Author Archives: Brandon

It only reads .bashrc. So I created a soft link with ln -s .bash_profile .bashrc to get things like hostname completion, and my modified paths to work with xterm.

I was enjoying some sushi when I had a sudden eureka! feeling. I’m not sure if these came from upstairs or myself but it was quick. I am going to call these universal truths, and they were all ways to improve quality of life. There may be more.

1. Assume nothing.
While you can take your past experience with you as a guide never make false assumptions based on those experiences. If you perform action over and over again you would expect the result to be the same each time right? Wrong. While this may work most of the time, don’t bet your life on it.

Example;
Say you make a machine that grabs a ball and hurls it at the wall with the exact same amount of force and in the exact same direction repeatedly. Some would expect that ball to make the same impact, in the exact same spot each time, they would be wrong and the reason why they would be wrong is because there is such a gremlin as variables. They are not taking something into account, curvature of the ball, a slight air current, ball temperature, something is going to throw the ball ever so slightly off every time. if you don’t believe me ask someone that is better at probability and statistics than you.

2. Be efficient. Spend what you need, keep what you can.
This works best if you apply it to everything. Think of every resource you have as money.

food == money
water == money
electricity == money
brainpower == money
housing == money
etc…

Example;
When you are eating a meal, eat until you are full and then take the rest home to enjoy when you are hungry again if you can. Think of this as saving money for use later. If you can apply this principle to housing, and only “spend” as much space as you need, then you will have more money/life credits when something pops up.

I set up bind as a caching nameserver on my home network, + squid as a caching http proxy. The only serious editing of the squid config beyond the acl was setting cache_dir ufs /store/squid/ 100 16 256. I did it this way because /store is where md0 my raid 5 setup is mounted, thus reads and writes are much speedier there. Browsing is unnaturally fast now. I also discovered pgrep while I was reading a how to. You can use pgrep to get the process id of any running process. For instance pgrep httpd; will just return the process id’s of the apache threads with the main one being the 1st. Peace.

Its called “first spring”. Some cat online didn’t like the old one and recommended this one. I like it.

It was so easy that its not really worth noting, I just wanted to remember that it got done on this date. If you are looking for a how to just google “samba printer sharing cups”. The only snafu was I forgot to add guest ok = yes to the smb.conf. It was nice to have it pop up under os x as soon as I restarted samba, and even nicer to be able to print from my laptop anywhere in the house. Why didn’t I do this years ago? Live and learn.

Where the fuck is my older brother? No one in my family has spoken to him in over a year, and I haven’t seen him since he totaled my damn car in 2002. The last thing I heard was that Oliver (AKA “Twist”) was working as a roofer in Texas just after hurricane Katrina hit. If anyone knows where the fuck he his, cough it up. He is stressing out our mother which is naturally causing shit for me. You had better not be dead because you owe me a car.

Update – he called my our grandmother the very same night this was posted. He got locked up, but is now chillin in Dallas TX.