Hanging At Cimm's and "Hero" Review

Went and hung out at Cimm's house last night and watched a (very cool) movie; Hero. The movie was amazing eye candy, based upon some semi-legendary Chinese history.

MINOR SPOILERS AHEAD!

MP3 Player Installed In The Truck

Spent a little money today and got the MP3 Player mounted in a "super secret" location in the truck. The system is booting without errors, but the display and input boards are not yet mounted up. Quoth is going to come in and help me mount and test it on Monday at work (no slagging me for the crappy site design, Somebody else did it).

It is amazing how important the proper tools are to do this kind of work. My meter was at work this weekend, so I ended up flying half blind, and using an LED soldered to a resistor in order to test for polarity and voltage on all my power leads. Cheesy.

Learning wxPython

I have been pretty lax lately about a policy that I have carried for a long time, but have recently found that I am not the only one.

For this reason, I have decided it is time to get off my ass and learn wxPython. That's right... not just Python but the wxWindow library for it. That way I can code for Windows, Linux, and OSX at the same time. Call me a M$ whore for GUI coding, but I insist on UI standardization.

I Got New Glasses! With Bonus MSIE Bug.

I finally got a new pair of glasses! Check em out! The previous glasses were chipped, scratched, and otherwise destroyed. I guess that I am not allowed to ride these while dirt jumping though...

As an added bonus, when I posted this article, I found a bug in the MSIE 6 interpretation of CSS when creating :hover borders (border-color) on img items...

Pagerank is Dead? Good Riddance!

Looks like pagerank is finally going the way of the dodo. No big surprise there, since it has been easy to take advantage of for a long time. It is no secret that deliberately cross linking can increase your rank, but there is now a lot of conjecture as to how Google knows which pages to cull. Here is an idea on how they are doing it.

I am guessing that blogs have a unique and easily detected text string that makes the job a no brainer.

Hint: It's the trackbacks stupid.

Red Hat 9 SMBMount Bugs

Looks like RedHat has done it again. Way back in the day I got pretty pissed off at RedHat for their release of 7.0 with tons of beta software in it. Upgrades always seemed to go badly for this version, and things didn't get any better until about 7.2 (and 7.3 is still my benchmark version). Because of 7.0 I decided to never install a RedHat X.0 release.

8.0 came and went and then RedHat went to a new numbering scheme, leaving RedHat 9 (no dot) as the obvious 8.1 release.

So I do my upgrade after waiting a few weeks to see if any showstopper bugs appeared, and then changed my sources, and ran apt-get dist-upgrade.....

Shoutcast Daemon (Source, Download & Docs)

One of the things that always bothered me about the shoutcast server was the fact that you had to stuff it in the rc.local in order to get it to start up. In order to fix that, I wrote a script for SYSV daemon startup for shoutcast. This script is optimized for Red Hat Linux (tested on 7.2 - 9.0) and can be made permanent with chkconfig as follows:

cd /etc/rc.d/init.d/;chkconfig --add shoutcast;chkconfig --level 3 shoutcast;chkconfig shoutcast on

Rantradio.com has been running this script since late november, and reliability has been GRRRRRRRRRRRRR8!

Feel free to either download the script here, or continue reading and copy and paste it.

RedHat 9 And HUGE USB 2.0 Hard Drives (and tutorial) Part 2

It came to my attention that some steps were missing from the tutorial I wrote up, so I though that I'd finish up here with the next few things to do...

I Hate Urethane

I hate urethane. It is sticky, it is messy, it destroys clothing, and the equipment that moulds it is FINICKY!!!!! No entry for today.

Movable Type Server

Just set up a Movable Type server here, separate from my current personal MT site. I guess now I have to find some friends who want to have blogs. Neat huh? Send me an e-mail if you are interested (and I know you). Already added GOTL.

AVIFile Rulez0rs

Just installed the newest version of AVIFile for Linux on my main workstation. Love it. Just tested a bit on the DivX rip of Metropolis using the Xvid codec. Seems to be as quick as on my Windows install. The compile took a while though.

SARS Is For Wussies... This One Will Kill 1% Of The Population!!!!

Your chances of dying of SARS in the States are 1 in ...oh wait, none have died in the states....not too shabby huh?
Your chances of dying in an automobile accident in the states are approximately 1 in 6400 every year. Those aren't the odds in your life time, those are your odds each year.

Intro To Emma

Some of you may know that I have a little terrier cross named Emma. Emma is the cutest little bundle of cute that ever cuted a... !!SLAP!!

Recently the farmer next door has been spraying manure to fertilize their field. Emma has run around in that a couple of times, and it reeks. I thought that that was the worst possible thing in the world that she could do.

Today I received a message from Quoth about my dog's "whacky hijinks" for the day:

RedHat 9 And HUGE USB 2.0 Hard Drives (and tutorial) Part 1

Once upon a time a boy had a tape backup, and it was good.

Then the backup failed, and it was bad. This cycle repeated itself many times, and this was also bad.

Then the boy bought a 200gig USB2.0 Hard Drive, and this was good, after it was bad for a while.
This is the story of his quest...

New Weblog

I have finally taken the plunge and converted my system to Movable Type so as to make the maintenance chores a little easier.