Patrick’s Rants

What do you get when you take four misfits, Detroit corruption, and the murder of an innocent woman who also happens to be the adoptive mother of those same four misfits? Four men who take the law into their own hands to find the real reason their mom was killed. Their journey to truth takes many turns that alternately points at street thugs, Detroit mobsters, and even to one of their own.

This film is rife with high speed chases down snowy night time streets, fiery crashes, personal conflict, and inner hatred disrupted by firefights that include military-grade automatic weapon’s fire. When the brothers finally uncover the plot that sent their mom to her grave, they hatch a plan that is unexpected and ingenious. In order to succeed they must cast off the cloud of suspicion that hangs over them and fully trust each other.

If you like full on testosterone pumping action, unexpected plot twists and believable dialog then this film should be pretty high on your list. Your girl might even watch it with you.

The bumber sticker has risen out of the fight to cripple Flagstaff’s economy, reduce the sales tax revenue, reduce tourism and elminate jobs from our tourism/snow ski economy.
If you want to “save the peaks”, water them

I recently reviewed OpenOffice 2.0.1- running on Windows. Admittedly, my experience wasn’t the best that I have had with software but after a few bumps I got things working. It is fair to say that I did not read the documentation where they warn not to install 2.x over the top of 1.x. Since I never had a problem before I figured that just installing an upgrade would work like most other software - it wasn’t of course.

Today’s post comes on the heels of upgrading to OOo2 on the K12LTSP install that runs over at the office. This is a Fedora Core 4 based install. I was recently informed that OOo didn’t print - at all. I spent the better part of two days trying to get printing to work, afterall it was only OOo that refused to print. After searching for other people experiencing *nix printing problems I ran across a few notes, reminding me that once upon a time, on my own RedHat 6.2 system I had to run spadmin (renamed to oopadmin in newer versions of OOo)…. to configure the printer to work with OOo. I have never had to configure the printer on the K12LTSP machines. They use CUPS very well, even sharing the printer with Windows based machines through Samba. Now, though, through some strangeness I had to configure the printer under OOo. I found spadmin - not renamed to oopadmin on K12LTSP, but renamed on Debian based systems, and most likely in the main package from openoffice.org. I ran spadmin, and a selection list of printers came up. There was no choice to use the system default, no choice to point to CUPS, and dammit no choice to use the printer that was hooked directly up to the machine. So not only did I have to set up a printer twice for use with this program, but it didn’t even see the drivers that were already available… including the one that drives the printer that we use.

After more ‘net searching (I was trying to find the “right” format for print drivers, OOo looks like it uses a postscript type printer driver file as it will only look for files with a .ps extension) I ran across a posting that reads in part:

“edit psprint.conf and change:
Command=
to
Command=/usr/bin/kprinter”

Amazingly, that worked; until I installed the OOo upgrade from v 2.0 to 2.0.1… then I had to do it again. So whether it is the combination of K12LTSP and OpenOffice.org that doesn’t print, or the fact that somewhere in the configuration OpenOffice.org changed the print settings doesn’t really matter. The point is that I shouldn’t have to install a different printer for each piece of software that I run.
Despite the fact that OpenOffice.org is a great piece of software -I dare say it not only challenges that “Other Office Suite”, it beats it in most areas - little idiosyncracies like “breaking” when installing over the top of the previous version - even if warned about (hardly anyone really reads the installation docs, and then not for every single version upgrade) - and for its convoluted printer setup in Linux based systems, choosing to use an entirely different set of print drivers than the ones actually used to every other program on the system - the only way that I found the answer to this was to search the internet for user complaints to mailing lists - could prevent some people from installing it for their use.

The printer configuration wasn’t in the setup or installation guides available from openoffice.org.

Luckily, the print issues did not cost my company any money - beyond the value of my time. Had this been a situation where we needed the docs immediately this would have been a different story and OOo would have lost.

Recently we celebrated Matt Lauer’s birthday at Olive Garden. There was an elderly couple sitting at the next table, finishing their meal.
When they were done and got up to leave the stopped by our table, told us how well behaved our kids were and they thought we were doing a good job raising them.
Kids will surprise you sometimes.

Well maybe not hit F5, but recommending that others refresh a web page on a school web sitehas - at least temporarily - cost a high school student his freedom. He will no doubt be prosecuted as a terrorist for jokingly telling people to hold down the F5 button on their computers. Checking this on my own web server - meaning that I own it and won’t be calling the police on myself - I noticed there wasn’t much, if any effect on the server. The load for the web server remained low and the only thing to spike it was the mailing list software. F5 seems to only cause the screen to itter… not much else. Remembering that I have a caching server between me and that web server, I tried logging into a Windows machine across the way that allows me to run my browser without the caching between me and it. Still not much. I’m running less that a 1.0 load average I get higher spikes from the spam filter…
So if holding down the F5 key sends someone to jail (or tries to) then what happens when more than one person at a time actually visits the site.
File this under clueless, stupid “authority figures”.
purported “damaged” site: http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/ So is it time for a new commandment, 27, Thou Shalt Not Refresh. And whatever you do, don’t run this command on a *nix system:

while ( $i != 1); do lynx -dump http://lake.stark.k12.oh.us/;
done


My kids take long showers. They would take even longer showers if I hadn’t taken steps to curb their shower abuse.
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