Tims Blog

To kinda followup with my post the other day about creating a search provider in firefox, included are some links to cool search plugin related sites.

• convertico
• creating opensearch plugins for firefox
• firefox search plugins generator
• an experts guide to napping
• lincity-ng 2.0 is out
• plop boot manager
• instantwatcher

I sat through an hour and a half of I am Legend tonight. Boy, what a crappy movie.

For all the “oh my god Will Smith” and “oh my god, it was so good” that movie was a letdown. “But the poor dog!” Yeah, big deal about the dog. It gets bitten by some zombies and Will Smith breaks it’s neck, there, the secret is out.

The whole plot reeks of 28 days/weeks later which were both far better movies. For one, the zombie folk are played by real people. All the zombies in IAL are computer generated. They dont instill that same level of fear that the zombies in 28 did.

Smith gets props for playing a great role; he was just defeated by everyone around him.

I wrote a firefox search plugin today for our telephone book at work. I love the telephone book, I just hate having to surf to the page. I can never remember the url and once I get there I need to navigate these drops down menus and stuff. No offense to the guy who wrote it; I know him, and he’s a great guy. I just needed something even more basic.

Joe had it right with his caller id hack. I took that idea and turned it into a firefox plugin. It’s cool.

Well, I was looking forward to Berkeley, and then I got a dose of reality; now I’m not looking forward to it. Really, why am I going out that way if we’re not going to use the product. There’s some stuff going down at work that, while I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it is happening, is taking me by surprise that it is happening.

I rant about these issues at work all the time, but now action is being taken and I’m left standing there saying “what? oh snap, I better make sure I’m indeed playing my role”.

What is my role again? I mean, sometimes I just get the impression that people are making excuses for me. “He’s too busy” and stuff like that. I don’t buy that claim; ever. The reality of it is “he’s just lazy”, or “he’s depressed” or “he just doesn’t know what the hell to do next because he’s so stellar that he finishes everything he touches in a week and work can’t keep up with him”.

I’m never “too busy”.

I am usually one of the aforementioned three.

Everyone uses that argument sometime in their life though to justify their inability to accomplish a task; pick one.

Right now a lot of my tasks are programming related. I’m not “too busy” for them. In fact, I work on them straight 8 to 4. The problem is more along the lines of “I’m having trouble thinking this problem through” or “how is a good, not perfect, way to make this?” Those are the real reasons it takes time to do work; not because I wear 50 different hats.

I’ll admit though that I’m going through a bout of laziness/depression right now; happens to the best of us. Just gotta keep plodding along and rolling with the punches.

Yesterday totally sucked.

• toms twelve laws of life

I finished work on an enhanced version of David Levine’s mailparse script. I’ll defer questions and screenshots to the wiki links on the right side of the screen, and the software link to the right where you can download my copy of the code.

More of my code is making it’s way into git also. Check back every now-and-then to the software page to stay current with it.

On a totally different topic, I finished Common Sense on Mutual Funds; a fantastic book written by one of my financial idols John Bogle, founder of Vanguard. It was a difficult book to read at times due to the volume of math that is tossed around, but I can say I profoundly enjoyed it overall and it re-affirmed my outlook on personal finance and low-cost investing.

I’ve started Atlas Shrugged. It’s a huge book (1100+ pages) and I’m so stoked to read it and Fountainhead (also sitting on my bookshelf). Also, I crunched some numbers and decided it’s not worth it in the long run to keep the mortgage; it’s only saving me ~300 bucks a month when you figure in the tax write-off. It’ll be ~900+ saving every month, after tax, when I’ve killed it. Baby steps though, the next year is focused on motorcycle and student loans.

Thought I’d take a moment to geek myself here and point out that my Hyundai Sonata has the most fuel-ups of any Hyundai Sonata on the Fuelly website; 88 at this writing. So, I win.

And then 2 steps back when I ran into the same snafu that everyone seems to run into when git push doesn’t do what you think it’s going to do. No problem though, it’s fixed now.

Comcast called today to ask me how my new installation was going.

… new installation? … huh?

I cancelled your service a month ago sir; it’s going great!

That concluded the call pretty quickly : )

On another note, under the Software page to the right I’ve posted links for cloning my public git repositories.

Some crazy stuff has been happening these last couple of days.

First, I got in contact with an old friend, Cole, who I haven’t seen in about 5 or 6 years. We hung out at my place and caught up on everything that has happened between then and now. It was amazing to hear all the stuff that can happen in what sounds like such a short amount of time. I hope that he and I can continue to be friends, as he’s really not a bad guy and has a lot of potential.

I finished Paulos’ book “I Think Therefore I Laugh”; it was a tough read. Paulos typically doesn’t let the Mathematician in him escape in his writing, but this book was completely different. My head was swimming as I read what was intended to be humorous quips to Philosophical ideas. Good thing the book was limited to < 200 pages. My eyes were bleeding by the end.

Next in the queue is to finish Bogle’s book “Common Sense on Mutual Funds”. I started it a while ago but stopped ~200 pages in because parts of it can be dry, or require a level of attention that I just couldn’t provide at the time. It’s one of those books that you really need to read out loud to yourself because you’ll drone off if you’re silent. He has a lot of valid points and strong arguments, but the subject matter is just naturally void of Indiana Jones style action or fantasy; it’s finances, what do you expect.

I finally got around to moving all my subversion code off of the webserver. I had planned on doing this for a while because I wanted to drink from the Git fountain just like everyone else. The small problem I had was I was on an old linux system hosting my subversion repos, and I couldn’t find a migration tutorial that worked. Well, while posting my PHP IDMEF library to GitHub, I found a tutorial that worked.

So my git repos went into a virtual machine santioned for only that purpose. Ubuntu JeOS 8.04 is the underlying OS since there’s no reason to have a lot of horsepower in it. So I will updated my subversion page to be just a general code page. I’ll post public git repos there for some of the software I’ve written. Also, check out php-idmef on github. Documentation on my wiki will be available shortly.

• gitcasts
• vyatta dhcp static mapping
• ubuntu static ip
• the knight santa went crazy

So cold that when I went to leave work today, my car didn’t start at first.

Then, it started, but the ESC (Electronic stability control light) and check engine light stayed on.

I proceeded to press the ESC on/off button, and the light didn’t respond; great. Pressed gas pedal, no response; wonderful.

Let car sit and idle for a bit. Maybe it’s just cold I thought.

Waited 10 minutes. Joe came out and we had a quick chat about how I stole his book from him and was going to have my way with it tonight in my office tonight. Good times, good times.

Got back in the car, turned off car, turned on car. ESC light went off; progress! Check engine light stayed on; bummer.

In fact, the check engine light stayed on the entire way home. So of course I was thinking the worst, but the car is still under warrenty. I just didn’t want to dick around with any problems. I get fed up with problems like these.

Well, so maybe it just needs to warm up a little. I parked it in the garage and let it sit until about right now (10:30-ish). Went in, fired up the auto and voila check engine light turned on and then off (as it should, and normally, does).

And it’s supposed to be colder tomorrow; wonderful.

I’ve had the pleasure of talking with Renaud from Tenable about the Nessus Transport Protocol lately. I was getting frustrated because I only had the 2.x code to reference, and wasn’t sure if 3.x was significantly different. He was very welcoming to my plight though and answered my questions as best as he could. It reassured me that Tenable is not evil.

I’ll post some of the things I’ve observed about NTP so that others may be less confused.

• yui compressor online
• know your stuff
• otp commands
• slacker radio on ipod
• userfly