Dave Bullock / eecue : Programmer | Photographer | Admin | Human

For years my blog allowed comments, but the system was hard to figure out and people rarely commented. Recently I have noticed a few sites using Disquss to power their comments and I decided to give it a try. It's easy to use from both a publisher and a user's perspective. One nice feature is the ability to export all the comments, which I'll likely do once I finish the rewrite of the software that powers this site. I hope you'll leave a comment if you enjoy reading my blog and viewing my photos. Thanks!

Tomorrow is my 30th birthday, but instead of sending me gifts or cards, please donate to Midnight Mission:

http://www.midnightmission.org/default.asp?pg=don

Thanks!

Update: Note that although the donation form appear to not be secure, the from is contained in an iframe and is on an SSL enabled server.  

Over the years I've been using various social networks here and there, but for the most part I've been posting my content directly to this site, eecue.com. I spent a few hours today going through all my profiles and updating my bio, tags, links and whatnot. Here is what I updated my bio to:

Dave Bullock / eecue is the offspring of a photographer and a programmer. He has been sifting through bits on the internet since he was young and along the way has taught himself programming, UNIX and photography. Dave is a frequent contributor to WIRED News and a member of the San Bernardino Sheriff's Search and Rescue Team. When he's not shooting photos of geeky stuff around Los Angeles, you can usually find him crawling through a cave, out in the desert or rescuing a wayward hiker.

And here is my one liner:

Programmer / Photographer / Admin / Human

And my tags:

programming, photography, downtown los angeles, los angeles, cooking, desert, search and rescue, SAR, electronics, ham radio, microcontrollers, hacking, computer security, wired, photojournalism, hiking

Here is the daunting list of social networking sites I have profiles on, along with a short description of what it is all about. [If you want to join a site that is invite only, let me know and I'll make with an invite]:

• 43 Things - A fun list sharing sit for goals.
• Bebo - Bebo is a blogging site, they really need to add RSS importing though.
• Blip TV - A social video site, which allows you to upload content in HD with no size limit. I use it for both my personal movies and D2LA footage.
• Delicious - This is a social bookmarking site. I've been using Delicious frequently, and their site posts my links to eecue.com on a daily basis.
• Digg - Digg is a great social news site, the only problem is that the more friends you have the slower the site loads. SQL optimization time guys!
• Dopplr - Dopplr is a pretty cool social travel site with very a simple feature-set and interface.
• Facebook - Facebook is currently the best social network IMHO. It has plenty of great features. Some of the application invites get really annoying, but they recently added a feature to ignore certain apps.
• Flickr - Flickr is a social photo sharing site. I've had some issues with them in the past, but they're still quite cool. I use them to host all of the photos that you see in my blog posts.
• Good Reads - GR is a reading list / book list sharing site. My next project is to catalog the hundreds of books I own and upload them to GR and Library Thing.
• Jaiku - Jaiku is a pretty cool social aggregation site. Although, it seems to have some RSS importing issues right now.
• JungleScene - JS is a site I run about drum'n'bass and jungle in Los Angeles. It's a fairly active forum site that I started in 1999.
• Last.FM - Last FM is social music site. I haven't installed the app yet, but I will soon.
• Library Thing - LT is another book list social site.
• LinkedIn - Linkedin is a social network for professionals. I have my resume up there, although I'm not currently seeking employment.
• MeFi - Metafilter is an old school social new site. I've been a member for some time now, but I actually rarely use it anymore. I'll have to check back more often.
• Ning - Ning is a site creation platform that you can use to build a complete internet community. I wish they would allow you to use 5 character site / user names!
• Tribe.net - Tribe is a social networking site that some of my hacker friends used. I never really did much with it.
• Pownce - Pownce is another social network site that you upload files, photos and text to.
• Xanga - A blogging platform. I'm not sure about this one, will probably kill my account at some point.
• My Yahoo Profile - Not really a social networking site, but yahoo does allow for a profile.
• Reddit - Reddit is a cool and simple social news site. Full-disclosure: I am a frequent contributor to WIRED News who's parent company owns Reddit.
• Slashdot - I used to spend a lot of time on Slashdot, but I mostly just use digg now and my RSS reader. I do still subscribe to an RSS feed from Slashdot.
• StumbleUpon - SU is one of my new addictions, I can seriously waste hours finding new and cool sites by hitting the stumble button. Unfortunately it only works in Firefox and I've been using Safari since the Leopard updates.
• Tailrank - Tailrank is a meme aggregator. You feed it an OPML file and it give you a listing of what people are talking about that day.
• Technorati - Technorati is a massive blog aggregator and link tracker.
• Twitter - Twitter is a great little site for posting short thoughts online. It's like instant messaging that all your friends can see.
• Upcoming - Upcoming is a social calendaring site.
• Vox - Vox is a blogging platform, but also includes cool RSS aggregation features as well as linking to your other social profiles.
• YouTube - I've only uploaded a couple movies to YouTube, but one of them has over 100,000 views. I need to get an ultracompact digicam that has better video capabilities and use it more often!

Update:

• Virb - This is a cool site for artists and musicians.
• Myspace - Totally forgot I had this. I updated my profile, but I don't have any friends. =]
• Blogger - I've actually had this page since 2002, but I've always just used my own software for blogging. I updated the page with my RSS feed and profile.
• Naymz : I can't tell if this is really a legit service, but it seems cool enough. Could just be a personal detail data mining site.
• Yelp - I've been meaning to use Yelp more often.
• ClaimID - This seems like an interesting aggregator, will have to set it up with my other sites.
• Mugshot - A social network aggregator that may actually be useful.
• Profilactive - Another aggregator.
• Ziki - YASNR
• Uber - forgot about this one as well.
• Wink - Seems like an interesting social contact site.
• LiveJournal - I totally forgot I had this.
• MyBlogLog - I also forgot I had signed up for this.
• Deviant Art - I'm going to upload some of my better photos to here at some point
• Tumblr - Another microfeed site. I think I'm going to write a tool to post to every one of my social sites at once.
• Twitxr - Scott Beale set this up today so I figured I'd give it a try.
• Buzznet - I uploaded a few photos here once... someday maybe more.
• Friend Feed - Another social feed aggregator.

Hello Readers! Thanks for following my blog. I hope you've been enjoying my writing and photos over the years. Don't worry, I'm going to keep blogging and shooting! I made some changes to the site last week and last night. Here is a quick rundown of what has changed:

• Error Page: I have updated my error page to actually be helpful, before it was worthless, but now when you land on it, you'll find it much more helpful.
• Side Bar: Added blog categories list, added full archives listing, removed login
• Comments: I have totally removed the comments section from this site. They were hard to use (almost impossible) and spambots spent all day trying to spam them, although they did actually fail, but still. I will be reintroducing comments when I release the next version of this site. If you want to comment on a post, email me and I'll update the post with your comment and a link back to you (link the old boingboing style)
• del.ico.us Links: As I'm sure you've noticed I've been automatically posting my links from del.ico.us every day. I hope you're enjoying this. Let me know through email either way.
• Image Layout: I've changed the layout of the image pages by simplifying the interface and moving the album information to below the image. I've also added a share this button.
• Blogs: I've added a date posted field as well as a share this button.
• ShareThis: I saw this post on laughing squid and decided to add that functionality to my site. You will find a ShareThis badge on every page now.

Let me know what you think! 

The day before yesterday I dropped a glass bottle on the floor, which I then picked up and vacuumed off the floor. I warned my wife to not walk around barefoot just in case. I should have heeded my own advice. Yesterday I was walking barefoot in my loft and I stepped on a shard of glass which lodged itself deep in the arch of my left foot. I tried to get it out with a pair of fine tweezers I sterilized.

The self-help tweezing didn't work so I called Penelope who came home and she also tried to get it out. With the glass still stuck in my foot we decided to call our doctor. He saw me right away, but said that he wouldn't be able to get it out and to go to the Emergency Room.

The doctor injected the wound with lidocaine and went to work. After about 15 minutes of probing my foot with a pair of sharp tweezers and enlarging the entry hole to about triple its original size she pulled out the shard of glass. It was about 10mm x 9mm x 1mm and quite sharp. I was amazed that piece fit in through the tiny entry hole which was only about 3mm wide. I guess skin is quite stretchy!

The procedure didn't hurt at all thanks to the lidocaine, and I went home without any pain. In the middle of the night the lidocaine wore off and I was awoken by the extreme pain in my foot. I am basically unable to walk, I can sort of hobble and hop, but my foot is extremely sensitive even when I'm laying down. The doctor prescribed me some pain meds, which Penelope is picking up right now.

This weekend I am shooting NAMM for WIRED News, so I have rented a wheel chair. That should be interesting.

UPDATE I've been working from Downtown LA (read: home) today and my foot is feeling much better. Penelope picked up my 'script of Tramadol, but I haven't taken any yet. I think I'll probably pass for now. The pain isn't so bad when I'm just sitting around. She also went out of her way and picked up a wheelchair for me (which WIRED News is footing the bill for) that I'll use to make my way around NAMM tomorrow and Sunday. Hopefully that will work out. 

So a few people have asked me if there is anything in particular that I want for the Holidays. If you want to buy me a present and can't think of anything, check out my Amazon Wishlist. Thanks in advance!  

I just want to congratulate my beautiful, sweet, wonderful, caring, intelligent, inspiring, empathetic, hot and sexy wife, Penelope, on passing her Nursing 200 final today with flying colors. You did a great job baby, and now you just have a little over a year to go! You're going to be the best nurse ever! You are the world to me sweetie pie. I love you!

Photo of us atop the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge near Taos, from our recent trip to New Mexico. 

My beautiful, sweet wife and I had a beautiful wedding 1 year ago today. We've had an amazing array of fun adventures since then, starting with our honeymoon in Fiji, and continuing with trips to the zoo, the desert, San Francisco, Huntington Gardens, DEFCON, Santa Barbara, San Diego and many more. Our special day every week is Sunday and we try and do something fun and different every time.

Penelope is the sweetest woman I've ever met, and her charm and charisma is readily evident to everyone who meets her. I couldn't have asked for a better person to share my life with. Thanks to her compassion and love for humanity, she will be the best nurse ever.

My only gift to her today is dinner at the Water Grill, plus some hiking / scrabble action. The real gift will come next month in the form of a vacation to Santa Fe, Taos and Sedona. Sweet sweet Penelope, you are perfect for me. I'm looking forward to the next 50+ years with you. 

We just checked in to the newly remodeled Hotel Majestic. The first room we checked in to, one of the standard rooms, was a bit smaller than we remembered and had a flickering light, so we called down to front desk and the gracious and pleasant Nisi upgraded us to a junior suite. The suite is lovely, and although neither it nor the hotel smell like old books any more, and we are quite pleased with it. It has a very nice fireplace, which Francisco the bell hop / valet driver fired up for us, as well as a lovely 4 post bed. It also reminds us a bit of home as our windows are facing the street.

We have a reservation for 2 at Perbacco and boy are we hungry!  

After taking a tour of Hearst Castle, the wife and I are almost to SF. I'm posting this from my new Macbook Pro through bluetooth to my Blackberry and out over the EDGE network. We're going to be in SF for 5 nights and are planning on having some good food. I've been saving up for this as it our Christmas present to each other and I'm really excited. I posted a thread on Chowhound SF seeking recommendations for good restaurants. I will potentially be guest blogging on Metroblogging SF. Vacation, yay! 

I just want to put up a quick post to say the wedding went wonderfully and we had a great time. I would write more, but I have to pack for the honeymoon in Fiji.  

I have changed the design, but you will probably only notice it if you are running Windows Internet Explorer. This page should now render correctly in IE and it no longer has the javascript warning you that you are running an insecure browser. That was just plain annoying, and I apologize for it. I have also moved the blogad away from the right and column and into the left hand column below the google ads. In order to do so, I widened the left column by about 10 pixels. So basically it was a very small change, but once I launch the new version of this site will be a bigger change. I am going to get rid of the whole programmer / designer / admin / human thing as I no longer design, and instead mention something like programmer / photographer / human... or something to that extent.  

My coverage of the marches has been mentioned on slate:

La marcha: As hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their political supporters turned out nationwide Monday, bloggers documented the demonstrations. At Metroblogging Los Angeles, amateur photographer Dave Bullock captures the scene on the West Coast. Explaining the pictures of demonstrators "feverishly waving their American flags," Bullock notes that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa "opened his talk with a polite request for the protesters to roll up and stow away their non-American flags. He said that the flags from other countries would not help their cause, and most of the protesters obliged his request." (See the complete collection of Bullock's photos on his personal Web site.)

I started the day by forgetting to Spring forward. On my way to Echo Park, whilst mounting my bike when a light turned green, I ripped a 10" hole in my shorts. When I got to the park I was greeted by Mack, Eric and Wil and shortly after that my portrait was taken by a photog with a battery powered inkjet printer in tow. In said picture, I looked like a mutant squinting pirate, despite the fact that our team was not the arrrr'ing one. Furthermore I blew it when I passed on the free vegan tamales and beer.

Read the rest at blogging.la. 

So I noted that my photos and my website were shown on CNN the other day, well I am going to be back on CNN. The weekly "On the Story" show is filmed tonight and will be shown at 7-8 p.m. ET Saturday and 1-2 p.m. ET Sunday. Today I got a FedEx'ed yellow pelican case containing a Mac Mini and an iSight. During the show "correspondents give you the inside word on the stories they cover each week" and I am going to be the featured "internet correspondent". Hopefully CNN won't spin it like Deutche-Welle spun it (starting at 8:00 [it is already down]), where they called me an "activist protesting the [HR4437] bill".

Update: Well that went pretty smoothly. I'm looking forward to seeing the show. They definitely didn't spin me as an evil blogger or an activist. Everyone on the crew was very nice and I actually enjoyed it. Hopefully I didn't look too nervous. Btw Abbi told me that the Saturday show will be preempted for some other coverage, but it will be show again on Sunday and possibly late at night. 

Just got back from a birthday shooting trip in the desert. Penelope and I had a great time, but I'm glad to be back at home in my air conditioned loft with running water. Photos coming soon. 

I love my sweetie pie! We finally set a date, July 9th 2006 at the New Otani garden! I am excited.

So I just spent about 15 minutes writing the first few paragraphs of my first ever novel. You can read what I have so far here on my nanowrimo page. I will be writing every day and posting up what I have, be warned the copy has not been edited yet. Thanks to Robert Daeley for inspiring me to do this! 

Last month my site had over 100,000 visits from over 22,000 different people and a total of over 1.2 million hits. You can run an add that runs right over there to the right of this text for $20 a week. Click here to buy an add. 

So as you can see over to the right of this post I have my first blogad. It seems pretty relevant as I live in a loft and write about loft living several times a week. It's funny because if you look at my stats on the blogads website it only shows that I get 1700 hits a week (mostly because the counter has only been on there for a couple of days) but in reality I get about 5000 visits DAILY from 2000 different sites... I assume about half of those are RSS or search engines that don't load the blogad code, but it will be interesting so see how many I get at the end of one week according to blogads.  

I just swapped out the two failing 80gb drives that were in this server for 2 brand new 160gb drives. It took about 3 hours to transfer the data and now everything appears to be up and running ok. The second drive will be a daily backup of the main drive. In the next few days I will also be upgrading the database server. Enjoy!

[It's a good thing the server is back up because while it was down, 44 spam emails were waiting for me!] 

You can now buy advertising on this site by following the link at the right. The prices are very reasonable and the site gets about 5000 unique visitors a day. 

So I've lost a large portion of my photos from this site. I still have them in a backup somewhere and hopefully I have a backup of the actual files from this site... I will work on finding that backup but be warned that the whole section may come down and I may have to reload them all from my desktop. Joy.  

Are you ready for a disaster? Do you have what you need to make it through "The Big One," assuming you aren't crushed by some large piece of your residence? Even before Katrina I had been asking my fiance and myself those questions. For the last few months my survival pack of goodies has been at my mom's house in Yucca Valley, but this weekend Penelope and I grabbed them from my truck in the desert and brought them home to our loft. I now have enough MRE's and water stored here to last Penelope and I at least a week along with batteries, flashlights, radios, plus plenty of guns and ammo all the disaster necessities. All my Search and Rescue gear including my alpine gear, climbing gear and backpacking gear is down stairs in our storage unit. Now Penelope and I just need to create a disaster response plan. 

During my adult life, I have alternated between getting way too little sleep (<4 hours) and way too much sleep (>8 hours). Call me strange but I have noticed that if I get sleep in 2 hour blocks, like 4 hours, 6 hours, 8 hours I feel well rested and refreshed, but if I sleep an odd number of hours I feel like I'm being robbed of sleep. I'm not sure if this is a mental thing or if it is my body's biological clock telling me to feel rested. Anyway, I've decided that 6 hours of sleep is the perfect amount for me to feel well rested and also to allow me to get more done in the day. I have been trying it out and it really does make me feel good and I don't even need to set my alarm as I tend to just wake up after sleeping 6 hours. Another nice benefit is that at night I actually feel tired when it is time to go to bed. 

She posted twice today on her website... once about the horrible service she got from the Carson Saturn dealership and then about the good experience she had with the mechanic she and her family have used for years.  

This is just a partial update. I am going to make it look less boxy when I have some free time, hopefully tonight. 

My fiance updated her blog... it is an honest to goodness miracle I tell you! Soon she will have her photos up there too and post on a more regular basis! Wow! Go Penelope! 

Take a look at all the crap I carry around in my bag. 

I made some changes with the way that the gallery looks. I made the interface cleaner and changed the order of display of the image details. I also updated the tag creation in the images and log sections. I also fixed the way the comments are added in these sections. Finally I changed the RSS feed in the comments sections so that it only shows replies. 

Check out the tags page to see if you are one of the top 500 words in my photos / logs / albums.  

Tagging is a way to identify posts / photos / events / albums / etc. with keywords that you can search by and cross-reference. Technorati has a good introduction to tags. Flickr uses tags as well. Now this site uses tags, of which the top 500 can be found on my tag page. You can also check for tags by using the following url: http://eecue.com/tags/[tagname]. Right now the tags are somewhat one-way (you can only see tags on the tag page... eventually each item will have a list of tags that it belongs to). 

During the month of January I received over 200,000 hits from search engine spiders. Here are the top 6 spiders that crawled my site:

• 116,448 Hits from Yahoo! Slurp
• 37,011 Hits from msnbot/0.3
• 26,424 Hits from Ask Jeeves/Teoma
• 14,618 Hits from psbot/0.1 (picsearch)
• 12,204 Hits from Mediapartners-Google/2.1
• 10,514 Hits from Googlebot/2.1

I wonder if picsearch will ever have more than 4 images from the search for eecue. 

I have created 4 different layouts that you can now choose from. Click on the links in the menu labeled layout. The site is currently laid out to the left. The liquid layouts will allow you to change the size of the window and still see content. Enjoy! 

So I recently signed up for flickr. I then created an export system where I can send selected images to my flickr page. Cool deal! 

So as you can see I have created an archive by category index on the navigational section of my site. These links will allow you to browse just a category if you choose. These links also work with Technorati tags. =] 

I have updated the way that trackbacks and comments displayed on my site. My posts now support technorati tags. I am also now pinging ping-o-matic. Cool deal. 

Now attempting to ping Ping-o-mactic's Metaping.  

I have imported all of my various mini-sites and even created some new ones. They are now part of the main eecue site, but they have distinct designs. I wonder how long it will take the search engines to find the new info on these sites:

• Metaphoto
• Driveslag
• Japan Trip
• Resume
• Snarl
• Slacker

=] 

I have updated my website to now support iCalendar import and export. This means that you can upload a calendar that you export from nearly any organizer application and you can subscribe to a calendar with the same application. It doesn't currently support recurring events, but it will eventually. Here is a link to my calendar, and here is where you can add my calendar to your organizer program (like iCal, Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc). 

So I've been working on a few thing over the last few days and I have finished them for the most part. I have changed all the code on my site to be XHTML compliant and everything should now validate... you can test for yourself with the links at the bottom of the page. I also finished importing about 20,000 images from my old junglescene photo albums. All of the archive pages should be generated in the next few hours... feel free to look through them. I have also changed the CSS code for the image pages so now you can see more than one column at a time (note that this works in everything except Mac IE). I still have about 2000 of the new images from junglescene to import and then I have to import all my old articles and journal entries. Finally I will be creating a page where I can easily edit a whole groups' captions... when that is done I will go through and label all the thousands of unlabeled photos. Joy! 

I want to wish everyone a safe, happy and prosperous new year. I also want everyone to take a few minutes from their day and a few dollars from their bank accounts and help out with Tsunami Relief. Click the link in the article below to find charities to donate to. Thanks! 

For Christmas (as you may have read about in my last post) I registered a domain for my fiance Penelope. I also set her up a site just like this one only prettier. Check it out! 

Hope you are all having a merry holiday! I have created a few sites as Christmas presents for my fiance, my niece and nephew, and a couple of friends:
Peneloper
Skyela
Auhstin
Bassbinboy
Mike Rocchio
I haven't done any designs for them yet, those will come in the next few days so for now they looks somewhat generic. Btw if I created a site for you and you need help setting it up let me know!
 

Well as you can see (or maybe not if your don't run a CSS compliant browser) my site has been updated. The design update was the easiest one I have ever done! All I had to do was change 1 file and my entire site was updated. I am all about separating content from design!

I have also improved the way the images work so that they can be cached by your browser (and save me bandwidth). I am about to update slacker and created a whole plethora of sites. =] 

Right now the files are still being cached... it takes a bit of time to create all the flat files so you may find some links do not work... they will just wait! 

I have created a caching mechanism for eecue / slacker. Every time a page is added or changed, a (mostly) flat html file is created. This will prevent server overloads from slashdotting and whatnot. It also greatly decreases the page load time. This caching mechanism also creates a flat file for the RSS feeds (which allows HTTP/1.1 to handle the work). I have also improved the page navigation for multiple page albums etc. I am adding this and the other functionality I added to slacker and will be creating sites for several people for xmas. 

Ok so during the update I added a really cool feature. The calendar now displays thumbnails for each event / photo group / post from this site... check it out:

• June 2004 (a busy month!)
• July 2004
• August 2004
• September 2004
• October 2004
• November 2004

My cat died a few weeks ago... I just wanted to post up these pictures of him in memory... I miss you little guy!

As of November 24th, 2004 I am now engaged to the lovely and beautiful Penelope Proffitt. I love her very much and am looking forward to a wonderful life with her.

=]

more pictures of Penelope

I have radically updated my website. I was using a program called serendipity for my news / blog and one called gallery for my photo galleries. There were some really good features, most of which I have emulated in my own code, and there were some bad features, which I have replaced with good features.

I am still importing my photos from a few other sites that I currently have them on.... soon enough they will all be on here.

Read on for the complete list of changes...

When i went to Santa Fe High School, I had a great Contemporary US History teacher named Jane Zinn who is the wife of Howard Zinn [I was totally wrong about this! It was a different Zinn!]. He has an interesting piece on RadioNation:

RadioNation AudioBlog: Howard Zinn on Kerry/Bush: "America's leading radical historian on why voting does and does not matter."

(Via the nation.)

My laptop's hard drive died a nasty death, that started with slowing and freezing and ended up in complete and total data loss. Between those two stages i was able to back up my data. I am now catching up on the 900+ news items in NetNewsWire... i wonder if the same thing happened to boogah:

99 problems and an ibook is one
it would seem that the venerable ibook is acting up again.

over the weekend i've seen more beach balls than a lifeguard, which is odd because things were running okay on friday night. so i decided to repair permissions, run the periodic maintenance scripts, update the prebindings, boot into single user mode, run fsck and zap the pram. twice.

still, i can't have more than one app open without getting a beach ball every time i issue a command. ichat gives me a continual beach ball after ten minutes. itunes skips every time i play a song. my computer is absolutley unuseable.

every bit of diagnostics i've run says all my hardware is fine. the only option i seem to have at this point is to reinstall. bollocks. [gomi]

ben requests the following:

------ please please please please please don't post crap like "today is wednesday. i woke up and ate cheerios. then i went to the store to look at warhammer 40k figurines. i then played 2 hours of dungeons and dragons and my level 5 elf found a short sword of balancing +1! i then went to fry's and bought three ethernet cables. I like the belkin brand cables because they're nicer and more bendy. i then looked on ebay for 80's toys that my mom wouldnt buy me when i was a child. i found an optiums prime, mint condition for only $600!!! i'll post pics of it when i get it. then i checked my lavalife account and found that i had two smileys. i'm so happy today."

---

ok folks the new server is in and rockin!

it's about 10 x faster than the old one with way more ram and disk space to boot. there is a possibility you may get some old email again, and you may have some old files in your ftp site.. 

all websites will be back up ASAP 

what is fnorg you ask? fnorg is something that doesn't belong over here. it belongs over there. there is fnorg...


 

Yesterday this web page got slashdotted. For many small sites a slashdotting means the site is totally unreachable. For this server it was business as usual... 

thanks to inspiration from arclight... i decided to set up my X10 home control again. instead of using the more complicated 2 way system i had before i opted to use the firecracker module and the bottlerocket software package.

using ssh tunnels from my home unix box behind the firewall here to connect to my webserver and open a reverse tunnel back to the unix box in my house, and setting up keys that can only execute the scripts i wrote with bottle rocket, i created a php script that check the authorization and makes sure it's me logged in it allows you to turn on and off my office and living room lights or all of them at once.

wow that was a long run-on sentance.

-eek 

I have released the latest version of slacker ... slacker version 1.4.1

it has many bug fixes and enhancments.

 

As you can see by my article from Friday, I went to New Mexico to visit my mom. I drove by myself, I left on Saturday at about 11am and drove on the new part of the 210 that connects to the 15 and then to the 40.... 

Early Saturday morning I will be driving out to new mexico (12 hour drive) to see my wonderful mother! She just moved in to her new condo in Albuquerque! It will be great. I went to High School in new mexico and I really miss it. They have the best green chile in the world there!

I'll take lots of pictures so you all can see pics of the Land of Enchantment. 

ok I have a new office in El Segundo... Today I just got a plant! yay... it's really nice...I love plants! Check here for the picture section on junglescene.com. Or....