return void;

Okay, so I haven’t posted lately mainly due to my monthly upgrade cycle started last weekend. Since then, I switched my desktop to running ~x86 portage tree. In the process, I found several things that help keep your system running smoothly.

First, make sure you regularly clear out the Gentoo clutter. Gentoo is highly optimized and customizable, yet tends to suffer from bloat if you regularly upgrade. I found a guide as to what can be deleted and what cannot. Just so you have an idea what can build up, I had 6 kernel source trees (~230MB each) and about 3 gigs worth of package downloads in /usr/portage/distfiles.

Then I found that after upgrading, my audio started sounding distorted. I have a Maestro 2e card, which works perfect with ALSA. The Linux kernel has built in support for ALSA (which I recommend over the alsa-driver). I read around the Gentoo forums that many people were having sound level conflicts. The good folks of Gentoo even made a fancy ALSA guide.

With this upgrade, Firefox was upped to 1.5.x. This version has greatly improved the memory leaking issues with 1.0.7. It even has this nice little feature to download the latest of my plugins and themes when it detects incompatibilities.

I have also upgrade to kernel version 2.6.15-gentoo-r1 (after a resync, there was r7 available). I haven’t rebooted but I doubt I’ll encounter any problems with this new branch.

I’ve also resolved to installing gnome again. Every so often, I get a desire to switch wallpapers, themes, window managers, or something. This time, I want to try out Gnome 2.12 before 2.14 hits. Apparently, there are many speed and memory improvements in Gnome 2.14, which will hit next week.

Lastly, I have decided to remove all of the cruft. Anything OSS (the sound system) related will get the boot, as well as Gribisi, TEG, Chromium, Ktorrent, and Globulation. I am also contemplating trying out Evolution (the desktop) D17, and XMMS2 (and associated client). I’ll make sure to post the details concerning my tests.

One last note, I will be upgrading this install of WordPress to version 2.0.2 to fix the XSS security problem sometime this weekend. I will have to make a note that none of the WordPress files can be edited from now on to make upgrades smoother and easier.

I was surfing over on Kotaku and I spotted this jewel. I am going on over to Gamespot immediate after work tomorrow and plunk down some cash for this pre-order. I’ve been anxiously awaiting this game and this is like icing on the cake.

Place your bets, call your shots, and give your local bookie a ring ~ its Oscar time. So in the spirit of making you the reader think I know more than I really do I am going to pick the winners for this year. Mind you, I haven’t seen a majority of these films, but I will try to offer brief explanation to my picks. With out much more to do…the nominees

Best Actor in a Leading Role

• Philip Seymour Hoffman Capote
• Terrence Howard Hustle & Flow
• Heath Ledger Brokeback Mountain
• Joaquin Phoenix Walk The Line
• David Strathairn Good Night, And Good Luck

Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been doing a fantastic job in a number of movies over the last few years.
He has gotten snubbed in the past and the judges know that he has, this year he is due, that is money.

Best Actress in a Leading Role

• Judi Dench Mrs. Henderson Presents
• Felicity Huffman Transamerica
• Keira Knightley Pride & Prejudice
• Charlize Theron North Country
• Reese Witherspoon Walk the Line

The Desperate Housewife isnt going to get it, and neither is the Monster Baller, Charlize Theron. This
year will go to the Legally Blond Reese Witherspoon for her role in the tale of Johnny Cash. *I have not seen
any of these movies thus far.

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

• George Clooney Syriana
• Matt Dillon Crash
• Paul Giamatti Cinderella Man
• Jake Gyllenhaal Brokeback Mountain
• William Hurt A History of Violence

Paul Giamatti chose a heck of a year to give a great performance in Sideways last year going up against Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, and Don Cheadle. He didn’t even get nominated, so this year he will taste the snub, Matt Dillon is my choice. He gave a heck of a performance in Crash playing the role of a seemingly racist LAPD officer, and has earned the statue. Hmm, so far I have given the Oscar darling of 2006, Brokeback Mountain a doughnut thus far, shall we continue…?

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

• Amy Adams Junebug
• Catherine Keener Capote
• Frances McDormand North Country
• Rachel Weisz The Constant Gardener
• Michelle Williams Brokeback Mountain

This is a complete roll of the dice, and well why not the Constant Gardener getting a little somethin’ somethin’?

Best Achievement in Directing

• George Clooney Good Night, and Good Luck.
• Paul Haggis Crash
• Ang Lee Brokeback Mountain
• Bennett Miller Capote
• Steven Spielberg Munich

Yup, Ang Lee is going to win this award for his work on Brokeback Mountain. For all the hype and
praise this movie has received I don’t see any other real competitor.

Movie of the Year

• Brokeback Mountain
• Capote
• Crash
• Good Night, and Good Luck.
• Munich

Oh, it hurts to do that because Crash really is a fantastic movie, and really is my *real* pick for the
winner, but I see the Broke machine leaving with one of the large awards it was nominated for. There seemed to be two major players with this one, Brokeback Mountain and Crash, both which have received hype as of late making it seem like a two film race. Wouldn’t it be funny if Good Night, and Good Luck won?

So there it is, let me know what you think if you comment before the awards start. If you post after, you can thank me for helping you make all that money with my predictions. Isn’t there some sort of percetage involved? ;-)

I haven’t felt persuaded to give props to a company for customer service for quite some time now. I have got to hand it to the New Balance DFW store in Frisco, you know how to take care of customers and make them a loyal customer.

About a month ago, early February, I had gone to the New Balance store to find a new pair of shoes to replace my worn out pair of 765s. After looking at the selection of shoes in several shoe stores I went to the official New Balance store and tried on a two pairs of shoes, one being the 766 (new version of the 765 I had), but I didn’t like its style as much as the 857s I tried out.

So after wearing these shoes for a short time, mainly at the gym and on week ends I noticed that the sole had started to peel off on the heel portion of the shoe. So I decided to see what would happen if I took it back and showed a representative what had happened.

I walked up to the cash-register, and started to show the sales associate what had happened. “Hmm, I haven’t seen this happen before” he said to me and swept them off the counter and headed to the back for a replacement pair. In a total of about five minutes I was able to walk in, show what happened and was given a replacement pair.

Props to you New Balance!

Seems someone has decided to attack hellkeep.

Some of you may have noticed that s1n.dyndns.org went down temporarily. The reason is because a botnet behind a NL domain launched a DOS attack against my dyndns address. This person port scanned me a handful of times and then sent many ICMP Destination Unreachable packets within a few seconds. Snort was able to prevent them from doing any harm, but since the attack was so fast and lasted too long, my router was effectively crippled for a while. I eventually noticed that the phone wasn’t working, my torrents had died and I could sporadically connect to an external DNS server. Shutdown the router for a few minutes, hoping the packets would eventually stop, and everything was back to normal.

Time to update my snort definitions and get my torrents back up and running.

Update: These attacks have begun again. There seems to be a break in the attack for the time being, but I expect them to continue. If this is the case, I will contact SBC and let them know as well as provide an IDS log. Expect rough waters.

Kotaku just hosted a big scavengar hunt to reward someone with a very coveted DS Lite straight from Japan (bear in mind, the PSP and DS are region-free). You can check out the contest rules here. I took the time, wasting a perfectly good hour and half finding all of the answers. Since the contest is over, here they are:

Clue One
Clue Two
Clue Three
Clue Four
Clue Five
Clue Six
Clue Seven
Clue Eight
Clue Nine
Clue Ten
Final Answer: Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan

I haven’t posted anything lately for two reasons: sunshine and I visited Austin for the weekend and I have recently started work on my graduate application process. While in Austin, I took the time to install a few usability plugins in the blog.

First, I installed a post view counter called WP-PostViews. You will notice right next to the comments link at the bottom of each post, there is a count for the number of times a post has been viewed. This count is not updated if a user is logged in, so these view counts are strictly for guests only.

Second, I just installed a spell checking plugin for the Write admin page. I chose not to make this available for comment posts because it accesses system resources and I want to limit who can access this feature. So far, it appears to be working fine. It did however point out a glaring problem: you can install aspell without installing a dictionary. To do so in gentoo, for English speaking users, emerge the aspell-en package.

Next, I installed a Google Sitemap generator. I don’t know how much more traffic this brings in versus running a site without it because I have not installed a web stats tracker. Before the shift, we were pulling about 15-18K hits a month. I’ll try to get some metrics on visitors at a later point in time (volunteers welcome).

Then, I installed a MasterWish plugin. MasterWish aims to tracks a user’s wishlist for any site or any product. Very ambitious but it seems to work with a lovely bookmark that snags everything off a page that it can. I found a bug in the plugin that refused to list the wishlist contents and reported it. Within 2 days, I received a response from the author that it had been corrected. You can check out the testing page here. I still think it should automatically show the list selected on the admin page, but I have to wait and see if the developer responds to that suggestion as well.

Then I tried to find something that would track my collection of media such as books, CDs, DVDs, and games. I stumbled across a plugin called Addictions, which seemed to more or less do just that. When I installed it and checked out the admin page, there was no lookup method. I had to enter all of the information manually. That basically renders the plugin useless. I discussed an idea with rainman about creating an application that performed automatic lookups and generated an RSS feed. Then a WordPress plugin could be written to consume this feed and present it on the user’s blog. Sadly, I haven’t found anything suitable yet.

I’ve also found a few neat new themes, but I doubt I’ll have time to installed them right now. Perhaps at a later time and date. For now, I must continue working on my statement of purpose.