PhilipLawlor.com

THE POLITICAL CANDIDATE PLEDGE I, ________________________________________, upon signing this document, do hereby swear and affirm under penalty of forfeiture of office and wages, that I shall: 1.) Make no public statement which demeans, denigrates, or defames any active member, unit, or branch of the U.S. armed services, or the military as a whole, except in cases where an individual soldier or group of soldiers has been tried and convicted of committing a criminal offense or offenses.

2.) Never draft, endorse by signature or vote, or lend support in some other way to any piece of legislation which affords illegal immigrants any legal rights other than basic human rights, or extends to them any employment opportunities within the United States, or public services other than emergency medical assistance. (more…)

VW Appears to have dropped the ball on this one…I will attempt to make it a reality. Phil…

The New Beetle allows us to relive the days of feeling young, politically oppressed and penniless, albeit with modern mechanicals and reliability. Sort of. Today’s Beetle isn’t priced to accommodate those without some means, even on the used market. And a lot of the people who buy the new bugs know very little about anything that happened in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Nor do they care. You can expect the same from whatever version of the Microbus concept arrives in the United States are reconditioned nostalgia for a price.
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Pick a good story/theme and go for it. I will choose Konatcica for my firewall’s name.

An Apache Legend

Long, long ago, animals and trees talked with each other, but there was no fire at that time. Fox was most clever and he tried to think of a way to create fire for the world.

One day, he decided to visit the Geese, te-tl, whose cry he wished to learn how to imitate. They promised to teach him if he would fly with them. So they contrived a way to attach wings to Fox, but cautioned him never to open his eyes while flying. (more…)

I must say I am impressed by the SmoothWall firewall. It has a fantastic interface and it was an easy install. A little reading ahead of time and an understanding of firewall zones helped get my firewall knowledge converted to Smoothie talk.

I started with a PIII-400c Compaq, 256 MB RAM and a 1.5 GB HD (I will replace that with a CF card when the IDE-CF adapter comes in), 1.44 Floppy, a CDROM and 3 NIC’s. After a video card swap (AGP1 not AGP 2) and a few CDROM swaps, I found one that worked…why do I keep the broken ones…and the install went with out a hitch.

Since I have web/email servers, wifi and hardwired clients, I choose the GREEN + ORANGE + RED configuration. This was probably the hardest choice of the install. (more…)

What could make a better breakfast on a chilly winter morning than a few steaming hot biscuits slathered with fresh butter? Not much, say I. And come to think of it, a hot buttered biscuit is a pretty good way to break your fast at any time of year.

As I generally do when the focus of this weekly sermon turns to baking, pastries and such, I consulted my bride and resident baking expert, who’s been making great biscuits for a long time but nevertheless keeps on searching for ways to bring the next batch even closer to perfection than the last.

This morning’s results may have been her best yet: Tall and light, delicate in flavor and feather-light in texture, they almost floated up from our plates to bounce around on the ceiling.

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Now that the Web server is running and the database is being backed up it is time to create a failover webserver. I had grandiose dreams back in 2006 when my main web server took a dive and I needed to buy a new server. Why not get 2 identical servers and run them in parallel, I don’t have that kind of money that’s why! So along came this tiger catalog (I wont say their full name…) Look I can get 2 computers for the price of one Dell!!! BIG MISTAKE!!! One system went up w/o a problem, but the other has a new power supply, memory, MB and CPU and still it sits in my closet, I believe the MB is giving another error code, I will never buy an ABIT MB again.

After investigating the how to create failover systems, I came upon 2 articles below that are good foundations for the principle. Linux-HA is a great website that reads like a dictionary, not a how to site. So I am looking for a few articles that will guide me through the process. Here are a few: (more…)

The next task for me is to put in a real router, I have 5 IP addresses and I am currently running with 3 off the shelf Linksys Home routers. I would need to buy 2 more to use all 5 IP’s, the cable router is a 4 port Cicso which makes it impossible to use all 5 IP’s. The capabilities of these home routers are extremely limited and I have maxed out each one with how many rules they can have (20). One old PC, LRP and webmin can solve this issue for me. I have been “Mind-Planning” this for some time and this article from Linux Journal gave me the inspiration.

FYI: LRP, Linux Router Project, went off-line in 2005ish. I used LRP disks for years (1998-2006) as Seti@Home clients. I booted old computers from the floppy and loaded a Seti client from another disk and let them do all the calcs in memory. When ever the power went out I had to re-launch all systems.

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Soysauce 1 cup
Orange Juice 1/2 cup
Vinegar (Rice wine) 1/4 cup
Garlic (minced/chopped and/or whole – your choice)
Honey/ Dark Corn Syrup/ Brown Sugar (or white) 1/4 cup
5 spice 1/4 tsp (don’t put in too much!)

Optional
Oil (Peanut or veg) 1 tbsp
Chile Oil 1 tsp
Thia Chile Paste 1-3 tbsp (adj for spice)
Red chile flakes (adj for spice)
Galangal Fresh 1-2 slices diced (adj for spice)

I guess I just can’t let well enough alone. For 6 years I have been a die hard QmailRocks, Qmail Toaster fan. Finally fed up with the lack of updates to an awesome, and cumbersome, combination of software, QmailRocks.org has lost a devoted fan. QMailRocks has done a great job, but it appears that they have lost their drive to keep on top of the latest technology. I wish I can recall the article that tipped me off to Zimbra.com during the summer of 2007, I would surely give them credit here. After several months of glancing at the site and thinking “what was that kool looking email application again?”, I got brave and downloaded the open source version.

I downloaded 5.02 GA to my MythTV project server, a Dell 8100 P4 1.5ghz, 768 MB RAM desktop I bought back in 2000 when the P4 was brand new. The installation is not for the weak at heart, timid or otherwise new to Linux, however it was by no means as time intensive as the QmailRocks install, which is extremely well documented. Zimbra has done a great job of hiding and integrating all the tools needed for a proper Email environment. (more…)