I must say that although my Comcast HSI connection has been somewhat less than reliable lately, when it does work…

It’s mighty fast. :)

Back in January I put together a new desktop, but for some reason I never got around to buying a new UPS to go with it. So today, while I was out picking up some other items, I used a $20 gift card I had kicking around and picked up an APC BE325R at Office Depot for $19.99. Not a bad price.

The BE325R is discontinued, and it will only give me a minute or two of backup power, but I think that’s all I need. I turn off my desktop when I’m not using it anyway, so I just need something to condition the incoming power and to give me enough time for an orderly shutdown if the power goes out.

Right now it’s doing it’s initial 16-hour charge…. we’ll see how it goes.

Quoth Twitter:

When your downtime is measured in days (not minutes or hours), I question how “quickly” they are working on it.

Oh well, you get what you pay for I guess.

At the last CPLUG meeting, Patrick mentioned that he was hoping to plan a capture the flag (CTF) event sometime in the near future. Although this time there will be no DoS attacks allowed and there will only be one target box, so you shouldn’t have to worry about player vs. player attacks… hopefully. :)

Well, it looks like things are starting to take shape! After an initial post on the mailing list, he has about 13-15 people signed up. The date/time are still TBD, but I know that I’ll be there no matter when it is.

Sounds like fun!

Today is 3/14… Pi Day! And in honor of this great day, James Tauber wrote a Python script to generate the hex digits of pi. Nice!

If you are so inclined, Wikipedia has a nice article on the various methods of computing pi. Here’s my favorite method:

#!/usr/bin/env python from math import pi print pi
Heh.

Tonight’s CPLUG meeting topics were Monit and NetReg.

I did the Monit talk and, as far as I could tell, it went pretty well. People seemed to be fairly interested and there were some really good questions/discussion afterward. If you are interested, my presentation slides for my talk are online.

Jason Long covered NetReg which is basically a set of Perl scripts that coordinate your DHCP server with Apache to create a captive portal. Really interesting stuff.

Overall, it was a good meeting.

Update: One of this issues brought up was how to monitor Monit (i.e quis custodiet ipsos custodes?). Jason suggested running Monit from inittab/inetd, which seemed like a decent idea… and one that I was pretty sure I had seen mentioned before. As it turns out, that issue is covered in the Monit FAQ under Question 7.

As I’m sure you know, Congress decided to change when daylight saving time is observed this year claiming that it will reduce energy usage. Well, a side effect of that is that the clocks on my two Gentoo servers were off by an hour today.

In both cases I had to emerge sys-libs/timezone-data-2007c. On my MythTV box, that seemed to fix the time almost immediately. On my other server, it still seemed to be an hour off until I restarted the clock service:

europa ~ # /etc/init.d/clock restart * Caching service dependencies * WARNING: you are stopping a boot service * Stopping bitlbeed * Stopping exim * Stopping syslog-ng * Your TIMEZONE in /etc/conf.d/clock is still set to Factory! * Setting system clock using the hardware clock [Local Time] * Starting syslog-ng * Starting bitlbeed * Starting exim

After all the services came back up, my time seemed to be correct.

Honestly, I haven’t looked into why I had to do that… but I figured I’d pass it along in case it was helpful to anyone else. Enjoy.

I’ve been using Microsoft Outlook to manage my TODO list for a while.

Yes, I know… everyone complains about Outlook, but for me it fits the bill about 90% of the time. The tasks are easy to add, there’s a place to add notes, and it keeps track of when I complete tasks. But it is very limited in overall functionality, and it doesn’t scale well… with lots of old completed tasks cluttering the UI after a while.

I’m a picky person, and it’s just not quite right. So the hunt begins for the perfect TODO list…

(more…)

Last night Sean hosted a Game Night to wish a fond farewell to Brad before he heads off to start a new job in Georgia. As it turns out, it turned into one of the largest Game Nights in quite a while, with about 10 people in attendance. Very cool.

Of course, CS:S was the game of the night, but there was time for a little HL2:DM and PVK2 as well. And Matt and I even found a little time to get some Guild Wars in…

Got home at around 4:30 AM this morning. Rock!

Quite the gaming night tonight! Started with some CS:S around 9PM, and then switched to Guild Wars with Matt around 10:30PM.

I’m happy to report that Zophar is now Level 4…

w00t!