Something went wrong with Googlegroup e-mail.

ACAC presentation.

Delphi Summary

syntax comparison

Love the browser. It's going to be great when they get the bugs worked out of it. Right now, it doesn't handle the edit boxes correctly in Dokuwiki. Ah, well. The blazing speed makes up for a few oddities while editing small bits and pieces of text.

Link extracted from Thunderbird e-mail two different ways.

Neither link works in either browser.

http://surveys.canisius.edu/Spring_2008_ballot.aspx?invitationID=3D2748&userguid=3D127170bb-dd8d-420b-bd4e-49b14dcc22a8r7=06???=3D?????!9??
http://surveys.canisius.edu/Spring_2008_ballot.aspx?invitationID=2748&userguid=127170bb-dd8d-420b-bd4e-49b14dcc22a8r7%06???=?????!9

This is the link as processed by the ASP script:

http://surveys.canisius.edu/Login.aspx?s=c33738df7cc54174931c102a34a1eb82&invitationID=2748&userguid=127170bb-dd8d-420b-bd4e-49b14dcc22a8r7%06???=?????!9&redirectUrl=%2fSpring_2008_ballot.aspx%3finvitationID%3d2748%26userguid%3d127170bb-dd8d-420b-bd4e-49b14dcc22a8r7%2506%3f%3f%3f%3d%3f%3f%3f%3f%3f!9

Firefox 2.0.0.13 fails to log in

IE 7.0.5730.13 fails to log in

I've tried both from Thunderbird and from Griffmail.

Source of e-mail (as seen by Thunderbird):

Return-Path: <huard@canisius.edu>
Received: from mx0.canisius.edu (mx0.canisius.edu [138.92.8.15])
	by griffmail.canisius.edu (MOS 3.8.5-GA)
	with ESMTP id AEM41191;
	Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:17:37 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from surveys (surveys.canisius.edu [138.92.8.154])
	by mx0.canisius.edu (MOS 3.8.6-GA)
	with ESMTP id CDA94204;
	Tue, 15 Apr 2008 08:18:34 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <200804151218.CDA94204@canisius.edu>
mime-version: 1.0
from: "Kevin Hardwick and James Huard, Tellers of the Faculty Senate"
 <huard@canisius.edu>
to: moleski@canisius.edu
date: 15 Apr 2008 08:21:48 -0400
subject: Spring 2008 Faculty Elections -- Ballot 
content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable
X-Junkmail-Whitelist: YES (by domain whitelist at mx0.canisius.edu)

The Spring 2008 Faculty Elections are being held from now until 2 pm on=
 Thursday, April 17.  Please vote in the elections by clicking on the link=
 below.=0D=0A=0D=0Ahttp://surveys.canisius.edu/Spring_2008_ballot.aspx?invitationID=3D2748&userguid=3D127170bb-dd8d-420b-bd4e-49b14dcc22a8r7=06???=3D?????!9??

The screen I get after clicking on the link:

FIX

• Click on “send new password” link.
• Insert e-mail.
• Follow link that is e-mailed and change password.
• Go back to original ballot e-mail and click on link.
• In the login screen, insert username (sent in e-mail from the “send new password” link) and the password selected.

Internet Explorer → Tools → Manage Add-Ons → Enable or Disable Add-ons

Find all of the Skype add-ons. Click on each one once, then find the radio button underneath the list box that says “Disable.”

After disabling all of the Skype add-ons, click OK to close the screen.

I hit a snag integrating PHP and javascript: strings picked up from the MySQL database may look OK to PHP but cause javascript to gag. I couldn't find exactly what I wanted on the web, so I wrote a PHP function to make sure that what I pass to javascript is javascript safe.

Great article that I hope to understand better some day.

Performs is a plug-in for Joomla that allows polling questions and results to be embedded in regular articles.

It needed a little tweaking to play nice with Joomla! 1.5.

After fixing the problems with RSGallery2, I spent the rest of the week working on troubles with page navigation.

I spent all day today (February 19, 2008) happily chasing down a way to patch RSGallery2. Here's the whole story with pictures.

I've spent the last three days up to my elbows in hardware (February 9-11, 2008).

The new linux box is in my office and working beautifully (February 12)!

It's an Athlon motherboard with a gig of RAM and a couple of hard disks. Much better than the little “profile” unit that I used last year.

Fedora 8 looks and runs great on the new baby.

I've been developing a new site for the NSRCA for the last 14 months or so.

I'm in awe of what the Apache Software Foundation has done for us web users. Their Apache server is freely distributed to anyone who wants to use it. (Server software “serves up” pages requested by a browser–that's the most common function that makes the internet tick.)

I've had Apache installed as a service under Windows since December 21, 2006. It just runs somewhere in the background waiting for calls to <http://moleskin.ipowermysql.com>.

I've been using it a lot this week trying to solve some problems with the .css for the new site. Just this morning I reconfigured it to make the organization of my files a little more useful to me. Apache took the reconfiguration in stride and gave me exactly what I wanted.

I'm bowled over. It's an outrageously excellent program.

And I have to give kudos to Windows XP, much as I hate to do it. My system only has 256 MB at present, but I've had six or eight programs called up and available while playing MP3s in the background. Windows bends a bit, but it hasn't broken (knock on wood!).

While I'm in the mood to hand out awards for excellence, I've got to include DreamweaverMX (2004), too. It's probably time to see what a new version will cost me, but I'm immensely grateful for what I've learned from Dreamweaver and for the way it handles my websites. In my reorganization, Dreamweaver counted around 50,000 files in my html folders, about half of them HTML. Dreamweaver didn't scold me. It just went through them all, one at a time, and made some monster cache for future reference.

Meanwhile, the MP3s kept me company (a country mix).

Yes, Garrison, it is nice when things just work.

A post from rev.aviation.piloting (!)

Some set theory to think about.

Instructions and photos.

I've started familiarizing myself with a new classroom content management system being used by Canisius. I've found a bug of some kind in our setup. I've quit playing with this myself. I don't think Angel is on top of this situation.

— 2007/08/30 06:30

Sequence:

• Installed Fedora on old PC using live CD for i386. Everything worked fine.
• Updated everything.
• Result: 7.89 Rawhide 2.6.21-1.3228.FC8 on an i686 but no joy.

Problem: After logging in as root or as a user, the screen would go black. I could see and control the mouse pointer, but nothing else came up.

Solution:

• Downloaded an FC7 rescue disk:
  • F-7-i386-rescuecd.iso
• Played with startx a lot, using CTRL-ALT-Backspace to terminate X windows, come back to the command prompt, and read the error messages.
• Modifying the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file didn't give me any happiness. I could affect the state of the display, but I didn't find the core problem.
• After hours of hitting dead ends, I tried yum update. Something there got me in touch with Xwindows–at the wrong resolution, but I then could set the monitor so that after exiting (CTRL-ALT-Backspace) and restarting Xwindows (startx), I got the display working properly.

I don't know what was wrong and I don't know exactly what part of the update fixed my problem. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.

UNIX Airways

Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.

Air DOS

Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again, jump on again, and so on… — Wednesday, February 28, 2007

From http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/evilfinder/

M  A  R  T  I  N  X  M  O  L  E  S  K  I  S  J
13 1  18 20 9  14 24 13 15 12 5  19 11 9  19 10     - as numbers
 4 1   9  2 9   5  6  4  6  3 5   1  2 9   1  1     - digits added
\___________/ \___________/ \__________/ \_____/
 7             6             6            4         - digits added

Thus, “Martin X. Moleski SJ” is 7664.

Multiply the number by 002 - this is the symbol of greed, from right to left. It gives 15328.

Add 1986, the year of the Chernobyl “incident” - the result is 17314.

Turn the number backwards, divide by 11 - the symbol of judgment and disorder. The number is now 3761.

Turn the number backwards, subtract 911 - the date of WTC attacks. The number is now 762.

Subtract 96 from the number - this is the symbol of perversion and pleasue in sin, written backwards. It gives 666.

The number 666 is the number of the Beast.

This clearly proves how evil the subject is. QED. — Friday, February 02, 2007

A former student of mine is a linux guru. I'm dropping his e-mail in here so I can play with it next week during office hours:

1. Check out the following sites at your leisure, They have TONS of great opensource software, freshmeat even has a religious category

1.1 www.freshmeat.net (Trust me its new Linux software, nothing that will later require a confession :))

1.2 www.sourceforge.net

1.3 www.slashdot.org (This one is just informational)

2. If you are looking for packages for redhat check out

2.1. rpm.pbone.net

2.2 www.rpmfind.net

3. In the event you haven't played with RPMS, here's a crash course.

3.1 rpm -i <rpm1.rpm> <rpm2.rpm> <rpm3.rpm> will install RPMS

3.1.1 Sometimes RPMS have lots of dependencies so you need to get all the depend ones and install them with the initial one you wanted to install

3.2 rpm -e <package name> removes the RPM

3.3 rpm -qa gets all the RPMS installed

3.4 rpm -qa | grep -i <rpm name> lets you know if the rpm <rpn name> is installed

3.5 rpm -ql <rpm name> tells you all the files in the RPM

4. If you're lucky you can skirt the entire RPM deal with yum, its a network front end to RPM

4.1 Find out what the actual package name is

4.1.1 For example “yum install Apache” might not work but “yum install httpd” might

4.1.2 You can get the package name by searching rpmfind.net or rpm.pbone.net

4.1.3 yum install <package name> will get the package and automatically load any dependencies

5. If you come across any Apache/Mysql/PHP programs that you want to try but would take you a long time to configure

5.1 Feel free to pass them to me.

5.2 I have Internet servers all configured for them

5.3 I can pretty much get any Apache/Mysql/PHP setup running in under 10 minutes assuming they are compatible with PHP5

6. If you are trying to get a program to work from source (Only do this if you can't find an RPM or yum it

6.1 There should be a configure executable file. In the source directory type ./configure

6.2 Type “make”

6.3 Check the file “Makefile” in that directory and ensure there is a “Install” directive AND AND AND and “Unistall” directive

6.4 If you type make install it will install the compiled code IF THERE IS NO UNINSTALL IN THE MAKEFILE YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO REMOVE IT

6.5 if there is no “configure” file, I wouldn't bother with it. Code is probably not mature enough to be any good. Everyone who's anyone uses this “configure” process

— Friday, February 02, 2007

Thanks for giving me a little more information for my search. I now
better understand that I need a little Faith to go with the philosophy
because the philosophy alone isn't going to get me where I need to go.

“Good” philosophers should be willing to keep an open mind, just in case the uncaused being might want to reveal something that philosophy can't reach by itself.

I think I may stop and reflect a little on the everyday miracles to
increase the Faith to better complement the Philosophy and critical
thinking part. I don't want my Nan's (or my) God to be infinitely
ambivalent and I may need to step back from the philosophy for a little
while and re-visit it later (this is gonna be difficult because its like
giving me software with no source)

You need the right disassemblers to peek inside some of the compiled libraries. If you try to open them in a text editor, you're not going to get a whole lot of information out of them. (It depends on how good you are at translating text representations of machine code.)

Finally as I was writing the little Linux stuff for you, I couldn't help
but ponder some analogies between Linux/GPL and religion. Some of your
computer geek student may actually find some humor (and substance) in
it.

Yes, indeed!

1A. Anyone using Linux would find it silly to write everything from
scratch because of the abundance of packages out there, you just have to
learn to pick the right ones (see the sites I gave you in my quick Linux
crash course)

Got that.

1B. For me, it makes sense to draw from the best of breed religions (I
view the value that the Jesuit Catholics put on education and the fusing
of theology, logic, and philosophy to be “best of breed”)

Jesuits nowadays disagree among themselves about what it means to be Jesuit, Catholic, educated, theological, logical, and philosophical. You need to read the label carefully and check the ingredients in the package (sort of a checksum thingy, except it has to be done by wetware).

2A. A lot of times, best of breed Linux software doesn't address the
particular business needs. If its GPL'ed, it can be adjusted to address
the business needs under the condition that the modified source is
passed back to the author.

2B. Although The Pope would not consider the Catholic Faith GPL (Gnu
Public Licensed), personally I am trying to adapt the parts that I
understand into my life.

There are lots of optional components and modules that can be integrated into the Catholic Content Management System. We call them “spiritualities.” When Protestants disagree with each other, they found new churches. When Catholics disagree with each other, they create new spiritualities: Benedictine, Trappist, Cistercian, Dominican, Franciscan, Carthusian, Camaldolese (sp?), Ignatian, Redemptorist, Trinitarian, Passionist, etc.

In other words, there is a huge amount of variety within the Catholic system.

The Nicene Creed sets some boundaries and provides a foundation, but it doesn't answer all questions nor decide all issues about how to live a Catholic life in today's circumstances. That's where spiritualities come in as plugins to help us figure out where we are and where we're going.

3A. Before any piece of GPL'ed software can be adapted, time must be
taken to understand its inner-workings. The programmer performing the
adaptation might not like the way the software is written, that is
really not relevant, if it works, it works, you don't have to like it.
If the programmer doesn't understand how the software works, the change
adapts a perfectly good piece of software into something broken that no
longer solves the original problem it was designed for but also, the
need it was being adapted for.

BTDT. My greatest hack in the 80s was finding and patching one byte in a hard disk device driver when MSDOS changed from 1.25 to 2.0. Other hacks have been less successful. :o(

3B. Personally, I believe that once something is understood to be true,
whether someone “likes it or not” it is not relevant. I also believe
that to try NOT to understand something because I might not like the
outcome is not logical and a character weakness.

Agreed.

A Jesuit challenged me to sum up my philosophy training. I thought of two words: “Love necessity.” I'm not sure that really says it all, but I do think it's a good maxim.

Unfortunately I think GPL'ing Catholicism would create a parfait, pick
and choose religion. This would definitely destroy the continuity that
seems so essential to all religions, but it would be interesting.

That is the spirit of Protestantism: take the parts that you like from the whole and throw away the rest. So, for example, most Protestants take the Catholic canon of the Scriptures (completed circa 380 AD to 420 AD, not at Nicea in 325 AD) which was fashioned by popes and bishops, but jettison other teachings of the popes and bishops that are as old or older than the canon.

Canon = measuring rod =⇒ list of things that measure up

Canon of the Scriptures = list of books that the Church decided were to be taken as “the word of the Lord.”

I've just finished reading Think unix by Jon Lasser.

I have no idea how the book came into my hands. I was scrounging around for something a few weeks ago–who knows what now?–and the title caught my eye.

The book ends with this reflection:

 
Lasser did a great job helping me to understand the spirit of unix. I'm not quite ready to write any regular expressions yet, but perhaps soon I will take that leap into the (for me) nearly unknown.

— Monday, January 29, 2007

I've got my old printer moved to my office and my new printer chugging away at home. I'm slowly understanding the way linux thinks about things and I'm guardedly optimistic that I will eventually get it running right.

Office hours are over. I think it's nap time! — 2007/01/22 10:38

When the printer troubleshooter asks, “Is the cable plugged in?”, check both ends of the cable.

Don't ask me how I know that plugging in just one end of the cable doesn't do a #$%&*+! bit of good.

— Sunday, January 21, 2007

I turned an old computer in my office (Windows98) into a linux box. I experimented with four or five varieties and have “settled”, for the time being, on Fedora Core.

I'm learning linux as I go along, so sometimes I shoot myself in the foot when I'm aiming at a bug. Java Runtime Environment and Novelclient are the two current sorgenkind.

I desperately need to keep track of some stuff when I'm debugging, so I'm taking my hand-me-down HP LaserJet 4 to my office to help me sort things out. It's being replaced here at home by an HP LaserJet 1020. Big improvements all around!

I bought this bike the day I did my first fourth step.

I put several thousand miles on it.

Someday I'll finish typing up the story of my ride from John o' Groats to Land's end (1998).

I don't think I have any photos of the bike. I'll have to scrounge around and see. My last ride was in the spring of 2000. I realized I couldn't do both the Rideau Lakes Ride and finish indexing and proofreading Personal Catholicism. I got the book done.

Meanwhile, trying to get this scanned I ran into some problems with my scanner.

I am about to throw away three books from the 80s that have sat on my shelf for lo! these many years:

• 8086 8088 Assembly Language Programming
• Assembly Language Programming for the IBM Personal Computer
• Bluebook of Assembly Routines for the IBM PC & XT

Many happy memories–but I'm not gonna be doing any more ASM.

— Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Another 11.5” of shelf space reclaimed today:

• The 8086 Book
• Advanced MSDOS
• IBM DOS reference manuals.
• All the references for the old DOS-based Turbo Pascal. I'm done with them. It took several years, but I have finally made the transition to Delphi.

A day at Field's.

— Saturday, January 06, 2007

Bought a 300+ GB ATA drive this morning for ~$100–roughly fifteen times the space I really need. My old secondary drive was noisy and my main drive seemed to be getting full.

That was an illusion caused by my not emptying my personal tmp folder for three years or so. When I got rid of that 12 GB of stuff, things looked much nicer. But D: was still noisy, as was an old fan that came with the computer.

Getting the case apart and swapping the old drive for the new drive went quickly, even with several bouts of cleaning the dust bunnies out of the cooling vents.

My first attempt at using Ghost was a success, too.

Then I shot myself in the foot.

I booted up to check that the new disk was really there, chock full of all of my favorite programs in their proper places. Then I made the big drive the master and the small drive the slave so that I can go another few years without having to clean the drive regularly. FATAL ERROR! The mapping of the drives is now written to them rather than derived from their position on the cable.

I tried several things that only made matters worse in the late afternoon. I went to the Wing and Rotor meeting with Dan, where Don Kmack gave me good advice. It's working. I came home, isolated the small drive, booted from it to make sure it's OK, and now am re-copying the image to the big drive. I'll isolate that drive, make sure that it's a good copy, then scrub the little drive and copy back the material to it that I'd like to have backed up.

Worst case scenario: I just scrub both disks and start all over. I've got the most important data on the smallest of the three disks. But if Ghost works this time, I'll be miles ahead because I won't have to re-install and reconfigure all of my favorite programs.

— 2007/01/05 19:55

I just connected Dokuwiki to the NSRCA demo version of Joomla. It probably took less than two minutes to configure the combination after I got the files uploaded.

Open source rocks!

My shoulders ache and I've got a stiff neck and a sore wrist from several days of climbing the learning curve, but it sure is great stuff when it works.

Next: some editable calendar to go with the package.

— Thursday, January 04, 2007

I've decided to redirect from WordPress to the wiki.

• There is a steady series of attacks by spambots on the WordPress blog.
• I'm accustomed to the look and feel of Dokuwiki's syntax.
• The look of the page seems cleaner and neater to me.

I've gained some control over the .css that drives Dokuwiki. I now have ragged-right margins, a style for the table of contents that works OK, a hack that lets me put a header on this page alone, and a little tweak of the PHP footer file that includes an e-mail address on every page of the wiki. There are still some peculiarities that I don't understand, but I can live with them for now.

“We claim progress, not perfection” (AA Big Book).

Well, that was a short-lived New Year's Resolution. I learned about Mozilla's DOM inspector and fixed a slight color difference between the main text and lists. If I want to go back and have slightly different colors, I now know how to do it.

— Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The Problem and the Solution

I've been playing with a WordPress blog on and off since April, 2006, but I've come to prefer the look and feel of Dokuwiki. I think I'm going to shut down my WordPress blog and use this namespace instead.

I've written a macro with MacroExpress to give me the date in a top-level heading. That solves one of the problems with using a generic package. And it leaves me with four other headings that I can use within an entry. Good stuff. — Tuesday, January 02, 2007