Send comments or
suggestions to:
Christopher 'Vulpine' Kalley,
vulpine@cyberfox.org

Copyright © 1998-2006

"Better Vulpines through Technology."


"Aaarrrggghhh!" = Klingon for, "Go ahead.Make my day."


Computers...ain't they grand Sun Jun 29 22:38:07 CDT 2003
Mood: tired Music of the Day: Corrosion of Conformity - Heal my Wounds
Well, I spent the day working on various computers. First, I took down Discordia, and de-motherboarded her, placed it in a differnt case, added the various hardware bits from Rhiannon's computer and booted. As expected, it had to reinstall the drivers for most hardware. Big shock... Then it asks for the driver disk for the video card. Well, I had it here around here somewhere. Couldn't find it. Cried a bit, then hit the internet. Found the driver, never could download it. Cursed alot. Finally dug up an old 4 meg video card, slapped it in. Worked fine. While I was doing that, I attempted to merge Fnord and Discordia. Lets just say it didn't work, for some reason I couldn't get the machine to recognize the drives on the raid controller, so I gave up and reset Fnord back to normal. So I have a working fileserver. Tomorrow I may try again, with doing a full reinstall. I don't know. Depends on how brave I feel. But I'm happy, Rhiannon has a computer of her own again, and I've sorta got my network back together, just with the gateway being Shub-Internet for now. Ok, speaking of windows. I finally got Nyarlaptop up and running with Win98. Had some problems with a corrupting/corrupted explorer.exe, but fixed that (aka re-reinstalled). Now to finish tweaking under windows and make it all nice and unixlike ;) Install Gaim for windows, ViM and PC-Pine ;) Ya know, the useful stuff :)

Nyarlaptop v 2.3 Sat Jun 28 22:22:05 CDT 2003
Mood: Geeky Music of the Day: Deep Purple - Knocking at Your Back Door
Well, I've decided to put Windoze 98 back on Nyarlaptop. No real reason, save as a backup for Rhiannon, and to get sound working on a portable box. I rather run linux, hell I used to run linux with sound on this thing, now no matter what I do...no sound. No clue either, but I'm tired of futzing with it. If I do get this working, next toy will be wireless so I can geek in the living room. ;)

Speaking of geek toys, I played with a Sharp Zaurus today at Fry's Computers. Kinda cool, alot more toys than my poor little Palm III. $500 there, but I can find similar ones at Pricewatch.com for $225...so maybe after I get a job. Would be cool to have, toy wize.

Charlie's Angels Sat Jun 28 16:24:59 CDT 2003
Mood: ok Music of the Day: The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets - Frogstar
Well, yesterday I went to see Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle yesterday with Rhiannon. It was pretty much exactly as I expected, so far over the top it almost landed on the moon. But it was fun. Alot of fun. You could tell that the actresses had fun making it, which was one of the best parts of the first movie. It looked like fun. :) John Cleese shows up as Lucy Liu's father, and he really played it for laughs. All in all it was a good film, except for one problem, the soundtrack was so loud in spots you could not hear the dialog. Now that may have been an issue with soundmixing in the theater, but it really got annoying after a while. But, I'm easily distracted by eyecandy...so the movie was still fun ;)

Fridays, don't mean a thing... Fri Jun 27 08:34:42 CDT 2003
Mood: alive Music of the Day: Vandenberg - Nothing to Lose
When you're unemployed. But at least they still are better than mondays. ;) Not alot going on in my life, went with Rhiannon and saw Finding Nemo. Cute movie, exactly what I expected and it was fun. The computer rendering that Pixar does just gets better with every movie. Plus, it was just funny as heck. I give it two thumbs up.

Rhiannon's computer has decided to give her soul to Shub-Internet. Aka it's crashed hard. I think it's the motherboard, but I haven't really sat down to figure out what died. *sigh* Some days I hate computers, but at least I don't have to hear a certain someone cursing at the crashing computer. Now I hear her sigh wistfully for her computer. Oh well, we'll see what I can do to fix it. *thud*

Seti@Cyberfox Tue Jun 24 20:33:25 CDT 2003
Mood: Geeky Music of the Day: Blue Oyster Cult - Take Me Away
Well, I've decided to get back (again) into the SETI hunt. Look out aliens, here I come ;) Seriously I went ahead and installed setiathome on all my machines (yes, I left Rhiannon's alone...it has enough issues.) and installed a control client for Gkrellm as well, so I can turn it on and off all from Shub-Internet. *grin* Life is geeky. For the curious, you can see how well I'm doing here.

Sunday... Sun Jun 22 20:05:08 CDT 2003
Mood: ??? Music of the Day: Judas Priest - Turning Circles
Well, another weekend almost over. Not much going on, been reading alot. Already polished off 2010 and the Ninja book from the library, started reading about Pluto and Charon...and while I'm getting it, I'm not getting it as fast as I'd understand history. The math looses me til I can spend a few min getting the picture in my head. But the authors of the book make it very readable other than when they have to go into mathspeak. And there aren't many spots like that. And it's very intresting, figuring out how they determine mass and density of an object several billion miles away. So I'm pretty proud of myself for having half a clue on what they're saying.

Worked on Rhiannon's computer today. It's been crashing ALOT. So, since the usual fixes don't fix things (reboot, scandisk, etc.) and I have no clue on windows, I followed the hardware path and swapped RAM. Nope, no difference. It may need a reinstall of windows, or something else. Might even be heat, the box was damn hot when I turned it off and opened the case. But it's an AT case, not alot of room to stick a fan in there...though I may try that. Or not. I know nothing about Windows anymore save how to configure internet stuff, and how to make NT play nice- nice under IIS. And even that's pretty fuzzy. I'm a Linux geek, and I don't have much want to go back to the dark side.

Not much else, had weird dreams about fighting zombies and driving though a wartorn zone in my car. But the funny thing is, I was pretty damn positive about the whole thing. Then again, I was HEAVILY armed and my Eclipse had a turret with some large gun in it. What can I say, I'm weird.

Encryption and Vulpine at the Library Fri Jun 20 20:00:54 CDT 2003
Mood: Groggy Music of the Day: Queensr˙che - Someone Else
Well, a geeky little post for the day. First of all, I went back to the library today to get more books, I finished 2001 in about 4 hours all told. So I returned a book on time, and got 5 more.

  • 2010: Odyssey two, Arthur C. Clarke
  • Ninja: The True Story of Japan's Secret Warrior Cult, Stephen Turnbull
  • Essential Saltes, Don Webb
  • Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System, Alan Stern and Jacqueline Mitton
  • The Life and Works of Josephus, translation by Whiston.

    So 2 fiction (#1, #3), and 3 non fiction, all of those on odd topics. Ninjas, outer Solar System astronomy and judaic history. Made the librarian's eyebrows go up. The Josephus book looks to be fun, I've read other Biblical histories commentary on him for years, and exerps of his works in lots of other books, but never went to the source so to speak. So this should be fun, but not a book to read while trying to get to sleep. ;) The others, well I snagged them as they caught my eye. I've been wanting to work on learning things besides gaming, geeking and redheads. So, on to hard sciences. ;)

    In other news, I stuck a little 1gig hard drive in Shub-Internet and set it as an encrypted device. With SuSE it was fairly plug and play. Now the fun part, getting it to backup as an encryption...I may have to just manually do that. Since automating it takes out the encrypting factor... We'll see

    • Glow in the Dark Pets Thu Jun 19 12:49:29 CDT 2003
    Mood: Awake Music of the Day: Annwn - Follow Me Up To Carlow
    http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,9830,978391,00.html

    'Fluorescent fish' give the green light to GM pets

    Yep, for all those people who wanted pets you could read by, glow in the dark fish. This actually sounds kinda cool for the geek in me, but I wonder how long they'd live and other issues with health. Plus, they would drives the cats nuts. "Look, nighttime targets!" *Pounce* he he...

    What's going though my brain is a cartoon I read as kid about "Good things about nuclear war." #whatever, you can put the cat out as nightlight. ;)

    ARGH !!!!!!!!!! Wed Jun 18 20:44:01 CDT 2003
    Mood: Frazzled Music of the Day: Vicious Rumors - Don't Wait for Me
    Well I found out why neither Discordia or Shub-Internet were allowing SMB access...

    Firewall.

    *thud* *thud* *thud*

    Both machines have acted as a router for the network...so both had all kinds of firewall foo configured. So the fact that Discordia couldn't be accessed via SMB is a Good Thing(tm). But I never turned off the firewall foo on Shub. Which is why she's been a haughty little bitch ;) Turn off the firewall, and it's all good. *crash* Now to fix all the crap I've been messing with and get everything back the way it was. *thud* *thud*

    Have I mentioned lately I hate MS stuff...

    Bored Fox Post Tue Jun 17 21:00:29 CDT 2003
    Mood: Bored Music of the Day: Apocalyptica - Beyond Time
    Well, it's time for another Bored Fox Post. Been a boring couple of days. Got Samba half working here at Chez Cabal23. Rhiannon's box can talk to Fnord via smb. But not Discordia or Shub-Internet. Weird...the only difference is the two non-working machines are running SuSE 8.0, with Samba 2.2.3a, and Fnord is running 2.0.7. Rhiannon's box runs Win98. If anyone has a bright idea what's up, let me know. Besides that, I've been doing laundry. Lots of laundry. 4 loads today, including a batch that were cat-marked. All came out good. *happy fox* Still have about 3 loads to go, I own too many tshirts ;) Been playing with desktop foo again...going for a nice sexist background for eyecandy :) I want 3 monitors though, that would be so much nicer ;) Not much else, was going to watch Scorpion King on DVD, but Ogle is having issues...oh well one more try...I'll just watch from the begining. Laters gators.

    Geek Update Sun Jun 15 15:54:06 CDT 2003
    Mood: Geeky Music of the Day: Testament - Dog Faced Gods
    Well, I've been geeking a bit over the last few days. Alot of it is fairly minor and dull things, like desktop work...making things as readable as possible. Others are a tad more fun, and I've even added a few new projects to my list.

  • Project 1 (Code Name: Project Webgeek): Setting up a home webserver.
      Still working on this, haven't even touched php or sql on the box yet. But I do have it working as a virtual host. And I have all my websites mirrored on Discordia now. And I've got the HTML mostly cleaned up so all the links and images are hardlocked to "www.cyberfox.org" or some such.

      Project Status: 75%
  • Project 2 (Code Name: St Gulik's Dance): Setting up a Sendmail based mailserver from scratch.
      Nothing new on this. Just haven't gotten around to it.

      Project Status: 1%


    I also have a new toy to work on. A friend gave me a HP Deskjet 842C printer. Needs a powersupply, but once I get that, I get to experience the joys of printing under linux...and setting up so Rhiannon's computer can print as well...which leads to my next project...
  • Project 3 (Code Name: Operation Babel): Setting up SMB.
      Ok, this should be a breeze. But it hasn't been before. Of course, I've been making fairly half assed attempts to make this work for a while, but since it's not a daily issue...it gets pushed back. So, I'm going to tear into my Samba docs, and get all the machines here at Cabal23.net playing semi nicely. I've done it before, I'll get it again. Just have to sit down and do it.

      Project Status: 0%


    I've got some other vaporware level projects in my head, like building a gaming box, setting up a new network once I have DSL with static IP's (and boy is that turning into a fun mental exercise), and other foo. Oh well, dreaming doesn't cost money.

    • And back again... Tue Jun 10 21:37:02 CDT 2003
    Mood: ... Music of the Day: Gaelic Storm - Johnny Jump Up
    Well, my experiment with dualhead failed. While it did help my Mplayer framerate, and made playing Starcraft a little better, it made everything else go absolutely nuts. Including making Ogle run slower (or so it seemed) No idea if it really did or not, but I prefer Xinerama...so back I went. Err...oh well.

    Mood has been shot to skeit (sorry, been reading a book about Ostrogoths, and I've picked up the slang) most of the day. But a good friend of no website called out of the blue and proceded to make me smile alot. So thanks to a certain Meerkat out there for the cheer up. Hope it lasts for a while :)

    Bored Fox Post Mon Jun 9 19:58:46 CDT 2003
    Mood: Geeky Music of the Day: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
    Well, I've been hacking away on Discordia for the last couple of days, getting mod_perl and virtual hosting working correctly, and setting up mirrors of all my websites and a few sites I have copies of. Generally it's been easy, once i remember wtf I'm doing. Now to get hacking on things like php...increase my skillset. :)

    I also switched my desktop from xinerama to dualhead, so I can get better pics and framerate with various multimedia programs, like Mplayer and Ogle. I'm having fun juggling programs showing up on various screens, but other than that, things are fine. No, no screenshot...nothing's really changed that you can see :) Well, except my cool Background. :)

    What a Fox does at 3am on Friday Sat Jun 7 03:49:03 CDT 2003
    Mood: geeky Music of the Day: King diamond - At The Graves.mp3
    For those who wonder what I do on my nights of insomnia, so far tonight I've played Starcraft, watched Big Trouble in Little China and Elvira's Haunted Hills as well as a couple of Futurama episodes, tinkered with my desktop settings as well as two fairly big geek projects.

  • Project 1 (Code Name: Project Webgeek): Setting up a home webserver.
      Ok, I've done this a dozen times before. This version is one that is actually functional and production useful. Step one, remember how to setup virtual hosting from scratch, instead of just copying over a config file. Now at 2am, that's not easy ;) But now it's working, and Discordia has virt hosts as well as 'personal pages' (aka discordia/~vulpine). This is a good thing, since I've been plotting a local server for me and Rhiannon for some time now, mostly for that lovely problem we have called schedualling. Now to find a good calendar script to run. I also need to setup all my websites on Discordia as a test bed for changes and updates...then have it rsync to Podge (my RL webhost) on demand. Hmm, maybe I'll use CVS for that, I've seen others do that.

      Project Status: 50%


  • Project 2 (Code Name: St Gulik's Dance): Setting up a Sendmail based mailserver from scratch.
      Again, something I've done the easy way before...but this will be the first time I've installed Sendmail completely from source, instead of using the OS and patching the snot out of it. Mostly I just moved all the webcrap from Malaclypse to Discordia and downloaded the Sendmail source. Well, and untar'd it and read the docs...and promptly decided to wait on working on that til I've had more sleep. But from there, setting up SpamAssassin for smart virus snagging and just using procmail here on Shub-Internet for filtering to folders. And once we get DSL and some IP's, then we have a mailserver ready to go. :)

      Project Status: 1%


    So there you have it...what I do when I can't sleep...Envy me ;)

    • The Graphical Fox Thu Jun 5 06:03:24 CDT 2003
    Mood: Creative Music of the Day: Dream Theater - Learning To Live
    Well, insomnia woke me up around 5am, so I got to work on finetuning the icons I use here at home, cleaning them up and whatnot. And well, I thought other people might like to have a few Discordian Icons. So, go download them here. Enjoy.

    Animatrix DVD Review Wed Jun 4 00:06:19 CDT 2003
    Mood: Soso Music of the Day: Animatrix DVD
    Well, I'm working my way though the Animatrix DVD. So far I'm enjoying it. The first short, Final Flight of the Osirus, is the best so far of the bunch. This is the one that was shown before Dreamcatcher. Personally this seems to be the closest to the story line of the movies. The next two, Second Renaissance I and II, are cool but kinda lacking in plot. But they will catch you like very little else, just the imagery of humans interacting with machines and how poorly we may handle it. Kid's Story explains the annoying kid running around Zion after Neo in Reloaded. Program is hyper anime fun, but not much for story. World Record made no sense ;) Beyond is the story of kids finding a glitch in the Matrix. Detective Story is good, done by the creator of Cowboy Bebop. Very film noirish. :) Matriculated is the last one, still watching it...looks very surreal to me, but it seems to be about the reprogramming of a machine mind by humans.

    Ok, short form review. It's a good add on to the Matrix storyline. Not all the stories are great, but's worth the $20 for Final Flight alone, IMHO. And if you happen to enjoy anime as well, it's even better. Vulpine gives it, two thumbs up.

    State of the Vulpine Address Tue Jun 3 17:10:43 CDT 2003
    Mood: good Music of the Day: Animatrix DVD
    Vulpine's update of the $TIMEPERIOD.

    Well, it's early in the AM, and I feel like poo. Slept about 4 hours last night, and now I'm in that lovely groggy sorta-awake state that I love so much. Sinuses are killing me, my mood is fairly bleah and in general I've had better days.

    On the plus side...haven't had any big fights with Rhiannon in a few days. This helps, nothing like dreading to be around someone you love to make life pretty sucky. The coming down off the Effexor hasn't helped, not to mention lack of money and lack of energy. So we'll see what happens.

    Hmm, what else. Doing a little research into Beowulf clustering. For the non-geek, a beowulf cluster is a supercomputer made up of lots of regular PC style systems, that run in a group to achieve supercomputer speeds. They are used for things like image rendering, weather prediction, chaos theory, all kinda of nifty things. Theoretically, I could build one here at Chez Cabal23 out of the systems I have. Will I ? Probably not, but the fact that I could, and that I'm starting to understand how does my ego some good. Hmm, ... Shub-Internet, Black Goat of 1024 Child Nodes ?

    *ponder*

    Lets see...today is payday for the fox on the dole. Most of that money gets spent right away. :( Maybe I'll have a little left over to play with. Hmm, Animatrix DVD is out today. *ponder* I do need to run to the Pflugerville library, and sign up. Make my book addiction a tad cheaper I hope. Also need to hit the store and get mt dew and poptarts. We be way out, and I'm feeling the lack. ;)

    A bit later...

    Check came in, went and got it cashed, got rent money order, got mtdew and allergy drugs. And ended up getting the Animatrix DVD. Yeah, I shouldn't have. But what the hey. I'm enjoying it. Final Flight of the Osirus is hellacool, and so far the 2 shorts called 'Second Renaissance' is very good, very Anime, but very good. Explains well why the machines revolted.

    Putting Nag-Yag, my Palmpilot to good use. Downloading alot of ebooks for reading. It feels so weird, and yet so right to be reading books on a computer. Currently snagging a bunch of the old Ian Fleming 007 novels. I've always wanted to read them, now I will. :)

    I think that's enough babbling for now ;)

    Stupid Cam Tricks Sun Jun 1 16:26:16 CDT 2003
    Mood: Geeky Music of the Day: None
    Well, I just figured out an important lession in shell scripting, if/then. Yep, kinda necessary to know. Well I was trying to write a program to stop/start my webcam, with Tom Gilbert's camE program. It uses a file called .blockcam in my /home dir to stop uploading and taking pics. Remove the file, and the pictures start up again. Easy. But I was bored, and tired of typing 'rm /home/vulpine/.blockcam' and 'touch /home/vulpine/.blockcam'. So I wrote a script to check for the existance of .blockcam, and either remove or add it from there. It looks something like this.
      #!/bin/bash
      BLOCKCAM=$HOME/.blockcam

      if [ -f $BLOCKCAM ] ; then
      rm $BLOCKCAM ;
      else
      touch $BLOCKCAM
      fi
    Nice, simple and it works. :) I'm a happy fox :)