+ Friend dfenstrate

Over all he seems to be a reasonable fellow from the dozen or so posts of his I have read from his user page. What first caught my attention was the pro-gun and pro-castle doctrine stance he took in a thread from today.

Yesterday I noticed that my GroupWise mailbox was snappier. Didn't know why, and thought that maybe the email archiving software had trimmed my mailbox (which would be a good thing). I've got 19 GB in my mailbox, and 18 GB of it ought to relegated to the archive. Nope - turns out my co-worker had added RAM to the server while nobody was watching.

GroupWise has a mode called Client/Server where your desktop fat client talks to the server via TCP/IP packets. Back around GroupWise 5, if the post office agent (on the server) went down at all, everyone knew it because every machine immediately got an error on the screen: lost contact with server! Somewhere around GroupWise 6 or 6.5, Novell reprogrammed the fat client to wait instead of immediately throwing up an error. The timeout is about 30 seconds.

Last year we started a whole push to virtualize as much as we can. We use Xen virtualization, as that is what Novell supports and includes in SuSE. Paravirtualization has a few advantages, one of which is that you are essentially running a guest OS that is the same as the host OS. So when it comes time to reboot, the OS is already loaded in RAM - the Xen host just has to create the guest, and do a bit of linking. We typically see an init 6 take ten seconds from time we lose continuous ping packets to the time we get them back.

My co-worker was looking at the server stats, and the mail server showed pretty much 100% utilization 24 x 7. Certainly the post office seemed slow. He thought it might be a process gone bad, but no - the mail server was just that busy. It looked like it could use a little more RAM though.

(Prepare by opening the Virtual Machine Manager)

Init 0
Edit the VM definition to have another 1 GB RAM
Init 3

It is up, and before the 30 second timeout from 120 fat clients. Nobody notices, nobody calls. It just works (and faster, too).

Sweet. :-)

Iowa Senator Says AIG Executives Should 'Resign or Commit Suicide'

From the title and what was said, I was pretty sure it was going to be a Democrat. Hating business and saying outlandish things go hand in hand. Well, I was wrong. But, AP made it too easy, as by the second paragraph the party was mentioned immediately.

White House Ridicules Cheney After Criticism

Not really "Name That Party" since we all know who is in the whitehouse. But I am personally upset that we are now a Republican cabal. I much prefered VRWC, even the name sounds mysterious.

However, I do think Cheney should quit playing the Carter role and retire quietly. Unless Cheney is going to be running again, presidents and vice presidents have traditionally stayed out of the political fray after leaving office. Carter and Gore being two modern exceptions to that rule.

Justice Thomas Says Americans Self-Indulgent, Don't Sacrifice

What is wrong with this article? No, it isn't that it is AP posted on Fox News. Fox posts a lot of AP articles.

I like to play a game when reading Fox, which is to skip the source right under the title and read the article and then guess the source. The fourth paragraph told me it was AP. I could tell because the paragraph had nothing to do with the article and implied there was a conservative majority on the court. Conitnuing on in the next paragraph it mentions the confirmation process with Anita Hill's sexual harassment allegations, which again have nothing to do with the title of the article.

Mohammed must not be parodied.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509258,00.html

Well, as I mentioned previously, I purchased a gun this week.

I've been watching on gunbroker.com for a Glock 17L or Glock 34 for the past month or so. I finally found a reasonable deal on a Glock 17L and put in a bid (look for the chart about 3/5ths down the page).

As I mentioned before the 9mm and long barrel were the two features I was putting highest on my list. The 9mm for common and less expensive ammo for training, less recoil than a .40 or .45, and also a reasonably effective defense caliber. The barrel is 6.02" long, over 2" longer than many semi-auto pistols. The longer sight distance makes aiming more accurate as the "cone" is smaller.

From the boards I've read, a lot of folks dislike the Glock look. Personally I think they look fine, simple and utilitarian. They are not shiny or gaudy, but rather simple and unimaginative. Folks especially dislike the competition guns, like the 17L and 34 in 9mm, and 24 and 35 in .40. But for whatever reason it doesn't bother me. I guess I find function more attractive than glitter.

So, after winning my auction, I need to do a handful of things. First, I need to go back to the gun shop who will be doing the transfer for me to figure out all of the steps I need to take to take posession of the gun.

http://www.michigan.gov/msp/0,1607,7-123-1591_3503_4654-16241--,00.html

According to this, I will need to get a License to Purchase a Pistol. This will cause a NICS check to be run by the FFL (gun shop/transfer agent). The police will do a background check on me and I'll need to answer a Basic Pistol Safety Questionnaire with at least 70% correct. I'll also need to swear before a notary that I am legally allowed to own a pistol. I'm not sure how all of this works with the timing, but hopefully it all works pretty quickly and smoothly.

I've already read over the Basic Pistol Safety Questionnaire, which has a couple of what I would consider "trick" questions. One of them being along the lines of, "The owner must report a stolen pistol within 1 year (t|f)." Well, technically true, since it is actually 5 days, and 5 days being less than a year the discreet set of days by which the owner must report the gun stolen is within the set of 1 year. But I am pretty sure the answer they are looking for is false.

Anyways, while looking around the last couple months, reading about hand guns, safety, and anything else remotely pertaining to handguns I found a number of sites that I really enjoyed.

Most recently is Cornered Cat, a site by a mother of 5 who writes or has written for a couple gun publications. It is very much oriented towards women and self defense, but she also encourages safe gun handling and usage more than any other site I've read. This is a really good site for those with a family and how to be considerate with your spouse.

Christian Gun Owner was on of the early sites I found, mostly because it had a page or two dedicated to Glocks (reloading specifically if I recall). This site really struck a cord with me, as it was shooting with other men from church that really started me on looking into purchasing a handgun. I have wanted to pick up something for a long time, but it was shooting with the guys from church that put me over the edge (that and the timely election of Obama).

The Civilian Gun Defense Blog is pretty interesting. For all of those folks who think guns are bad and only exist to harm folks, this is a pretty interesting list of real situations where a gun owner either protected their life or property against someone. These are folks who did not wait for a policeman to stop a Bad Guy(tm), but stepped up for themselves or others.

I am really looking forward to getting my gun. Once the ground thaws I will start digging out a berm for a homemade range. The layout of our property will work really well for a pistol/rifle range, as we have a gentle slope to shoot at, and after I dig out the berm it will be a pretty level area to shoot into. It will probably take me a few weekends to finish digging, but it will be pretty cool to have a range right behind the house.

Please click to get the correct color scheme.

Sure, it has nothing to do with rights online, but I figured if it was good enough of a category for Michael to post his anti-Bush conspiracy theories, it is good enough for me.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/first100days/2009/02/19/report-oklahoma-city-pd-admits-mistake-pulling-man-anti-obama-sign/

Evidently pro-Obama folks think abortion is murder. Who would have thunk it.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,488644,00.html

So, for those who are pro-abortion, does this bother you at all? The abortion failed, since the child survived crossing the into the world from the womb.

Was this murder or an abortion?

It is possible for a child to survive when being born after 20+ weeks, though the chances are very low. And since the child had air in the lungs, it obviously breathed by itself.

I think what this story highlights is that life begins at birth is a really lousy definition of life. There is a point at which a child can survive outside the mother on its own, or at least through help from modern medicine. But that point is getting closer and closer to conception. Assuming techonolgy continues to advance, we might even see the a __Brave New World__ decanting children.

The only clear point that we have at which point life begins is conception. The unique and individual (don't be stupid and argue genetic twins) and completely separate DNA begins an individual. At least to modern science we know of no other clearly defining time that occurs in all pregancies.

RGSPCP

I'm an old guy (my first program was in FORTRAN on punched cards in 1979) and I learned programming the old-fashioned way. Which means that I like my source code to be obvious as hell.

Here's what makes sense to me*:

$source = "abcdef";
$pattern = '/^def/';
preg_match($pattern, $source, $destination);
print($destination);

Really, what I want is:

$source = "abcdef";
$pattern = "/^def/";
$destination = regex_match($source, $pattern);
print($destination);

How it's done in Perl:

$source = "abcdef";
$pattern = '/^def/';
$source =~ /($pattern)/;
$destination = $1;
print($destination);

Why do I hate thee? Instead of letting me assign something to $destination, I have to encapsulate my regex pattern within parenthesis (because OF COURSE that's the assignment operator), and now the result will magically be assigned to variable $1 - wherever the hell $1 came from. THEN I'm allowed to assign $1 to $destination. Wonderful. And by the way, the single quotes around the regex pattern matter - you cannot put it between double quotes.

Obvious as hell, it ain't.

*Note that first snippet is working PHP code. Yes, I would have answered my own rant, except that my postfix and GroupWise boxes do have Perl on them, and do not have PHP on them.

So no-one wants to maintain KRegExpEditor which was a part of KDE 3 utils. So it was dropped out of KDE 4. Turns out the least hassle way for me to run a local regex tester is to:

1) install Wine
2) install Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable Package (x86)
3) install The Regex Coach from http://weitz.de/regex-coach/#install

gnome doesn't seem to have a regex buddy either. Yes, there are a ton of web sites that will do the work - but I don't really want to work like that.

Well, it is better than cranking up the xen virtual machine I have of Windows XP Home.... Cut and paste is far easier.

Today was GroupWise upgrade day. We upgraded 30 servers from version 7.foos.bars to 8.0.0 (+)*

It was almost a perfect. By 14:00 everything was done except the one WebAccess server. Turns out I pointed at the wrong (older) version of Tomcat during the re-install** and it took a while to figure it out. I had to ask a co-worker to find the problem, because I don't yet grok where all the Apache and Tomcat pieces live, especially since they move locations when you advance your OS to newer versions. This was an older OS with the new Tomcat, and I missed it.

The new WebAccess has AJAX-y goodness now, so when you scroll the mouse wheel, the web server fetches more data to display without a page reload. It's subtle, but much nicer. The web pages act a whole lot more like the fat client now.

The real star of the day is the Linux fat client. It *finally* looks and acts like the GW 7 Windows fat client. It's got the customizable home view, color codes based on category, implements custom tab views. I didn't see anything missing from the GW 7 Windows client, although I think that there was a least one feature that didn't make it. I think it was the DMS, which we don't use anyway.

It now has a Notify feature that can pop up when you get new mail. That's been in GW since version 4 (or before) so it's good that it finally made it.

The GW 8 Windows fat client did get some new features, but I haven't played with them yet. I was just happy my settings and custom applets worked as if nothing had changed. The best kinds of upgrades are the painless ones. ;-)

*I've got pre-release service pack code, so that I can test a bug we found a little while ago.

**This is the one component I wanted to rip and re-install, so that weren't any legacy pieces of code still getting loaded. If the thing were to ever flake out, I'd have that remorse of not doing it right the first time. So I spent a little more time today in hopes of less maintence problems tomorrow.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/01232009/news/politics/prez_zings_gop_foe_in_a_timulating_talk_151572.htm

Stop listening to folks that disagree with me and we'll get along fine. I won, therefore I get to implement what ever I want.

This sort of hubris is what the Left expected from Bush.

I have been looking into pistols for the last couple months. Since shooting with some men from church last November I have been researching and reading up on different pistols.

I've narrowed my search down to just a few guns:

- Glock 17L
- Glock 34
- Taurus 24/7 Pro Long Slide

They are all longer barreled pistols which in theory are more accurate, and all in the 9mm family for less recoil. I would mainly consider them to be for using for home defense and target practice. If I choose to carry at some point in the future I will look for something smaller and more concealable, and likely not consider a glock since because of the trigger safety.

From my research I have found that glocks are riskier to reload since the stock barrels are slightly oversized adding to the stress on the brass. But as I am just a noob and without any reloading equipment it isn't much of an issue. Additionally, shooting unjacketed lead bullets will foul the barrel of glocks because of the way the barrel is threaded. This shouldn't be much of an issue either as I'll likely be shooting jacketed rounds anyways.

I've read mixed reviews of the Taurus. It is hard to separate fact from general dislike. Taurus as a Brazillian company had lots of quality issues, but Taurus USA is supposed to have a much higher quality guns. It is hard to figure out if folks are just being "bigots" or if there is still valid concerns with the Taurus.

Well, the Mrs and I are batting .667*. Our second child is on the way and hopefully to arrive in July, Lord willing. Morning sickness has been much worse this time around (which all the old wives around tell us means it is going to be a girl). We have are really hoping for a girl, but we'll take what comes our way.

The little guy still is having speech issues and understanding speech, so we have had a hard time communicating that he is going to have a sibling in a few months. He has been in a group for children with speech issues since the beginning of the year, but in such short time we have not seen much success. He otherwise seems very intelligent and able to manipulate his surroundings, but speech still eludes him quite a bit.

* 3 months of trying, 2 pregnancies

http://townhall.com/columnists/CalThomas/2009/01/06/interview_with_president_bush_from_the_oval_office

This was a pretty interesting interview with President Bush. It fills out some of the his reasoning, whether you agree with it or not, of why he made certain choices and explains some of his thought process of why he worked at certain issues.

I have no idea if this link is persistant or not; but, at the moment it shows that Digg has surpassed Slashdot in the Netcraft toolbar ratings. Slashdot is the #513 most visited web site on the planet, and Digg is #512. Google is still #1.

At one time, Slashdot was ranked #25 world-wide by Netcraft.

It will have fallen to The Onion less than 30 ticks from now.

Of course, sites like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, YouTube, Engadget and Blogger bumped the 'dot out of the rankings by going after larger audiences. Although I don't know of anything that made it impossible for Taco and friends to cater to those people.

Other sites, like Weather.com, Foxsports, Wikipedia, Drudge Report, Woot, - they all blew past Slashdot - but they aren't really interactive content sites. They publish, you read. It's a different paradigm. The 'dot is all about community.

The fundamental question that is left: how long before Slashdot is less popular than I Can Has Cheezburger?

100 ticks and counting....

You Digg it?

So, a bunch of men from church got together Saturday to bitterly cling to God, guns, and religion. Since I haven't shot anything since my teen years I figured I'd go along and try out some various guns. I'm interested in picking up a handgun at the moment, since our president elect is likely to try to make getting them more difficult. My personal hunch is we'll see another "assault weapon" bill within the first few months, because scary looking weapons are bad. Then we'll see something for handguns, cause they only serve one purpose, which is to kill people. Finally, if it makes it that far, we'll see hunting weapons targeted.

There were two stations setup, a shotgun/skeet station and a rifle/handgun station. Before we split up one of the men explained the rules and safety pointers. Once we were familiarized with the rules we broke up into groups to head to the respective stations. I went to the rifle/handgun station as I've shot shotguns before and am in the market for a handgun. We were setup across a pond from the targets, at a range of about 50 yards. Certainly longer than I would consider for a handgun distance.

We pulled out the rifles first, which were only 22s. Because of the cold they were not loading well at all from the clips. It took some playing with before I got my first shot off, but I pinged the 4" target from about 50 yards. Of course that was beginners luck as I was only about 75% after that. I might consider picking up a 22 rifle at some point for my rabbit issues, but certainly not any time soon. Over all, very uninteresting.

The pastor's son brought a 9mm. It was about a 4 inch barrel, which seemed pretty short. I'm not sure if he has a CWW or not, but that seems to be more the size I'd expect for carrying. He put in the clip and shot off at the target 2' x 3'. I'm pretty sure he didn't hit the target once, and sunk a handful in the pond. One of the professors tried next. He was a bit more accurate, actually hitting the target a couple times. I loaded up a clip to try it out and put most of them at the foot of the target. The issue was that the sight was low, so I couldn't actually see the target when it would have been centered. I found it was pretty nice, with not a lot of recoil. But I'm not sure my wife would feel comfortable with it, but there are some things you can do for limiting the recoil. This was the gun I shot the most, as it is probably what I would be looking for as a hand gun. I might consider something with a longer barrel around the house, as I'm not sure that carrying about town is really a
concern.

The second handgun I tried was a 45. Thise one certainly had a bit more recoil, and definitely would no be suggested for the wife. It would take a lot of concentration to use this in a defensive situation and be able to hit your target even if they were not moving, at least for a second shot be be any accurate. The trigger on this one was very sensitive. The professor who tried this one accidently shot off twice while only intending one shot because of the recoil and light trigger.

I also tried out a 22 handgun, which was equally unintereting as the 22 rifle. I don't really see the purpose of a 22 handgun as you are not going to be shooting small game with it, nor using it defensively. So it seems more like a toy rather than a useful weapon. I suppose you could use it to put down a rabid racoon, but that seems kinda a niche use.

While I'm not a huge gun buff, I do figure I ought to exercise my right. First, living out in the country I don't expect a cop to be around to help. And relying on a neighbor who wouldn't be able to hear a yell in the first case is no help. I don't expect to ever even need a weapon around the home, but I don't ever expect to need a cell phone to call for a tow truck either, but we keep one around just in case. We even use it for calling other folks once in a while too. Just as I'm sure when we pick up a gun we'll shoot off a few rounds every now and then too.