For Christmas, I made Banana Bread for friends, co-workers and neighbors. I really _NEVER_ want to see a loaf of it again, at this point. Anyways, for posterity, here's the recipe (from the Food Network website.

1 cup granulated sugar
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature
2 large eggs
3 ripe bananas
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt

Depiction of the differences between Slot machines and E-Voting machines. E-Voting machines, to date, have a horrible record that should shame EVERY computer programmer/scientist in the US.

There is no reason (other than you know...political and private industry!) that we cannot develop a system that is reliable and verifiable. We can develop systems for gambling money, sending secure messages, destroying large parts of our planet, and landing on another planet altogether, and yes we can't do something as track if you pick a series of A vs. B choices. I call BULLSHIT.

=> tftp $dbtaddr $dtbfile
Speed: 1000, full duplex
Using eTSEC1 device
TFTP from server 10.1.1.1; our IP address is 10.1.1.2
Filename '8544ds/uImage.uboot'.
Load address: 0x8544d
Loading: #################################################################
#################################################################
#################################################################
#################################################################
#################################################################

"FreeNAS is a free NAS (Network-Attached Storage) server, supporting: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, AFP, RSYNC, iSCSI protocols, S.M.A.R.T., local user authentication, Software RAID (0,1,5) with a Full WEB configuration interface. FreeNAS takes less than 32MB once installed on Compact Flash, hard drive or USB key. "

Power has been restored in my neighborhood, and surrounding areas. All my gear has come back up without too many problem, though a hard drive has been flaky ever since. Anyways, welcome back to this sentry, Dave.

Some 10 days after Ike, my little community still has no power. I have, however, had the luxury of being able to find and purchase a generator and (as of yesterday) a little window air conditioner. Basically, my bedroom is a little apartment within my house.

Centerpoint says, "After Thursday." Yep...not BY Thursday, just some nebulous future date. One day, I will leave the stone age.

I've posted some pics here.

So, we got hit by Ike pretty hard, but missed a bulk of the damage. My neighborhood has only minor debris, and a few trees that have fallen but not caused any damage. The neighborhood 50' behind my house looks like a war zone--just about every third tree down, most of them hitting houses or cars along the way.

No power in most of the area. However, HP is open for business, so I took my UPSs to work to get them nice and charged up.

Also, the weather is GORGEOUS today. High 70s with a nice breeze. NO HUMIDITY.

At work, we're endeavoring on a project that involves low level switch programming. This article, titled "Ethernet for Programers" was posted to Reddit or Digg, and looks super useful. It's not just about packets and frames, but includes microcontrollers, SPI interfaces and the sort.

I've been setting up an Debian image that can be used by a number of developers at work. The developers need X installed, but not necessarily running on the server--that way they can use it for remote desktop environments back to their local computers, thin clients, etc...

In looking for the "Debian Way" to do this, I found what I needed on the Debian Tips page.

Specifically, do the following:

cd /etc/init.d
update-rc.d -f ?dm remove

I've recently run into a handful of systems that have thrown up an error when trying to sync the system clock to the hardware clock:

inara:~# hwclock --systohc
select() to /dev/rtc to wait for clock tick timed out

I found a couple of useful pages with a work around solution, which is to provide an additional command line parameter to the hwclock command, specifically "--directisa." Depending on your distribution you may be able to add this to /etc/default/clock, or /etc/init.d/hwclock.sh to include the fix permanently.