Posts

Wed, Jan 29, 2003

So rather than utilize a junk windows PC for my computer for research, I have been allocated a SunBlade 100, not a bad computer at all. The problem is that I need USB network device driver support for it. Solaris doesn’t cut it. So I figured that I would install Linux on it. The natural choice, at least for me, was Gentoo. It seems like a nice enough distribution. I like the entirely from source totally-up-to-date aspect of it.

Tue, Jan 21, 2003

It’s a good thing that I live in an area where not that many people have computers. I doubt that anyone above or below me has a wireless keyboard. My neighbors are old folks who probably don’t have a computer. But in Norway, well there you could be using the same keyboard as your neighbor and it might take a while to find out. Well, not the same keyboard, but you would get interference.
I’m glad that I started using the MySQL stuff for movable type. I just wrote snippet of code that selects the five most recent entries from my blog and produces links for them. Here is the code (where it’s assumed $GLOBALS[“dbh”] is a handle to the PEAR database handle): function mtLink($_entryId, $_entryTitle, $_entryDate) { echo "<li><a href=\"weblog/archives/"; for ($i = (6 - strlen($_entryId)); $i > 0; $i --) { echo "0"; } echo $_entryId.

Mon, Jan 20, 2003

For a long time I was a bit of a MySQL bigot. I preferred to use PostgreSQL because it had some more advanced support built in for things like transactions. Well, the conversion back to MySQL has been pretty nice. I just found out about MySQL Control Center which is a nifty GUI by the MySQL people for administering databases. Although I know SQL, the GUI makes it easy to do simple things.

Sun, Jan 19, 2003

I’m sure most people by now have heard of the evils of the RIAA and how Hillary Rosen is just plain misguided about technology. Apparently at a conference in Cannes, France, Ms. Rosen suggested that there be a surcharge for people who utilize peer to peer services. This is impossible to enforce. It would require an ISP to monitor every connection that is made and furthermore dig into the data. Of course, slashdot spun the story to make it sound as though Rosen was a fire-breathing hobgoblin who demanded the fee from all users, which isn’t what she said at all.
So, after the fiasco with ecollege.com I decided to look up how to change my browsers user-agent (I use galeon). Here is how you do it (take from the Galeon Faq): To get the current user agent type: gconftool -g /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent To set a user agent type: gconftool -s /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent –type=string “XXX” For example, to make the system think that you’re running IE 6.0 on WinXP do this: gconftool -s /apps/galeon/Advanced/Network/user_agent –type=string “Mozilla/4.

Fri, Nov 22, 2002

Okay, so I tried to contact these people and the addresses bounced, go figure. Here is the followup email that I just sent to their techsupport and evaluation@iit.edu. This is a followup to a phone call I just had with your technical support people. The first issue is that of email addresses on this page: http://iit.ecollege.com/pubinclude/ErrMessaging.asp?Error_Type=13&LTID=A&ClientID=&ClientString=&URL=A%5FPSH%2Ereal&browser=Netscape&version=5 It tells me to email techsupport@realed.com, but this is the response that I receive: > From: System Administrator <postmaster@ecollege.
The IIT Course Evaluation Site does not currently support Mozilla. Let them know that you use Mozilla and would like it to be supported. Email evaluation@iit.edu and techsupport@realed.com and ask them to support Mozilla based browsers. Here is the email that I just sent. As a person who cares both about my personal security and the quality of my software, I am more than a little surprised at your lack of support for Mozilla based browsers on the IIT evaluation site.

Tue, Nov 19, 2002

With telnet most people know you can hit ^] to escape back to the program, but most people don’t realize that you can do a similar thing with OpenSSH. This is VERY helpful when your session dies. In OpenSSH the escape key is the tilde. Here is the segment from the OpenSSH manual. *Escape Characters* When a pseudo terminal has been requested, ssh supports a number of func- tions through the use of an escape character.

Wed, Nov 13, 2002

Here is an interesting article from CNN about how Mitch Kapor is working to put together another open source challenger to outlook. So what makes his different from Evolution. Well, it’s not evolution to put it simply. It still is open source and all, but it’s gonna run on Windows and Mac to start with. This is a huge boon to the system. Kapor is known as the guy who started Lotus.