Diary of a Wolfeman

CompTIA Press Room – News has this to say:

Washington, DC, May 20, 2004 – At a Capitol Hill briefing hosted by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) today, CompTIA hailed US House introduction of the TRAIN Act by Representative Jerry Weller (R-IL) and other congressional leaders. According to CompTIA, the bill will facilitate greater training and re-skilling opportunities through a tax credit for qualified information and communications technology (ICT) training, helping American workers and the companies that employ them stay more competitive here and abroad.

It needs our help to pass, folks – contact you local representatives and urge them to pass this.

Well,after many months of procrastinating, I finally went down to the store and bought myself a little birthday present with the fundage my old man sent me: one of those illuminated keyboards.

Specifically, the Zippy Technologies EL-715 I chose the black frame, and I’m fairly impressed with it so far. It’s what passes for daylight up here in Portland right now, (IE, overcast) so there’s still some light creeping in through the blinds, but I am happily typing now without turning on the overhead light so I can see the keyboard. (If you haven’t figured this out, I cannot touch-type to save my life.) This should reduce some of the eyestrain I have been getting lately while spending so much time at the keyboard hunting for work.

Functionally, there is no tricky software for the keyboard, and the keys are a scissors-type, much like that of a laptop. It is quiet, but still has good tactile and auditory feedback on each keypress. There are a couple of things I would change about it if possible: first, the frame of the keyboard comes up a little high in front, so if you’re like me and tend to hit the spacebar with the sideof your thumb, it can get in the way. Second, the last keyboard I had was laid out a little differently than this one, so I am apt to make some mistakes until I learn the new layout. Nothing big here, folks, just me being picky. But not picky enough to go back to the other keyboard.

Conclusion: a good buy, especially for us cave-dwellers who hate the light of day.

Oregon Live has good news for all us Linux geeks out here. We’ve had the OSDL for a while now, and Linus has finally decided to come supervise things himself, and to get out of the insanity that is the Silicon Valley.

Everybody’s favorite quote from the article:

“The plan was to try to acclimatize and have time to grow webbed feet (although I’m told there are implants available) by moving during the summer,” he [Torvalds] wrote.

So, what does the Wolfey-guy do late at night when he’s bored, can’t sleep, and is tired of reading other peoples’ blogs? He does a little bit of ego-surfing and checks his server logs.

I must say, I was surprised at how much traffic I’ve been getting. I remember looking at the logs several months after I started the Diary-X journal and being happy to see more than ten hits a day, but now (for the past three weeks, anyway) I’ve been averaging about 75 hits a day, after you subtract the ones generated by my own site maintenance and postings. Average page hits are under two, so folks aren’t digging through the archives, but they’re reading the main entries.

Greyduck gets the booby prize for biggest referrer, with over half of all the hits coming from his domain. Thanks for the link, roomie! (Sorry, but the ‘booby’ in question will have to remain metaphorical.) Conspicuously absent, however, were referrals from a site I’ve been affiliated with for quite some time – turns out, they’ve removed the link. Can’t please everybody, I suppose.

What I’m really wondering is where the heck the referral from nude celebrity blogs came from. I think somebody is very confused.

Well, I had a couple hours before the barbecue started yesterday, so I went ahead and tried the ftp install of SuSE 9.1, and I am very happy with the results.

I thought it would take alot longer, since it was the openning weekend of the process, but I was up and running in just about two hours. It only missed one package during the initial download (a console font package) which it correctly installed when I did an update later.

There will of course be the minor annoyances of renamed packages and paths, but that really only hits me in a couple of programs, as I can usually build from the source code. Aside from that, the interface is slick as always, there’s a ton of stuff already installed, and it has a solid feature set.

Two things I was disappointed to see: the “My Computer” icon on the desktop and an implementation of a WindowsXP-style “autorun selector”. Both of these things are easy to kill though, so it’s not a huge problem.

Now to shove the ATI drivers down it’s throat :)

Ok, so far, I have gone through three different hard drives before I found one that would stick, but I don’t believe that has had anything to do with Arch. Finally got it working on an 82.3 gig, split kinda half-n-half for / and /home.

Not a bad little system. The pacman package manager works as advertised. A simple ‘pacman -Sy {packagename}’ gets you the latest version, checks (and downloads) all dependencies, then installs the whole kaboodle, all from the command line. (Anyone who has ever tried to install mplayer from scratch will appreciate that!)

This is still a young distro, so there (of course) are going to be some shortfalls in the package lists, but it looks to be fairly simple to build your own packages out of tarballs. The nice thing is that the packages that are on the list are right up-to-date. (I didn’t realize that Gaim had finally gotten the ymessenger snafu figured out until I installed it last night.)

Things I still need to figure out:

Nothing too major, but it will take some playing. The big irritant is that Arch uses the DevFS filesystem, which means the nomenclature is once again, different than what I’m used to, so I can’t simple copy over the /etc/fstab file from my working system. (/dev/hda1 is now /dev/discs/disc0/disc1 for instance)

All-in-all, a distro to watch. A good middle step from the uber-user-friendliness of SuSE or Mandrake to the gotta-know-everything of Gentoo or Slackware. As they move towards the 1.0 milestone, things should get pretty sweet.

The folks over at ITWorld.com write that a Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years not for spamming per se, but rather for identity theft when he spoofed two accounts to send out “more than 800 million spam messages”.

This one brings it home to me today, since I noticed several bounced emails in my inbox from AOL mail servers. According to the messages, I have tried to send email to a few dead AOL accounts, and they are kindly letting me know that those accounts no longer exist.

Which is right neighborly of them, but I haven’t sent anything to an AOL addy in months. Someone is apparently spoofing my comcast email address.

Since there’s been less than a dozen of these bounces, I’m more inclined to believe that this is the work of a virus on somebody’s home computer. It is probably sending an email to every address in that person’s addy book from every address in that book.

So, if anyone out there has received an odd message from me that you weren’t expecting, let me know so we can compare address books and maybe figure out who the poor slob is that got infected.

Now if I can just track down the loser who keeps sending me vitamin ads to my blog email address…

According to Symantec, there has already been a virus (W64.Rugrat.3344) released for the IA64 Windows platform – which hasn’t even seen wide release yet.

The virus is just a proof-of-concept, and it’s interesting to note that it won’t affect AMD64 Windows platforms – or any current 32-bit Windows platforms for that matter, unless you’re running 64-bit emulation. All non-Microsoft OSes are of course, immune to this virus.

Danger to the average user as of right now: NIL.

Wired News: Army Reboots GIs’ Tired Fatigues

Okay, I quote this article for the following bit (from the second page):

There’s still a slight whiff of vaporware in the air at Natick. Powering all these doodads, for instance, won’t be easy. The Army wants to keep the total “power budget” for FFW down to 15 watts or so — a quarter of what a typical light bulb takes. “We don’t even know where to begin,” sighed Kalish Shukla, FFW’s power-management chief.

They have at least one idea, though. “Avoid the use of Microsoft Windows operating systems,” a recent memo on the subject directed. FFW is going open source. Cleaner software needs less energy to run.

From the “to weird for me to have made up” department: MSNBC – Airship groomed for flight to edge of space

That’s right, folks: Blimps in Space.