Brian's Blog

According to BBC article Bin Laden is reported as to possibly be dead. Interesting.

What's Bush going to do with his time now that his "arch nemesis" may no long be a problem?

Notice I said "may". Meaning none of this is confirmed but what kind of impact would it have on Bush's policies if it were true? Probably none but it's still something to think about.

Update: Today BBC has an article saying there is no evidence that Bin Ladin is dead. I knew it was speculation and it's still an open question at this point but still something to wonder about. Personally I don't think his death would change a thing as the "War" on Terror would continue even with out him. I mean, it's not like we'd be pulling out of the middle-east the day after his death is confirmed.

Oh, if it were only true!

I currently have Service Electric cable modem which, for the most part, I am happy with. I miss my ADSL and would just love to sign up with Speakeasy if they only had decent service in my area. Sure, I'd be paying more for less bandwidth more than likely when compared to cable modem, but then I'd have an ISP with a clue. Actually, I'm not picking on Service Electric in any way on this one. The situation is that Service works with PenTeleData (PTD) to provide service and that service, of course, includes E-mail. Prior to changing to PTD I had Fastnet, which is now USLEC. And they did zero spam filtering, which is fine by me, as I liked having control of that aspect of my Internet usage and the ability to see just what is being blocked in the event of a false positive.

Oh, as an aside, the reason I changed from Fastnet to Service is because I had to. See, I moved and Fastnet didn't have service at the new place, actually, no DSL service was available here. Even though I moved at tops about a 5 minute drive away. Now, supposedly you can get DSL here but it is slow and expensive.

Anyway, back on topic.

After using PTD for some time I noticed a sever reduction in the amount of spam spamassassin was catching. I called and confirmed that PTD was doing filtering which for the most part is cool. However, after roughly two years I've noticed that I wasn't getting messages that I wanted. For instance, the latest being confirmation/activation messages from forums that I have intentionally signed up for. If these messages were tagged as spam in my own system it would just gotten dumped into the spam directory and I'd still get it. But PTD seems to think it's better to dump things that they think are spam into the void. Knowing how easy it is to adjust spam settings I attempted to find their on line tool to adjust my inbox filter settings only to find none, which prompted a phone call to them. They claim that they can't change the filters at all or turn them off as they apply to everyone. Additionally, they swear up and down they don't dump anything to /dev/null but only tag it as spam for the user to filter. That last part is very obviously a 100% lie because if it was true I would have gotten the tagged messages. I've heard other stories about the same kind of flexibility problems with other ISPs before so I know I'm not unique.

I mean, what the heck is it with these brain dead ISPs? Why is it acceptable for me to loose E-mail because they are over aggressive in their filtration? I'm paying them money to get all of my legitimate E-mail. Depending on the content of the E-mail it could have negative impact if a message is lost. What if I'm corresponding with a potential employer and suddenly a message sent gets dropped? Here I am oblivious to the message and the sender sits around wondering why stupid Brian isn't replying and, oh well, he mustn't want the job anyway. How unprofessional of him.

PTD seems to be OK with this, I mean, it's not screwing them so why bother keeping a customer happy?

A friend of mine, Ricardo works at a company called Pobox which provides some darn cool mail services. I signed up for the basic service for $20 a year, which is essentially a forwarding service which points to my current E-mail address. I found a message sent to my Pobox account and then forwarded to me would get through, while the same message would get dropped when sent directly to my ptd.net address. I'm guessing PTD is dropping a broad range of IP addresses and the forums I've been trying to participate in happen to be caught in the crossfire. It happens, but I should be able to whilelist things that I want. So far Pobox has taken care of my problem and the nice thing is if I change ISPs I can just keep my pobox address and change the forward. No need to inform everyone of the address change. Once I'm on more financially solid ground I may upgrade to the Mailstore service so I can have a separate POP/IMAP/webmail account from my ISP and bypass all the idiotic ISP stupidity completely.

I just wish ISP's would wake up and become a bit more geek friendly. They can fool the average user who doesn't know any better with their bullshit but must start to realize that geeks will call them out on it. And it's not good to piss of the geeks as they are the ones that usually recommend service providers to non-geeks.

I just got a funny spam. The subject went something like this:



I've heard iPods were really nice but I didn't know Apple could help geeks in that department!

Really, there are some people in this world that should not be permitted to breed.

With the recent change to my E-mail address I thought it might be a good time to generate a new GPG key and distribute it. I've already sent it up to a key server but it can also be found here and is also linked in the "Links" section on the right as it has always been.

Please update if you are using my old key. Also, anyone who knows me and would like to contact me to verify fingerprints you know how to get in touch with me. I just wish more people would use encryption. It's sad that only two people that I know do.

My experimentation with amarok prompted me to search for a system tray replacement for my preferred window manager, windowmaker. At the time I found docker which is more than sufficient with the only drawback I saw being it could only hold for system try icons and that's it. I mentioned this to my friend, Chris, and he pointed out wmsystray which does essentially the same thing except that is puts little scroll buttons on the dockapp to allow more than four icons. Also, docker is written for openbox and is compatible with windowmaker using the -wm switch whereas wmsystray is made with windowmaker in mind from the get go as far as I can tell. The only crappy thing I ran into was it just won't compile on Slackware-current (almost 11 at this point). I had to resort to grabbing the rpm, using rpm2tgz to make it a Slackware package, and then installpkg it. It seems to be working fine now. And I think it looks a little bit nicer than docker. Not that there is anything wrong with docker. It's more than sufficient for the job I think, I just like wmsystray better.

I know, a boring entry again. Maybe I'll get around to posting something interesting sometime soon.

I've been getting an increased number of spam messages as of late that seem to be nothing more than insane ramblings. I'm trying to figure what purpose these things have, it's not like it's advertising and I may buy something from them. It's just text with no purpose other than to make me hit the delete key. I've included the full text below just to see if anyone else can make any sense of it. I mean, why send these things out at all if it doesn't get the sender anything?

It was not the physical discomforts alone that defeated him.

By the time Mary came in to him, he was nervilya-shake.

Also, from an injudicious word he let drop, the idea leapt atMahony .

Learning and common sense did not seem to gotogether.

Richard also went on to crush herwith St.

Tilly sat on the edge of a bunk and was very down in the mouth. Naturallythe subject of Simmondss collapse had come up, and the fix it had puthim into.

But to whom am I to turn,Id like to know? In place of Simmonds he had been met by a . A caution, that child, if ever there was one! His nerves felt like the frayed ends of arope. And, in spite of everything, his determination to get away did notweaken.

What a little hell the mindcould create for a mans undoing! In which, as long as Simmonds isaway, I shall not set foot again. Youre alwayswild, at the moment, to get away, but afterwards youre no happier thanyou were before.

Oh, Im not clever enough to argue about these things.

Just a walking bundle, said Nannan, ofwhims and crotchets.

Depend upon it, one doesnt dreamthat kind of thing for nothing.

True, also, was what shesaid about the damage to his pride.

For to this there could be noreal reply; and Richard knew it. But to whom am I to turn,Id like to know?

Hisdaughters were past their school years; of an age to be launched insociety. But nothing that happenedcould shake Marys convinced unbelief.

Youve cut yourself off from every one, and now, whenyou need help, you havent a soul to turn to.

Naturallythe subject of Simmondss collapse had come up, and the fix it had puthim into.

I believe he means to die, just toinconvenience me.

I've been a die hard xmms fan pretty much since I started using Linux about 5 years ago. I've heard good talk about amarok though and gave it a half-hearted try some months ago and decided I didn't like it. I found it to be slow and difficult to use at the time. Looking back I don't think I gave it a fair shake though. So I decided to try it out again and I'm kind of glad I did. I mean, it's still way to system intensive for a music player but it's got some really cool features I didn't realize were there. Ones that make me willing to use a heavier music player than xmms. So far I really dig the cover art manager. It's kind of nice to see the CD cover art of whatever song is playing. The only thing that is somewhat annoying is that it doesn't always guess the correct cover is. But, to be fair, that's probably because I don't have all of my stuff tagged properly so it just goes the best that I can. It's just a but odd seeing it display a kids music CD when Green Jelly is playing. I also never knew it had a tab to pull artist and album info from the Wikipedia. I often Google for artist info when I hear a song and this just saves me the step. Pretty cool. Still, I don't think I'd use it on a low power system, but I've got CPU cycles to spare on my main workstation so why not?

One other hang up I had was that amarok didn't play the way I wanted with windowmaker. I like having my music player pretty much hidden, but amarok always left the big app icon on the bottom of the screen. And I couldn't easily control it with right click menus. After a bit of searching I found a cool dockapp called docker that creates a small "system tray" area. The only thing is when it's in windowmaker mode you only have room for 4 icons or so. But that's better than none. And it lets me put gaim in it too so I can clear up a little clutter by putting two icons into one.

Oh, one more cool thing is that it can be setup to transfer songs to and from your digital music player. Up until now I've plugged in my player, opened a command prompt, mounted the device, copied over what I wanted, then unmounted and disconnected. Amarok was easy to setup to essentially to that for me. It won't mount the player, but the connect button makes it easy. Then I can tag a bunch of songs in my collection for transfer and as soon as I hit the transfer button it just copies them all over. Then I can hit the disconnect button and I'm done. I know, it's the same steps, but it's still nice to queue up a bunch of things then have them go over to the player in a batch rather than all the cding to directories and cp -R over and over to get what I want.

Oh, and the search features of amarok are incredible when compared to xmms. don't get me wrong though, I still like my little xmms. I may switch back with time, but I'm still having fun playing around with something new.

This is a funny one from BBspot where Paris Hilton released Tinkerbell Linux. A couple of my favorite quotes are:

Like its creator it has a flashy and highly polished feel to it while remaining easily accessible - both front-end and back-end.

Tinkerbell Linux is based on Slutware Linux and will be distributed on Paris Hilton's next music CD entitled "Crontab for Love."

You just gotta love news spoof sites. Or perhaps I'm just easily amused?

Everyone who knows me knows I'm studying to upgrade my MCSE Cert for work. I've been slowly chugging along in getting ready for my two exams and have ranted several times over various things that are just plane stupid in this book. All of my previous rants can be pretty much blamed on the author(s) and the editor(s). However, I've just come up with one that is squarely a Microsoft issue.

The problem is that I've hit the section regarding the Manage software update infrastructure objective in the 70-292 exam in which it talkes in the book about Microsoft's Software Update Services (SUS). Well, SUS has since been replaced with Windows Software Update Services (WSUS) and in fact all support for SUS will stop at the end of the year. It will literally stop working forcing everyone to use WSUS. That's not a big deal, but What the hell am I supposed to study for?!

I've checked the Microsoft Press section for the book I'm using for an errata which doesn't seem to exist so it seems they haven't updated their text. Or perhaps they just don't care to update it? I've searched on various forums only to get the impression that they are still testing for SUS, but that's just an impression and nothing I could take as a solid answer. So, at this point, assuming they are going to test me on something that won't work in a few months I went to download the older version of SUS only to be redirected to a download for WSUS.

At this point I have no solid answers on what I am going to be tested for. And if it is still SUS then I have no way of actually using it before the exam forcing me to simply read, look at screen shots, and hope I don't get to many questions on it. Or, if the test is on WSUS then I have no official study material to prep for this thing. Which means I'll just have to grab a white paper, install it, and hope I accidentally teach myself the specific bits they are going to test me on.

I find this utterly ridiculous. If they want to test me on old unsupported technology then that's their stupid decision. I'd much rather spend my time learning something I'll actually use at work. Ultimately, I really don't care one way or another what they test me on so long as I know what the hell I need to learn. I just want to get the exams over with so I can get back to learning more stimulating things (aka something not Microsoft).

I've been a user of Bloglines for quite a long while now and have thus far been fairly happy with it. Just in case you've been living in a bubble, Bloglines is a web based RSS aggregator. The primary advantage for me was that I could access it anywhere without having to install a client on the PC I was at or needing to ssh into my box here at home to load up snownews. The only thing that Bloglines has going against it is you really don't know exactly what they do with all that data and usage statistic that I speculate the gather.

What I'm leading up to is a project called FoFRedux. FofRedux is a continuation of the stagnate Feed on Feeds project. Both are web based server side RSS aggregators. FoFRedux has a very simple, yet effective interface. There are some minor annoyances that I picked up on, such as the Mark All Read option doesn't mark everything as ready. It only marks all the entries currently showing on the screen. Slightly annoying but not a show stopper by far. It requires PHP and mysql to work, which was a jump for me as I've never setup a PHP/mysql app before. Once I got over my stupid errors it was up and running in a snap and crawling through all my feeds giving me a central location to check up on news that I can access from anywhere.

I know I could just keep using Bloglines, but I've been trying to get away from relying on external services for basic things such as these. Call me a control freak but I much prefer to have as much of my data local and under my jurisdiction as I can.

A few weeks back on the LottaLinuxLinks podcast various note taking apps were discussed. They sounded all OK ranging from a simple bash script to full blown postit note programs. None of them really got me excited enough to actually try them out. However, in a later podcast Dave mentioned TiddlyWiki. TiddlyWiki is a single HTML file that uses javascript (as far as I can tell) to let you edit and save your notes and entries. It tagged as a reusable non-linear personal web notebook but it seems to me like it could be used for much more than that. I've only been messing with it for a few hours and it already seems way more powerful than being just a note taking application. In my opinion TiddlyWiki could be used as a simple blog or even a small corporate intranet if used correctly. In fact, the TiddlyWiki site is using TiddlyWiki itself. To get an idea of what it can do take a look at its list of main features and also this excellent tutorial. By the way, if you wonder how something was done in a particular entry just double click it and you'll be able to view the code for that entry.

Pretty cool stuff. I feel I must find a useful application for it just so I can play about with it more!