Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Bought a new CPU fan and one new case fan. Also, ordered a new chipset cooler from the Soyo web site.

The machine locked up overnight. I had to pull the power cord to get it unwedged. Then it locked up again this evening. I suspect heat problems. Took the cover off and rigged a fan blowing in to the case.

We still have the praying mantis. It’s been living in its cage in the kitchen. Here is a picture of it eating a spider.

Set up a link so Lucinda’s computer can access the Web. Set up a Squid 2.5 proxy server on Moe. Gave the dc1 interface an IP address of 192.168.2.1 and gave her computer 192.168.2.2. Made a long crossover cable to connect them.

Today we all went to the Science Museum in Exposition Park to see the Risk exhibit. This is about probability and perception of risk. It was pretty interesting. It also seemed somewhat appropriate, since fires are raging in the mountains. Lucinda was a bit afraid of the bed of nails at first, but after she tried it, she liked it enough to do it six more times.

There were also some exhibits on the second floor from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

http://www.1134.org/lucinda/photos/index.php?string=&ayear=2003&amonth=10&aday=26&byear=2003&bmonth=10&bday=26&submit=Search

After the museum, we all had dinner at El Torito before going home.

To make a directory into an ISO filesystem image:

mkisofs -L -a -R -o output.raw  /path/to/directory

To mount an ISO image file as a device:

bort# cd /modules
bort# ls -al *vn* 
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 71386 Dec 24 10:36 vn.ko
bort# kldload vn.ko
bort# vnconfig -c /dev/vn0c smoothwall-1.0.iso
bort# mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /mnt

To burn a CD with the image file:

cdrecord -v speed=1 dev/dev/cd0d:6,0 output.raw

People sometimes ask me why I hate Microsoft. Well, just look at the graph below. The big green lump in the middle is all the Swen viruses that infected machines sent us. I had to spend several hours configuring the mail server here to reject them. It was incredibly annoying.

Today we had two adventures. First, we went on a short hike in Rubio Canyon. We got to see some of the remains of the old Mt. Lowe Railway. We didn’t get far enough up the trail to see the big landslide that covered the waterfalls, though.

After this, we went to Griffith Park to see the L.A. Live Steamers, but when we got there, the sign said that they were closed today. So we went next door to Travel Town to see the trains there. Lucinda had fun climbing on the trains.

After all this, we had lunch at Chevy’s in Glendale.

Mandy gave me a digital camera to experiment with. I got it to mount on FreeBSD with:

camcontrol rescan all
mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt
cd /mnt/dcim/100_fuji/

Added ‘deirdre [at] sokol.com’ and ‘owner-skeptic [at] listproc.hcf.jhu.edu’ to the whitelist for SpamAssassin in /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf.