Stefan Lasiewski

I’ve been listening to the music on StaticBeats.com for the last several months. Their choice of music is quite excellent and varied– mostly IDM, but the station delves into Hip-hop, Ambient, & industrial tunes, convering a very wide range of sounds.

Their playlist is extensive— 90% of the music is totally new to me, and I rarely hear any song repeats after listening for weeks on end.

Each song includes a convenient link to the Artist’s or Label’s webpage, as well as a link to the album on Amazon.

Check ‘em out!

Well, according to NerdTests, I’m on the low-end of a “Computer High-Geek”. I’m at about 75% of geekdom when compared to my peers.

That’s exactly where I want to be. I’m not an uber-geek. I like to do things differently then the perceived geek stereotype. I never programmed in CP/M or assembly, and I don’t really feel the need. I don’t have any of the “Art of Computer Programming” series (but I do have the Pragmatic Books in electronic form). I go to sleep before midnight, don’t play MMORPGs, like to be outside, and I’m married to a beautiful woman and have a lovely child.

Sure, technology is fun, and I like working with technology, but it’s only a means to an end. Computers are revolutionary tools which let you do incredible things. If computers didn’t exist, I’d probably be a farmer or an engineer– I gotta build stuff.

MusicForHackers.com was one of the greatest IDM music streaming sites that ever lived. Hundreds of hours of IDM, ambient, experimental and other electronic music, all provided commercial-free.

MfH used live365.com as their main broadcast source, and had a large listenership. Sadly, they shut down in late 2003. I’m not sure of the details, but it involved the live365 fees. live365 themselves were reqired to pay the music labels and the RIAA for each song broadcast. Ironically, most of the labels represented on MusicForHackers were not members of the RIAA.

But don’t dispair! The spirit of MusicForHackers.com lives again at IntelligentDanceMusic.com. Similar feel, HUGE music list (30 days worth of music!), streaming titles and auto-refreshing playlists so you know what song is being broadcast.

I’m very happy to find that the spirit of MfH lives on. Please check it out.

I’m testing out SuSE 9.1 on VMware 4.5.2 on top of Windows XP.

VMware comes with the ‘vmware-tools’ package, which enhances performance and usability when running SuSE or any flavor of Linux under VMware.

Unfortunately, vmware-tools fails to build with the following error:

# ./vmware-config-tools.pl
(… snip …)

make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.1-111′
/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/cpName.o
/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/cpNameLinux.o
/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/dev.o
/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/dev.c:20:
/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/main.h:184: error: conflicting types for ‘kstrdup’
include/linux/slab.h:121: error: previous declaration of `kstrdup’
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only/dev.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config4/vmhgfs-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.6.1-111′
make: *** [vmhgfs.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config/vmhgfs-only’
Unable to build the vmhgfs module.

EWW! GROSS!

This is because the function ‘kstrdup’ in the vmware-tools source (in the vmhgfs module) is conflicting with the function ‘kstrdup’ in the Linux kernel source, in mm/slab.c , drivers/md/dm-ioctl.c , and a few other places.

To work around this error, you need to modify the vmware-tools source a little bit.

- Find the file vmhgfs.tar and untar it:

cd modules/source
cp vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs.tar.old
tar xvf vmhgfs.tar
cd vmhgfs-only

- in main.c main.h and driver.c , replace the string ‘kstrdup’ with something unique, like ‘vmkstrdup’.

Then tar it back up, remove your old temprary files and re-run the tool again:

cd ..
tar cf vmhgfs.tar vmhgfs-only
rm -rf vmhgfs-only

Rerun vmware-config-tools.pl and it should work!

I’ve been collecting quotes off the Internet since 1991, here are some of the gems of my collection:

“Can of worms? The can is open… the worms are everywhere.”
– Brian Wood, a coworker of mine at the Institute for Global Communications, Spring 2000
Used as my Slashdot Sig for many years.

I first saw this photo several years ago, and found it again after a long search on the web. It is one of the most horrible, yet inspiring photos that I have even seen. If I remember right, this scene takes place in Afghanistan, after the American invasion. The cities are destroyed, but the children demonstrate their magical ability to adapt to the horror and find a way to play.

There is always hope and play.

Many of you have a Yahoo account. Over the last couple years, Yahoo has been gradually changing it’s Privacy Policy to allow Yahoo to sell your name, email address, and postal address to other marketing companies.

This means you will receive more Spam in your email box and more Junk Mail and telemarketing calls at home. We all hate Spam, Junk Mail and telemarketing calls, right?

To counter this, I took a look the Yahoo Marketing Preferences page, and spliced a URL together which should turn off all of your Yahoo Marketing Communications at once. To turn off all of your Yahoo Marketing Communications, click this link, doublecheck the results, and then hit “Save Changes” for these changes to take effect.

Yahoo modifies this page a couple times a year, so I’ll need to update this URL from time to time. Please let me know if this URL fails to work for you.

I dressed up as a ’stick figure’ for Halloween 2004. Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, but I’m a little annoyed by the amount of violence and gore in many of the costumes today. I’ve always considered Halloween to be a fantasy holiday– dress up as something fun.

The inspiration for this costume hit me at Burning Man a few years ago. Many of the participants at BM like to appear real bad-ass– wearing spikes, acting it up, designing machines to tear things up, etc. That’s all well and good, but some of it can get tiring real quick. there’s also a small, but growing movement which isn’t all about attitude. Fun things. Rainbows, kid’s camp, solar camp– much more my style. I like fun.

I purchased some Electroluminescent Wire, a dozen connectors, one battery pack and a ‘Fish Driver’ from Cool Neon in Oakland, California (Friendly people, hard working, I was an early customer back in 1999).

This was Version 1– quick and dirty. I spent 8 frantic hours designing and making the whole thing in time for the trick or treators, and had to decorate the house at the same time. Next year, it’ll be better!

Right now I am working on attaching the wire to my clothing sewing some see-through plastic to the clothing (from the costume store), and will separate the wire into body segments so that I can attach the legs separately from the torso and head. I’m also designing a big happy face for the head, but stringing the eyes, a nose and a mouth is actually quite complex, and I’m not quite sure how to attach the thing to my head.

Beautiful blinking lights for your bicycle! These blades are programable and allow you to create patterns and write messages on your bicycle wheels.

Hokey Spokes - Bicycle safety lights with fun new twist

This site provides excellent instructions on how to get OpenSSH Client and Server to run on top of Cygwin.

tech.erdelynet.com: Cygwin - SSHD Setup

SSH programs like Putty are great, but nothing beats the simplicity and debugability of the commandline.

Took me forever to find this site.