I think I'm getting OSOCD, Operating System Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

I used Redhat 6 from the time it was released until I decided one day to get Redhat 9. That pissed me off. The day I got my disks in the mail, Redhat declared that they would discontinue Redhat 9 support. Of course, I had a few months of support left, but the timing still got to me.

Then, I finally decided to jump to Fedora (at Core 1). That wasn't too bad. It was nearly identical to RH9 - all the same bugs with mouse and sound drivers. As soon as I got sound to work in Flash, they announced Fedora Core 2. Cool! (I initially thought.)

I upgraded to FC2 with yum. That wasn't too bad. I learned a lot about the XF86.conf file with Redhat, so I got everything back to where it was with FC1. Then, I got a new computer (thanks boss). The P4 is much nicer than the old 486 - and the flat panel display doesn't take up my whole desk! However, I didn't have FC2 disks. So, I installed FC1 and tried the yum upgrade again. A couple days later, I gave up and downloaded the isos and made FC2 disks.

Now, FC3 is coming out and I feel the need to keep upgrading. Why!? I still have Win98 on my obligatory Windows box. Even there, I feel this unnatural desire to upgrade that to XP.

I was throwing out things last night (so I won't have to pack them when I move at the end of the month) and I found a set of DOS 6.2 disks. Maybe I should just fdisk everything and go back to the good old days.

The fundamentals of construction are not beyond me. I understand the purpose of studs, drywall, plumbing, electrical conduit, and all of that. However, I am a computer geek. I started programming in third grade and that has been my primary hobby and profession ever since. Even my brief duty in the Marines was spent mostly programming radar and communication systems. However, I am now doing construction.

I bought a little townhome and I had grand ideas when I first saw it. Replace the windows with double-pane energy efficient ones. Move the half-bath into the large walk-in closet, expanding the dining room. Rotate the kitchen to remove the wall separating it from the dining room - opening up the area. Replace a spot of damage near the front door. Build an entertainment center into the area under the stairs. Put in hardwood floors. It goes on and on.

So far, I've replaced the damaged area by the front door - and added an electrical outlet on the front porch in the process. I need to replace the drywall I removed. I have replaced a lot of uneven subfloor I found after removing the carpet. I have built half of the entertainment center and it actually fits under the stairs. But, at this rate, I will still be working on all of this about this time next year and I have to move in by the end of the month.

I think that I am now realizing that the 'do it yourself' plan isn't going to work. For instance, it took me about 12 hours to repair the front wall and I haven't even replaced the drywall yet. In 12 hours of programming, I would have made at least $1,000, which would easily have paid for a contractor to do the repairs for me. So, I hired a plumber to fix the diverter valve in the main bathroom and I'm looking into contractor to move the bathroom. As I said, I'm a computer geek. I'm going to leave the construction to the pros.

Apparently, the powers at be have decided that I deserve more than an old Dell Optiplex GX1 for work. So, I came in today to find a brand new Gateway E Series on my desk. I'm sure it is faster than my old 400 MHz GX1, but I'm still a bit conflicted. I *finally* got both the video and sound working properly in Fedora and now I have to start over again. But, with a faster computer, it should be much quicker this time, right?

I think I've had my last pet for a while. I had a hedgehog named Hopper (after Grace Murray Hopper). She died very young from an aneurism. I got another hedgehog a few months later, Bella. Now, she is still young and I've just found that she has cancer - squamous cell carcinoma to be exact. I don't know which is worse, waking up one morning and finding your pet dead on the floor by your bed or taking her in for her yearly visit and finding out that she will spend the next few months slowing withering away from cancer. No, I think the worst is having most people tell you that a hedgehog doesn't qualify as a pet because it isn't a dog or a cat and therefore you aren't justified in having any feelings about its death.

This is *not* about the performer Pink. This is about using "pink" distribution is writing music. The pink distribution is also known as 1/f or Zipfian. I am writing this because I made a reference to it and there were some questions as to what I meant.

First, what is pink? In this case, calling it 1/f is better. Consider a set of countable items - like legos. Lets say you have 12 green legos, 3 red legos, and 6 blue legos. If you order the counts by frequency, you get 12, 6, 3. If they are perfectly pink or 1/f balanced, the second frequency will be 1/2 the first one. The third frequency will be 1/3 the first one. The fourth frequency will be 1/4 the first one - and so on. In our example, the first frequency is 12, so the second frequency should be 12/2 or 6. It is, so that is balanced. The third frequency should be 12/3, or 4. Ours is 3. So, that is close to being balanced, but not great. We need 1 more red lego to make it perfectly balanced. Finally, if we wanted to get some white legos to balance it out, we'd be creating a fourth frequency which should be 12/4 or 3.

There's a catch there. We did have 3 red legos. If we got 4 white legos and kept the 3 red ones, we'd have a frequency count of 12, 6, 4, 3. If we got one more red one and then got 3 white ones, we'd have a frequency count of 12, 6, 4, 3. The point is that the ordered frequencies do not have anything to do with what is being counted.

On to music... There are all kinds of things you can count in music: Pitches, note lengths, transitions between notes, distance between notes of the same pitch... I worked on a project at the College of Charleston where we measured all of those paramters in hundreds of music samples from classical to punk rock. We found that popular music has a high pink balance and unpopular music does not.

Now, my theory: Music with pink music is probably good enough to become popular. That is unproven. I have to write a program to create pink balanced music and then listen to it. I'm just too busy with other stuff. Also, the project I worked on at the College of Charleston is continuing in that realm. So, why repeat the work they are already doing.

OK. It has been over three days since I made the comment that referring to China as a fascist totalitarian state was hateful. I'm still getting hate emails about it. So, instead of replying to each of them one by one, I will explain myself here - just in case anyone who took the time to go here, find my homepage, and then find my email address is interested.

First, it is absolutely true that China was a fascist totalitarian state under Chairman Mao. However, he is not in power now and has not been since 1976 - almost 30 years ago! The halfway intelligent hate email I'm getting is referring to actions that Mao's goverment took and using that as proof that China of today is a fascist totalitarian state.

After Mao, China immediately started to change. It took on a republic government. Granted, that is not a full democracy, but it is getting there. In 1978, the Chinese National People's Congress took a stance against fascism and totalitarianism with New Organic Law of the Villiage Committee. That stated that villiage elections (equivalent to State elections in the United States) must be competitive and all candidates must be nominated by the villiagers. Right there, the communist party could not provide one and only one candidate. Also, they could not force candidates on the people.

By the early 90's, the prevalent problem with democracy in China was not the communist party. It was a lack of education created by Mao's government. Uneducated people are prone to violence. Therefore, elections commonly turned into large fights. Slowly, the education system in China is being repaired. It is not at the level of the public education in the United States, but the Chinese government is working on it. As the newly educated children become adults, the elections will naturally become more democratic.

All of the resources China is pouring into national education proves to me that they are not fascist or totalitarian. If they were, they would be like Afganistan under the Taliban or Iraq under the Bath party. They would deny their country of any real education and then feed their ignorance with mock elections.

I never said China was as democratic as the United States. I simply said that calling them a fascist totalitarian state is hateful. Even if you believe it to be true, it is still hateful - and that is what I was commenting about in the first place. I only wanted to say that there are nice ways to say things and there are mean ways to say things. I don't feel that it is necessary to be mean when you can be nice. That is my opinion. I'm not forcing you to agree.

Also - for all you who got pissed because I used the word 'black' instead of 'African American', don't be so sensitive. I'm half Native American. Have I ever sent you hate email for saying 'Indian'?

I read a post today which claimed we should go to Mars so we can beat the fascist totalitarian Chinese there. The author of the post was "USAPatriot" - which I assumed meant that the author was a "Proud American". So, I replied with the opinion that pride in America doesn't mean that you have to hate the Chinese and call them fascist totalitarians. Man, was that a mistake. Not only did I get a slew of nasty replies in the message board, I got more nasty emails than I could read during my lunch break. Let that be a lesson to you all - do not go Pro-China around Slashdot. That is worse than going Pro-Microsoft.

I have been working on an idea and it is becoming a program: pgMule. The goal of this program is to provide massive load sharing among PostGres databases with a single PostGres server connection point. So, I can write my PHP code and tell it to connect to a PostGres server (the pgMule program) and then pgMule will decide what resources are necessary to best handle the queries.

I now have it to the point that pgMule can attach to one real PostGres database and any client (psql, PHP, or JDBC) can attach to pgMule, thinking it is just a normal PostGres database, and talk to the real database.

Next step, add more clients to pgMule. Then, add in a replication service to keep all the databases the same.

I've had my ups and downs with the few comments I've made here on slashdot, but I never saw this one coming. I mentioned that I applied for Microsoft and I was asked by the interviewers to quit college. You'd think that would get the anti-MS people to chime in. No. I got ravaged by nasty emails from pro-MS people telling me that my comment was obviously a blatant lie meant to make MS look bad. Well, like it or not, that is exactly what happened. Continuing with college was a hard decision as I was already married and had to decide between a good salary in the immediate future or a college degree and the hope of a better salary in the future. I still don't know if I made the best choice.

Ferriera, my anti-spam project, uses 'dig +short' to get a list of the IP addresses of the URLs in emails. As a good side-effect, it also returns the proper domain name for many URLs. It has been working wonders for me, blocking a good 95% of all spam without any false-positives. But, everyone tells me that it is the absolute dumbest idea in the world because dig takes too long to lookup all those IP addresses. So, I have to wonder... What if dig times out on three or four IP addresses in a row? What if it takes a good six minutes to parse one email? What happens? Am I supposed to believe that my email server will suddenly crash, or explode, or take on an evil form of artificial intelligence and start raising killer bees in the Napa Valley region to put a thorn in the side of the major wine producers of America? Since this is the reason I am always given for NOT doing an IP lookup, I want to know why I shouldn't do it.

I need to learn RegEx. I am using SED to get the URL out of emails to check it for spam. I figured out how to get the domain name from http://somedomainname.com/, but I cannot handle two variants: http://www=3Esomedomainname=3Ecom/ and http://www.yahoo.com@somdomainname.com/

Until I figure that out, I can't block ALL the spam I've been getting, just most of it.

I have been toying with an anti-spam idea. I'm sure someone else thought of it before me, but I couldn't find it. So, I had to do it myself. I called it Ferriera because it has to have a name. Here is the simple theory:

Spammers usually want you to go to their website. They also tend to show images in your email with tracking info in them. Both of these practices require URL links in the email. I block the spam by first filtering out the URLs. I then lookup the IP addresses for each URL. Then, I check the IP address against a blacklist of IP addresses. With this system, you can block all spam to a server by putting the IP address in the blacklist.

This is highly efficient because of the cost of owning IP addresses. We all know that domain names are cheap. One spammer can easily own over 100 domain names. However, he probably has only one IP address. A large spammer will have maybe 10 IP addresses in one block. It doesn't take long to block out a spammer all together - regardless of the domain names he uses.

This also has a second effect of making spam punishable. If you start a website and you hire a spammer to advertise it, you just blocked your server's IP address from all emails. You can't even change the domain name and advertise again.

I would *really* like to know what everyone thinks of this. If you want to see more, I made a little website that covers it in a little more detail: http://chris.kainaw.com/ferriera/

I am stumbling along through the anti-spam thing and I have had an idea. I would greatly appreciate it if you could read how I got the idea first before you tell me how stupid it is, but if you cannot, just skip the next paragraph.

I started with spamassassin's blacklist. I then created my own blacklist in procmail. I started blacklisting domain names that appear in HREF links and IMG tags. That worked well, but spammers can buy hundreds of domain names for their servers. I needed to block servers, but just domain names - but how?

My idea is to use procmail to rip the domain names from emails (found in the HREF links and IMG tags), look up the IP address for the domain names, and check the IP address against a blacklist of IP addresses. This will block a hell of a lot of spam because so much spam has images or links to the servers. You can easily block a spammer's server (if there is one) or block of servers (if it is a big operation). In order to spam you, the spammer will be required to hide all domain names in the email.

I know that this will hit the server pretty hard (including the network to do all the IP lookups). But, if it is easy to set up and becomes very common, it will take a lot of profit out of spam by requiring the spammers to continually buy new servers, not just cheap domain names.

What do you think?