April 2004 Archives

So it was already annoying enough to have to submit a work request ticket to have my local sysadmin install Perl modules for me. I'm an instant gratification kind of guy and certainly don't like waiting hours or even a whole day just to get a bloody module installed. After having root on my own Linux boxes it's so annoying to have to rely on someone else to do what would take me seconds to accomplish.

So you can imagine my enthusiasm when he tells me that he now cannot install anything without getting approval from 'production control'. Production control is a weekly 'meeting of the minds' held out of State by our sister office. Installs are 'scheduled' by a bunch of people I've never met for sometime in the future.

Sometime in the future? WTF? It's a frigging Perl module fer crissakes.

shell> PERL5LIB=/my-lib-dir; export PERL5LIB
shell> perl Makefile.PL LIB=/my-lib-dir PREFIX=/my-lib-dir

There, problem solved. No more tickets, no more meeting of the minds. Instant bliss :-)

Woohoo. The old corporate laptop is getting replaced. Getting me a Dell Latitude D600. ROCK!

If you use Mozilla Firefox (you *do* use Firefox right??) as your browser of choice but don't really like the name Firefox, fret not. Just get yourself a copy of the Firesomething extension.

I noticed that Bloglines looked little different this morning. Wassat references link all about? Mark Fletcher provides the scoopage:

This morning we introduced a new Bloglines feature. If another feed has linked to an item that you're reading, there will be a 'References' link under the item with a count of the number of references to that item. Clicking on that will bring up a list of all the items from other feeds that have linked to the item you're reading. It's a great way to follow conversations and see different viewpoints.

Neat New Bloglines Feature

This is a good thing.

WASHINGTON, April 25 — A vast multitude of protesters marched here today in support of abortion rights and to highlight what organizers contend is the Bush administration's erosion of reproductive liberties.

Huge Demonstration for Abortion Rights Fills Washington Mall

That is all.

Triple digits tomorrow. The Arizona summer cometh. Brace for impact.

I usually get about 6 hours sleep a night. This seems to work quite well for me for the most part. Last night I went to bed early and ended up getting about 9 hours sleep. The weird thing is that I cannot stop yawning today. What's up with that?

I guess the moral of this story is that I need to get *less* sleep and then I might be more awake throughout the day. Which is all rather odd really.

You know it's been a long day at work when you find this amusing. From File-Find-Rule.t

eval { $class->import(':Test::ATeam') };
is ($@, "", "if you can find them, maybe you can hire the A-Team" );
can_ok( $class, 'ba' );

And later in ATeam.pm

sub File::Find::Rule::ba {
    my $self = shift()->_force_object;
    $self->exec( sub { die "I pity the fool who uses this in production" });
}

Yep, today has been one of those days.

Just how cool are the new Thunderbird icons? Me like.

Just goes to show that you really can learn something new every day. I had never even heard of kite surfing until today.

Kite surfing is similar to windsurfing but uses kites instead of sails. Its official UK website declares it as "the most extreme of water sports".

A teenager is critically ill in hospital after a freak gust of wind blew him into a wall as he practised kite surfing.

Ross Milton, 17, was caught by an 80mph wind and blown out of the water in Aberavon, south Wales.

He was catapulted over a fish and chip shop before hitting two walls.

Surfer hurt in freak kite crash

I've got to get one of these t-shirts.

On tonight's 60 Minutes, be afraid, be very afraid.

How does the president think history will judge him for going to war in Iraq?

“After the second interview with him on Dec. 11, we got up and walked over to one of the doors. There are all of these doors in the Oval Office that lead outside. And he had his hands in his pocket, and I just asked, ‘Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,’” says Woodward.

“And he said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’”

Woodward Shares War Secrets

What's up with the United States Postal Service and their "helpful" uplifting receipt messages? I took a gander at a receipt they gave me yesterday and was quite surprised to find this little message at the bottom:

Spring is a Time of New Awakenings

WTF? What genius thought *that* was a good idea?

And how much does the new Baldur's Gate game rock I ask you? Does the fact that we were still playing it at 3:00am give you any idea?

Yep, it's that good :-)

Via Ben, (and feedster seems to back him up), this page 23 business is quite popular today.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Right, well mine is buggered right off the bat. Page 23 is a whole page of C++ code. Ok, how about page 24 then. There, that's better:

When this occurs, then we usually count the maximum number of required operations for inputs of a given size.

Last night I finally completed Ratchet & Clank 2 and I must say it's one of the best games I think I've ever played.

Today I picked up Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II and can't wait to play it. Both my wife and I are HUGE fans of the first Dark Alliance game and we've been looking forward to the sequel for AGES. I love those games were two can play at the same time. I'll be killing skeletons in one corner of the dungeon, my wife will be casting spells on other baddies somewhere else on the screen and a good time is had by all.

So, we've got plenty of beer in the fridge, let the gaming begin :-)

So, chocolate fudge brownie ice cream may *not* be the best ice cream ever after all. I've got a new fave. Chocolate chip cookie dough.

That is all :-)

I'm working from home today which rocketh quite hard. Got a decent amount of coding done this morning but it was all for nothing.

My dog Foster has a killer tail from hell. When he wags it, he could kill small children. I was sitting at my desk typing away and he comes up to me all happy and wagging his tail. Then his tail hit the front panel of my computer and he managed to press the power-off switch. Computer began to immediately shut down.

Now, normally I would have found this most amusing. You know, If it wasn't for the fact that I hadn't saved the new changes to my code and the lengthy email I'd just spent 15 minutes writing had just gone down the toilet.

I love my dog. I do.

So Jessica Simpson is a diva now? Please, someone - anyone, make her go away.

And she finally ranks as a diva — in VH1's eyes, anyway. She's one of the headliners at Sunday's live broadcast from Las Vegas.

Jessica Simpson to Headline 'Divas' Show

Justin Mason does a quick comparison of how Google's GMail compares with SpamAssasin .

Spam: So, I set up a .forward to forward all my personal mail to GMail to see how it coped with my spam load, and compared it against the personal SpamAssassin install I'm running these days. Here's the results:

* test start: Mon Apr 12 15:50:39 PDT 2004
* test end: Tue Apr 13 18:26:45 PDT 2004
* total spam messages received by both during the test: 210
* total ham messages received by both during the test: 528

The SpamAssassin results:

* true positives: 189
* false positives: 0
* false negatives: 21
* true negatives: 528
* FP%: 0.00%
* FN%: 10.00%

The GMail results:

* true positives: 144
* false positives: 7
* false negatives: 66
* true negatives: 521
* FP%: 1.32%
* FN%: 31.42%

Some stats on GMail's spam filter

Reactions to Dubya's press conference last night are all over the blogosphere today. I was reading Jay Rosen and came across a comment that someone had posted that almost made me want to clap out loud. This sums up my thoughts in a nutshell.

Then came the actual press conference and it simply fell apart. I do not like Bush or his policies, but I felt horribly embarrassed for him. Most of the questions were open enough for him to finess with ease, but he was so clearly ill at ease and teetering on the brink of some obscure fury. I really did find it astounding that he could not think of one thing he regretted either doing or not doing in regard to either 9-11 or the invasion of Iraq.

All this said, I really do not know why the White House decided to go ahead with this -- Bush is so bad at doing these exchanges that it's almost simply not worth it. It's absolutely worthless when the expectations of actually hearing what the hell the plan is aren't realized. And that's what happened here -- the uplifting message from the Almighty that was the premise of the opening speech got way blurred by the fumbling, faltering, futility of the As to the Qs.

Even though the opening speech wasn't a bust, it was marred by Bush's obvious unease. He has a number of tics that are off-putting to the watcher. He licks the corner of his mouth constantly and moves back and forth at the podium; he seems to be kicking one of his legs frequently. I suppose if the press were to appear to be vicious or unfriendly, these behaviors on his part could make the viewer feel protective of him. But the press wasn't acting like attack dogs last night. The questions were earnest and fair, given the gravity of the situation the country finds itself in.

I think, over all, that this effort wasn't made to convince fencesitters or make anti-war folks rethink. It was addressed to the Bush followers, to keep them in line. What I don't think the White House people thought about in advance was the strong possibility that Bush would be so bad that he would scare viewers. Which he did.

Monty Python's Terry Jones with a tongue in cheek response to Tony Blair's recent "Why We Must Never Abandon This Historic Struggle in Iraq".

Dear Mr and Mrs Blair,

I have just had to mark Tony's essay, Why We Must Never Abandon This Historic Struggle in Iraq, and I am extremely worried.

Your son has been in the sixth form now for several years, studying world politics, and yet his recent essay shows so little grasp of the subject that I can only conclude he has spent most of that time staring out of the window.

His essay, of course, is written with his usual passion and conviction, but, in the real world, passion and conviction do not count for many marks.

Crucially, Tony does not seem to have read any of the first-hand accounts that are easily available and describe what is really going on in Iraq. On the recent escalation in violence, for example, he writes: "The insurgents are former Saddam sympathisers ... terrorist groups linked to al-Qaida and, most recently, followers of ... Moqtada al-Sadr." This is simply not good enough. Tony ignores the multitude of reports indicating that revulsion against the occupation is now widespread among ordinary people.

Tony really must try harder

I really try not to get sucked into reading comments on /. but every once in a while I just can't help it :-) Today I was reading Two Takes on the Java Dilemma.

This description of Sun made the coffee run out of my nose and is going to take some beating methinks:

...which is now a neutered zombie company selling its own living organs for booze money...

I knew that LiveJournal was popular. Just didn't realize *how* popular :-)

From Brad's journal today:

So I'm just banging out my intro slides for the MySQL conference. Ya know, the one to whet people's appetites about why they should care about LiveJournal's backend....

I hadn't looked at the logs in a while, but damn it's busy lately:

40-50M hits/day
766 requests/seconds at peak hour.

And those are all dynamic mod_perl requests...

whoa

I, for one, would like to know the answer to this question as well. Hopefully the 9/11 comission has the balls to ask Ashcroft & Mueller about it when they take the stand next week.

IN ITS TOUGH QUESTIONING of Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice, the 9/11 commission has already shown itself to be more resolute than some skeptics predicted. Many Americans now realize that multiple warnings of an Al Qaeda attack on American soil crossed the desks of Bush administration officials in the months leading up to 9/11. The administration's previously unchallenged narrative has begun to unravel.

But when hearings resume on Tuesday, we may learn exactly how tough the commission is prepared to be. This time the stars will be Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, among others. When they testify -- especially Mueller -- we will see whether or not the commission has the stomach to address what may be the single most egregious security lapse related to the attacks: the evacuation of approximately 140 Saudis just two days after 9/11.

This episode raises particularly sensitive questions for the administration. Never before in history has a president of the United States had such a close relationship with another foreign power as President Bush and his father have had with the Saudi royal family, the House of Saud. I have traced more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts that went from the House of Saud over the past 20 years to companies in which the Bushes and their allies have had prominent positions -- Harken Energy, Halliburton, and the Carlyle Group among them. Is it possible that President Bush himself played a role in authorizing the evacuation of the Saudis after 9/11? What did he know and when did he know it?

Unasked questions

Ate more crab cakes than is humanly possible at Joe's Crab Shack. Loved every second of it.

Dusted off Ratchet & Clank 2. I'd taken a little gaming hiatus since Christmas and it was so much fun to have some time to sit down and get lost in a game. Should have it completed by the end of today and then I can finally start on Jak II.

Lost In Translation - I gave this movie 57 minutes before running for the hills. I'd heard some good things about it and I was really quite surprised at how bad it turned out to be. A lot of movies are overrated and this one is certainly no exception.

Retro Gamer is the UK's first regular retro magazine. Published bi-monthly, each issue delves into the glorious, ever-growing retro scene and covers all the classic games, computers and consoles from your misspent youth

Please unsubscribe from mailing lists before you go on vacation. I really don't want to receive your cheesy auto responder message when I post to the list.

That is all.

An old article by Courtney Love that someone sent me the link to today.

The controversial singer takes on record label profits, Napster and "sucka VCs."

Courtney Love does the math

This is certainly, er, unique. Don't quite know what to make of it yet. It's a different way to look at google news that's for sure.

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

newsmap

Server was relocated and we now have some more bandwidth. Fractional T1 instead of 144kbps DSL. Woohoo. It seems that Perl and a number of other things were upgraded prior to the relocation. My mt-blacklist seems to be broken as a result.

An error occurred: Could not save your blacklist data: Tie '/path-to/the-db-directory/plugindata.db' failed: File exists

WTF?

/me investigates...

UPDATE: All fixed. Took the easy way out - a matter of deleting plugindata* from my db dir, running mt-blacklist again, setting my config from scratch, and importing the latest master blacklist . Et voila, all is well.

I suspect something didn't like the upgrade to Perl 5.8.3 (maybe Storable??) but I really don't have time right now to find out the *exact* reason. I'm just happy all is well in mt-blacklist land again :-)

Sigh. You know, the more I read about this kind of thing and see what a complete clusterfuck Iraq has become, the more annoyed I get that the bloody fibbers aren't being held accountable. I'm looking at you Dubya.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Sunday for the first time that Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile germ factories and labs probably "did not exist," and he sharply criticized prewar U.S. intelligence about Iraq's suspected weapons.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., who typically is a strong supporter of the CIA and the Bush White House, said the administration's use of flawed intelligence regarding the alleged mobile bioweapons facilities is "embarrassing for everybody."

Republican senator says Iraqi mobile labs probably 'did not exist'

I'm a big M. Night Shyamalan fan. I absolutley cannot wait until The Village comes out. We're talking opening day, I'm there :-)

Currently reading Howard Zinn's A People's History Of The United States. It's a real eye opener. One of those "what your teachers didn't tell you in history class" or even "what the media didn't tell you about current events". I first heard Howard Zinn on NPR *ages* ago. He was having a debate with someone about what children are taught in classrooms and he had me hooked. I went out and bought this book the same day but with one thing or another, never got around to reading it until this week.

In one of the later chapters, Zinn describes the book:

As for the subtitle of this book, it is not quite accurate; a "people's history" promises more than any one person can fulfill, and it is the most difficult kind of history to recapture. I call it that anyway because with all it's limitations, it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance.

That makes it a biased account, one that leans in a certain direction. I am not troubled by that, because the mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction - so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements - that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.

Matchstick Men. Took a while to get going and the twist was a little predictable but good stuff nonetheless. Liked this one better than the three movies we rented on Friday.

So after thinking it was an April Fool's prank, it would seem that Google's GMail is real afterall. Check out some of the screenshots from a beta tester here.

Via Justin Mason.

It's been a while since we've rented any movies so we started catching up last night.

First up, Runaway Jury. I've liked a lot of the John Grisham books that have become movies. Runaway Jury is still not as good as A Time To Kill but I still liked it a lot. John Cusack was good as usual.

Next up, Cold Creek Manor. Not as good as the trailer would have you believe :-) I dunno, it's not exactly *bad* but I don't think I'd watch it again.

Last was the surprise of the night, Somethings's Gotta Give. *Total* chick flick and to be honest I don't know how I got talked into watching it. Glad I did though as it wasn't actually that bad. In fact some bits were really quite funny. As far as I can make out, Jack Nicholson plays the same part in every movie he does. This movie was no exception. That's not to say he's crap (although I know some people who think so), it's just that he never really changes, ever. That can be a goodl thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it I suppose. Diane Keaton was quite good though.

Why oh why do some vending machines make me use my brain? Please show me how much money I've already put in so that I know how much more you need. Don't make me keep track of it in my head.

That is all.

There's something rather wicked about being able to slurp a file, extract what you want, and dump it to another file in 3 lines of Perl. Brian Ingerson's IO::All lets you do just that.

my @lines = io('stuff')->slurp;
my @good_lines = grep {not /bad/} @lines;
io('good-stuff')->print(@good_lines);

NICE.