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Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
vulpine@cyberfox.org
Copyright © 1998-2006
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"Better Vulpines through Technology."
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| Nogitsune upgrade | June 29th 2000 |
Hello there from Cyberfox land. Well, some more new from the Lair. My main
workstation has gone though a MAJOR renovation. When last we checked in with
Nogitsune, he was a dual celeron 366, 256 megs of ram and about 36 gigs of
hard drive space, with two 19" monitors. Well, in the past week I've removed
the 20 gig drive (and placed that in Fennec), added a internal Zip drive,
upped the memory to 384 megs, upgraded the processors to 533 mhz and added
a 3rd 19" monitor. I now have 4800x1200 in desktop space. I'm so cool I
scare myself. I also have so much desktop space I don't know what to do with
it. Oh well, I'll find uses :) Of course, with all this radiation in my
system, I should be sterile in a few weeks. Hmm, yet another benefit ;)
For the curious, I've got the oft requested screenshots...
Left,
Center, and
Right. Sorry,
it's not the Tara Monroe background of last update, I need to make a 3rd
screen for the new monitor. Maybe tonite. Anyway, tiled backgrounds are
easier to setup. On screen one we have communication software (pine,
IRC, GAIM, and LICQ) as well as Gkrellm and epplets. Pan downloading
headers from a news group, and just for grins, a image of what I want
my apartment to look like this time next year. Yep, the fox wants a Beowulf
cluster. :) Hey, everyone needs goals.
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| Movies | June 29th 2000 |
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On to non geek news, not a whole lot. Been a movie watching week. Saw
U-571 on Tuesday, and The Patriot Wednesday. Both pretty good, if a few
historical flaws. Of course, you have to be an ex-history freak to find
them, nothing that ruined the story. Just a few things that I noticed.
Other than that, both really good movies. Will probably see them again,
and or buy them when they come out on video/dvd. If I own a dvd player by
then. Next, I want to see the Perfect Storm. As much of an ocean freak
that I am, I kinda need to see this. Storms, oceans, boats...*happy fox
dance* and again, I have to see how historically accurate this is. One
day I'll see a movie I don't have to ponder the accuracy of.
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| Geeks in Kilts | June 29th 2000 |
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Else in the news, it looks like I'm going to be showing my white geek legs
in the future. My dear friend
Amythest has come up with a great idea. Raise money for a
charity, and you get me and Needo
out in kilts. For more info check out
UserFriendly or DFWUfies. And if
you want to donate, email
kilts@dfwufies.org with your pledge. And to answer why I'm doing this ?
I'm scots, and I'm just a tad crazy. Plus they say girls go crazy for a man
in a kilt, and I'm willing to take that risk. For the curious, no I don't
plan on going regimental. Just cause I'm crazy doesn't mean I want to risk
an indecient exposure charge ;)
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| DNS Experimentation | June 20th 2000 |
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Another week, another news entry...more or less. Actually have some new toys
for the network. Vulpes, the shell server is now also a DNS server. I setup
caching DNS on it, and routed my workstations to use it as a primary name
server. It's got a bit of a delay, as it is a caching DNS server...but not
a bad one. So I've got half the DNS issues done. Next I need to do
authoritative DNS for my network. But that will wait until the DSL line
is installed. I got my range of IP's, and configuration docs. Of course,
they don't make much sense. And the fact that it's windows setup doesn't
help things. Oh well, nothing I can't make work. :) Along with the DNS
on vulpes, I got my sendmail headaches fixed. So now vulpes is doing the
mail for kallisti-linux.net,
my secret project in Linux. What does it do ? Not much, I was originally
planning on developing my own variant of a linux destro...not sure now.
I don't want to do a linux howto site, that's overdone. Any ideas ?
Mostly the domain name has been used to demo DNS crap. So I don't break
what works :) Oh well.
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| Camping | June 20th 2000 |
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Went camping this weekend, got rained on so much my brain still squishes. Had
a good time. 4 days in the big blue room without internet access (or anything
more hightech than my cellphone). Kinda scary. So, i'm recovering by
spending most of the day in front of the computer. Like I said, I worked
on vulpes alot, did some desktop layout stuff, caught up on email (2000+
is a touch much I think) and generally have been lazy. I need to finish
clearing and cleaning the office, and rebuild Reynard. From there, I have
plans for my computers :)
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| Newest Tara Monroe Screenshot | June 20th 2000 |
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Speaking of desktops, yet another screenshot for your viewing pleasure.
(This reminds me, I need to update the screenshot page...I'm woefully out
of date.) We have a return of the Goddess Tara to the The Screenshot of
the $time. This time, I have a small montage of nice pg-13 images,
on a purple background. 100% done with gimp. Come take a look at the
left monitor
and the
right monitor. This shows my new eyecandy, plus some new toys...MTV
(no, not Music Television) an mpeg viewer, and Mozilla (the freeware version
of netscape). Mozilla is...intresting. Not sure how much I'll use it over
netscape, but it's nice to have running...I made it work, I'm happy.
Btw, if your curious, you can download the wallpapers from the ftp server,
ftp.cyberfox.org/pub/files/
The images are free to distribute, as long as you don't claim them as your own.
(And if someone owns the copyright on these images, let me know and I'll pull
em).
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| Fennec | June 12th 2000 |
Another day, another bit of news. A good bit of news, I finally have
Fennec up and running. Fennec is the long awaited Mp3 server I've been
planning and designing for the last few months. Well, I finally got off
my butt and built it :) And this box should be known as Fubar, not Fennec for
the amount of kluding that went into building him.
Fennec is a AMD K6-2 300, with 64 megs of RAM and
two IDE hard drives. 1 is a basic 8.4 gig, the other is a brand new Maxtor
60 gig drive. We are talking major space. And major headaches to install.
Bios doesn't recoginize it, but Linux/FreeBSD do. Ok, no major worries...
go and partition it using Redhat...whoops, only sees 27 gigs. That's not
good. Switch to SuSE, same thing. Curse alot. Start up FreeBSD, it sees
all 60 gigs, hurrah. Setup the disk slices, no problem, create file system
...and it goes snafu. For some reason, FreeBSD's installer cannot create
a file system that matches 60 gigs...bummer. This was Sunday, give up and
go gaming (more about that later) one of my gaming buddies suggested spliting
the drive into two slices, and going from there. Get home last night,
try it...and $deity be praised, it worked. Give up at that point, and sleep.
Get up today, install the full FreeBSD install...and no network routing.
Curse, alot. Configure it, tweak it until I'm blue in the face, call it names.
Finally I give up on FreeBSD, try Slackware 7...get about 5 min into the
install and note the 'change partion type' option in fdisk. Say, what the
hell, and change the partitions...no error. Junk the slackware install and
go with the champ, SuSE. And guess what...no errors on install. *happy dance*
Then I notice why I have been having networking foo...the cable isn't plugged
in, I had removed it after the first install last night to prevent network
traffic...
D O H !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Another case of Pournelle'sLaw.
"Always check your cables first, 95% of the time it's a cable problem, and
your going to feel like an idiot." Oh well, fixed that and it came up nicely.
Plenty of hard drive space now for Mp3's. I shouldn't have to do this
nonsense again for at least 6 months. *laugh* At least I hope not :)
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| Gaming | June 12th 2000 |
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As I said early, I'm back into gaming. Shadowrun to be exact, a rather novel
mix of Cyberpunk and Fantasy. Datajacks and Dragons. Data Havens and Trolls,
fun :) Magic exists, so does high tech. And I'm slowly getting back into
being a good storyteller. In high school and college I used to live in
these games, and I could spin an adventure without having to use preprinted
adventures. I'm not quite back up to my old talents, but working on it.
The group is made up of DFW local fans of the comic strip
UserFriendly. No, no dustpuppies
in the game...yet. :)
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| New Screenshot | June 12th 2000 |
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On to, The Screenshot of the $time I've still got my fetish for
rendered landscapes. As usual, here are the
Left Monitor
and the
Right Monitor.
The background on this one is stolen from the
Windowmaker Windowmanager. It's
one of the default themes. I snipped about 40% of the image, and saved it
as a seperate image, and stuck it on the left screen. :) And voila, one
big ocean night scene. A friend of mine is designing me a rendered landscape
image based on this idea, but with a little more detail as we speak, and it's
designed for 3 19" montiors :) *happy dance* Of course, I'm also planning
on designing my first Enlightenment Theme, based around stolen bits of
other themes I like...and Tara Monroe images. Which will win out, Sexy
redhead or beautiful landscapes ? We'll see. :)
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| Office Move | June 12th 2000 |
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Not much else going on, slowly moving things back into my old home office.
Going to try to lay this out better, so I'm not so crowded. Pics to come
later. :)
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| June in Texas | June 2nd 2000 |
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Ok, it's June, it's Texas...DAMN IT IS HOT ! Ok, I'm done. You'd think
after nearly half my life in this sweatshop, I'd know how bad it gets in the
summer...but no, I have to be shocked every year. Oh well, at least I get
to take a vacation soon. Go somewhere cold. I'm thinking Northern Cal,
the San Francisco Bay area :) It's nice and comfy there, with a decient
public transport system so I don't have to mess with renting a car. Tis a
thought.
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| Job News | June 2nd 2000 |
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Well, on to news. When last we saw the Cyberfox, he had just started working
for a startup. Well, as of this last Tuesday I have terminated my employment
with them. Lets just say it was a nice combo of lack of motivation on my
part, and a lack of motivators on their part. Pro bono work doesn't
make people want to break their back, unless they get 'something', since
I didn't get anything but a few vague promises and a hard drive (that they're
wanting back), I didn't put forth any great effort. Oh well. Live and
learn. So back to vacation, which I think is better for me anyway. :)
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| DSL | June 2nd 2000 |
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On to more fun stuff, I'm finally joining the ranks of DSL users. My ISP
Ticnet can provide me with a 384k
SDSL connection for about the same price total as my ISDN line. Since it's
SDSL, that 6 times the bandwidth of my little ISDN (384 up and 384 down, instead
of 128 across the board). That's a bloody T-1 in my book. :) So, once
I get that installed, I'll be moving all the accounts on my virtual server
back in house to a local server. So I have to build a new box...funfunfun.
lair2 (the new server will probably get built fairly soon, since I don't have
to use a BSD test box anymore. Of course, I need to get off my butt and
build Fennec (the Mp3 server). I'm out of room on Nogitsune. *laugh*
Another case of procrastination, I've got all the parts (I think) I just
need to get off my butt and do it. We'll see :) Plus Vulpes (the shell
server) is having hardware glitches...when it raines, it pours.
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| Tempest | June 2nd 2000 |
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Well, on to good news. I went to see a concert tonite, Tempest. For those
not in the know, they're a celtic rock band from San Francisco. If you get
a chance to see them in your town, by all means do it ! They're a nice
bridge band, rock enough for the metalheads, and with enough trad tunes for
the folk freaks. Plus they are just damn fun to watch. The band seems to
be a pack of ferrets on speed, bouncing all around the stage...without
dropping a note. Well, I found it impressive as all heck. They played for
what seemed like too short a time, but they did manage to hit some of my
favorite tunes. Then, I got to chat with some of the members of the band.
And they are just a nice bunch of guys. I could go on and on about how
cool this evening was (The autographed CD didn't hurt things at all) but
words won't do it enough justice. So instead, go see them yourselves.
http://www.tempestmusic.com is their
website. Check it out.
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| Screenshot Time | June 2nd 2000 |
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And finally, the long delayed Screenshot of the $time. Or screenshots
as it where, I tried to make one shot out of the two images, but gimp got
a little pissy. So here they are,
Left monitor
and
right monitor
. As you can see, I've got a nice matching background for both monitors.
Rendered landscapes are very nifty. Usual toys running, with the addition
of some epplets. Mostly eyecandy and toys, but fun eyecandy and toys.
The top one under Gkrellm is a magic 8-ball, for those business decisions,
next is a mixer for sound. Next to that is the phase of the moon (dark, that's
why it's black). Next is a pair of E-flames, one showing process usages, the
other showing network traffic. Under that is a mountbox and a program called
Beavis, a epplet version of xbiff. But they look cool. :) And that's all
that matters. Sooner or later I'll get Xinerama running under XFree4.0, and
then no more spliting the monitors. Oh well, one of these days. Also got
a friend of mine working on some more rendered landscapes, so I should have
some new views, as well as a scape that works with the planned 3rd monitor.
Hmm, 3 monitor nighttime seascape...*drool* Of course, I may go back to the
goddess Tara. Say a 4800x1200 set of images of Ms Monroe :) Of course, then
I'd have to go back to transparent eterms...the choices the choices ;)
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