stolen or broken computers

A friend of mine (Erik) recently had his computer stolen, and it reminded me of my general philosophy regarding broken or stolen computers. I'll express it here with regard to Erik's current situation, but it applies equally well to any broken computer or part (except for the junky part, unless you sell the broken computer to a junky on ebay and he fixes it up first and then sells it for drugs, or a new tie or something.)


So, on to Erik's computer:


I always find these things to be blessings in disguise.

It was time to upgrade already, but you would have procrastinated over it for months or even years. Now there's no procrastination, in fact it becomes imperative that he get a new computer, and Moore's Law guarantees it will be an upgrade. Erik wins!

Some poor junky who can't afford a computer gets a pretty decent (maybe beat up, and well used) computer until they sell it for drugs. Junky wins twice!

Everyone is happy.




--Christopher

Mice!

In a house somewhere, at this moment, there is a disease ridden mouse, nibbling on food, rendering it unfit for human consumption. That mouse is not this mouse. This mouse is dead. Passed on to my by a friend are the images of the last of the Mouse von Mousersons. The last of a noble family. Heffe von Mouserson was the adventurous type, ranging far and wide to provide for his many offspring. Unfortunately for Heffe von Mouserson, his adventures ended with a *snap*.

Urine Testing

To all the misguided folks out there who think urine testing is or should be compulsory:

You do not have to be drug tested to get a job. YOU are allowing them to take your freedom, and so they take it, and think they can just take mine too.

Just say NO, I will not be degraded and demeaned so that you can consume my soul in exchange for a bi-weekly paycheck.

Anyone who asks *me* to pee in order for me to work for them has seriously misjudged me. My only response can be, and has been, to leave the interview immediately, as I'm not interested in helping further the interests of a company who thinks they own their employees.

While I agree I do not want my pilot to be on heroin while he is flying my plane, drug testing has become far too commonplace. I do not care one whit if the guy at my insurance company gets high after work, or the kid at the hotel desk smokes a joint some weekend. It is none of my business, and it certainly is not company business either.

The current business stance on this subject can only end with workers who are no better off than slaves. When the company has that kind of control over the entire life of an employee, we can start calling ourselves "client employees" and re-institute collars and human branding. Down with slavery! Down with urine testing! Down with fascism and censorship!

--Christopher Maujean

PS. Free Luna!

Rake task for compiling LESS css stylesheets

desc "Compiles all .less files in app/stylesheets directory into the public/stylesheets directory of a Rails application"
task :less do

 require 'less'

 less_files = 'app/stylesheets/'
 destination = 'public/stylesheets/'
 stylesheets = Dir.entries(less_files)

 stylesheets.select{|s| File.extname(s) == ".less"}.each do |sheet|
    f = File.new("#{destination}#{File.basename(sheet, ".less")}.css", File::CREAT|File::TRUNC|File::RDWR, 0644)
      f.write Less::Engine.new(File.new(less_files + sheet)).to_css
 end
end

Hey Sister, can you spare some dead snake?

Submitted by my awesome sister Lelia.

Without further ado here it is:

Roadkill with a twist

Awesome!


see more Fail Blog

I am a special kind of idiot.

Perhaps the biggest idiots are those that know too much about a given subject.

I've been putting off my mac support call for over a month, because I wanted to clean out my HD before sending my precious laptop off to some untrustworthy den of hardware techs, where they might look at my pictures and laugh, or sic the RIAA on me, or something. Having finally cleaned this machine out, I made the initial support call to mac.

The nice mac technical support operative on the other end of the line didn't seem to think the issues I was having were hardware related. In fact, he felt that we should try some "basic operating system maintenance" things first, like emptying caches, resetting the bios, and fixing permissions on the disk.

This seems to have completely fixed my problems.

Yes, I used a linux machine, built on hardware from 10 years ago, for over a month, instead of my beautiful 2008 macbook, because I am a computer guy, and I know too much about computers to see the forest for the trees.

--Christopher

Another Seizure

If you subscribe to my twitter account, which I update once a month if I'm really on top of things, you might have seen that I had a seizure. It's true, and is my second one since I've lived in Oregon, and possibly up to my sixth one, if you count several unexplained "fainting" spells I had as a kid.

Anyway, here's how it went down:

I was sitting on my couch, programming. Salina and John were in the room talking. I felt a bit weird, kind of odd feelings in my stomach and chest, so I got up and tried to go for a short walk, got lost in the living room, as I started feeling a bit confused. Brandon, in the living room , gave me a weird look as if I was just standing there staring at him, which I realized, is what I was doing. I went back into my room, had the same odd feelings, tried to go for a walk again, made it to the living room again, and started to feel dizzy, so I went back to my room and sat down on the couch. Salina looked at me and said "Chris, what's wrong?". I replied "I'm feeling a little dizzy." then my eyes rolled back in my head and I stopped breathing. This is where everything went into a swirling checkerboard whirlpool. An indeterminate time later, both instantaneous and forever, I heard voices coming from nowhere, saying a random jumble of things, including what sounded like someone speaking to 911, and people timing things. I instinctively began giving commands, "Put me in recovery position!" and was told I was in recovery position by someone I realized was Salina. My sight and feeling began to come back and I realized that I had wet myself (a common seizure side effect) and that I was lying on my bedroom floor. I had Shalah and Salina loosen my clothes and remove my coat, boots and socks and wrist brace (did I mention I broke my wrist 3 weeks ago?) and cover me in a blanket, I just lay there in recovery position for some time, getting the strength to stand and go shower. After the shower, I talked to everyone about what had happened while I was gone, and learned that after I had said "I'm feeling a little dizzy" and such, John noticed my eyes roll back and got Salina's attention, and together, they got me on the floor into recovery position and I started breathing again. Brandon called 911, and Shalah was summoned from her cabin. For about 3 - 4 minutes, I lay there, stiff with my hands shaking, at which point I began regaining consciousness.

After some reading, I've realized I have an 80% chance of having another seizure. They seem, so far to be rather spread out, and I'm much more scared of the the side effects of the mainstream pharmacure solutions than I am of having a seizure. I get a good 2 minutes or more of warning with my aura (an aura is a set of warnings that a seizure is coming). The odd torso feelings, confusion, and dizziness are my aura, and may be simple partial seizures and basically the real beginning of the seizure. They give me enough conscious time to pull over if I'm driving, find a safe spot if I'm out in the woods or at home, or whatever, and warn whomever I'm with that I'm about to have a seizure, or at least that I'm dizzy. I wonder if 2 seizures is a reason to get a medalert bracelet? I don't want to be seen by the quacks I've witnessed in this area and could not afford them even if I did want my humours adjusted.

--Christopher

Atom Quote

Atom: Dad, do you want a bite of this sandwich?
Me: Nah, I'm not hungry.
Atom (incredulous): You don't want a bite of heaven?

Music Acquired Recently

Albums
Tricky - Knowle West Boy
Kultur Shock - We Came To Take Your Jobs Away
J.U.F. - Gogol Bordello vs. Tamir Muskat
Various - Electric Gypsyland 2
Gogol Bordello - Gypsy Punks
Gogol Bordello - Multi Kontra Culti
Balkan Beat Box - Balkan Beat Box
Balkan Beat Box - Nu Med

Tracks
Balkan Beat Box - Adir Adirimi (Nickodemus Remix)
The Sway Machinery (feat. Members of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Balkan - P'sach Lanu Sha'ar

I think I've become somewhat addicted to horns and accordion.

James Hurley House Concert

I went to Erik's last night and witnessed James Hurley play a "house concert" for a crowd of about 10. It was cool, the music was good. It was an intimate little concert, and unlike anything I've seen before. I even beat Erik and Brad at pool at The Breakroom (I won 2 games of cutthroat out of 3) after the concert and the following party. All in all, it was a very good evening of carousing, which culminated in a Number 8(2 carne asada tacos, beans and rice) at Muchas Gracias and a taxi ride back to Erik's house.

Now that I'm home, it's time to watch some new Doctor Who episodes and relax.

New theme blog

I've added a second blog to my stable, while this one will continue to be filled with the VERY random and infrequent odd post, tekfreek will delve into problems i'm solving, and how I'm solving them. Hopefully, one day I will have a wonderfully huge readership, and be super-geek-famous and shit. Who knows, but I'm sure I'll never be as awesomely cool as why.

Troll speak:
das right, dis da new blog: http://tekfreek.blogspot.com/

cmaujean@gmail.com

541-846-9092

541-499-5022

PO Box 133

Williams, OR 97544

Christopher Maujean

Experience

2004 – Present

Musician’s Friend - Medford, OR

Senior Programmer/Analyst

• Gathered requirements, designed, coded and maintained software in perl and ruby for a top 50 e-commerce retailer with 20+ front end servers. The software included: backend software for the website, and utilities for maintaining and auditing the various data flows to and from the web portion of the business.

• Lead large projects for implementing features including international sales capability and interfacing with internal and external services such as tax calculation software, address validation services, and Filemaker servers.

• Mentored and advised junior team members.

• Participated in design and code reviews for all projects from minor bug fixes to complete rewrites of various systems.

2002 – 2004

Self Employed - Eugene, OR

Freelance Web development and IT services

• Designed, coded and maintained client websites.

• Advised clients regarding hardware, software and networking choices.

• Purchased, built, installed and configured client workstations and servers.

• Worked with clients to keep business workstations safe by removing viruses and updating computers with the latest patches.

• Taught clients proper practices for keeping computers safer from attacks.

2001 – 2002

Premierelink Communications - Eugene, OR

IT Director/Lead Programmer/Sysadmin

• Managed several in-house and contract programmers on multiple concurrent projects.

• Managed multiple Linux based Apache+SSL, Bind, Sendmail, ColdFusion and PHP servers hosting over 250 clients.

• Prepared technical bids for, designed, and lead programming on multiple web applications for client and internal projects using ColdFusion, MySQL, perl, PHP, PostgreSQL, XML, HTML, JavaScript and other tools.

• Maintained company workstations and networks.

2000 – 2001

Qwil - Eugene, OR

Lead Programmer

• Built 500 million record database in PostgreSQL.

• Designed process and programs for efficient data mining.

• Built and managed Linux web and database server for a public records site.

1999 – 2000

Courtlink, Inc - Bellevue, WA

Lead Programmer

• Maintained and improved a 50,000-line Perl backend for a major public records oriented web application.

• Implemented proper programming process using CVS and Razor (a CVS front end)

• Mentored and advised junior programmers

1998 – 1999

HL Yoh (assigned to Microsoft) - Redmond, WA

Performance Tester

• Designed and implemented a performance-testing suite for Internet Explorer 4.01 service packs, and Internet Explorer 5.

• Designed a profiling plan for Internet Explorer Service Pack source code.

• Verified, tested and reported Internet Explorer performance issues and bugs as found by my testing suite or reported by consumers and other teams.

Skills

Programming

I am proficient with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Bash, SQL and PHP. I have had at least passing experience with Java, ECMA Script (JavaScript and ActionScript), AppleScript, Filemaker, ColdFusion MX, PowerBasic, C and others.

Operating Systems (user and admin)

OS X, many flavors of Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, PalmOS

RDBMS

MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite3, MS SQL Server, Filemaker 9

Network and Application Servers

Apache, Lighttpd, Mongrel, Sendmail, Jabber, Bind, IMAP/POP3, Subversion, ColdFusion MX, and many others.

Other

Code maintenance, Code optimization, process automation, build processes, software and system design, 3^rd party integration, data mining/munging/mashing and mangling, multitasking, learning new software and programming languages, and internet research.

Education

1980 – Present

Self-taught - Multiple locations

• All of the above

References available upon request.

Toronado Pub

What a cool place, good atmosphere, and the jukebox had some good music on it. Oh! Wait! did i mention FORTY BEERS ON TAP?!?!




here is their site: http://www.toronado.com/

Bloggin' from the MS Bloggers Lounge

I'm here at the Awesome Awesome MacWorld Expo, and its cool. Getting alot of good training on filemaker from John Mark Osborne of Database Pros. Currently, I'm writing this entry from the Microsoft Bloggers Lounge, so that they'll scan my badge and enter me in whatever giveaway they're running (thats the point of Conferences and Expos: FREE STUFF, right?)

Puppy!

I've gotten a dog. Yes, kind of amazing, given that I was never really a dog person before, but I've warmed up to them in the last few years, and decided I wanted one that was *mine*. Now I've got a little(gonna be huge) part Rottweiler, part Collie, part Mutt.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

This is a pretty cool number. stupid MPAA. Someone should revoke their right to claim sentience.

Configuring Apache 2 with mod_proxy and mongrel_rails on SuSe 9x

In the process of forcing helping a friend with his conversion from Coldfusion to Ruby on Rails, we had to get him set up with a way to run multiple rails apps from his hosting machine. Here is what I discovered when I investigated using Apache 2 and mod_proxy to host rails apps through mongrel_rails:

NOTE: the examples use su -, but I would recommend using sudo instead.

Apache 2 / mod_proxy

mod_proxy was already installed (with yast) and just needed some configuration:

1. su -
   
2. to file /etc/sysconfig/apache2, add:
   proxy proxy_ftp proxy_http proxy_connect
   to the APACHE_MODULES= line
   
   
3. create /etc/apache2/vhost.d/example.com.conf
   because apache isn't hosting any files, this is rather shorter than his apache/coldfusion vhost files
   
   

   
   <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerAdmin webmaster@example.com
      ServerName www.example.com
   
      # if not specified, the global error log is used
      ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/example.com-error_log
      CustomLog /var/log/apache2/example.com-access_log combined
   
      # Avoid open your server to proxying
      ProxyRequests Off
   
      # Let apache correctly rewrite redirect
      ProxyPass / http://hishostname.com:8000/
      ProxyPassReverse / http://hishostname.com:8000/
   
      # Let apache pass the original host not the ProxyPass one
      ProxyPreserveHost On
   
      # don't lose time with IP address lookups
      HostnameLookups Off
   
      # needed for named virtual hosts
      UseCanonicalName Off
   
      # configures the footer on server-generated documents
      ServerSignature On
   </VirtualHost>
   

   
   

mongrel_rails

1. su -
   
2. gem install mongrel -y
   
3. export your source from version control to a likely directory (preferably as a non root user)
   
4. cd to your base rails directory
   
5. type something along the following lines:
   
mongrel_rails start -e production -d -p 8000 -l log/mongrel.log -n 20

   

anyway, thats it man. its freakin magnificent.
except the SuSe part. Get a useable server, yast sucks.

--Christopher

LinkGrabber

I've finished a release of linkgrabber, you can go to links.boxgnome.com to see current output.

If you're on a channel linkgrabber lives on, you can ask for 'last' or 'channels' or 'help', by doing a /msg linkgrabber last|channels|help

Black Widow vs Hobo

We found a hobo spider in an old backpack, and I put it in the cage with my black widow. here's the video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4529105889870787216