Ry4an's Unblog

Last weekend I was camping and the person buying the food bought frozen pizzas.

When getting or giving directions I always prefer a map to written directions.

When editing source files checked out from CVS I sometimes want to prevent them from going back in to source control without further edits.

For years I've been using garble to pull track and way point data off of my Garmin eTrex GPS.

I was just digging through some old files, and I came across my first web pages.

Approval voting is an alternate voting system that has many benefits as compared to Instant Run-Off Voting.

I wrote an article that got posted on the O'Reilly Network.

When writing I frequently find myself searching backward, either visually or using a reverse-find, to see if I've previously used the word that I've just used.

When you click on a link in your browser to go to a new web page your browser sends along a Referrer: header, which tells the owner of the site that's been linked to the URL of the site where the link was found.

Foreign cell phone services have had a feature for awhile called Ringback Tones which allows you replace the normal ringing sound that callers hear while they're waiting for you to answer with a short audio clip.

I've repeatedly encountered the statement, always presented as fact, that if you chill beer, let it return to room temperature, and then chill it again you will have affected in it a degradation of quality.

My latest project for Onion Networks has just been released: it's a first beta release of SwarmStream Public Edition, a completely free Java protocol handler plug-in that transparently augments any HTTP data transfer with caching, automatic fail-over, aut…

The w3c, the nominal leader of web standards, has a recommendation against using click here or here as the text for links on web pages.

Earlier I talked about generating random Subject lines for emails.

Jetty is a great Java servlet container and web server.

Lately I've been corresponding a great deal with someone who doesn't elect to use the Subject: line in emails.

Back in 2003 I started tracking some numbers on my email use patterns, especially related to replies.

I've switched from a mailing list driven system to a wiki based one for this UnBlog.

I try to maintain good password practices -- total random gibberish, never use the same password for two things, change them monthly --, and the EBP lite from http://mandylionlabs.com/ certainly helps.

I went ahead and aggregated the survey results related to this previous entry about starting a social club: https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00076.html The results can be found at: https://ry4an.org/oldenburg/survey/ Sadly, I've been forced to conclude that th…

It's time once again for that marriage of mathematics and paranoia that is a cryptographic key signing.

I've got the entries and current scores posted for the Dead Pool at http://sarinity.com/deadpool/ .

I eat pretzels like Darwin would have.

On Tuesday some friends and I were talking about how we immaturely approached alcohol back in the dorms, and I was thinking it would be fun to take out a full (or half) page ad in the student paper, The Minnesota Daily, like this: WE LIVED IN THE DORMS.

I code for a hobby and a profession, but usually it's only the hobby stuff I can release here.

My Halloween costume this year came out pretty well.

I've decided to run a dead pool this year.

I'm again going against the 'only things that I create' policy for this mailing list, but unless you count lactic acid nothing was creating during my running of the twin cities marathon yesterday, yet I'm posting about it just the same.

I wanted a way to quickly append text to Moin Moin wikis.

My all time favorite board game is called Diplomacy.

It's not much of a creation, but I recently made a T-shirt that says, "I BUY LIQUOR FOR MINORS" in nice white on black lettering.

As mentioned previously I'm a tool of the media machine and am thus now playing poker.

I don't like color in my command line windows.

A few weeks back I got a Roomba Robotic Vacuum (http://www.irobot.com/consumer/product_detail.cfm?

I've been rolling this one around in my head for a few years now, and I think it's finally coming closer to fruition: I'd like to start an old style social club.

I get a lot of email, and a good percentage of it is spam.

The tool scp, UNIX for secure copy, is a wrapper around ssh, secure shell.

I've got a policy here on the unblog where I only do entries about things I've created.

I added a RSS feed to the Minneapolis Security Camera Project site.

History of the World is a fine game from Avalon Hill.

I use the Mozilla web browser on a few different machines, and its lack of roaming profiles/bookmarks is a source of annoyance.

Back when I started at the University of Minnesota in 1995 the course registration system was terminal/telnet based.

Cheap Ass Games (http://cheapass.com) make a lot of great games which are available for very little money.

EtherPEG (http://www.etherpeg.org/) is software for the Mac the listens in on local network traffic, identifies any images being downloaded, and displays them.

I like mixing drinks, despite having no real skill for it.

I got sick of having to edit the launch file whenever I ran my Poker Timer (https://ry4an.org/unblog/msg00038.html), so I wrote a quick CGI that generates a JNLP file which launches the app with the specified settings.

I said I wasn't going to do it, but I ended up doing so anyway.

There are no new ideas in the message, I just don't know if the existing components have been previously combined in the way I'm proposing.

A few years back I was working in an office where my workspace was so noisy I kept slipping away to find quieter places in the building to work whenever I has a task which could be completed away from my desk.

As seen in the previous posting my friends and I are on a bit of a poker kick lately.