Month: May 2006

Perry’s in San Francisco on Union Street

Went there for dinner today. It seemed to be okay … a typical sports bar, but from the outside, it looks like a nice, expensive restaurant. It’s a nice atmosphere without terribly loud music. We watched the Miami / Detroit basketball game while we were there. I had a Long Island Ice tea that got me a little buzzed when I first got there, so I don’t think that I got the best food experience while there. It’s rated pretty highly with other people’s reviews though. I think it’s definitely worth going to again.

don’t smoke someone else’s weed …

at least don’t smoke it from someone you don’t know … recently, just talked to a cop friend and he was telling me about all of the dangerous stuff out there. For all of you out there that think that the cops will confiscate your weed and smoke it themselves, you may be right, but may not be. It’s scary to smoke someone else’s stuff when they don’t know what’s in it. There could be all kinds of hallucinogens or what have you inside of it. He proceeded to tell me about a small bottle he found in someone’s pocket. It was a small clear bottle – he thought about opening it up and sniffing it, but luckily, changed his mind and took it to the crime lab. Turns out, if he did, he would’ve had a massive headache and perhaps a small at the least and death at worst. Horrible huh? He picked it up from some woman that was passed out at a rave. Interesting huh?

Video games can help cut surgical errors

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/oukoe_uk_videogames By Lisa Baertlein Wed May 24, 2:41 AM ET LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A new study suggests that people preparing for surgery ask their doctor: “Have you played your video games today?” ADVERTISEMENT Surgeons who warmed up by playing video games like “Super Monkey Ball” for 20 minutes immediately prior to performing surgical drills were faster and made fewer errors than those who did not, said Dr. James “Butch” Rosser, lead investigator on the study slated for release on Wednesday. The research involved 303 surgeons participating in a medical training course that included video games and was focussed on laparoscopic surgical procedures — which use a tiny video camera and long, slender instruments inserted through small incisions. The study was conducted by Beth Israel Medical Centre in New York City in conjunction with the National Institute on Media and the Family. Doctors were measured on their performance of the “cobra rope” drill, a standard laparoscopic training exercise used to teach how to sew up an internal wound. Researchers found that surgeons who played video games immediately before the drill completed it an average of 11 seconds faster than those who did not. Any errors committed during the training lengthened the time it took to complete the task — indicating that faster finishers made fewer mistakes. The results supported findings from a small study conducted by Rosser in 2003, which showed that doctors who grew up playing video games tended to be more efficient and less error-prone in laparoscopic training drills. That earlier study suggested that playing video games sharpened eye-hand coordination, reaction time and visual skills. Laparoscopic surgical procedures can be used on organs such as the gall bladder, uterus or the colon. Rosser, director of the Advanced Medical Technology Institute at Beth Israel, compares performing laparoscopic surgery to “trying to tie your shoe laces with three-foot-long chopsticks while watching on a TV screen.” The 51-year-old surgeon, who said he play games online since the now-primitive looking “Pong” tennis game was the rage in the 1970s, developed the Top Gun Laparoscopic Surgery Skill and Suturing Programme used in the study. Rosser said he has collected data on 5,000 doctors who have used the training programme since its 1991 debut. His ultimate goal is to clamp down on medical errors that are estimated to contribute to 100,000 deaths each year in the United States by giving surgeons training tools akin to flight simulators used by pilots. “We can’t practice on patients,” he said.]]>

Modify Apache webserver to show something else on Netcraft

I guess I was wrong. I guess the other reason might be just to look cool for geeks. So here are the steps: 1) download the source rpm for my distro.
2) install it.
rpm -ivh apache-2.0.55-3tr.src.rpm
3) make a patch. Here’s how:
cd /usr/src/trustix/sources
tar jxvf httpd-2.0.55.tar.bz2
cp -pr httpd-2.0.55 httpd-2.0.55-orig
vi httpd-2.0.55/include/ap_release.h
— then change the AP_SERVER_BASEPRODUCT to whatever you want. In my case, I used ShocKNetworK.
4) create a patch.
diff -urN httpd-2.0.55-orig/include/ap_release.h httpd-2.0.55/include/ap_release.h > shock.patch
5) add the patch to the spec file list
vi /usr/src/trustix/specs/apache.spec
added to where it lists the patches (your numbers may vary):
Patch6: shock.patch
and where it does the prep:
%patch6 -p1
(Just do a search for patches and you’ll find it)
6) build the rpm:
rpmbuild -ba /usr/src/trustix/specs/apache.spec In my case, I ran into a dependencies problem:
root@chunli /usr/src/trustix/specs# rpmbuild -ba apache.spec
error: failed build dependencies:
expat-devel is needed by apache-2.0.55-3tr
gdbm-devel is needed by apache-2.0.55-3tr So I just downloaded installed them:
swup –install expat-devel gdbm-devel
Trustix (http://www.trustix.org) has a pretty cool tool called “swup” which is similar to yum (that Fedora http://fedora.redhat.com includes or some others. If you don’t have either of these, you could easily just download the rpms from your mirrors and install them manually. So, after all of the stuff’s built and done, I found my rpms in /usr/src/trustix/rpms/i586 So, I just reinstalled it.
root@chunli /usr/src/trustix/specs# rpm -e –nodeps apache
warning: /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf saved as /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.rpmsave
root@chunli /usr/src/trustix/specs# rpm –nodeps –force -Uvh /usr/src/trustix/rpms/i586/apache-2.0.55-3tr.i586.rpm
Preparing… ########################################### [100%]
1:apache ########################################### [100%]
root@chunli /usr/src/trustix/specs# cp /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf.rpmsave /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
root@chunli /usr/src/trustix/specs# /etc/init.d/httpd restart It’s pretty simple stuff – definitely not rocket science. Something to do when you’re bored I guess. Another thing is, if you go to Netcraft and you see something like this:
ShocKNetworK/2.0.55 (Trustix Secure Linux/Linux) You can hide the version and stuff by opening the httpd.conf and adding to the Section 1: Global Environment:
ServerTokens Prod I also set
ServerSignature Off
just so that it doesn’t show up where I have some directory file listings when there’s no index file. Fun stuff, huh?]]>

followup: up at 5am! (river rafting)

http://www.whitewatervoyages.com/rivers … river.html It was rather fun and I’d definitely do it again. We’ll probably go again next month. We’re debating on how to do it though. Some want to do a class 4, but I’m arguing to do a class 3 without a guide. Hopefully, they give us our refund – we initially scheduled 5 people and only 4 went and also rented 5 wetsuits and only needed 3, so we’ll see what happens. If we don’t get the refund or credit, we might not go to the same place again. After rafting, we stopped by downtown Sacramento on the way home. Just to take a stroll around the capitol and stop by a coffee shop for a pastry/coffee and conversation for a break away from driving. Among other things we talked about, I remembered talking about genetically modified food – how it may not be fully tested, etc. I guess there’s a couple arguments for and against it. Growing corn that the bugs won’t eat might be cool so we can have more food for ourselves, but who knows? Maybe the bugs know better not to eat the corn for one reason or another. Then again, this might be a good thing as we can grow more food for less money and we can feed more people with it. It may disturb the ecosystem a bit though – perhaps creating an imbalance. When they took the wolves out of Yellowstone park because they were killing a lot of elk, they created in imbalance where all of the water was being drinken and grass was being eaten. Bring the wolves back brought back some balance. For dinner, we headed to a restaurant called Prasand. (http://www.pasand.com/index.html) It was pretty good – had a bread basket, some naan and Chicken Tikka Masala Curry. I’d recommend the restaurant – I went with Indians and they thought it was good and authentic. It was good for my taste buds as well. Our dinnertime conversation included of some talk about some of the art on the wall. I asked about one of them similar to this one:
Image
(Image pulled from: http://www.asitis.com/)
From that, I got the brief version of the story about Krishna and Arjuna. The Legend of Bagger Vance was actually a book based on that story. Cool stuff. Was exhausted – went home, showered and went to bed.]]>