Month: May 2007

The Oregon State Legislature Finally Joins The 20th Century

Yes, I said 20th Century, not 21st.

According to a press release the Oregon State Legislature put out, this week was the first time ever that they’ve used a laptop and projection screen for demonstration purposes during floor debate.

(Salem) The Oregon House of Representatives will hold a historic vote today regarding the use of the Legislature’s web site. “As we understand, this will be the first time visual aids using a laptop and projection screen have been used for demonstration purposes during floor debate on a measure,” said State Representative Linda Flores (R-Clackamas), one of the Co-Chief Sponsors of House Bill 2603.

Wow — does anybody else find that sad?

Thanks Barney for the release.

May 17, 2007

cPanel, ClamAV and MailScanner

This is totally for my information in the future, but might be useful to somebody.

I have MailScanner installed (via this great package) and ClamAV setup to scan mail that comes through this server. The problem is that lately, ClamAV was sucking up a lot of CPU power when scanning messages. After a ton of searching around on the cPanel forums, I basically came up with this solution which dropped my load considerably. But long story short, you’re changing Mailscanner to use the clamavmodule virus scanner versus the clamav one.

  • Run these comments from the command line (if you don’t know what they do, don’t bother with this at all):

    up2date -i bzip2-devel

    up2date -i gdbm-devel

    /scripts/perlinstaller Mail::ClamAV

  • Edit your MailScanner.conf (probably in /usr/mailscanner/etc/MailScanner.conf). Look for “Virus Scanners = clamav” and change it to “Virus Scanners = clamavmodule”.
  • Then run “killall MailScanner”, wait a bit to make sure all the child processes are killed, and then “/usr/mailscanner/bin/check_mailscanner”.

So far, the load on the server has gone down significantly (at least so far) and made pages load faster as now Apache and MySQL have more breathing room.

May 17, 2007

I Have A Newfound Respect For Bruce Willis

For the most part, I don’t look up to anybody in Hollywood, nor do I feel that people in Hollywood should be looked up to. But I’ve found a newfound respect for Bruce Willis for basically telling Hollywood to shut up.

BRUCE WILLIS is fed up with listening to outspoken actors – and believes their opinion shouldn’t mean “jack s**t” to the general public. The Die Hard star understands some of his colleagues want to do good for various causes, but wishes others would keep their thoughts to themselves. He says, “I don’t think my opinion means jack s**t, because I’m an actor. “Why do actors think their opinions mean more because you act? You just caught a break as an actor. There are hundreds – thousands – of actors who are just as good as I am, and probably better. “Have you heard anything useful come out of an actor’s mouth lately?” He adds, “Although I liked George Clooney’s documentary on Darfur.”

May 17, 2007

Why I’ve Always Liked Giro Helmets

Way back in my youth (before I got into distance running), I was a road bike racer. I always swore by my Giro helmet, as they were light, aerodynamic, cool, and strong and they offered replacements for when you were in wrecks (as you should always replace your helmet after a wreck, no matter how minor). If I ever get back into riding again, I’m going to buy another Giro, especially after reading this:

A white paneled delivery truck ran over a UW-Madison graduate student’s head on Division Street Friday afternoon and, except for a concussion, he wasn’t hurt.

[…]

“I didn’t see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.”

His helmet, a Giro, was crushed, but Lipscomb’s head was fine.

Just a reminder to Oregon bike riders: If you’re under 16, state law requires you to have a helmet on, period. It annoys me to this day to see kids riding down the hills near my house stupidly fast without their helmets on. They’re going to eat it once and then regret it.

May 16, 2007

If Anybody’s Game…

…it looks like TGI Friday’s is looking for a Bend franchisee. I’ve only eaten at one once, many years ago, so I have no idea what they’re like. But they are wanting to open here, it would appear.

May 16, 2007

There’s Been A New Land Speed Record Set…

…for sofas. The speed? 92 MPH. Lest you think it’s a hoax, there’s video.

May 16, 2007

A Few Tweaks At Bend Blogs

Going through and deleting a few old feeds on Bend Blogs today (there are a lot of ones that have gone private or haven’t updated in over a year, so expect many feeds to disappear), but a couple things that you might notice over there:

    No Categories Tab: I’ve gotten rid of the “Categories” tab on the left side, as I never seemed to be able to get it to work right with feeds that had categories. Everything’s going to tags instead. Speaking of tags, remember you can submit your own tags to any entry on Bend Blogs — like I added the tag Liquor to this post. When you click on the [edit] link to submit a tag, it will offer suggestions, if it can, based on del.icio.us tags, if available.

  • I’ve added ads in a few more spots. Sorry, but it has to be done. The site’s getting more and more popular, and the server’s getting pushed harder and harder.
  • Aforementioned removal of feeds (work in progress).
  • But the biggest thing (and the thing I’m probably going to have to tweak a bit to make it less MySQL-server intensive) is the feeds list on the left side now sorts by the latest updated blogs (or at least close to it — it all depends on when the feed’s latest item was grabbed), making it far easier to keep track of blogs that update locally more often than the rest (their www and syndicating feeds links are right there).
  • A few tweaks here and there to make the site easier to browse in general.

If you have any more bright ideas or suggestions, feel free to post a comment here (and yes I know the design is a bit stale, but haven’t had time to really get down and dirty with the CSS).

May 16, 2007

Video Link Dump

Have a bunch of links to get rid of after being offline for several days, so here are a pile of good videos that have been sent to me over the last few days. Enjoy them all after the jump.

(more…)

May 15, 2007

The Hit-and-Run Story Gets Even Weirder

Remember the California father and son who were arrested in that nasty hit-and-run a month ago (solicited lots of comments on this site)? Well, the story gets weirder: The father, George Goodson, who allegedly helped his son and buddies dispose of the car that was involved in the incident, was found dead in a Bend hotel room. Unfortunately, there’s no story on KTVZ.com yet that I can see (correct me if I’m wrong, Barney), and the Bulletin’s story isn’t a freebie, so I can’t really point you anywhere to read this. (If somebody at the Bulletin’s reading this, which I know you are, can you get that story unlocked?) The Bend Weekly has a story here.

Just the same the brief story basically says that the death is still under investigation — not calling it a suicide or a homicide, so this just puts another twist in this already oddball story.

May 15, 2007

Ah The Joys Of Geekdom…

I’m sure every geek has had moments like this.

I went to one of our remote offices to move some equipment around as they were going to be doing some remodeling. Computer moved fine, but when I picked up the printer, I noticed something really wet on the bottom of it. It was blank ink — the cartridge inside at sprung a leak. It was now all over my hands, and had sprayed black ink all over the desk and all inside the printer. I tried to open the printer cover, and it was stuck a bit, so I gave it a firm yank, and the thing flew open, throwing ink all over the place — including on my face. Knowing that this stuff is a pain to wash off when it dries, I sprinted to the bathroom and scrubbed my face as hard as I could to get it all off. I did, but now my face is red from the scrubbing (better than black from the ink, however).

That printers going to the garbage, as there’s no way it can be cleaned out easily. It’s an old crappy HP Deskjet and was past it’s prime anyway.

Now to get to all these RSS feeds I’ve been missing over the last few days…(and yes, the concerts went fine, I’m just really exhausted after three nights of concerts on a stupidly hot stage).

May 15, 2007