Mike's Blabberings

The Aventail VPN client requires Sun Java to correctly function on Ubuntu. For whatever reason, the OpenJDK is not sufficient, and the client exhibits numerous bugs. Unfortunately, for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Canonical decided to move Sun Java to the partner repository. It’s no-longer apt-get-able by default.
No worries, we can easily add the [...]

The wife and I are trying to pick out some pictures for the baby’s room. We can’t decide whether to go realistic or whimsical.
What works best in a nursery?

With a baby boy on the way (due in early June 2010), I decided to start looking for fun stuff for my lil dude. I thought that maybe I’d have to wait a few years to unleash him on the world, but lo and behold there’s some seriously badass gear for infants and toddlers! [...]

I Just got an email from Google, describing a new feature of AdSense dubbed “interest-based advertising.”
I don’t think it’s any shock that Google has the data to segment users based on their browsing habits. The shocker to me is that they’re making the result of that segmentation available to webmasters everywhere.
The full [...]

OMBC has published a tentative schedule of mountain bike races for 2009. The madness begins this month! I won’t be able to make the first race, as it conflicts with PyCon, but I’m hoping to tear up Vulture’s Knob soon thereafter. I’m getting antsy to get out there and see what all the [...]

After fighting with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 for months to get WIFI working, I finally found a Dell driver [0] that worked on my HP laptop through ndiswrapper [1].
A few hours later with success claimed, I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, assuming I had conquered all possible obstacles and that anything in the future [...]

I stumbled across “Dammit I’m Mad” by Demetri Martin, a rumored-to-be 224 word palindrome poem.
I was impressed, but needed to check the accuracy of such a statement. So I dialed up a python session.

import re
awesomedrome = """Dammit I’m mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed [...]

If you’re like me, you’ve got a few friends on Twitter, but most others are hesitant to make the jump. Hell, I had a hard enough time convincing them (and myself really) to join Facebook. So what fun would it be if there weren’t any drunk pictures floating around, but rather just a [...]

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