How about a holiday where computer support professionals get the day off, and nobody else does? I'll call it "Buffalo Bill Cody Day". No, it doesn't make any sense. Why do banks get the day off on Columbus Day? Exactly. October 15th is now officially Buffalo Bill Cody Day, and I ain't doin' shit.
Turns out nobody has a rectifier for my alternator. Parts America said that they did, but I guess it was all a ruse. I wound up going on eBay and getting a whole alternator for $6 more. With shipping. It's a bit used, but it should work better than the one I've got. Or, at the very least, I should be able to make a working alternator with two shoddy ones.
I made the most awesome pizza ever last night. It was divided into two halves, the left half being a "pepper extravaganza" with slices of red bell, yellow bell, and cubanelle peppers, and the right half being hawaiian with ham, pineapple, and apple slices. The whole thing was on homemade dough, and topped with shredded cheddar. I ate half of it, and was so satisfied that I forgot to eat breakfast this morning.
Random Thought of the Day:
Why they have never made a Mitsubishi Eclipse commercial involving "Total Eclipse of the Heart" I'll never know.
I just saw Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion tonight. It was actually better than I thought it would be. It was a story about a woman whose hatred was so deep that she became something invincible. The editing and effects were bad, but the acting was great. The only complaint I can really make is that there is too much nudity. Never before had I ever thought it was possible to have too many naked Japanese women. I was wrong. :-/
My debit card stopped working. Friday night. At Meijer. With a cartfull of booze. I was unable to pay for it, and had to leave it there. The fun thing about having this happen Friday night is that I can't even call the bank about it until Monday. Ok, I guess I could try to go to the bank before noon on Saturday. But fuck if I'm going to get up before noon after Marcin's Birthday Party.
And what a party it was. At some point I was careening around Yan's apartment with my trusty 5 Helm of RadioShack on, playing Rum and Coke pong and dancing to Daft Punk. From careful examination of the last sentence, you will realize exactly how drunk I was. If you still can't figure it out, ponder this: I don't like Daft Punk, and the 5 Helm of RadioShack was a RadioShack plastic bag. What's worse is that the entire debacle was captured with multiple digital cameras and my video camera. I haven't looked at it, yet, and I'm not sure I want to. Such things should be kept buried, in a box in the attic, to be found by your kids after you lecture them about the evils of alcohol.
Yan and I made the best squid soup tonight. Well, it was the best because I'd never had, nor made squid soup before. It had squid, shitake mushrooms, and green onion in it. It was awesome. As soon as I get my head on straight, I'll post the recipe.
Now to find some way to bring VFS to the unsuspecting masses...
Halloween is coming up, too. Since I didn't dress up last year, I'm obligated to this year, even if I have to default to the cat ears again. At least it gives me a good excuse to dye my hair again.
Tonight, we're having a... Oh, wait. It's supposed to be a surprise. :)
*sigh*. Work is boring. My boss is gone, and I've got nothing left to do but problems that won't be easily solved. Problems like: Why would remote X via ssh be much, much, slower with RH Desktop 4 instead of RH 7.3? I've narrowed the problem down to the X forwarding, but I have no idea why it would do this. In fact, I can't get X forwarding to even work to my Linux box.
Ah, I found the problem. In OpenSSH versions 3.8 and above, X forwarding is by default untrusted. The messed up thing is, this is a *client* option, so it doesn't explain why the windows clients are messing up. They should be working in the old way. *sigh*.
At some point Erickson suggested that submitting my site would be a boon for mankind, if not a boon to my wallet. If nothing else, he continued, a howto section would be nice once the googlebot stops by. That would be great, but I'm much better at finding and complaining about problems than I am at fixing them. :)
Audience: Initrds!
Yes, good. You remembered. Y'know what else I hate? Web boards. Now, for someone who has never used an actual NNTP reader to read actual USENET newsgroups, with actual threading, then you have no idea how bad off you have it.
Threading, you ask? Yes, in NNTP, each message has a list of referrers, which lists the post's parents all the way up to the original post, and allows your newsreader to reconstruct a tree of posts and their replies. This allows posts to be read in the more logical order of parent/reply, instead of the easy but counter-intuitive ordering by date. This is my major gripe with webboards, but the list goes on... (I do love my lists.)
- Poor navigation - How many of you have wandered across a thread with over ten pages? How many of you have actually read everything in order to catch up with the thread? No? Of course not. Your average web board user is going to read the first page, maybe the last page, and think they understand what the conversation is about. Points will be repeated, stupid questions will be re-asked, and flamewars will result.
- Lack of state - When I come back to a webboard, even though I have a login and password, I have no way of telling where I was in any given thread. The list of threads gives me page numbers, but that will only get me close if I remember where I was last time. If I've got tens of threads to look through, I'm just not going to bother.
- Bloat - Things like this make me want to beat someone with a sack of doorknobs:
Compare for a moment the amount of actual content I have added to the conversation with the amount of additional redundant information about me. There is far too much extraneous information here. I don't need to see if they're online. I don't need to see when they joined, how many posts, their "level," links to their various contact methods, etc. I certainly don't need to see "Re: ...", since nobody ever changes the subject. I don't need to see if the IP was logged. That's a no-brainer. I dont' even really need to see an avatar, but it can be useful. I mean, look at how much space is being taken up by that left panel, and how much space it's wasting in the actual content of the post. And this information is in every post. I need a name, a date, and the post content. This is just wasteful.
- Registration - Ok, this one is less of a gripe, since sometimes registration is a good way to create a healthy, private community. But the fact of it is, for each one of these boards, I have a separate login and password. A distributed identity system like OpenID would help alleviate this by providing a single identity for all the scattered webboards out there.
Now, I don't really have the solutions for problems like threading or registration, but poor navigation, lack of state, and bloat are things that programmers can fix now, if they'd stop being lazy and start innovating. Google Groups is a good start, since most of its functionality is modeled after the USENET readers I mentioned at the beginning. Indeed, it integrates USENET archives with the creation of new, local, groups. Things like 2ch eliminate the registration problem by removing the requirement altogether. An even cooler solution would be to take the web out of it and make webboards a kind of threaded RSS feed. This way, you could use a web-based reader or a local client at your whim.
And in a bizarrely fitting twist, I just got this from fortune -a:
Almost anything derogatory you could say
about today's software design would be accurate.
-- K.E. Iverson
Did the last paragraph seem dull and lifeless? I'm in my lab for LIS201 at the moment. It's early.
I finally got the DDR footage cut up. It's on the tracker if you're interested. Do not download the Doukas 5.1.1. Freestyle unless you have a strong stomach. I mean no offense against Doukas, who has cojones I could never hope to have, but the sight of him doing a striptease on the DDR pad is not a sight for young, impressionable minds.
Today's lecture looks to be a yawner:
- Define network-related technologies and concepts such as IPs, Domain Names, Protocols, Ports, etc.
- Describe the process of how information is transferred via the Internet
- State how bandwidth (up/down) affects accessing information online
- Describe the privacy risks associated with the browser features: cache, cookies, history, javascript, and autocompletion for forms
Since I'm an exacting bastard, here's the "Mr. Downey bungles it" scoresheet:
- I don't think WANs have ever referred to Wireless Area Networks.
- IP Numbers aren't 12 digit numbers. They're a 32-bit number.
- Each octet in an IP address ranges from 0-255, not 1-255.
- www.uiuc.edu is not 128.124.1.1 (but really, who needs to know that, anyway?)
- Megabits, not megabytes per second
- Cookies are not "scripts of code." They're just data.
- You don't need Javascript to capture someone's IP address.
Now, I'd love to correct him, but none of my classmates need to know this stuff, and I'd be correcting him every three seconds. Nobody likes a know-it-all. That, and we have to form into groups for the final project. I don't want to tip my hand. Also especially funny was "Mr. Downey tries to decode a cookie." Unfortunately, the humor value does not counterbalance the effort of getting up at 9am.
*yawn*
Hate me if you must, but I just finished the first midterm in my only class. It wasn't quite a piece of cake, maybe ¾ of a piece of cake. Looking forward to that 75%...
On the way in, I was standing in line to use a computer at the Union computer lab. A girl behind me was eating some potato chips. Despite her best efforts, it sounded as though she were demolishing the starchy snacks inside my head. Now, you'd probably think that got me a little peeved, but I actually found it completely hilarious. I wanted to turn around to her and say, "Hey, could you crunch a little louder? I can still hear in this ear!" If you don't think that would have been hilarious, you're obviously missing the reference.
My latest anime have been Full Metal Alchemist and GPX Cyber Formula Double-One (I'm not joking at all, that's the real name). Full Metal Alchemist is fun, but downright disturbing at times. It actually makes me not want to be an alchemist. GPX Cyber Formula Double-One is an OVA based on a TV series that had a name of presumably similar length. It was made in 1992, and quite honestly, it's awful. It's campy, it's simplistic, it's predictable, and I ate it up. Could it have had something to do with the fact that it involved ridiculously fast automobiles? Perhaps. Might it have had something to do with the heightened levels of fanservice present in most OVAs? Perrrrrrhaps... I think I'm just a sucker for early 90's crap.
initrds. Specifically, how RedHat requires them for proper booting. No, I can't just compile my own kernel, I need a freaking initrd with it, or I don't get any device nodes! Whose idea was this!? Is it really that big of a deal to just store the device nodes on the filesystem, so that, y'know, they'll be there without a convoluted boot system? Ok, I'll outline it for you.
This is a normal Linux boot process from the kernel to userspace.
- Kernel boots
- Kernel mounts root
- Kernel executes init
Here's what RedHat does:
- Kernel boots
- Kernel extracts initrd and executes init on initrd
- initrd creates tmpfs for /dev, and populates it using udev
- initrd mounts the real root device
- initrd binds /dev to the real root device
- initrd pivots the root to the real root device
- initrd executes init
The root filesystem on RedHat has absolutely zero device files in it. It depends entirely on this convoluted process for /dev to be properly populated. Now, granted, the initrd method is a very useful system for PCs without hard drives, since you can bring up the network with it, and mount root as NFS, or extract it from a tarball via TFTP, or something along those lines. But if you've got the space (/dev is taking up 86K on my system), and the persistent storage, why not throw me a freaking bone and put in a few necessary devices so that I can boot up a rescue shell when your shit breaks? Hmm?
Which brings me to the other half of my rant. The Promise SuperTrak SX6000 is a broken piece of shit. All of this trouble started when we upgraded one of our RedHat 7.3 servers to RedHat Enterprise Desktop 4. Quite a leap, I'll admit, but my boss and I figured that this i2o compliant SX6000 should work right out of the box, right? I mean, RHD4 has a 2.6.9 kernel, and this card came out in something like 2002. Nope. No dice. There's a bug with the SX6000 where it isn't detected by i2o_block, and it apparently wasn't fixed until 2.6.11 or so. You can see how this leads into my first problem.
So fuck you, RedHat, and fuck you, Promise. That is all.
Are you sick of lame random name generators? Would you like to give some authentic spice to a story? How about a name for a demented Pokemon knock-off? Check out Chris Pound's Name Generation Page. As I have suggested, these are not your normal name generators. For one, you don't click a few check boxes, hit the submit button and get a list of lukewarm names. These are perl scripts. For those who don't know, perl is a programming language known for its hardcore text processing capabilities. The lc utility on Chris's site can snarf in your own word list and generate new similar words by analysing the character sequences. Pipe that through prop to get a list of proper names. Now you, too, can sodomize the english language just like Lewis Carrol or J.K. Rowling! This site is pechugglo, if I do say so myself.
Linked to from this page is Happy-Lucky Chinese Restaurant Game. Basically, you and your friends do improv comedy to create a Chinese movie on the fly. I haven't actually played it, but it sounds like fun (and should be entirely adaptable to other things, like magical girl anime. }:->). I'll have to try it the next time my friends and I happen upon a Chinese restaurant. Gee, I wonder how we'll ever find one of those around here... :)
I found this the other day through google news. Apparently a robot found buried pirate treasure on the island that inspired Robinson Crusoe. No, I did not just make that up, nor did I steal it from How to Kill a Mockingbird. Man, I bet those pirates are pissed. You take all the trouble of burying your treasure 15 meters below ground, and some robot comes along with freaking radar and finds your shit. 15 meters isn't a short distance, either. For the metrically uninclined, that's 45 feet. Those pirates better get on the ball. And what of the ninjas? My guess is they're lying in wait for the treasure to be dug so they can make off with it in the night.
Ok, I'm going to cheat, and link you to my brand new webboard software for the last link. It's modeled after 2ch.net, with the ideals of simplicity, efficiency, and ease of use. In other words, it's everything that stuff like phpBB is *not*. There are no logins (all posts are anonymous at your option), no unwieldy navigation (bookmarks encouraged), no admins (left as an exercise to the reader), and minimal configuration. Stop on in and say hi. :)
Today is shaping up to be one of the better Mondays in existence. I got to eat lunch with Kan Kan this morning. That was nice, even if I did have to get up early to do it. As a wonderful consequence of this, after I was well fed I had enough time to go the Union and play some ITG and hang out with people there. I don't do that nearly enough.
This weekend Mike came down, so him, Phil, and me crawled our drunken asses all over campus this weekend, generally having a blast. I've never played Burnout Revenge before, but I learned enough in three rounds against him to start whooping his ass consistently. I mean, it involves driving and destroying things, how could I not be a natural? From my rather wavy perspective of the game, it definetly looked good. Whether or not it's actually a good deep game, I couldn't tell you.
Ok, here's one thing that's been wheying on my mind: Organic skim milk. (Haha. Get it? "whey"-ing? Ok, I'll stop.) I can understand wanting the best milk you can get, but I looked at the ingredients list of the normal Meijer brand milk I just bought. Here's the list, verbatim, in its entirety: MILK. Yes. Just milk. No preservatives, no emulsifiers, no corn syrup or soy oil. Nothing but milk. What part of that isn't organic? Ok, so synthetic bovine growth hormone is probably in there, but I'm really not worried about synthetic hormones designed to work on a completely different species. (For those who don't care to RTFA: No, BGH does not affect humans)
The "non-organic-ness" of normal milk notwithstanding, how can you want completely organic milk, then in the same breath say "Oh, but I don't want any fat in it."? Doesn't that somehow make it... unnatural?
∧ ∧ ／￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣ ～′￣￣( ﾟДﾟ)＜ 逝ってよし！！！ UU￣￣ U U ＼＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿
Ah, I love Giko. He always tells it like it is.