Since I was running Linux, Parallels was not an option for me. Instead I dug in and found a Virtualbox. This VM also had the seamless mode feature which I’ve grown to really love and has become a key feature that I look for. Another great advantage of the VM is that it’s fast, really fast! It seems so fast, that it’s almost like running Windows XP (for example) right on my hardware. Plus, booting Windows XP is so much faster than if I were to install it and load it right from disk.

Enough about Virtualboxes feature. What I’m really doing is describing how to get the guest OS to access the host OS file system through samba.  By default, Virtualbox uses the IP of the host OS to get online. This is fine and dandy, but what if you wanted to access shares on the host from within the guest OS? This is how you do it:

1.  Make sure that the kernel has 802.1d Ethernet bridging and that Universal TUN/TAP device driver support is either compiled into the kernel or as a module.
2. Login as root
3. create the device. The output will tell you that the device has been created and the ID of the person who owns it:
   # tunctl -t tap0 -u username
   Set tap0 persistent and owned by uid 500
4. Change the permissions of /dev/tun to 666 (tun may be in /dev/net)
   # chmod 0666 /dev/tun
5. Create the bridge
   # brctl addbr br0
6. Add the real interface to the bridge
   # brctl addif br0 eth0
7. Add the tunnel interfaces to the bridge
   # brctl addif br0 tap0
8. Bring up the bridge
   # dhcpcd br0

The last part is modifying some of the guest OS’ settings. Start VirtualBox, select an OS, click on Network, make sure that the network adapter (or at least one of them) is enabled.  Change Attached to so it says Host Interface then type in tap0. Finally click OK and start the virtual machine.

If you need to add more than one interface for running multiple Virtual Machines at once,

Under the Control Panel:

• Double Click ‘Administrative Tools‘
• Double Click ‘Services‘
• Double Click ‘Remote Access Auto Connection Manager‘
• In the Startup type: pull down menu, select ‘Automatic‘
• Click the Start button.

The next step is to make sure that you have a connection already configured and that it’s set to autodial:

• Start->Settings->Network and Dial-up Connections
• Ensure that there is a dialer or create one if there isn’t
• Select the Dialer
• Click the ‘Advanced‘ pull down menu
• Select ‘Dial-up Preferences…‘
• Under the Autodial Tab, enable the ‘Enable autodial by location‘ checkbox

Optionall, if you sometimes connect to a network and use dialup:

• Start->Settings->Network and Dial-Up Connections
• Click the ‘Advanced‘ pull down menu
• Select ‘Advanced Settings…‘
• Under the Adapters and Bindings tab, in the Connections: window, choose the order for DNS to use (LAN or dialup adapter)

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.output { border-width: thin; border-style: solid; border-color: red; size: 12pt; background: black; color: cyan; }

div.indent { margin-left: 1.5em; width: 100%; }

The other day while I was modifying a client’s site I saw that his contact form was in PERL. Recently I just got a Mac Book Pro. I’ve set up XAMPP and Eclipse on it to do my PHP programming, but I didn’t count on getting into any PERL. As a challenge I thought it would be fun to do some PERL programming.

I first installed XAMPP. Right out of the box I was able to do PHP programming and access MySQL databases which saved me some time configuring and trouble shooting issues. Or so I thought. I’ve written PERL scripts before, but never done anything that would run on a web server. When it comes to writing pages in PHP, just write the code and it works. That’s because the headers are sent for you. As a test I put the following into my script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print(”Hello!”);

Expecting it to work. However I would get an error message saying Error 500. I looked at the log file /Applications/xampp and saw that the script was ‘exiting prematurely’ which did not make any sense at all. I could run the PERL script just fine on the command line.

After doing some digging around, about an hours worth I finally found what I was looking for. I needed to print the headers. In order to get my PERL script to work with Apache I needed to add the following:

use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

so now the script looks like:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;

print $cgi->header . $cgi->start_html . “hi” . $cgi->end_html;

The key to this script is the $cgi->header function call. With out it, you will get an internal server error. There are other functions associate with the CGI class. The start_html and end_html are the beginning and closing HTML tags.

Last night, the group hosted a public event at the Miramar Theatre in Milwaukee. We normally don’t run around in the dark, but since it was a public event and we all wanted to have a little fun and break from tradition, we had most of the lights off. Anything that we catch will be in question as the Lemon Lounge was open until approximately 2 in the morning.

Even though I can not prove to you my personal experiences, I can at least share them with you. At 21:25, I was sitting in the theater listening to the presentation that we were giving the public. My location in the seats was the South East corner of the theater. I heard a womans voice talking, thinking that there was someone behind me, I turned around but saw no one. I then waited for someone to come out of the bathroom that was right outside the door. After a few minutes of waiting I went into the Lemon Lounge to talk to the bartender and ask if anyone left. To my surprise it was just the bartender. The only people that were in there before I came in were the owner and his girl friend. Yet they left by using the door of the Lemon Lounge.

Around two, two of our guests said that while they were on the second floor passing two dry erase boards, one of the guests saw a dry erase board fall back to the wall and make a bang while the other actually saw the board come away from the wall and fall back.

Three other investigators and myself were doing an EVP session in one of the sound rooms when all of a sudden my hand felt really tingly. Also upstairs, in another one of the sound rooms, I felt particularly drawn to a corner. I grabbed an EMF meter and found that the heater was giving off a 2.4 milligauss reading.

While doing another EVP session in the basement, 4 investigators and myself were standing around while in complete darkness. During the session, I felt the presence of someone standing next to me. I asked the question if anyone was next to me, and when the session ended, another investigator asked why I asked that question. He too, also felt as if someone was behind him, which would have been next to me.

Around four in the morning, while everyone was in the theatre watching videos on the projector two lights suddenly turned on. We all got excited but after some playing around with the controls for the lights, we found that contacts were bad and were able to recreate the event. Our EVP specialist was in a room sleeping on a couch while this happened. During the time while we were trying to figure out the lights we heard foot steps upstairs. Some of us ran upstairs to check it out. Our EVP specialist also heard the sounds and also checked it out

The decision was made to do one file EVP session. Everyone but myself and two other investigators took part in the EVP session in the theater while we all sat in a room that over looked the theater. While we were sitting there watching the session, we all heard a banging on a drum. We couldn’t figure out what it was, until we came to two dry erase boards, the same boards that two of our guests had an experience with.

We have a lot of video to go over. We had four IR cameras running for 12 hours, I don’t even know how many voice recorders were running and for how long. I personally have an hours worth of audio and video.

I had a blast at the Miramar Theatre and look forward to going over the video and audio.

The easist way, but not the best way is to move or rename a file. The file that we’re looking for is the QuickTimeUSBVDCDIgitizer.component file. This file is located in the /System/Library/QuickTime folder.

What I did to disable my iSight was move the file up a directory. When any application tries to access the camera, it will say it’s in use.

Right now I’m not aware of any other way to disable the camera, but I will continue to look into it. I’m also looking into disabling the internal microphone.

If it’s an external link

<a href=”http://www.otherdomain.com/page.html” rel=”external no follow”>
•    Avoid broken links: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xennlink.html
•    Google asks that any paid links have the no follow attribute.
Site Maps
•    Search engines reward for site maps. Xml-sitemaps.com
•    Place a link to the site map on the home page.
•    The file name should be either sitemap.html or sitemap.php.
Robots.txt
•    mcanerin.com/en/search-engine/robots-txt.asp
•    USER-Agent: *
Disallow: /imgaes/
Disallow: /directory/file.htm
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.html
http://www.htaccesstools.com
Re-writing URLs
•    Rewrite old page to a new one
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old\.html$new.html
•    Rewrite dynamic page
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)\.html$ /viewproducts.php?category=$1 [L]
Will rewrite the url from www.example.com/viewproducts.php?category=sports to www.example.om/sports.html
Redireting Non-WWW to WWW
If search engines crawl over example.com and www.example.com, this can be seen as duplicate content, and if other sites link to example.com and www.example.com then the links are spread out over two different entities. This issue is referred to as non-ww/www canonical issue. This can be solved by a simple redirect.
Rewrites non-www to www
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Rewrites www to non-www
RewriteEngine ON
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^example\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

A while back I was working on a site, and as I was writing the back end and making sure that it works properly I thought to myself “If .NET has nunit, and Java has junit, does PHP have phpunit, or something similar?” After some digging I found the answer. The answer I found was yes! In addition to finding unit frame works for PHP I also found some for other languages like ada, haskell and so on:aunit - for Ada
hunit - for Haskell
ant-junit - Apache Ant’s optional tasks depending on junit
dbunit - DBUnit is a JUnit extension targeted for database-driven pr
ojects.
tagunit - for testing custom JSP tags
xmlunit - for XML
and so on. If you want a complete list, on the command prompt, if you’re using Gentoo, just type:

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In the past I’ve written how to use Eclipse with phpdbg and ZendDebugger. The phpdbg was short lived as it was replaced with xdebug. According to Zend’s website, they say that there are no serious limitations of xdebug. However, there may be some limitations when working with other Zend modules.

This is not going to be a problem seeing as all I want to do use it to debug web pages. This will work on either Windows, Linux, and possibly MacOS X.

Since posting about Eclipse and Zend, it has gotten much easier to get Eclipse and configure it for PHP. Go to Eclipse’s homepage. On the front page there is a link to download the IDE for other languages; click on that and get the one for PHP.

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For this entry we’ll only be concerned about Javadoc.

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I’m working with the 701 model. The first we need to install wine. The Eee PC uses Xandros which uses the Debian Package system. Under Settings there is what looks like a program that you can use to install additional programs. Unfortunately all this is used for is updates. In order to get to where we need to be, the terminal, we need to hold ctrl+alt+T.

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I have a couple of folders with a ton of compressed files in them. I’m not talking about 10 or 20. No I’m talking about a couple thousand. Instead of spending all eternity uncompressing the files, I did some research into how one would go about having the command line do all the glorious work for him.

One of the requirements was that I didn’t want to decompress any Japanese files, which were indicated by ‘(J)’. However, if the file was American, European, and Japanese, then I did want the file decompressed. Another problem I had was that the indication of the type of file was clear. It could have either been UE, EU, JUE, UJE, or UEJ.

I wanted to keep the files separated, so I created another directory called dir2, which is the directory I’m in when I run the following command:

$ ls -1 /home/paulus/dir1 | grep -E ‘.*\((E|U|EU|UE|JUE|UJE|UEJ|JU|UJ)\).*\.zip’ | xargs -d’\n’ -L 1 -I ‘{}’ unzip ‘../dir1/{}’

The first command is a very well known command to anyone who has used a *nix distribution. This is listing the files in /home/paulus/dir1. The -1 is printing a list of files with one item on each line. The output is piped to the grep command.

The grep command gets a little messy with the regular expression. The . (period) is the beginning, the * (Asterisk) is saying “anything from the beginning to the first parentheses.” We have to use the back slash to escape it, otherwise it will be interpreted as a condition.

Notice how the second parentheses is not escape, that’s because we’re using it like we were if we were doing an if statement. From ‘\(’ to ‘\)’, we are using an if statement. So, return true if E or U or EU or UE or JUE or UJE or UEJ or UJ or JU are found. The ‘.*’ is saying anything after the ‘()’, then we have the extension, so we’re only looking at zip files.

Now that the regular expression is out of the way, we can move on to the xargs command. The xargs is used to build and execute command lines from input. Some programs don’t like to get data piped into it, such as the case of unzip. With the -d‘\n’ parameter, we are saying that each line is a separate argument and we are limiting one argument per command by the use of -L 1 parameter. -I ‘{}’ is saying that we are going to replace {} with an argument, such as one of the file names received from stdin. We finally get to the point where we can use the unzip command as if it were on the command line. xargs will execute ‘unzip ../dir1/{}’, but the actual command that gets sent is unzip ../dir/file.zip, where file.zip is one of the arguments that it was passed.

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According to the Author, she makes claim that behaviors, how we talk, books we read, dreams we have, interests, hobbies, talents, and weather we like are all indications of who we were in a past life. Even the jokes we make and how our home is like indicates who we were in a past life. One of the more known is the Birthmark theory. Typically a birthmark is an indication of tramma that you suffered in a past life. One of the most entertaining claims is that deja-vu is a definite sign that something around you was apart of your past life, whether it be a person, place, or thing. I read an article by Rick Nauert Ph.D. There is a mechnism in the brain that distinguishes similar yet distinct places. When we visit a place, neurons in the brain fire creating a blueprint. So next time we see the place, the same neurons fire. When we come into a new place, that is very similar to a place that we’ve already been, some of the same neurons fire as well as new neurons creating the sensation of deja-vu.

The next major subject of the book is Karma and why we are destined to be reincarnated. We are reincarnated to perfect our souls by learning lessons. If we let someone down in a past life, we must learn that lesson by living it in another life. Frankly, I believe that’s stupid. I don’t think I need to learn a lesson by having to live it. Personally the idea of us dying, poking around in the interuim deciding what lessons we want to learn in the next life is completely absurd.

“Karma is the universal law of cause and effect.” It IS cause and effect, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or deep philosopher to come up with that. The cause and effect can be felt from the time an event takes place to whenever it runs out of steam.

Perhaps re-incarnation isn’t what Gloria thinks it is. Perhaps re-incarnation is something along the lines of us living, then dying, our decaying bodies being used as food for plants, and those plants are consumed by pregnant women who then use that food to sustain the babies still in the womb. Perhaps there is a collective conscience that we all share and that we are nothing more than devices that access that database and utilize it’s resources to how we feel we can benefit from the situations.

If you are looking to discover who you are, then I don’t recommend you read this book. The way that the author describes how to retrieve past life memories is weak and can easily be suggested. To me it’s more about having a buffet of information laid out in front of you and you get to create who you were in a past life. Until there is a method of learning of a past life, if one actually exists or not, we will never know who we were.

Occasionally I will get a customer in my store whose library has been corrupt or lost but their music is still on their iPod. The way that apple designed iTunes is that if the library gets messed up, you run a high risk of losing your music. Fortunately there is a way around that. What I do to save the customer’s music is take their iPod, connect it to my Linux computer. In order to see the files on the iPod, you’re going to need a few drivers either compiled as modules or into the kernel:

• Device Drivers
• USB Support
• <*> Support for Host-side USB
• [*] USB device filesystem
• <*> EHCI HCD (USB 2.0) support
• <*> OHCI HCD support
• <*> UHCI HCD (most Intel and VIA) support
• <*> USB Mass Storage support
• [*] USB Mass Storage verbose debug
• [*] Datafab Compact Flash Reader support (EXPERIMENTAL)
• [*] Freecom USB/ATAPI Bridge support
• [*] ISD-200 USB/ATA Bridge support
• [*] Microtech/ZiO! CompactFlash/SmartMedia support
• [*] USBAT/USBAT02-based storage support (EXPERIMENTAL)
• [*] SanDisk SDDR-09 (and other SmartMedia) support (EXPERIMENTAL)
• [*] SanDisk SDDR-55 SmartMedia support (EXPERIMENTAL)
• [*] Lexar Jumpshot Compact Flash Reader (EXPERIMENTAL)
• File systems
• DOS/FAT/NT Filesystems
• <*> MSDOS fs support
• <*> VFAT (Windows-95) fs support
• Miscellaneous filesystems
• <*> Apple Macintosh file system support (EXPERIMENTAL)
• <*> Apple Extended HFS file system support.

I compiled in all the things under USB support for various other things. If you don’t need them then you don’t have to compile them into the kernel.

Once you recompile the kernel or compile the modules and load them, you can connect the iPod to the computer and then mount it. When you try mounting it, it’s going to be a SCSI device. After you have mounted the iPod, Copy all the m4a files from the ipod_control folder, then re-import them into iTunes.

The Tables

First we’re going to need a table to hold the user information. I’ve done a very basic table, you can expand this table to include the user’s name, e-mail address, street address, etc.

CREATE TABLE TblUsers(
user_id VARCHAR(18) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
user_password VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
question TEXT NOT NULL,
q_answer TEXT NOT NULL,
CONSTRAINT user_id_fk FOREIGN KEY(user_id)
REFERENCES TblPermissions(user_id));

For the sake that I can, in the event that you want to limit users to perform certain tasks you can create another table for permissions:

CREATE TABLE TblPermissions(
user_id VARCHAR(18) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,
perm_one INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 CHECK( perm_one < 1 && perm_one > 0 ),
perm_two INT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 CHECK( perm_two < 1 && perm_two > 0 )
);

I kept this table simple. Obviously, if you wanted to you could definitely add more permissions depending on how big your application or site is. I will explain this in a later entry. We’re going to need a place for the user to log in. In order for the user to login and remain logged in, we’re going to have to start a session:

session_start();
Now we must undo what magic quotes does. If magic quotes is enabled, this will undo everything that it did.

if( get_magic_quotes_gpc()) {
$_REQUEST = array_map(’stripslashes’, $_REQUEST);
$_COOKIE = array_map(’stripslashes’, $_COOKIE);
}

We’re going to need at least three files for the user to login, do some work, then log out. Again, you can definitely have more pages depending on what you’re trying to acomplish.

The login page is a very basic page where the person is going to put in their credentials. Behind the scenes the page will submit the data to itself and verify that the user is a valid user. After it determines that the person trying to gain access is valid, it will foreword the user to the second page, which is called main.php in this example.

When storing passwords in a database, it’s important to encrypt them. NEVER store them in plain text!! The query that we’d use in this case to create a user would be:

INSERT INTO TblUsers(user_id, user_password, question, q_answer) VALUES(’test’, PASSWORD(’password’), ‘Where was I born?’, ‘New York City’);

Now, if you wrote a page to add users, the query would look like:

$query = “INSERT INTO TblUsers(user_id, user_password, question, q_answer) VALUES(’” . mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST[”UserID”] . “‘, ‘” . mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST[”UserPWD”] . “‘, ‘” . mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST[”UserQuestion”] . “‘, ‘” . mysql_real_escape_string($_REQUEST[”UserAnswer”] . “‘)”;

The mysql_real_escape_string function is to ensure that the user isn’t putting any evil data into the field that would result in data being exposed.

That’s it! If you want, you can download the files that were used in this entry:

• SQL Queries
• login.php
• logout.php
• main.php

A while back I was working on a site, and as I was writing the back end and making sure that it works properly I thought to myself “If .NET has nunit, and Java has junit, does PHP have phpunit, or something similar?” After some digging I found the answer. The answer I found was yes! In addition to finding unit frame works for PHP I also found some for other languages like ada, haskell and so on:

aunit - for Ada
hunit - for Haskell
ant-junit - Apache Ant’s optional tasks depending on junit
dbunit - DBUnit is a JUnit extension targeted for database-driven pr
ojects.
tagunit - for testing custom JSP tags
xmlunit - for XML
and so on. If you want a complete list, on the command prompt, if you’re using Gentoo, just type:

# emerge –search unit | less

and have fun!

For PHP there are a few different ones:

dev-php4/phpunit
dev-php5/phpunit
dev-php/simpletest

At the time of writing this, dev-php4/phpunit is masked, but the version of phpunit for PHP 5 is not. I chose simpletest because I didn’t have to unmask any packages in order to install it.

# emerge simpletest

BAM! Done!

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1. Start->Run

   

2. Un-check the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer”

   

That’s it. You no longer have to enter a user name or password to use the computer.

I can’t begin to tell you how happy this makes me. When I signed up for them over a year ago, I was only able to use PHP 4, and MySQL 4. On their Windows Server, they were still using .NET 1.1. This was rather frustrating as when I signed up they just said “PHP, MySQL, and ASP.NET” It wasn’t until later they changed it to reflect the actual version.

So by the time the new year starts, I will be able to use PHP 5 and MySQL 5. Hopefully, they will upgrade .NET 2.0.

I’m praying that there won’t be any kinks with my blog or anything else on my site. If there is, you know what I’m going to be doing for the first part of 2008!

While working on a site, I decided to add some Java Script to the menu bar so the site would be more interactive. I wanted the image to change so it gave the appearance as if the user is actually clicking on the button. Being a bit rusty on my Java Script I had to look up how one is supposed to reference an object on the page.

I came across a well written tutorial on how to change the images, but there was one minor problem. The script didn’t work. Perhaps it’s my web browser, or maybe I’m doing something wrong. When I look at the code itself it doesn’t make sense to me. What I kept finding over and over again was this:

document[image_name].src = …

The problem with the above statement, is that you’re trying to find the image by referencing the document array with the image name. That is an array of documents, not an array of images. I played around with this at first thinking that maybe Java Script is a bit funny. The error console in Firefox kept telling me that I was trying to set the property of an object that did not have that property. Further investigation revealed that I was correct in my thinking.

The correct way in setting the source of an image object is actually:

document.images[image_name].src = …

The best way to change the image when the cursor is over the image is to write a function that can be reused:

function(mouse_over(image_name, image_source)
{
document.images[image_name].src = image_source
}

After including the code in your page, you can use the function like so:

Psychic Hearing impressions are usually subtle. This ability is very much like talking to yourself. People who have this ability may not even know they have it. Often times they rationalize their premenotions being nothing more than an over active imagination. These people tend to ask:

• Does psychic perception really exist?
• Why haven’t I had the same kind and number of ESP experiences as other people?
• Others have strong feelings, experience intuitive premonitions, and see visions. Why doesn’t that happen to me?

The receptive area for psychic hearing is located above the ears. Using this ability is like using your physical ears, but you are not focusing on your ears but the area above them.

1. Sit comfortably; relax.
2. Take a deep breath and exhale gently.
3. Practice sensing the different parts of your head area.
4. Shift your focus upward and sense the area above the ears. This area is about 1 - 2 inches above the ear.
5. gnote how this area has a hieghtened sensitivity, like a microphone ready to amplify any sound or signal.
6. Alternate the levels of focus several times, first aiming your awareness at ear level, then letting it slide up to the temporal-lobe area above the ears.

Practice by noticing the difference between outer and inner listening. Move to a location where you can hear people talking around you; sit down and relax:

• Listen to some background converstation and notice how your attentino is not only at ear level, but how your sense of the sound is outside of you.
• Shift focus now to the temporal-lobe area and talk to yourself, think to yourself. Notices how your attention is not only above the ear level, but above how your focus is inward.

Something that you can do is ask youself questions while you are doing the above exercise. When you ask yourself a question, don’t analyze it right away, just record it and come back to it later.

While working with psychic hearing you may recieve nothing more than a few words or sounds. These are called keywords. from there you have the skeleton for what you seek. You may also use psychic hearing to obtain your own mantra:

1. sit quietly and relax.
2. As you breathe omfortably and easily, turn your thoguhts inward and focus on yourself and your day.
3. Project the mental question and at the same time let it echo in your mind.
4. Grasp and note the word, phrase, or understanding that comes to your mind.
5. Continue the process by reviewing the people and events of you upcoming day and getting psychic guidewords for dealing with them.

Advantages

• At full volume, best for grabbing attention.
• Best for getting key guidewords and inital direction
• Best for understanding and analyzing a problem or situation.
• Best psychic sense for thought projection.
• Best for getting specific answers to questoins.

Disadvantages

• At low volume, can be confused with thoughts.
• One of the slower psychic senses.
• One of the hardest psychic sense to develop.

Stengths

• Can hear when someone is lying to them.
• Are the best at getting keyword mantras
• Are the best transmitters of psychic thoughts.
• Are least likely to experience psychic overload.
• Are direct, uncomplicated initiators.
• Are excellent organizers of details
• Are the best at receiving and understanding specific psychic information

Weaknesses

• Can doubt their psychic potential and talk themselve out of ESP.
• Can be overanalytical and ask too many questions.
• Can come on too strong and radiate too much mental energy.
• Can have trouble trusting feelings and intuition.
• Can be least sensitive to psychic subtleties.

Personal notes taken from “You are Psychic” by Pete A. Sanders Jr.

A while ago I wrote how you can configure Eclipse, PHP on a Linux machine to debug PHP pages using phpdbg. At first this worked very well but after a while break point wouldn’t work and I would have to restart the session. Another problem that I was having was that the session information was saved. I got around this by clearing out the session information in Firefox. This continued until one day when I tried to start a new debug session and all I got was this:

At that point I decided to dump phpdbg and start using the Zend Debugger. Getting the extension to work properly took some time. After many hours of searching the Internet I managed to find a decent site to work off of. Unfortunately, it was aimed at the Windows platform. Getting PHP and eclipse configured was half the battle that I faced.

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I woke up on Halloween to the sound of my music playing. Then all of a sudden it stopped. I got up not thinking much of it. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check my email. When Thunderbird didn’t open and programs stopped responding I got suspicious. I dropped in to VT12 to see what was going on. What was being reported was: (more…)

On All Hallow’s Eve, some of use will sit down with friends and a Ouija Board to gain insight or have a little fun. I’ve done some research into the Ouija Board to learn how to use them and play with them safely.
History

In 1853, a French spiritualist named M. Planchette created the early version of the planchette. This early version of what is paired with the Ouija Board was originally used by mediums for automatic writing. It wasn’t until the planchette made it’s way to America when a cabinet and coffin maker named, E.C. Reiche took a wooden lap tray and inscribed the letters A-Z, numbers 0 - 9, and the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ into it.

Reiche named his board ‘Ouija’ because he thought the word ‘Ouiji’ was Egyptian for “Luck.” The true meaning of the word “Ouija” is a combination of the French word “Oui” and “Ja” which both mean “Yes.” Reiche then sold his idea to his friend, Charles Kennard, who later founded the Kennard Novelty Co. Kennard received a patent for the board in 1890 and the first board was sold in 1891.

Not long after the Kennard Novelty Co. started, William Fuld and forced Kennard out of business and changed the name of the business to Ouija Novelty Co. He then began producing the Fuld’s Talking Board in record numbers. Fuld remained in charge of the business for the next 35 years, but in 1927, he died from falling off the roof of his office building. Whether it was an accident or suicide is unclear.

In 1966 Fuld’s heirs sold the company to Parker Brothers. The Ouija Board is the only game to outsell Monopoly.

Usage

The Ouija Board is extremely easy to use as there is no special requirements other than an open mind. Although one person can use the board, it’s recommended that at least two people use the board. No more than 5 people should be on the board at one time.

I’ve read that a Ouija board should be used indoors and indoors as this is a controlled environment for the communicating with spirits. If the session is conducted outside, it’s said that you may attract elemental spirits by the energy that you’re trying to channel through the board. These elemental spirits are a lot harder to control. The argument of why you should do it outside is that so nothing remains in your house after you finish your session. If you close the session right, then you don’t have anything to worry about. I have done sessions in my basement and even on my bed. Afterwards I have not experienced anything out of the ordinary.

When doing a session inside adhere to all the fire safety rules when lighting candles and turn off all the lights. The use of black candles will attract negative entities. So the use of any other candle is fine.

Never use the board while under the influence of drugs or alcohol and remain in a positive frame of mind. In the event that something begins to spell out a sinister word such as devil, demon, 616, etc, dismiss that spirit. If the planchette starts making an infinity symbol or moves to all four corners of board, dismiss that spirit as it is probably an evil one. Another thing to watch out for is if the planchette moves from A to B to C and so on or 1, 2, 3 and so on. Dismiss that spirit.

Once you are done, move the Planchette to goodbye after asking the spirit if you can leave then flip the board. This will ensure that the board is closed.

As I said before, using a Quija Board is very easy. If you really wanted to, you could sit down and start using one and disregard everything that I said or what ever any one else has said. You may not get anything or you may not get what you want.

Things to Remember

• Be serious, but it’s ok to have a little fun.
• Don’t contact anyone specifically.
• Don’t fully believe or act upon anything that is said.
• Be respectful to the spirits even if they are being rude.
• Move the planchette to goodbye to end the session after asking them if you can leave. Then flip the board when you’re done using it.
• Never ask the spirit to do anything such as move something in the room or make a noise. By doing this, you’ve said it can leave the board.
• If the planchette moves to all four corners, then it’s an evil spirit. Dismiss the spirit.
• An infinity symbol made with the planchette is also bad.
• When the planchette iterates through the alphabet or numbers, then dismiss that spirit.
• Do not let the planchette off the board. This is a spirit that is trying to escape.
• Don’t leave the lights on. Leaving the lights on is said to chase them away.

Other Advice

• Have a cup of water and another cup of salt by the board.
• Say a prayer of protection and a prayer for after you finish the session.
• Burn sage before using the board as it will keep the area clean of bad spirits.
• Use a ring of salt around the board to keep the energy contained and anything else out.
• Place a pure silver coin on the board to keep evil away.
• Have a cup of water to attract spirits.
• Don’t play alone.

Questions to Ask

Talking to a spirit is like talking to anyone else. Be respectful and don’t egg them on. Some good questions to ask are:

• Are there any spirits here?
• Would you like to talk to us?
• What is your name?
• How old are you?
• Where did you live?
• When did you die?
• How many spirits are here?

The way that Microsoft says to repair this problem is to backup the user’s data and recreate the account.

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When my Compaq Presario X1000 (X1010US) died I was sad. It took me some time to get gentoo to work correctly with the hardware. The biggest hurdle that I faced was getting the wireless to work. At the time ndiswrapper wasn’t working very well and would often either lock up my system or cause a kernel panic. The second hurdle that I faced was getting 3d acceleration to work. When I was forced to give up the ghost on my beloved Compaq Presario X1000 I ended up purcharsing a HP Pavilion dv5000 (dv5139).AMD Turion 64 ML-37 (2.0Ghz)
2×1GB DDR333
120GB 5400 RPM Seagate HD
15.4″ Wide 1280×800
ATI XPRESS 200M
8x DVD-RW DL with lightscribe
54a/b/g wireless
Bluetooth
Windows XP MCE 2005 ( which was wiped out right after removing it from the box )

Again, I was having problems with the wireless and video. The laptop has a bcm4319 chip and from what I’ve read, the native Linux kernel only has drivers that support the bcm4318 and earlier. However, I was able to get the ndiswrapper to work with the Windows drivers. The video card took a lot of monkeying around with but after many many hours I was able to get it to work. Unforunately there are some strange bugs in the driver such as once X starts you can’t switch back to the VT without seeing some tripy colours.
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