i wrote a perl script about a year ago called qconsole that used wmctrl to incrementally scroll an xterm down from the top of my screen, then back up when it was called again. i called it qconsole because i thought i remembered the game quake having a console like that. even though i have lots of xterms scattered around my screens all the time, having that one console around in whatever workspace i was in, accessible with a single keystroke, was really handy.

when i switched from fluxbox to xfce4/xfwm, it no longer worked because xfwm won't allow windows to be moved off-screen even a window's mapping geometry is specifically requesting it. that sucked, and i stopped using qconsole.

one day i found visor for mac os that provided something similar with terminal.app, which made me start looking again into making qconsole work on x11 with xfwm.

over a year ago, i switched from a blackberry curve to the apple iphone. the iphone has been a fairly good smartphone and i haven't had too many complaints, until a month or two ago when everything on it started to get really slow and laggy. opening an application like notes or sms would take a few seconds to show anything, then another 5 or so seconds to actually respond to a tap. by the time the camera application would actually show its video, whatever i wanted to take a picture of had usually changed or moved.

bandwidth usage for rt.fm:

i added geolocation functionality to is it going to rain? so it will try to find your zipcode the first time you visit.

i recently sold something on ebay and actually added up all the little costs and fees and days of waiting. it's ridiculous, and there has to be something better out there. craigslist does not inspire confidence in buyers or sellers, and goes so far as to shut down sites that let you search outside of your local area making it difficult to sell to anyone outside your own city.

i've been using mutt as my mua for over 8 years now. long ago i would ssh to my server and run it on local maildirs, but as soon as i started using smartphones and multiple computers i had to switch to an imap+ssl setup. mutt's header_cache option has long made accessing large mailboxes snappy, and the recent message_cachedir option available in 1.5 makes browsing through messages with attachments equally snappy over imap.

a useful side effect of message body caching is that it provides an offline copy of entire mailboxes which get synchronized automatically and can easily be read in mutt as a local mailbox... well, almost.

yay!

jcs@gauntlet:~> host jcs.org
jcs.org has address 216.250.181.234
jcs.org has IPv6 address 2001:4980:100::1:2

now i just need an animated gif of carl dancing...

here are some ideas i've been thinking about but am too busy/lazy/stupid to implement:

websites:

• a reverse friendfeed that lets you push data to all the sites you're a member of. if my name, e-mail address, street address, etc. changes, or i want to upload a new picture/avatar, i should be able to do it once and have it pushed to all of the sites that i use that need that data. it should use flickr-style authentication api's so i don't have to give my passwords to this intermediate site.
• a last.fm for movies. basically imdb but focus less on technical information for movies and more on the social aspect. let me "scrobble" (or whatever it will be called) and rate movies as i watch them, let me see what movies my friends watched and how they liked them. provide a central place to see movie trailers and let me mark which movies i want to see, then when they are about to be released, automatically notify me and show me the times it is playing at all of my favorite nearby theatre[...]

it appears that asterisk/sip servers are now a target of random (?) internet brute force scans just like ssh and smtp with authentication enabled.

jcs@...:~> zgrep "Registration from .* failed for '217.117.222.206'" /var/log/messages.*.gz | wc -l
   13520 

i'm curious what they would have done had they found an account with an easily guessable password, though. make free long distance calls to their friends? it'd be like finding an ssh account and then using it to telnet back to your home machine, no? i'm half-tempted to create one of these simple accounts and then make asterisk record all of the calls made by it and then post the audio up on the internet.

while none of the accounts on this asterisk server have anywhere near-guessable passwords, it's a bit worrisome that asterisk sends a different reply for valid accounts with an invalid password versus invalid accounts, just like smtp servers that respond differently to an RCPT TO for a valid email address.

i've been using a lacie 500gb "big disk extreme with triple interface" on the mac mini hooked up to my tv to hold all of my movies. it died the other day and wouldn't attach to the mac. since it was out of warranty anyway, i opened it up to see what was happening.

it's a big unit since it has two 250gb drives in it that are concatenated as one 500gb drive to the operating system. when plugging it in, the drives would whirr up very faintly but nowhere near full speed. the blue light on the enclosure would blink and then go solid for a second, then keep blinking as if it was continuously trying to read from the drives to attach to the mac.

amazon's wish list system has a "universal wish list button" feature now so you can add things from other websites. i wonder which silly web 2.0 startup they put out of business with this addition.

i've been using amazon's wish list for the past 6 years to add books that i hear about and plan on buying myself later. now i can add all those non-amazon things that i plan on wasting money on, like a supercharger for my exige.

so if you are feeling sad that my exige does not have a supercharger and is too slow at road america, now you can buy me one because it's so easily accessible from my amazon wishlist.

whenever carl hears a police car or an ambulance, he tries to howl and bark along with the siren. while sitting at my desk the other day, i heard a siren and saw carl pop his head up, so i started recording him howling at a police car.

while uploading the video and playing it, he heard himself howling and started doing it again, so i recorded carl howling at carl howling at a police car.

i received an e-mail asking me how i got started with openbsd, so i thought i'd write the answer here in case anyone else wanted to read it.

i started using openbsd in 1998 (version 2.3 or 2.4) to host a bbs that i was running. i chose openbsd because of its security record and because i was getting fed up with linux (slackware) at the time. i think the machine was a pentium 75 or something, and openbsd worked quite well on it. during the course of building the bbs, i had to install some 3rd party software, so i got interested in openbsd's ports system to make installation of that software cleaner. i submitted some ports to the ports@ mailing list and got them committed by other developers. i tested others' ports and supplied feedback where i could. i hadn't done much unix development back then, so writing simple makefiles for ports was an easy way to get involved.

i made a muxtape. it is mostly songs with words. i am not really sure why i picked these, but picking 12 songs out of my 4700 in ichoones is hard.

i will probably make another one with songs without words, and maybe one of old idm stuff.

i upgraded my iphone to the 2.0 firmware yesterday since the jailbreak was just made available. sadly, some of the apps i was used to don't work on 2.0 yet (sendpics, mcleaner, etc.) but one of the most annoying changes was that i couldn't easily disable the typing auto-correction with a tweak to the preference plist like i did with the 1.1.x firmware.

however, it seems if you just move the dictionary out of the way, it accomplishes the same thing: