So I'm an obsessive freak. I added the ignore all feature.

On the spell check front. I fixed a few small bugs, and, for Ben, made it so it selects the first word option instead of leaving it blank. I need to add the ignore all, and add to dictionary feature, but probably not 'till I get back in December.

The house is empty. Everything we own is packed away in a storage locker across town, except for our backpacking gear and assorted cloths and other travel related items. We stood in the back bedroom singing bad harmonies to the echoing hallway. Tam broke down and cried again when I told her about the note the new owners left on the white board in our basement today when they did the walk through before closing. It simply said, "Have fun in New Zealand." Strange how the weirdest things can set you off. Uther, our dog, is in a constant state of panic. He hates it when we pack. It must be because he knows we are leaving him behind. Every time we open the front door he darts for the car.

It's odd how an inanimate object like a house can take on a personality. It becomes more to you then just a roof and a shower. Over time it becomes your home.

I managed to get a working prototype of the web spell checker hacked out today. I was planning on stealing most of the javascript from SquirrelSpell, the spell checker plugin for Squirrel Mail, but I only borrowed some design ideas, and hacked out the javascript on my own. This is still very much a prototype, so it may be a bit buggy.

Take a look see: (spellcheck your own text if you desire)
Aspell is an Open Sourcee spell checker designed to eventually replacie Ispell. Its main featuree is that it does a much better jbo of coming up with possible suggestions than Ispell does. In fact recent tests shows that it even does better than Microsoft Word 97's spellp checker or just about any other spell checker I have seen. It also has support for checking (La)TeX and HTML files, and run tiem support for other non EPnglish languages. Aspell also is a library however the recommend way to use aspell is through the Pspell library as the actuel interface to the aspell library is constantly changing.
(Only tested in ie 5, will not work in netscape).

I hacked up a quick prototype for a spell checker for web forms. Here's what I have so far.

spell check proto (only tested in ie 5, will not work in netscape)

Packing, packing and more packing. Tam's doing a lot of packing. I lend moral support as needed, and make box size suggestions until she throws the tape holder at me.

I cleaned out the room in our basement that, until last Sunday, housed the server that you are currently connected. A small enterprise of web development and some hosting was had there. The room is now an empty shell of it former self. As I swept up the floor, I couldn't help but think how long its been, and how much I learned about running a small and unsuccessfully business into the ground. Only in America...well Maybe Canada, and quite possible the UK, and most of the EC, but you get the idea.

Image graciously supplied by Nick:

that's eight full inches of x-mas cheer.

I was trying download some drivers yesterday, but the site was down because of the latest virus ("W32/Nimda worm" or the "Concept Virus (CV) v.5."). It got me thinking about viruses and system security, and in a way terrorism.

I've done a bit of system administration in my day, and security is by far the hardest part. In essence, your are forced to keep your finger(s) in the dike, or at worst keep an eye on the water that is flowing trough it. One simple mistake can compromise your security. One slip up, or a little bit of laziness on your part, and you can be compromised. The malicious hacker only has to be right once. They can try exploits, probe ports, sniff packets. These thing can fail countless times, but it doesn't matter. Eventually they will find a week point in your damn, and the water will flood through. It is a simple fact that no security plan is foolproof.

This line of thinking led me to thoughts of the government's task of combatting terrorism. They have a much bigger and astronomically grander dike to keep their fingers in. There are thousands of gallons of water flowing through everyday that they have to monitor, and the price of failure on their part is much greater. They live with the burden of having to achieve a perfect record. One slip up, one mistake, and the cost is massive. The terrorist, on the other hand, needs only one success. They need to slip only one bomb on one plane, and they have won.

For those of you asking, "What should I get Mark for x-mas this year?" Ask no longer! Nothing says I love you quite like a Padre Pio stigmata watch. Or maybe the Christmas Nail. Eight inches of Christ lovin' iron. (Unfortunately, there is no photo here, but in the mail order catalog you are privileged to see what closely resembles a railroad spike with a red ribbon tied to it. Just lovely). http://www.leafletonline.com/. If Jesus was here, it's where he'd be shopping.

Yesterday was my last day at techies. I am off for a three month leave to California, New Zealand and Fiji. I am excited, but, to be honest, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed as well.

It has been a strange and sad month. We are selling our house, and everything we own is in boxes. My job has ended, and Its hard to say if techies will be around when I get back. All of these things have be overshadowed by the events on the 11th. The world has change before our eyes, and the future seems as uncertain as it ever has.

I have always believed that change was good, but it never seems to sprinkle change. Change never trickles through my life a little at a time. It's always a thunderstorm of change, a downpour of shift and deviation from the life that I have grown comfortable with.

Sometimes you need throw away the comforts of the past, to get to the future.

"It's not the end result that matters, but the journey. Keep energy flowing in a positive direction, and you'll end up where you need to be." - Mom

From Ben

Palestine school

Not much to say lately...

It would seem that someone, I'm not going to name names, has been tampering with our latest survey results. Your only cheatin' yourself, and everybody else.

I'll tell you one thing, I'm not gonna let this put a damper on my techies.com spirit. Burning through gagillions of dollars like fire through a paper warehouse has taught us dot com people how to stand up against adversity, how to rise up and say, "where sick and tired, can we please have some more funding?"

I re-added the search feature. I used htdig recently on a project I was working on, and I have become quite smitten with it, so I decided to try it out here.

Here at techies.com we hold weekly all hands meetings to update employees of current company business and engage in sharing and/or caring. The Engineering department, filled to the brim with techies spirit, has erected a techies.com flag that we plan to unfurl and fly proudly at the next all hands meeting.

We have one small problem. Who deserves the privilege of flying our techies.com colors at the next all hands. Who has the skill, intellegence and moxie to proudly unfurl our techies.com spirit to the entire company, and someday maybe the world.

This is where we turn to you humble reader. Please use the survey below to steer the fate of the techies.com colors, and maybe even the destiny of the fledgling dot com itself.

Derek	Eric	Mike
Mark	Ryan	Matt

The spirit of techies.com lives in all of us employees, and we'll take the time to express it at any given opportunity.

After a few days of hack ass coding, I have got a preliminary log admin interface up and going. This is really a test bed, a prototype of sorts, for a grander web log admin tool that Scott, Ben, Brent and I are planning on building. This interim tool, mainly for me to post stuff remotely, is a test implementing a very cool persistence framework that Scott built. I added a simple object caching piece, but the cool stuff lies in the main persistence code. So, now the pill is updated using a new front end and Scott's cool new persistence framework.

Here is a peek at the admin interface on my dev box if you are interested:

log admin
user: test
pass: test

Resulting web log

Note: these logs are cached in memory, so to see updates you either have to wait about 60 seconds for the cache to update itself, or just select the reload blog cache link.

I just inadvertently discovered my own personal emoticon:

. )

A couple of friends have been asking some simple unix/linux questions lately as they are admining there own web servers/dns servers/what-have-yous. I don't mind helping them out, and it gives me a little boost being able to help them work out the kinks. I had started to get a big head, and I was thinking I was quite the smart little computer scientist. Of course, today I bring down the list serve on my machine for the day because of a stupid permissions change I made that the people I have been "helping" wouldn't be stupid enough to make. It would seem the computer master is really a bumbling idiot. Whenever I start to get a big head there's always something right there around the corner with a huge humility mallet. WACK, take that smart guy! Not too hard to hit my over inflated head anyway.

Tam picked up the tickets for New Zealand today. I am so excited I can hardly stand it.

A palm version for Steve. He was complaining how the new design wasn't displaying well on his palm V. Now he can go back to reading "The Pill" on the can.

It fills me with a small sense of pride knowing that my sensless and endless blatherings lie comfortably beside the stack of Hustlers on Steve's bathroom floor...I guess everything has its place.