As many of the folks on my friends list know, I'm an active duty member of the United States Navy. Prior to enlistment, I spent a few years as a general I.T. nerd, doing software development (desktop and web applications, mostly on Linux) and network security work. At age 25, I made the decision to enlist in the Navy, and have been extremely happy with my decision ever since.

In my somewhat limited spare time, I maintain an educational resources web site. I take a great deal of pride in my job in the Navy, and have written an article for people thinking about enlisting after high school. I enlisted a bit later in life, but I hope I'll still be able to relate to folks in the 18-20 year old range.

Please feel free to give me feedback on the article, and I'll do my best to answer any questions my fellow geeks may have regarding military service.

Since I do most of my web development in Perl under Debian Linux, I decided to write a beginner's guide to Perl development. It's a work in progress, but already has eleven chapters as of this posting. Source code examples are provided for each concept. Here are the current chapters:

1. Introduction and Motivation
2. System Requirements and Getting Perl
3. Variables and Data Types
4. Program Flow Control
5. File Input/Output
6. Subroutines and Code Reuse
7. Your First Web Application
8. Getting User Input with HTML Forms
9. Coding Style and Maintenance
10. Security Considerations
11. Additional Programming Resources

Please feel free to give me some feedback on the tutorial; I'm looking for ways to improve it. Thanks!

Western-Style Voting 'A Loser'

Tweaking The Math Behind Political Representation

I've created a web-based embedded version of the open source crossword generator application on ClassHelper.org's Crossword Generator page. This version allows visitors to your web site to create custom crossword puzzles using their own words and clues, and we support customization of the template it uses to match your site (we perform this service for free).

The free version is ad-supported; you can subscribe to the paid version for $3/month. Happy puzzling!

A buddy of mine authored an article entitled "How To Etch Glass", available on the ClassHelper site here: How To Etch Glass. It explains how to create your own etched glassware piece using inexpensive supplies. Enjoy!

My wife and I operate a small educational resources web site, under which we're trying to build a community of educators and parents who are willing to submit content licensed under Creative Commons style licenses. The objective is to ensure that member contributions are accessible to and freely usable by the largest audience possible, primarily educators and parents. I designed the site to include a donations system to allow people who find content useful to reward the author with a monetary donation of their choice, as an incentive for people to submit useful articles.

I'm at somewhat of a loss for how to really get the word out about this sort of system, without resorting to buying AM talk radio spots :). We don't have the budget for that sort of thing... my "day job" is active duty military, and my wife works as an EMS instructor. Wikipedia has the massive inertia factor working in their favor, and things are looking to get even better for their community with the switch to Creative Commons licensing for their content. What sort of communities are out there that could help us promote our ideas and build a community of education-centric folks?

Been spending a lot of my free time working on my new educational resources site, ClassHelper.org. Today's mission is to create five new crossword puzzles in the "History" section :). I've spent enough time programming; this will be a nice break that still serves to make the site a better resource for others.

Anyone can contribute to the site, free of charge. It's ad-supported for the time being; if I can build up a decent community around the site, I may offer an ad-free subscription based version. The site is primarily designed for teachers and others in the education community, but all feedback is welcome!

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

A question about numerical methods for solving the wave equation made it onto the frontpage of Slashdot. :-O Even more amazing was the fact that there were informed and helpful comments and replies.

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I am absolutely stunned that Slashdot's editors would give credibility to a completely false story, pushed by a paid industry PR professional. As Rugrat said,

The "article" is not an article, but a press release written by an employee of a public affairs company.

"Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company."

For a website that spends so much time and energy combating FUD from Microsoft, and the MPAA and RIAA, it is baffling that FUD that was paid for and is pushed by the oil industry would make the front page here.

Come on, Slashdot. You can do better.

For the last year or so, I've been happily using Debian, with a mixture of sources so I was stable, but current, just like nearly everyone who uses Debian.

Then I tried to upgrade or something insane like that, using aptitude, and the whole thing went tits up on me. No amount of cussing, kicking things, or actual tinkering with the software could save my machine.

I thought about asking for some advice in the Debian forums, or on one of the lists, until I ran out of fingers in my entire family tree to count the times someone said some variant of, "Shut up, noob! Your stoopid and not leet leik I am! Go back to Winblows! Ha! HA! HA!!!1"

Yeah. Guess I'm not venturing into those waters, so I figured I'd just have to grab my network install CD and start over (luckily, I set up /home on its own partition a long time ago, so if I fuck something up really bad, I don't lose all my porn very important data.

The day I planned to reinstall Debian, I read that Dapper Drake had been released, and everyone loved it so much, they totally wanted to marry it. A friend of mine, who is wise in the ways of science and the air speed velocity of unladen swallows has also been singing the praises of Ubuntu for a long, long time, so I grabbed a Live CD to see what all the fuss was about.

Holy shit. What an awesome bit of work it is! It's the first Linux distro to find every single bit of hardware on my old Sony Vaio desktop machine, including all the USB ports. It looked great, too, and was the most "Mac-like" Linux I've ever used.

I realize that a lot of you are mocking me right now, but listen for a second: I'm not interested in hacking on my kernel to make sure something is detected during boot, or modifying all sorts of settings in a text editor just so I can make the damn thing find my camera . . . and don't get me started about CUPS. I love technology, and I love and fully believe in "free" as in speech, and I'm grateful for free as in beer. But also really into "works," as in just does. And on my machine here, Dapper Drake just works, and it's awesome. This is the Linux distro that I can take to my parents, and to my friends who are drowning in a sea of FUD, and convince them that they don't really have to be part of the Borg if they don't want to.

And ultimately, I believe that has to be our goal if we're going to convince people to give Linux a real, serious try as an alternative to Windows. We need to be able to tell them, with confidence, "Put this CD in your machine, and give it a try. I think you'll like it, because it just works."

O Tanenbaum, O Tanenbaum
Your microk3rn3l rul3z!
O Tanenbaum, O Tanenbaum
Those m0n0lithic foolz!
They build a kernel all-in-one,
Where all the bugs can have free run.
O Tanenbaum, O Tanenbaum
Those Linux guys just drool. ;)

-cbiltcliffe

I have considered this at length. Having had this account for many years, and occasionally posted drunkenly, and sarcastically, and trollishly, I think it might be about time for me to move on to a new, clean account and sever all ties with this one. I shall bid my anonymous crazyphilman identity farewell, and let it fade into obscurity.

Consider this a sort of account suicide, while I move on to fresher pastures and start anew.

Last week I lost a wonderful mentor and friend, Prof. Emmett Leith. Prof. Leith was my research advisor and was going to be my dissertation committee chair in the PhD program in electrical engineering at the University of Michigan. Among academics, Prof. Leith is known for making holograms useful and ubiquitous by inventing the off-axis method of recording holograms--one could make a strong case that the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics, in addition to being awarded to Dennis Gabor for the invention of holography, should have been shared with Prof. Leith, Juris Upatnieks, and Yuri Denisyuk. Among those who met him--family, friends, students, and colleagues--he was known as a wonderful man. I feel extraordinarily privileged to have had the opportunity to work with and learn from Prof. Leith.