Saturday, December 25, 2004

Xmas 2004

Another busy holiday at our house.

Christmas Tree 2004Kids Xmas 2004Two new mommies taking their babies for a walk

After months of hounding him, Griffin made me this adorable Tux pengin christmas ornament for his Secret Santa.

Clay Tux by Griffin
Clay Tux by Griffin (side view)

Monday, December 20, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-12-20

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-12-16

Saturday, December 4, 2004

Want to be noticed? Buy *this* truck

It is time to sell The Beast. We replaced it with a car but didn't trade it in, although we probably should have.

Everyone in town recognized me in that big yellow truck taking the kids to daycare, shopping, going to work and now it can be yours.

The Beast!



Favorite memory of The Beast -- Back in early December 1999 (leading up to big Y2K panic) and when Wendy was very pregnant with Emma, we took the five other kids out to choose their
own christmas tree ornament and look at some christmas tree lights. Driving back down
Contential Blvd, three deer ran across the road and I clipped the little one. There is still
a small dent in the front from where the head it it, but it got up and took off into the woods.
We stopped and called the police in case they wanted to take a look for the injured animal. After about 10 minutes of waiting and assuring the kids that "No, Daddy didn't just hit Rudolf", the
police show up. I roll down the window and the policeman sticks his head in and says: "So I hear you just killed Rudolf." Tears start from the little ones.

The officer was nice enough to explain to the kids that, no, Daddy didn't kill Rudolf.

Ah, holiday memories!

Now go bid on The Beast on Ebay

Friday, November 26, 2004

comment spam

The daily comment spam is getting worse and worse -- easily 100+ per day. It never makes it to the website because WordPress is setup so I need to approve all postings, but it is a PITA to weed
through the spam to find the occasionally real comments.

I've seen on Jeremy Zawodny's blog that in order to post, you need to type *his* first name in one of the forms. Not rocket science if a human is making the posting, but perhaps just difficult enough for the spammer's script to fail. The other nice thing is you can always change the question to something equally as trival. Say, "what the the color of the sky?" or "3141592 is my favorite number, what is my favorite number?"

Jeff Barr posted an entry on exactly how to do that in Wordpress. The only thing that was a little tricky was the change to wp-comments-post.php was on line 22 in my copy of the file. The difference because the file is a DOS format and emacs displayed it with ^M^M at the end of each line (essentially halving the
number of line Jeff saw.

The changes work for me...

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

NH State site with community profiles

This is one of those hard to find, but handy URLs that are so common with government sites.

The New Hampshire Employment Security's Economic and labor Market information Bureau's site has a breakdown useful information about each town/city in the state.

NH Community Profiles

I found this link in the weekly free newspaper, the Merrimack News Connection.

Saturday, November 13, 2004

listening to podcasts on a less than optimal mp3 player

Today some of the kids have a 5 hour fencing competition and I wanted to get caught up listening to some podcasts. The problem is the cheap little RCA Lyra 1080B has a couple problems with listening to long mp3s. When you pause playback for more than a few minutes, the device turns off, but on restart it resets to the beginning of the mp3. Also there is no way forward ahead within an mp3.

So looked around google for a way to split mp3s into smaller chunks and found
mp3splt.

This is how I load up the mp3 player with podcasts now:

Copy those 'casts I want to a tmp directory and then:

mp3splt -f -a -t 5.0 *.mp3

Which splits all the mp3s in the current directory into 5 minute chunks.

Then copy those chunks to the player mounted on /mnt:


find . -name "*00.mp3" -printf 'cp -v "%p" /mnt n' | sh


Off to the competition!

[update: Griffin got 3rd and Trevor 6th in novice Epee 12 and under while
Spencer came in 4th for 13 and older]

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Be nice to me today

I gave blood at work.

American Red Cross -- Don’t today!

Some kind of personal best -- from signing in to heading back to the office -- a total of 1:15m.

And I got a free t-shirt out of the deal.

Tuesday, November 2, 2004

I voted

Around 10am in Merrimack, it took perhaps all of 15 minutes to vote. I've put some photos over on http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcn

Wendy, doing GOTV (Get Out The Vote) for Kerry/Edwards, has been on the road since 5:30am getting signs out to folks, voter rolls to the poll watchers, names and maps to canvasser.

Busy, busy, busy.

Monday, November 1, 2004

Bunch of photos from yesterday's John Kerry Rally in Manchester's City Hall Plaza

I uploaded a bunch of new photos from yesterday's event:

John Kerry Rally, Manchester NH (31-Oct-2004)

Photos include:

* Granny D Haddock
* Red Sox management ( Red Sox co-owner John Henry, who was joined by partner Tom Werner and general manager Theo Epstein)
* Lou D'Alessandro
* Bunch of photos of John Kerry (natch)
* Couple of photos of Senator George Mitchell (here you go Juri of Harvard)
* Spencer in a clown suit with a sign "No more clowns in the White House"
* All the kids in halloween costume
* A photographer (from JK campaign?) taking pictures of the kids after the event (Who are you and where can I get copies?)
* Snipers on the Manchester City Hall Plaza clocktown and building (which Trevor thinks is such a cool job)

Sunday, October 31, 2004

Just back from the John Kerry Rally in Manchester, NH

A busy, busy day --- we've been up in Manchester since 11am and just got back with enough time to throw some dinner at the kids and send them out for trick-or-treating.

The ol' digital camera decided it no longer liked the CF SanDisk (blinky 'CF') so I was forced to rely on the limited internal memory and take photos at the lowest quality. Fortunately I had the ol' Minolta SLR, which was working and took three rolls, but those will have to wait until tomorrow.

At this rally I took some notes between keeping a eye on the kids -- Wendy had a 'pink ticket' which means she got to stand up on stage with Kerry and a ton of other folks.

Right now most of the kids are our prowling the neighborhood so a writeup will have to wait unti later. There were a ton of people there!

Head over to flickr to see some kinda crappy photos from the event.

Fear my StrongBad Pumpkin!

StrongBad pumpkin 2004

Saturday, October 30, 2004

John Kerry in Manchester, NH tomorrow

George W. Bush was in Manchester at the Verizon Center on Monday and word is they were hoping for 12,000 but only 7,000 showed up! The gossip at the kids soccer game today was lots of people didn't bother to go when they heard Red Sox pitcher Kurt Schilling backed out at the last moment. Weakening Bush support in NH!

From the flyer:

- - -

See John Kerry for the final New Hampshire Rally

Sunday, October 31st

Gates open at 12:00

City Hall Plaza, Manchester

900 Elm Street

Featuring:

* Musical Guests Bruce Hornsby
* Children's Halloween Costume Content
* Candy and Free Kerry Gear

Please limit personal items

No Bags. No Signs. No Umbrellas.

For more information:

Manchester Democratic Headquarters

311 Lincoln Street

(603) 622-2549

- - -

I strongly recommend that you call the headquarters and try to get tickets for the indoor portion.

Here are some directions to City Hall Plaza.


[ Yahoo! Maps ]
Directions to
900 Elm St
Manchester, NH 03101-2007

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Digital photo of last night's lunar eclipse

This photo I took with an HP 318 digital camera came out much better than
those taken with the SLR.





A coworker said "gee, I just used my timer to take the picture so I don't have the jitter". D'oh!

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Creating an audio blog reply using Festival

I listened to Dave Winer's Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble's voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft's voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I'm creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as 'nozzel', so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like 'dec-tork' and 'december' (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3



* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3

Monday, October 25, 2004

Wendy introduces John Kerry at rally in Dover, NH

This morning Wendy had the honor to introduce John Kerry at this Dover, NH rally.

Check out some of these photos:

John Kerry rally in Dover, NH (25-Oct-2004)

He was on fire today!

[update 27-Oct-2004]

Check out this picture on JohnKerry.com -- Wendy looks so serious. Here is a taste:

See johnkerry.com for larger image

Thanks to Shannon for this picture:

John Kerry hugs Wendy Thomas after she introduces him in Dover, NH

Some other coverage of the event
can be found on Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?

Friday, October 22, 2004

Installing ubuntu 4.10 on an Compaq Armada m700 laptop

In addition to a work-provided nc6000, I also have personal Compaq Armada M700 and gave ubuntu 4.10 a install this evening.

Absolutely no problem installing or having X properly configured! One nice touch is the installer found the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA card and configured it so the network was available immediately on boot.

Installing ubuntu 4.10 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn't find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don't seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless -- works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth -- don't have any other bluetooth devices, haven't tried
* IR -- haven't tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic -- works
* SD bay -- works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it's menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu...

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn't loaded. Using 'sudo network-admin' fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing -- watch here for more info]

Thursday, October 21, 2004

quick anti-Bush joke from the internets

Q: What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?

A: Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-17

Friday, October 15, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-15

The first year we put out political signs...

We've been in our home 11 years and our mailbox has been fine the whole time. This is first year we put out political signs and our mailbox is vandalized. Hmm.

Well, now in addition to a couple Kerry/Edwards, there are now signs for Pam Green and Deborah Pignatelli

Monday, October 11, 2004

Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-05

Saturday, October 2, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-02

  • HP/MySQL Database Server Solutions --
    This document discusses how the HP ProLiant server is a excellent Industry Standard platform for creating a Linux-based MySQL database server. Scale-out and high availability are possible using Intel® Xeon®, AMD Opteron and HP Blade technologies. Using Tagged as: [hp linux selfpromotion]

Thursday, September 30, 2004

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-29

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-28

  • Channel9 Forums --
    Aggregation of people working for Microsoft Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet Mozilla --
    Aggregation of people working on Mozilla Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet Perl --
    Aggregation of people working on Perl Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet Sun --
    Aggregation of people working for Sun Microsystems Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet Apache --
    Aggregation of people working on Apache Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • planet n --
    Aggregation of people working for Novell Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet Planet! --
    Yet another web-based aggregator. Edit config file to add new feeds, good for set-and-forget sites like PlanetGnome, PlanetSUN, etc Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

  • Planet SuSE --
    Aggregation of people working for SuSE (a subset of Novell) Tagged as: [AggregatedBlogs RSS]

Monday, September 27, 2004

Emma's own "John Kerry" sign

Emma just loves the Kerry/Edwards sign she made Saturday at the headquarters.

She knows the letters are L E 5 4 and E S 5 4 and that it says "John Kerry".

Emma’s own John Kerry signEmma with official John Kerry sign

Sunday, September 26, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-26

  • Goatse Rescue Floppy --
    If you don't know what Goatse is, don't ask and certainly don't download this 'rescue' disk ;-) Not safe for kids or those with weak stomaches. Tagged as: [humor reference]

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-25

Making signs for Kerry/Edwards

In preparation for Sunday/Monday's visit to NH by John Edwards, the entire family helped the [Kerry/Edwards](http://blog.johnkerry.com/) campaign headquarters in Manchester make some signs. Tomorrow Wendy is attending a NH campaign meeting and help drive some national campaign staff and/or press around.

Griffin, Trevor and Spencer took most of these photos:

John Kerry Headquarters in Manchester, NHSigns for Kerry/EdwardsMore signs for Kerry/EdwardsStill more signs!NH loves KerryWe love you John (Spencer pointed out that it could be reused when Kerry visits)John Edwards NH Loves U

Friday, September 24, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-24

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-23

1848 letter from Capt John Bright to brother

Last week I bought an old letter on [Ebay](http://www.ebay.com) from Capt John Bright of Cambridge, MA to his brother in 1848.

[Last year other strangers pointed me](http://nozell.com/blog/index.php?s=gideon+taylor&submit=Search) to an Ebay auction for a [Gideon Taylor/Sarah Burr 1857](http://www.nozell.com/genealogy/gideon-taylor-sarah-burr-family-bible/), I was alerted to the auction by some stranger who suggested that it may be related to my wife's BRIGHT line.

Seemed like a good deal at $15.

Here are some smaller versions of the scans I made tonight. Drop me some email if you want a copy of each of the 9M files.

Front of 1848 letter from Captain John Bright to brother

Front of 1848 letter from Captain John Bright to brother

The seller was nice enough to include a photo copy of some background info from "U.S. Naval Institute" by Carl C. Cutter (1961), pg 484 has a line from the "Queens of the Western Ocean", Center line, Ripley Center & Co, 73 South St., Mobile Agents est 1824. (In Boston? NYC?)

Year Vessel Tons Masters
1824 Bg. Susquehanna 207 J. Bright

The column with the "Bg." is untitled, but the other entries are "Sp.", "Sch.", and "Bk." Some type of ship type? (eg. Schooner)

Max Cleland at Kerry/Edwards event

I was downloading images off of the camera and found this picture of [Max](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Cleland) [Cleland](http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Max_Cleland)
that my wife took at a [Kerry/Edwards](http://www.johnkerry.com/index.html)
event last week in Manchester, NH.

Max Cleland in Manchester, NH (2004-09-13)

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-22

  • del.icio.us --
    blog about del.icio.us Tagged as: [blog delicious]

looking for a WordPress, Markup RSS bug

Here is a link: [link](http://www.somewhere.com/With_Underscore/foo.html)

Which is a link to http://www.somewhere.com/With_Underscore/foo.html

The problem is the resulting RSS contains something like this:

a href="http://www.somewhere.com/With_Underscore/foo.html

Where there is an ampersand pound 95 semicolon in the above line which is not valid in
an href.


This is a by-hand link that uses underscore: with real under

14th anniversary

They went by quickly.

height="217" alt="Marc and Wendy circa 1989" />

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-21

IT Conversations and other interesting listening

Yesterday I listened to [Adam Curry's](http://live.curry.com/) Daily Source Code and the Dave Winer collaboration, [Trade Secrets](http://secrets.scripting.com/).

Last night poked around with [ipodder.org](http://www.ipodder.org) and downloaded all the 'stock' content that came with the [get_enclosures.pl](http://www.ipodder.org/) script.

IT Conversations audio is a gold mine! The only problem is not having enough time to listen to everything that interests me.

I don't have an ipod (or an [Apple ipod + HP](http://h10049.www1.hp.com/music/us/en/ipod_flash.html)), but the car does have a CD player, so get_enclosures may need to be hacked to burn a daily CD.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-20

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-19

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-18

Friday, September 17, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-17

Yet Another DailyDelicious hack for WordPress

I wanted a nice simple way to mirror my daily bookmarks that I've added to [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us) into [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org)

Stephen Eyre's [dailydelicious](http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt) was close, but
not exactly they way I wanted it. He used the RSS feed, but that doesn't give a good daily cutoff.

So, I present Yet Another Daily Delicious php script: [yadd.php](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/yadd-1.0.TXT).

It asks for just today's bookmarks using the published api, parses the XML, generates nicely formatted HTML and creates a WordPress entry.

Here is the writeup from the code:
- - -


This is yadd.php V1.0 by Marc Nozell (marc@nozell.com) based on
Stephen Eyre's dailydelicious
(http://www.dot-totally.co.uk/dailydelicious.txt)

See http://www.nozell.com/blog/ for the latest version of
'yet another daily delicious' (yadd.php)

USAGE:

1) Edit the section below. At the very least use your del.icio.us
username and password ($del_user/$del_password)

2) Put there file somewhere on the server where you run WordPress.

3) Arrange for this page to be hit once a day, say 11:30ish your
local time. del.icio.us seems to track UTC so depending on which
timezone you live in, some bookmarks from your yesterday may show
up. Consider using a simple cronjob that looks like this:

30 23 * * * $HOME/bin/yadd.sh

where yadd.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
curl http://www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

4) In the morning edit the entry if you wish. I've tried to generate
pretty HTML so it will be simple to edit the entry.

THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND

Anyone that hits the URL for this script will cause your current
bookmarks to be dumped into WordPress. Clearly this is not
desirable.

You have some options. The easiest is to keep this URL 'secret'.
Name it something unusual and put it in a non-obvious place.
Remember that if you display your web hit stats, the url will be
exposed. A better solution to use .htaccess to limit access. If
you do that remember to update the url wget uses to include the
username/password, something like this:
curl http://someuser:somepassword@www.yoursite.com/yadd.php

Enjoy,

-marc

funny NSFW story

A few weeks ago I was at work reading a blog on Microsoft's developer's blog site about some lessons learned on a particular development project. Boring project management stuff really. The second comment was along the lines of:

"Good stuff. I've just finished defending my masters paper on this same topic. Click here to read it http://www.some-reasonable-looking-site/lastmeasure"

Bam! Tons of popups, moving, resizing windows, really disturbing porn/violent images all over the place, but the best part was the sound -- at the loudest volume -- 'HEY EVERYBODY! I'M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!' repeated over and over and over.

Fortunately I had headphones on at the time and running Firefox on Linux, so killing it was simple.

Sadly, it appears the MS blogger has removed the comment from his site and I've X'ed out the
offending site. However if you are clever with google, you'll be able to find where it has moved to.

Here is the email I passed on to some (now former) friends....


Subject: Hey everybuddy!

Here is a cool new site. Make sure you have the volume turned way
up -- it may be hard to hear.

http://XXX.XX/lastmeasure/

It works best in a work environment.

NOT!

Best viewed NOT at work and with the headphones on.

I got the link from one of the comments
of the article "21 Rules of Thumb â€Å“ How Microsoft develops its Software"
http://blogs.msdn.com/David_Gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/164849.aspx

This is a much more obnoxious version of the previous URL --
http://XXX.XXXXXXX.XXX/~lysol/lm.swf

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-16

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-09-15

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Sample of Griffin's stop motion movies

Griffin was the sole director, producer, photographer and set designer for this mini-movie.

All I did was knock down the resolution for the web version (the original is 20M, this is only 2M)
and run the magic command to convert it to an animated GIF image (convert -delay 20 *.jpg output.gif).

[Check it out!](http://www.nozell.com/marc/blog/data/griffin-stop-motion-snake-video-small-format.gif)

Send kudos to Griffin by sending email to his first name @ his last name dot com

Friday, September 10, 2004

making stop-motion videos

This evening Griffin and I made some stop-motion videos using some clay figures he made and my HP camera.

[Take a look](http://www.nozell.com/blog/data/griffin-video-02.avi)

This is how we did it:

* Set the HP 318 Camera to the lowest resolution, turn off flash
* Screw in the little tripod I got years ago for one of the first webcams
* Have plenty of light
* Take about 90+ photos
* dump onto my Linux/Debian laptop (gphoto2 --get-all-files)
* Convert to an animated gif ( convert -delay 10 IM*.jpg out.gif) with a 10/100 second delay. Realize it is a huge 20M file
* Convert to AVI ( mencoder "mf://IM*.jpg" -mf type=jpg:fps=7 -ovc lavc -o output.avi) which gives a much smaller (~1M) file.

Repeat until the batteries need to be recharged.

Wednesday, September 8, 2004

Back to School tomorrow!

In honor five of our six kids heading to the school bus tomorrow, I present this picture of me, perhaps the day before *I* had to go back to school.



On the whole, I'd rather read my comic book

Originally uploaded by marcn.





On the whole, I'd rather read my comic books

Have fun kids! Mom & I have been looking forward to this day for about 13 weeks...

Saturday, September 4, 2004

flickr upload for gnome's nautilus

This evening I noticed that there was a new perl module in CPAN by CPB Flickr::Upload. So I hacked together a Nautilus script to integrate Flickr.com uploads with the Gnome file manager.

If you want to give it a try,

* Install the perl module Flickr::Upload using either CPAN or download from http://search.cpan.org/~cpb/
* Grab this script
* put it in your ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts directory
* edit the following lines for your own use:


my $FLICKREMAIL = 'your-flickr@email-address-here.com';
my $FLICKRPASSWORD = 'somesekretword';
my $FLICKRTAGS = 'i like traffic lights'; # space separated list


It works find on my debian/sarge laptop, but should work fine on any other gnome desktop.

Patches would be welcome.

Wednesday, September 1, 2004

HP's Technology at Work Linux edition

HP has a new website to track all things Linux @ hp. You can sign up for Driver, Patch, Security and Support alerts/notifications for just specific products.

[Technology at Work Linux edition](http://www.hp.com/go/linuxnews) (http://www.hp.com/go/linuxnews)

Yeah, yeah, I work at HP, but its still is a handy website.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

festival speech synthesis on my debian laptop

Last night I was mucking around with festival, the text to speech tool (ala the old DECtalk. On my [laptop](http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/321957-64295-89315-321838-f33-367367.html) it was speaking too fast.

The solution is found in the Festival FAQ: Running Festival


Create the file festival/lib/siteinit.scm (if you don't already have it) and add the following






(Parameter.set 'Audio_Method 'Audio_Command)

(Parameter.set 'Audio_Command "sox -t raw -sw -r $SR $FILE -c2 -t ossdsp /dev/dsp")




On debian, you put those two lines in /etc/festival.scm

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Saw some Olympians today at Gymnastics Village

At noon time [Gymnastics Village](http://www.gymnasticsvillage.com) had a clinic taught by three former female Olympic gymnastics team members -- Tasha Swikert, Hollie Vise and someone whose name I didn't catch. Mary Lee Tracy, the Women's International team coach was also there promoting _Rock with the Stars from Athens_ at the Whittemore Center next week. It was really focused on just the girls, so we didn't stay too long after buying tickets to the show for Trevor and a parent to be determined later.

Here are some photos:

Tasha Swikert, Hollie Vise and someone whose name I didn't catch (drop me a note)

Tasha Swikert, Hollie Vise and ? at Gymnastics Village (2004-08-24)

Hollie Vise showing the girls how to stretch

Hollie Vise at Gymnastics Village

Thursday, August 19, 2004

John Kerry in Derry, NH today

Wendy and the kids were invited to a John Kerry house party today in Derry, NH. Griffin, the budding artist/photographer took these pictures. Addy was disappointed Mrs Heinz-Kerry wasn't there, but thought she drove Kerry there. (She didn't) Trevor has decided he wants to be one of those cool secret service men, one of which looked like Agent Smith except for his hair.

Here is the press release for the event:
[Kerry Outlines Health Care Plan to Bring Down Costs for Families, Strengthen the Economy and Create Jobs](http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2004_0819a.html)

Wendy estimated there were a few hundred people there to listen. Apparently some of the neighbors were not Kerry supporters and had a bunch of W'04 posters on their lawns





Wednesday, August 18, 2004

Alpha RIP

HP Logo [
Hewlett-Packard Co. will release the final processor upgrade for its AlphaServer line of Unix servers on Monday.
](http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/16/HNendofalpha_1.html)

Goodbye old friend.

The DEC Alpha Processor 1992-2004 RIP

[Check out the tombstone generator](http://tombstone.dogcrap.net/tombstone.php)

Monday, August 16, 2004

HP, Motorola, Debian Linux

HP LogoHP just won a large contract with Motorola which includes Debian running on Itanium.

From InternetNews, [HP Get Call for Carriers](http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3395271)

"Virtually each of the network equipment providers is migrating to next-generation platforms based on Linux," Joy King, HP director of its worldwide marketing for its network and service provider business, told internetnews.com.


HP has modified the Debian Linux distribution to optimize it for carrier grade systems


Also in CNET, [Motorola and HP in Linux tie-up](http://news.com.com/Motorola+and+HP+in+Linux+tie-up/2100-1039_3-5311739.html) and Information Week [Motorola To Incorporate Integrity Systems Into 3G Call Path](http://informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=29100410)

Friday, August 13, 2004

messing around with tiles

Over on taprats there is a cool java applet that lets you create geometric patterns in the Islamic style.

Here is the original. The app doesn't save to disk, so I did an image grab with gimp and
edited it down.

original tesselation

This is an attempt to get just the minimal tile portion, but it still makes a nice tile on the background.

Tile for background

Donate blood

The Red Cross came to work this week and I've finally had the nerve to look at the needle while in my arm. Okay, so I had the [phlebotomist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_donation) take the photo and I looked later.


About a inch of needle is in my arm


20+ years of donating and the thought still wigs me out.

Saturday, July 31, 2004

New favorite T-Shirt

Wendy picked up a T-shirt at a yard sale today. It says:


one by one
my children
steal my sanity

Monday, July 26, 2004

Cool, funky mixes

When I was hacking on a way to migrate from [blosxom](http://www.blosxom.com) to [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org) I was hanging out in the #wordpress channel on IRC and met [drDave](http://unknowngenius.com/) who has made some cool music mixes. I've burned them into CD for the drive home and this weekend the older boys wanted a copy for their CD player. My favorite so far is retrogressive2.mpg, but drDave_MiniMix_I.mp3 is bopping too.

Check it out: [Dr Dave's Blog](http://unknowngenius.com/blog) (Hint: navigate over to the Online Empire section on the right side)

Thanks for the hours of tunes drDave!

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

silly email disclaimer from NH Governor's office

A coworker used the NH.gov webform to send a comment to Craig Benson, NH Governer.

Check out this disclaimer that was at the end of the response.


This email and any attachments are confidential and are intended solely for the use of the individual to whom it is addressed. If you are not the addressee or the person who delivers email to the intended recipient, be advised that you have received this email in error. Any use, dissemination, forwarding, printing or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. If you received this email in error, please immediately notify the sender by replying to it and then delete the email. Thank you.


Any use is strictly prohibited? No printing?! Doesn't is seem a bit excessive since this is coming from a government employee?

Saw a hawk in Nashua

These pictures were taken looking through the window of my office building.

I've never seen a hawk just standing on the ground.

Hawk 1



Hawk 3


It has been a good summer for wild life sightings for the family. We've seen a couple of red foxes in town, a young black bear running across the Kangamangus Highway, a large snapping turtle
in Amherst, garter snakes in our yard, a nest of woodpeckers in a neighbor's tree and even a squirrel raiding and eating a baby bird.

I'll try to dig up the turtle pictures. Too many digital photos to search through....

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

HOWTO migrate from blosxom to wordpress

For my piece of mind, please backup your wordpress database before proceeding. I don't want my instructions to cause you to lose data.

  • Grab my mt blosxom flavor files and add to your $datadir. Right-click to save these files:
    content_type.mt date.mt, foot.mt , head.mt, story.mt

  • Edit story.mt and change the line "AUTHOR: marc" to whatever
    username you will be using.

  • If you are using the blosxom clicktrack plugin (00clicktrack),
    disable it.

  • Visit your blosxom site using the mt flavor:
    http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt and save it into a
    file named import in your wp-admin directory. You may want to try
    this: lynx -dump http://yoursite.local/cgi-bin/blosxom?flav=mt >
    wp-admin/import.txt

  • Take a look at the import.txt file you just created. There are some
    things you may want to fix now rather than after the import.
    • Lines are wrapped at 79 characters, so long URLs or entry titles may be broken.

    • If you have a habit of using a bunch of dashes to separate text, the importer
      may get confused and think it is the beginning of a new entry. Consider replacing
      - with =

    • All the categories will be something like /nh (based on the pathname). You may want
      to remove the leading slash. You can fix this after import and well as build up
      a category hierarchy, so it isn't a big deal.




  • Follow the standard WordPress instructions for import-mt.php.


  • If you don't like your categories named with a leading slash (eg:
    /nh), then edit your new WordPress categories.


  • Start going through your posts and clean up any messes...


I'm migrating from blosxom to wordpress

My webhoster just setup MySQL access for my site so tonight I'm migrating.

Rael has done a great job with Blosxom, but I wanted blogging engine was web-based (del.icio.us shows how nice such interface can be) and that had a large active development community.

The fact that my webhoster doesn't charge extra for MySQL is a plus too.

Once I've migrated I'll post the blosxom flavor I wrote to help the migration. It basically generates a Movable Type export format that WordPress can import using import-mt.php.

Take a look and then bookmark this new location: http://www.nozell.com/blog

Tuesday, July 6, 2004

Let's just say we are happy

Go John Go!



Nozell/Thomas family with John Kerry


Go John Go!



Nozell/Thomas family with John Edwards

Monday, July 5, 2004

Alien images from last night!

Some pictures I took last night around dusk.




The Alien's scout ship! (04Jul2004)



The Mothership lands! (04Jul2004)



Some unrelated images I took at the same time (04Jul2004)






Okay, so digital cameras don't do a good job catching fireworks (04Jul2004)



The best part about fireworks in Merrimack is we can see them from the
neighbor's driveway and walk 30 seconds and be home. The worst part
is always the bugs...