Fluttershy visits the Keeper of the Plains

This is my entry to the Ponies Around the World project.
Wichita's most famous landmark is the Keeper of the Plains, at the confluence of the Arkansas and Little Arkansas rivers.

Behind the statue is the Keeper Plaza, with various plaques and artwork detailing the lives of the Plains Indians.

Another shot, from across the river.

Spamming search results

In the past few months, I've noticed several blogs linking directly to images on my server. All of these blogs are hosted under the blogspot.com domain, and none of them has any real content. Each "post" on the blog seems to be just the results of a web search for a specific term. The goal is apparently to be first on the list of results for these terms, serving up relevant but stolen content, and either increasing ad revenue or serving malware.

I'm not going to list them here, but if you see one of these blogs, please report it to Google.

How to hose your Linux box, lesson 1: the power of rm -rf

If you've used Linux, you already know rm can be dangerous. Getting a newbie to run sudo rm -rf / is a cliché joke among geeks. Helpfully, GNU rm won't actually let you delete the root directory, but you can still get into trouble.

Recently, I was cleaning out an old system disk in order to use it as a backup disk. I had already copied some data onto it, so I didn't want to just wipe it out, so I explicitly deleted the directories I did not want:

I knew it was going to take a while to delete all the files, so I went back to working on the backup script. After a few minutes, something odd happened: any command I entered failed with No such file or directory. The rm process continued to run, since it had already been loaded into memory. When the most basic commands like ls and cp don't work, there's not much that can be done. I couldn't stop rm; I had detached from the screen session and screen couldn't start again. I had no choice. I pulled the plug.

Booting from a USB drive, I was relieved to find that the root drive had not been wiped. The only casualty was the /lib directory, which explains the error: The ELF interpreter, /lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 was gone. I restored /lib from a recent backup, and everything was fine.

So, why was /lib singled out? The culprit was the extra slash on lib64/ — lib64 is a symbolic link to /lib. Normally, rm does not follow symbolic links when deleting recursively, but it does follow links to directories when resolving paths given on the command line; rm -rf lib64 means "delete the symbolic link lib64", while rm -rf lib64/ means "delete the directory lib64 points to".

Today's lesson has been brought to you by the letter "B", for backups. It doesn't matter how secure your box is, one typo on the command line can completely clean out your data.

An update? Unbelievable.

I started working full-time right out of high school, so I never had time or incentive to continue my education until now. I've started taking a few gen-ed classes at Butler Community College, and I'm plannng to transfer to WSU for a degree in Computer Science.

Long story short, my English professor strongly encourages me to practice writing, so I'm going to try postng here more than once every two years...

Anyway, I recently bought an HP LaserJet Professional P1102w, and was disappointed to find that there was no way to set up its wireless networking using Linux. I did some digging, and hacked together a script to access the embedded web server over USB: USB EWS gateway. It may work with other printer models, but I've only tested it on mine.

Man, screw KDE4.1

So I finally broke down and upgraded my laptop to Kubuntu Intrepid. Everything went great -- until I restarted, and found that my nice, neat, KDE 3.5.1 desktop had been replaced by ugly-ass KDE4. Not only did it make no attempt to import my keyboard shortcuts from KDE3, I discovered that changing the keyboard shortcuts requires you to log out and log back in. The default window decorations are ugly as sin, and even worse, the GTK integration makes all GTK apps ugly.

Edit: KDE4.2 fixes nearly all of the problems I mentioned.

Dreaming of Androids

Today I received my new HTC Dream, a.k.a. the T-Mobile G1, running Google's Android OS, and it kicks the iPhone's sorry ass.



How is it better, you ask?

1. It has more than one farking button. In fact, it has a full QWERTY keyboard.
2. It took only four taps to enable installation of "unofficial" applications. No jailbreaking needed.
3. It can run more than one goddamn app at a time.
4. I don't need to pay 99 bucks to distribute an app.
5. I don't need to send it in just to change the battery.
6. If I lose the data cable, I have a crapton of USB mini-B cables lying around that will work just as well.

And what does the iPhone have that the G1 doesn't?

1. Multitouch. Ooh, look, I can squeeze the page and it gets smaller. Big whoop.
2. A half-eaten piece of fruit stenciled on the back.
3. An aura of smugness.

iPhone fanboys, flame away.

Dammit, Google, quit changing your icon!

The purpose of a website's icon — or any icon, for that matter — is to provide a visual way to quickly find something in a list. Sometimes, the icon represents some abstract concept; in most applications, the "save" icon is a floppy disk, even though they're nearly obsolete. However, if the icon is unique, experienced users have no trouble connecting it with what it represents. I use icons exclusively for my bookmarks toolbar:




Of course, this only works when the icons don't change. Google has recently changed their icon again, just as I was getting used to the second one. Call me old-fashioned, but I happen to like the original Google icon.

I can understand changing the logo on the front page for special holidays (which seems like just about every day now), but icons shouldn't be changed just for the hell of it.

My crappy little server gets an upgrade; perverts game back online; politics

My primary server, "marvin", just got an upgrade from this:

To this:

	Old	New
OS	Heavily modified RedHat 8.0	Xubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"
Processor	AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.8Ghz	Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz
Memory	1GB DDR 333Mhz(2x512MB)	2GB DDR2 800Mhz (soon to be 8GB)
Motherboard	PCChips "piece of shit" M848A	GigaByte GA-EP45C-DS3R
Video	NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra	NVidia, um, *cough*geforce 2*cough*

Ok, so the video isn't that great. It is primarily a server, after all. The FX 5700 ultra is AGP, so I had to rummage around in the scrap bin to find a PCI video card. The next phase of updates will include a PCIe video card and 6GB more memory.

Anyway, since I now have plenty of CPU cycles to spare, I've decided to bring back the "Pick the Perverts" game. Can you tell a pervert just by looking at him?

Also, since this is probably the last blog in the world that hasn't mentioned Obama, here goes: Thank the FSM! He'll have a tough job restoring the economy, but he certainly can't do worse than Dubya.
This is truly history; Obama has broken out of the mold set by the last 43 presidents. Maybe in my lifetime, we could even have an openly gay or Atheist president. One can only hope...

New web server

Wow, it's been almost two years since my last blog post. Not that anyone reads it. I guess that means you don't exist...

Anyway, I've just finished migrating my website to Lighttpd. It was a pain in the ass, but I should get a little more performance out of it.

So, if you see something broken, let me know.

REO Speedwagon is awesome!

I just got back from the Wichita River Festival where I saw REO Speedwagon. I got right up next to the stage.

Kevin Cronin:



Bruce Hall:


Bruce Hall and Dave Amato:


This list was taped all over the stage. I guess it's so these old farts can remember what songs to play:


I want this hat!


I don't know who this is, but she looks like Brenna from Penny Arcade.

A 128MB SDRAM chip just fucked me out of a day's work

I just spent nearly a whole day installing Kubuntu on my second machine. After finally getting the base system to install, I managed to get a halfway working system by installing the rest from the internet (I thought it was a problem with the CD-ROM). Several segfaults and lockups later, I found out the dpkg database was corrupted, so I could no longer install any more packages. I finally said "fuck it", wiped the hard drive, and started up the installation again. After about 5 or 6 times trying to install the base package, I started getting kernel panics. That's when it struck me that it might be bad memory. So, I started Memtest86 from the Kubuntu disk, and it found several locations that were dropping bits. I took the chip out, and Kubuntu installed without a hitch.

So, my lesson for the day is that no matter how stable and robust the OS is, on flaky hardware it's about as stable as Windows 95 is on good hardware.

BTW, if you haven't tried Kubuntu, I highly recommend it. There is a live CD available if you want to try it out before you install it.

New page URL

I just registered jspenguin.org, so my blog URL is now http://blog.jspenguin.org/. The old URL will redirect to the new URL for as long as cjb.net is around (which should be awhile).

Power outage

The power went out at home while I was gone. I don't know when, but my machine was off when I got home. To top it all off, when I started it back up, my IP address had changed. Ever since I have had Cox, the only time my address changed was when I changed NICs. What happened this time? I didn't even get a 68.103 address -- it's in a completely different block. Oh well, it will be changing again when my DSL modem arrives from SBC. Hopefully, they'll be a lot better.

Yin-Yang Cats

This is too cute: Yin-Yang Cats. Those are my cats, but I didn't see the Yin-Yang right away.

I posted this picture in a Totalfark thread, and somebody else posted it on this forum. How did I find out? Web server logs. Gotta love 'em. Just be warned that I can change these images at any time to anything I want. If I didn't think this was so cute, I would have changed it to this image if I was feeling nice, and another image otherwise (I won't post it here).

Idiot bus driver leaves child on bus

From today's Eagle: Bus driver quits after leaving sleeping child

When I was in elementary school, I knew a girl that got left on a bus all night. This has got to be scary as hell for a kid. I'm just glad this kid was OK.

Ok, I'm pissed. Already.

I was setting up my profile, and apparently, Blogspot does not think the URL http://jspenguin.cjb.net:8080/imgs/me-small.jpg exists. It didn't even check! There are no hits in my log for that url. I had to get my picture hosted somewhere else. But, if for some reason the free image host dumps my picture, it will always be available at that URL.

Hello World!

Hello, world! I created this blog because I got tired of updating my page by hand every time I wanted to say something. So, if you want to learn more about me, visit the about page on my site. You can also read my rants page to see some of the stuff I don't like. The front page doesn't have much content right now.