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Description: the blog of luke stroven
Last Update: 01:41:39 03/04/2006
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Additional Info
First Fetched: 00:18:24 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 01:41:39 03/04/2006
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Now <a href="http://www.winsupersite.com/images/showcase/office12_pre_word_02.jpg">this</a> is a different approach to the toolbar.
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| 06:52:58 November 9, 2005, Wednesday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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This weekend a story was pulled on gnomedesktop.org. I had the misfortune of having to make a decision based on my own opinions and between the opinions of two people for whom I have much respect. The story emphasized the things that were good for GNOME while the linked story contained things that were both good and bad for GNOME. The linked story contained some facts but also some statements that were at odds with each other. The story on gnomedesktop.org would have without a doubt generated a massive comment flamefest. It would be much nicer to promote stories based on concrete sources where GNOME wins because of its own merits versus winning as a result of the mis-fortune of a company that employs many GNOME hackers and makes significate contributions to GNOME and free software. Still, the story was in many ways newsworthy as it contained information about things that will impact GNOME. But at the end of the day, the eweek story will be covered in many other media outlets, and ...
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| 21:13:44 November 6, 2005, Sunday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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This past weekend I took what was left of the old gnomedesktop.org server, added a few parts and loaded up <a href="http://www.edubuntu.org/">Edubuntu</a>. Fired up TuxPaint, and Potato Guy for my 2.75 year old son and let him play with it for half an hour. He cryed very loudly for 10 minutes after I pryed the mouse out of his hand and made him go to bed for the evening.
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| 12:49:02 October 18, 2005, Tuesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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At a restaurant last night with the family, someone moves a chair which makes a "noise". My 2 1/2 year old son stands up on the seat of our booth and yells: Son: WHO FARTED? Me: sit down, be quiet, nobody farted Son: BUT SOMEBODY DID, I HEARED IT Me: nobody farted, sit down! Son: but they did! Me: Here........ Have some more chocolate milk
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| 08:35:16 October 13, 2005, Thursday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Friday at 14:03 my wife gave birth a beautiful baby girl. Mom and Baby are doing great!
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| 07:12:36 September 10, 2005, Saturday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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<a href="http://www.siox.org/preview.html">Nifty</a>
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| 06:07:58 August 10, 2005, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Went to Davenport, Iowa last weekend to visit my brother. Had fun on I-80 with the construction. Was really cool where they split the 3 lanes on I-294 west into a 1+2 set-up and then don't bother to put up a sign telling you that miss the I-80 exit if you take the left lane. My brother works for John Deere in Moline IL, and we were gonna go check out the plant, but is was just too dang hot. My son had fun at the John Deere Commons, but was pretty tired out afterwards. He now thinks that every river we cross is the Mississippi... Also swung by the Brookfield Zoo on the way home.
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| 09:41:33 July 25, 2005, Monday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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After several months of poor stability, a crashed hard drive, and several days of downtime the the server that powers FootNotes, gnomesupport.org, and the gDesklets site is now back up. I purchased a new MB, CPU and HD so things should be faster know. Currently only running on 384MB of borrowed RAM, but I have GIG on order that should be here next week. Would have liked to have spent more, but my wife is gonna be mad enough when she sees the credit card bill next month. She just has never understood why someone would invest money in a PC just to have it sit on a rack in a small dark room ;) Also special thanks to thos for the new AGO feed viewable on the side of the FootNotes website!
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| 07:35:43 July 16, 2005, Saturday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Been plugging away try to get the machine back-up and running. /var was completely hosed, so I bought a new HD. Didn't want to take any chances with the HD going kaput. So I put in the new HD, reloaded with the latest and greatest, throw it on dhcp, update, put on the static and the network connection hoses. The nic recieves the packets but they go nowhere, and the TX is dead. Throw it back to DHCP on a different network and it is still dead. Kill the firewall and other non-essenstial things still dead. Try 2 other nics and 2 more reloads with the same result. I swear this machine is taunting me. So I am basically ready to toss this machine in the back of my fathers manure spreader on top of a pile of cow shit just to see how far the beaters on the manure spreader can fling it. <a href="http://www.ces.purdue.edu/pork/images/apply/mmcd165.jpg">Visual here</a>.
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| 12:56:18 July 13, 2005, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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The machine that powers gnomedesktop.org and gnomesupport.org has just tanked ;(, and will be down until I figure what to do. I can be reached at luke-at-stroven.org in the meanwhile.
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| 13:52:32 July 11, 2005, Monday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Now <a href="http://www.moonedit.com/indexen.htm">this</a> is just cool. It would be even cooler as a backend to a wiki. The license leaves some things to be desired though.
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| 09:29:51 June 10, 2005, Friday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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To the gd.org anonymous posters at hp & target: thanks for the insight and laughs ;)
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| 13:56:59 June 1, 2005, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Over the last several years spam has been a part of my day job. Currently I have around 1200 email users and am blocking 2.6 million spams per week with spamassassin/mimedefang, and my users still complain about the amount of spam they receive. Now spam is part of what I do for fun. Over the last several months gnomedesktop.org, and the forums and wiki on gnomesupport.org have fallen victim to a barrage of spam. I implemented a captcha's on gnomedesktop.org, which has significantly reduced the amount of comment spam but it still continues. I'm seriously considering the holding of anonymous comments for review before going live on the site. I've also disabled anonymous posting on the gnomesupport.org forums, which has reduced the amount of spam it receives to an acceptable level. Could definately use more moderators on the forums. Actually I guess I should be suprised that spam hasn't been a problem sooner on the websites...oh well. Gotta love the cat-n-mouse game.
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| 11:46:45 February 21, 2005, Monday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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This week I migrated the FootNotes website to Drupal. So far I am pretty happy with it. I've been wanting to do this for months. Especially over the last month when my machine has been getting overloaded, and bombing quite frequently. I have been using a caching system which bought me an extra 1-2 years, but that time was up. There were already scripts available to migrate the user accounts, stories, and comments......But nothing available to rebuild the comment thread structure. So cut-n-pasted some of the code out of the Drupal comment module and came up with a script to rebuild the thread structure. It took 1.5 hours to traverse through 32000+ commments on a 2.8 p4, but it went pretty smooth. One of the main weaknesses of PHPNuke is it's comment system. The basic way the comment system functions in PHP-Nuke is pretty much the same system that existed in Thatware which PHP-Nuke was forked from. PHP-Nuke does a SQL for every comment in a story plus and extra query at the bottom of ...
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| 08:29:00 October 30, 2004, Saturday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Went away to Michigan's Upper peninsula for the weekend. Visited Mackinaw Island, the Tahquamenon falls and the Soo Locks in Sault Ste Marie. Here are a few photos...
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| 12:58:32 August 4, 2004, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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I've looked into satellite radio, but wasn't to interested in yet another monthly bill. But Dish Network recently added all of the Sirius satellite radio stations for free. I've been thoroughly enjoying channel 23 "Hair Nation". There just aren't many stations around that still play much of the 80's hard rock and metal. Been playing will some dial-up accelerators lately, they improve things a little bit but it still is no where close to the slowest dsl or cable connection. As I suspected, most of popular accelerators out there are just Squid with some image optimization enhancements. Plus you are forced to use a client that only runs on Windows. At the rural ISP where I now work, for every 10 customers that walk in wanting DSL only 1 actually lives close enough to get it. Been trying to do a little landscaping around the house lately. I have very sandy soil, so I've been hauling some dirt+composted cow shit from my dad's farm. It's amazing how small of a pile of dirt a 1/2 ton ...
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| 08:50:45 June 3, 2004, Thursday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Friends shouldn't let friends run <a href="http://stroven.org/blog/photos/spyware.jpg">Windows</a>.
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| 06:15:47 May 27, 2004, Thursday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Thoroughly enjoying my new job working at a small ISP. Took a while to get adjusted, plus getting a few things straigtened out that I had been letting go while only working on a limited basis for the ISP. I love having more time with my family and friends, (no more night shift!). It has also been interesting supporting the so called "Grandma's" at the ISP. It has been a very enlightening experience. I would say a good 30-50 percent of my users are part of the so-called "Grandma" group. Forget menu's, if there isn't an icon on the desktop for it, they aren't gonna use it. To them a Windows desktop would be every bit as confusing as a GNOME one. What is important to these users is consistency. They can learn what icons to click to do what they need to do, buy if things constantly change or move around on them, thats when they get frustrated with a pc. With spyware and viruses that is one thing that a Windows desktop isn't, consistent. gnomedesktop.org Disabled the ability to set an ...
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| 12:15:40 May 11, 2004, Tuesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Been really busy lately working three jobs. My main job running and programming cnc machines for the automotive tool and die industry 55 hours a week plus 10 hours of commuting, my second job at an ISP when ever I can find time, and a third job as a network admin for a small business for 10 hours a week, which I started a month ago. Things are looking good at my second and third jobs, so I turned in my resignation from my main job this week. I've been running CNC machines now for 10 years and have grown rather bored with it, plus after 8 years on the graveyard shift I'm looking forward to spending more time with my family. The blue machine above was built in Taiwan, and all the warning labels on it aren't translated very well. On the front of the machine is a warning label that reads "Do not foot in slippers". Funny stuff. Got one week to go as a CNC Machinist, saying good-bye to a company I've worked for for 8 years is a little more difficult than I expected. I work with a great ...
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| 00:14:51 February 21, 2004, Saturday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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After a rather mild December, winter has definately arrived. the backyard Definately too cold for this kind of tomfoolery. gDesklets: Added a couple of RSS feeds to the gDesklets website. Those that wish to easily keep up on the latest file downloads and Display/Sensor news can now do so.
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| 23:10:52 January 18, 2004, Sunday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Was shocked to here of Mark's passing. He was always so full of energy and life. The first time I ever became aware of Mark was stumbling upon his website he had years ago where he had written a bunch of tutorials about using GNOME on Mandrake, which were very well written. They were written in a way that people new to GNOME/computers in general, would easily be able to understand. I think he was like 13-14 years old at the time. No doubt we would have seen many more great things from him.
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| 21:27:36 January 11, 2004, Sunday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Been rather lazy with my blog, so figured I better get this thing going again after a little prodding from the man without pants. gnomedesktop.org... Came very close to losing my hosting provider for gd.org due to the ISP almost getting sold, but that worry is now long gone. I work part time as the systems administrator for this small rural ISP in exchange for my Internet service, webhosting, and other perks. It is a really convenient situation for me cause the gd.org server is only 4 miles from my home. Added half a gig of memory to the gd.org server a couple of weeks ago, so this will hopefully buy me more time. Gonna need to scrape some cash together to get a faster machine soon. Sri: Don't feel bad about copying stuff from FootNotes. The summaries typically reach a much wider audience than FootNotes. Alot people out there enjoy just reading a weekly summary versus tracking FootNotes or PG on a daily basis. Be sure to submit them to LWN, Linuxtoday and Newsforge, etc. It is so ...
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| 00:39:16 January 6, 2004, Tuesday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Went shopping tonight for more woodworking tools. I aquired quite a few over the course of building my house, (radial arm saw, mitre saw, router table, etc) but still need a few more. Been shopping around for a scroll saw and a drill press. My walls are pretty bare, and I've had the itch to build some shelves and maybe a few other wood projects to decorate the house with. My wife would like me to build a headboard for our bed, and I have all the tools I need except for a mortising head and mortising bits (they drill square holes). The main place I went to (drove for 1.5 hours) was closed when I got there. Bummer.
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| 01:50:31 November 16, 2003, Sunday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Got all my stuff restored, not a single problem yet. Having a fun with Fedora, seems so much speeder than what I was running before. Nice to see some of Garret's beautiful photography included as wallpapers. Gave Inkscape a whirl, not much different yet from SodiPodi from a newbie point of view, but it runs nice. I'm looking forward to the new things that will be coming soon. Had alot fun playing around with it, discovered a few valuable lessons. I've always wanted to learn to use a vector graphics editor better. Hope I can find more time in the future to play. I see jdub posted the hackergotchi heads. Hopefully people have fun with them. Many of them could be so much better, but some of the photos I started with weren't very high quality to begin with.
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| 01:44:05 November 16, 2003, Sunday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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I've been running a 2.2 beta for ages now (I'm a slacker), after I moved, I didn't bother setting up my DirecPC dish. The thing is a pain to point in, it weighs way too many pounds and the FAP policy just plain sucks. Where I live, we can't even get cable tv yet. I've been on a modem since, and just haven't had the ambition to download and build 2.4 over a modem. I just got my hands on a set of Fedora CD's, so I figured it was time to actually use what I've reported on for the last 6 months. I've taken the upgrade path for years now, and figured it was time to start clean. I backed up my home directory, which is always pleasantly weird, cause it is so simple. When I work on my wifes computer, or the computers of other relatives that use Windows, you can spent alot of time searching for things that are scattered all over the place, and still end up not getting everything you want off. So I started the Fedora installer and formatted all but my back-up partition. I ended up trying out ...
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| 18:03:37 November 13, 2003, Thursday (PST) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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One of the things I debate in my own head when working on gnomedesktop.org is the use of transparent pngs. The majority of the audience uses browsers that support trans pngs but there are still a few that don't. Development of IE by Microsoft seems to have pretty much halted. Now that they've won the browser war, it seems they could care less about about IE. These days it is an undisputable fact that Mozilla is a better web browser than IE. Is it time to start adding those little stickers to our webpages that say "Best viewed with Mozilla/Gecko"?
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| 18:47:57 October 22, 2003, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Been busy tweaking spam assassin rulesets, so far my users have be overjoyed with the results. Not alot of reportable news happening lately in the GNOME world, but it looks as though many people are kicking ass behind the scenes. Fixed a bug with the cache on gd.org that affected people that have a language other than English set. Need to find a way to come up with some extra cash to buy a new gd.org server - it could use some extra speed.
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| 19:57:48 October 8, 2003, Wednesday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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My son was baptised over the weekend. He did good. No crying and just as happy as can be. He was jumping up and down so fast in pastors arms, that he had a hard time hanging onto him. Was nice to see so many relatives come. The church ended up overfilling, and afterwards my house was packed. Teased my brother a little bit about wether or not the floor would cave in (my brother built the house).
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| 20:21:05 September 29, 2003, Monday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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My despair over spam is over. Put together a new server to use an anti-spam gateway. Loaded it up with a Gig of RAM and mimedefang/spamassassin, and so far it is smashing spam with ease. Load averages around .6, which is acceptable, and better than I had hoped for. The machine is currently processing around 160,000 pieces of mail per day. Mimedefang just totally rocks! Easy to set-up and easy to write your own custom rules.
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| 20:17:11 September 29, 2003, Monday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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Been spending way to much time dealing the effects of spam lately. The only thing worse than having your inbox clogged with spam, is being responsible for a server that has to cope with tens of thousands of spams everyday. There are many good open source solutions for filtering spam available, it just seems that there aren't many solutions available that are both rock stable, fault tolerant, and high performance.
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| 20:18:13 September 22, 2003, Monday (PDT) |
Source: Stro's Log |
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