Hugh's Worthless Blog

Luckily for the Rams, they only had to play the "lite" version of the Eagles on Monday night and they were able to pull off a win. Now it is all down to the Jets game this Sunday. If they can win and either Seattle or Minnesota loses they are in the playoffs. Big deal. Even if they make it into the playoffs they are not going anywhere. Why kid themselves? It sounds like the Games Knoppix folks are going to release a second version on Jan 6 (The Three Kings version). I will try to grab that as soon as available via BitTorrent and put in online at WUARCHIVE.WUSTL.EDU . Other recent releases are the Beta #3 version of ProMEPIS (ProMEPIS-2005.b03.iso) which is also on wuarchive and the latest versions of Puppy and Feather linux on my site on optinemailpro.com .

Ugly would be a kind word to describe the Rams against the Arizona Cardinals yesterday. Yes, Chandler stunk it up pretty bad, but he had plenty of help from a defense that generally made the Cardinals offense look good, and Marshall Faulk being completely underused and unaffective when run against the pitiful Arizona run defense. Let's see, Stephen Jackson and Arlen Harris are both healthy and both showed they could run the ball. Why does Martz not use them? Instead he wants Chandler or Martin, those two powerhouse quarterbacks, to throw to the talented Rams receiving corps. News to Martz: great receivers mean nothing when mediocre quarterbacks with poor protection are getting the snap. I thought this guy was supposed to be an "offensive genius"! I cannot wait to see his genius moves against the Eagles next week... On happier news, I have now been given a MEPIS directory on WUARCHIVE where the latest SimplyMEPIS-2004.06.iso and ProMEPIS-2005.b02.iso have been added. T...

Well, as expected the second team Rams self destructed against the second team Panthers. Chandler tried valiantly and made lots of good throws... to Panthers. Arlen Harris tried valiantly too, but it was not enough. At least they have the Cardinals next week. I have now have write privileges on the main RAID on wuarchive, so I have created a knoppix repository there with the new official 3.7, as well as the PC-Welt Professional and Games Knoppix versions. See my little Knoppix 3.7 site there for more information. Of the three I still prefer the Games version, just because I like the default xsnow background!

Well, hurray, after last weeks pummeling by the Packers (who themselves were pounded by the Eagles this week), the Rams won it yesterday without Bulger or Faulk against the lifeless 49ers. Chris Chandler started out looking pretty good, as did Steven Jackson who looked a lot better than Faulk has been looking lately. With two away games at weak teams for the next two weeks, they may actually win another game before they have to face the Eagles on Monday night Dec 27 and get obliterated. On the Linux front, Game Knoppix 3.7 was just released today, so I grabbed the ISO via BitTorrent (hey, that is legal for a Linux distro!), and put it on my home space o n wuarchive.wustl.edu . I had to stuff it on the tiny 4GB file system where my home directory lives, but hey, it still works. Mandrake 10.1 official is finally available for public download too, but I am not putting it on my mirror site due to the high traffic it has been receiving for Knoppix ISO images. Hey, you can find Mandrake m...

Well, since my last post the Rams have gone an unimpressive 1 of 3, first getting clobbered by the unstoppable Patriots, then winning in a solid game to beat the Seahawks, but then reverting to their more typical inconsistent selves to lose to the Bills. And what was the genius, Mark Martz's solution to fix the team? They fired their very reliable punter, Sean Landetta. Wow, what a stroke of genius! When the other team returns punts for touchdowns it is the punter's fault, right? Or could it possibly be the awful return coverage? No, then it is too hard to figure out who to replace. Just replace the punter instead. Tonight they get to play the Packers in Lambeau Field. I am guessing another ugly Monday Night collapse by the Rams in the deep Wisconsin cold. Amazingly the Rams would actually move into first place in the NFC West if by some miracle they show up and actually play and win tonight. That just shows how bad the Seahawks and the rest of the NFC West are playing. In t...

Well today is the big day for Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and it looks like its home page is swamped! I suppose that is good news, but you would have thought they would have prepared the web servers for the bombardment. Fortunately the ftp servers seems fine (since they are actually distributed everywhere) and it was easy to grab a copy of the new official release. So far so good! Fedora Core 3 was released yesterday and I grabbed all the ISO images via BitTorrent. If only I had write permissions on wuarchive, I would write them there, but alas, no such luck! So instead I have them on my own mirror site . Looks like a new MyDoom virus variant e-mails just simple HTML links which are not so easily caught by virus catchers. Instead I had to search for the particular text strings in the messages themselves in our system /etc/procmailrc file. Luckily that should stop the little buggers. What an annoyance!

Boy, oh boy, do I hate rebates. It is so much work for so little possible gain. When you see a promotional flyer or e-mail showing a low, low price on something, it almost always now says after mail-in rebate tacked to the end of it. Ooooh, how that drives me crazy. It is bad enough doing it for home, but when it is for a business or large organization (like a university, for example!) it is even more ridiculous. To save $5 on a spindle of CD's, I am supposed to print out some form, fill it in, attach a receipt (which I was supposed to turn into accounting, which means I need to make a copy of it). Then I mail it in, costing an envelope and postage, hoping in 6 to 8 weeks I get a check back. Then I have to take that check and send it to our accounting group to take the measly $5 and put it back into our budget. What a long convoluted chain of events to save my organization a lousy $5. Do any organizations really do this? Or does one of the employees just take the rebate check them...

Well, the folks over at CTS gave me an account on wuarchive again so I can start putting some Linux distributions back online. All they have now is debian and whitebox. Debian is good to have for all the "apt-get" folks, but whitebox? Who in the heck uses that? I will start some rsync mirroring for mandrake, fedora, ubuntu, knoppix and my favorite, mepis once I actually get write access (hello?) on the 1.5TB RAID. It seems to be a nice little box though.

Now that the Series is over and the baseball season has come to a close I can get back to more geeky topics. First off, the Mozilla gang has released Release Candidate 1.0 of Mozilla Firefox. The are supposed to release the official version on November 9 with a big full page ad in the New York Times. It should be interesting. A new distro I have been looking at is called Ubuntu and it seems to be a nice Debian distro using GNOME instead of KDE. There is a LiveCD version (a la Knoppix) which I have tested ut which seems a bit more polished than the 0.8 or 0.8.1 versions of gnoppix. They will even send out free CD's to people who register on their site, no shipping charge or anything. Pretty neat. Mandrake has released the official 10.1 release to members only, so it should be hitting mirrors and torrents soon. I now have GMail invites everywhere. If anyone wants an invite, just e-mail me and you can have one. Does anyone actually read this site?

Well, it is all over now. The great Cards team that won 105 games this season and stomped out the Dodgers and Astros didn't show up against Boston in the Series. It was not a pretty site, but the Sox pitchers were definitely in control, and the Cards pitchers and hitters were not. The Red Sox deserved this one for sure!

I must have been cheering too hard for the Sox to beat the Yankees, since now they are beating up on the beloved Cardinals! In Game 1 the Cards were continually catching back up, but last night Schilling put them in a big hole and they couldn't produce many runs even given the errors and runners on base. Well, luckily we will have three games here at home where hopefully the Cards can at least last through to Game 6. However, back in Fenway I feel the Cards' luck may run out. At least the Rams don't have to play the Patriots for a couple weeks! Yesterday the Rams lost in a lackluster game to the previously winless Dolphins. At least they now get a week off to try to regroup before battling the Patriots here at home. Do you think the Rams can beat the Patriots winning streak? Somehow I don't think so...

Oh well, the NLCS is now tied at two games a piece. At least we know it will end here in St. Louis. I still think the Cardinals will finish it off, but it won't be easy. And what about those Red Sox? I went to bed at 10:40pm thinking they were finished, being down a run in the ninth, but when I wake up what a surprise! They ended up with a big win in the 12th off an Ortiz homer. Hey, that's what baseball is all about. I sure don't want to see the Yankees in the World Series, and you never know, the Red Sox just might pull it off. And Boston still has the Patriots. Do they know how to win, or what? The problem with them now is expectations. At this point everyone expects them to make it to the Super Bowl. They probably will, but nothing is ever certain in football either!

Well, the Cards definitely needed to win the first two before going to Houston and facing Clemens and Oswalt. If they can win one of those two I think they will win the series. But it won't be easy. I think the Cards can outhit their bullpen late in the game once they pull their starters, but only if the Astros don't get big leads in the first few innings. At least Matt Morris isn't pitching in Houston, that would really be scary! I really wanted the Red Sox to make it to the World Series too. How can anyone actually want the Yankees to win?

After Saturday's loss, it was good to see the Cardinals return to true form to beat the Dodgers convincingly yesterday. The Dodgers are a class team, though and played hard. I look forward to the NL Championship and then that Cards vs. Red Sox World Series!! The Rams even had a good 4th quarter yesterday. After falling behind by 17 I had already counted them out, but somehow they managed to come back to life and win. Even the defense looked like a real defense in the 4th quarter yesterday. Sometimes they can surprise you. In other news, the campus has settled back down to normal after last week's debate. I think WashU did a good job hosting it, and both candidates did a better job in their delivery on Friday. I will leave out my political commentary, but I thought it was interesting how Bush had an "invitation only" after debate celebration in Queeny Park, but Kerry has an open to the public celebration at the America Center. Bush gave a quick 5 minute talk so ...

Well, my buddy in Southern California still thinks the Dodgers are going to win it in 5 games, but I don't know. The Cardinal bats sure came to life against Perez yesterday. Let's hope they can continue again tomorrow. Bush vs. Kerry II is just a couple of days away here in St. Louis, and I'm ready to hide up at home while the campus becomes a zoo. I've decided to stay home both tomorrow and Friday since they are closing off some important roads and lots on campus. It isn't worth coming into work if it takes an hour to get here and an hour to get out, although I know many people are used to that kind of a commute all of the time. Luckily, with the advent of DSL and voice mail I can get most of my work done from the comforts of home while the Secret Service and CNN can invade campus. On the Linux front Warren and company released version 2004.03 of MEPIS, something new and fun to play with. I have also been updating the Firefox installations around the departme...

Well, as soon as I say the Cardinals are on a roll, they fall into a 4 game losing slump. The starting pitching is really starting to worry me for the playoffs, particularly Matt Morris who has become very inconsistent of late. Luckily, a lot can change in one week, so I hope by next week the Cardinals will all be ready to actually play some ball. It was fun watching the Presidential Debate last night (my daughter had to for school and it was her first full debate!). I don't think the debate will really change too many people's minds, since neither candidate wavered or said anything really stupid. But neither side really hit a big "home run" either. What is really more concerning to me personally, is that it all moves here to St. Louis and, more specifically, here to Washington University next week!! This place will be a zoo, and I won't even bother coming into campus on Friday. It will be better to watch it from home anyway since I am not sure who they are going ...

Well, at least the city of St. Louis has one sports team to cheer for this fall. The Cards have won five in a row (okay, it was over the Rockies and Brewers, but still it's five in a row!) so they should hopefully keep up the momentum going into the playoffs. They looked a big sluggish the week or so before, so I was worried they might just coast through the rest of the season since they knew they had won the division. But luckily I was wrong and they are not coasting at all. If the starting pitching can keep up and Scott Rolen can get healthy in time we should have a good playoff run. But some folks who are running on a slow cruise control speed are the Rams defense. They looked pretty pathetic in the last two games against some okay but not top notch offenses (Atlanta and New Orleans). Mike Martz continues to make idiotic calls since he believes we can pass our way to victory on every play and that our defense can actually stop somebody. Our rushing defense in particular looks...

First off, it appears that now my wife's GMail account has finally received her 6 free invites, as has my sons' account. Plus I have 6, my daughter has 6 and the account I set up to catch the department's spam has earned 6 too! That makes a grand total of 30 GMail accounts for my whole family. These things multiply like rabbits! I've asked some folks here in the department if they want one and they amazingly aren't interested. Go figure. Well, WUARCHIVE's RAID controller died, but it sounds like we will be getting a new box by the end of October. Since I really am not in charge of things I'll have to see what new box we are getting. Hopefully it will be back up soon, and with much more modern hardware (and I bet it will run Linux.) On the sports front the Cards won game number 100 last night. Let's just hope they keep going strong into the playoffs.

Well, in typical fashion the Cards came from behind and won late in the game over the Brewers, claiming absolute control over the NL Central as the Cubs split a doubleheader. With 98 wins now, they will likely end the regular season with 102~106 wins, the best in the majors unless the Yankess end on a tear. Hopefully their starting pitching can win them through the playoffs. We will see. I have been noticing increased traffic on my Linux Mirrors site, primarily from folks who download the new Knoppix 3.7 ISO from PC-Welt magazine. It looks like most of the references are actually coming from this worthless blog! Wow, is someone really reading this? My Feather Linux ISO mirror there has always been pretty popular (especially after every release, like the recent 0.5.9 version this week), but the other distros were pretty low in traffic. Now Knoppix is using up more bandwidth than Feather Linux (especially since its ISO is so much larger). The 3.7 release is pretty neat. English speak...

Well, Google has replenished my supply of GMail invites to 6 again, and surprisingly my daughter received 6 although her account has hardly been used. My wife's account (which was started the same day as my daughter's) did not receive any, although she has been using it as her primary e-mail account now. So I am not sure how they decide to give out invites to people. It seems odd. In any case, my wife is ready to make her GMail account her primary account, and I am as well since my primary personal e-mail server at hughchou.org has been really flakey lately. Even our departmental server at the university has a 4GB filesystem for over 100 e-mail accounts. At GMail I get 1/4 of that all to myself. Amazing. I have even started to divert all our departmental spam to a special GMail account. Why use up our own disk space, when we can use GMail?

Well, the Cardinals have statistically won the NL Central Division, but they remain in a recent rut. The lack of Scott Rolen doesn't help, but for some reason they couldn't even sweep the Diamondbacks yesterday. Their starting pitching has been in a bit of a slump the last couple weeks, and the bats a little cooler than usual. Let's hope things pick up with the Brewers series starting today. They did win 2 of 3 from the Diamondbacks this weekend, but us spoiled Cards fans are now used to them sweeping teams like that. Whereas the Cardinals still have 14 more games this season to redeem themselves, the Rams are looking not too impressive. After a shaky win over the hapless Arizona Cardinals, they lost with gusto to the Falcons yesterday. Despite a nice 3rd quarter comeback they faltered at the end, when the fairly solid looking Falcon defense knew they were going to throw, throw, throw. With Bulger always going for the jugular with Bruce or Holt, they knew who to cover, a...

Our lovely old UltraSPARC server's RAID controller seems to be on the blink and WUARCHIVE is temporarily out of service. This is a pretty old UltraSPARC 2 system with a recent addition of disks, but still old! Since I help support the archive I was sad to see it go. Hopefully it will be back up soon. In the meantime, people looking for Linux distribution ISO images can check out my site here .

The Knoppix folks in Germany just released version 3.7, but only as included in the German mag PC-Welt. Luckily someone ripped it into an ISO image and posted it as a torrent, so anyone can grab it at my Linux mirrors site . eNews has reported that the Mozilla folks are also just about ready to release the first "final" version of Firefox. Frankly, I think 0.93 is multiples or orders of magnitude better than IE anyway, so I'm curious to see what they add in 1.0.

I was curious how long it would take, and after only 6 days of using Gmail, I received 6 invites, so I signed up my wife and two lovely kiddies (who had been using Yahoo mail before), but still have three left. I'll have to say after using Gmail for a few days it is has some really nice features I like more than Yahoo mail, so I'll probably be using it more. I had originally started this blog since I heard if you had a blog at blogger.com you'd get an invite, but I don't think I have received one yet that way. Oh well...

Well, depsite having a less than impressive 2-4 road trip, the Cards won last night over the Dodgers to prevent a sweep. Still 17 games ahead of the Cubs and Astros, they should lock the division title sometime this week. The Rams beat the Arizona Cardinals in football as expected, but not without some bad turnovers, and with only one TD over a medicore Arizona defense. At least it was good to see Faulk make some good runs, and Stephen Jackson looked very good too.

Amazing, I finally have my own Gmail account . It seems like a pretty nice Web interface, but it will take some time to mess with and test out to compare to my Yahoo Mail Account. I actually got it completely free from a kind fellow on eBay who was giving them out totally free. It is a shame that folks are actually selling invites when this is supposed to be a free service. Once I actually have invites to give out, I will have to find a novel way to give them out, after I set one up for my wife, kids, the cat and possibly kind folks here at my university department...

Warren has officially released the 2004.01 version of SimplyMEPIS (which had been available publicly since August 27) on the MEPIS Home page . It is really a well put together 1 CD distribution. The Cardinals won again too, lowering their magic number to 10. How are these related? They aren't except that I think they are both good news, and this is my blog so deal with it.

hello people.i am alive.please send pictures of your kool cars to www.hughchou.org cause we like 'em.

It is Labor Day and time for another worthless post. The Cardinals are still winning, having swept both the Padres and the Dodgers, and Mandrake just released 10.1 RC1. Interested parties can download it here . Otherwise, nothing of note has occurred except for disaster and destruction in Florida and in Russia.

My actual website can be found at: www.hughchou.org This is just a place where I can ramble about just about anything...

Yup, this is Hugh's amazingly worthless blog. I am starting this even though I already have a full web site of my own. Why? Just because I can, and because I am completely nuts.