So found this in a /. article, and thought it was really cool. Petals Around the Rose.

Update: The original link appears to be broken. This link from JoeBuck appears to still be working.

Sometimes I just have better things to do than update. Like nothing. Sometime shortly after the last update things blew up at work. Then as soon as or shortly before one thing would be fixed something else would break. I don't really remember the order or anything anymore - the whole few weeks turned into a blur, with pretty much solid work and not much sleep. Things have pretty much recovered now, although there's still plenty to do, but at least I get to leave on time. At least most of the time. Tonight I get to take stuff down at 10pm, so I just stayed the whole time, spent a bit cleaning the office, upgraded one of our fileservers by 800GB (hot swap is so nice - it means I can get out of here sooner), and am gonna be upgrading the RAID card firmware and applying patches on an Exchange server in a bit. Such is life. I think I need to start planning some time to do something else though.

In case you haven't figured them out or been sent links already, I went to a couple weddings and have pictures up online. First is Betsy & Pete, second is Ross & Lindsey. There's also pictures from Ross' bachelor party up on the pics page. Other weekends included my brother's white coat ceremony for med school, and then one of trying to relax. This weekend I may see about wiring my house in anticipation of filling the attic with insulation due to the gas price thing predicted for the winter and insulation being on sale. I think I'll go 2xCAT-5, 2xRG-6QS, and 1xSCAT-5 to each plate, mostly one per room except for some big ones. I think that should cover things pretty well.

Movies have been somewhat lacking although there's been some good ones. Raadt and I have been taking advantage of the free redbox movies on Mondays in October to get some. I also have all the netflix, and Firefly courtesy of the JoeBuck. That's a sweet show. Much better than the 24 I had been watching. Other movies were The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which was good, Hotel Rwanda which was also good, and Brazil which I thought sucked.

Today the aforementioned webmaster noticed the /. article on the MySpace XSS worm, leading to a discussion on it since he's just been working with AJAX interfaces and stuff. After the discussion about how they deserved it for pretty much ignoring stuff that everyone knew about, we started thinking about whether other places had vulnerabilities. Due to schdav's recent activity the one that immediately came to mind was facebook. We poked a bit but it seems they've actually locked it down quite decently (upon further review it appears they had vulnerabilities but didn't ignore them). There are some interesting things you can do related to certain actions such as collecting friends, but it's a more interactive process and not an exponential worm like samy's. Still should be an interesting experiment. Enough fun for the day though - back to work...

So it's been a while. Last weekend I don't remember anything too out of the ordinary. I did watch Constantine, which was decent but nothing too special. Also watched After the Sunset, which I liked a lot.

Last week at work was nice in that even though it was the beginning of school, nothing blew up too much. Some surprise network upgrades to deal with some other issues (Word under Windows sucks when talking to a server). It's still up and running though and that's more to prevent things from getting any worse. I did end up doing a bit of extra work moving some servers onto a different network core, which will hopefully allow the transition to go better. It should be interesting to see what ends up happening over the next few weeks - hopefully only good things.

Saturday I got to catch up on sleep a bit. Also read a bit of a nice book I got on Active Directory. I'm still debating whether to read it straight through or use it as a reference. It's like 1500 pages so I may just read parts and then look up stuff as needed. I'll have to see on that though. I also watched Demolition Man. It's an interesting movie, definitely mid-90s rather than modern in effects. It's sorta scary how close some of the stuff in it sounds to the way society is going now though.

Sunday I went to church with the family at BBC, and then we went to the state fair. I hadn't been in years, and I'd definitely say it's gone down hill since I was younger. It's much less of people showing off their stuff, and almost entirely selling stuff now. I went to the all you can drink milk stand, which last time I went to was only a quarter. Now it costs a dollar, but at least they've upgraded to 12 oz cups. I still felt I had to get my money's worth, but only drank 4 cups. My brother beat me by a cup, but that last cup was hard. It definitely gets noticeable when you have to stand in line for a minute between cups rather than just downing them repeatedly. One of the more interesting things I thought was the KKMS booth, where the one guy would openly debate people on the street as to their beliefs. The pineapple malt at the dairy building was also very good. Other than that nothing too interesting. The free stuff people give away has definitely gone down in quality and volume. Now it seems to mostly be brochures and stuff. The whole fair experience was sorta funny too. I didn't have anything specific I wanted to see, I actually only found out we were going late Saturday night (and my brother found out on Sunday morning when he got my message). So the family basically just wondered in general directions, making several loops around the fair area. Nobody really bothered to stick that close together either. Everyone had such different interests that we'd walk into a building and nobody would pay attention to where anybody went - just go find something interesting, and eventually within a few buildings everyone would be somewhat close together again. Overall I'd say the fair was an OK experience, but nothing too special this year.

Monday was family birthdays, so it was up to the St. Cloud area. It was a fun time, as those seem to be happening less and less often as time goes on. I think we celebrated June through October this time. Those things used to be monthly... As they're dairy farmers and we hadn't seen the latest equipment (they had a fire a year or two ago that meant rebuilding pretty much everything), it was off to the barns and milking parlor. Everything is extremely automated now, to the point that the cows all walk in and line themselves up (with the help of metal guides), there's the cleaning and the equipment goes on, and when the milk stops the vacuum shuts down, the equipment falls, and is pulled back up out of the way. When the row is done, hit a button and the gates open and they walk out, and the process repeats. Still gotta watch out though - manure falling 5 feet to concrete still splatters quite a ways.

A rather interesting blog. He also has pictures.

On Google Talk

Lissner Hall Construction

It's a timelapse of one photo per day from 6:35am on August 30, 2004 through 11:23am on June 16, 2005 (when the camera went away). Time shifts by one minute per day to simulate building through a day, but the camera's automatic brightness/contrast adjustments sorta ruin the effect. Runtime is 4:49.

Large (704x480, 20.6MB) and Small (352x240, 6.3MB).

So the X5L mentioned previously arrived last week. So far I like it a lot. I had to do some renaming initially as I copied stuff over, but I had to do an equivalent with the old thing anyways since ogg doesn't have track numbers but the metadata did. Anyways, I have a decent amount of stuff transfered over, and the rest has to wait until I boot up other machines (I didn't have much on the powerbook since I always had that with). Anyways, for starters the sound quality is awesome. The response curve is better than the old one, which I thought was better than a lot of other things. With a well encoded file it actually starts sounding rather similar to the original. The noise floor is awesome too. I initially didn't here it, but then I realized the background noise from the room through my earphones was just louder. There's nothing from the screen or drive though, just a very quiet hiss and a pop with the power switch. The UI takes a few seconds to get used to (a coworker said it made sense after about 30 seconds), and seems workable. The screen is bright and crisp, and easily readable from a decent distance or any angle. It doesn't take thinking and it's instant to turn the backlight on or off without affecting other things, which is nice. My only complaint is in audio mode it only updates a few times a second so the audio level graphs are kinda pointless. The thing feels slightly heavy for its size (but still reasonable), but I think that's probably due to the battery. I can pretty much unplug it in the morning when I go to work, use it all day (drive to work, work, drive home, evening at home), and not bother turning it off at all (like when I leave the office or go to lunch), and still have it barely drop off the top of the battery gauge. That is such a nice feature that way too many things lack. Stupid battery technology... Anyways, I have nothing but good things to say about it, so if you're in the market for a digital audio player, you should at least consider it.

As for the week at work, it was busy. I got power distribution for a rack moved to new circuits in one server room, and in the other one added 2 (sorta 3) new circuits. Should allow us to get everything up and running before school starts. Stuff also sorta blew up, but luckily none of it was my fault and I can't really do anything but sit back and wait for it to be fixed. I almost got another new server up, but I'm waiting for it to be able to reach stuff so it can be used. I think I finally got all the new student stuff figured out, and the system assigned permissions this morning. I still sent the list of changes it made to the student supervisors for verification in the morning since I don't know if they got me everything. I also got permissions for student workers for the rest of the school tied to contracts, which should hopefully save time for everyone (they say the access when requesting the job, don't have to think about having it added/revoked since everything's tied to contract dates and signing/termination). It'll be interesting to see how well that works after what's happened though - apparently they couldn't get contracts printed and signed in May, but had to wait until August to request them, so people may have a couple days waiting to get access after getting back and signing them. Such is life I guess, and maybe can be resolved next year.

The weekend was good, with sitting around and relaxing. First movie was Elektra which was better than expected (I had low expectations going in). Other than the intro when I put in the DVD that is. I have something funny if people want to see it. Anyways, the plot wasn't all that great, but it had fighting and martial arts and some interesting effects. Second movie was Wild Things 2. It was one of those where when I heard of it I was wondering how they could possibly do a sequel, so I had to see it. It's basically the same plot as the first one. Yes, same plot, although some of the characters have different relationship roles and some minor details are different. So yea, not such a great movie, unless you want to laugh at the movie. Third movie was Swimfan, which was better than expected. The plot was interesting, although nothing special. The soundtrack was interesting and well done technically, and they used some really interesting editing techniques. Like rather than draw out the scenes to simulate the normal emotion like most movies, there's multiple angles cut together with overlap sorta like a replay. That description actually doesn't do it justice, and it works way better than it'd seem at first. It's sorta combines a this is important with the character replaying what happened in their head to sorta make you look at it from their perspective. Yea, I'll stop before I totally mangle it. You should see if you haven't though.

It was a good weekend, although I'm glad I could mostly ignore work for it. On Saturday I watched Back to the Future Part III, and on Sunday it was The Firm. Both are good movies. Other than that it was sitting around and wishing that it either wasn't the weekend or newegg was open on weekends. Or that the thing had died on Thursday morning rather than Friday... Such is life I guess. I'm sure tomorrow I'll be busy enough after what's been happening this weekend that I won't think of it too much.

So, you think he can get more cowbell now? Walken 2008

So my bad luck finally managed to catch up to me. Sometime during the night last night the hard drive in my Karma managed to go into click mode, and I woke up to no music but a clicking and rather warm box. After a couple resets, hitting it on things, and letting it sit, it still isn't actually able to access the hard drive enough to boot before the bootloader times out and shut it off. I guess it's not too unexpected. I was probably lucky to have been able to get it back after the last time I had it go bouncing off each corner in turn across pavement and then rolling over a few times for good measure. Or the few times before that. That one actually involved me having to give it a drop of a few feet to unstick the heads (smacking it against hard surfaces from a few inches wasn't enough). Hard drives (even the 1.8" ones) aren't designed to take that sort of abuse, and after the last big tumble I'd occasionally notice it obviously trying to remap things on the hard drive and a few tracks suddenly being "bad". Unfortunately the drives are like half the cost of it, so I now have what's effectively an expensive paperweight.

So given the amount I use the thing, I began my quest to find a suitable repair/replacement. Repair involved hard drives, which are about as much as a new Karma, and I'd have to check compatibility and install it. eBay isn't much cheaper than new. Even though it's come down a third in price since I bought it, it's still kinda pricey for a device that's been effectively EOLed by the manufacturer. Off to the Intarweb. My main feature requirement is Vorbis support and good quality audio, with around 20GB of space being preferred (I had, while I guess still have, about 17GB on there). Those on IM were no help with suggestions other than iPod, which is out due to the lack of Vorbis and that &#!% wheel thingy. I don't like interfaces without a tactile response unless I'm looking at the screen - and for me a music player generally qualifies. The UI just seems unintuitive to me as well - I always have to use my second guess as to how to do something when I play with them. My first other idea was to use my Axim. It's handled the role temporarily before nicely, albeit the touch screen is a drawback - but at least it could have a custom interface. The fact that 8GB of storage costs over $600 and 4GB is over $200 pretty much shot that idea down though. I'm not going back to swapping a bunch of small cards again. So with my requirements I'm basically left with 4 players, one of which is the Karma.

After much reading reviews, checking comparisons, and looking up prices, I settled on the iAudio X5L. It has the Vorbis, and FLAC is an extra bonus. I don't care about color screens other than if they suck battery, as my Axim can play full xvid movies at 640x480, which no dmp can even approach. The X5L is rated for 35 hours of battery life, so that's not gonna be a problem. Reviews still place it in at somewhere over 30 hours. As a bonus the thing has a very strong, very clean audio output, with the highest S/N ratio out there. Apparently the output is very flat too, although it has plenty of adjustments. I contemplated for a second the lack of the 5 band agile equalizer and being locked into fixed frequencies, until I realized the only real use is to compensate for crappy headphones. It lacks crossfade which I'll miss. The ID3 database probably won't be an issue for me, as while Rio has awesome selection stuff in RioDJ, I never really used them. Having direct access to the files and ability to mount and generate m3us will actually be much nicer. As an added bonus this thing should be able to mount external drives to pull data across. It sounds like anything that complies with USB Mass Storage. Should be interesting to see how well it works. Theoretically it could double as a place to offload CF cards from the camera. Anyways, I'll have to post a review shortly after it arrives. Which will hopefully be early next week. I love that basic shipping from Newegg always ends up arriving the day after shipping.

Well, as most of you know or figured out from my July 29 post, I've been on vacation with the family. We left 2 Saturdays ago, and came back on Wednesday evening. It's good we came back when we did do to what we found when we got to my parents house, but that's another story and I probably shouldn't talk about it yet - maybe later.

Anyways, in Grand Teton we visited lakes, took lots of pictures of the lakes and mountains, and the other usual park things. I managed to slide down a hill and get covered in dust and rip up my hand a bit. It actually wasn't bad until I got annoyed with the wounds leaving marks places, but nothing some betadine, bandages and tape didn't fix. We went to Signal mountain which provides views in all directions of everything. Of course appropriate to the name it has a nice tower at the top which is right next to the path. Being the geek I am I have some nice pictures of the antenna arrays, cabling styles and runs, the microwave uplink, the building, etc.. :) I thought it was funny that everyone wondered why their cell phones were maxed out slightly down the mountain but the strength went down next to the antenna. The fun world of RF...

After the night in Grand Tetons park, we went to Xanterra world, also known as Yellowstone National Park (Mount Rushmore Memorial falls under this too). The parks aren't that commercialized, but it's sorta funny since the park/nature stuff is branded NPS but everything in buildings other than the visitors center has Xanterra branding everywhere. We stayed in Yellowstone for 3 nights, saw all the "sulfur pits" as we started to call the hot springs, and saw old faithful both at night and during the day. The geothermal stuff was cool at first, but due to the smell we didn't stay long or find them that interesting. We also saw moose and osprey, and got good pictures of both. The moose was across a pond and I didn't want to bother getting out of the car, so the pictures are OK but not the greatest. The one Osprey was only maybe 50 feet down over a ledge so I got some great full frame shots of both it and another one coming down looking like they're gonna fight. We'll see when I'm motivated enough to post them.

The highlight of that park was probably the "Grand Canyon of Yellowstone". Basically it's the canyon through which the Yellowstone River runs, and has an awesome combination of rock and trees on the sides and base of the canyon. There was another osprey nest with birds in it just below Lookout point, but it was pretty far away so I'm not sure if the photos have enough detail to see much (you could barely see the nest with just the eye, let alone things in it). We hiked down to Red Rock Point, which had a great view of the falls as well. It's not a long hike in length (maybe half a mile), except it has a lot of switchbacks, dozens of steps, and was probably a few hundred feet down. While normally a few stories of stairs doesn't bother me, climbing back up this one wasn't so much fun. Think of me plus the fact that it's a few thousand feet up in the mountains for why.

This is the hike where I realized something interesting too. On the way down the path is steep enough that you have to force your legs to move slower as otherwise gravity will give you a decent rate. The switchbacks also are pretty much 180 degree bends right back against itself with no railing at the pointy end and a nice drop off. I realized this wasn't actually much worse than a lot of other things, and thought it unusual considering the emphasis put on safety in recent years. Then it hit me. This is a national park, meaning federal government, meaning 28 U.S.C. S1346/S2680(a). BTW, basic safety training for the rangers has been ruled discretionary in the past. It must be nice being the federal government...

The west side of the park also has some nice river and falls views, and it's more flat. Stuff is pretty close to the road as well, so you can see lots of stuff quickly. Another thing we saw lots of in Yellowstone was Buffalo. They were right around (and in) the road in one area, which resulted in lots of good pictures. There were a lot of idiots walking up close to them, but I didn't hear of any of them getting hurt. It's unfortunate that some people either insist on getting a close up picture on their camera without a decent lens, or for some crazy reason think their young kids want to see the buffalo up close and it's a good idea. People were seriously going up to within 5-10 feet of them, including climbing down into the depression where they were. Did I mention that there were a lot of young buffalo with their mothers? Yea... That was just in one place, and there were buffalo all over the park close by the road. It was actually sorta funny in some places seeing people (who had apparently just entered the park) pulled over to watch/take a picture of a single buffalo when there were herds of them just up the road. We also saw a grizzly on our way out of the park, and I got out and got some good pictures of that. There was a tour bus of some older people that had unloaded and everyone was at the side of the road watching this thing off a decent distance away. It started walking on a path that brought it a bit closer to the road and I heard one lady say to another that it's getting closer so they better get closer to the bus. I looked up to see where they were relative to the bus, and the distance from them to the bus was about 2/3 of the distance from them to the grizzly. I just sorta laughed and figured whatever makes them feel safe.

We left Yellowstone on Monday and headed for Mount Rushmore (also Xanterra land). We sorta stopped at Devils Tower but only drove a mile into the park since we didn't want to pay to go up to the base (and everything closed like 10 minutes after the time we arrived). So we just took pictures by the sign and at an overlook down the road and continued our journey. By the time we arrived it was too late to do much of anything, so we just set up camp and called it a night. The next morning was showers, which were nice, and then off to the mountain.

For those who don't know, I have interesting memories of Mount Rushmore. My last visit was in 1989, and after falling 6 feet onto my face, getting completely bloody, and laying on a backboard from about 21:30 until 03:00 (including a long ambulance ride) and then going through x-rays of my back and neck... I'm actually probably lucky that my parents were there since they're both trained and could handle the medical stuff while the rangers basically could tell them where the infirmary was and call an ambulance but nothing else. I just realized how that ties into my thing above. Anyways, we get there any everything's completely different. There's no 80+ steps to get down to the amphitheater (it's level with the ground), there's parking ramps, a new visitor center, everything. Turns out it was all approved in 1990, and they worked on it from then until 1998. Makes me wonder... Anyways, the place is nice, and they have a trail up right by the base that gets some cool pictures. They consider it strenuous, but it's only like a half mile and less than 200 steps, so not bad at all. We basically went to everything during the day, and being as there's not too much had a few hours to kill.

So next stop was Jewel Cave. We went there in 1989 as well, but nothing much has changed. They still have the same tour, and still do the same things (like turning out the lights on the one platform), and the same things to look at are in there. Last time I wasn't in the best mood though since it took place the day after the experience at the mountain, and this time I also had a camera with, so I enjoyed it a bit more. It was actually sorta funny since we had a half hour to wander the visitor center before the thing I had looked at the stuff on the walls. Apparently nobody else really had, as the family asked me questions and I'd tell them and then somebody else would ask the guide and it'd be the same answer. I thought that was funny. After that we went back to the mountain for the evening lighting ceremony. There ended up being a "lighting storm" (apparently South Dakotans have interesting names for what actually was a rather weak thunderstorm), and they cut short the movie. Everyone started running when it rained a bit, so we sorta looked around wondering why they were getting so worked up about it. They turned on the lights, and I got some pictures of the mountain. I didn't even have to worry about heads in the way either. The lights also made interesting patterns in the rain, especially with the pulsing illuminating the rain drops brighter every half inch or so. Eventually I went back to the visitor center and looked around a bit trying to find a map of the old setup, and only found one aerial photo that a ranger who had been going there every year her whole life knew was in some book. Better than nothing I guess. That was it for the night, and it was back to the campsite.

Our campsite was actually overflow due to them giving us misleading info on the phone, but it actually turned into a good thing. Most of the campsites are just rows of sites, while ours turned into us being the only people in a big field that also had the group camp facilities (so we had a table and a fire pit). It was better than a regular site, although I wouldn't want to try it in an RV or a vehicle without good traction or with low ground clearance. Wednesday morning we packed up and headed home. Stopped for Pizza in Mitchell at a place we had visited in 1999. My brother ate 15 pieces (we think, it was just under 2 pizzas but we don't remember how they were cut) the last visit, but the buffet was closed at the time we arrived so this time he had to be limited. It was good though. Then we drove home, parked in the middle of the street and unpacked (part of the above untold story), and then my bro and I headed home. Thursday I returned the GPRS card. The speed wasn't too great, the latency was iffy and was already mentioned in a previous post (pretty impressive to not lose any packets in the 3 minutes it took them to travel, but...), and it just wasn't worth the cost for long term use. With their policies I actually am only going to end up paying the prorated charge for the time, with activation waived and full equipment refund. Can't complain there. I spent the rest of the night rebuilding some relatives' computer, which wasn't as bad as usual and it was good to see them again. Friday has been sitting around the house and also watching Pete finish moving out. He seems like a good roommate, although I really only saw him for about 10 minutes of his time here (he moved in while I was gone). It's a long tale, but now it's all told and I can ignore this thing for a few more days (maybe).