thursday i wanted to do something a little “cincinnati christmas”. so some friends of mine and i decided to meet downtown and hit the cg&e model train exhibit. cg&e’s been doing this for many years now and it’s a true cincinnati christmas tradition. it’s not a super spectacular exhibit, but it’s still fun (it stays basically the same every year) and its enjoyable to watch the kids fascinated by the trains.

i was a big model train freak as a kid - i was into almost anything electrical or mechanical. but trains always had a sense of nostalgia with them. my mom and dad had bought me and my brother a lionel train set when we were real little, then sold it to buy ‘ho’ scale stuff that was the hot item - they are shooting themselves for such an act ’cause the lionel would be worth quite a lot nowadays. i think i still have the old lionel transforer - but it might have gotten pitched along the way…

anyway… the real discovery, well re-discovery, came after leaving the train exhibit. i parted ways with my friends and headed to the main branch of the cincinnati library.

to back track a bit…

i use to go the main library all the time. in the ’80s, i would pour over the computer and electronics books. i know i missed the main era of hardware hacking of the ’70s, but i was still a curious kid and loved the books tab publishing put out - little op-amp circuits, flashing leds, short wave radio, logic counters, flip-flops, music synthesis boards… and then progressed into more programming areas, assembly, c… i didn’t understand it all, but i loved it!

i lost part of that spirit in the latter high school years - well maybe not lost it, but redirected it into music. so the libary became a great place to get new/obscure/classical/experimental cds that i could sonically devour. (the green township branch replaced the main branch when they got cds since it was closer to my parents where i was still living at the time.) everything from john cage and philip glass, to coltrane and miles, to billie holiday and ella, to mozart and sibelius. even checked out some old lps, like cedona - which was a totally cool “meditation jazz thing” as i wrote on the cassette dub i made.

then i just stopped going. don’t know why.

about a year ago or so i decided to renew my card - and return a few cds that i never bothered to return before. it had been so long since going… like ten years, maybe more… that i wasn’t in the library’s computer system anymore - so i was able to return the cds without paying an astronomical fee! (although, i think they only charge up to the face value of the item.) having the card now, i went every two weeks to return and checkout cds - for a couple months anyway.

then i stopped again. don’t know why.

if you’ve been reading my blog, you know i’ve had a resurgence in reading over the past two years. and my thirst for reading material has grown, although my checking account has shrunk. so you can see the growing interest in the library. (there’s more to it as well… i’ve become addicted to learning… and to the history channel, learning channel, discovery channel, pbs, npr, etc…)

if you’ve read this much, you’re probably saying, “pat, get to the point!” ok…

the library is awesome! i spent three and a half hours there thursday. and i really didn’t look at cds - i wanted books.

of course i first went to the computer books - not great, but a nice selection. i wouldn’t go there for a programming book per se, but i did find some great history type books - like one on xerox parc, but i’ll save that for next time. i did get just for fun (the story of an accidental revolutionary) by linus torvalds and david diamond. (linux rules! i’m almost done with the book.)

i also checked out some of the books on the gospel of thomas and other apocryphal writings. i’m not a religious freak, but religion, archeology and the bit of mystery of it all fascinate me - i am on a sort of quest of my own for meaning/religion/whatever. i was sparked to look into the writings of thomas from the movie stigmata, which although somewhat hokey, i enjoyed.

my final mission was to look for the book the codebreakers by kahn. i put this on my list after reading crypto by levy. i first went to the history section - i was trying to find it without refering to the card catalog to see how much i remembered. within a few minutes i was perusing the vast WWII shelves and a few seconds later hit the spy and crypto section. wow! tons of books to put on my list! found battle of wits which looks quite interesting, especially if you’ve read cryptonomicon.

but alas, no codebreakers. so off to the card catalog i go…

well, of course it’s not really a “card” catalog anymore… it’s all online in the “cinch” system. i was impressed that the library had a plethora of machines to access cinch and even access to the web was provided. you can use cinch as much as you want, but web access is limited to 90 minutes after you enter your library card number and pin. it’s a bit slow - they’re using wyse winterms running windows ce and citrix clients - but pretty cool for a basically free service. unfortunately there were a lot of “patrons” playing yahoo’s online games like pool and such, but there were still many terminals available.

so it was a “cinch” to find the codebreakers. for some reason, it wasn’t in the history section, but in government and business. go figure… since the book is old - well 1967 isn’t too old to me - it was down in “storage”, but five minutes later i was holding it my hands. it’s a monster of like a thousand pages or so. i was happy.

ok, maybe i got a little to excited about my journey back to the library…

side note: i’d like to see this “storage” part of the library. i can only imagine what it looks like. i was in a storage section of one of the university of cincinnati’s libraries one time - it was cool, but kinda spooky.

[wow… this has got to be my longest post ever!]

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i know i’m a little late, but i wanted to say merry christmas to my 2, maybe 3, readers out there!

it’s been an ok holiday season. i know money’s not everything, but i really love buying gifts for people to open on christmas - since money’s tight this year, i didn’t do so well in the giving…

i did manage to transfer my mom and dad’s favorite christmas record (yes, record, as in vinyl) to cd - clicks and pops and all! it’s called “christmas fanfare” on london recordings and it’s been out of print for many years - it was made in 1980. i think they should release it on cd ’cause it’s really beautiful. and it brought back a ton of memories of past christmases. so i guess that’s a pretty cool thing to give… especially since my parents haven’t had a turntable in like a bazillion years!

i’ll give the recording a going over with a click and pop filter someday. it’s amazing what you can do with a sound editor and a few plugins these days!

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the script kiddie left us some cool/interesting/unusual mp3s!

there was some cool christmas stuff to augment my holiday collection. and a wide range of german tunes - everything from techno to more traditional songs.

but the best find was “masters of chant III” - a collection of pop songs sung in gregorian chant. well, it’s mostly chant, there is instrument accompanyment by keyboards and drum machines, maybe a real guitar too.

some of the more outrageous songs are depeche mode’s blasphemous rumors, new order’s blue monday, chris issac’s wicked game and yaz’s only you.

the strange thing is that as strange as it sounds, i still like it! it’s still listenable! but boy did i have a good laugh at first listen!

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i recently installed squirrelmail web-based imap mail reader on wasted. it’s awesome. not too frilly. not too much overhead. basically just does email and that’s what i want. i had been using horde/imp but that’s really overkill for what i need. since it’s written in php4, it’s pretty easy to understand how it works if need be.

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it’d be nice to use linux all the time, but sometimes windows still makes a better desktop operating system. for those times, winscp (windows secure copy) really comes in handy - ’cause your server is running linux and ssh, right? winscp is my new fav utility for those times when samba or webdav isn’t available or i don’t feel like firing up the vpn at home. you can also download a stand alone exe file - no installation needed! (i know there is secure ftp, but i’ll stick to ssh/scp - ftp is a dying protocol.)

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the rumor mill is crankin’ at high speed! the latest is that macromedia may be aquired. by who? (or whom, never can tell) microsoft. yep, that the lastest buzz. so would flash flurish or perish?

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skript kiddies piss me off… and iis, too. seems that one of our nt boxes had some remnant of code red or nimda exploits left over - or could’ve been that newer mdac one. but some skript kiddie was able to get servu ftp server running on port 2002 and set up a warez site… they didn’t get too far, just some mp3s and a few movies. (i might add some of the mp3s to my collection, he he!)

luckly we’ve got bb running monitoring disk space as well as services - that box is set to notify me if the disk space is 95% used, so i knew something was up when i got a notification of 98% disk utilization!

i’d love to know how much internet bandwidth is wasted on skript kiddies. All of our servers, both iis and apache, have code red/nimda like accesses on a daily basis - pisses me off cause it wastes our disk space with logs…

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it’s been a while since writing any visual basic code, but i fired up vb6 to code a little activex control. i needed the http put method implemented in the browser, but the browsers don’t directly support put. activex is the simplest way to add on this type of functionality. (i actually like activex technology - the security model is what microsoft f*cked up.) yeah, i could’ve written it in java, but we’ve already got a code signing certificate for activex. the wininet api makes it a piece of cake! i had a few minor problems, but all in all pretty painless. i’ve still only got the code in a vb app, but converting it is a no brainer. so now i can just drag and drop file uploads. well, not to mention that http post file uploads can be a killer hit on performance! now i got a pretty progress bar, cancel button, can check the file size before the upload… and it’s just cool.

side note: the .net stuff looks cool and i assume i could do a control with vb.net, but i don’t know how long it’ll take for the “.net framework” to be installed on enough client machines. wonder if flash mx could do “put”. i’d love a cross platform solution… at one time i thought java might be it, but who know how long java on windows will work? and i’ve only seen one signed applet in my life… not too promising…

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part of my time has been occupied by a side project. wish it was web-based, but it was a java application - my first java application. i don’t like doing ui stuff - servlets are more my “cup of tea” - but i used some cool tech to accomplish the task. to create the printable report, i used the apache project’s fop (formatting objects processor) to take xml (generated by the application) and apply a stylesheet to generate a pdf which is both printed and emailed. the xsl template used both fop tags and svg tags, as well as xsl processing directives (for-each, etc.) which worked out quite nicely…

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mt looks ugly with only a few posts to show.

instead of configuring “number of days”, i think it’d be better to do “number of entries”. that way the last 30 entries would be shown even if those were over a two month time frame. prolly could change manually in the stylesheet.

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