October 2005 Archives

[Moozik: Pearl Jam - Yellow Ledbetter]

Last night I watchced the always brilliant Curb Your Enthusiasm and was about to turn off the TV after the episode ended. Glad I didn't as I finally actually watched an episode of Extras. I'd been wanting to see it for ages so I could see what Ricky Gervais could come up with after 'The Office'. Turns out, Extras is bloody good. Last night's episode was hilarious. Les Dennis did a good job taking the piss out of himself too. Talk about blast from the past, I'd forgotten Les Dennis even existed :-)

[Moozik: Madness - Night Boat To Cairo]

Sean doesn't allow comments on his journal but what he wrote today is so true that it deserves a big 'bravo that man'.

Interfaces on DVDs are awful and getting worse.

Folks, I just wanna press Play (once!) and have the movie start. Yes, the actual movie, not the "preview" blurbs, not menus where you can't tell what's selected because it's too cutesy, not the increasingly insane FBI warning screens, not the repeated "splash screens" for the studio, but the movie, the actual reason I rented or bought the disk.

I have taken to quantifying part of the interface awfulness, by counting the minimum clicks to takes to get to the actual movie. I am toying with the idea of calling that number "the Burke index". I think this would firmly establish the tradition of my naming deeply frustrating things after myself.

The Burke Index

[Moozik: Oasis - Hello]

Last night's Bill Maher show was so much better than last week. Billy Connolly was bloody funny. No surprise there, I've been a fan of his ever since I was a wee nipper[0].

Tony Snow, you sir, are an arse. Just another example that the White House talking points are sent directly to the Fox News teleprompters. Good lord. I loved it when Billy Connolly brought him down to size after he made some moronic comment about Scooter Libby being indicted for 'talking to reporters'. He said something to the affect of (imagine a strong Scottish accent) "Scooter Libby wasn't indicted for talking to reporters; he was indicted for PER-jury". Classic[1].

[0] My Dad was a fan so I got to watch my fair share of Connolly stand up videos when I was growing up.
[1] Well, you had to be there I suppose :-)

[Moozik: Die Krupps - Wahre Arbeit, Wahre Lohn]

Storktelligent Design. Made me chuckle anyway.

[Moozik: Diverje - Enough To Destroy]

Davyd Madely proudly shows off the piggy bank he received when opening a bank account in Australia. He wouldn't have even received one in England though.

British banks are banning piggy banks because they may offend some Muslims.

Halifax and NatWest banks have led the move to scrap the time-honoured symbol of saving from being given to children or used in their advertising, the Daily Express/Daily Star group reports here.

Muslims do not eat pork, as Islamic culture deems the pig to be an impure animal.

Salim Mulla, secretary of the Lancashire Council of Mosques, backed the bank move.

"This is a sensitive issue and I think the banks are simply being courteous to their customers," he said.

However, the move brought accusations of political correctness gone mad from critics.

"The next thing we will be banning Christmas trees and cribs and the logical result of that process is a bland uniformity," the Dean of Blackburn, Reverend Christopher Armstrong, said.

"We should learn to celebrate our difference, not be fearful of them."

Khalid Mahmoud, the Labour MP for a Birmingham seat and one of four Muslim MPs in Britain, also criticised the piggy-bank ban.

"We live in a multicultural society and the traditions and symbols of one community should not be obliterated just to accommodate another," Mr Mahmoud said.

Piggy banks 'offend UK Muslims'

So, presumably, the next step is to ban: all Porky Pig cartoons, the 'Three little Pigs' story, the 'Green Eggs and Ham' Seuss book, 'Miss Piggy' from the Muppets, restaurants from serving any dish with ham, and supermarkets from selling any pork related product.

Then once that's taken care of, the next step would be to eliminate the phrases 'when pigs fly', 'bringing home the bacon', and 'your room looks like a pig sty'.

Just today's reminder that I must have gone to sleep and woken up in the bizarro world..

[Moozik: Alice In Chains - Dam That River]

Alec Baldwin, while commenting on the hypocrisy of Kay Bailey Hutchison, has a couple of simple questions.

My question for today is: Why are contemporary Republicans so full of shit? And a follow-up...How did the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and General Eisenhower get taken over by such lying, thieving, self-serving scoundrels?

What Happened To The Party Of Lincoln?

Moozik: Coldplay - Amsterdam]

Usually I really like Bill Maher's show. Only this week, not so much. Not one of the better shows this week I must admit.

He certainly wasn't thrilled when Arianna Huffington didn't say *exactly* what he wanted did he? He coached her, interrupted her, and talked over a lot of the things she was trying to say. It seemed very awkward to me. I was really disappointed with Spike Lee. In fact I thought he was almost embarrassingly bad. Shame really because I've seen him on other talk shows and he's no slouch in the articulation department. On Bill's show he was all wacky conspiracy theories and sensless rambling.

I was really looking forward to New Rules because they can often save a less than stellar show. Not this time unfortunately. As each New Rule came and went I was holding out hope that the last rule would redeem the others. Nope, the Saddam new rule was the worst of them all.

[Moozik: The Verve - Catching The Butterfly]

Good thing that new $50 million pool doesn't leak. Oh wait.

MELBOURNE'S new $51.5 million Commonwealth Games swimming pool is leaking.

Just 144 days before the sold-out venue hosts Ian Thorpe and some of the world's best swimmers, the Melbourne Sports and Aquatic Centre pool in Albert Park is losing water from at least 12 leaks.

Games minister Justin Madden sprayed the first drops of water into the new pool 19 days ago, but yesterday announced that it had been drained.

"There's a number of those leaks, they are only very small, very minor, probably the size of a puncture in a tyre, but in that, you can lose significant amounts of water so it's really a matter of locating them and ensuring that they are repaired," he said. "I'm not aware of the rate at which it is losing water but I understand that they are not big leaks, but as with any water leak, they are a concern if you don't fix them."

New pool springs 12 leaks

[Moozik: The Jam - Down In The Tubestation At Midnight]

So this is the first post from my new home. To be honest, my move has been long overdue. I was taking advantage of some free digs on perlmonk.org and my disk & bandwidth usage were bordering on taking the piss really. I owe Chris my overdue thanks and appreciation.

So, yeah. New home, new URL. Seems awfully anti-climatic somehow :-)

[Moozik: Tubeway Army - We Have A Technical]

Tomorrow marks my ninth wedding anniversary. Nine years. Where does the time go eh? I can remember my wedding day like it was yesterday.

Last year we rode rollercoasters, watched surfing on the pier, paddled in the Pacific, and ate fantastic Italian food in San Diego. This year, my better half decided she'd like a new computer instead of going on another California adventure. New computer you say? Oh, alright, you twisted my arm :-) I sure do luurve me some new gadgets & computers :-)

Ahem, so yeah, brand spanking new Dell no less. 3Ghz P4, 2GB Ram, 160GB disk, 20inch flat panel monitor. She's quite excited. Mind you so am I because I now get her existing computer to add to my Linux pool :-) Actually the others will be retiring forever as they are quite the shite. So I'll have one dedicated Linux box. No complaints here. Her existing computer is no slouch. 2 Ghz P4, 512MB Ram, two hard disks totaling 50GB, 19inch flat panel monitor.

I see a fresh Ubuntu install in my future :-)

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - A Pain That I'm Used To]

This here little blog of mine will soon have a new home. I'm trying to get everything setup & configured before I make the switch. On the new host, Movable Type needs to run under cgiwrap which is all very new to me.

It seems that mt-check.cgi has a teeny weeny bug that causes it to die when run under cgiwrap:

Useless use of private variable in void context at mt-check.cgi line 318

Yipes. So lets see what line 318 actually does shall we?

$dbi_is_okay if $mod eq 'DBI';

Well there you go, there *is* a useless use of a private variable in void context. That should prolly be:

$dbi_is_okay = 1 if $mod eq 'DBI';

So after modifying mt-check.cgi to fix that little buglet, all is well. No longer dies under cgiwrap. Like a good MT community member, I reported it to the MT community forums.

[Moozik: Enya - The Memory Of Trees]

If anyone received multiple "test" entries in their aggregators - I apologize. You see, I accidently discovered that MovableType uses craploads of memory when rebuilding after a new post. This may be common knowledge but it came as a surprise to me. Dunno whether it was the upgrade to MT 3.2 or whether it's always been a bit heavy on the memory usage.

I was running top to look for something unrelated while a blog entry posted and noticed the mt.cgi process growing, and growing, and growing. It grew to 56M. Yipes. So I farted around with the config and tried disabling all plugins and even the archive building to see if I could immediately spot the problem. Alas not. In fact nothing I did had any significant impact on the size of the mt.cgi process. So WTF?

I'm far too tired to fart around with it anymore tonight. I can sense a post to the MT forums in my future :-)

[Moozik: U2 - Numb]

- The week of studying for my Algebra exam paid off. Wasn't anyway near as bad as I had expected.

- My neighbors have painted their house bright pink. I kid you not. It was always a kind of off-pink but now it's shockingly pink. If my camera actually had batteries I'd snap a couple-a-shots so you could see how shockingly pink it is. My wife's reaction: "that's, er, quite pink isn't it?".

- Seems my MT upgrade did not go without a hitch. I'm thinking the database upgrade had a hiccup somewhere. I appear to have lost all of my old comments. When viewing comments, I see the correct total count but when you go to view them, I get a nice little "No Comments Could Be Found" message. Bugger. So, if the MT forums don't help, I guess I'll be digging into the MT Comments code to see if I can whip up something in Perl to find out what has happened.

- With the win over Everton, Spurs are now second in the premership. Whoa. Someone pinch me.

- Today marks the start of the big diet. No really, it does. Ahem, we'll see how long this lasts :-)

[Moozik: Virgin Prunes - Pagan Love Song]

So you lucky blighters in the UK can buy DM's Playing The Angel on Monday. It's not released in the US until the following day. Guess what I'll be doing on my lunch hour Tuesday?

I'm really looking forward to this album. I'll be honest; words cannot describe how disappointed I was with 2001's Exciter album. After Alan Wilder left in 1995 I really wondered how the band would suffer. He *was* the sound of DM for a little over 13 years after all.

Their first album without him, Ultra proved quite promising and I must admit I really like it. Then they released Exciter. Oh dear. It's really not very good. I started wondering if 'Ultra' was just a fluke. The whole album feels under produced and none of the songs are particularly memorable. The only song that I listen to with any regularity from that album is 'When The Body Speaks'.

Then Dave made his solo album and Martin made his second solo album. These were not promising signs. I honestly thought DM were done.

So it was with some pleasant surprise that I read they were back in the studio again to record a new DM album. I bought the Precious single as soon as it came out and I'm still heavily playing it. Luurvely song, reminds me of 'Enjoy The Silence' somewhat.

Anyhoo, I'll stop rambling now. I've got to get some shuteye as tomorrow afternoon is the big Algebra exam. Two hours of utter maths wank. I'd rather saw my big toe off than take this exam. Because, hey, who needs two big toes anyway?

My wife is currently listening to Nick Cave. I see my excellent musical taste is rubbing off.

Ahem.

[Moozik: Suede - Trash]

So the big announcement of Apple's new iPod video has come and gone. Better battery life (yay), bigger color[1] screen (yay), display photos (yawn), watch videos (huh?).

Yes the screen is bigger but it's still only 2.5 inches with a resolution of 320x240. Why oh why would I want to watch videos & TV at 320x240? Even if I were traveling, I'd take my laptop so I could watch stuff on a 15 inch screen and be safe in the knowledge that my laptop battery would last longer than the 2 hours quoted for video for the 30GB iPod. So WTF? I've never quite understood why people rave about surfing the web or reading email on their cell phone or blackberry. On such tiny screens, it looks bloody awful. But that's just me.

Being able to download TV shows[2] in iTunes 6[3] is an interesting prospect because you're not limited to watching it on your iPod. Although seeing as I've got a DVD burner hooked up to my TV equipment anyway, I can already burn those shows directly to DVD without coughing up $1.99 at the ITunes store for each episode. Although my DVD copies will not be commercial free but that's what the fast forward button was made for right?

It will be interesting to see if any other TV companies bang on Steve Jobs' door to get licensing deals. Perhaps in the future there will be something worthwhile that I can't already watch & burn myself that will entice me to download something. Time will tell.

[1] My better half has had an iPod photo for a while now and I must admit that I've been rather envious of that luurvely color screen. I couldn't care less about the ability to see photos but having a color screen rocketh.

[2] Well, as long as you live in the USA.

[3] ITunes 6? Didn't 5 come out about 3 or 4 weeks ago? Awfully fast for an entire version increment donchathink?

[Moozik: Inspiral Carpets - Uniform]

Hmm, seems I own six of John Peel's top twenty albums:

The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground and Nico
Pulp: Different Class
Nirvana: Nevermind
The Smiths: The Smiths
PJ Harvey: Dry
Hole: Live Through This

[Moozik: Oasis - Gas Panic]

Say it ain't so. The Arizona summer might actually be over. I didn't use my AC on the way to work this morning. Good sign. We've had the windows open with a nice 68° breeze blowing in for the past hour or so.

Every single bloody year I remind myself that this is the reason I love living in Arizona.

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Flys On The Windscreen]

If this post shows up, the upgrade to MT 3.2 might have actually worked. Time to checkout everything else...

[Moozik: Front 242 - Until Death (Us Do Part)]

Wasps hardman Lawrence Dallaglio has been unmasked as an angelic choirboy who sang on one of Tina Turner's biggest hits.

The former England captain - all 6ft 4ins and 18 stone of him - formed part of the school ensemble that provided backing on We Don't Need Another Hero in 1985.

Nice Little Turner

[Moozik: Wumpscut - Ich Will Dich]

So I thought that Friday night's Bill Maher show was really quite good. I just finished watching it and I must say that the panel of Andrew Sullivan, Ben Affleck, and Salman Rushdie worked really well. I was actually quite surprised how intelligent Ben Affleck is. Here I was thinking he was a complete tool.

Ahem.

Oh, and did I just find myself actually agreeing with some of the things Ann Coulter was saying? She actually made some very valid points regarding Dubya nominating Miers to the supreme court.

Rushdie's "where are the holidays for Atheists like us?" comment made me chuckle.

[Moozik: Apoptygma Bezerk - Kathy's Song]

I see that Ann Coulter is going to be on Bill Maher's show tonight. Should be interesting in light of the less than stellar comments she's been making about Dubya of late.

I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush's real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.

Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ...

First, Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early '80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.

However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn't qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on "The West Wing," let alone to be a real one. Both Republicans and Democrats should be alarmed that Bush seems to believe his power to appoint judges is absolute. This is what "advice and consent" means.

This is what 'advice and consent' means.

[Moozik: The Cure - Sinking]

The MySQL Query Browser is really rather nice. It's a GUI frontend to MySQL and it's handy when you're browsing a table with quite a few columns or columns are of type text with a lot of information in them. Trying to view those query results in a terminal window is a major pain in the arse.

The other nice thing is that the Query Browser has tabs so you can have multiple query result sets just a click away without the need for multiple terminal windows doing the same thing or dumping results to a file and opening them in vim.

But it seems that version 1.1.15 has a really rather annoying bug in the tab implementation. Type in quite a lengthy SQL statement on one tab, switch to another tab to grab some info, switch back to the original tab and your original SQL statement has gone buh-bye. Bastards. I don't remember that 'feature' in earlier versions.

Well, someone already beat me to filing a bug report. And it's already been fixed. NICE.

[Moozik: Nitzer Ebb - Floodwater]

So I mentioned the upcoming Depeche Mode tour of the USA. Well, tickets went on sale on Saturday and I parted with my cash.

So woohoo, I will be walking to a DM gig.

Those arenas within walking distance of your house are rather handy :-)

[Moozik:Depeche Mode - Barrel Of A Gun]

The bloke from Dish Network came out this morning with a plethora of spare parts and woohoo, I now have Satellite TV once again.

He was an older guy who told me he was actually retired and took this job to help finance his scuba diving :-) I wasn't sure whether he was winding me up or was actually telling the truth. He had some good stories of diving around shipwrecks off the South Carolina coast even if he did make it up :-)

Anyway, he took one look at where my dish is mounted and said "woah, that's high isn't it". He said it in a voice that suggested he wasn't at all comfortable on rooftops. Odd for a Satellite repairman but there you go. So I followed him up on the roof and he seemed grateful to have someone else up there.

He seemed to let out a sigh of relief when he got off the ladder and his feet touched the ground :-)