all entries in category 'hinkybox'

A Web Nerd’s Eugoogely

Effective this past Monday, April 3rd 2006, Hinkyboxdotcom is no longer hosted from a basement on a frankenserver. Though it was quite nice to be root and have 100GB of space to myself, my upcoming move will require at least a few months of portability, so I decided to cough up a few hundred dollars and get an (mt) account like I should have done months ago.

I’ll miss you, webhog. Sure, a unconfigurable EISA SCSI daughterboard made it impossible to boot you remotely, and sure, you only had five of your six RAID disks, and sure, running Fedora Core caused a few stability problems now and then, and sure – you sounded like a freight train with Tourette’s, but you never imploded too badly and your uptime was nothing to sneeze at.

Now, a poem:

Adieu, Web Hogger. Adieu,
You made my blog exist.
Adieu, Web Hogger. Adieu,
I hit you with my fist.
Adieu, Web Hogger. Adieu,
You'll not soon be forgotten.
Adieu, Web Hogger. Adieu,
And Comcast never knew.

Gimme Your Wurst (Words)

Never one to shy away from an easy scripting project (cheers to brother Mad for the idea), I’m revamping my captcha class (comment spam thwartin’ image doohickey) with some intelligible-yet-still-fairly-random words, and I need some help in compiling a list. I’ve already got A through C fleshed out, but i’d like a little input from you wordsmiths out there on the rest of the alfa... alpo... you know what I mean. Do me a solid and leave a comment with some words I can use, will ya?

A few things:

1. Words need to be 8 letters or less; 9 is okay if there aren’t too many m’s or w’s (its a fixed-width sort of thing).
2. Be creative.
3. Dictionary words? What’s a dictionary?
4. Vulgarity is always welcomed… nay, encouraged here.
5. Each word goes on its own line (helps me cut and paste them into an array). ex:
   
   goggled
   grumper
   gherkin
   ganked
   gleeked
   ganja
   
   ... you get the picture.
6. Anything A through Z is cool. Mix it up if you want, but if you get going on a particular consonant (immolated, implosion, invertednipple! Aiiieeeeegh!), much obliged.
7. I’m thinking ten-to-fifteen words is enough for each letter of the alphabet, but if you have more than that, feel free to purge your fecund brain – I’ll pare them down as I go.
8. Do you think stream of consciousness exercises like this are an accurate measure of an individual’s personality? Well I do too, you sick fuckers.
9. Make me laugh, I dare you.

Married Bits of Disparate Ideation: A Contest Weiner and My New Pod

Without further ado (and not exactly an assload of fanfare):

The winner of the First Annual HBDC Chicken Separatin’, Petrochemical Ingestin’, Slim Jim Countin’ Contest of Lurve is:

Mokiejovis, with his (very first guess, the lucky shit) of 134; the actual number of ‘Jims being 133. Mr. Jovis, I’ll be getting in touch with some of my less scrupulous friends down at Ft. Meade to ascertain your mailing address, so watch your mailbox. Like a hawk.

Its too bad you didn’t get it on the head – I would’ve coughed up a finsky for that kind of stickpin voodoo craziness. As it is, you’ve pretty much convinced me that you’re Rain Man. I hope you’re happy. Expect your goodies in the next few weeks, or if I ever do make it to one of those Happy Hour things, I’ll deliver ‘em thataway. As for the rest of you, don't feel too bad, you were up against a ringer. Stay tuned for more pointless giveaways, though — you'll get yo' chance.

Unrelated Bit : Oh yeah, and I finally got my iPod. Other than the UI being almost too stupid-simple for it’s own good (iTunes: seriously, designed by cracked-out spider monkeys.), and having a quoted battery life that is almost criminally inaccurate, I like being able to listen to Jamiroquai on the shitter. A few small snapshots, of course…

HBDC Slim Jim Contest 2006

Okay, so I have this surplus of Slim Jim™ snacks that I’m blogging about. Not familiar with the snack? Here’s a quick blurb to get you up to snuff.

Slim Jim:

(n) 1. a tool used to surreptitiously open the door of an automobile. 2. a delicious, meat-like snack made popular in the early 1990’s by “The Macho Man” Randy Savage.

Some other facts for your perusal (from the label, natch):

Ingredients: Beef, mechanically separated chicken, water, salt, corn syrup, dextrose,
flavorings, spice, paprika, hydrolyzed corn gluten, soy and wheat gluten proteins,
sodium nitrite, lactic acid starter culture. contains soy and wheat.

ex. 1: A graph (of sorts) I’ve put together to frighten the vegans:

I’m just curious – why do they go out of their way to say both “spices” and “paprika”? And am I the only one who figures “mechanically separated chicken” is just a euphemism for
the employment of a chicken gun? “Contains soy and wheat.” Oh, gotcha. thanks for the heads-up, I might’ve started thinking this was bad for me.

Okay. Enough of the observational shtick; This is a contest. You might want to take
a second to eyeball the photo montage.

ex. 2a-d:

Got it? Okay. Allons-y, mon contestant. How many:

• Chicken beaks
• Cow udders
• 1980’s era Adidas™ shoelaces
• Slim Jims

are in this jar?

Okay okay, so you only have to guess the # of Slim Jims. Closest (lets say by five) gets the much sought-after hbdc prize pack, which includes:

• Monty Python’s Life of Brian on DVD (the real deal, still in plastic)
• A Candy Bar in the wrapper (It’s best if I surprise you on this one)
• A brand new Slate ‘n Black 32-ounce (1L) Widemouth Nalgene bottle
• Not one goddamned Slim Jim; they’re my gastrointestinal burden to bear

and–of course–my eternal gratitude for playing along. I’ll check back here next Tuesday (Jan 10th, 2006) and pick a winner. Two guesses and you’re out. And sorry, but if you live across an ocean, your out. I’ve got money, but not that kinda money.

Typical Tidings

Did you miss that? If so, See it again for the first time. Don’t worry, you’ll be redirected back to this entry.

I’ll be even more away than usual for Jesus’ B-day, so I hope – in accordance with his wishes no doubt – that you get a whole heap of electronic baubles made by godless Chinese peasants for handfuls of government rice. I’m pulling for an iPod Video, myself.

If you have family, I pray you’ll be able to stand them long enough to appreciate their existence. I know I’ll be trying my best to cope.

Happy Holidays!

Josh

Hinkybox Retoins.

Yep, things are back to normal; for a month or two at least.

In accordance with my move, the email address jbestell@comcast.net is no longer valid, so if you email me there, don’t ‘speck a reply.

Hinkybox: Down But Not Out

Hinkybox.com will go dark for at least a week, effective October 30th (this coming Sunday).

Moving is a bitch, and I have neglected to acquire the requisite hosting space to migrate my behemoth of a home network (life intrudes).

Thanks for visiting, and I’ll see you on the other side.

– Josh

Like Rifling Through Someone’s Desk

From my logs:

Unique Visitor: 34085
Date: 28 Sep, 17:17:09
Location: United States
Hostname: ip155.163.235.64.susc.suscom.net 
OS: Windows XP  
User Agent: Firefox 1.0.7

1  	 /includes/ 	403	55 s  	 
2  	 /		200	01 m 16 s  	 
3  	 /test 		404	18 s  	 
4  	 /new 		404	16 s  	 
5  	 /v2 		404	12 s  	 
6  	 /v3 		404	09 s  	 
7  	 /new.htm 	404	04 s  	 
8  	 /v3 		404	02 s  	1 
9  	 /v2 		404	01 s  	 
10  	 /new 		404	01 s  	 
11  	 /test 		404	14 s  	1 
12  	 /redux 	404	20 s  	 
13  	 /op_ro_d.css 	404	07 s  	 
14  	 /op__ro_d.css 	404	10 s  	 
15  	 /op_ro_d.css 	404	  	1 

Tsk tsk tsk. Snooping? Really.

Try as you might, I am not the kind of asshole who uses 12345 as the combination for his luggage. No, I'm a different kind of asshole altogether.

Thanks for showing interest, though. ◊

The Management

This Blog’s in Jeopardy, Baby.

Do you ever watch Jeopardy?  Well, I do.

On occasion.

My favorite part of the show has always been the time set aside for a meet and greet with the contestants – you know, the few sentences they are given to show how shit-hot suave and down to earth they are?

This is easily the most awkward 180 seconds in television. Yes, from the stories about how someone booked a trip to climb Kilimanjaro, but instead spent a week in a fleabag Tanzanian hotel coping with life-threatening food allergies or explosive diarrhea… to the fidgeting, gesticulatory diatribe about how many Del Monte™ fruit cups a forty-five year-old man has collected– so far. Why, Alex might ask? Well, to get the Limited Edition Boba Fett™ action figure, of course! Only the best, Alex.

Okay, getting to my point.

This past week it seems that I can’t force myself to post, so I got to thinking of this 3-minute chunk of unadulterated social ineptitude and the crazy chill that runs up my spine when it goes horribly wrong. Then I asked myself “Okay self, how would you handle it, smartass?” Here’s what I came up with.

AT: “Joshua Estell is from suburban Maryland, and he runs a website called um.. hinkybox? Is that right?”
Moi: “That’s right, Alex.”
AT: “Oh, Okay. Did you want to tell us about it?”
Moi: “Not particularly, no.”
AT: “Ahh. Well, is there anything else you’d like to tell us about yourself?”
Moi: “I got nothin’, man. Let's move on here.”
AT: “Oh, Okay. Well then, lets pick up our signal buttons and get ready for the Jeopardy round.”

Alright self. Not so bad. This time. ◊

Three Strikes

I suppose the right thing to do when you have a personal website is love thy visitors; never chide them for peculiar behavior, unless of course it is discernibly malicious. Not unless you want to be a PR 3 until your hosting runs out, and you move on to another hobby, like playing jarts.

Alas, being an avowed statswhore, I cannot help but be amazed, befuddled, and on occasion dismayed when I see the work of linkspammers–of late mostly exas-tay oldem-hay oker-pay sites–which bring all manner of obviously confused and truly bizarre visitors to my site.

And then I see something like this.

1. Windows ME. Lord, have mercy on this poor bastard.
2. Okay… Cancel #1. How DARE someone look at my website with Opera 5.11.
3. It came from a linkspammer site. Good grief. Surf porn, man. If you want to gamble that bad, take a trip to Reno or whatnot.

Its okay if you come back, but please, for the love of God, get it together.

I’m watching you.

Damn, I’m Bored.

So bored, in fact, that I’ve spent about 3 hours so far un-fscking my older websites and design projects, with an eye to having the lot available for examination, butchering, and of course, ready-made lessons on how-not-to-do-it-yourself.

Just a few examples, more to come.

Original HB. Warning: Tableful Attrocity.

ill fated hb layout # 35.

◊

Single Point of Failure: Acts of God and PoE

Perhaps only the RSS feeds noticed, but hinkybox was down yesterday due to the unfortunate mixture of technology and the wrath of mother nature.

Yes, it would seem that the devastatingly beautiful lightning storm that plodded through the Maryland region on Monday night was too much for my hodgepodge MacGyver-approved network to bear.  I was quite concerned when I walked in my front door to a sharp snoutful of ozone, not unlike what one might encounter in an arcwelding shop, and soon I discovered that not only was my cable modem a handy new paperweight, but my beloved monster of a firewall, hinkystein002, also had bitten the proverbial dust. A motherboard, a NIC, and a CPU was the final body count. This was not the introduction to PoE, or Power over Ethernet I was hoping for.

Alas, being both industrious and perennially surrounded by old computers, I was able to rebuild the firewall in about 2 hours. Yes, the stopgap solution involved a bit of duct tape; then again, I've never met a good stopgap that didn't.

The cable modem, however, required a trip to the local sundry Mart and a cumulative two hours of holding with the fine folks at Comcast. Yes, I heard Kenny Roger's The Gambler FOUR times.

But I'm back, dammit, and all this networkin' schoolin' has, at least in this case, paid off. :) ◊

Put it to a vote, he said.

The current style or this one?

I'm trying to put my best foot forward here. ◊

Hinkystein Reboot

Finally, my server decided to go down. After running it non-stop for what is an incredible length of time (if you knew what this server was made of, you linux dweebies wouldn't dispute this notion), it had had enough, and needed a breather.

> Uptime: 53 days, 4 hours and 34 minutes.

I say HaZaAh! to you, webhog.hinkybox.local. HaZaAh!

Standards Compliance - For Real This Time

I am working on a completely by-the-book version of this site. Being that I am rusty with CSS, it is going in fits and starts, but if you want to follow along with its progress, you can see it at the link below. ◊

hinkyboxdotcom:sc prototype

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Update Saturday, 05/14/2005

You're lookin' at it.

Standards Compliance and Portability - HBdc and TIA

Some Thoughts on Standards Compliance and Portability

Here at HinkyboxDotCom, our crack staff of engineers represent the bleeding edge of web design; as a group, they expend copious amounts of intellectual, psychological and physical energy melding captivatingly stylish design with the absolute necessity that is standards compliance. These standards, as laid down by some of the brightest and far-thinking(est?) computer scientists of our time, represent an ideal vision of not only the world wide web of today, but also of the bustling, content-rich web of the future.

As you probably already know, this site is a veritable beehive of activity; the staff hardly know what to do with the plethora of content at hand. This in and of itself is not a problem. Content, when it is plentiful, is a blessing to a web site. The issue is the shape of the content. Very often the content is too diverse to hold within any sort of template—and this amorphousness puts a strain on the entire process of providing this content to the end user (you).

Not to worry!

The good people at Hinky³, always guided by principles, have recently made public a long-running but covert program designed to increase the portability of the information aggregated on HBdc. This program was far reaching in its scope, and involved a group of well-traveled operatives, scouring the globe for answers to this infotech conundrum. As your moderator, I am pleased to announce the stunning success of this mission. No longer will end-users be saddled with the demands of average web content (mocking pantomime quotes if you please) - that is to say, a relatively fast personal computer, an expensive operating system, and a broadband connection. No, our quest for portability has eliminated these stumbling blocks between you and what the U.S. government likes calls T.I.A.: Total Information Awareness.

So friends—saddle up and get your no-need-for-thinking-caps on. . . HBdc is here, HBdc is there, HBdc is everywhere. No need to get dressed in the morning, and screw walking the dog. The sun is breaking forth on a new age of reason - a new paradigm possessed of unwavering personal satisfaction and an ideal existence of blissful and content-rich living. Hell, I need not risk overreaching with words; I will let images do my persuading from here on out.

Godspeed, fellow traveler! ◊

• ¹ All images courtesy The Void, 2005

Yum -yt upgrade and Zend Error

I was feeling cheeky in class the other day, and I decided to pull up a remote shell from my webserver on the computer in class—basically, just to do it. While I was in the shell, I decided to do a package upgrade - you know, the latest and greatest that Fedora core has to offer - why not, right? It is fun to see the machinations of a remote computer! As you might already know, Linux does not need a reboot to implement things like program upgrades—all it does is wait for a slow period and reinitializes the programs that are running.

The problem is, however, that in this casual process, I inadvertently upgraded my PHP to v4.3.10, which, much to my chagrin (now that i find out), has issues with "older" bits of php code. Due to my illness, you see, I spent my weekend hiding my head under my pillow, only occasionally messing with the site. well, I awoke last night at about 8:30pm to find that all of the sudden, like an act of god, large chunks of my code were useless crap. I spent about 3 hours pulling my hair out over this—nothing I did remedied the situation. I still am a bit wound up about it– one of my less noble traits is a structural inability to adequately cope with a seemingly unsolvable problem set–I do not initially overreact with frustration, but allow my dissatisfaction to simmer and affect my mood. Especially, of course, when the scope of the problem is seemingly within my control—add to that a bout of influenza, having to go to work on a monday (a concept that should be outlawed), and generally speaking, this last day has been a pretty shitty one. It is 1:05am now, and now that I have figured this out, I am going to bed. Hopefully shit refrains from happening while I am asleep. ◊

True Hinkyboxes, Part One

True Hinkyboxes

When it comes to hobbies, I wander in and out of them with passion; I always seem to have a project here, or some unfinished paint job there. I often catch myself thinking of projects so outlandish that they will always remain idle considerations, or of things I know I should not start because I can see far ahead of time that they will never come to fruition. My mind, therefore, is quite like an enormous warehouse for ideas that run the gamut from the virtually impossible to the criminally stupid. Sort of like ol' Monty Burns and his beloved Spruce Moose.¹

I am sure there are millions of tinkerers like me in the world, and there's no question which side of the family I got this from both. My mother is an absolute genius when it comes to aesthetics, and my dad, well he has not met the 8-penny nail he could not impress into glorious structural servitude. My thing, I guess, is electronics. I have been an electro-buff ever since my great uncle Pete, when I was a mere pup, gave me a wad of foil, an old doorbell and a lantern battery to play with. He was a hero of mine; A self-taught electrical engineer who worked a lifetime with Consolidated Edison in southern New Jersey, and could fix anything that pushed electrons as if he had been working on the team that built it. In short, I get it honestly. Problem is I am an infernal un-finisher.

Well, all this posturing notwithstanding, here are a couple of things I managed to bring to life, and this being my site, I wanted to do a little show and tell, lest you think I am all talk about reviving crappy computers and squeezing the last handful of usefulness out of things bound for the landfill. Yes, I would be remiss if I did not reiterate that all of this stuff is second hand, most of which I received soon after it “fell off the truck", and though he will remain nameless, I am forever in the debt of the person who has been my major supplier, and consequently, a de facto champion of the hinkybox.

Project No-Light

One of my first projects with my new-found supply of computers was to be a customized file server, running an operating system called ClarkConnect. It was small, relatively fast, and did a lot of nice things like DNS proxy, SMB management and limited Network Address Translation. I used this particular computer, a small form factor Compaq Presario, for about 2 months, and not once did I ever have an issue. Then, in a fit of creative stupidity, decided to customize it, rather like someone would a 1967 Chevy. Good thinking, right? I had grandiose ideas of making a custom faceplate, with individual LED's (blue, of course. Green and red are so 1990) to indicate which of the 4 drives was active (yes, I stuffed four drives into this thing, which was only meant to house two). I hatched a plan to use a small program that runs under Linux called ifled; this program blinks the keyboard lock lights to indicate network activity: Tx, Rx, and link status. I was diligently (I thought) soldering a resistor on one of the components I'd added, confident that my experience would not lead me astray. Well, long story short, I fried it. After all the soldering was done and I got up the nerve to turn it on, the small chip that controlled the onboard network card went Pfisszz, and before I could reach over towards the power button, the BIOS itself was smoking. I sort of wish I had the motherboard so I could take some macro shots of the damage; it was pretty amazing. Alas, I was far too disgusted to have it sitting around for very long after it expired–some things you just need to throw away. As for the notion of a file server, well, after some re-jiggering of my network model, it ended up being a plain vanilla (since painted metallic grey and looking quite smashing) full-sized desktop machine (PII 400) that runs Fedora Core 2. It is the keeper of my 150 plus gibibytes² of crap, and I am happy to report that the only thing it has on its faceplate is an aftermarket on/off style power switch (I hate ACPI power. It reminds me of the modern human tendency towards prevarication).

Fettucine al Network

I like networks; All kinds. Ethernet has always sort of appealed . . . nay, beckoned to me, and if a computer is running in my apartment, there is a 99.999%³ chance that it trails a Cat5e cable from it's rear-end. Yes, this can get hectic—even when you are talking about 5-7 computers. They all feed into a switch, you see, and from there, tangles are almost a given. Oh, but not for long, as I set my mind to working it out. I began building this frame with some scraps of wood I had from a previous and as-yet unfinished cabinetry project. I thought it was rather clever, seeing as how the cable modem is the most god-awful rounded “ergo” shape I had ever seen and getting it to lie flat and square was a job for the chisel and the ol' eyeball. I hit upon the idea of using recessed hinges to allow the top to flip up, and voila, after about an hour at the table and miter saws and a can of flat black spray-paint I had my nifty little network rack. Flat black, and quite cool looking in the dark.

Smoothwall Inside

Every network needs protection; the day I got my broadband connection I was so incredibly excited that I set up a direct link to the internet, shunning everything I knew about Microsoft's untenable security predicament, thinking “Yes, well. . . the 2 hours I will be exposed could not possibly be harmful, right?  Turns out, I was but a nave.

I was port scanned 4 times in that period, and some malicious Chinese fellow came very close to turning my beloved XP desktop into a spam zombie. So, what to do? I set about completing a project I had thought about for awhile. When I was stuck with dialup, nothing seemed important enough to warrant a standalone firewall appliance, but now that I had broadband, I intended go all out. I knew I wanted Smoothwall as the firewall's operating system, because it is simply the coolest and most powerful open source firewall out there. I scribbled some stuff on paper, and did quite a lot of online research for this project. The hardware requirements being almost ridiculously low, I dug deep in my closet and unearthed an old Cyrix 6x86 computer out of mothballs.

I knew that the motherboard on this particular machine was square, the processor was not particularly prone to overheating, and that with a little coaxing the power supply would fit within my envisioned dimensions. I also wanted to do something unique—something uncommon. I thought of clear acrylic, but I soon remembered my foray into that material in school, and how easy it was to screw it up, especially when someone else wasn't paying for it. Metal was an option, but it seemed too common. I settled on wood, I guess because I have a death wish of sorts—but then again, I rode my bicycle to school every day for 16 years without a helmet, so I liked my chances.

I put some serious thought into this project—I gingerly reworked the casing for the power supply to provide upper clearance for the lid, fabricated a one-off motherboard bracket, and milled the wood framing to provide the best airflow possible—tested with a stick of sandalwood incense, of course. I spelunked around the local flea markets to find 3 suitable, low-profile network cards to make up the business end, and when all was said and done, i installed Smoothwall. I now have a firewall that provides me security rivaling many medium sized companies–with a whole host of features I haven't even considered implementing.

The beauty of this machine is the zoning it applies: the green interface, or the trusted interior network, the red interface, the one the big bad meanies can see, and the orange—the beloved Demilitarized Zone—a place to put servers that need access to the world, but might be compromised by an attacker. I am happy to be ablle to say that every single packet you received when loading this website traveled through that little wooden box, which I have subsequently sanded and painted a deep metallic blue—a treatment befitting the info-hotrod that it is. I did desire to post pictures of the finished product, but that would require the downing of my network, and that is just bad form. ;) ◊

Exchange!

The forums are up and running - minus a little polish, of course, but they work.

hinkybox /exchange/

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Update Monday, 6/20/2005

After little interest in maintaining a bulletin board (both on my part and the general public), I torched the whole enchilada. PhpBB is full of holes, and I was tired of getting logs full of worms trying to get in. ◊

Bumpity-bump

Change is afoot! ◊

MySQL Insertion Problem : Resources

A list of resources that might help you out if you are having difficulty retrieving and/or inserting strings into a MySQL database.

• The Solution for wheatblog .0x
• How to determine if Magic Quotes is enabled on your server.
• PHP.net Function reference: addslashes

ALR Dual 6, BABY!

Just a peek indside the domain, as it were:

1. Cable Modem, 10/100 switch, and Smoothwall Box (firewall), designed to keep the mongol hordes at bay
2. Pimp-assed high-tech web server, donated by my brother (barely functional)
3. Six rather large drawers full of assorted computer guts and wires and other shiat.

And for the record, that little blurb helping you locate yourself is accurate; hinkybox is mapped to that very shaky RAID0 array.

Hinkybox was a C-Section

Ya know, I think I am getting the hang of this website stuff.

<!-- This is a test post, and if you are seeing it, perhaps you are visting this site too frequently, eh? -->

Kidding, of course.

Stay. Eat. Make yourself comfortable. Read about the newest package updates from Fedora -- or perhaps some sales propaganda from Cisco about how they intend on selling out the US government and moving the whole operation to China within the next ten years.

Oh yeah! I got this from an article in a magazine I subscribe to (freebie) called Network Computing (great magazine, I love it. Makes me feel like an IT guy already). It turns your average task name, i.e, Mowing the Lawn into something like Bulldog Mammoth.

Try it out, it is amusing for about... enh, 10 minutes.

http://www.nwc.com/go/itcodename.jhtml

◊

Testing MkII

Final Migration of this layout from Alpha to Beta was successful! Well, sorta. On to the Forums! (fekk)

What is a Hinkybox?

Ahem. Is it a computer that has found a new calling?

Indubitably, my good man. ◊