May 2007 Archives

[Moozik: The Clash - Clash City Rockers]

So perhaps news of their demise was just a tad hasty.

A source close to the band told NewOrderOnline that the news about the split is false, New Order still exists despite what New Order's bassist said. Peter Hook can leave the band, but this doesn't mean the end of New Order.

We remind you that the claims of New Order's split originated from Peter Hook's blog on MySpace, apparently he didn't warn the rest of the band that were surprised about this news.

[Moozik: Switchblade Symphony - Witches]

This week was the week for season finales. First up, Heroes on Monday night. You know when you're watching good television when you find yourself glued to your sofa and the hairs on your arms stand up. As it ended I thought to myself, that's the best bloody show [0] on TV.

Well, until I watched the two hour Lost finale of course.

Wow. If you ever need a text book example of how to end a season, this is it. The season 3 finale of Lost is the standard by which all others will be judged. I'm not entirely sure there is such a thing as two hours of perfect television, but this comes really close.

So, let it be known that this week marks the start of the great American Summer Teevee Wasteland. Nothing worth watching until the Fall (sorry, Autumn). Personally I can't wait for the new seasons of Battlestar Galactica, Heroes, and Lost.

Are we there yet?

How about now?

Bugger. It's going to be a loooong 5 months. And in the case of Lost, a loooong 9 months. Please tell me the internets are wrong and I don't have to wait until next February.

[0] Americans call TV programmes 'shows' for some reason ;-)

[Moozik: The The - This Is The Day]

The perl-5.8.8-sol9-sparc-local package for Sparc Solaris 9 on sunfreeware is rather broken. Or should I say was broken.

As part of a Perl install yesterday on one of our new Solaris 9 boxes (more in this in a later blog post) I installed the perl-5.8.8 package. Everything installed easily and I went about my business installing some modules. So I do my usual perl -MCPAN -e shell to fireup the CPAN shell. Except that IO::File could not be found in @INC. What? That's a core module. Something is wrong.

./usr/local/bin/perl -v

This is perl, v5.8.7 built for sun4-solaris

Ah, well that's not good. 5.8.7? I just installed 5.8.8.

So, last night I fired off an email to the sunfreeware guys to let them know that the package is broken. To my pleasant surprise, a reply was sitting in my inbox this morning.

Sorry about this. I have repaired the package and reuploaded it.

NICE. I'm extremely impressed at the turnaround time on getting this fixed.

[Moozik: Love and Rockets - Motorcycle]

Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski on the allure of Captain Jack Sparrow.

[He's] The booger that's stuck to your finger, and you flick it and it's on your other finger. And you try to flick it again, and he keeps coming back

Er, right then. Not exactly how I would have described a character in one of my movies but there you go.

[Moozik: The Mission - Grapes Of Wrath]

It looks like Trent Reznor is not very happy with his music label. From his latest post on nin.com.

As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. A couple of examples that quickly come to mind:

* The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne's record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).
By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: "It's because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy."
So... I guess as a reward for being a "true fan" you get ripped off.

* The dreaded EURO Maxi-single. Nothing but a consumer rip-off that I've been talked into my whole career. No more.

The point is, I am trying my best to make sure the music and items NIN puts in the marketplace have value, substance and are worth you considering purchasing. I am not allowing Capital G to be repackaged into several configurations that result in you getting ripped off.

[Moozik: Girls Under Glass - Talk]

Ah. So that would be the reason why comments were taking longer to publish than usual.

All recent versions of Movable Type include a number of plugins for blocking spam, including a set of plugins called SpamLookup. We wanted to update you about a third-party service that’s affected the performance of one of the plugins, along with some easy steps you can take to fix the issue.

Recently, an IP blacklist service known as Blitzed ceased its operations. Movable Type’s SpamLookup plugin uses this service to process incoming comments and TrackBacks to determine if they are spam or not. With Blitzed shut down, a lot of you might be experiencing delays when publishing your readers’ comments.

The fix is to replace opm.blitzed.org with zen.spamhaus.org in the SpamLookup - Lookups configuration.

[Moozik: Killing Joke - The Wait]

Sometimes you read or listen to something and you are completely at a loss for words. This is a video of the former deputy Attorney General James Comey testifying before the Senate. It is truely stunning. Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzalez apparently waited until then Attorney General John Ashcroft was in intensive care in hospital to try to convince him to sign off on an NSA spying campaign which both Ashcroft and Comey felt was illegal.

Remind me how Alberto Gonzalez still has a job again?

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Terrible Lie]

Atrios writes...

I do think it's one of those subjects that reasonable people can disagree about. Personally I'm quite pro-immigration and think there should be fairly straightforward and transparent paths to citizenship for people who come here. I think cultural homogeneity is a bad thing as it tends to be self-reinforcing with homogeneity leading to increasing conformism. I think this country would be a much less interesting place without the recent immigration boom, which followed decades of historically low levels of immigration.

And I would mostly agree albeit with one caveat. The straightforward and transparent paths to citizenship for people who come here should only apply only to those that came here legally. And as long as that was what Duncan had in mind, then he and I are in full agreement.

With yesterday's announcement of an immigration bill compromise, there are those that are calling it an amnesty for immigrants who are in this country illegally. Personally I'm whole heartedly against any blanket amnesty for anyone who broke the law to come here. And I say that for one reason and one reason alone. I'm a legal immigrant and I had to do it the right way, why should it be different for anyone else?

And let me tell you, obtaining your "green card" to come into this country legally is not exactly a picnic either. It requires a lot of time, money, and effort. There are mountains of paperwork to fill out and prerequisite documents to obtain. Fees to pay, medical exams to take, and interviews to conduct. One of the overseas interviews I was required to attend involved flying to the south of Italy for a lengthy two day extravaganza all out of your own pocket. And it doesn't stop once you get to this country either. More paperwork, more interviews, and the added bonus of being herded around like cattle by rude, obnoxious, condescending officials at the local immigration office.

So yeah, I'm going to be just a tad peeved if people are going to be able to bypass all the fun of coming into this country legally ;-)

[Moozik: Mesh - Self Healing Lie]

Tonight ABC aired a 45 minute Lost special called "The Answers". It featured two of the Lost producers, Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelhof providing the fans with answers to questions raised in the past 3 seasons.

Except they didn't.

It was really 45 minutes of two very smug men describing what we've already seen in the past three seasons. Don't get me wrong, I like a Lost recap as much as the next rabid-cannot-imagine-crack-being-more-addictive Lost fan. Just don't bill the premise of the special as "Lost: The Answers" when it's really a Lost "greatest hits clip fest". Well, to be fair, in the 45 minutes they did give us two definitive answers.

** MINI SPOILER ALERT **

1. They're not in purgatory, they're not ghosts, they are alive and actually on an island.
2. It *was* Desmond that brought the plane down when he didn't enter the code in time.

So yeah, a little disappointed but in hindsight what did I really expect? Were they really going to blab all the answers and not leave us guessing for next (and future) seasons?

[Moozik: Depeche Mode - Shame]

Ok, so that was 20 mins of my life I'm never getting back. It would appear that my blog has been a little under the weather for the past day or so. Could not post comments, could not login to Movable Type, pretty much anything non-static was all rather dead.

Movable Type generated the following error every time I attempted to do anything

Statement has no result columns to bind (perhaps you need to successfully call execute first) at lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI.pm line 108. at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 909

WTF? I haven't touched Movable Type in ages. No upgrades, no new plugins. Hmm, obviously having issues with reading something from the database. So I ssh onto the box hosting my site to see what else MT::ObjectDriver::DBI and MT::App::CMS might be up to. Yep, looks database related.

So, all in a panic because I haven't done a database backup in a while I gingerly fire up MySQL Query Browser and cross my fingers as I attempt login to the database box. Ok so far, can login to MySQL on that box, I see my blog database, I see tables. I'm beginning to calm down a little at this point. Running a select count(*) from mt_entry revealed that I still have as many blog entries as I should have. Phew. So perhaps a table is corrupted?

And that, as they say, hit the nail on the head. A check table mt_blog; revealed it was the corrupted table. So a quick repair table mt_blog; did the trick and here we are. All better. Might have been a little nicer if the MT error messages were a little bit more intuitive and perhaps hinted at a corrupted table or even what table it was attempting to query when the error occurred.

And remember kids, database backups are your friend.

[Moozik: KMFDM - Juke Joint Jezebel]

The 2007 Glendale Open was so much fun. I initially got into Beach Volleyball while watching the 2004 Athens Olympics. I must say that being there in person really gives you an appreciation of just how hard they hit (sorry, spike) the ball. That man above, Phil Dalhausser, at 6'9" is one intimidating bloke and when he spikes and/or serves you just say "wow" out loud.

It was also really cool to see Misty May and Kerri Walsh (gold medalists in Athens) in person. I have to give credit to Kerri Walsh for hanging around for ages after the match to take photos and sign autographs for everyone that came up to her. And there were a lot of people that did want photos and autographs ;-)

[Moozik: Fad Gadget - Pedestrian]

Nothing rounds off a Volleyball weekend like a visit to McGrath's Fish House. Creamy Crab and Artichoke Dip with Parmesan Bruschetta followed by New Orleans Catfish. Yum.

Petite Prawns, Andouille Sausage, Mushrooms, Scallions, Peppers, Tomatoes and Cajun Cream Sauce over Blackened Catfish.

Followed with a trip to Cold Stone Creamery of course. Chocolate ice cream with brownies of course ;-)

Then teevee.

The Sopranos. Followed by three hours of my guilty pleasure. Survivor.

[Moozik: Jane's Addiction - Jane Says (live)]

Today's 2-1 win against Man City means my team finish a respectable fifth in the table. Which means we've earned that guaranteed Uefa Cup spot next season. Finishing a position lower than Arsenal is a little annoying but overall I think we did rather well.

Hopefully the fact that Dimitar Berbatov is tipped to stay at Spurs turns out to be more than just speculation. If he does stay at the club I have high hopes for next season. The highlight of the season for me was his goal against Charlton last week. Truly amazing.

[Moozik: Gary Numan - Down In The Park (live)]

Took the day off work today because of my Discrete Mathematics final exam. Woke up at 5:45am all in a panic. I always panic just before I take a final but when it's a Maths final I somehow manage to tap into my unknown hidden inner panic. Last year I did make it through University Calculus aka the year of maths hell but I put that down to one Mr Adrian Simione who is, by far, the best teacher/professor/instructor/whatever bar none. And interestingly the only person from Transylvania I've ever met in my life.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, panic. As it usually does, my crack o' dawn panic this morning centered around tried and trusted gems such as I'm not ready and the ol' standby I haven't done enough cramming. So, the next 5 hours were spent doing just that. Cramming. The exam itself was 2 hours long and wasn't anywhere near as bad as my panicking would have me believe. Luckily lots of questions on graphs, binary trees, and circuits. Stuff that I had actually studied. Which is always nice ;-)

Right now I'm feeling so relieved and I'm looking forward to tonight. We're going to the evening rounds of the Glendale Open at Westgate. Got hooked on Beach Volleyball at the Olympics back in 2004, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the Olympic Medalists in action.

[Moozik: The Clash - Bankrobber]

William Hague with a surprisingly good summary of Tony Blair. I did chuckle at his ending paragraph.

So we, the British people, will not look back on Tony Blair and love him: he has been in power too long for that. We, even his opponents, will not hate him: his attributes have always repelled that. But we will, on all sides, look back and ask "What did he really believe in doing? And when was he going to get round to it?"

[Moozik: Tears For Fears - Watch Me Bleed]

The Alan Wilder years are, in my opinion, when Depeche Mode released their finest work. After his departure from DM I've been interested in his work with Recoil.

[Moozik: The Smiths - Girlfriend In A Coma]

And New Order fans the world over shout a collective noooooooo at the news of their split.

British rock band New Order, which arose from the ashes of post-punk band Joy Division in the early 1980s, has broken up, according to a Web posting by the group's bass player.

"I'm relieved really hated carryin on as normal with an awful secret so lets move on shall we?" Peter Hook wrote in a blog published on Wednesday on his MySpace page.

Hook first revealed the split as an aside during an interview last weekend with Manchester radio announcer Clint Boon, when he said, "... me and Bernard (Sumner, New Order singer/guitarist) aren't working together."

That sound you hear is me shouting noooooooo.

[Moozik: KMFDM - Spiritual House]

A couple of days ago some of the keys on my cellphone (mobile for those from England) stopped working. Which is, you know, all rather arsey really. So I called Cingular to see what they could do for me. I wasn't really sure if the phone was still under warranty but thought it certainly wouldn't hurt to try.

The customer service rep I spoke to had to ask me the obvious make sure the customer isn't a clueless prat questions. Is the phone on? Have you tried pushing the buttons really hard? That kind of thing. Once they verified that the phone had indeed given up the ghost, they had no problem shipping me a new one for free. Should arrive tomorrow.

The whole process was about as painless as it can get. Lady on the phone was friendly, helpful, and certainly knew what she was talking about. The whole conversation lasted less than 5 minutes. As I hung up I thought to myself now that is how customer service should work. My faith in humanity has been somewhat restored ;-)

[Moozik: Mesh - Last Breath Of You]

I've wondered how much longer Lost will stay on the air. Now I know.

LOS ANGELES - ABC is attempting to rescue once-hot "Lost" by ending the show — in 2010. Bowing to the fact that convention isn't working for the drama about plane-crash survivors on a surreal island, the network is taking the unusual step of turning "Lost" into a limited-run series.

It will run for three shorter and uninterrupted seasons until its "highly anticipated and shocking finale" in the 2009-10 season, ABC said Monday.

A total of 48 episodes will air over the next three seasons, with 16 episodes running without a break each season in the style of Fox's "24." That will take care of viewer complaints about reruns that left them dangling.

Not sure I like the idea of limited-run seasons but will go with it. I'm really hoping the "highly anticipated and shocking finale" isn't something lame. No dreams. No already being dead etc. Time will tell ;-)

[Moozik: Goldfrapp - Strict Machine]

By and large I've been extremely happy with Ubuntu. The most polished Linux distro I've tried to date and for the most part "just works". The box that houses Ubuntu though is getting a little long in the tooth and is certainly not the fastest thing around anymore. So at some point this year I will probably end up getting a new one.

This weekend I happened to be in my local MacMedia store playing with the 24inch iMacs and some of the Macbook Pros. (Hmm, those laser etched Macbook Pros are really sweet. Their samples don't really do them justice at all.)

While I was in the store they pulled the curtains down on all the windows and gave an in-store class to about 40 Mac customers. The bloke giving the class had a great sense of humor and kept us all very entertained while he put one of their Macbook Pros through its paces. I was all very impressed. Certainly something to think about when I consider my next computer purchase. Ubuntu love or no Ubuntu love, I may yet get assimilated into the Apple collective.

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Only]

A few days ago a bugzilla developer made (and how shall I put this diplomatically) a rather ill-informed blog post in which he blames Perl for why the bugzilla codebase is an unmaintainable mess. He contemplates re-writing bugzilla in another language as a result.

Luckily there were a number of Perl folks on hand to point out that the problems with bugzilla are not because it is written in Perl. The problem with bugzilla is that the codebase isn't very good. As chromatic says tongue in cheek:

I've heard this song before. The verses are Don't make me install modules!, We're not very good Perl programmers!, and We didn't design the code very well, thus the language sucks!.

I don't blame Max for feeling frustrated with the bugzilla code. Over the years it certainly has become a mess of spaghetti code. The last time I looked at the code a year or so back I was surprised at the quality. But that is certainly not Perl's fault. You can write unmaintainable code in any language if you don't design it very well. Perrin notes:

It's going to be pretty amusing 5 years from now when all the people who were somehow tricked into thinking Ruby would be harder to write bad code in than Perl wake up and smell the pile of nasty Ruby code they've amassed. I wonder what language they'll jump to next.

As I mentioned to Max, his time might be better spent familiarizing himself with some of Perl's best practices and running the code through Perl::Critic instead of writing prototypes in other languages. Sure, bugzilla is a huge codebase and refactoring will take a decent amount of time and effort and I'm hoping they will see that it is possible to write clean maintainable code in Perl and that they will stick with it. Will be an interesting space to watch.

[Moozik: Nine Inch Nails - Survivalism]

Just thinking out loud here. But if you're going to let everyone know that today is a high pollution day and that we should use the bus or carpool, telling us while we're already on the freeway in our cars might just be a little late. Just saying.

[Moozik: The Jesus & Mary Chain - Almost Gold]

Some time ago, Andrew Sullivan asked the readers of his blog to send him photos of the view outside their window. Since then he has been posting these photos on a daily basis. I found the whole thing really quite interesting and saw some cool views from all over the world.

Today he announced a new gallery site containing these photos all in one place. It's really quite cool actually. Go take a peek.

A little over a year ago, I had the idea of simply asking Dish readers to send in photographs of what they see from their own windows every day. This blog is more of a collective effort than it might seem. Hundreds of emails pour in each day, with tips and arguments and ideas and differing perspectives from all over the world and from every point of view. I get to read them (or at least as many as physically possible). You don't, and I tried to think of a way to better convey the global reach of the Dish readership, and to remind people that the web is not that technological or abstract. It's actually human beings with bodies and souls and homes and gardens and windows. I've been posting a window view almost every day since, but received many more than I could possibly post. So what to do?

[Moozik: Japan - The Other Side Of Life]

Best. Hour. Of. Television. Ever.