I’ve enabled a Blosxom feature called “writebacks” on the blog, which is basically a comments system. I had been using the TrackBack feature before, but I think it may have confused people because it was being used in a non-normal way apparently. Anyway, clicking on the “x writebacks” link below any story will let you view any existing comments and leave your own. Use it, but be nice! 🙂

I finally got around to watching the film Office Space last night. Extremely funny film, but the sound-track was quite possibly one of the worst I’ve ever suffered through. Nothing but track after track of vulgar, disgusting (c)rap. One of the “selections” contained at least 50 uses of the “F word”. That’s just absurd. Actually, that’s just obscene.

You know, I’ve come to a realization over the past several years and that is that there are absolutely no redeeming qualities to rap. I won’t even dignify it by calling it music. It’s just crap. Raunchy, vile, vulgar crap. It says quit a bit about the character of those who listen to it. We already know about the character, or lack thereof, of those who produce it and the thug culture in which most of them live.

“Welcome!” he [Albus Dumbledore] said. “Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!

“Thank you!”

This is a great book!

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

I was heartbroken Saturday morning when I read, around 10:15AM, that the space shuttle Columbia had burned up over Texas. I was especially saddened when I heard that the family of Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut, was at Cape Canaveral waiting for his return.

President Bush addressed the nation later that morning saying “The Columbia is lost. There are no survivors.” I believe he was genuinely saddened by this event. And then in a move that I’m sure has the “no one in government should ever even think of God” crowd in a lather, he quoted the prophet Isaiah saying

Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of his great power and mighty strength not one of them is missing.

He then continued

The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home.

There is a growing page of editorial cartoons paying tribute to Columbia here that are really good.

My minister ends each Sunday morning service with these words “whether we live in the Lord or die in the Lord, we are the Lord’s.” I believe that. And I also believe that those seven brave souls who died Saturday morning have most certainly gone home.

Well, the reviews of my book Ant Developer’s Handbook are in. Here is a picture of the reviewer as he curled up in his favorite easy chair with a fresh copy. His comments, “Great, Daddy!” and “I liked pretending that I loved it!” Maybe I can get him to write a review at Amazon.com…

My DSL service has been really sucking for the past two days. I quickly blamed it on DirecTV DSL which used to be Telocity. The reason I so quickly blamed them is because they announcd on Dec. 18 that they were closing up shop. I think they have a problem and are letting the network slip into oblivion, depsite their statements that they would keep it running until January 16; it may be running, but not running well.

So early this morning I check my router logs and I see lots of attempts to come in through port 137. What’s port 137? It’s NetBios. This is the port that Windows networking uses to do name resolution. It’s an apparently easy exploit to get in this way on unsecure systems. Mine is secure (my router blocks every port but the four or five that I use), but the net result is that my router could get overloaded, thus producing a Denial of Service.

There are also attempts to get in on port 1433 which is the port that Microsoft SQL Server runs on. This exploit hits folks who never setup an admin password when they installed SQL Server. I have to say that someone who installs a database and doesn’t change the admin password almost deserves to get hacked. Of course vendors who ship software that doesn’t force you to even set an admin password should be shot…

I’m seriously bummed about this. I’ve already initiated a switch to SpeakEasy.net to continue my DSL service, but I don’t know how long it will take to get that moved over. I’ve had DSL for about 1.5 years now, and the thought of not having it is something I don’t like to think about…

Well, it’s 00:29 on December 26… Christmas is officially over. I always get bummed after Christmas; the lights don’t seem as pretty and the tree seems lonely and sad. We had a great Christmas here. My son, Thomas got everything he had asked for and more. My wife and I got a nice new digital camera that I’ve been trying out. Very nice and easy to use. I just wish it didn’t store its images in JPG format. It’s a 4 megapixel camera so the jpeg-iness probably won’t really be a problem, I just don’t like lossy compression without a conscious decision to use it…

Anyway, so Christmas was good for us. It was good in another respect too: I got my laptop setup with Red Hat Linux. I’m using their default window manager, which is built on/with/is Gnome. Looks great. Feels pretty good. Still a bit tricky to do things that should be easy like adding icons to the main menu… I did get it working with my LinkSys WPC11 wireless LAN card. I can pretty easily switch between a hard line and the wireless, which is nice. I installed the latest Mozilla, Eclipse and Java dev kit, so I’m really cooking now. I still need to install DB2 and WebLogic Server 7 to get my day-job project going. (I just got JBoss going…)

Then for fun I need to update Ruby, Python and the myriad Eclipse plugins that I use regularly. It’s taking time, but I’m pretty happy with the results so far.

The news today is that Iraq has shot down one of our unmanned Predator aircraft. Those people have been firing on our planes patrolling the no-fly zones for some time now, and we’ve only recently started really hitting back. Thankfully they’ve never taken out a manned aircraft. This time it was a drone, but next time it could be for real. The pattern for the last several times that they’ve fired on us was the levelling of the installation that fired, or the radar station that peppered the aircraft for the missile to hit. It’s time to take it up a notch and rather than just hitting the particular installation that fired the missile, we need to take out, say, 10 of their bases. And then increase the number with each infraction.

“He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way…”

I’ve decided to Linux-ify my company laptop so I downloaded all 5 ISO images or Red Hat Linux 8.0. All 3,325,001,728 bytes of it. Yes, DSL is a beautiful thing. So I’ve got these ISO images now and I need to write them to CD. There is aparently a metric ton of software for Linux systems that will write these things to CD, but precious little for Wintel boxen. But of course all that cool free software doesn’t help me. I need to get them written to CD before I can install Linux and have access to these great tools that will let me write them to cd… Ah well… I tried using this ISO Recoder Power Toy but it didn’t work very well. Most of the time it told me I had a non-writable cd in the drive when I knew darn well it was a virgin CD-R. It could be my crappy CD-RW drive, but I’m not sure. So I’m going to install an old copy of something I had laying around on the laptop which has a working CD-R drive. Fun fun.

I’m switching from my Blogger.com-based blog to using this extremely neat tool called Blosxom. Instead of having to go to blogger.com in a browser and use their tools, Blosxom works off text files in a simple directory hierarchy. It’s 144 lines of Perl that does a whole lot. I get an archive of sorts, though it’s not quite as nice as the Blogger style archive. I can live with that. In fact, I have some ideas of how to implement that style in Blogger. I just have to find time.

As for the old content, I’m working on converting/sorting all of that to the new format. Until then, you can click here to see the old stuff in the old format.