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Hmm, I just realised that come 2011-09-09, this September is going to be roughly the fifth anniversary of when I began keeping my journal via weblog. Facebook rather entered the mix after a friend decided to run one of his projects off it, as opposed to more traditional mailing list/forum structure.

Still have files littering my home directory, since at least 2007. Either private thoughts or project notes that I’ve recorded. Most things generally end up here on my journal, because that’s the sense of one. Facebook for me is utilized more as a hybrid of things. Friends generally prefer Facebook, so it’s a practical consideration. Me, well, I rather prefer something like Blogger or Instant Messaging. But what can I say, people tend to be attracted to such monoliths.

Over the years, I have rather amassed a large sum of time around computers: virtually since diapers! I don’t think that I can even remember not having a computer, and my memory does go quite a far ways back. In the pat ten years, I really don’t want to know how many more hours I’ve spent on/around computers, than doing something else. So yeah, it makes sense that I would use a computer for recording my thoughts.

Some people use paper, and hide it away someway. Me on the other hand, I’ve few things to hide, and am too cheap to buy a larger hard drive than the cloud.

or why I’ll never walk across a bridge built by my mother.

It’s Common Knowledge either by experience or paying attention, that if if smooth something (nail) goes in, enough force makes smooth something come out the hole. That’s why screw’s screw in instead of *push* in. I’m not the most handy person on earth but even I know when to use a nail and when to use a screw. Unless you want to get screwed by physics,

Writing the previous entry, made me recollect something that I was thinking about on the way home from work Thursday or Wednesday. Are passwords outdated when it comes to logging into a web service? Really. I think they are to be honest.

At work and at home, I use ‘keys’, not passwords. My ~/.ssh/config and /etc/hosts files are configured so that I can run ‘ssh pcname’ and log into machines automagically; no need for a password. I do it this way, because while I can set a passphrase on SSH keys: the ratio between chance of theft and frequency of logging in, is wide enough that I’ve little need to worry. If someone walks off with my computer, the SSH keys to my other PCs are the least of my worries, assuming that they didn’t take those too!

Quite readily one could just adapt something like the SSH2 public key authentication to browsing the web; and maybe improve on it while they’re at it. Even better, rather than relying on the browser to “Remember passwords” it can simply be made to ask a key agent. While Windows out of the box has always lacked something comparable to my knowledge, GNOME and KDE have had keyring management services for as long as I can remember; Konqueror was the first web browser that I ever used that integrated with something approximating one (KWallet). Although I rather prefer the GNOME keyring stuff, hehe.

This could then if desired, be linked to your computer login. For example, login to your desktop can unlock the keyring and allow pre-authorized requests to utilize it’s services. There are obvious implications for such things but I rather would like to see what it could do in like the next ~20 years.

All that of course, still means that if you leave your computer unlocked and your bank account open, you deserve what you get ^_^.  For what little I consider it worth, my systems are usually programmed to auto-lock after a short delay, and I frequently lock them before going AFK, if there’s any sense to it. I.e. at home, the PC is more likely to get carted off by a thief, then the one at work, lol.

Today’s the last day for one of our more skilled hackers, so the powers that be decided to cart Engineering out to lunch for the send off. While I’m happy enough to accept the invite, I’m also, well, I just eat a quick lunch and go back to work lol. Asked one of my peers whether he thought it would be rude if I brought the netbook along to get some work done and he thought nothing of it. The guy that’s leaving the company, I’m surprised we could pry him off work long enough for the gathering. Yup.

So of course I’m working remotely off alice by the time the like ~20 of us are filtering out of this Mexican restaurant up the road. What brought a smile to my face however, was when Steve remarked something like, “You just couldn’t leave work?” and then realized we had wifi access the whole time xD.

My closest friends know that I’m kind of a workaholic at heart…. and that I am also insane lol

I reckon going by historical critique, my opinions would differ but I think I may have finally figured out how to give my mother a smile towards Mother’s day.

Last night ma went kind of on red alert when she noticed someone climbing up a ladder outside her window; me of course, why would I worry? If they’re smart enough to use a ladder they’re not stupid and if they break the window, well, you shout at them to be more careful next time… heh. It was far past time for sleeping that short of seeing a TV lowering out the window, little to worry about in my books.

In my shift from tired mode to quick-computate mode, things obviously suggested thief, or someone sneaking in without the parents knowledge. Seeing a young arm hanging out a window, holding a pink ribbon tied to the ladder and trying to ‘remotely’ hide it on the other hand, would suggest the latter to me. So of course, ma had me look up the non emergency number for the local police, which conveniently has an outpost like 2 minutes up the road from here. Sure enough, 17-year old whose probably going to have upset parents.

Nothing like being out in the cold with like four cops poking around to get you wide awake again. *Groans*

The best part about being a penny pinching S.O.B. is when you make a budget that’s designed around being bled like a stuffed pig, unless the car halts and catches fire, the fact is that the reality can’t be toooo terrible when the graph is so good.

How? Driving ~30km per day at a rate of approximately 450km to every 45 litres, seriously beats the ****ing hell out of driving near ~225km per day and using around 38 litres for the same general distance covered.

And my budget for the next month or so is built around the assumption that petrol will cost me around $4.15 a gal, or roughly $1.09 a litre. That’s about a $0.25 higher per hal then it is now.

Haven’t had much tie to update my journal lately, kinda had more important things on my mind when I’m off work. At work, well, most of my time of late has been spent working on a project that’s shared between the two principal developent groups. Work related stuff, usually filters through to private notes or the companies internal stuff. That’s my policy at least.

If we could move the table out and bring in a cot and my PC, I’d probably never leave work, except to use the shower lol.

Aside from being grumpy that the company I work for, takes Good Friday as a company holiday :'(, I’ve been somewhat busy today. My mother wanted to visit a Catholic church some miles down the highway, so I took her up there, she didn’t like it of course, but trying to please my mother isn’t quite trivial for anything, let along the Roman Catholics.

After that, it was essentially off to the nearest Publix supermarket to appease her shopping list a bit. Even though I’m not at work, I couldn’t help but notice a type error when walking down the isles. Ma wanted to grab a box of matzah, bottle of soy sauce, etc. So they’ve got the “Mexican” food, they’ve “Asian”, which is vaguely ethnic but convenient, “West Indies” which is more geographic then ethnical, but what really made my brain reach up and say “Compiler error: type association invalid”, is when I saw at the end of the isle, the sign marked “Kosher”. To top it off, the directory labels the isle as ethnic foods and the sign marks it as Hispanic foods. Yeah, I’m a pain in the ass.

The word Kosher, essentially refers to a discipline: if we go by one of my favourite resources from Princeton University, semantically it means food that obeys the jewish food law. It’s not an ethnic group. I.e. you may have a Mexican that eats kosher food in the west indies but you are unlikely to meat a someone of the Mexican-Kosher ethnicity from the west indies ^_^. O.K. so sue me, I’m stuck driving my mother around instead of being at work, the marbles ain’t going to shift out of programmer mode that easily. Besides, that kind of branch of math is very relevant to my work.

What I really would like to know however, is in what kind of type model that also makes sense, does fish != a meat. But eh, I’ve been wondering about that one for most of my life.

Yesterday, Alice proved her utility. When I went to work Friday, I decided to go “Live fire”, leaving dixie home and bringing alice. Where as the day before  I had brought both. Except for a few cases, I rarely use my laptop at work, except to version control my notes and stream 94.9 The Bull.

A fellow programmer is implementing the backend that makes the code I’ve written on one of our projects, work. So we were sitting in front of his work station trying to get a couple things sorted. Very conveniently I just brought alice and set her up to remote access the development server the way my workstation does. What proved so useful, the battery life was being reported as over 12-hours: allowing me to focus on the work at hand, and not keeping track of when I would need to go get my charger.

Of course, alice still needs a workable OS but hey, no girl^H^H^H^Hcomputer is perfect. I could arguably live with Windows 7 Starter on it, but I rather like XMonad. Considering how slow Cygwin has been on more powerful systems, I really don’t want to try it on alice. So far,  I’ve yet to solve my booting issue with OpenBSD, and tests using X11 forwarding between dixie and alice, by way of xming/putty; does not make me think it’s gonna work. So I think alice will end up with Ubuntu Netbook or some other Linux distro, for the sake of ease of access to Google Chrome—Mozilla firefox can go suck rotten eggs.

The sad thing, since alice seems to be >= dixie on resources, it will probably work perfectly in a ‘normal’ laptop capacity :-/.