Hubble is cool
HST rocks. Check out this pic:
And this gallery:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
I can't believe they're going to decomission it, but I guess that the size and capability of ground based scopes has grown so much that I can understand it a bit.
renewing an expired SSL cert for IMAP
On my host, which is Debian:
cd /etc/ssl/certs
openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -out imapd.pem -keyout imapd.pem -days 365
It will ask a few questions, give a few answers...Done!
I had forgotten how since I did it last almost 2 years ago. I have just been putting up with the annoying warning when I connect to my server. Link here: http://www.knowplace.org/pages/howtos/linux_imapd_with_ssl_howto.php
vi on a dark background
I use Vim at least 100 times a day. And I like my terminals set to light on dark. Over the last 10 years or so you would find me in a dark office with a dark screen and bright text. I've since moved to a new office that is a little brighter but I still prefer the darker screens. With vi, the default syntax highlighting settings are too dark to actually read the text...the blue's are almost unreadable with background glare. So, a quick search revealed an option that fixes all my problems:
set background=dark
or
set bg=dark
Now my text is much brighter and still readable in the brighter office.
More: http://cephyr.cid.net/doc/vim/html/options.html#'background'
Web Hosting providers
People ask me frequently how to get started with a personal web site. I generally point them to a route that takes them to setting up Apache on a cablemodem connection. But since web hosting is a commodity now and is highly competitive, it's extremely cheap to get a site hosted on professionally run servers and they come with a lot of features. Two that I have seen and would recommend for a personal site:
Dreamhost and Powweb both have plans for $8 a month and include your own domain name, nearly 5G of disk, mail, MySQL and a host of 1-click software packages including blogs, wiki's, forums and other typical website type things. I wouldn't put a business critical or revenue generation website on these low-end services but they work perfectly fine for a personal site. I do see that each of them offer higher end services, but I can't comment on the reliability of those. A friend of mine uses Dreamhost's higher end stuff and it seems to do well for him, buy YMMV.
Funny link of the day: Beef Panties?
"Quaker Maid Meats Inc. on Tuesday said it would voluntarily recall 94,400 pounds of frozen ground beef.."
make firefox a little more writer friendly
Geek to Live: Turn Firefox into a web writer - Lifehacker *
The rise of the read/write web makes the term “browser” a misnomer. If you use web-based e-mail like Gmail, or if you post to forums or write a blog, you’re using a “browser” to author documents as well as browse them. A plain, tiny web page textarea is not very conducive to writing. If you spend a lot of time writing the web with Firefox, soup up your “browser” with a few extensions that will turn it into a powerful text editor.
Rodent Patrol
Warning: this may be a little gross for squeamish/PETA readers...
So we have these next door neighbors. And they have a lot of people living in their house. And 4 dogs. And the amount trash they produce as a household overflows from the bins. And that (among other things) has given them a pest problem. Ants, rats, mice, whatever. This spring, his wife made him tear down the shanty/shack he built in the back yard because it was infested with rats. He told me they all ran into my yard. Thanks. The rats made their way to my storage shed, which Tracy discovered a few weeks later. That totally wigged me out to see 3 or 4 rats running around in there, so close to my house. I am like Indiana Jones's dad, I hate rats. After scaring the remaining rat out (and doing a little adrenaline dance when he exited between my legs) I cleaned it out and put out poison. It vanished, they vanished. We also found a few mice dead in the pool. Yuck, but at least they were outside. I've never lived anywhere that rodents were a problem inside or out. I guess in SoCal, the proximity of homes and dense population gives them a little bit better place to survive. Having neighbors with a rodent problem doesn't help either.
So last week Tracy swears up and down she saw something dart across the living room floor out of the corner of her eye, but didn't get a good enough look at it to tell if it was a lizard or a mouse. Yes, we had a lizard in the house once or twice, they like to sleep near the door frame on sunny days. The next day she says she saw it dart around again and said it was definatly a mouse. So I tear up the living room looking for signs of mice and find that the AC intake vent isn't installed properly, leaving a gap which the little bastards could squeeze thru from the airbox. The AC intake bridges the living room and the garage because the airbox is in the garage. So I reinstall properly, closing the gap. I also used some expanda-foam to fill in a bunch of cracks and areas around the airbox. That was last week, no sightings since, even the crickets have disappeared. I figured he found his way out in the middle of the night somehow.
But tonight, after eating a glorious meal of orange peel chicken, I was sitting on the couch using the laptop when some movement caught my eye. The little bastard darted from beside the TV and went under the couch I was sitting on. Two words: heebie jeebies. I whipped out the mag-light and investigated. He must have gone into the couch. So I got Tracy to man the hallway with a broom. Didn't want him going into the bedrooms...I wouldn't be able to sleep, might have to burn down the house or something. I armed myself with a broom as well and started trying to get him to exit the couch. I turned it on it's side, nearly knocking down our ceiling fan. I beat on it, I ripped up the bottom and poked around, beat it some more, nothing. At one point, after a hard smack, I heard him plop from one side to another but no exit was made. So I pushed it over and let the whole 3 seat couch nail the ground. Instantly, he darted onto the tile and hid behind the nearby vaccum cleaner. I removed the vac and he took off again in an attempt to run into the kitchen.
Keep in mind that no animal runs well on polished ceramic tile. They just kinda slide. Ever see a dog or cat try to run on tile? Imagine that but shrink it into mouse form and feed it some crack to enduce the amazing 10-direction-changes-per-second running style of a mouse.
I did a quick street-hockey move with the broom and he went flying across the tile and slapped the wall near the front door, stunning him for a moment. Totally unprepared to actually catch him, I ran at top speed to grab some some yard gloves while Tracy (who was until now standing on a chair, screaming) fetched a plastic bag. He regained his composure and started to make his move again so I pinned him with the broom. Haha! Got you now, little fucker! But he was squirming a lot...I didn't want to get bitten in the capture attempt. So I did what any momentairly insane rodent hunter with street-hockey skills would do: dropped the puck. I let him get a few feet away and immediately slapped him into the wall again for a 2nd stun, this time a little harder. Whap! I quickly grabbed him with the gloves, put him in the bag, took him outside and bashed him against the ground a few times before depositing the bloody mousebag of death in the trash.
Holy fuck that was gross. Yikes.
I immediately felt a lot better knowing it was dead/gone, but the whole ordeal put me a little on edge. So I proceeded to place a few traps around to see if there are more that need the kaibosh. Damn dude. Rodents suck. w
Halloween Humor
Seen on the side of the zombie container in "Return of the Living Dead":
DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY
CALL 1 (800) 454-8000
Call the number. But not from work.
Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper - Ma Na Ma Na!
The new Dr Pepper ad for Cherry Vanilla has some familiar music to it...click on 'media gallery' and then the 1st TV ad: "Date".
http://www.drpepper.com/CherryVanillaDP/index.aspx
Turns out, it's this:
http://www.devilducky.com/media/7452/
Man, the muppets rule.
script.aculo.us
script.aculo.us - web 2.0 javascript
If you develop web apps and you haven't heard of this, go check it out. It makes it easy to add great functionality to your apps like drag-n-drop, visual effects and auto-completing text fields. There is another article that provides a way to use script.aculo.us in S5 slides....which you should also check out. ;)
http://labs.cavorite.com/presentacular/
For some demos of this technology, check this out:
vi global addressing
Something I found very useful today:
ITworld.com - Search and replace with vi -- part 1
There is another form of line addressing called global addressing. It is similar to the % (all lines) address, but allows you to limit the search and replace action by specifying certain text that must appear in a line before the search and replace action is applied to it. An example is show below. The syntax shown below would read "for all lines containing `some text', search for `search text' and replace any instances with `replacement text.'"
:g/some text/s/search text/replacement text/
In effect, you are requesting that two strings must be found in a line, but only one of them is to be replaced.