Matthew's Weblog

It appears that gift cards are not as good a gift as some people think, with expirations and fees running amok. California has some protections for retail-offered cards, but the credit card companies haven’t the same restrictions…

If you really want a gift accepted at all stores, remember, cash never expires!

So the problems with the patent office aren’t going away without a lot of people yelling louder and Congress finally listening… but at least IEEE is trying to make reasonable suggestions to fix the process. The more professional organizations that take a stand, the better.

Family DVDs

• White Christmas Collector’s Edition
• Indiana Jones trilogy
• Amadeus (original release preferred; director’s cut O.K.)
• Toy Story
• Toy Story 2

Kids DVDs

• Beauty & the Beast
• Little Mermaid
• Alice in Wonderland
• Herbie the Love Bug DVD set (4-film set)
• Mulan
• Star Wars Episode 1

Allyndreth

• toy horse(s)
• touch-and-feel books
• Spot the Dog series of books (she already has “Where’s Spot,” “Spot’s Birthday Party” and “Spot Goes to the Beach”)
• mittens
• gardening gloves
• bike helmet
• backpack

Tyrian

• a red motorcycle and a blue motorcycle (his phrasing, so I guess the colors are important)
• anything Spiderman
• age-appropriate board games (whatever looks cool to you. He’s really into game playing, like his Daddy. Please, no Candyland)
• remote control boat (to drive on the pool)
• “Star Wars Episode 1 -The Phantom Menace” DVD
• Star Wars figures (original characters? Don’t know if they make them anymore)
• bicycle
• rollerblades and protective gear

Christina

• Theater tickets
• Black metal frames from American Frame
• Plexiglass for framing posters
• Pioneer 12X12 Scrapbook and extra pages (from Michael’s)
• Cuisinart Food Processor

Matthew

1. Theater tickets
2. RF universal Remote Control with IR repeaters
3. 4-channel TV Modulator (optimal , or just fine )
4. Stereo with 5.1 channel input/output and 2+ zones if possible (home theater and porch), ideally with radio built in… kind of like this but not necessarily with the dvd player. Please realize I haven’t done any serious research and don’t know about whether home theater stuff ever comes with a second speaker output…
5. Black metal frames from American Frame
6. Books (titles still TBD, sorry… I’m thinking…)
   1. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
7. DirecTivo (after we get the DirecTV installed)

Matt’s links are for product reference, probably more expensive than elsewhere so don’t just grab the default…

Green power from Green Mountain got a great writeup from the Houston Chronicle about how it was now about the same price as the non-green (gas and coal plant) electricity. The change is – literally – in the wind.

Unfortunately, Green Mountain has had to stop providing power to individual California consumer households because of the whole deregulation mess and political fallout from the power issues. So I can’t buy it. Grrrr.

Guess I’ll have to be a bit more independent, then.

People still sound surprised when they find out users write down passwords, and yet they neglect to mention specific possible solutions in the discussions. It bothers me that corporations are being bullied into useless solutions such as changing passwords every N days that could be addressed with a bit more thought.

Nothing new, just a rant…

I’m glad that the military is pushing wearables because I’m very interested in getting them for myself… and someone has to bear the R&D costs. It’s good to know at least some of my tax dollars are going to something I support…

from the old FAQ:
How do I disable the rule that forbids portforwarding on port 81?

You will need to do two things to avoid port conflicts.

First choose a new port that you want to let the IPCop interface listen on. Do not choose 8080, 800 or 80 as squid is listening on 800 and if you have DansGuardian installed, it listens on 8080 and port 80 is used by webservers.

You need to edit the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file, search for all instances of 81 and replace with your new port. Once you have done that, save your work and we need to restart the web server with the following command:
killall httpd
httpd -DSSL

Next we need to adjust the port forward page to allow you to forward port 81, but restrict a forward on your new port.

Edit /home/httpd/cgi-bin/portfw.cgi

Find line that looks like this:

my @tcp_reserved = (81,222,445);

Change the 81 to the port number that you previously chose.
Save the changes.

You can now port forward on port 81.

[ ] 1.1 [ ]1.2 [x]1.3 Version 1.3 only

Here’s a good description of intelligent infrastructure – they’ve defined it clearly, and that’s been one of my major problems with the whole autonomic computing baloney. The interesting part is that with a focus on these characteristics, any process (programming group, ops group, etc) could really gain perspective on the existing systems. The differing vantage of each point they bring up should allow some triangulation on where systems ought to be…

Hmmm. Something to try out…

Very cool tech here… projectors instead of screens. However, check out the last bit of info in the article – this is a fellow thinking beyond today. Seeing how RFIDs, projectors, and expiring goods all tie together? That’s more than your average techie at work. Give that man a cookie!

Stuff I’m investigating beyond Debian Woody:

Debian Sarge

Ubuntu is a new Linux distribution that brings together the extraordinary breadth of Debian with a fast and easy install, regular releases (every six months), a tight selection of excellent packages installed by default and a commitment to security updates with 18 months of security and technical support for every release.

Progeny Debian 2.0 Developer Edition aims to provide an unmatched “out of the box” environment for software developers building applications for the Java, Mono/.NET and LAMP platforms.