Fugitive Thought

Well, here is the very beginning of my blogging system. I get involved in a ton of projects, but it appears that this website is my current main project. I'm a bit out of practice with my web coding, but I shall get back up to par. I would like to thank Steve for his wonderful help with the color scheming. He's going to fix my messy shadows and other stuff as soon as he finishes one of his other projects with a deadline, but I think I can live with my rudimentary design until then ;).

The cool thing about this site is that I am writing it completely from scratch (aka, no editors any better than vi!! (okay, so maybe I'm using eclipse a little bit too....), but basically it means I'm writing all the code by hand, the old school way ^)_(^. And I'm doing it from inside my two LinuxFromScratch boxes that have been put together completely by me (and of course the OS is customized, I'll get the details on my own version of LFS up in the Projects Section as soon as I get the time). So I guess you can say I'm doing things from the ground up here ;). Too bad my two comps aren't custom built.... I cheaped out and got an eMachine's desktop a while back (good deal on it tho!) and a nice Toshiba lappy. I'll customize the hardware later :-P.

As some of you may notice from the changelog, I am currently living on the west coast (Washington State to be exact). But it appears my family is moving (yet again!) back to the east coast (to Maine). So there may be a lull in my connectivity and work on this site, but I promise I soon as I get back to a good 'net connection, and definitely by the time I get back to school on August 18th, I'll get right back to work on it! My own car project (the Dodge Mirada) is currently up for sale. If I can get the price I want for it I'll be happy, and I really don't think I'll be too desperate for a car around here, or when I get back to school.... we shall see what time brings.

Alright, I guess that's long enough for a first post! Oh, and since Steve's blog isn't up yet, I'll post a link he sent me. For you technically inclined people, or even the not-so-technically-inclined who still care about your privacy rights, here is an interesting read: http://www.prisonplanet.com/022904rfidtagsexplode.html.

Peace, and happy hacking!!

Well, I've been a bit busy recently, so not much progress has been made on this site :-/. Anyway, I'm putting a little time into it today, and I'll keep moving forward. For today's cool link of the day, Steve brings you an amazing dude who built his own computer from scratch. No, this isn't a "from scratch" as in he bought the different cards, etc, and put it all together. No no no, that is cool, but not hackerly. A TRUE hacker designs his own computer from COMPLETE SCRATCH using TTL gates!!! Then comes up with an instruction set, compilers, etc. This amazing guy's website is here: http://www.homebrewcpu.com.nyud.net:8090/.

Speaking of Steve, he's terribly busy also, at the moment with no time to learn phpMyAdmin basics, so he won't be posting on his blog until he either gets the time to learn about phpMyAdmin or else I write a completely intuitive posting / editting system. So I guess II'll work on that some today....

For anybody interested in looking at my Dodge Mirada, the old site is available here for your viewing pleasure. I'll transport it over to Fugitive Thought as soon as I get a quick chance.

Enough for today. Peace out and happy hacking!

Alright I'm about up to HERE with required and foisted-off-upon-steve style projects ....and its not yet a full month into summer. Hmm. Scary. I'm currently taking a well deserved break.. I. Am. Tired. For those unaware of my workload at the moment, I am: creating the senior video for my old high school marching band out of several hundred snapshots taken over a four year period, burning 45 or so dvds, and stamping them with a lovely commemorative sticker. If you happen to know anything of video editing....it can be a pain in the ass. And scanning, croppping, and enhancing 700 pictures? Grrr. Then of course we have my 1968 mustang, for which I have been rapidly acquiring parts and materials to begin my restoration. More on that soon to come in the projects section.

I DO have several other things in queue, including the construction of a linux honeypot for some network security research and, oh yeah, this site. We can't forget my job either (not that I mind it much). I can only hope that things relax a bit. Time sure does fly by when you're not having much fun and wish you had more of it.

Anyway, given that this is my first actual blog entry I suppose I should be doing it some justice..which would mean that I must come back at some point later in the day or week because at the moment I must run (big surprise).

...Hi, my name is Steve, and I will be your gadget, networking, wireless, aquaria, linux specialist, as well as bibliophile, eccentric, and general breaker-of-stereotypes. Be back when I have time to edit this or make a better entry. Ciao
-s

I've been reading the book World War 3.0 by Ken Auletta recently. It's the story of the Microsoft vs. United States legal battle concerning whether Microsoft was a monopoly or not. If you don't understand the case, I highly recommend you read this book. Ken does an awesome job of wording it so you can understand the case without having to understand massive legal or technical jargon. (No, they didn't pay me to say that, but if one of "they" is reading this and wants to pay me, I gladly accept it! Preferably 50's and 100's please!).

Anyway, there was one thing that caught my eye and inspired this blog. One of the primary pillars of the case was that Microsoft had acted in a monopolistic fashion by packaging Internet Explorer along with it's operating system for no charge. This damaged Netscape Navigator in two ways: first, Netscape charged for their browser, because the browser was their sole product and the only source of income for the company. Secondly, since computers came with Internet Explorer on them, and no Netscape, users were exposed to IE first, and did not have the option of using Netscape right off the bat, resulting in an increase in the IE browser with entry-level computer users and a major hit to Netscape.

Anyway, the part of this that hit me as ironic is that Microsoft killed a charge-for product (Netscape) by releasing a freeware alternative (Internet Explorer)!! Now that Linux seems to be maturing and approaching a more new-user and converted-user friendly state they may yet have the chance to over take Microsoft and do to them what they did to Netscape.

This is true not only Linux, but for the entire FOSS (Free Open Source Software) movement. In the ongoing browser wars, Mozilla Firefox, a freeware web browser, has been gaining ground against Microsoft's IE because it is free and because it is viewed by some as a better product. I have run into a large number of fairly ordinary computer users (your average non-techy type) who are running Firefox just for this fact!! If the average consumer is capable of moving away from Microsoft's (percieved?) monopoly and toward alternative products simply for the QOS and because the price is right (hey, what's better than free?!), then there is yet hope for the FOSS movement and the downfall of the corporate giant

(Some of you may note that I am declining calling Microsoft the "evil empire" or any other such phrase. This is intentional. I enjoy Linux and FOSS movement, but I don't view Microsoft as any evil entitity. It is my personal belief that Bill Gates is a very shrewd business man who ended up having a product that lead the standardization of computers and obtained a market position that is difficult to beat. His use of his power is his own business, I believe in true Laissez-faire and the idea that the better product for the better deal will win out. Microsoft had it, and might still, but eventually something else will come along that can and will replace it, as technology marches on. In the words of Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems: he supports the governments case, but he hopes that one day he'll be so successful that the government might be all over Sun. That's how he'd know he was successful.

On that note, peace out and happy hacking. Don't let your brains get stale!

Well the final decision is in on the Dodge Mirada: I'm keeping her :-D. I reinstalled my stereo (sounds woonderful again!) so I can have some good quality sound on my cross country trip. We cleaned off the gauge next to the fly wheel for the timing belt and get her timing back in the right spot using a handy dandy Timing Light.

If you have never seen or used one before, check it out, it's an awesome example of basic electronics: you connect it to the first spark plug wire and to your battery. Whenever the first plug fires, the fluorescent bulb in the gun flashes, hilighting the timing mark on the fly wheel. Next to the fly wheel is a gauge showing top-dead-center (TDC) and a number of degrees in each direction. Then you can adjust the timing to the correct position (for my Mirada it's 16 degrees before TDC) by rotating the distributor cap. The coolest part to me is the sensor on the gun that detects the signal in the spark plug wire.

Anyway, so yes, the beast baby will be coming to Maine with me when my family moves and I'll probably store it in Maine until I get parking all straightened out at UConn. So that's the car update of the day. On a computer front, I've been reading a book on Python and am becoming familiar with it. It seems to be a cool, straight forward language that has some power. Most of what I'd do with it is probably better done with Perl or C, but for something quick and dirty, python seems to be able to get it done. I'll put up a bunch of Python programs that I write up on our Projects Page as I go on. Who knows, maybe I'll come with something useful!

Alright, the Justin is tired, peace out and happy hacking.