Silflay Hraka

Got some stuff from Digital Dagger so Kevin and company will have something to tie to and with the day of the beer festival.

Spool of Ande monofilament – 40 pound test. For making shock leader. I don’t expect to be hooking anything that can produce over 40 pounds of pull.

Spool of Trilene Big Game Supreme monofilament – 17 pound test. For the Penn 109 reel and 7 foot Sanhu casting rod I got over ebay.

Purty red Gamakatsu Octopus circle hooks – 5/0, 6/0, 7/0, 8/0, 9/0 and 10/0, 6 each.

Just in case you wanted to know.

In the seven weeks since the RIAA launched its legal campaign against file trading, CD sales have declined 54%.

Excellent.

Meanwhile the editor of the Linux Journal tells sysadmins that they need to start blocking all Kazaa traffic, not in order to protect against legal challenges, but as a means of promoting the development of better file sharing systems.

The gap between what P2P needs to do in order to be a useful free and anonymous speech system and what Kazaa bothers to do, is shocking. If you can detect Kazaa traffic, repressive regimes certainly can. Help encourage the development of strong P2P by blocking inadequate P2P.

I’d pay for a completely anonymous file sharing tool, certainly more than I’m willing to pay for CD’s. I suspect others will, too.

I’ve discovered an even shorter command that will allow me to kill multiple Tomcat/java processes, which ought to save a second or two next time that needs to be done.

The old command, courtesy of Caerdroia

kill -9 `ps -auxwww | grep smart | grep -v grep | awk ‘{print $2}’`

The new one

kill -9 `pgrep -f smart`

Pgrep, short for “process grep,” or so I assume, returns information on running processes. If you doubt me, ask the man page.

“The pgrep utility examines the active processes on the system and reports the process IDs of the processes whose attributes match the criteria specified on the command line.”

The -f option sets it to return just process ids, which are then given to the kill command for disposal.

Update: And, as a correspondent pointed out, the -f option can also be applied to the pkill command, making “pkill -9 -f smart” the new king of the shortest multiple kill roost.

That’ll teach me to read the whole man page, next time.

If you don’t see many images on the site, then the UNC network is still down. It’s suffering through its second attack of the of the day, thanks to what appears to be a modified version of the Randex virus. I save on bandwidth charges by hosting most of my images files on the UNC servers, but when the network goes, so do they.

We think it’s a modified version of Randex due to the fact that the virus initially slipped through what were fully up-to-date filters, yet it shares many of the same characteristics of the orginal Randex; Netbios scans, attempts to crack weak passwords, trying a DOS attack on an anti-spam site, etc. The first attack happened last night on the stroke of midnight, the second at noon today. We’ve stopped the Netbios scans it uses to propagate at out our border routers, so the virus hasn’t propagated outside of the internal UNC network, and we’ve also managed to prevent the DOS attack from hitting its intended target, but the amount of internal traffic is hellishly large right now.

So, nothing works. When I left an hour or so ago, people were wandering aimlessly around the halls, waiting for the network to come back up. Since we didn’t recover from the midnight attack until seven this morning, they’re probably in for a bit of a wait.

What’s unnerving about the attack is that it came from computers that did not participate in the midnight attack. The original attackers were disconnected from the network and penalty-boxed as each was tracked down, where they have since remained.

So this newest attack came either from machines penetrated by the virus last night, or there are more infected machines on campus than we originally realized, and they don’t always participate in an attack.

Either way, I suspect the network admins aren’t looking forward to the witching hour tonight.

I have begun to take notice (most likely because of having kids) of that fact that I am quickly getting old. I don?t consider myself to be old yet, just older. But as my 30?s fly by before my very eyes I am realizing that it won?t be long before I will be the creepy old guy that kids avoid??.similar to the way they already treat Bigwig. Perhaps I am just noticing things more, but there are several signs which tell me that I am about a decade or so away from being an old fart.

One of the first things that became aware to me was the lack of really loud music playing non-stop in my car, at least not from the radio. I cannot remember the last time I played a rock station on the radio for more than a minute or two. I get bored with it and quickly pop in my own cd or cut it off all together. I don?t feel like listening to 30 minutes of crappy music just to hear one song that I like. I would rather listen to what I want all the time, so advertisers? money is wasted on me on radio stations. I still play my own music loud at times, but I am consistently out-blasted by the car next to me at the stop light???.any stoplight.

When the radio is on in my car, 99% of the time it is tuned to NPR. Sure I may be getting smarter, but I am becoming less and less cool with each rise of the sun. It is a battle I am destined to lose, I realize. The pull of NPR is too powerful for me to turn off, just so I can listen to Britney Spears, or the assortment of shit being played on today?s radio stations.

Another sign that I am getting older is that I sometimes get hungry around 4. Only my grandparents were allowed to eat that early. I refuse to go to the cafeteria with the senior citizens at this point in my life.

Finally, I don?t think my drinking abilities are what they used to be. For some reason, wives don?t think that getting drunk and passing out is nearly as cute as girlfriends used to think it was, so this plus the combination of having children has drastically cut into my ability to down massive quantities of beer. Perhaps the yearly fishing trip will help me get back into game shape. Drinking beer for breakfast tends to do that for a person. If nothing else, maybe it will help me feel as though I am not so far removed from my youth, even though I recognize that distance is growing wider than I would like.

I?m not old, just older????..but it won?t be long before I am chasing children off of my lawn and creating that old person smell.

Okay – Drinkers and Stinkers,

This is what I have in terms of T-shirt orders. Please add and amend any mistakes. I will get the shirts going tomorrow.

Greg K – 1 XL White
Clif – 1 Gray XXL
Sid – 1 XXL White, 1 XL White – paid
Charlie – 1 L Gray – paid
Kevin Mangum – 1 XL Gray
Mason – 1 XL White
Colin – 1 XL Gray – paid
John Turner – 1 XL Gray paid
Travis – 1 XL White paid
Scott – 1 XL White paid
Curt – 1 XXL Gray
John Gray – 1 XL Gray
Adam S – 1 XXL White
Dallas – 1 XL White
James – 1 XL White
Andy – 1 XL Gray
Andy’s Dad – 1 XL White

OKAY!! Got everyone?!!
Last call for T-shirts……….

I will post the cool fishing shirt options later this week…..

Two days from now, wherever you happen to be, find somewhere to hoist a Foster’s for Mikey, the last of the 343 firefighters killed in the World Trade Center to be laid to rest.

On Sept. 11, “he didn’t flinch. He didn’t hesitate,” Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said at the service. “He saw those two towers with thousands of people in need, and he rushed in.”

Replicas of the black No. 3 car driven by late NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt and of the logo for Foster’s beer ? both favorites of the young firefighter ? were placed on the altar