At work I was tasked with upgrading our tape backup system, from old hardware running Veritas 5 to new hardware running Symantec (Veritas) NetBackup 6.5. The new server is running RedHat EL 4 and we bought it a QLogic QLE2460 Fibre Channel card for the tape drive communication. This was a horribly long, drawn out, unnecessarily complicated project. Symantec tech support is mostly outsourced to India, and mostly useless. It's nothing against Indians, it's just that they were obviously working from a script and poorly trained.

Buddhism is a very old and expansive religion - there are many teachings and behavior prescriptions. It's also one of the few religions that doesn't give me the heeby geebies because the main tenents tend to be along the lines of being nice to everyone and leaving a small environmental footprint (in my limited exposure). The ultimate goal of every Buddhist is to become a Buddha.

There has been a debate about browser version targeting for some time. Browser version targeting is a scheme devised by Microsoft whereby a website declares which browser it is designed for, and it's then the browser's job to display the page in the appropriate way. If Microsoft proposing a new standard doesn't make you at least mildly suspicious, you must not have handled Microsoft and non-MS interoperability.

My ballot picks and reasoning thereof for the February 5, 2008 election in California:

This article from Lifehacker: Access Your Computer Anytime and Save Energy with Wake-on-LAN reminded me that I've been meaning to write this up for a long time.

Over a dinner conversation tonight I started to come up with various reforms to make this country a better place. These are in no particular order and there are undoubtedly many others which I haven't though of yet. Feel free to post your wishlist in the comments.

I watched many clips of the youtube Republican Debate. It amazed me - the debate was a scramble for the Crown of Crazy.

Watch them for yourself:  http://youtube.com/republicandebate

Do you really want another 4 years living under loonies? Then make sure you vote.  Not only that, but make sure everyone you know votes too.

I've been a member of the ACLU for a while and while I believe they are vital to our nation's future, I can't stand all the spam (snail mail) that I get from them; usually asking for more money. I understand that paying lots of lawyer's salaries gets expensive - but come on! I've already donated. Please don't ask for more money than I've donated (for an annual membership) more than once or twice per year! I hate to imagine just how much of my donation is going towards spamming people and filling landfills with wasted paper.

The USA lost the War on Terror the day it started. The fact that there is a "War on Terror" means that we lose. It bears repeating that Terrorism is a tactic. This so-called "War on Terror" is just an excuse for an endless war entailing increased government powers, spending, opaqueness, and tabling other "less important" issues.

Listening to the Point of Inquiry podcast with Francis Collins was a little bit frustrating. Francis Collins is a world renowned researcher - one might say one of the most important scientists in the world - yet he's a Theist. I'm convinced that having the skepticism and critical thinking skills that make a good scientist leads to agnosticism/atheism. When Dr. Joe Shmoe preaches something crazy about God, it's easy to think, "Anyone can get a PhD these days!" But when it's a top scientist it makes you wonder what's going on.

After attempting to configure pureftp, I gave up. The configuration is ridiculous and even after hours of monkeying I could not get it to behave as I wanted.

Then I tried vsftpd. After 20 minutes, the server is up and running just the way I want it. From what I can tell (no debian security advisories in the recent past) vsftpd lives up to its name, very secure.

Agnosticism is the same thing as Atheism. If you don't believe me please read on.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that his country will have nuclear power by February. In a related story, the IAEA has found traces of plutonium and uranium in a nuclear waste plant in Iran. Ahmandinejad is naturally a thorn in the side of the Bush Administration - which tries to enforce its worldview through intimidation.

Amazing things happened yesterday in the polls. Most of all, and I hope I'm not being naive, some hope has been restored in me. After the 2004 election I lost all faith in the American voter. The idea that Bush could be re-elected after all the havoc he caused (not even including the Iraq war) was unfathomable to me. The day after election day 2004 was the most depressing day of my life.

Carl Sagan died in 1996, and shortly thereafter so did his religion, if you use modern politics as a gauge.

In a desperate bid to seem sane, effective, and in a desperate bid to appear like he's still the decider George W. Bush gave a speech today detailing his hopes for immigration reform.

This post is to show you naysayers that when you speak your mind to politicians, your voice is heard. If you are lucky your voice resonates strongly with the politician as it did in my case. Was it my articulate prose, or my concise argument that moved Diane Feinstein to such a response? I may never know, but I am proud to show the world that my political concerns matter, and that Diane Feinstein truly cares about Californians. My emphasis has been added.

There is a glaringly obvious hole in our government's truthiness (thank you Colbert). After the Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham scandals there was a lot of lip service paid to the idea of reform and anti-corruption. However the spotlight has already faded, the media has moved on. The chronically amnesiac American public is thinking about the next episode of American Idol.

I am not the only one who has been sick of the Democratic Party - not of their issues, values, or views - but with their lack thereof. Their jellyfish-like behavior in the shadow of a strong Republican party is embarrassing for many who care about human rights, civil rights, the environment, corruption, and overall policy: foreign and domestic. Their lack of initiative to hit Republicans where they are weak is pathetic (and there have been many opportunities).

Dimmeria is back online after a hiatus because I was switching ISPs from dslextreme to SBC (now ATT). ATT offers this slick deal where it's $18/month for 3Mbps down and 512Kbps up - dynamic IP and no ports blocked (so it will work for a server, like this one).

I was told by a sales lady, Beth, at the end of January that I could transfer my DSL without losing connectivity. That turned out to be a complete lie.

Cindy Sheehan was arrested for wearing the wrong T-shirt at the State of the Union Address. If I didn't know better I would say that my freedoms were limited by this Administration: Indefinite arrest without trial, torture, limitations on speech, no right to privacy, no right to judicial oversight in the executive's affairs.

To agree that Cindy's rights were violated you don't have to be a supporter of Cindy or share her point of view on Iraq, because I don't. You just have to care about your own freedom of speech.

I have been frustratedly watching from afar as people have been discussing making a .xxx top-level internet domain. While this may not be a bad idea - it also be not be a good idea. We don't want to limit graphic material on the internet to .xxx - afterall, there are many sites which show nudity which are not porn sites (medical sites, science sites, international entertainment sites, etc.). A .xxx TLD doesn't make the web safe for kids - they can still access .com sites with explicit material. Plus the whole idea of the internet is free information - restricting any genre to one part of the internet is a bad idea. If we start restricting information on the net, we start killing the net. Limiting all graphic material to one part of the internet (which nobody may be proposing yet, but probably would in the future) is a bad idea.

A much better idea is to create a new top-level domain called ".kid".

When you interpret it that way. For the past few years the Right-wing, with the help of Bill O' Reilly and other pundits have been waging a "War for Christmas" by trying to force people to say "Merry Christmas" as opposed to "Happy Holidays".

Personally, I've always celebrated Christmas, albeit secularly. I don't celebrate Hanukah, unless I happen to be invited to a Hanukah party. Not only do people celebrate Christmas, but we also celebrate Thanksgiving at the end of November and New Years. Last I checked, New Years and Thanksgiving didn't have much to do with Christmas, but most American Christians celebrate them. If you say "Happy Holidays" you can include all 3 of the holidays instead of just one. Therefore the term "happy holidays" just makes more sense. This whole time of year is just a string of holidays where you have to spend time with family and friends, get fat, and drink lots of booze. When I was younger, I celebrated time off of school. In my old age I get paid time off work. This whole time of year is an entire season of holiday.

Background:

Political scientists, scientists, politicians, generals, and journalists have devoted an extraordinary amount of time trying to figure out ways to keep WMD from being distributed to people who would use them against the US or allies. The history of the secrecy and distribution of WMD has become large and complex in a short amount of time. Highlights in this history include:

I sent Senator Bill Frist (R Tennessee) this letter after hearing about the Democrats invoking Senate Rule 21 on NPR, and after reading this article on CNN.

How come you have a "Justice O'connor retirement" message topic on your contact form, but not a "war in iraq" topic?

Maybe it's a symptom of the same problem I'm writing about. You don't want to talk about the war in Iraq. Honestly, we both know why - because your party made a mistake. You guys made a costly, tragic mistake. The Republicans don't want to look at the reasons why we went to war in Iraq, because their Administration was either ignorant or malicious in regards to the truth about WMD. As much as I'd like to see the Administration publicly ridiculed and crucified, that's not what I really care about.

I'm posting this information because it solves a problem that wasted several hours of my life. It's somewhat obscure, and I didn't find much help from google searches.

If you are trying to set the width of a css element in javascript, you must add "px" (or eg "em") after the value for it to work in IE and Firefox.

UPDATE 10-28-2007: Revised for Drupal 5.

This is a how-to guide to install drupal (drupal runs this site) on Debian or Ubuntu.

Background: