Updates and such

Hope everyone had a (insert general non-demoninational seasonal well-wishing here) or if you're not anal, a "Merry Christmas" or "Hanukkah". Did you know this was only the 4th time in the last one hundred years that Christmas and the start of Hanukkah fell on the same day? Neat stuff.

I don't feel like getting into a long rant here, so I'll just post some stuff up.

NASA's Stardust comes home on the 15th after a 6 year mission. This will be great stuff if it lands ok. Good luck!

Students turn MIT into a giant Mario World level. One of the best hacks yet...=)

Anime fans! Japan and U.S. look to share the same region encoding for Blu-Ray. Now all of of the anime in Japan will work in your U.S. Blu-Ray player legally!

I gained a rank (67 out of 1,500) and broke 1,400 in Folding@Home. We're set to overtake Overclockers Australia sometime tomorrow. For The [H]orde!

If you are not folding, you need to now.

Oh, and if any of you know cheap places to get plane tickets to say, Stockholm, I need to know. June 14th-30th.
I took some pictures out in Western PA and West VA over the Christmas break, look for those later.

No randomness here.

There is a really good post up here regarding the things we as sysadmins see on a daily basis. All that is up there is 100% true.
But that’s not what I am here to post about.
What caught my eye was the title for his page. Two keywords caught my eye: “Inane” and “ramblings”. Let’s take a look at this:
If we do a dictionary lookup (Ever used the dictionary built into Microsoft Word? Bet you guys didn’t even know it was there…Go to Tools -> Research and select the dictionary from the drop down menu in the bar that appears on the right side. Goodness…=) on “inane”, this is what we get:
in·ane

• silly or unintelligent


• having little sense or importance


• insubstantial


• empty, insubstantial, or void

Is his work really inane? I thought there seemed to be a great deal of wisdom behind his latest piece. Surely he cannot feel that his own writings are insubstantial or empty, otherwise, why write them?
How about “ramblings”
ram·bling

• not to the point


• continuing for too long and with many changes of subject

A short paragraph brings the reader into his top ten list, of which every item precisely on point with the title of the piece. Again, rambling doesn’t fit.
You’re probably wondering what I’m getting at. Granted, I haven’t looked at all of his writing, but I’m pretty sure that “inane” and “rambling” don’t describe most of them. (I’ll give some leeway to “ramble”.)
There’s another word, “random” which isn’t mentioned but I think is almost definitely implied. How many people use “random” when describing their blog or journal? Or anything they say at all?
     We learn in cryptography that true randomness is very hard to find. Even in the most complex of systems with millions of possible outcomes, it is still possible to derive a formula or statistical analysis and give some sort of weighted odd as to what will appear next. Unless your subject matter is chosen from a field of all possible subject matter in the universe, assigned a unique identifier which is matched to the pattern at which atoms undergo radioactive decay, your topic isn’t truly random.
     But we don’t need to go that far. A little quick thinking can explain that we choose topics and say the things we do based on what we’re thinking about and what we’ve experienced. Sure, the subjects may change a bit, but I can be reasonably certain that there’s a better chance you’ll talk about last night’s football game over some obscure topic, say, effects of peppers in white turkey chili. Now you may decide to discuss white turkey chili, but depending on who you are, I’ll argue that statistically, the odds are stacked slightly towards football, even if you don’t talk about either of those. In short, very few blogs are “random”.
     Even fewer are “inane”. No one writes stuff they think is inane. To put forth the effort to write such, you must attach some importance to it. (No one said anyone else had to find it important, however…=) If it’s important to you, it is certainly not “inane” to you. And I am willing to believe based on the popularity of livejournal and others and the millions of comments people post, at least someone out there doesn’t find it inane either. The fact that I found the link on Slashdot suggests to me that someone at that site didn’t find it inane, and went as far as to theorize that a good deal of Slashdot readers wouldn’t find it inane either. (Sure enough, there are 80 comments in response to the Slashdot post.)
     I think descriptions such as “inane”, “rambling”, and “random” are too often used and totally inaccurate to describe 99% of the writings on the internet. While 99% of the writings on the internet may be total garbage, they certainly mean something to someone, (ruling out “inane”) and unless they’re suffering from a neurological disorder, they probably wrote the piece for a reason. (Ruling out “random”.)
     I’ll give some leeway to “rambling” since there are many people who simply cannot stay on subject, or repeat themselves too many times. I’m sure I could qualify for that on occasion.
     But what you won’t find here is any “random” or “inane” posts. I write for a reason. I write with a purpose. However insignificant those reasons and purposes may be, I am not typing at the whims of radioactive decay.

apathy

     This has been an odd semester.
     
I’ve loved my classes. For the most part. My cryptography class has been invaluable and the information I’ve learned from it simply astounding.

Of course, the workload should be more appropriate for a 400 level class. I have 7 assignments for that class due by Friday, all of which are late. I smell blood in the water.

IT 213. Multimedia and Computer Graphics. What a waste of time. And I was looking forward to it since I know next to nothing about Photoshop, 2D graphics, etc. The teacher was uninteresting and woefully unprepared (some of which was not his fault. But only some.) The lab instructor couldn’t be understood half of the time and the labs equally pointless. I do not need to have my hand held. Why they do these stupid quizzes to make everyone come to the labs is beyond me. I got much more done working at home from the book. (The book, which was very good, was the only pro of the class.)
Suffice to say, I didn’t attend the labs. So no quiz grades. 3 assignments late for that class, which I may or may not do. Blood in the water here as well.

IT 301. IT and the Global Economy. Wow. I want to be an economist now. Intelligent discussion, debate, very interesting topics. I only have one assignment missing in this class and it doesn’t weigh that much. Should pass ok, with a B or A.

One done, danger of failing two. And yet, I can’t get the motivation to work on them. It’s all gone. I have noticed that all of this started shortly after Lauren and I broke up, but I cannot see why that would be an excuse since I seem to have made it through pretty well. (If anything, the opposite usually occurs during these episodes: I throw myself into my work because it serves as a distraction.)

On a good note, project management is requesting my salary info in order to best determine how to give me a raise. This can only be a good thing. My performance review went very well so I’m told I should see a reward from it. I can’t complain.

So job is going well, but for 5 days I’ll have to pull off either the biggest turn around, biggest act of bullshitting, (or both?) or take one hell of a hit which I may or may not be able to absorb. And yet, I don’t feel too concerned about it.

Have I absolutely lost my mind???


Ok, onto cool stuff:

Rat brains fly F-22s.

The Netherlands frets about shooting a sparrow. What I want to know is, African or European? There’s a big difference, ya know.

Child’s Play hits over 200k. You guys seriously need to donate to this shit, cause Jack Thompson won’t!

Also, my SSH server seems to have lost it’s ability to create virtual directories, and yet everyone can still access theirs. Weird shit.

I’ll be hyperlinking to some pictures I took of the Christmas lights on my house at some point, but I should be studying for my exam in a few hours….

Hmmmm….studying…..on second thought, let me get to working on those pictures…

SSH and Child's Play

The SSH server had to be reloaded after the utility I was using wouldn't let me create different root folders for different users. But all of that has been sorted out. Since the site updates via SSH as well, I had to wait till that was online before putting up a new post.

So now that the file server is up and running again, it''s time to start editing the site. There's some links I'll be putting up, and I took pictures of the house the other night with all of the Christmas lights up, so you all can see those as well.

In the meantime, you all need to head over to Child's Play and donate some money to Children's Hospital. While guys like Jack Thompson can rant and rave about how gamers are society's evil, we can show how we donate hundreds of thousands to needy kids, and still get our frag on! Child's Play is run by Penny Arcade, and if you haven't seen them before, you need to go check out their funny shit.

Some of you have access to the File Server. Those of you who do, you no longer need to type in the IP address, but rather go to www2.koznet.net. The IP address had a tendency to change, but with the domain name, it automatically updates, so feel free to put that in instead and make a profile so you don't have to type it in every time. I'll put together a little user guide sometime if you're confused about how it all works. And of course, if you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can drop me a line and I'll fill you in.

Koznet up and running

Got DynDNS to redirect around the port 80 block Verizon slapped on, and now that the kinks are worked out of the SSH server, Koznet is open for business. I'm a little dissapointed that Blogger doesn't support AES encryption for SFTP, but I'll take what I can get I suppose. In the meantime, pardon the sparceness of the site, I'll be adding more over the next couple of days.