Tuesday -

Monday - Christmas morning started with Sebastian at 6am on the dime. Since all the presents had been open prior to the day intended, it looked like it might be a slow day. As it turns out, it was very eventful.

At 6:10am, Sebastian and I went downstairs to begin breakfast. He was hungry. A bowl of frosted mini-wheats later, Nana came downstairs to begin preparation of the annual Biscuits and Gravy, and Toast and Creamed Eggs. Sebastian enjoyed second breakfast and soon the whole house was active preparing for 9am mass.

The rest of the day was consumed with games and eating.

Sunday - Christmas Eve had arrived. We opened presents with the Abbeys, and I believe we all shared in the happiness of giving and receiving.

The most notable gift I got was Programming Python. While I do currently prefer Perl, that is probably only because I know it best. The scripts I tend to write rely heavily on Perl's tight integration with regular expression searching, or utilizing the weak-typing with flexible built-in data structures like the associative array. However, I do agree that Perl can be difficult to maintain.

Anyway, many folks at work use Python and it seems to be listed a requirement for getting a job at RedHat. Regardless, it's yet another book to add to my growing library of quality computer books. I've collected a mish-mosh over the years and really want to improve the signal to noise ratio.

So after opening gifts, we packed up the van said our good-byes, and headed off to Charlotte, NC. The boys were on best behaviour AGAIN! They both slept 3 out of the 3.5 hours. We were greeted by a smiling Stephanie Guild and Cindy Hellmann. Shortly thereafter we headed downstairs to meet the rest of the family and the Hellmann family visit had begun. After losing terribly to Corey Testerman and Stephen Guild, Greg Hellmann and I determined that Stephen must have stinky feet.

If the morning weren't enough gift giving, we decided that it would be easiest to go ahead and open gifts tonight. I got another book to add to the library, Design Patterns. The boys received a multitude of plastic toys that will be entertaining for years to come. An excellent end to an already wonderful day.

Saturday - Dad went into work at Lowes in the early AM. Kristen woke up feeling awful and spent a great deal of the day in bed. It was up to me to take care of the two wee little men. It truly is an exhausting full time job to be a single parent.

Sebastian, Will, Michael, Mom & I had a pretty enjoyable day. We decided that we should have Christmas dinner today. It was yet another delicious dinner prepared by my mother. Turkey, real mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, rolls, gravy, and other yummy items were on the menu. Fortunately, Kristen was feeling well enough to eat dinner. The boys went to sleep without great fuss, and the rest of the crowd watched Unbreakable.

Friday - Since the day was filled with rainfall, my brother and I decided it would be fun to go to the fitness center at the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston. There we played five games of racquetball. He was a bit out of practice, but I believe good times were had by all. That night the whole family sat down for a rousing game of Apples to Apples.

Thursday - After only three hours of sleep, I woke up with Sebastian placing my shoes in my face. I guess he wanted me to get up. So we had a nice breakfast and awaited my Mom and brother to return from NC. After lunch the boys went down for a nap, and my dad and I had a nice conversation about kernel synchronization and hard drive design considerations (NERDS!). I was describing the methods used to protect critical sections in parallel processing, and that made him ask about hysteresis in hard drives. I told him I didn't know much about E&M but I could probably find some folks who know. As the conversation was winding to a close we got a call from my mom and Mike. They had arrived, after Mike's visit with old friends. It was nice to see them both again. Not long after they arrived, we piled in to the van, and went on the hunt for a Christmas tree... bout time eh? Two hours later with Christmas tree in hand, we were hungry dinner. Mom and Dad treated us to their favorite Chinese restaurant in the Summerville area. The atmosphere was very nice, and it certainly was one of the nicest chinese buffets I've every seen.

That night after the boys went to bed, we watched an episode of Grey's anatomy. Not longer after the end of that episode, my brother and I engaged in the time-honored fraternal bond of horseplay. Apparently being in the armed services gives you alot of time to exercise. He has become a very formidable opponent.

More to come!

Wednesday - We ended up leaving West Lafayette around 1:45pm and the boys, Kristen, and I were excited to embark on the first 780 miles of the 2800 total miles to travel. Since it was around naptime the boys eventually entered a nice slumber shortly after leaving Tippecanoe County. William woke up briefly in Indianapolis to stick out his tongue suck his thumb, and then return to sleeping.

After we were on the road for about two hours we decided to take a break to grab some lunch. An hour and a half later (it was a long break!) we were back on the road. We stopped again, and then got back on track. Ultimately we got in to Ladson, SC at 2:45am and were very happy to see Grandpa Joe.

Today I received the complimentary PowerPrep software from registering for the GRE. The application deadline for Fall 2007 admittance was Dec 15th... I took the GRE back in October.

Now thats... timing.

I think Schneier captured it best:

"Remember to vote, everyone (in the US). If you don't, there's no chance your vote will be counted correctly."

It's $_SESSION not $SESSION.

*sigh*

Now I have working sessions with train & track 2.0!

Happy Halloween!

Let's say you want to implement something like a two-column ledger in TWiki. So that everyone in your organization can access the financial data, edit it, and audit each other. But you only really want to edit the data in one place, and have genereal reports and stuff like that. Furthermore, you're picky and don't want see the same table multiple times

So rather than using php and a database, let's use the wiki. This assumes you have a TWiki, and that you have a basic understanding of the Spread Sheet Plugin:

First create an AccountsReceivable topic, and set a variable. The example I'm giving sets a variable that is the sum of all debits in a table.


%CALC{"$SET(accountsReceivableDebits, $SUM(R2:C2..R5:C2))"}%


Now to "access" the variable in another topic without seeing the topic, we get to do some CSS trickery. Create a new topic, BookKeeping for instance:


<STYLE type="text/css">
.hidden
{ position:absolute;
left:0px;
top:-500px;
width:1px;
height:1px;
overflow:hidden;
}
</STYLE>
<div class="hidden">
%INCLUDE{"AccountsReceivable"}%
</div>


The CSS listed above will hide the inclusion of the AccountsReceivable entry, and will allow you to "access" all variables declared in the AccountsRecievable topic.

Enjoy!

On boingboing.net, there was more of a discussion of DRM. I just wanted to make note of this.

Benjamin Franklin Somebody once said:

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

I think in times such as these with the Patriot Act, NSA AT&T stuffs, and proposed bills, we should remember the words of our forefathers somebody.

Edited 4:02pm

I am reminded by Dan Noland to RTFM.. and in the URL for Ben Franklin's quotes it says that he probably didn't actually utter the quote. Regardless, the idea is sound... whoever said it.

Forge:

v.
1. To form (metal, for example) by heating in a forge and beating or hammering into shape.
2. To give form or shape to, especially by means of careful effort: forge a close relationship
3. To fashion or reproduce for fraudulent purposes; counterfeit: forge a signature

"forge." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Answers.com 14 Sep. 2006.
http://www.answers.com/topic/forge

Lots of project, two kids... busy man.

I recently purchased a lot of 6 juiceboxes.. the Mattel video thinger. Apparently it runs Linux, and is hackable, but it seems like not many folks have aggressively tapped this.

I've been gearing up for the Half Marathon.

That's all for now.

First a little background.

I use Password Safe to manage all of my passwords. This allows me to easily use random passwords on multiple sites. Essentially, you store all of your passwords encrypted with one password, with a relatively friendly interface. This way the single point of failure is isolated to my password safe. If password safe gets compromised, then I'm in trouble. Regardless this is better than using the same password everywhere for everything or writing them down in your wallet.

As opposed to a dictionary password or mnemonic password, it is more difficult for an attacker to "guess" my password on any given account as they are 14 "random" characters which includes A-Za-z0-9 and symbols. This means there are more than 1E26 (that is a one with 26 trailing zeros) different passwords to try. To put this in perspective, even if they could try 1 trillion passwords per second they would witness the sun expanding into a red giant before they ran out of that key space. (That's in about 4-5 billion years)

Unless I'm stupid.

And today I was stupid, well maybe careless is a better description. Password Safe provides a feature called auto-type. First, open the page or login that you wish to authenticate. Now unlock your password safe and select the auto-type feature of the account in interest. Password Safe then enters your username, emulates a tab, enters your password, and then emulates an enter. So effectively it enters your login information without much interaction from you. Unfortunately you cannot target the auto-type intelligently. It must be the previous window you selected. In this case, where I was stupid, it was an IRC channel. Whoops. So, I reduced the time to discover my passwords from the current life of the universe, to one brief second.

Fortunately I trust most of the folks in that chatroom, and it isn't exactly the username/password combo to my bank account. Rather it is the username/password combo to my gmail account. Regardless, I decided to quickly change the password. It is easy to do, one click of a button and password safe generates a new one for you! Neat.

This brings me to my point.

Everything was back to normal. I now have a stronger password, but... now I can't check my email with Thunderbird. Right I need to change my password*.

Wait, how do I do that? Oh right Tools->Options->Privacy->Passwords->View Saved Passwords->Remove Entry. K, done. What it still won't let me login? Sending of password failed? This is the correct password!!! I just logged in to gmail through the web interface!!! What is going on??!

Long story short, and I haven't found this documented anywhere on google, or mozilla. Which you think they of all people would have the first hit for this problem. Right, long story short. You need to verify your password change:

Click Here to Validate

I promise that is the correct link. Here it is again:

https://www.google.com/accounts/UnlockCaptcha

Thank you msink of this forum.

The validate link unlocks your account for POP access, presumably. I've done this and am happily checking my emails again!

*We'll ignore the fact that Thunderbird stores my password, and that this is also a potential security problem. Again, these aren't the keys to the kingdom. More like keys to alot of spam, openssl-users mailing list archives, and automatic emails I send myself.

I'm catholic, and have recently been blessed with a new son. I work in an office that is 90% male. Most of them are single and have, uh, colorful views on children. They are also fairly generous when it comes to gift giving. Add in the fact that they'll do anything for a laugh, you should be nearly primed for this. Yep they bought me a box of condoms.

All were amused.

First here's the pictures: William Xavier Abbey

I'll get a summary soon

Turns out alt+tab is really close to ctrl+w

I've been training for the Chicago Half Marathon for the past three weeks. Part of the training is following Hal Higdon's Novice training. The other part is giving up soft drinks and sugary coffee at work, an overall reduction in my consumption of sugar. I'm replacing the soda and coffee with water.

I decided that it might be a good idea to start tracking the progress of my training. You can check it out here. At the moment I have to manually update my CSV file that contains all my data.

Anyway I hope to get my pace below 10:00 before October 1st, and lose some weight.

See you in Chicago?

Yo,

If you are in the area, and you know me. I am having a cookout tonight at 18:00. Pictures to follow...

Menu:

Hamburgers, Brats, Salads, Beer, and other assorted yummy goodness.

Edited June 13 @ 11:19am

There will be no pictures...

Working...

I'm always excited to get emails from readers of the blog. It makes me feel good when I know that I've shared knowledge with someone. Especially someone I've never met. That's the case this evening, I received a comment from Andre asking for a circuit diagram of the AC Serial Switch. Not to disappoint, I opened mspaint and doodled a quick diagram.. I tried to make the diagram as true to life as possible.

On the Solid State Relay, each contact is labeled. Contacts 1 and 2 are for completing the AC's circuit. Contacts 3 and 4 are for controlling the completion of the circuit between 1 and 2. Contacts 3 and 4 on this particular relay "support" between 3 and 30VDC. Contacts 3 and 4 are tied to the DTR and GND of the serial port, respectively. The +12VDC that the serial port supplies is more than sufficient to switch the relay.

You'll notice that the AC is grounded to the relay's mounting point. The solid state relay has a heatsink on the back of it, that the ground is secured to.

Jim Vaught and I were extra paranoid, and put a 120V switch and 15A Fuse inline before the current ever got to the relay. Furthermore this is switching the black (hot) wire, that way there is no live current when the switch is open.

The Show

Two "hacks" concerning the DIY checkout line at Wal-mart:

1. If you speak English, you may immediately scan items. You do not have to select a language. I'm sure most people know this, but if not, now you know. :)

2. If you are going to pay with a credit card you may swipe it once done scanning items. You do not have to select finish & pay, credit. I didn't know this, I tried it today.

Cheers,

Joe

Work has been crazy.

Everyone seems to have too much to do. This is not a bad thing, as it means there is work to do. However it seems that it has made some edgey, me included.

Fortunately a great deal is about to change. We're getting a full-time IT guy in. Terry and I get to drop a title, and a load of work. Speaking of Terry, hopefully he and the other members of development team will be less stressed soon, as today is code freeze for their project. I'm sure there are lots of bug fixes that await.

Anyway, finally getting good work done on my project. It was hard with a ridiculously high priority IT request, that apparently really wasn't that high priority, getting in the way. But now that's yestiday, so I'm back on track. Code freeze in two weeks. Bring on my bugs???

That's about all for now.

Cheers,

Joe

We woke up late this morning, or at least I did. It was about 7:00a when I got up to start the morning grind. You know the normal routine, get up, prepare breakfast, feed Sam, go get Sebastian. Before I got up I heard him over the monitor saying, "Puppy" and other babbles. Everything was going accoriding to the routine, except this time, Sebastian came to us.

As I was making his oatmeal, I recall hearing scuffling in his bed. I thought to myself, it must be Kristen getting him ready. Then I look to my right and I see that Kristen is getting herself ready still. "Hello", shouts Sebastian as he enters the room. Kristen asked, "Did you get him?" I replied no. The young man was quite chipper as he strolled into the kitchen. It was quite a pleasant surprise.

I hope he remembers to stay in bed when it is time to sleep.