html email
:0
* ^Content-type: text/html
{
:0bfw
| (echo "[html stripped]"; lynx -dump -force_html -stdin)

:0ahfw
| formail -i"Content-type: text/plain"
}

April 21, 2006

Shinedown

As soon as I discovered that it wasn’t Chris Cornell behind a certain song from the point of view of the overmedicated, I’ve been enjoying Shinedown. So next Monday night, AC and I are going to see if their stage show holds up to the CD. Also on the ticket is Trapt, whose song Still Frame was once played by my old band, and two bands with whom I’m unfamiliar. See you there at Ram’s Head Live in Baltimore, doors open at 7pm.

April 21, 2006

Awarded

Yesterday, Director’s awards were distributed here at work, and the powers that be were nice enough to honor myself and a couple of other programmers on our mad software skillz even though we are only contractors. Despite the fact that everyone pronounces “Director” in hushed tones as if they are Death Star peons discussing The Emporer, sure that their thoughts are being probed by some dark-side evildoings, we didn’t realize that the awards ceremony was An Affair, which is to say that suits were required. So I show up, along with my coworkers, in full-on business casual to a gathering of hundreds of ensuited Vic Mackeys. Like the jackasses that wear a T-shirt on picture day¹, we ignored the occasional looks of disdain directed towards our section during the service. I say service, because it was practically a church affair, with a prayer at the beginning, a prayer at the end, and lots of boredom in between that mostly didn’t apply to me. The only difference was that instead of an organ, the pre-ceremony music was played by members of The President’s Own Marine Corps band. After an interminable wait, during which people who actually deserved awards were recognized, we eventually got called, walked across the stage, shook hands with Palpitane and the second-in-command at DOJ, then hid behind better dressed personnel for the group photo. So I guess what I am saying is, fear my awesome certificate, bitches!

[1] Usually me, in early grades at least, because my organizational skills are so slight, not because of any illusions of being too cool for school.

April 18, 2006

Stanley Jordan

I’ve been scanning the local venues and home pages of a few favored artists to find good shows to attend this summer. Who would have guessed that Stanley Jordan, two-handed tapping jazz guitarist extraordinaire, would be a full-on nerd? Of course, I mean that in the most complimentary sense. Watch as he schools usenet entities on his APL and C=64 FORTH hackery. Neat.

April 17, 2006

Projects afoot

I’m in something of a manic mode now that winter has fully departed. This weekend saw the embarkation on/completion of a few projects. I finished up all of the remaining niggling table-saw work required for my kitchen — the quarter round floor molding and the remaining decorative molding under the cabinets. Then I cleaned up my garage a bit; who knows, maybe in a month or two I’ll be able to get my car back in there. I also took the first steps in what I hope to be a less sucky landscape for my house: I mulched an area around my trees that tends to grow weeds like crazy, pulled up said weeds, removed a rotten and termite infested bench, and started a little indoor herb garden. I still had time to play a few rounds of The Ur-Quan Masters, until I remembered what an incredible time sink StarCon2 happened to be, at which point I resigned my post as intergalactic diplomat forever and went back to noodling on the guitar.

April 12, 2006

No Through Trucks

I suppose I should say a word or two about the latest Derek Trucks showing, and compare it to the other 6(?) times I’ve seen them, but what is there to say except that DTB was good as always and the 9:30 Club was really smokey. Kofi was probably super high as he was more animated than I’d ever seen him, standing up in the middle of a solo and banging out the bass chords with his fist, bellowing “I have a Wah-Wah pedal” during a particularly wokka-wokka keyboard part, and acting the preacher during their gospel number, testifying that “one man saved his life” — nope, not Jesus, but Derek Trucks! I picked up their new album Songlines which is interesting in that each song flows into the next, much like at their shows. On the whole it’s worth the $15 and it’s nice to hear Mattison on a studio release, but unfortunately it fails to live up to past glory like Soul Serenade when all the songs were brand new. There are definitely a lot more people at shows compared with
6 years ago so the word is getting out.

Author: bob