FreeBSDGirl.com

I haven't posted in a while, and I know this site is well overdue for an update. A lot has happened in the past few weeks, but I've been trying to lay low and relax - with little luck.

Some of you may have heard that I quit my job at Yahoo!. Yes, this is true. I put in my year there and I left. You won't hear me talking any smack about Yahoo!, and although I've certainly heard about (and seen first-hand) the "mass exodus", I don't really consider myself a part of that. Yahoo! is a great company to work for, and I'd still recommend any of my friends apply for jobs there. I just don't think I like working for big companies. My stress levels were getting absurdly high, and it just wasn't worth it. I'm taking some time off from the IT scene for a while. I'll be doing little consulting jobs here and there, but I don't plan on entering the real workforce again until December or January. I need a vacation.

Igor asked me to move in with him, so this cut my living expenses down considerably. My rent is absurdly cheap, but I'm living in Sunnyvale. Yuck. Not that there was a whole lot happening in Belmont, but at least it's closer to San Francisco than Sunnyvale is. Trying to fit all of my servers into this small apartment is a nightmare. He didn't even have gigabit. I thought everyone had gigabit. When I moved in, the first thing I did was sign us up for Comcast Business Cable. If you've got the option to get it, do so. They've got a promotion going on right now that puts the 8Mbit/1Mbit (the best they offer) at just $10 or $20 more than standard residential. We got 5 static IP's as well, not that I'm entirely sure what I'm going to use them for.

Last Tuesday night, I got robbed. To be more accurate, someone tried to rob me and failed miserably. It was Igor's father's birthday, so we all went out to a nice restaurant and drank way too much wine. His mom and I were both pretty buzzed when we left around midnight. As soon as we got home, I fell into a dead sleep. I'm still rather surprised that the popping noise coming from the living room at 4:30 AM actually woke me up.

I've heard that noise before. It sounds just like a power supply shorting. I completely freaked, remembering that I had just moved incubus and succubus and powered them on a few nights before. I pushed Igor out of bed, threw off the covers, and ran into the living room. My servers looked fine, and there was no funky burning electronics smell. Then I saw the window.

I saw a hand holding a lighter just outside our window. At first I thought some guy was just smoking a bowl or doing something equally retarded just outside our apartment. I am not the brightest thing right after waking up. It took a minute to register that the hand was actually inside our apartment. He had been using the lighter to weaken the links of the screen. The popping noise had been him ripping it open. He was trying to reach around to unlock our door.

Now what would your first thought have been? A reasonable female would have retreated back into the bedroom and called the police. Once again, I'm not all that quick to think when I'm all that tired. So what do I do? I think to myself "heh, I have a leatherman." I started yelling at him, and the hand quickly retreated back through the window. I was about to open the door to confront him, but then I realized oops - I'm naked. He apologized profusely and took off running.

When I talked to the landlady the morning after, we put together that he already tried breaking into another apartment before mine. It looked like I scared him off. That's right. If I was on Heroes, my super power would be naked leatherman wielding. Robbers beware.

I seriously miss being able to say "I'm bored". Not that I've even uttered those words more than a few times in the past year.

I turned 26 last Saturday. I don't really feel any older than I did when I was 25. The goods? A new nvidia 8800 gts from Igor. Mmmm. Having a gamer boyfriend is nice - he buys me hardware in lieu of flowers. I always said that I'm not the kind of girl that guys buy flowers for. He gets this.

So what's been keeping me away from my blog? Work, work, work. When I'm not working, I'm packing my stuff. Igor asked me to move in with him. Originally we were looking for a place in San Francisco, but his contract with Yahoo! was extended until the end of this year at least, so instead I'm moving into his tiny dark pit of an apartment in Sunnyvale. No, it's not exactly the best location, and calling this place a pit is probably being a bit kind. I don't think he's ever cleaned it. Ever. I'm not exactly a neat person; I've got way too much stuff for that. Even so, other peoples messes bother me, so I'm working on cleaning it before I move too much of my stuff. I can't complain too much, though. My half of the rent will be $400, and this is unheard of in Northern California. His internet connection is much faster than what I had at my house in Belmont, so that more than makes up for it. Insert perverted joke about his pipe here. I'm too tired to think up one myself. Have fun with that. It's not so much a serious relationship move as it is a lowering my rent move. I'm not all that happy about not having my own bedroom, but I'll deal with it.

The Shuttle PC I bought is working out splendidly. I manage to steal a few moments now and then to play Bioshock and Heroes of Might and Magic V. Ok, not so much Bioshock. Yes, it's a spectacular game. I love cuddling up to Igor and watching him play it. I installed the game (Igor bought it for me, such a good boy!) while azn_jesus was over during one of The L Word marathons, and I managed to swim through the plane wreckage and get in the elevator that took me down to Rapture. Then I saw one of those Splicer chicks, and she started going crazy and trying to get at me. I freaked out and turned the game off. I am such a wuss, I know. My old video card, an NVidia 8500 GT, was all I had at the time, and the game played horribly. If I can't play in 1600x1200 with the video settings turned all the way up, I'm not a happy camper. I still haven't put the 8800 GTS in, as I need to stop by my house and get a Y power splitter. The 8800 is a beast. It takes up two slots (which is all the Shuttle has) with it's massive heatsink and fan and requires *two* power connectors. I really hope the shuttle can handle it. It claims to only need a 400W power supply, which is what the Shuttle came with. If all goes well, this absolutely adorable tiny PC will make a killer gaming box. All it's missing is a window kit and blinking lights.

I keep glancing at Igor's kitchen. I'm dreading having to clean iit, but I guess I should get the worst over with. I'll attempt to update more often in the future, but it may be a few weeks until things get back to some semblance of normal. I can't wait until I get my desk here. I may be buying a car soon, as well. My boss is considering selling me his BMW 323i. It's a totally cute black convertible. Definitely my style, even if I'll only put the top down at night.

Ok, that so obviously didn't happen. As I'm sure you can probably tell.

I'll be doing it at some point... instead I bought a new computer to use at PAX. It's hella sweet. More on that later. I'm about to take off of work to go home and install Windows Vista (heh!) on it so I can game.

FreeBSD isn't a gaming platform. Yes, I play WoW on it - in fact, I prefer using WoW in FreeBSD to using it in Windows, but there are other games out there. I know it's hard to believe; I was shocked when I found out.

I must prepare for PAX. I must train. My game-fu will be strong. Oh, yes. The time of FPS reckoning has begun.

I recommend that you all go out and listen to Kidneythieves at once.

I'm migrating to MoveableType 4.x today (hopefully). Expect the site to be down for a bit.

I get hit by a lot of blog spam - depending on the time of day, up to 3 attempts per second. It's one of the reasons I moved to MT. While I really liked using WordPress, I couldn't ever get the junk filtering the way I wanted it. MT catches about 90% of the spam if not more. I moderate comments, so I'm able to catch that extra 10% when I'm checking my approval queue. Even so, it gets annoying. I'm tired of reading about Viagra. My solution? I wrote a script to go through and pull the IP's of every comment marked as spam. I've noticed only 1 false positive in my entire time running MT, so I'm mostly confident in only pulling abusive users' IP addresses. I populated my bannedip's table with this list. If you're having problems posting comments because your IP is banned and you're a legitimate user, let me know and I'll fix it. If anyone is interested in doing the same for their blog, I can provide the script I used to do this as well as a list of the offending IP address.

I was interviewed by Geek Entertainment TV at Linux World - you can check it out here. I'm on about 1/3 of the way through.

I was completely frozen up and nervous the entire time. Matt/Denise put me in front of the camera, and 5 seconds later it was on - despite my protests. You can tell how nervous I am (and how much of a ditz I am). Regardless, it was kind of amusing. She totally played with my tail. :P

If you haven't heard the news yet, SCO got fucked. Heh. Point and laugh. I nearly fell over laughing when I read this:

According to Judge Kimball's ruling, Microsoft paid SCO approximately $16 million for license rights and Sun paid approximately $10 million. SCO neglected to turn over the licensing fees to Novell, which "gave SCO its first profitable year in history," Kimball notes.

Props to Kimball.

Today, I'm working on capacity planning. Capacity planning is by far one of my least favorite aspects of my jobs. It's an exercise in futility, in my opinion. It reminds me of shopping for pants. I find the perfect cute pair, and then I'm reminded of how much soda i drink, leading to the question "Will these pants fit me a year from now?" Capacity planning for large networks like I'm responsible for now is the exact same way. Will this number of servers still properly support my butt after so many late night coding sessions? Hmm.

It's been quite a while since I wrote a post about getting flash working under firefox in FreeBSD. It's gotten fairly popular, but I've also gotten a lot of emails and comments telling me that it was out of date. I hadn't set up flash on my computer at home yet, so I just went through the steps and revised them a little.

linuxpluginwrapper will prompt you with a config menu for multimedia/linux-realplayer and print/acroread7 support. I suggest not enabling acroread - as of mid 2006, linuxpluginwrapper was having some issues with unresolved symbols. It appears this is still the case.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linuxpluginwrapper
# make install clean

If you try to compile linuxpluginwrapper with acroread support, you'll get something like this when you try to use it later:

LoadPlugin: failed to initialize shared library /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/intellinux/nppdf.so [/usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/ENU/Browser/ intellinux/nppdf.so: Undefined symbol "__ctype_b_loc"]

rltd has to be patched if we want any chance of getting flash7 to work properly.

# cd /usr/src
# fetch -o - http://people.freebsd.org/~nork/rtld_dlsym_hack.diff | patch
# cd libexec/rtld-elf
# make clean && make && make install

Install www/linux-flashplayer7. Do not use flashplugin-mozilla.

# cd /usr/ports/www/linux-flashplayer7
# make install clean

Although linuxpluginwrapper does supply an example libmap.conf, it's old. I mean, just look at the version number. 2005? I'm going to assume that you actually bother to run somewhat updated software, so here's a libmap.conf that will work with the prefix change for X.Org when we bumped major versions.

# My sample /etc/libmap.conf
# Flash 7 with Mozilla/Firefox
[/usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so]
libpthread.so.0 libpthread.so.2
libdl.so.2 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
libz.so.1 libz.so.3
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/flash7.so
# Helix RealPlayer
[/usr/local/lib/linux-mozilla/plugins/nphelix.so]
libstdc++.so.5 libstdc++.so.5
libc.so.6 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so
libm.so.6 libm.so.4
libgcc_s.so.1 pluginwrapper/realplayer.so


We're almost done. Create a symlink for the flash player.

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so /usr/local/lib/browser_linux_plugins/