Wednesday, 31 December 2008 at 09:24
The powers that be saw fit to give everyone at work an opportunity to go home four hours early on 24 December 2008, the better to go home and get ready for Christmas Eve. To that end, I sniffled and honked a bit and set course for home where Lyssa was still hard at work. I sat down to fill out my paperwork for the week (such is the life of a professional contractor), packed a duffel bag for the weekend, and slowly came to the conclusion that I'd somehow caught the beginnings of a cold earlier in the day. When Lyssa finally clocked out for the day, we loaded our stuff into the TARDIS, stopped off for dinner at the Sweetwater Tavern just down the street, and then set course for southwestern Pennsylvania, where her family (my in-laws) can be found. The trip wasn't a bad one, just a long one: when you factor in traffic it took us a little over four hours to make the journey.
It seems that opening gifts non-traditionally is becoming something of a tradition for Lyssa and I. A few hours after we arrived, we exchanged gifts in the living room of Lyssa's parents' place. Due to lack of time and getting sick, Lyssa and I had gotten gift cards for not a few people in the family. That said, I was very appreciative of recieving a gift card for
Micro Center, the better to buy new parts for a media machine to add to the home entertainment center. The core of our gifts this year was the home theatre system that Lyssa's mother had found for us - surround sound speakers, Blueray player, HDMI out the yin-yang, the whole nine yards. Grant's offered to help us set everything up, which I'm profoundly grateful for because I'm almost out of my league when it comes to home theatre, and I'd like to learn a few things in the process.
The next morning was spent with Lyssa's family, eating breakfast, chatting, and generally catching up. I got a late start to things because I was worn out from the drive up to Pennsylvania and fighting off the cold that ravaged my sinus cavities. Some time that afternoon (I don't exactly recalll when; certainly after breakfast, a few cups of coffee, and two caplets of Dayquil) we loaded another set of gifts into the TARDIS and made the two hour trek to northern Pittsburgh to visit my family. We arrived early in the afternoon and spent the afternoon with my folks, exchanged gifts with everyone (I really like the new waistcoat and sweater), and spent the afternoon watching
The Dark Knight, which my folks hadn't seen yet. I also spent the afternoon fighting with a stack of bad CD-R disks trying to copy the next batch of wedding photos for my family (as well as make backup copies for ourselves).
More under the cut...
Friday, 26 December 2008 at 18:31
I've finally found the time to edit the photographs taken at
the Cruxshadows concert Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I attended over Thanksgiving. You can see the photo album
here.
Friday, 26 December 2008 at 16:32
At long last, the photographs I took while
Lyssa and I were on our honeymoon at the Wintergreen Resort. You can see the gallery
here.
Friday, 26 December 2008 at 16:06
Tracey has e-mailed me two sets of pictures that she took at the wedding - you can see them
over here.
Thursday, 25 December 2008 at 14:01
Merry Christmas, joyous Yule, happy Chaunakkah.. whatever it is that you celebrate at this time of year.
If you're on the road today, travel safely.
Wednesday, 24 December 2008 at 15:58
EDITED: Added Creative Commons license block. Other content remains the same.
Long ago, in the days of DOS and OS/2, deleting a file meant that it was gone for good. How file systems worked was a mystery to just about everybody, and so we were told to back up our data often lest a mistake or drive crash wipe out something important, leaving us up a certain body of water sans propulsion. Years passed, as they are wont to do, and someone discovered that data didn't really evaporate when it was deleted, it was just renamed in such a way that it couldn't be seen anymore. This discovery lead to the creation of many data recovery tools for DOS (for OS/2 was on the way out), and many a user who'd just deleted the wrong file heaved a sigh of relief. For people concerned with deleted data being extracted from their systems without their knowledge, such as law enforcement, intelligence and defense agencies of many countries around the world, and people who risk persecution or execution for their work, brows began to sweat and many sleepless nights were had.
As alluded to before, just because you delete something doesn't mean that the data winks out of existence. Most every file system does basically the same things to keep track of files and free disk space when files are deleted: a table of some kind is kept which maps blocks of disk space to names of directories and files. Block 123387 of the first hard drive holds part of ntoskrnl.exe, block 98926127 contains /usr/local/src/gtkwifi-1.10/README, and so forth. When a file is deleted the entry in the file systems' tables is updated to reflect the fact that it's slot is now available for re-use, as are the blocks on disk associated with that table entry. Moreover, the first block of a file points to the second, which points to the third and so forth, making a chain of disk blocks for that file. So long as those disk blocks aren't overwritten by parts of another file, that data might still be extracted by someone who gets hold of your computer (or just the hard drive) for a while. While many of the data forensics packages are too expensive for your average user to get hold of, there are some good ones out there that are open source (like
Autopsy and
ddrescue (which was designed with damaged drives more than forensic analysis in mind)) or at least highly affordable (like
FTK Imager from AccessData).
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 24 December 2008 at 15:28
I'm a big fan of the open source
pilot-link package to back the contents of my smartphone up to offline storage on the off chance that something goes wrong and I need to buy a new phone or restore data from the last backup. Ages ago, someone figured out the protocol implemented by PalmOS for uploading and downloading data from handhelds and worked it into a command-line app that does it all for you: it backs up, restores, installs, uninstalls, and basically does everything but let you make phone calls from your laptop (though there is other software available that can let you do that). There's just one thing about the pilot-xfer utility: for all its power, it's not particularly user friendly, and no one's written a real manpage for it. I often spend a half-hour or so every time I back up my Treo re-figuring out exactly how to do it. When I first figured it out, about two years ago, I made a note for myself in my desktop sticky-note program... which I then promptly forgot about.
So, to save others (as well as myself) some time, a quick reference for how to use pilot-xfer to back up your handheld.
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 at 21:36
I've updated
my .plan file. This should frighten all of you. Some NSFW content - as always, use discretion.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008 at 21:30
(Original image courtesy of
Amanda Palmer's blog)
Monday, 22 December 2008 at 17:58
Lyssa took sick last week. On Thursday she woke up having trouble breathing while I was in the shower, which threw our plans into a tailspin. I took a sickday and drove her to urgent care (where I seem to spend far too much time in the waiting room these days), only to discover that she has a sinus infection. Lyssa spent the bulk of the weekend in bed pumped full of antibiotics and anti-inflammatory drugs, with the odd sortie to get food in some form or go shopping.
This also meant that I was running solo when I went to $work's holiday party on Friday night, which I'm still a little disappointed about. Because I was driving in from Maryland I wound up being one of the last ones to arrive - fashionably late, as it were. It was good to spend some time with folks whom I don't get to see very often (due to field work) - we got in a couple of good discussions about making and bottling wine,
the Wintergreen Resort, and a museum somewhere in southern Virginia that restores and races tanks (!) (which took me right back to the
desktop fabrication train of thought for making spare parts). I also spent a couple of hours with my boss and another cow-orker debating physics and the Large Hadron Collider and rounded off the night by burning a DVD full of music for a friend at the office who doesn't do much field work.
Somehow Lyssa got me out of bed at 0945 EST5EDT on Saturday morning so that we could drive to Tyson's Corner Mall to finish up our Yule shopping. As expected, the parking lot was packed to the gills with motor vehicles of all kinds, but we struck it lucky by finding a parking space at the far side of the Macy's parking deck and hiking the rest of the way. We picked up a couple of things at Macy's and then had an early lunch at Gordon Biersch to fuel ourselves up (by this time I was running on fumes) before stopping at Barnes and Noble to pick up a couple of last minute gifts. After returning home to drop Lyssa off I headed back out to the
HacDC space to help clean up the addition to the workshop they'd negotiated from the church. Unfortunately, the only other person there was Nate, so not a lot of cleaning got done though we did hack around a little on a firewall appliance (a Netraguard?) that makes an amazing amount of noise for such a small device (it's a 1U rackmount). We spent an hour or two finding ways of building a new cooling system for its CPU (which runs surprisingly cool for its time) but didn't make it very far because we didn't have a way of bending copper tubing without permanantly kinking it.
More under the cut...
Thursday, 18 December 2008 at 20:57
Majel Barrett Roddenberry, widow of
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry,
died today of leukemia at the age of 76. Majel was best known to fans of
Star Trek: The Next Generation and the other new-gen series as the voice of the ships' central computers, the occasional guest appearance as Lwaxana Troi, and she even had a small role on
Babylon-5 as Lady Morella.
Fandom has lost another icon.
Monday, 15 December 2008 at 23:03
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, sapient lifeforms of all ages: welcome to the holiday season. I just wish that it didn't involve so much road rage in the DC metroplex, let alone being greeted with an upraised middle finger rather than a wave of good cheer. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but wasn't this traditionally the time of year to be good to one another (if no other time) and practice random acts of senseless kindness, especially during a season that seems to be blowing through like a nor'easter this time 'round. I think I've had a chance to blink once, maybe twice since Thanksgiving, and
*BANG!*, here we are, halfway through December. This should also be taken to imply that I'm scrambling to get my Yule shopping done as soon as I can because next week is Yule. Thankfully, not a few packages reside in the library next to my sewing machine right now, so I'm not that bad off.
Later Friday evening, after sparring practice (which I passed on in favor of working out at home) Lyssa and I met up with Hasufin, Orthaevelve, and Jarin for dinner. Jarin suggested that we try a new restaurant (for us, anyway) in Falls Church called the Dogfish Head Alehouse (6363 Leesburg Pike; Seven Corners Center; Falls Church, Virginia; 22044; phone 703-534-3342; fax 703-534-6538). If you've ever perused the specialty beer section of Whole Paycheque (if you live in such a state) you've seen their wares for sale. What many people do not know, however, is that they also run a small restaurant chain (four locations or so) in the DC area. When we arrived around 2100 EST5EDT or so, the place was still packed with the Friday dinnertime rush, which is a pretty good sign for a restaurant. It's also a pretty straightforward restaurant; while it's not a dive or a sports bar, you will find a lot of dead critter that's done a hitch or two over a hot grill on the menu. Their specials are excellent, however - the appetizer Lyssa and I shared was a queso dip which incorporated chunks of grilled chicken and hot wing sauce with a side of tortilla chips. Horribly bad for you but tasty. Pretty much everything there was good, from the appetizers to the burgers that most of us order to the grilled chicken sandwich. I'm definitely going to stop back in there the next time I'm after dinner in that neck of the woods. I give it two flareguns.
The rest of my weekend was pretty much filled by banging away on my workstation from work, which conked out about two months ago. I haven't been all that concerned about it because I spent most of my time in the field and not in the office, but I've also had that particular box sitting in my home office for about as long. After spending almost four days continuously hammering on and swearing at it, I've decided to swap out the DVD-ROM drive because said drive throws errors at roughly the same place on every disk I throw at it. If I wasn't doing that I was off hunting for Yule gifts for people; praise be to
Amazon, without whose wishlists we would all be in serious trouble at this time of year.
More under the cut...
Sunday, 14 December 2008 at 12:54
I'll spare everyone my usual apology for not posting anything lately and jump right into a catch-up post as a warmup for a longer, hopefully more interesting entry later today.
First of all, earlier this week a cultural icon passed -
Bettie Page, queen of the pin-up, died of pneumonia at the age of 85 following a heart attack suffered earlier this month. Page was well known for her line of 'naughty girl' photographs, which featured nudity, lingerie, implied lesbian trysts, and even light bondage (the latter two scandalous for their time). Page stopped modelling in 1957 and all but disappeared from the public eye, and turned to religion as a way of finding meaning in her life. Interestingly, later in her life she was known to make appearances at conventions, though she rarely gave interviews and would not allow herself to be photographed.
We'll miss you, Betty.
In other news, the video game music remix and cover site
OC Remix has announced that
it's been collaborating with video game company Capcom on a soundtrack for their new game,
Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix.
Come on, Capcom. You used to be able to come up with good titles for games.
At any rate, this is a ground-breaking even because it marks the first time that a commercially offered video game has ever had a soundtrack produced by the fans. Over twenty video game loving musicians, including Big Giant Circles, Malcos, DJ Pretzel, and McVaffe have contributed their time and effort to this project. Also, you can legally download the entire soundtrack gratis from OC Remix piecemeal or
using their BitTorrent tracker.
And now, some topics near and dear to my hearts which you probably didn't think went together: coffee and alternative energy.
Researchers Mano Misra, Susanta Mohapatra, and Narasimharao Kondamudi, who are based out of the state of Nevada, have discovered a source of organic waste which is ideal for making biodiesel in industrial quantities:
coffee grounds. If you're not familiar with the substance,
biodiesel is a non-petroleum based fuel very similiar to diesel which is manufactured from other oils, such as soybean oil, vegetable oil.. or in this case, the lipids and oils left in used coffee grounds after disposal. Coffee grounds after brewing average out around 16% oil and other lipids, it should be noted. The three researchers, as an experiment, collected used coffee grounds from an unnamed multinational coffee house chain (gee.. wonder who that could be), separated the oil from the grounds, and
brewed up a batch of fuel
. The resulting diesel fuel, which smells strongly of coffee, was found to be unusually stable due to the high concentration of antioxidant chemicals in the resulting fuel. The leftovers from the synthesis process are said to be safe and can be used as compost for farming or small-property gardening.
Sunday, 07 December 2008 at 23:15
Like many people today, I have a GPS (
Global Positioning System) navigation system mounted semipermanantly in my car to help me get around when I'm out and about. Every once in a while, however, I find myself being asked a rather curious question to which I haven't really put together a rehearsed answer. That question is this: "If you're so consciencious about your privacy, why do you have a GPS unit in your car? Aren't you worried that you'll be tracked wherever you go by your GPS?"
The short and simple answer to that question is, "No, I'm not concerned about that," and here's why:
GPS nav systems, like
my TomTom
, are basically small computers that contain databases of maps and roads coupled to a high-frequency
radio receiver that picks up transmissions from the GPS
satellite constellation. The GPS performs a lot of very specialized math using the information carried by the signals to figure out where on the planet it is. This is all well and good but that doesn't help Them locate me because They have no idea where my car is at any particular time unless They happen to be looking right at it. To do so, a GPS unit would need to have a
transmitter inside of it to broadcast its current location on a certain frequency. For various reasons (including the sheer number of GPS units on the road, power requirements, hardware hackers opening their GPSes up to play with them and blowing the whistle, and
FCC regulations) this simply isn't done in consumer GPS units (though specialized surveillance devices are available on the grey market, such as the
Quick Track Pro and various devices sold by
Laipac Tech). On top of all of this, The Powers That Be simply don't have enough people to keep an eye on the movements of several million vehicles simultaneously - when you stop and think about it, it's kind of ludicrous.
In short, unless you've gotten on the bad side of a governmental agency, a law enforcement agency, or a technically knowledgable private investigator, you really don't have anything to worry about. Now, there are some on-board nav systems like
OnStar which do report your position to a central office, but a GPS unit that you can purchase at the corner consumer electronics store doesn't have this sort of functionality - not only would you have to subscribe to such a service to make it worth their while to keep an eye on you (paying the salary of an eye in the sky, as it were), but such devices draw a lot more power than you might think and would run down faster, something that a consumer would no doubt take notice of at the worst possible moment.
Saturday, 06 December 2008 at 13:57
Always make friends with the one busybody in your apartment building who pokes their nose into everyone's business. They're good for keeping you abreast of things that could bite you in the ass at the worst possible time.
Friday, 05 December 2008 at 18:22
As you may or may not know, I'm a fan of
The Dresden Dolls as well as
Amanda Palmer's side project. That said, I'll cut to the chase and say what kicked my puppy. Their record label, Roadrunner Records (no link to them because I don't like bumping up the Google rankings of buttheads) is giving her a hard time over her new single
Leeds United and especially the
video for same because.. get this...
Her midriff is bare in the music video, and Roadrunner Records says that she's too fat.
Now, I don't know about you, but
I've seen Amanda Palmer not wearing a whole lot from the waist up (note: safe for work), and I'm wondering where in the hell the powers that be over at Roadrunner got that idea. Could it be because Palmer doesn't look like she subsists on a can of diet soda and a fistful of crackers every day?
As one might expect, this raised the dander of not a few fans who have been posting
pictures of their bellies all over the Net in protest.
Lots of them. In fact, they're calling it
the rebellyon.
