All posts by Keith Garner

Geek, Linux

A tale of two RedHats, Part 1

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A bunch of friends and I have rented a box at ServerMatrix, a managed hosting service where you get total control (root) on your box. They support Windows, BSD, and Linux. The flavors of Linux they’ll install are RH9, RH EL3, or Debian. I’ve been elected as head admin of the box and MARK NOTARUS is my other partner in crime. Mark and I were most familiar with the free RedHat versions, and since EL3 is based on those, we went with that.

To sum it up, I’m really impressed with EL3. It seems like a really well QAed version of RH9, which was a solid distribution.
Continue reading A tale of two RedHats, Part 1 →

General

The Sanctity of Marriage

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J.Lo Reportedly Weds Singer Marc Anthony

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Jennifer Lopez reportedly married Marc Anthony in a small ceremony at her home, less than six months after she ended her high-profile engagement to Ben Affleck.

For Lopez, 34, the marriage would mark her third – the first was to waiter Ojani Noa in 1997, the second to dancer Cris Judd in 2001. Noa lasted a little more than a year; Judd for nine months.

Anthony, the Latin singing sensation, just divorced former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres last week in the Dominican Republic.

(Emphasis added by me.)

Can someone tell me how gay people are going to ruin marriage again? I just don’t see how, given crap like this.

Chicago, General

A documentary on the southern suburbs wherein my in-laws get the shaft

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Tonight, during their pledge drive Channel 11, WTTW, Chicago’s PBS station aired two very cool programs put together by Geoffrey Baer. Sarah and I ended up watching both of them.

The first was called Chicago’s Lakefront that was filmed 5 years ago or so. It covers the lake front of the city and many of the sites and pieces of architecture along the lake. It was well worth the time to watch and I recommend it if you get a chance to see it.

The other was called South of Chicago: Suburbs, Steel Mills, and Shorelines. It started in Gary, Indiana, and traveled up Lake Michigan, and then down the Calumet river, to the Cal-Sag Channel, and then south when the Channel starts to cut west. It was really interesting and I know a lot more about the southern suburbs then I did before I watched it. I also recommend watching this one if you get the chance.

One reason we decided to watch this one as well was to see if it mentioned South Holland and its history. We were interested in South Holland for a number of reasons. One reason is that South Holland was the onion set capital of the world . The most important reason is the fact that the Peter Peerbolte Company was there. The Peter Peerbolte Company was an onion farming company. They even had their own train cars, which you can now find as models.

In any case, Sarah is a descendant of Peter Peerbolte. He was her great-great grandpa. What we’ve been told is that with the onion company, he owned most of the land that is now the town of South Holland. Unfortunately, the Great Depression took its toll and he had to sell everything. Its worth nothing that he did not end up buried in debt as he managed to pay back everyone he owed money to with the proceeds from selling off the company. He had enough money to buy a farm in Kankakee, which is how my wife’s mom’s family ended up there. But I digress…

In any case, during the discussion of South Holland, the Peerbolte family wasn’t mentioned. Sarah was upset about that. However, its caused us to question how big the farm was, and if they were the only farm in South Holland. I think we may be visiting the South Holland historical society to do some research as we’re both interested. Why are we interested? I’m not sure, it might be only so we can tell Dinah more of her family history when we get that far.

Baer is currently working on a new documentary about the North-West suburbs that I’m looking forward to seeing when WTTW airs it.

[Update 5/26/2011: Sarah was doing some web searching and came across some found film footage of Peter Peerbolte and his family in 1929.]

Geek, ____ of the day/week

openssl as a debugging client

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Today’s “useful tool of the day” comes to us thanks to the openssl command line tool from openssl. It was probably well known to all, but I just found out about it today.

From the openssl man page:

       s_client  This implements a generic SSL/TLS client which can establish
                 a transparent connection to a remote server speaking SSL/TLS.
                 It's intended for testing purposes only and provides only
                 rudimentary interface functionality but internally uses
                 mostly all functionality of the OpenSSL ssl library.

Here’s an example:
Continue reading openssl as a debugging client →

General

Red Forman kicks ass

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I was watching TV while holding Dinah this evening. One of the things I watched was That 70’s Show. I thought to myself, “Everything I ever needed to know about being a father, I learned from watching Red Forman.” Okay, not really, but Red kicks ass.

My favorite bit of Red Wisdom:
“You know, son, alcohol and women can be a lot of fun when used seperately. But when mixed, they can make you a real dumbass.”

Geek News, General

Google being evil? NOT

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Edward Kasner, with the help of his nephew, Milton Sirotta, coined the term googol. We all know it now to be 10100. Kasner’s relatives are supposedly upset that everyone’s favorite search engine Google is making money of the word he coined. Peri Fleisher, Kasner’s great-neice, is appearently talking to NPR and anyone who will listen about this injustice.

First note, in that second article, I love this quote: “I had heard of Google in 1988 before most people were aware of it. I didn’t know if the company was going to take off or not.” (Emphasis mine.) I’m sure this is a typing mistake, but its still funny to me.

Second note, this seems really silly to me. I guess the controversy comes to these two points: 1) In Google’s favor, Google spelled it differently. 2) In the family’s favor Google acknowledges that they based their name on this term, but doing a play on the word. The family might have some merit, but once a word is released into the lexicon for general use, its too late. Especially a seemlingly general term like googol. Unless you’ve trademarked it and defend that trademark, or something like that.

Being a geek, I knew the world googol long before Google came along. How many “normal” people did? Scrabble and Upwords players maybe. And that’s why the family is all ticked off.

Seems like a lot of sour grapes to me.

Geek, Geek News

Fry’s news

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Looks like the Chicago area Fry’s is still moving forward. (Thanks to MARK NOTARUS for the link.)

From Suburban Chicago News:

A new power player

Fry’s Electronics wants to broaden its national presence and hopes its first venture east of the Mississippi River will pay big dividends.

After almost two decades of operating exclusively in the western and southwestern United States, the consumer electronics retailer is ready to make its Midwest debut in Downers Grove. The store is near interstates 88 and 355 and was built on the site once occupied by Auto Nation.

Update:
Martin Maney has pointed out on the LUNI mailing list, that our friend whyme has a newer update at his site that says Fry’s is actually hiring.