October 2004 Archives
After a nice one week break, this week was the start of the new school semester. As I wave goodbye to any and all free time once again I sometimes wish I had gone to University after sixth form instead of trying to juggle the ole day job, night classes and life in general. Of course I didn't have the faintest idea what I wanted to be when I grew up back then so it's prolly just as well I'm doing it now. Can't help but feel that I'm getting a little burned out by it though. The break over Christmas will be *wonderful*.
Last semester I took Compilers and an English class. The English class was just a bunch of essay writing and while a pain in the arse, wasn't really too difficult. The Compilers class while interesting was bloody difficult. First of all the professor was, well, a bit crap. Secondly the text book we used was awful. Now, the dragon book may be regarded as *the* book on compilers but I hated the bastard with a passion. I've read (and own) loads of technical books and this has to be one of the worst I've ever had the misfortune to wade through. Writing a lexer though was quite fun I must admit.
This semester I'm not taking any core computer science classes. I'm doing a Criminal Justice course and an American History course. Both yawnsville but I need them both. Go on admit it, you're really jealous that I got to write a 1000 word essay titled "The systems of government set up by the early settlers to the American colonies" and you didn't :-)
Sunday morning cat blogging.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Should stop those greedy bots right? (Well those that ask for robots.txt to begin with - i.e a well behaved bot).
So I'm a little surprised to find this when I tail my access_log:
66.249.64.55 - - [30/Oct/2004:03:47:02 -0400] "GET /archives/000885.html HTTP/1.0" 200 6750 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
/me investigates...
For those of you (all two) not using an RSS aggregator to read my drivel you'll notice a slight tweakage of the look of the site. Don't really know why I thought green & grey were pleasant colors so now they're history. Background is now white and all <a> tags are 100% green free.
Today's "blog post title that made the coffee run out of my nose" award goes to Brad Fitzpatrick for his Only Debian doesn't suck monkey balls.
The Times layeth the smack down.
The primary function of democracy is not to elect good leaders, since nobody can predict in advance how a politician will perform. It is to eject leaders who have manifestly failed. The ability to remove leaders who turn out to be corrupt, dangerous, outrageously dishonest or manifestly incompetent is the primary privilege and duty of any democracy. And if any leader in our lifetime deserved to be ejected by voters, regardless of their ideology or political persuasion, it is surely President Bush.
So there I was all excited about the Lunar Eclipse tonight and it was bloody cloudy. Bugger.
As I was driving home tonight, NPR aired a piece about John Peel. It was quite good and I was really quite pleased that an American radio station would be willing to cover Peel's death. There were interviews with Peel's boss at the BBC and the bass player from The Undertones as well as a couple of clips of Peel himself.
Blimey, John Peel has died. I really enjoyed listening to him. Sunday nights right? I remember he always always opened his show with a song from The Fall - even when he filled in for other DJs in the daytime. Classic.
Phew. Just got home after a 5 hour drive from San Diego to Phoenix. Bit knackered. Had an excellent time. Thanks to an extended play on the beach in La Jolla this morning, I'm quite sun burned. Right, time for a beer then I'm off to bed. Got to say a big thanks to the comment spammers who over the last 5 days have posted 1536 spam comments. The phrase "total wankers" doesn't seem to do them justice at this point.
I used to be a huuuge Adam and the Ants fan when I was a kid. I remember playing the Prince Charming album to death. I played it over and over and over and (well, you get the idea). Yesterday I was going through some of my old records (yes, those black circular vinyl thingies) and guess which album I found?
I think if I played Scorpios or Stand & Deliver one more time Sally was going to beat me up with a large stick :-)
Boys and girls, listen to your uncle Jamie Zawinski.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to fix.Amen brother. Today I found this snippet of code.
if ($self->{dbh}->query($SQL, @bindVals)) {
$self->buildPage('success.tmpl');
} else {
# FIXME: hmm, so now what?
}
Former head of the FCC, Reed Hundt, takes the current FCC chairman to task.
Chairman Powell instead pretends that he has been asked to bar the showing of the propaganda -- which no one has asked him to do. His remarks are so far off the point, and he is so intelligent, that one must conclude that he knows what he is doing and intends the result -- tacit and plain encouragement of the use of the Sinclair airwaves to pursue a smear campaign. No broadcast group in the history of America has ever committed an hour to smearing a presidential candidate, and no FCC chairman before this one would have reacted with equanimity to this radical step down in broadcasting ethics.Ok, hands up, who is the slightest bit surprised that the current chairman of the FCC will do nothing? You know, seeing as he's the son of the current Secretary of State and all.
Blimey, next Friday is my 8th wedding anniversary. I cannot believe 8 years have gone by. I can remember my wedding day like it was yesterday. Did time always go by this fast or is it just me?
Anyhoo, to celebrate we're going to California for 5 days. Can't wait. We'll be spending a couple of days in Los Angeles before heading down to San Diego.
In LA we'll be riding a roller coaster or two. We've been to Magic Mountain before and *loved* it. Best theme park we've ever been to. Never been to Knott's Berry Farm so we're looking forward to that. Of course we'll have to decide which park to go back to at night for the halloween scare-a-thon. Knott's Scary Farm seems like a good candidate :-) A few years ago we had an awesome time at Halloween Horror Nights in the Hollywood Universal Studios. Looks like they're only holding it in Orlando this year. Picture a massive theme park at night. Artificial fog everywhere, *amazing* haunted houses, beer stands on every corner, actors in horror makeup/costumes hired to scare the crap out of you. The fact that they don't let kids under 13 into the park at night should tell you that this is no wimpy trick or treat fest :-)
San Diego will be the relaxing part of the trip. We're staying in an excellent hotel on the bay. Now that I think about it, I've never been to Seaworld before so I'll try and convince Sally to go while we're there.
Hans Blix layeth the smackdown.
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix said Wednesday the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had failed tragically in its aim of making the world a safer place and succeeded only in stimulating terrorism.
If I'm reading a blog post and it contains a link that is NSFW - please, please, please label it as such. That's all I ask. How much effort would it have taken eh?
We bought a new Hoover Windtunnel bagless vacuum cleaner this weekend. I have to say it is the loudest bloody vacuum I have *ever* heard. The cats are scared shitless and scatter to all four corners of the house as soon as you turn it on. The dogs aren't paricularly thrilled with it either.
We watched Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. I think anyone who is planning on voting for Dubya should be forced to watch this and tell me you still want to vote for him. The scene in the Florida classroom where he sits there for 8 minutes after being told the second plane had just crashed into the WTC got me so angry. Eva turned to us "why is he just sitting there, why isn't he doing anything?". Talk about deer in the headlights. He had no idea what to do. Scary.
Mental note to self. Always, always, always read the entire documentation for a Perl module before using it. Don't just read the synopsis and look at the code examples and go to town. Don't do that.
Ahem. Had I actually read the entire documentation for Archive::Tar I would have known that it reads entire archives into memory. Would have known that processing a huuuuuuuge tarball would bring the dev machine to its knees. Would have known that I should really have avoided Archive::Tar like the plague. Would have known it would be in my best interest to shell out and use /usr/bin/tar instead.
SQUEEEEEEEL.
Ahem. Oh yes. Beers Steers & Queers. Classic Revolting Cocks. When I saw NIN circa very early 90s at the London Astoria, they played Beers Steers & Queers over the PA before Trent came out. The whole crowd was moshing like they came too see RevCo. In fact, as I recall, someone from the NIN crew came out on stage with a camcorder and taped the crowd moshing. Clearly NIN fans like them some RevCo :-)
In case you couldn't tell, I've been listening to a lot of Industrial type moozik this week. Front 242, Skinny Puppy, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb etc. I've come to the conclusion that Kathy's Song (Victoria Mix) by Apoptygma Bezerk might just be the dogs bollocks of electro/industrial moozik with Uberman by Sheep On Drugs a *very* close second.
That is all.
Yeah I sat through it. I'm sick like that. Where to begin? Ok here goes. Cheney is much better at this sort of thing than Dubya. That is obvious. Even though he's still a liar liar pants of fire, he does it...better than Dubya. Simple as that. I couldn't help but wonder how many Republicans were wishing Cheney was lead man on the ticket instead of Elmer Befuddled.
John Edwards did a good job at reminding the public that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. That is a key point that they need to drive home. The more people that question why America invaded Iraq in the first place the better I say.
Not sure Edwards is going to count this as one of his better performances though. A number of flub-ups[0] didnt really help him out and a couple of times I was shaking my head at a missed opportunity.
[0] Yes that's a technical term for a verbal faux pas :-)
Who the fu** is Luke Goss? Don't tell me you don't remember Bros from the late 80s? I think he was the drummer wasn't he?
Anyhoo, the reason I bring it up is that Luke Goss is on the cover of our local TV Guide here in Phoenix. Turns out he's an actor now and our TV guide is promoting Frankenstein in which he plays "The Creature". He also had a part in Blade II. Who knew?
I was a big fan of the SNES version of Prince of Persia and this week I finally bought Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time for the PS2. It's been out for over a year but for some reason I kept overlooking it when browsing for games. What a fool I was! I can honestly say it's one of the best games I've ever played. If you own a PS2 and don't already own this game - run, don't walk, and buy yerself a copy. You won't be disappointed.
We all saw Dubya taking notes throughout the debate last night. Looks like some brave soul managed to sneak them out without anyone noticing.
Via tilly