The Killing Joke

I haven't posted in a while, apparently. Another month gone. I didn't realize that anyone went to my site until I had 3 people tell me on the same night "I go to your site every day. You haven't posted". Well, OK. You're right I haven't.

I was hoping that having internet access at work for the first time in a long time I'd get to post more during the day while I'm thinking witty thoughts about the stupidity around me. Unfortuneately, we've been so busy at my -what was supposed to be a cushy- tech job that I barely have time to type my notes in Vantive. (Yep, Vantive). We've had a couple of software rollouts that have gone all pear shaped in the past months. We were almost through all the calls from the first update that completely unspooled when the next monthly update came out and snarled up a bunch of other stuff. I will say I'm definately learning at an accellerated pace since we've managed to blow up almost every install we have out there (not really, just seems that way). It certainly cut into my posting time.

Nothing is going on in my life. I'm alive and in fairly good health for a 36 (almost 37) year old beer swilling smoker. I go to work, I go home. I watch TV or read. I go to bed.

It's been too cold for me to get out in the garage and work with my lathe but I have a bunch of new toys for it and am hoping to do some machining in a couple weeks, so it better damn well warm up. The lathe is something I really enjoy and I'm hoping to get out there and really start using it. I don't want it to be something I shouldn't have bought (although I could sell it and get most of my money back if I decided I wouldn't use it). I've also been considering getting one of Taig's small milling machines. I would like to do more work on my lathe first to see if I can justify the expense -- as in will I actually use it? Honestly, I don't need the milling machine. I just WANT it. The fact that I haven't already bought it hopefully indicates that I've matured somewhat in the past decade. But how cool would it be to have a CNC desktop mill with the 4th axis rotary table so that you could mill out 3d objects created in CAD software and controled by your desktop? Isn't that really the best of both worlds? This would be an opportunity for me to tie two seemingly useless hobbies together.

Getting one of those would be cool but it won't happen for a while. I'd like to have a house first. I'd really like it if we had our own washer and dryer. I'd like a kitchen big enough for two people to stand in at the same time. I'd like a garage that had enough room for my toys and both our cars. I want I want I want = $$$$ so I'm hoping to get a house first and soon, then worry about some of these other toys.

So I guess that's the long term plan. I'm still paying off some other things but I'm close to being done with that. Then get a house. Then of course there will be stuff I'll need to get like a lawn mower and whatnot to actually maintain a house. Maybe then I can get some new toys like a CNC Mill or a new PC or something...if there's any $$$$ left.

Posted by The Joker at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

ok, superbowl 41 is over. colts won... the wrong rex grossman showed up for the game... eveyone was putting the ball on the ground like they were the keystone kops

lets get to the real football story of the weekend

Brett Favre has announced that he's coming back next year. Yay!. Seriously.

This guy is the reason I even started watching football. Would I watch football if he retired? Well, yes, because I'm hooked now and the Packers would still exist as a team... but it just wouldn't be the same for quite a while. There's something about the way he can throw interception after interception and still look like he's having fun...
and still come back in the last 4 minutes and win a game. The "win a game" part has been happening a lot less in the last couple years of rebuilding, but I'd argue that it had nothing to due with Brett's ability to play the game. He's lost some receivers, etc but the rebuilding seemed to be complete by the end of this season. They didn't make the playoffs, but they had a chance. The Giants won their last game, which did nothing for the Giants, but it kept the Pack out of the playoffs. More wins on the Pack's part would have helped the situation.

So, now I get to plan a trip to actually go to an NFL game. Going to go to one of the games at Lambeau early next season while the weather is still kinda nice. I try to live my life with few things that I want to do left undone, try to have no regrets. If I didn't take the oporunity to see my favorite player play a game at one of the most historical stadiums in football I'd regret it. Michele was already looking at travel packages and plane tickets online last night. No package prices yet, as tickets sales don't start until April, but we'll be going.

Posted by The Joker at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

uhhh you know.. tall things, really hard -- like a stick but bigger -- green and bendy in the spring and summer...
anyway I've been trying to get the anit-spam crap set up on my linux box for 3 days with little success. I was hoping to use the thing that puts a jpeg or image on the screen that contains letters or numbers that you have to type in to submit comments. I found a moveable type plug in for that called Captcha. The Captcha plug in required that I install Authen::Captcha and GD.pm perl modules on my Linux system. When I downloaded those and read the readme's, I discovered that GD.pm (GD-2.35 is latest version) is actually a prerequiste of Authen::Captcha. Not a problem, except that GD.pm reqires another module called libgd to be installed. libgd (gd-2.0.35 is latest version) is a module that allows you to dynamically create .gif and .jpg files, which is exactly what I wanted to do for comment security. Cool. Oop, bad news. Unfortuneately, gdlib requires 2 other completely separate modules in order of it to actually create the .gif files -- the PNG graphics library (to create .png images) and the zlib compression library. There are also 3 other "optional" modules, one of which -- the JPEG library (verson 6b or later) -- is neded to get .jpeg files to work. Ok. So I find those, read THEIR documentation and now I'm ass deep in this thing and have all this crap downloaded. If you've read this far, you must have been bored out of your goddamn mind when you started reading. But my story gets even better.......Well, longer.

Believe it or not, I don't know diddly-shit about Linux. If I manage to get something to work for me in Fedora's gui, that's a big, way cool, triumph. I kind of understand what's going on in there but I don't know where anything is, why it's there or what might be using it. Part of the reason for that is I normally don't have a monitor connected to that system. It has a keyboard so it will POST, a network cable and a power cord. If I need to make changes to it, which happens pretty often when I'm in a programming mood, I use webmin and it pretty much takes care of me. It knows where everything is.

Be that as it may, I was able to get zlib, png and the JPEG library installed which was very encouraging considering I'd spend more than a few hours downloading this and that and finding out I needed the other thing too. Keep in mind (if you have one left after reading this far) that all of these packages/libraries/modules are created, maintained, compiled, updated, documented, etc, etc by different people/groups/sea monkies who all need to stay in their mom's basements and continue coding, rather than going outside where they might end up breeding. The packages are all out on different sites. One thing might use another thing, might even require it, but that doesn't mean that the guy who lives in his mom's basement will communicate or coordinate his efforts with some other guy in his mom's basement to make the sofware they wrote while sitting around in their boxers and velour bathrobes chainsmoking to work together. They'll give you some general hints about how to get their little chunk of pooh working and that's it. They have great instructions like:

Unpack the distributed source code. Don't ask us how to do this, we don't have time to teach you basic computer usage.

Unix users probably don't need to read the rest of this file. Run:

./configure

make

make test

If make test fails you have something wrong on your system. Uninstall everything from your computer, drop the partitions on your harddrive and recompile the universe using a new sigularity point. If you continue to have issues it is because your observation of the software is causing the uncertainty wave to collapse leaving you a particle of software with s=nonfunctional. ./configure without any method of observation or measurement. You will have software with potential s=functional,s=nonfuctional

If make test passes, run:

make install

I've actually done that before -- well, not the sigularity part (we're all still here, right? duh!) So after getting the first 3 downloads to install no problem, I figure I got this licked. Not so. I spent all of my non working, non sleeping hours the next day trying to get the gdlib to recognize the PNG and JPG libraries. Since Linux is open source, no one bothers to install stuff in the same directories from one flavor to the next. Nice. Late Thursday I finally found how to point the ./cofigure to the location of my libraries (where they automatically installed) rather than where it was looking for them (where the programmer moved them so his hdd was alphabetized?).
Another small victory. So, time to install GD.pm and get this wrapped up cause the rest is simple. GD.pm won't install. No matter what I do, it fails on the test. It look like it runs the make correctly, no errors--then pukes on the test. I've spent about 12 hours on that. I even thought that *gasp* the code in the test may be wrong. I moved on with the make install, which appeared to work... well it did "stuff"...but then the make test on Authen::Captcha gave errors so strikingly similar and yes, at this point, familiar, that I was back in the readme in GD.pm learning how to create a sigularity and start over. That's all that's left. I can't find the other things that they save HAVE to be my problem.

So. If you're still reading, I went to Monty's today (see the M files link to the right) and played LAN games with him, Jason K. and Stu. By the time I got home, I'd decided I'd rather turn the comments off than piss with this shit any more. Then I decided to go look for another spam blocker that maybe didn't have so many prerequisites. I found Comment-Challenge. It's text based but requires a key that goes up with some other hidden stuff. I installed it in about 25 minutes -- including the time it took to read the very clear, straight forward documentation. The key isn't dynamic (yet) and apparently it doesn't need to be. I might do a little perl/php to make mine dynamic and see how that goes.

OK Holly, long story short. The comments now require an authentification code that should block spam. Anyone/everyone should be able to post comments again -- just no spambots. When you can't see the forest for the trees, take a step back. I was at the "can't see the tree because of the bark" stage this time -- or maybe the "don't know it's bark because I didn't recognize it's cellular structure" stage. Shit.

Posted by The Joker at 01:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I can't figure out who thinks spam is an effective marketing tool. Give me a break. Does anyone really think that sending someone 800 messages will get them to eventually click on one of them and then buy the product? I doubt it. Yet spam probably accounts for 20% of all internet traffic...jamming things up for the rest of us. In addition to the extra traffic, we, the users who pay for the service, are required to get additional software to watch for/block spam and that chokes our bandwidth down even further. If any of this spam is ever trackable, I'd say Class Action Lawsuit time. But unfortuneately most of these spamming assholes are untrackable.

I've shut down the comments to "trusted users" hoping to eliminate some of the problems I'm having in my comments until I get some comment security plug-ins installed. I've been getting some bot comments and it's getting worse. About 30 a day right now for me to delete.

I started installing the modules and packages I needed in Linux to setup the security app last night. I'm having trouble getting libgd to compile correctly and I probably already have an older version that I need to delete first. It was midnight when I quit fighting with it, and since I get up at 5:30 now, that's late enough. I'll get back to it as soon as possible and get my comments going again.

Right now, if you've left me a comment before (and weren't trying to sell drugs or pedal porn) you can still comment, others will have to wait until their commment's approved. But I check it most every day. I'll try these settings. If I continue to have issues with the spam before I get the security app installed, I'll have to turn comments off completely until I'm done.

Posted by The Joker at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)