Matthew Steven

Iowa's Auditors Favoring Own Parties In Ballot Ordering

Matt — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:22:22 +0000

I've discovered a serious voting fairness issue in Iowa. In a nutshell, the candidate who is listed first tends to get more votes because of the few uninformed voters who are just circling in the form to say they voted, or think they need to vote for every position whether they know the candidates or not.

Shortest Callsign Service Terminated

Matt — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:55:13 +0000

While there was some interest in my service for short, available vanity callsigns, the reaction from a minority of hams was suprisingly hostile. A few people felt very strongly that it's not appropriate to collect even a miniscule fee for the work I did to produce the service and were fairly vile and pernicious about it!

Fixing Drupal's Taxonomy Menu Modules's Tooltip / Title Clutter

Matt — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:16:43 +0000

Drupal's Taxonomy Menu is very useful for organizing your site, but its developers have added a real nuisance in the form of the title attribute to the "a" tags it generates when paired with a suckerfish menu in a theme or "nice menus" module.

Here's a patch to dismiss that problem, run it from the "modules" folder in your Drupal installation.

Cram a Single-Payer Health Care System Down My Throat, Please

Matt — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:37:13 +0000

I've lived in France, and seen first hand the efficiencies of their single-payer system.

Socialist? Hardly. They have more competition between providers, medical labs, and pharmacies than we have had for years.

Want a higher quality of service in France? Just buy a supplemental policy. Yes, rich folks and hypochondriacs, you too can do better than the rest of us by virtue of your cash in a single payer system.

Munin Ping Plugin - Changed to show one ping per graph

Matt — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:01:29 +0000

I started with the very nice ping script from the consttype blog, but I didn't like that the graph was so hard to read with multiple ping hosts that had similar latencies, and it would time out with more than three IP addresses, and that it took the best ping rather than the average. So I have changed it to use a faster ping, report a ping of 1000 when it fails to connect (so you get a spike rather than a gap) and be linkable with ping_ipaddress format.

Magic Jack, Ooma and a POTS Credit Card Terminal Working on VoIP

Matt — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:04:40 +0000

I wanted to dump Qwest. That's the root of it, I really don't dig their way of handling customers. I wanted to take advantage of my really nice internet connection, and use VoIP. The only major hurdle seemed to be the use of my credit card terminal, and the occasional fax. After a few evenings of struggling, I achieved success.

Copying a Virtual Machine lv or Partition Over SSH

Matt — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:26:36 +0000

Copying a Logical Volume or Partition over SSH

This should only be attempted on either a snapshot lvm volume, or an unmounted hard drive partition!

Using ssh and dd you can copy any LVM or (unmounted) hard drive partition over the internet to a new machine easily. You can do a "push" or "pull" copy. Here's a "push" copy:

dd if=/dev/vg0/partition-snapshot bs=1k |
ssh remotehost dd of=/dev/vg0/partition-destination bs=1k

Flex 3000 Initial Impressions, An Early Flex-3000 (F3K) Review

Matt — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:56:11 +0000

This review gives the story of my initial experience with the Flex 3000, followed by the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

XFCE4 review: After Over 10 Years with KDE, I'm Moving to XFCE, and Xubuntu!

Matt — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 15:18:02 +0000

In choosing a Linux desktop, I want something both highly stable and great looking. I stare at these monitors for 10-14 hours a day! Speed and ease of configuration/use are also important. This post is about my journey from KDE4 to XFCE4, and is also a review of sorts.

Raw Food Supplier Started with Joanna... Introducing Sirova

Matt — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:16:13 +0000

In the last few months I've been building a new site for Sirova, a group selling Raw Food. Raw foodists believe that food that hasn't been treated with chemicals and excessive heat is more nutritious than foods that have not been subjected to such treatment.