all these things that i've done

20 promises, and “because I said I would”.

Matt — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:27:14 +0000

Update (4/4/13): A video of Alex right before surprising the kids at Candlelighter’s:

Update (3/22/13): Alex followed through, here is a picture of him with Gail from Candelighters.

A guy named Alex has a site I found out about today called “becauseisaidiwould.com“. At this site, you can request 10 free cards that are blank, and simply say “because I said I would” at the bottom. Alex started doing this in September of 2012, when his father passed away from lung cancer. He does it as a memorial to his father, who always kept his word.

~~Kelly~~ Gail, from Candelighter’s Childhood Cancer Foundation in Nevada received something in the mail recently from a stranger (Alex from the website above).

~~Kelly~~ Gail invited 5 year old Delliliah to open the package. Delliliah lost her brother Jackson to childhood cancer in April 2012.

Inside the package were 20 cards to be given to children who had been diagnosed with cancer. On each of the cards was a handwritten note, with “I will get you a ticket to Disneyland” and the plainly typed “because I said I would.” in the bottom right.

Alex wrote one more promise card.

I’m writing this blog post tonight knowing it will also be posted to Facebook, and hoping that those who see it will also share the story.

Original images from imgur.com
Original post on reddit.com

Installing the nVidia drivers on Fedora 18 – version.h does not exist [Fixed]

Matt — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 03:09:37 +0000

For a gaming system, I always want the latest driver. So, I often go nVidia’s site, download the latest (sometimes beta) drivers for my Fedora 18 system. After upgrading to a new kernel (there’s been a few released lately), I was unable to install the nVidia blob drivers from the site, and it took me a while to figure out why.

When running NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.run, as downloaded from the site, I kept getting the following error:

If you are using a Linux 2.4 kernel, please make sure
you either have configured kernel sources matching your
kernel or the correct set of kernel headers installed
on your system.

If you are using a Linux 2.6 kernel, please make sure
you have configured kernel sources matching your kernel
installed on your system. If you specified a separate
output directory using either the \”KBUILD_OUTPUT\” or
the \”O\” KBUILD parameter, make sure to specify this
directory with the SYSOUT environment variable or with
the equivalent nvidia-installer command line option.

Depending on where and how the kernel sources (or the
kernel headers) were installed, you may need to specify
their location with the SYSSRC environment variable or
the equivalent nvidia-installer command line option.

So I started digging into the driver, and ran it with a “-x” option to extract it only, like so:

sh ~/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.run -x

That created a directory structure that I could look into, and looking through the files, I figured “kernel” was a good directory to start in, and “conftest.sh” sounded like something that would be used to … drum roll … check configuration and do some sanity testing before allowing me to continue.

For some reason, /usr/src/kernels/3.7.8-202.fc18.x86_64/include/linux no longer includes a version.h (which the nVidia driver uses), so it was failing to detect which kernel version I had installed. After some searching through the filesystem, I found that it was instead in /usr/include/linux/version.h.

Now there are probably much more elegant ways to do this, like with some environment variables or magic switches to the NVIDIA.run file, but my crude solution worked:

ln -s /usr/include/linux/version.h /usr/src/kernels/3.7.8-202.fc18.x86_64/include/linux/version.h

After that, the driver installed just fine and I’m back to 3D accelerated goodness (none of that fallback mode crap for Gnome Shell).

And actually, I’ve popped in to KDE 4.9 to have a look around, as I haven’t tried this desktop environment in a few years. Seems okay so far. Gnome Shell has been giving me some trouble lately at work (very sluggish performance over time requiring a restart of the DE), so maybe this will be better…

I’ll have to see how it performs with my games…

Google (GMail team specifically) randomly decides to enforce strict SSL for external POP3/IMAP accounts

Matt — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 21:12:01 +0000

After Google announced it was doing away with personal (or was it trial?) Google Apps accounts, I’m getting the impression they want to get rid of freeloaders (like me). I have a free GMail account, which I’ve setup to retrieve messages using POP3S from my e-mail server at home. This allows me to get better spam and phishing filtering, and also get e-mail addressed to my personal account (@moldvan.com). This was a great setup until…

On December 12th (or around there; the official announcement was vague), the GMail team decided to flip the switch to do strict SSL certificate checking. What this means is if there is any problem with an SSL cert, the connection will be rejected and boom you’ve got no e-mail anymore.

The above was done without any warning, and I just thought things were quiet until I logged into my GMail account Sunday evening and saw “Error synchronizing account (account name)”. Digging through the error, I found that the certificate had expired (I was using the default Dovecot SSL config).

Aaaanyway, special thanks to Sergiy Dzysyak at http://site4fast.blogspot.com/2011/10/dovecot-ssl-how-to.html, who put together a good document on getting the SSL part of DoveCot working okay.

The first mistake I made was adding the ssl_cert_file and ssl_key_file to /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf, instead of /etc/dovecot/10-ssl.conf. The config in 10-ssl.conf overrode the other one, and I didn’t know I had e-mail sitting lonely on my GX260 at home for a few nights.

I got a free SSL cert a while back from StartSSL.com, but they don’t support subdomains, so mail.moldvan.com wasn’t going to work anymore. I quickly changed my MX records to point to www.moldvan.com (the CN of the SSL cert I got for free), and changed up the config mentioned above, and all was well again.

Total number of people who ever lived – 71 Billion

Matt — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 02:00:16 +0000

Ran across this tonight and thought it was interesting…

Source:LiveScience

Microsoft KB Article: “Your computer randomly plays classical music”

Matt — Sun, 12 Aug 2012 04:32:48 +0000

The funniest Microsoft KBs I’ve run across: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/261186

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music

Article ID: 261186 – View products that this article applies to.

This article applies to Windows 2000. Support for Windows 2000 ends on July 13, 2010. The Windows 2000 End-of-Support Solution Center

(http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=http%3a%2f%2fsupport.microsoft.com%2fwin2000)

is a starting point for planning your migration strategy from Windows 2000. For more information see the Microsoft Support Lifecycle
Policy

(http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/)

Expand all | Collapse all

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS. You may want to have your computer checked or serviced.

For aditional related information, please see the following DFI Technologies Web site:

http://www.dfi.org
(http://www.dfi.org)

Microsoft provides third-party contact information to help you find technical support. This contact information may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this third-party contact information.

Article ID: 261186 – Last Review: March 27, 2007 – Revision: 3.6

APPLIES TO

Microsoft Windows 2000 Server

Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Edition

Microsoft Windows 95

Microsoft Windows 98 Standard Edition

Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition

Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 Standard Edition

Blizzard bans Linux players using Wine for Diablo 3 – requested cancellation

Matt — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:21:33 +0000

Update (7/21/12): A little while ago Blizzard responded to my ticket and let me know that I wouldn’t be banned for using Linux. So, I’m “seeing how the situation evolves” for now.

Some Diablo 3 players have recently reported being banned for using Wine on Linux to play Diablo 3. I was so excited to play Diablo 3 on Linux, considering it had been a full 12 years waiting for the next part of the game. With Steam’s recent pledge to get a native Linux client working (here, here, and here), I’m shifting all of my money that way.

Quote from the official Diablo 3 forum, here:

Account Action: Account Closure
Offense: Unapproved Third Party Software
A third party program is any file or program that is used in addition to the game to gain an unfair advantage. These programs may increase movement speed or teleport heroes from one place to another beyond what is allowed by game design. It also includes any programs that obtain information from the game that is not normally available to the regular player or that transmit or modify any of the game files.

My ticket content:

I couldn’t find a topic that matched this specific question, but I’d like to express my disgust with the fact that your company is banning users who are using Wine to play on Linux. I waited a solid 12 years for Diablo 3, and couldn’t wait to get it going under my newly Windows-free computer, like I have been doing with World of Warcraft for three years on and off, 1 year solid now. I’ve been an avid supporter of Blizzard since the first World of Warcraft game, and I’m seriously concerned that you have taken such a stance on the use of a free, open source operating system. While I understand that it interferes with you collecting system hardware statistics, I would never expect to go so far as to ban players for using Linux.

So, considering my original intention when I signed up for the one year contract to pay for WoW and receive Diablo 3 for free, I would like to request a full cancellation of my account effective July 9th, 2012. I’d like to gracefully bow out of my guild in WoW and give away whatever items/gold I had stored.

I never did have the extra time to get Wine patched and Diablo 3 running, but now I am too disappointed with your company to even try.

DNSMasq breaks DNSBL! Fixed…

Matt — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 04:19:28 +0000

So this was driving me nuts, and was effectively stopping me from turning off GMail and using my own e-mail server with RoundCube/ZPush. Basically, I get a ton of spam. One of the reasons I’d been using GMail is because the spam detection is great.

To block spammers, there are RDNSBLs (Reverse DNS Black Lists) that when performing a reverse DNS lookup return something in the 127.0.0.0/8 range if someone is on the “bad list”, and your MTA can be configured to block senders based on these responses.

At home, I have Tomato installed on my wireless router. I’m all set to use that as a DNS server to speed up and cache DNS lookups, but there is one problem: when a response comes back as 127.0.0.x from a DNS lookup, DNSMasq doesn’t like this and simply drops it. This is very bad for a RDNSBL, as it relies on exactly those type of responses.

I’ve been tinkering with getting this working forever, and tcpdump again helped me debug an application that wasn’t giving me much info. On my web/e-mail server, I watched the output of tcpdump for port 53, and waited a while until a spam message came through. I saw that Sendmail was doing the lookup, however each time it was simply letting the “bigger boobs” or whatever spam message through. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why even my manual lookups were failing:

[root@webl001t mail]# nslookup 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org. Server: 192.168.1.1 Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer: *** Can't find 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org.: No answer

<<< Note >>>: Repeat the above ad nauseam for about a month, on and off of course

Finally, I decided it was Sendmail that was the pain in the ass, and had to be my router. Just as a hunch, I unchecked “Use internal DNS”, and after a “service network restart” on the server, now the same DNS lookups were working!

[root@webl001t mail]# nslookup 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org. Server: Address:

Non-authoritative answer: Name: 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org Address: 127.0.0.4 Name: 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org Address: 127.0.0.11

This, however, wasn’t the best solution as I’d rather not use my ISPs DNS servers if possible. But, I was finally on to something. Googling “DNSMasq DNSBL” came up with a lot of hits, and this discussion finally got me the answer.

After I added the below to my Tomato configuration under Advanced -> DNS/DHCP, I was finally good to go, still using my own DNS and also able to lookup domains with 127.0.0.0/8s in the response.

rebind-domain-ok=/rfc-ignorant.org/ rebind-domain-ok=/sorbs.net/ rebind-domain-ok=/uribl.com/ rebind-domain-ok=/surbl.org/ rebind-domain-ok=/dnswl.org/ rebind-domain-ok=/njabl.org/

[root@webl001t log]# nslookup 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org. Server: 192.168.1.1 Address: 192.168.1.1#53

Non-authoritative answer: Name: 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org Address: 127.0.0.4 Name: 45.83.75.187.zen.spamhaus.org Address: 127.0.0.11

NHL Fighting Poll – Why I love Imgur and the comments sometimes

Matt — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 20:17:58 +0000

ccmstrk17 476 points : 15 hours ago best report
–> Who was the bitch that said yes?
Studio1417 211 points : 14 hours ago
–> @ccmstrk17 Obviously Crosby. He wants to be able to pull hair without being punched in the face.

Fix for “Could not apply stored configuration for monitor” in Gnome 3

Matt — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 14:44:11 +0000

Prior to removing, you can verify that ~/.config/monitors.xml exists and has the configuration causing Gnome to show the error.

Open a terminal, and run the following:

-f ~/.config/monitors.xml && rm ~/.config/monitors.xml

That could also be a simple deletion of ~/.config/monitors.xml, but it’s more fun that way.

Student survey responses (almost) always make me smile

Matt — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:02:25 +0000

This quarter was a challenging one for me. I changed jobs and have a baby on the way, so I was struggling a bit with the class I teach part time at ITT. It is a new course, only the second quarter it has been offered, and some of the materials provided to me were … lacking.

I did something this quarter I’d never done before: out of sheer frustration for a lack of an answer key and very vague questions on the assignments, instead of the relatively strict grading I usually do, I on more than one occasion gave out 100% grades to those who turned in their homework. I felt bad about this because I felt like I was losing my integrity and doing those students who were turning in quality assignments a disservice.

But I digress. This post isn’t about what I felt like I failed at this quarter, it’s about the nice surprise I got when I looked over the student survey responses. Almost all of the responses (11 out of 14 students responded) marked “Strongly Agree” to the instructor based questions (e.g. “Can he control the class”, “Is he approachable”, “Does he encourage participation”).

And, the icing on the cake were these three comments, which literally made me smile.

Its nice to see that instructors still care about the students.


MR Moldvan is one of the best instructors i've had both at ITT tech and any other school i've been to. He is fun to listen to and play but also knows how to keep control of the class to get to business and learn. He is very knowledgeable and if something is not known he will try to figure it out for you. Outstanding Instructor.

Excellent instructor. Looking forward to having Mr. Moldvan for future classes.

Edit: The “almost” in the title is just so I don’t jinx myself. I’m sure at some point in my teaching career I will receive a bad response, but (fingers crossed) it hasn’t happened yet.