Patrick’s Rants

Way too often we hear the car hood welded shut comparison between Windows® and Linux. This generally is based upon the assumption that people want to be able to work on their own car - most don’t.
An interesting article written on the O’Reilly web site seems to have a different, and I dare say, better comparison. Now we talk about fixing your car yourself taking it to the local mechanic, or taking it to the dealership. The comparisons are pretty good and probably more in line with what non-geeks might understand.
Although it is over a year old, it makes much more sense than a lot of arguments I’ve hear before: Supporting Open Source

Over the weekend we took some free movie passes and traded them for tickets to the Fantastic Four.
There have been a large number of movies lately that are comic book based: Spiderman and Spiderman II, The Hulk, Mystery Men, Daredevil (and the follow up Elektra) and the whole Batman series. Add one more to the list: Fanastic Four. Immediately following the movie my step-son and daughter said it was boring (although he could be heard talking excitedly about the action later with his sister at home). (more…)

After more time than it should have ever taken, I ran across this website: http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-re.html. Long story short though I wanted to discard addresses in Mailman. So the regex that works to discard senders in the privacy settings in Mailman is:
^[.]+@example.com So simple, so duh once I got it. This translates to (Mailman wants the caret[^] to denote a following regex) ^ Mailman’s starting character. [.] is any character, the + following it means one or more. So one or more of any character then your @ and the domain you want to get rid of. There are more delicate and fine tuned methods, but this works for me.

Re-defeat Bush in ‘04 (guess that didn’t happen)

Don’t blame me I voted for Kerry

My child is an honor student,
My president is a moron.

Conserve fuel, stop driving by my house.

Seen on a pickup : Stop the MPAA

The FCC wants to tap your internet connection. The scary part of the whole thing is that they back doors on everything it would seem. Routers, switches anything at you ISP. The problem with this is that it will leave huge gaping holes in the hardware that runs the internet… er the US internet. That means that our internet will be less secure than that of our “enemies” - real or imagined. That means that things like Code Red, Nimda, all of the other nasty bugs that hit Windows machines (due to default user names and blank or default passwords on the backbone of the internet) will start hitting the entire internet. And there will be default passwords.
The government will want the same username and password on all routers. They could do this “right” only requiring an output jack on the hardware, but they won’t. They will require that companies code their crap in, that the passwords are the same for the entire internet (and some disgruntled employee at just one internet hardware company will be able to take the US internet offline) and that the software be the same in all the routers - an exploit in Cisco means an exploit of all US internet hardware.
In its overzealous attempt to name every citizen a terrorist (if you’re not with us, you’re against us) the government is attempting to open a hole into everyone’s internet connection.
Even scarier is the exploits we won’t hear about - routers able to be reprogrammed so that you can’t trust your connection to your bank, silently stealing your login and other information. Makes the fact that George W. Bush went into a self imposed e-mail “blackout” when he was inaugurated seem far more sinister now doesn’t it?

The feeds on the right side should be “fixed”. Fixed is in quotes because I’m sure that I have written that before. I discovered that I wasn’t updating the timestamp when the page is reloaded. The timestamp is used to not overwhelm the receiving site with requests if the page is (re)loaded often. In theory it should not try to update the links more than once every 30 minutes.

Due to Jake’s recent posting regarding some stupid lawyer letter, I have added a new disclaimer to the bottom of my pages: “Comments, opinions and drivel © the poster. Satire protected under Fair Use. Opinion protected under First Amendment (see: Constitution of the United States)”

In the day and a half since the newest member of our family was snuck in by my wife, he has decide that he is in charge. I’m used to cats being shy, hiding for the first day or so - the established animals hissing at them from just out of reach. Not this one. He started out checking the whole place out on day one. He just had to know where everything was and right away. He has helped himself to the food and water and the various “cat toys” which are laying around - and not timidly either. He comes right up to us with his still small voice and meows to be picked up. He went to sleep in my lap this morning. The story is that he hopped right into a car at the store and went home with the girl my wife got him from. Although he is only about 1/4 the size of our other cat, he gets right in the big cat’s face and now chases the big cat up and down the apartment.
The kids have imaginatively named him Spots for the orangish blobs on his otherwise white fur. I guess we’ll keep him.