Okay, this has to be the best Christmas gift ever.

MeriAnne? bought me an Acer Aspire One which I spent last night installing Linux on (I left XP on with a 20G partition... maybe I will need it some day) and it totally rocks.

A tiny little Linux box (okay, it's bigger than my Nokia 700 and my SqueezeBox Controller... but it has a much better screen than either of those, and a keyboard as well.. and 160G drive, running Debian and Gnome.)

Out the box Debian Net-install, the X server and wireless didn't work. Grabbing an X server from Debian Testing worked for the X server, and grabbing a new kernel fixed the wireless. Now it works perfectly.. well, need to fix some LEDs so they light for wifi and such, but.. really this is one slick toy.

Between that and a hellish week, and a bad week for my baby car, I am very happy I lucked out and found (and married! :P) MeriAnne?.

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hah, I see that for some reason Google think it is smart to run a match.com ad over on the left.

Let's see, match.com is the one who introduced me to the woman who was in her 30's, and two weeks earlier broke up with her fiance, who had just turned 21... (for those counting, that is two danger signs in one.. try to count them all!). She wanted to tell me she was very open minded, because she took her then-fiance to a strip club for his 21st birthday and paid for him to get a lap dance.

And I shouldn't really be concerned about how often CSD visited her, her son just had some metabolism issues, and he really was eating, he would just not gain weight.

And the reason she no longer had a car is because they went to the coast with another couple and the other woman was somehow injured and they didn't want to go to a hospital on the coast because they would ask a lot of questions, so they drove 100 miles back home, but got stopped and her fiance didn't know that his license was suspended, so they impounded the car and she doesn't have the money to get it back...

And somewhere in there I lost the call.

Or there is the woman who insisted that we meet soon, because she had to get back to her old place and get the stuff out before her husband (!) threw it all out and she was hoping she would survive that trip back to the house, and i better call quick because he would probably turn off her cell phone.

So, um, no to match.com.

Eharmony is another matter, though.

(Of course, it is nice to be out of the online dating game, but.. I can say from experience that Eharmony is the only one worth the trouble. The others are not only a waste of time and money, they are filled with some very dangerous people.)

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In the past year, my job has changed drastically: from a bored Linux admin (even with a half dozen servers and a few thousand customers, really, my job was mostly boring...) to a Linux admin, webmaster for 5 sites (3 of which are very dynamic, getting a large number of page views per day) running Tikiwiki on one for a company intranet site and Drupal for the others.

Three of the Drupal sites are pretty tweaked in layout, but really just boring news sites. Bonus features are hacking the ad module to handle FLV ads, support for FLVs to be attached to items, and some fun layout and styling stuff, which is still pretty simple with Drupal and theming "views". This was all done in less than 3 months with really only me doing code and a cow-orker doing much of the basic layout and flow, and it replaced a project that costs tens of thousands in software alone, plus 7 servers and 3 fulltime employees for a year... and still didn't work.

The Tikiwiki site is mostly a stock Tikiwiki with some fun trackers for things like vacation requests... and an especially cool Jabber IM server which has been really useful... but it is pretty much something I ignore now, which is too bad, since I actually really enjoy Tikiwiki despite some annoyances.

And this month's fun is Yet Another Drupal site... but instead of having thousands of stories and different ways to show them, there are only a couple dozen pages (right now), but the layout is the important thing, with odd sized blocks overlaying each other, and precisely positioned.

Which is why I hate HTML and CSS, and especially IE. Stupid Microsoft ignoring standards and making it difficult to design for their browser. ("Hey, why is that box 40 pixels too low? It works fine in Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror... oh wait, IE sucks.. that's why.")

My employer has saved a small fortune, in the order of tens of thousands of dollars a year by moving from a broken proprietary system to Free Software. And I still have my 12 year old waiver that any code I write or modify, I can release as GPL, so I can submit patches to Tikiwiki (yay!) written on company time... (simple logic: if I submit a bug fix or feature it stays fixed on future updates so I don't have to keep redoing the same work.)

Would be nice if I got a cut of the money saved, though.

But now back to figuring out why IE decided to move some boxes down, and why it is ignoring my z-index and stacking the boxes wrong.

(But, yes, that is why I am so quiet... and why this page is so neglected...)

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There are some programs that I totally depend on in order to have a semblance of a life away from my servers...

One of those is key. It is my real trick to sleeping at night, even if it does sometimes wake me...

mon is such a beast.

It is incredibly reliable... before the last time someone at work toasted a server (hint: it is bad to miss the 'bypass' mode on the building UPS and swing it all the way to Off.. it is equally bad to then swing it back to On in a panic...), I had a mon process that had been running continously for 3 years, notifying me of every failure and impeding failure I had configured, which over the past 12 years as built up a pretty good set of things to test).

Anyway, I was looking for a supplement to mon.cgi that had a simpler UI so that I could ack pages easily from my cell phone... and I remember how infrequently I update mon, yet how crucial it is to my job.... and how much I rely on it.

Mon is the exception to most softare: it gets updated infrequently because it has a very complete feature set (and adding new monitors is trivial, often not even worth submitting them to the contrib monitors, because they are so trival it is easier to write one than even download it...) and ... just.. works.

In a world where software needs continuous updates to provide missing features and fix horrible bugs, mon is a rarity.

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tw 2.2 will be released "in a few hours"...

Yeeks. Version upgrade mania, which is good: tikiwiki upgrades tend to not totally destroy everything as Drupal's do. ("Sorry, all your plugins need to be upgraded, and it may be months before that happens...")

So I am holding off a bit on my tedious changes do modifier.sefurl.php and various templates.

See, I like the whole 'search engine friendly urls' thingie, which works great for wikitext, but doesn't do anything for galleries, blogs, etc. Even though the default .htaccess file allows for things like "/gallery23" to go to the browse_gallery page for gallery 23, nothing outputs code that would do that.

So, I changed up modifier.sefurl.php a bit and added a couple cases to handle blogs and galleries.. but then it gets ugly with 1283 templates to change to invoke sefurl on each call.

And work keeps distracting me from doing important stuff. (Though since I use tw at work, this does sort of help work, I think it's a nifty cleanup.)

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another fun week at work

This week's fun toys:

Policyd

policyd... since one of the servers I have to deal with is filled with people who seem to think that sending their username and password off to Nigeria is a good idea, which leads to tons of Nigerian 419 schemes spewing from the server. It is low on my list of fun things to delete thousands of pieces of spam every morning.

Policyd lets me set limits on a per-user, per-time-interval basis, ie, "you can send 50 pieces of mail an hour for a total of 100 recipients" before it forces the account to cooldown and let the timer reset. Users that are more trusted than others (ie, I don't think they will be sending their password all over the place) can be given higher mail quotas. Add in a couple interesting things like spamtraps that autoblacklist and it seems to be working very well.

Since I installed it, there have been 3 spammers blocked, all before they got off 300 mails total, which beats me cleaning up thousands of items each with hundreds of recipients.

Drupal

The other fun is just more Drupal stuff. It is still mostly fun to make pointless tweaks. This week's fun is to piece together a "mobile" set of sites with cell-phone capable menuing and content. It works reasonably well despite having a shortage of content.

Other Stuff

I have more pictures to upload: MeriAnne and I went back to Dee Wright Observatory last weekend, and it was as impressive as last time, but this time with a sprinkling of Snow. It looks like we timed it just right, since the old highway closed this week due to rockslides, and with more cold weather coming, the road will close soon for the winter.

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Okay, so I don't have anything in particular to say that fits the title, but I still think it is a cool title.

As I wade through my unsorted unlabelled and randomly named images, trying to make some sense of the stacks of chaos I have let build up, I ran across this one from a trip to the Oregon Coast Aquarium earlier this year with MeriAnne?... I like it.

So that is the open maw, but, alas, life is fine and I have nothing to say that would fit the title at all.

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for some reason tikiwiki is still being a pain in the butt regarding permissions.  I have to grant myself far too many permissions in order to just post images or blogs...

Batch-upload-dir, for example, seems to want admin privs which is just wrong.

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Hrrmph. Tikiwiki is still doing odd things with permissions, but I guess that is what I get for using svn trunk...

At any rate, a quick bit of perl and I magically got all the images with the correct datestamps despite being snarfed in and out of gallery and tikiwiki a couple times.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Image::Info  qw(image_info);
use Time::ParseDate;

foreach $file ( @ARGV )
{
   next if $file =~ /thumb/;
   next if $file =~ /scaled/;

   my $info = image_info($file);
   $date = $info->{'DateTimeOriginal'};
   $date =~ s|^(\d+):(\d+):(\d+)|\1-\2-\3|;
   $stamp = parsedate($date);
   print "UPDATE tiki_images SET created = $stamp WHERE path LIKE '$file';\n";
}

Now to figure out how to use tiki markup in blog posts...

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or Killing Babies for Fun and Profit....

This is one of those things I wish I had the foresight to grab the camera for... but there is no photographic record and the evidence has been, well, eradicated. You'll have to take my word for it.

Thousands dead, including tons of innocent babies, both born and fetuses.

The story? Bah, isn't that enough?

Fine.

Sunday night I noticed my yard light was stuck on. It is supposed to have a motion sensor and only come on when things, well, move. But it was on solid and nothing was moving: so I went out to look.

There were tons of ants crawling around in and on the little gizmo that has the light/motion sensor... hundreds. And if I looked through the translucent plastic lens, I could see they were on the inside.

Swell: so I put out some poison and went to bed.

The next morning they were still playing. They were not impressed with the poison. So I added some of the other poison I have.... and went to work.

Tuesday evening they were still partying like mad. I could smack the motion detector and dozens of ants would run out to see what was going on.... blah. I mentioned this to the maintainance guy at work and he said, "ooh, you need to try this stuff, they love it and it will kill the colony in a couple days!" and he gave me a syringe full of nasty sticky death-to-all stuff.

I duly placed it on the light, on the wall the light is on, even in the little hole, and they did seem to like it. They gathered to it immediately and started feeding. Success!

But last night, I went out and they were still there: it didn't seem like I was making a dent at all. I remembered I had some spray poison in the kitchen: the kind you really shouldn't use — killing ants on patrol or recon missions won't stop them. You need to kill their queen in the nest.

But there were so many, that I figured I could at least drop their population some and therefore make the poison get to the survivors faster. I smacked the detector a few times and they started to escape, and I sprayed. Some more came out, and I sprayed them, too. Oily ant corpses.

I looked at the bottom of the sensor and figured I could squirt into the hole they were using to come and go: and I did, which lead to even more enemy casualties:. They started staggering out, and then plummetting to their deaths as they reeled in the spray.

And then I saw what I feared: through the translucent lens I could see hundreds more ants. It was a smear of moving black dots.... and little white ones.... eggs.

Yes, leave it to me to find the most socially maladjusted ants in the world: ants that want to live in an ant colony. "Oh, and look we have a window on one side, this is cool, now people can watch us move around!" There are carpenter ants, thief ants, pharoah ants, acrobat ants.. and I get the exhibitionist ants.

So I fiddled with the lens a bit and found I could move it and squirt even more spray inside, right on top of the critically wounded mass and their eggs. So I did. And then the corpses really fell, in big clumps of black and white, taking their innocent babies with them.

I pulled off the lens completely and gave it a final spraydown and watched the last of them die: then I got the hose and washed the corpses and eggs away.

See why owning a home is part of the American Dream? It gives us an excuse for massmurder and destruction. What could be better?

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