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Archive of entries posted on January 2006

Things I must teach my daughter

Everytime the doorbell rings or someone knocks on a door, it is NOT ALWAYS a man delivering pizza. Just sometimes.

But we do know her favorite food, I guess.

I have no problem admitting it

I am a giant sandwich fetishist.

Snakes on a plane!

Have you heard Micheal and Evo?

Top ten reasons geeks make good fathers

Parent Hacks pointed me towards a blog entry that makes a top ten reasons why geeks make good fathers.  It seems dead on to me.

Okay, maybe not, the you can’t go wrong with list that includes legos, video games, and gadgets.

Firefox and Thunderbird extentions

I thought I’d document which Firefox and Thunderbird extensions I’m using. This is as much for me to remember should I have some disk failure or something as it is to generate discussion.

Firefox extensions

  • User Agent Switcher – easily change the user agent for sites that work with Firefox but don’t think they do
  • GooglePreview – inserts preview images (thumbnails) of web sites and Amazon products into the Google and Yahoo search results pages. Thumbnails are provided by thumbshots.org and alexa.com.
  • BugMeNot – Integrates BugMeNot right into the browser. Right click on the login area, and boom, you’re in.
  • Live HTTP Headers – Follow the HTTP headers back and forth in real time. Helpful for debugging.
  • ScrapBook – helps you to save Web pages and easily manage collections.
  • ForecastFox – brings weather info from AccuWeather.com® to your status bar.
  • WebDeveloper – adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. I haven’t used it a lot lately, but is can be fairly useful.
  • Google Toolbar for Firefox – goes without saying…
  • Tab Mix Plus – Adds a lot of functionality and configuration over tabs. Allows you to change tab size, where the close button is, a session managers, etc. (Now TinyMCE friendly!)
  • del.icio.us – Integrates del.icio.us right into firefox. Has a bit more funtionality than just the drag and drop javascript eextensions
  • Adblock – does what it says, a powerful content filter
  • Fasterfox – allows you to tweak-out firefox’s network and rendering settings.
  • Viamatic foXpose – OS X expose like choosing for open tabs in Firefox

Thunderbird extensions

  • AboutConfig – adds about:config to thunderbird, for behind the scenes tweaking. The most important for me being mail.check_all_imap_folders_for_new
  • Attachment Extractor – Can detach multiple attachments from one to many messages in one fell swoop. Rather than visiting each message each attachment.
  • Enigmail – GPG/PGP integration. I mostly use it as a prereq for Display MUA.
  • Display mailing list header – implements RFC 2369 for Thunderbird: Special mailing list header fields in the mail are parsed, and the links are displayed in the extended header view.
  • Display Mail User Agent Extension – This one is more for fun, but sometimes gives insight into who has e-mailed me.
  • Mail Redirect – adds one the features I was missing from mutt. Adds redirection, better known as bounce in elm, mutt, and others.

Now I just need to find a thunderbird extension that does arbitrary headers that are updated on sending. And mutt could be removed from my life. So sad.

Things we have relearned today

Regular backups are your friend. Also, if you can’t normally back something up (i.e. data in open ldap’s backend) do a regular dump and back that up.

rsync/unison/scp data off your co-loc to a local machine, and back it up again, just for good measure.

The new drive is the drive most likely to die first.

Losing /var really fucking sucks.

Recreating most of the information in ldap out of mail logs is cool, though.

Drinking doesn’t solve sysadmin nightmares, but it makes you feel good while you’re having the nightmare.

I need more free time…

At a dinner party a few weeks ago, the subject of Sting and his powers of 6 hour tantric sex came up. It prompted one of those attended to ask:

If we’re having sex for 6 hours, how long do I have to fucking cuddle?

It seems that Sting was lying about the whole thing. The question still stands.

Crystal’s Party Bar

In the Tempo section of the Chicago Tribune was an article on Crystal’s Party Bar in Crystal Lake. This sounds like a place that 1) needs to be closer to me and 2) is close to the vision I had if I were to open a bar.

But the multi-player games are a little addictive at Crystal’s Party Bar in Crystal Lake. Like many suburban bars, Crystal’s has that all-in-one motif: A dance floor for clubbers. A bar menu and playoff games for the sports bar set. Fireplaces and couches for the lounge lizards

But it’s the video gaming that sets Crystal’s apart. More Dave & Buster’s than Crobar, Crystal’s is adorned with flat-screen televisions at each of its first-floor booths, allowing interactive game play from just about anywhere in the bar

And with Xbox and PlayStation2 consoles securely attached to the first-floor ceiling, patrons can play their favorite video games at any of the individual booths.

Just sign up, turn in your driver’s license at the DJ booth and you’ll receive a game and two wireless controllers, manager Brian White says. The bar staff will handle food and drink orders while you play (appetizers and sandwiches are available until 10 p.m.).

I think this is a great idea for a bar, its just too bad its too far out. I’ll have to drag Sarah out to check it out sometime. If only because their video Texas Hold’Em is a big draw.

I’ve always wanted to open a geek friendly bar, and I’m not sure this is it. Although, it has all the items I’d want in my place, except maybe wireless networking of some sort.

The party music, though, in my bar would be relegated to Friday and Saturday night. The rest of the week I’d like to keep it somewhat sane so someone could bring thier laptop and do some coding and drink a beer. Or maybe play Quake or something. Of course, I’d have a large beer selection.

However, running an bar would take a set of skills and a bunch of capital I don’t have. I’ll have to keep the dream alive. A place like Crystal’s Party Bar makes me think I’m not totally crazy.

Another feature I’ve been considering more recently is how to make it somewhat kid-friendly, or at least have a kid-friendly night. The video games certainly help there, but I’d also like people to feel free to bring their toddlers. If only for my own selfish purposes.

Really Slick Screensavers for FC4

For those who haven’t seen them, the Really Slick Screensavers they really are some nice eye candy. A number of years ago, Tugrul Galatali ported them to Linux, primarily for use with XScreenSaver.

I’ve been pretty busy the past few months, so I was living without the RSS on my desktop since my move to FC4. I finally had some time to kill today, so I went about to get them up and running, and in RPM form. Since last time I installed them (version 0.7.4) Tugrul updated them to version 0.8.0. The spec file I used needed to be updated to match 0.8.0, to fix a small bug in the 0.8.0 build system, and account for differences in FC4. After a few moments of screwing around, I’ve got a spec file that works, a patch that works, and a built rpm.

This spec file is by no means perfect, as I’ve been learning how to build spec files on the fly, but it’ll work in most cases. I haven’t loaded it up with BuildRequires, but if you’ve got a modern desktop like GNOME or KDE installed and their devel packages, you should be in good shape.

I have to give credit to who originally put the spec file together, but I forget who that was. I’m fairly certain I got it from Tugrul’s page, but I can’t seem to find it again.

Maintenence fun

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It looks like everything went okay. For some reason on firefox the rich text editor isn’t working so well, but that’s something that effects me, not you as a reader.

Let me know if you see anything weird.