reesesWeb

Never talk to muffin trees!

I never use vi. (Never? Hardly ever!) But somehow, today, I wasediting a dataset for gnuplot, and tried to exit Emacs with Esc-: wq.

I only use vi when I'm on some inadequately-configured machine, so it's not as if I even use it regularly. There was no reason for that to be implanted into my head.

I need a lie-down.

And I need to disable auto-fill-mode with blogger.el.

This is brilliant.My favorite is Java: C++ is a kludge. And Microsoft is going to crush us.

What makes me overpromise chunks of work, so I end up staying up at night to pound them out? I want to sleep!

I love that things like this surprise people.

I love the name of this article. I wondered exactly that when I first started learning about functional languages. Right after currying, that is. :-)

This is interesting, for you Oracle-on-Linux weenies. I've had about a dozen Oracle on Linux installations in the past couple years, and tuning is _vastly_ more important than it might be on other platforms. Out of the box, installed on some out-of-the-box distribution, Oracle is a complete dog on Linux. Tuned, it can stay up with Slowarse installations, and spank NT installations. This article is naive, but a good start for education.

It appears to have worked. Whoohoo!

I'm just testing blogger.el...

Feeling crafty?

I was a total sloth today. Stayed home, read a bit, ventured out to wash Kat's car and get coffee, and that was it. I did get CMU Common Lisp running on this laptop, which was a nice accomplisment. I have been putting up with CLISP or ACL on my other laptop, since they both run on Win2k, but I actually prefer CMUCL for development, because the people I know who are doing Lisp work are working on that platform, and it's easier to get advice about corners of the system.

I'm again reminded how slow GUI applications are for Linux. Shell apps are painfully fast, but web browsing, etc., is still dog slow. I guess it's easy to make a web-browser fast when you embed half the DLLs in the OS. ;>

Man, after three days off, I'm ready for another week.

Funniest...photo...ever.

We live in the Potrero Hill area of San Francisco. Actually, we live nearer Dogpatch, but it's all the same. Due to the location, there are occasionally some interesting elements nearby, especially around the old abandoned warehouses, and under the freeways (101 and 280 pass near here). It's not uncommon to see homeless people any time one ventures outside. It's a really, really unpleasant aspect of San Francisco life.

We went up to the corner store, which is actually about six blocks away, on the other side of 280. On the way back from getting milk and snacky cakes, we were walking behind a couple guys. One guy looked relatively normal, if not a little hirsute.

The other guy was a bit more hardcore. He was wearing a leather wide-brimmed hat, leather duster, leather pants, and carrying a leather backpack. These were all "clothes that last the rest of your life"-Fight-Club-type leather, not pervy leather. This was only about 30% of the impact. The rest was that the guy wasn't wearing shoes. He was just trucking around, in weather running 35-50, with his little tootsies naked to the air. I've read about feral children and their oblivity to cold, but sheesh.

If he would have growled and said,"Give me your money," he would have had a fistful of money and a great view of my back from an increasing distance. :-)

I was reading the hard drive mod page, and went up to the root of the site. Wonderfully danged funny. ;>

We went downtown this afternoon to score thai at Banana Leaf, and do some shopping. We wanted to grab a book on Prague, and I wanted to grab a pair of black shoes with chunky soles. I didn't have any luck, but somehow, I ended up buying Kat a pair of Prada slip-ons. :(

This is mildly amusing. It would be even cooler if it were software-controlled.

Good lord, I love Linux. I really do. Even after ten years of using it (well, nine years and ten months) it's still a mystery. Getting an antiquated sound chip working with wireless ether in an older laptop is a real joy. ;>

I gave up on using the alsa drivers, because, with the default Deadrat 7.2 kernel, there's some sort of conflict with the OSS drivers, or whatever it is that ships with the kernel. I'm not going to go through the make config pain, just to do away with that. As it was, it skr00d the module dependency graph, and kept the wlan driver from loading successfully. I'm not enough into system-level stuff anymore to bother debugging and replacing it, so I terminated it with extreme prejudice.

Anyway, it's working, and the main reason I had installed Linux on this machine was to see the sub-pixel font rendering, since I don't have (and won't install) WinXP. That aspect is quite lovely. It's still a slow box, though, and all of the available pretty-pretty tools take a long time to start. This isn't that old a box...it's a pII/233.

It's a throwaway laptop, and I could sell it on ebay now for about 10x what I paid for it, now that the novelty may have worn off. It may just end up being a CMU CL toybox.

We drove down to Fry's today, because I have an old Thinkpad 600 (bought from Punch for about $25 when we moved offices) that needed some love before it could be useful. It had about 64M RAM, and about 3GB disk. I wanted more RAM and disk, and bought another wireless ether card. I ended up putting this card in my work laptop, because it's newer, and it gets an incredibly strong signal compared to the other. Since that's an issue in the office, I want the hairiest card possible in there.

I installed the RAM without incident, but the HD required a BIOS update, and just started flickering the screen. D'oh! It apparently doesn't really love the 802.11b card, because the screen cut out at random. I'll put it back in after the Deadrat installation is done, and see if it behaves differently.

Anyway, we drove back up 280, and stopped off at Half Moon Bay. It was an unplanned stop, so we didn't bring a camera, but it was a nice break. Windy and stormy at the beach. After that, we stopped at Home Depot for a hand drill. They didn't have one! A hand drill!

Savages.

At least now, I can use a laptop when I don't bring one home from work, and someone hogs the fast one.

I think our cats are a lot less happy now that we don't use CRTs at home anymore.

This is the second-funniest thing I've seen today. I could tell you the first, but I'd get in trouble.

This may not be factual, but it's True.

Mother F*ckers

Pretty!

I went to Safeway tonight to buy some essentials, and used Kat's discount card code in the kiosk, saving some pittance, around $2. I came home, emptied the bags, and took a peek at the receipt. The name associated with our phone number is apparently "Richard Hermann", because that's the name on the receipt. (apart from the name associated with my CC#)

This explains two things:

1) Why the flirty woman behind the counter suddenly stopped being flirty upon reading my receipt. (Hey, it's SFO.)

2) Why we've been receiving a great deal of wrong numbers lately for "Richard Hermann". The bastard. I wonder if he fake-numbers people with our number. :/

I bloody well love Microsoft's solution to this Outlook/Outlook Express bug.

Basically, UUENCODE slaps a header on its data consisting of "begin " like this:

begin 666 astyle_1.13.8.zip

M4$L#!!0 ( ,X[BBH) E^F^C )7S > 87-T>6QE7S$N,3,N."]!

M4T)E875T:69I97(N8W!P[7W]=QLWDN#/H_?R/R#.7DA*I&CYYO8FEN496J83

[...]

end

Apparently, the LookOut MUAs just look for "begin" followed by a space, with a mode, followed by a space, followed by a filename, in email attachments. The mode and filename are optional parms, so "begin" followed by two spaces is a legal construct.

So, what do you think would happen if you put, say, the word "begin" at the beginning of a line in an email to a person using Outlook?

Yup, Outlook would think it was an attachment, be unable to UUDECODE it, and leave it blank.

We all write bugs, so this isn't a big deal in and of itself. The hilarious and ludicrous part is MSFT's solution to the problem:

To workaround this problem:

• Do not start messages with the word "begin" followed by two spaces.
  
• Use only one space between the word "begin" and the following data.
  
• Capitalize the word "begin" so that it is reads "Begin."
  
• Use a different word such as "start" or "commence."
  

I can see it now:

From: Wage Slave

To: Big Boss

Sir,

I'd like to Begin to talk about a salary increase, based on my attention to detail and professional presentation.

Thank you.

Wage

From: Big Boss

To: Wage Slave

Mr. Slave,

If you can't be bothered to capitalize the correct words in a sentence, how can you be expected to help us capitalize on our good name in the industry? Not only are you not going to receive an increase in compensation, a copy of your grammatically incorrect email will be placed in your permanent personnel file.

Love,

Big

With this one bug, and the inane workaround, MSFT will usher in a new dark age, an economic depression, a new era of illiteracy, as children expect to see this quasi-germanic capitalization as acceptable. Capitalonics!

This is hilarious. Terry Gross and Gene Simmons (with blog!) get into it on NPR. Much as I think his "music" is lame, he's quite well spoken, and 0wnz0red Terry Gross.

Yeah, I said 0wnz0red. I also used suxx0r in a meeting with a client last week. It's bad when the terms we use mockingly become part of our idiom. :-)

Waugh. Flipping channels on TV to kill time before SATC, and stumbled on a special on MTV on cosmetic surgery. Started off with two reasonably attractive women who had started down the slippery-slope...one had had two breast augmentations, from A->C, and C->scary, and wanted big lips and a bump off her nose, and her friend, who had the boob job, nose job, etc., and wanted liposuction. Basically, they picked a few people, and went through the process with them, showing the pain, the result, etc. Only one person on the show had a strong justification for surgery (stomach restriction for a morbidly obese person), and it was weird to see someone who probably started off gorgeous, and turn herself into something rather, umm, odd. The big problem with large, fake breasts tends to be the weird nipple location. It's like seeing someone with their eyes in their chin -- it's just wrong, and it ties into some genetic "bad mate" detector. You see the hyper-inflated chest, and the nipples look as if they're riding the collarbone!

Watching them break a chunk off the nose, foof, even worse than the icky boobs. Dang.

Speaking of SATC, what is this "wait several months for new episodes, then get five before ending the season" garbage?

Whew, got back from SLC this afternoon. My mom bought weird tickets -- SFO->PHX->SLC, SLC->PHX->SFO. I spent two hours in the Phoenix, AZ, airport each way. From what I've seen from the airport, I don't have any desire to return and see the actual city. I'll catch heck for this, but once you get away from the coasts, people get ugly. All the good-looking people live near the ocean. :-)

Maybe someone can correct me on this, but Salt Lake City isn't a particularly attractive city. It's not a large city, so there aren't a lot of tall office buildings. So, you have a flat city of short buildings on a flat plain, with a big, dead lake in the distance (not next to the city!), surrounded on all sides by really, really beautiful mountains. It would be a great place if you were a religious leader and wanted a defensible, remote, hard-to-leave, isolated area to build a commune in the early- to mid-nineteeth century. Now, it would be very difficult to defend, because the perimeter is too long, and the city is too low below the peaks and passes, but two-hundred years ago, anyone coming through the passes couldn't carry artillery, and hey, we all remember the Donner party. Those mountains can be nasty. :-)

In addition to the swamp-like appearance of the city, there are no trees. The municipal government hasn't planted any trees next to the roads, the state government hasn't planted any next to the highways. I live in San Francisco, and for ten years before that, I lived in Seattle. No trees is weird!

The game (Latvija & Osterreich) was good, but I think the altitude was really a factor for the players. After playing for twenty years, I know what it looks like when hockey players run out of steam -- both teams were exhausted at the end of the second period, and the only checking being done in the third was poke-checking, or a few dirty hits from frustrated players.

After the game, the 6000 people in attendance came outside to get on the shuttle buses back to the parking area, which was a few miles away. We came out of the arena in Provo, and were herded toward the street.

Where we were stopped by a fence.

We sat behind the fence for about twenty minutes, behind a big crowd. The crowd surged forward, then, when we were about ten feet from the gate, they closed it again. For another twenty minutes. Then it opened up, and we pushed forward, only to be stopped behind barricades. What the organisers had done was build a fenced in area, with a vestibule capable of holding the number of people that could fit on one row of buses. So, when they had another row to fill they could let the people in the vestibule go. After the buses were loaded, they'd close off the vestibule, and fill it with the next group of people.

This was at 9:30pm or so. In Salt Lake City. In winter. It was cold. And, until we got up to the outside edge of the vestibule, we had no idea what was going on, if we were going to be waiting five minutes, or five hours. I felt bad for Mia, my almost-four-year-old niece. She couldn't see anything, there were big people crowding around her, and her nose was cold. She was a sport, though, and remained cheery. My sister has no idea how lucky she is to have such an easy-going kid. :-)

Whoohoo...off to the Olympics tomorrow morning. My mom bought me plane tickets to go up tomorrow morning, and come back Sunday morning, because I'm so busy with work. We're going to catch some hockey while we're there, and do all the things one can do in A) a crowded Olympic-type place, and B) Salt Lake City, Utah. Voof! I saw on TV tonight that bars can't serve more than 1oz shots, or beer with more than 3.5% alcohol. Not that I'd go to go on a bender...

I just watched a mildly amusing film. The premise is quite amusing from a male perspective, but I discovered that it's not as amusing from a female perspective. I don't know why. :-)

I'm not sure how I feel about dogma films. This one was actually improved by the technique, because Kat was completely convinced this cad was actually trying to populate the Falklands with little half-argies, and didn't know it was scripted. I was really annoyed by the frequent 90 degree rolling of the camera, though. At least it was short. About thirty minutes longer than it should have been, or it should have involved more "conquests", but it'll do.

I got a Googlewhack, for now.

look! cute little kittens! blogjam random kitten generator

Which drink are you? I'm an imperial. I am horribly toxic and obnoxious although I may seem interesting.

How do they know???

Argh

I've been trying to install some stuff today, without much luck. First, I had to figure out how to make the CPAN module install for a non-root user. The cretins hid the information in the most ridiculous place -- the documentation!

This is probably a good point to mention that I despise Perl. Hate it. All you have to do is say,"Perl," to me, and I'll start foaming, so I'm definitely predisposed and biased against it. I'm aware this isn't going to help me.

So, I modify my local config, and try to use the CPAN module. I start that bad boy up, and enter "i /spam/", to look up any modules, etc., with "spam" in the name.

Trying with "/usr/local/bin/lynx -source" to get ftp://ftp.cpan.org/pub/CPAN/authors/01mailrc.txt.gz

CPAN: Compress::Zlib loaded ok

Error reading from /home/reeses/.cpan/sources/authors/01mailrc.txt:

Bang! No good!

So, after a bit of Googling, I learn about CPAN::Nox, which avoids pre-compiled stuff in case you're mangled your binary platform. I finally learned, and tested by hand, that lynx on DeadRat is so helpful, it will un-gzip .gz files for you. Now, when you try to gunzip a non-gz file, it throws an error...

Sound suspicious? :-)

(I'm bothering to put this here so Google will pick it up and perhaps some other sod won't have to go through the pain of tracking this information down.)

Lycaeum > Leda > A letter of appreciation for Pfizer is the funniest thing I've read today. But it's only 7:30pm.

Hot diggity!

From jason andrade <jason@dstc.edu.au> by way of deadbeef:

ANGERED BY SNUBBING, LIBYA, CHINA AND SYRIA FORM AXIS OF JUST AS EVIL

Cuba, Sudan, Serbia Form Axis of Somewhat Evil; Other Nations Start Own Clubs

Beijing - Bitter after being snubbed for membership in the "Axis of Evil," Libya, China, and Syria today announced they had formed the "Axis of Just as Evil," which they said would be way eviler than that stupid Iran-Iraq-North Korea axis President Bush warned of his State of the Union address.

Axis of Evil members, however, immediately dismissed the new axis as having, for starters, a really dumb name. "Right. They are Just as Evil... in their dreams!" declared North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. "Everybody knows we're the best evils... best at being evil... we're the best."

Diplomats from Syria denied they were jealous over being excluded, although they conceded they did ask if they could join the Axis of Evil.

"They told us it was full," said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

"An Axis can't have more than three countries," explained Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. "This is not my rule, it's tradition. In World War II you had Germany, Italy, and Japan in the evil Axis. So you can only have three. And a secret handshake. Ours is wicked cool."

THE AXIS PANDEMIC

International reaction to Bush's Axis of Evil declaration was swift, as within minutes, France surrendered.

Elsewhere, peer-conscious nations rushed to gain triumvirate status in what became a game of geopolitical chairs. Cuba, Sudan, and Serbia said they had formed the Axis of Somewhat Evil, forcing Somalia to join with Uganda and Myanmar in the Axis of Occasionally Evil, while Bulgaria, Indonesia and Russia established the Axis of Not So Much Evil Really As Just Generally Disagreeable.

With the criteria suddenly expanded and all the desirable clubs filling up, Sierra Leone, El Salvador, and Rwanda applied to be called the Axis of Countries That Aren't the Worst But Certainly Won't Be Asked to Host the Olympics; Canada, Mexico, and Australia formed the Axis of Nations That Are Actually Quite Nice But Secretly Have Nasty Thoughts About America, while Spain, Scotland, and New Zealand established the Axis of Countries That Be Allowed to Ask Sheep to Wear Lipstick.

"That's not a threat, really, just something we like to do," said Scottish Executive First Minister Jack McConnell.

While wondering if the other nations of the world weren't perhaps making fun of him, a cautious Bush granted approval for most axes, although he rejected the establishment of the Axis of Countries Whose Names End in "Guay," accusing one of its members of filing a false application. Officials from Paraguay, Uruguay, and Chadguay denied the charges.

Israel, meanwhile, insisted it didn't want to join any Axis, but privately, world leaders said that's only because no one asked them.

We went to see Brotherhood of the Wolf today. I was nervous right when it started because it was turning out to be subtitled, and I know Kat's french is not exactly up to the task, having had only one or two years at uni. The movie was good, though. Hollywood is infecting french film. That's happened before, but the people (Luc Besson, etc.) usually end up defecting to our side. Who knows what will happen.

Well worth seeing.

Whoo...wasted several hours trying to get blogger.el working under Win2k. Not quite yet, even though the data in emacs appears to be valid...I need to slap a debugging servlet on this machine to see if it's actually POSTing anything. Anyone else with problems like this?

Full-color hoopty!

I've been a slacker for all things not work lately, but we just hit a major deliverable, and now I get a few days of rest. Whoohoo!

What am I going to do with it? Why, squander it, of course! I'm going to be lazy, sit around, snack, and watch TV. I tried watching telly tonight, but the programmers are working against me. I have around fourteen trillion channels (AT&T digital cable ultra-super-sexy broadband love with purple monkey action), and every single one of them is showing either something I have on DVD (Priscilla and Ronin), or showing absolute dreck (use your imagination).

So, instead, guess what I do? I do recreational things that are indistinguishable to the untrained eye from working. Hint to chickies living with me -- if there are lots of parens, or it does something interesting, it's not work. I could make a joke about practicing my Lisp after moving to San Francisco, but I'm tired of picking the low-hanging fruit today.

Got Poppy fixed today. She came back looking truly freaky, as if they'd scooped out half her tummy while they were in there. She's a little drugged out, and it's rather frightening when she loses her footing and you expect her stitches to open up. I guess they wouldn't have sent her home today if they had any worries about that, though. Even though she's The Devil, you have to look out for her.