Daley Ponderings

I am working on a Vista machine for a client, and was trying to update things - the firewall was turned off, windows update hadn't been run in a while, etc.  Windows Defender was complaining about not updating for the last 8 months, and currently giving me an error of 0x8024402c.  I searched... (More)

I have heard people debate about whether not being able to hear a child playing is worse than hearing one that is really loud.  I can tell you that I would take either one over waking up to sounds of water splashing around. We were out late last night at the Moore's Art Party, and... (More)

On a Wednesday, two days past my due date, the midwives scheduled me for post-dates testing at the hospital the next week. At first these only consist of a non-stress test (monitoring to be sure the baby's heart rate increases when he moves) and an ultrasound to confirm adequate amniotic... (More)

This started out as a reply to an email to Heather's parents, but I figured maybe other people are interested in the thought process about water quality.         After lots of hours looking at water things today, I think we will definitely get a " MetalMaster " which gets rid of... (More)

I think I have written before about DenyHosts , but this evening, it prevented somewhere around twenty thousand individual hosts trying to login to one of my servers. The hackers have gotten smarter - that they used to just try from one host, which was trivially blockable, even manually.... (More)

Life cereal was on sale for $2, and we found a $1 off coupon inside one box.  So tonight, Jonathan bought a box of cereal with his own dollar bill.  We all walked to the store together. Jonathan found the cereal aisle by himself and saw where the cereal was, but had Daddy reach up to... (More)

I had the privilege of installing VMWare 1.0.5 on a brand new 2.6.25 kernel.  I downloaded the 2.6.XX patch for vmware 1.0.4 , applied the one change from asm to linux in vcpuset.h.  That had worked for me before when using 1.0.5 on a 2.6.24 kernel, but today I downloaded a 2.6.25... (More)

Last night I had Jon put his hand on my belly while I was reading to everyone at bedtime.  I figured that was an easy way to wait patiently for a kick, since we'd have a story to listen to.  Sure enough, about five minutes later, he felt one! (More)

I woke up this morning to find Taiwan's Yahoo server rejecting emails that were supposedly sent using my server.  I originally figured it was the regular old spammer trick of using invalid return addresses until I noticed that it was one of my servers who was reporting the failure, rather... (More)

I don't know if it is only relevant to Allegheny County or if it is more universal, but a friend asked me to write a parcel id (parcel/block/lot) parser to help him out in his real estate searches.  It was kind of a fun project (3 hours) and it was neat to see how well it worked out in... (More)

Shortly after I posted the first analysis of my time , I realized that my hours per day calculation were kind of off, since I was counting 7 day weeks, and I basically never work on Sundays.  As I am redoing the calculations, I see that I must have been doing something strange to try get... (More)

I finally decided to buy a wireless card for my laptop that uses the cell phone network, as opposed to plain wi-fi.  This will allow me to have more/better access when I am not in range of a wifi access point (say, hypothetically, if one were to travel to Middleburg, Virginia to a house... (More)

Some people have asked where my time is spent, now that I am working from home.  I don't keep track of non-computer time, but I do keep track of when I am on my laptop, partially to see where I am spending my time, and partially for billing reasons. I found this handy software called... (More)

I assume that the EETimes is paid by their advertisers based on how many active readers they have in certain categories, etc.  Hopefully, the advertisers know that those numbers are inflated, since I think it took me a year of calling and emailing them to get them to stop mailing me the... (More)

Just when I thought I was a geek, the bar is raised... I forgot to post this a while ago: Tim Hawkins and the "homeschool family".  Prairie Home Sausage is kind of funny - and has a picture of a really neat merry-go-round.   Lastly, being... (More)