(Damn. It's been almost two months since my last Journal. I've been TOO busy.)

My "vacation" from my job is over which means I should hopefully have a little more time to post again. What did I do on my "vacation": one month of hard, solid work in the attic in 90+ F heat. My body aches everywhere and that attic still isn't done. What is done: floor has been fixed, cat 5e for gig ethernet on second and third floors is in place with four drops per room, the entire house is insulated, the sealed off crawl spaces have been converted to storage with nice custom built (by me) insulated doors, a low ledge around the stairwell has been built up to three feet to be a bit safer than the original eighteen inches, removed the old nasty in wall gas heater and converted the exhaust port into a portable air conditioner vent, baseboards were removed for stripping in the garage to prevent lead paint dust from getting all over the place, just started patching and skim coating in order to get ready to prime and paint... I'm hoping to have the attic done by late Fall early Winter with only one day a week to work on it now.

Here at work, I've got lots in store for me. Plus I've decided to start taking on speaking engagements to evangelize free/open virtualization technologies to non-profits. So it'll be busy, but "good busy".

I haven't abandoned Slashdot for Multiply. There's still too many things I prefer about Slashdot over Multiply. I've just been way too busy at home and at work to post much of anything. The latest is that my MIDI keyboard of 21 years finally died. So I had to get a new one, which wound up being the Yamaha MM6 over the weekend. It's pretty decent. Not a total replacement for the Ensoniq Mirage, but it will hold me over until I can afford something better. Since I was keyboardless for a week and a half I turned my eyes to (repost from Multiply follows): ..polishing up my Photoshop skills. In GIMP, of course. ;P

So I've gone back to learning more about layer masks and channels. I found a few Photoshop tutorials and it's apparent to me now that if you really know the underlying concepts, it's not hard at all to duplicate the same kind of work in GIMP for most of the basic stuff. Photoshop has changed a lot, so I know there are some things beyond the well known professional print support that it can do that GIMP can't do in quite the same way. But this isn't meant to be a GIMP vs. Photoshop post so enough with that.

What I'm asking any of you Photoshop users out there:

Q. How do you edit a photo to remove stray hairs without making the subject's head look weird?

I'm hoping you can fill in the A. part of this. After some experimentation last night and little perusing of Photoshop tutorials on-line, Here's what I did:

I followed one tutorial's suggestion to go to the channels and look at each one individually for the channel that has the most contrast between the fly away hairs and the background. Once you find it, you duplicate it. You use the levels and other color correction tools to adjust the contrast to get the edges as well defined as you want them Then the painstaking part is where you use a mix of the lasso, fill, paint and erase tools to basically create a "mask". Hard black for the subject and white for the areas you want to cut out. You might need to re-adjust levels several times after you paint in/out the areas you do or don't want. Once your have just the silhouette of your subject, you can set the channel copy to a selection, then use that selection to delete (or fill depending on your goal) a layer mask in the layers pallet. I'd recommend using the feather command to soften your selection otherwise you end up with nasty jaggies that make the cut out object look very amateurish. It "sorta worked" for me. But it's still not quite right. So I'm wondering if any of your Photoshop pros out there have any suggestions as to what you do. (I'm specifically avoiding any mask plug-ins since I'm in GIMP and there is no such animal! :)

Anyone else doing this kind of thing in GIMP? If not, WHY (outside of professional print needs)? It's completely possible.

...you need serious help. Having grown up in a mixed catholic/fundamentalist christian home, I'm glad I escaped the lunacy that is modern fundamentalism (as well as the odious counterpart called Catholicism). Are there ANY religious people with common sense? Yes. I suspect there are. And if they exist, I suspect they find the site linked above both disturbing and darkly humorous. Unfortunately, those who believe in the notions that the site above espouses are also being armed to vote in 2008. We must stop them at all costs. They have no right to participate in the election unless they have two feet planted firmly on the ground and aren't dreaming of mansions in heaven.

Disclaimer: If you're religious and take offense to my JE, you might want to analyze why you take it so seriously. The Bible is only slightly historical and definitely not to be taken literally. Especially where future events are concerned. Because if you do take it literally and that seriously, then there is little difference between you and a follower of the writings of Nostradamus.

Thank you very much Justice Kennedy for taking the first step towards potentially endangering the lives of many young women, my daughter included, by upholding a federal ban on partial birth abortio(pba)n. Yes, pba is grotesque. Yes, it's a traumatic experience for the woman who may need to undergo it. But is it any more grotesque than what we do to innocent Iraqis? Is it any more traumatic than what our soldiers go through when they know they have to kill more innocent people, when they may not want to be in Iraq anymore? No. However, thanks to your swift thinking, you've now accomplished multiple goals. I can't credit you though. You're merely a simple pawn in what I guarantee will eventually become a real full blown war in America if your side doesn't change course.

Hey! Democrats!!! Look you gutless wonders... The Republicans just went nuclear for 2008! They have you checked an mated. You're fucked. Game over. 2008 is going to be the election that surrounds the issue of abortion. The Republicans are going to make it that. They know that their lunatic fringe voters will outnumber the pro-choice voters since most of America is too stupid to even think deeply about this. So if any of you run as being pro-choice, you're committing political suicide. And if you don't, then you risk not getting the support of one of your strongest bases: women. The same goes for ANY presidential candidate on the left with a history of supporting pro-choice. If you have any spine left in you, you NEED to find a way to simultaneously support choice and keep it OUT of the discussion for the 2008 presidential election. Sounds pretty impossible to me.

WARNING: Graphic stuff below. Skip this if you don't want to read my views on sex You have been warned..

On a personal note, since I have a daughter who will likely be affected by any future rulings against her own choices, I have every right to be even angrier than before. I'm going to say this to be completely clear... I believe in sex for pleasure. Pure pleasure. 99% free of the worries of pregnancy. That's the world my wife and I grew up in. I've been "screwing" happily since my mid teens. I want my daughter to enjoy that same privilege when she's ready too. Be that age 15, 17, or 21. But I want her to be able to enjoy it without having to worry that IF she gets pregnant, that she has to screw up the rest of her life by raising a child when she's NOT ready to do that. This is the simple and basic truth. We're ready to have sex and enjoy it, in many cases, long before we're ever ready to actually be parents. I spent over half my life having sex for pleasure and will continue to do so until I die. That is EVERY person's "right to life". And I sure as hell wasn't ready to be a parent until my mid thirties at the earliest. It looks like the kid's college fund may be redirected to the kid's escape fund from this shit hole of a country. Fuck you justice Kennedy. And fuck ANYONE who thinks this is a good move.

Nope. Nothing to do with the Circular Refuge. Just a reference to the fact that my link to this blog entry on my Multiply account is circular because there is a link there that points back to Slashdot. ;P

So if you're wondering what else I've been up to beyond the stuff I posted in my journal yesterday, there's the rest of it... Hopefully the Fall will see me having more time once again. Hopefully.

Gentoo Forums:

Weighing the benefits of LVM2 vs. RAID vs. EVMS

Setting up RAID10 on USB flash drives. Because I CAN...

Cross compiling on a virtual machine to get around the speed and limitation of my old laptop with 32 megs of RAM

QEMU Forums:

Helping people solve their /dev/kqemu problems...

Getting the 'seamless mouse' feature of QEMU to work with a Linux guest in Xorg 7.x

Sharing my experience with sound blocking applications that interfere with a QEMU guest's sound

Verifying that it is not possible to burn CDs from a QEMU guest (and therefore a Xen VM)

Unix.com Forums:

Reconfiguring my internal DNS on my darknet for better name resolution...

More to come later... Join in the fun!

A USB stick.. Actually three of them to be exact. Seeing that these "jump drives" have been coming down in price, I bought two of them for $15 at a size of 2 gigs each recently. Happy birthday to myself. I already had a 1 gig stick. So.. I decided to see what I could do with these things. They're so cheap I don't care if I do break them with my playing around. So here's what I did:

I used LVM2 to pool them together into one big whopping 5 Gig device. Then I used Qemu to boot up a Gentoo live CD so I could copy the contents of my secretive VM onto the array of USB sticks. Once that was done, I made a few modifications to the Gentoo installation and then booted it up with Qemu. So now I have a Gentoo VM that I can carry around with me from work to home that has my entire environment (apps and data) on it.

It also uses OpenVPN to establish a tunnel to home and it proxyies all web traffic against my personal squid server behind my firewall at home. Did I mention that it rocks? ;P The only thing I decided to do to try and save some of the write cycles on the sticks is put a swap file on the HD of my workstation in a secret location that gets destroyed each time I stop my Qemu session. Did I mention that it rocks?

Oh and one more thing... did I mention that it rocks? ;P

...was developed by the spam industry? One of my hats at work, is mail admin. We've been using a Barracuda Spam Firewall for the past few years and it's been doing an admirable job. But, I've noticed some very interesting trends in the past year or two regarding spam. You know how much of the spam you receive just happens to have a From that you could argue is an amalgamation of a few people you know? And you know how sometimes the subject lines relate to personal interests of yours? Well last week I got the ultimate example of this at work. A message with a From address that appeared to be from someone with a very similar name to our head building manager. The subject line was also one that was relevant to our organization. So I opened it (I use Thunderbird as my client and it's on Gentoo, so you can rest assured that my system hasn't been compromised to the best of my knowledge). It was yet another penny stock scam.

So the idea hit me the other day. The folks creating these spam bot networks might be doing some rather amazing things in their effort to battle the spam filters and even savvy users. It hit me... what if these miserable bastards wind up actually making a self aware system? And what if that self aware system has more abilities than just sending out "make big penis" mail? And, the big what if... what if the system is discovered by law enforcement and the ultimate decision is to shut it down? What would the ethics be in this situation. Obviously, there'd be plenty of people who would just say, "kill it" since it's being used to spam the planet non-stop. But, what about the system itself? What if it has more potential and it just happens to be in bad company. Even more bizarre... what if it's a distributed botnet of Windows boxes? The mind boggles.

So. Yesterday morning I'm walking to work. I get to the intersection of two major roads. The lights change and I get my "WALK" sign. As I start crossing the crosswalk, this stupid woman in a white SUV begins to make a left turn from the adjacent street onto the street I'm crossing. If she didn't stop, she would have hit me. But as it is, she's blocking traffic on the street she's turning from by being halfway in the crosswalk and directly in the path of oncoming traffic. I've seen this happen fairly often at this intersection. Now for one thing, the pedestrians (ie. me in this case) have the right of way when the crosswalk sign says "WALK". The second thing, if you're making a left turn you should wait for all the oncoming traffic to pass by first. So we can gather that this woman is an idiot.

I lost it. I couldn't take it anymore. I'd had enough of this kind of behavior. I stopped directly in front of her vehicle and pointed at her to get her attention (as if she didn't already see me in the cross walk). Then I did a Ted Knight (Judge Smails) snarky smile and illustrated the crosswalk I was on with my hands in game show presenter fashion. Then I held up my middle finger for a good ten or fifteen seconds. All of this happened within eye shot of the traffic cops who were on the corner just before I crossed (they probably didn't notice). Then I went on my merry way. Did it help? Well, she's probably still an idiot, but I felt a whole lot better. :)

So after giving it some thought, I decided that I'm going to take a new approach to the idiot drivers who almost cream pedestrians downtown. Here's the plan:

1. I'm getting a sign to carry disguised as a folder that will say: "You're an asshole driver. I'm taking your picture right now. The picture will be posted on http://www.youreanasshole.com (or whatever domain I come up with that's available UPDATE: that domain is being squatted on... UPDATE2: domain was misspelled... thanks to the FPer for noticing. You grammar nazi you. ;) ) for my viewing pleasure. Have a nice day dickhead".
2. I'll arm my cell phone camera before walking to/from work
3. Let the fireworks begin

Comments? Suggestions?

OK. I'm over there... (eno2001.multiply.com) but I'm not 100% sure who is who. There are names I don't recognize, and so far I've added a handful of people who I do recognize. But, where are the rest of you who have left here or at least don't participate as much? Just post here with your multiply id so I can add you. Thanks.

Where I work, the graphics dept has the need to be able to make files available to and retrieve files from clients who interact with them. Some of the clients are internal and others are external to the organization. They used to use e-mail,but our mail server chokes when we go above 16 meg attachments, not to mention the recipient's mail server. (That's another story and thankfully will be ending this year when we migrate to Zimbra) They now want to be able to ship around files in the 64-256 meg range, so e-mail is definitely out.

I suggested FTP, but the problem is that they won't have clients who are coming from known IPs, so I can't limit the FTP server to only accept connections from a range of IPs. The other option I thought of was to use FTP for them to place the files on the server and then HTTP for the clients to pull the files down "anonymously". But... there are times when those files may be sensitive. So that's out too. It sounds like we want the client to be able to have un/pw combos to log in and retrieve only THEIR files.

Here's where I'm left scratching my head. I can deal with setting up and FTP server for them. I can also deal with setting up a web server. But the IT dept can't deal with a constantly rotating set of un/pw combos as the graphics dept needs them. So, the real question is whether or not there is a way for the graphics dept to hit the system and generate accounts as needed. Preferably something that already exists in terms of internet file sharing on Linux.

The ideal would be:
1. An FTP server (I'll probably be using Gentoo with PureFTPD)
2. A web server (Likely Apache)
3. A web interface to manage the FTP users that I can feel comfortable letting the end-users deal with (this is the "pie in the sky" part I know) the creation/deletion/pw changing for FTP accounts only

Has anyone seen anything like this? How well/poorly did it work? Is this an insane idea? (I happen to think it is, but I work in an insane place with insane requests)

OK. Fine. I give. I created eno2001.multiply.com. But it will be a while before I have the time to actually do much there. My plan is to show the less technical side of eno2001. The side that like music, movies and exploring the creative side... Don't get me wrong, there will also be technology stuff there too. Probably just not as much of it because I don't think the audience will "get it". I shudder when I think this is just another MySpace clone. So how's it done? "ADDZ PLZ!!! THX!!! LOLZ!!!111!!!"

I admit it. I've never liked CompUSA. But here in Cleveland, the only big box choices for computer stores were CompUSA, CompUSA and Microcenter (based in Columbus Ohio). I don't even want to talk about Best Buy, Circuit City, HH Gregg or the other big box consumer electronics store because they don't carry computer components to the extent that you can build your own box. So I found out recently that CompUSA is closing it's only two stores in the Cleveland area. That means the only option left will be Microcenter. And they are a good 45 minute drive from where I live, so I can't really visit them as easily. Honestly, I've always preferred Microcenter both in terms of selection and price. But CompUSA was geographically closer (about 15 minutes away). Anyway, here's what bothers me: They will be closing their two locations in Cleveland, but will be keeping the locations in Cincinnati and Dayton open. It seems that if your general community in Ohio didn't vote Red in the 2004 elections, all sorts of businesses are pulling out. Whereas communities who supported Bush are faring much better.

Now I know that Cleveland isn't suffering just because of the way it (and most of Cuyahoga county [Kerry won here]) voted in 2004. It has a host of other problems as well. But, with the recent departure of the only other grocery store in Cleveland, things are really looking bad. We essentially have a monopoly on the grocery stores here now with the departure of Tops. Giant Eagle is the only store in town (I don't count Heinen's as they are more a specialty store). Something is amiss. I just wonder if this is happening elsewhere in the U.S. or is Cleveland the only place to be experiencing such a downturn. The whole state is experiencing a brain drain as it is. Graduates leave as soon as they can and I really don't blame them. This place is starting to turn into the deep south of the 70s.

Of course he's not an American. Still, it's EXACTLY the way I see America. God I wish I could afford to leave this sickening country. As it is I'm stuck here. But if I can make things turn around for myself, I will take the first ticket out of here. I really feel like I'd fit in better in the UK anyway. Anyone have any suggestions as to how to get myself out of the U.S. and into a nice IT job in England?

It's a shame that LainOS didn't really go anywhere. But it was obvious from the start why it wouldn't: no real concept + lack of actual developers with an itch. For any of you who have seen and are fans of the anime series "Serial Experiments: Lain", you would know that the actual functionality of the Copeland OS is not thoroughly investigated. There were some neat features displayed but nothing really that notable. For example, the voiceprint login that the system displays was done by Apple pre-Mac OS X and was hastily removed. Probably because it wasn't reliable. But that doesn't mean these things aren't possible. It just means that the developers aren't interested enough.

The remainder of the JE is basically going to be a list of what I consider to be missing features from all current OSes but that I believe are possible to implement. I invite you to comment, criticize and contribute:

1. Reliable voice print login or 3D face recognition
2. Hybrid CLI/GUI interaction
    a. Spell and syntax checking for the CLI language before execution outside of an editor
    b. Selecting a file/folder name in a GUI terminal and then dragging and dropping it to a file manager folder or the desktop behaves like the GUI file object
    c. Right clicking on a file/folder name in a shell gives you various options like rename, copy, move, link, delete
    d. Dragging a GUI object like a file/folder or http link to a shell window prompts for the appropriate CLI and GUI options (open in an editor, copy/move, open in a browser)
3. Application and data packaging into live movable objects between networked machines. For example, you have a 3D render happening on a slower box. You "package" the processes and data and send them to your more powerful box over the network for processing. This assumes centralized storage. ...have to leave now. Will add more later.