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A collection of 72 posts

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Rejected!

As I expected, Tcpreplay was not accepted for the Google Summer of Code. Most likely because compared to many of the other mentoring organization applicants, Tcpreplay is not able to accept many students- hence the overhead is too high. Of course, if you are a student (or anyone else for

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08-09 Sharks Schedule (or converting .csv to .ics)

Every year I end up manually inputting the entire San Jose Sharks schedule into iCal because the Sharks organization doesn’t provide an industry standard .ics file (instead they support Microsoft Outlook). This year, I finally decided to figure out how to convert the .csv file to .ics. Anyways, long

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Linky #2

I’ve been sitting on these interesting articles and I figured I’d share: Warren Buffet explains in the New York Times why now it is the time to buy stock in US companies. Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford Law School, and co-founder of Creative Commons writes

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Joe Louis Arena: Please sit down!

Attention Detroit Red Wing fans: SIT DOWN! Look, it’s great your excited about your team. I’m a Shark season ticket holder and I understand that hockey is exciting and you want to cheer your team on. But if you ever have watched a game played at “the Joe”

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He's dead Jim!

So about two years ago I started telling everyone to stop emailing me at aturner@pobox.com. It’s still rather amusing that people occasionally use that address, but I figure if you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m pretty sure the only thing that will teach

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Saw that one coming

So I’m in the market for a small camcorder. After doing some research, I settled on a model (Samsung X210L) and started looking for the best price. Most online retailers I was familiar with were in the $400-$500 range, but one store (GearXSmall.us.com) was $340! Once

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Well that was just a little harder...

Upgraded to WordPress 2.1. Was mostly a smooth upgrade, but of course not everything was plug & play. Apparently there were some slight API changes which broke the right sidebar, but after reading the developer docs things fell into place. Anyways, things seem back in one piece. Doesn’t

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1 insanity down...

printf '%d to go!' "0x`dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/stdout bs=1 \ count=4 conv=ascii 2>/dev/null | xxd -g0 | cut -d " " -f 2`"

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How not to find great employees

I won’t name any names, but I came across a job posting which required two rather highly sought-after skills in today’s market, neither of which is particularly common. They were very specific about what a great job it was, how you would be worked like a dog, and

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1,000th comment!

Just reached the 1,000th attempted comment spam which was picked up by Askimet. So I guess the good news is that Askimet is very effective at combating comment spam. I guess the bad news is the near complete lack of actual comments. :) On a side note, I tried signing

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Boring...

So I’ve watched a few world cup games… mostly because nothing else was on TV at the time. One thing though I don’t really get is, why do people like soccer (or football for everyone outside of the US). I’ll admit that the players have to be

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Suck

Well looks like things have gone from bad to worse. Server has hung in an apparent I/O wait condition @ load of 25+. Existing ssh sessions have hung and can’t login. Ping still works. The word “hosed” comes to mind. Hopefully when I hit the reset button in the

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Site news

Well let’s see… * I upgraded WordPress to 2.0.3. * Enabled mod_deflate to apache so that pages should load faster. * Added some pics from my latest track day at Thunderhill Raceway. * I’ve significantly improved the docs for tcpreplay Anyways, right now, my main goal is to learn

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Great quote

I have a poorly maintained hobby of keeping track of great quotes. Just recently I read another great quote which I found very timely considering what is going on in the world and the US of late: As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an

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Adaptec/Supermicro sucks

I’ve been fighting a drive apparently going bad for a little over two weeks now. One of four drives in a RAID 0+1 array apparently has some blocks going bad and neither the drive nor controller seem to be able to remap the blocks. To make matters worse,

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VP of Eng.

At Mu we’re looking to hire a VP of Engineering. Anyways, I figured I’d list some of my interview questions I plan to ask. 1. As a manger, what kind of environment makes you the most effective? The least? 2. Every manager seems to claim they have an

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RAID & Backups

So every IT person worth a penny knows that RAID isn’t a replacement for backups and that backups are worthless if you don’t test them. So why do so many of us find ourselves “too busy” to bother testing backups? So today I almost found myself burned. After

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Drugs are good.

Well finally went to the doctor yesterday. First time in something like 5 or 6 years I think. Got me some new fangled antibiotics which you only take once/day for 5 days and some Flonase for my allergies. Should be interesting to see if the Flonase works better then

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Confidentiality in Email

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed more and more companies have been adding confidentiality notices to the bottom of emails. Lately, I’ve been wondering why. I mean, just what is the purpose of these notices? Are they legally binding? Do companies really believe that people will do

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Well this sucks

It’s 3:40am and I’m awake. Not sure if this is just a bad case of allergies anymore or a head cold, but I can’t sleep. Claritin and Sudafed 12hr have failed me. Maybe I’ll try some Oban 14. So here I am, working on my

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Oops!

A simple story which should give any geek pause for concern before helping his mother use this internet thingy.

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Educated vs. Trained

I assume most people intuitively already know this, but I found this article to be a clear explaination of something that I’ve found 100% true… that there is a real difference between people who are “educated” and “trained”. “This brings me to my last point… I have noticed a