Stan’s Obligatory Blog

To make a directory into an ISO filesystem image:

mkisofs -L -a -R -o output.raw  /path/to/directory

To mount an ISO image file as a device:

bort# cd /modules
bort# ls -al *vn*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 71386 Dec 24 10:36 vn.ko
bort# kldload vn.ko
bort# vnconfig -c /dev/vn0c smoothwall-1.0.iso
bort# mount -t cd9660 /dev/vn0c /mnt

To burn a CD with the image file:

cdrecord -v speed=1 dev/dev/cd0d:6,0 output.raw

People sometimes ask me why I hate Microsoft. Well, just look at the graph below. The big green lump in the middle is all the Swen viruses that infected machines sent us. I had to spend several hours configuring the mail server here to reject them. It was incredibly annoying.

Today we had two adventures. First, we went on a short hike in Rubio Canyon. We got to see some of the remains of the old Mt. Lowe Railway. We didn’t get far enough up the trail to see the big landslide that covered the waterfalls, though.

After this, we went to Griffith Park to see the L.A. Live Steamers, but when we got there, the sign said that they were closed today. So we went next door to Travel Town to see the trains there. Lucinda had fun climbing on the trains.

After all this, we had lunch at Chevy’s in Glendale.

Mandy gave me a digital camera to experiment with. I got it to mount on FreeBSD with:

camcontrol rescan all
mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /mnt
cd /mnt/dcim/100_fuji/

Added ‘deirdre [at] sokol.com‘ and ‘owner-skeptic [at] listproc.hcf.jhu.edu‘ to the whitelist for SpamAssassin in /usr/local/etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf.

Last Saturday, we found a large praying mantis in the back yard. We put it in a little cage and brought it in for Lucinda to see. She took it to school yesterday to show everyone. Last night, we went out to the garage and caught a large spider and put that in the cage with the mantis. This morning, all that was left was a small pile of legs in the corner of the cage.

I noticed that we are getting another surge of activity on the dead dot-com page. This time it’s coming from a Spanish site at www.putalocura.com.

We went to the Pasadena History museum today to see “Next Stop – Pasadena – From Red to Gold”. This presented the history of rail transportation in Pasadena. It was pretty interesting seeing the old photos and artifacts.

Then we went to see “The Weather Underground”. This is a documentary about the Weathermen and their attempts at overthrowing the U.S. government from about 1969 to 1980. Now they are pretty much all settled middle-class folks, so it was interesting seeing them now and how they were then.

Today was the Inkslingers Ball. This is the big event of the tattoo social scene. It was a fun time.

Upgraded sendmail and openssh last night. The sendmail wasn’t working for sending out. Got a ‘permission denied’ error. The fix was to get the ’submit.cf’ file from /usr/share/sendmail/cf/cf and put that in /etc/mail.