Long Term Storage

I have this fantastic server which redirects console output to its serial port and I wanted to take advantage of it.  I went through the process of setting up inittab and grub to work and then I started testing the configuration.  In Windows using Putty, everything worked fine.  As soon as I moved the cable over to the serial port of an OSSIM box, I kept getting this error.

/dev/ttyS0 is not a tty

Googl’ing around returned nothing helpful which is why I am posting this here.

I have a habit of  disabling unused peripherals when I setup a new box.  Since I rarely use Serial Ports, I disable them.  Well.. that was the problem.  The disabled serial port isn’t going to work very well for a serial connection.

Hope this saves someone some time.

SAIC announced today that they are starting a CyberSecurity blog over at Typepad.  It should be interesting to see who they have do write ups.

So.. it is 9pm and I am manicaly pressing refresh on my browser page to see the changes.  This is an ideal time to catch up on some of the things that I have been meaning to post.

If you are like me and have trouble really understanding where the candidates stand on issues, then you should check out the VoteMatch Quiz provided by OnTheIssues.org.  It is a simple 20 question quiz that asks you your position on a handful of topics.  It then takes your respones and compares the to the candidates voting records and public statements on their position.  You can also click through to see the details behind those scores.  Show how your specific responses compare to the candidates responses.

Overall, I find the site very useful.  Their position data is fully cited so you are free to make your own judgements of their positions.

Funny quotes from Reddit.

The Wikipedia Uncertainty Principle

One cannot call attention to a Wikipedia article without causing that article to be altered.

Schrodinger’s edit

At any given time a Wikipedia article both contains and does not contain any one given fact. Observing it will cause only one of the cases to be true. Calling attention to it will cause the other case to become true for a short time until it resettles on the first.

An interesting article I found over at Balance Through Extremism. Apparently RedHat has had a long time bug in the bless/overload function of Perl.  It causes massive Disk IO usage for no apparent reason.

In short, if you are using the official Perl RPMs from RedHat on RHEL, CentOS, or Fedora, you are likely experiencing a major performance bug.  The simple solution is to roll your own.

After seeing and hearing Anna rave about her FiveFingers, I decided to take the plung.  We went down to River Sports on Saturday and I tried on a pair.  My biggest concern was having things between my toes.  It irritates me to no end.  I can’t wear sandels that have the thing between the big and pointer toe.  I tried them on and wondered around the store for a while.  They were suprisingly comfortable.  Unfortunately, they are so popular right now, they didn’t have my style/size/color in stock.    Same thing happened when we went to get hers.  I ordered them online and I hope to have them soon.

Since it is open mic night on my blog.  Here is an amuzing page a came across.  101 Atheist Quotes.  Listed are some very funny and opportune statements.

I try hard to keep this from being a political blog.  I don’t want to mix Technology and political issues here.  I am going to make an exception for this one though.  It isn’t about parties or who is better than the other.  It is about Voting.  It is about our right to vote and how it is being stolen through legislation and misinformation.

Check out this video on freeforall.tv.  It is a documentry on how the election was stolen in Florida in 2004.  Bare with it, it is a hour long and does get a little silly at parts.  It is well worth watching though.  If anything, you will understand how to protect your rights.

The activist site is videothevote.org.

I received this article from my mother.  Being a fan of beer, it was shocking to me.

Study shoes beer contains womens hormones.

Been a very busy day. I am just not getting the chance to post about seeing Nine Inch Nails last night and damn was it a good show.

This is the 4th time I have seen NIN in concert and Trent Reznor never disappoints. He had a great mix of old and new stuff. I was especially fond of the light show. It reminded me of the Fragile tour which is my favorite album. The later half of the show was mostly songs from Year Zero, Ghosts, and The Slip. I have always enjoyed NIN instrumentals and the tracks from Ghosts was no exception. He did a great job visualizing the songs.

Another great concert for the memories and I can’t wait for the next show.

NIN FTW.

I have been using Google Hosted apps for my mail domain for over 2 years now and I couldn’t be happier with the service.  It is always available and quite frankly keeps getting better.  Now Google had an email outage yesterday and at latest count, there are over 125 news articles about it along with COUNTLESS complaints.

It befuddles me to think that someone has the rights to bitch about GMail being down for two hours.  A service that most and by most, I mean high 90s percentage do not pay for.  It may even be 99% don’t pay for.  How can you complain about a service that offers soo much for free when it goes down for 2 hours or less?  Is your life/business/etc so critical that you can’t not be with out email for two hours?  Best of all, it was only the web interface that was down for two hours.  You could STILL access it by POP or IMAP.

So I have to ask again, WTF are you complaining about?  If your business relies on a FREE BETA application that much that two hours will have a significant impact to you, then you seriously need to reconsider your IT strategy.  It is no one’s falt but your own if you go out of business for, again with emphasis this time, RELIYING ON A FREE BETA APPLICATION for business critical services.  Period.

I don’t care who you are, what you do, how you do, how much money you make, or who you fuck.  You are frankly an idiot if this makes you mad or damages your business.  And you can quote me on that.

Pretty neat site I just came across.

This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypal problems, and related definitions. Algorithms include common functions, such as Ackermann’s function. Problems include traveling salesman and Byzantine generals. Some entries have links to implementations and more information. Index pages list entries by area and by type. The two-level index has a total download 1/20 as big as this page.

http://www.nist.gov/dads/?

We went and checked out the Vibram Five Fingers shoes today.  (http://www.vibramfivefingers.com/)  Anna is dieing to get a pari and I have to say, they are pretty cool.  I may have to splurge and get a pair before the trip to SE Asia.  It would make for an interesting journey.