Daley Ponderings

We signed up for a new phone number for dealing with rental stuff, and bought the numbers to go on the sign today.  Three hours later, we got our first call.  Crazy.  I haven't gotten around to getting it on Craig's List yet or anything. The guy is deciding between a house and a... (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)

4/10 - "That makes us laugh to the tip of our lungs!" 4/21 - Kind of like a spoonerism: "Daddy, do you want a bug wrap?"  He meant "back rub."  We all got a laugh out of that one. 4/25 - He woke up in a happy mood this morning, before the rest of us.  He took off his diaper,... (More)

I just updated Usermin, and so wanted to make sure that my custom modules didn't break.  And in the process, poked around through my webalizer module, which shows the things that people type into search engines to end up at our blog as well as the number of hits for certain pages. ... (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)

It took some amount of work to get Linux up and running on my laptop , but I just got a new computer ($50 from Peter's workplace - let me or him know if you are interested, there might be some more left) and installed Linux in an hour two, including copying all the old data from the old... (More)

Due to needing to have the well-child visits a year apart and to my previous and current hesitation to use the phone, especially with our doctors' office having this weird new scheduling system, we didn't get to Jonathan's four year checkup until last week. He is 44lb and 42." This... (More)

Jonathan is very often singing or humming now as he works or plays.  He knows the first and last verses of Amazing Grace and parts of the middle verses.  He likes the "What's in the Honeypot" song from his piano lesson CD, as well as the version of "This Old Man"... (More)

I am sure this will excite many of our normal readers, but I have finally (after four years) switched my laptop to Linux.  Now that I am using it everyday, it is much nicer to be in this environment, instead of having putty windows all over the place.  Perhaps if I had a better... (More)

Whew... For some reason, taxes took longer than they have in other years.  Part of the time was spent trying to get out of a federal tax penalty for not calculating the estimated taxes correctly.  We spent 14.63 hours (courtesy of worklog ), mostly together working on them.  I... (More)

Noah likes to help set the table.  When I ask him to put forks at the places, he will run to the drawer and grab a fistfull, then put a fork on top of each plate.  I usually have to help him put away the extras, or they end up all over the place. He's also been copying words... (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)

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)

I somehow missed when Street View (and for that matter - Terrain ) showed up on Google Maps.  I am not sure when that happened.  Actually, now that I look at the demo video, I did see the demo before, but I hadn't seen when it came to our house.  You can't quite see how ripe our... (More)

I have been getting a bunch of spam through my contact form over the last couple of days, so I thought I would check out what they are trying to do.  The domain's contact information is protected by privacyprotect.org, so we can't know who they are, though I filled out a form showing... (More)