November 2003 Archives

Giving XMMS a good workout this afternoon:

Kraftwerk - Computer World
Kraftwerk - Tour De France Soundtracks
The Cure - The Head On The Door
Wumpscut - Evil Young Flesh

Now *that* is music to put xmas decorations up to :-)

You can never have too much help putting up a christmas tree. I heard a little rustling in the tree, I turn around and there's Pumpkin supervising; the cheeky bugger :-)

Caesar on his christmas stocking (yes, Sally made him a christmas stocking - she's sad, er, good like that).

Nice day outside, so Bella and Caesar decide to have 40 winks - bless 'em.

I hadn't run Red Carpet on my Linux desktop at work in quite a while. So today I thought I'd see if there were any 'urgent' upgrades. There were a few. One of them was glibc. I dunno, something gives me the willies about upgrading glibc. I'll just have to hope I haven't just hosed my system :-)

Hmm, seems MT has something in common with formmail. MT has a rather nasty little feature whereby anyone can send mail to pretty much whomever they please. Seems that mt-send-entry.cgi is the culprit as described in this MT Support Forum post.

I just renamed mine.

Link via Ben Milleare.

I finally finished 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'. It took me ages to read. As I've mentioned before, I'm an odd reader. I can go a month without even picking up a book, then I'll suddenly get the reading bug and I'll read and read and read at every possible opportunity. The Order of the Phoenix is not a bad book, it's just that I was in one of my non-reading moods. Once I picked it up again I was finished in 3 days.

Now I'm currently quite involved in Neil Gaiman's American Gods.

Another year, another birthday, another year older. This time it's the big 30. Where the hell did the last 10 years go? Talk about flying by.

Had quite an interesting birthday actually and one I'll remember for a while. I had the day off and Sally had Jury Duty. I dropped her off and decided to hang around the courthouse for a bit. Glad I did as I got to see the American Justice system first hand. I wandered in and out of a couple of trials. Really interesting. One trial had an abusive witness and had to have security called. She was dragged kicking & screaming from the court. Very dramatic :-) Anyhoo, turns out Sally was picked as a juror and will now spend the next week on a murder trial.

We ended the day at Claim Jumper. Good food, good Guinness, good day.

Silly me. Here I was thinking you could protest against the government without fear of reprisal.

Washington -- The FBI has collected extensive information on the tactics, training and organization of antiwar demonstrators and has advised local law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at protests to its counterterrorism squads, according to interviews and a confidential bureau memorandum.

FBI scrutinizing anti-war protesters

I like the bit where suspicious activity is reported to it's counterterrorism squad. I mean if you protest against Dubya and the war you must be a terrorist right?

Sigh.

I can't believe it. England actually won the world cup.

How cool is that? I think I must be dreaming :-)

It's not like I wanted to go to bed early tonight or anything. Nope, instead I get to practice more of my Oracle-fu. It's been a long time since I've been paged at home with a "the sky is falling in" type message. Well, I've done my part, now waiting for the hardware guys to do theirs. Ho hum...

So, here in America, Mars bars are actually called Milky Ways. The chocolate bar that is *actually* a Milky Way is called '3 Muskateers'. Confused yet? Why can't the English & the Americans agree on common names for chocolate bars fer crissakes :-)

I dunno I think I agree with Kasia about this.

I know many people think that the reason there aren't many linux viruses is because it's not quite as popular. That's actually not really accurate.. it's because even if a user executes an email attachment on a linux machine, unless he's running as root (and most people who use linux know better) the virus won't be able to do anything bad to the sytem. So linux viruses are kind of pointless.

Don't be sorry

Mind you, the fact that you're not running as root will only limit destructive viruses (deleting files, inserting trojans). Overwriting my .profile can be equally annoying. A sysadmin I used to know played a "funny gag" on me a few years ago by adding exit to my .profile so that I couldn't login. It remained funny for about 1.5 seconds.

A few people at work have got the flu. Sal started coughing up a lung yesterday and she's feeling all yucky. I wonder how long it will be before it gets me. Must make sure I get loads of sleep, take vitamins. To be honest, I don't get ill very often so I might scrape through this unscathed :-)

Of course now that I've said that, sods law states that I'll be in bed whining like a baby come Friday :-)

The BBC have a list of the 50 places to see before you die.

So, 4 down, only 46 to go :-)

Somehow I managed to get the short straw tonight and had to put on my Oracle DBA hat so that we could shutdown the database. Ha that's a laugh - dammit Jim I'm a programmer not a DBA. Just to prove how true a statement that really is, I just spent the past hour trying to figure out why my shutdown command was hanging. I was overlooking something so stupid that I'm now kicking myself. If you issue the shutdown immediate command, it will hang until all connections have been closed. Well, if you have a mod_perl app utilizing Apache::DBI for that persistent database connection you *still* have a connection. Doh. I was starting to think I was nuts. "But there are no users logged into Oracle, I don't geddit." I kept saying to myself.

Damn that crafty Apache::DBI :-)

First up, Finding Nemo. In its first 2 weeks of release, Finding Nemo has sold 20 million videos/DVDs. IN TWO WEEKS.

LOS ANGELES - Animated underwater adventure "Finding Nemo" has sold an industry leading 15 million DVDs in less than two weeks at retail stores to outpace expectations, the video's distributor said on Monday.

Combined with 5 million videos, the story about a little lost fish named Nemo whose father sets out to find him, has accounted for 20 million units of home entertainment product sales since hitting retailers Nov. 4, according to Buena Vista Home Entertainment, a division of The Walt Disney Co. .

Disney and Pixar Animation Studios Inc. teamed up on "Nemo" in a partnership that produced several other computer animated hits, such as "Monsters, Inc." and "Toy Story." "Nemo" is currently this year's top grossing movie with $340 million at U.S. and Canadian box offices.

'Finding Nemo' DVD Sales Hit 15 Million

Then there's that bloke Potter. Sales of Harry Potter books have just topped 250 million worldwide.

Rowling, once a single mother who penned her books in an Edinburgh cafe, is now a multi-millionaire who has been ranked as the world's best paid author.

The Sunday Times put her earnings over the past year at 125 million pounds ($211 million), which was calculated as being the equivalent to 388 pounds for every word of her latest Potter saga.

"She is a money-making machine. The temptation to keep writing after the last of her seven planned Potter adventures must be irresistible. She could be the first billionaire author in history," said Philip Beresford, who compiled the Sunday Times pay list.

Harry Potter Sales Reach 250 Million Worldwide

Dubya is visiting blighty next week. I hear that plenty of protests are planned. Dubya doesn't like protests:

President Bush has never been an advocate of the First Amendment. Even when he was governor of Texas, he prohibited demonstrations on the walkways in front of the governor's mansion, an area which had traditionally been used for peaceful protests.

As president, Bush has widened his restrictions on demonstrations against his policies. Anti-Bush protesters are now relegated to what are euphemistically called Free Speech Zones. These areas are cordoned off as far as a mile away from the president and the main thoroughfares, so that Bush cannot see the demonstrators, or their signs of protest, nor hear their chants.

The free speech enclosures are only for those who disagree with the administration's current policies. Those citizens who carry pro-Bush signs are allowed to line the street where the president's motorcade passes.

Hiding protestors in 'Free Speech Zones' is cowardly and un-American

I was speaking to my mum on the phone today and she said that Bush was not going to have a friendly welcome based on what she had read/seen in the English press. The English are a resourceful lot though and are trying not to let Dubya's protest censorship prevent them from having their say.

We'll be accepting intelligence reports and images from volunteers and the public on the ground, then publishing them here for all to see on a post-and-update basis.

Input will be categorised as follows:
# Bush: Current Location Reports
# Bush: Decoy Watch
# Visions of Protesters
# Images of Chaos (caused by security measures)
# Protests in the News
# Lies in the Media

In reaction to our misgivings about censorship via crowd control the UK government has taken the position that we will not be forcibly kept at bay during his visit to the United Kingdom.

However...

The itinerary is deliberately vague. Planned movements that we do know about are sure to be changed at the last minute to keep us away from the action. There is talk of shutting down whole streets (no doubt for 'security reasons') to shuttle Bush from place to place without confrontation. It is also likely that decoys will be used.

These shadow-play and shut-down techniques are the last publicly-acceptable weapons left in their arsenal. And we're going to stuff that up.

Chasing Bush

Richard Reeve's latest op-ed piece.

WASHINGTON -- Talking to Donald Regan once about his years as President Reagan's chief of staff, I asked what was the biggest problem in the White House in those days. "Everyone there thought they were smarter than the president," he said. "And I mean everyone."

The same thing seems to be happening now. As our strategy in Iraq, such as it is, collapses into a level of chaos, the accounts -- read finger-pointing and head-burying -- of how we got into this are not about what the president thought, said or did. The accounts are about what he was told. Vice President Dick Cheney told him this. No, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that. Or was it Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, who said....

Things have gone wrong across the sea in the war and everyone is busily pretending not to notice. The terrible thing here is the man in the great bubble on Pennsylvania Avenue may be the only one who does not actually know. He does not read newspapers or watch television, he says. Press reports and information itself are not relevant at the top. He does not talk to or listen to the Congress, they say. How would he know? Is Cheney or Rumsfeld telling him?

The City In The Bubble

I've been to Vegas a few times. Casey makes a really good point about those slot machines you find in the airport. To be honest I never really thought about this but he's so right :-)

After two lines of seats at the Las Vegas Terminal, there are rows of slot machines. Let say you win big just before your flight. How exactly are you going to get 50,000 quarters onto the plane?

ApacheCon Arrival

Nat Torkington's take on Revolutions.

One word review: "avoid".

Five word review: "At least it's the last."

And did I mention that it explains nothing? The Wachowski Brothers are cheap hacks. They're no better than Chris Carter, who also ended up with self-contradictory ambiguous metawank. The difference is that Carter was trying to keep an open-ended show going, and by the time he knew he had to wrap it up, he'd already gone in too many different directions for there to be anything left to make sense. The Matrix, on the other hand, was allegedly planned as three movies. If so, the Brothers Dubya should be the fucking laughing stock of Hollywood for being unable to keep their shit together for a mere THREE episodes.

Matrix 3

Oh yeah. CSI tonight played 'She's My Sister' by The Stone Roses. The Stone Roses were perhaps the best band that never was. They had so much promise but didn't ever amount to anything. They were a big part of the late 80's - early 90's British "indie" movement. "I wanna be adored" is still one of my all time favourite songs.

So, let me get this straight. He shot someone, dismembered the body, dumped the body in the bay, jumped bail, and then fled the state. What the hell were the jurors smoking? How is this man not guilty?

After four days of deliberations, the panel in the murder case of real estate heir Robert Durst found him not guilty Tuesday morning. Durst, 60, admitted dismembering his 71-year-old neighbor but claimed the killing was the accidental result of a struggle.

Verdict: Not guilty

Well, according to my logs I got visited by the mod_throttle fairy last night. Hopefully a crafty robots.txt should take care of the plethora of bots that seem to be banging away constantly.

Wow, you've got to admire George Soros' conviction. I would like nothing better than to see Bush lose the election next year and it seems it will be Soros' mission in life :-)

NEW YORK -- George Soros, one of the world's richest men, has given away nearly $5 billion to promote democracy in the former Soviet bloc, Africa and Asia. Now he has a new project: defeating President Bush.

Soros, who has financed efforts to promote open societies in more than 50 countries around the world, is bringing the fight home, he said. On Monday, he and a partner committed up to $5 million to MoveOn.org, a liberal activist group, bringing to $15.5 million the total of his personal contributions to oust Bush.

"America, under Bush, is a danger to the world," Soros said. Then he smiled: "And I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is."

Asked whether he would trade his $7 billion fortune to unseat Bush, Soros opened his mouth. Then he closed it. The proposal hung in the air: Would he become poor to beat Bush?

He said, "If someone guaranteed it."

Soros's Deep Pockets vs. Bush

WASHINGTON - Former Vice President Al Gore says the Bush White House is using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to justify a major offensive against the freedoms and liberties Americans have enjoyed for centuries.

"They have taken us much farther down the road toward an intrusive, 'big brother'-style government -- toward the dangers prophesied by George Orwell in his book 1984 -- than anyone ever thought would be possible in the United States of America," Gore charged in a speech.

Gore, who lost the disputed 2000 presidential election to President Bush, brought many in the crowd of 3,000 to their feet Sunday when he called for a repeal of the Patriot Act, which expanded government's surveillance and detention powers, allowing authorities to monitor the books citizens read and conduct secret searches.

Gore to Bush: Rescind Patriot Act

Got to love that morning commute. I got up an our early so I could get to work early. Bloody traffic meant that I only ended up getting to work 5 minutes earlier than I usually would. Grrr. On a lighter note, I did get to listen to White Zombie's Astro Creep so it wasn't all bad :-)

A separate accessor and mutator to increment a sequence number? I think not :-)

$foo->sequence(($foo->sequence) + 1);

I feel all dirty now :-)

There comes a point where you have to admit that you're not even reading the messages posted to the mailing lists you're subscribed to. Sure your email client tucks them away in their own little folders but they end up sitting there unread for days. I just don't have the time to plough through them all. It's a shame really as there are some *really* good hints-n-tips that I'm missing out on. So I took the plunge this morning and unsubscribed from the majority of them. I'm now left with just 4: Mason, mod_perl, POE, perl-xml. It would be a stretch to say I have time to read all the mod_perl posts so that one might be going as well :-)

Here's Rummy forgetting that we have such things as interview transcripts.

In recent testy exchanges with reporters, Rumsfeld interrupted the questioners and attacked the premise of the questions if they dealt with his pre-war comments about weapons of mass destruction and Americans-as-liberators.

For example, on Feb. 20, a month before the invasion, Rumsfeld fielded a question about whether Americans would be greeted as liberators if they invaded Iraq.

"Do you expect the invasion, if it comes, to be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq?" Jim Lehrer asked the defense secretary on PBS' "The News Hour."

"There is no question but that they would be welcomed," Rumsfeld replied, referring to American forces. "Go back to Afghanistan, the people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and the al-Qaeda would not let them do."

...

But on Sept. 25, - a particularly bloody day in which one U.S. soldier was killed in an ambush, eight Iraqi civilians died in a mortar strike and a member of the U.S-appointed governing council died after an assassination attempt five days earlier - Rumsfeld was asked about the surging resistance.

"Before the war in Iraq, you stated the case very eloquently and you said . . . they would welcome us with open arms," Sinclair Broadcasting anchor Morris Jones said to Rumsfeld as the prelude to a question.

The defense chief quickly cut him off.
"Never said that," he said. "Never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of somebody else. You can't find, anywhere, me saying anything like either of those two things you just said I said."

Rumsfeld retreats, disclaims earlier rhetoric

Jeremy has a post about one of the things that "makes him go hmm'" about blogland. I've got my own "thing that makes me go hmm" about blogland: guest posting. Guest posting appears to be the rather odd concept of having other people post entries in your blog. I'm awfully confused by this. I mean

• Why would you want someone else posting to your blog?


• Why would someone else *want* to post an entry to your blog?


• Why would readers of your blog want to read posts by someone other than you?

I must be missing something here. Surely I read your blog because I'm interested in what *you* have to say, not 5 other random bloggers of your choice.

I don't get it

So I've apparently been living in a cave this week. I only read about the Prince Charles Scandal this morning as I was drinking my coffee. Of course they're not saying what the allegations are. Not to worry, you *know* someone has to have blogged it.

Feedster is your friend :-)

Do we smell? Do we have the dreaded lurgy? Three of our neighbors put their houses up for sale this week. Quite bizarre I tell you.

There's nothing like waiting 28 years to sue someone :-)

NEW YORK - The boxer who was the inspiration for Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" films plans to file a lawsuit against the actor for illegally using his name to promote the films and other merchandise, attorneys said Friday.

Boxer Suing Stallone for 'Rocky' Films

Couldn't believe my eyes when I read on slashdot this morning that the original Star Wars trilogy is actually coming out on DVD. No way? Way!

Blimey, made a bit of cash then have we?

Mega-hyped science fiction movie "The Matrix Revolutions" debuted to worldwide ticket sales of $43.1 million in its first day in movie theaters, a spokeswoman for the Warner Bros. film studio said on Thursday.

...

When "The Matrix Reloaded" debuted in May this past year, it took in $157.6 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada, setting the record for the biggest opening week ever, according to the studio.

"Reloaded" went on to rack up $735 million in global ticket sales of which roughly $455 million, or 62 percent, was international and about $280 million was domestic (U.S. and Canada).

The first "Matrix" in 1999 racked up $456 million in global ticket sales of which around $285 million, or 63 percent, was international and just over $171 million was domestic.

New Matrix Opens to $43 Million Global Box Office

So far the reviews of Matrix Revolutions haven't really been that good. I think I'll wait for it to come out on DVD.

An older article from back in January concerning new propulsion for space travel.

NASA has requested a "very significant" increase in funding for the development of nuclear propulsion systems for spacecraft, according to Sean O'Keefe, the administration's chief.

Existing chemical rocket technologies have restricted missions to the same speed for 40 years, he said. "With the new technology, where we go next will only be limited by our imagination."

Researchers believe new nuclear propulsion systems could triple the current speed limit for space travel of 29,000 kilometers per hour. This would make it possible, for example, get to Mars in two months, rather than six. But NASA has dismissed media speculation that it is planning a nuclear-fuelled mission to take astronauts to Mars.

NASA boosts nuclear propulsion plans

I dunno, when I was a kid I really thought we'd be a little further along than we are now in regards to space travel didn't you? I thought we'd have cities on the moon and vacation trips to Mars. Stuff like that. It really makes you wonder why there haven't been more advances made. I mean we've been using the same method of propulsion for the last 40 years. In fact, nothing exciting has happened in manned space travel since the lunar landings in the 1960s. Well, the advent of the Space Shuttle is something significant I suppose but we've had that since the late 1970s. Oh and then there's the 'International Space Station'. Not exactly the riveting science fiction you dreamed about as a youngster is it?

Don't ask me why I think about this stuff :-)

Evolution has been my mail client of choice for quite a while now. I just found out that there's an Evolution blog. What a cool idea, now you can keep up do date on some of the new stuff going into v 2.0. NICE. It would be cool if Ximain had a development blog for some of their other products too.

Ahh, yes, the joys of working from home. Got the moozik going, wearing t-shirt & shorts, patio door open with fresh warm(ish) air blowing in. NICE. Got a decent amount of coding done as well. In fact, if it wasn't for my sodding car I'd say that today is turning out rather well.

As I left work yesterday I noticed a rather loud grinding noise coming from the front wheels whenever I turned the steering wheel left or right. It was the kind of noise that makes your heart sink as you *know* something is really quite wrong. The noise was accompanied by a vibration in the steering wheel that didn't help matters. Got progressively worse as I got closer to home.

Took the car to the dealer. Turns out my power steering is screwed up. No power steering fluid is making it into the system and it needs some new parts. One of parts cannot be found *anywhere* in the metro Phoenix area and they're having to have it shipped from the factory. So, I'll be without car tomorrow as well. Bugger.

The car is still under warranty so it's not going to cost me a penny but the inconvenience is a little annoying to say the least.

I've spent most of today learning POE as I've seen it recommended a number of times in various Perl forums. So far I think it's *really* cool. I'm looking forward to refactoring some of my older code to use it.

You know, when you don't have time to scale Everest, why not run 7 marathons in 7 days across six continents? Seems reasonable enough to me :-)

NEW YORK, Nov. 2 — Two British adventurers accomplished what seems impossible. They ran seven marathons in seven days on six continents, finishing up in New York on Sunday. Sir Ranulph Fiennes and longtime expedition partner Mike Stroud crossed the New York City Marathon finish line in 5 hours, 25 minutes, 46 seconds, ending their weeklong journey.

The idea started when Fiennes — who is related to actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes (pronounced “fine”) — called Stroud in January and asked if he wanted to scale Mount Everest. Stroud, a doctor, said he did not have time for such a trip because of his schedule. So he proposed running seven marathons in seven days on seven continents.

Britons run 7 marathons in 7 days

I kid you not. pacman excel. Yes boys and girls, someone has written an (almost exact) arcade replica of pacman entirely in Excel VBA macros. I just played it and I'm at a loss for words. *Very* clever.

Link via J-Walk

Think you know your 80's song lyrics? I thought I did. That is, until I took this little quiz. I only got a 72 (well actually 67 because I got 5 bonus points for entering a URL in the "tell us where you saw this quiz" - so that doesn't count). So I obviously don't know as much about 80's music as I thought I did :-)

I emailed the author because one of the questions had two possible answers. **SPOILER ALERT** - they said the answer for question 5 was "People are people" (the Depeche Mode song). It could also have been "People are strange" - originally a Doors song, it was remade by Echo & The Bunnymen on "The Lost Boys" soundtrack. I'll have to wait and see if they agree :-)

Link via Michael Hanscom.

Last night was fun. We had quite a few kids come around and we ran out of candy. One of our neighbors turned his garage into a haunted house. It was really good. He had dry ice, spooky lighting, and all his family dressed up as zombies. Very cool :-)