Finally finished the kiosk stuff. It's a bad idea to firewall outgoing packets to 127.0.0.1. X looks like it's working, but then stops working and just freezes for no obvious reason. I think it'll all set though now. Even have the idle timeout working now (found a cool perl module called X11::IdleTime that has one function call - bet you can guess what that is). After work went over to schdav's and hung out with him and Brad for a bit, and we watched Dead Poets Society. Brad ditched out early, but soon after the movie ended JoeBuck walked in and there was much chatting for many hours. Always fun stuff. Much better than tomorrow night will be... :(

I got the kiosk stuff up and running today. The last piece is the idle detection and reset after use. It seems to work much better than the old kiosks, and now is loading stuff like printcap and other commands to execute from the kiosk server. The idle detection will probably involve digging through some X code to figure out how to do that. I also got sick of dealing with MAILER-DAEMON messages today. Basically I get 1500-2000 emails per day just to that folder. It was sorta annoying to have it always show up as new messages in this buried subfolder of postmaster, but I couldn't exactly leave it either - I like to delete everything older than a day or two to keep it under a couple dozen MB. So I installed Net::IMAP and have it searching and deleting everything with an internal date older than the previous calendar day, and having it mark any unread messages read. Now I actually can have that folder unsubscribed and only check it if I'm looking for a specific bounce or we get a complaint. Much better. Now to write perl script to automatically deal with some other emails... Nah, it'd be nice sometimes, but probably not worth it. Tonight I learned a bit about certain industry-specific tools while helping someone with computer stuff - that was sorta interesting. If you know who to talk to you can get lots of stuff. Then chatted a bit, and ran across an interesting legal document. Also ended up looking at tech stuff again - gotta stop doing that. Watched Sniper to top off the day. It's a movie I guess, but it's low budget and it goes from there... I think the story was decent, but wasn't done very well. Oh well.

Got started on a new kiosk image today. Turns out rh9 has some odd dependencies. I started off with a 400MB or so install, and threw apt on it and started removing stuff. Got it trimmed down pretty decent, then started installing stuff again. Hopefully I'll finish up most of it tomorrow. Lunch today was Noodles and Company, which was really good. Was a little bland so I had to add my usual amount of hot sauce to the top, but that's expected from most places like that - oh well. After work I researched programming on my new toys. I won another auction for a couple serial interfaces too, so it should be fun when everything arrives and I start plugging them together. I also watched Bad Company. I'd have to say that's a really great flick. Cool soundtrack too - think Sum of all Fears but with Chris Rock and an Urban/Hip Hop soundtrack. I definitely recommend it.

Usual day at work, had a movie night and watched Run Lola Run. It's a good movie. I also got a dts trailer DVD and the AXB-IRS4. I haven't gotten time to play with it, and I'm tired so am going to bed now. Way too early, but oh well.

Today was interesting, after church read AV forums for a while, and rearranged and put all the wiring which was running all over the floor in a somewhat nicer layout. The fixed chair isn't so bad, but the ones on wheels are sort of odd - chairs on wheels aren't designed to have speaker cabling going to them... I have a decent setup with semi-direct routes and enough wire under each chair to move it from it's normal position about as far as it can physically be moved without lifting it. After cleaning up bigger stuff I watched Pushing Tin. That's a decent movie, a bit too romantic for my tastes, but the part with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton flying in the Wake Turbulance from a 747 is rather funny, and has an awesome LFE track. There are some other decent parts too. It seemed a bit rushed, although it did seem balanced in showing the different perspectives. John Cusack being excessively paranoid was interesting, but he did it well. My dad in typical fashion walked in two minutes before the end and wanted to know what had gone on, so watched half the movie over again after it finished (skipping half the decent parts in the process). Oh well, more time reading forums, and being thankful I have my wireless access point at home. Then my brother, dad and I watched Office Space. That's just a classic, although neither of them had seen it before so were quoting it for a while afterwards. I think we have two more fans... Then it was cleaning time. I figured if I'm having people over, I should make it presentable. Cleaned up the piles of trash, took out the resulting bags, and actually vacuumed the place (it needed it especially after I was digging in the ceiling and dumped drywall dust all over a couple chairs and the floor). To top of the day I watched American Psycho. That's a weird movie... The whole violence and weird methods of killing people didn't bother me as much as him doing the crazy stuff before killing people. The whole movie is sorta him trying to act like these other people, although he's seemingly not doing things even close to what the other characters are doing. While he's off on his own having multiple girls over and killing one or more of them, all the other guys are out having drinks. Apparently they don't notice him being occupied half the time either. The timeline is sorta odd, and could have had a bit more continuity, even though that's sorta the point (confused psycho). Anyways, party tomorrow so probably only one movie then, but hopefully a good one.

Slept most of the day, and then watched The Thomas Crown Affair and Meet Joe Black. I'd say Thomas Crown Affair is a good movie. Interesting plot twists, and since I hadn't seen it since '99 it was interesting to catch bits and pieces but still be surprised at parts. Meet Joe Black wasn't anything special. It was an interesting idea, but way too long. I didn't struggle to stay awake, but I think that has less to do with the movie and more to do with the fact that I haven't been awake much longer than it takes to watch two movies. Oh well, that's only 3 of the 10 new DVDs, so I'm sure there will be more tomorrow...

Pretty usual day at work, more routine stuff although a few interesting ideas. Got to build a drive array box with an ATX power supply and no motherboard - had to go find the specs and jumper so the powersupply would turn on. After work I hooked up the other two transducers to some chairs. Didn't use the best wiring, but they still deliver an excessive amount of power, so we'll see how that lasts. I also rearranged some equipment so all the stuff except the power amp for them is in the stack of other equipment. That's turning into a mess though so I'll probably have to figure out a better way to stack stuff up. I'm thinking maybe build a rack with shelves and some fans for cooling. After all the hardware was hooked up pulled out Sleepy Hollow. Lots of horses running in that one. :) Looks like maybe a movie night Monday night, which should be fun. Bug me if you want more details. I'm tired though, so time to start off the weekend right...

Work went well, did some more crazy coding, but more smaller things today. It looks like we're doing a lot with the kiosk stuff, but may be making a lot of changes to the kiosk image. Should be interesting to see what happens. I was notified that a "heavy" box arrived at home as well. Giving that most stuff I've ordered recently is rather light, I figured that'd have to be the tactile transducers (also known as bass shakers), so headed home relatively early/on-time. I immediately flipped over my main movie chair and a chair I use as my footrest, and screwed a transducer into the bottom of each. Then I grabbed some speaker cable, crimped on the ends, grabbed a 20W/channel amp and a subwoofer equalizer, and hooked it all up. I figured I have a decent sub so started rolling off the input on the high end around 60Hz, and since the sub doesn't like real lows and the transducers struggle bumped up 25 and 35Hz a bit. I also patched that in before the compressor as the main reason for that is to avoid blowing the sub or the house structure or some combination. All I can say about them is wow!!! I'm running them at under half their rated power handling, and running decent program material and matched in level with the sub you have no problem feeling the hits. I set it up with music and as long as they're not set unrealistically high they actually fill in very nicely - yes, even on more mellow music which just has deep bass. I ended up watching Gone in Sixty Seconds since I've seen a lot of my other action flicks recently. My dad actually didn't notice any difference at first since they blended so well, but if they're turned off (or cranked up for a second) it's a very noticable difference. Of course the Dolby Digital trailers were pulled out again to test it out too. The only drawback is now I have cables running all over the floor, and another chair is now stacked full of audio equipment and cables. I think my weekend work is cut out for me - re-racking and recabling all the equipment. :( Oh well, it beats being bored, and it should be very nice when it's done. Although with the other new stuff and especially the automation I'm guessing I'll end up doing it a few times again soon... And now just sitting here it looks like I managed to knock a level off on the sub while I was digging - I hate too much bass (yea, it sounds weird since there's normally so much, but if you pay attention the non-bass levels match the bass properly). :(

So The Nick is complaining that I don't talk about him enough and his sweet ride. He says because we have lunch together almost every day I should talk about him more. This good Nick? :) Today was an OK day. I got an a coding kick and started doing a bunch of stuff in the IncidentBase. Got Next/Previous buttons working for detailed views, as well as this crazy out-of-office thing Dave thought up. Basically it shows Incidents assigned to you to other people when you are out of the office. That part isn't that odd and is actually pretty straightforward - the crazy part is where it gets the data. It logs onto the switches and analyses the traffic patterns for your machine, and when it finds a deviation from the normal...no, it actually just goes and looks at the calendar on the exchange server every hour (grabs the web page version), and parses it out. Turns out our office administrative assistant is consistent enough that I was able to parse the data with only a handful of regular expressions. Basically it pulls out a mapping of name abbreviations and nicknames and maps them to the person's identity. Then it takes keywords such as "out" or "on vacation" and changes the status. It also looks for context for timing such as "until x" or "after x" or "at x". Then it adds a row to a table for each occurance of a person being not in the office. All that data about people being gone is actually taken by another script which looks at preferences of who should see what when a person is gone and actually changes what everyone sees to match. Eventually I should probably add a manual override to it I guess. Then it makes it easier to abuse though - right now you have to do it a round-about way so I doubt anyone will even bother. Plus there's that mess with the department calendar and the admin assistant will have a talk with you, and the fact that you have to be either important or a server admin to modify the calendar, and she's basically doing the data entry for me... :) Anyways, after work Dave came over and we watched Spider-Man. I still like that movie, although I can see why a lot of people don't. No cool geek toys arrived today, hopefully some stuff will start showing up tomorrow though - I want to play with cool stuff...

Today was a pretty average day, with the highlight being lunch at Chipotle. My dad and 2 siblings decided to watch a movie tonight so we decided to watch Extreme Limits. For quality of the movie, it was pretty bad, for humor good only in that you laughed at it. It started off looking a lot like Cliffhanger. Then they pulled footage from cliffhanger, and not little pieces either - think a few minutes with different closeup shots cut in... One of those movies that's just good for a laugh...