kasia in a nutshell

Finally, of course this is the week from hell so even Friday couldn't possibly have gone without something happening..

This time, a tire.. on my way home from work to give out candy to the neighborhood heathens. Thankfully, some good soul took pity on my desperate attempts to loosen the lug nuts(? is that right?) and helped me out.. He said it's the first time he helped an elf change a tire. I'm Legolas for the day.. we did "Lord of the Rings" theme as a group (the geeky engineers, of course). I like the pointy ears, I may keep those, but the blonde wig had to go.. it looked more like "Legolas the porn years" than the LOTR kind.

So right now I'm sitting on my doorstep, giving out candy to the occasional witch and monster and utilizing my wonderful wireless. It seems we get much fewer kids than we used to, so it's a bit boring to just sit here waiting. Must wonder, what else could possibly go wrong this week? Will a vampire-dressed 5 year old mug me for my powerbook? Of course, there's always tomorrow too..

<Two minute break>
Cute, minature white ninjas. And why is one of my neighbors playing the musak version of "Lean on me" loudly on his doorstep? Not exactly Halloween music..

Posted by kasia at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

A common trait among software engineers (really, most engineers) is our logical thinking. It takes a logical mind to enjoy writing software and become proficient at it, half the battle of problem solving is just that.. logic.. Given this trait, my dreams forever amuse me.

I tend to dream very vividly and also tend to remember most of my dreams. It's really a great feature of being me, I know most people don't share this. What is also great is the dreams right before waking up.. You know.. after you've hit the snooze button 20 times already and incorporated the alarm sounds into the plot? Those dreams. I had one of those today.. and it amused me to no end remembering it in the shower..

It went something like this...

I went to a toy store don't remember why, probably Halloween-related given it's the candy-grabbing time of year again. As it turned out, the clerk taking care of me at the store was an author of one of the weblogs I read on regular basis.. someone I've never actually met before or remembered seeing a picture of. I'm sure I must have though, since after checking the person's website this morning it turned out I dreamt the facial features and general look quite correctly. Obviously, there was a conversation involved.. went something very close to this:

Dreaming Kasia: "Why are you working at a toy store, aren't you a programmer?
Dream-blogger: "I had legal problems due to some hacking and I'm not allowed to use a computer anymore".
DK: "Oh, I see, how do you write your weblog then?"
DB: "On my mac, that's okay to use".

This made perfect sense to the dreaming, subconscious mind... but the conscious, close to waking mind was screaming "NO, wait a minute! This makes zero sense!".

Even when sleeping, my logical mind emerges and mocks up a perfectly nice dream. You can see how this can be amusing when remembering later. Okay, maybe just to me, but I thought I'd share regardless.

Posted by kasia at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

There is one thing that I hate more than being micro-managed... and that's being micro-managed by someone who isn't my boss. As any programmer will tell you, being productive is hard enough at times.. without someone on an ego trip deciding that you're not 'allowed' to do something without his permission because he says so.. now there are perfectly valid reasons for someone to say that.. but in this case, not even a whiff of them was anywhere within a hundred mile radius..

But wait! There's more!

So we covered..

• micro-management == bad
• micro-management by not your boss == double bad

Remaining point...

Micro-management by not your boss in an incredibly rude manner that includes charming phrases like "crapping all over the database"... and trust me, I know I didn't affect or break anything.. I wouldn't be bitching about this otherwise... not to mention it was a test to benefit this particular wonderful person's underling.. (that poor guy) not me.

I had a point.. oh yes.

Work can be hard enough... it's not so hard to be nice to your co-workers (even the ones who are one engineering level below you) particularly when they're trying to help and aren't exactly being brain-dead (unlike the other day..shh) and getting in the way. Mmkay?

Maybe it's a gender thing.. good god, I hope it's not a gender thing..

Posted by kasia at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

This week has certainly been fascinating. Monday, I did something braindead on a work machine, yesterday I started a flame war.. I wonder what today will bring?

In other news, Connecticut appears to be under a deluge.. personally, I'm packing all this rain in boxes and shipping it out to California, they could use it.

Looks like Jeremy has SARS.

Posted by kasia at 09:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Dave Winer:

And Linux ships with every security feature wide open. An end user who actually installed it (an amazing accomplishment in itself) would end up (instantly) hosting a playground for script kiddies everywhere.

Information that can be very easily verified as false.. at many levels, but for the sake of argument let's pretend we're talking about RedHat, undoubtedly the most popular linux distribution, which 'ships' (and has for a couple years now) with a fully configured firewall, turned on by default, and all insecure (telnet, ftp) services turned off.

One less weblog for me to read.. anyone who refuses to correct an obvious error that's been pointed out to then by numerous people (yet takes the time to call them 'zealots') isn't worth my time.. Not a great loss for Dave, I'm sure, but still a disappointment to me.

Posted by kasia at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (62) | TrackBacks (13)

I believe I may have just acquired a winner for the 'dumbest thing you've ever done as root' collection.

I was busy cleaning out some unnecessary files from my home directory on one of our linux servers and noticed I have a nice collection of files owned by root in there.. most dating back a year or so.. hence most likely from an old project that's been deader than a doornail for a while now. Naturally, I decided to clean those out. Now being a conscientious (hah, that's a laugh, read on) unix user, instead of just doing it as root, I decided to change ownership and delete them as my own user.

Naturally.

sudo /bin/tcsh
cd /home/ktrapszo
chown -R ktrapszo:ktrapszo .*

Spotted it yet? Well.. I didn't. Not until there was an email from a confused unix admin that is.. "All files in /home are owned by ktrapszo.."

D'oh.. that looks familiar!

Thankfully, it took all of ten minutes to fix.. Thankfully the unix admins didn't see the huge red blush at the realization of my stupidity. Thankfully it wasn't /.. Thankfully our cvs repository isn't in /home.

I am truly a dumbass sometimes.

Posted by kasia at 07:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (19)

I suppose that's putting it lightly.

Why, why, oh why do they try so hard to circumvent spam filters? Isn't it rather obvious that a person who uses filtering is thoroughly uninterested in viewing their offer of a larger penis, bigger breasts all while chewing viagra and paxil?

Surely, there must be a better way to market to the gullible.. if I was so uh, well, dumb, as to believe the products they're pushing work.. I probably would not be using spam filters..

It's just so frustrating..

1. Spamassassin let it through.
2. Apple mail client didn't notice it.
3. Well.. I did and deleted, congrats? You got me to hit my delete button?

Who is the idiot who buys from these people, I want to kick his ass.

Posted by kasia at 08:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (3)

Disclaimer: I'm relatively new to the world of osx, so easily impressed.

• Expose is awesome.
• Mail filtering actually finds spam now. Previous version marked it very rarely..
• Safari still has a huge memory leak.
• GUI is definitely faster.
• Postfix is a nice touch.
• Disk utility changes are neat.
• MySQL! -- I don't know what I was smoking.. there's a mysql user & group but the server does not appear to be installed, I'll try to do that later.
• shell still defaults to bash, but that's easy to change.

Took me about 5min to remember how to copy MP3s off of my iPod to import into my iTunes library. This shouldn't be such a pain..

For future reference...
Mount iPod, make sure to not allow iTunes to take over it (this will erase it).
in a shell cd /Volumes/<ipod name>/iPod Control/Music
Using a simple shell script, copy files from each dir (foreach dir (`ls`) etc..) then import the files into iTunes and all works...

Posted by kasia at 01:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (2)

Panther up and running.. X11 installing... then configure. Looks good so far. Mark has a good write up on what's new in panther

Posted by kasia at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (2)

I've had it on my hard drive for a while now. Over a week actually. Stop wishing evil things on me, I can explain why I waited this long. See, I didn't have any CDRs or for that matter CDRWs. I just bought some yesterday and promptly burned panther on them. Now, I also have a real life (yes, I actually do and some of it is quite problematic) and didn't really have a chance to do the install until tonight.. but what's a better way to spend a Friday night if not with your favorite laptop? So.. panther... here we go.

First the checklist..

• Files backed up - check.
• MP3s on the iPod - check.
• iPod still working - check.
• CDRs all actually work - check - it would really suck to find out halfway through the install that one of them is corrupt.

See you on the other side.

<powerdown>

Posted by kasia at 08:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As I was updating a user's account with an e-mail address today (don't ask) I felt I've seen it before. That's unusual, since it's not a user I normally interact with or really ever remember seeing before.. checked the history and sure enough. This is the second time this year that I've helped with his e-mail address. Same e-mail address.

Last time was back in March.

So, essentially. Back in March I saw an e-mail address for about a minute (that's about as long as it takes to paste it into an SQL statement) and now, seven months later I remembered it perfectly.

Seven months later remembered something I only glanced at very briefly. I remembered *that* but I don't remember where I put my car keys the night before!

Apparently my brain is wired to remember the most inconsequential of things and forget the important stuff. Can I use this as an excuse at work? "I forgot to show up today, sorry.. I was writing a letter to the boy who sat next to me on the second day of kindergarden. He moved to Italy few months later, but I still remember his address and he owes me a lollipop from the field trip we took to Museum of general stupidity on Pratt street in Warsaw."

Posted by kasia at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Woke up this morning to a light covering of snow on my car.. damnit, it's only October!

Posted by kasia at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

Yes, I am easily amused, thanks for asking. If you're scratching your head, look at the title bar in that image.

Posted by kasia at 09:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

i) For those two MT-using bloggers who have not yet seen Jay Allen's blacklist plugin for Movable Type, here it is. It sounds like a great idea and I'm sure it works quite well.. unfortunately not at all with mod_perl.. The inevitable slowdown of not running MT under mod_perl would probably negate the time saved no longer deleting spam comments, so I'll have to wait on this one.

ii) I got tired of looking through spamassassin-marked-spam. Over the last year or so that I've been using spamassassin only 2 or 3 real e-mails were marked as spam.. and the cause there was over-use-of-html-in-email-syndrome aka "Mom, quit using that crap for e-mail". So.. result?

/^X-Spam-Flag:.YES/ HOLD

In header_checks.. Postfix rocks.

What's that.. you sent me email in HTML and I didn't get it? Gee.. bummer.

Posted by kasia at 08:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Downloading.. downloading.. damn this is slow.

meow.

Posted by kasia at 08:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Spotted on one of those lighted-traffic-boards on the highway on the way to work this morning:

Yankee's suck RedSox Rule

On 91 South.. around exit for route 68.

Posted by kasia at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

As anyone who is reading this probably realizes, I'm a unix person. Not only am I a unix person, I'm also a unix programmer. Which just means I program under unix - under normal circumstances anyway. Recently, I've had the opportunity to be exposed to the world of windows programmers.

I have a few things to say.

I'm sorry I have ever made fun of windows programmers.

I am sorry I ever made light of your work and accomplishments.

I am very sorry.

You guys (that's the windows programmers 'you') have to work under conditions I would equate to working in salt mines in 19th century.

Instability, cryptic non-transparent technology, mouse, good lord, everything is mouse-driven. I am in awe and amazement that given the environment and constant non-code-related problems you guys accomplish anything.

My hat's off to you. If I wore a hat anyway.

Posted by kasia at 07:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBacks (1)

My quads hurt, my calves hurt, my feet hurt (blisters) and my hamstrings hurt.

I've also been eating lots of beans (protein to rebuild all those muscles) so you can image what other side effects I'm having.. attractive, isn't it? :)

How in the world do people run a full marathon and survive it? Maybe I'll find out next year. I think I need a nice massage.

Posted by kasia at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Anyone who tries to question the decision of running 13.1 miles on a Saturday morning instead of catching up on sleep can stop now. I already know it's stupid.. but hey, I got a t-shirt out of it.

It was actually a beautiful day to run, dry, little windy, 70s and the sun was out the whole time. I'm so glad I wore my sun glasses.. I swear that course was designed to make sure sun is always shining on the runner's faces. Maybe for better photo ops?

The Cliff's Notes version:

I ran, finished under 3 hours (barely, don't laugh yet), got nasty blisters on both feet and well, finished. That's the important part.

The longer version:

The good news.. my knee didn't hurt and the first 8 miles felt fantastic.. I could have ran a lot longer and faster (I was pacing myself).

The bad news.. the blisters (around mile 9 or so) were really, really painful (technically, still are). I wore coolmax socks in hopes of preventing blisters. Obviously, that didn't work very well. So the next 2 miles or so.. I probably did more walking than running.. but then, as hordes of runners passed me by, I decided to grin and bear and ran the last 2 miles.. not as fast as I would have liked to.. but hey, not many people can run fast with what feels like needles being stuck in their feet. Anyway, I finished and that was my ultimate goal. To see if I can actually do this.

It's actually quite amazing I ran it at all. See, I signed up for this over six months ago.. I had a training schedule in mind and was pretty damn excited about running a decent race. Then I trained.. and I trained.. and I trained some more.. Of course, (this is *me* after all) not even halfway through my training program -- I injured my knee. Badly. Ran a 9 mile-long run in a park.. and it's a route that's nothing but hills.. I guess I wasn't quite ready for that. Or at least my knee wasn't. Over two weeks of zero running (try running when even walking is painful!).. and I had to cut down on my weekly mileage considerably.. Not to mention my average pace plummeted by nearly 2 minutes a mile.. since running a bit faster brought on knee pain.

So why did I run anyway? Good question.

I intended to either cancel my registration or downgrade to a 5K (that I could run even with an achy knee).. but.. well.. at first I was hoping the knee pain would go away and I could get back into training. That didn't happen.. the training I did do wasn't really sufficient (longest run 6 miles and forget about speed work). Then I was just hoping something would prevent the race from happening (yah, I know, that's realistic) so I would have an excuse.. well.. that didn't happen. Then this last week.. not to go into details, but I've had better weeks.. hell.. I don't think I've had many worse weeks.. and well, that kind of took my mind off of it.. until this morning.

I picked up my buddy (he ran it too and finished 3 minutes before me-- his excuse was cramps, I didn't get those, thankfully).. went to the start line.. all a bit in a daze.. gun went off.. people started running.. and well, what the hell, at that point might as well do this thing. So I did.

So see, yes, under 3 hours is a damn lousy time.. but all things considered, I'm amazed I even ran this thing.

Next year: I'll try for the full marathon and this time, maybe, I'll actually train for it.

Posted by kasia at 03:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Go figure, the Bush weblog is using Movable Type.. That's pretty funny...

(Tag in RSS feed gives it away if the archive structure didn't).

Posted by kasia at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBacks (2)

I just changed the time zone on my west-coast based server to eastern time..

It was really as a convenience to some other people not myself.. but dang it, it just feels so.. wrong..

Posted by kasia at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1)

Spam in comments continues to increase... I get about 10 or 20 a day now (delete, delete, delete).. So looking for patterns..

1. It's always done by a real person.. does not appear to be an automated script.
2. Inevitably, the original hit is a result of a google search.

Maybe I should just disallow commenting for all who arrive via google..

Maybe if Google fixed their bloody methods and stopped treating weblogs to high rankings for everything this wouldn't be an issue.. since the whole point of this spam is to increase a site's google ranking.

At any rate, this is getting more annoying by the day.. yet another thing ruined by spammers.

Posted by kasia at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Door-to-door salesmen. I thought they all died out with the ease of e-mail spamming.. but apparently not. The perils of living in suburbia.. lots of houses with lots of people in them and easily accessible by foot for the right-minded perky college student.

*ding dong*

[Insert long diatribe about winning some contest (a trip to Cancun! You ever been there?) which culminates in a brochure with subscription options for such fine magazines as Reader's Digest]

k: "Uh, no thanks".
sg: "Don't you want to help me win?"
k: "No, not really, but nice guilt trip"

Not even a good bye and he's walking off to the next house over.. and our admittedly short but yet so spunky and perky relationship ends.

Oh well.. still.. it's something to tell your grandkids 50 years from now as they marvel at the idea of people selling things door-to-door.

Posted by kasia at 04:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I've received an e-mail today claiming to be from ebay and requesting confirmation of information.. That's nothing new, of course.. we've all seen these scam email soliciting information.. The clever part of this one was that the entire e-mail content was just an image, which was of course a link..

Looks quite real, doesn't it? I bet my mom would have fallen for it.. If she used ebay.. I've tried to explain to her why html in email is bad, but she doens't get it, sigh.

Posted by kasia at 08:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (1)

This is something I meant to blog for a while, since discussing it with a co-worker (who has a nearly-teenage daughter) over a lunch and some general silliness.

One can measure the maturity of the human female by which character in the movie she is attracted to..

• Pre-teen girls are drawn to the boyish appearance of Frodo. An adult woman attracted to him is probably in need of therapy. Badly.
• Teenage girls (and men worldwide) are attracted to Legolas. Girls to the long blond hair and boyish good looks, men just want to look that cool when mounting a horse.
• Adult, grown women, of course, Aaragorn. He's full of raw sexuality and ragged masculinity. If your teenage daughter is attracted to him, buy a very large lock for her bedroom door.
• Older women, of course, the wisened and yet brave and never-fearing Gandalf. The ones who can still remember what sex is like probably prefer Aragorn though.

Star wars had a similar thing, except the selection wasn't quite as good. There was Luke for the kiddies and Han Solo for the adults.. Chewbacca? Nah..

Posted by kasia at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1)

This article describes pretty much how I felt when I opened my powerbook box..

Apple does pay wonderful attention to detail. The packaging, the products, everything is esthetic and pleasing. It's a lost art, pity.

Posted by kasia at 07:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (1)