return void;

today hit me like a ton of bricks. around 9.30am, my allergies started flaring up. my head split right open and my nose was runnin like it was in the olympics.

i went to the grocery store and some high-school broad forgot to include a bag of my sandwich stuff. so i went back to claim my goods. they told me to just go get what i paid for and bring it back. upon my return, they had thrown away my receipt, so i waited a good 10 minutes while they fished it out.

on my trip home, i was nearly in a car accident. some douchebag decided at 1604 and Gold Canyon that they wanted to get over at the exit ramp, IMMEDIATELY. i was driving about 45-50, in the far right lane, and about 10 yards behind a trailblazer that was exiting the highway. they ended up crossing over ~5 feet of solid white lines to get into the parking lot next to me. this meant that they dropped their speed to below 30, and were now driving perpendicular to me (and the rest of traffic for that matter). i slammed on my breaks, layed on my horn (the most important part) and swirved to the left to avoid them. BARELY missed em, but i ended up with coffee all over my floorboard.

i had half a mind to just pump the gas and hit the car, to teach the wanker not to mess with an 85 olds. but i figured if i did, i’d roll the suv (low car hitting a tall suv = rolled suv), and possibly kill someone. didn’t feel like having manslaughter over my shoulders. i also wanted to follow them into the parking lot and give them my “what-for”, but i didn’t want to add battery/assualt to that as well. so i let it be, as much as i wanted to punch a hole in their chest, i left them alone.

by time i got home, all i wanted to do was have a beer and pastrami sandwich, which i did. i watch narc (it finally finished downloading), and did some housework all night. i downloaded “samurai 7″ episode 2, and it was really neat. it hasn’t been licensed yet, so im going to watch all of it that i can.

time for bed.

so crystal and i drove to dallas this weekend to visit her uncle brian. man, that was a blast.

i left work at 4.30, and made it to austin by 7.30 (yes, i hit traffic in both cities). we left austin by 8, and made it to dallas by 11. since he lives out in the country, it took us an hour to get through dallas (to the east side), arriving there by midnight. it was fun finding our way around in pitch blackness with no roadsigns or city lights.

we woke up sat. morning around 8.30, and uncle brian was cooking breakfast. apparently its kinda unusual to eat cereal in the country. we spent a good portion of the mid-morning lounging around watching satallite tv. yes, that’s all you can get in the country. there is no such thing as broadband either.

around 3 we went to visit her chain-smoking grandma (im not insulting her, it’s just a very bad habit of hers). she just got a new house and we were curious to see the place. it was nice, she wanted to try and garden the place up, but lacks a green thumb. like her uncle said, you can’t go over without having to do a chore. she _tried_ to get me to trim the hedges, but i didn’t intend on doing that on my vacation.

that evening i learned to play texas hold’em. her grandma came over and we fixed spaghetti. uncle brian’s youngest (from the divorce, nicknamed bart simpson for a reason), crystal, gran, uncle brian and i all played a game of texas hold’em. i think we started out with something like $2000 (not backed by real money!). the chips were really nice (in fact, im bidding on a set right now). that game is incredibly fun.

i’ve been thinking about starting a poker night.

sunday we went fishing for 2 hours. uncle brian caught a fish in less than 5 minutes, and i hadn’t gotten a bite in over an hour. guess some people got it, and some don’t. we made plans to go back in october, this time we’re gonna take his boat out to one of the lakes in dallas (i think there are 4).

we left for austin/sa at 4pm, and arrived in austin at 8pm. i made it back to san antonio by 10 and was ready to zonk out. i can’t wait to do it again.

there’s a reason i run a non-standard, non-sucky webserver:

66.65.69.175 – - [12/Aug/2004:17:39:45 -0500] “GET /scripts/..%c1%1c../winnt/sys
tem32/cmd.exe?/c+dir HTTP/1.0″ 404 0 “” “”

this continued for quite some time. in fact, i count at least two dozen attempts from this guy today. being the curious cat that i am, i wanted to know more about this IP:

s1n@citadel ~ $ nmap 66.65.69.175

Starting nmap 3.55 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-08-12 21:55 CDT
Interesting ports on 66-65-69-175.nyc.rr.com (66.65.69.175):
(The 1645 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE
135/tcp filtered msrpc
136/tcp filtered profile
137/tcp filtered netbios-ns
138/tcp filtered netbios-dgm
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
593/tcp filtered http-rpc-epmap
1031/tcp open iad2
1521/tcp open oracle
1720/tcp filtered H.323/Q.931
1755/tcp open wms
2111/tcp open kx
3372/tcp open msdtc
6666/tcp open irc-serv
7007/tcp open afs3-bos

Nmap run completed — 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 12.600 seconds

ouch! notice the hostname. it’s a home computer in new york city using RoadRunner cable service (pretty obvious). the thing that tips it off is the fact that there’s an open irc-serv port and an open oracle port. the oracle port isn’t as big as the irc-serv is. its my conclusion that this machine has been owned. its a shame really.

i had something similar happen the other day, only with 66.142.232.218. this time, the machine doesn’t have as much open:

s1n@citadel ~ $ nmap 66.142.232.218

Starting nmap 3.55 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-08-12 22:01 CDT
Interesting ports on adsl-66-142-232-218.dsl.hstntx.swbell.net (66.142.232.218):
(The 1654 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE
135/tcp filtered msrpc
139/tcp filtered netbios-ssn
445/tcp filtered microsoft-ds
1025/tcp filtered NFS-or-IIS
1720/tcp filtered H.323/Q.931
5101/tcp open admdog

Nmap run completed — 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 11.259 seconds

i get these attempts to load up DLLs, cmd.exe, root.exe, you name it. i’ve seen em all. it sure is fun to watch though.

i’ve been testin out some software lately. today i installed fluxbox. it took about 5 minutes tops to compile the whole thing and install it. i have since switched to it. it may not be a permanent stay but i will be using it for the time being.

the thing i like about fluxbox is it’s the most stripped down a GUI can be. in fact, I don’t have to worry about the developers changing things on me because everything is controlled by a config file. one config file. i can add menu items, set the background, have docklet apps, everything you’d expect out of a modern desktop. only thing is, fluxbox is completely stripped down. in fact, fluxbox is a rewrite of the old blackbox. i used to use it when i was a sophmore in college, but switched to gnome for the eye candy. well the eye candy was starting to bring my machine to it’s knees. as of right now, i have about 50 times the available memory as i did with gnome.

i have also started to think about organizing my absurdly large music collection. i’ve checked out a couple applications to assist in the cleaning of the filenames and tags of all my music. i was going to write this myself, but someone has already beat me to it, so there’s no need. audiotagger is a VERY simple and clean CLI app. i am leaning towards this one as of now. however, easytag looks very promising, yet very complicated. i need to spend some more time with it to see if it’s easy to manage an entire collection, rather than a single track/album.

anyhoo, i need to go pack, we’re finally heading to dallas to visit crystal’s uncle. i’m really looking forward to this weekend. more on that as it develops.

based on the previous anger-post about gdesklets and it’s memory usage, i decided that perhaps it wasn’t just gdesklets, but gtk all-together.

in my quest to find a faster DE, i decided i’d try 2: fluxbox and xfce. fluxbox seemed to have some neat features like transparent objects (menus, mwindows, etc), but my search wasnt for the DE with the most eye candy (gnome seems to have beaten e16 nowadays), but rather the DE that was the quickest s.o.b. this side of the rio grande.

so i tried xfce4. gotta admit, i kinda like it. as a matter of fact, im diggin the simplicity of it all. it’s just as modern as you would expect a DE (no, its not like CDE), but it is VERY quick in everything it does. on top of that it seems to eat very little memory, as compared to its hungry friend gnome.

i want to take a screenie, but i neglected to install any kind of image editing software. so im emerging gimp (2.0.4) as we speak. yes the aforementioned problem may be in GTK+, but nothing, and i mean NOTHING, beats gimp at image editing. soon as that’s up and ready, i’ll post a screen.

speaking of which. i have a working website once more!! check it out, it’s the first time i’ve done an update on that badboy since 2002.

/me goes to bed

another sleepless night.

i spent way too long trying to get gdesklets to work right. well that wasn’t the hard part. the hard part was deciding on a setup. for whatever reason, most of the desklets have not been included with gentoo and i tend to shy away from something if it’s not in portage.

onto my grievence. i keep reading these posts by people on al kinds of sights defending scripting languages such as python for intensive desktop applications. gdesklets was written in python, using the PyGTK. after trying my best to find a setup that left me with at least 50% of my possible memory, i have come to the conclusion that python is NOT meant for the desktop. in fact, it sucks so much, i doubt i’ll ever learn it (unless forced to by an employer).

the average desklet would require 25-50M+ of memory, not counting the ungodly amounts of shared memroy.

gdesklets performance is deplorable. simply to avoid managing memory (lazy bastards), they chose to write a very cpu/memory intensive application solely in python. brilliant. i would like to thank the retards that cooked that idea up. i should NOT have to upgrade my hardware to use software. if your software sucks so much that it brings my machine to its knees, perhaps you should re-think your software. i don’t buy the old “update your hardware and the software will be fine” addage.

conclusion: i will NOT be using gdesklets. rather i will be using plain-old-fashion transparent panels in gnome instead. at least for now, gnome-panel was written in C. it’s a shame too, cause gdesklets is very pretty.

back to rethinking my desktop. i’ve been contemplating trying blackbox/fluxbox again. if i can minimalize the amount of memory required by the WM, maybe i can make room for the memhog.

ok so this weekend was relaxing. the car had the radiator replaced (as well as a few other things). it doesnt seem to be overheating…. yet.

we went to go look at cars, specifically, jettas. found a nice worlfsberg but i wasnt ready to buy it then and there. i took some pictures so i’ll provide a link for that when i finish doin the site thing.

speaking of which, i worked on a mirror of my site. cleaned it up bigtime. fixed the links, updated some of the content, added some content. im also thinkin of setting up a new webserver. im thinkin i want to use gentoo and here’s why. i’ve offered some free hosting space for friends and they seemed receptive of the idea. however, to maintain the machine and make sure it has the latest and greatest, i need a distro that can be better managed. debian sucks, so im once again lookin at gentoo. portage just plain owns.

so if you want some space, let me know. it may be a few weeks, but im working on some ideas as to how i can manage this. i want to keep using the sparcstation 5, but im not sure it has the processing power to manage many users simultaniously (170mhz). more on this as it develops.