FreeBSD
Home of FreeBSD

Synnack
Home of musician and Linux God Clint Sands noise project
Mono-Chome
Indie-Electro side project of Clint Sand and Victoria Lloyd
Sector 9 Studios
Home of Sector 9 Studios
Parallel Project
A side project of Negative Format
Negative Format
Project of the master producer Alex Matheu

Sorry, it was pointed out earlier that commenting was broken on this thing [blog]. I think I have it fixed. Im actually trying to clean up the code behind the site, so there are bound to be some more issues here and there.

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For the last two years, I've been going to the same Dunkin Donuts every few mornings to get a medium coffee. I've been a regular there so long that I don't even need to order my coffee, its just ready when I walk in.

This morning however, I walked in, said hello to the people behind the counter, grabbed my coffee, and realized my wallet was at home.

The dude behind the counter, I don't know his real name but his name tag says Bob, said "Don't worry about it, pay for it next time."

It really was a small gesture, I'm sure in the tip jar alone I've paid for 10 free coffees, but it caught me off guard. The worry of having to run home to get my wallet and the slight embarrassment I was feeling immediately washed away with his words.

I really do walk around waiting for people to be rude or ignorant, but every once in awhile its nice to get slapped upside the head with a small act of kindness.

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Just wanted to make a post to remind myself NEVER to buy another Abit motherboard.

Sure the peripherals they usually throw on the boards are pretty good, and I really haven't had a catastrophic motherboard event yet. But you better hope that the motherboard you purchase never needs any updates or you will visit the world of hurt that is Abits 1980 technology.

First off, the website Slow Site is horrendously slow and tedious to navigate. Through some sheer luck I was able to finally find my motherboards page which included what I was looking for, a new BIOS update. I tried to use the search field on their site only to find that the results are only related to marketing material on the site. Nice.

I've owned many a pc in my life time, and around 1998 there was this really kick ass movement of upgradeable flash Bios's that hit the market which did NOT require you to be in a DOS prompt. Apparently getting clicking around and getting lost in Abits website put me in a time rip and sent me back to the early 90s. Take a look at these instructions, keep in mind my motherboard is less then a year old.

Are you F***IN kidding me? I have to boot my PC into DOS to flash my BIOS? Let me share with you the pain I went through because I had to boot to GODDAMN DOS to flash my BIOS.

First, I don't have a floppy installed anymore, WHO DOES! So I started thinking around actually booting off a floppy. Somehow I needed to get to the command prompt with USB support. I started to realize that the effort to put together a DOS boot disk with USB support was probably going to be more then the effort of digging out an old floppy drive and getting it hooked up. So thats what I did, blew off the dust from a crusty old floppy and installed it into my desktop. In the future I will give one of these methods a try bootdisk, because trust me, as you read below my decision delivered successive blows to my face so rapidly I couldn't even get my hands up to block, in fact, Im not even convinced I was being punched, I think I was actually hitting my face against the proverbial fists of my bad decision.

The first challenge was finding some old floppies I could use. I recently went through my old computer boxes and chucked out a TON of old parts, thank god for some reason I felt nostalgic about my floppies.

With floppy installed, I formatted a boot disk and downloaded the zip package of BIOS updates. Now mind you, this is the middle of the afternoon and I am also working on a Perl project from home. This means my concentration level for this task kept getting overwritten with other priorities. However, I was pretty confident about what I was doing, Ive done this before many times, its just been about 10 years since Ive had to.

The floppy from XP finished formatting and then I noticed something really aggravating, the disk space left after XP does what it needs to make a floppy is about 500k, the .bin file alone from the flash is over 100k. Thats right, I'm already out of space.

I grab another floppy and decide to just copy the entire folder containing all the flash files onto the floppy. I boot into DOS, swap out disks and run the flash utility, I get another nice surprise. Apparently the flash utility can only run off the root of the disk and the files cannot reside in a folder. At this point Im slapping myself.

I boot back into windows, copy the files to the root of the drive and finally get this pig flashed up. Thats where round two kicks in and the slaps turn to full contact fisticuffs. But I'll save that for my next post.

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I was bored and decided to create a little monster for myself. I really have no idea why I decided to do this but he was fun none the less.

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I took Christina to see Cloverfield last night. I hated it. Im not going to spoil the movie or anything in this post, however, I do have a rant. I was ready to walk out of the theater within the first two minutes once I realized that the entire movie was going to be shot using the "Personal Mini cam" a.k.a "The Blair Witch" technique.

The idea and execution in the movie was decent, and once in awhile you dont mind shutting down and letting Hollywood take over. But for the love of god, can we end this phenomenon of chaotic filming from a small camera technique. Im not interested in watching an unfocused and blurry screen while actors run from danger. And stop trying to make me buy into the ridiculous notion that in the face of such catastrophe some douche bag is going to worry about keeping his mini-cam going.

Movies like this are best left as rentals, where you aren't watching a giant screen of unfocused and chaotic crap. Its easier to watch when you are sitting back on a smaller television screen and you can take the whole thing into focus. I left the theater with a total headache from the visuals and shitty acting.

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I have been on a mission lately to get rid of the clutter I own. Apparently fate agrees with me on this decision and has helped me along by breaking various things that I didn't realize were clutter until they were broken. Case in point, an old PC I was keeping around.

I recently upgraded my XP box to better handle some games that I'm playing. I decided to go with a complete upgrade instead of opening up some upgrade paths with a new motherboard. So the old PC became a spare which I reformatted to use Ubuntu. Im not a huge Linux fan, but most of the other developers at work are using Ubuntu so our IT department actually supports it. I decided to get up to speed on it at home so I wasn't so green at work.

As fate dictated, that older PC recently decided to die. I spent a few weeks attempting to cannibalize parts from other PCs to keep it alive, including efforts from my good friend Greg who sent me one of his old desktops. Eventually, I realized the effort was futile and I scrapped the whole thing. This turned out to be quite an epiphany, for some reason I was running two desktops under my desk in hopes to extend the investment of the spare PC. I guess my logic was that even if I could squeeze another couple of years running Ubuntu I could justify the upgrade. Not realizing of course that this philosophy was just adding to the clutter.

I was however able to dig out an old Dell D600 laptop I had laying around, and after some futzing with display settings I'm now using it as my Ubuntu machine. And of course, the foot print is a lot smaller. I wish the laptop had a little more juice behind it, especially in the video department, but for now Im just happy to have another piece of the clutter puzzle figured out.

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I hope everyone had lovely holidays. Christina and I observe the gift giving aspects of Christmas and not much else, in fact we often cant even wait until Christmas morning to exchange our gifts. This year she got me some very nice paint brushes and a complete set of paint colors for my newest hobby. I have taken up the passion of painting miniature figurines. I love the meticulous detail that can be achieved in such a small space. There are technical aspects to layering and blending that are easy in theory but hard in practice, and that aspect of this hobby has me hooked. Painting such a small space requires some amount of controlled breathing as you don't want to move an arm accidentally as you place some paint just as you breathe. The whole experience put me in a very Zen state.

I got quite a bit of time this week to paint as I had 5 straight days off. I was able to complete a mini for Christina and start another mini which I forced myself to layer and blend slowly. Its a learning process and Im enjoying the journey so far.

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This weekend I had the chance to help automate a task for a friend. He was faced with the challenge of parsing user information in the form of individual XML files derived from passing the user names and aliases to a binary file. Why the vendor supplied this as a valid method for extracting important user information is beyond me, but our options were use the slow GUI or a gimped form of getting horrid output.

The situation was compounded by the fact that there were over 2000 users that we needed to mine for the data. We needed to come up with an easy way for helpdesk techies to search for a user alias and end up with a PIN. All we needed out of these XML files were username, alias and PIN; such a hassle for a small amount of information.

Our first step was to get all the XML files per user. My friend had a convenient excel spreadsheet already containing the users name and OU they belonged to. Since there was a short delivery time we decided to go with a complete VBscript / HTA solution. I first created a VBscript that would read the excel spreadsheet and for each user, pass the necessary arguments to the vendor supplied binary. This worked perfectly and generated the expected XML files, there were some issues where users in the spreadsheet were no longer with the company, but this only created empty XML files which we were able to address later on with the solution.

Now that we had each user represented with by an XML file, I created a VBscript to parse each file and generate a CSV file that contained username, alias and pin. We now minimally had a CTRL-F function of searching if we wanted, and I had saved my friend hours of work and headache, but I took it a little further. The last step was to create a nice front end for the helpdesk techies to make searching easy. I used HTA and created a little application that would open the CSV file and search line by line matching each result and displaying the matched names and pins.

The end result was a nice simple scripted solution for the backend guys that allowed them to control tasking of the vendors application. They were able to only parse the names they needed at the time based on what user names they left in an excel spreadsheet. They were then able to provide their helpdesk techies the CSV file and an HTA to easily search that CSV file for matches.

Besides the pride in a job well done, my friend decided to reward me with a Founders subscription to Hellgate:London! An unexpected but much appreciated thank you.

Thanks G.

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Last week I had the unfortunate displeasure of going to the Eagles vs Bears football game. I don't often talk about my love for football, but for some reason it's a passion that I indulge in to the fullest. I am a devote Bears fan for reasons that will probably be discussed in a later blog, the story is actually interesting as Ive never lived near Chicago for more then 7 months. However, location complexities aside, I am a die hard Bears fan. I have hats, jerseys, shirts and even line my cube with random Bears paraphernalia. So one could imagine the joy of getting to see "my" Team play live. Here's the catch, I live near Philadelphia.

I decided, despite warnings, to wear a Bears hat and a Bears shirt to the game. I chose not to wear a jersey in case I had to "tussle" with some locals, I didn't want to ruin something expensive. Admittedly by these decisions, I expected some sort of trouble. But actually thinking about it and having it happen to you are totally different things. I guess in hindsight some of the negative encounters were my fault. I should not have walked around the tailgater's as much as I was, but I had a few outstanding invites from friends that were Eagles fans and tailgating.

The name calling and heckling was expected, but the day took a turn for the worst when some very drunk 20 somethings decided to throw food and beer cans at me. When I turned around to confront them I held my hands out as if to say "come on then", but of course, at that point it was just about name calling and heckling me. Needless to say the cowardliness of the situation put me into a state that I could no longer enjoy the game. I was so frustrated that I was afraid any other negative encounter like that would result in me getting either arrested or hospitalized.

I decided at that point to remove my Bears shirt and put my hat in my pocket. I didn't do this because I was afraid of the retribution I might receive celebrating my team, I did this because I spent a ridiculous amount of money off of scalp-hub for the tickets and I wanted to watch the game. If I wanted to pick a fight with an Eagles fan I could do that anywhere, anytime.

So I sat in my nose bleeds watching a mediocre game, cheering when I should cheer but not being obnoxious about it. At the end, the Bears delivered a gut shot to the Eagles fans when a touchdown secured the Bears victory within the last :09 seconds of the game. The collective sighs from the chests and hearts of Eagles fans filled me with rejuvenating glee as I raised my arms in victory.

I wont visit "The Linc" again, you Eagles fans can have your stadium and your tailgating. After all, what else do you have to look forward to.

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One of the main reasons I started this blog was so that I could stop paying attention to my livejournal account. In my opinion this social networking thing has gone a little too far and unfortunately livejournal is caught in the crossfire. Don't get me wrong, I think there is still some valuable content being passed around the various members and groups of livejournal, but I want to slowly remove myself from the social networking sites.

This is a harder decision then it would appear on the surface. At first the idea of joining something to see how many people I could muster under my friends lists was fun. It started with friendster and ended with myspace, I have yet to sign up for facebook, I doubt I will. But the excitement eventually faded until a new value of long lost friends or contacts who were able to locate me started to make social networking exciting again.

What I have recently discovered is, despite the ease of reconnection and the immediate onslaught of catching up, there really isn't much substance beyond "Hey, hows life?". So now the personal value of social networking has again plummeted and I would prefer at this point to let that fire smolder and die.

So along with the desire to sharpen my PHP skills and have a web project that I can constantly tweak, I've decided to part ways with friends lists and focus on something a little more personal and expressive.

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