I freely admit I may have a problem when it comes to Jelly Bellies, along with my other addictions. You can often find me popping them and chasing them with kaluah & coffee in late-night efforts to meet a deadline. (Yes, I realize I'll prolly be a diabetic by the time I'm 30, but this link gives me hope)
There's even a bad story about my younger years when I got home from work, and the two roomies sent me to the store because we needed milk and something else which I can't remember. Being entirely undomesticated, I was a complete sucker for the giant wall of jelly bellies display, and ended up coming home with the milk, the other thing, and $47 worth of jelly bellies in a bag. The girls were unamused, and it was an ongoing joke about whether or not I'd done it on purpose just to not be sent to the store again.
In my defense, the above is deceptively easy to do: you grab a bag, a scoop, and if you don't realize just how much a scoop, well, scoops, you find yourself going "oOooOo I love this type *half scoop* and oOOoOo juicy pear *half scoop*" until you realize you better put another bag around the one you're holding, for structural integrity, and you're standing at the checkout counter going "WTF? $47?!?" but at that point the checkout girl is looking at you oddly enough that you have to act as though you knew how much you wanted all along, suck it up & take it like man.
So anyways, I love them. All of them, even the jalapeno flavored. But there is one I just cannot stand: buttered popcorn. It's horrific. I know there is absolutely no way in hell it can be remotely naturally flavored, yet it tastes just like buttered popcorn. I like popcorn, and it isn't as though it's artificial tasting... it just tastes just like buttered popcorn, yet is in a sugared bean form. Uncanny valley territory. I just can't dig it, and find it grotesque.
There are few things worse than being on a nice jelly belly consumption roll, popping 'em without really paying attention, and you happen to grab one out of the bag that is buttered popcorn. Because the god damned yellow spots on them are so light, they're nearly impossible to discern under low-light working conditions late in the evening. Oh sure, you kinda hold it up to the screen to see if you can see yellow spots, but of course toasted marshmallow has light brown spots... and you end up with that horrible taste that you can only get rid of with 5 more beans or with a shot of rum.
I figured I couldn't be the only one, and wondered just what the hell they're thinking to keep shipping this abomination of a flavor. I did a google, figuring I'd come up with a neat lil "I hate buttered popcorn jelly bellies" page I could vent on, but instead I found this article:
At present, very cherry is Jelly Belly's most popular jellybean, although buttered popcorn held this coveted title for many years.
What. The. Hell.
Screwed.
posted on February 29, 2004 at 11:25 PM
I came across this article in Wired, saying Webmonkey is going to be officially shut down, even though though the articles are still up at the moment.
It's kinda old news, but I'm still playing catch up on some stuff this week... & just taking a quick moment to say goodbye.
I learned a lot of stuff via webmonkey. I can remember distinctly years ago starting to wrap my head around CSS and finding their articles to be a big help, same with PHP session handling and javascript. I kept a lot of their articles bookmarked because I was constantly forwarding them onto people when it came up: their Introduction to Programming & their Server-side Scripting Language Shootout being the most common.
Excerpt:
...Launched in August 1996 as part of a fast-growing collection of websites funded by the original owners of Wired magazine, Webmonkey instantly became the surprise hit.
( ... )
All that came to an abrupt end. When advertising revenues dried up during the dot-com bust in early 2000, Webmonkey curtailed its staff from ten to three. The remaining original staffers quit, most citing frustration with...
Their death seems to have been in-built, as they failed to capitalize on their momentum. Content barely changed for ages, and while the articles they had were great, especially for a n00b, they never progressed and became more in depth. Other sites with similar content have flourished, simply by using Gates' adage: momentum begets momentum.
Either way, R.I.P. webmonkey.
Over in Proof is the Bottom Line for Everyone, Taylor is asking if using the ratio of debt to the GDP is some sort of voodoo economics. It's not, although you'll only hear dems talk about the deficit in terms of dollars (and I'm sure the repubs would do the same thing- but much of this talk is very alarmist and getting old, but either side doesn't really have much to talk about besides it), not % of GDP.
And no, I'm not a republican, but the alarmist talk from the left gets old, when its not put into context (the alarmist talk from the right would too, if not put into context), and election rhetoric doesn't really help solve the real problems... and its telling that Kerry & Bush are basically offering the same things when it comes to the deficit.
Some things to remember: deficit is short a country will be on what it will be spending in the current year, the national debt is how much is owed total, and debt service is paying interest & principle on the debt owed such as when savings bonds mature.
Bush's proposed (and current) deficits as a % of GDP aren't even the highest in history, even if you exclude WWII. Hell, for some fun, look at the size of the 1993 budget deficit when Clinton was in office. When using nominal dollars instead of constant (nominal dollars have been adjusted for inflation) Bush's current and proposed deficit spending doesn't sound nearly so insane. The upcoming 2004 deficit when adjusted for inflation, considered to be the end of the world by some, only ranks 21st since 1940.
A good example would be to look at Reagan, who is credited with starting the largest national deficits ever, and Word War II, arguably the largest war america has ever been involved with:
- WW II deficit: $50 billion
- Reagan deficit: $300 billion
Reagans deficit looks to be six times as big as the deficit racked up in WW II, and it is, in constant dollars. But, if you google on the percent of the debt: WW II's deficit was about 25% of the GDP, reaching a peak of 30%, whereas Reagans was about 5%, and suddenly things don't look quite the same. And there are a LOT of reasons to carry debt, and a lot of ways in which debt can become a real problem.
About the easiest way (at least for me) are mortgages and credit card debt. You have to be careful about national debt also (what the government has to pay), but these generally work:
Lets say:
- You make $50k/year
- You buy a house, and have a mortgage payment of $700/month over 20 years.
- On the face of it, you have a debt burden of $8.4year
- You have a total debt burden of $168k
This would leave you with a debt burden (service) of 16.8% GDP (if you can think of your earnings as gross domestic product). On the face of it, owing $168k looks pretty fucking scary when are making $50k/year, but it doesn't mean its horrific. Of course it would be better if you were making $100k/year and paying $700/mo, as it would give you more fiscal freedom to do other things with your money. But there are advantages to the above scenario, so lets take two:
- Equity
You aren't just dropping money into a bucket, you're building equity in an actual investment... the house itself. At some point in the future, the money you have paid out may actually show gains when you resell it. You're giving now to get get it later, which is why Kennedy first started running a deficit in order to give tax cuts because he wanted to spur economic growth. Equity also gives you leverage in case you get in trouble and need to borrow again (say, borrowing against the equity in your home if you lose your job instead of just being out on your ass if you are renting). - More manageable than the alternatives
Depending on where you live (figures pulled outta my ass, but realistic), the cost of renting a decent 3 bedroom home might be $800-$1,500k. Which means you're paying 19%-36%. You get none of the other benefits, but gain one: increased freedom. You end up carrying a larger debt but for a shorter period of time.
As a juxtaposition, the estimates of debt as a % of the GDP are:
- 2004: 4.5%
- 2005: 3%
A quick google will back that up, although be careful as there are lower numbers out there- I'm using the updated numbers released & spread around in February. And yes, I trust those numbers, as every other economist backs them up, some even saying 2004 is too high.. but they don't generally account for a lot of the war-related expenditures.
For historical reference, the %debt/GDP of past presidents & budgets:
1943: 30.3% FDR
1944: 22.8% FDR
1945: 21.5% Truman
1946: 7.1% Truman
1982: 4% Reagan
1983: 6% Reagan
1990: 3.9% Bush
1993: 3.9% Clinton
2004: 4.5% Bush 2.0
2005: 3% Bush 2.0
Before the war and other expenditures that came up are factored in (which they are), Bush's budget was actually less. The problem of course is that while debt isn't all bad, it isn't all good, either, and the government isn't a person. There are some good things to that (ie, they dont die and have to settle up) but other things factor in too.
Some of the dangers? Well, without going into a lot of voodoo, if your deficits become too high (it gets really wiggy here, as different people have different views on just what "too high" is) you start inviting higher interest rates which starts inviting inflation. You also get into a situation where you lose economic freedom when you need it, just as a person would.
For example, go back to the mortgage example: if you're making $50k, that's one thing. But what if suddenly you had to take a drastic paycut, and only made $30k? You might have to borrow more, and more, setting up a scary chain of events.
Not that we're anywhere near that point- but the scary word is "unsustainable". We're not anywhere near that, but if you take a look at some other countries- it can be a real drag, and the scary word becomes insolvency.
Which isn't to say that debt is good, just that isn't not necessarily bad. A lot of it has to do with the focus of the government at the time: expansion versus stability, etc. IE, do a google on france pissing off a hell of a lot of europe (their national debt & deficits are rising to a point where they are tipping off of what the EU considers acceptable) by shunning the Stability Pact, because they wanted to focus on economic expansion.
At either rate, again I think the dems are completely missing out on what Bush is doing, even though his administration has a pretty clear MO: ask for two to three times what you really want, so the other side can save some face but you end up walking out the winner because if they can't meet you at least halfway they look like a*holes to the swing vote.
The republicans are being stupid at the moment because they think the swing vote can actually understand or care about anything economists say... not that only the republicans are, look at Kerry and his free trade stances.
And what he's asking for is telling: 7% increase in defense, 10% increase in homeland security, and 0.5% increase in discretionary spending (discretionary spending is stuff not mandated by law), and some large foreign aid to africa AIDs initiatives.
Going to be really hard to:
- Go into an election year promising to raise taxes. Kerry & the like are trying to get around this by saying they'll only raise taxes on the rich, but no one, not even the dems who are voting for him really know that (look at some exit polls).
- Not spend money on homeland defense
- Not spend money on Iraq & the counter-terrorism, especially in places like africa where its getting scary. The dems are talking a good game, but no credible candidate is saying we don't have to do this stuff
- Fight against the relief for africa for AIDs, which is just ravaging the continent in incredible ways, and we haven't seen the worst of it
Where, exactly, are you gonna cut and not look like an asshole especially when Rumsfeld is cutting long running military projects like the comanche in order to streamline the military? Worst case scenario, Bush walks out with half his relief for Africa, half of his defense increase, and half of his increase in funding for homeland security. And the dems are walking right into it again, primarily because they aren't offering anything else, and are (if you actually listen) banking on the same thing GWB is: the economy growing.
So, back to debt: There's a reason why Greenspan is coming out and saying he is worried about our long term fiscal situation: his job isn't just to say how things are now, but where they are going. The left trumpets him saying we are heading for real problems, and right trumpets his saying the tax cuts should more assuredly stay permanent just as they are.
And we are heading for some real problems: the main problem being social services, as Greenspan brought up. Something is going to have to be done, one way or another. Which is why Greenspan is sending out those warning shots: its fine and dandy to run large deficits when the economy needs it, but Greenspan doesn't believe congress will be able to restrain itself when the times turn really good soon and take care of some of the debt. And it is incredibly hard to cut anything, and everyone always thinks their projects are worthwhile and for the public good.
But its not sustainable, and that's what Greenspan is trying to warn against: 10-20 years, ending up in a position where we are paying an enormous amount of money to service our debt and then something big happens, like having to seriously bail out social security or medicare.
I'll spare the credit card analogy in regards to national debt because I've got other things to do, I doubt anyone would care, and I'm depressed enough about the government and both the parties as it is. Plus, I'm not an economist, so I prolly barely know what I'm talking about anyways.
I came in last night to find 24 emails in my inbox, the gist of which were "Your mysql article sucked, it was too short to be useful"... which confused me, as I hadn't written any mysql article. I started to respond, as some were just nonsensical, but then just figured I'd deal with it tomorrow as the rum was taking hold, and crashed.
DrunkenBlog gets a hair over 600 uniques/per day, about 1/3 of them rss fees being pulled down, so I was a lil surprised when yesterday it got 1700+ when I checked the logs. The referrals were all coming from macsurfer.com, which got even odder. Checking their site, it looks as though macsurfer linked to this article on my blog... and hence the confusion.
- I have no clue how that article got linked. I don't care that it was, but I certainly didn't submit it and wouldn't have. I did send macsurfer an email asking if they had an rss/xml feed, which I mentioned in this post... it's the only contact I've had with them.
- If you want to contact me, that's fine- but don't contact me regarding that article- or rather its lack of being an article. I write reviews & tutorials from time to time, like the ones on the 10.2 terminal (search for "terminal fun" in the search box above), but this wasn't one of them. It's not an article, its just a few paragraphs in my blog about a package I was checking out.
Had this notice sitting in my inbox when I got home tonight. Excerpt:
In Mac OS X 10.2, Apple updated Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) to permit secure connections over SSH (Secure Shell) protocol. However, Chris Adams, a system administrator in San Diego, Calif., noted that while users could request secure connections, the system will not issue any alert or indication if an SSH connection is unavailable and then defaults to a non-secure connection. He noted that the only indication was a negative one—users must be aware that an alert "Opening Secure Connection" did not appear.
By way of explanation, AFP is the default file sharing protocol for the mac. With 10.x, AFP was extended to be tunneled over TCP/IP. This isn't that big of a deal for secure networks, but there are a lot of shops who use AFP over IP to transmit files between macs over the net. Obviously when you're going out over untrusted networks (ie, the internet) you want to do it securely. When they think they're doing it securely, but they're not, that just sucks.
But more disturbing:
Though Adams said he first reported this bug to Apple in early December 2003 and followed up weeks later, he received no response from the computer manufacturer. However, he told eWEEK.com that a final notice that he was going to release the information publicly resulted in a response on Friday.
So, a response time of 5-6 months until they even replied to the person submitting the vulnerability, let alone actually releasing a fix. This goes back to something I've been bitching about for awhile now.
I had this article from wired forwarded to me yesterday, and its kinda wiggy. Basically, a guy and his girlfriend are parked by the side of the road, are approached by the police because of a domestic disturbance report (people reported them fighting).
Police show up, and immediately ask to see ID, guy asks what the problem is and refuses to show his ID until he's told what he did wrong, gets arrested, goes to jail, and has to pay a fine for obstructing an investigation. All domestic violence charges against him get dropped. There's a video of it here.
It's not as though the police were complete a**holes or something, which is cool. The issue isn't really with their behavior, but rather the protocol & laws. They were investigating a report of a disturbance and if there is suspicion of a crime or intent to commit a crime they can ask. It really seems to comes down to whether or not you can handle the idea of police asking anyone at any time to show ID, and if not, they go to jail/pay fines.
There are reasons why you could argue in favor of it, but there are enough nightmare scenarios that it just isn't a good path to go down, especially with the upcoming advent of things like RFID and national databases. I know the thought of scanners picking up and logging every place I go from the ID in my pocket is kinda wiggy to me. Put on your yellow stars.
Speaking of rss/xml feeds, I realized the other day that I hadn't hit macsurfer.com in over a month, if not more, whereas it used to be every other day or so I'd go and browse the front page and second days news for anything interesting. But without a feed, it's just very inefficient to "go check and see if there's anything new of interest".
I sent them an email, asking for an rss feed to be made available... but after thinking about it I'm not really holding my breath. These types of sites generally make revenue via advertising, by aggregating links to articles of interest at other sites and letting you know when/if they've updated, but offer no real content of their own.
And since, well, the newsreader by and large does 90% of what they do by aggregating all your news into one place. It's not filtering yet (say for mac-oriented things from cnet.com), but that can't be far off at all.
It's going to be interesting to see what/how rss plays out with those sites, I have a feeling there are going to be some casualties.
*Yawn* Up early to get a start on stuff, as do to the stupid phone I didn't feel as accomplished as I wanted to yesterday. Friday night approaches, and I know its going to involve dinner + movie, but I'm not sure which movie yet.
It's either going to be one of the two above, which one I'm not sure, but I'm pulling for Club Dread. No one else really seems interested, and the other person (who can prolly pull a veto vote, since they're of the opposite gender) sent me to the rotten tomatoes review.
And yeah, it's not getting good reviews, but it's gotten better reviews than their first movie, super troopers, and I laughed the entire movie. Besides, I have a feeling Club Dread won't exactly be in the theaters for all that long, whereas Passion of Christ might end up playing perpetually.
And as a random aside, I had this movie forwarded onto me, which is a satire involving Kill Bill & the Passion of Christ. I hope whoever did it has gone underground.
Someone pointed me to this mysql package for OSX, which includes 4.0.15 (reasonably up to date, and doesn't have the bug that apple is shipping in theirs). It comes with a decent installer (you'll still have some manual typing) and neatest of all, a preference pane for starting/stopping mysql.
For "normal" users, getting mysql up and running can be a bit of a drag (least i've seen a lot of people hose their users & permissions trying), so this has a lot of promise.
It's got some rough edges, while I was messing with it I wasn't able to get it to not start mysql when the machine boots through the pref pane. Oh, it'd say it did it, but I'd get an error message and upon rebooting sure enough mysql would be running and the check box to start upon boot would be rechecked.
It's still a nice job so far, and I'm keeping my eye on it, and its worth a look if you're after a simpler way to get mysql on an OSX machine.
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Update
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If you are coming here from macsurfer, please read this post.
I hate spending my entire day on the phone.
When there is a problem, and you're point on the team, one of the biggest drags are when the people on your team are constantly calling for updates. The more people on the team, the worse it is. You can say "I'll email you when I have more information" but, for whatever reason it just doesn't go that way.
You end up spending your day unable to get into any sort of groove at all, because the damn phone is ringing every 15 minutes on average and ruining your concentration. If you're lucky, you get concentrated packets of calls, which mean you just lose a few hours. And these particular people are just a lil outta control on it.
It's driving me batty. It's just too inefficient. I'm fine with inefficient, if its a conscious, intentional choice over efficiency, but in this case its not, and I'm getting kinda snippy. It's not that I hate the phone- if I'm in "phone mode" I don't really care. When I'm in concentrate mode, it's a drag. When I'm in "brainstorming mode" I'm dangerous...
I'm wondering if RSS feeds might help a little, feeds sure do make my day a lot simpler and efficient when it comes to certain things, and I have been pushing them pretty hardcore. (As an aside, yay! tomservo added trackbacks and an rss feed! of course not having trackback links on the individual article pages means I have to go to the article, then back to the main website to grab the trackback ping) You could make a case that I'm getting addicted to them in my workflow. I love them.
But maybe I'm heavily addicted to them and the "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" might be applying. IE, I can see a lot of ways where RSS/XML feeds could be way more efficient for status updates on various things, especially when data was pushed (like pings)...
But:
- Human factors
If you can't get people to actually view their email as the werd on status updates, instead of calling, it may be doubtful that they'll view RSS feeds differently. There might be some benefit from how inundating email can be now- I know I have moved some email updates I used to get to RSS feeds, and at the end of my day, even though I may be waiting for an email, sometimes I can dread opening up my email app simply because of everything else I might have to deal with. - Mobile devices
I'm unaware of any RSS/XML feed apps for the various mobile devices out there: phones, pda's, etc. Which isn't to say they don't exist, I'm just unaware of them. Feeds would be awesome for these, especially the simpler RSS. Hunting down that info would be a drag. - Security
It isn't as though this project is under lock & key, with gpg-encrypted email going back and forth or something. But generally you're talking IMAP over SSL, but even with straight POP3 with everything over cleartext is prolly more secure than havingwww.mycompany.com/status/horribleshowstoppingbugs.rdfout there for spiders to pick up. Prolly not something you'd want people googling on, but I'm not aware of any client that allows you to say, grab a feed from behind an.htaccess-protected page. That'd be cool. - Various windows clients
I use OSX, by and large, and really don't have a good handle on the various windows feed readers out there. I'm assuming they're out there, and I know of a good web-based aggregator, but I'd want to have some decent software recommendations in my stable before I pushed something. And finding 'em would be a drag.
Ah well. I'll keep my eye out for others looking at doing the same thing, and see if anything turns up. Bah.
I walk through the room and they're watching tv and Alice Cooper is on some FOX "Celebrity Spelling Bee" show. Tipping point...
Tomservo got huffin' about his downloads, but once the high wore off quickly turned into a wuss like the rest of us. Yet he still hasn't put an RSS feed up on his site, and still hasn't implemented trackbacks for his posts, so I am gonna have to continue to hound him into complying.
I had my own brush with a cease & desist a long while ago, and it made things a drag for a few weeks. You can prolly guess who, look at my domain name, then think about a large company that merged with AOL and made several movies with part of the domain name. While it was a drag, I do have to admit that the people that made it a drag were actually pretty nice about the whole thing, they were just doing their job.
On a related RIAA note, I got a check for $13.86 from the RIAA antitrust price fixing trial. What a hoot. I had just filled out some form from a slashdot link on a lark and never thought anything of it.
As an interesting aside, I wonder if there were any numbers done on the amount. $13.86... not really enough to do anything with except to, well, you know, buy another CD.
Some of those grant dollars must be going to some good use, as it clinical trials with a new HPV vaccine are showing it to be completely effective.
And yes, I said HPV, not HIV. Don't know what it is? You're not alone, it freaks me out to realize how many people have no clue regarding it, how it is transmitted (um, how it is transmitted is scary as hell, basically just through genital/oral contact). Its scary shite. Hell, I ran into some people when I lived in Las Vegas who, due to their *cough* line of work, should prolly have had a clue as to what the hell HPV was, yet didn't.
I got into learning about it when a friend contracted it, and in order to be a good friend to her while she went through it I wanted to know what I was dealing with. It wigged me out. Women seem to have the real short end of the stick when it comes to it, as figures I've heard have said its responsible for up to 50% of all cervical cancers in older women... and its just extremely wide spread. The article above says up to 90% of cervical cancers, so, ew.
There were some schools in california that were reporting 60% infection rates among the female student body... most had no clue, till they were told by the doctor... and the girls had no clue until they went in for their physical. There's a lot of eye-opening info out there on it.
Luckily, I'm notgeeks aren't in any real danger of contracting it.
Came across a really exciting article today, basically saying that scientists have discovered the protein in monkeys that allows them to contract HIV, but they don't develop AIDS. This is huge. We know some people get HIV, and just never develop AIDS, but we don't know why. If it turns out that its a similar mechanism to the monkeys, we may be able to boost/inject this protein into someone infected with HIV, but they won't develop AIDS.
When I was younger I had an opportunity to spend a summer in Montreal volunteering at an AIDS hospice, and went. This was the early 90s, so the stigma/hysteria and AIDS wasn't really at its peak anymore, but it was still pretty heavy and a lot of things were very weird. Things weren't allowed to be shared between the different houses, lots of people wouldn't go into the hospice, all sorts of stuff.
It seemed even worse in some ways in Montreal than when I came back to the states. Kinda blew my mind for awhile, really, but there are few things I would have traded the experience for.
Besides learning that the french are really only assholes when they haven't gone out of their way to get to encounter you, I learned more about life, death, kindness, fear, empathy, etc than I could every really put into words. A lot of people I grew close to died of AIDS, so anything they can do to put an end to it (or just keep it to HIV infection would be an amazing start) would be great news. It's just such a slow and terrible way to die.
Woo hoo! For a limited time you can save up to $700 on select memory upgrades from Apple.
On second thought, Dells sales generally bump you up to 512megs for free at the moment, and Apples RAM, so I decided to check what the difference might be, since well, you know, Apples RAM is on sale, and Dell isn't thought to have bargain basement RAM prices in the x86 world:
To go to 512megs of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $200
To go to 1gig of RAM:
Dell: FREE
Apple: $350
To go to 2gig of RAM:
Dell: $470
Apple: $650
To go to 4gig of RAM:
Dell: $2,350
Apple: $2450
I used Apple's single processor memory prices, with the savings applied, and using a best case scenario (IE, using four 512 modules instead of two for 1gig of RAM). But still, not so good. Dell is giving it away for free until 2gigs, at which point Apple is still 28% more expensive, even though its on sale. When not on sale, Apple's memory would be 50% more than Dells.
At 4gigs Apple is only 5% more expensive. And realize that going through someone like datamem, 4gigs would cost less than $1000.
I'm starting to think someone at Apple rings a bell every time a user buys RAM, its just a joke. I could have done some more, but it was getting a little silly. IE, Dells dually CPU lines all use ECC ram, and Apple only started using that in the XserveG5 a month ago or so, and Apple basically won't let you buy less than 1gig, whereas Dell starts you off at 256 and throws in stuff for free.
I one could start calculating based on what the upgrades cost, but that was more work than this laugh was worth.
Mr Gregory has a funny post over on his blog dealing with pigeonholing/labeling/categorization, how we all do it and the dangers of it. I think.
Excerpt:
And how we draw those barriers through our own lives too, imposing restrictions often through sheer inertia. "I don't eat Indian food. I don't read mysteries. I hate French wine. I'm not into documentaries. I don't look good in red. I hate history. I never go to the opera. Blah, blah, blah."
For the record, I don't look good in red, as my skin color is a tint away from translucent, and if I'm wearing red it looks as though I have massive chest wound. Bright orange is out too, as well, radiosity takes hold and people start to ask if I'm feeling ok or have been eating too many carrots.
But at any rate, yes, we all create/impose those barriers. And we do it at multiple levels, but there are generally reasons for it. The big one is efficiency in our thinking & decision making process.
Can't we all be a litter more subtle, a little more aware, a little more creative, and start seeing the world in all its shades of grey, and all the hues of the spectrum?
Well, sure, if we didn't want to actually get anything done.
I think the danger is when your categorization/label/pigeonholing isn't part of a conscious equation... as an equation can (and should be) reevaluated as new variables are introduced. Something that is adopted/assumed can't really.
We don't live in a box. We live on a ball, always revolving, always changing, moving ahead, never in the same place for more than a moment. That's the nature of the universe. That's the true nature of man. And that, my label hungry friends, is what Art is all about.
There's an old adage that says "Life is what happens while you're making plans". I kinda dig what he's saying, as something similar came up some people I do work with, and how many of them are having to reevaluate and redefine their roles (IE, DBA having to deal with security related issues).
But put in technology terms:
Let's say you do a google on something, and get a list of hits. You then open up the list of results in a bunch of tabs (because you're using a browser that supports tabs), and glean what you can.
Now, if that list of links was "live" and changes to googles pagerank algorithm were constantly being updated in your web browser as they came in every second or so, it'd make it a more accurate tool, at the cost of efficiency and well, just getting your damn stuff done, even though you couldn't be sure it was a 100% accurate set of links.
It doesn't mean it shouldn't be reevaluated at an arbitrarily set time, and for damn sure it shouldn't be used as an excuse for personal growth, but there are reasons for it.
A friend of mine sent me the Presidential Match Wizard, where you fill out your stance on some issues and it matches them against the positions of the candidates, then tells you which candidate matches up best with your choices.
My results were:
Bush: 100%
Kerry: 95%
Edwards: 92%
Dean: 89%
Kucinich: 63%
Let's leave out the fact that my positions would match up with 63% of the mad elf's. 95% match up with Kerry? Wooo, that's interesting. There might be something to the whole "both the parties are the same" thing bandied about.
I have a feeling there is going to be some serious buyers remorse regarding Kerry by the dems when/if he becomes the nominee. I enjoyed watching Dean galvanize the dem base, reminded me a lot of Pat Buchanan when he made his run for the president. But right now the dems are just voting for who they think can 'beat bush', without really knowing what the guy actually stands for... it's gonna be fun when people really start going after him. Remember, Dole had more than 60% of the vote at around this time...
More than anything I just wish the dems were putting up a decent candidate that won't get thumped on when the real campaign starts: it'd increase the chances of having a good debate.
Oh well, it was fun to compare mad elf Kucinich & Sharpton. And, oddly enough, I didn't realize Kerry wasn't against partial-birth abortions. I'm pro-choice, but will admit that minus a few special cases (mothers life in danger, etc) that partial birth abortion is a pretty icky thing.... but check out Kerry & Bush's stances on economics & free trade.
Wiggy.
No chinese food, instead I got introduced to ginger hot wings and guiness. I love buffalo wings, but had never had these. They were actually really tasty, although I was wishing for a wetnaps packet. Can you buy wetnaps for your home?
Anyways, the movies were weird as hell. Really weird. Hang with you and kick your ass for several days kinda weird, to where you're looking up more info on them. We actually had 3, but only got through 2... I was kinda worn out mentally from the ones we saw, so we'll get to "City of God" sometime this weekend, which I've heard is good but again know nothing about.
The first was "Requiem for a Dream". It's just amazing, but incredibly sad. It follows four people through their drug addictions, and you watch as their lives and points of reference on their lives unravel. It just doesn't stop, and feels eerily real. I think part of that has to do with just how fast the movie moves: it has turning points, but you really get a sense of just how fast things can unravel. The cinematography & editing is amazing. Even just how the seasons and lighting are used... damn.
A lot of the characters are extremely are very one-dimensional, but it works, both because it keeps you outside of them enough to be able to see point A to point B in their lives without becoming too attached, which almost gives it the emotional impact of a documentary, where it feels real. The acting also makes the shallow characters work, as many of them sort of revel in being the best arch-type that they can, with little droppings here and there that make your mind fill in the gaps. There's "just enough" for it to work, and work hardcore. There are some bigger names in it, but they give some performances you really wouldn't expect.
I'm not sure what else to really say about it, except it kicked my ass and I felt like throwing up afterwards. I'd recommend it, but not as a general movie... know what you're getting into, and don't eat before hand... it's just relentless.
The other one we watched was Donnie Darko, which was just as good but in a different way. I was tempted to write that there aren't any names in this that you'd recognize, except for the main protagonist who is hopefully an up-and-comer (Jacob Gyllenhaal), but that's not true.
It has some names you'd know: Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swayze, Noah Wiley, and I'm pretty sure the guy in the bunny bunny suit was the guy who was in that old doom generation movie who had an unsightly end. I was surprised to see Barrymore was the producer... all the big names aren't credited or pushed, and have small but pivotal roles. You also forget they are big names: I was surprised as hell when Swayze showed up, and Barrymore, and Wiley, but they all worked. Swayze and Wiley in particular were great in their roles, you forget who they are, in the same way you forget its Bruce Willis in the "6th Sense" and "Unbreakable". It took a lot longer to do that with Barrymore.
But at any rate, I can't really say what this movie was about, as it was about a whole lotta stuff, and really still have no clue. I'm going to have to watch it again as I'm not sure about well, major plot points or whether half the stuff was intended to be real, or if the whole thing was... but damn it was good.
I knew nothing about it going in, and hadn't had anything spoiled... so there were a lot of "WTF, where is this going?" moments. It never seems to go where you think it is, and even when you're right you're only half right, and it meanders between extremely dark and creepy and sweet constantly.
Highly recommended, I've found myself chuckling about it all day. And I'm going to be able to picture that god-damned-evil-imaginary-friend-bunny for the rest of my life.
This MyDoom variant going around the net is a lot nastier than the previous versions, with a destructive payload that gradually goes through your systems and destroys .jpg, .xls and other files. The gradually part is smart, in a way, as it also launches a DDOS against microsoft and the RIAA, and if someone realizes what's happening right away they'll kill the system.
At this point there isn't that much of a threat to people, the worst of MyDoom is going to be over due to patching, etc. I can't imagine if this had been the first version, though. Lucky again.
At any rate, ClamAV is getting a workout. Yesterday & today its caught over 640, the majority being Worm.SCO.A-dam inter-sprinkled with some Worm.SomeFool and Worm.BugBear.B.
Woo hoo! A friend and I are supposed to get caught up on a whole slew of movies tonight after dinner, which should be a blast. I love movies, I just never seem to really get a chance to go see them anymore, or rent them, and there are a lot I haven't seen over the last year.
She's picking out the DVDs, but we have similar tastes in movies, and the whole quest seems to get me caught up "What do you mean you haven't seen that movie?!?! We have to get it!". She's in charge of food, too. And I've never ever seen her cook, which prolly means chinese is getting brought in.
Yum. General tso's chicken here I come.
Was going over some stuff with one of my little brothers who is about to graduate high school soon (well,hopefully), and some of the reading he has to get done... and one of the books is "A Separate Peace".
It's actually kinda cool. I'd forgotten all about this book- I ended up reading ahead because I was bored in English class one day, and just got really into it. It was one of the first books that just stuck around in the back of my head for weeks and months, I must have read it 4 times.
So far, the only book I've been able to get him to read on his own (and finish) is "I Am Legend", which isn't exactly book report material and more of a novella than anything, but he really doesn't have the attention span and I'm up for him reading comic books as long as words are going from the page to his brain.
I really hope he gets into it as much as I did, at this point about all we have in common is that we both loved "Where the Wild Things Are" when we were kids, or at least I remember him letting me read it to him. He thought the Little Prince was kinda posh, IIRC.
And these are the euro-russian countries that have their acts together, which the USA should be looking to for guidance in all affairs?
Excerpt:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed his government in a live television broadcast. The surprise move comes weeks before a presidential election which Mr Putin is expected to win by a landslide.
As a random aside involving stocks, I've been following an odd little company... CRGQ.OB. They're an umbrella company for a bunch of smaller ones, but they have a very interesting product called fibergel which was developed by the US department of agriculture awhile back, and CRGQ won the rights to develop and sell it.
How do you improve a really crummy weekend?
Easy, Pooka (aka christina) stops by to hit your favorite italian dive for chicago-style pizza and big thick slabs of garlic bread, chased with frosty droughts of Guinness.
We ended up not having pizza, even though that was the whole purpose, but that's alright.
Yum. This is the good garlic bread too- thick as your wrist, with diced bits of garlic on top... I love that place, and it's one of the things I like about a larger city.
Great food, reasonably priced, and good service. Generally when I'm traveling I'll find two of the three, but Chicago just has them everywhere... and nothing kills my evening faster than a lousy meal.
On another note, I went to town on drunkenblog yesterday since I had a few hours in the morning and evening. It's been bothering me for a long, long time and it feels good to actually make some headway into having it look decent. I hate how those things drag on.
What's the saying? Too busy working on other peoples stuff to work on your own, yadda yadda yadda... I can't even really use that as an excuse, as it isn't as though I care much about this site compared to my others... but it's fun to get your hands in some CSS again after banging your skull against IE v5's rendering engine for a few months (damn you corporate standardized desktops!).
At least its not so heavy anymore, and is on the way towards real improvement.
Still have to (in no particular order):
Cleanup the front page- Cleanup the left-hand side, lots of linkage not yet linked.
- Cleanup the individual, monthly, category & search pages
- Cleanup the comments
- Experiment with a richer RSS feed
- Experiment with some of the newer mt plugins
- Implement categories
- I've upgraded 4 friends' installs of mt, yet mine is still running 2.6.2... should prolly look into upgrading the mt install
PlayingExperimenting with some of the newer mt plugins provides a good excuse to look at more perl code before v6 ships and it makes its break for sentience.
I'm going to have to get to adding the categories at some point, as I have a lot of 10.3 bash-specific stuff to throw up at some point, similar to the 10.2 tcsh-specific stuff, but without category linkage its a drag to have to find it all.
I wonder if I'll actually get around to it before 10.4, or 2005, whichever is sooner...
TomServo is a lil braver than I am, and has thrown the Grey Album up on his site to participate in Grey Tuesday. He's got some decent bandwidth, and it might be worth the download if you're into that sorta thing, although I don't know what the bitrate of his files are.
I'll admit to having heard the album a few weeks ago, and was pretty damn impressed. It's extremely creative.
If you don't know the story it basically goes like this: DJ creates remix album of Jay-Zs Black Album and the Beatles White Album, DJ releases album on the net, remix album becomes extremely popular and critically acclaimed, record companies give no way for one to buy it legally and start making what some would consider to be insane efforts to shut it down which just gives it more publicity...
There's more history at the Grey Tuesday site, it's worth a read.
I really hate NDAs, besides the fact that it's a drag to never be able to point to what you're working on if you think it's very cool, they generally keep me from bitching to my full potential.
It's been a pretty crappy work week. Long story short a huge project has been ground to a screeching halt because during load testing transactions started getting lost and throwing errors. It turns out the uber-coders it was being offshored to had made a huge flaw in the backend of the app.
I'm getting old. I haven't called to confirm what happened in the last few hours nor just how much was consumed, but just going by the massive throbbing going on in various parts of my body I'm pretty sure someone took a 2x4 to it.
Woke up this morning to find ClamAV had caught 22 copies of a new virus in my inbox, called Bagle-B.
*sigh*
Worms are at least creative, but these email attachment things are just lame. Billions upon billions of dollars of damage done all because Microsoft decided you should be able to directly run attachments in outlook by default.
*sigh*
Looks like the security hounds have spent some serious time perusing the windows source code that was leaked, as there's already a really, really nasty exploit out.
The good news is that it only affects IE5. The bad news is most statistics out there say that IE5 still has 35-40% of the browser market, and the people using it are often tied to not upgrading for one reason or another.
The really, really bad news is that arbitrary code can be run simply by viewing a malformed bitmap file:
A remote user can cause arbitrary code to be executed on the target user's computer when the target user's browser loads a specially crafted bitmap file. The code will run with the privileges of the target user.
There's no known workaround.
Cringley's newest column is worth a read, essentially following up on some earlier columns regarding burst and their lawsuit with microsoft over streaming patents.
I've kinda taken to skimming Cringleys articles over the last year, in many of them now you get this chaotic rush-job feeling, without a whole to say. 80%+ of them just aren't as good as they used to be... not as informative, not as insightful.
The one I've linked to is in the vein of his older, better columns.. and worth a read. I can't imagine how this is all going to play out, but it should be interesting.
*Yawn* Lord.
The auto show wasn't quite as bad as I feared, but any hopes I had of bright spots in the day were dashed when I realized the Kitt from Knight Rider wasn't going to be there. I had a Knight Rider lunchbox thing when I was a kid, and just thought that car was the coolest. I actually make an effort to avoid old reruns of it, as well, "stealth mode", when viewed 15 years later, simply is not as cool as I remembered it being. Nor is seeing the same exact shot over and over (ala power rangers) for certain scenes. I'd like to remember that show as being cool as hell, so yeah I try to avoid it even though I have a pal who has rips of them.
I can't believe I'm up at 5am on a sunday to go to this thing today. If you asked a random sample of people who know me, and gave them a multiple choice list of places I might be today, an auto show would be at the very bottom of their guesses.
It'd even come in below a local fair, as well, local fairs at least have good fair food (corn dogs, elephant ears, etc) even though they have the scary livestock.
Ah well, a promise is a promise.
Egh, Windows source code is making the rounds. Read it and weep.
Apparently some 30,000+ files of Windows 2000 source, making up the bulk of service pack one, were somehow leaked via a partner. Yikes.
This is a seriously bad juju time for Microsoft. I don't think anyone was really thinking about piracy- but for crackers its a wet dream. It's like removing a huge barrier to entry in the whole cracking process.
Been a fun couple of weeks for these, eh?
Mydoom.A is still going strong, but not as bad as it was. Most of the viruses I'm snagging are tagged with it though. I don't know what damage it's doing via Kaaza, it isn't something I've followed but would be interesting in reading more on.
Palm announced their new OS, Palm OS Cobalt (not going to comment on the name), which brings all kinds of goodness from their purchase of BeOS awhile ago. Multi-tasking, multi-threading, memory protection, more memory and much better graphics. For multimedia performance, BeOS was hard to beat, so this thing could really give the fancier pocketPCs a run for their money.
The bad news? They've dropped mac support completely, which is a little deflating as it was already very poor. People would often wait for months for palms conduit to be released for the mac whenever new versions came out.
Out of the 3 OSs (palm, pocketpc, zaurus), none include mac support now, so what the hell do you get if you're a mac user and you want/need a PDA? Kinda throws some water on the digital hub thing Apple is going for. Especially considering that Apple tried to buy Palm.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. The MacBU might include support for pocketpc's in order to help sell copies of entourage/officex, or Apple might get off their ass and create a serious, decent calendar solution. iCal is a pretty lame piece of software for a whole lot of reasons.
People are talking about the Zaurus, because it runs using Linux, but they seem to be forgetting that just getting some of the software over isn't really going to cut it, nor is just being able to connect. You still have to get your data onto it and from it. Palm, due to its size, could release it's connector and Apple, Microsoft, and the others would support it.
Who knows, maybe Apple will try to buy Palm again. Even if they don't care about little squiggly interfaces, I'm sure there is a ton of BeOS IP that could migrate into OS.
Depressing. The devil is in the details with users, and syncing data to and from PDAs was already a royal pain in the ass for mac users. Not being able to sync/use PDAs is going to get real lame real quick.
Sometimes I love having friends who will send me the weirdest, random things they find on the net. Usually I just laugh at how they could possibly come across the random stuff they do. There's one in particular who always tops my weird forwards list, and one of these days I'm going to figure out where the hell she finds this stuff.
This one from yesterday takes the cake:
Perhaps most remarkable of all though, the Topinama of Brazil, who date back to the 16th century, would encourage poisonous snakes to bite them. The pain apparently receded after six months but left the man with a hugely inflated penis that proved popular with the womenfolk.
Ewww... wiggy.
The upshot is that I get sent pictures like the below, which just crack me the hell up. Apparently it's Diane Lane and some movie critic at an awards ceremony. Click for a larger version, it's worth it.
I'm kind of embarrassed, because this one has been flying under my radar, and it's actually extremely interesting. I generally try to keep up on the different Linux distros and their various merits and focuses (Redhat, debian, gentoo, mandrake, etc), but I'd never even come across SELinux until the other day.
Obviously this distro is going to focus on security, but I got curious as to what would set it apart from other distros.
Since I'm an obsessive note taker, this is from what I can find:
- There is no root (superuser) account, which is very interesting. Since this account (or privilege level) doesn't exist, it would seem to do a lot against the standard escalation exploits.
- All packages start out with zero permissions, so you can't just grab the source and build for SELinux. Package maintainers have to explicitly and painstakingly give each package just enough permissions to do its job. IE, in a normal setup, someone might be able to exploit apache, which often needs root-ish permissions to access virtual sites and the like. They can then use that to do a lot of damage. In SELinux, apache might have read access to its .conf file and only some very specific directories, and write permissions to even fewer. Hence if you exploit apache it won't be able to do a whole lot, nor any code it's told to execute.
- No privileges are inherited, IE: If I am logged in as the admin user, if I run a script/program, that script inherits my privileges and can do anything I can do.
There are obviously other aspects, these are just the main ones I was able to grok. It looks as though Redhat/Fedora are going to be the first to incorporate support for it in the 2.6 kernel releases, but at least gentoo and debian are also working on support.
You have to give some props to this, it's an interesting approach to making *nix's more secure, and I'm looking forward to seeing how/if it increases complexity and workload on sysadmins.
...has been announced for all current versions of Windows. What they don't mention in the article is that Microsoft has apparently been aware of this for at least 6 months.
What I'd be curious about was whether or not this was found internally, or whether it was brought to them by independent sources, and whether or not this exploit was found via the underground.
Mozilla Firebird Firefox 0.8 is out, and they've changed the name again. You can download here.
The name change thing is annoying, but understandable since they didn't want to step on anyone's toes. I just wish I knew how they were picking these names. I was never a big fan of firebird, and thought that the browser (firebird) and the mail client (thunderbird) should have switched names. Firefox just sounds like a video game or something.
The annoying aspect is that I've really tried to get a lot of people to check out firebird firefox, as it's a fantastic little browser (great on OSX, even better on other platforms) but having to explain the name change things every time is getting a little grating.
On OSX, especially with the latest release that has the newer default theme, it's become my go-to browser whenever Safari is acting stupid or I have to deal with SSL sites. I'm still amazed by how mac-like they've gotten it when they're using their own interface engine.
Speed is about the same, although I'm pretty sure my SSL sites have gotten even faster. There are some nice little touches though: previously, when you had no windows open and clicked on the dock icon nothing happened, you'd have to create a new browser window. Now, a new browser window is created for you, following Apple's UI guidelines.
Normally, if I came across a piece of software as interesting as Inquisitor for OSX, I'd be telling everyone about it. The interesting thing is the speed, and the live updates while searching really do help.
But it's really pretty lame, there are free downloads (betas!) which are fine, but the damn things time out after a week or so, at which the old one refuses to work and you have to stop everything to go catch the new one.
The first annoying part for me was that I'd saved it, and hasn't installed it yet as I hadn't gotten the time to play with it... so my first greeting upon opening it is a message saying it's expired that day and I have to go download the new version.
The biggest annoyance was that it just hangs out with a download button, and won't let you quit. You can't quit from the dock, you can't even quit from the menu item. So my first experience with this soon-to-be-shareware product is that upon first launch I have to force quit it because I don't want to download something.
I have to imagine he is just trying to get people hooked and it's going to be released as shareware, but really, developers, this kind of thing is sooooooooo stupid.
I really wish spaceflightnow.com would add RSS feeds, as I'm geeky enough to end up checking it every day. I'm primarily addicted to the mars rover updates... I love those pictures. They also make you pay for the quicktime streams, which is getting to be a bit of a drag.
There are some nifty new pictures of them rolling off their platforms and grinding into a rock that are worth a gander.
On the upside, I came across this site today, the basics of space flight, which is a really slick intro on just what it takes (design, testing, launching, maintaining) to get something into space.
Doomjuice is out in the wild, infecting boxen who have been infected with mydoom.a. Nice.
This one isn't actually that bad, it doesn't spread via email and it doesn't seem to create any backdoors. It essentially just scans for machines that have been infected with mydoom.a (port 3127), installs itself, and then randomly hits on microsoft.com.
A Microsoft spokesman said Monday that "any performance problems on the company's site are likely related to countermeasures the company took to evade the MyDoom.B DDoS attack and not an attack from machines infected with the latest variant."
That's odd. Virus hits the wild Sunday, microsoft.com has "troubling performance" sunday night and monday morning, yet the theoretical cause are changes made to protect against mydoom.b?
Hmmmm.
I try to keep an eye out for articles that do a good job of explaining something I might get asked, as it makes it ever so much easier to just send someone a link instead of having a long involved conversation.
Not that those conversations aren't fun, especially if beverages are involved, but 9 out of 10 times someone else has already eloquently put something into words better than I could.
If you're ever in the need of a decent primer on how microprocessors come about, this is a decent article to check out.
There are some omissions... IE, it would have been fun to see mention of other reasons for the bunny suits and great air scrubbers: the incredibly toxic chemicals used in the whole process. But on the whole it strikes a good balance between simplicity and technical for your average reader.
As an overview, it's very well done.
10.3 has a theoretically very cool API that will solve a lot of problems regarding controlling/managing internet connections for developers, called SCNetworkConnection. Unfortunately it's barely documented. By that I mean there is zero documentation.
There are other examples of this kind of thing, just looking at 10.3... like diskarbitrationd, a neat little daemon for handling disk mounting and the like. It's man page barely gives you an idea of what it does. Or scutil.
I'm just ranting about 10.3 stuff, but lack of documentation has been a bit of a joke for a long, long time. It's a real problem, and I can't imagine the frustration I'd have if I was messing with this stuff full time.
If you're not a developer, you can sort of get an idea of that frustration they have to deal with by looking at Apple's help system. Barely functional, and far from informative.
I'm having to dive into PPLib, but guess what... Apple says its not supported, and could go away at any time, so use the newer API for everything, which isn't documented.
Sucky. This isn't some shareware product, we're simply talking quality and polish. And it's been such an ongoing problem, version-to-version, year-after-year, that you have to reach the conclusion that it just isn't a priority for Apple.
The worst excuse I've heard is "Would you rather have the programmer writing documentation, or writing new code?" which is such a circular argument as to never be valid.
Everyone and their mother is asking where I am lately... no, I'm not dead (old joke), just extremely busy with everything. There was a time when I was that young guy annoyed as hell at the coworkers always having to go to do this and that, missing meetings because they had to get someone from soccer practice and the like... man, now I just wonder how the hell they even get anything done at all.
I feel perpetually behind, now. My time is not my own. I don't like it.
Went up early this morning... can be viewed here. The marketing aspects are pretty transparent, almost a bit lame, but you do get an "OMG this could raise some hackles" feel from it. I just hate when its obvious when adults are trying to make an ad that will manipulate the kiddies mindset towards them. And yes, that means I hate most fast food and kid cereal commercials and the like with a passion.
There are slicker ways to do it... the new iPod commercials are an example of building an image without being shucky. Would have loved to be in the meetings on getting this one approved.
I'm more interested in just how much extra publicity it might pick up from news stations talking about the ad.
