Searching for Tao, 7573 Kilometres from Home

February 23, 2004 03:11 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

the one big impediment to publishing the source for this blogger is finally fixt. the theme manager seemed to work properly, but in reality, i was just faking it to make it work while i figured out what to do. the problem had less to do with a bug, and more to do with how to write the theme manager properly, but now it's actually fixt... which means i'll be able to publish the source code within a week or so.

February 22, 2004 07:44 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

i took a trip to the w3c's validator today and was really surprised at how badly my blogger failed the tests. apparently attributes like "border" are deprecated for html 4 and are supposed to be replaced with stylesheets. so i killed an hour or so today going through the site nuking all occurences of the attribute and replacing it with a single, global entry in style.css for each type i'd applied it to (<table> and <img>). not big news if you're not a geek, but interesting to me.

February 13, 2004 17:54 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

from slashdot:

shystershep writes "It's official. Microsoft admits that 'portions of the Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code were illegally made available on the Internet.' No more details, although it seems clear that it is only a portion of the code. Microsoft is, naturally, downplaying its impact, while everyone else is busy speculating about how serious this could get." A lot of you apparently haven't read yesterday's story. An investigation of the code is already underway.

i'm not going to lecture here. but here's the gist of the possible reprocussions: a) virus levels and destructive payloads could increase, b) the end of micros~1's "security through obsurity" campaign ("our stuff is more secure 'cause no one can see the code" etc.) c) micros~1 could go after various Free software projects like samba and kde claiming that members of the development process for those projects have been influcenced by seeing their copyrighted code and therefore, they own the rights to it.

it'll be an interesting next few months let me tell you. bitorrents are already circulating.

January 31, 2004 03:18 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

for you internet exploder users, you may have noticed that some entries in my blog don't have the nice little grey line on the right. this is not my fault and i refuse to once again modify my work to compensate for micros~1's crappy code. the bug arises whenever someone uses an <em> tag to make some italicised text and said text wraps to the next line. it works in konqueror, it works in mozilla and it works in opera. therefore, micros~1 can "lick me today".

kudos to angela for that one.

January 22, 2004 05:43 +0000 | Geek Stuff Personal Life 0

pavel invited me out tonight to attend something called a "nerd rave". it was at a club we'd been to before where i'd had a nice time so figured: "why not?" here's why: it was rediculously lame. no offense to pavel who i'm sure enjoyed his time there, but it was a room full of irc geeks who all knew each other well enough to not need to communicate over the absolutely terrible music. i spent the whole hour and a half i was there getting my ear talked off by a drunken idiot named "mike" who just wouldn't stop talking. a really, really unhappy time was had.

however, when i finally escaped, i went for a walk on the frozen streets of toronto. at 11pm, the city is still somewhat alive, the occasional bar or cafe still open to passers by. i window shopped in at the long closed trendy stores on queen, passed city hall and wandered up yonge to the hard rock cafe where i stopped in for an $8 milkshake (last time i'll ever do that). it was cold out, but not brutal, and the wind was low. i chatted up a garbage man doing the recycling rounds, asking him questions about the amount of stuff that actually gets recycled and process of it all. you'd be surprised at how much people love to talk about their jobs -- and how much they know about something you might be interested in. next time, just ask... you might be pleasantly surprised.

January 15, 2004 03:56 +0000 | Geek Stuff Nifty Links 2

i've recently upgraded the blogger to handle something micros~1 calls "accessibility options". this a feature i plan to expand on later, but for now, certain people who have trouble with small, low contrast fonts will have an easier to read layout once they've logged in. it's based on a set of dynamically-called stylesheets, which are in turn based on the style engine. and the code is near ready to post. i just have to include a few docs with it first.

to add to the list of cool stuff online, i offer you grocerygateway.com. it's what i've always heard should be available, but until now, i've not seen anywhere. order all of your groceries online, at normal prices, in the sizes you like. i just placed an order and it'll be here on thursday (sadly, next week. i ordered too late to get it tomorrow morning). when it comes in, i'll post a review.

January 12, 2004 23:25 +0000 | Employment Geek Stuff 0

every once in a while you have one of those days where you fight and fight and fight with a stupid machine and in the end..... you actually win. today was such a day. but for the record: getting cvs to work from windows over ssh using key-based authentication is a rediculous bitch of a thing. ...you just have to remember to to think like a windows user, and not an intelligent person ;-).

and here's the howto that did it for me. there's a lot of them out there, but as crackt-out as this one may look, it really is the best.

January 05, 2004 02:13 +0000 | Geek Stuff 0

somehow, magically, anarchy is responding again. i tried to login today at around 5pm pst and somehow, everything works. i don't know why, and i'm going to have to spend a few hours finding out, but for now, i'm just happy my cpu isn't dead ;-)

January 02, 2004 21:32 +0000 | Geek Stuff 4

this post is strictly a geek rant, so if you don't know what ssh, x11, or linux is, you probably don't want to keep reading.

my desktop is not responding.
it's been 3days of me trying to get in, to figure out what's broken. my yahoo mail account is almost full and if i don't get in and run kmail soon, yahoo will likely start bouncing emails.

so what's wrong?
essentially the box is up and running, but the cpu load is at 4 and has been there for an unknown number of days. something (i'm thinking it's arts from kde 3.2-beta2) has run away with my cpu. linux is nifty there friends, but stay the hell away from that beta stuff. of course any number of other processes might have blown up, but without a working shell, i can't really speculate.

however, it would seem that the gods were indeed smiling last night (or maybe just taunting and laughing) 'cause after repeated login attempts, i actually got in. see, it basically lets me login, then waits..... forever. then dies with "connection closed by ". but this one time, it actually let me in. slowly going through each stage of the login until i finally got my prompt (this is where i saw the cpuload). so what did i do? diagnosing the problem seemed somewhat improbable, since just typing "su" took about 10min. so i just put in the following:

su
[password]
reboot

i got the "this system is going down now!" bit and got kicked out. yay! i thought, now my box will work again! but it would seem that the box never actually rebooted 'cause my continuous pings never dropped a single packet.... i'm trying something similar now and if i get in again i'll let you know if it works. otherwise, i'll be doing this half-awake when i get home in a few days.

January 01, 2004 09:35 +0000 | Geek Stuff Personal Life 3

i'm downstairs in jeanie's room trying to fix a number of seemingly broken things that blew up for the new year. my blogger's theme engine broke and right now, i've just hacked it to *look* like it's working. not only that, but my desktop box isn't responding to my login attempts, even though i can ping it... not sure what's going on there, but it can't be good.

new years here @ the sebastian household was kinda nice. i got to hang out with family #2 and quinn @ paula even came out to the party. i've missed everyone terribly and it was really great to see them. we're all spending the night and i'm looking forward to waffles come morning. then, if the roads are friendly, i'll be getting on a big smelly bus and heading back up to kelowna to spend my final days in western Canada. it's a beautiful place to live and i'm sure i'll end up here again someday.

when i was younger, i used to use new years to look back on the stuff i did over the year. and typically it was centred around the ladies in my life (why is this not surprising?). i think for now though, i'll end it here -- 'cause apparently "god" is calling for me to come upstairs. i think we're going to watch "pirates of the carribean". i'm sure jeanie's excited.