After a few run-ins with the Death Star, I have returned with a new outlook on the force.  Hopefully, that will translate into many more posts.   In the meantime and between time, check out some of the stuff Ken is working on with OLPC and WiMax over at Lathe of Dreams.

Or you can just spend some time salivating over MAKE magazine’s Arduino Gift Guide.  I know what I want to play with in the New Year.

With no one around, I’ve had a little time to focus on projects that I have yet to complete as well as pick up a few more.  I’ve spent the greater part of this week getting Nagios and Bacula installed and configured.  I’ll save the details for another posting.

Although not 100% official, I’ve been asked to take on a role in a new media venture.  I’m not completely comfortable with the work I’ll be doing.  However, I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge or a good opportunity to learn/sharpen some skills.    It’s going to be a long engagement, but I’m sure it will be a lot of fun.

Still miles to go before I sleep.

Lately, I’ve been wanting to teach my daughter to program.  Some might think it’s a little early, but she’s already a promising little geek.  She’s already mastered sarcasm, so it’s about time for her to start getting her programming chops. Personally, I believe in learning the logic involved in programming rather then being bogged down in syntax.  Learning syntax is considerably easier once you understand the concepts behind it all.

So what do I start her off on?  When I first started programming, it was with the Turtle bka  LOGO.  I can remember the feeling of accomplishment I had making the turtle draw something as simple as a box.  She pretty artistic so I figured that might make it a bit more fun for her.  After a little googling, I came across an intersting project at MIT called Scratch.  Scratch is a tile-based visual programming environment geared towards kids.   Kids can build games and animations by dragging and combining “blocks” to create the programming logic. It’s pretty cool. So far, she loves it. It didn’t take her long to have the Scratch cat running around the screen pooping streams of color.

While Scratch is only officially available for Windows and Mac.  Someone was nice enough to put together an installer for Linux.

I’m home for the next couple of days and I’m sure at some point I’ll have to connect back to the office to do some work. Previously, I would just use the  linux  version of the  Cisco  VPN client.  However, lately I’ve been having no luck with it.  It makes the connection fine, updates the resolv.conf to use the company DNS servers, but anytime I try to pull up an y host I get nothing.  I googled and found someone experiencing the same problem.  They eventually used Kvpnc instead.

I’ve installed Kvpnc in the past, but didn’t invest much time in configuring it.  It’s fairly easy to set up since you can import your Cisco pcf file. The major setback at the time was supplying the group password.  The encrypted group password is stored in the pcf file, but you need to supply KVpnc with the unencryted password.  Honestly, I don’t understand why it didn’t just pull it from the pcf.   Thankfully someone was nice enough to come up with a Cisco vpnclient password decoder.  Using the decrypted password, I was able to connect to the office network with no problems.