return void;

So Trent Reznor decided to break with tradition and release a new Halo (presuming it’ll be a Halo) after only 2 years and 1 single since the last album. This time around, it’ll be called Year Zero to be released on April 17, 2007. It’s supposed to be a concept album and it is already generating more buzz than any Lost plot.

So for the first time ever, I think viral marketing actually worked on me. That’s right, I’ve sworn that marketing would never work on me but all of the buzz around the internet has made me desire this album even more than beforehand. This album sounds like either it has been planned for quite some time or Trent has employed an army of people to get the word out.

So here’s the deal. YearZero.com first revealed a couple clues, a sequence of numbers in the form of 24.xx.yy. Then people started finding related websites with similar clues. Eventually, YearZero.com released the video advertisement featuring The Presence, where people spotted “/0024″ in the white-noise film bands. That basically told everyone what the next album covert art would look like, since the filename is a dead give-away. Various other sites have cropped up following this post-apocalyptic theme. Here’s a nice description of the story so far:

The year is year zero. Most dates end with 0000 or something similar. When referring to the past, the years are in negatives. Example: Thirteen years prior to 0000 is listed as “-13 BA,” or “Born Again” (we think), as that would work with the negative sign before the year. It is now proven that year zero itself is actually year 2022, as indicated by the image located here (hint: look to the left of the first image, it’s slightly hard to see!). This makes the year 2007 actually become -15 BA.

- Parepin, found on the first discovered site, is a drug used in the water system and drinking supply of the general public. Its first use was said to combat all disease, though there has been no proof of it. The Administration added it to the drinking supply to both combat disease and reduce the risk of any kind of biological attack on the people; however, many citizens are reluctant to believe this. Discontinued use of the drug reveals clarity of thought, which the government claims is paranoia. Things are not as they seem.

- Opal is a new drug distributed commonly in liquid form. This is supposedly “the new crack,” as it is cheaper to distribute and more widely available. According to many underground news sources, this drug’s main distribution source is America itself. Opal is said to be a religious experience for many people. Also, many will remember a song called “Head Like a Hole (Opal),” eh?

Consolidated Mail Systems has a professional description of the drug. This implies that its name is “opal” because the color is distinct and black.
This sound clip details various things about the drug. People are arguing whether it’s Trent or not speaking at the beginning. Later in the file is a Colombian woman, which Triple_A has lovingly translated for us:

Colombian woman wrote:
when i was a girl things weren’t easy, but now it rains and rains. we haven’t even dried the coca leaves and then they left. they say its because of global warming. 2 years ago the river took my brothers house, it took my brother his wife, my nephew, and the baby girl. we found her covered with mud and when she dried out she resembled ashes. last year was difficult but the men who by the coca leaves told us to grow what we could. and we did it and they they took it. we waited and we waited and then finally they told us that they could not pay us. because nobody wants to by coca leaves. *baby crying in the background* (talking to it) shhhhhh… there there pretty girl. this year the rains returned and we could not grow anything. now the people say that nobody will buy the coca leaves, its not worth anything to anyone. in Bogotá they only want OPAL. they buy OPAL in the United States and they bring it to Bogotá… OPAL

- The Presence. You guys remember that old song “The Wretched” and how the singer says that “God himself will reach his arm through,” right? Welcome to reality. The Presence seems to be this gigantic arm pushing through the sky onto the ground. On various websites dealing with the new concept, it is stated that sightings of the Presence can be attributed to many different things, whether it be the new drugs Opal or Parepin, a quasi-religious experience, and many others.

Then there are about a dozen or so websites that have this look and feel and all seem to reference some over-looming government abuse of power, rebels, and some link between The Presence and the Parepin drug. It’s crazy like this and if you actually check out all of the sites, read all of the released material, and read between the lines by viewing the source files, you’ll find that this is probably one of the most interesting internet marketing campaigns ever.

So far, people have been busting out the spectrograph all over the place with the songs and the white noise in the teaser video (as can be found by the posts in the ETS forum). There was a clear effort to assemble all of these clues in the spaces outside of casual observation. My hat is off to Trent for his marvelous artistic work and I want to thank him for me wasting several hours looking and finding such clues in these spaces. Hell, I even called the phone numbers that have been found and try to solve the cryptograms that were found with the 24.xx.yy reference numbers. After playing with the numbers enough though, I’m starting to think that they are actually pre-YearZero dates that would be akin to using the negative BA dates. For example, 24.3.3 would be March 3, 2024. This is only a possibility, but until Trent gives us more details, it’s all speculation. The story has be speculating like crazy and I hope that he never really reveals everything so that there’s always going to be something to ponder.

You can follow the latest details by checking out this forum posting or the associated wiki. I will be pre-ordering this album the second it goes on sale.

I referred to an IT band injury earlier, but I never really explained what I was talking about. For those of you who are not runners, the IT Band, or Iliotibal Band, is this muscle on the outside of the knee that runs from the top half to lower half of the leg. Basically, when your legs are not properly aligned, this muscle will incur undue pressure and rub against the femur. This will be very painful and difficult to treat, but is very common.

It happened when I was out running around White Rock Lake. About 4 miles into it, my knee started to ache then sting. I wasn’t able to finish at my desired pace and had to hobble back. I iced it for a few days but on Tuesday, I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. I called an orthopedic doctor in my area and scheduled an appointment. He diagnosed it as I described it after taking some X-rays and tests. He said the cause was because my hips were not strong enough to support my stride. He then prescribed an anti-inflammatory and suggested physical therapy.

I had my first visit with the therapist last week. They applied several devices that caused various effects, such as electric stimulus or intense cold sensations, and then did some balancing and weight training. After 2 hours (initial session is long) my knee felt great.

Since then, I have been doing a lot of cross-training: cycling, rowing, stairs, elliptical, weights, and even walking. I have noticed that my thighs are getting even more muscular than before. I was already having to buy jeans a size larger than normal for the extra room in the legs, but if this keeps up I’ll have to get even larger pants! I’ve enjoyed the cross-training but am eager to get back to running. I’ve got another appointment with the physical therapist on Wednesday and depending on how they say I am, I might try a light 1-2 mile jog.

I hope to get back into my training because I have some races that I would like to be ready for.

Okay, I spent many hours trying to find the best way to organize and publish my photos through this site. Since I use WordPress fairly heavily, I’d love to use it as my content-management system for this as well.

I tried every plugin under the sun. I even contemplated writing my own plugin. But after some fiddling, I finally settled on fGallery. It’s actually a pretty decent plugin, but there were some issues to iron out with the lightbox engine. I should probably warn everyone from having two plugins with built-in lightbox support installed and enabled at once. They will work against each other and cause serious headaches for you.

So without further ado, you can now check out my photos on this page. Note that there is a link at the top of all pages with the rest of the page links. If you are interested in subscribing to the RSS for an album, I should warn you that I am still in the initial phases of adding all of my photographs, so it is likely that an album or an image will change names (you have been warned).

One other note: I added a page about my running. I am currently recovering from an IT band injury, so I have a little more free time and I figured I’d take advantage of the situation.

Since the release of Vista, it reminded me how much I really love Linux. Not just linux, but Gentoo and Gnome. So I’ve been dying to tell my tale of switching to the dark side of computing.

I was a freshman in college and I was getting frustrated with all of the problems of Windows. I was tired of Windows 2000 thinking it knew how to run itself better than I did. I wanted more control over the system. I wanted a more stable system. After so many blue-screens-of-death, you start to yearn for something that doesn’t need to be rebooted everyday. Unfortunately, I didn’t know enough about the computer world to know that I had options.

A friend of mine mentioned Linux in passing while talking over ICQ. Mind you, this was back in 2000 and ICQ hadn’t quite gone the way of the Dodo just yet at that point. I believe it was a week or two, but someone gave a presentation at the end of my Introduction to CS class about a ACM meeting. I decided to attend. I focused mostly on listening to what the older students were keen on. I wanted to be more in tune with the industry than I currently was so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Alas, it didn’t seem as interesting as I had hoped.

At this time as well, I used to play too much Quake3 Rocket-Arena. There was a crew of guys that I met regularly on the Texas Thunderdome servers, the Packet Kids. They were San Antonio area gamers who worked in the technology industry. I came to know these guys and eventually agreed to a mini-LAN party with them. They seemed to be relatively wise in their fields. The guy who introduced me to the group seemed the best at what he did.

Eventually, I expressed my desire to leave the Windows platform and move on to something that will better cater to my needs. They mentioned Linux. I had heard of it before, but only in a mocking manner with respect to XFree86. I remember thinking that the most hardcore thing I had ever heard of was compiling your OS, or “kernel.” I had never heard the term before, but it sounded frightful to want to compile anything like that myself. This group of guys installed RedHat 6.0 onto my machine. It was okay; did a lot of things I didn’t understand and seemed a bit flakier than Windows. After playing with it some, it was clear this Linux thing was what would teach me everything about computers that I’d want to know.

Installing RedHat 6.0 was like removing the veil from my eyes, as if I was blind before. Suddenly, my computer would do what I wanted even though I wasn’t sure what I wanted yet. It seemed like I had more direct interaction with the basic operating system than Windows. I eventually learned the difference between a shell and XFree86. I learned that ALSA was this project that provided mediocre sound drivers. I learned that Gnome was a window environment (still couldn’t tell window managers from XFree86, etc.) that had more polish and simplicity than its rival KDE which seemed to cater towards those wanting a Windows-like experience. I even learned that this “kernel” idea was all about.

Eventually, I grew tired with the limitations of RedHat and decided to try other distributions, such as Stormix, SUSE, Caldera, Trustix, Debian, Mandrake, OpenBSD, and eventually settled on Slackware. At the time, I was told that Slackware was Linux for the purists. That got my blood boiling because I wanted the hardest experience possible. I wanted my distribution to do the least amount of things for me. I spent about a year or so using and loving Slackware. I bounced over to one of the other distributions from time to time, but always came back to the Slack.

I grew tired of manually compiling and resolving every tiny issue with Slackware. I tried Dropline Gnome, but it broke my Gnome install on more than one occasion. Then a friend gave me a Gentoo 1.0pre LiveCD. I had never heard of LiveCDs, the concept of running an entire OS from a CD, especially a mini-CD, seemed alien and amazing to me. I rescued my Slackware install only to find out I wanted to try this thing called Gentoo. This friend told me about how you could turn on system-wide features for things, everything was compiled from scratch, and you could compile your system for the hardware it ran on. This was extremely appealing to me as it would give me unprecedented control over my computer.

One day I installed a Stage 1 Gentoo install and I remember thinking to myself, “wow, I must have been blind to use RedHat.” Ironic, but the first time I installed the OS from the command-line gave me a huge sense of power and control. It was as if I was commanding an army to cater to my every whim. After setting up the networking the hardware, downloading the portage snapsnot (still didn’t know what this was), and bootstrapping the system, I resigned that I would never again try a different distribution. Of coarse I was lying to myself, but I never left the Gentoo camp.

So in the course of one evening, the Packet Kids gave me the perfect nudge I needed into knowing everything about software, computers, and Linux that I could ever hope to garner from college. I became obsessed with learning. I would install distributions just for the hell of it. I even did a Linux From Scratch install once, back when it really was from scratch. I learned to compile my own kernels (still do on a fairly regular basis), I learned how to use the popular package management systems (rpm, deb, ebuild, tgz, ark), and I learned to read open source software and use it as a teaching tool. My life was forever changed with the install of RedHat and I cannot offer enough thanks to those responsible for enlightening my path to self-discovering.

I recently read an article written about whether Gentoo was fit for the server environment. As many of you may know, I am an avid Gentoo user myself and advocate its use whenever freedom is desired. So in response to this article, I’d like to make a point/counter-point assessment of the original author’s article.

Before I begin, let me mention that I have been using Gentoo since the 1.0 beta days. I had tried every other distribution and grew disgruntled with the package manager in every instance. Then a friend burned me a mini-cd of Gentoo, and I never looked back. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Debian insisting that I needed a mail server and a log rotator even though I knew that I did not want a mail server (sendmail was the default at the time). I was tired of RPMs not correctly updating my system, of having to build my own Slackware packages from scratch just to stay up to date, and of deb’s wanting to pull every possible application that might be used no matter how remote the possibility. I am by no means a newbie with Gentoo, I’ve done many things throughout the years that other distributions just cannot match (that doesn’t mean I haven’t had my fair share of troubles).

1. Gentoo is Time Consuming to Install
The liveCD comes with a graphical installer and the instructions can be followed from the command-line as well. I have done every install from stage1 on the terminal only (that means no X and no framebuffer). Check your documentation pall.

2. Gentoo is Even More Time Consuming to Install
This may be true. `emerge -uDp system && emerge -uDp world` is all that is needed, but if you’re running on old hardware that can barely handle Windows 2000, then it will take a long time to emerge everything (ignoring stage3 installs). Of course, you’re bringing this on yourself by compiling all of your software on a machine that can barely handle running the software, let alone compile it.

Then again, anyone with enough sense will know to install software from source while you are away from the machine. For my server and workstation at home, I do upgrades and installs at night or during the day (`at` is great to delay the emerge of something). Then again, you have less lee-way in the enterprise environment to do so.

3. Gentoo’s Stability Strategy: Update Everything
Nothing about Gentoo forces you to update, ever. Period. If you choose not to update either portage or the installed software, that is your choice. However, as a sysadmin, it would be wise to keep your eyes on profile updates as those occur for a reason. The last profile update I did was because the new Java management system that was implemented alongside gcc and binutils.

In fact, my server runs x86 and hasn’t sync’d portage in 2 or 3 months. I haven’t updated anything, but I have installed a few packages since. This is flat-out a misunderstanding of Gentoo.

“There is no ’stable’ version of Gentoo.”

This is flat out wrong and proves the author did little to no investigation on this. Check out the ACCEPT_KEYWORDS documentation to see how to run stable packages:

# Advanced Masking
# ================
# Gentoo is using a new masking system to allow for easier stability testing
# on packages. KEYWORDS are used in ebuilds to mask and unmask packages based
# on the platform they are set for. A special form has been added that
# indicates packages and revisions that are expected to work, but have not yet
# been approved for the stable set. ‘~arch’ is a superset of ‘arch’ which
# includes the unstable, in testing, packages. Users of the ‘x86′ architecture
# would add ‘~x86′ to ACCEPT_KEYWORDS to enable unstable/testing packages.
# ‘~ppc’, ‘~sparc’ are the unstable KEYWORDS for their respective platforms.
#
# Please note that this is not for development, alpha, beta, nor cvs release
# packages. “Broken” packages will not be added to testing and should not be
# requested to be added. Alternative routes are available to developers
# for experimental packages, and it is at their discretion to use them.
#
# DO NOT PUT ANYTHING BUT YOUR SPECIFIC ~ARCHITECTURE IN THE LIST.
# IF YOU ARE UNSURE OF YOUR ARCH, OR THE IMPLICATIONS, DO NOT MODIFY THIS.
#

Then there was this comment about the profiles that’s debatable:

A profile update will touch a very large number of configuration files, and it may even alter your startup process. Obviously this is not something you want to do to any server. It would be very difficult to verify that everything works as it used to afterwards, and you’d be fairly likely to end up with broken configuration files that may stop working the next time you reboot. This is in fact exactly what happened to me, despite a substantial time spent updating /etc files. The end result: the machine had to be resuscitated on-site with associated downtime.

Last I checked, dispatch.conf takes care of merging the changes you have made so that none of your configured servers are interfered with. Learn to love it because I’ve only hosed a file once and it was my own fault.

4. Gentoo’s Security Strategy: Update Everything
The author starts complaining that there is no official portaudit substitute, even though there is GLSA tools. I checked the FreeBSD ports database and found that portaudit is at version 0.5.11 at the time of writing. In fact, digging through some CVS logs, you’ll find that the Gentoo GLSA concept was first envisioned back in 2003, and glsa-check was initially checked into the gentoolkit module in March of 2004. However the FreeBSD tool only beat glsa-check by 2 months, being checked-in in January 2004. So FreeBSD can’t really claim to steal Gentoo’s thunder on that.

I particularly liked these two paragraphs for their ability to display the author’s lack of experience:

I firmly believe in updating server software only when you need to. If you don’t need new features, and things are working, why change anything? If you update anything you will doubtlessly need to update configuration files. You will need to fix things that break in the upgrade process. This is exactly what happened to me with Gentoo during its test year. I had nearly no idea of what I was updating as I ran the dreaded but most needed “emerge world” update. And once I was done I still no idea. I spent a long time working my way through updates in the /etc folder, using the built in ‘etc-update’ command. I tried to read the enormous emerge log file and take appropriate actions. And still things broke.

The best way to keep a system stable is to get it working and then not changing anything. This is hard with Gentoo. Gentoo wants you to change a lot of stuff. It wants to be bleeding edge.

First, use the -p option, which can be explained fairly well in the man page. You can also interactively emerge packages with the -a option so you can prevent certain packages from installing. This can be dangerous though, as some necessary dependencies will be skipped (if you don’t understand why that’s bad, you shouldn’t be a sysadmin). You can even mask out entire packages or even specific versions of packages.

The author never mentioned the wonder that is the overlay system, or the stage tarball concept. These features allow people to create highly customized installations that meet the exact need for everyone. Time is money, so invest some time and improve your bottom line.

At this point, it’s pretty clear this guy doesn’t maintain a large setup, probably one or two machines. In a real enterprise environment, you NEVER update software on a live server without thoroughly testing in a sandbox first. In fact, when I interned as a sysadmin, I was once told that installing anything without putting it through its paces on the sandbox machines first was a fire-able offense. This just makes sense. What you should do is bang on it left and right on the test environment. Then when everything is okay, make the same changes to an image backup on a separate drive and machine. Then make a swap and let it run on the new machine before re-imaging over the old machine. Hell, you don’t even need to dump the old drive; you could keep it in the event of system failure to fall back to a last known working system.

If that wasn’t enough, then I read this article today about this other nit-wit who claims to have given up on Linux (the OS, not the kernel) simply because StarOffice sucks (yeah, and everyone knows this) and Evolution doesn’t seem to work well with an Exchange server. News flash moron, these are closed specification systems. Without Microsoft’s assistance, open source developers are left to reverse-engineer the protocols. This leaves any proprietary format creator holding all of the cards and leaving the general public to play catch up. Bottom-line: don’t switch to Linux thinking that everything will work without a hitch from the start.

If you are a system administrator and don’t want to put in the time to manage any system, quit your job before you’re fired.