Geekdump

Here's a further smattering of geeky links for ya.

• How to count to 31 on one hand
• Murphy's Law, and Other Reasons Things Go Wrong
• Rockwood: A Comic Strip Odyssey
• Sysadmin's Random Excuse Generator

that's enough.

Ramen

That geek staple:

Ramen

It Leeeeeeves!

I finally got the new Gentoo installation up and running. my latest snag was a problem with the kernel; grub would find the root and boot partitions, but as soon as it tried to boot, things stopped, and the caps and scroll lock LEDs would start flashing.

now, according to my man Doug (hey Doug!), this meant a kernel panic. the only problem was, it was supposed to give me some indication of what PART of the kernel caused the panic, but I got nothing. bupkiss. diddley-squat.

some obscure web searches later, I had only a guess: the power management bits of the kernel were causing the panic. I rebooted with the CD, recompiled without the power management add-ins, and rebooted... and BAM, it boots up!

now, to see if I can't get my box web serving again.

Gentoo + Security

a thought I had this morning while waiting for my system logger to compile:

you really have to put a lot of trust in Gentoo and their Portage package system. since you can compile everything, you have to trust that noone has inserted unpleasant code in the config script, or anything like that.

of course, being that it's Free Software, there's no guarantee about anything. I would expect, though, that they audit their packages regularly.

this is all obvious to anyone who might be installing Gentoo, I'm sure. it just occurred to me, is all.

Gentoo, sumore...

snurf. I ended up restarting my Gentoo installation today. I went to do some configuration, and realized that I didn't remember anything about what I'd done.

So, I've begun again, and this time, I'm writing down all of the information I enter or require, in case I need it later (which I will).

You'd think that I'd learn.

But hey, the install is still better documented and easier than anything else that I've tried, so far!

Hockey sucks.

for those of you not familiar with this particular form of (barely) organized gang warfare, here's MAD's Ice Hockey Primer. from the March 1969 issue, it still pretty much stands today. too bad it didn't have the pictures with it, as I'm sure it would make it that much better.

(I'm sure my warfare hockey-loving friends would just love this one, especially at this time of the year).

For all your post-apocalyptic zombie horror needs

check out Day by Day Armageddon. this is the online journal of a U.S. military man who is trying to survive in a zombie infected alternate world. well written, interesting, with excellent buildup throughout the month to intriguing peaks.

PG-13 at the least, but I don't think that I'd let my kids read it until they were a little older than that.

Gentoo Linux

I've heard quite a bit about Gentoo Linux lately, so I thought that I'd give it a try on my box at work. I decided to get the "full" Gentoo experience and compile everything, and take advantage of custom compiled binaries and whatnot.

I started this on Tuesday. I'm still at the stage 2 step of the installation, where it compiles up the system. so, I don't know if I'm really qualified to review what I've seen so far, but here goes anyhow.

based on the documentation, it seems as if the developers had read the Linux From Scratch documentation, and said "Hey, this is neat. But not everyone has the time to do EVERYTHING from scratch, so why don't we make up a new system that does some of it for them, while documenting the steps that one goes through?" I'm not very far along in the setup (just about to do the kernel compile), but I already feel like I have a better knowledge of a linux system than before. not alot, but some. plus, I've used some utilities that I hadn't before.

the documentation is also amongst the best of any open-source project I've seen. it puts crap like what the Apache Cocoon Project puts out to shame (a subject for another rant / post). It's well organized, easy to read, and easy to find information that you need or are interested in. It contains a plethora of information on sub-projects, also well organized, and projects that are outside the Gentoo developement circle, but are still relevant to the Gentoo project itself.

I'm excited to see how this turns out. hopefully, it will lead to a more easily maintainable machine. or at least, something that I enjoy using, rather than beating my head against.

Tontie

This little flash game is an amusing distraction. I've heard it called whack-a-mole, goopy-style.

Just try not to get addicted.

The Incredibles

there's a new trailer for The Incredibles. go see it. now. really.

I'm very excited. there are quite a few people that work at Pixar that have passed through my alma mater. if only that gave me some sort of insight into the movies they produce, alas, they're as tight lipped as you'd expect.

anyhow, I can't imagine that this will be anything but awesome.

new blogger...

I like the new blogger look and feel.

it was a bit of a surprise when I logged in this evening, but things work very nicely. the "Edit Posts" area works as I expect it to now, meaning that I can see my draft posts when I view everything, and it's obvious which posts are such. plus, the colours are nice, too.

the only thing that I really have to complain about is that I don't like the way it converts line breaks. it makes everything look all crappy. so, I turned them off and started doing manual line breaks.

only problem was, I had to go back and fix all my old posts. luckily I only had a handful... :)

RSS Linkity Links

I thought I'd drop in the links that I found on RSS 2.0:

• RSS 2.0 Specification
• Extending RSS 2.0 with Namespaces
• Content Feeds with RSS 2.0 (IBM)
• Dave Winer's RSS 2.0 Political F.A.Q.

I've been thinking about how to use RSS to shuffle around the data, and I think that it's going to this: on script that publishes the XML to the web, and a separate script that doesn't output anything, but returns useful values. the publish script will pull from the functions script, and so will anything else that wants the data. I mentioned this last night when I posted, but it definately seems like this is the way to go, so I thought that I'd mention it again.

I've worked up a test RSS feed that validates, that I'm going to use as a template. The neat thing that I'm doing with it, I think, is using the <guid> field as a link back to the bookmark or group edit page, and the <link> field as the bookmark or group link proper. it seems to fall into what the spec meant to have the guid field used for, I think. this should work just fine with groups or bookmarks.

Fun with RSS

I've been reading up on RSS, specifically the 2.0 spec. I think that I want to use it to pass data around my new homepage. see, I'm building it from scratch, and have several modules that I want to be able to access easily from different parts of the page... like the bookmarks or news module from within the module, or from the front page. plus, then it would be easy to access various bits from outside of my homepage... for example, I could subscribe to my list of left-handed chainsaw sites, and view it in an aggregator along with my news from slashdot, or whatever. one stop surfing, really.

of course, I don't want to have my homepage widgets having to communicate over port 80, since that would impact my bandwidth. so, I'll need to have some functions in the modules that I can export to other php scripts, in order to nicely communicate without having to go off of the webserver. makes sense, I think.

(Yah know, you'd think that if you were trying to see 'everything' in the manage posts area, you'd be able to see ALL of your posts, including the drafts. not terribly user friendly at all).