Jeremiah Oeltjen

Back On Campus

I'm writing this from the CyberCafé at UCR. I haven't been here since May, but it seems like only yesterday that I was here.

Less than four weeks to go. I'm still not exactly certain which classes I'll be taking, but everything is in order and on schedule. I'm excited.

SCO/Nigerian Spam Parody

All I can say is, "This is funny."

New URL's

In reading Elizabeth Lawley's post about URL redirection that she is now using to redirect the archive links using MovableType's default six-digit numbered style (/archives/000022.html) to the date/dirified title just like Mark Pilgrim. This is a really neat idea and makes sense for her to do now that she has moved to a new server.

I like this idea. Now the URL takes on some meaning. Sometimes it even seems to help in search engine rankings if a keyword is part of the URL. It also conveniently organizes the archives into subdirectories instead of having one directory loaded with thousands of files (once my blog grows to that size).

Here is how I did it

1. I added an htaccess template (the same as the forementioned site) to the Index Templates. I named the file htaccess (without the dot) because I didn't want MT generating a real .htaccess file whose contents I had not yet verified. This provided permanent redirects (HTTP code 301) from the old archives to the new ones.
2. In the "Weblog Config" section I changed the naming scheme of the individual archives to <$MTArchiveDate format="%Y/%m/%d"$>/<$MTEntryTitle dirify="1"$>.php. For some reason this didn't entirely work by copy/paste. The date formatting and dirify attributes weren't applied so I was getting URL's like http://kb0off.sheddwellers.org/blog/archives/July 24, 2003 08:08 AM/Paper Folding.php . I typed it in by hand and it worked like a charm.
3. Rebuilt all files
4. Checked out the newly generated htaccess file and moved it to .htaccess in the archives directory.
5. Deleted the htaccess template since I should never need it again.

My weblog now has fancy new URL's and I have Liz and Mark to thank.

Update: Mark has his templates available for public viewing. This page also includes the archive naming instructions.

Paper Folding

I came across this post about folding paper:

Today I am reminded of the episode of Mr. Wizard's World where he explains that a piece of paper (regardless of size) can not be folded more than 8 times...I just conducted my own unscientific scientific experiment and I could only fold the piece of paper 6 times.

I had the same result as well.

This is an interesting problem. It turns out that there is no hard and fast rule that paper cannot be folded in half more than eight times, but it is in that ballpark. Think about it for a moment. By the time you fold the paper in half six times it is as thick as 64 individual sheets of paper. Not easy to fold all together.

More information about this is available from Dr. Math

Hidden Thumbnails

Some digital cameras store information in the images they create in the form of EXIF headers. This metadata may also include a thumbnail. This is great, but not all image editing programs use this. Some, in fact, seem to keep the original information (including the thumbnail) even after the photo has been edited.

This is why I put together the JPEG Thumbnail Checker. It is based around a small utility called jhead and displays the embedded thumbnail (if one exists) from an image the user uploads via the web form.

Your First Linux Distro

Catching up on a major backlog of e-mail reading I came across the headline in the Slashdot daily mailing about Slackware's tenth anniversary. It was fun to read all of the comments and see how many people had used Slackware as their first distribution.

When I first started college in 1997 I was given an account on a FreeBSD machine. Of course I just had to know more about how to use it, so I bought the book and CD set from Walnut Creek CD-ROM.

Not very long after, a friend of mine purchased RedHat 5.1 from BestBuy and we played around with that for a while. I was taking a UNIX class in school at the time and was able to use what I learned in class on my FreeBSD system or his RedHat Linux system.

That summer (1998) I took an advanced UNIX class in which we set up our own machines with copies of Slackware (3.0, I think). From there I was hooked.

I have occasionally tried other distributions, but have always come back to Slackware.

Finally, a Cool Animated GIF

I don't really like animated GIF's, but this one is just too cool.

Webalizer SearchEngine Update

I just spent the last hour (or more, I wasn't paying attention to the clock when I started) updating the SearchEngine lines in my webalizer.conf.

To make a long story short, here they are:

SearchEngine    abcsearch.com     terms=
SearchEngine    alltheweb.com     q=
SearchEngine    altavista.com     q=
SearchEngine    aolsearch         query=
SearchEngine    ask.com           ask=
SearchEngine    ask.co.uk         ask=
SearchEngine    buscador.ya.com   q=
SearchEngine    dmoz.org          search=
SearchEngine    dogpile.com       q=
SearchEngine    dpxml             qkw=
SearchEngine    eureka.com        q=
SearchEngine    feedster.com      q=
SearchEngine    google            q=
SearchEngine    hotbot.com        query=
SearchEngine    infoseek.com      qt=
SearchEngine    ixquick.com       query=
SearchEngine    lycos.com         query=
SearchEngine    mamma.com         query=
SearchEngine    metacrawler       q=
SearchEngine    msn.com           q=
SearchEngine    msxml             qkw=
SearchEngine    mysearch.com      serachfor=
SearchEngine    netscape.com      query=
SearchEngine    northernlight.com qr=
SearchEngine    ntlworld.com      q=
SearchEngine    overture.com      Keywords=
SearchEngine    search.com        qt=
SearchEngine    search.earthlink  q=
SearchEngine    teoma.com         q=
SearchEngine    teradex.com       q=
SearchEngine    wisenut.com       q=
SearchEngine    yahoo             p=

This is primarily from the search engines I find in my referrer list. It is by no means complete. I also made an attempt to verify that all of the URL variables were current as they do change from time to time. Any additions or corrections are certainly welcome.

Happy (One Month) Anniversary

It's been one month since my First Post.

Hooray!

DSL Sharing

I've been switching the DSL manually for about a week now. I finally got a Linksys EtherFast� Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port Switch. I was planning on setting up a Linux box to do this, but this is all we really need. It can do port forwarding and filtering. It serves as a DHCP server for the local network. The installation is completely web driven so there is no platform depencence (there is a CD that comes with it that helps you set up your computer's IP settings, but I opted to use the Quick Start Guide instead).

Now, my dad and I can both be online at the same time. Someday, I may install Samba on my system and we will be able to share files and printers.

Next order of business: webcam.

More Space

I was running low on disk space on my computer so I started looking through all of the stuff I had in my home directory. Some of it was stuff that I saved as a backup a year or two ago and haven't looked at it since. There was some other stuff of which I had multiple copies. One directory I had was the data I kept from the laptop I used when I worked for Riverland Community College. I rearranged some of the data, deleted some useless stuff and moved some of it to other parts of the drive. I then made a tarball of the directory so I could keep all of the data that was left, but not take up so much space. While it was running I thought to myself, "It would be good if this actually compresses down to half the original size." Here is the result:

jeremiah@fluffy:~$ du -sh laptop*
370M    laptop
50M     laptop.tgz

About all I can say is, "Wow!"

Now if I get really ambitious, I can come up with an elaborate scheme to archive data to CD in an organized fashon. That way, I can keep the data that I don't use often on CD-ROM and not on the hard disk drive and keep my space available for downloading Linux install ISO's and stuff.

A Whole Bunch of Movies

The other evening I was at my friend Roger's store working on his computer when the neighbor came in and asked me "Who threw all of the movies in the dumpster?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, so I went outside to see. Lo and behold. there were a few hundred VHS movies in the dumpster. Apparently, someone got a whole bunch of used movies from a local video store chain and decided to throw them away. Of course they couldn't use their own refuse collection service to do so. When we started to dig through I found a few good ones that I kept for myself. The neighbor and his ladyfriend took a couple of boxes worth home to sort through them.

While I was working on the computer I watched a couple of the movies. Of course this means that it took me until about four o'clock in the morning to get the work finished that I was doing. However, one of the movies I watched was The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest. A nice computer comedy. I don't want to give the story away, but there is one particular spot that still tickles my funny bone:

Two of the guys are arguing and one insults the other by saying, "Your mother uses Macintosh."

"What?!"

"System Seven"

If you don't get it, don't feel bad.