June 2004 Archives

Today is my sister's birthday, so I put up flying cakes and an appropriate song! My sister is 24 years old today. If you are 18 and younger, I bet that sounds really old!

Have a good one, Em!

Well, I'm back from my trip to Seattle. It was fun doing all the tourist stuff I haven't done since I was a kid. I took tons of pictures, and 108 of them are posted on my PictureTrail site here (pops). I have disabled the right-click protector feature, so you can right-click and save any images you like. Or mail me for the originals.

Using the Stitch Assist function in my camera, I created this panoramic view from my front door. I can't wait to take one from Bob & Linda's view of Puget Sound when I'm in Seattle this weekend. Click on the photo below for a much larger version that pops into a new window.

Today's random tidbit:

Girls are like Internet domain names, the ones I like are already taken.

This was taken from the sig line of a slashdot poster, bhtooefr. And it's sooo very true.

Today I've been working on horn arrangements for Devo's "That's Good". Hopefully I can talk my father into having his band play it. I think the song lends itself well to horns. Check it out here in Lo-Fi (60 Kb/s) or Hi-Fi (144 Kb/s) Windows Media formats. Feedback is welcome, complainers can bite my shiny metal ass.

This is waaaay geeky, but so what. Recently, I've been playing around with modifications to Smoothwall, a Linux-based open-source firewall that Bayly and I both use at our homes. I began looking at these custom fixes in an effort to secure my Wifi network away from my LAN due to some flaws in WEP and WPA encryption (and due to the fact that my bridge to the Neoware client in the kitchen won't speak WPA-Radius). Eventually, this led me to the Homebrew forums on the Smoothwall webpage.

While perusing these forums, I noticed someone express an interest for a plan to add the nmap tool (a security scanning tool) to their Smoothwall installation. I played with the RPM package of Nmap 3.50-1 and got it taken apart enough to add to Smoothwall. Another forum member then created an installation package and it was off to the races. This marks my first developer-level contribution to an open-source software project. You can see the final install thread in the forums here (I post under the name BespokeEng).

Yeah, yeah, I know I should get out more.

I have found the mother lode of extremely interesting and diverse pictures. The guys at cellar.org host an Image of the Day that is just fantastic. You can visit it here (pops). I recommend checking it out every day, and when I get the time I will add it to the permanent links over on the left sidebar.