July 2003 Archives

This one had me grinning from ear to ear today.

WASHINGTON, July 31 - The Pentagon official who oversaw the development of a plan for the military to operate a terrorist futures-trading market is resigning under pressure, a senior defense official said today.

John M. Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, is stepping down ``in the next few weeks,'' the official said, following disclosure of a proposal that outraged lawmakers and embarrassed senior Pentagon officials. The plan was to create in essence an online betting parlor that would have rewarded investors who forecast terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.

Admiral Poindexter first gained notoriety in the Iran-contra scandal during the Reagan administration, and more recently he oversaw a Pentagon program that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists.

Under that plan, Admiral Poindexter envisioned a program of sweeping electronic surveillance as a way of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial records.

Poindexter to Resign Following Terrorist Futures Debacle

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein has not lessened the security threat to Britain from weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism, MPs warned today.

Iraq war may help al-Qaida, MPs report

From Kasia:

.. point-and-click programming should be banned.. visual editors are horrible, horrifying and petrifying.

Amen to that :-)

...of my house. While up on the roof taking some photos of the shingle damage I snapped the view of the Golf Course. It was quite windy and I almost dropped the bloody camera :-)

From James, a version control system written in Perl.

Munge.

Not too shabby for only 8 hours work, I might be giving this baby a testdrive :-)

And of course I needed to get some RSS Aggregation action going. Linux RSS aggregators seem to be a little thin on the ground. Straw looks promising. It's written in Python and needs a bunch of libraries installed. I couldn't get PyGTK to install and I haven't had the time nor patience to figure it out yet. Perhaps I'll revisit it at some point.

So, I've settled on Newsmonster in the meantime.

I finally got around to installing Linux on my laptop last week. Extremely painless. The Mandrake installer is extremely friendly - diskdrake did an awesome job of partitioning my harddrive. Everything auto-detected nicely and I was up and running in no time. My USB optical mouse even works (doesn't on my RH 7.1 box) which is a nice bonus.

Ximian's Gnome 2.2 is my desktop of choice (always has been), so a quick run of red-carpet ensured everything was nicely updated. I was previously using Mozilla's mail client for my email (when my laptop ran Winders) but that's all changed now as I'm back to using Evolution once more - it rocketh hard.

It would appear that Napster will rise from the ashes as a pay service later this year. I wonder if anyone will care though?

Although Napster was knocked off the air last year after a drawn-out court battle, it's coming back as an Apple iTune-like paid downloading service called Napster 2.0. The new Napster will feature more than 500,000 tracks at launch, according to Roxio, and will offer downloaders the choice of paying for music files individually or by monthly subscription.

Napster To Return In Time For The Holidays

Ahem, my excuse today is that I've been working with OO code for a while and suddenly had to make the transition back today (yeah I know, it's not a real excuse):

if (restartprocess($process)) {
   # code here...
}

sub restartprocess {
   my ($self, $process) = @_;

Doh :-)

Well the past few days have been bizarre. First Foster and all the worry & lack of sleep. Then the A/C and the roof incident. Then yesterday I got paged by work because the sky was falling in - spent the next couple of hours working :-(

So, to cheer ourselves up we went out to Red Lobster and had their 'all you can eat' Snow Crab Legs. YUM. Then we went home and watched Phone Booth which was *almost* good. Kiefer Sutherland was excellent, Colin Farrell wasn't bad. The ending SUCKED with a capital S. Short movie too, an hour and 10 minutes.

So, have you ever wondered how they get an A/C unit onto your roof? Well wonder no more. They use a crane and they swing it over your roof :-)

We were without A/C for about 6 hours yesterday which wasn't the most fun I've ever had in my life. Oh, and the wankers managed to damage a whole bunch of shingles on my nice new roof but that's a story for another time as I'm still trying to calm down. Needless to say the A/C company will be paying for the damage - oh yes...

Anil Dash on those dialog boxes still partying like it's 1994. Most amusing.

Dear Microsoft: What the fuck?

Yesterday Foster was not the only source of entertainment at the ol' Spencer residence. We had a power cut at around 11:00am which lasted for about an hour. When the electric came back on, our upstairs A/C unit decided it didn't want to blow cold air anymore.

Called the A/C company. They came out about 30 minutes later. Bloke went on the roof, came back down with bad news. The compressor was fucked. Seeing as the compressor is *the* most expensive part in an A/C unit - I knew I was going to end up spending a *lot* of money.

The A/C unit itself is 13 years old. If we replace just the compressor, how many more things are going to go wrong with it over the next couple of years?? This week the compressor, next week the ? and then next year the ??.

Just to add insult to injury, we'd noticed the downstairs unit not blowing as cold as it used to over the last few days - it was *almost* cold enough but you could notice it.

A/C bloke confirmed that the downstairs compressor was on it's last legs.

So, Sal and I ummed and arrrrred for a few minutes and then decided. So, today, I'll be the proud owner of two brand spanking new A/C units.

Over the course of the last year and a half, we've had to replace almost *all* the appliances in this house. At 13 years old, everything is beginning to give up the goat at the same time it seems. Well, at least I shouldn't have to replace *anything* else in the house for a looooooong time (don't say that you idiot, quick touch some wood) :-)

Foster actually started to look/act a little better by the time I took him to the Vet this morning. He had a spring in his step as we walked from the car to the Vet's building. Dropped him off and was told that the Doctor would call me in a few hours after they've taken some more X-Rays. A few hours passed and the doctor called. He was amazed at how much better Foster was acting. He then told me that they could not see anything wrong in the new X-Rays.

This was all rather puzzling because I actually saw the X-Rays they took yesterday with my own eyes and could clearly see a black 'thing' stuck there. The Vet thinks that it came dislodged overnight and he would probably pass it normally. Just to be on the safe side they kept their eye on him for the rest of the day. I just got back from picking him up. I saw the X-Rays they took today and sure enough - the black thing had gone :-)

Looks like I got myself worked up into a state for nothing. Foster is back to his usually happy friendly self.

What a weird couple of days.

Ziggy makes some excellent points to address some of the common misconceptions about Perl.

Perl allows you to program in a way you feel comfortable programming. The goal is for you to increase your productivity. David Megginson's XML::Writer module is a case in point. It's Object Oriented, but in a very, um, idiosyncratic way. If you look at the code, you'll see a lot of closures in the constructor. I wouldn't expect J. Random Perlhacker to recognize this idiom at first sight, nor figure out precisely how to extend it after seeing the module for the first time.

Second, Perl is not one skillset, but an environment that supports multiple skillsets. The kind of programming I do when writing quick hacks is abhorrent. Global variables all over the place. No code abstracted away into modules. Copy-and-paste coding peppered about. No test code, and often no documentation. But it's supposed to be that way. What's the point in documenting and testing a 12 line program that'll be run maybe a dozen times in ideal conditions. Here, duct tape really is the way to go, and taking the time to sit down and get the UML diagram just right before writing a dozen Java classes (with unit tests) is truly counterproductive.

On the other hand, on a large project, duct tape coding practices need to go out the window. Test cases, documentation, good style and modular programming are all the norm, and for good reason. Some people specialize in one subdomain or another. Some people can switch between these domains fluidly. Al of this is just proof that Perl is much more than "a single skillset".

The best analogy I've heard to describe the vast breadth and depth that Perl is more like a line of interoperable power tools. Sometimes you need a tablesaw to get a whole mess of wood sized perfectly. Sometimes you need a hand-held saw for some touch-up jobs. With Perl, you have both, but it's up to you to know when you need the hand tools, and when you need the heavy machinery.

What Is Perl?

So it's close to 3:00am and I'm on official Foster watch.

Poor bloke starting throwing up constantly and was moaning in pain in the wee hours of Thursday morning. Continued for most of the day so I took him to the Vet. After spending most of afternoon in the waiting room (no appointment means you just sit and wait), they did all kinds of tests and took some X-Rays. Looks like he swallowed something he shouldn't have and has a 'foreign object' stuck in him. The Vet was actually quite concerned and said he needs urgent surgery to remove it.

So, they managed to schedule the operation for today - all of their non-emergency surgeries have been re-scheduled for next week so they could fit him in. In the meantime, someone has to constantly watch him to make sure his stomach doesn't swell. If it does, we need to take him immediately to the emergency animal clinic.

Sal and I are watching him in 'shifts'. I went to bed early and got up at 2:00am for my shift. Poor bloke is just lying at my feet right now. He has no energy whatsoever and has a hard time moving around. I have to take him to the Vet at 7:00am this morning so they can get him ready for his operation.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little nervous about it. I'm sure he'll be ok though.

This is (thank goodness) the last week of my Artificial Intelligence class. We had a project that was due last Sunday. In true Kev Spencer fashion, I decided to start it on Thursday :-) Truth be known, because of how busy work has been for the past couple of weeks, I'm amazed I even got the project finished in time.

The goal of the project was to write a game that simulated Artificial Intelligence. Not just any game mind you - TicTacToe. Now because TicTacToe is an easy game to write, the instructor threw a spanner in the works by stating that it had to be a GUI, have 3 difficulty levels, run on a Winders box and must run without installing any additional software (i.e must be a standalone executable).

I was a little peeved at this because I wanted to write the game in Perl and thought that a Tk frontend would be perfect. Shouldn't have worried though. Those Activestate folks and their Perl Dev Kit saved the day. Got an evaluation license which enabled me to run perlapp on my Perl source to turn it into a standalone executable. I cannot stress enough how much that rocks. It rocks, rocks, rocks.

I'd never actually used Tk before so I spent some time trying to grok the various concepts involved. I ended up picking up a copy of Mastering Perl/Tk to help me out. That book is AWESOME. If you want to learn Tk - BUY THIS BOOK.

So after working on the program after work for a couple of nights I ended up with a GUI TicTacToe game that appears to work rather well. If you're bored enough and are so inclined, you can find the source here. It undoubtedly has a bug or two and the code could probably use some cleaning but that's what you get for 2 nights of work :-)

There's nothing like getting pissed off while eating your breakfast to start the day right.

Remember at the start of the war in Iraq we were told how evil and sick the Iraqis were because they showed photos of dead American soldiers on TV? There was quite a big stink made of it as I recall. So, I switched channels to CNN this morning to be greeted by photos of Saddam Hussein's dead sons complete with blood & gore.

Gotta love that double standard :-(

Venice has a plethora of tiny little sidestreets which (depending on how you look a it) is really cool or really frustrating. Sometimes you'll find a quaint little pub or restaurant. I remember finding a little pub that served Guinness on tap and sold Newcastle Brown Ale and, er, cans of Stella. Tipples I hadn't had since leaving blightly so I thought it was the best pub on the planet. Couldn't find it for the life of me the next time I went. Searched high and low. I'm sure it was 'just-around-the-corner' but everything starts looking the same after a while :-)

I'd love to go back for a visit someday. Not just Venice but the village I used to live in, the mountains, Lake Barcis, *real* pasta dishes, excellent vino. I think I'll dig out some photos when I get home tonight.

Interesting article about the problem Venice has with flooding and what's being done to stop it.

For centuries, St. Mark's Square has been slowly slipping closer to Atlantis. Here's how a massive system of floodgates could turn the tide.

The Lost City of Venice

Venice is nice. Dirty and somewhat rundown, but oddly nice. I'm lucky enough to have lived an hour away by train so have visited quite often. I don't remember being there on a day when St Marcos's Square flooded but have seen photos of it.

Handy little Mozilla reference list via Brad Choate.

First up: 101 things that Mozilla can do that IE cannot. The first 2 are *biggies* for me. (1) Tabbed browsing. Seriously, once you've used tabbed browsing, you won't want to go back to using anything else. (2) Popup blocking. No explanation necessary here - this, quite simply, rocks.

Next: Hidden Mozilla Prefs. Some of these I'd heard about before, some were new. I had no idea you could spoof the UserAgent. Just slap this in the prefs.js file (changing the Agent to whatever you want):

user_pref("general.useragent.override", "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)");

Not sure what kicked off this little Cure moozik extravaganza but for the past few days these albums have been in my car:

The Cure - Pornography
The Cure - Head On The Door
The Cure - Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
The Cure - Wish

The following songs seem to get replayed more than others:

Short Term Effect (Pornography)
Strange Day (Pornography)
Push (Head On The Door)
Sinking (Head On The Door)
All I Want (Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me)
Wendy Time (Wish)

With some rather loud claps of thunder, the Monsoon Season officially started last night. Thunder, lightning, wind, and rain. Lots of rain. While Sally was 'oooing and ahhhing' at the lightning I kept glancing up at the ceiling saying "please don't leak, please don't leak" as this was the first test of our new roof. It didn't leak, which is always a bonus :-)

Tim Bray, Rallying The Troops.

Safari is good. Opera is good. Mozilla is good. People who go there, don’t go back.

So, what are you waiting for? Head on over to mozilla.org, you won't regret it :-)

I swear if I do this one more time I'm going to find a big Perl stick and beat myself with it

sub _loadConfigVals {
   my ($self, $project) = shift;

Doh :-)

I couldn't possibly be any busier than I am right now so stupid bugs like this are extremely annoying to have to track down. 'kay - time to get back to coding...

Watched Minority Report again last night on HBO. I'd forgotten how good it was. You know what, I'd watch it again if it were on tonight :-)

Been reading some favorable stuff about Pirates Of The Caribbean. Now I *really* want to see it. Problem is, Sally thinks it looks crap so I don't think a trip to the cinema is on the cards. Hurry up and come out on DVD dammit :-)

It's not officially the monsoon season yet but last night was a preview of things to come. Thunder, lightning, big dust storm. I actually like this time of year as some of the lightning storms are really quite impressive.

I'm sure I'll be quite the idiot outside with my camera trying to get some decent lightning photos :-)

I had a nice little surprise waiting for me as I left work yesterday. Sat down in the drivers seat, put the key in the ignition, turned the key, heard the dreaded 'click' from the engine. Nothing, nada, fuck all, dead as a bloody door nail. Luckily Scott was still at work (and had jumper cables) so he tried to give me a jump start (mental note to self - buy another set of jumper cables so *both* cars have a set). Still nothing.

Scott was going to give me a ride to buy a new battery so before we left we tried to take out the crappy one. Now that was funny. My engine is laid out in such a way that there's NO way you are getting the battery out unless you are a complete contortionist with tools from hell - as we found out :-)

As I mentioned, yesterday was 117°, so you can imagine the sweat was literally pouring off of us. Scott looked at me and said 'well, good thing it's not hot out'. We pissed ourselves laughing and I decided enough was enough.

So, an hour and a half later, the tow truck showed up :-)

Turns out it wasn't just the battery. The positive battery cable needed replacing as well so even if I could have put a brand new battery in - it wouldn't have done any good.

Record heat today. 117°F (47°C). I don't think I'll mow the lawn tonight :-)

Now this sounds *extremely* cool.

extproc_perl extends the capabilities of an Oracle database by allowing PL/SQL functions and procedures to be written in Perl. Rather than using inefficient piping methods (e.g. DBMS_PIPE to a perl process), extproc_perl actually embeds a Perl interpreter in an Oracle external procedure, allowing for per-session interpreter persistence, and tight integration with the calling database. In addition, DBI has been extended to allow queries back to the calling database through the existing connection, making for lightning-quick responses without the overhead of establishing a new session over SQL*Net.

extproc_perl: Embedding Perl in Oracle

This would be a very good thing.

The controversial Terrorism Information Awareness program, which would troll Americans' personal records to find terrorists before they strike, may soon face the same fate Congress meted out to John Ashcroft in his attempt to create a corps of volunteer domestic spies: death by legislation.

The Senate's $368 billion version of the 2004 defense appropriations bill, released from committee to the full Senate on Wednesday, contains a provision that would deny all funds to, and thus would effectively kill, the Terrorism Information Awareness program, formerly known as Total Information Awareness. TIA's projected budget for 2004 is $169 million.

Funding for TIA All But Dead

Ok so it's nothing quite that sinister although I'm a little worse for wear because of my four legged friends :-)

First up was Foster. We were outside throwing the ball around Saturday night when I whipped my hand around and it caught him right in the chops. One of his teeth sank into my finger. It was one of those looks-worse-than-it-actually-is cuts as blood was dripping down my hand and onto the floor. It actually took quite some time to stop bleeding and I was wondering if I was going to need stiches.

Yesterday it was Peachy's turn. I made the mistake of thinking I could pick her up (baaad mooove). She decided to bite and scratch my hand. Again, another looks-worse-than-it-actually-is jobs. Less blood this time but I now have 6 scratches & some teeth marks on my left hand.

Finally this morning, Caesar (no photo yet - shame on me) decided it was about time for me to wake up because he jumped onto our bed and started biting my big toe :-) I woke up immediately uttering the classic half-asleep 'whathafuckisgoingon' before realizing it was just the little bloke telling me he was hungry :-)

The Recruit. Not bad, I'd give it about 7/10. Bit of a convoluted plot but certainly kept you guessing who was who - and I like that in a movie.

The ol' Safeway Club card. I like saving money as much as the next bloke so I like it when I get a discount on certain items when I use the card. What I don't like the fact that everything I buy from Safeway is stored away in a database. I dunno, it just gives me the willies.

Well, I can rest easy from now on for Rob Cockerham has come up with a plan so crazy - it just might work. We can all use his card instead :-)

Along with stored procedures, MySQL 5.x is going to have another cool feature - an internal cron process.

CREATE CRON <title>
[ AT <datetime> ]
PROCEDURE <name of the procedure>

Well apparently you don't need to apologize if you're an outright liar anymore.

Secretary of State Colin Powell defended the administration in its handling of information about Iraqi weapons programs, saying Thursday that President Bush shouldn't have to apologize for a statement that later proved false.

Bush need not apologize over Iraq-uranium statement, Powell says

First there was the moronic pre-emptive strike policy and now the 'you-don't-have-to-apologize-for-fibbing' policy - what a wonderful example the Bush administration is setting for the youth of today :-)

Another week, another RSS aggregator :-) Yeah I know, I'm never satisfied am I?

'kay, this week I'm trying out FeedDemon. Winders only unfortunately. Probably the slickest aggregator I've used thus far. Very nice. It's probably the nicest looking UI I've seen as well. Quite purty.

The current download is a beta version and (unfortunately) the stable version is not going to be free. From the FAQ:

Will FeedDemon be free? Will it be open source?

Sorry, no. I have nothing against open source, but I also have two kids to feed :) Pricing has not been determined yet.

I heard on the radio this morning that the Phoenix metro area will possibly have record temperatures today. They're predicting 115°.

<rant>Why do people insist on asking "hot enough for ya?" eh? How exactly are you supposed to answer that? "No I usually like it when my face begins to melt but this is good enough I suppose".</rant>

A former US intelligence official who served under the Bush administration in the build-up to the Iraq war accused the White House yesterday of lying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The claims came as the Bush administration was fighting to shore up its credibility among a series of anonymous government leaks over its distortion of US intelligence to manufacture a case against Saddam.

This was the first time an administration official has put his name to specific claims. The whistleblower, Gregory Thielmann, served as a director in the state department's bureau of intelligence until his retirement in September, and had access to the classified reports which formed the basis for the US case against Saddam, spelled out by President Bush and his aides.

White House 'lied about Saddam threat'

I mean c'mon, I could have sworn it was my turn to win the lottery this week :-)

So we ended up going to see Terminator 3 yesterday and I must say that I loved it. If you are a Terminator fan you won't be disappointed. All action sequences aside, I loved how they advanced the overall Terminator plot/timeline. The ending is great. This is a definite buy when it comes out on DVD :-)

It's Sally's birthday today and I took the day off from work. Got up early to make her breakfast in bed, I don't do that as often as I should. Mental note to self - make wife breakfast in bed more often. Anyhoo, then I had to run off to take Foster to the Vet (only appointment I could get unless I wanted to wait until next Friday). Just got back. We're now going to the Cinema. Should be interesting seeing as Sal's ankle is not better. Lookout punters, lady on crutches coming through :-)

I'm not quite sure how I got talked into this but tonight I'm going to try and make a seafood dinner complete with lobster tail, shrimp, & scallops. Now I'll be the first to admit that I know as much about cooking as I do about brain surgery so it should be awfully amusing.

Woohoo, the best Linux magazine not published here in America is available from my local Borders and I didn't even realize. The British Linux Format is the magazine I'm referring to. I picked up a copy last night. Because it's imported it's not exactly cheap, $13.95, but worth it in my opinion. This month they had 3 CD's of software including a full install of Mandrake 9.1. I'd been meaning to try Mandrake and now I'll have the chance. I'll try throwing it on my desktop at work first of all as I'm running an older Red Hat 7.x that I've been meaning to replace with one of the newer Mandrake or SuSE distributions.

Finally the Bush administration is admitting that some of the claims it made about Iraq in it's push for war were incorrect. Everyone is now conveniently baffled as to how these claims made it into Bush's State Of The Union speech earlier this year.

WASHINGTON, July 7 The White House acknowledged for the first time today that President Bush was relying on incomplete and perhaps inaccurate information from American intelligence agencies when he declared, in his State of the Union speech, that Saddam Hussein had tried to purchase uranium from Africa.

The White House statement appeared to undercut one of the key pieces of evidence that President Bush and his aides had cited to back their claims made prior to launching an attack against Iraq in March that Mr. Hussein was "reconstituting" his nuclear weapons program. Those claims added urgency to the White House case that military action to depose Mr. Hussein needed to be taken quickly, and could not await further inspections of the country or additional resolutions at the United Nations.

Bush Claim on Iraq Had Flawed Origin, White House Says

I try to hang out on Perlmonks as often as I can as there is no better Perl developer community IMHO. Of the many Perl programmers that hang out there, one has an interesting past :-) Turns out that benn is none other then Ben Daglish.

Ben wrote/programmed the music on many of my favorite Commodore 64 games back in the 80's. He used to work for Gremlin Graphics. At one point or another I either owned or had played almost every Gremlin C-64 game and knew instantly who Ben Daglish was.

I just thought it was way cool that Ben is now a Perl programmer :-)

We got home from a little drive this afternoon to find that some arsewipe had smashed our back patio table. Glass was everywhere. Of course there's no way of knowing who did it or how it was done and someone owning up to it isn't likely.

Bastards :-(

At this point I really hope this is a joke.

Jerry Springer says his fame could help revitalize the Democratic Party if he's elected to the U.S. Senate next year.

Jerry Springer thinks about running for the U.S. Senate

Rude ignorant people with no manners really get my goat. Today when I got to work I was walking up to the building when I heard someone shout behind me. I turned around to see the UPS delivery bloke walking toward me (he's *not* carrying anything by the way).

UPS bloke> Yeah you, hold the door.
Me> You what?
UPS bloke> I said hold the door
Me> Please?
UPS bloke> Just hold the door.
Me>( now eye to eye with him because I wouldn't move) Don't be a prick, just ask me nicely.
UPS bloke> (now looking a little sheepish)Please can you hold the door.
(I hold the door)
UPS bloke> (mumbling under his breath
Me> (grinning from ear to ear) Don't mention it mate.

Last night at about 10:45pm the upstairs A/C decided it was the right time of year to stop working. So we had 16 trillion fans blowing to make it bearable. The repair bloke is coming out to take a look this morning. Fun fun.

Update: And $400 later, we now have A/C upstairs again. Woohoo.

Test.

UPDATE: Ahem, user error. The new version of Zempt reset my text filter and I forgot to change the post options so that the "Convert Line Breaks" filter was enabled again.

This time I'm setting the <p> tags myself to see if that helps out.

Love him or loathe him, Dave Winer has hit apon an idea that might just solve the problem I currently have with multiple RSS aggregators on multiple machines.

I'm thinking out loud here about a new Web Service for people who use aggregators and have more than one computer. The problem: I subscribe to a feed at home but my aggregator at work doesn't know about it. It's actually kind of tricky to solve the problem, but I think I know how to do it.

In progress: Subscriptions harmonizer

So these are the CDs currently occupying space in my car.

Coldplay - Rush Of Blood To The Head
Garbage - Garbage
Oasis - Heathen Chemistry
Marilyn Manson - Antichrist Superstar
Marilyn Manson - Holywood
Skinny Puppy - Rabies

They've been there for about a week now with no sign of me getting bored with them yet. Oddly enough, the one that is getting the most repeat plays is Manson's Holywood. Typically I have to be in the right mood for a Manson CD but no matter what mood I'm in I seem to like it :-)