What's it all about, Alfie?

OK, good news. The latest version of NetFinder seems to know about FTPS, which is what the protocol is called when FTP does SSL/TLS, and does the connecting automatically. This is good news because I now have at least a functioning secure uploader for the time being. Hopefully, Transmit will add this if it's not already in the works now.

Interestingly, I had a hard time figuring out that NetFinder did this because the documentation was pretty darn bad. That is to say, the documentation that came with the program. When you go to their web site, the docs are quite good and complete - which is where you learn that SSL/TLS is tried automatically and if it's successful, a small locked padlock is shown at the upper right corner of the screen. But to figure that out took me a while.

Maybe I'm slow.

In any case, until something better is found, I'll stick with NetFinder and let is go at that. Whew!

OK, I've become a little more educated today about yet another way for ftp to be transported. It turns out that sftp uses OpenSSH as the transport mechanism whereas ftp on SSL/TLS simply uses OpenSSL. Interesting, but a pain in the rear as I'm trying to find a way to upload changes to my Comcast web pages without using clear-text passwords. In it's infinite wisdom, Comcast has decided to use the SSL/TLS form of securing FTP, and for Windows users, that's probably just fine. But I'm on Mac OS X, and there aren't a lot of SSL/TLS clients out there.

In fact, a Google search said that several clients for Mac OS X were capable of dealing with SSL/TLS, but when I tried them I was unable to get any of them to work with the Comcase upload site. Now there's certainly a possibility that the port number I'm using is wrong. In one client it allowed me to set the port number but defaulted to 990. Interestingly, there's no mention of a port number on the Comcast web site for SSL/TLS. Why should there be?

So I'm left with the email I sent to Panic.com - makers of Transmit, the ftp client that I like to use (and have purchased) for Mac OS X, and we'll see if they come back with anything helpful to try. One source listed Transmit as an ftp client that did SSL/TLS, but I've yet to be able to prove that with the program in hand.

It's been a long time since I added much of anything to the journal, so I wanted to make the effort today to add a little bit. That's the real issue - making the effort to make this a daily task.

When I started the journal, there weren't weblogs/blogs and the standards that exist now for blogging software simply hadn't been conceived. So I built up everything from scratch and it works just like I'd like. I can do all the journaling that I need. But the one thing that's changed is the frequency that I insert entries into the journal, and I have to admit that if I had a tool that made the creation of journal entries easier, I might just leave it up and make simple, little entries as opposed to entering nothing.

So I'm starting again, and maybe I'll write a little app to make this even easier than it is now.

Hackers

OK, a few months ago I got hit by a hacker named "Spray" - as if that is supposed to mean something to all. Anyway, typical script-kiddie didn't have the first idea what he was doing, but he had enough tools to exploit my sun box, sparky. Sure, I had left it more open than I should have, but then again, I'm from a time that there weren't hackers - more correctly, when the word 'hacker' had an entirely different meaning in computer circles. Anyway, so he got in, and I went through the box finding all the little things he'd messed with. I got most of them, but not all, and so in a few weeks he was back. This time I got more, but then again not all.

On the third attack, I got everything, but at the same time I wasn't taking chances with Solaris 7 having unpatched holes and so I decided to put sparky behind a firewall so as to make my life a little easier. I just needed SSH and web access to him, and so with a little port forwarding I was in business. Well... it took a little more than that as getting the Linksys BEFSX41 working properly took more time than I had anticipated, but in the end, that's about all the real progress that was made.

Then I realized that I could put all my boxes behind the firewall if I wanted to and get rid of the extra IP addresses I had from Comcast. So I got a bigger hub and went about the job. Turned out that this job meant that I had to re-do some wiring in the house, and decided to upgrade to 802.11g so that I could get 54Mbps on my Powerbook and the kid's computer, but then everything was 100Mbps wired and 54Mbps wireless. Not bad. Not easy as it was a very long weekend to get it all working, but it's working now and that's good for me.

In general, get all the latest firwares for the routers/firewalls/access points and then start with the factory defaults and configure from there. Also, check your wiring. Yikes... that was a bad weekend.

Now I'm just in the mode of fine tuning the port forwarding parameters to make it possible for me to get the access to the machines that I want and need. For the most part, it's SSH and web, and thankfully Apache and OpenSSH can listen on multiple ports so I can have the boxes all stay on the default port numbers (22 and 80), but also have unique port numbers that the redirector can point to. Not a big deal, but it's details that all have to be worked out.

I've done it again. I can't for the life of me tell you why I do it other than I'm a Dad, and when it comes to what's right and what's easy I try to teach my kids that it's the right thing that's worth doing. Always.

So I'm trying to suggest that things at work change. Not a lot. Just make us look at what we're doing. Stop and look at things. That's all. But I've been accused of being afraid that my job would be eliminated by the success of this one project. Even if this project was perfect... even if it did everything it was capable of, and then some, I wouldn't be worried. Why? Because I've talked to the management and they have me working on more things every day. I'm in no risk. Yet everything I say is going to be discounted by the people working on the project because of what they feel are my actual motivations.

So in a way, it's a sad statement of paranoia. They feel certain that I can't be trying to help them so everything I say is tossed on the floor. They don't stand a chance of getting better without some help, but they don't want to listen to me.

Still, because I'm a Dad, and I'd tell my kids to do the right thing I'm going to keep trying. Wasting my time, probably.

Interviewing can be a pain and it can be a lot of fun. When you're out of a job and you really need one, then interviewing can be a lot of grief trying to make yourself fit into each and every interview simply because you need the job. When you have a job, and are looking for something better - more interesting work, more free time, more pay... then interviewing is a lot more enjoyable. At least it is to me.

This morning I had a lovely talk with a company, and while nothing's perfect, this place sounded as close to it as I've ever heard. They're looking for someone to do just the kind of work I like doing, in a small team, with the right tools for the job - and get this, they are even looking to use Mac OS X on the developer's workstations. This is almost like a dream. I can hardly believe it.

Of course, this might be a little bit of a sales pitch as many interviews are - "please like us so you'll come work here". It works both ways. So I'm not expecting all that I heard to really materialize when (and if) I go and talk to them in person, but it's a lot in the right direction and that's a really big step forward for me. I'm looking forward to see what the reality of the place is. It promises to be a very interesting time.

Things are very predictable these days at work. More data, more views, it's like I'm a super-DBA where the "Database" I manage is all the data they are interested in seeing. It's not particularly exciting work, but it's OK.

A few days ago I did a minor overhaul on one of the input parsers I had in InfoShop. The flat file parser was really pretty limited and I wanted to make it more general in it's parsing as well as in it's inputs. So I added the same style of code as the database parser to allow the creation of nested data structures, and allowed for a command to be executed and the output of that command be the input to the parser. This will give me a much greater capability as I can put scripts there as well as programs and such. It'll make for a much larger universe for the parser and it's needed that for over a year.

Other than that, things are moving along at their own pace. Not too bad given it's July.

I should write in this journal more often. Hard to believe that I'd have enough stuff to put into it each day to fill a few pages. Now work and such is slower and there seems less and less to write about. But I'll try to bring things up to date.

I got a windfall and purchased a 17-inch Powerbook. It's everything that all the reviewers are saying: awesome display, excellent keyboard, fast and a lot of fun. I ended up moving everything from my iBook to the new Powerbook so I didn't loose anything and it took a lot less time than I had thought. The Transfer Mode in OS X is exceptionally nice and makes the one machine look like a firewire drive to the other. I slaved my iBook to my Powerbook and simply copied things over. Very nice.

I've added several things to BKit, most notably is the inclusion of the VantagePoint graphing from Visualize Inc. to enable quick and easy graphing of data sets that I run into from time to time. The licensing for VantagePoint is excessively expensive (starts at $25,000), but for large corporations, I can see it being a reasonable payoff.

I've started work on a new version of the potential/electric field simulator for OS X - nothing fancy, but it's nice to be working on something like that again. I'm taking a new approach on the class structure as well as the simulation/solver code. I already like the way the changes have made things easier and cleaner, I hope they also make things quite a bit faster. I'm also banking on the AltiVec and the math libraries compiled into OS X to help on the speed issue.

Work has been somewhat interesting in that recently the powers that be have decided to thin things out a little more. This round of cuts comes to a group that's consistently been the most arrogant, unlikable group of people that I've ever met in one place. Lead, of course, by the two singularly most unlikable folks I've ever met. Now, to put a little bit of perspective on this, I haven't met any serial killers, or national politicians - yet. But up to now, these two are at the top of the list and by a wide margin. So now they get theirs. Karma... excellent.

It's getting close to Summer and that's nice, but it's still Spring, and that means school, activities, and work around the house. Lots of work around the house.

I'm guessing that's what's kept me from writing more in this journal than I have lately - not a lot of fun things I felt like sharing. Sure, life is generally good for me and I shouldn't complain. But there's a big difference between "not bad" and "good". I guess it takes more "good" things to happen for me to take the time to write them down.

I've never been a big gamer. I wrote a few games that my friends liked, but as for myself, I can't remember a game that held my attention to the point that I was really good at it, or six months passed - with the possible exception of my teens when I'd go to the arcade with my friends. But I have to admit that ever since I played Empire or Xconq or FreeCiv I've been hooked. Not really sure why that is, but it probably has to do with my favorite board game - Risk. So I've been playing Xconq for a long while and I have to admit that the versions I've played in the last year are by far the best I've seen - even in the commercial offerings.

So the latest version available on the Xconq web site runs on both X11 and Mac OS Classic - which, on my iBook, runs very nicely. Sure, it's a toss-up which would run better - X11 or Classic as each has to run in a new environment, but I like the look of the Classic version better so I play it.

I will admit that it'd be nicer to have the multiple screens on my iBook that I have on my Linux boxes, but maybe I'll fix that with a new 17-inch PowerBook. I've been lucky enough to have a windfall that's exactly what the new PowerBook will cost - when it ships. It's about the most perfect computer for what I do and need, and with that 17-inch screen I'd be able to play a very nice, large, Xconq game :).

One of the things that I'm really looking forward to is the Carbon-ization of Xconq so that it wouldn't need the Classic run-time environment on Mac OS X and I know that they're working on it - I just have no idea how close they are to getting it done. I'm guessing that there's a ton of work to do, but again, I don't know how close they are. I do know that one of the main maintainers of Xconq is an employee of Apple, so it's likely he knows what to do as well as anyone, and he is working on it. So I'll wait... if a bit impatiently.

I had a bad case of The Blues this past weekend - I wanted to get a few things done and as it turned out, none of them got done. I've put too much emphasis on the weekends as a recharge cycle for these weeks I've been having. Too bad it took me until today on the way in to realize this. But I guess I had to have something snap me out of it, and that little something this morning was the realizition that there's a company that will upgrade the hard disk in my iBook from the existing 20GB to 30GB, 40GB, or 60GB. One of the problems I had this weekend is the realization that my iBook was not very user-servicable and I was running out of space on the 20GB internal drive. I didn't want to believe that it was a dead-end, and with finding this company this morning, I know that if I don't want to do it myself, I have an option.

The other thing I wanted to do this weekend was look into getting an additional drive for barney my SGI Indigo². It's getting closer than I'd like and while it's easier for me to add the drive because I have the enclosures and cables, it's still a couple of hundred dollars to get a 36GB SCSI drive - as oppoed to 80GB+ if it was EIDE... but that's the cost of SCSI, and it's worth it.

So I didn't get either of these things done and I realized this morning that there's no one that's going to get me out of The Blues except me. I'm the one that's responsible for my own happiness. Yeah, it's the standard party-line from the counseling I had years ago, but it's easy to forget and blame other things.

The Road less Traveled is less traveled because it's harder... Every now and then it's important to remind oneself.

OK... it was a nice three-day weekend, but thanks to the kids, there was a lot of things to do and a lot of crabby kids. Life is, after all,
messy.

One of the things I've still been looking for is a nice project to keep my mind active. Things here are getting more stagnant as I have more links to others and they don't work at the same speed as I do. This is not a surprise, but it's something that has to be delt with. Right now, I'd love to see a few improvements in Safari so that it'd work with Hotmail a little bit better. I'd also like to see Halime get things all straightened out and group my news again... but I'm working on the latter and Apple is working on the former.

I'm just not a patient person.

It's been another really fun Christmas for the kids. They have really enjoyed the surprises and I got more shirts and a shop-vac. It's tiring because the kids are up so darn early and are so excited when they go downstairs to the tree... well... that's what being a kid is all about, right?

But it leaves me wondering about the end of this year, my birthday, turning 40, and what's coming in the New Year. I'm not really giving the number 40 much weight, but it does mean that I'm no longer young no matter how young I feel. But that's not bad... youth wasn't my best time anyway. I'm spending more time focusing on my personal situation and the passing of time.

Several years ago, when I was at Port-to-Port, Damon, my partner at the time, and I went to Corporate Counseling to try and iron out some of our differences that were really hurting the company, and it's plans for the future. Damon and I had been best friends for more than 15 years - he was the Best Man at my wedding, and I was the Best Man at his. Yet when we tried to run a business, there were a lot of problems that came up due to our vastly different personal styles and backgrounds.

While in this counseling, I learned all about co-dependency, what damage it does, how to try and avoid it, etc. And ended up learning a lot about myself, my relationship with Damon, and several other relationships I have had. In the end I was much more mentally healthy, but not without a cost.

You see, if I am really 100% mentally healthy, and not suffering from any form of co-dependence, then I really don't care if you've had a bad day. I mean I can be sorry that it happened, but it won't effect me at all. Your bad day is just that - Your bad day. Yet is that really the kind of friend you want to have around? One that isn't really interested in sharing your pain? At least a little?

When I dealt with Liza, I'm sure I seemed very uncompassionate, very aloof, very uncaring, because I simply was cutting all the ties that bind us, and in the end, cutting those from her as well. This is not something you want to see in your spouse, I'd wager, so it wasn't all good news.

So I came to a decision about mental heath - it's a good thing, in moderation. Which sounds like another good mental health axiom - maintain a proper balance. So while I still understand the problems of co-dependency, and how to avoid it, I think it's good if I'm a little co-dependent on my family. Just a little. I want to try and feel my son's pain when he has a bad day... tell him that when I was a kid I wet my pants too when I didn't make it to the bathroom in time. These are good things to share. Because after all, we are here to share in the experience, as we are, as humans, very social creatures.

So I'm purposefully not as mentally healthy as I could be, but I'm a lot happier for it. And I think I'm a much better person for it as well.

Which brings me to my concern about my current state of uncomfort. For many years I have been looking for something outside of me to give me a pick-me-up. In grad school all it took was going to the Bookstore and getting a new pad of paper. I loved the feel of it. The unlimited possibilities that those pages could hold. It would keep me happy for a day or two at the least. When I got out of grad school I was teaching at Auburn and I started to decorate my office in the most incredible way imaginable. I had trees in my office, a Basketball goal, a 30-gallon salt water tank, Lego castles, a nice stereo... in general, more than should have fit into that office, and more than I should have needed to feel comfortable.

But I'd just risen the bar a bit... Now instead of the pack of paper, I wanted to get a new Lego castle, or a new fish, or a new CD, or two, or three. It was nothing more than a distraction from the problem that I had that I could not seem to find happiness and contentment within myself. When I got a new thing I was distracted from the problems I had until the newness wore off and I had to deal with just myself again.

So here I sit... today I want a new computer - two in fact. A new desktop that's a screamer, and a new notebook that's the best money can buy. Yet I know these are distractions. But the desire is just as real. But taking a page from my past, I'm wondering if I really want to solve this particular mental illness.

What I mean to say is this: I am concerned that whatever qualities I have now that keep my ego, my greed, my arrogance in check need to stay there. I'm not silly enough to think that I don't have these. I do. And in large measure. But they are kept in check by something that I'm not really sure of. But I want them to remain in check, because I think I would be an absolutely detestible person if I lost those checks.

One of the things I was asked to do in the Counseling was to write down my list of the 10 people I liked most in the world. When my list was done, Carol (the counselor) asked me why my name wasn't on the list. It's a very interesting question. My concern is now, what kind of person would I be if I was #1 on my list?

Would I sacrifice my personal time for my kids? Their time with me is limited to the first 18 years, and after that, they are one their own with whatever skills and tools I've managed to impart to them. If I put them in front of me, at least for the time they're with me, then they'll have a much better start. It's the real cost of having kids, isn't it? The same goes for many things... so in the end, would I really be a better person if I took more time for myself?

Clearly, the answer lies in the balance. No time for me, no diversions, no toys, and I would become a very unhappy person and that's not good for anyone. Too much, and other things in my life suffer. So it's got to be a balance that's struck. The problem is it's very hard to balance things like diversions and toys... I mean really, who doesn't enjoy having fun? I know I do. So it's hard to say "OK... enough fun..." but that's what has to happen.

In the end, it's the balance that's important, and for that I need to have a lot better understanding of myself than I do right now. I guess the older you get, the more there still is to learn about yourself. Well... at least I've got that going for me - I shouldn't be bored for the rest of my days.