oddprocess.org

That’s right sports fans, its Game 1 of the Eagles NFL pre-season. I can hardly wait. The plasma TV is ready to rock. I can hardly wait to see the green of the field. The clack of the pads.

Oh that’s right. It’s football time.

Oh yeah. The Bills play Saturday versus the Redskins too.

If you have a *nix workstation you have probably either seen or used GKrellM. It’s a handy dandy program to give you up to the second stats on most of the important data on your system. Disk space/activity, network traffic, CPU and memory usage, processes, the works.

If you are looking to run it on remote headless machines, ssh is your friend and makes life easier. Install GKrellM on the remote box. In a local terminal, do the following:

ssh -N -f -L 19150:127.0.0.1:19150 user@host.com

Obviously, change the “user@host.com” to your user and host. You can also change the 19150 to pretty much anything, just make sure you match that in the gkrellmd.conf file. Once the gkrellmd daemon is started, you can then connect to it by running:

/usr/bin/gkrellm -s 127.0.0.1 -P 19150

Again, changing the 19150 port to match whatever you used in the above set. Configs are stored locally and can be manually edited, or you can use the standard GUI setup. You can then run the above with different ports for different hosts.

Happy monitoring!

Thanks to Eric, I finally found mailing list management software that is not only easy to setup, but super easy to use. If you are looking for something easy yet powerful, check out mlmmj. Most of the configs as well as message storage are all flat text files, so everything is super fast and simple to configure. It only took a few minutes to get a new list setup and running, and most of that time would have been saved if I actually read the documentation.

But come on, what fun is that?

Same course, same deal, same everything, although I used what I learned.

67 on the front 9, 63 on the back. Total is 130. 142-130 = 12 stroke improvement.

Not amazingly stellar, but I will take it.

Disk /dev/sdc: 32.4 GB, 32480690176 bytes

My old 6GB flash drive seemed to be getting slower and slower. I think that’s because it is really a mini hard drive and isn’t really flash memory at all.

I picked up a Corsair Flash Voyager 32GB Flash Drive for $110 bucks. That’s pretty cheap and man is it fast. Much faster then the old drive and well worth the price.

Who would actually believe it? Philly finally has a championship. That’s rights Arena Football fans, the Philly Soul won at the Arena Bowl and are the champs. It was quite a game actually. Both teams traded scores back and forth through most of the first half, and Philly finally came up with the first defensive stop, as well as coming up with an interception. The Soul were up with only 2 minutes remaining in the game, and the onside kicks came into play. By the end of the game, the Soul only won by 3 and I had to take an extra pill for my blood pressure.

I finally got in my first 18 holes of golf. Take note, this really is only my 3rd time touching a set of clubs. I didn’t really expect much actually, which really helped. Old Homestead Golf Course is right across the street from my office, so we decided to start there. I was up and down, shooting 76 for the first 9 and eventually cleaning up with 66 for the back 9 (that’s a total of 142 if you couldn’t do the math in your head). While that put me in the official category of “Sucks,” I did learn a lot. I unfortunately tend to top the ball a lot, which really doesn’t help. I also slice off the tee like a madman. However, practice makes perfect. But, I also learned way back in high school that “perfect practice makes perfect,” so I have a lot of work to do. At any rate, I picked up a lot and felt a lot better when I drained a 40 foot put on the last hole.

As you can clearly see, Emily really likes to giggle and smile!

# zcat exim_reject.log*.gz | grep -c “rejected”
63193

Wow. That is a serious spam count for only 30 days worth of logs…

OK, so I’m sure everyone knows that I am “not exactly a big fan of Windows.” We have all heard it before, so I won’t dwell on it. At this point, I am about 90% Windows free. Most of that, however, is for work. The Novell network stuff still relies on Windows for basic management. The current version of ConsoleOne (Netware administrator) is written in Java and actually runs better on my Linux box then it does on any Windows machine I have tried. So I still run Windows XP in a VMware desktop on my Gentoo box. I’ve come to find a small warm spot in my heart for XP, almost enough to call it “not too terribly bad.” Don’t worry, that’s as good as it will get.

Anyway, enter Vista. I decided to give it a whirl in a fresh VMware session. All I can say is Oh. My. God. I gave the thing 2 virtual processors and 2.5GB of RAM and it was still awful. I personally think the way the new Windows Explorer (My Computer, etc) design is terrible and totally difficult to use. I know the argument is that “it is just different,” but I don’t think so. It made simple things that I do hundreds of times a day so much harder. It only took me a half hour of playing around before I killed the virtual machine and wiped it into oblivion. It was that bad.

I guess if you really don’t have anything important to do with a computer (like spider solitare) Vista is OK. But really, if you need to get stuff done, stick with XP.

The official word came out today, the Spectrum will be closed and demolished sometime next year. I believe the plans are to build “Philly Live!, a destination retail, dining and entertainment district.”

I’ve been to quite a few games at the Spectrum, and it certainly did have “character.” Let’s hope they will sell the seats to fans like they did with the old Vet, I could really use another pair…