Planet Yakko
July 02, 2008
July 01, 2008
June 30, 2008
June 29, 2008
Here is a contest from Along for the Ride to win a bunch of great slings!
<a href=”http://www.alongfortheride.biz/contest-s/49.htm”>Win the Essential Babywearing Stash from Along for the Ride (one Beco Butterfly, one Hotsling baby pouch, one BabyHawk Mei Tai, one Zolowear Ring Sling, and one Gypsy Mama Wrap)</a>
And here is a contest from Nature’s Child to win a starter set of cloth diapers!!
http://blog.thenatureschild.com/2008/06/beat-heat-summer-con-
test.html
(Matt wants you to know that this post was written by his dearest love)
June 27, 2008
June 26, 2008
June 25, 2008
So, I passed off a bottle of beer batch two to a friend at a local cafe - he said it was the best beer he’s ever tasted. Me thinks he needs to get out more often, perhaps try a place that doesn’t serve big-named American beers. Batch three is ready but untested - need a good reason to drink besides “Wednesday.”
If you’re up a cartoon that seems like the writers have ADHD and freebased a concoction of caffeine and sugar, I’d recommend ぱにぽにだっしゅ (Pani Poni Dash). It satirizes Japanese cartoons and culture along with a bit of exported Americanisms. Make sure to watch it with subtitles to translate the background signs and text to double the laughter. If you quaff homemade beer, be sure to swallow fully before laughing.
June 24, 2008
June 16, 2008
June 14, 2008
June 13, 2008
So, I tried another brew - Weizenbier with my mini-beer kit. Unfortunately, my assistant was not here! Watching the birth of his child or some unlikely excuse. Thus, I didn’t get the batch correctly made the first time. About an hour later, I remembered that I forgot to mix in some boosters. since it was so close to sealing up the keg, I thought I’d try adding boster late. So, I uncorked the keg, added booster, and stirred. We’ll see if it turns out or if I spoiled it.
As for batch two, the “Canadian Draft,” it was a success. A few bottles were less carbonated than the others and there was an unexpectedly nice sweetness to one. Also, when looking at the bottles in the fridge, it looked as if the carbonation bubbles only came half-way up the bottle. Really funky looking, but there was no separation in the liquid. Nevertheless, still very good.
June 08, 2008
June 04, 2008
Well, I’ve spent the last 6-9 months typing in the Dvorak Keyboard Layout. A little history lesson for those who don’t know much about qwerty and why it sucks. Qwerty was developed as a standard typewriter layout to prevent the typewriter from jamming as often. This means the most frequented keys are spaced out so that they are in harder to reach spots on the keyboard. Of course, as we made the switch from the older typewriters that jammed often, to more reliable typewriters, and eventually to computer keyboards, the standard layout was never changed. Dr. August Dvorak had designed a more logical layout in the 30s, which focused on putting the most-used characters in the English language on the easier to reach keys, but people were already too adjusted to the qwerty layout for there to be any real push to switch. Dvorak’s layout is more ergonomic, meaning its easier on your fingers/wrist, which would mean a less severe Carpal Tunnel problem in the US. It’s also argued that since it is a more efficient layout, higher speeds can be achieved, and the learning curve isn’t so steep.
My personal experience with dvorak was a good one. With qwerty, I would occasionally get really stiff/sore wrists when I spent too much time on my computer, when i was using the dvorak layout, this didn’t happen once. I achieved a maximum speed of ~70WPM during the brief period I was using it, but that was still slowly increasing to this date. My maximum qwerty speed was over 100WPM, but that speed difference didn’t bother me. I’m quite sure if I had decided to stick with it, I would’ve been able to reach 100+WPM.
Alas, dvorak still has some minor setbacks, none of which are it’s own fault. All Operating Systems will support dvorak, but that doesn’t mean it will be a pleasant experience. Many shortcuts are set to the keys they are for ease of use (See Ctrl-Z Ctrl-X Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V). Those shortcuts are no longer in the lower left corner of the keyboard, but scattered across the entire thing. When gaming in dvorak, support is limited. It usually means a good 10 minutes of re-mapping keys to what they should be. The only exception to this that comes to mind right now is the Linux SecondLife client. It also raises the problem of when someone else uses your computer and isn’t able to figure out how to type. All of these reasons don’t bother me too much. Unfortunately as an aspiring sysadmin, I need to keep in mind that I will be on a lot of different pc’s and servers while I’m working, and it just isn’t worth the trouble to have to worry about keyboard layouts all day. To anyone that doesn’t hop around computers very often, I’d highly recommend giving it a shot.
So long dvorak, you’ll be missed.
June 02, 2008
May 29, 2008
I recently had the opportunity to setup Automatic Proxy Detection for a customer. I’d never taken the time to figure it out before. It worked in both IE and Firefox and was kinda neat.
It turns out that when you start your web browser and you have automatic proxy detection enabled it attempts to find a file at the URL http://wpad.yourdomain.tld/wpad.dat. In my case it would try for http://wpad.mattscott.org/wpad.dat. If that file is found it runs the javascript in it and sets the proxy settings to however they are defined in the wpad.dat file. Here’s what we did. I’m using example.com as my domain to protect the guilty.
Create a DNS Record
We created a CNAME for wpad.example.com that pointed to a web server. In this case a Microsoft Small Business Server 2003 running IIS. An A record would work okay too but given the fact that this will probably never be a server’s primary name record a CNAME made sense to me.
Create wpad.dat
Now you need to create your wpad.dat file. We found several examples on the web. Here’s an example. Google can help you find more:
function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{
if (shExpMatch( host, “192.168.1.*” )
|| shExpMatch( host, “127.*” )
|| shExpMatch( host, “localhost” )
|| shExpMatch( host, “*.example.com” )
|| isPlainHostName( host )
|| dnsDomainIs( host, “.example.com” )) {
return “DIRECT”;
}
return “PROXY proxy.example.org:8080;”;
}
The first section inside the if block tells the browser to connect to the destination server directly if one of those conditions are met. You’d normally do this to bypass your proxy for a host on the local LAN. The second section is where you define the proxy for use with everything else. It’s just a javascript function so you could probably go pretty crazy with the thing if you wanted to.
Once you’ve created your file copy it to the root of your web server. One thing that we noticed was that IIS wouldn’t server the file initially because it didn’t have a mime type for a .dat file. So we added a mime type of application/x-ns-proxy-autoconf for .dat files and we were good to go.
Create a DHCP Scope Option
The last thing we did was create an option in our DHCP scope to define where your wpad.dat file is. I don’t believe his isn’t strictly necessary since a machine should generally attempt to connect to a host called wpad in its own domain. I see it as a good idea though because you might run into issues if you ever have guest machines on your network or if you are using some sort of split DNS tunneling over a VPN client or something like that. It was a recommended step so we did it in DHCP on a Windows Small Business Server 2003.
Create an Option 252 Entry in DHCP
To create an Option 252 entry in DHCP, do the following.
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1. |
Click Start, point to Programs, point to Administrative Tools, and then click DHCP. |
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2. |
In the console tree, right-click the applicable DHCP server, click Set Predefined Options, and then click Add. |
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3. |
In Name, type WPAD. |
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4. |
In Code, type 252. |
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5. |
In Data type, select String, and then click OK. |
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6. |
In String, type http://Computer_Name:Port/wpad.dat where:
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7. |
To add the option to the scope right-click Scope options,under the scope you want to add it to and then click Configure options. |
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8. |
Confirm that the Option 252 check box is selected. |
Unless I left something out, that about does it. All you should have to do is to check the Automatic Proxy Detection box in your browser and you should be good to go. In Internet Explorer you can sort of push this setting down via GPO. Of course it’s one of those whacked out policies that users can mess with if they know how. In Firefox I am not aware of a way to automate this but I’m sure somebody’s written something.
Enjoy!
May 28, 2008
Yep, there was a big hype about solaris 2008.05. One review even mention it as being ‘What Ubuntu hopes to be someday’. Sorry folks, I’m going to have to disagree. I booted the OS onto my laptop today, and spent the majority of my morning dealing with its various short-comings. The OS has finally evolved into a LiveCD, years after all of it’s Linux competitors have done the same. I was greeted when i first booted up by a console-login and no graphical interface, hopefully just a compatibility issue with the on-board graphics on my laptop, though the GUI worked just fine after logging in with a blank username/password. (I feel like I should be automatically logged in with a LiveCD, maybe I’m just too picky)
I’ve ran my share of CD-based operating systems in the past, I like to test out an Operating System and see what it has to offer over others. OpenSolaris has got to be one of the slowest live distributions I have come across, launching firefox and bringing up a local start-up web page took a good 30seconds, pretty disappointing. Since it was running so slow, I decided to jump right into installing it on the disk, I had already freed up about 20GB of unallocated space to install it to. Unfortunately, the Installer was bugged on my system, and I never made it that far. It recognized my root and swap partitions from my kubuntu install, along with the ~20GB of unallocated space. OpenSolaris has a minimum of 3GB diskspace, and a recommended 7GB. Trying to be generous, even for an OS I didn’t expect to get a terrible amount of use from, I tried to allocate 10GB to a solaris partition. Unfortunately, every time I tried to continue and write the partition to disk, the installer automatically changed my disk allocation to .1GB, and as a result wouldn’t let me install.
Next, I thought I’d try formatting the disk with fdisk and then running the installer. This requires becoming root on the terminal. My first thought was to ’sudo su -’, unfortunately it didn’t come with sudo installed. My next attempt was a ’su root’ and a blank password, which wasn’t the answer either (Probably for the best :-] ) Finally, I checked the sun docs and found that ‘pfexec su’ does the trick. I’m in as root, I can’t complain too much here, this was more because of my inexperience with solaris in the past. (On a side note, ubuntu will tell you how to run commands as root the first time you open a terminal in the livecd, something the opensolaris dev team might be wise to consider adding.
Next, I figured it was best to follow sun docs to go on from here. I started with the format utility, it recognized my drive and had me select it. After selecting it, it asked me how many cylinders my disk had, where I’m sorry to say I got fed up with the whole thing and gave up on opensolaris for the time being. I could’ve used prtvtoc to try and read a cylinder count from my disk, but I was too frustrated at this point to want to.
With the completely new design and advertising scheme for opensolaris, I hoped to see a more user-friendly environment. I’m sad to say that this wasn’t the case for me, I hope those of you that decide to try it yourself get a bit of better luck than I do.
May 27, 2008
May 26, 2008
So. I was doing some reading this weekend about parasitic worms. I do crazy things sometimes. I found the life cycle of the hookworm most interesting. Here’s a worm whose larva can be absorbed right through your skin. Then they ride around in your blood and get stuck in your lungs. At this point their journey is just beginning. These little guys burst the capillaries in your lungs and then begin the long crawl. They worm their way up and out of your lungs and then down into your stomach. All of this happens without the host having any idea what’s going on.
One in your small intestine their work is pretty much done. At this point they latch on, drink your blood and mate with each other. Just one great big hookworm party.
If you are interested, Google knows lots of stuff about the hookworm. If you don’t feel like typing, click here http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&hs=c1G&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=hookworm+lungs&spell=1
May 25, 2008
May 24, 2008
I recently acquired a system of brewing beer, something called Mr Beer. It’s a cheap kit and what the heck, I don’t have the enough room for a full-size adult kit. So, I’ll use my plastic children’s toy to make a brew.
The first recipe is Vienna Lager. Baseball and hockey on the over-the-air HDTV, a few purchased beers in the fridge, and pizza from across the street: perfect beginnings for or Aaron and I to brew. After we did some arm curls with existing beer, we starting boiling the “booster” following a can of flavouring mix. Told you it was for children, too easy. Mix in the plastic key, add yeast, seal, and let set for two weeks. Then, with fourteen 20oz bottles, transfer the beer, add sugar, seal, and wait another two weeks for carbonation to set in.
So, the first batch results: “quite drinkable” according to Aaron. Our sights were set low and they were excessively exceeded. Amazing. And cheap, like $15 for the keg + $5 for the batch of the beer works out to $1.43 a beer or 35¢ if you don’t account for the initial keg purchase.
Next up, Canadian Draft, whatever that entails. Only one more week until we can open the bottles, maybe during the Redwings.
May 23, 2008
May 19, 2008
May 18, 2008
May 15, 2008
May 13, 2008
May 12, 2008
May 07, 2008
May 05, 2008
May 03, 2008
May 02, 2008
May 01, 2008
April 30, 2008
April 25, 2008
April 22, 2008
April 21, 2008
April 19, 2008
April 13, 2008
April 11, 2008
April 09, 2008
April 08, 2008
Yeah, like underwear.
t’has been a while. Wow that contraction didn’t work at all. For more examples of strange contractions, see urban dictionary’s entry on “t’would”:
James: Wanna go hang out at the mall next week?
Jill: T’would be cool.
But I digress, it is my pledge to make a post with more substance than content. Or vice versa, whichever sounds better. Underwear aside… eh, let’s try again.
Hi, I’m Brian. This is my blog and it hasn’t seen the light of my thoughts (I’m conceited that way) in about… let’s see here… just shy of five months, all told. No doubt when I started I didn’t imagine I would suffer quite a dry spell all at once, but there you have it. I’ve gone quite inward about the whole thing. What is a blog? Why do I need to use it? Is it possible to swallow one’s pride, as it were, and still commit one’s thoughts to paper for everyone else to see? Maybe not, but I guess I don’t care anymore for I’ve given up seeking the answers to such questions.
I work for a company that recently bought another company and you can read all about that over here. I neglect the mention of specific names because that would mean SEO which gets on my nerves. I’ve been doing all sorts of neat work on new features, new designs, fixing old things, and staring out the window in anticipation of the massive crowds set to arrive on April 9th. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about, let’s torch this joint!
“Olympic Torch” this joint, that is! That’s right, the torch is coming to San Francisco and I’m gonna be at ground zero when stuff happens. I’m not sure exactly what will happen, but if you’ve been watching the news recently, you know it will be worth a few photos.
Security heightened at Golden Gate Bridge
Olympic Torch Relay Descends Into Chaos
Olympic torch relay should be confined to host country says IOC official
Officials in Paris were today forced to extinguish the Olympic flame and carry it by bus when protesters against Chinese policy in Tibet tried to seize it.
Can a protest ever ‘win’? Perhaps in time, a ‘win’ can be felt. In Paris, a more immediate win was experienced when the Olympic flame, nay, spirit which travels the world for everyone to see, amidst thousands of security personnel had to be put out and confined to a bus. My friends in Paris, I say to you, “good show”. We Americans now have a protest to out-protest.
But I digress, (yes I did that twice. Don’t tempt me should you not wish a third.) there are other things on my mind as well. Doctor Who, for instance. It was recently revealed that Richard Dawkins would appear in an upcoming episode, as himself!
“People were falling at his feet,” says Davies, creator of the BBC’s flagship show. “We’ve had Kylie Minogue on that set, but it was Dawkins people were worshipping.”
I guess I can’t imagine how Dawkins fits in to all of this but I hope it at least involves a turtle that can fly.
And on that note, Battlestar Galactica was good, if not a bit uneventful in light of all the promises made. I suppose that’s how they get you hooked for the entire season. Maybe I should just wait till the season is over. It’s much more fulfilling to watch a whole season over a few days than feel cheated at the end of each 40-minute segment. Though I suppose to make it a social occasion would be a good excuse to have “Friday night plans”. Oh who am I kidding, I don’t know anyone else who watches this show.
Well, back to my life, which, at this moment, includes me going to bed.
April 07, 2008
March 28, 2008
I have a customer that has felt it necessary to secure the network ports in their conference rooms. The goal was to make it impossible for untrusted computers to access the LAN and if possible dump them on to a VLAN that would allow them only Internet access. Rather than detail the whole project I’ll just provide a couple of links that helped me out and explain a couple of difficulties I faced. I am still working on the guest vlan portion of the project and will update the config below when that portion of the project is complete.
Switch Configuration
We used a Dell PowerConnect 6248 switch in this case. During R&D for this project I also made 802.1x authentication work on a PowerConnect 6024 and a Cisco Catalyst 2950 series. I actually made things work with the Catalyst first by following this article http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/switches/lan/catalyst2950/software/release/12.1_9_ea1/configuration/guide/Sw8021x.html. The important bits of the config for the PowerConnect 6248 are as follows:
*snip*
! This enables dot1x globally
dot1x system-auth-control
! This sets up the radius server. 192.168.1.5 is a Windows Server 2003 server running IAS
aaa authentication dot1x default radius
radius-server key "abcdefg"
radius-server host 192.168.1.5
exit
!
! This port requires authorization. This is the default.
interface ethernet 1/g1
exit
!
!This port is forced into an authorized state.
interface ethernet 1/g2
dot1x port-control force-authorized
exit
Windows Client and Server Configuration
To configure the clients and server I used this article: http://alextch.members.winisp.net/802.1x/Defending%20your%20internal%20network%20with%20802.1x%20and%20Microsoft%20PKI.htm.
This article pretty much got me where I needed to be but here’s a couple of things to note.
- You have to make the registry change found on Page 13. There doesn’t seem to be any way around it. If you find one, let me know. The plan is to make the change in a logon script.
- How your computer names are stored in the certificate issued to the clients is important. The default settings had been changed on the system in this case and this caused some problems. I successfully used a Subject Name Format of None and checked DNS name. I also used a subject name format of Fully Distinguished Name with nothing checked underneath. I do not fully understand these options so YMMV.
Keeping that in mind you shouldn’t have any problems implementing this using the two articles that I linked to. I may eventually get really motivated and take screen shots.








