In just 4 short hours I’m headed to Colorado for the week to go skiing! sweeeet! Five of us are cramming into an SUV and making our way to ski at Winter Park. I get home Sunday and then leave Monday morning for a week in San Diego (for work). Ahhh…a nice long vacation is going to be killer!
hahahahaa, SteveB sent me this link and I about died laughing. I hope my good friends at M$ can find a little humor in it 
My favorite:
If a tree falls in the forest, SOA knows about it.
1) dd_rescue is a life saver when trying to extract data from a 9 year old SCSI drive (with no backups in sight…my former employer is lazy)
2) you can’t sniff a loopback device using Ethereal for windows
3) a Black and Tan is delicious with Irish Beef Stew
4) you can tell WinInet to ignore SSL cert warnings with the following flags: INTERNET_FLAG_IGNORE_CERT_CN_INVALID, INTERNET_FLAG_IGNORE_CERT_DATE_INVALID
5) sometimes openvpn tunnels go down for no apparent reason (but eventually come back after sending a few packets with netcat)
6) my cheapo linksys router doesn’t like a lot of bittorrent traffic and needs to be rebooted ever 20 minutes or so
I was having trouble connecting my Mac’s Remote Desktop Connection to the console of my windows box (not a new terminal services session). Thankfully I ran across this great tip from: tech blog - skaelede online
Just save a connection and edit the text file and add:
connect to console:i:1
works like a charm…now I can connect to the console where I’m running vmware
I uploaded a pre-release version of an updated version of DekiWiki. This is primarily a bugfix release but it’s certainly better than the existing sourceforge release!
More info here: http://forums.opengarden.org/showthread.php?t=138
Mare and I went up to Maple Grove to drop some clothes off and Goodwill this weekend. We both had some gift cards from Christmas to use up so she went to Khol’s and I stopped by Barnes and Noble. I picked up 3 new books
Mind Performance Hacks looks very interesting. I haven’t had a chance to dig into it, but for some reason it did inspire me to learn the alphabet backwards while running on the treadmill at the gym later in the day. Learning the alphabet backwards and trying to memorize all prime numbers < 100 made a 60 minute, 7.5 mile run go by WAAAAAY faster...and now if I ever get pulled over by the police, I can recite the alphabet backwards
A while back I purchased a CarChip. I’ve left it in my car and haven’t pulled any data off it for a LONG time. The CarChip software only works in winblowz and I’ve been without a win box for a long time now.
This weekend I finally tried (and failed) to get data from it using linux/wine, linux/qemu
My attempt at using wine failed miserably 
The CarChip software (v2.2.0) simply wouldn’t run in wine.
Then I installed WinXP in qemu (and used kqemu). Ubuntu (kernel 2.6.17-10) recognized the device as a cypress_m8 USB to Serial device.
I started qemu with:
qemu -boot c -hda winxp.img -net nic -net user -usb
I then entered the qemu Monitor by typing:
ctrl-alt-2
Then i ran:
info usbhost
and then ran the following to enable the USB device:
usb_add host:04b4:5500
At this point Windows should recognize the device. Since it didn’t, I lauched Device Manager and scanned for plug and play hardware. At this point, my QEMU instance slowed to a crawl and was pretty much unusable. Windows never did find the device and the CarChip software didn’t work (obviously).
Finally, I threw in the towel and decided to wait until my new windows hardware arrives (which will be tomorrow…the best Valentine’s gift a geek could ever receive…or wait…maybe there are better gifts!).
Even though I never got it working, it was fun to learn more about qemu. I was able to convert my qemu image to a VMWare image using:
qemu-img convert winxp.img -O vmdk winxp2.vmdk
I also installed a freebsd qemu image from FreeOsZoo, and played with the Cocoa port of qemu, named Q. Despite the fact that I never did solve the problem I set out to solve, qemu is cool in my book
I just wish I had the time/knowledge to write a linux driver to read the CarChip data…but I’m dumb.
openssl pkcs12 -export -in mycert.crt -inkey mykey.key -out mycert.p12
Guess what!? I’m _finally_ getting a new windows box! I haven’t had a windows box of my own for at _least_ 4 years now and have been limping by on my old linux box and my very decent powerbook/G5.
However, more and more of my responsibilites at work are requiring a decent Windows setup (specifically VMWare Workstation, VS.NET, and SQL Server). I’ve been connecting via remote desktop to a windows box at work but with a 1Ghz processor and only 768M of RAM, I couldn’t run more than 1 VMWare image at once. hehehe, now that I think about it, I had a faster machine back in 2003 when Soni/Tracy wrangled up a couple of sweet dev servers for Mr. M. and I!
Anyways, I decided I would email “the boss” and just see what his reaction would be. I argued my case by explaining the productivity increases (not to mention the intangible benefit of maintaining my sanity!) gained by some new hardware. I finished my email by saying “Would that be a possibility or do you think I’m crazy? 
”. The response reminds me of how cool my boss and the company I work for is! “It’s only crazy that you waited this long to ask! ”
So yeah, I got to put together a really nice box and it was approved and orderd TODAY!? How cool is that? I’m excited to have something decent to work on. Specifically, I plan on getting DekiWiki up and running on as many OS’s as possible (using VMWare) and documenting the process. I’m super excited.
On a personal note, I finally made it to the gym tonight. I’ve worked way too many hours this week and it was so nice to get a nice run in. I ran 4 miles which was hard considering it’s been about 2 weeks since I had a workout. Oh well…it’s cold and a break was nice
Tomorrow is Friday and I’m excited to spend a weekend doing absolutely nothing and hanging out with Mare.
Maybe I’m dumb for not know this yet but often times I want to do:
cd somedir
cp -r * /someotherdir
But the * doesn’t find hidden files/directories. I finally found the solution by setting dotglob on.
shopt -s dotglob
cd somedir
cp -r * /someotherdir
I probably should have know that years ago
1) get a valid kerberos ticket by connecting to: \\<ipaddress>\c$ and logging in
2) qwinsta /server:</ipaddress> — get the ID of the session you want to kill
3) rwinsta <id> /server:<ipaddress>
man i hate windows…
ahhhh…I love living in Minnesota! It’s refreshing to walk outside, cross your fingers in hopes your car will start, and hearing my vehicle groan in agony as it turns over There’s also something strangely pleasing about being outside for less than two minutes and feeling your nostrils freeze up as you breath!
The last two weekends have been absolutely wonderful. Last weekend I went up I took Friday off and headed up to Aitken MN to “the shack” with Joey and Mr. M (who flew in from Seattle). During college, Joey and Mr M took a yearly ice fishing trip and I had the pleasure of going with them this year.
It was an absolute riot! We picked up M at the airport and drove up on Thursday night. “The Shack” is a little 10×20 (i’m guessing) cabin that Joe’s uncle owns on an 80-acre plot of land. A few of Joes friends arrived the day before so the wood stove was fired up and it was nice and toasty when we arrived. We made it out onto the ice and the crack of noon (or was it 1?) and started drilling holes and setting up the ice houses. The tip-ups were going off like crazy and we caught a bunch of small Northern Pikes…most of which we released. The temperature was bearable and it was great to be standing on a frozen lake, talking nerd-speak, and grilling burgers
After packing up we headed back to the shack. When we got back, someone decided that it was time to shoot some guns Ryan had brought along two of the most, though incredibly impractical weapons one could ever imagine: a S&W .500 and an AR15 (semi-auto M16). I shot a Glock .45 caliber on my last shooting debacle so I was pretty much scared to death of this giant .50! I swore I wouldn’t shoot it but Phil’s wise words of “C’mon Pete, this is the biggest gun you’ll ever shoot!” was enough to convince me. The ammo costs about $2.50 per cartridge but, oh man, was it ever worth it! I watched two guys shoot it and there was cartrige left so it was my turn. They told me to get a firm stance and “hold on as tight as you can!”. Words can’t even describe what that felt like. Holy crap! It felt like a shotgun in my hands! I laughed hysterically!
The rest of the night we continued our previous debate about capitalism, wealth, poverty, etc. As you can imagine, a social liberal such as myself had a hard time convincing the group of gun-toting republicans in the group that the rich will always oppress the poor! Thank goodness I had Mr. M on my side who has an eloquent way of communicating these concepts
The next morning Joey made a couple of bloody mary’s and Mr. M. made the best coffee I’ve ever had in the percolator. Tim wanted to shoot the AR15 so a couple of us went ouside and emptied two clips. The AR15 was a lot of fun. After emptying a clip of 25 I had the strange feeling of being in some sort of milita group! hahahahahaha…fun times. Then we headed back out onto the ice for another day. The temp had dropped considerably and it was unbelievably cold on the lake (I’d guess -30 at least figuring in the wind-chill) The wind was so raw that on a couple of occasions, our tip-ups literally froze into the ice and we had to dig them out. When a flag went up (a fish was on the line) we had to go out in pairs: one guy to pull in the fish, the other guy re-measure depth and re-bait the hook. Thankfully, the houses were pretty warm and gave us a chance to restore feeling to our extremeties!
We ended the night at a log-cabin style bar/restaurant where I had some delicous chili and ribs. mmmmm…
We headed back Sunday morning, stopped by Joe’s so Mr. M. could clean up, and then I dropped Mr. m off at the airport and headed home. A warm shower never felt so good!
I spent the rest of the week working too many hours. Mare’s company had their annual company meeting so she was busy most of the week. This gave me a good chance to play around with some stuff I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.
I got our wiki software running on Fedora Core 4 using Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud…which is suuuuper cool IMO. I’ll post some more about that later.
On Friday, Mare and I snuck out from work early and headed up north to visit my parents. I had been home since July so it was great to see the fam again. We picked up my brother in Bemidji on the way home and made it home in about 6 hours…hehehe, speeding is fun…and I highly recommend it to everyone (when you’re up north and don’t see headlights for miles!)
On Saturday, we ran some errands around town. Mare wanted to stop at a shop and buy some clothes and Andy and I went to wash my filthy car. For some reason, I forgot to take into account the fact that it was -30 degrees outside so the soap literally froze as soon as it hit the car. lol. Then we visited my old neighor and headed over to watch my youngst brother play bball. Dave’s graduating this year so it’s the last game I’ll ever get to see him play. They lost in double-OT but it was still a great game to watch. On a side-note, the team they were playing had a guy who had a prosthetic right leg (attached below the knee). He was absolutely incredibly. I think he outscored everyone and if my dad hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have even noticed. He definitely favored his right leg a bit, but found a way to adapt his game accordingly. It just blew my mind!
After the game we had a nice dinner at the “fancy” restaurant where one of my old baseball buddies was the head cook. It was fun to catch up. Then Mare, Andy, and I headed out to my grandparents house and chatted with them. Today we went to church, had some delicous lasagne and made the long treck home.
I’m pretty exhausted but the last two weekends have been so much fun! I plan on taking it easy this weekend and possibly taking a trip out to sunny San Diego within the next couple of weeks. Sunny and 75 degrees sounds nice right now