Serenity -- WTF!?
Posted 30 Sep, 2005 at 23:13 by kael in /MovingPictures | Permanent link
Joss Whedon, if you're reading this, you oughta know you're a goram ***.
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Dear PHP.net: Learn from ActivePerl
Posted 30 Sep, 2005 at 01:33 by brent in /System | Permanent link
PHP still doesn't work. Install sucks ass. I'm going to sleep.
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Suicide solution
Posted 29 Sep, 2005 at 16:57 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
I read Long Way Down -- Nick Hornby's latest, a jolly little tale of four people who meet while standing on a roof with the intent of jumping -- a few weeks ago, and had some trouble articulating my reactions. Now that it's been mulling for a while, let's see if I can do any better.
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Server progress
Posted 29 Sep, 2005 at 02:12 by brent in /System | Permanent link
Well, got mail up and running. Who would have thought that I would not only need to setup another domain controller for oneoddsock but to also find a little checkbox deep in the bowels of the active directory UI to indicate I also want the box to be a global catalog server? That was what was preventing exchange from running correctly. For future reference: Active Directory Sites and Services, Select the desired server in your site, go to NTDS Setting, properties, and select global catalog (not on the connection but on NTDS Settings itself). Then wait for replication to complete before sending servers to the wild blue yonder.
The other problem with mail was that all the script maps were wrong. See, I backed up and restored the IIS metabase to the temp host and of course then install exchange into a slightly different path. Grepping the metabase and correcting these instances has been nothing less than a pain in the ass. I also had to updated my mkexchange.vbs to finally support integrated servers. Not such a bad thing really. Maybe I should post it somewhere for others that have multiple login domains (UPNs) being managed by one domain controller and need to set up log sites in IIS for each login domain.
Please try logging in to the web interface for mail to make sure it is working for you.
Still having a problem with PHP however. It's improved at least from a 500 error to a 404. I suspect another mapping issue since I've also upgraded from 4 to 5 and so there is a name change involved that could snafu a path. Why couldn't they simplify upgrades and use the same name between all versions? Oh right, PHP still uses ini files...
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Space Elevator?
Posted 27 Sep, 2005 at 06:10 by blue in /Science | Permanent link
Apparently someone missed Tenti's Applied Math course. I may have failed miserably, but I do remember the discussion over why a space elevator is not currently possible. DIdn't stop these guys from trying though.
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FYI
Posted 26 Sep, 2005 at 17:43 by matt in /System | Permanent link
As was mentioned a while ago, our esteemed proprietor Brent will be moving house (and country) in the near future. It's possible that you'll see some mild disruption over the next couple of weeks at this site.
Or maybe I'm the proprietor and Brent's the landowner. Whatever.
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Poetic Something
Posted 23 Sep, 2005 at 00:49 by kael in /World | Permanent link
So, I'm taking a non-degree retail management issues course at $BIG_SCHOOL by Distance Ed. There's a set of course notes we need for this course.
The course started Monday.
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So you want to be a Hooters girl?
Posted 21 Sep, 2005 at 07:20 by blue in /FoodDrink | Permanent link
Thanks to an exhibit in a federal lawsuit, the Hooter's employee manual is now online at The Smoking Gun.
Amusingly, the article contains links to work standards for Vitoria's Secret, a NYC stip club and a phone sex outlet (just for comparrison purposes).
Explain to me again why anyone would would want this job?
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War. Huh. What is it good for?
Posted 20 Sep, 2005 at 11:55 by blue in /World | Permanent link
Occassionally I like to do random searches on Google and see what I will come up with. Today, after reading articles about 'Who owns the moon?', 'Will India become the next major power in the world?' and 'So what were those two British agents doing in Basra anyway?'... I decided that the word of the day would be war.
The first hit for Google took me to a site talking about the cost of the US War in Iraq. While I've seen sites like this before, this one was kind of neat in that it also has counters which compare what else this money could have been spent on.
Being completely cynical, I could suggest that they aren't really playing fair with the numbers or looking at the broader picture. At the same time... that's an aweful lot of house, educated kids and sick people that could have been helped too.
Worth a second to check out and read... if you can spare it.
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Google Print: Is it good or bad?
Posted 19 Sep, 2005 at 12:26 by blue in /Books | Permanent link
That seems to be the question being argued amongst publishers.
For those who haven't heard of this endeavour from Google, Google Print is a project to scan in and make searchable all print publications. A good article on the current debate can be found on CNN today.
A couple of notable points I found interesting or amusing:
One quote states "For a typical author, obscurity is a far greater threat than piracy," said Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of O'Reilly Media... which I would have to agree with. The vast majority of writers will never see their work published. Then again, while they may not mind the work being 'copied and distributed' I think a lot of them still fear 'copied and claimed'.
The article states that Publishers won't rule out a lawsuit against Google. which brings to mind all kinds of similarities to the RIAA and so on. The organizations that profit from... er... I mean... defend the rights of... artists always seem to be opposed to these sort of distribution methods while the artists/writers themselves seem more open to new delivery channels.
But perhaps the best quote in the article was this, from another publisher, who felt it was unfair of Google to ask for a list of books which the publishers did not want to share (and hence, Google would not scan... kind of a negative-sales tactic). The publisher stated "We're not aware of everything we've published," Sanfilippo said. "Back in the 50s, 60s and 70s, there were no electronic files for those books." Hmm... so you're not aware of everything you've published, yet you'll defend to the death your right to not let others copy it. Seems to me that if Google simply scanned this man's books, he'd be able to figure out which ones are his by entering a search. But hey... that's just me.
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Nintendo Revolution
Posted 19 Sep, 2005 at 10:01 by blue in /Games | Permanent link
Now I realized that several people may be partial to other gaming systems... but having been raised on Nintendo, I've always had a soft spot for them and always hoped that they would get their proverbial heads out of their asses and resume some level of decency in the gaming world.
Their latest invention, coming soon, certainly looks interesting and unique. I'd have to see/try it before I'd be satisfied that the 'coolness' factor and playability were there... but even so... nice to picture fighting with real sword motions. I'm a huge fan of video games making you more 'active'.
Check out the Revolution for yourself.
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Gullible?
Posted 19 Sep, 2005 at 09:58 by blue in /Social | Permanent link
While I'm not sure that I side with their version of answers in all cases... it still makes for interesting reading... (cause if you don't carmine is, where city fluride comes from or about gas hydrates... you're missing out ;) )
Take the Gullibility Test and then read the answers they give afterwards. They also provide links to other sites so you aren't just taking their word for it.
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Library Thing
Posted 16 Sep, 2005 at 09:33 by wendy in /Books | Permanent link
I know that at least one of you has put together a catalogue of all your books. Now someone has built LibraryThing to let you keep your catalogue online. Even better, instead of entering all the book info manually, you can use search terms and it will search Library of Congress as well as Amazon (and a few others I think), then let you select the book you're referring to from the search results. Or you can enter the info manually. You can set your catalogue to be public or private, so your friends can find out what books you have. Add comments so you know if you liked something or not...or add a comment that it's currently on loan to a friend.
I suspect I'm going to be using this...they let you enter 200 books free, then there's a $10 fee for a lifetime membership which seems really quite reasonable, you'd pay more than that for software which would have less functionality.
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Is true genius a group or individual talent?
Posted 15 Sep, 2005 at 11:55 by blue in /Chatter | Permanent link
Is it just me or do you question the 'public knows best' concept of many of the reality TV shows.
I'm speaking of the 'Choose the next... (Popstar -- Apprentice -- Boy Band -- and most recently -- movie'
It principle it seems like a sound enough concept. Gather a bunch of talent and put it out to the public to choose their favorite... after all, shouldn't the one that gets selected be the most comercially viable because it's the most popular? And in the end of the day, that is what pop music, pop culture etc is about?
The thing is... I don't buy it. I think the really pop stuff comes not from what the public things is cool at the moment, but rather that unique genius that simply does it and manages to swing the mindset of millions.
But just my opinion.
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Movies in September '04
Posted 15 Sep, 2005 at 00:31 by kael in /MovingPictures | Permanent link
Okay. I might as well bring this up.
Who's in for Serenity on the evening of Friday September 30th? I'll somehow work out buying tickets....
Turns out Aeon Flux is also coming out then, with Charlize Theron and some Hungarian guy, and some "fantasy" movie called MirrorMask seems ho-hum, until you look at the writers.
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Slither Link
Posted 14 Sep, 2005 at 13:17 by blue in /Games | Permanent link
It's been a while since I posted a game up here... so here is a nice little implementation of a more classic pencil and paper puzzler.
It's called Slither Links, but as you'll see, it's one of several types of puzzles on this Japanese site.
Enjoy!
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Web Comic Telethon
Posted 14 Sep, 2005 at 08:56 by blue in /Chatter | Permanent link
To support relief efforts in the southern states, a group of well know comic artists (Kim Deitch among others) have organized a (web comic telethon. If you're big into web comics, as several of you are, you might enjoy it. Even if you aren't... it's kind of an interesting social/political medium through which to witness the hurricane.
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Fire Around Corners
Posted 14 Sep, 2005 at 07:32 by blue in /Games | Permanent link
For those who like paintball... here is the gun for you... it can literally shoot around corners. Almost seems unfair eh?
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River is made of Chocolate
Posted 13 Sep, 2005 at 12:58 by blue in /MovingPictures | Permanent link
Warning: http://www.riverismadeofchocolate.com/ should be considered a spoiler for the movie Serenity. That said... watching 'the complete River Tam sessions might be something you'd like to do too... viral marketing... gotta love it.
I would be curious to know though if anyone locally has a copy of the 3 issue comic that bridges the gap in time between the series and the movie...? Anyone? Bueller?
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Burn The Zither and Boil The Crane
Posted 13 Sep, 2005 at 12:42 by blue in /MovingPictures | Permanent link
Now some of you may have expected that phrase to go something more like 'Burn the land and boil the sea', but that would only because you now have a rather catchy tune from the beginning of Firefly going through your head.
So where did the song's creator come up with that from? It's possible it came from any number of sources, but given the 'Sino-American' future portrayed in the series... I would strongly suspect that it came from fen qin zhu he (or...
...for the purists in the audience).
Burn the zither and boil the crane?? What the heck does that mean, you say (or at least in my head you do).
Well, it was an expression used to describe the disregard/destruction of, fine culture and good taste.
In traditional China, the zither came to be viewed as a symbol for the ideal that music was one of the essential subjects a cultivated gentleman should master. Much as in ancient Rome, a true nobleman was a farmer (among other things... oration and other things mattered as well).
The crane's significance is as freedom from worldly concerns.
Thus, to burn the zither to boil the crane are therefore acts of cultural annihilation committed in ignorance for some modest and questionable material gains.
Now the question I have for you, the reader... were they referring to the Alliance... the Brown Coats... to the Reavers... or to the crew themselves?
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How to Confuse Media Store Clerks
Posted 13 Sep, 2005 at 10:20 by kael in /MovingPictures | Permanent link
Present them with the Firefly box set, and when they inevitably ask if you found everything you were looking for, tell them you couldn't find second season of Firefly.
Panic ensues, as everyone tries to figure out where it is.
Be offered Faith Hill's new album Fireflies as the soundtrack offering.
Explain that there is no second season, as the show was cancelled.
Spend five minutes wondering if any of these people know what they're selling.
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Tracking Turtles
Posted 12 Sep, 2005 at 06:20 by blue in /Enviroment | Permanent link
Long a fan of the WWF (the real WWF)... I was highly intreguied by this latest online project.
You too can track a small herd of leatherback turtles which they have fitted with satelite receivers. The turtles, tagged in late June in 4 different locations, have scattered to the currents. Thus far, at least one has died, thanks to manmade interference. Another is setting records for amazingly deep dives and has traveled across half the Atlantic ocean.
Check it all out for yourself at the WWF sub site set up with maps and regular updates.
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Slight protection
Posted 12 Sep, 2005 at 00:35 by matt in /System | Permanent link
Another new feature: only people who are able to count letters in a word will be allowed to post.
Hopefully this will not include automated blog.spammers, but we'll see how this works. Sometime later this week I'll be going through the comment files and removing what spam has accreted there.
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Unscheduled outage
Posted 10 Sep, 2005 at 22:12 by matt in /System | Permanent link
This site is (clearly) back up after about thirty hours of unscheduled downtime. Apologies to anyone who noticed.
There seems to be a couple of things going on here: one is that I really should be setting up some sort of "test" environment when I want to try out a new plugin, so that this sort of thing doesn't happen very often. (It might still happen -- I have no computer in my apt. or at my office which can run IIS, and so there could still be creeping incompatibilities.) Second, something in the pipeline between perl and IIS is really, really crappy when it comes to error handling.
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Ah, Google
Posted 09 Sep, 2005 at 13:06 by kael in /Chatter | Permanent link
Seems that typing "failure" into google and hitting "Get Lucky" links to G. W. Bush's biography.
Someone obviously has a sense of humour....
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Leave it to business in Orleans
Posted 09 Sep, 2005 at 05:42 by blue in /World | Permanent link
Say what you will, and in no way to diminish the work done by relief agencies or even the governments, but here is an example of how corporate, capitalistic enterprise can often be more effective than government.
When you follow the link you may need to click it again to launch the pop up. It links to CNN's video player.
In a nutshell, the VP of Starwood hotels within a few short days, ensured survival of guests and staff alike... has repair crews in the city... provided a secure headquarters for police operations... has three of the only buildings with full power in the city... and expects to have them repaired and back to 100% fully functioning within another week.
We have the technology... we can rebuild it.
When there is a buck to be made, it would seem that people can be extremely efficient. One almost wonders if the best plan the government could have had for the evacuation and restoration of the city wouldn't have been to simply take the money they are setting aside for relief and put out to tender a contract for evacuation. Some may think it sounds sick to put a price tag on human life, but I can't help but wonder if it wouldn't have attracted a highly efficient response from someone looking to profit.
(okay... you can start the flaming response now ;) )
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Side-grading
Posted 07 Sep, 2005 at 18:26 by matt in /Technical | Permanent link
Apple's just pulled off a neat sort of trick: they've introduced the iPod Nano, and it's replacing the Mini in their product line.
What's the difference? Well, the Mini was larger in terms of physical space but also in data capacity; the 4G Mini cost the same as the 2G Nano costs now. The Nano's also got a few extra features: colour display, some capacity for showing photos and videos, etc.
So there's a trade-off: less actual music, but less massive and more frills. Is it worth it?
Personally, I'd say "no". I know that the tendency in hand-held technology has been convergence to the Universal Device: PDAs become phones, phones become cameras, and so on ad infinitum. This is just of a piece with that; one could already synchronize addressbook and calendar programs on an iPod, and now they've added graphic capability. But I don't really want a single universal hand-held device. I'd much prefer to have several gadgets, each of which does a single task (or set of tasks) well, rather than one device that does numerous things half-assedly. So the extra capabilities don't do all that much for me.
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Upgrades
Posted 05 Sep, 2005 at 20:49 by matt in /System | Permanent link
Today, in case anyone cares, is the (first!) anniversary of Dangling Conversations. To celebrate: a couple of new features. Both of them can be noticed on the sidebar.
Firstly, I've hacked up a way to view posts by author. Our names on the side will now link to see the last twenty (or less) posts by a given person. The structure of the URL is this:
http://www.goldenempires.com/dc/?user=foo
...where foo should of course be the name of the blogger in question. This co-operates with the rest of the archive system, so if you wanted to see, say, all of the posts made by Kael in 2005 concerning culinary matters, you've probably do something like this:
http://www.goldenempires.com/dc/blosxom.pl/FoodDrink/2005/?user=kael
Easy, right?
(Links to our personal webspaces have been moved to the bottom of our little bios, as you can see. Other DC folks: let me know if you want one of your e-mail addresses to be linked there as well, like I've got mine.)
The second new feature is the "Giving us what-for" box, which (as is probably evident) lists any posts that have picked up comments in the last week, in order from the most-recently-commented-on. I'm working on getting the post names in the proper colours, but perl's not fond of me today for some reason.
Anyhow, that's that for now.
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Since I'm clearly not busy enough
Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 19:47 by matt in /System | Permanent link
We're coming up on the first anniversary of DC, which I suppose makes this as good a time as any to check up on Ye Olde To-Do Lyst.
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Is Brooke Greenberg a Hoax or Real?
Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 14:21 by blue in /Social | Permanent link
Some of you may have heard of this already...
In Baltimore, a girl lives who is supposedly the only one of her kind on the planet. She may also hold answers to increased longevity. She is a medical mystery. She's also pretty darned cute.
Why?
Cause, at the age of 12, she is physically and mentally, still a baby.
In a quick (5 minute) quest to determine if this story was true or false I wasn't able to prove anything other than that the story has been on going on the internet for the last few years.
Here are some quick links to get you started if you want to weigh in...
When she was 8 this article ran on WBAL TV in Baltimore Same local news agency ran this update when she was 12. This site took a stab at trying to figure out the truth... they didn't get far. This site went further... again... they were unable to prove one way or the other anything about itI have watched a video of the recent story... by all accounts it seems real. If you want to see it, let me know.
A quick search of her name on Google will turn up lots of sites... but surprisingly for something which is such a mystery... very little constructive information.
What do you think?
Real or not?
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How did New Orleans arrange to be lower than sea level anyway?
Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 12:20 by wendy in /History | Permanent link
Unsurprisingly this topic came up the other day. It didn't seem very likely that the city has been sinking, and yet, how exactly would you go about building a coastal city that was beneath sea level anyway? And why on earth would you do something like this? Doesn't it just seem insane? And just what is a levee anyway? Turns out that Wikipedia has the answers to these questions and more.