Oy, what a night….

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Ok, so one of my friends AIMs me, cussing a blue streak and shouting that I’ve been hitting on his girl friend. I don’t even know her, lol. Since I knew it wasn’t me messengering her (friends wives/gf are off limits in my brain!), my head went into hazard mode: Counterintelligence time? Began making plans on upgrading all my password interlocks, and standing by to start an audit trail to see if anyones been listening in on my lines of commu. (Down to the hardware level.)

After developing an interesting cipher, and a vague idea of a secure password manager; I took to CO-Phase I, ascertain the truth and recon avenues of compromise — without tipping my hand to any would be DB&E artist, that I know what’s up.

Sure enough: false alarm, and a big sigh of relief at not having to change most of my Tier-3 password interlocks. While the new cipher is interesting (especially when mated to my Tier-system), I’m rather glad to have avoided CO-Phase II, deployment of the cipher and beginning a more traditional pattern of digital counter espionage efforts.

Sorted the whole thing out between the two of them, in so far as I am involved (lol). Which also brings my head up from Defcon II, to Defcon IV, now that I know my AIM account is still secured. My IM accounts only run at Tier-3 to Tier-4 of my personal security policy, so I know better then to rule out any monkey business; but ahem, I know prefer to stay out of trouble and keep my name likewise ^_^. I think I will begin migrating things to Tier-5 via the new cipher though, just to shake things up a bit.

I can’t help but think, that he put f(X, B) = name together and figured it wrong, in the direction of AIM name lolololol. Oh well, I am cleared; and didn’t even have to hit CO-Phase III :-). All in all, watching my friends raging-bull attitude, I’m rather glad that I don’t get jealous very easy!

While a more correct choice of words, would be Counterintelligence (CI), I chose “Counter Operations (CO)” for the initial label, since a little more Direct Action then purely CI-related actions would be warranted, should anyone breach my Networks security rather then just an AIM account, hehe.

*sigh*

Something that would really be cool….

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The ability to take something like most forum packages “New Posts” data, and distribute it over RSS.

Could you imagine, tracking your favorite forums over an RSS Feed reader? Just click the link in your feed reader, and voila: view the whole thread in a web browser :-).

Just looking at the ‘Google Reader in Plain English’ video, makes me wish I could stuff all the sites I frequent into ONE place; I haven’t checked RSS feeds in centuries but forums, every day baby…

My first date with KDE 4.2.2

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Being someone who knows a few things, I decided that in order to be fair: I would generally hold off deciding whether KDE 4 is an improvement over KDE 3, until after KDE 4.2 was released. Well, as life has it, I’ve spent most of two days compiling KDE 4.2.2, and things went very smoothly (not that I liked compiling ocaml among the dependencies :-/). This is on my core workstation, running FreeBSD RELENG_7 (i.e. 7-STABLE).

My very first impression was… is this thing working??? All that first time setup takes a while to do, and without much sign of anything happening in the background. On the second boot up, after logging in through the X Display Manager (XDM), I counted 17 seconds until there was a usable desktop; but user interaction was clean all the way, no doubt about that this system was coming online. If you count the time it takes for korganizer and the other system tray icons to load, about ~45 seconds to get a full desktop — but it’s not far to count background programs like systray icons lol (especially the kind you’ll likely remove later).

Although I think the startup time shouldn’t be to bad for most people, I’ve forgotten how long it took to get a full KDE session going up, but I would say 17 sec is pretty good on my hardware hehe. With just a Sempron 3300+, even Blackbox and FVWM2 could start faster for my tastes, so no problem.

I find the new style K-Menu quite useful, takes a little getting used to – learning what adapts a focus follows mouse approach (the nav-icons on the bottom) and what requires a clickly click to work (most everything else). It is beyond me why it defaults to that behaviour (developer preference maybe?), but easy enough to make it a bit more consistent: right clicking the big K and going into the application launcher settings put the desired option right under my noise :-).

Obviously, the first thing I looked for was Konsole, the theme stuff on it is just awesome. Second thing was to dig up the run command dialog to get my urxvt+screen going. Further attempts to use the run dialog, proved that it was mostly a piece of krap. (Eye candy, but shitty to use; guess that is why there are terminal emulators.)

Closing the desktop folder viewer widget-thing was the third major action. Because I’m a person that hates having a desktop cluttered with icons (I prefer terminals :-), I like the idea very much, but since I have no immediate use for it, no need to have it taking screen realestate.

One thing that irked me, bringing up the help and control center entries on the applicaiton launcher (K-Menu?) loaded the ones from KDE 3.5.10, joy 8=). Oh wellk, it’s quite easy to remove or change them via the menu editor. In the case of khelpcenter, it seems it just finds the wrong documentation ^_^. Killing off the old thing and setting /usr/local/kde4/bin in PATH at the top of my ~/.xsession file, fixed access to the Control Panel. I must admit, I rather dislike KDE3 cruft in the menu – however you slice it

For years, I have wondered why some systems never turned on the NUMPAD by default, considering that I now do so much off a laptop; I can understand why, it’s a pain in the ass if when its unexpectedly on xD.

I generally feel that the whole Plasma and widget crazed stuff is a good element of KDE 4, but in all honestly, FVWM and Blackbox have just spoiled me something terrible.

It would appear, that KDE 4.2.2 is more or less ready for general usage, and unlike 4.0RC*, can actually be customized quite a lot to taste :-). For a little while, I was worried that Gnome might take the lead, and keep it… but I think by the time Gnome 3 hits, KDE 4 will be queen and king of the desktop environments, hehe. For those who desire eye candy, and have a machine capable of it; if you liked AERO, you ain’t seen nothing yet laddy. I think anyone who is still holding onto KDE 3 at home, should start migrating while the getting is good; and employ programming talent for bringing along any missing “Must haves” to the new desktop. I am not sure if it is really an improvement beyond the concepts, but hey, at least there is Okular!

The technologies that interest me most, are only Phonon and Kross — although I’m not likely to use either programming wise, beyond their stake in Qt (Qt has some form of Phonon, and has had a JavaScript’ish thing avail for awhile; and I wonder if kross will make it’s way in before Qt5, hehe)

As for me personally, well I’ve gone back to the Famous Virtual Window Manager version 2.5.27, old habits die hard 😉

Further testing of KDE 4.2.2 and later, will probably be through the Windows builds, rather then assaulting my poor stable laptop hehe.

The reasons I hate Firefox

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All OSes

Control over JavaScript is pitiful — NoScript should be stripped down and built into Firefox.

Controls over tabbed browsing is minimalist, in so far as notepad and ed are minimalist text editors; Last year I tried TabMixPlus on one machine and was annoyed that such a thing could be necessary, just for basic tabbing features. (Konqueror and Opera are much better then extensionless Firefox)

The default theme sucks, and good custom themes that have kept up with releases can be hard to find. On my last hunt, I laughingly ended up with a variant of the ‘first’ theme I ever setup, all the way back in Firefox 1.0.x !!!

Until recently the interface for managing ‘Applications’ to open stuff with, was usually useless; by until recently, I mean for a user who has been here sine 2004~2005; and old enough to know that the name and ‘logo’ has changed somewhat ^_^.

For years plugins have been a major pain; a plugin should never be able to crash the ENTIRE web browser, or worse! Render the entire web browser unresponsive — the ability to restore the users session is an excellent feature, not a band aid for the problem.

The ability to customize things is ridiculessly low, unless you want to get into themeing or add-ons; take a look at Konqueror, for a starting point on keybinding lol. I’m not even going to speak of Firefoxes interactive-scriptability…

On my Windows NT 5.1 machine, tested under Firefox v3.0.3, v3.0.6, and 3.0.9 tested; have never experienced this under BSD or GNU/Linux systems; but under Win32 the following also….

Images are about 3 times the size; if you go by dimensions in terms of window.resizeTo()’ing the browser window to match the on-screen size of the image.

Text is huge; I had to turn fonts down to size 10; SeaMonkey runs at 16 on the same machine, and the FreeBSD box uses the defaults.

Firefox initially refused to remember my home page in the preferences

Firefox blatantly refuses to accept ‘Show my home page’ on startup, and always ‘starts up’ with the ‘Show my windows and tabs from last time’ option. EDIT: seems to be doing it on unix as well; piece of shit web browser!!!

Firefox refuses to remember what size a window was when it closed; unlike previous versions have always done (in so far, as I have ever had to resize anything). In fact, I like Vimperator because *now* I can easily have Firefox resize itself on startup via JavaScript through .vimperatorrc.local, since the Windows version on my machine lacks the abilities of past Win, and all unix versions i’ve used :-/.

Except for the last three, I’d reckon the problems are because my Windows machine does not use the default DPI setting in Windows — if that causes a problem, I would consider that to be Mozilla’s problem and not Microshaft’s ;-).

Note: Over the past 10 years, it has not been uncommon for me to spend that many hours a day, surfing the World Wide Web; so I am not a total moron.

Curoisity may fry the spider

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Hmm, I wonder how hard it is to build a Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) and Digital to Analog Converter (DAC), suitable for mucking with a phone signal… not a dial up connection, but quite litterly ‘hook in’ to the signal as it goes from the phone jack, and into the phone. I.e. for processing and manipulation along the way….

Kind of like a router really, only workin’ with POTS rather then the common Ethernet — and like wise, with all of the fun stuff we can do with modern switching technology…. oh man, this makes me wish one of my friends was an electrician lol.

Why I don’t drive

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…
(22:44:17) Friend: drive?
(22:44:29) Spidey01: no license
(22:44:55) Friend: WTF?
(22:44:58) Friend: are you serious?
(22:44:59) Friend: why not?
(22:45:04) Spidey01: can’t afford it
(22:45:20) Spidey01: it’s like a f****** endless loop !!
(22:45:28) Friend: dude yes you can
(22:45:37) Spidey01: how?
(22:46:01) Friend: go take the test
(22:46:28) Spidey01: cost of maintaining license, cost of insurance, cost of gasoline
(22:46:44) Friend: get more money cumming in
(22:46:53) Spidey01: how?
(22:47:23) Friend: well how do you get to work now?
(22:47:43) Spidey01: Her royal majesty drives
(22:48:34) Friend: dude how can that not bother you?
(22:48:38) Friend: mommy still driving you around
(22:48:43) Spidey01: uh huh
(22:48:59) Spidey01: there are 2 ways in which I can afford to rectify that situation:
(22:50:44) Spidey01: A.) Quit this job, get sufficient income to do it –> SIDE EFFECT: must make up lost earnings due to putting her royal majesty out of work; that means a job with around $1000-$1200 take home pay, plus more for cost of (license, insurance, gasoline), and I’ll probably end up her royal majesties taxi driver and even more so, an errand boy
(22:51:54) Spidey01: B.) Talk her royal majesty into paying the bill –> SIDE EFFECT: will surely end up her royal majesties taxi driver, and probably even more of an errand boy; attempts to use the car regularly will eventually result in a *cut off* of gasoline supply -> return to original problem definition….
(22:53:34) Spidey01: hence, either way I lose in the end -> life is a very evil chess game
(22:55:30) Spidey01: Any ideas?

where =~ substitute/her royal majesty/my mother the royal pain/globally
note $range is an off the top of the head estimate; but in the right ball park.

Imperialist or Vimperialist?

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I’ve begun testing the firefox extension “Vimperator”. I have become, should we say increasingly disatified with Firefox since the 2.0.0 release; so it has basically been pissing my off for the last 2 or 3 years ^_^.

All web browsers just suck, most are totally lame… Firefox, the 1.x releases were a great step up over IE5/IE6, but by modern standards Firefox 3.0.x is still lacking – it has not really evolved *all that much* past what it was so many years ago. The finaly piss in the bucket, was when Windows Firefox 3 proved to run more effectively on FreeBSD under WINE, then FreeBSD Firefox 3 on FreeBSD or Windows Firefox 3 on Windows NT 5.1. That, just popped the cork… lol. It’s my firm believe that a web browser, especially something as big, fat, and ugly as Firefox, Opera, or Internet Explorer — are seriously fucked in the head, if they require non-standard issue add-ons to make them useful.

Personally at the minimum, I think any browser that supports tabs and javascript; but lacks a _real_ way of managing tabs and security (think NoScript), is just !@%!%^^! retarded. Ok, that kills off the majority of web browsers ever created, doesn’t it?

Tonight, I installed Epiphany; and despite the unappealing appearance of the program, I actually found it superior to Firefox 3 after a few minutes of testing. The extensions package offering an interactive Python console, especially so. The standard JavaScript interface was fine I guess, but I would much prefer Python to JavaScript; because I know the language much better.

To give Firefox one last, and final chance… before I take a HEX EDITOR to the SON OF A ****, I’ve installed the Vimperator extension; in the hopes that the massive changes it makes, might redeem Firefoxes lameness. So far, it seems to be quite an improvement. The ability to navigate documents is much improved; most notably it now has *S* *A* *N* *E* tabbed browsing support, heck I’ve seen modeless editors with better tab support then standard Firefox, and that’s kinda sad. Access to JavaScript is much more readildy available (in a less ubtuse way), and bringing most of the Vi IMproved style stuff along, builds up issues solved by some add-ons, and not dreamed of yet by most “regular users”.

What can I say, I am no normal user — I spend inordinate amounts of time on and around computers. During that time, the programs I use most often include a terminal and command line intreptor (Windows is just moronic here, period), a text editor, various chat programs, and a web browser. Although there are countless people in this world, who use more of the web then I bother to explore: few people use their web browser more then I do, lol.

I chose Vi IMproved as my text editor, because it is quick, effieciant, and rewards the user with a tool that respects the most simple fact of any program solving a common problem: The user has more things in life to do then use this shitty program, so let’s make their life easier.

Why can’t a web browser do that also?

Writer’s Block: Beautiful Vistas

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What is the most beautiful view you’ve ever seen? Have you been there, or do you plan to visit? If you have one, share a picture.

Live Journals Writer’s Block

The most beautiful view that I’ve ever seen, has got to be Tennessee — the mountains are so beautiful. One you get far enough into north Georgia, you start to get into mountain country, and the trees start to grow thicker all around. Further into Tennessee, it just gets better. And of course, there’s always the great smoky mountains 😉

I remember when we were in Tennessee for my brothers wedding, it was a royal pain to take the trip up; but the sights were well worth it. We were out in Sevier County (Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, and Gatlinburg), and then we made the trip home through the smoky’s. Wish I had a picture like what I see in my minds eye, but if we took any of the mountains, it’s probably still in the camera (on 110 film lol). The trees were in a multitude of colours, beautiful reds, oranges, browns, and even some greens; so it must’ve been during Autumn that we were there. Reese and Gail married about 1999, and divorced last year, I’ve never actually bothered to remember the date… haha. (Foul memories of that darn suit however, still abide!).

Another great view was the summit of Stone Mountain, I’ve been there; on a day when it was almost clear enough to actually see as far as the proverbial eye can see ^_^. As far as views that I would love to see, I’ve always wanted to see Texas and Key West; my mothers always said how beautiful Texas was, and well, being a Floridian: do even you have to ask about the Keys? hehehe. Like wise, parts of Ireland and Italy come to mind. But, all in all, I’m not likely to see any of them within my life time.

I would love to someday see the mountains out in Tennessee again… I guess, even though I’ve always been around a ‘city’ style environment, I just prefer being a little further from contemporary civilization. I don’t think I will ever forget the sight of the mountains.

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“Sometimes,” said he, “in my voyages, when I was a man and commanded
other men, I have seen the heavens overcast, the sea rage and foam, the
storm arise, and, like a monstrous bird, beating the two horizons with
its wings. Then I felt that my vessel was a vain refuge, that trembled
and shook before the tempest. Soon the fury of the waves and the sight
of the sharp rocks announced the approach of death, and death then
terrified me, and I used all my skill and intelligence as a man and a
sailor to struggle against the wrath of God. But I did so because I was
happy, because I had not courted death, because to be cast upon a bed
of rocks and seaweed seemed terrible, because I was unwilling that I, a
creature made for the service of God, should serve for food to the gulls
and ravens. But now it is different; I have lost all that bound me to
life, death smiles and invites me to repose; I die after my own manner,
I die exhausted and broken-spirited, as I fall asleep when I have paced
three thousand times round my cell.”

— Edmond Dantès

Le Comte de Monte-Cristo (The Count of Monte Cristo), Alexandre Dumas

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Geeze, last night was nuts, and tonight not so much better. When bed time came around, I was wide awake with plenty of stuff to do; so I didn’t bother with rest.

I nearly forgot to sleep!!!!

Next thing I knew, 4 hours had passed since the last time check, and light was pouring in through the blinds 🙁 🙁 :-(.

At least tomorrow, I don’t have to be up and out for work until noon lol.

Most people who knows me well, know there’s only two reasons I can see for being awake so early… One would be to watch the sunrise with that special girl, and as anyone who knows me at all -> then start wondering why we didn’t pack a picnic-breakfast xD. The only other logical reason, is to setup an amphibious ambush, and go fishin’ ;-). Hmm, I wonder how many years it’s been … I’ve always enjoyed fishing, just get out in nature, and forget the rest of the world exists for a while. But unfortunately, you’ve eventually got to go to work lol.