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October 7, 2009

Substance.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 5:55 pm

Pretty much what this blog has been lacking as of late. So what’s new?

Well, getting married for one I suppose. May’s creeping up on me and Liz, and we’re drudging through the planning of it all. Liz has been amazing handling the catering plans and the cards and stuff. I have to design some sort of website for us, and add gifts to our registry. I suppose these are things I could actually enjoy – letting my creativity flow and finding things for people to buy me – but I guess I’ve just been slacking on it. We still have a good deal of time to plan everything. The wedding itself will only be about 15 minutes worth of actual traditional consummations, the part where Liz and I say “I do.” Everything else, well, lots of pirate garb and decorations, and a healthy helping of rum. Non-traditional is the best. I just can’t wait to see Liz’s dad dressed up as a pirate. He is totally stoked. Even Liz’s brother is now a justice of the peace so he’ll be the one marrying us.

Work’s been crazy for me. I’m head-first into a ton of shell scripting, programming, web design, and image maintenance. It’s a lot to handle, but I manage to keep it all under control for 45 hours a week. I manage to sneak in some fun every now and then, too. I’d probably go insane there if I didn’t have a good crew of people around me.

Went to Boston last week for a much-needed vacation. Got to see some old faces, meet some new ones, and just have a real blast. Nearly everything was perfect for me there, I already want to go back. Not sure when/where my next vacation will be, it may not be until MAGfest at the end of the year. We’ll see.

I was in Jersey a few weeks back, too. Apparently people still go to DDR tournaments, myself included. Of course labeling it an “old-school” tournament piqued my interest. 5th Mix was such a sight for sore eyes. Got to play Technika (which I am totally loving) and other various broken Bemani. But it’s the Broken, what can ya expect. This trip also the first time I’ve been able to step foot in Jersey without anything going wrong. Traditionally if I have to drive or fly into the state something screws up along the way. I guess I got lucky this time.

I should probably try to update this more, but it’s so much easier and convenient to micro-blog on Facebook and Twitter. Ah well.

July 3, 2009

Ever annoyed by those “absolute anonymity” blogspam comments on every single article that gets on Digg/Reddit?

Filed under: The Internet — sherl0k @ 10:59 am

“Prevent identity theft! Protect your email from spammers!”

Really?

Well, all it takes is a WHOIS on the domain you’re not-so-cleverly masking up with free domain redirectors, to see who this genius mastermind is. They’re all just iframe pages with the main content being hosted at http://www.harleydeals.net/ua/. So let’s query the WHOIS database and see how private this dude’s/dudette’s info really is.

registrant-firstname: William
registrant-lastname: Moffatt
registrant-street1: 8879 W Colonial DR
registrant-street2: Suite 143
registrant-pcode: 34761
registrant-state: FL
registrant-city: Ocoee
registrant-ccode: US
registrant-phone: +1.8636983793
registrant-email: dexxa@att.net

Google searches confirm the name and phone number are accurate, unless he’s using that pseudonym in real life along with on the Internet. I don’t know about you guys, but if he’s dumb enough to not hide his WHOIS info behind a privacy protector then he’s probably dumb enough to use his real information in there.

With this information (which is publicly available) I’m not calling for an army to spam/harass/find his house; I’m simply making an ironic point that a guy advertising anonymity on the Internet is doing a shoddy job of doing it himself.

June 1, 2009

Life: Now in HD.

Filed under: Uncategorized — sherl0k @ 12:06 am

Got a raise at work, to reward myself I bought a huge friggin TV. 42” Panasonic plasma. 1080p resolution, plethrora of inputs, amazing sound. Only $700 since it was an open box model. There’s only a few cosmetic issues but unless you’re an inch from the TV there’s really no way to tell. It’s also missing the remote and manual, but I got myself a universal remote that works just fine, and the manual’s online.

With an HDTV requires all these other little upgrades that I never thought of initially; component cables for the DVD player and the PS2 (yes I know I only need a PS2), HDMI cable for my laptop, and the aforementioned universal remote. Small purchases, all worth it. My DVD player is progressive-scan so movies look way better than with normal composite cables. Cannot wait for the HDMI cables to come in to watch all my awesome HD movies on the big screen.

An XBox 360 is the next thing on the list of things to buy. Considering getting a micro-ITX case and doing a little HTPC. I might score a digital receiver too, not sure yet. I wouldn’t know where to put everything.

Hit up the outlet mall yesterday too; got some new Puma’s. They’re extremely comfortable, glad I picked them up.

Today I did homework then rearranged the living room to fit the TV in. It’s a lot roomier in here now too, Liz and I got rid of a lot of stuff that was just taking up space. Everything’s coming together here, minus a few things.

I’m pretty content with everything as of late, I can only hope the trend continues.

April 30, 2009

Oh I turned a year older.

Filed under: Life,Work — sherl0k @ 1:02 am

I have retired my old-ish laptop, aurora. It served me quite well but I have moved on to a complete beast of a computer. C2D P8400, 4GB DDR3, nVidia9800m GTS 1GB, 320GB HDD @ 7200RPM, 17” WUXGA display. This baby flies. The only thing I don’t like is that there’s only 3 USB ports – my old laptop had 4, I was used to that. Other than that though I really can’t complain. I moved all my old data over without issue. I bought Orange Box for $10 on Steam, and got it running through Crossover. It took some fiddling with the configs to get it working, but TF2 runs at full res without choking. Not bad for implementing DirectX APIs in Linux, I’d say.

My weekend was totally crazy. Liz wasn’t around for part of it, she was at a convention downstate. After getting out of work on Friday, I did my laundry, caught up on some TV, then went right to bed so I could go back into work on Saturday. After that, Liz was home so we got some food, then went off to a karaoke bar with a bunch of my coworkers for a birthday bash. I share a birthday with one of them too, so it made the night even more awesome. Lots of good times proceeded. Sunday morning we woke up somewhat early so we could head out to Rochester, because Jouva’s visiting a friend there and we wanted to see him. Got to visit this awesome little trinket shop, played Extreme on a 100% legit Japanese cab which still had all the cardboard attractors around the monitor, and played a round of Munchkin (which is my absolute favorite card game btw). Drove back home later in the afternoon to catch dinner at my parents, then stayed up late to finish my homework.

After all that, I’m working 10-7:30 shifts at work due to the head engineer being out of the office for the week, which meant me getting up early Monday morning. Not fun. Lots of good stuff happening there though; figuring out solutions for some problems, making everyone’s lives easier, and just overall having fun there. I just don’t like coming home to an empty apartment.

No plans at all for this weekend, I’m stoked. It’s been a while since that’s happened.

March 27, 2009

How to give a chroot’d FTPd access to outside folders.

Filed under: Linux — sherl0k @ 2:41 am

For basic security reasons, FTP daemons don’t let you access folders that are symlinks (aka shortcuts) to folders that are outside of your jailed root, when you have chroot jailing enabled. This is standard practice for most shared FTP servers. So for instance my FTP session is limited to /home/sherl0k and all its subdirectories. I recently added a second harddrive to my server, and I wanted to access that drive with two major conditions: 1) not mounting the drive in a folder that resides in my /home, and b) giving me access to the contents without requiring a second FTP login. I also wasn’t going to turn off chroot.

So as I said, a symlink is not possible here. Doing a ln -s /second/dreamcast ./dreamcast from inside my home, and then accessing it via FTP, would yield an error: 550 Failed to open file.

So what’s a sysadmin to do?

Oh, the joys of the mount command. Believe it or not, it’s possible to mount a folder and/or filesystem in two places at once. Mind you making changes in one place will yield those same exact changes in the other, so doing editing in both places at once would yield some issues. But for my uses, this would never happen. I suppose this would also apply to normal symlinks.

Lo and behold, the code to rule them all: mount --bind -rw /second/dreamcast/ ./dreamcast

The drive was originally mounted as /second, with the dreamcast directory owned by my user account. I can now "bind" the folder anywhere on the filesystem – in this case inside my home directory – and have full access to it via FTP. No symlink involved.

March 11, 2009

Finally, reliable technology in my hands.

Filed under: Uncategorized — sherl0k @ 3:13 am

I have been plagued all my life it seems with piece of junk routers that never work right. Started off with a Belkin that gave extremely bad speeds, moved to a D-Link that would die everytime someone’s wireless dropped, then to another D-Link that had its wireless drop every 24 hours, then to a Netgear that would just crap out every hour or so if used actively.

Granted, I get what I pay for with these routers, either they were provided by the ISP or were bought for less than $50. I’ve always wanted a Linksys, but those cost upwards of $60 in stores. I just couldn’t justify the coin.

I finally got fed up with my string of crappy routers, and bit the bullet. At least I thought I was going to. Apparently Linksys WRT54G-TM routers are only $40 on eBay. Snatched that deal up, and I’m happy as ever. Even flashed the beast with DD-WRT and I’m even happier. It was a breeze to install and it gives me so many more options to play with.

It’s kinda silly how giddy I can get over a piece of hardware; but after years of dealing with faulty consumer routers I’m just happy to have something that works.

March 6, 2009

Good stuff right here.

Filed under: Life,Linux,Work — sherl0k @ 7:29 pm

Working with a client to deploy thousands of Ubuntu images across a network, using (what else) free, open-source software.

I’m pretty stoked about this project, not only because it’s giving me a chance to prove myself to a bunch of experienced engineers who’ve been in the field for 15+ years, but also because I get to work with my favorite software of choice.

This job gets better every day.

March 1, 2009

I HAVE A DREAM…CAST.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 1:35 am

i have a dream...cast

$45 for the DC, two controllers, and a memory card.

Not pictured: 377 Dreamcast games sitting on my external harddrive, ready to burn and play.

February 15, 2009

Hooray for Valentine’s Day.

Filed under: Life — sherl0k @ 1:35 am
chibis

sherl0k voodoo dolls exist, now let’s see how Liz will control my life.

Had some awesome Thai food, went to Wegmans for some delicious desserts, and now we’re drinking and watching the Blade movies. Out of order, because we’re awesome like that.

Also went into the office for a few hours this morning, went to the gym, and even got a nap in. Pretty decent holiday, I would say.

February 5, 2009

Fun fun at work.

Filed under: Bemani,Life,Work — sherl0k @ 2:55 am

Welp, they gave me a desk, I’m (supposedly) getting a company laptop I get to take home with me, and a dash of oversight. We’ll see where the pay raise comes into play here.

Today I imaged over a hundred thumbdrives, labeled them (until the labeler ran out of tape), moved hundreds of gigabytes of images from server to server, and other random stuff for my coworkers.

Went to the gym after work, too. I’m enjoying working out after hours, I still have a lot of energy in me and this is a good way to use it. Been trying to eat healthier, too. Let’s hope my health regime bears fruit.

Heading out to VA for a weekend to play Empress. I’m pretty excited. Get to meet a lot of people I only know through the internets, and see some old faces from my DDR tournament days. Greg’s awesome for letting me crash at his spot and helping me with transportation to/from the airport. Liz is all sad I’m going to be gone for *gasp* two days. I think she’ll survive.

Time to catch up on some primetime TV.

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