Beginning in October of 2010 I found an awesome kung fu school in South Pasadena that teaches Hung Gar Kuen and Choy Lay Fut. It’s a very laid back and low key class that really focuses on the body physics of the forms to make them more effective. My Sifu’s lineage traces back to Lam Cho and Wong Fei Hung. I go once a week on Tuesdays from 8pm to 11pm and it is a serious work out. The dues are only $65 a month and the class is small so you get lots of attention. Check out their website at http://asiaartsassociation.com.
I’m sure there’s tons of people just like me who HATE the fact that firefox makes you click like 10 billion things just to visit a page with an SSL cert that it doesn’t like. It’s absurd! And in fact I dealt with it for quite some time until I was like, wait a minute, I bet this POS is configurable to make it not be as cumbersome to visit such pages. So it turns out you can cut things down to just two clicks! Which still sucks but is much better than what you had to do before.
And here’s how:
1) Browse to “about:config”
2) set browser.ssl_override_behavior = 2
a) The 2 means “Pre-populate the current URL and pre-fetch the certificate”
3) set browser.xul.error_pages.expert_bad_cert = true
a) This will tell it to ‘Unhide the “add exception” button on the SSL error page, allowing users to directly accept a bad certificate.’
I was meaning to post this earlier but I was lazy. April 18th, I got a chance to skate The Berrics with my friend Peter, Diane, and Peter’s Fiance Mars. I was super excited to be going, I had many tricks planned for this spot. When I first got there I went to do some warm up, I started off with a flatground kickflip and wasn’t prepared for how slippery the ground was there and ended up spraining my ankle on my first trick! I was devastated! Here I was at the Berrics… WITH A SPRAINED FUCKING ANKLE!!!! Anyhow I stood against the wall trying to move my ankle and let it loosen up, finally it loosened up a bit so I hit the stair set and hubba ledge to get my adrenaline going to help me ignore the pain. I tried to get a frontside crook on the big hubba but kept slipping out on the landing, I dont understand how the pro’s are able to land so many tricks on such a slippery surface. Anyhow, I did make it onto the Berrics website for their Explicit Ills Pizza Party 6 with a smith grind down the hubba. I’ll slap together some footage that diane took with her point and shoot camera later.
I gotta say… I really hate it when musical artists either create a “hidden track” behind a long pause of silence… or even a track that just has extended silence, like wtf is the point. The hidden track makes sense on a cassette tape but in this age it’s completely pointless.
I was listening to this track by Telepopmusik called “15 Minutes” on their Angel Milk album. Great album btw, but this track is like 1 minute of some dude with a horrible lisp talking about flying. And the remaining 14 minutes of the song is just silent. Like wtf is the point of that?! I thought my ipod was broken or something but then it’s like, “oh just kidding, the song is just silence”. That’s just swell.
For the last 4 months I’ve been following a game of S.K.A.T.E of a bunch of top name pro’s, today is the day they show the semi finals and the finals. I’m actually sitting around waiting for the finals to get posted. I wanted to post this semi final match I just watched… this is quite possibly the most insane game of skate I’ve ever seen… Mike Mo vs Billy Marks…
The other day I thought it’d be a good idea to run an `apt-get dist-upgrade` on my debian etch laptop, I noticed that not only was a new kernel available, but debian wanted to switch from hotplug to udev. I’m not a big fan of udev but I decided to go with the update, if things broke I would fix it and come out a better man right? Well first thing that broke was my sound, that was easy, just had to `modprobe snd_pcm_oss` and add that to my /etc/modules. In fact that was the only thing I noticed, great!
Later that night I got to my girlfriend’s pad to help her pack and move out of her apartment. During a break I bust out my laptop but I can get on the wireless! I immediately remember I never built new ipw2200 and ieee80211 modules with the new kernel, so I build them and unload and reload the modules but still no love. I look in changelogs and notice that ipw2200 is actually included in the linux kernel now, so I wipe all my modules and make sure I’m using the included ones, and now I’m getting errors:
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Failed to set encryption.
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
ioctl[IPW_IOCTL_WPA_SUPPLICANT]: Operation not supported
Oh yeah, I’m using WPA by the way. So I keep thinking that wpa support is missing from ipw2200, so I recompile a couple times, load and unload, trying different versions and WTF NOTHING WORKS! I start going to faq’s and forums to try to find other people with the same symptoms and some solutions but find nothing that works. I check debian bugs, nothing. Finally I start thinking about the ‘wpa-driver ipw’ configuration line I use in my /etc/network/interfaces, maybe it’s using a new driver I think to myself. So I start reading through the docs for wpasupplicant to find info on the drivers to set in the wpasupplicant config.
Users of linux kernels less than 2.6.14 will be required to specifiy wpa-driver.
and…
WPA/WPA2 support was added in Wireless Extension 18.
This version (or more correctly, WE 19) was included in the Linux 2.6.14 kernel, and is therefore supported by 2.6.14-compliant drivers such as ipw2200 v1.0.8.
In order to take advantage of this WE 18 support you need to use wpasupplicant’s wext driver. You may have previously used a specific driver such as “-D ipw” for older kernels, but to use the new WE 18 features in kernel 2.6.14 or later, you’ll want to use the generic “wext” driver instead.
Not specifying a wpa-driver is the same thing as using wext, so I just removed that one line from my /etc/network/interfaces and BOOM! it works. What a waste of time, and that’s why I love linux.
My girlfriend’s home got a bee “problem”, the bees have formed a nest just out behind her house. It’s actually inside her roof or something, you can see a bunch of bees entering and exiting through a little hole in the wall. Anyhow, she asked me to look up how to get rid of bees on the internet, so me being a good boyfriend took the task on.
During my search I found this great little page here where people shared their own answers of how to get rid of bees and I found a very entertaining entry, so I’m sharing it with you.
I have had bees living in my wall for 3 years. I had a pest control guy come out three times last year, with no results. This summer I decided to wage war. I rigged up my shop vac with the hose by the opening and after visiting the site multiple times per day, I estimated I had sucked up over 5000 bees by the time 99% of them had disappeared. I hoped the queen would realize something is wrong and head for a new home, but no luck. Each day I get around 50 new ones showing up that I continue to suck up with the vacuum.
So this morning I have had it. I cut a 5 foot section of the sheetrock out of the bedroom wall where I was able to expose the honeycomb between a half inch strip of space where the studs meet in the corner. I started spraying ammonia in and a few bees started coming out. A half hour later I sprayed isopropyl alcohol in, still no effect. They I stuck my sheetrock saw blade in and started poking into the honeycomb and that’s when they got pissed off and started coming into the room. I’ve got about 50 that went to the window and are currently buzzing around. My next step is to rig up a hairdryer aiming at the honeycomb and melt them out.
I’ve thought about spraying gasoline into the space and lighting a match, but I’m not convinced that would be entirely healthy for my house.
I could call the pest control guy back now that I have better access to the nest, but I don’t feel he is very competent.
About that post from Dec5th about debian and the ipw2200 driver… Like the next day I backed up the data on my laptop and installed Ubuntu. That didn’t last long… the distro was soo dumbed down, which is good for a lot of people out there… but it just wasn’t my thing. The package base was tiny, it was soo gnome centric. It was definitely not what I was looking for. So instead I swiched to the “testing” or “etch” version of debian linux. Unstable just has too many changes too fast, not completely coordinated. Anyhow, the ipw2200 driver on there worked like a charm, and the driver finally has promiscuous mode so I can use kismet again to wardrive, or war sit hehe, and good for analyzing traffic.
There is one thing though, there’s not xine-ui package for testing which I find very odd, I’ll have to pin a release from unstable and use that.
I also switched from fluxbox as a window manager to XFCE. Very very nice. I am pleased, just the right amount of eye candy, a clean interface, a few things could be more customizable (maybe there are ways I dont know of yet) but over all I am pleased. And my desktop terminal placement script works perfectly.
I’m still using the same background as before, I gotta find one that matches better with the rest of the desktop.
About a month ago some dude broke into my car while it was parked in my girlfriend’s apartment underground parking garage. They stole my car stereo, my Creative Zen micro holder, my car charger for the Zen, and I thought they stole my squeegee for a while but it was under my seat hehe.
Anyhow I’ve been driving to work in silence and it really sucks, so I finally bought a new stereo. My parents actually funded me saying it’s my holiday gift. I went on Crutchfield and did ended up deciding on a Sony CDX-GT200. Has everything I need, and Auxilary port in the front so I can plug in my mp3 player… and… that’s about all I need. It also plays mp3 cd’s but I really dont care about that, and it has a radio but I only listen to one radio station. But it’s good for if my girlfriend wants to listen to something else. I debated getting it install professionally but I read a bunch of reviews about this stereo on crutchfield and all the reviewers were saying how easy it was to install with the instructions and parts provided by crutchfield. I swear they must be paid to say that cause that was not the case.
I tried installing it, it was hell. First off the car kit that comes with the stereo for my car was the cheapest thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve had other car kits and they looked and felt way better than the one provided by crutchfield, but hey it was free with the stereo so whatevers. The “easy instructions” provided… um dude, it’s split into like 4 different manuals. I had to refer back and forth between manuals to figure out what to do. Keep it in one fucking place already. Being accustomed to information being scattered (thanks to open source software) I started going at it. I ran into a snag when the diagrams for the wiring harness did not match the wiring harness I was given by crutchfield. The wires in the diagram were in a different order so I went by color. There was also an extra wire on the harness that wasn’t even referenced in the manual. I had to make some inferences to put it all together and just cross my fingers when I plug it in hoping I didn’t cause a short.
Then there’s the “back mounting bracket”, the screw clips provided with it didn’t fit over the holes I needed. I had to do a hack job to get it to screw in. I also had to bend the metal bracket so that my stereo would fit within the bracket… I can’t believe people would consider these instructions to be simple and clear cause they weren’t. Anyhow, after a lot of guess work and slamming things in with the back of my screwdriver my stereo is installed and it’s working.
I love Debian Linux, seriously it’s great. The package management system rules, the packages themselves rule, the package base is hunormous, and I’m used to working with it. But sometimes it really gets on my nerves. The last few days I’ve been tackling a bug in the ipw2200-source sid package which causes the compiled module to fail when attempting to insert it. Now maybe it’s ieee80211 which is to blame, I’m not sure but one of them is fucking shit up. My mobility has been crippled. I’m currently using the version of the ipw2200 module that comes in linux 2.6.14 but it doesn’t support WPA, how useless is that!?! I could revert to an older kernel and use a version of ieee80211 and ipw2200 that works but, I really want to get this working.
To be honest, it’s not Debian’s fault… It’s my fault for using the Unstable version of Debian, but I seriously dont want to get stuck in the past, and some packages you just can’t find in stable or testing. It even crossed my mind to start using Ubuntu after this, but some stupid part of me is saying to stick with Debian. Anyhow, I spent a small part of my day compiling new kernels trying to get this thing working by replacing the ieee80211 and ipw2200 sources in linux 2.6.14 with the ones from the current debian source packages, ipw2200 compiled just fine, but all the other wireless drivers are erroring out on me. It’s kinda fun… or something. By the way… I’M RICH BIATCH!
