Ok, maybe I sort of drew that after I edited someone's image after that someone deleted Bush's original bathroom message and put a funny message, and then a journalist got a hold of it and maybe kinda started a contest. I won't win, surely I don't deserve to, that thing took me about 3 minutes to do.

That's internet speak for "business". My website is now working on my Gentoo Linux laptop. I had no data in there but recently ran part of my software that exports data that can be imported into a blank database. It's pretty neat. It exports it to XML. It's easy too. Anyway, this weekend, in moments of consciousness and soberness, would be a good time to update my website. I actually fixed a bug yesterday that was the culprit for me not having an "About Me" page on this site anymore... minutes of hard work and thinking right down the drain, overwritten by the Points of Interest page in the blink of an eye. Also, I'll be adding stuff. But more importantly, I'll be starting the software architecture for stringed.org. I'll be reusing much of the stuff I wrote for this page, reorganizing my packages, adding features, fixing bugs, getting rid of redundant stuff, etc. It's going to be lean and fast, and powerful.

More about the XML export. Right now I have to restart my webserver after I set some settings that tell the software to export every object in the system, and it'll do the export, then I have to reset the settings back to tell it to not do the export next time. That's one thing I'll be building: a web-based management tool for "dumb". That should help out a ton. Export all the data? Sure, click a button. Or export certain data? Which ones? Click. I only since thought about only exporting certain data because my software generated an XML file that was 487KB!! That's huge for a text file. Although, in college, I had a list of every word in the English language for a project, and it was around a megabyte. 1 million characters! I was working on a program to solve cryptographs, those things in newspapers, but I had only reached Computer Science 2, so I had not learned of neat or efficient things like "hash tables" and "regular expressions". If you don't know these things, I suggest that you never learn them, as to allow me to keep my current value to employers :) If you can, make the people who know them forget about them. Please. Thanks.

I have a story for tomorrow. Just you wait.

So, I'm trying to get my laptop ready for more development. As you may have read, I've installed Gentoo Linux on my laptop recently. This has turned out to be quite a learning experience. Gentoo is no self-installer. You end up learning a TON about Linux, boot loaders, file system, device drivers, configuring a kernel, compiling a kernel, setting up partitions for boot, swap, and system, mounting the system, and just about everything you can imagine. There is one thing I can't figure out though. Laptops have a touchpad for a mouse. Most of these touchpads are one brand, and that's Synaptics. Gentoo has drivers for these devices, and there are other drivers out there. I can't get it to work. The mouse part of it works, like basic movement and clicking, but mine also has a scroll "wheel", which is actually a touch scroller, and I can't get it to work. The thing is, when my system boots up, I can see that Linux has found the Synaptics touchpad, however, the drivers don't recognize it. It sucks because the reason I was so fast at working on that computer is because of the mouse setup. So that's keeping me from working on my website. I can work as it is, but I want my mouse damnit.

Another thing that's keeping me from working on my website is that my website isn't working on my computer. I set up MySQL and configured it, so that's not the problem. I can compile it in Eclipse, so that's not the problem. And Tomcat works fine. The problem is, Tomcat stopped development on the 5.0.x version and is only working on 5.5.x. The new version of Tomcat only works with the new version of Java, Java 5. I got all that to work fine. The thing is a software problem. When I run my website, the thing tells me it can't find this one function in this one Apache class. I know the problem, the new version of Tomcat uses new versions of Apache classes, and JavaServer Faces apparently uses an old, deprecated version. Or they're just completely different. For a new version of software to not support the old version is practically a bad enough crime to seek the death penalty. Apache knows this, so it leads me to believe that they are just different. I have the old version that JSF used to reference, and references for compiling, but I'm not about to overwrite the newer Tomcat's version with it. That screams bad news.

One last reason that I can't work on my website is because of video games. They're too fun.

Download Google Talk. If you don't have an account, you can email me at jasontconnell [the AT sign] gmail [the dot] com and I'll gladly hook a brotha or sista up. Apparently they are opening gmail soon though, or it is open, I can't tell. I have six accounts, I have no need nor desire to find out. :) It's a clean interface, no ads, no nothing. Just a list of contacts. Click a contact and you can type to them, or click the "call" button, and start talking through a microphone and they will hear it on their end. That's really all there is to report.

I'm glad it's simple. Everyone else tries to get everyone to use their IM client by packing it with webcam stuff, extra toolbars and everything (I'm looking at you MSN Messenger), popping up windows to a "Today" page with news, crap, junk, garbage, and email alerts. Google's philosophy (which has worked wonders for them, cripes, look at their corporate website for Pete's sake... nothing but an image, a textbox and a few buttons and some links below all that, and then some company info), is make S@#%#@$ simple. This philosophy is shared among many many companies, but only Google manages to excel at it.

I ran across an article that called Google's new "Desktop Search" for Windows a "Mini Operating System". I posted a reply. When I think "Mini-OS", I certainly don't think of a program written to run on an operating system. When I think "Mini-OS", I'll tell you what I think: Embedded Linux. That's "mini" and that's an "OS".

So what does an operating system do exactly? The first and foremost job of an OS is to interface with the hardware; let you save files on disk, use your monitor, your modem, your attached peripherals like printers, digital cameras, webcams, and anything else. This includes interfacing with your network card and implementing the TCP/IP stack so you can connect to the internet. Also, it includes a "platform" for writing software, an Application Programming Interface (API). Lately, operating systems have included all types of goodies, like integrated search (Mac OS X) and widgets (Mac OS X). This is simply "value added" stuff. Since an operating system might come with these things built into them, it does not change the definition of an operating system. Even if adding "Mini" to the front of it makes your observations less serious, you still have "OS" at the end, invalidating your generalization. How about call it a "program". That's what I call it. A program that happens to search your files and have plugins for stuff like weather. I don't even use it and I know that it's not an operating system.

One comment came from Google.

--- "We're really trying to make this into a platform"
---- Nikhil Bhatla, product manager for Google Desktop.

That can be confusing. I'll have you know that Eclipse is called a platform. I don't boot my computer into the "Eclipse" OS, though. It's a Java editor. A very great one. What this person means is that they will be developing programs on top of it. Which is why Eclipse is called a platform, you can write PLUG-INS. Technology is so misunderstood.

I'm a stickler for technological phrases used in the right way. I'm sure doctors, architects, lawyers, and every other profession will get just as upset if you butcher their terminology. Like, if a man finds a person murdered in the alley, and calls the police and says "We have a grand theft auto here." I'm not the only one :)

Here's another thing about it. That site, "paidcontent.org", is apparently a pretty highly visited site, and one that is as qualified to interpret that Google quote as I am to interpret Shakespeare. They call Google Desktop a mini-OS. People who read that are going to just go ahead and agree, usually. Unless they study. And they'll make posts on their websites, and it's like that game we would play in 2nd grade. One person starts the chain by thinking of something to whisper, and it goes around til the last person, and the last person says what the message is. I don't care if it starts out as "An apple a day keeps the doctor away", it'll turn into something like "A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog." Somehow. Let's just call into question every term that every past computer scientist has defined. I've run across at least 3 sites that refer to that post, and also call it a "Mini-OS".

This is another problem with the internet. If the facts are right, it's a beautiful filtering process, eventually making its way to everyone. But if it's wrong, it's like cancer.

If all you ever knew about me, you read from this website, then you would be shocked. You would probably think I'm some loud-mouthed kid, talking all the time, squeezing in a joke here and there, and sometimes keeping quiet to get some programming done. This is almost completely opposite from the truth. See, I'm as quiet as the next deaf-mute. I listen a lot. But when I do want to say something, I get impatient if you talk all the time. All the sudden, some people are like 5 topics ahead before I have a chance to add my wisdom, and this makes me look stupid. Rarely have I ever seriously considered myself to be stupid. Then if I do just blurt out what I'm thinking, I'm all of the sudden rude :) That's why I have this place on the web. People can be like "Hmmm, I wonder what Jason has to say...", and hop on in and leave completely disappointed or with a chuckle, and maybe a gold nugget of wisdom. The thing that I do a lot though, which is why this site ever even came to be in the first place, is think. I'd say 99% of the day I'm thinking about stuff that is important to me. I like to think, it makes my day. And it makes it go faster :)

Man, that would be awesome to dress up as a website for Halloween. Or software in general. "What are you?!" "I'm Mac OS X" or "I'm www.jasontconnell.com, jeez, isn't it obvious?" I think that's where this whole internet thing is going. It was a pretty good idea, but in the future it will just inspire a clothing line from some unheard of clothing company, and they'll become bazillionaires and take the internet offline, so even more people will buy their clothes to remember what they used to waste so much time doing. "Hey, that perfume is great, what is it?" "RosePedals.com!" or "They're a cool pair of jasontconnell.coms! I'll bet they're comfy on your feet!" "Yeah, and I can jump so much higher now!"

You get the idea. It's brilliant.

It only took a year or so for a movie about e-mail. I was in college in 1997 when I first really started using e-mail. You've Got Mail came out in 1998. I don't know when this "web log" phenomenon started up, really. The original jasontconnell.com was up in Mid 2001. They're now huge, so we should be seeing previews for a movie about them shortly. I can't imagine what to call it. Perhaps "Publish to the World" or "You Got Published!" or "Media of the Masses" or "For the People, By the People" ... I don't know. Post your ideas. Whatever it's called, it's gonna be awesome, and I should be listed in the credits. I think Johnny Depp will be the leading role, with Jennifer Connelly playing the supporting one. That would make a good flick. I anticipate it like a guy dressed in a Darth Vader outfit at midnight 2 days before the opening of the latest Star Wars. I'd be out there with my laptop and dressed up as my website. Don't think I don't have the costume already... it's in my closet.

Fridays always sneak up on me now. Before, at other jobs, it would always seem like months had passed before you would get a few days off. Now, it's like HOURS. It's wonderous.

So, to kick off the weekend, here is a list of some funny things and some trying to be funny things:

40% of the internet population would refer to this website as a "blog". I don't care what you call it, I don't call it a "blog". Here is a comment I made on this topic earlier today:

"We have to come up with a better term than that."

Amen. As if not being considered anywhere even close to cool wasn't enough, now I have to contribute to something that 40% (+) of the internet population classifies as a "blog". Wonderful.

One popped in my head: "Vulcan"... That planet!! In Star Trek! ;-) Honestly, having never watched Star Trek, I still think that's better than "blog". My girlfriend from a few years ago was the first person to use the term "blog". When she got sick after drinking a lot, that's the sound she made.

Another one popped in my head: "Iceman". This would create better situations at the bar.

Me (to girl at bar): I write an iceman.
Girl: Awesome! Like Val Kilmer?!!? Here's my number.

And there you have it.

Next. I don't think Terrell Owens will be an Eagle this year. He might play a game or two, but Andy Reid will get sick of his B.S. and trade him.

Next. I play video games. Last night I played Battlefield 2 on my newly rebuilt computer. It was neat. On one map, I climbed to a roof behind the other team's base, and picked off like 9 guys before running out of ammo, jumping off the roof, parachuting down (you always have a parachute on you), and reloading all of my ammo, only to be killed by an artillery strike. I laughed at that one though. It was like I had just reloaded all of my ammo from a supply crate that dropped from the sky, and thought "Alright, time to go kick some more ass!"... The first artillery shell is what got me. I had no idea it was coming! At one point, before refilling my ammo, I was shooting 100 yard shots with my pistol! I only got a kill or two with that thing.

Next. Linux and the mug still hasn't arrived.

Damn, I know I had more. Here, let me check the newspaper...

Hmm. First headline : "T.O.'s tirades could signal trade envy." Nope, already commented on that one. Second headline: "Owens heads to Atlanta." Nope, I've said everything I can about that one. Third... "Owens errs in telling his Super Bowl story." Nope, can't think of anything to add to that one. Man, the media has to stop writing about T.O.... honestly. Shut UP!! Hehe, get it. Like T.O. and Andy Reid said to each other?! Read the paper, you're bound to find an article or two-ZILLION about it. Cripes.

More video game news. Yesterday, I also bought "Fantastic 4" for the PS2, so Jeff and I or Bean and Jeff or Bean and I or whatever, can whoop some ass together. It's fun.

Don't trust Microsoft's benchmark tests. Here is a security comparison between Windows Server 2003 with SQL Server 2000 vs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 with MySQL. Seems like a fair test? Well, download the PDF. Nowhere does it mention that the current version of MySQL (even at the time of the test) and the version of MySQL that is used in the test differ in version number by 1 MAJOR VERSION!! How big is the difference of 1 Major Version? Well, SQL Server 2000 is actually SQL Server Version 8.0. SQL Server 2000 was actually released on January 19th, 2001. SQL Server 7 was released in late 1998 or early 1999, I'm not sure. I couldn't find it. So, that's a difference of at LEAST 2 years. Plus, Red Hat recently released Enterprise Linux 4.0, so maybe Microsoft should do another security test? This goes for most of their tests. And you can't blame them for fixing the results, but you can blame them for writing inferior software :)

Next. Thinking back on a certain state's decision to elect a certain Hollywood action star as its Governer, I began to realize the obvious good and bad in that. A good thing is no stupid Arnold S. movies have been released in a while! A bad thing, Hollywood had to find a replacement, so there are still stupid movies, but without Arnold's style of awful acting.

Next. I'm starting to hate Rounders. If you watch it too much, you'll just find Matt Damon to be another awful actor. It's funny, that movie also stars John Malkovich, one of the best actors. When I watch a movie, I want to watch it and say "That's Teddy KGB" not "That's John Malkovich". But every movie in which Matt Damon stars, he's always the same. Whatever happened to the great character actors, and why aren't they all famous, if they are still around. Another way to look at this quality in an actor is to watch a movie with an actor, and then watch another one with the same actor, and not see the previous character one bit in the new character. If they can't do that, I consider them a bad actor. No offense ;-)

Maybe I'll have more, if you're lucky.

I never reported this, but I broke my motherboard on my very expensive gaming computer a few weeks ago. This is how I described the mishap on a forum I visit:

my F#%$@#!ing motherboard broke... it was my fault though. stupid crazy ass place for a 5 gallon bucket of paint... i'm kidding, i tried to put in a pci card but there wasn't room, and i snapped one of those little chip things that sit on the motherboard and make them work...

Woops. So, eventually, after like a month, I decided to finally replace it because I want to play video games like I do sometimes. So, I ordered the motherboard. Here is that forum entry:

I miss playing games sometimes, but I want to play F.E.A.R. more than anything. The demo is out. So I ordered that b@#$%@ today. Plus, I have a 250GB secondary hard drive on there, with no room in my other computers for it, and I need the space. I hope I got a good one, it'll definitely be better than the last one though... it got a score of "5 out of 5 eggs" on newegg.com. plus it has a very similar layout to the other motherboard, which is HUGE. the last thing I want to do is empty out my liquid cooling and recut tubes to make that s@#$% fit.

It's thundering and lightening here pretty bad, I'm scared so I'm gonna go under my desk. (19th floor is a lot closer to that stuff than the 1st floor).

hopefully, by friday, you'll hear me mumbling sweet nothings to you on teamspeak after I put a bullet through your mother F@#%@#$ing dome.

A few liner notes. Teamspeak is a program used for talking to other people over the internet for free and in real time. There are a few people that I talk to, but I haven't been on in a while, because it's normally used for trashtalking in games and coordinating strategies in a first person tactical team based shooter. FEAR is going to be a cool game. And a motherboard is a very necessary, very fragile computer part. I ALWAYS censor myself, on any webpage I go to. Anyone who knows those words can tell right off the bat, but what if little kids visit? I can't make them not read it, so I figure I'll just make it safe for everyone, for the most part. These posts are "as is".

The other part of this story is my converting every other computer I have to Linux. When Windows Vista (formerly Longhorn) is released, I won't and can't go buy a copy for each computer I have. If they're lucky, I might buy one for the gaming PC. Here is the post about me ordering Linux. So that's also on the way.

It's a race (as the title indicates). Linux and the coffee mug are somewhere between San Pablo, CA, and Drexel Hill. They left San Pablo on August 6th at 5:01 AM. It's anyone's guess where it is now. The motherboard was ordered yesterday, and left Los Angeles, CA at 9:16 AM today. However, Linux and the mug were shipped through UPS, and the motherboard was shipped through FedEx Saver and is estimated to arrive on Thursday, August 11th. Obviously the UPS package has a bit of a head start.

Place your bets!

Recently I wrote about how the Internet was going to hell, and I had mentioned that one reason was the fact that the sheer amount of information available on the internet will be an overwhelming amount for any search engine to handle. One complaint I had was when I typed in my name, my website didn't show up for at least 7 pages. Well, I've taken a look at Google's method of at least trying to solve this type of problem: Personalized Search.

Essentially, personalized search keeps track of all of your past searches. You can either search the web, or as you search the web often, and your history builds up, you can search your history. However, searching the web does not also show results in your history, which I think they will change.

Also, I noted this. Being the anniversary of the lunar landing of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Google now has a maps.google.com type of satellite picture of the moon, pinpointing the locations of various important places on the moon. It's cool. And funny! Zoom in all the way, you will see Google's humor once again.

Apparently, maps.google.com isn't integrated with moon.google.com so this directions request didn't work:

Here are a few reasons why you can't blame Mozilla for its SpreadFireFox.com site getting hacked.

1) They didn't write the server software that it uses to publish the website with. The software that they use doesn't actually have a security hole. It was PHP that had the security hole, a server side scripting language.

2) They don't write server software. They write browser software. Yet still, ZDNet writes

"The hack is an embarrassment to Mozilla, which uses security as the main selling point for the Firefox Web browser."

That's a joke, right? An insecure server software that you didn't write is on the opposite end of the spectrum as a secure web browser that you are proud of writing. Please.

3) It's some server admin's fault, not Mozilla. Whoever was supposed to keep the server software up to date obviously didn't do their job. This shouldn't reflect on the quality and security of Mozilla's web browser.

4) Microsoft claims to be on a "Secure Computing Initiative" for their operating systems, and yet you can still hack the f*#^% out of them.

5) Here's an analogy (since I love to use analogies): A car company, who stresses their cars are the safest, has an accident on the assembly line, causing a worker to die. Sure, they're not the safest place to work, but if the industry says their cars are the safest, does this make them not the safest? It absolutely is their problem, and a big one, but it doesn't take away from the safety of their cars in the least bit. People who believe this... well, I feel sorry for them. It's public image, but the public is stupid.

I will continue to make love to their web browser, as sexy as it is.

I've recently become enlightened to the fact that there are actually interesting websites out there on the internet. Out of all this time I've spent browsing the internet since its inception, I was sure that I've visited everything. However, I recently came across 2 fascinating sites (well, not exactly sites).

In high school, I had heard of Nirvana. It wasn't until after Kurt Cobain's death that I really got into them. My music phases post talks about this a bit. I listened to "In Utero" for a long time, on the walk to and from school, in a tape walkman I had probably stolen off of one of my brothers. I wouldn't say I became obsessed with the band, just the music, but I would buy a few magazines that had Kurt in it. I probably don't have them any more. I remember that day back in 1994, in April, at Jim's house, our friend called and said Kurt Cobain had died, rather, had killed himself. I was like "Who's Kurt Cobain?". No lie. Apparently, if you read more and more into this story, it soon ends up not looking like a suicide, but more of a homicide. I found a site, In Defence Of Kurt Cobain (that's how they spell "Defense", they must be a Brit). There are tons of facts there, leaning towards the author's implication that Courtney Love murdered Kurt. Form your own conclusion.

On to the next one. We all know of the events on September 11, 2001. What everyone doesn't know is exactly every piece of information that was available. Until you watch this movie called Loose Change. Search the internet for a downloadable version of it. The movie is pretty good, but can seem a little bit far fetched. It opens with the perfect disclaimer, "For Your Consideration". It simply points out that most of the world was given enough evidence to make the conclusion that al Qaeda attacked us on September 11th. But there is more. Take it as entertainment, or let it convince you. I find that the picture it paints is too shocking for me to believe it, but the evidence, or lack thereof, is there.

I might try to find other interesting stuff and post it here every week, but we'll see how long that holds up.

Since I'd rather not use my dedicated Linux server as an email server as well, and catch tons of spam eating away at my 1000GB monthly bandwidth, I have a few free email accounts and one not so free. Namely, 4 or 5 gmail accounts and a hotmail account. There are probably others. However, I'm starting to hate hotmail. I pay $20/year for it, and will probably still pay for it at least one more year. I am going to try to completely convert over to my gmail account. They have better spam filtering with NO initial setup! For instance, only one email that was junk got into my inbox, but NO emails that weren't junk went into my "spam" folder. Hotmail basically has no idea. Gmail is smart. The one thing it's lacking is email groups, but it's underway. Everything else is solid. I've started using labels to categorize mail, which is cool. The one thing that I don't like about Gmail is that all of your mail stays in the one folder. I see where they're coming from, and perhaps if I use more labels and more frequently, I'll start to see the beauty of them, and won't care as much about the one folder thing. The one extra extra strong thing that gmail offers is it'll automatically store sent messages. I sometimes like to read messages after I've sent them along to make sure I wrote them perfectly, sometimes laugh at my own jokes that I wrote in them, or just simply waste a few minutes of time. I always forget to check the little checkbox in hotmail to store a message that I'm sending. I hate it. Gmail is good where I want it to be good.

So if you have me as a contact in your mail program, please update my email address to :

jasontconnell [the at sign] gmail [the dot] com

So, email me already.

This process has started. Yesterday, I copied all of the worthwhile contacts from my hotmail account, saved them as a csv file after much pain and suffering, and did an import into gmail. Works like a charm. That contact groups thing hurts me, because I wanted to send an email out to everyone that I drink with. I would create a group called "Drinking buddies" and send it a message. Gmail doesn't have great contact support, either (or "yet"), like it only has Name and Email address fields, but it's a beta (meaning, it's not finished). So later on they'll probably have phone fields, extra email addresses for people, pictures, quick facts (like, "This guy can't hold his liquor"), and other neat stuff.

If you want to try gmail out, send me an email, although I can't imagine anyone who spends more than 30 minutes a day on the internet doesn't have an account...

Podcasting is basically radio shows made by anyone and stored in mp3 format and downloaded by people. They are called podcasts because a) they're radio-show-like (broadcast) and b) because people would copy them to their iPods and listen to them.

So, Apple has welcomed them with open arms and developed an add-on to iTunes to let you download, subscribe, and listen to Podcasts (not necessarily in that order). I heard of them long before last night though. But, it wasn't up until last night that I actually listened to one.

Please, point me in the direction of a good one!

So basically, I'm listening to a few random ones (there are 3000+ on iTunes), and I must have bad luck, because out of all the ones I tried, I didn't like any of them. I won't say "they suck", even though I think they did, but they weren't for me. I'll leave final judgement to the masses.

I did listen to Al Franken's and the guys from WDVE in Pittsburgh. They're both just clips from their live radio shows, which is fine. Jim Krenn and the guys at DVE are hilarious. I have a CD of theirs called "Former Altar Boys" and there are some skits on it that are hilarious. Tom (my old college roommate and good friend) let me borrow it, joined the Air Force, went to Iraq, and apparently forgot all about it. His Loss!! Sucker.

So please, point me in the direction of something good. Except Zatko, don't post "Microsoft News Log" or any of those. I'll mail a box of rotten eggs to your house.