Doug Goldstein

So here’s what I want to do. I want to put 2 Gentoo boxes in the office. But I don’t want to emerge sync or anything. In fact, I’d be more then happy if they didn’t have a Portage tree on them. Basically I want what I think a couple of business would want. I want a centralized box (a 3rd box) that would be my compile server and then it would share out the packages. And I could integrate some configuration options or /etc/ files. I dunno.

Right now what I have is a box that builds binary packages and hosts Apache with a special alias for http://mybox.com/pkg/ to point to /usr/portage/packages/ and then on the other boxes their /etc/make.conf is setup for binary pulls from http://mybox.com/pkg/ and I just run emerge -gKuD world on the other boxes. But this still requires a bunch of manual work. Just looking to cut down the manual work of editing the scripts and files. I was kind of thinking of having a SVN repo of my scripts as templates and some integrator program and replaces the variables with the necessary values when it installs.

Lemme know how you do it.

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I tried to give you consolation
When your old man had let you down.
Like a fool, I fell in love with you,
Turned my whole world upside down.

It’s been nearly a year. All of it a waste. I have wasted 10 full months of my life and money. Situations and relationships are damaged, some beyond repair. Where did it all go? Why? Isn’t it suppose to all work out in the end? Who knows when I’m going to graduate. I just want to hear that annoying nickname again.

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and

I enjoyed both of these books. The Last Juror is more classical John Grisham. It’s set in Clanton, MS where he started his writing career with A Time To Kill. Except the difference is that this one pre-dates A Time To Kill. Only towards the very end does it begin to introduce the rest of the characters that appear in A Time To Kill, except Lucein Wilbanks who appears throughout the whole novel. It’s quality Grisham. Involves a rape and murder trial, not unlike A Time To Kill but from a different perspective. From the view of the county newspaper editor/publisher. I’d recommend it.

The Brethren takes a whole new approach and is set in Florida in a federal prison near Jacksonville called Trumble. And centers around 2 former judges (one federal and one state judge) and a justice of the peace who are in prison for various crimes and are trying to extort money from men all over the country. Unfortunately, they accidentally stumble upon a man who is running for President and has all the backing of the CIA. It’s a little unbelievable as far as the CIA part goes. But then again, who really knows what the CIA does. But the director was really just an unbelievable and unlikable character to me. But oh well, I still liked the book and would recommend it.

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So my friend, who is attending law school in the fall, had a paper to write about copyrights and maybe the DMCA and asked me for a topic or an opinion, knowing quite well I’m full of those. So I explained to her some of the stuff I’ve recently seen on /. with regards to the GPL.

So she began to Google and check out LexisNexis for some info. She then asked me What does GNU mean? and this is where things went down hill. So I explained that it means GNU’s Not Unix. To which she replied, Right, but what’s the G stand for? So I explained that this is recursion, to which I got a big HUH? What’s that mean? You mean to tell me the person who has read and actually uses the words from There’s a Word for It! : A Grandiloquent Guide to Life in everyday speech doesn’t know what recursion means?!

Apparently yes. I then made the fatal flaw of writing the following out:

f(x):
f(x-1)

Which to any computer science person would be the simplest and stupidest recursion function. To which I was told that it doesn’t make sense because if you have 5 and you subtract 1 from it. You don’t have 5 anymore. You have 4. So that’s wrong. The only thing that provided any comfort to me at this point was my vast intellect. So I explained, no, you’re calling the function “f” and then it calls itself with he parameter “x-1″. To which the answer was How many legs does a dog have if you call it’s tail a leg? I answered 5. And I was told, wrong, it doesn’t make any sense to call a tail a leg. I could feel my brain coming out of my head.

So obviously the point of the GPL was lost and any opportunity I had to inform was gone. And as I was leaving, I could hear the question What’s OSS mean? I just ran harder.

Filed under: General
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First, let me be another one of the masses that says Asterisk (or * as it’s called by the people in the know) without providing much detail. And secondly, MAN ARE MY EARLOBES SORE! That being said, on to the body of the post.

On the MythTV front, eradicator made 0.18 ebuilds in my absence and masked them I’ve heard complaints they don’t work and I’ve heard success stories. Personally for me, they broke the OSD. He says they work for him, but I can’t fault him. He did mask them. Basically, don’t complain if they don’t work, they’re not meant for mass consumption.

My Dell DJ is freaking awesome. Sound quality is pretty good, but then again I’m really not musically inclined (besides my attempts at the guitar). Everyone should get one… And Dell should give me 10% of sales for saying that. It’s constantly been with me and connected to me. My ears are even getting a little sore from the ear buds. But then again, all ear buds do that to me. It’s probably cause I don’t wear the things right. Oh well.

Asterisk is a Open Source PBX, used a lot with VoIP services. Which is what I used it for. Just testing and messing with it, I’ve set it up like a call center simply. Literally 5 min worth of work. I created voicemail boxes and a couple of soft phone extensions. I’ve had friends across the country install a softphone and give me a ring on it and the sound quality was great, even with my roommates bringing down my good name in the other room on Xbox Live getting into “no your mom” arguments with 5 year olds. They’re what we call simple.

emerge asterisk and give it a whirl. Asterisk’s Docs & Howto along with Asterisk Wiki. Or the lazy man’s approach, Asterisk @ Home.

I haven’t gotten everything that I want going with it. I’m hoping to integrate it into my father’s company’s phone system and maybe a few other neat things. Eventually maybe answering the phone line at my apartment. I’ll post details and links here eventually. I have managed to call Dell via asterisk and a softphone installed on my roommate’s machine to inquire about my laptop. Still waiting.

Well, off to take a Discrete Math final. Blah. Didn’t even bother studying. All practical sense crap.

Filed under: General, Linux, Personal
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So Dell delivered my new laptop to my father’s office while I was on the phone with Dell and they were insisting it would get delivered to me, not to my father’s office. So it was shipped up to me and I finally got it and opened it up. And low and behold, it’s not what I ordered. Slower processor, crappy screen, crappy video card… tons of software I didn’t want… Linux is going on here after all. So after spending 3 hrs on the phone with every guy out there who was currently studying “ESL” aka… English as a Second Language. I finally got transfered to a woman stateside, proof that Dell employs American workers still. They’re just hidden. After working everything out I’ll be getting the right laptop, but it won’t ship until 5/5. Yes. That’s more then 2 weeks away. And I have to ship this one back today. It sucks.

But on to the post title… So Dell offered to take $125 off a Dell DJ for me to make up for all the screw ups. I of course accepted. I mean geez… a Dell DJ Mini for $55 + tax and no shipping. Who can say no. Even if I don’t want it, I can sell it for double on Ebay. So I guess it was their attempt to calm me down after their series of screw ups.

So I wonder, how Linux friendly is the Dell DJ?

Filed under: General, Linux
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I’m writing this mid rant to some guy at Dell who I only understand every 5th word from and who appears to understand about the same from me. In a previous post I mentioned that I ordered a new laptop from Dell. Now I unfortunately made the mistake of ordering it over the phone. Why did I do this? I have further discounts available to me through that method, (i.e. my father’s company gets tons of stuff through Dell so they give him a discount. ROTC gives me a military discount). Well the guy at Dell decided to send the package to my parents home address. I called back to change this and after a huge run around of apparently having to call the rep, who wasn’t in and I had to leave a msg with, which he never returned. He finally told me I needed to speak to UPS. UPS of course told me that they couldn’t fix Dell packages, only Dell could. More run around, Dell’s phone system disconnecting at the 15 min hold point. Finally, through the new sales department, which magically got answered before my finger came off the button, I got to someone that could change the address. I informed him of the correct address and a few hours later the UPS tracking number was updated to list a new address. BUT NOT THE CORRECT ADDRESS!!! Magically this guy ignored the address I gave him and decided that he’d list my father’s business address. So now it’s on to this current call. Which I’ve been informed that UPS can’t do more then 1 change in 24 hrs for security reasons. And that Dell will queue it to fix it tomorrow… RIGHT… I’m sure they will. They should give me the system for free at this point.

Moral of the story. Outsourcing to people who don’t understand English and have no idea what they’re doing leads to pissed off customers… Pissed off customers lead to bad sales and posts like this appearing online. Which leads to worse sales, and more outsourcing. Which leads to more dependance on external workforces and less on internal workforce, which provides less jobs for Americans and now we’re a poor country relying on others.

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Jenn (aka Jennkee.. Jennkey?… whatever) said something the other day that got me thinking. After the smoke cleared from that. I actually had some productive ideas and came upon some thoughts and plans I hadn’t thought about for a while. Which was good. Thanks Jenn.

Right now I’m suffering through procrastinating for the past 4-5 days a paper for my senior project. This final paper is truly a load of BS served cold. Realistically the topics our paper covers are things that should come out in a proper presentation. This just gives the teacher the ability to just completely ignore any of our work and defer to the advisor’s evaluation of the paper. But this doesn’t surprise me, considering the professor slept through the first round of presentations and proceeded to scribble and not pay any attention to the second round of presentations. If he actually had to evaluate us, he’d be poorly equipped. So rather do the University of Florida Dept of Computer Engineering thing to do and give us pointless work to do.

Or better yet, give us a huge project without actually teaching any of the necessary pre-reqs and set un-attainable deadlines… Way to go ACE! Then follow it up by an e-mail sent to their entire class telling everyone the material you teach is never used in real world applications but the concepts are fundimentals for SQL. Hey… I’ve known and used SQL for ages without needed to learn that crap. P.S. You lost the war and we’re not in Orange County!

But I’m not bitter…

What I really wish is that my paper writing guru was here to help.

Originally, I enjoyed your spirit and welcomed your honesty. I wished many bad things upon you, but your honesty was refreshing. A clear point in something that had been so murky for a long time. But now, blue eyes, are you happy now? Cause you’re everywhere to me.

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Here’s a bone for the Subversion fans out there. I now consider it a must have for any Subversion repository, it’s a little Python package add-on for your web based Subversion repo. It provides a way to designate releases, or milestones/iterations. It provides a bug reporting tool and excellent search capabilities. Best of all, everything is done in a very simple Wiki fashion. I set one up for the exceedingly ghetto game my group made for our senior project. Now please note, we didn’t have any graphics guys on board, they all flaked. And remember, the main point of this is to give kudos to Trac.

It’s highly customizable and offers a way to use plugins. In fact, I’m using them now on the site. I’ve added a plugin, which some minor changes, to allow class names to be linked to their Javadoc. I also added a template to allow me to add items to the menu field. I submitted this as an update bug to the Trac team so maybe we’ll see it for 0.9 or 0.8.2. Another great plugin is the Table of Contents plugin.

On to the install. emerge trac was basically all it took. I have to flag this though because the latest Portage version as of this post is 0.8 while 0.8.1 is available. bug #84054 It’s in fact an easy fix for both you and the www-apps team.

So head on over to the Trac website and grab a copy. I do recommend reading the excellent Gentoo Install Guide.

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So it’s day 2 after my beloved Inspiron 8200 bit the dust. After what began as a rocky relationship has ended in doom. Oddly enough I’m typing this on my Inspiron 5000, which was suppose to be returned to Dell over 2 years ago but they never sent me the shipping label and by the time they realized their mistake it was nearly a year later so I didn’t bother. Bad me.

(more…)

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