Monthly Archives: July 2004

A new format

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After looking around quite a bit to find a blogging program that I can live with, I’ve decided to try my hand at doing it myself. Rather than trying to fit something like PostNuke into my way of doing things, I will start by creating these pages manually, and over time develop programs that will automate the process somewhat. As I have time to play, I’ll be adding a few features. I’ll probably go back and convert old entries as well, although that project has a lower priority.

One problem that I resolved immediately is the moving entry link. In the past, when an article first appeared here it was on the main diary.htm page. After three months it got moved to the archive for that month. This caused no end of trouble for people who linked an item or used a search engine to find entries. Now, all entries are written to individual static Web pages and the 50 or so most recent will be aggregated on this page. You can find the article’s permanent location by clicking on the article title in the header.

Currently, and for the near future, this scheme requires that I upload two pages to the server whenever I add a new article: the article’s permanent file, and also this main page. There’s no way to fix that until I add some server-side code here that will automatically create the aggregation page. I’m planning to do that, but it’ll be a while.

Let me know what you think of the new format.

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Installing Apache

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I’m getting better at this Linux stuff. Today’s project was to get the Apache Web server running on my system and play around with it a bit. Eventually that machine will function as a staging server for some changes that I want to do to this Web site. Today I wanted to get all the software installed and make sure that PHP and MySQL are functioning correctly. As is most often the case, things didn’t go as expected.

I started up the SuSE installation program and told it to install Apache, PHP, and MySQL. Everything installed okay, but when I tried to start the Web server I got a rather unhelpful message telling me that the multiprocessing module failed to start. No details, no log file entries. Just “Failed.” Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I only spent an hour searching documentation and trying different configuration options before I decided to run the online update to see if there was a newer version on SuSE’s update site. There was, along with a kernel update and a few other things. I find it odd that the update system doesn’t identify the specific problems that a patch addresses.

In any case, I have Apache running now and can begin my PHP/MySQL experiments.

Transplant patients die of rabies

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Last week I ran across an article on Yahoo about three organ transplant patients who had died of rabies.  Yes, rabies.  The lungs, kidneys, and liver of an Arkansas man who died of a brain hemorrhage were transplanted into four patients in Texas, Oklahoma, and Alabama.  One of the patients died of complications during surgery.  The others died of rabies.  A fifth transplant patient, one who had received an artery, also died of rabies. The first three were relatively easy to track through organ donation records.  Tracking the cause of the artery recipient’s death was a bit more difficult.

When you hear about stuff like this, the first response is “But they should have caught that!”  Maybe in a perfect world.  Who would have thought that you’d need to test donated organs for rabies?  I guess we could test for everything, but I suspect that attempting to do so would make it nearly impossible to perform transplants in a timely manner.

Firefox browser security fix

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If you’re running Mozilla or Firefox, head over to mozilla.org and download the patch.  Or maybe just upgrade to Firefox 0.9.2.  Mozilla announced today that a vulnerability in the Mozilla and Firefox Web browsers allows the execution of arbitrary code in Windows NT, 2000, and XP systems.  See this page for more information.  My understanding is that the security hole isn’t all that bad as it’s difficult to trip, but it’d be a good idea to install the patch or updated version just to be safe.

The Open Source community is trying to make points with their discussion of this vulnerability, saying that they were able to identify, discuss, fix, and distribute a patch within 24 hours of discovering the problem.  They contrast this with Microsoft’s recent one week response to a vulnerability.  An interesting read and an impressive achievement, but I could do without all the “rah rah, we’re number one” cheerleading.  See this NewsForge article for an example.

Spybot

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My friend Dean suggested that I download and install SpyBot on my system to remove the inevitable spyware that he says every system is subject to.  I’d dismissed spyware in the past, figuring that my hardware firewall and other precautions were good enough.  But, figuring that as one of the network guys for a major city in southwestern Nevada, Dean knows what he’s talking about, I went ahead and took his advice.  Was I ever wrong about my security measures!  SpyBot located over 30 tracking cookies as well as a handful of Internet Explorer exploits that had infected my system.  SpyBot is free for the download, simple to install, easy to use, and by all reports and from my own limited experience, quite effective.  Grab it.  Install it.  Run it often.  Highly recommended.

Canon’s Digital Rebel

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Dean, Paul, and I took a walk this afternoon down to the beach and around the point to view Randy’s house from the bottom of the cliff.  Unfortunately, we were only able to see the back fence and a small part of the roof.  The back yard is approximately 85 feet above the shore and the house sits quite a way back from the edge of the cliff.  My little digital camera doesn’t take very good pictures at that distance, but Randy got some very good shots of us with his 6 megapixel camera.  Some samples (warning, large pictures):

Climbing to the shore, about 200 feet away.
Standing on the rocks, about 400 yards.

The camera is a Canon EOS Digital Rebel.  Very slick.  The unit goes for under $1,000 ($200 less if you get just the body with no lenses) and allows you to use Canon’s SLR lenses.  I just might have to get one of those.

Tour de France Prologue

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The Tour de France started today with a 6.1 kilometer prologue individual time trial.  The winner of today’s race was Fabian Cancellara, a 23-year-old Swiss rider in his Tour de France debut.  Lance Armstrong, the defending Tour champion, came in two seconds behind.  I think my friends are a little mystified by my fascination with bicycling in general and the Tour in particular, but they humored me and allowed me to watch the race.

This should prove to be an interesting Tour.  Lance Armstrong is attempting to become the first rider ever to win the Tour six times, and there are plenty of riders out to beat him.  Interestingly, the lead riders on several of the other teams are former members of Armstrong’s U.S. Postal Service team.  There was some discussion going into the race that Armstrong is past his prime and won’t do well.  If today’s showing is any indication, I’d say that he’s as fit as he’s ever been.  Armstrong is a great overall rider although not a time trial specialist, and yet he beat the best time in the world by more than 10 seconds.  Granted, it’s just one day of the Tour, but if I was a betting man, I certainly wouldn’t put money on anybody but Lance Armstrong in this race.

Hanging out in Laguna Beach

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The primary purpose of this weekend is a reunion for five of us who hung out together back in the early 1980s in Grand Junction, Colorado.  My friends Randy, Dean, Mike, and Paul had known each other for several years before I met them in 1982 when I wandered into Randy’s computer store and TV repair shop.  (The TV repair business paid for his computer habit.)  The five of us did a lot of things together for the two years I lived there, and we’ve kept in touch to varying degrees since then.  By this evening, everybody had arrived and we started talking over old times and discussing the things we’ve done in the past 20 years.  The beer flowed and the puns flew, and we had a grand old time playing poker and Mexican Train (a dominos game that I’d never played before).  I’m not sure what our wives and the children thought of our antics, but we sure enjoyed it.

Tide pooling

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Debra and I got up this morning to go tide pooling.  We walked down to the beach and then out onto the rocks to view the sea life that gets left in the holes, nooks, and crannies when the tide goes out.  There’s always a wide assortment of sea urchins and sea anemones, plus rock crabs, striped crabs, hermit crabs, mussels and barnacles.  Limpets, sea slugs, and starfish are less common, but we saw a few of each.  The thing in the picture at left is a limpet, or so Randy’s Audubon book leads me to believe.

The tide pools are protected by law, but that doesn’t stop people from picking things out of them to take home.  Taking shells and other dead debris is one thing, but many take crabs or small fish for their aquariums and some even pull off the mussels and other shellfish to make fish stew.  While Debra and I were hopping from rock to rock trying to avoid stepping on anything alive, others were running straight through the mussel fields, stepping in the pools, and generally destroying the sea life wherever they tread.  I even saw one guy trying to peel a starfish off a rock.  Sometimes I wish I could just smack some sense into these people.