public static final KITTEN

New Blog Location Reminder

2007-10-28T13:12:00.000-07:00

I've rearranged my homes in cyberspace. public static final KITTEN continues in a new location:

http://andrew.becherer.org/blog/

The comprehensive portal for all things Andrew Becherer is:

http://andrew.becherer.org/

Google Analytics is the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread!

2007-08-20T15:04:00.000-07:00

I just recently started using Google Analytics. I have this to say to anyone who has had trouble maintaining a blog before... GET GOOGLE ANALYTICS! It is amazing. I set it up for my new blog and I can't believe how cool it is.

Apache2, DNS, MX, apache2ctl

2006-06-25T17:54:00.000-07:00

So this afternoon I have been setting up my VPS. How did I manage to be a geek this long and never have to deal with Apache configuration, DNS zones, MX records and stuff? Anyway, you can see the fruits of my limited labor by typing http://andrew.becherer.org/blog into your trusty web browser (or you could click the link).

Where are the posts?

2006-06-25T08:11:00.000-07:00

My loyal readers may have noticed I have not posted in two weeks. I haven't even posted Friday Kitten Blogging. What is up? Well besides a fantastic trip to the Commonwealth of Kentucky to visit friends and family I am moving this blog.

Moving!?! Yes, moving. There are a couple of reasons I am moving. The first is that I want to be just like Ted Haeger and since he moved to Wordpress I am going to move to Wordpress! The second is that I have owned the domain becherer.org longer than I can remember and I want to make more use of it than just email. The third reason is so that I can give my Dad (and anyone else in the Becherer clan who wants one) a blog.

I have purchased a "virtual private server" based on Xen from a really great outfit called Rimuhosting. It is currently running Debian 3.1 but I may upgrade it to Ubuntu 6.06 prior to really getting it setup. Ubuntu 6.06 has newer version of everything and unlike previous versions it will be supported for a long time (several years as I recall).

The reason for the delay in moving is that I have been doing my homework. I looked at a number of blogging engines (Wordpress, MovableType, etc.) and I also looked at different content management systems (Drupal, Joomla!, etc.). Expect to see some action soon.

In the meantime this is still the right bat time and the right bat channel.

Friday Kitten Blogging: Handy

2006-06-02T04:46:00.000-07:00

All I have to say is why couldn't my cats have been this handy? You can read the discussion over at Cute Overload.

Google Web Toolkit (GWT)

2006-06-02T04:28:00.000-07:00

Google released an interesting project at JavaOne 2006. It is a JavaScript generator written in... Java! All of you servlet and JSP developers out there can get in on this whole web 2.0 AJAX thing without leaving the comfort of the Eclipse IDE. Get ready too create dynamic sites like Google Maps, Flickr, YouTube and more.

Is there a catch? Yes. It is under a non-OSI approved license and does restrict your ability to do certain "things" with code developed with the GWT. Most notably you cannot redistribute derivative code. IANAL so find a lawyer to interpret the "terms of use" for you if you are considering using this commercially.

Campaign Against Digital Rights Management Heats Up

2006-05-27T20:20:00.000-07:00

Thankfully people keep talking about Digital Restrictions Management and the Defective by Design campaign. I think the latest thread and my experience today at FreedomHEC show that the campaign, no officially launched, needs work in a couple of areas.

We are reaching out to technologists yet our media is not very sophisticated. Our website is content poor and there are broken links. Our print media was described as amateurish by a FreedomHEC attendee.

The campaign has gotten of to a great start! We need to take it to the next level. We need to leverage our collective skills to present a coherent, sophisticated and intelligent image to those we are reaching out to. People are generally responding well to our message let's refine our appearance.

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Greetings from FreedomHEC

2006-05-27T12:18:00.000-07:00

FreedomHEC is in its second day up here in sunny Seattle, WA. Greg K-H just finished up his Make Your Own Linux Device Driver talk. Who knew a USB device driver could be so easy.

If this presentation was any indication of the material presented yesterday I am regretting missing the sysfs talk. I sincerely hope this becomes an annual phenomenon.

More later including photos.

France Considers Anti-DRM 'iPod Law'

2006-05-26T21:29:00.000-07:00

"We oppose the idea that the seller of a song or any kind of work can impose on the consumer the way to read it, forever, and especially in the consumer's home... Can we allow a couple of vendors to establish monopolies tightly controlling their clients and excluding competition?" said Assembly member Christian Paul.

Can someone remind me when interoperability became a bad thing?

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Friday Kitten Blogging: Saved by Jen

2006-05-26T12:48:00.000-07:00

Thanks go out to Jen for rescuing Friday Kitten Blogging. I was so wrapped up in a whirlwind lunch picnic that I almost forgot to post. That would have been a trajedy! Only in its 3rd week! She got Friday Kitten Blogging back on track.

When your eyes match the carpet and you have the curled paw you know you are cute. (Check out the rules of cuteness over at Cute Overload).

I have to say that this little kitten's portrait conveys a certain longing. I imagine his owner is away and he is sitting in the late afternoon sun waiting for his owner's return or for the appearance of something to hunt and kill. Cats can be such jerks.

Preemption

2006-05-25T20:31:00.000-07:00

Jeff Maxwell will be posting soon to "put me in my place." I thought it best to get out ahead of that train wreck. Jeff is going to say, "DRM is bad but TC is inherently neutral... It is an open standard."

I say this... TPMs are neat, I like things like Trusted Grub but we have to take the long view here. Peer down the slippery slope Jeff. What are we gaining and what are we risking?

Do you believe that the corporations with dominant market positions in conjunction with the government will not foist truly treacherous computing upon us?

What Are You Talking About?!?

2006-05-25T02:53:00.000-07:00

I have been talking to a lot of people about what I did on Tuesday morning and I have been getting one response more than any other, "what the heck are you talking about?" That is precisely why I paraded outside of Bill Gates' Windows party wearing a HAZMAT suit.

Technology and law are changing at an unprecedented rate. It is impossible for us to keep up with everything all the time. There are certain things we take for granted that could change very soon. Scottish publishers secured free culture for us in the 1700s and we are very close to giving that free culture back to those in positions of power and authority. I believe culture is too important to be owned and caged.

Please view or listen to Lawrence Lessig's July 2002 O'Reilly Open Source Conference presentation on free culture. It is only about 30 minutes long and will make clear to you the issues surrounding the erosion of our "copy rights" as well the threats posed by Digital Restrictions Management (DRM).

The flash presentation is the best way to view this presentation. If you want to listen to this presentation on the go a DRM-free audio version of the presentation is available.

Peter Brown Speaks Out

2006-05-25T02:51:00.000-07:00

Peter Brown is the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation. In this video Peter explains why we paraded around outside of Microsoft's WinHEC conference in Seattle on Tuesday morning dressed in HAZMAT suits.

Why should you be concerned about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM)?

Tiki 2

2006-05-25T02:40:00.000-07:00

Tiki 2,
originally uploaded by semaphore_.

This is the second in the series of four. I really enjoyed painting this one. I started to get my groove on so to speak.

I have laid down the base color for the other two paintings. There is a red canvas and a blue canvas. These can be viewed on my Flickr.

Astute accessory for the iPod Shuffle will recognize this guy. Oh the irony...

I Create Too!

2006-05-25T02:37:00.000-07:00

Tiki 1,
originally uploaded by semaphore_.

I have been fascinated with tiki lately. So much so that I have been turning my apartment into a tiki bar. Unfortunately I do not have the wads of cash that make such an endeavor quick and easy.

This is the first in a series of four paintings. It is currently just called Tiki 1 but I plan on giving it a name soon.

Astute viewers of a certain Canadian podcast will recognize this guy. Also viewers of a certain blog will recognize this image from a certain banner ad (look down). My art is most certainly derivative...

FSF Kicks Off Anti Digital Rights Mgmt Campaign

2006-05-23T20:01:00.000-07:00

I attended the Free Software Foundation event in Seattle today. We dressed up in HAZMAT suits and handed out fliers outside of Bill Gates' keynote speech at WinHEC 2006 in Seattle.

It is my opinion that Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Treacherous Computing (aka Trusted Computing/TC) are the number one threats to free and open source desktop operating systems such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and more.

I would be remiss if I let the large industry players (Microsoft, Apple, Real, Intel, etc.) force this technology on an unsuspecting public without attempting to inform them of what they are giving up in return for a magical world of DRM convenience.

I will keep blogging about this. In the meantime check out:

http://www.defectivebydesign.org and http://www.fsf.org

More to come....

Visit the new home of the public static final KITTEN blog at http://andrew.becherer.org/blog/ where Andrew Becherer continues to blog about technology and life.

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Part of the blogosphere?

2006-05-19T06:13:00.001-07:00

Am I officially part of the blogosphere now? I was recently blogged by Ted Haeger of Novell Open Audio fame (see the post here).

I met Ted at the 2006 Linuxfest Northwest in Bellingham, WA. After skipping out on Ted's presentation to check out FreeGeek I sneaked in to heckle him for the last 20 minutes. If you have the opportunity to heckle Ted I highly recommend it. He is a very dynamic speaker and gives you plenty of opportunities. I was glad to check out the last 20 minutes of his presentation as the Banshee music player and fSpot are really sweet.

After the fest the honorable Jeff Maxwell and I attended the AprilBrews event courtesy of Google. Note to all you corporate search tycoons; if you want me to use your search engine buy me beer. We were fortunate to bump into Ted and Decibel. The beer tasting was fun and pizza followed.

Ted, if you ever run into John Bartholomew on the street there in Utah make sure you pepper him with extremely detailed questions about computer security technology and policy.

(Regarding FreeGeek; you can take the man out of Americorps but you can't take the Americorps out of the man)

Friday Kitten Blogging: Fierce!

2006-05-19T05:58:00.000-07:00

We all know kittens are fierce predators. Noodle comes to us courtesy of our friends over at Cute Overload. No bathrobe is safe when Noodle is in the house...

Sun to Open Source Java

2006-05-16T14:35:00.000-07:00

From the "it's about time department" comes the announcement that the question of whether or not Java will be opensource is not so much a whether as a how/when? Sun is afraid of forking and fragmentation of the developer community.

I believe all Sun has to do is what they are already doing; develop the best Java in the world. Once Java is opensource people will want two things. They will want compatibility and bells/whistles. This will lead every Linux distro in the world to package Sun Java.

The only glitch for Sun could be if IBM moves in like the did with Java IDEs (see Eclipse).

I can not wait to apt-get install java and receive a working, full featured JRE.

PCI DSS to get revision this summer

2006-05-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

The almost universally ignored Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard will be recieving an update this summer. I'm hoping the Card Associations are not caving but instead are making sensible choices about how to raise the bar for data security.

Currently the situation among small and medium sized buisnesses (level 4) is awful. These people do not have the knowlege or the support to become compliant. The service providers (VARs, Web Hosts, etc.) have no incentive to provide compliant solutions. This puts the merchant's buisness at risk, the cardholders data at risk and makes it difficult for acquiring institutions who try to do the "right" thing to compete in the marketplace.

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Tongue Twister TikiBarTV

2006-05-15T23:54:00.000-07:00

This delightful video podcast comes to us from the Terminal City, Vancouver, BC. Watch as LaLa, Johnny Johnny and Dr. Tiki again make the world safe for libations everywhere!

Friday Kitten Blogging: First Post!

2006-05-12T06:16:00.000-07:00

Every Friday Bruce Schneier posts his "Friday Squid Blogging" and I think it is fantastic. Unfortunately squid don't really fit in around here. I think I know what does though...

Today's kitten comes to us from that bastion of cuteness known as Cute Overload. The combination of the camera angle, the folded ears and the glossy eyes leads to only one conclusion, pathetic cuteness. Cute Overload gives credit to the Kittenwar site for this gem.

(Friday Kitten Blogging is my shameless attempt to get my Mom to read my blog. Hi Mom!)

Setting up XGL in SuSE 10.1

2006-05-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

XGL and Compiz are seriously awesome. This is the reason why I want to beef up my hardware (huh, maybe I could just by the barebones system one Opteron and some ram and a decent but cheap NVidia AGP card). This feature from Novell Cool Solutions tells you just about everything you need to know.

Ubuntu has this in Dapper Drake but my STL2 has issues with the kernel on the install disc and I have to pass -noapic and even then it won't boot.

Ok Ted Haegar you salad dodger... your shamelss Novell propaganda at LinuxfestNW paid off... you win... I'm going to install SuSE.

(Actually I used to use SuSE until I discovered how awesome apt-get was and then I was all "El Debian es la bomba!" Then this crazy distro called Ubuntu showed up with an awful release name, Warty Warthog, but it was Debian Unstable and it was (supposedly) stable. So really this is an old SuSE user coming full circle after giving SuSE 2 years to improve their package manager.)

I'm going to install it right now! What? You say it is almost 10 PM and I have to work in the morning? Ah, yes, I see... alright I am going to fire up my bittorrent client and I am going to download every single ISO and when I get home from work tomorrow I am going to go out to the pub with my friends and drink beer. But! Just as soon as I wake up on Saturday I am going to... go to work and write some soul numbing Visual Basic for Applications. But! Just as soon as I finish writing soul numbing VBA I am going to go to the local greek restaurant and have a gyro. But! Just as soon as I finish that I will either install SuSE or take a nap. I haven't decided which yet.

The point is I will be installing SuSE and I will see how pathetic XGL performs on my hardware.. then I will be extra motivated to figure out how to afford better hardware.

(screenshot shamefully stolen from Ted's flickr without his permission)

Visit the new home of the public static final KITTEN blog at http://andrew.becherer.org/blog/ where Andrew Becherer continues to blog about technology and life.

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Dreaming of a new PC

2006-05-11T05:48:00.000-07:00

I am so jonesing for a new desktop PC. I am very grateful for the PC I have. It was quite the beast in its day. It is configured with Dual PIII 1 Ghz, 512 MB Registered ECC PC133, Intel STL2 Motherboard, 2 x 250 GB HDD, Promise ATA100 Controller Card, Dual Layer DVD+-RW, NVidia Geforce4. It is all wrapped up in an Intel Hudson case which is roughly the size of a battleship. It is responsive yet slow enough that I feel bogged down in KDE or Gnome so I run Xfce4.

I want another multiprocessor system. I would really like 4 cores and I want it in a small form factor. To that end I have been "researching" the IWill ZMAXdp. This is a dual AMD Socket 940 system with the aging NVidia NForce3 chipset, AGP graphics and Hypertransport.

I know what you are saying, "AGP! Scoff! PCI Express 0wnz J00!" I don't game, I won't be gaming, I have no plans on gaming. The only reason for me to get a beefy graphics card is so I can enjoy the accelerated desktop goodness of XGL & Compiz. Then you say, "Dude! NForce3 is so old my grandmother uses it!" To this I say NForce 3 is pretty well supported under Linux and I see no reason to view it as a deficit for my purposes. There was that nasty USB 2.0 bug. I wonder if the kernel hackers ever fixed that?

Here comes the good part. This small form factor box supports dual core AMD Opterons. So I can drop two dual core AMD Opterons in this system and it gives me the quad core goodness I seek.

This is just what I would do if I had an extra $2000 lying around, which I don't. So I will waive goodbye to my dream system. By this fall I'm sure I will be lusting after some small form factor box that support two Intel Core Duo (such as the upcoming Clovertown-MP).

--- Dream System Specs ---

- Socket 940 SFF PC Barebones:
IWILL, ZMAXdp (Black) SFF Barebone, nForce3 Pro, 2x So940, DDR400 ECC 2GB, AGP 8x, SATA RAID (2), Audio, Gb LAN, FW, 300W PSU

- Socket 940 Opteron 200 Series Processors:
AMD, 2 x Dual-Core Opteron™ 270 2.0GHz, HT 1000MHz, 2MB (2x1MB) L2 cache, 95W, 90nm

- DDR400 ECC Registered DIMM Memory:
2GB PC3200 DDR (2 x 1GB) 400MHz CL=3 SDRAM DIMM, ECC Registered

- AGP Video Card:
NVidia 7800GS, GeForce™ 7800 GS, 256MB DDR3, AGP 8x (the fastest NVidia AGP card ever made)

- SATA Hard Drives:
2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 SATA, 16 MB Cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ) Raid 1 Mirroring

- Operating System
Linux with all the bells and whistles. Probably Ubuntu Dapper Drake but maybe the latest SuSE or even Gentoo.

TorPark: A secure, anonymous, and portable Web browser

2006-05-09T19:00:00.000-07:00

If you have never used Tor here is your chance to join the party. Tor stands for "The Onion Router." It is a way of anonimizing internet usage. This can be web browsing, email, ssh or any other activity. Tor uses a network of volunteer hosts to bounce your (encrypted) requests and replies around the internet. Tor even allows for the anonymous hosting of internet servers.

A wide variety of people use Tor including political dissidents, journalists, the EFF, the United States Navy and law enforcement officials worldwide. Tor depends on volunteers to donate bandwidth. If you are concerned about illegal activity on your node you can either limit the types of traffic that can exit your node (port 80 only please) or designate yourself an internal node so you will only handle encrypted node to node communications.

TorPark is awesome because it gives you an incredibly easy way to try out Tor and as a bonus you can put it on a flash storage device and use it on any Windows box. Do be warned while using Tor is safe and anonymous it is slow... until everyone is running a Tor node there is a cost for privacy.

One last caveat; as with most portable apps that are all the rage TorPark is Windows only. Those of us on Linux don't have to rely on portable apps we can bring our whole operating system with us!

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