+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Comment Spam...

The comment spammers have gotten really creative... before all they used to do was try and flood their comments with links to poker and sex sites, but now they try and hide the URL's in the comment URL field, or try to have a redirect page from a normal sounding URL to the real, actual sex or poker site.  Worst of all, they seem to have gotten more frequent! I will try and find ways to minimize the spam, short of disabling the comments. I still like reading people's remarks on my musings...

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶DVD Not Ejecting in Linux?

FYI: If you're having a problem ejecting a dvd drive under Linux, try doing the following in the console:

fuser /dev/dvd
... returns (program id)

ps aux | grep (program id)
top -> kill (program id)

The last line means to type top in the command line, then press "k" and enter the program id you got in the previous steps.

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Another season is over...

With their loss to the Washington Huskies in the 2nd round of the NCAA Basketball tournament, the season is over for the Fighting Illini... While they had a chance to win the game (we were up by more than 10 at one point in the 2nd half), the Illini let the game slip out of their hands at the end. I'm not saying that the officiating wasn't bad, it was... I've never seen so many stupid fouls called on one team over another. The fact is that the Illini of last year would have overcome that kind of officiating and won anyway. The team this year needed to play with a little more poise and skill, and that didn't happen in the last game.

The good thing is that we'll have some good talent returning, despite the loss of Dee Brown and James Augustine (thanks for 4 great years guys!!). We'll have Rich Mcbride (who's gotten alot better over the year), Josh Smith, Chester Frazier in the backcourt and Shawn Pruitt and Brian Randle in the frontcourt. Hopefully the returning players will learn from their experience this year and really step it up next year. I see the Big Ten being wide open, with players like Paul Davis (Michigan State) and Greg Brunner (Iowa) graduating, so the Illini have a great shot of competing for the title again.

Here's to a pretty good season Illini, full of ups and down throughout. Now I'll be cheering for the Bradley Braves(from Peoria, Illinois) in the tournament... they've just upset their 2nd straight team!

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶Hooked on del.icio.us

I've recently have been hooked using a site called del.icio.us. Basically its a service/site that lets you keep your bookmarks online. It has good integration with browsers like firefox (through extensions) and you can even sync your bookmarks locally using an extension like foxylicious. This means that you can take your bookmarks with you, regardless of the computer you are using... You can find my del.icio.us entries here.

I have also added my del.icio.us link feed to my web 2.0 page!

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Wikipedia Vanity Entries

My friend jeff, has done a wikipedia vanity entry. A vanity entry is an entry about yourself, and usually is written in a positive light. I think they are cool... if no one else will chronicle your life, do it yourself! Here's to everyone having their own wikipedia entry (even though they will probably get deleted rather quickly for being 'vanity' entries).

Update:Apparently you can write whatever you want on your own user page... so my entry is safe for now ;)

+ 2 - 0 | § ¶Using Gmail to remotely keep track of your Debian system

I've been trying to find an easy way to keep track of what my debian system was doing while I was away from home for a little while now. One idea I had involved having my computer send status updates (with a package called logcheck and using cron job reports) via email to my gmail account. That way I could login to the account from anywhere, and check to see if my system was still in working order. To do this, I had to configure exim4 (the default mailing agent on Debian) and my gmail account. First off, I reconfigured my exim4 program using:

dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config

In the settings, I chose to relay via smarthost, but did not select to recieve email locally via fetchmail. After that I edited the template config file for exim4:

nano /etc/exim4/exim4.conf.template

and added the following:

remote_smtp_smarthost:
debug_print = "T: remote_smtp_smarthost for $local_part@$domain"
driver = smtp
# hosts_try_auth = ${if exists {CONFDIR/passwd.client}{DCsmarthost}{}}
tls_tempfail_tryclear = false
hosts_require_auth = smtp.gmail.com
hosts_require_tls = smtp.gmail.com
port = 587

Comment the line out above, and add what isn't already in the file. After that I ran

update-exim4.conf

to propogate any changes that I had made. Finally, I added the following lines to the "/etc/exim4/passwd.client" file:

smtp.gmail.com:username@gmail.com:password
gmail-smtp.l.google.com:username@gmail.com:password

Replace username and password in the above two lines with your own info. After that I used a program called MUTT to send out a test email to my gmail account to see if it worked. Sure enough there was an email from myself in the inbox... Finally I configured logcheck and crontab to send email to my gmail account by adding my email address to their respective config files.

For reference, I found most of the info in this debian mailing list posting. Enjoy!

+ 1 - 1 | § ¶TV over IP

Finally, someone gets the whole TV over internet thing right. I would be more than willing to sit through some ads in order to be able to watch a show when/where I want on whatever device I want. I'm sick of all these '); document.write('sirmikester<\/a>'); // --> | Remark | No comments yet