sterlinganderson.net

Big sigh…

13 Days to go until Apple ships my MacBook Pro. It’s getting hard to wait. I’ve been hearing about some issues people have been dealing with. At work I’m hearing complaints about older apps and no Classic support. Since I do not use any Classic apps and

Birthday present from the kids

My kids apparently came up with this on their own. It’s great, a Darth Tater. 🙂

My family loves me.

I got an early birthday present from my wife and kids today. A 60 GB iPod! It’s very nice, I am ripping the Star Wars trilogy to add to my iTunes library right now. 🙂

Piper, our new dog!

We’ve had Piper for a few weeks now, and she is great. The kids are getting used to having a very excitable puppy around, and Sarah is doing a great job starting to train her. Check out the gallery to see some pictures of her.

Apache 2 startup item for Mac OS X

I’ve installed Apache 2.2.0 on a few systems lately so I decided to create a startup item. If you have installed Apache 2 on your Mac and would like to have it start on boot like many other services do, here’s how. It’s nearly identical

Another big change

So, now I just migrated the entire site over to Textpattern. It’s a PHP/MySQL based Content Management System (CMS). Much like all the other “blog” type systems out there. I was really impressed with how Textpattern is built though. It’s got a very robust template system. Pretty

I hate server upgrades

I’m pretty sure now why it is that I consider myself a software developer and not a system administrator. I get to do both to a degree at work and ever damn time I touch a server something goes wrong. Maybe I’ll relay the LDAP directory server upgrade

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy

We went to Wal-Mart this weekend. Wal-Mart is totally the Mos Eisley spaceport of the United States.

Here’s karma for ya.

I think the fates are conspiring against me. Or I’m just dumb. Last year the wife and I built a deck. We decided not to bother with a building permit. Between my father in-law who has been building houses for over 35 years, and my brother who has spent

New .Mac stuff

Well Apple updated their .Mac service this week. They upped storage capacity to 1 GB, which is definitely a nice change. Of course, at last count I have something close to 20 Gigs of personal data on my work PowerBook that I would love to stick on my iDisk but

I am the Strongest Link!

I am at a security conference today. Over lunch we had a little trivia contest based on the game show The Weakest Link. Guess who won? Hey! You’re right, it was me! Guess what I won? A 1 GB iPod Shuffle!

WWDC 2005

Well, the first day of the 2005 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference is drawing to a close. There is a reception a half an hour but the sessions are over. Of course, the big news is Apple is switching to Intel processors. It was kind of funny when Steve Jobs confirmed

Finally, an ISP with balls.

The largest ISP in Australia is shutting down users who are infected. So many ISPs have decided to put tighter controls on all their customers instead of just the ones who cannot keep their computers clean. It’s nice to see a company with the guts to tell their customers

Color your PowerBook Apple

I noticed in my Apache logs that there seem to be quite a few people actually looking for this so I decided to update it and make it available on the new site. Especially since the link most people are going to no longer exists. I’ve read a bit

LDAP Authentication using PHP

Authenticating against an LDAP server consists of just connecting to the server then binding using your credentials. Here’s a couple functions I use to authenticate again LDAP. The first function, ldapauthenticated, takes your uid and password and attempts to bind to the LDAP server. It returns a bool, true

First post of the year.

I haven’t posted since before Christmas. Things have been a bit hectic. So I decided to just create one largish post with a fair amount of info. Christmas was great. The kids of course had a great time. I took some time off of work since Noah was on

Happy Festivus

Happy Festivus to all. Please, leave the tinsel at home.

The numbers can be deceiving

Complaints to the FCC about what we watch on television were up to 240,000 in 2003. This is up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in 2001 and 2000. Wow, Americans are getting fed up with the crap we see on television, right? Not

Fucking snow baby!

Yes, it is finally snowing! Of course, it is above freezing and the snow is mixed with rain, but still. Its snowing!

Happy Halloween!

Well, it’s Halloween. Quite a fun holiday I must say. With 2 kids today was filled with costumes, trick or treating and hyperactivity. Presently I am watching Queen of The Damned. Recommended to me because “it is so terrible it is awesome.” So far I must pleasantly agree. This

Doh!

I had every intention of posting at least every couple days, but I have fallen behind. I would have posted earlier this week but we had a piece of network hardware fail somewhere between work and campus, where we get our internet connection. I would have just posted from home

Cool .Mac upgrade

Apple’s .Mac just got a nice little upgrade. Users now have 250 MB of storage for mail and other files, up from 15 MB for mail and 100 MB for files. Not 1 GB like some other services offer, but with the extras you get with .Mac still worth

Cat Stevens: Terrorist!

Yes, the man responsible for such songs as Peace Train, Father and Son, and Moonshadow is on the Terrorist Watch List. That’s what you get for becoming a Muslim I guess. Cat Stevens changed his name to Yusuf Islam when he converted to Islam in 1977. I wonder if

My life has made a difference

This morning while sitting at the counter eating breakfast my 5 year old daughter turned to my 2 year old son and stated “Jack, you are such a freakazoid.” It makes a father proud to hear such wisdom come out of his child’s mouth.

The Bush twins stumping for Dad

It seems Jenna and Barbara Bush have learned quite a bit from their father. From a recent article: The First Daughters seemed slightly nervous, and Jenna, who spoke first, flubbed her lines a few times while reading from a prepared speech. Oops, I lost my place,? she said at one