Andrew Fore

Shows like CSI, Law and Order and Bones, throw around a lot of interesting phrases in Latin. While you may not care to study Latin, here’s a few that are fun:

• caveat utilitor – let the user beware
• condemnant quod non intellegunt – they condemn what they do not understand
• deus ex machina – god of the machine
• Roma aeterna – Rome is eternal

For some more fun phrases in Latin check out the entry List of Latin phrases (full) on Wikipedia and the latinproverbs wiki.

Do you ever use a phrase that you heard growing up as a child that no one else around you understands?  Frequently I find myself having to explain the meaning behind a phrase to my student assistants.

One of the latest ones is the phrase bar pit.

Now, I don’t recall whether I heard this from my parents or someone else growing up, but the explanation is quite simple.  And the explanation itself includes a colloquial corruption of a word as well.

Often when you are driving down the highway, at least in South Georgia, you will see large tracts of land where large pit have been created by removing dirt for DOT projects.

These are the bar pits and this term comes from the fact that it is a pit where they are barrying the dirt from.  Now the word barry is itself a corruption of the word borrow.

So it seems that L. Frank Baum’s Oz book series is going to at last come to the silverscreen as a whole.

According to an article on sliceofscifi.com, Warner Bros. has purchased the film rights to all of the original 14 Oz novels, plus a fifteenth book by Ruth Plumly Thompson.

Apparently it is going to be a combined effort between Todd McFarlane and Josh Olson.

One can only hope that McFarlane will restrain his tendencies a little and not produce a product that is as out-of-touch with the original concepts of the books in the way that his Twisted Land of Oz action figures are.

I think that it is great that he wants to update the series and make it “more 2007,” but please don’t warp the childhood of millions by turning Dorothy into a dominatrix.

So this morning, during a momentary lull in my workday, I was perusing my huge and unorganized list of bookmarks when I ran across a bookmark to the Burma Shave section of The Fifties Web.

For those of you, like myself actually, who are to young to have witnessed them yourself, Burma Shave used to put advertising slogans on signs up and down the roads in the US. For more on this, you can check out the article at Wikipedia.

Here’s you a good one:

The wife Who keeps on Being kissed Always heads Her shopping list

Burma-Shave

It’s always nice to see that the Internet is being used to keep alive parts of our culture that might otherwise go by the wayside of progress.

Yesterday walking back to the office after lunch, I was following a girl who was chattering away on her cellular phone using her wireless headset.

It occurred to me that for years on of the signs people looked for when evaluating your sanity was whether or not you talked to yourself in a conversational way, or appeared to be talking to an invisible companion.

Since the advent of the bluetooth headset and it’s popularity, this has become less and less of a tell.  How are you to know that the person standing next to you in the convenience store looking for a soda is really talking to an invisible companion, themselves, you, or someone on the phone?

Welcome to the world where talking to yourself for no apparent reason may cease to be thought of as mental instability!

Another day, another off the wall saying.

So my father used to use the phrase “You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd” all the time when I was growing up. Until recently I never really cared what the origin was, I used the phrase and went on.

Recently, however, the subject of my unusual phrases came up at a luncheon for one of my student assistants that had just gotten a new job as a full time staff member in another department.

So, here’s the origin. The phrase comes from a song by Roger Miller entitled, strangely enough, You Can’t Roller Skate In A Buffalo Herd. For the complete lyris visit .

Every now and then I will utter a saying that I grew hearing or using that makes my assistants wonder.

Today I happened to use the saying If wishes were horses, beggars would ride in reference to one of my assistants wish that the timesheet process here was all done electronically instead of the paper system that we have.

She wondered where I get these things from. I thought it was a pretty common saying, but I had never actually investigated where it originated, so I went googling.

The first reference I found was from Bartleby.com which listed the meaning behind the saying according to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy as:

If wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted.

While this was nice, I already knew what it meant, so I went googling some more for the origin of the phrase. It turns out that it is a line from a Mother Goose nursery rhyme, entitled If Wishes Were Horses:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride. If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side. And if “ifs” and “ands” Were pots and pans,

There’d be no work for tinkers!

Ref: apples4theteacher.com

Next Page »

The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does. — Allen Ginsberg

Here is a recipe that I got from my Aunt Cindy.

Ingredients

• 1 3/4 pounds of carrots, peeled & chopped
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 2 teaspoons confectioners’ sugar
• 1 stick butter

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a large pot of boiling water, cook carrots until very tender.  Drain and transfer to a large mixing bowl.
3. While carrots are warm, use an electric mixer to beat with sugar, baking powder, and vanilla extract until smooth.  Mix in the flour, eggs, and butter.  Transfer to a 2-quart baking dish.
4. Bake 1 hour in the preheated oven, or until top is golden brown.
5. Sprinkle lightly with confectioners sugar before serving.

Images

The ingredients

Everything mixed in the bowl

The finished product

Notes

• The confectioner’s sugar is optional, I personally think that it is sweet enough without the sugar coating.
• When incorporating the butter into the mix, it works best to blend it in using small chunks instead of adding the entire stick at once.  I use quarter-stick chunks.
• If you are going to be refrigerating this, use plastic wrap and press the wrap down into the casserole dish to contact the top of the food.  This will help keep the moisture in the dish as well as prevent a skin from forming.
• When cooking this, resist the temptation to check it.  Soufflés can deflate or fall when they are disturbed during cooking.  As Alton would say Just set it and walk away.

The first time I made this I followed the instructions to a T, but this time I was making it with an eye towards someone who has a gluten allergy.  In researching the flour substitution, I did find that some people take the time to mill their own gluten free flour, but this was beyond my particular skill set.  What I ended up using was a gluten-free all purpose baking mix from Arrowhead Mills.

So I ran across a story on Slashdot about how ABC/Disney had a blog shutdown over the posting of some audio clips from a radio-station affiliate in conjunction with the blogger’s letters to the radio station advertisers over their tacit support of the comments and views of the talk radio hosts on the station.

The Slashdot post linked to a blog posting on the Daily Kos: State of the Nation that had more details.

While I don’t exactly like the idea of corporate America picking on the little guy when their pocketbook is being affected, I wonder at the hoopla that gets kicked up in the liberal ‘Net community everytime something like this happens.

One of the comments on the Daily Kos post stated that this was

this is a really big First Amdendment and Blogger Rights issue

I think that the author of the comment would have had a good point if they had stopped after “First Amendment”.

What is it that makes speech in a blog any different than speech in any other medium? If there are legitimate freedom of speech issues in this particular case, beyond the often confusing interpretation of what constitutes fair use, then that is a valid point. However, just because the post was made on a blog shouldn’t impart any special protection beyond what has been granted in the caselaw surrounding the first amendment protections.

For years, people that have an issue with a particular view expressed through a commercial entity, be it radio, television, or print, have been writing letters to newspaper editors and advertisers. How is this any different now that we have another medium to voice our opinions? Just because the ease of getting the opinion across has been increased with the advent of Internet forums and blogs, does not mean that the same laws concerning freedom of speech or copyright are more or less applicable.

Do we really need a whole raft of new legislation when the medium is digital instead of analog?

Sungevity is a company that does residential solar panel installations. They have this cool web app that lets you enter you address and then determines how much energy you will need. They use satellite imagery to help design the system.

When you’re ready to see how much solar your home needs, Sungevity makes it easy. Simply enter your address, and we’ll design a system for your roof remotely, using satellite images. We’ll get back to you with the systems that will fit on your roof – all online and free.

Pretty cool, but unfortunately it is for California residents only.

Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.

It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

So on an Apache webserver you need to add the following to your mime types file:

application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx

Thanks goes out to Vlad Mazek and his post on this one.

Now if only it was so easy for a Windows webserver running IIS. For the process on updating IIS, surf on over to the entry on David Oberton’s blog at a href=”http://uksbsguy.com/”>UK SBS Guy.

Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server.  Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.

On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots.  Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard.  The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.

The first step is to create a symbolic link to the NRPE config file from the default location to the root of the NRPE directory.

1. cd /usr/local/nagios/
2. ln -s etc/nrpe.cfg nrpe.cfg

The next setp is to ensure that the NRPE daemon will be able to connect with Nagios server.  There are two ways to do this.  One way is to add a line to the /etc/services file to allow for an open port for NRPE.  The second way is to open the port as part of the launchd process.

Method One – edit the /etc/services file

1. cd /etc/
2. sudo vi /etc/services
3. add the following line to the end of the file:
   5666/tcp # Nagios NRPE client

Method Two – use the launchd process

This method involves including a dictionary key into the launchd plist file that sets the socket type and port number for the NRPE service to use for listening.  The plist code is shown below:

Sockets Listeners SockServiceName 5666 SockType stream SockFamily IPv4

The rest of setting up the plist is required to make the process work.  Here is a copy of my entire plist:

KeepAlive NetworkState UserName nagios GroupName nagios Program /usr/local/nagios/bin/nrpe ProgramArguments -c /usr/local/nagios/etc/nrpe.cfg -i Sockets Listeners SockServiceName 5666 SockType stream SockFamily IPv4 inetdCompatibility Wait Label org.nagios.nrpe

Copy the above code into a text file and name it nrpe.plist and copy it into the /Library/LaunchDaemons/ directory.  You can manually start the service by executing the following commands:

1. sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/nrpe.plist
2. sudo launchctl start org.nagios.nrpe

Download the plist file here

My last two posts, Starting NRPE via launchd and Nagios NRPE on OS X Server 10.5, concerned getting NRPE to run on OS X Server 10.5 and having it startup at system boot.

However, this is only part of the battle.  Once you have Nagios monitoring setup on your server you also need to have some nice options for checking the availability of your running services.

Tim Wilson from the Savvy Technologist, wrote an NRPE plugin that helps out with this.  The plugin check_osx_services does an excellent job of checking on the status for many services running on 10.5 Server.

The documentation on the plugin at the NagiosExchange site is pretty thorough.  One thing that is not mentioned is that you will need to run the check_osx_services script as superuser since it calls the system level command serveradmin which must be run as root.

Last week I posted on how to setup NRPE on Mac OS X Server.  Here is what you need to do to make it start up at system boot.

On a Linux or Solaris machine you can just include the call to the daemon in an init script like rc.local and it will be started when the OS boots.  Unfortunately, Apple has made this a little more difficult on Mac OS X with Tiger and Leopard.  The standard startup processes (cron, inetd, xinetd, etc.) have been rolled into a single process known as launchd.

Read more

Recently I was tasked to install the Nagios add-on NRPE on two OS X 10.5 servers.

I read a little on the ‘net about it, but no one actually had much in the way of a walkthrough, so I thought I would fill the void.

The basic steps involve compiling the NRPE source, but doing so involves altering some of the code.

Read more

Over the weekend I setup a Ubuntu 8.04 installation in my apartment.  The main purpose was to have a box to use to connect to my Tivo, but I am also going to use it to play with Java servlet and jsp development.

Of course none of this is any fun without Internet access.  So I started configuring my Linksys pci wireless adapter.  Turns out that the longstanding bug that affects the WPA2 passphrase store in Gnome Network Manager is still not fixed.

Read more

This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash.

Background

My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon while working in Windows. You got the standard click of the drive arm against the platter that wouldn’t stop.

I tried some basic restoration techniques to see if I could at least see the drive:

Nothing worked. So I went out and bought a new hard drive for her from one of the local computer places in Valdosta, Belson’s pcXchange.

Installation Problems

At this point I thought I was going to be homefree, boy was I wrong. The first hurdle was getting the Windows install cd to even see the hard drive. Apparently the bios for the CX210X does not have a legacy option to allow the SATA controller to be seen as a standard IDE controller. No problem, I can just use a USB floppy drive to load the drivers before the install, right? Wrong.

Read more

Next Page »

In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.

I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple TV using iTunes.  I use the built-in Apple TV profile to do this.  The profile sets the frame rate option on the encoder to be “Same As Source”.  It turns out that if your rip has a final fps (frames per second) that is greater than 30 then the resulting movie will not be available in the list of Shared Movies on the Apple TV.

Over Thanksgiving break I bought an Apple TV.  Like any good geek I wanted to expand the capability of the unit beyond the default setup.

After installing Firefox and getting USB keyboard and mouse support going, I realized that it would be tremendously cool if I could control it from my iPhone instead of using a wired keyboard.

To begin with I installed OSXvnc.  The only problem was that I needed to store a password.  After reading a the VNC post on the aTV Flash forum, I successfully conquered that.  However, I had the same problem that iMattUK had: you had to use an ssh connection to start it.

To conquer this I wrote a launchd plist to launch OSXvnc for me at system startup.  Read on for the process I used to get it all working.

Read more

This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.

The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the fact that evidence has shown that consumers are not prepared. The new legislation sets a deadline for the switch to June 12, 2009, however broadcasters can switch over to digital prior to that deadline if they so choose.

Read more

Fringe, a new series on the Fox network that is using a new format Fox dubs Remote-Free TV.

The episodes are longer than your average sitcom.  The Wikipedia entry on the show states that this series will have less commercials and promos.

While this is true, one of the interesting bits is that before each commercial they tell you how many seconds should pass before the next segment starts.

Another interesting aspect of the series is how they identify each location during the episode.  Often shows just print plain text on the screen, however in Fringe they use 3D text on the screen and it is oriented differently depending on the scene.