Interesting

I was reading a Slashdot article, and found reference to COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Progam), and more specifically the Church Report (select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities, United States Senate) of 1976. There's a decent transcript here. I Googled around, and couldn't find scans/PDFs of the original document anywhere, and I'm not 100% sure how to get hold of old select committee reports now that I'm not an academic. this seems to demonstrate it's existence, though. It's an interesting read, and definitely of historical relevance to anyone worried by the climate in modern America.
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

An interesting life

This morning was stressful. I arrive, login to PGAdmin, and discover that 35 PostgreSQL databases are missing. My mind filled with "were we hacked?", "did the drive fail?", and so on. From the logs, I'm pretty sure we weren't hacked. The drives are chugging along fine - except for the block that glitched on a power fluctuation... that just happened to contain the PostgreSQL master object catalogue. In other words, PostgreSQL was dead!

Fortunately, I have a system that keeps 14-days of rolling backups. I took a dump of the current database (just in case), reinitialized the database (to be sure of NO corruption), and imported yesterday's backup. 2 hours later - 5 gigs of database is humming along well again. I love PostgreSQL. This is it's first glitch in 3.5 years, and it recovered with grace and ease.

In other news, I'm learning RSS/Atom. I have Firefox configured to show my friend's blogs/LJs/Whatever as folders on my bookmarks panel in Firefox. They update on their own. I'm probably going to add some news sources, Slashdot, and others too. It's really neat - they update themselves, so I can just check headlines without wasting a visit to the site. I'll definitely put an RSS feed on this site, soon.

Anyone object to being included in an RSS aggregator that lists all my friend's blogs/any others I find interesting and summarizes them on my site?
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Journalists!

So I waltz into work, and find a Tribune journalist with a camera in the office! My first thought was "oh crap, what did we do?" only to discover that they were there to do an article on MyFreeCalendar,
a site I've worked on for years. Quite a relief, but it's kinda creepy have journalists in the office. Sudden urge not to have bad hair, and a inexplicable sudden urge to hide under a table and scream "respect my privacy!"
Mood: blah
Music:

Woot

I made the mistake of linking to one of my projects in my Slashdot sig, and promptly got a 5 Informative at the top of a front-page article. Lots of hits. The great thing? We're still running, and NO appreciable slowdown! Go Zero1Tek!
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Sick. Michael Howard needs to be beaten with a clue by four.

I'm sick. I just checked my temperature, and scored 100F on the ickymometer. Took analgesics, and it's coming down okay, so no imminent danger, just feel like crap. :-(

I just read this in the Guardian, a follow up to the Sun's war on gypsies. Michael Howard, leader of the Conservatives, agrees with the Sun! Populist agendas are one thing in politics, but agreeing with the persecution of an age-old (and historically, legally protected) culture is not acceptable in the least. The list of party leaders who have officially sanctioned Gypsy persecution in the least 100 years is pretty short: Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Chiraq, and now... Howard. Great. I'm sure he's proud to be on that list.
Mood: sick
Music: None

XOrg on Debian

I took the plunge yesterday, and installed XOrg on Debian. First, some history. A year ago (or so), XFree86 development was going at a snail's pace, and Keith Packard (+friends) decided that the only way to get any real development done was to fork XFree86. This was initially greeted with a large sigh of apathy from the community, as well as a separate fork the name of which I can't remember. Anyway, not long after, the XFree86 people decided to change their license to incude a Free Software-Incompatible clause, basically requiring that anything that use X prominently display the (huge) list of authors. That would mean Red Hat, Debian, etc. would have had to feature huge splash screens, despite the fact that XFree86 was notorious for not accepting patches from distributions. OpenBSD were the first to announce they would stick to an old XFree release, followed by Debian, and then just about everyone else. Shortly afterwards, Xorg became usable and just about everyone switched... except Debian, who plan to switch after Sarge becomes Stable (capital S because Stable is a distribution, not a phrase). This is annoying for Debian users like myself; overall, Debian is excellent. Unfortunately, the old XFree86 doesn't hold a candle to XOrg - and having to wait months for integration to begin after Sarge goes Stable is a pain in the arse. The fact that Stable will then go for years without XOrg basically rules it out as a desktop client (and Unstable tends to be a bit scary after Stable releases, since that's when they really start experimenting again).

Fortunately, installing XOrg proved to be pretty easy, although there aren't as many instructions out there as I'd like. Step one was to modify /etc/apt/sources.list to include the following line:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hoary main restricted

Step two was to do the usual "apt-get update", followed by "apt-get install xorg-xserver xorg-common". Wait.

Step three was to rename /X11/X, and then symlink /etc/X11/X to /etc/usr/bin/X11/Xorg.

Step four: reboot. XOrg worked first time for me, complete with my Nvidia drivers. Wooty woot. Finally, I went into Synaptic, and did a smart upgrade after telling Synaptic to favour Debian packages rather than the Ubuntu ones we added to sources.list.

The end results are pretty good. Font rendering is MUCH nicer. Once I enabled Composite Rendering with the following section in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4, everything was zoomy:

Section "Extensions"
     Option "Composite" "Enable"
     Option "RENDER" "Enable"
   EndSection

Finally, I setup Gnome to run "xcompmgr -c" in the background. All my windows have nice dropshadows now.

Oh, and if you try this at home with an nVidia card, make sure that you enable nVidia render acceleration by including Option "RenderAccel" "true" in your Device (nvidia) section under the Driver nvidia line.

So far, so good. It's not quite as stable as XFree was, and has locked up on me when logging out - but it's a whole lot more usable.
Mood: accomplished
Music: Dio - Don't Tell The Kids

Hmmm

I spent a big chunk of the day working on a new website (I'll talk about it when it's live), writing some of the coolest DHTML/C# I've put together in a while. It's really nifty, I've managed to get the two talking via JavaScript XmlPostRequest calls, giving a gmail-like dynamic interface.

I then wasted an evening in SWG. Just after I got buffed, a general "help this guy do Melichae" went out. I love that mission, so I went along. The mission was bugged - no Melichae. I dueled a guild Dark Jedi Knight for fun, and was incapacitated really quickly - but happily for me, I did manage to land one shot. That's an accomplishment against Bet, he's that good. Then, a Bounty Hunter+Jedi gank squad (I really disapprove of Bounty Hunters bringing friends on hunts, especially jedi!) shows up for Bet - and I'm 'on leave', so I can't help out. Bet flees, and they challenge the lot of us to a big PvP battle. So, I go overt, group up, waste 30 minutes while everyone buffs, run around Coronet - the enemy don't show up. Waste more time waiting. Move to a different city, get a few shots at a Rebel jedi as she flees into a house (not being able to follow into houses sucks!), and then waste a huge chunk of the evening sitting with the group while we try to find anyone to fight. Yawntastic. Some of my guildies tell me that PvP is always like this, which might explain the attitudes of the PvPers who think they are inherently superior... they are definitely patient, and since they rarely actually fight anything, they have plenty of time to brag!

I'm loaded up on cold-meds, have bad sinuses. Ick.
Mood: tired
Music: None

Sometimes, The Sun (newspaper) makes me really sick

This, being one occasion. What is this, 1938?
Mood: tired
Music: None

Tired, but a good day

Overall, I like today. I released Persist 0.9.2 an hour ago, and noticed that I have 11 Freshmeat subscribers now (and one user emailing me/using the thing - woot!). SWG just announced a new expansion pack, Rage of the Wookies. Cybernetics, new planet, space mining - sounds good so far.
Mood: accomplished
Music: None

Re/Max Server Closet Diary, Part 5

Well, it's 9pm, and just about everything is done. The new server is very fast, and really sweet to work with. We've had all sorts of client hiccups getting migrated, but overall things are pretty good.

My goodness, but I'm tired.
Mood: exhausted
Music: New Model Army - Never Any Trouble

Re/Max Server Closet Diary, Part 3

It's around 9am, and I'm awake, fired up, and things are looking good. Hair largely intact. The active directory domain is now entirely migrated to the new server, complete with all the FSMO roles. I'd like to give credit to this site, for some of the best FSMO documentation I've ever read.

Now we just have to finish Exchange 2003, tweak things a bit, and it's all done. Wooty woot.
Mood: accomplished
Music: The ROAR of the fans

Re/Max Diaries, Part 3

It's 7:12 am, and I'm actually awake. I'm armed with all of the data I needed. I need more caffeine, another cigarette, and some good luck!
Mood: awake
Music:

Re/Max Server Closet Diary, Part 2

It's been 11 hours and 45 minutes, and I'm dog tired. The migration has gone less than smoothly, but we're finally in a good place: the new server is an Active Directory 2003 Domain Controller, all the domain accounts are migrated, and WINS, DNS, DHCP, File/Printer sharing are all configured. That just leaves Exchange for the morning - before noon. It's late, the team is tired - so we're stopping for sleep. Steve was kind enough to buy us pizza - yay!

The problems started when we tried the recommended 'upgrade an NT4 system to Win2k3 for Active Directory'. REMAX1 died. Hard. It won't boot any OS, and it's acting like it has bad RAM. After 5 years, it probably just wanted to be buried! Fortunately, we'd backed EVERYTHING up off of it, and had backup domain controllers that took over just fine. Then we setup an NT4 box in VMWare, made it the PDC, and upgraded it. After a scare with a bluescreen (requiring a driver install - no biggie in the end), it worked perfectly. Phew.

I am soooo tired, but I think some rest will make me ready for the final challenge: Exchange 2003.
Mood: tired
Music: None

Re/Max Server Closet Diary, Part 1

Last night's file copying went pretty smoothly, and now Exchange is backing up to PST files. The new hardware works well, and we've not had much go wrong yet - other than Win2k3 OEM edition not liking upgrades; fortunately, I have a CD that can fix that for the 10 minutes we need the old NT4 server upgraded (gotta love migrations!). It's 80 F in the closet, and I'm beginning to feel the heat. Still have hair. Am hopeful that I'll sleep in my own bed and not the closet tonight...
Mood: accomplished
Music: The ROAR of the fans