Kevin's page o' fun

someday i'll actually be happy with this, but in the meantime there's this page. i'm a unix/linux developer, galway resident, a yank, "that hairy guy", a person who has never met a pun he didn't like - and pass along to any nearby victims. and of course there's my undying love for capital letters. i'm currently recovering from the diy phase in a new home.

while i intend to never move again (i've done it enough), i have moved about a fair bit in the past. so if anyone i knew in the past is trying to figure out if i'm the kevin lyda they knew at some point (not that there are many) i was born in brooklyn, ny. then moved to salina, kansas before i knew any better. then i moved to huntington, ny to attend that wonderful american cultural institution: high school. after surviving that, i went to university in buffalo, ny. then i went to work in boston, ma. finally in 1998 i moved to ireland - first to dublin, then to galway. in my working life i've worked for the suny@buffalo student help desk, the school of dental medicine, meditech, net daemons associates (eaten by interliant), unifi (rest in peace), dretec, trintech and now work for doolin technologies. the last time i wrote something like this up i only found a few links to the places i'd been, now there are many for each. it's a wired world...

i'm a huge fan of online artwork and creative stuff done by people around the world. the net is a great equaliser in many ways (not all, but an office building owned by mego-corp will look much more impressive then one by jane murphy, while their web sites can be quite similar). anyway, one artist is cristopher baldwin and his cartoon bruno is great.

against my ethics i bought a dvd player. this is mainly to watch buffy but due to the actions of the mpaa i need to assuge my conscience so i've put up this little rant. essentially the mpaa is targeting software developers and milking consumers with regard to dvd's. the video on a dvd is in a digital format that is converted to the various television standards upon playback. but in order to create artificial shortages they've set up a region encoding scheme - and they've even made it more annoying. in addition they prosecute software developers who write players for "non-mainstream" platforms including the one i use (which, incidentally, was used to create titanic and other films that made a great deal of money for the film industry). in other words i find the mpaa both unethical and rude. so if people have recommendations for movies made outside the states, particularly european films, i'd be glad to hear them.

online privacy is finally making the news. sadly not in a very intelligent manner. like all good things in life privacy takes work. if you want to feel safe from prying eyes i suggest looking at pgp or better yet look at the free software alternative - gpg. most good mail clients support integration of one or the other. for intelligent (non-hype) commentary of tech risks i suggest reading the comp.risks.

several of my friends have web pages. i just noticed that deborah probably deserves special notice since she has a shrine dedicated to her. and then there are my more colorful friends jessica and kathryn who are on the left and right sides of the atlantic respectively. allen has a java email client thingy, and jdwas lucky enough to actually grow up in buffalo. liam has a really great web page.

things i'm fiddling with: help?

• gnome-terminal. essentially i added a patch to gnome-terminal to have it remember it's cwd across sessions. credit goes to kenn humborg for the idea and motivation. i386 (12 megs) and src (5 megs) rpm. the patch and the spec file. all of these apply to the gnome-core-1.2.1-0_helix_3 helixcode rpm for redhat. speed wise it's probably quicker to just download the gnome-terminal (63k) binary itself.
• cheap box hosting rates in ireland. possible?
• a cgi/perl script i threw together in a rush to allow users to modify their unix accounts (with particular focus on mail) via the web. the goal is simplicity, i'd appreciate any patches that make it more secure. also it currently picks the first matching username, a method of narrowing down the username if there are multiple matches would be nice. it's released under the GPL, so feel free to use it with your stuff. you can find it here: user.cgi.gz. you'll need the CGI and Authen::PAM modules.
• good links for using lego mindstorms with linux. just using it, i don't need linux ported to the lego computer brick thingy, that would just be silly. i'll fill in the list below here.