Heather and Jon have inspired me to try my hand at making fresh pesto from my basil plants.  So tonight was the night!  I cut my basil plants down to their lowest leaves and managed to collect 3 cups of basil.  One recipe, and a blender later we have home made pesto.  On first taste it is a wee bit salty but on second taste it is delicious.  Now to make some gnocchi…

The picture doesn’t do it justice, it is intensely green. So GREEN

The Pesto Recipe

• 2 cups packed fresh basil
• Just over a 1/4 cup of olive oil
• 1-2 cloves garlic
• 1/2 tsp salt
• Pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup parmesan cheese (bulk section type stuff)
• 3 tblsns pine nuts or blanched almonds
• 2 tblspns freshly grated pecorino romano cheese (or fresh parmesan from a chunk of cheese)

Blend it all together, taste, alter to what you like, but that is how we do ours!

I didn’t have any pecorino romano cheese so I just skipped that part. Of course I haven’t eaten all the pesto so the plan is to preserve it in the freezer in a yogurt container. That said I hope to eat it very soon.

This moment is coming to each of us. This video said a few words to me.

Looks like Royal Wood is coming to Victoria with Hannah Georgas October 7th , I’d like to take in that show. Anyone want to come?

Sunday afternoon I made the excellent decision to sit outside and enjoy a simple lunch.  It’s 4 days later and I’m still thinking about how good it was.

Entertainment is a double edged sword that I think about from time to time. Whether its reading a book or watching TV, I spend an awful lot of time putting other people thoughts and work into my vision and into my mind. Often I don’t ever take the time to make a response to what I’ve seen or heard. And I can’t help but wonder if that cheapens the experience. Is there something truly human about responding. If it’s true that watching TV puts peoples brains at a lower state of activity then sleeping is that something that we as a people should really be striving for?

It’s so easy to make life about consumption and inputs. But what are we putting out? What are we adding to the world or our society?

Certainly, there is a time for enjoying those things that others have worked hard to create! That’s art! And art is made to be shared and enjoyed. But I have found that concerts are better when I’m able to stir the courage to be a dancing and plays are best when I am able to shake hands with the players or clap loudly to encourage them. There is a big part of me that wonders if when there is a lack of ability to have that kind of feedback if there is something missing. I recognize that reading a book is a passive consumption and I wonder if the reason that schooling forced us through book reviews was to help us engage the work. At the end of the day I think that’s what is at stake here, engagement. Where input/entertainment is taken without engagement I feel like there’s something amiss. Input deserves output. Even if its just a status update, sharing something with a friend over a beer or a full blown blog post.

Two new-to-me techniques for keeping your server free from SSH brute force attacks by tuning up your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file. I know that using IP Address based security is probably more secure, but I wanted to find a solution that could yield higher security without limiting IP addresses. I like to be able to access the machines I need to access without having to be at a specific location, or have a vpn, or ssh through a couple machines before I can access the machine I need. I recognize those solutions are likely more secure but, I’m trying to avoid, IP based security restrictions if possible.

Stop people from attempting to login as root

Add (or find and modify the this line:
PermitRootLogin no
This simply doesn’t allow people to login directly to your box under the root user. Simple enough. Not letting people log in directly as root takes away one of the well known users that people will attempt to login as. This means that everyone who wants to gain root will first have to login as another (more obscure) user on the system, which leads me to.

Only Allow Logins from specified users

Add (or find and modify the this line:
AllowUsers username1 username2
This means that only these users are allowed to login. Every other user cannot. This is handy because it eliminates all those other user accounts that are created on the system, which probably aren’t but might currently have ssh access.

Neither of these techniques strike me as silver bullet solutions, but as I’m realizing there are no silver bullet solutions in keeping a machine secure. So consider these two more possibilities for further guarding the machines. Like a moat around the castle walls.

Simple problem. I have a bluetooth keyboard, I want to use it at work (Thinkpad T61) and home (eeePC 1001P), both machines running Debian (hardware and OS details). I want to find a good way to get this keyboard connected and running full time. Here goes.

Bluetooth Doesn’t Seem To Be Working At All!

First I install blueman. Start it up, most everything is disabled (greyed out). Ok, why is that?

hmm… maybe hcitool will tell me something different
$ hcitool scan
Device is not available: No such device

ok… I guess that means there is no device available, check the startup via
$ dmesg | grep Blue
lots of Bluetooth entries there.

next check the bluetooth kernel module is loaded
$ lsmod | grep blue
bluetooth 41795 6 sco,bnep,rfcomm,l2cap
rfkill 13012 4 bluetooth,cfg80211

Looks like the module is loaded. Time to Google my error message
http://forum.soft32.com/linux/Bluetooth-ftopict440233.html
Provides a hint that I need to install the userspace package, in Debian this means
$ sudo aptitude install bluetooth
that installed a bunch of packages. Trying my tests again
$ hcitool scan
(same result)
Blueman (same result)

$ /etc/init.d/bluetooth restart
(maybe it’ll help… nope)
Hmmm.. sort of feels like the bluetooth adaptor is turned off. The 1001P doesn’t really have a hardware switch that I can see for turning bluetooth on.

Further Googling is talking making me feel like I should really have an entry in the output of lsusb that says something pretty clear about bluetooth, and I’m not seeing that. This really makes me think it isn’t on.

I know I shouldn’t have to… but I”ll try a reboot to get a fresh dmesg to look at and this laptop has been in and out of suspend a lot, I see that has fouled others up in that past. Nope that didn’t help.

eeePC Gotcha: Bluetooth is Controlled in the BIOS

Okay, Got a tip from a site that bluetooth on the 1001P can only be controlled via the bios (are you serious!?!) So I boot into the bios and sure enough under Advanced -> Onboard Settings (I think) there is Onboard Bluetooth and it is disabled. Enable that, save and exit. Reboot.

$ lsusb
now has an extra line in it… promising.
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0b05:1788 ASUSTek Computer, Inc.

Bluetooth is Working, Now for the Keyboard

Straight for the throat, starting blueman, YES we have an adapater. Double checking with hcitool.
$ hcitool scan
Scanning....
alright!!

Now just to get the keyboard working. Put the keyboard into discovery mode.

Into Blueman, and searching for the device. It shows up! Good sign. Attempt to pair with the device. My secret code is requested. I enter it. “1111″ (the usual) and I go to the keyboard type “1111″ Enter. Looks like we’re paired. Uh oh it looks like it disconnected. Hmm… reconnect, which works, and then click on the trust icon. Still connected good, good. Start typing, it’s working!! (I’m sure this could all be done from the command line with hcitool as well, I’m not exactly sure how.)

Awesome.

Testing, The Use Cases

Now the two remaining tests. At work I’m doing some frustrating hack using
hidd --connect MAC ADDRES GOES HERE
and if I leave the computer for 10-20 minutes the keyboard dies. It totally sucks. Secondarily, if I restart the computer the keyboard isn’t connected. Both of these things didn’t weren’t a problem in the past, but they are now. So let’s see if the problem is the same here.

1. Coming back the next morning and it is still working!!
2. Suspending and restoring and it is still working.
3. And it even works (with a minor delay after a reboot) in the gdm screen.

Hurray!! Complete Success.

Bonus: killing the Blueman applet doesn’t kill the connection, I suspected this would be true but just wanted to confirm.

Bluetooth Files

I previously had attempted to edit a bunch of files in the /etc/bluetooth/* and /etc/default/bluetooth, but none of those files appear changed in this case and the keyboard is working fine. Being curious I snooped around and found that the specific device information related to the connection with my keyboard can be found in /var/lib/bluetooth/* but looking at a few of the files. I can see that they are definitely not meant to be editted by hand. AKA leave it to the tools in this case blueman. I’m sure hcitool also refers to and edits these files although I have not confirmed that.

Hardware and Operating System Details

• Keyboard : Microsoft Wireless Entertainment Keyboard 7000
• Debian squeeze (pre stable release)
• Linux Kernel Linux 2.6.32-3-amd64
• And of course my eeePc 1001P

Now to see if I can get it working on my work computer! Thinkpad T61.

This post has been written over the past six months…

The Gift of Organic Food

After much asking around (Thanks to Sue, Sara and Amit who all offered their opinions), if this gift idea was WAY to far out to be considered a REAL gift, I decided that yes, indeed giving Joanna a weekly subscription to a Share Organics local organic food bin was going to be a part of her birthday (Dec 28th) present. And today (this was way back in January) the first bin of goods arrived.

We started out with a weekly delivery, which while it seemed completely reasonably at first (at $35/week it was a bit expensive for veggies, but I figured that if it meant that we could eat more organic veggies it would be worth it.  But truth be told, we just couldn’t keep up.  Too many veggies.  On top of too many veggies. This was likely because we went with the local only box, meaning that the produce had to be from geographically close locations. The types of veggies that we’re used to weren’t regulars in our boxes. So we quickly figured out that one every two weeks was more reasonable for us.

Flash forward six months.

We kept up getting our bins into April. We had sunchokes galore, leeks a plenty, bags of blueberries, an interesting number of sprouted bean/seed mixes and some delicious greens. Then we decided that we were ready to move on. There’s a few reasons:

1. Growing season was starting and I was keen to plant a garden and enjoy both the activity of a garden and the fruit of my labour
2. $35 for a box like the one above seemed a bit pricey, (I know, I know you don’t do this sort of thing for economy) but even though it was delivered and even through the food was very good (and interesting) it still seemed a bit pricey
3. We’re still regularly going to the grocery store so the delivery aspect of the service isn’t really making life easier. Buying organic veggies while you’re at the grocery store isn’t any harder than regular veggies.

Would I recommend getting organic deliveries?

As an experiment? Definitely. Share Organics themselves were very easy to get started with, they were on time and the food generally arrived in good shape. The experience really helped me begin to get over the idea that bottom dollar pricing is the most important aspect of food. Buying organic seems like a good idea to me, and this experience helped me get in the psychological mindset to want to continue to buy organic, by making it dead easy to have organic food around.

Previously the organic food aisle was generally just more expensive, but having gone through this experience, it seems that the additional monthly expense is really quite small. I don’t think I’ll be restarting our subscription with Share Organics (or any other providers) when my garden gets tired. Simple plan going forward, remain a frequent visitor to the organic aisle.

For the uninitiated CMC BC = Canadian Management Consultants of BC! CMC BC held their first conference in Richmond at the River Rock Casino two weeks ago. Through Terry Rawchalski I had the opportunity to present on what I feel were the salient points in creating a valuable and rock solid web presence.

You can see my slides below

I tried focus not on the technical parts but on the aspects of that are readily accessible to anyone aiming to develop an effective educational tool/lead generator/etc. that is invincible to search engine algorithm changes (isn’t that the definition of the stormy sea for a website). For your enlightenment, the 30 second version of what I said 40 minutes to say at the conference is this:

The search engines are getting smarter, closer and closer to being as smart at knowing what we want as we are ourselves (a bit creepy) so let’s focus on creating the creating the really awesome, compelling, interesting and helpful stuff that would like to find on the Internet. Put this kind of content onto your site and the search engines are going to reward you with strong search rankings. Because… We the collective people who use the Internet, love great information and tools. I did also touch on how to give the search engines signals that you’ve got some great stuff, via keyword planning/alignment, linking, more linking and patience. But those details, while very helpful and important are never going to make up for a lack of great content. Show me a site that ranks without content and I’ll show you a short lived win. Show me a site that has great content, and I’ll show you a great opportunity.

I really appreciated the audience participation, it’s a pleasure to present where people are involved in taking in what is being said and dishing out meaningful questions.

As is becoming usual, there turned out to be far too many slides and the last portion of my talked had similarities to an inkblot test. I flash a slide on the screen and say one sentence that describes what feels like the most important aspect of that slide. An exercise in brevity.

Thanks to Terry and Chris Burdge for their parts in what turned out to be a great and well-rounded introduction to creating an effective web presence.

This Spring I had the good fortune to have the opportunity to go to Word Camp Victoria and both listen to a few of the presentations/workshops as well as lead one of the workshops about plugins for Wordpress.

I had the good fortune to sit in on a workshop with Tim Ayres as he gave the masses a little of his hard fought wisdom being a blogger/real estate agent in Sooke and looking for ways to be effective as a blogger for business. It was an interesting discussion, as he told basically how much time and effort he put into creating an interesting blog. It was a great reminder how you can build a name for yourself, a following and some online presence by simply putting your head down and writing. I’m not in a position reight now where daily blogging is possible but I can say that it is something I would like to work toward.

Next I sat in with Paul Holmes as he expounded on the world of blog aggregators, their strengths and weeknesses. He pointed out the BC bloggers network. That was a new one for me. Which reminded me that it would be fun to setup a planet for Victoria. I feel like Victoria wide would be local enough to keep the contents interesting. I do enjoy reading planet.debian.org would I enjoy reading a planet.victoria.org. Hard to say

Next was me! I talked about in plugins for Wordpress, it’s a huge topic and in spite of the fact that I prepped a presentation, I pretty much abandoned it immediately in favor of simply taking questions and doing my best to put together some answers from the expertise in the crowd. That was my plan help everybody help one another. If you were expecting me to be the fountain on knowledge… well… you would have been disappointed. But I thought we did pretty well to address a few issues that people were having with forms, caching, signups, etc.

Finally, I sat in on Raul’s talk about having a blog for personal/life and a second blog for professional purposes. This was great to hear his take on it. I’ve though about this tons. Especially with relationship to different topics. He did a good job of drawing things back to your goals for your audience and first defining those and then letting everything flow naturally from that starting point. Maintaining two blogs is obviously more work, but if you really are trying to reach separate audiences, it just makes sense.

That was it! It was a great afternoon at Wordcamp! I enjoyed having the chance to lead a workshop and hope that the folks in the workshop were able to learn a thing or two!

Getting off sugar a month in review

My month without sugar started on April 25th, a Sunday. I determined to stop eating things that were blantantly sugary for the purpose of

1. seeing if I could do it
2. seeing if what happened
3. trying to change a habit that is generally acknowledged to be destructive

What happened?

The biggest problem was that after work and after dinner, times I regularly chow down on sweet things, there were some cravings. A little like I imagine a smoker without cigarettes there were some moments of wondering what I should be doing now that I wasn’t making 5-minutely trips to the ju-jube bag. I filled the after work void with crackers (and cheese if I was feeling energetic). That worked pretty well, I have no idea if it added up to more or less calories but it avoided the sugar. For post dinner cravings I was reduced to eating fruit, which in general was fine (I like fruit) but having an apple after dinner was a bit anti-climactic. All those years of training that if I ate my dinner I would get some tasty dessert were being turned on their heads.

Physio-logical Difference?

Disclaimer: This is completely unscientific.

Interestingly, I didn’t get a cold AND there was one slowly picking people off in my office. This is notable because I usually DO get a cold if there is anything going around. When I started, I felt a little sick but it didn’t end up turning into a full blown sickness. Thinking about this I can’t help but wonder if not eating sugar was doing something to help my immune system. While I’m not sure I may keep this technique in my pocket for the next time I feel a little tickle in my throat.

Other than that I felt a little more alert. Which I could easily pass off on the placebo effect. (Is there still a placebo affect if the action you are taking is avoiding something? Hmmm..)

Lasting Changes

My time without sugar has easily shown me that yes, I have been leaning on sugar for snacks when I’m feeling lazy, living without that has led me to eat some better (and better for me) snacks. I’m hoping to keep that up. When I’m sick expect me to lay off the sugar. My experience leads me to believe that my immune system functions better when it isn’t being fed sugar.

Moving forward, I’m going to aim to keep sweets for social occasions and after dinner. If you’re considering going off sugar for a little while I would encourage you to go for it! It was a good and reasonably enlightening experience for me!

Confessions:

• I ate lots of sauces, ketchup, hoi sin, teriyaki. I didn’t even really look to see how much sugar was in there per serving, so before the non-sugar zealots point it out, let me acknowledge the weakness of my method.
• There was some jello+ that went down the hatch on May 23rd, but to make ammends I extended my experiment to the end of May 26th.
• I’m eating ice cream again, and just enjoying the heck out of it.