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Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Context Change

August 14th, 2009 No comments

Today marks the last day of my work with dotSUB. I decided some time ago to accept the full-time position of Chief Technology Officer at Versature Corp.

So today I reflect on the past and look toward the future.

Categories: General Tags:

Obama

January 20th, 2009 1 comment

As I listen to the speech being given by Obama, one line stands out for me:

As for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

This man is a breathtaking orator.

Categories: General Tags:

I Am Now a Radio Amateur

January 16th, 2009 No comments

I can pat myself on the back, as I am now a licensed Amateur Radio operator, call-sign VA3SHR.

Categories: Communications, General, SAR Tags:

Stop Motion Graffiti

May 14th, 2008 No comments

I am incredibly humbled and awed by this art:

 
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Categories: General Tags:

Quote of the Month: Steve Jobs on Spending Money

May 11th, 2007 No comments

At Apple Inc.’s May 10 annual shareholder meeting, a member of the audience questioned Jobs on Apple’s relatively low figure of reinvestment in R&D, saying that he felt the company was missing low handing fruit with new product opportunities, particularly with the delay of Leopard. Jobs responded:

I wish it was just a matter of writing checks. If it was just a matter of spending money, Microsoft would deliver good products.

Terrific quote. :-)

Categories: General Tags:

The Taming of the Beast

April 7th, 2007 No comments

Oxford had a serious trim this morning, it is hard to believe this is the same animal!

BeforeAfter

Categories: General Tags:

Oxford

December 2nd, 2006 No comments

For the purpose of beating my lovely wife to the punch, here are photos of our new Miniature Schnauzer, Oxford

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Severe concentrated cuteness. :-)

Update: I lost. By like over an hour. :-(

Categories: General Tags:

BarCap Ottawa (BarCampOttawa)

April 22nd, 2006 No comments

I’m currently sitting in the BitHeads auditorium listening to introduction to the first BarCamp being held in Ottawa. Alec Saunders is presenting on the topic of demos/presentations themselves, which I’m looking forward to.

What Makes a Great Demo

Alec did a great job at this presentation, thanks!

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Categories: General Tags:

HP NetServer LH 3 (lh3) Ethernet Controller under Debian Sarge

April 12th, 2006 No comments

If your e100 (eepro100) or any other NIC won’t work for you, try setting IRQ Routing to “Fixed” in the BIOS. I would get “Device or Resource Busy”. Also, I needed to manually load the megaraid module and then run the hardware detection step again to get the RAID controller to work.

Categories: General Tags:

The Lucky Olive Boat

July 29th, 2005 1 comment

Our good friends actually had this lucky olive boat waiting patiently for us:

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Thanks guys!

Categories: General Tags:

I Did It

July 28th, 2005 7 comments

Today is the Big Day! :-)

IMG_0212.JPGIMG_0213.JPG

I officially proposed to the wonderful Ana Cristina Fernandez Gonzalez. Now, wish me luck! Oh, and she did say yes. :-)

Categories: General Tags:

Open Source Includes Support Options

July 24th, 2005 No comments

O’Reilly’s ONLamp has a great article which is most interesting. The premise is that Open Source software includes support options instead of support futures. I love it:

[Open source is] converting warrants on future maintenance and enhancements into options, which means that instead of having a sole supplier (warrants), we have created a third-party market (options) of these derivatives.

How capitalistic is that?

Very well said indeed. Found it from here.

Categories: General, Software Tags:

Apple’s Patched OpenSSH doing SRV lookups?

June 23rd, 2005 3 comments

Recently, while trying to figure out why ssh is taking so long to connect to many systems under Mac OS X 10.4.1, I sniffed the DNS traffic. To my surprise, I see SSH is doing SRV lookups:

0.000000  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local
0.001124  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local
0.001272  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
0.001989  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local
0.002321  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
0.002848  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local
0.003176  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
0.003993  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
2.027353  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local.techsupport.local
2.027840  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local.techsupport.local
2.028764  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
2.029120  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
2.029562  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local.techsupport.local
2.030249  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query SRV _telnet._tcp.mariesa.techsupport.local.techsupport.local
2.030829  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
2.031551  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response, No such name
4.042563  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query A mariesa.techsupport.local
4.043651  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response A 10.100.0.103
4.064124  10.100.0.23 -> 10.100.0.10  DNS Standard query A mariesa.techsupport.local
4.065093  10.100.0.10 -> 10.100.0.23  DNS Standard query response A 10.100.0.103

That is very aggravating, since I don’t see a way to turn it off. Some Googling reveals a post on the topic.

Update: Stany did a little digging, found lots of patches, but not what I was looking for:

Now, regarding SRV lookups…. I’ve not noticed anything magic in the source that causes that to happen. Maybe that’s part of GSSAPI stuff – I frankly weren’t looking too closely. Maybe it’s something that libSystem.B.dylib does on behalf of ssh. Further investigation is needed, as it didn’t jump out at me.

So I’m thinking that this must be a part of the resolver. Although, it is doing lookups for _telnet._tcp.

Categories: General, System Tags:

DrunkenBlog: Behind the Red Shed, with Jonathan ‘The Wolf’ Rentzsch

March 28th, 2005 No comments

In this post on DrunkenBlog, Jonathan Rentzsch gives a terrific interview. Notably, he discusses Apple’s enterprise software development gem, WebObjects, which I’ve always wanted to know more about.

Anyone know if there is a downloadable developer’s version somewhere?

Update: Yes, you can download a 1 month evaluation copy from http://connect.apple.com/.

Categories: General, J2EE, Software Tags:

No More Appendix

March 24th, 2005 1 comment

Well, I’m back home with one less organ: my appendix was removed yesterday by Dr. Jose Pires at Montfort Hospital. Everything went very well.

Categories: General Tags:

Extracting URLs from .webloc Files

March 2nd, 2005 No comments

Before I forget how to do this, here is a simple way to extrac URLs from Safari’s .webloc files:

find ./ -name '*.webloc' -exec strings '{}'/rsrc \; | grep http | sed '/^.http/s//http/' | sort -u | pbcopy

Seems to work for me.

Categories: General, Software Tags:

Top Ten Technology Predictions

February 20th, 2005 No comments

I try hard not to link blog, but this post on Cameron Purdy’s blog, /dev/null, is great. I’ll save you the anxiety:

And a drum roll, please ..

1 – At the 2005 TSS Symposium, Rod Johnson will not be able to resist saying the word “Spring.” Yup, it’s like trying not to think of pink elephants — impossible once you get that in your head. Spring, spring, spring, spring. La tee dah, spring spring spring. Take that, Linda. Spring-diddy-spring spring. Spring.

grin

Categories: General, J2EE Tags:

Awesome Quote from Frank Herbert

November 12th, 2004 Comments off

A fantastic quote from Frank Herbert:

Above all else, the [architect] must be a generalist, not a specialist. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The [architect] on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his [application]. He must remain capable of saying “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The [architect]-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our [application] is merely part of a larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the [architect]-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” – From Children of Dune by Frank Herbert (1976)

I love it. Something to keep thinking about. Thanks Grant.

Categories: General, Software, System Tags:

The Gimli Glider

October 25th, 2004 Comments off

It’s actually a pretty old story, but awesome nonetheless. Take a short break and read the story of “The Gimli Glider”.

Categories: General Tags:

Docs Grow New Jawbone for Cancer Survivor

August 29th, 2004 Comments off

This is pretty impressive. Using a metal frame and some magic, they grew a fellow a new jawbone: article. I don’t usually post this type of stuff, but wow.

Categories: General Tags: