Geeky Baldisms

I gathered these rocks from the roadside on a quiet country lane. It was at the site of a cutout about 10' deep.

The rocks are brown in color, and very porous. They get very soft when saturated in water.

First, the one that got away. I found an exquisitely detailed trilobite rear end that literally crumbled when I split the rock open. Sadly (and stupidly), I didn't photograph it on the spot. It crumbled into nothingness when I attempted to trim the rock down a bit.

Live and learn, as they say.

Here are some pics of some fossils that I did manage to successfully extract:

A small brachiopod, but exquisitely detailed. The soft rock preserves extremely fine details, as you will learn by continuing.

Continue reading "Fossils from Soft Rock, Benton County, Arkansas, 6/2009" »

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This post will concentrate on finds that I discovered that cost me a pretty penny.

I mean, I'm in northwest Arkansas, I'm on a country road, a car passes every twenty minutes. No need to lock your door, right?

Apparently so. Some disgusting slimeball stole my iPod and my GPS. I gave the cops a description of your car, scum. Rest easy.

Anyhow, on a more positive note, I found some killer stuff. Here we go:

This is exactly the SECOND crinoid calyx I've ever found. The first one still lies in the wash in the woods on my Pea Ridge, Arkansas farm home I enjoyed when I was fourteen. It's in a slab that was too massive for a kid to mess with. It's just as well. I'm sure I would have misplaced it by now, as I did with a bunch of massive oysters I found in Austin, Texas construction sites as a kid.

Continue reading "Fossils from a Recent Escapade" »

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Just so you know, I'll probably be getting another domain set up soon for my fossils. I'll try to keep this one concentrated on the geeky, computer-wise (and the occasional gripe). I've been having a BLAST getting back into a pastime that I enjoyed a lot as a kid. I've met some great folks on the web who have been helping me identify unusual finds.

This post will be very graphics-intensive, my apologies to those of you still dialing up.

Let's start with an absolutely amazing massive crinoid stalk:

Here's the monster still in its matrix.

Continue reading "More Fossils" »

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It's not computers, but it's geeky. Here are some pics of some recent fossil finds.

Crinoid stalks.

Crinoid Mass. That big stalk is about two inches long.

Continue reading "Fossils!" »

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Logwatch is an invaluable tool. It will sum up your error logs and send them to you in an email on a daily basis, if you set up a cron job for it.

I have taken to setting it up on every *ix server I manage.

But the daily logwatch entries from my CentOS web server that I lease were huge, ungainly monsters, due to reporting the activity of every bot (thanks again, Microsoft) that was vainly attempting to use my server to send out the latest VI4AGR4 spam.

I'm more concerned with attempted ssh breakins, Clamav scan results, FTP activity, etc.

So I started doing Google searches for stuff like logwatch ignore courier mail.

Nada.

Fortunately, I've gotten geeky enough over the years to go digging through conf files on my own, and I solved the problem.

Continue reading "Getting Logwatch Under Control" »

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Today's the day that 9.04 is released, and guess what? Ubuntu.com's servers are swamped!

I don't think it's a DOS attack from Windows zombies.

I believe the entire world is downloading Jaunty Jackalope!

Thanks, Ubuntu team, for getting millions turned onto Linux :-D

In 2007, The Consumerist held a poll and determined that the RIAA was the single most hated company in America.

Gee, sue a few grandmothers and grade-school-age kids, and all of a sudden the world gets all testy about you.

The RIAA survives today largely through litigation. Many musical artists have expressed their disdain of the recording industry in general, and of the RIAA in particular.

The basis for most of the legal shenanigans perpetrated by the massive corporate entitiy which makes lots of money from the talents of others is this: Anything we produce is copyrighted. Any usage of anything we produce which is not expressly approved by us is illegal, and will be prosecuted.

Let's back up a minute. A musician, as well as a company which owns the rights to a musician's work, all make money through sales.

What is a large factor that drives sales? Buzz.

Where does buzz come from? Word of mouth.

What drives word of mouth? People getting their hands on stuff.

Continue reading "The RIAA and the Art of Not Getting It" »

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My I Remember JFK site has lots of small graphical images on it which many folks love linking to to display on their own sites.

The problem is that what they are doing is costing me bandwidth.

I have a stated policy on the site that individuals can copy a graphic and use it on their site as long as they give irememberjfk.com credit.

But unfortunately, many choose instead to simply link directly to the image.

The powerful .htaccess file will put a stop to it. I'm listing mine here, for the benefit of any others who might have the same problem. Read on.

Continue reading "Foiling Graphics Leeching" »

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I just noticed that my Windows virtual machine is off by an hour.

No problem. I'll just download the KB931836 patch and fix it.

So, I begin by visiting the Windows Update site via IE. I get scanned, the site suggests I use express install to get up to date.

No thanks.

I'm running service pack 2 on XP Pro. It's a legal copy. It would blast through WGA authentication.

Except...

I refuse.

I think WGA is the single most contemptible way to treat customers that has ever been devised.

On Seinfeld, customers risk the wrath of the soup Nazi because his product is perfect.

Why would Windows users accept the same treatment for a product that is so fundamentally flawed?

Continue reading "My Windows Virtual Machine is Off by an Hour" »

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McDonald's is #1 in the fast food industry.

They dominate, but not overwhelmingly so. Burger King made inroads several years back to knock the golden arches off of their perch at #1. During this time, they attacked McDonald's by name in their advertising.

McDonald's never, ever mentioned Burger King or any other competitor in their ads. Despite stupid hot coffee lawsuits, changing perception of good taste vs. good diet, and relentless advertising by their rivals, McDonald's simply continued to advertise their product on its merits alone, without referring to its competition.

I'm not a big fan of McDonald's, although I will treat myself to a high-fat, high-calorie helping of the most delicious french fries on the planet. But I only eat them occasionally.

The point that I'm making is that you don't mention the competition in your advertising unless (a) you're feeling like you can dethrone #1, or (b) you are #1, but a sinking ship.

The strategy sometimes works in the former case. It has for Apple, in their Mac vs. PC commercials. It NEVER works in the latter.

With that, if you've been watching the NCAA Basketball Tournament on TV, you've likely spotted the commercial where the redheaded ditz comes to the conclusion that buying a laptop computer with Windows Vista on it is a much, much better deal than purchasing a MacBook.

The Microsoft ship has begun to list.

Continue reading "The Microsoft Ship Begins to List" »

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I can't give too many details about my 9-to-5, they are a conservative company who doesn't like their employees running on at the mouth about their business.

But I manage an intranet, one loaded with php/mysql apps. I also communicate with Oracle, SQL Server, and any other platform out there which allows ADODB connections.

The intranet has to be Active Directory-aware. Most of the apps are locked down to limited access based on group membership.

I have managed to put apache to work on Windows Server 2003 usind mod_sspi_auth. That weaned me from IIS. IIS is designed to work with MS-specific web technologies, and making it play ball with php is like getting a horse to dance. It's possible, but the horse will never dance as well as Gregory Hines.

But let's face it. I'm still subject to the whims of Windows. Updates that mangle customized coding, the occasional system foobar, the need to reboot at least once a month, that all is the sort of thing that causes one to get paged at 3:00 AM.

Thus, I decided to spend some time on building a Linux system and put mod_ntlm_auth to work. The payoff would be freedom from Windows.

I guess you have to be a developer specializing in open-source apps to know just how sweet that feeling would be.

This site gives you the details on what procedure I followed. What follows here are the hurdles that I ran into myself, and how I cleared them.

Continue reading "Serving up an AD-Smart Intranet from Linux" »

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Problem: Flash sucks.

Microsoft solution: create a proprietary standard that doesn't suck quite as much.

It will work great on XP and Vista. Oh, and Mac has made some serious inroads on our desktop, we'd better make it play nice for its users as well.

There. That takes care of everyone.

As an Ubuntu user, I have grown used to making my web browser and my OS of choice jump through a few hoops in order to access content that was never intended for me. It's part of the price you pay to remain Microsoft-free. One day, Microsoft-free will be irrelevant, sort of like NDOS-free.

Anyhow, while I was disappointed to be unable to watch Winter Olympic videos through my native browser, I figured that by now all would be well. After all, check out this glowing MS blogger report:

Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Silverlight Moonlight 1.0 ships today

Novell has released version 1.0 of Moonlight for Linux. http://go-mono.com/moonlight/. Moonlight is an open source implementation of Microsoft Silverlight for Unix systems. Congrats on the release and look forward to the comments.

Hooray! I can watch Silverlight videos at last! And just in time for the NCAA Basketball Tournament!

Yes, another corporate entity has drunk the Kool-Aid and gone with MS's proprietary format to provide live internet videos.

Oh well, as I mentioned before, all is well now. Microsoft has chosen to support "Unix." Let's watch some videos!

Only...

Continue reading "The Silverlight Blight" »

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Dreamweaver, we hardly knew ye.

Yes, you can still purchase a copy of Dreamweaver, currently the appropriately named version CS4, from its new owners, Adobe.

But for all practical purposes, the web development package is dead.

Macromedia's web editors and I go back a long way. I reviewed Macromedia Studio for WorldVillage way back about 1995. I was impressed with its wysiwyg editor. The suite itself was designed to run as a backend on a Windows server, providing many built-in extras for websites. I have always hosted my sites on UNIX/Linux, so I never tried any of them.

When Dreamweaver 2 came out in 1998, I jumped at the chance to review it. It was everything that the Studio Designer was and more. I next got my hands on version 4, MX, MX 2004, and finally Version 8, which was released in 2005.

That year, Adobe bought Macromedia. At the time, I thought that it could have been worse. There had been rumblings for years that Microsoft had its eyes on the Dreamweaver product. We call know what a raging success Front Page has been since Redmond acquired it.

But remember, Adobe consists of the developers who have taken a basic pdf-reading program and turned it into a monstrosity that is now a 20 meg download in its most basic form, which expands to at least twice that size on your hard drive.

For a pdf reader!

Thus, I had low expectations for the "new" Dreamweaver. And I must say that I was not a bit disappointed.

Continue reading "R.I.P. Dreamweaver" »

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In 1993, it was scary business buying a home PC.

A new system typically ran around two grand. And a typical first-time buyer had no clue what RAM was, how big a hard drive should be, and what dot pitch was.

And even though I'm a professional geek nowadays, in 1993 I was an electrician who was fascinated by computers, and who saw lots of benefits in obtaining his own system.

He just didn't have a clue as to how to go about buying one without getting ripped off.

Enter Computer Shopper.

I went down to Phillip's Food Center in my home town (it's not there anymore either) and purchased a two-pound volume of Computer Shopper. I took it home and studied its vast contents for a week. By the end of that time, I knew that I was seeking a 486 DX-33 with four megs of RAM, a 250 MB hard drive, and a monitor with .28 dot pitch. I needed a SVGA card with a meg of RAM to get good resolution and performance. I also wanted a 24-pin printer (affordable inkjets were still a year or two away). If I could locate a package with all of that for around 1700 bucks, it would be a bargain.

I ended up getting a local to custom-build me that package with a 486-SLC2 66 IBM board for 1500 dollars.

Thanks to my CS education, I knew that I had scored a seriously great deal, indeed.

Continue reading "End of an Era: Computer Shopper Stops Their Print Edition" »

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Joomla looked like the perfect contact management system for me.

Back in 2006, I created a bonzer site for a Realtor based on Mamboserver. Its backend interface was weird beyond belief, but I was impressed with what I was able to accomplish, creating a simple property search as well as a more sophisticated one that was accessible to site members.

Recently losing a nice paying gig caused me to investigate building a general-interest site with either Mambo and Joomla. I decided to go with Joomla this go-around.

I was able to get a site up and running in short order. But after that, things began inexplicably breaking every time I would attempt to add features.

Worse yet, stuff that worked fine broke on its own in the course of a few days.

I still believe that Joomla is a wonderful product. I just feel like it's not friendly for old-time hands-on php developers like myself.

So, I'll soon be deleting the content that I have at zuptoday.com and putting the domain itself on ice until i can come up with another idea for it.

My current desktop system is no slouch: a 2006 HP a1483w with dual-core AMD, two gigs of RAM, and built-in Nvidia graphics with 256 MB of shared memory. Hey, with two gigs, there's plenty to go around.

A gamer would sneer at it, but it's more than powerful enough to run Ubuntu Intrepid with a VMWare 2.0 Server XP machine running 24/7 in the background.

Sometimes, I run my 2K machine virtually, too. And all three systems coexist nicely with barely noticeable speed hits.

But I have decided to purchase a bare-bones system and build it up from scratch with Ubuntu.

I will probably buy through TigerDirect, since I've always had good luck with fast deliveries, getting what I expected, and no-hassle service on the lone order that I had to cancel.

I know that there is some scuttlebutt out there about their less-than-stellar handling of rebates, but I make it a point to never buy an item with a mail-in rebate attached.

I expect the process to go very smoothly. I have done some groundbreaking work by placing my home directory on a separate partition. In fact, it's on a separate SATA drive from my operating system, so I plan on taking it out of my existing machine and transferring it to my next one.

Continue reading "Building a Linux Power Workstation from Scratch" »

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I **LOVE** VMWare. And I really love VMWare 2.0.

But, despite its blazing speed improvement and improved console experience, it had a problem on my Ubuntu 8.10 system.

Notice I said had.

My keyboard mapping was fubarred on the console window. My back arrow key didn't work, neither did my delete key. Other keys may have been affected too, but these were the two that I noticed.

Then, I found this website that provides three fixes.

In my case, the fix that worked was this one:

Edit /etc/vmware/config as root.

Add this line: xkeymap.nokeycodeMap = true

Restart your virtual machine.

That's all it took for me! There are two other fixes listed at the site if you're not as lucky as I was.

• I was a baseball fanatic when I was nine years old. And lately, my forty-year-old love for the St. Louis Cardinals has outweighed my contempt for the rest of the sport, although I must confess to actually watching my first non-Cardinal World Series in ten years with the unlikely success of the Tampa Bay Rays. But I wouldn't be caught dead watching a Yankees/Red Sox game, or any regular-season non-Cardinal game, for that matter.

  Baseball has ZERO salary caps. That means that unbelievably rich owners like Hank Steinbrenner can run roughshod over everyone else, signing greedy free agents willing to sell their souls to leave their small-market fanbases to go play for Satan's Team.

  This year, enraged by the fact that the low-budget Rays won the AL East (the only division in baseball that matters, according to ESPN), Steinbrenner has turned loose of nearly a half-BILLION dollars to sign C.C. Sabbathia (up yours, Brewers fans), A.J. Burnett, and Mark Texeira.

  Fans of baseball, the sport, does that make you want to puke?

  The only reason I'll be paying even the slightest bit of attention to baseball news this year at all is because what you pay for is what you get.

  A team full of high-salaried "superstars" that no other teams could afford?

  It would take a Joe Torre to effectively coach that gargantuan mass of ego and turn it into a team.

  And Steinbrenner has run Joe Torre off. :-D



• I paid a little attention to the NBA when I was about twelve years old. More recently, Michael Jordan's Bulls also piqued my interest.

  But in 1997, some idiot (don't want to give him any credit by naming him) choked his coach. In fact, his teammates had to pull him off of the man. What did the NBA do about it?

  A ten-day suspension.

  If trying to kill your coach doesn't count as a lifetime ban, what does?

  Well, at least he didn't bet on his team.
  

• Another idiot, one that San Francisco Giants fans loved, but hardly anyone else (and now, even Giants fans don't love him), didn't play baseball last year.

  Why? Was he banned because of horribly tainting the sport by bulking up to the size of an NFL lineman by taking steroids?

  Nope. The sports owners (even Steinbrenner) showed some brains and, dare I say it, a little class, by ignoring his free agency.

  Of course, baseball, the business, has no problem with him. His home run records stand.

• China has been flaunting the rules in Olympic-type sports since the Russian Empire crumbled. But nobody does anything about it.

  After all, we don't want to do anything to offend the world's suppliers of cheap crap that is sold at Wal-Mart, now do we?

I manage a handful of blogs, doing a better job of keeping everything updated with some than with others.

One of the biggest PITA's that a site owner has to deal with nowadays is comment spam.

It's not unusual for a well-trafficked domain to amass hundreds of bogus emails daily. Irememberjfk.com ranks around 365,000 with Alexa. That translates to 700-800 daily visitors. For some reason, spambots prefer better ranked domains, in my experience.

Anyhow, it's a pain to blow away all of the garbage that accumulates in the spam bin. And if I simply ignore it and let it get automatically deleted, I may well also lose legitimate comments that were flagged by the visitor not getting the CAPTCHA right the first time.

But I am happy to say that that particular problem is now a non-issue for me. That's because I have discovered Bad Behavior.

Bad Behavior (or Bad Behaviour, to you Brits) is a PHP application that screens attempts to get to your comment-posting scripts. Here's a quote from the Bad Behavior site explaining its operation:

Bad Behavior complements other link spam solutions by acting as a gatekeeper, preventing spammers from ever delivering their junk, and in many cases, from ever reading your site in the first place. This keeps your site’s load down, makes your site logs cleaner, and can help prevent denial of service conditions caused by spammers.

Cool, huh? But there's more to the story than that.

Continue reading "Bad Behavior (Not Really!)" »

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[rant on]

You know, nobody likes a whiner/complainer.

That's why I'm really reluctant to make postings like this, because it's basically whining/complaining on my part.

But sometimes I get good and mad and have to vent.

Where I live, there are basically two newspaper choices: a good-sized local and the larger Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

I'm a fan of the New York Times crossword, ergo I go with the latter choice.

I'm also a sports fan. I really enjoy good sportswriting.

I consider the penultimate newspaper sportswriter to be the late Bill Connors, who wrote columns for the Tulsa World for many years.

Connors supported the local teams, of course. But he did so without much homerism. Example: he frequently roasted dirty OU coach Barry Switzer, despite the fact that he always spoke highly of the team as a whole. He also lambasted Brian Bosworth, one of Switzer's proudest.

What Connors was loath to do was whine.

Bad calls? Horrible officiating? Cheating? Sure, fans of the Sooners, the Cowboys, and the Golden Hurricane would speculate such after losses, but not Connors.

Bill believed in a team's being able to overcome outside adversity and win despite strange circumstances.

When BYU won a national championship in 1984 after a victory in the Holiday Bowl over 6-5 Michigan, the complaining was long and loud from sportswriters all over the country. But I recall Connors being philosophical about it, pointing out that all that OU (or USC, who defeated OU in the Orange Bowl) needed to do was WIN EVERY GAME, and the national championship debate wouldn't be a debate at all.

Bill, when I read Wally "Bad Call" Hall's rants at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, I miss you. A lot.

Hall has managed to become the head of the sports department at the newspaper.

(deep sigh)

Continue reading "Bad Sportswriting" »

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I recently made this post in reply to a Windows user (a reasonable one) at Computerworld:

Here's the "profound" truth that I finally learned about Linux:

You can fix stuff.

One of the most maddening things about Windows (including XP) is that if something goes awry in the system, as is bound to happen sooner or later with ANY OS, the fix is usually reinstalling.

Office pukes? IE gets squirrely? Cut-and-paste not working consistently? Back up your data as best you can, and let the reformatting begin. Or, if you're REALLY lucky, a system restore. But don't hold your breath.

If something breaks in Linux, you go online and quickly find a solution. Or, with a little experience, you learn to edit the bogus config file, or reinstall a specific library, or sometimes simply do a ctrl+alt+backspace to restart your X server.

Continue reading "Reason #2,187 to Try Linux" »

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Stolen from a forum online, placed here on my blog so I can find it:

I’ve found I have to run this after connecting any usb devices:

sudo chmod -R 777 /proc/bus/usb/*

Otherwise when you goto device connect in VMWare server 2.0 remote console, it comes up with:
“Remote USB device error: Remote device disconnected: an error occured while sending data.”

Works like a charm!

Webmasters like myself have to pay the bills. With that in mind, if you would like to allow Adsense ads through Adblock Plus, here's a graphic showing the exceptions that need to be allowed. These exceptions allow ONLY Adsense ads, nothing else, as far as I can tell.

You can do a search for google and adsense in the Adblock Preferences dialog to get most of them, a manual search for /ads*.php$subdocument and http://pagead2.$~other,~object-subrequest will get the last two.

So why would you want to do such a thing? Well, I began using Adsense on my sites three years ago because it was polite. And it hasn't gotten any less polite with the years. I decided long ago that annoying surfers with intrusive advertising was bad business, so I have always refrained from doing so.

Adsense ads load quickly and inobtrusively, IMHO. I have NEVER had an annoying experience with them. So I personally see no need to block them, a la Adblock Plus.

I let them through as a courtesy to other webmasters who use them.

If you would like to do the same thing, here's your tutorial on how to do so.

NOTE: if you trust the website to behave itself, advertising-wise, you can hit the ABP button on Firefox (upper right corner) and select "Disable on www.domain.com"

Feel free to do so on my sites. I GUARANTEE you that any advertising I have is polite. If you see popups, then you have spyware problems.

I recently switched from AT&T DSL to Cox Internet. My download speed went from about 900k to speeds which vary from 3 meg (when usage is high) to nearly 20 meg (early in the morning). However, surfing didn't speed up much, if any at all.

The issue was that I would spend much time looking at "Looking up google.com" in the bottom bar of Firefox. In a word, Cox's DNS servers here in NW Arkansas are horrible.

The fix to that was to set up other DNS servers in my Belkin router. However, for some reason, the router wouldn't propagate the changes to my /etc/resolv.conf file. It continued to list the three slow Cox DNS servers and nothing else.

My fix could have been as simple as editing the file. However, I decided to dial things up a notch by installing dnsmasq. It's a local DNS cache that will greatly speed up name lookups.

Here's how to do it the GUI way:

Install dnsmasq with Synaptic Package Manager.

Now sudo gedit /etc/resolv.conf.

Here's what mine looks like:

domain Belkin
search Belkin
nameserver 127.0.0.1
nameserver 4.2.2.1
nameserver 4.2.2.2
nameserver 208.67.222.222
nameserver 208.67.220.220
nameserver 192.168.2.1
nameserver 68.105.28.11
nameserver 68.105.29.11
nameserver 68.105.28.12

Continue reading "Fixing S L O W Browsing with Firefox and Cox DNS Servers" »

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I just got off the phone with my best friend, for whom I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on his laptop.

I installed it two weeks ago. His main concern with Vista was that it wouldn't play ball with his office network. It couldn't see the shared backup folder that i had set up for him years earlier, and also couldn't see his shared office printer.

I told him I didn't work on Vista, and he said that he wanted to hire me to get RID of it and install Ubuntu.

I did so, and his wireless worked out of the box (it was a new Gateway laptop, i don't recall the model). He also had good high-resolution video that played nicely with an additional plugged-in monitor. And his son had a DVD handy, so I got the codecs installed to read it.

And, of course, he can also see his shared folder and print to his shared printer ;-)

However, he called me up this morning feeling frustrated. His computer wouldn't connect to his home wireless network, and it also bombed on any DVD's he tried to play.

I consider the problems to be my fault, and I am making a mental note to make sure and do a more thorough job on my next Linux-converted laptop. Here are five steps you need to follow to make certain that you have a happy customer yourself:

Continue reading "Five Steps for Those Who Would save Others from Vista" »

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While reading the latest spam crisis report, a thought occurred to me.

This world is incredibly litigation-happy. If some yutz injures himself doing something foolish and dangerous, he's liable to hire a lawyer and go after someone, and sure enough, some bubble-headed judge will likely judge liability on some innocent bystander who didn't stop the fool from hurting himself.

Indeed, lawyer-spread liability is feared like the rat-spread plague was in Europe a few hundred years ago.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft for the spam crisis?

The vast majority of spam is generated by bot nets. These networks of outside-controlled computers all have one thing in common: they take advantage of security holes in various Microsoft operating systems to profligate.

And these aren't operating systems that have been donated by the behemoth corporation out of the goodness of its heart. No, these are bundles of software which have, in many cases, been painstakingly proven to be genuine by WGA. And as many as is humanly possible have been paid for, with proceeds going to Redmond, Washington. The amount of money that Microsoft has received for its various incarnations of Windows is too staggering to comprehend.

And what does the consumer receive for his money?

A “lease” of an operating system that promises security, reliability, and availability.

This operating system is far from secure, of course. Its architectural layout guarantees that if a hacker can get in with user rights, he can make fundamental changes to the operating system and bring it under his control. Another member of the bot net is thus produced.

Microsoft offers patches to keep things secure. However, many millions of computers remain unpatched, fair game to worms that will infiltrate them and add them to the botnet.

Spam costs untold millions, or possibly billions of dollars. Who pays? Big business, governments, and individuals.

So why hasn't anyone sued Microsoft?

Continue reading "Sue Microsoft for Spam Bots?" »

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