Geeky Stuff

This forum has some scary stuff in it... Fires just waiting to happen!

So I went to the mall for lunch today, and wandered into an FYE. While browsing the aisles of overpriced music, video games, DVD's, and so on, I saw a package that looked somehow out of place...

"Disney's Pocahontas Screen Scenes"

WTF? So I picked it up, turned it over...

System Requirements:
386 SX/16
Windows 3.1 or greater
4MB of RAM
...etc.

This was software from 1995! What the heck was it doing in an FYE that opened in 2001? It also came on 3.5" floppy disks, and had a very ancient looking, worn out price tag telling us it sells for $16.97.

I felt like buying it for the nostalgia value, not to mention the "WTF!" value, but it would lose the "WTF!" value once extracted from the store that was built in 2001.

I actually bought Lion King Screen Scenes back in 1994, which was almost identical, only with TLK pictures, so it was a strange blast from the past. Of course, with TLK screen scenes, I quickly tired of the crappy software, extracted all the JPGs, and used them in my own software. }:)

So, I'm currently at work and in the process of building a Linux box to replace Mustang, our syslog/fax server. This is kind of sad, in a way.

Mustang is currently a Sun SparcStation 10; the oldest model Sun we still have in production use in the department. This machine is about 14 years old, and is STILL DOING A GREAT JOB. The only reason we're replacing it is because its root disk is starting to fail and it's harder to find a replacement SCSI disk for it than to just build a whole new machine.

I used to be proud of the fact that we still have a 14 year old Sun still doing production work, but soon that machine will be gone and our next-oldest Sun, Mongoose, which is only 11 years old, will be the new "oldest machine still in production use".

Heh, I'm such a geek for being sentimental about this. }:)

Well, I just upgraded Sarabi's kernel; there's a newly discovered security hole in Linux Kernel 2.6, which Fedora Core 2 and 3 use by default.

So if you run kernel 2.6, you might want to look into getting your boxes upgraded/patched.

Bah, I hate kernel security holes. It's pretty much the only update on UNIX systems that requires a reboot!

So, the paper sleeve in one of these old LP's has an interesting marketing ad on them:

Records give you more of what you want

Back in 1972, when this was printed, the main competition to the LP was reel-to-reel tape and 8-track. Vinyl, of course, had the lowest overhead and highest profit margin of all manufactured music, so obviously the labels wanted people to buy their music on vinyl whenever possible.

Who knew that 10 years later, a shiny silvery disc would be introduced that would relegate most records to the dust bin...

Gotta love old out-of-date marketing materials...

So a friend gave me an old turntable he wasn't using and I went out and got a cartridge for it today. I can finally play those old LP's I have lying around!

It's amazing how good records can sound even after 20-30 years. Though some of them are a bit dirty, the sound is still crystal clear. I particularly enjoyed listening to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack from vinyl. The nostalgic feeling is just awesome.

Ahh well, time to sleep!

Well, we spent the morning migrating our mail server at work from Sendmail to postfix. It was an interesting experience. I'm actually surprised at how smoothly the migration went; most of the problems were compilation/sasl2/library issues that didn't really have much to do with the mail server configuration itself.

Postfix is pretty spiffy. I like its architecture; the fact that it uses multiple programs to receive and deliver mail. Its paradigm is very compatible with sendmail's (unlike qmail which does things WAY differently) and it's several orders of magnitude easier to configure than sendmail.

I guess zorin.org is next, eh? Heh, maybe not. Zorin.org's sendmail install has been rock solid. Why fix if it ain't broke?

I work with someone who really pushes BSD a lot. I mean, we're talking obsessed over it to the point of sometimes being annoying. Anyway, I have no problem with BSD, but imagine my amusement today when we tried to get dialout PPP working on FreeBSD for him and...

...the kernel panicked right as PPP tried to negotiate.

I nearly lost it laughing right there! I've never had Linux pppd cause a kernel panic in my life!

Of course, all is forgiven; it was probably just a lousy kernel on the LiveCD, but it was still amusing...

P.S.: Isn't panicked an awkward word? panicked.. paniced.. no matter how you spell it, it just looks strange...

Everyone's always whining about Windows being insecure.. But us Linux users have to keep on top of things as well...

A new security hole has been found in Samba, that nice program that lets Windows machines mount directories on Linux servers.

Waitasec... This security problem is in something related to Windows! Big surprise there!

Anyway, here it is.

This mug rocks. I've had it for nearly twenty years! Notice the 5.25" floppies and the fan-fold computer paper. Doesn't nostalgia simply rock? }:)