Cricket Chirps to Temperature
"To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get temperature. "
The Old Farmers Almanacis so cool.
Today is Moon Day
Look up at the moon tonight and think about a few hundred footprints, left 36 years ago today by a few good men.
Retirement of the CTRVAX
So the first internet connected computer system I ever used has been
retired. "CTRVAX" was a VAX6000
series machine that served as one of the primary computing resources for
Vanderbilt University in the late 80's and early 90's. I think the year
that I used it was 1992 or 1993, I don't quite remember. My mom, a
teacher, was taking a computer training course at Vanderbilt/Peabody. I
tagged along with my mom as the little kid that was super into
computers. After asking me a few basic computer questions, a kind admin
saw it fit to grant me an account as well...'hubbarn' was the username.
My mom's was 'hubbarf'.
I don't remember a lot about the class...I was too busy playing around with stuff they weren't teaching. I think they were teaching e-mail...which I had of course already mastered on my local BBS. At the time however, I didn't have real internet access at home, instead relying on AOL and 'The Nashville Exchange', a local internet connected BBS...so this was a new and exciting world for me. I immediatly found the 'Remote Hosts' and 'Internet' menus and started playing with NNTP and remote BBS's. I tried to get onto other servers but couldn't really figure out what was going on and ended up looking for files with Archie. I remember using 'Gopher' and 'FTP', which I thought was pretty neat. This was before the 'web' so that was about as close to you could get to what most people today think of when they hear 'internet'. I remember downloading the Anarchists Cookbook, which I already had downloaded from a local BBS at home, but it was neat to do it over the 'Net. I think it was stored in my CTRVAX account...hopefully for a suprized admin to find when they cleaned my account. After the few hours were over, we left and I was hooked. I convinced my parents that the internet was the future.
Anyway, kinda sad to see the CRTVAX go...but quite remarkable that it was rendering services up until a month ago.
/nostalgia
London and the Social Net
First, I would like to say that what has happened in London is a complete tragedy. Whatever s**thead organization that did this needs to be drawn and quartered. Or turned into a glowing hole in the ground. Violence begets violence, whatever.
I am completely amazed at how blogs, flickr, technorati and wikipedia have provided coverage of this event. It's a testament to how well these social systems work. I went to CNN long enough to not be satisfied with the content. I went to Google News, but only got the same Reuters crap. Then I was sent a link for the London bomb pool for Flickr, which showed me pictures of the tragedy and the famous double-decker bus that the media kept mentioning. Which was totally ripped to shreds, horrible. Then I hit up Technorati for 'London' and read Londoner's blogs on the subject, a great number of which had been affected by the event. Then I hit up the Wikipedia article, which was marked as a 'current event - information may change rapidly'. And it was, at a rate of 4.17 edits per minute (2 hour average around lunchtime yesterday). Totally incredible that I got this much coverage without really checking out mainstream news channels. The "blogosphere" has been on my critical systems for communication map for a while, but Flickr just stepped into place along side it.
Back on 9/11, I calmly drove to work that day, talked to my co-workers who were trying to set up cable so we could check out CNN. I browsed Slashdot and found a few links to digital cams and digital pics that New Yorkers had put up of the event. At one point, I found someone who had a big directory of all the images that they had found and more were popping in by the minute. But it was instantly killed by huge amounts of traffic. A mirror popped up, I quickly mirrored it locally and provided everyone at work with the coverage of the event we couldn't get on CNN's site, thru the TV or other 'hub and spoke' style media outlets. If we had Flickr, Technorati and if blogs were more prolific back then, it would have been vasly easier to get the 'news' when we all needed to see it. It's apparent to me now more than ever that the mainstream media will be relied on less and less as enabling software becomes more and more popular.
Yosemite/Sequoia Birthday Trip
So, this last weekend, my dad and brother took me to Yosemite and Sequoia for my birthday. Thursday, I left work early to drive up to LA to meet them at David's work. The traffic was horrible even though I left at 2:45pm. Yuck, I don't ever want to do that again.
We drove thru the night and stayed in a crappy Motel 6 in Fresno. I know that the 6 is a low end motel, but this was compounded by being a low end Motel 6. I slept terribly.
The next morning we dragged out of bed and made the rest of the drive from Fresno to Yosemite. We arrived about 9am and had breakfast in Oakhurst, just outside of the park. The day was amazing...we visited Glacier Point, which had a great view of all the wonderful waterfalls of Yosemite. We then ventured down into the valley to visit Bridal Veil Falls...which was generating so much mist it was like getting rained on sideways. We had lunch in the valley and swarms of mosquito's attacked us, more specifically, David, who was eaten alive. So we retreated and went to Yosemite falls, which was more majestic and less...wet. Still very misty though. We went to the Mariposta Grove to visit the trees. Very very cool. The trees were huge!
We decided to head back to Oakhurst where our campsite was located and start dinner and get ready for bed. We checked in late and didn't have any firewood to start a fire. David had brought some charcoal but we had some really nice neighbors that gave us some Eucaliptis and Oak to burn in our fire pit. We roasted hot dogs and had some beer and then went off to bed. I actually had better sleep that night in the tent in my old military sleeping bag than I did in the hotel in Fresno. Much better.
The next day we woke up and decided that we had seen all the good points of Yosemite and decided to go to Sequoia. We had breakfast again in Oakhurst and then headed out. Sequoia was really cool, the trees were much larger than the ones in Yosemite. We went to see the Grant Grove, which included General Grant and General Sherman, the largest organism by volume in the world. Pretty incredible. Then we went to the Giant Forest which was just more huge trees. We did a 3 mile hike loop around the Forest. Got some great pics. We headed home about 5pm or so.
We stopped at a fruit stand near the grapevine and bought some of the best tasting fruit I've ever had in my life. A few hours later we stopped in a small town to eat dinner, then headed back to LA. Dad and I stayed at David's for the night and then the next morning (Monday) we headed to SD.
It was a great trip. This was my first trip to see redwoods and it won't be my last. I loved it, it was a great birthday present. Dad left on the following day, Tuesday at 6am. I wish it could have lasted a month! :)
Earthquakes and Glowing Water
The ride in CA is definitely been a little bumpy lately...First it was this one at a little after 8am last Sunday:
Magnitude 5.2 - SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 2005 June 12 15:41:46 UTC
Which Tracy and I both felt. Pretty good little jolt and a few sec of aftershocks. We both jumped up to look outside and see if the pool was shaking. It wasn't.
And last night we had this:
Magnitude 7.2 - OFF THE COAST OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA 2005 June 15 02:50:54 UTC
Which came with a Tsunami warning for the entire Pacific coast. And people screaming on the beach and evacuated/shut down communities. We had gone down to the to have dinner and watch the Dinoflagellate bioluminescence with some friends. Our waiter came out and said that there was a Tsunami warning. Idiots in the street were shouting it. Dude, we were 300 something feet above sea level. It'd have to be a meteor impact off the coast of San Diego to affect us. People were acting silly.
This is what it looked like:
Oh the horror!
And then 25 minutes later, it was cancelled. Heh.
But the bioluminescent dinoflagellate were coooool. The waves were crashing and creating a neat blue light each time. Tracy and I went down to investigate even closer and didn't find much. We headed back up the trail only to find a skunk in our path. Which promptly chased us with it's huge black and white tail in the air. So we walked over a (*#$%ing) mile up to Swami's to go around it. As we were about to head up the steps at swami's, a couple told us that there were tide pools that were glowing like crazy...so we investigated that.
We noticed that as we walked, we were leaving glowing footprints in the sand. So cool. You could tap the ground and it would light up. You could tap the water in the tide pools and it would fan out like lightning bolts. Running your hands around on the rocks (covered in algae) would leave trails. It was so bright and so neat. Highly recommend going out to see this. More on it here.
Invalid user guest from 62.193.142.170
Subject: Re: Breakin Attempts
Our computer seems to be hacked in, so we are currently locked out from it.
I will see to it, that the computer is disabled asap,
and the means of entrance into the system discovered.
Thanks for the report,
Nenad Peric
system administrator
Sinfonika d.o.o.
Belgrade
Neat. At least there'll be one less jackass script kiddie bot probing ssh all over the freaking place.
I used to report these all the time back when I was a sysadmin at a small ISP. I get reports of the logs on our servers daily and process anything from our customers and send it off to various organizations' abuse contact. It was far more effective to actually call people than it was to send e-mail. But that was before spammers would relentlessly call any number listed in whois. And back when most of the own3d machines were from the US. I don't plan on calling Belgradeto report a script kiddie. Once, I got a page that our NetApp had just reached 100%. Apparently some kid at UCSD had found a customer's open ftp account and had uploaded 8G of w@r3z games. I reported him like usual. The admin was nice and said the account had been suspended etc etc. About a month later I got a call from the FBI wanting to know the monetary cost of the 'hack attempt'. We came up with a small number to give to them. I talked to the agent and she said that the kid that did it was a student and had been kicked out of school and that her job was to gather evidence for his court appearance. Wow! I guess UCSD took that pretty seriously.
I felt bad for the guy for a while, but then I remembered that he was pirating a shit-ton of microsoft games and woke me up in the middle of the night over it.
/bofh
I love Futurama
I can't believe that it was cancelled. Such a shame. But you can still buy all the DVD's from Amazon.
Plenty of fan sites exist tho, and I think the one I surf the most is http://www.gotfuturama.com/
I've also heard that there will be a direct-to-DVD set of new material published soon. Or at least that's the rumor.
Bender kicks ass!
MP3 streaming
So, I hate not being able to listen to good music while at work. Well, here are my 3 solutions:
DAAP (iTunes) streaming. I use http://www.mt-daapd.org to stream my mp3 colletion over DAAP to my work host. I use apple's mDNS responder to fake a local iTunes host with a remote IP address. Then I use iptables and a password to only allow my host access to the music library. This has proven to be a really great solution for listening to my music at work. And the iTunes interface kicks ass. Nothing else has come close to being as good as iTunes for finding my tunes.
http://www.mp3act.net/ I just stumbled upon this. An AJAX enabled web based mp3 streamer. Very cool. This went on my server with a quickness.
SomaFM. http://www.somafm.com. Excellent music stations. I listen to "Secret Agent" and "Groove Salad".
Update: Obie just informed me of this: http://www.freshlymixed.com/ Pretty sweet!
MacTel
So Apple will be switching to Intel in 2006. Initally this pissed me off and I was skeptical. After noodling on it a bit, I like it. I betcha that very quickly, the Linux hackers will make Linux that runs killer on the Intel based Macs. They'll also make compatability libraries for Linux Intel binaries. Then Windows Intel binaries. Imagine seamlessly running MS or Linux binaries on your Mac. Killer.
Some questions I have:
- How will Endianness be handled? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_endian
- What about this Rosetta stuff?
- Will Macs simply be high end PC's that run OS X? Or will it be like today's mac except an Intel Proc? I'd rather contine to have superior hardware that you just can't put together off the shelf and can't be sold by Dell.
I gotta upgrade to Tiger. Think I also need to buy a Mac Mini.
New song I'm addicted to: Starry Eyed Suprise by Paul Oakenfold