//mikelococo.com/ Recent content on Bulbous, Not Tapered Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:50:00 -0400 //mikelococo.com/2017/09/usb-audio-latency/ Thu, 07 Sep 2017 17:50:00 -0400 //mikelococo.com/2017/09/usb-audio-latency/ Introduction Not all usb sound devices are made the same with respect to latency, and the difference matters quite a lot if you hope to use your audio interface for real-time effects. This post will show two cards with widely varying latency on Linux and Jack, but many of the concepts apply to other platforms as well. Latency is not Throughput It’s easy to find specs associated with audio interfaces that relate to “speed”. //mikelococo.com/2017/08/disable-touchpad-while-typing/ Fri, 04 Aug 2017 22:00:00 -0400 //mikelococo.com/2017/08/disable-touchpad-while-typing/ Introduction I have a Lenovo Thinkpad t460p laptop that currently runs Ubuntu 17.04. In general the system is a pleasure to use but one niggle has been mildly infuriating… the touchpad regularly engages when I’m typing and my cursor jumps to an unwanted position mid-word. It doesn’t happen frequently enough to be a serious problem, but it does happen frequently enough to be intensely irritating. The fix was simple, but researching it was not. //mikelococo.com/2017/07/chef-lxc-to-ansible-docker/ Sun, 02 Jul 2017 22:02:27 -0400 //mikelococo.com/2017/07/chef-lxc-to-ansible-docker/ Introduction I recently changed the way I manage the handful of personal servers that I maintain. I was previously using Chef to provision containers on LXC. I’ve recently switched over to a combination of Ansible and Docker. So far, I’m happy with the switch. Going through the process, I feel like I’ve learned something about what each technology does well. The TLDR is: Chef remains my favorite system for high-volume high-complexity configuration management work. //mikelococo.com/2017/06/goodbye-wordpress/ Tue, 13 Jun 2017 23:22:00 -0400 //mikelococo.com/2017/06/goodbye-wordpress/ Introduction After more than 12 years it’s time to say goodbye to Wordpress. It’s been a good run and WordPress is fantastic software but I spend considerably more time maintaining it than I do writing. A static site can do everything I want and needs way less maintenance when I’m not using it. I’ve switched over to Hugo and am relatively happy… though there were some minor bumps and bruises along the way. //mikelococo.com/admin/ Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:38:29 +0000 //mikelococo.com/admin/ media.lan plex srvr.lan netdata srvr.lan crashplan mikelococo.com netdata mikelococo.com caddy expvar stats //mikelococo.com/2013/12/filling-up-the-boot-partition/ Tue, 03 Dec 2013 13:15:37 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2013/12/filling-up-the-boot-partition/ Ubuntu doesn’t remove old kernels when upgrading to new kernel versions, which is a great because sometimes there’s a compatibility problem and you want to roll back. If you don’t pay attention to free disk space, though, it’s really easy to fill up your boot partition which is only a couple hundred megs by default. When this happens, kernel upgrades start failing and apt may start throwing errors for all package operations, which isn’t fun. //mikelococo.com/2013/11/chefspec-3-and-guard-evaluation/ Sat, 16 Nov 2013 16:52:02 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2013/11/chefspec-3-and-guard-evaluation/ Introduction Chefspec is an incredibly useful tool for testing Chef cookbooks. It’s much much faster than running chef on a real node, but it can provide you much of the testing feedback you’d get from a real chef run. Verious.com has a nice introduction to chefspec if you’re not already familiar with it. What makes chefspec so fast is that it doesn’t perform a full chef run. It loads Chef with your cookbooks and modifies them in-memory so that they merely send messages to Chefspec instead of performing real system changes. //mikelococo.com/2011/08/snort-capacity-planning/ Sun, 14 Aug 2011 14:43:02 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2011/08/snort-capacity-planning/ Snort is a very capable network intrusion detection system, but planning a first-time hardware purchase can be difficult. It requires fairly deep knowledge of x86 server performance, network usage patterns at your site, along with some snort-specific knowledge. Documentation is poor, current planning guides tend to focus on one or two factors in depth without addressing other broad issues that can cause serious performance problems. This post aims to be a comprehensive but high-level overview of the issues that must be considered when sizing a medium to large snort deployment. //mikelococo.com/2011/04/snort-zabbix/ Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:51:00 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2011/04/snort-zabbix/ In January I gave a presentation to the REN-ISAC on how to monitor the performance of Snort IDS systems. It covers: A comparison of high-performance capture-frameworks like vanilla-libpcap vs pfring vs dedicated capture cards from Endace or similar. An overview of the perfmon preprocessor and the --enable-perfprofiling configure-option that allow snort to log useful performance metrics. A very brief overview of Zabbix as a system-monitoring framework, followed by some worked-examples of actual snort problems that are analyzed using data collected by Zabbix. //mikelococo.com/2010/10/relaunch/ Wed, 20 Oct 2010 03:45:36 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2010/10/relaunch/ My RSS subscriber has reminded me that my feeds have gone a little bit wild over the last couple of days as I’ve gone through old posts to retag and update dead links. That’s all finished now, promise. I’ve been cleaning house and generally updating things… I’ve migrated from Laughing Squid shared hosting to a linode virtual private server. Laughing squid has been good to me over the years, but I’ve gotten to the point where I really want a root shell on my web-server. //mikelococo.com/genealogy/ Mon, 19 Jul 2010 01:01:55 +0000 //mikelococo.com/genealogy/ Introduction The Lococo family has done a substantial amount of research into our family history, much of which is available online if you know where to look. Genealogy Resources Life’s Great Flood: Several members of the family worked together to create a book that details what we know about our family history. It contains many family stories, historical context to put events in perspective, illustrated family trees, and family photographs and documents. //mikelococo.com/2009/06/virtualization-and-security-boundaries/ Mon, 08 Jun 2009 04:07:34 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2009/06/virtualization-and-security-boundaries/ Virtualization security is coming up frequently in higher-ed security forums as folks scramble to understand best-practices before whatever path-of-least-resistance gets too entrenched to change. Unfortunately, there’s almost no intermediate-level documents on virtualization security to help us wrap our heads around the problem. There’s plenty of introductory documents rehashing the same six bullet points over and over and there’s quite a lot of deep-dive technical material on various details, but almost no technical survey material for folks looking to bootstrap themselves on the topic. //mikelococo.com/2008/03/fedora8-on-d620/ Mon, 24 Mar 2008 04:12:35 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2008/03/fedora8-on-d620/ Fedora 8 works quite well on the D620 right out of the box, and with a few tweaks can be just about fully supported. This guide summarizes what I’ve done to get things working to my satisfaction. It is not a step by step howto, but does attempt to link to more detailed resources when they are available. The table below shows at a glance what is and isn’t working well on my system. //mikelococo.com/2008/01/multihop-ssh/ Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:38:41 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2008/01/multihop-ssh/ Introduction It’s not always possible to ssh to a host directly. Many networks require high-value systems to be accessed via an intermediate bastion/proxy host that receives extra attention in terms of security controls and log monitoring. The added security provided by this connection bouncing comes with a cost in convenience, though. It requires multiple logins to access the protected systems and substantially complicates scp/stfp file transfers. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to automate connection bouncing and make it as convenient as direct connection. //mikelococo.com/2007/12/ssh-presence/ Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:49:20 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2007/12/ssh-presence/ There are a number of excellent guides to setting up public key authentication for ssh, but they tend to stop short of describing how to integrate presence events like a screensaver turning on. It’s a topic that isn’t possible to cover in a generic way, since it depends heavily on your operating system, distribution, desktop environment, and preferred shell. I present here the information I’ve pulled together to get things running under Linux, specifically Fedora 8 with Gnome and Bash. //mikelococo.com/2007/04/new-york-city/ Sun, 15 Apr 2007 16:44:25 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2007/04/new-york-city/ Making good on the heels of my CISSP certification, I’m going to be joining the Security Services group at NYU in May as a Senior Network Security Analyst. Security Services is charged to protect the entire NYU network, which provides connectivity to around 40,000 nodes. I’m incredibly excited about the move. Since my partner lives in New York, I’ve been job hunting there for almost a year and half and I’ve found that it’s a very competitive market. //mikelococo.com/2007/03/d620-battery-life/ Sun, 04 Mar 2007 20:21:55 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2007/03/d620-battery-life/ Dawid Lorenz, myself, and a number of other folks (read the comments on Dawid’s page, and also on the product pages for the D620 batteries) have all experienced poor battery life on Dell Latitude D620’s that are typically less than six months old. There may or may not be a high failure rate for this battery model, and this page details my experiences in diagnosing the health of my battery and obtaining a replacement under warranty. //mikelococo.com/2007/01/fc6-on-d620/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 05:04:39 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2007/01/fc6-on-d620/ Dawid Lorenz already has a very comprehensive set of notes on running Fedora Core 6 on the Dell Latitude D620, but I’m going to drop in my two cents as well for variety’s sake. FC6 works quite well on the D620 right out of the box, and with a few tweaks can be just about fully supported. This guide summarizes what I’ve done to get things working to my satisfaction. //mikelococo.com/2006/12/cissp-certification/ Sat, 16 Dec 2006 21:46:13 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/12/cissp-certification/ As of Thursday I’ve fulfilled all the requirements for CISSP certification, my papers should be in the mail by Monday. I haven’t wanted to talk about it online until I had some firm results, but folks who know me in meatspace know I’ve been studying on and off since August. I’m a little more amped about this credential because they’re not handed out like party-favors and people who have them seem to be doing interesting things. //mikelococo.com/2006/10/fc5-on-d620/ Sat, 28 Oct 2006 05:57:08 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/10/fc5-on-d620/ Instructions for getting Fedora Core 5 humming on the Dell Latitude D620 probably fall into the category of better late than never at this point. Since FC6 was recently released, this post will primarily serve as a comparison against a future (and more timely) guide for FC6 on the D620. FC5 can be made to work fairly well on the D620, but many things require tweaking to work properly. This guide summarizes what can be made to work and how. //mikelococo.com/2006/09/parsons-design-workshop/ Thu, 28 Sep 2006 22:16:45 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/09/parsons-design-workshop/ My partner is part of a group of graduate students at Parsons who have been working to design and build a laundromat and community information center in DeLisle, Mississippi. The student-lead team worked from January to May to design the building and plan its construction, then moved to DeLisle for the summer where they lived and worked to build the structure. The project has been very well received: It was displayed in a group exhibit at the 2006 Venice Biennale. //mikelococo.com/2006/09/wucoco-0102/ Mon, 25 Sep 2006 04:24:10 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/09/wucoco-0102/ This is a bugfix release for WuCoco, it contains no new features but resolves the following issues: Comments now render properly in IE6. This is a moderately severe bug. Posts with complex HTML tags now display properly in the category archives. All theme variants are now validating again (thanks for the patch Brian). The comments link now correctly links to the comment form when a post has no existing comments. //mikelococo.com/2006/08/droopy-drew/ Mon, 28 Aug 2006 21:25:21 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/08/droopy-drew/ Drew… you didn’t leave your e-mail address or phone number. Try another way. Or send me an e-mail at the address I contacted your brother from like a normal person. You’d be impressed with the sleuthing job Rich and I did to find you. P.S. Sorry for the private post in a public forum, folks. I’m tracking down an old friend and don’t have conventional contact info yet. //mikelococo.com/2006/08/the-peanut-threat/ Sat, 12 Aug 2006 02:38:18 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/08/the-peanut-threat/ Earlier this week, Schneier wrote about a short paper from the CATO Institute that attempts to give some everyman-context to the risks associated with terrorist threats. Although it was BoingBoinged the same day, apparently not enough people read it because the media is ablaze all over again with totally irrational commentary since the incident in the UK. A choice quote from the CATO paper puts the risk of dying in a terrorist incident into perspective: //mikelococo.com/2006/07/wucoco-0100/ Thu, 20 Jul 2006 02:48:36 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/07/wucoco-0100/ During the development for 0.9.0 I thought I was ramping up for the big one-oh release, but as I dig deeper into the theme I’m finding that there are a few more cycles of disruptive development before I’m ready to settle into a maintenance cycle. WuCoco 0.10.0 features… The much requested three column variant. I’d like to thank Soulpress.net for generously sponsoring the development of this feature. A completely revamped layout engine, based on the Octopus Engine from Dragon Labs. //mikelococo.com/2006/07/a-tale-of-how/ Sun, 09 Jul 2006 05:21:50 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/07/a-tale-of-how/ Check out the amazing animated short available from the Blackheart Gang, A Tale of How (low-res youtube version). It feels grand and beautiful and immediately evokes a kind of childlike wonderment that’s all too rare in the adult world. The short is often and aptly compared Terry’s Gilliam’s animation for Monty Python’s Flying Circus and to anything by Tim Burton (WFMU says: “I’m sure they whip a stapler across the room every time someone goes ‘Tim Burton. //mikelococo.com/2006/07/wucoco-0101/ Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:06:27 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/07/wucoco-0101/ WuCoco 0.10.1 is a small update that adds IE7 compatability. Please don’t download IE7, though. Seriously. Internet Explorer has been an anchor tied to the leg of the web design community for years. CSS3 support is just around the corner, and it’s going to start all over again with the hacks and the new features that are supported by every browser but IE. Firefox is great, Opera is great, Safari is great. //mikelococo.com/2006/06/wucoco-090/ Wed, 07 Jun 2006 02:27:47 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/06/wucoco-090/ WuCoco 0.9.0 is the result of the first round of concerted development work on the theme since its creation and it’s chock-full of new features and bugfixes: Clean archives (Update: website for the clean archives plugin has disappeared) has been integrated to provide an information rich and inviting view of your post history. No fussing with plugins required. Author comments are now highlighted to stand out. The two-column layout is widget friendly. //mikelococo.com/2006/06/wucoco-preview/ Sat, 03 Jun 2006 13:42:03 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/06/wucoco-preview/ This site is now running a pre-release copy of the next version of the WuCoco theme, which will be ready for public consumption soon. It includes several significant new features including author comment highlighting, clean archives style archives (Update: links to the clean-archives plugin all appear to be dead), widget support in the two-column theme, and a major stylesheet revamp to ease future development. Have a poke around and leave a comment if you have some feedback. //mikelococo.com/2006/05/aplus/ Thu, 04 May 2006 23:29:58 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/05/aplus/ Not just grade A, I’m A+ and I have the papers to prove it. Or I should in 6-8 weeks. I took and passed the exams earlier this week. In some ways I feel a little silly about it, because it’s a lightweight certification that’s meant to demonstrate only very basic computer maintenance skills. I’ve put off doing the certification dance for too long though, and going through the process with an easy exam has been a good way to get my feet wet. //mikelococo.com/2006/04/wucoco-043/ Tue, 25 Apr 2006 12:34:36 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/04/wucoco-043/ The latest version of the WordPress theme used on this site is now available. The updates are all documentation related, updating links to point to the new project page and preparing for submission to the WordPress Theme Competition. Download the one-column layout, the two-column layout, or the image sources in Gimp XCF format. Read the project page for the latest downloads and more information. //mikelococo.com/2006/04/plunger-press/ Tue, 25 Apr 2006 02:58:21 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/04/plunger-press/ Check out plungerpress.com for groovy political kitsch, including t-shirts with Donald Rumsfeld’s head in a mason jar. All products are hand-printed and shirts are nice quality cotton/poly tees by Hanes. I’m not clear if this is a permanent web fixture or temporary art installation. It was incorporated into a recent graduate thesis in fine art at Cornell University. But it’s not obvious to me if it’s aiming to create a pop-culture brand to market and financially support the artist’s work, or if it’s an ironic critique of consumerism. //mikelococo.com/2006/04/icdsoft-wrapup/ Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:06:13 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/04/icdsoft-wrapup/ As previously mentioned, I did decide to migrate to a new domain and webhost. In addition to the comment left in response to my original ICDSoft commentary, an ICDSoft representative contacted me via e-mail. The message conveyed considerable distress over my post and also mentioned an unspecified potential terms of use violation. Although the representative suggested that ICDSoft would never consider censorship of its users, the choice to address possible policy violations in a conversation about critical content was distressing to me. //mikelococo.com/2006/03/new-home/ Wed, 29 Mar 2006 04:52:43 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/03/new-home/ Even though cool uri’s don’t change, I’m in the process of moving to a new home at mikelococo.com for reasons I’ll elucidate on shortly. The new site is already live (it looks just like the old one), and next week I’ll tear things down on lococo.org. After that happens, visitors who come here looking for me will be redirected the the corresponding page on the new site. Hopefully it will all be fairly seamless. //mikelococo.com/2006/03/icdsoft-rocks/ Wed, 15 Mar 2006 03:31:50 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/03/icdsoft-rocks/ Update: Shortly after this post, I stopped using ICDSoft as a host due to this incident. Read ICDSoft wrapup for details. In short, they contacted me privately in an an email that conveyed considerable distress over my post. While they claimed that they would never consider attempting to censor their users, they also chose that conversation to mention an unspecified terms of use violation that I might have made. While nothing more came of the discussion and there were no tangible consequences, I decided it was time to move on after that. //mikelococo.com/2006/03/wucoco-042/ Sun, 12 Mar 2006 03:24:55 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/03/wucoco-042/ At the request of Wuhan’s author, I’ve packaged up one- and two-column versions of this theme for download. Love/Hate mail as well as bug-reports can go in the comments here. Download the one-column layout, the two-column layout, or the image sources in Gimp XCF format. Otherwise, head over to the project page for the latest downloads and more info. //mikelococo.com/projects/wucoco/ Sun, 12 Mar 2006 02:57:32 +0000 //mikelococo.com/projects/wucoco/ Introduction WuCoco is a simple, meditative theme for WordPress 2.x, available with one-column, two-column, or three-column layouts. You can view screenshots (one-column, two-column, three-column) of the theme when viewed under Firefox. Update 2010-06-28: WuCoco has had a long and useful life, but I’m not planning further updates at this point. At the time of this writing, the theme does work well with recent versions of WordPress (tested most recently with 2. //mikelococo.com/2006/03/new-skin-for-the-old-ceremony/ Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:06:49 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/03/new-skin-for-the-old-ceremony/ So the new site skin is up and I’m fairly happy with it. It’s based on Wuhan 0.4, with a short javascript lifted from Gespaa. I made lots of small changes, most notably folding the menubar into the header image and switching the layout to a one-column format. I’ve also enabled comments again. I turned them off almost immediately after starting the site when I had blog spam problems, but it has become increasingly clear to me that this site exists primarily in order to solicit feedback and it does a poor job of that with comments disabled. //mikelococo.com/2006/03/upgrading-wordpress/ Tue, 07 Mar 2006 00:10:31 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/03/upgrading-wordpress/ Beware of drastic changes in the appearance of the site while I’m fixing it up over the next few days. There may also be short outages while I perform upgrades to the backend. //mikelococo.com/projects/exif-touch/ Sun, 05 Feb 2006 00:17:09 +0000 //mikelococo.com/projects/exif-touch/ exif_touch is a perl script to set the “modified date” of a jpg image (or a directory of images) to match the “image creation” date information in the exif headers. This can be useful in allowing image browsing software to sort images images according to when they were shot, instead of when they were last modified. It will probably run on any platform where exiftime and touch are available, but I’ve only tested it on my machine, which runs Fedora Core 3. //mikelococo.com/2006/02/fun-with-punctuation/ Sat, 04 Feb 2006 21:55:11 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2006/02/fun-with-punctuation/ Everybody’s talking ‘bout the new sound, funny but[t]. It’s still rock and roll to me. It’s especially funny if you can sound exasperated and lisp, sort of like Napolean Dynamite meets Butthead. I was recently contacted by a childhood friend whom I remember fondly for his Butthead impressions. He’s the first friend or foe to find me through my website, although I suspect he won’t be the last. Lately I’ve had an increasing number of where-are-they-now conversations, even with friends who typically don’t care where “they” ended up. //mikelococo.com/2005/11/a70-service-notice/ Wed, 09 Nov 2005 01:13:18 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/11/a70-service-notice/ Some time ago, I wrote about my Canon A70 digital camera failing, and the subsequent replacement adventures I went through. It turns out I wasn’t the only one, the problem was quite widespread and affected several manufacturers. The fiasco is documented in excruciating detail at imaging-resource.com, and Canon has published a service notice on the A70 product page. The short of it is that Canon is offering to repair affected cameras at no charge regardless of warranty status. //mikelococo.com/2005/07/more-on-dubai/ Sun, 31 Jul 2005 22:36:52 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/07/more-on-dubai/ The more avid readers among you may have noticed that Hal’s posts have disappeared. It would appear that he was too honest for his own good, and he has chosen to self-censor rather than offend those who inspired him. We’ll all have to look forward to the book. //mikelococo.com/2005/06/my-house/ Fri, 03 Jun 2005 02:58:39 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/06/my-house/ …is a very very very fine house. There are, in fact two cats in the yard, although neither of them are mine. Lots of folks haven’t seen my place even though I’ve lived here almost a year, so now you can experience the experience of the comfort of my own home without leaving the comfort of your own home. It’s like magic. //mikelococo.com/about/ Fri, 27 May 2005 23:47:29 +0000 //mikelococo.com/about/ Who are you? Mike Lococo. Red Hook, Bard, short sojourn in Kansas, long stay in Ithaca, not quite long enough in New York to be a New Yorker, several years in the dark shadow of our nation’s capital, now returned to the land of my people. I receive email right here at mikelococo.com, and my username is ‘contact’. Deducing my email address is left as an exercise for the reader. //mikelococo.com/2005/05/blogging-the-blog/ Thu, 19 May 2005 17:23:53 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/05/blogging-the-blog/ I’m going to attempt to make the transition from solo to group publication. Hal is the first additional contributor, and has already begun titillating audiences with the elegant writing style and unique perspective given voice is his recent post (yes, this thing is on). Things will be shifting around in the next couple weeks as I do some house cleaning and make the technical changes necessary to support more writers. If this experiment is successful, we may gather more interested folk in exactly the way that a rolling stone fails to gather moss. //mikelococo.com/2005/05/exif_touch/ Tue, 10 May 2005 23:01:34 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/05/exif_touch/ See the permanent URL for information about exif-touch. //mikelococo.com/2005/05/dishes/ Sun, 08 May 2005 21:56:02 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/05/dishes/ Hmm… perhaps I should do the dishes. //mikelococo.com/2005/04/fun-with-camera/ Sun, 17 Apr 2005 23:03:11 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/04/fun-with-camera/ I’ve had my camera for a couple of weeks now and have been snapping away like mad. Some patterns that caught me eye… //mikelococo.com/2005/04/google-labs-problem-3/ Tue, 12 Apr 2005 02:55:48 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/04/google-labs-problem-3/ Google likes to put cute math problems in their employment ads.The first time I saw this was when they took out an ad in the Cornell Daily Sun, and I thought it was amusing enough to clip and hang on the wall of my geek cave. This weekend I caught the bug to solve it and see if I’m smart enough to work at Google. Apparently I’m not, because I ended up cheating when I checked my initial (and I thought correct) solution against what others had found. //mikelococo.com/2005/03/camera-drama/ Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:35:36 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/03/camera-drama/ My Canon A70 digital camera gave up the ghost after a year a half. Luckily, the folks servicing my Staples extended warranty came through and cut me a check for the purchase price of the camera, after determining that the repair was too expensive to bother with. Update 9/2/05: It’s worth mentioning that Staples was more of a pain than I first thought to deal with. They originally sent me a Staples gift card (after telling me I would get a check, and which arrived after I had already bought my new camera at Best Buy), and it took me over 2 months of frequent follow-up calls to get my check. //mikelococo.com/2005/02/right-to-disinterest/ Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:45:31 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/02/right-to-disinterest/ My interest was piqued when I came across this CNN story about a recent survey asking high school students, faculty, and principals about the first amendment. Even though I don’t normally post news commentary, I found some moderately amusing facts that I didn’t see noted elsewhere… Update: CNN seems to have taken down their writeup, so I removed the link. It’s true that the results are pretty distressing, the students did atrociously on the fact-based questions in the survey. //mikelococo.com/2005/01/badger-cello/ Fri, 21 Jan 2005 23:52:47 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/01/badger-cello/ Anagrams are fun and educational. Cornell University can be rearranged to spell lots of fun things (not all of them appropriate for children). Find out which one is on the back of my car! It kind of looks like it was stuck to the window by a three year old, but it brings me great joy nonetheless. Go play on the Internet Anagram Server, or read some of my other favorites: //mikelococo.com/2005/01/this-just-in/ Thu, 06 Jan 2005 03:27:35 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2005/01/this-just-in/ Please enjoy this special holiday video report brought to you by Fio and Uncle Mike, there’s some great footage in it. Coming to you from the Lococo household in Massachusetts, Fio’s reportage unearths a poignant story of holiday cheer that’s not to be missed. Filesize: ~3.4M License: all rights reserved //mikelococo.com/2004/12/christmas-in-boston/ Fri, 31 Dec 2004 19:39:43 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/12/christmas-in-boston/ Christmas in Boston, Fio was a riot whizzing around in his NASA space shuttle “jetpack”. He borrowed my camera to document his favorite gifts, and took the photo of the space shuttle puzzle. //mikelococo.com/2004/12/let-it-snow3/ Sun, 19 Dec 2004 20:39:25 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/12/let-it-snow3/ The first snowstorm with a couple inches of accumulation always announces the “real” arrival of winter in my mind. That was today in Ithaca, and Laura and I went on a winter walkabout to bring the experience to you. //mikelococo.com/2004/12/intertwingle/ Mon, 13 Dec 2004 22:47:44 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/12/intertwingle/ Intertwingle Filesize: ~600K License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ This is another automated art project and a bit of a work in progress. Some time ago I wrote an FXScript for Final Cut Pro 3.0 that edited a movie to run forward and backward, interleaving the frames instead of compositing them. This is the test video I used as I was writing the script, you can still see (but not read in this heavily compressed version) the variables I was tracking on-screen while I debugged. //mikelococo.com/2004/11/mohawk/ Sun, 07 Nov 2004 07:44:59 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/11/mohawk/ I’m in the process of putting up lots of old junk that I’ve told people about but often haven’t been able to show them. Last time I shaved my head I kept a mohawk for a week. It’s funny to have people look at you like you’re attached to your hair, but the novelty wears off pretty fast. Update 3/20/06: Since a few hundred folks a month seem to be finding this site searching for information about mohawks, a short update is in order. //mikelococo.com/2004/11/giant-rainbow/ Sat, 06 Nov 2004 12:06:52 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/11/giant-rainbow/ I saw a giant rainbow over the summer. It rocked. //mikelococo.com/2004/11/study-in-gray/ Mon, 01 Nov 2004 21:40:22 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/11/study-in-gray/ study_in_gray2x2 study_in_gray3x2 The recent proliferation of high level computer programming languages has made it possible for non-expert users to write interesting programs without getting bogged down in technical specifics. In particular, the availability of libraries and API’s that provide high-level, user-oriented data primitives like pixels and video frames are very interesting because they allow users to approach visual tasks without having to understand how the computer internally represents visual data. //mikelococo.com/2004/10/what-is-the-federal-register/ Sat, 23 Oct 2004 13:54:21 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/10/what-is-the-federal-register/ It has been brought to my attention that 5 out of 5 otherwise intelligent and well-informed people have almost no clue what the Federal Register is. It’s where the action is in the Federal Government. If you have a question about a proposed law, an executive order by the president, a new FDA rule, or a recent change in FCC policy… the answer is in the Federal Register. But really none of that is important. //mikelococo.com/2004/10/im-famous/ Fri, 22 Oct 2004 16:19:38 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/10/im-famous/ In 2002 my comments on the proposed settlement in the antitrust case against Microsoft were cited in the Federal Register. I must be famous or something. In late 2001 and early 2002, the Department of Justice collected over 30,000 comments on the proposed settlement for the Microsoft antitrust case, including one from me. Apparently someone actually read it, because it was one of 107 comments cited in the DOJ’s reponse filed with the Federal Register on March 18th, 2002. //mikelococo.com/2004/10/photos-from-jims-wedding/ Fri, 22 Oct 2004 01:59:36 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/10/photos-from-jims-wedding/ Update, 3/7/06: Here aren’t some photos of the trip I took down to New York to go to Uncle Jim’s wedding reception. I took them down. Contact me if you really want to see them. //mikelococo.com/2004/10/pinky-suavo-are-you-pondering-what-im-pondering/ Thu, 21 Oct 2004 22:13:51 +0000 //mikelococo.com/2004/10/pinky-suavo-are-you-pondering-what-im-pondering/ Yes, but why does the chicken cross the road, huh, if not for love? Oh, I don’t know. –Pinky and The Brain