Hugh's Worthless Blog

Today the new MercyMe album came out "All That Is Within Me" and they seem to be competing with Casting Crowns to see who can release the shortest album! In reality they are sounding more and more like Casting Crowns minus the female vocals which is both a good and a bad thing. At least they did not put a weird hidden song on the end of this album like they did on " Coming Up to Breathe " or Casting Crowns did on " The Altar and the Door ". Just ten very nice tracks and that is it. They actually post their lyrics on their own album lyrics site , but my "All That Is Within Me" lyrics page makes the words actually copyable and also adds in the "extras" as they sing them. My latest software toys include the vmware player running on both Windows and Linux and gOS . Since the vmware player is free you can openly install it where ever you like, create virtual machines ad infinitum and enjoy the wonders of virtualization. We may actually ...

I started setting up someone's system to dual boot between XP and Gutsy Gibbon when they asked about using some virtualization software like Xen or Parallels to actually run XP within their Ubuntu host. I already have Parallels on my iMac and that runs pretty well, but I had never had the greatest luck with qemu or Xen under Linux since I never had a machine to play with which had enough memory to run a virtual client well. But her system had 2 GB and a Pentium D processor so it seemed like a good time to try to get it working. Following a suggestion I found on the net, I downloaded vmplayer from vmware.com and then went to www.easyvmx.com to create a blank virtual machine to run. Following the instructions I have written up at our freeware site , I was able to boot off my XP CD and install a full running copy of XP SP2 on her Gutsy Gibbon box (and later on my own Dell Precision) complete with working audio, networking and Shared Folders. Now when I need a Windows box, I can just...

First off, I am happy to say I finally received my official copy of Steven Curtis Chapman's latest album, "This Moment", last Thursday from MusicToday.com (two days after the release date) and was surprised to see that I actually received the "Special Edition" which included the four bonus acoustic tracks. I did not remember ordering that "special" version but I'll take it! This one has the special yellow cover instead of the bluish one. The neatest thing about it is this technology they used to allow you to access a special online site by using the CD as a "key" that is read by a Java applet. I looked at the CD and did not see any special files on it besides the audio files, so I am guessing it generated some signature based on the arrangement of the tracks and use that as a key to allow access to the site. I am curious if I make a CloneCD image copy of the CD if it will still let me access the special content or not. It may actually us...

The other "new release" that has most interested me has been the new Ubuntu 7.10, the " Gutsy Gibbon ". I have installed it on three different older systems, my Dell Precision 420 (dual 1 GHz P-III w/ 768MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS), my Dell Latitude C640 laptop (2 GHz P4M w/ 512MB RAM, ATI RADEON 7500), and a Toshiba Satellite Pro M10-S405 (1.4 GHz PM w/ 256MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce4 Go 420). I was curious if Compiz Fusion and it's nifty special effects would work with any of their graphics cards. The answer in all cases was a disappointing "not yet". I could load the restricted NVIDIA and ATI graphic drivers on each of them, but when I tried to activate any special effects they could not be enabled. I had booted my Latitude using the Kororaa AIGLX LiveCD and that had seemed to have worked fine, but upgrading my Ubuntu 7.04 to 7.10 did not allow me to use the same special effects that ran fine under Kororaa booted live even after installing all the GL,...

Well, today is the official release day of Steven Curtis Chapman 's new album " This Moment " and I had hoped to receive the official CD yesterday in the mail since I had pre-ordered it, but it didn't show up (boo-hoo!). I had pre-ordered and received Aaron Shust 's "Whispered and Shouted", Casting Crowns ' "The Altar and the Door", Chris Tomlin 's "See The Morning" and Audio Adrenaline 's "Adios" all the Monday evenings before their release dates, but not "This Moment". I am hoping it will show up today. I have to check if I had missed any lyrics on my "This Moment" lyrics page and I also have to update my SCC Bible verse search engine with his new referenced verses on his liner notes. I think it is neat that fans have been able to pre-order and listen to the album for two whole months before the release, and I am curious how other people will take to the new album. In my opinion, I still t...

Argh, first someone got a hold of my university credit card number somehow, and then I received a call today from a faculty member. "Where's the LCD projector for my classroom?" he asks. I'm guessing it is not sitting there locked down to the cart where it has been for the last couple years, and sure enough, I go to the classroom and find the busted up lock that used to secure it, but the projector is gone. Knowing this is a classroom in a wing of our building locked down with card access from 6:00 pm to 8:00 am, that means the projector was stolen either: 1) off-hours by someone with card access (i.e. an "inside job"), or 2) by someone who walked into an actively used university building between 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, intentionally broke our lock with tools he/she brought (it required either a hacksaw or some bolt cutters) and then stuffed the projector into a backpack and walked out with it. The amazing thing is this is the second projector people have st...

Well, the flex spending plan we use at the university did not like the fact that we paid $450 on my daughter's wisdom teeth (Hey, I bet I liked paying for it even less!). So they wanted me to FAX them a copy of the receipt so they could approve the expense on my Flex account. Since we do not have a FAX machine at home (nor long distance service on our land line) I needed some way to FAX them the receipt. I could have done it here at work on the department FAX machine and pay the 30 or 40 cents it cost to FAX it long distance, but instead I scanned the receipt and FAX'ed it for FREE using FaxZero . It was fast and worked flawlessly. This is a great way to send free FAXes over the Internet. Thanks, faxZERO!

It's a limited time offer but right now at Geeks.com if you spend $50 on most items you get your order shipped for only $1.99. I try never to pass up this cheap shipping deal, especially since they always have such good deals anyway. I ended up getting a rack mountable 24-port switch and a pair of Powerline Ethernet adapters for our department for a grand total of $70 including shipping. You can't beat that price!

I received the new Casting Crowns CD, "The Altar and the Door", in the mail yesterday and the worst things I can say about it are: 1) It only has 10 songs and 2) what is that funny thing at the end of "All Because of Jesus"? Anyone who has the CD should know what I mean. It reminds me of MercyMe's "Coming Up To Breathe" which had a similar very weird hidden track at the end of the last song. It is one thing to have a hidden track at the end, but why do some artists put such unusual choices?. I did a Google search for "altar and the door" with "hidden track" and it appears to be a Korean peace song called "White Dove, Fly High". Weird. Otherwise, I like "The Altar and the Door" better than "Lifesongs" but not as much as their debut album. It has a lot more piano heavy ballads which are done very well and features Megan and Melodee more on vocals which contrast very well against Mark's voice.

Okay, on Tuesday I pre-ordered Steven Curtis Chapman's "This Moment" so I actually get to listen to the album before the official release in October. Best $18 I've spent in a while. I'll have to say that Steven's new album is just terrific. The song "Cinderella" is one of my favorites, a very touching song about a father watching her daughter grow up (not easy for me to listen to with an oldest daughter just starting her junior year in High School!) I have already figured out all the lyrics and added them to my "This Moment" lyrics page . I also added "With One Voice" which is another worship type song he has written and performs with his sons and a full chorus. Caleb's voice is very distinctive and he sounds great singing with his dad. Steven also has his usual Mary Beth inspired song, another piano-heavy ballad called "One Heartbeat", which is not quite as touching as "Cinderella", but still a great son...

You can now listen to Steven Curtis Chapman go over a new song from "This Moment" on a iTickets video and hear the full song at the end along with all the lyrics. The song is "Children of God" and is a audience participatory worship song (a la Chris Tomlin). I have grabbed all the lyrics and added them to my "This Moment" lyrics page . From the first two songs this sounds like it will be an excellent album. I will pre-order my own copy tomorrow, Aug 14, when it will supposedly be available for sale at his official web site and get early access to hear the music. I will let you know more once I pre-order it and see what they send me.

Now that the album release date for "This Moment" is set for October 23, they have posted Steven's new single "Miracle of the Moment" at his official website as a shockwave popup you can listen to over and over again! I did and I figured out most of the lyrics which I have posted here . It's a very refreshing sounding pop single which reminded me of "Remembering You" from the Music Inspired by Narnia CD, with a hint of "Speechless" thrown in there. The album page on the website also covers some of the other songs that will be on the new album. Fourteen new songs!! I can't wait!

Well, I've been waiting for news on Steven Curtis Chapmans's new album, "This Moment", to be announced, and perhaps when his new official website goes live on July 10 we will hear more about it. Meanwhile, Casting Crowns has released their first single from their August 28 album "The Altar and the Door". The song is "East to West" and is a typically beautiful Casting Crowns power ballad you can hear at their MySpace site . I typed up the lyrics for it since I like doing that kind of thing. Now I just have to figure out where I will buy the album since as usual there are so many different deals around as I have listed here. Do I want early on-line access or a free T-shirt? So many decisions to make...

I just received an e-mail notice from MusiChristian.com where they are selling a bunch of good albums for under $10! This includes several new releases from well-known artists including Aaron Shust's "Whispered and Shouted" and Relient K's "Five Score and Seven Years Ago" (to note two of my favorites of 2007). Jeremy Camp's latest "Beyond Measure" and Chris Tomlin's "See The Morning" are also available for $9.97. If you don't have Aaron's first album "Anything Worth Saying" that one is still only $7.97. For the truly "off-the-wall" you can even get Relient K's cover of the VeggieTales song "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" with along with "Breakdown" (Performed by Larry the Cucmber) for only $3.99! Where else can you get singing vegetables for under $5?? Buy enough albums to push the total over $100 and the shipping is free. There are so many good albums here under $...

Well, although MP3's from Aaron Shust and Relient K's latest albums are still on rotation on the $30 NewEgg MP3 player in my car (similar to this as Cyberguys ), my latest favorite album right now is "Wake Up! Wake Up!" by Everyday Sunday . Songs from their last album "Anthems for the Imperfect" sounded pretty good, but I never bought the album. This one caught my interest and after hearing some of the songs on HearItFirst.com , I decided to buy the album and I have not been disappointed. They sound fresher and more energetic than on their earlier albums (due to new musicians in the band, a new producer and a new label) and this is definitely a good album to have on rotation in my car along with Relient K and Aaron Shust. It's great "discovering" more and more great, "new" artists out there in the Christian music scene.

I actually received my autographed copy of "Whispered & Shouted" last Monday (a day before the official release!) and I was happy to see it was also put in a DigiPak like "Anything Worth Saying". Since I typically only play the original CD a few times (I prefer to mix my own copies to burn on CD-R's) the DigiPak's should last as long as plastic jewel cases and are definitely less likely to break at the hinges. Aaron again wins another award for thickest CD liner note booklet around. He dedicates one page to the lyrics for each song and another page with personal notes and background about each song. You can also find his lyrics on his site or at my site too! One interesting change I noted in the new massive liner notes was whereas last time he put relevant Bible quotes in the upper right corner of the pages with lyrics, this time he actually embeds the bible verse references directly in the lyrics on the lines where the verses are relevant. Neat. I may...

Yes, I discovered the easiest way to prevent SSH attacks om Linux/Unix boxes -- you turn simply it off! There are some systems where I am the only person who ever uses SSH to connect to them to a shell prompt so I just kill the daemon and make sure it is not set to automatically start on reboot. So what happens when I want to connect? Well, I have a little CGI script I wrote to turn SSH back on (using a hidden password protected URL), and then I log on, and then the SSHD daemon gets shut down again. (Once you are connected you do not need sshd to be running.) So people cannot break through the SSHD server since it simply is not running, and I just have it run for 5 minutes for me to logon whenever I want. Simple, isn't it? Another similar tactic to drastically reduce attacks is to set crontab to turn on and off sshd for specific times. If nobody ever uses SSH at 2am Monday morning, why does it need to be running then? The only things connecting to the SSHD server then are internati...

Here is a place to find a local lender for a home loan, refinance or HELOC. You simply tell them your state and what product you want and then supply your contact information. They will direct several lenders to you who will contact you. What you should first do is set up a brand new GMail or Yahoo mail account and use it exclusively for your loan search. Otherwise you will get spammed to death at your primary e-mail address. Plus many corporate spam filters will eat many of your correspondences from lenders. And you do not need to give them a valid phone number, or they will call you to no end. I like giving people FAX machine numbers to call! If you need one to enter, use 425-936-7329 (Microsoft's support FAX). If lenders are too lazy to type up an e-mail to you they are not worth your business. Let them just talk to the Microsoft FAX machine instead!

On my ever quest to enter contests I found out that HearItFirst.com has a new contest where they are giving away 300 T-shirts (that is correct -- there are 300 of them!) with Sanctus Real on them. Now personally I love Sanctus Real , but I am curious how many people really want a T-shirt with on them (along with "NEEDTOBREATHE" and "This Beautiful Republic" printed on them). They are an incredibly talented band, but they just aren't as popular as say Switchfoot, Relient K, Jeremy Camp or Chris Tomlin for example. A big-time Christian artist I could understand a giveaway of 50 or 100 T-shirts, but 300 shirts for a tour headlined by Sanctus Real? I think the odds to win one of those beauties must be pretty high! So I am going to enter as often as I can! I personally would be proud to wear one around, even if people ask me "Who in the heck are they?". Then I can simply respond, "Duh, it's Sanctus Real, can't you read?"

Well, not only did Aaron Shust win three GMA Dove Awards but he also just made his new album "Whispered & Shouted" fully available online! Yes, all you have to do is buy the CD online at his website for a whopping $9.95 shipped, and once you order it, they tell you how you can listen to the whole thing online until you receive the actual CD in early June. I know because I am listening to it right now through my Firefox browser while I type this. Cool. I have even pulled the lyrics from his website and fixed them up like he sings them on the album. The album is great so just go buy it. At $9.95 I am thinking about buying another one as a gift. I am wondering if his new album will also be released in a cardboard jewel box like "Anything Worth Saying" was made. I always hated how typical jewel boxes break all the time, and I liked the cardboard/plastic design of his debut. Plus it is easier to mail since it actually protects the CD as opposed to just being some...

Well, I'll be the first person to admit I'm not perfect, and I found that out really quickly when we were hacked severely over the weekend. My biggest mistake was using the same two passwords all over a bunch of assorted Linux boxes I use around the Internet, and my second mistake was overusing 'sudo' and giving myself too much access based on two very good and cryptic passwords . Sure they were good passwords, but once someone has captured those two passwords (through a compromised ssh client or sshd server no doubt), they had root access all over the place. So now I have changed passwords everywhere, patched assorted systems with clean binaries (why are we still using Red Hat 9 on some boxes?) and removed access to many domains and simply turned off sshd on several systems that really did not need it (Did I really need to ssh into my iMac?). What a fun time this has been, all because a few people somewhere thought they needed to run psyBNC bouncer somewhere and also...

Well, a friend of mine inherited an old IBM ThinkPad from his sister which had a 800 MHZ Pentium-III (not too bad), a 10 GB hard drive (small but usable) and 128MB of RAM. He could have bought more memory for the machine to run XP on it (forget Vista), but since you can buy a whole laptop like this on eBay for under $100, it seemed like a lot to spend $20-30 to push it to 256MB or 384MB just to run XP. The simple solution appeared just a few days ago -- a brand new Puppy Linux release (version 2.15 Community Edition)! Just a 130MB download and a fast burn onto a $0.20 CD and his old ThinkPad roared to life? The small 128MB is no problem, Puppy runs just fine with that. After installing it fully, the disk still had well over 9GB free since Puppy only took about 450MB (including AbiWord, Gnumeric, Firefox, XMMS, etc....) It easily detected his IBM EtherJet card (he still needs to find his sister's dongle -- but that sounds creepy!), my Dell branded 3com CardBus ethernet card, and ...

We transfer a lot of files around using FTP and SFTP (that's how you are supposed to move around large files -- not with e-mail attachments!). Typically we use FileZilla since that is a popular open source project. For unencrypted FTP within our department and for small SFTP transfers it isn't a problem. But for SFTP'ing large amounts of data FileZilla seems to be a bit of a dog (i.e. slower than molasses). I tried some other open source SFTP clients and whereas some were substantially faster than FileZilla no Windows client came close to just using command line SFTP within Linux (or Mac OSX terminal). That is until I tried Tunnelier . It does have a file explorer type interface and is relatively easy to use, but the great thing here is the speed. It simply flies doing SFTP transfers, running several times faster than FileZilla, CoreFTP LE or even WinSCP (which was substantially faster than the other two). Since speed does matter, I will have to start promoting Tunnelier o...

Since I have been so lucky in the past winning free CD's and stuff from ChristianBook.com and HearItFirst.com , I had to sign up for their latest contests. At ChristianBook.com you can win a brick of 30 CD's from the artists on the WOW Hymns CD . Even though I already have several of the CD's, I entered the contest anyway. I can always give the extras away. Included among them is Steven Curtis Chapman's "All Things New" which you can now purchase for $5.99 from them as well. Switchfoot's "Nothing is Sound" and "Learning to Breathe" are also there for $5.99 each. I may have paid more for my copies, but I've also experienced the years of enjoyment from them! Steven's "Abbey Road Sessions/The Walk DVD" is also available for $5.99 and I am considering actually buying that one now. At $15-$20 I did not see the point since there were no new songs there, but now as just $5.99 it is tempting! It is almost my birthday after...

I recently discovered that Aaron Shust is releasing a second album ("Whispered and Shouted") this summer on June 5 and that you can pre-order it on his site at aaronshust.com for only $9.95 which includes free shipping, 3 bonus streaming songs and the ability to start listening to the new album starting May 1. What a deal! His first album, "Anything Worth Saying" is also available there for only $14.95 and if you order both you get free shipping on the whole order (and no tax either). That means a total of $24.90 for both albums plus the bonus songs and early access to hear the "Whispered and Shouted" album. You can't beat that deal! I really liked his first album which had a lot of good songs on it that would be good choices for our church praise band, Joyful Noise (at Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Creve Coeur, Missouri) to perform in one of our services. Hey, that almost sounds like an advertisement doesn't it?

I cannot believe the big deal everybody is making over the stock market dip that occurred on Tuesday (Feb 27). Sure the Dow dropped 416 points that day, but that was from a quite lofty 12,632 the day before to a point where it had been only in late November 2006. It's amazing how when the Dow continually hit all time highs just a week or two ago nobody was making a big fuss about it, but when it then drops 4% to end where it was late last fall people are all doom and gloom. If you look at the more broadly based S&P 500 it dropped about 50 points to close at 1399 dropping a more modest 3.47% after it had increased 15.8% in 2006. In fact after yesterday's small rebound to 1406.82 the index is just a little under 10 points under where it was at the end of the year. Big deal. If a 3-4% drop scares people they should not be in the stock market! Think of poor old Bill Gates. According to the Yahoo Finance , Mr. Gates owns 921 million shares of Microsoft which dropped $1.20 to $27...

Well, we finally received a copy of Vista and I thought I would try it out on our "test" system, a Dell Dimension 2400 with a 2.6GHz Pentium 4, 1GB of RAM, and 80 GB hard drive and a DVD+/-RW. I knew starting into it that the integrated Intel 845G graphics on the box were not going to support Aero, but who cares, we were going to run Vista Business anyway, and I just wanted to see how it all looked. First off the installation took forever, and I mean forever. I started shortly after lunch and I had to go home that evening with the system still installing Office 2007. However, during the Office install I was still able to play with the box. And my bottom line is this. Vista is really darn annoying and as slow as a dog on a 2.6GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM. That is scary. It's installation also killed my GRUB install so I cannot access the Ubuntu 6.10 installation on the box which just flies on this low end Dell with 1GB of RAM. I am sure I can reinstall GRUB to bring it back to ...

Well, we inherited an old XP box we needed to administer so I thought I would fire up INSERT and use captive NTFS and chntpw to blow away the old Administrator password. But it wouldn't work! I soon found out that worthless XP SP2 was patched so that captive-ntfs no longer works, so I instead I see I must use ntfs-3g instead! The winning LiveCD this time was Helix whose latest release (v1.8) includes both ntfs-3g and chntpw. So I just booted it up, mounted the system drive as ntfs-3g and blanked out the Administrator password so I could logon and change it. My, oh my, that was easy!

Wow, I can't believe I haven't posted anything since last year! I have to keep adding more content and more links. Today I gave a mesmerizing talk on "Quick and Dirty Web Sites" in our department's Brown Bag Seminar Series . I tried to keep it lively by insulting random grad students in the crowd and throwing up old pictures of folks (okay, maybe just one person!). I also spoke highly of Google's own Google Pages which is just as easy to use as blogger for making simple websites. You can even see my lovely Google Pages example site and gaze upon our expensive, but still unnamed building on campus. If anyone out there has several million dollars they would like to donate to our fine university , you can get your name on this gorgeous building!