Sep
30
2006

Stealing Ideas

And Random Moods Banter

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, September 30, 2006 - 12:30:30 pm
(Posted Under: Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene)
Last night I had one of my Friday night guitar sessions, before promptly passing out. On working out some more Black Moods songs, and looking up for the tab for Hard Luck Woman, I noticed a cool ass Josh Kennedy quote...

This is a song we wrote with Kiss back in - when they stole our makeup idea - and Garth Brookes. Oh yeah, Garth Brookes was there.
Gold. It's still hard to believe that the Moods are no more. Sick In Bed has become one of my favorite songs. It was always high up there, with Frontline, Seven Day Binge and Tall, but it being on Live At Last Exit Vol. 1 (and my playing that heaps over the last few months) really makes me notice how much of a stand out it is.

Listening to this acoustic Sugar Daddies show always
Now Playing: The Black Moods - Hard Luck Woman (Live - Sugar Daddies, Tempe, AZ)
Sep
26
2006

Do You Remember When Email Worked?

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, September 26, 2006 - 01:01:31 am
(Posted Under: Rants)
The only thing more annoying than spam, is the new wave of 'spam protection' that is completely fucking the whole email concept.

Top on my hitlist is Hotmail, the poor excuse of piece of shit that they call an email system! God forbid I actually use Hotmail, because I don't (other than for handing out an email address when I don't want to actually hand out an email address), but sadly I have to write to people who use Hotmail - or an account under the Hotmail system.

I've had a huge problem with that (in it not working) over the last couple of months, which I thought (although the problem didn't fully make technical sense) was somewhat related to Alphalink, and hence solved by the fact that I am now going through a different ISP. Wrong! Not that I'm convinced that the Alphalink factor didn't play into it at all, but I discovered tonight the inability to send email to myself at Hotmail with an email containing choice spam phrases (completely legitimately). This is to myself (from outside of Hotmail), with myself as a contact in Hotmail, and the Hotmail spam setting to exclusively allow email from contacts. The email didn't go into Junk Mail, it didn't even get delivered at all.

I don't care that it didn't get delivered to me - like I said, I'm hardly delusional enough to use my Hotmail address for anything important. However, I'm fucking sick and tired of sending email to people, with the expectation that it arrived, and it doesn't, without any notification. Similar was my disgust in finding my Alphalink email address deleting certain spam, without my explicit instruction to do so.

Fuck this shit, seriously. Can we go back to the days where inboxes were full of porn, viagra and penis enlargement adverts, and Nigerian bank schemes. It was annoying as all hell, but at least email worked! I'd take email working any day! And word up to anything that automatically deletes email - there's already something to accomplish your task - it's called the delete key. Seriously, can't we go back to using this and restore email to a functional medium?
Sep
24
2006

The Changing Of Seasons

(Add / View Comments) (0)Sunday, September 24, 2006 - 07:04:16 pm
(Posted Under: No Category)
I like Katie's was of noting seasonal change...

He's growing his fro out....that's how you can tell it's turning fall. [smile] In other parts of the country, the leaves turn orange, in Tempe, Norm's fro gets bigger. [smile]
Now Playing: Ghetto Cowgirl - Castastrophelia (Long Wongs, Tempe, AZ - 08/13/2000)
Sep
19
2006

See Ya Later Alphalink

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, September 19, 2006 - 01:22:35 pm
(Posted Under: No Category)
All good things must come to an end, apparently. I was dubious about the Chariot buy out of Alphalink at the end of last year, though nothing too bad seemed to happen. However, since June, the cracks have started to show. Firstly I haven't been able to send email to Hotmail for at least a month (strangly fixed last night). Then shell.alphalink.com.au (ssh access) was shut down. In addition, webhosting was moved to another server, which broke all of my websites. Not that easy to fix, without a shell account to debug! And another recent annoyance was discovered - my upload speed being capped at around 3-5kb/s (it was supposed to be 128 kbit).

Not long after this, the change that I have half expecting since December last year, and definately the last straw - decomission of the Alphalink Wireless service. Immediately looking for a new provider I realised (not that I didn't already know) what a good deal Alphalink Wireless was - 2MB/128Kb, 10GB downloads for $33 a month. The main drawcard for Alphalink Wireless was the low cost, rather than the 'coolness' of Wireless, being much cheaper than ADSL (and without the overheads of a phone line). Looking around at other wireless providers in Melbourne, they are definately charging at a premium, and much more than ADSL. Alphalink Wireless was such a sweet deal...

So it didn't take long to give up on that, and reside to getting ADSL, which I'd always been so proud of not having to do thus far. Largely for the cost. But I resigned to the inevitable, forked out for a modem, line splitters and phone line and signed up with Internode.

Kinda sad, given that Alphalink is the only ISP I've been with (8 years July just gone) and up until the Chariot buyout, was the one bill I never minded paying. Though, while the outlay costs combined with paying double a month than what I used to sucks, I'm kinda glad to be away from Alphalink/Chariot given the way the last 9 months have gone. If wireless had of stayed, I probably would have too (the deal was just too good), but leaving those problems behind is kinda nice.

Don't delete my spam!
In addition to all of this, I've been doing some cleaning up of my Alphalink account, retreiving all the stuff I want to keep, and came across Chariot's email management page, and on perusing that, discovered that my email had been given a spam setting of Medium and emails were being deleted. I had half suspected this as of late my spam folder hasn't really been getting anything. Seriously not cool, as I'm against deleting suspected spam outright. I've turned this off (for the whole 10 or so days I still have an Alphalink account), but it explains emails that I've never received.
In addition to this
Now Playing: Jeordie - Sunset Strip
Sep
09
2006

Patch-O-Matic & Portage

(Add / View Comments) (0)Saturday, September 9, 2006 - 11:53:17 am
(Posted Under: Gentoo Linux Gentoo Linux)
Up until now, I've manually applied and installed iptables modules via patch-o-matic. I've been thinking about finding out how to do it via portage for a little while not, for a couple of reasons - the first one being because I end up with userspace iptables in / (portage install) and /usr/local (manual iptables build), and more annoyingly, I always forget which patch-o-matic I've previously used. Installing to /usr/local worked okay, as long as I remembered to copy things from /usr/local/lib/iptabes to /lib/iptables, but it was time to change.

I looked into this last night, and found a howto on forums.gentoo.org, which mostly worked. With a couple of annoyances. The first one is that my kernel sources are already patched for the added modules I use (account, condition, time). But if I unpack the iptables userspace source, it's obviously not patched. Fine, except that running patch-o-matic will detect the patches as already applied, because of the kernel sources. Fine, just reverse the patches. Not rocket science, but kinda annoying, nether the less.

The other annoyance is that the unpacked sources' Makefile has PREFIX set to /usr/local. Installing via ebuild still installs to /, but the binary looks for modules in /usr/local/lib. I'm not entirely sure how emerge -v iptables differs from ebuild [ebuildfile] install, however it sets PREFIX correctly. In anycase, again, this just requires the Makefile to be modified between ebuild unpack and ebuild install. Again, kinda annoying, and moreso than the above issue.

The other annoyance is it doesn't change doing an emerge. Which I guess was part of my major desire, the half of it. Having one copy of iptables installed and tracked by portage is achieved, but still emerge iptables is still going to override the installed version with a vanilla copy. Being able to do emerge iptables and have the wanted patches installed would be nice.

Having patch-o-matic in portage, and a patch-o-matic USE flag, and then specifying which modules to add would be sweet. Using USE flags for a module list wouldn't really be appropriate, but being able to define a list somewhere, and have USE="patch-o-matic" emerge -v iptables install iptables with the required pom patches applied would be sweet.
Now Playing: Zubia Brothers - Angelina
Sep
05
2006

Robin Wilson with Scotty For Open Mic

(Add / View Comments) (0)Tuesday, September 5, 2006 - 05:43:03 pm
(Posted Under: Music Music, Tempe Music Scene Tempe Music Scene)
So, Robin Wilson joined Scott Johnson for his open mic tonight - and I scored a phone call from Yucca, which is such a sweet deal. My girlfriend rocks, what can I say? [smile]

Nice selection of songs too: Quitter, G-Daddy, Some Meat Puppets Song, Sunnyslope, Allison Road, Stop!, Come On Hard, Collider, Learning The Hard Way. Couldn't ask for more actually. As soon as Stop! came on, even over a phone, it hits you how good that song is. This was also the first time I've heard it with the new chorus lyrics that Katie and Aaron have been going on about ("Stop messing me around"). [smile] I concur with them, pretty gay. [wink] Stop, stop, stop was just fine. [smile] Stop screwing up the songs, boys. [smile] But regardless, Stop is so great. Both Come On Hard and Learning The Hard Way sounds exceptional good, again even over the phone.
Sep
03
2006

Please, Just Make The Symlink

(Add / View Comments) (0)Sunday, September 3, 2006 - 10:15:44 pm
(Posted Under: Geek)
An interest experience with Gentoo tonight. I'm in the process of converting from exim to postfix for email. Of course, testing it out in a virtual machine.

Trying to emerge certificates so that sending through gmail's server without warning, portage complained about the symlink for /etc/make.profile not being valid. After some googling, I realised that this is probably because of an emerge-sync removing the 2005.0 profile I was previously. Fine. Update it to 2005.1, which is still in portage:

# ln -s /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/x86/2005.1 /etc/make.profile
Easy, until the symlink was silently not created. No error, but no symlink. What the hell is up with my file system, it refusing to create anything in /etc. Or for that matter, /. Hell, if I do an 'ls' on anything, the directory is seemingly empty, yet tab completion shows files in the directories. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?.

Once 'ls' wasn't working, I finally caught on - I'm really big on bash's history. I'll more often recall the history and modify the command, than retype it from scratch. Which is fine, except for when the previous command line begins with '#' (the comment character for you non techie readers) and you don't realise it! [smile] No wonder none of my commands were doing anything! [smile]

I really thought that was going to turn out to be one of the weirdest problems I've ever encountered. As it turns out, it was just my stupidity - again. [wink]

Note to self - be careful with cut and paste in an xterm when your shell prompt ends in a '#'. [smile] I really should just blame this whole debarkle on using the default Gentoo bash prompt on this machine, rather than my more familar custom one.
Now Playing: Better Than Ezra - King Of New Orleans

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