Now that the election is over, I hope we can take Slashdot back from the political extremists. I want once again to be able to read comments without having it slip into a Kerry/Bush debate shortly after the idiotic First Posts.

Is it just me, or are the boards becoming more and more politically bipolar? You can't even read comments about a new video card until someone twists the topic into an anti-Bush or anti-Kerry forum. I'm sorry, but technology and politics are not fundamentally connected. They can support one another, but each can survive without the other. As it is, this site is degrading into a black hole of parrot-heads that misquote half-truths and paste undocumented websites to support themselves. I t

I finally broke down and got a copy of Doom3. I knew going into it that it was a bad idea. My PC is only 1.7GHz and my video card only has 32MB RAM. Of course, it didn't run. My wife's computer is a little better at 2.0GHz and a 64MB video card. It runs, but it is so choppy. So, now I'm in the hunt for a new video card and CPU. I'll probably need a new motherboard when all is said and done with. What to do with an old Motherboard/CPU/Video Card?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 lun

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'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

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

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/

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: