So this weekend was a rather busy one we went to a baseball game on Sunday.

Daddy got sunburnt and needed a nap

and today was Zayden’s Birthday

And unfortunately its back to work tomorrow.
Whew its been a wild couple of weeks, I forgot just how busy things get when there is a new baby in the house. I haven’t gotten to sit here much or keep up with much news either. Projects are seriously behind as well, but all is good been working alot and spending time with skye and the rest of the family. She is getting big thats for sure its amazing how fast they grow. Well on to some news and notes a site that was recently brought to my attention all you CentOS junkies may want to check out is
How2Centos
They have posted some nice how to’s and they also have a twitter as well, although I did send them a message to see if they would get a statusnet/identi one going as well. Hopefully they will get one going there as well. Things seem to be on the quiet side all over, must be that summer is here and all the pasty geeks are out coating themselves in spf 100+ and trying to figure out what that blazing orange ball in the sky is. Hope all of you are enjoying the summer, I better wrap this up before skye wakes up take care all!
To my dearest daughter Skye
You were born on Friday May 7 2010 at 1:06pm, it was a rainy day and I firmly believe that was because the angels above were crying as you depart from among their midst to join your mother and me to begin your life. Their tears of loss go along with my tears of joy as you enter my life anew. It was a long nine months as I waited and watched your mother grow. I went to all the doctor appointments and saw all the ultrasound pictures and as time went by I became more and more anxious to see you.
You seemed to have decided that you were gonna come out early with no disregard for the fact that it was too early and your little body was just not ready to take on the world just quite yet. So we spent time with the doctors trying to keep you in the womb to give you more time to develop and be ready to hit the ground running when you got here. And wouldn’t you know after all that time spent to get you the best chance of this and we get the all clear from the doc you get stubborn and won’t come, ahh stubborness a trait I think you got from me, albeit probably not a good one. But alas here you are now and your life begins.
So as your father I thought I would try and fill you in on some things that you may need to know as you grow. You have three brothers and three sisters. All of whom have been anxious to see you as well. So far your siblings have made this family what it is, and with the addition of you our family just got a whole lot richer.
Let me start by saying that as your father I am gonna do everything I can to make your life as rich and happy as I can. I have visualized tea parties in my head complete with the extension of my pinky finger and I just break out into a big smile. Somehow that seems so wrong but yet so very right. I’m sure it wont take you long to realize that your Dad is a pretty strange guy. My interests are wide and varied, I like to sit and watch classic movies with mom, and hopefully you soon too. I have a very strange sense of humor and often times you may not understand it and I can almost see the quizzical look on your face in my head as I write this. I’m sure your mom, siblings and grandparents will be able to tell you all kinds of stories as you grow up of the strange and stupid things I have done. And as you grow i’m sure the questions about my various scars, strange sayings and other things will come up and I will fill you in the best I can.
Well lets get to life – life in general is not easy never has been never will be, but I will help you with whatever I can. There is a movie I like to watch, it is called Forrest Gump, it has two of my favorite all time characters in it. One of course is Forrest Gump, he is simple man not the brightest but his outlook on life(mostly taught to him by his mother) is one of the most refreshing I have ever seen in my life. It is very basic and simple, things happen and you deal with them. Forrest ends up with quite a life, now remember Skye this is a work of fiction, but movies, books, and music are great inspirational tools albeit fictional or factual. So for me I would say keep things simple and see the bright side of life. Do the best at whatever you are doing at that moment and revel in the joy of doing whatever it is that makes you happy. Make sure I approve of it first though!
Now life is not always peaches & cream though, people are not always nice and things sometimes happen and life gets tough. Enter Lieutenant Dan – probably my all time favorite character. LT Dan has had some trouble in his life things have not gone his way. But at one point Lt Dan and Forrest are on a boat and facing down a hurricane that is sure to destroy everything in its path. LT Dan climbs to the crow’s nest straps himself in and faces the storm head on, with gusto. Yelling at mother nature and god to do their worst. Some people would say that LT Dan wanted to die, I however disagree LT Dan wanted the heaven’s and earth to know he was there to stay no matter what they threw at him and there was no stopping him. It was a turning point in LT Dan’s life. I have taken great inspiration from LT Dan’s story and is how I like to think of myself when facing problems. I would like you to do the same do not fear difficulties do not shy away from the unknown. Let the heaven’s and earth know you are here and you will stomp them down and prove the universe wrong, no matter what they throw at you, and always remember that if you need an extra LT Dan to give you some help I will be here. We can strap ourselves in together and scream away and show the world what you can do.
Now I know that as a father I am not perfect and I will fail and probably fail miserably. I would like to apologize ahead of time and only say I am human and bound to make mistakes. But I am sure your mother will straighten me out as soon as she can. Your mother is good at keeping me in line, and I think she gets some enjoyment out of kicking my butt on occasion.
I’m sure as the years go by we will argue and disagree on many things, what time you will be home, what boys you are gonna date, and so on and so on. No matter how bad we fight just remember my love is always forgiving and eternal. You will always be this little tiny girl laying here taking a nap as I write this. You see a father always see’s his kids as those little ones who need our protection and we can be quite fierce about this especially me. Please know I don’t do this out of spite or just to be mean. I love you and want the best for you I don’t want to see you hurt or upset. So if I am sitting in my lay Z Boy in my boxers polishing a shotgun when you bring that first boy home for me to meet please don’t be surprised. Although I am pretty sure your mom will not let me get away with that one. Although what a story to tell your kids though huh ?
It is really hard to sit down and write everything out about how the past day has felt. Watching you being born was amazing, your mother and I both in tears and emotionally spent and drained but laughing and excited to see you. The emotions run fast furious and very deep. Our Family is large and has now gotten even larger now with the addition of you. Which only means life in itself has only gotten even better. Your brothers and sisters and now you have given me such an apreciation for life, it is unfathomable to imagine my life without any of you.
I better wrap this up by now you are figuring out your Dad is long winded although I never talk out loud much. I hope I can be a father you can be proud of. A father you will be happy to see and spend time with. I will always love you no matter what. Its forever your place now as one of Daddy’s Little Girls.
Love Dad
Well with all the buzz about google buzz competing with the likes of Facebook and Twitter a new thought occurred to me. What the heck ever happened to IRC ? You know good ol Internet Relay Chat ? Let us compare some of the similarities shall we. For instance on most of the social networking sites I can become a member or fan of a group, I can do that exact same thing by joining a channel on a IRC server, which is usually populated with people I want to talk with right ? Must be because I joined the channel.
Next say someone in this channel is a butthead and I really don’t want to listen to them anymore, so I use the /ignore command and they magically go away. Much like blocking someone on a social website. Now they can probably still see what I am saying but I no longer have to deal with them. Pretty nice feature huh. Now lets say I want to only talk to one particular person, I can then institute a dialog with this person, so now it is just me and them talking about whatever we wish to talk about without interruption.
Most IRC servers have a message system or memo service that you can use to leave a note for a friend, Hmm sounds alot like posting a status or something to one of these other social sites to me. You can also register your nickname so no one else on that particular IRC server can use the same nick as you. Is this all starting to sound very familiar ?
Some other points to mention is that some IRC networks allow encryption via ssl, so for those who hold their privacy near and dear to their heart can encrypt their sessions as well. Also if I want to post pics or a good article I read I can merely post the link in the channel and all my new found friends can enjoy. Even most media players have a irc script that will post the song you are listening to in the channel you are in. Wow does this not about cover all of the inglorious spam you wish to spread to the planet ? You can whoa wait for it —- create your very own channel, yep you read that right your very own channel. With its own topic and operators and everything. Wow what a novel idea huh ?
With that said I have been using IRC for years now and it is still my preferred way to communicate even over instant messaging which is basically again just over glorified IRC. So my question persists social networking ? Why yes I do I use IRC everyday all day!
Well as usual on my weekends off I try to get to one of my many projects but this weekend I suffer from slackeritis. I had all the best intentions of getting to some things but I didn’t. Every time I sat down I just didn’t have the normal fuel I do for getting things done, and when I am feeling that way it just doesn’t pay to try as it wont work anyway. So I took this weekend off just kinda laying around the house, went out with family, watched the super bowl and really not much else. Could be all the snow we are getting today that has just put me in kind of a foul mood, who knows. Hopefully this will go away soon and I will get back to my normal insane list of projects I have that I wish to get done. Hope your projects are going better than mine, so til next time then, remember CentOS isn’t just for servers ya know…
Well as most of you know by now I use CentOS, and some things just need to be tweaked. I for one have always liked the panel applet for sensors the version I was using was a little old and I wanted to see if I could update it and sure enough I could and I did. Obligatory screenshot

So as always the rpms are located in the rpm4centos section and you will need two of these which are
libXNVCtrl – which gives lm_sensors the ability to see nvidia cards
gnome-applet-sensors – the panel applet for gnome
You need to have lm_sensors installed for this to work which you can just do a yum install lm_sensors for.
Then if you have not run /usr/sbin/sensors-detect as root do that before installing these packages. Then
as root install the libXNVCtrl first then the sensors rpm with the normal rpm -Uvh command, log out of gnome and back in and click on your panel and select add applet. Then look for Hardware Sensors Monitor and add it to your panel. There are some settings you can adjust in the applet preferences so be sure to check that out as well after you have it on your panel.
If all goes well you should now have the sensors displaying their temps in your panel.
New in the rpms4centos category I have built the latest version of Xchat for CentOS along with Easytag v2.1 as well today they are available in the rpms4centos section. On a side note for Xchat to install you will need libsexy which you can get from Dag’s repo which is here, Enjoy!
e16 1.0.2 was released yesterday so it was time to update my rpms4centos as well. New e16 rpms can be found in the designated area. Some of the fixes in this release are as follows this is from the mailing list
e16-1.0.2:
- Fix bogus image cache directory files being written in home directory.
- Enable pango by default.
- Enable showing mini icon in border part.
- Fix stacking order when showing desktop state is set off.
- Merge autoraise settings into focus settings dialog.
- Remove old e-icons, add some new ones.
- Fix manual placement when switching desktop.
- Fix potential crash when window is destroyed while being
moved/raised/lowered.
- Merge miscellaneous documentation into e16.xml/html.
- Add simple e16 man page.
- Fix old translucent move mode when shm pixmaps are not available.
- Many minor bug fixes and enhancements, see ChangeLog for details.
As usual enjoy!
Woke up early today and wanted to make a new background for my blackberry so I whipped up these based on a tutorial in my Linux Format magazine, enjoy!


Well here we go again kids building packages just in time for christmas. So I built up the latest stable release of kvirc for CentOS 5. For those of you not familiar with kvirc, it is a irc client much like xchat or konversation except that it has a million options and theme support and a treasure trove of other features. You can learn more about kvirc here.As usual I have placed the rpm in the link above rpms4centos, src rpms are also available as well as debug info. Enjoy and happy holidays.