Category Archives: Geekstuff

Anybody know how I can get cheap access to a IBM VM/CMS system?

February 21, 2009 – 6:35 PM
Just for kicks, I’d like to do some programming on a VM/CMS system, build some menu-driven apps that I can access with a 3270 emulator. What’s my best bet for this sort of utterly useless programming experience? Why do I want to do this? Well, let’s just say I’ve got a hankering for the ole MIZZOU1 mainframe. I don’t feel like my life programming experience will be complete until I’ve done a bit of bona-fide mainframe programming. It doesn’t have to be on a mainframe, mind you. It can be “mainframe-like”. It has to be a descendant of the CMS series though, and I have to access it through a 3270 terminal emulator, because seriously, out of all the terminal emulators, those 3270s they used to have at the Univ of Missouri-Columbia computer labs in the late 80s used to make me think I was living in the world of Logan’s Run or THX 1138 every time I used them. Obviously, I’m influenced by this guy.... Read More »
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Web 2.0 - 6.0

February 21, 2009 – 6:24 PM
You’ve heard of Web 2.0, right? It’s all this Ajax crap. Ruby On Rails. Fun duo-syllabic names for web companies. Supposedly Web 3.0 is the “cloud”, but I’m reading that’s also Web 4.0. Just for kicks, google web 5.0. Interestingly enough, Web 6.0 is just far enough out there that it’s still an amusing punchline. All this, pardon my french, tells me that Web X.x is actually utter crap, which probably explains why I still get so much mileage out of Web 1.0 destinations. Update: Oh yeah, I just realized this is the 200th post on this blog in almost 7 years. Tearing the blogosphere a new one, ain’t I?... Read More »
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I really hate it when...

October 2, 2008 – 5:21 PM
…you get way too caught up in the discussions on a web forum, and then let somebody who repeatedly calls you “trash” and your mother a “c**t whore” press your buttons and get you to stoop as low as them, and respond in kind. It’s kinda debasing. I didn’t really want to grow up to be be a debaser I coulda been spending all that time hanging out with my kids. I really wish I knew how to quit these damn internet discussions. Shit. It’s like alcoholism.... Read More »
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Enough about the goddamn iPhone already

August 25, 2008 – 3:30 PM
Noone cares about your new iPhone purchase as much as you do. Yes, I'm taling to you. Read More »
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Gary Gygax, RIP

March 4, 2008 – 12:25 PM
Gary Gygax, who along with Dave Arneson, created Dungeons and Dragons, died this morning at the age of 69 at his home in Lake Geneva, WI. I am very saddened to hear of his passing. I cannot put into words how influential Mr. Gygax was in my life. He not only taught me to use my imagination, he taught me how to apply it within a system of rules and boundaries. That experience, more than any other, I believe is responsible for whatever moderate amount of success I have achieved as an adult. Thanks for everything Mr. Gygax. I hope you find the lands of your dreams in the afterlife.... Read More »
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DSL Speed Update

October 31, 2007 – 11:41 AM
Had Qwest send a DSL tech out here today. While the modem itself is reporting an outgoing speed of 1536 kbps and an incoming speed of 800 kbps, in “the real world” I’m actually getting: Apparently there was a “load” or “amplifier” on the line that needed to be removed in order to see the faster speeds. Didn’t cost me a dime. If the service remains reliable, I don’t really see how my cable internet provider can compete. The bad news is, it appears that getting any faster a speed anytime soon is not going to happen. DSL is only supposed to extend 18,000 feet from the point of presence, and we’re right at 19,000 feet. The Qwest tech said to be eligible for the 7Mbps connection, you’ve got to be within 7,000 feet of the POP, and unless Qwest builds a new facility, that probably ain’t gonna happen. Oh well, I guess any improvement is a worthwhile one.... Read More »
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So, I finally get DSL at my place in the mountains...

October 30, 2007 – 2:17 PM
and it absolutely sucks. I mean, it’s freaking slow, with amazingly high latencies. I was typing in a shell, and Missy was pulling up a web page on her laptop, and all of a sudden, I could no longer get a response from the shell. It was like being back on 28.8k dial-up. Supposedly, my connection is rated at “Up to 1.5 Mbit!” I think Qwest is leaning a bit too heavily on the phrase “Up to!”, because my connection speeds since the thing has been installed are barely a tenth of what’s supposed to be it’s maximum. In fact, here’s what I normally get: I’m trying to do their online chat thing to see if there’s anything they can do about it, but I’ve been in the chat room for 30 minutes now, with the following message repeated ad nauseum: “We are experiencing higher than usual service times. Please wait and an analyst will be with you shortly.” I guess their definition of “shortly” is right up there with “up to 1.5 Mbit/sec!” Fortunately, I still have my CanyonCable account, which is way faster: Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit on the unreliable side, although it goes for very long bouts of no problems whatsoever, followed by a week or two of it-doesn’t-fucking-work-at-all-oh-god-why-doesn’t-this-thing-fucking-work. OK, so I started writing this while I was in an online chat with Qwest, and after some fiddling, I’ve now got the following performance from my DSL line: It’s still a far cry from 1.5Mbit/sec, but at least it’s no longer in the same league as my old ISDN line. Still though, as someone who lusted after an ISDN line in 1994 as being the penultimate home internet connection, it pains me that, 13 years later, I’m still not surfing at insane speeds. Just another cost of living in the mountains. I’m pretty sure the peace and quiet and views and air quality are still worth it.... Read More »
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Inspired bit of casting

August 22, 2007 – 9:35 AM
I’d just like to say that casting Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach in the upcoming movie version of the Watchmen is one of the most inspired casting decisions I’ve seen in years. I think he was born to play this part, and can I just say that it’s really cool to see him having a late career resurgence? Seriously, after Kelly Leak and Moocher, it was bit parts, followed by a complete withdrawal from 1993 - 2006, and now he’s cast as Rorschach? I didn’t see Little Children, but I hear he’s really good in it. Also, they better not fuck up this movie. Heads will roll. That shit better be like, 3 hours long and as far away from the FF movie attitude as possible. Watchmen is precious to me.... Read More »
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I finally paid for LiveJournal

August 8, 2007 – 7:33 PM
So, I was trying to go back and delete the prodigious amounts of comment spam left on the LJ portion of my blog (I use LJ for comments, and although I’m fairly sure that most people who read my blog do so through LJ, I actually post these thoughts to mememiner.com, and through the magic of a cross-posting plugin, publish them to LJ at the same time), and I found that I could only go back so far in the comments in the easy list view to delete them. Since I didn’t really want any adultfriendfinder or hydrocodone ads in my comments, I figured it was worth ponying up $20 for a year’s worth of the pimped-out LJ experience. I’m not sure why I indulge, I don’t really post that often to my blog, but maybe this will change at some point. Kinda like how I have this kick-ass studio, yet don’t release any music. I’ve got a MySpace page, but I don’t put any work into it. I’m sure it will all change at some point, or at least, I’m gonna keep telling myself that. I think the reasoning for all of this is roughly the same: I feel like a damn narcissist every time I post to the blog, and like I recently posted on the idm list (the same post that got me in so much hot water with the aforementioned soon-to-be-disclosed-nutjob), I’m not such a damn egomaniac that I think anyone wants to hear my unfinished tracks.... Read More »
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Qmailsucks.org

April 24, 2007 – 4:45 PM
I’ve been meaning to get this off my chest for a long time, but if anyone is considering installing Qmail or the Qmailrocks distribution, here’s a word of advice: don’t. Now, I should point out that for many years, Qmailrocks worked just fine for me. The problem is, Qmail is stuck at v.1.03 because it’s creator is some kind of weirdo that doesn’t want to take the time to update it, but won’t allow the project to be branched and further developed, so if you want to update Qmail with modern SMTP features such as SMTP AUTH, STARTTLS, etc. you have to modify it with an increasingly-large patchset, many of which are incompatible with one another and of which any one could take down your production mail server for the better part of a day. Plus, it uses the absolutely ancient ezmlm mailing list manager, which was a great idea in 1999 or 2000, but pretty much sucks these days. Now, let me explain why I hate the Qmailrocks.org distribution in particular. Sure, it ships with some goofy settings that don’t really make sense in a production environment, but what really irks me is the support model. Qmailrocks has a web forum, which is comprised mostly of stuck newbies trying to figure out easy shit like permissions problems. It also has a support mailing list, of which there are no easily-accessible-or-search-able archives, which means you can’t easily look up a question that might have been asked before. Now, if the list was populated with really helpful people who didn’t mind seeing the same questions asked over and over again, that would be one thing, but it’s not. In fact, it’s populated by the kind of poorly-socialized, smarter-than-thou computer nerd that responds to legitimate, well-formed questions with a link to Eric S. Raymond’s How To Ask Smart Questions document, which is their (well, his) way of saying that you’ve asked a stupid question (I should also mention that I’m always annoyed when anything written by ESR is suggested to me). Additionally, the guy basically takes an attitude that if you haven’t, like him, spent many nights reading the Qmail source (I’m guessing, based on his online demeanor and general lack of socialization, that the guy has plenty of nights at home alone to devote to reading source), that you’re unqualified to not only run Qmail as your SMTP server, but also unworthy of asking a question in his little virtual clubhouse. I will say that I’m grateful for some of his little tools, and he did wind up giving me some useful advice, but given that getting legitimate questions answered on the mailing list initiates such a large amount of feather-fluffing on these guys’ parts, I decided to give up on Qmail altogether and migrate to a commercially-supported Postfix, vPostmaster. So if you find yourself in a position where you’ve got to set up email for the small-sized (or medium-sized) company you work for, and have not found yourself in the midst of people who think that “email server” == “Microsoft Exchange”, then by all means, avoid Qmail like the plague, and check out vPostmaster. (slightly edited for clarity and grammar)... Read More »
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New server

August 4, 2006 – 7:14 PM
After a 7+ -month hiatus, I’m back. I know I said goodbye to my LiveJournal site, but since my last post, it appears that LiveJournal is now supporting OpenID logins. If I can figure out if that works with my free account or not, I might keep posting there. Mememiner.com is now running on my a server I’m sharing with some co-workers. After years of doing my mail and personal websites on other people’s unix machines, I’m finally running my own. I’ll post more soon. Mostly I’m just testing the MT 3.3 upgrade with this post, and see if it will still post to my LJ account. Update: Looks like the ljcrosspost plugin still works, although I can’t seem to configure the comments on my basic-plus LJ account to accept OpenID for login.... Read More »
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MPC card reader mod

June 12, 2005 – 12:16 AM
So, almost 2 months after getting my IDE card reader in the mail, and having my MPC opened up with it’s guts spilled out in the corner of my studio for roughly the same amount of time, I finally got up the nerve to install it. Why did it take nerves? Because the power cable connecting the floppy drive to the motherboard used a floppy connector, and the IDE card reader I was installing uses 4-pin Molex. I spent some time at J.B. Saunders (Boulder’s excellent electronics supply store) trying to find a cable that would go from the motherboard with a 4-pin Molex out, but no such luck. It’s apparently a rare, maybe proprietary cable, so I was gonna be forced to splice a Molex cable to this proprietary cable, and I guess if I fucked it up I’d be left without a card reader or floppy. My worries were completely unwarranted. As my friend Chris said, it was clip, strip, wrap, solder and tape, and voila! My MPC has a nice flash-card reader, and I can say bye-bye to the zip drive and external SCSI. No more moving parts! Here’s a picture of the installed card reader: and here’s a picture of the 32MB CF card showing up as mounted:... Read More »
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Stupid Safari

April 19, 2005 – 2:54 AM
I knew there was a reason I quit using Safari -- it's CSS support stinks. See the great thing about CSS supposedly, is that it separates the display information from the content. You're supposed to be able to put your content wherever you want in your HTML page, and then through the wonders of CSS, render that content whichever way you want as long as you follow the rules. So let's say, that in a document where you're concerned primarily with content, like say, a listing of blog posts, you're going to subscribe to some hierarchical design philosophy, and put said listing of blog posts at the top, and links, etc at the bottom, and let CSS sort it all out right? Well, most browsers do not care about the topology of said content and instead follow CSS's positioning directives to a tee. Not included in these browsers is Safari. Perhaps I'm missing something here, but Safari wants it's left-to-right two-column web pages written in such a way that the stuff on the left appears on top, and the stuff on the right appears below it, valid CSS be damned. I have done this at the expense of my own content-organizin' philosophy so that the page doesn't look all fucked up in ye olde Apple browsere. Now when my page gets indexed by google, it'll grab all the links at the top instead of the real content. Thanks a lot Safari.... Read More »
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Post to del.icio.us from within NetNewsWire

March 23, 2005 – 10:59 PM
Really useful script for those moments when you want to add a del.icio.us bookmark from NetNewsWire (say, something you found on oishii’s RSS feed: Net News Wire 2.0 -> del.icio.us Apple Script... Read More »
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CYBER CLAUS

December 24, 2004 – 7:16 PM
CYBER CLAUS: “In the night of 12/24/07, though sensors woven through the very fabric of the house had thus far registered a complete absence of sentient bio-activity, I found myself abruptly summoned from a rare, genuine and expensively induced examples of that most priceless of states, sleep. (Via Gibson Blog.)... Read More »
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MarsEdit

November 5, 2004 – 11:08 PM
Here’s a test post using Ranchero Software’s (the same people who make NetNewsWire) MarsEdit. Although Movable Type’s web interface works just fine for me, I hope that having a specific tool for editing and posting to my weblog will somehow result in more posts. Mostly though, this post is meaningless.... Read More »
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LiveJournal Crossposting!

May 23, 2004 – 9:34 PM
I just installed Chip Marshall’s excellent lj-crosspost tool. This neat little Movable Type plugin now allows me to crosspost my blog entries here at mememiner.com to my LiveJournal blog. Why would I want to do this? Mostly, to tap into LiveJournal’s excellent user community, something my little blog’s comment section can’t compete with. Also, because it’s a really geeky and fun thing to do. Because of the way it crossposts, and the way I’ve set it up in my MT templates, it wound up archiving all of my mememiner blogs onto my LiveJournal site, with the same dates and times that they originally appeared in mememiner. I also had to delete 4 old posts from the mememiner archives because the XML-RPC mechanism used to update the LJ site kept barfing on some of the posts, but c’est la vie. There’s a few things that don’t work quite right; you can’t change a post’s status from “Publish” to “Draft” in Movable Type and expect the LiveJournal post to reflect this (I think this is because LJ has no corresponding “draft” functionality), and I don’t think deleting a post on Movable Type will also delete the post on LJ. I’m also not quite sure how to use mtkeyvalues with lj-crosspost to set the mood, music and picture LJ attributes such that those things show up in my LiveJournal post, but not my MT post (where they wouldn’t make much sense, frankly). Still though, it works pretty damn well. Now to figure out how to build a photoblog with MT. BTW, if you’ve subbed to the mememiner feed on LiveJournal, you might want to unsub so you don’t see duplicate posts.... Read More »
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All the crap I subscribe to

May 21, 2004 – 3:17 PM
In my never-ending quest to be as narcissistically geeky as possible, I've added a link to my latest OPML file, aka my personal RSS subscriptions, to the front page of mememiner. If you're interested in what I read every day, or just need a solid list of RSS feeds to start out with, grab that file and import it into your newsreader. I'll upload a new version of this file every time my subscription list changes. For what it's worth, I use NetNewsWire on the Powerbook and FeedDemon on the Dell desktop.... Read More »
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Sweet version of Win2VNC

May 19, 2004 – 5:55 PM
So for the last year or so, I've been using a combination of the programs Win2VNC and OSXvnc to integrate keyboard and mouse control between my Powerbook and Dell desktop. I fire up OSXvnc, then fire up Win2VNC on the PC, scroll my mouse pointer to the left side of the PC screen, and it reappears on the right-hand side of the Powerbook screen. While it's over there, input from the keyboard is sent as well. Move it back east and it re-appears on the west side of the PC monitor. I can even cut and paste text from one machine to the other. This is an unbelievably convenient way of working, and going back to typing on the Powerbook after years of using an ergonomic keyboard cuts my typing accuracy and speed by about 30% (BTW, what happened to these things? It seems manufacturers aren't really interested in them anymore -- i.e. I have yet to see an ergonomic bluetooth keyboard.). One major problem I always had though was that there was no mouse wheel support on the remote machine (Powerbook) and certain key combos (such as Alt-Tab or Ctrl-Esc) would lock Win2VNC, necessitating a Ctrl-Alt-Del on the Dell, pulling up the task manager and manually killing the Win2VNC process. Given that the Alt-Tab combo is a very common keyboard combo for me, I find this extremely frustrating when it inevitably happens 2 or 3 times a day. I couldn't find a new version on the Win2VNC homepage, but I did find a link to a hacking/support blog of sorts, wherein the topic of mouse wheel support came up. After reading through some posts, I came across a kick-ass modification of Win2VNC. I guess I could have just have dug a few entries deeper in the Google results and would have discovered this modification available via SourceForge, but honestly, I thought the original version was on SourceForge and it was a redundant link. Feico de Boer's version of Win2VNC hacks in mouse wheel support and, by using the Scroll Lock key for the first time EVER (for this user, at least), allows one to not only use key combos on the host machine without locking it, but also send them to the remote machine! Now I know that this doesn't sound like much -- but please understand that I use this VNC combo every day, for 10 hours/day, and these little enhancements make this way of working not just functional and convenient, but now, for the first time ever, SWEET. If you've got two machines you want to control from one keyboard/mouse combo, I suggest giving this version of Win2VNC a whirl.... Read More »
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Speaking of Atom feeds

May 14, 2004 – 10:19 PM
I've added one for mememiner.... Read More »
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Google Groups goes Atom

May 14, 2004 – 9:29 PM
I read today on BoingBoing that the new beta of Google Groups features the ability to subscribe to Atom feeds of newsgroups. They also suggested a newsreader called Shrook (which has support for Atom feeds), but I think I'll stick with the beta of NetNewsWire, which has support for Atom, although I had to Google for this info, as the Atom beta isn't listed on the NNW beta page. Of course, the really sad part is that while this is certainly one of the coolest things to happen to Usenet in a while, as a medium of discussion it is pretty much an irredeemable cesspool. I've subbed to the feeds of boulder.general, rec.music.ambient and alt.music.techno nonetheless.... Read More »
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Added Site Meter

May 9, 2004 – 9:28 PM
Added one of those sitemeter traffic thingees, so I can be underwhelmed at the extremely low traffic that hits the site (for now). It's on the right.... Read More »
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In Praise of Japanese Otaku...

July 23, 2003 – 8:55 PM
Just watch this I love the Japanese.... Read More »
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wireless, aw yeah.

December 23, 2002 – 5:45 AM
i'm at my mother-in-law's home in lake saint louis, missouri. one of the drawbacks to being here is the lack of high-speed internet connectivity. or so i thought anyway. i spent all day yesterday working at a friend's house so i could take advantage of their DSL line to get some work done. i get home to said mother-in-law's house last night, flip on the powerbook, and find that a neighbor is running an unsecured linksys network access point, and that they are getting their connectivity via WDSL. long story short: i've been on the net since last night free-of-charge getting about 40-50k/sec downloads. hilarious. my geeky brother-in-law was tres impressed. i think he's ordering WDSL soon. he's been on dial-up modem all this time.... Read More »
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