It gets better every *single* time. I took a few photo's It's part of a larger picture. Mainly my Brother John and Cindy getting married. It was the best time. They need to invent a word that is at least an order of magnitude more awesome than "awesome" and then we'll be gettin close.

Caroline got me up early this morning, so I got to see the sunrise. It was quite a sight, a blood red sun visible through the branches of my neighbor's oak. I took a photo of it, but it didn't come out well, the sunlight blotted everything out, and the red didn't come through. I'm sure there is a way to get a good photo of the sun, I just don't know "the way". So now we have a red sun, and everything has taken on a yellowish/orange tint. Ash is snowing down on us. I didn't think it would reach us out here in Ojai, but it has.

Brother Tom and sister Maureen live very close to the Simi fire so I have been keeping a keen eye on the news reports. So far they are safe, let's hope it stays that way. This fire has a bit of weird small-worldness to it. The fire was reportedly started on the street that my friend Tom Barron lives on way out in Val Verde. It must be 20 to 30 miles away as the crow flies from my brother and sister's homes, yet, there it is knocking on their back door. Tom and Barbara made the news. They were among the first to evacuate, I hope their home survives.

This is a picture of Dorthy. Yesterday she had a pal named Dennis. We won Dorthy and Dennis at the country fair yesterday. This morning we woke up to find that Dennis was missing. LeighAnn asked if I put Spooky in the garage last night. Indeed I had, so Dennis was not in Spook's belly, but he was nowhere in sight. Eventually LeighAnn found him in the bottom of one of Caroline's toy baskets. He was wrapped up in a pom-pom which was another toy that Caroline had won yesterday. He did not look well. We will get another friend for Dorthy today and perhaps lower the water level.

NRPS

Got turned onto them while in the navy back in 84 or so... Dead, Todd Rundgren, Floyd, The Who, and all the other usual suspects cruised with us all the way around the world, but mainly up and down the Persian gulf, good thing I chose an ayatollah class ship to spend my time on... my ship, the U.S.S. Chandler (DDG 996) was built for the persian gulf nice eh?

next up... Todd (No, he's not really god... ;-) )

I really want unix on my desktop to stick. Perhaps this time it will.

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I've been waiting for this story to appear:Techdirt:Virgin Consumer Electronics

We were out in Hollywood this weekend for my brother Johnny's batchelor party and he was pointing somthing out to me...

I've got a bunch of photos to upload from the episode... started out in Tom's garage, down to Duke's in Malibu, and then the scenic route to the sunset strip. No one was jailed, but we had enough fun that we should have been. I'll probably upload the set early next week as we are leaving for John and Cindy's wedding tomorrow morning and then a cruise down to Mehico! Ariba Ariba Aye YAYAYA!

Tom has someone looking for a vpn solution between home and office. You can roll your own as we have done using IPSec on FreeBSD, or you can purchase a device for each end that has it built in. SonicWall has gotten pretty good reviews. The cheapest I've found is $485 from LanStreet. You can get it for $534 from Firewalls.com, and if you like, spend an extra $90 to have someone configure it for you (although I don't think VPN configuration is included in the fee...).

One piece of advice: stay away from netgear. I have one of their "firewalls" and it's a piece of junk and support is non existent. It is collecting dust on the shelf...

Disclaimer: I have never used a SonicWall, I don't know if it's IPSec works with NAT or dynamic IP assignment. The folks at SonicWall can probably tell you if you lay out your situation to them. If you can get them with a money back guarentee, I'd give it a try. Just don't blame me if it turns into a nightmare :-)

Update: Here is a SonicWall with wireless built in: SOHO TZW

Update 2: Looks like the WebRamp 700s is really a sonicwall at aCheaper Price However... it has been discontinued and firmware upgrades may not be available
ITShield looks quite interesting... just need a spare box with a couple of ethernet cards.

I've been using The C10K problem website as a reference point for a number of years now. Figured I might as well blog about it so I can find it easier in the future...
Speaking of C10K, I would really like to see a kevent/kqueue module for ruby. Python has one: PyKQueue. I generally use select() now, but it has some problems, i.e. timing out individual fds.

QDBM: Quick Database Manager

QDBM is a library of routines for managing a database. It looks fast and has ruby bindings.