FBI issues warning about anyone browsing the reference section

Found a fun link over at Kuro5hin, about the FBI issuing warnings against people with almanacs. That's right, "almanac carriers" all over the United States, beware! The FBI is after you and they would like to chat about that fine reference book in your possession.

The promise of cellular wireless data technology

Sitting around over the holidays, away from a reliable internet connection has made a good opportunity to kick around the wireless connection I have via my Sanyo 4900. As Brian Jepson at Mobile Whack points out, unreliable is the key word. The connection is just barely enough for some basic tasks—but not much more than that. No streaming music yet.

Newsmonster over this link is pretty painful but it can be done. Strangely enough, I've been having problems with Newsmonster and the latest kernel I built, 2.4.23. I get all kinds of DNS timeouts, even on a real link. I haven't had the time to chase the root of the problem down, though.

In the throws of boredom

What do you do to escape the throws of holiday boredom? I'm marooned at my parents' house for the jolly season while they themselves are out visiting other relatives. And goddamnit, I am bored out of my mind.

Samsung VGA 1000 (A620) Pictures

One thing I've been trying to do to alleviate my present condition is hunt around for pictures taken from one of the camera phones I want, the Samsung VGA 1000, also known as the A620. Googling around turns up a lot of garbage.

However, one great resource I've found is Textamerica.com. It is a site that hosts "moblogs" or mobile photo-blogs. These are sites where people post uninteresting pictures of themselves or their pets—usually not the kind of sites I dig around at. However, these moblogs go from useless to quite useful when the author designates what type of camera-phone he or she took the pictures with. Then, they become sample image galleries for phone shoppers, like myself.

So here are some moblogs with sample images from the SPH-A620. They were found using the site: operator at google, like this search string.

• Kurtz on the go
• Sean Fay's Traveling Pics
• Meaning of Life
• DactylX Moblog
• chaosan//moblog
• TheFunHouse v.4.5.1: Pictures by the Penguin
• blackunicorn dot pics
• Moblog Yoblog
• Phillip's Moblog
• organ

Next up: the Sanyo 8100

As Google turns up...

• Laura Burstein's Moblog
• Schtuff I Want
• Joe Szilagyi's Moblog
• Around Texas
• Kacie's PhoneCam Craziness
• 3DW.net MoBlog
• Pharm.D 2005 "prn Playboy"
• Silico's Stream
• Proof of Life
• Kacie's PhoneCam Craziness
• Mr. Danomyte's World
• Tom's MOB Space
• Orangekat
• Andrews Phone adventures
• MacDaddyZ World of the Cell
• ScubaJason Moblog
• What The Fu%@ is an Unkin?
• CPU_Angel's Camera Phone Log
• Cat Handcuffs Moblog
• Tom's MOB Space
• the stiphead moblog
• Dazed And Confused
• James' Pictures
• A FAT KIDS LIFE
• Welcome to my world...
• guzugi mania
• Bob Ratekin's camera phone pictures Moblog
• She's Mobile!
• Dan's Photo Blog
• Moving Sale

One thing that is immediately obvious is there are a lot more 8100 moblogs than A620 moblogs. However, I'm not sure how long each phone has been available, so it may be that the 8100 is simply newer, or perhaps it is less expensive. Anyway, dig around in these links to find all kinds of real-life example photos.

Two Week Vacation

I'm off for a two week vacation today—happy holidays. I probably won't be posting much, and if I do, it will be sporadic.

Iraq Foreign Policy Link Digging

As a part of an ongoing discussion over at LaughingMeme, I have taken it upon myself to do a bit of link digging for material related to Regan-era foreign policy towards Iraq, and the supposed sale of chemical weapons agents by the US to Iraq.

One of the best resources I came across was the National Security Archive at George Washington University. They have a good collection of documents and writeup related to shift in US policy in the early 1980's to aiding Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. The writeup includes a WMV movie of Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam, while he was visiting as a special envoy of President Reagan. Find there also a publication covering what came to be known as Iraqgate, including aid that violated our supposedly neutral stance on the Iran-Iraq war at the time. The archives at GWU are a great place to start.

Moving on, check out a time-line of events between 1980 and 1990 related to our policy towards Iraq.

Digging further, it isn't hard to find find material critical of Clinton's dual-containment policy in the region. It is fairly humorous, however, to read a pre-war article that concludes with a warning about an "awful, shocking, but seminal event." Something that could have happened had Saddam still had those weapons of mass destruction that he turned out not to have.

On the subject of non-conventional weapons in Iraq, many people allege that the US sold chemical and biological agents to Iraq. The claim is that the Department of Commerce and the ATCC provided these shipments to Iraq. The American Gulf War Veterans Association cites Senate Report 103-97 (alternate link) on this topic, which as best as I can tell, doesn't cover the topic. Is there any reliable evidence of US sale of chemical or biological agents to Iraq? I haven't found anything definitive, but the best resource I've come across is a collection of article references at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, although that is scant little. Also check out their Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East page.

Well, that about wraps it up for two hours worth of link digging. Feel free to comment and contribute links or other information.

Samsung VGA1000 Compatibility Report

I just put up a compatibility report for the Samsung VGA1000. It works under Linux as modem (acm device) for wireless internet access. Just get a USB cable and you are good to go.

Fun with Apache Handlers

Pursuant to the recent CGI changes at Freeshell, I'm slowly moving the backend of this site to CGI powered by PHP, instead of PHP scripts running inside mod_php. For most people, this is the exact opposite of what they want.

However, at Freeshell, the admin recently enabled the usage of suexec, letting us run our CGI scripts under our normal user accounts. This opens up all kind of goodies, like secure file writing, not needing to mark all files readable by the nobody user, etc. However, suexec doesn't work for PHP scripts running in mod_php.

So everything here must be converted to CGI scripts—running PHP. For the most part that works nicely, except one small bit that gave me trouble. I use a technique with Apache to fake the appearance of directories inside URLs. It uses some mime magic to force the webserver to execute a script that does not have a file extension. That let's me execute the script 'search' in an URL like http://foo.bar/search/apache to search for articles related to Apache (foo.bar is not a real site, of course).

Well, mime magic doesn't work for CGI scripts. So you can use this bit of Apache magic in your .htaccess file.

And it's like, wa-lah! Instant fix for crappy URLs. Just check the $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"] variable in PHP, which will return to you everything after the hostname in the URL, to determine what content to display.

For more fun, read up on Apache Handlers.

CGI/PHP changes and trackbacks disabled at LAB-Y

First off, I have disabled trackbacks here at LAB-Y. As I am on the farthest edge of the blogosphere, probably qualifying mine as the least read blog ever, nobody used the feature anyway.

My reason for deciding to turn it off is due to the recent CGI policy change at Freeshell, giving me more freedom in generating dynamic content. Eventually, I'm going to redo the way I handle trackbacks. Expect the same changes in comments as well, when I decide to get off my lazy ass and get rid of my Squawkbox service.

Linux and Sprint Cell Phone Compatibility Reports

I've put together a small set of compatibility reports for using Sprint cell phones for Internet access under Linux. If you have used a model not listed here to get data access with our favorite operating system, please drop me a line and let me know. My email address can be found at the bottom of the page, obfuscated against spammers.

Great idea: IM alerts for blog visitors.

Check out Instant Gratification, the best idea I've come across in a while. It can be set up to notify you via IM (AIM) when someone visits your blog. Seems like a useful tool, as I've caught some jokers visiting LAB-Y recently. (Link via Kuro5hin.)

Fixed a small bug in the blog calendar.

I noticed a small bug today in my calendar that it seems a few people have fallen victim to recently. The month of December was being linked to in the archives as 'decg' instead of 'dec'. Looks like I fat fingered it and that mistake propagated itself into several different files. Should be fixed. Please mail me if you find any other broken links—my email address is at the bottom of the page, obfuscated against spam.

I've also noticed that someone from Japan has been giving what look like relative paths to my trackback script. Not funny.

Log_2_rss available under the GPL

Today I released a set of PHP classes called Log_2_rss under the GPL. You can find them available for download on my software page. These classes can be used to generate RSS 1.0 reports from web server log files, specifically from Freeshell logs, which use a specialized format. While it isn't currently supported, Log_2_rss could be easily extended to support the standard Apachelog formats, or any other format. Download and enjoy.

The college disappearing person act you won't read about in the national news.

What happened to those 700 grad students? Were they abducted after enrolling? Nope. They were enrolled without their knowledge in a scam to artificially inflate the enrollment of a certain Mississippi university. A university, I might add, that has been taken over by IdiotPresident Shelby Thames, who has allowed the of faking the enrollment to meet his goal to ballooning class size in order to funnel more state money to the university. Nice scam, huh?

Not so nice, cause people found out and the story was broken in the student newspaper. The scoop made its way to the city newspaper, but, as I hear rumored from a little birdy, it won't make it to the Clarion Ledger, from Jackson. I hear that the Ledger has been pressured not to run the story.

But we didn't really need another reason to remove Shelby Thames. Send him an email to let him know how much of a nutsack licker he is. He's the man who claims faculty input is critical for his butchering of the university—critical to ignore.

Boo

Palestinian cat link via Suburban Blight.

Technical Difficulties at LAB-Y

I apologize for the technical difficulties around here, recently. I recovered just a few minutes ago from an accidental delete-without-backup scenario (don't you love that?) and I've been suffering from some of the recent CGI changes at freeshell. Hopefully they should be under control now. Please drop me a line if you notice something overtly broken.

Roadblogging

I'm at my parents' house for Thanksgiving, enjoying the food and family times. However, being the geek I am, I've been trying to get connected all day. My Sprint PCS Vision service has been returning network errors all day—I don't know what the deal is. Only just now have I been able to establish a connection, either on the phone directly or from my laptop.

Whatever was causing the problem, I'm wired now, so this is the first real test of my roadblogging setup. Happy Thanksgiving from the road.

Random Linkage: Origins of Thanksgiving

• http://www.appleseeds.org/thankgiv.htm
• http://www.linguatics.com/thanksgiving.htm
• http://www.twilightbridge.com/hobbies/festivals/thanksgiving/history.htm
• http://www.genealogyforum.rootsweb.com/gfaol/Thanksgiving/Origins.htm

"ATTENTION WHITE PEOPLE"

White people, please read our latest newsletter for new instructions (via suburban blight). Thank you and enjoy your holidays.

Every now and then

Every now and then, one of those things happens that makes you smile. A KKK initiation goes bad when one bigot shoots another in the head (via suburban blight).

GNU/Linux on Thinkpad G40 Compatibility Report

I just put up compatibility report for GNU/Linux on the IBM Thinkpad G40.

The Horror, The Horror

My god, Doc Searls is right, Michael Jackson does look like a homeless woman in his mug shot. Peep this:

(Photo via The Globe and Mail). Naaaaaasty. Look at his left eye bugging out—I swear it is about to fall out of that skull of his.

Sanyo SCP 8100 Usable in Linux for Wireless Internet Access?

I'm still looking for a camera phone that I can use under Linux for wireless internet access without any extra funky hardware or software. I've been eyeing the Sanyo SCP-8100 for an option, as my SCP-4900 works extremely well for this. However, I've held back because I can't find much report of anyone successfully using an 8100 with Linux.

Until today. I found two examples of people supposedly getting an 8100 working as a usb acm modem with Linux. Checkout Lukewarm's SCP-8100 page and Frank E. Harrell's Linux Setup Notes for two examples.

Update:

I'm glad to say that the Sanyo-SCP 8100 is 100% supported under Linux. I spoke with Frank Harrell directly (link above) and he confirmed its operation with Knoppix. Now I just have to get one.

Do you want to know...what...it...is?

(Via Living On Earth.) For an entertaining, somewhat basic overview of the problems caused by large agribusiness on commercial meat production, head over to themeatrix.com (requires Flash).

If you find yourself interested in this topic, I highly suggest the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, written by journalist Eric Schlosser. Be forewarned, however, you may never feel the same way about that McFatty Burger you eat when you find out under what disgusting conditions the meat is produced and how that delicious flavor is engineered and added to the food.

I'm not vegan and I'm all for killing animals. Meat is just disgusting.

Ask yourself if this is appropriate

(Via Beats & Rants 2.1.) State District Judge Timothy Ellender, a white judge from the Terrebonne Parish, attended a Halloween party in black-face makeup, an Afro, an orange jail jumpsuit, and shackles. A fucking judge!

This case may go to the Louisiana Supreme Court if it is recommended by the state Judiciary Commission; I really hope it does. This kind of shit from a judge—a man whose job it is to put people in jail, mostly for non-violent crime I would bet—is unacceptable.

How can anyone in Ellender's court expect to get a fair trial? And for that matter, assuming they did, one would expect more mistrials declared and more appeals granted, on the mere suspicion of racial bias. That is a disservice to every citizen of Louisiana.

New IAC valve cost me nothing

The Ford place I took my car to today found the code in my computer was set indicating the Idle Air Control valve was stuck at a high idle. Just like I thought. I have to give it up to Ford, though—having it replaced again cost me absolutely nothing. Not a cent. We'll see how this valve works out.

Examine this

Why do people blog and is it interesting?

You can head over to NPR and check out Scott Simon's bit on blogging, why people blog, and whether it makes for interesting reading. His conclusion was that most blogs are garbage and examining your uninteresting problems is "bad for literature".

I was on my way to the local Ford dealership this morning, taking my car in again for IAC valve problems, when I heard Scott's piece. It hit home after the amount of self-serving bitching I've been doing on my blog.

However, I have to side with Rayne at Radio Free Blogistan, when he respectfully disagrees with Scott. If you go hunting around the blogosphere looking for crap, you will find no shortage of it, but if you spend just a moment looking for the bloggers who drop the gems on us, you should have no problem finding worthwhile material.

I couldn't possibly give linkage here to all of the bloggers out there who entertain me, inform me, and inspire me, but all of you have my thanks. Thank you for writing about what interests you or just bitching about your life, even if it is "bad for literature".

Of course, you couldn't expect someone with a blog to say something much different.

Through the lens of a soldier

Check out "Through the lens of a soldier" over at pbase.com for the view of life from an American soldier in Iraq. (Via Metafilter.)

Fuck it, I won't lie, my ride is a joke

God damn it. Really.

Yet again, the engine light in my 1999 Ford Escort has graced me with its dreadful luminance. It's back like a bad habit I can't get rid of and I'm FUCKING SICK of it. Ahem. Sorry.

My best guess is that the source of the sickly light is, once again, the idle solenoid, also known as the IAC valve. I don't know if Ford designs them to fail every few months, if the stars have aligned to produce another random failure in mine, or if somehow an unknown fault in my car causes them to fail, but that fucker had better be covered under warranty. Otherwise I'm going to be very mad.

I've got an appointment with Ford "service" this weekend.

On a positive note

My girlfriend is coming into town this weekend! At least I should have a good time waiting on some idiot mechanic to tell me he doesn't have the part available to replace in my car. Wait, I was trying to be positive. Should be a good weekend.

I did get all of my Xmas shopping done, except for my Girlfriend's Mother (all in one day). What do you get your significant other's mother?

Write on your own time and get suspended

These days, if you are a highschool student who writes on your own time, there is a good your school may suspend you or identify you as a problem student. Tough shit too, as there isn't much you can do about it. We've all learned recently the dangers of your employer reading your blog but this is going too far. The material on the student's journal was simply rude—not threatening. We need to stop cowering our heads in fear every time a highschool student coughs sideways.

I have to admit, though, I've cut out a few of my blog entries on sensitive topics, just in case. What kind of world is this? Maybe it is time to start a 100% anonymous blog for myself.

Debian GNU/Linux and Harris Semiconductor Prism 2.5 Wavelan Support

I was wrong when I mentioned before that the integrated wireless on my Thinkpad G40 wasn't supported under Linux. Turns out it is. I'm still struggling to get it working but I do believe it is supported.

Trying to get it working, I first tried the wlan-ng driver which claims to support this built-in, PCI wireless device. Debian comes with the wlan-ng driver and utilities prepackaged. You must get the linux-wlan-ng package, along with the appropriate linux-wlan-ng-modules-* package for your kernel. If you use a custom kernel, you must apt-get source linux-wlan-ng in your /usr/src/modules directory and make sure to build it when you build your kernel. See my page on building a custom kernel under debian with make-kpkg for instructions on how to build modules (like pcmcia-cs-modules and linux-wlan-ng-modules).

This almost worked except that the prism2_pci driver segfaulted on me when I tried to use it. Disabling PCI Bus Control under Power Management in the BIOS of this G40 helped a bit, but it never got it working.

Still not knowing what to do, I tried good old Knoppix. Knoppix autodetected my wireless automagically, using the orinoco_pci driver for support. Worked great, or as best as I can tell anyway without a WAP. The little wireless light on my laptop started blinking and iwconfig gave comforting output indicating the device was working.

So now I'm trying recompile my kernel in Debian to use the orinoco_pci driver, as it did not before. I believe the appropriate option is HERMES_PCI or something similar. It has been a headache but at least the onboard wireless is supported. More when I get this working.

Update: Working Kernel Config

What should have been an easy task ended up a night-long series of recompiles, but in the end, I think I have it working. For some reason, compiling pcmcia_cs modules with make-kpkg started failing on me, with a compile error. I think it was caused by some kernel header file. Instead of using it, I changed my config to include pcmcia modules directly from the main kernel tree. Doing this, I had to change the PCIC line in /etc/default/pcmcia to be yenta_socket instead of i82365, but other than that, it worked nicely. Now I can modprobe orinoco_pci and iwconfig outputs the following.

Now I just need a WAP and I should be good to go I think. Have a look at my kernel config file if you have a need.

Buuuuuuusted

Ouch. Mr. Rumsfeld caught in a red-handed lie. (Via Eclecticism.) You can't match the power of the all-knowing GOOGLE.

Holy Shit, 10 Years

By some strange coincidence, it's the album I put on first thing this morning, for some beats with my coffee and cereal. Turns out this album, Midnight Marauders, has reached its 10th anniversary (via Diesel Nation). Wow. Read on at Diesel Nation for a bit of info on where the old Tribers are now.

Aiptek Pencam Trio Incompatibility

I picked up an Aiptek Pencam Trio at my local Walmart.com (Every Day Low Wages!). Stay away from these—while gphoto supports some versions of them with the stv680 driver, the ones in stock at Walmart these days don't seem to be supported. I believe the chipset in these cameras has changed, along with the USB id's for vendor and product.

You can tell if you have an incompatible by looking at the id's reported by the kernel when you plug in the camera. If the output of dmesg looks like

Even if you force these id's to be recognized as a Pencam Trio, you'll end up with an unspecified error in libgphoto2's I/O routines. Here is the relevant entry in /proc/bus/usb/devices.

If anyone finds out how to get this working under Linux, I'd like to hear about it.

Busy week setting up new laptop

It's been a busy damn week here—work is still running me ragged and I've been spending my evenings setting up my new laptop. All of the core components except the integrated wireless and modem are supported with open source drivers; I will be putting up a compatibility report soon. In the mean time, if you have an IBM Thinkpad G40 and you are looking to make it work under Debian GNU/Linux, have a look at these hints.

The real reason they think Bush is of good moral character.

Mark, the real problem, IMHO, is lack of healthy skepticism.

The polls continue to show that the voters think that Bush is of good moral character personally, despite their discontent with his performance in office. Perhaps they understand that he runs an administration where mendacity is treated as a family value, and just don't associate deception by politicians with bad moral character, or perhaps they misunderestimate the extent to which Bush and his aides make up for their profligacy with public funds by observing a strict economy with respect to the truth. Probably, both are the case.

Source

I don't believe your average voter is as jaded as you suggest, but I agree, they may "misunderestimate" Bush. However, I think the real sickness of the American voter is gullibility. I'm weary of excuses from people along the lines of "Bush must know something we don't—he can't give out all of the intelligence now, it would aid the Enemy." People simply don't know how to be skeptical of their leaders.

And I thought I had a bad week.

Good glub, I thought I've been having a rough week/month/whatever. This guy has been having a much worse week. First fired from Microsoft for running around with a camera, it looks like he unintentionally jumped down the throat of some university network admin for ganking his website design.

Hang in there, Michael. Admitting your mistakes makes you bigger, not to mention gets you new regular readers of your blog.

Why is this not surprising

Why is it that some American POW's are treated differently after their return to America? Read on (via Blunted On Reality).

Trackbacks at LAB-Y

I finally got around to implementing Trackbacks here at LAB-Y. For more information about Trackbacks, read the specification. I also added support for the RSS Trackback module in my RSS feed.

This shit is 100% experimental, so drop me a comment if it isn't working.

Some things I need for Christmas

I got to thinking today about stuff I need and might request for Christmas. The first thing that came to mind is a new computer chair. I'm here, typing up this entry, sitting in a shitty, metal folding-chair, which is about as comfortable as having your festering flesh eaten by maggots. So a nice, new, leather office chair would be nice.

New Laptop Ordered

I just ordered my new laptop through my employer today. w00t! I finally settled on an IBM Thinkpad G40 instead of the Thinkpad R40 SMB I had been thinking about. The new rig should ship sometime tomorrow.

I have to give it up to my employer here, this is a pretty sweet program. It amounts to a 2 year, 0% interest loan for computer hardware. If my employment ends, it all comes up due (deducted out of the final paycheck).

Count these Rock's, biatch!

Last night I picked up my tickets for Chris Rock's upcoming show at the Beau Rivage Casino. I guess casino's are good for something. I'll be up in Section 206, Row T, Seat 1 with my girlfriend this Friday, which happens to be Halloween.

Getting Newsmonster working in Debian Woody (Stable)

If you've been keeping up with Blogzilla, you might know that Newsmonster 1.2.2 Pro was recently released for free. It is a "news aggregator" in the form of extensions to your web browser. It pulls RSS feeds from the sites you are interested and collects them all together for your perusal, making it easier to keep up with content.

For an application that is supposed to make your life easier, it is a pain to get working under Debian Woody 3.0 (stable). However, with a few quick, custom updates, you too can live in Newsmonster nirvana. These instructions assume you are using Mozilla.

Upgrading Mozilla

I'm not 100% sure if this is required, but it helped get rid of some errors I saw when trying to run under the decrepit version of the First Lizard that comes with Debian Woody. Using 1.0.x just doesn't cut it these days—a quick upgrade to 1.5 solved my initial problems. You can find a deb source at apt-get.org. I used the repository at http://debian.relativ.org/. To do this, add the following line to your apt sources file.

Then, after killing your browser, run an apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to bask in the glory of the 1.5 Lizard.

Installing Java

Getting Java 1.4 was the biggest hurdle to getting Newsmonster working in Woody. I had 1.3 installed from some deb source but that doesn't work. Newsmonster requires 1.4 but nobody packages 1.4 for Woody currently. But you can manually install it. Blackdown Java seems to be the best choice.

First, remove any installation of Blackdown java you have on your box, deb or otherwise. Then go to one of the Blackdown mirrors and find the appropriate j2sdk and j2re 1.4.x packages for your system, for me, I found them at ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/JDK-1.4.1/i386/01/. Down load the .bin files for GCC 2.9.5 to somewhere to install, like /usr/local, change the permissions to 700, and run them. Then create a symbolic link from /usr/local/j2sdk1.4.1/jre/plugin/i386/mozilla/javaplugin_oji.so to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/javaplugin_oji.so (assuming you installed in /usr/local).

Read good instructions for getting the java plugin working under your browser if you have trouble.

Then, start up your browser. Check about:plugins to make sure that you have the java plugin installed. Make sure that java, javascript, and software installation are enabled in Mozilla. Then, as root, go and download Newsmonster by just clicking on the button. If software installation is enabled, you should be prompted to install, answer yes. Then kill your browser.

That's it. As your user account, start Mozilla and begin the setup process for Newsmonster. I'm still learning how to use it at this point, as the documentation isn't so great. But all in all, it is a nice bit of work.

Adding Feeds

One nice feature of Newsmonster is that you can add a feed to your subscription list right from your browser. Right click on the page of a blog you read (like LAB-Y), and select "Add to Newsmonster". Follow the instructions and blam-o, you've got a new subscription. This autodiscovery does work here at LAB-Y.

The only problem I've noticed so far with Newsmonster is that it doesn't work with Prefbar, my favorite Mozilla extension. Anybody have luck getting these two XPI apps working together?

Anyway, happy blogging!

Unhelpful name at Blo.gs

I think when I pinged my blog at blo.gs, I gave myself a very unhelpful name. How does one change this?

Simple...

Update your rss file, then re-ping yourself with a different name parameter in the URL. Works like a charm. You can find the feed for LAB-Y at blo.gs by searching for "Lab y".

Any press, the news, I don't watch the two

As of today, LAB-Y as an RSS 1.0 news feed and a fabulous new blogroll (see sidebar). I've been meaning to get this working for a while now and it is finally done. You can catch LAB-Y updates at http://blo.gs. w00t!

Laptop Shopping

My employer offers a program to purchase computer hardware interest-free through paycheck deduction. They specify a few places I could order from, and one of them pcmall.com has the exact laptop I want, the IBM Thinkpad R40—pretty fucking nice. It would go great with a wireless internet connection.

Update

I just found out that I'm not eligible for this program until a bit later this month, on the day that I have been with my current employer one full year. Kind of a disappointment but at least I'm motivated to shop a bit more.

Radiation from the cell will erase the mind

I had a few minutes to play with that Sanyo data cable I got a while back. Now I'm posting this from my cell. With just a bit of kernel-tweaking and these fantastic instructions, I'm ballin' with a wireless connection via my Sanyo-4900. Who can stop me now?

The Priesthood of Technogeekery

Reading over some posts at Caveat Lector, a snippet about "technogeekery" struck a chord with me.

One asked me yesterday during break in reference class how I learned what I know. "Being dropped in the deep end," I told him honestly. There's this weird sense that technogeekery is a higher calling, a priesthood. Nah. It's what ordinary people do to keep from throwing very expensive pieces of equipment out top-story windows.

Source

Well fucking stated.

Happenings at LAB-Y

There haven't been many updates here at LAB-Y for a while. My life has been sucked down the black-hole of panic mode at work. It has gone from bad, all of the way through worse (without a bathroom break), to positively apeshit in just a month or two.

Gimme some Metadata, Damnit

I had been working on getting RSS integrated into LAB-Y code but thanks to my job, it has slowed down quite a bit. I'm going for the path of least resistance and work, rather than trying to choose the best version for me based upon any set of features. This is yielding a solution that is shaping up to use Perl and XML::RSS to generate my feed, a crontab script to get other peoples feeds, and a PHP script with XML_RSS to parse those feeds. My feed is probably going to be RSS 1.0, as that's the best version XML::RSS supports currently.

Update: 12/01/2003

Fixed a bad link.

Weekend Roundup

Somehow it is another Sunday but the story seems the same—I'm back for the weekend to begin another day at my hopeless job. I haven't had 10 minutes to live for myself, but life doesn't give a fuck what I want to live for, so I guess it doesn't matter. *grits hits teeth and sets his alarm clock*

"Keep Laughin At My Car And You's A Gonner"

That check from Courtesy Ford came in the mail with the reimbursement I requested for their shit job with my fuel filter. For their idiocy, I should have demanded more but that is what I get for being a reasonable guy. With this in mind, I took the ride in to have them address the reason my fucking engine light was on again. They didn't find anything wrong and suggested the other Ford place just didn't clear my computer last time. Whatever. They didn't charge me anything to simply clear it so from this point I'm just going to watch it and see what happens.

New Permalink Format

I have changed the format of the permalinks used here at LAB-Y. They now reference each entry by title. If you notice any broken permalinks, please post a comment about it or drop me a line so I can fix it. The old format still works but the new URL's are a bit more descriptive.

Me Vs. Courtesy Ford, Round 1

This past Saturday, I had that IAC valve installed in my car at a Ford place in another city, no worries there. The mechanic also addressed the starting problem and that smell of petroleum in the cabin of the car.

Turns out that Courtesy Ford didn't install my fuel filter properly when they did the 60K mile scheduled maintenance, leaving a dangerous fuel leak in my car. This was the cause of the smell inside my car. So here's a bit of advice, if your fuel efficiency drops about 10-15 mpg and you smell gas inside your car, take it in immediately.

The mechanic at this Ford place was quite courteous (no pun intended) and charged me only a half-hour of maintenance labor to fix the problem. However, Courtesy Ford still left my vehicle and my life in grave danger with their bumbling.

Below is a copy of the letter I faxed them.

September 13, 2003
Courtesy Ford
XXXX XXXXXXXXX St.
XXXXXXXX, XX XXXXX

XXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXX
XXXXXXX XXXXXX Ave.
XXXXXX XXXXX, XX XXXXX

Dear Service Manager:

On September 6th, 2003, I brought my 1999 Ford Escort LX to Courtesy Ford for a scheduled 60,000-mile maintenance and to address a problem with my idle air control valve. As a part of the scheduled maintenance, your mechanics replaced my fuel filter. However, they were unable to replace the idle air control valve because the part was unavailable.

Unfortunately, the fuel filter was installed incorrectly. When I drove the vehicle off of the lot, the cabin smelled of petroleum and the car had difficulty starting. I assumed this was due to some problem related to the IAC valve that was not replaced.

On September 13th, 2003, I brought my Escort to Ford-Lincoln-Mercury to have the IAC valve replaced. At that time, William Wilson, the Service Advisor of XXXXXXX Ford noticed that the fuel filter was incorrectly installed, causing a leak of gasoline. This left my car in a dangerous state, according to Mr. Wilson, that could have resulted a fire causing in "total loss of the vehicle."

With this fax, please find included a copy of the invoice I received from XXXXXX Ford-Lincoln Mercury. They removed and reinstalled the fuel filter of my Escort. I request that Courtesy Ford reimburse me for this cost in the amount of $24.50. This covers one half-hour of maintenance labor—a small sum, considering the danger to my vehicle and my person resulting from the negligence by your mechanic.

If you have any questions or concerns about this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. You can reach me on my cellular phone at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. Please leave a voice-mail message and I will return your call. You can reach Mr. Wilson at XXXXXXX Ford-Lincoln-Mercury at (XXX) XXX-XXXX. He will be happy to explain any of the details that may be unclear.

Sincerely,

Update: Freeshell is back online

Freeshell.org member homepages were having issues but they seem to be back up. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update: Running Total

I forgot to add: I spent $65 this weekend to have the IAC valve installed and the fuel filter reinstalled.

Current total: $1285

Courtesy Ford told me over the phone today that they would be happy to reimburse me for the amount I requested. Fucking super.

"Whatever it takes—sleep here if you have to."

Something you never want to hear your boss say. But since the company I work for apparently thinks software is free and it takes zero time to write, I didn't get 5 minutes to myself today. But oh well, I don't have to work weekends yet. [Bitch mode off.] I'm glad I have a job.

Comment Service Now Available at LAB-Y

As you can probably see if you have javascript turned on, I've added support for the free blog comment service from Squawkbox.tv. I know, I know, this is a fucking lame way to provide facilities to comment on blog entries but until I get my own coded up, this will have to suffice.

Since nobody reads this blog, hey, what the hell? Eventually this Squawkbox shit will be removed from my site when I host my own comments. At that point losing only piddly a comment or two isn't a big deal.

Update: Calendar Now Available Too

I also put up a calendar index into my blog entries. Credits to zend.com for their fantastic article on building a calendar blog index with PHP. The code was simple, elegant, understandable, and easily adaptable to LAB-Y. If you notice any problems with it, please drop a note my way as it is still experimental.

Cause I can do it, in the mix / Not a problem that I can't fix

Every day it seems like SCO does something else to shoot themselves in the foot with regards to their case against IBM and the Free Software Community. This time, they've sent out a ridiculous "Open Letter to the Open Source Community". It's chock full of all kinds of logical flaws, not the least of which are blatant misquotes of Eric S. Raymond and Bruce Perens. The flood of bullshit from them is hard to believe at times.

But in the spirit of fairness, sbuckhopper posted a "remix" of the letter on Slashdot giving SCO the same treatment. Let's see how they like being misquoted and misrepresented—included below is the full text of the comment.

Funny, the way I read the OpenLetter from SCO, Darl seems to be in favor of OpenSource. Now that he's dumping all of his SCO stock maybe he doesn't care anymore. Or maybe he's realized that there is not case...

Here is quotes from the letter that support my statement:

"This ""Open Source software is healthy and beneficial. It offers long-term benefits to the industry by addressing a new business model in advance of wide-scale adoption by customers."

"My company, the SCO Group, became a focus of this controversy when we ""fought ""to ""cast...""a shadow over the ""Open Source movement ""by ""alleging ""that UNIX System V code"" in fact"" proprietary software code""."

"Linux ""is a ""authorized ""work ""not ""derivative ""of ""the ""UNIX System V code""."

"No one can tolerate ""SCO's ""business model that is ""built only on ""a lawsuit against IBM"". ""Finally, it is clear that the ""SCO Group is ""increasingly alienated from anyone associated ""with ""software ""and ""community."

"I will continue to ""sue... ""everyone ""...as... ""CEO""."

Check the letter, every quoted word is in there in some context or another. I see this as just as valid of an interpretation of his letter as he does Bruce Peren's letter and ESR's statements.

Source

Weekend Report

I'm back from the weekend and what a weekend it was. Even after wrangling with Ford mechanics, I somehow managed to limp home in my car.

Another Fridge

After bitching enough to my apartment manager, he finally got me another fridge. My old fridge froze up too often for me to keep much food in it. When I got home from work for lunch today, I find in its place an old, torn-up unit that barely qualified as an ice-box. But it seems to work, at least for now. So maybe I'll be able to keep milk for more than 5 days.

In Other News

I've decided to start naming headaches like the National Weather Service names Hurricanes. Today's Tropical Cyclone Headache name is Robert. It is moving quickly to batter the coasts of My Sanity.

I'm More British Than Simon?

On a humorous note, I took the Britishness Test and I found I was more British than Simon Willison.

TCO of a 1999 Ford Escort.

Here is a quick run down of recent shit that has gone wrong with my car, a used 1999 Ford Escort, which I bought in August of 2002. I'm keeping a running total of how much I spend on maintaining it, minus very small things like oil changes.

Flat Tire: 03/04/2003

Okay, this one isn't Ford's fault but it set me back $200. I busted a flat on the way home and had to replace two of the tires. This is the first major maintenance I had to make.

Current total: $200

EVAP Leak: 05/06/2003

On the way back from New Orleans, not too long ago, my car sprung a leak in the EVAP system of the air conditioning—not a horrible problem but it caused the engine light to come on. Set me back over $150 to fix it. This is supposed to be common on Escorts according to the Goodyear mechanic I took it to.

Current total: $350

Idle Solenoid, AKA the Idle Air Control Valve and More Tires: 08/01/2003

Shortly after that the engine light comes on to annoy me again. This time it is the idle air control valve that determines the amount of air your car consumes when sitting idle. It stuck, but thankfully not at 0%, which would have caused my car to die every time it idled (think being suffocated under a pillow). The same Goodyear mechanic didn't see much wrong with the solenoid so he cleaned it and reset the computer. That cost me about $100. Then I went ahead and installed two new tires to have 4 new, which cost me another $200.

The fucked up thing is, the idle solenoid problem didn't go away. The engine light came back on not too much later.

Current total: $650

Sixty-thousand Mile Maint, Brake Work, and Idle Solenoid: 09/06/2003

This time, rather than going to the previous mechanic, I went to an official Ford mechanic. Since I bought my car at approximately 40K miles and I was at 63K, I figured it was a good time to get the scheduled 60K mile maintenance. (Very expensive.) I also needed break work, as I was hearing a high-pitched squealing while driving (but not breaking, strangely enough). They looked at the idle solenoid but didn't have one on hand to replace it. All-in-all it cost me right about $500. It did fix the squealing, however.

The only upside of the Ford place is they were open on Saturday. But after going there, my car is now having problems starting! The fun never fucking stops.

Current total: $1150

New Idle Solenoid Ordered: 09/08/2003

I called the Ford place in the city where my girlfriend lives and had them order an idle solenoid for about $70. This Saturday I'm going up there to have it installed and have them address the starting problems.

Current total: $1220

LAB-Y Reworked and Revamped

Well boys and girls, I've finished reworking most of the code here at LAB-Y, which now amounts to my own, home-grown, content management system. I've cleaned up all of the old bits of code that were hardwired, hackish, and dirty. The result is a much more elegant, maintainable CMS. I love PHP. Easiest language I've ever tried to learn, it is as powerful as you could ask for. It has a wealth of prewritten code like Perl with clean, understandable syntax like C. The content freeze is over.

Sanyo-Linux Update

I finally got my Sanyo SCP-4900 in the mail and got it activated. So far so good. Next step is getting the data cable and testing that out with my workstation.

A word of advice to anyone dealing with Sprint PCS personnel. The representatives that do nothing but activate phones are foul-mannered sacks of shit. Their general customer service reps are more helpful. They will, however, sign you up for things you don't ask for.

Content Freeze at LAB-Y

There won't be any more updates here at LAB-Y for a while. I'm holding off on any improvements, new content, or new blog entries until I've finished reworking a majority of the code. Much of it is too hardwired for certain settings and it is in need of some janitorial work. When this is done, I'm going to take it offline for a short period of time to move in the new code.

Long Weekend

In the meantime, to everyone here in the US anyway, enjoy the long weekend. I'm taking off the Tuesday after Labor day to have some more car maintenance done—the damn "Service Engine Soon" is on again for the third time in a few months. I suspect I may be having sensor problems. Anyway, enjoy the weekend.

Busy Day

Damn it has been a busy day and I've been up to quite a bit. You'll probably notice that all of the blog entries at LAB-Y now have category links. Follow any of them to search for entries that fall under the specified category. Just a smidgen of PHP and another feature falls out of the sky.

USB is nifty.

I went ahead and ordered my Sanyo SCP-4900 to eventually have wireless internet access under Linux from anywhere. It only set me back $170 (which included tax and an inflated shipping cost, fsck websites charging tax) and it is on its way.

To get this setup tested, I finally got around to getting USB working on my workstation. I've had the capability for quite some time but I've never used the kernel modules, partially because I don't have any USB devices. The only exception to that is a keyboard PS/2 to USB adapter that I have for use with my Playstation 2. It works great with any PS/2 keyboard I can dig up on the PS2 so I used it for testing USB under Linux.

I already had all of the appropriate modules compiled and installed, they just never got inserted into the kernel. A few insmod's later, I was up and running with a USB keyboard, no sweat. Now I'm waiting for the phone to get it activated. Then I'll buy the data cable and I should be good to go.

Put you on the floor quicker than Tyson did McNeely

Wanna know how to make that great, deep pain in your jaw? I call it the "Mike Tyson Lunch"—the one that leaves your jaw inoperative for hours.

In order to improve my vegetarian diet, I'm trying to phase out Roasted Garlic Triscuits (which are one of the few whole-wheat crackers available in my local grocery store) in favor of carrots.

Mike Tyson Lunch

So here it is, the power-punch to the jaw of lunchtime here at LAB-Y. If you want to feel like you've been hit in the face by the famous Mike Tyson, eat this.

• Sandwhich, consisting of:
  • Two slices of whole-wheat bread
  • Extra-sharp cheese (gotta have the Calcium)
  • Mustard
  • Tomatoes
  • Green Peppers
• Raw broccoli (as much as I can eat)
• Raw Carrots (as much as I can eat)
• Apple Juice

At this point, I'm beginning to feel like a rabbit except that I can't feel my jaw after eating lunch.

Linux Internet Access with Sprint PCS Phones

Sometime in the future, I'm planning on buying a laptop because I travel so much. I need to carry a mobile office with me, so I can get stuff done. To go along with that, as any geek would point out, I need wireless internet access from anywhere.

The best solution at this point seems to be using Sprint's Unlimited Vision service with a USB data cable. Some of these phones provide an ACM ppp device you can use to dial out and get reasonable wireless access. Another solution seems to be getting a PCS Merlin C201 PCMCIA card.

For anyone else who is interested, here are a collection of links to get you started.

• "[H]ow to connect a Linux box to Sprint's "Vision" (3G) network using a Sanyo SCP-4900 and the PCS Connection Kit USB cable."
• "Using the Sprint PCS Merlin C201 PCMCIA Card With Linux."
• "Sprint CDMA with Linux"
• Sanyo Data Cable
• http://activate.sprintpcs.com/
• Buy a Sanyo SCP-4900 from Dillards

If anyone knows if the Sanyo SCP-8100 works with Linux, I'd like to hear about it.

UPS customer service is getting better.

Well, I have to say, UPS customer service is getting better. I'm still waiting on the new J Rocc mixtape I ordered and UPS has tried twice to deliver it. Calling them on the phone, for the first time in my life, they were helpful and polite.

Their website doesn't tell you, but if they fail to deliver your package 3 times, they "postcard" the item and hold it for 5 days while they wait for you to come pick it up. And even better, when I left a note on my door to not leave my package with anyone other than the apartment main office, they actually respected it.

Alps Glidepoint in Debian GNU/Linux.

I just disconnected mine and set up another mouse, but if you have an Alps Glidepoint touchpad mouse (PS/2), have a look at instructions for getting it working in Debian GNU/Linux. I've since hooked back up a standard mouse because I have room for it on my desk now.

Getting back in the groove.

There is one part of going on vacation that sucks—I've gotten out of the workout routine. So today I'm trying to get back into the groove. Ugh.

Update: My opposition will have to recognize my steez

I just added the LAB-Y theme switcher. You should see it in the sidebar. Read about questions and problems with the theme switcher if you have any difficulties.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Worldwide travelers in your sector.

I just posted some pictures I took back in December of 2001, when I went to Amsterdam. Check out the Amsterdam photo gallery.

Update: A whole shitload of new galleries.

Also posted up the following galleries:

• My Computers
• Family Dog
• MPI Software Technology
• Memphis Trip

I also updated the gallery of pictures of my girlfriend.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Grand Canyon Vacation

I've finally finished scanning photos and doing a write-up of my vacation to the Grand Canyon. Check out what we did and have a look at some of the photo galleries here.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Back At Ya With the Realness

Well, as you can see from my previous entry, I'm back from my vacation and it was a blast. I'm currently in the process of doing a writeup on the trip, scanning in all of the photos (nobody brought a digital camera), and getting things back in order.

(Adjusts his radar detector). All of this should hopefully be done soon. I hope to be working on it over the weekend from home. Just after I get back, I'm out the door to go home. Have a good weekend.

New Image Gallery Mode

I just finished coding up a new mode for my image galleries, showing long descriptions with image floats. This let me move my POV-Ray art gallery over to the new code and eliminate an old section. You can also view any of the other image galleries in this way. This will work out nicely when I get the photos from my vacation scanned in (nobody took a digital camera) and put up.

Update: Moved RIP Gallery Over

I also moved over the image gallery of my car to the new gallery code. Head over to the gallery and check it out.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Destination: The Big Ditch

There won't be any more updates here at LAB-Y until sometime past August 9th, as I'll be on vacation. My parents, my brother, his girlfriend, my girlfriend, and I are packing up and heading to the biggest ditch in North America. After a quick stop off in Vegas, we will be spending almost a week hanging around the gigantic hole in the ground known as the Grand Canyon. Then we have another night in Vegas before we get back.

Hopefully I'll be able to put up a bunch of new image galleries when I return. Until then, however, there will be no further entries or updates.

I'll see y'all suckahs later!

New Blog Entry Permalinks Available

Every blog entry here at LAB-Y now comes with its own, shiny Permalink. Everyone thank PHP for bringing better things to life (I'll probably get sued for saying that). Coming soon: categories!

User Friendly URLs

Simon has a new article up about quality news site URLs. I've been doing a lot of work here to convert URLs to something readable, including section links, gallery links, and other miscellanea. I've used a trick I picked up over at evolt.org that uses Apache and PHP to clean up my links. Makes things a lot cleaner. If you have access to Apache and PHP, I suggest using it to make your URLs that are really CGI requests look like simple, readable, memorable directories.

Image Galleries Now Available

I've done more work on the code behind the scenes here, including the code behind image galleries. You can see the results in the two galleries available, images of my Girlfriend and the Dilbert Hole archive.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Nice use of CSS3 styling.

Stumbled on kadyellebee.com, with a nice skin that utlizes CSS properties that will eventually be in CSS3. This property, for rounding the borders of a box, is currently only viewable in Mozilla. If you run Moz, head on over and check it out. It's a very nice effect without horrible image hacks. Kudos!

I'm about to re-up and restructure the case

I've done some restructuring on the back-end, so email me about any broken links. Hopefully the changes should be invisible.

Emacs Lisp Code Up

I've posted up some Emacs Lisp code that may be useful to someone out there, released under the GNU GPL . Enjoy.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Sad, Sad Day

Last night, I spent several hours pulling soaking notebooks and folders of old classwork out of the milk crates they were stored in. My recent apartment flood destroyed a lot of it. Many years of effort and work went down the proverbial drain during this flood. Everything from Intro to Anthropology to Neural Computing was soaked.

So I set all of the material out to dry around my place. We'll see how much I can salvage after they dry up. *sigh*

Web Standards in the Post-Netscape Age

The news is spreading like wildfire around the Internet that Netscape has been killed by its parent company, AOL. Maybe Netscape was just in the right place in the right time, maybe they were lucky, but they certainly succeeded in changing the way we communicate. Because of Netscape, the World Wide Web has incorrectly become synonymous in the public mind with the Internet and everywhere we go, we are bombarded by the ubiquitous URI for everything from personal to corporate websites.

It's the end of the world as we know it

Sadly, with the death of Netscape, AOL also fired all of the Mozilla developers they had employed. So we are left to wonder, what will become of our shiny, new web browser, the David that was to take on Goliath and win the battle for real standards conformance? Will Mozilla gasp its dying breath and sputter out? Will those of us who disdain proprietary operating systems and value real conformance to established open standards on the Web be forced to use Konqueror? Or will the World Wide Web sink back into the dark ages of standards divergence?

Here -- he says he's not dead!

Thankfully, Mozilla lives on with the Mozilla Foundation, and because the source to Mozilla was open anyway, it will always be around. Ultimately, the death of Netscape can't stop the movement for real open standards on the Web. It all hinges on the content producers out there--the choice is ours. We can continue our push for true interoperability, accessibility, and usability. Alternatively, if we lose site of our goal, we can let control slide back into the hands of corporations to proprietize and polute real standards. The choice is clear. If we fail, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

I Bring the Element H With the 2

Broken hoses on toilet tanks suck. A lot. Especially when it happens just after you leave town and it floods your entire apartment. That is exactly what happened to me this past Friday.

I have to give it to the guy who manages this apartment complex; he caught it, cleaned up, moved all of my stuff out of that area into my living room, and cleaned all of the carpets. I spent all last night putting everything away. The result isn't perfect (my place now smells a bit) but it is better than the damage that could have happened.

I've got a lot more cleaning to do but all in all, I can't complain too much.

A bit more structural work.

I've been changing around some code and stylesheets here but functionally, you should notice no changes. Unfortunately, none of this has been tested in Internet Explorer, so please drop me a line if things fail to display properly.

Restless Energy

It is amazing what a bit of Evan Williams and some restless energy can do. I've gotten around to adding class material for computer architecture, compiler construction, and computer science I. Hope they prove useful to someone.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Engineering Stats Material Up

I just posted my old engineering statistics class material. Check it out. It was a fun class; I just wish I had saved my book.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Good Articles on Hypergeometric Distributions

Star City Games posted some good articles on hypergeometric distributions and multivariate hypergeometric distributions. Check out Luck And The Land Draw and Stats 101: The Math Behind Tom Carpenter's Assumptions for some great material on how these wonderful equations relate to deck building.

New Rulebook Posted and the Do-Not-Spy List

Hello, everyone. Updates have been moving at a blindingly slow pace here, but I have managed to post an HTML version of the updated 8th Edition Magic Rulebook. This time, rather than cleaning it up by hand, I ran it through HTML Tidy; therefore it lacks the nice cross-references and other cool features of the previous version I posted. But it is up-to-date and it took a lot less time to make. HTML Tidy is nice.

A Federal Mapping of Email Addresses to Phone Numbers

Okay, perhaps I am parnoid, but has anyone but me noticed that the new Federal Do-Not-Call Website has a signup process that boils down to a federally maintained database mapping email addresses to phone numbers? If you register online, Your email address is stored (remotely it says) and associated with your phone number. This lets them email you to confirm that your number is on the list. They also go on to say that they will share their information with law enforcement agencies.

Sound like a new era of wiretapping abuse? Mr. Ashcroft and his band of lazy goons should have a field day with this one. Don't feel like doing real work to catch the boogie-men out there? Just wiretap everything and watch everyone. With no oversight in law enforcement, are we to trust them?

So it goes without saying, register via the phone and avoid mapping your email address a phone number. And use encryption. Have a nice day.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Mindless Automation + Apprentice Successful

Got my problems with MA and Apprentice figured out and it worked great. And since screenshots are so much fun, here is an image from the game I got working. Shows my deck on the top and my girlfriend's deck at the bottom, me with MA and her with Apprentice. Kudos to MA's author, Sal Valente, for his excellent program!

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Picture of an Old Highschool Classmate in Hairspay

The AP carried a photo of an old classmate of mine, Rashad, playing in Hairspray. You can see him as rightmost figure on the side, in the yellowish-green jacket. Contrats, Rashad.

Moved Those Pictures

I moved those pictures of my girlfriend and I to this directory, under galleries. I wouldn't link directly to any of the pictures yet because they will probably be renamed.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Older version of Apprentice

I've dug up an older version of Apprentice (1.45) (REMOVED). I hope it works with Mindless Automation.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Better Version of HTML Magic Rules

I've got a a better HTML version of the official Magic rules. I've taken time to try to clean it up, put it in XHTML, create proper cross-references, and otherwise fix the file as created by Micro$haft Word. It isn't done yet and I'm sure it isn't yet completely XHTML compliant. Enjoy.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

New and Old Photos

For anyone who would find such things interesting, which would be all of nobody but myself and my girlfriend, I just posted some images of the two of us. A couple were from Xmas of last year and a few are from today. At some point, I promised myself that I would whip up some sort of PHP previewer for my images but at the moment, you just have to browse the directory as presented by Apache. Sorry.

Somehow, we always seem to take pictures at the same place--on the couch at my parents' house. What's up with that?

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

When Did Magic Get So Complicated?

Good glub, back when I played magic, around Unlimited and Revised, I don't remember things being so complicated. But today they give out an about 100 page Word Document with the official rules. <sarcasm>Thank's a lot, Wizards of the Coast, for using a cross-platform document format.</sarcasm>

For those of us who don't run Micro$haft software, here is 'a HTML version of the official rules. It is generated by Word for Windows, so the HTML is bad and wrong but it is viewable with many tools. Enjoy!

Mirror of Apprentice

I don't know what was going on but dragonstudios.com seemed to be down, so I've mirrored locally a copy of their Apprentice for Windows NT/2000 (REMOVED) and Apprentice for Windows 95/98 (REMOVED). This program serves as a virtual table top that you can use to play remote Magic the Gathering games. For people who run GNU/Linux, Mindless Automation is compatible, for cross-platform, remote Magic fun.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

More Structural Work

Well, more structural work is proceeding here at Lab-Y. Putting back up content is going slowly because of this and I appologize. In the mean time, those of you interested in CSS should check out The CSS tutorials in Simon Willison's Weblog--really great stuff and a great blog in general.

On another note, I'm not really sure what I want to do with this main page "blog", if you can call it that. I have some urge to turn it into more than news about what has been posted up on this site but beyond that, I'm fuzzy on the details.

More Work On The Backend

More work is progressing on the backend of this site. You should now be able to browse the entries that serve as a blog on this main page, using the control down below. Enjoy!

"Baby Got Back"

Changes have been progressing on the backend of this site, so please be patient if you experience errors while loading or viewing pages at Lab-Y. They may come and go from time to time but they will eventually clear up, I promise. I'm working to make things more generic and flexible as well as cleaning up code and removing duplication.

Yet More New Material Up, part 3

Yet again, have a look at class material from Intro to Anthro. One paper we had to write is posted.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Yet More New Material Up, part 2

More material posted. Have a peek at class material from Analysis of Algorithms. It isn't much as we didn't have a any programs to write; all I have is a transcript of our first test. Lots of good information in that class. I'm not sure, however, that I'll ever have much more of it online as nothing was in electronic format. Maybe one day if I am bored I'll type up more of any tests or quizes I can find. But we were not allowed to keep them, so unless I dutifully jotted every question down along with some answer, I simply don't have the content anymore. Quite a shame.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

Yet More New Material Up

Something tells me that I may be making a lot of these posts. More new material is back online. Have a look at my class material from AI. It was a fantastic class. I'm still missing lab3 but maybe one day I'll find it in an old backup somewhere and put it online. My first neural network learned like a retarded child, but it sparked my interest in learning algorithms, especially nature based models and drove me on to take Neural Computing with Dr. Boggess (GREAT CLASS!). Ultimately, that kind of thing is what I would like to be doing.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Updated some links in this entry.

New Material Up

New material is now up for your viewing fun. Check out the Dilbert Hole Archive from rotten.com, material that was removed long long ago. Also, go have a look at my Advanced Graphics class material that I have put back up. It is the first page of my old college class material to come back online.

Update: Oct 11, 2003

Fixed some links in this entry.

Removed Smarty

Well, I've come to find out that running Smarty here on freeshell is a terribly bad idea, so I removed it completely from my site, which was no small task. I quited liked Smarty but because of security issues, using it with freeshell's current setup is unwise. This has slowed my efforts to fully restore my old website, so please hang in there while I get things updated.

Under Major Construction

This site is under serious construction. Much of the content is not yet up but it is all on the way. It will probably take me a month or two to get everything up that once existed at http://www2.msstate.edu/~cfy1 and then moved to http://www.cs.msstate.edu/~cfy1.

Get a Good browser.

This site relies heavily on CSS2 instead of using tables for layout, so make sure to use a good browser. Internet Explorer 5.x users may experience some rendering faults because IE5.x misimplements the CSS2 box model. Upgrading to IE6 should help solve this problem.

If your browser supports Javascript, click here to have style sheets for this page removed (thanks to Jesse's Bookmarklets site for this trick). Hit reload to refresh the style sheet.

You can use a similar trick to view the style sheets associated with this page by clicking here. Feel free to borrow any techniques used here (or to suggest improvements); this page has been tested in Mozilla 1.0 Linux, Mozilla 1.3 Win32, and IE5.5 Win32.

Some CSS Links:

• http://glish.com/css/
• http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/
• http://www.bluerobot.com/web/layouts/
• Cascading Style Sheets Level 1 Standard
• Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 Standard