I went to www.fedoranews.org yesterday and found several helpful tutorials. I used the tutorial about fedora mirrors to modify my yum and up2date configuration to use different mirrors. I initially changed it to a mirror located at Miami University(Ohio) and had a problem with the released updates section. The error messages were very cryptic so I figured out the guilty party by guessing. I got it to work with mirrors in California and left it there. I tested it by installing the Flash-plugin.
Month: January 2004
Gay Marriage Poll Gets Annulled. The conservative American Family Association hoped an online poll would sway legislators against gay marriages, but a funny thing happened on the way to the altar. By Daniel Terdiman. [Wired News]
I cannot help but laugh at this. Gay activists have always been more passionate about this subject so it should be to no ones surprise that they found out and encouraged each other to participate in the poll. Oops! It was not exactly what the American Family Association expected and it makes them look foolish.
CSS Hacks (dithered.com)
“Because of the generally crappy CSS standards support in modern browsers, a number of techniques have been developed to hide CSS stylesheets, rules, and declarations from browsers that won't understand or will mis-interpret them, or to set different values to the same CSS property in different browsers in order to acheive the same appearance on all (or most) browsers. On these pages, I've collected a number of these techniques (usually called filters or hacks) and documented what browsers they work on. The W3C validator may reject code that appears to follow the letter of the emerging CSS3 standards. In such cases, I've assumed that the filter is valid CSS. In the summary tables, the background color of the CSS Version column indicates whether each filter passes the W3 validator or not (green = validates; red = doesn't) so that you can stick to filters that have been given this official seal of approval (I've removed all the obviously non-valid hacks to their own section).“
This is a nice link to have in your web developers toolbox.
RegExpr and Mailwasher
I finally got around to working on a RegExpr for my mailing lists in Mailwasher. I am averaging about 150 pieces mail a day and 80% is spam. The problem is that I am not consistent on my filtering and some mail is getting deleted. For some of the mailing lists I put them in my whitelist. For the rest I filter on the 'To', 'From', or 'Subject' fields using the contains operator. The contains operator is okay but I use up a rule for every mailing list and each filter is limited to ten rules. I could create more filters but I like to see the summary count of my mailing list mail in the mail statistics. Using RegExpr for some of this filtering seems like a better idea. To help me get it right I downloaded RegCoach and opened my Programming Perl book. The biggest problem was to escape the metacharacters(e.g. [ ] .). My initial testing showed the new rules to be working but I will continue to tweak and start disabling entries in the friends list.
Parrot's Kick Ass. I didn't know parrots could live to be this old. I just hope that if I make it to 104,… [IMAO]
This is way too funny! Winston Churchill's parrot is the oldest living bird in England and Winston taught it to cuss at Hitler and the Nazi's. Although the bird is called Charlie she is a female.
Individual versus Team sports
We had an interesting conversation at the dinner table tonight. I asked my son what his wrestling partner needed to do to improve. My wife broke in and said he needed to change wrestling partners if he wanted to improve. That surprised me! She saw her first wrestling match a week ago. She then gave us a lecture on why he should pick a heavier partner but not to heavy. She had some interesting points but there is no reason to rush into major changes. This is his first season. Watching my son wrestle and play hockey has been an enlightning experience for me. Naturally I enjoyed wrestling because I was good at it. A less obvious reason was that I was responsible for winning or losing. Recently I have heard several people echo the same comment on responsibility. A loss in a team sport leaves you with fuzzy feelings about responsibility. I think my son has begun to to enjoy wrestling for the same reasons. He enjoys winning. He enjoys being responsible. The success he has had at wrestling has giving him a lot of self confidence in his ability to check the bigger guys in hockey. I think I see the benefits of a team sport much better than when I was growing up. The teamwork required on a sports team is very similar to that required in the business world. The process on humbling yourself to the team's needs develops great character and great teams. I wish I knew this when I was in high school.
WWJD and John Kitna
At the 5th and 6th grade celebration the small group discussion was about what does WWJD really mean? I was surprised to find that this was a much harder subject for the kids to talk about. They answered the small group questions easily but the discussion between the leaders and the kids quickly lost its focus. Later when I was reviewing the night with a couple of the leaders I mentioned that Jon Kitna wears a WWJD bracelet. Jon Kitna is the quarterback for the Cincinnati Bengals. I can imagine that the pressure on a professional quarterback by the media and his teamates to deliver wins is tremendous. Life is probably pretty confusing and lonely for a professional quarterback. Sometimes the difference between being a hero or a goat hinges on one play. In a week most people will have forgotten the play and the game. I believe Jon wears the bracelet to remind himself who he is and what his goals in life are. I cannot help but think that the bracelet helps him get his feet back on the ground and be the man he always has been and always will be. The key to being a great player and person is to humble yourself to the game, your opponents, the coaches, and your teammates. It is not about doing less but about doing more by focusing on the good things in the game and life. Humbleness allows you to see the world clearer and make the right decisions. The key to unlock the humbleness inside us is to imagine what Jesus would do. I think this works for Jon both on the field and off.
Nessus scanning
I ran a vulnerability scan on my local network using Nessus after reading a nice How-To article I found on SecurityFocus. The scan took a pretty long time but it did not crash anything. The scan did not show any major vulnerabilities but I have a couple of items I need to research. Oh well!
I have been spread thin the last couple of days. I have been trying to finish up the annual and quarterly employer reports and W2s. Its not a hard job but I had to squeeze it in between videoing horses, juggling bank accounts, holding horses for the farrier, and going to my son's wrestling match. The good news is that I was able to file all of the state reports online. The last report to finally make the cut was the school district tax report. That is much easier for me and I am sure it must be much easier for the state. Tommorrow should be a little easier. I plan on finishing up the reports, W2s, and 1099s for Habitat.
Living in a barn
Our house is actually a combination house and barn. This can be really convenient if taking care of horses is a high priority in your life. It does have its drawbacks though. Around the evening feeding time my wife came upstairs to take a shower and watch Oprah and the news before dinner. Then she started screaming, “There is no hot water!” I was sent off to investigate. The water heater sounded like it was heating and the washing machine was not running. Then I found the culprit. The girls had used the hot water to fill the water buckets for the horses.