Rantville

Another old post, that never got the “posted” tag, but since this “evil” wont go away, here is goes, straight from the unfinished posts of the 2007 pool…

Marion Jones recent confession on the use of steriods during her career could hardly come as a suprise to anyone. Well, perhaps her mother & Mr George ‘Caveman’ Bush found it hard to believe. Those of you that atleast have a general overview of whats happening in the world of the ‘noble’ sports had to know.

Lets see, a quick 2007 run-down on those that did get caught, cause lets face it, there gotta be a damn nice percentage thats still performing souped up with a turbo or super charger installed.
I had a bored moment tonight and since my main sport is motorsport, I had to scroll through the sport sections in various national & international newspapers to get up to speed(eh!?).

I wont bother with when they used what & why, thats for those that actually care to dig into. I’ll simply list those that either got caught or confessed to using steriods during my search through newspapers, I came as far as May this year(2007), feel free to add to the list..

I’ll also skip the most obvious “sports” which seem to have no laws be it written or not, lets be very general and say any sport involving a ball for instance; Sucker/Fuzzball(pun tended), heck, Im willing to put money on the table there are golf players enjoying more than the random cocktail before they tee up.

2 wheelers:
Alberto Contador
Alejandro Valverde
Alessandro Petacchi
Alexandre Vinokourov
Andrej Kasjetsjkin
Bert Dietz
Bjarne Riis
Cristian Moreni
Danilo Di Luca
Eddy Mazzoleni
Erik Zabel
Floyd Landis
Iban Mayo
Ivan Basso
Jan Ullrich
Jörg Jaksche
Leonardo Piepoli
Matthias Kessler
Paolo Betting
Patrick Sinkewitz
Rolf Aldag
Sergij Gontsjar

Various run-a-toons:
Jaysuma Saidy Ndure
Justin Gatlin
Marion Jones
Olimpiada Ivanova
Vanya Stambolova
Yolanda Ceplak

The other nutters:
Andrej Kondrysjev
Denis Moisejev
Fetie Kasaj
Jevgenij Kostjevoj
Jürgen Pinter
Johannes Eder
Martin Tauber
Oussama Mellouli
Roland Diethart
Ruslan Otsjilov
Sergej Sjirjajev
Svetlana Fedorova
Venelina Veneva
Vladimir Varfolomejev
Wolfgang Perner
Wolfgang Rottman

Only scratching the surface, 40+ in my 30min skim-through sport head-lines, how long would the list become if I spent an entire evening I wonder?

Im suggesting the following; let them use whatever they feel like using, let each sport go as far as it can get, more value for the viewer, quicker death to the contestants.
To make it more(less?) interresting, add another division to the sports in question, add ‘extreme’ to the name. Not solely due to the fact that they push themselves as far as a ‘normal’ body can go, but also cause of the really heavy tests they have to go through at any point during their career.

Granted, some sports could never get this ‘no-limits’, security reasons come to mind. But as long as they only ruine themselves and the sport, shoot it up! I honestly dont think the steroid-hunters will ever get to the root of the evil, as long as people lack the morals(which they obviously do), there will be a cat & mouse game for all eternity.

This cant be serious you say? I’ll let you process the idea, my idea will never see the light of day, but as long as there is a potential for criminals to get away with it, they will try.. Thats just how the wacko mind of a human works, sad to say.

Dream Theater where rocking Oslo 2 years ago. Krikri & I bought tickets the minute they were out for sale, we’ll be screaming our hearts out

Its not too late for you either, get your tickets here!

*disclaimer* some of my friends, I wont mention names, have had a laugh at my so called technical gibberish. This post will be no exception *disclaimer*

Running several distributions can cause more than your average the-day-after hangover when you are due for a upgrade. Granted some are more a breeze than others, but they all got their quirks in some shape or form.

To my suprise this round the distro I was most worried about turned out to be the least of my worries.

To sum up the mix of distros running both dedicated and virtual atm I got; FreeBSD, Slackware, *ubuntu, CentOS & Gentoo. The ones I dreaded this round were CentOS(4.2->5) & Gentoo, the latter more so due to running old gcc, mysql and well, quiet a few other daemons & applications that are vital.

Although I love Gentoo it has lost terrain not to due to its capabilities & customizations, but rather well, what could be considered its biggest pros & cons. Since its a source based distro you got total control of what should be compiled, with which use flags & not to forget nailing the version of the given application at your discretion. But, and yeah, there is a but, the compile times even with Icecream chipping in can be a tool if you run several different archs. But looking aside from the day or so the boxes still running Gentoo had to use to get up to date it was really no problems. This is the first time in many years Gentoo has given me a “mainstream distro” feeling during such a big upgrade.

So all the coffee I had brewed, backups I had done, days of getting mentally ready for digging into odd errors were to no use? FreeBSD, Slackware & the various *ubuntu servers were all done, surely CentOS wouldnt be that bad?
Muhahaha, no, it wasnt, but it sure as hell beat all the previously mentioned distros by a milestone.
The fact that I run CentOS with OpenVZ did cause a few more hickups than a “vanilla” install would have, so I did get to consume most of the coffee I had prepared before I was done.

Ones you have the base systems updated/upgraded, and most of the vital daemons are up to date, then comes the fun stuff; All the other appliances/services running in the various boxes & VE’s..

This blog for instance, a Wordpress (aka WP) upgrade is no hassle, nor are most of the customizations Ive done to it. Only thing I wanted added feature wise was lightbox, had a decent hack with WPG2(v2) working earlier, but saw v3 had that on its feature list so decided to try it out. WPG2 is a integration plugin for WP to Gallery2, it has many features & uses, check out their wiki for more info.

To try & get back to topic of the post, the update cycle. With any update you got dependencies, and even more so when you add beta/rc appliancies to the pot. As I said, I wanted the lightbox feature in the blog, so brought home a SVN snapshot of WPG2v3, enabled and heh, lo’ and behold, more updates?

Sure, why not, WPG2v3 needed a newer WP, fair enough. Few minutes later, enabled WPG2v3 in latest WP(v2.2.2)… More updates? Yep, Gallery2 had to be updated, another 5 or so minutes Gallery2 v2.2.3 was in & WPG2v3 now works with lightbox.

So to sum it all up, *ubuntu, FreeBSD, Slackware & Gentoo, I still love you looong time, CentOS? Not so much, think its time to migrate OpenVZ to Gentoo or *ubuntu.

The rest of the daemons & appliances running have come a long way, most of them are a breeze to maintain & update. Be it bind, clamav, courier, dhcpd, exim, lighttpd, apache2, mysql, samba, snmpd, spamassassin and all its integrations & addons, it just works.

Summer is over, systems are all set for the winter… as always, if any of the services running under this or any of the other domains should have a hick-up, I’d appreciate a bug report.

I was reading a very well written article this morning as I enjoyed my freshly brewed java, its been on slashdot, digg & the link has travelled over many networks since it was published two days ago. It deserve every possible spread tho, so here’s to you Dave Gutteridge, you sir, made my day.

Link to article; Windows is Free

So we all(?) have spilled something on our keyboard at some point, be it water, beer, coffee or god forbid some kinda non-diet soda. Anyway, I had the great “pleasure” of dismantling my laptop for the second(!!) time within 48hours this afternoon. The first time was no accident, rather a summer cleaning to get a bit more respons from a heavily hammered keyboard, in aftermath I see that was a huuuge mistake.

FFWD 48hours…..;

Was just about to do some maintance work as I took a big sip of the coffee mug, just as the mug left my lips I felt a caugh coming, and the ms between the initiation and the java fountain I managed to turn my head a few clicks east.
Sadly, not enough to avoid my laptop, tv, nor the wall thats ~2 meters away from the chair.
Shut down the laptop & flipped it over letting it drip off while I cleaned up the chair, floor, tv and wall surrounding the mishap.

The only good thing about my clean-up 48h ago was that I could quickly dismantle my laptop and get the clean-up started. The end result is 3 keys not responding, hopefully they will start to respond again in the morning, I’d hate to take the laptop apart a third time. The keys in question are B-N-M, the mass amount of WD-40, Fluxlene, compressed air & Q-tips did get 12 of 15 keys to respond again, so there is still hope for the remaining 3.

Anyway… the pictures of the entire curse & clean follows;

EDIT:
Ok so 3 keys just didnt wanna function in the end, contacted the supplier of the laptop and asked if they had a spare keyboard, which they had! So for the neat price of 100NOK + mva I can retire the external usb keyboard.

PS Data has yet again showed themselves as a quick & service minded company. 10/10 (again!)