Hacker for Hire

Wow … I never thought I would see it happen, but another couple of posts have over taken the FBI post in popularity. I guess it was bound to happen at some point in time; however, I wonder how much of it is due to way that the new popularity engine ranks things. It is “improved” in the way that it doesn’t count when I click on a post, but it seems like it’s adding in other ways. I guess I’ll have to tweak the settings to make it more accurate.

But what is really surprising is that my “Disturbed, Yet Flavorful” post is ranking in as the most front page clicks of any post to date. Personally, I didn’t think that it was really that good, but hey, the numbers don’t lie. Apparently, you people come here to get evil ideas (either that or there is a plot to throw me awry in my inane ramblings).

Being as I’m a people pleaser (for intellectual types only, idiots get no pleasure on my watch), I will do my best to try and bring you more evil ideas. In response to the comments on my previous post, I will also do my best to make sure that I present enough background and detail for any of my stories/rants to be cleverly misconstrued as a real article written by someone that may have passed college English. Thanks for the feedback !

This is probably going to be a long post being as I’m just going to mash a whole bunch of thoughts together at once. Being as I’m going to talk and yell about several things (Motorcycle, other motorcycle, FreeBSD, SMACs, Macs, HTG, the blog, etc.), it’s going in the General category.
Continue reading ‘Life, The Universe, and Everything’ »

I was driving down the road the other day and it occurred to me that there are a lot of stupid fricken people in the world. Yes, yes … I know this is a thought that I have more than eighty times a day and I don’t need reminded of it. But what it did remind me of is how I have slacking off not providing my entourage with ideas to help spread out the evil and level the playing field of the world. So for those who feel slightly challenged on the evil side, this post is for you.
Continue reading ‘Disturbed, Yet Flavorful’ »

Recently, I’ve been toying with the idea of putting Google AdSense on my site. For those of you who don’t know, AdSense is a program where Google ads appear on your site and if someone clicks on them, you get paid some insignificant amount of money or something like that.

I’ve been look at is as something more to play with than as anything to make money off of. Hell, I know I won’t make anything off of it because I don’t have enough people that come and visit my bitter little corner of the Internet. I’m sure most of this has to do with that I’ve nothing of value to offer the Internet community much less the bandwagon of Web 2.0 jockeys.

None, the less, I’ve been reading the documentation on it and I’m wonder what kinds of hacked up crap it would get if I put it on my quote page … yes, that’s right, the good ‘ol hacked-ass php quote page that is so poorly engineered that one could almost do PHP injection if they were clever enough (remember, I said almost, I was lucky enough to accidentally fix that ). There is so much cruft on that site, I’m almost betting Google would say that I need to buy garden hoses and glue motor oil onto my web browser while visiting a church for gay whales.

My biggest thing though is that I don’t feel like I can customize AdSense enough. I can see where I can filter out what I want to be seen as well as change a few colors; however, maybe I should look into hacking it into something that blends in even better to the web page or something insanely stupid and counter productive like that. Any thoughts? (only silence is heard from the ether …)

I really like my X Server that Rick built for me. It’s fast, it’s 1u, and it’s got blue blinky LEDs on it. It had everything I wanted … everything but that pretty and cool OS X.

So I went on my war to get OS X on this system, and a long an arduous battle it was; however, I prevailed in the end. I’ve not booted my Mac since we moved into our new place. Mainly because I don’t have a place to put it other than in the server rack, but more so because it’s really loud. Last night, I decided that it had been dormant long enough and needed to be started (first mistake). I hauled all the crap I would need down to the basement, move the sever rack, ran a long Ethernet cable from upstairs, etc.

Powered it up … got a nice big (\) on my screen. Crapsticks.
Continue reading ‘Not so S.M.A.R.T’ »

Alright, for those of you who don’t know or read often enough to know, the Jabber server is located at hackerforhire.org. Anyone can register to it, you can IM to any other Jabber server from it, etc.

Well now I am please to bring you 3 fully functioning transports. What are they you ask? A transport allows the Jabber server to connect to other IM client servers like AIM, ICQ, and MSN. I say these specifically because these the ones that have been enabled on my server. You can connect from any other Jabber server to use these (i.e. GoogleTalk). The server has also been upgraded SUCCESSFULLY(users and everything!) to 2.6.1 so passwords are encrypted. The hope is that these transports will remain more active than the other servers that have these transports enabled.

Have fun.

This is short but I’ll follow it up later.

Google has officially released their calendar!!! It’s got iCal, phone support, alerting, and more! Go to http://calendar.google.com and get yours today!!!

For the most part, I love my Gentoo server; however, as with anything cool, there must always come one horrible drawback. This one appears to be upgrading MySQL. Right now I’m running MySQL 4.0.25 … the current version is 4.1.x. I’ve put off upgrading because generally upgrading something like a database requires upgrading everything that builds against the libraries it provides.
Continue reading ‘The Pain of Upgrading’ »

I don’t want to gloat too much … but that bitch had it coming . Last week we got our deposit refund. There were three deductions, one for the last water bill, one carpet cleaning, and then one $50 “additional charge.” Being naturally curious to see what the asses at Tall Timbers decided to charge us for, we called up. Apparently, the $50 charge was for going to month to month billing for our last payment.

One problem … we already paid that and we had the proof.

So we told them, they screwed around and finally Sara got an appointment set up for us to go in. Marie, the head jackass, was there to great us … and seemed unpleasantly surprised that I showed up as well. As she went over the billing, I leaned in and watched her move from item to item show how the charge was there … and then how we paid the charge … and then how we didn’t pay the water bill … and then how we had paid the water bill … and then how we were charged $50 for a March month-to-month fee …. This is where her hope was crushed like a mime in the Redwood Forest … silently and painfully. So now a check is being sent to us for their failed attempt to charge us more. I couldn’t help but smile as we walked out .

OK, first off, I love Firefox. It’s great; however, there are several things that just annoy the hell out of me. For example:

1. No “X” on each tab
2. Google Search not maintained per tab
3. Default loading of links in background
4. Crashes loose my tabs

However my friends, I have found the tweakers delight . Now, I know it’s been documented other places; however, I’m just going to put it here in the event that I blow something up and loose my stuff … it’s also for your benefit if you want to use it. Three of the above can be fixed in the magical “about:config” tab. The remaining has an extension to fix it. Ready to tweak? Great. Here comes the meat:
Continue reading ‘Firefox Tweaked’ »